Photosphere’ing Made Easy And Cheap

March 1, 2014 by 22 Comments

photosphere

Android phones have a cool function called Photo Sphere — unfortunately, unless you’re very steady and can manipulate the phone around its camera’s axis… the results aren’t that amazing. Unless you make a cheap 360 degree panorama head for your tripod that is!

[Oliver Krohn] designed this super simple adapter which you can mount on any tripod. It’s a U-shaped bent piece of aluminum, a bottle cap with a 1/4-20 nut, a thick piece of wire, and a cellphone case. The wire is bent with a notch to sit just below the camera’s lens on the cellphone — it is also placed directly above the tripods panning axis. This puts the nodal point in the perfect place, which allows for a great photo sphere every time.

To see how it works (and the amazing results!) stick around for the following video.

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DIY Foam Cutter Makes It Too Easy

January 26, 2014 by 39 Comments

Cutting foam is pretty tricky without a hot wire cutter. Don’t have one? Well, lucky for you, [Darcy Whyte] has a guide on how to make one. It takes just over an hour to build, and it costs next to nothing in supplies!

[Darcy] is using an old 9V power wart that he had lying around, but you can probably use any DC power supply. He designed the frame in SketchUp and cut it out with his CNC router, although a saw will work just as well for MDF. A piece of 40 gauge nickel chromium wire was strung taught between two 1/4-20 bolts, with one held back by a spring. The spring acts as a safeguard to prevent snapping the wire during overly aggressive cuts. This may be a simple build, but it does produce a handy tool.

[Darcy] demonstrates cutting foam with his creation in a video after the break. We think he could cut thin plastic with it as well—modify your 3D prints, anyone?—though he may need to crank up the voltage a bit.

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Flea Market Finds

April 16, 2012 by 47 Comments

We sometimes wonder why do don’t see classic electronic equipment at second-hand stores. We had thought it’s because these items tend to get snapped up quickly, but perhaps we’re not shopping in the right places. Here’s a photo set documenting some of the finds from a recent flea market.

The offerings cover a wide range of products and components. There are all kinds of bench tools like oscilloscopes, voltage meters, and bench supplies. But we also see more modern computer parts like cardboard boxes full of motherboards, and heaps of PC power bus wires. You can get five tube sockets for a buck and if you need the tubes they’re just $3-5 a piece. One of the more useful finds is a display case full of shrink tube of every diameter; and one vendor is selling wire by the foot.

License plates and common sense place this Flea Market in the Silicon Valley area. But if you’ve got more concrete info on where this type of event goes down please share it in the comments section.

[via Adafruit]

Simple Circuit Keeps Process Control Loops In Tune

October 19, 2023 by 7 Comments

Spare a moment’s pity for the process engineer, whose job it is to keep industrial automation running no matter what. These poor souls seem to be forever on call, fielding panicked requests to come to the factory floor whenever the line goes down. Day or night, weekends, vacations, whatever — when it breaks, the process engineer jumps.

The pressures of such a gig can be enormous, and seem to have weighed on [Tom Goff] enough that he spent a weekend building a junk bin analog signal generator to replace a loop calibrator that he misplaced. Two process control signaling schemes were to be supported — the 0 to 10 VDC analog signal, and the venerable 4-20 mA current loop. All that’s needed for both outputs is an Arduino and an LM358 dual op-amp, plus a few support components. The 0-10 V signal starts as a PWM output from the Arduino, with its 0-5 V average amplified by one of the op-amps set up as a non-inverting amp with a gain of 2. With a little filtering, the voltage output is pretty stable, and swings nicely through the desired range — see the video below for that.

The current loop output is only slightly more complicated. An identical circuit on a separate Arduino output generates the same 10 V max output, but a code change limits the low end of the range to 1 V. This output of the op-amp is fed through a 500-Ω trimmer pot, and the magic of Ohm’s Law results in a 4-20 mA current. The circuit lives on a piece of perf board in a small enclosure and does the job it was built for — nothing fancy needed.

And spoiler alert: [Tom] found the missing loop calibrator — after he built this, of course. Isn’t that always the way?

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PLC Vs Arduino Show Down

July 17, 2017 by 84 Comments

Hackaday readers don’t need an introduction to the Arduino. But in industrial control applications, programmable logic controllers or PLCs are far more common. These are small rugged devices that can do simple things like monitor switches and control actuators. Being ruggedized, they are typically reasonably expensive, especially compared to an Arduino. [Doug Reneker] decided to evaluate an Arduino versus a PLC in a relatively simple industrial-style application.

The application is a simple closed-loop control of flow generated by a pump. A sensor measures flow for the Arduino, which adjusts a control valve actuator to maintain the specified setpoint. The software uses proportional and integral control (the PI part of a PID loop).

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This Week In Security: Password Sanity, Tank Hacking, And The Mystery 9.9

September 27, 2024 by 15 Comments

It looks like there’s finally hope for sane password policies. The US National Institue of Standards and Technology, NIST, has released a draft of SP 800-63-4, the Digital Identity Guideline.

There’s password guidance in there, like “SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords” and “SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically.” NIST approved passwords must be at least 8 characters long, with a weaker recommendation of at least 15 characters. Security questions like name of first pet get the axe. And it’s strongly recommended that all ASCII and Unicode characters should be acceptable for passwords.

This is definitely moving in the right direction. NIST guidelines are only binding for government services and contractors, though they do eventually get picked up by banks and other industries. So there’s hope for sane password policies eventually.

Tank Hacking

Researchers at Bitsight are interested in infrastructure security, and they opted to take a closer look at Automatic Tank Gauging (ATG) systems. Those are found at gas stations, as well as any other facility that needs automated monitoring of liquids or gasses in a tank. There is an actual ATG message format, originally designed for RS-232 serial, and woefully unprepared for the interconnected present. The protocol allows for an optional security code, but it maxes out at only six alpha-numeric characters.

Among the vulnerabilities getting announced today, we have a pair of CVSS 10 command injection flaws, a quartet of 9.8 authentication bypass flaws, with one of those being a hardcoded credential — AKA a backdoor. The other CVSS9+ flaw is a SQL injection, with a trio of slightly less serious flaws. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Password Sanity, Tank Hacking, And The Mystery 9.9” →

Use That One Port For High-Speed FPGA Data Export

June 1, 2024 by 8 Comments

There’s a good few options for exporting data out of FPGAs, like Ethernet, USB2, or USB3. Many FPGAs have a HDMI (or rather, sparkling DVI) port as well, and [Steve Markgraf] brings us the hsdaoh project — High-Speed Data Acquisition Over HDMI, using USB3 capture cards based on the Macrosilicon MS2130 chipset to get the data from the FPGA right to your PC.

Current FPGA-side implementation is designed for Sipeed Tang chips and the GOWIN toolchain, but it should be portable to an open-source toolchain in the future. Make sure you’re using a USB3 capture card with a MS2130 chipset, load the test code into your FPGA, run the userspace capture side, and you’re ready to add this interface to your FPGA project! It’s well worth it, too – during testing, [Steve] has got data transfer speeds up to 180 MB/s, without the USB3 complexity.

As a test, [Steve] shows us an RX-only SDR project using this interface, with respectable amounts of bandwidth. The presentation goes a fair bit into the low-level details of the protocol, from HDMI fundamentals, to manipulating the MS2130 registers in a way that disables all video conversion; do watch the recording, or at least skim the slides! Oh, and if you don’t own a capture card yet, you really should, as it makes for a wonderful Raspberry Pi hacking companion in times of need.