Let A Spooky Owl Tell You The Weather

June 18, 2019 by 2 Comments

There can be few readers who were young in the 1970s who did not want to share in the adventures of the fearless animated ghost-hunting young crime-fighters of Scooby-Doo. What do you remember from the series though? The Mystery Machine van? Scooby snacks? Or perhaps the improbably haunted theme parks whose owners would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids? For [Alex Shakespeare] it seems to have been the trope of haunted pictures whose subject’s eyes would follow the protagonists around the room, because when he made a wall-mounted weather indicator he gave it an owl with eyes doing just that.

The weather part of the device is straightforward enough, an ESP8266 board drives a set of servos that move dial indicators according to data from the Dark Sky API. The owl’s moving googly eyes are the party piece though, for them the ESP takes input from an Adafruit AMG8833 thermal sensor array and drives a servo and lever arrangement to do the moving. Finally, the thermal camera’s output is available to see on the ESP’s web server. All the details of the project can be found via a GitHub repository.

The result is shown in the video below the break, and as you might expect in the spirit of its inspiration it’s more comedic than haunting. But maybe there’s the root of the popularity of artworks that follow the viewer, of which this is merely the latest in a long line.

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An Evening With Space Shuttle Atlantis

June 18, 2019 by 26 Comments

When I got the call asking if I’d be willing to fly down to Kennedy Space Center and cover an event, I agreed immediately. Then about a week later, I remembered to call back and ask what I was supposed to be doing. Not that it mattered, I’d gladly write a few thousand words about the National Crocheting Championships if they started holding them at KSC. I hadn’t been there in years, since before the Space Shuttle program had ended, and I was eager to see the exhibit created for the fourth member of the Shuttle fleet, Atlantis.

So you can imagine my reaction when I learned that the event Hackaday wanted me to cover, the Cornell Cup Finals, would culminate in a private viewing of the Atlantis exhibit after normal park hours. After which, the winners of the competition would be announced during a dinner held under the orbiter itself. It promised to be a memorable evening for the students, a well deserved reward for the incredible work they put in during the competition.

Thinking back on it now, the organizers of the Cornell Cup and the staff at Kennedy Space Center should truly be commended. It was an incredible night, and everyone I spoke to felt humbled by the unique experience. There was a real, palpable, energy about it that you simply can’t manufacture. Of course, nobody sitting under Atlantis that night was more excited than the students. Though I may have come in as a close second.

I’ll admit it was somewhat bittersweet to see such an incredible piece of engineering turned into a museum piece; it looked as if Atlantis could blast off for another mission at any moment. But there’s no denying that the exhibit does a fantastic job of celebrating the history and accomplishments of the Space Shuttle program. NASA officially considers the surviving Shuttle orbiters to be on a “Mission of Inspiration”, so rather than being mothballed in a hangar somewhere in the desert, they are out on display where the public can get up close and personal with one of humanities greatest achievements. Judging by the response I saw, the mission is going quite well indeed.

If you have the means to do so, you should absolutely make the trip to Cape Canaveral to see Atlantis and all the other fascinating pieces of space history housed at KSC. There’s absolutely no substitute for seeing the real thing, but if you can’t quite make the trip to Florida, hopefully this account courtesy of your humble scribe will serve to give you a taste of what the exhibit has to offer.

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Open Source Computer Controlled Loom Weaves Pikachu For You

June 18, 2019 by 17 Comments

The origin story of software takes us back past punch card computers and Babbage’s Difference Engine to a French weaver called Joseph Marie Jacquard. Jacquard created a way to automate mechanical looms, giving weavers the ability to change a loom’s pattern by simply switching punch cards. This invention not only made it possible to produce detailed fabrics in a vastly simplified way, it was an extremely important conceptual step in the development of computer programming, influencing Babbage’s development of the Analytical Engine amongst many other things.

So, when [Kurt] saw his son’s enthusiasm for weaving on a simple loom, he started thinking about how he could pay homage to the roots of software by designing and building an open source computer controlled loom. He knew this was going to be difficult: looms are complex machines with hundreds of small parts. [Kurt] wrestled with wonky carriage movements, cam jams, hook size disasters and plenty of magic smoke from motor control boards. After a year and a half of loom hacking he succeeded in making a 60 thread computer controlled loom, driven by an iPhone app using Bluetooth.

As well as writing up the story of this build on his blog, linked above, [Kurt] has also has made all of his design files, PCB layouts, firmware and code available on GitLab.

We’ve featured a few weaving hacks over the years, including this cheap, simple 3D printable loom and a Jacquard inspired bitmap display.

Fun, informative build video after the cut.

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Digital Multimeasure Helps You Get The Job Done

June 18, 2019 by 15 Comments

In any mechanical field of work, accurate measurement is key to success. [Patrick Panikulam] knows this well, and decided to build a device that would be useful for some of the more tricky measurement tasks he was encountering.

[Patrick]’s digital multi-functional measurement tool packs a bunch of useful hardware into a pocket-sized form factor. There’s a Sharp IR distance sensor for non-contact measurements, a rotary wheel encoder for measuring distances along curved lines, and an MPU6050 IMU packing accelerometers and gyroscopes for measuring angles and surface levels. Control is via touch buttons, so measurements can be taken without disturbing the position of the device.

The use cases for such a device are many and varied. [Patrick] reports using it to verify that his 3D printer bed is leveled, as well as using it to measure curved surfaces in order to accurately cut stickers to suit. It’s got the hardware to serve as a digital protractor, too.

Combining a variety of useful hardware into a compact form factor, while also taking into account usability, has netted [Patrick] a handy tool. It’s not dissimilar from commercial measurement tools available online, and yet is completely built from off-the-shelf parts. Truly a handy device to have in any hacker’s toolbox!

 

 

Exploring The Dell N1108T-ON Ethernet Switch

June 17, 2019 by 24 Comments

In an era where everything seems to be getting “smarter” every year, it will probably come as no surprise to find that even relatively middling networking hardware is now packing advanced features and considerable computational power. A case in point is the Dell N1108T-ON Ethernet switch. Despite only costing around $100 USD on the second hand market, [Ben Cox] discovered this particular switch was capable of a lot more than what was advertised by poking around its onboard operating system.

It all started by plugging into the serial port on the front of the switch, which [Ben] happily notes is an integrated FTDI USB serial adapter to make life easy. Booting into recovery mode gave him local shell access, and some poking around determines it’s the sort of BusyBox-powered Linux system that you’d expect on an embedded device. The biggest discoveries were that it was running a relatively recent kernel (3.8.1), and that it apparently had Python installed.

The reverse shell Python script

From there, [Ben] found out that these switches have a feature where the administrator can install and run Python “applications” by packaging them up as tarballs and copying them from a USB flash drive. So he wrote up a simple Python program that used the socket library to open up a reverse shell to his desktop computer, and to his surprise, it worked perfectly on the first try. Now with root access, the fun really started.

The next step was getting an SSH installed and running on the switch, so that he didn’t have to do the reverse shell trick every time. He then started installing the packages necessary to turn the switch into a secure VPN tunnel with Wireguard. This took a little fiddling as [Ben] didn’t have the option of installing the normal Wireguard kernel module, but he eventually got the necessary tools modified and cross-compiled to ARM. He believes this is just the start of what’s capable on devices like this, and we’re interested in seeing where the community goes from here.

We’ve seen hackers add management capability to a “dumb” unmanaged switch in the past, but software modifications like this promise to make the creation of custom, secure, networks far easier even on a hacker’s budget. A lot has certainly changed since the last time we saw somebody really dive into a professional Ethernet switch.

Game Builder Lets Kids — Even Old Kids — Build Games

June 17, 2019 by 4 Comments

One rite of passage back in the good old days of owning a TRS-80, Commodore 64, or similar vintage computer was writing your own game. It probably wouldn’t be very good, but it wouldn’t be much worse than most of the stuff that was out there, either. Today, trying to get a kid interested in “hunt the wumpus” is probably not going to fly and having them create a modern-looking game is out of the question. Or is it? Disguised as a game itself, Game Builder offers an interactive way to create interesting games without having to get too detailed into programming. On the other hand, it supports JavaScript, so you can get to programming if you need to or want to. We could easily see a kid — or even an adult — easing into programming using this game which is free, from Google.

In the old days, hardware was a limiting factor and Basic made it pretty easy to whip out some text or crude graphics. Our favorite was a high low game that guesses your number. But everyone had some little game they’d create so they said they could. Today’s games, though, have good graphics and music and 3D shapes and a host of other things you didn’t have to contend with back then. Game Builder, though, makes it pretty simple. You can work on a game by yourself, or with friends, or with the general public. Everyone involved can play the game, but they can also edit the game. The tool runs under Steam so even though it is marked for PC or Mac, it will also run on Linux if you have Steam installed properly.

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Neat Smart(ish) Watch Build Uses BLE

June 17, 2019 by 6 Comments

Digital watches are a pretty neat idea, and are a great way to experiment with designing and building low-power circuits. That’s what [Eric Min] did with this neat smart watch build. It’s based around an nRF52832 SoC that does all of the heavy lifting, including connecting to a smartphone to get the time when the battery is replaced. It also has a decent quantity of blinky LEDs, which is important on any project of this type.

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