Scratch Built Magnetic Vise Stays Where You Need It

May 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

For those who might not have run into one before, a magnetic vise is used when you want to quickly anchor something to a metal surface at an arbitrary position. They’re often used to hold the workpiece down when machining, and can be a real time saver if a lot of repositioning is involved.

[Workshop From Scratch] recently wanted to put together one of these handy pieces of gear, and as we’ve come to expect from his channel, the finished product is an absolute beast. Starting with little more than scraps of metal, the video after the break takes the viewer on a fascinating journey that ends with some demonstrations of the vise in action.

Conceptually, this build is relatively simple. Start with a vise, put a hollow base on it, and fit it with powerful electromagnets that will anchor it down once you flip the switch. Technically you could just build a magnetic base and bolt a commercially available vise onto it, but that’s not how [Workshop From Scratch] does things.

Every element of the build is done by hand, from the pattern cut into the jaws to the t-handle nut driver that gets adapted into a very slick crank. Of particular interest is how much effort is put into grinding down the surface of the electromagnets so they are perfectly flush with the base of the vise. Incidentally, these beefy electromagnets were salvaged from automotive air conditioning compressors, so you might want to add that to your junkyard shopping list.

Eagle-eyed readers might recognize the surface [Workshop From Scratch] uses the vise on as the custom drill press table he built a few months ago. These videos are not only reminders of what you can accomplish when you’ve mastered the use of a few common tools, but just how much design and thought goes into the hardware many of us take for granted.

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Oil Wells Done Rube-Goldberg Style: Flatrods And Jerk Lines

May 1, 2020 by Jenny List 30 Comments

The news is full of the record low oil price due to the COVID-19-related drop in demand. The benchmark Brent crude dipped below $20 a barrel, while West Texas intermediate entered negative pricing. We’ve all become oil market watchers overnight, and for some of us that’s led down a rabbit hole of browsing to learn a bit about how oil is extracted.

Many of us will have seen offshore oil platforms or nodding pumpjacks, but how many of us outside the industry have much more than a very superficial knowledge of it? Of all the various technologies to provide enlightenment of the curious technologist there’s one curious survivor from the earliest days of the industry that is definitely worth investigation, the jerk line oil well pump. This is a means of powering a reciprocating pump in an oil well not through an individual engine or motor as in the pump jacks, but in a system of rods transmitting power over long distances from a central location by means of reciprocating motion. It’s gloriously simple, which has probably contributed to its survival in a few small-scale oil fields over a century and a half after its invention.

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FDA Approves Ventilator Designed By NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

May 1, 2020 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

Yesterday NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that their ventilator design has received Emergency Use Authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration. This paves the way for the design to be manufactured for use in the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

JPL, which is tightly partnered with the California Institute of Technology, designed the ventilator for rapid manufacturing to meet the current need for respiratory tools made scarce by the pandemic. The design process took only 37 days and was submitted for FDA approval around April 23rd. They call it VITAL — Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally — a nod to NASA’s proclivity for acronyms.

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Hackaday Podcast 065: Game Boy Hacks Galore, Cable Robo Elbow, Pi Cam Solargraphy, And The Deepest Sub Is Crushing It

May 1, 2020 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams cover the hacks that made us happy over the past week. There’s an incredible cable-driven robotic elbow hack whose quality is only eclipsed by the fantastic explanation of how it works (like a block and tackle). Getting data like WiFi credentials into your embedded project may be just a blinking Android app away. Try your hand at digital solargraphy with creative use of f-stop and post processing. And Mike ogles an RC F-35 project while Elliot goes gaga for the deepest of all submarine designs.

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!

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 “Hackaday Podcast 065: Game Boy Hacks Galore, Cable Robo Elbow, Pi Cam Solargraphy, And The Deepest Sub Is Crushing It” →

This Week In Security: Firewall 0-day, Apple’s Response, And An Android Bluetooth Bug

May 1, 2020 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

Sophos firewall appliances are actively being attacked by a 0-day exploit chain that originates with a SQL injection. That injection is a nasty one, as it can be launched from the WAN user portal. The observed attack used that vulnerability to inject a shell command into the device database, where it would eventually be run automatically. If you have an affected Sophos device, go check that the hotfix was automatically installed.

While the vulnerability was a bad one, Sophos’ response here is laudable. They publicly disclosed the attack less than 24 hours after they were notified of it’s existence in the wild, and began rolling a fix out within three days. Additionally, Sophos engineers did a really detailed write-up (linked above) giving us all the details of the attack. The hotfix that closes the vulnerability also attempts to clean up the infection, although there are some additional manual steps that are suggested if your device was compromised. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Firewall 0-day, Apple’s Response, And An Android Bluetooth Bug” →

ICANN Board Withhold Consent For .ORG Deal

May 1, 2020 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Over the past few months there has been a battle waging in the world of domain names; the overseeing body ICANN had hatched a plan to transfer the entire .org registry to a private company, to significant opposition from .org domain holders, concerned citizens, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Part of the process before the deadline for handover on the 4th of May was a due dilligence process during which the ICANN board would review submissions related to the deal, and after completing that task the board have witheld their consent for it to go ahead. As you might expect the EFF are declaring a victory, but they also make the point that one of the reasons the ICANN board rejected the deal was a potential risk of a debt liability for the organisation.

It’s tempting to frame this as a rare victory for the Little Guy in the face of The Man, but the reality is probably more nuanced. When the deal was hatched the world had not yet come to terms with the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning that the thought of a post-virus economic slump would not yet have been on their minds. It’s thus not unexpected that the ICANN board would think about the financial aspects of it as well as the many objections, because in a time of economic pain the possibility of it going sour would be significantly increased. The future of the .org and other registries should remain a concern to internet users, because after all, this is not the first time such a thing has happened.

Old Laptop Gets New Lease On Life With Raspberry Pi

May 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 35 Comments

It seems not a day goes by that we don’t see somebody cramming a Raspberry Pi into some unwilling piece of consumer electronics. But despite being a pretty obvious application for the diminutive ARM board, we don’t often see it installed in an actual computer. Which makes this very clean Raspberry Pi laptop conversion by [Sherbethead2010] all the more interesting.

The first step involved taking a Dremel to the Dell’s chassis and essentially leveling out the entire internal volume. The only component that got reused was the fan, and even that appears to be relocated, so all the mounting posts were just standing in the way of progress.

[Sherbethead2010] mounted the Raspberry Pi towards the rear of the case so its USB and Ethernet ports would be available from the outside, and installed a driver board for the original Phillips LP171 LCD panel in the old drive bay. Power is provided by two custom 18650 battery packs connected to dedicated buck converters, along with an onboard charge controller to safely top them off.

Rather than trying to adapt the original input devices, [Sherbethead2010] decided to take the easy route and installed a Rii K22 wireless keyboard with integrated track pad into the top of the laptop. It turned out to be an almost perfect fit, and beyond the keys being slightly off-center, at first glance it looks like it could be stock.

The last time we saw a Raspberry Pi so well integrated into a real laptop, it was to create a functioning version of one of the props from Hackers. While that build was a joy for its own reasons, it’s hard not to be impressed with how unassuming this computer looks after all the work that’s been done to it.