2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, And Revamp All The Things

June 7, 2022 by 2 Comments

Where has the year gone? It’s already summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the second Challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize ends this weekend, along with your chance at one of ten $500 prizes. If you thrive on last-minute challenges, consider the eleventh hour upon you. But don’t panic; there’s still a decent amount of time left to start a new project over on Hackaday.io and get it entered into the contest.

The second Challenge focuses on creating new ways of recycling materials. What does this look like? That’s a pretty broad topic, but it could be anything from a better method of chip harvesting to an inexpensive and/or low-energy process for shredding used plastic and forming it into millable blocks.

Don’t just think big on a commercial scale — imagine what people can do at home with the stuff in their recycle bin or their neighbor’s trash. If everyone had access to one of [Jerzeek]’s plastic scanners for identifying the type of plastic that mystery bucket or old watering can was made of, just think what could be done. As long as your project focuses on reusing, recycling, or revamping, we want to see it!

So far, we’ve seen a bunch of excellent projects, many of which are focused on recycling plastic. There’s the Pullstruder, which creates PET filament from plastic bottles, and a method for vacuum-forming HDPE plastic directly from milk jugs. There has to be more than one way to upcycle acrylic scraps into new sheets and jewelry, but the best one definitely involves a panini press and a car jack.

Recycling plastic is totally fantastic, but it’s not the only material available at the dump. You’ll probably have no trouble finding tires from which to make footstools and tables, and if you’re lucky, there’ll be an old phone that could be turned into an IoT assistant. If you want to take the circularity thing literally, dig up a printer and and old CD player and turn them into a mini pottery machine that uses cornstarch.

So basically, we have a bunch of awesome entries right now, but we don’t have yours! Remember: it doesn’t have to be a new project, just a new project page. Did you revolutionize recycling during lockdown? Make a new project and tell us about it! Just don’t forget to actually enter the thing by using the drop-down on the left before 7AM PDT on Sunday, June 12th. Need a time converting countdown thingy? We’ve got you.

After the recycle bin is empty, we’ll be moving on immediately to the Hack It Back challenge. This time, we’ll be asking you to teach old tech new tricks, or to bring a piece of gear back from the dead. Turn a blender into a Dremel-like tool, or give an old ‘scope a screen upgrade. You know what to do!

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A self-service checkout computer game

Practice Your Shopping Skills With This Self-Service Checkout Game

May 18, 2022 by 13 Comments

Self-service checkouts have become a common feature in supermarkets the world over, a trend accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. While some may lament the loss of human contact, others relish the opportunity to do their own scanning: with a bit of practice, self-service can provide for a very fast checkout experience. Assuming, of course, that the machine recognizes each product, the built-in weight sensor works correctly, and you don’t get selected for a random check.

If you want to practice your checkout game without spending loads of money, you might want to have a look at [Niklas Roy] and [Kati Hyyppä]’s latest project: Bonprix is a game where the goal is to scan as many items as possible within a 90-second time limit. Installed at the Eniarof DIY festival, it’s designed to resemble a typical supermarket checkout with a display, a barcode scanner and a shopping basket filled with random items. The screen indicates which item should be scanned next; if you’re too slow, the checkout will begin to offer discounts, which you obviously don’t want. When the 90 seconds are over, the machine spits out a receipt indicating your total score.

The checkout desk is made from wooden pallets and cardboard; inside is a laptop running Linux, with a handheld barcode scanner attached via USB. An LED strip provides a beam of bright red light to indicate the scanning area, and turns green when a barcode is successfully scanned. Arduinos control the LEDs and the big red-and-yellow “start” button, while a thermal printer from an ATM prints the receipts at the end of each game.

Apart from a bit of fun, the Bonprix project tries to address questions relating to consumer culture and self-checkouts: is it fair to let customers do their own work? Should they be paid for it? Is it even ethical to encourage people to spend as much as possible?

While this is the first time we’ve seen a self-service checkout computer game, we’ve done a few deep dives into the fascinating technology of barcodes that makes it all possible. Check this out!

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A Minimal Motoring Manifesto

May 5, 2022 by 103 Comments

A couple of years ago, Hackaday published an article, “Electric Vehicles Continue the Same Wasteful Mistakes That Limit Longevity“, in which we took a look at the way the car industry, instead of taking the move to electric traction as an opportunity to simplify their products, was instead making their electric offerings far more complex. It touched a nerve and received a very large comment volume, such that now it is our 19th most commented story of all time.

It’s something brought back to the fore by seeing a The Drive piece bemoaning the evolution of the automobile as a software receptacle governed by end-user licenses rather than a machine under the control of its owner. In turn that’s posed the question: Just what do you really need for a car, and what is superfluous? Time to provide an answer to that question, so here it is: a minimal motoring manifesto. Continue reading “A Minimal Motoring Manifesto” →

This Week In Security: Java’s Psychic Signatures, AWS Escape, And A Nasty Windows Bug

April 22, 2022 by 2 Comments

Java versions 15, 16, 17, and 18 (and maybe some older versions) have a big problem, ECDSA signature verification is totally broken. The story is a prime example of the dangers of unintended consequences, the pitfall of rolling your own crypto, and why to build a test suite for important code. In Java 15, the ECDSA verification code was re-written, moving the code from C++ to a Java-native implementation. The new code misses an important check, that the initialization and proof values are both non-zero.

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This Week In Security: More State-Sponsored Activity, Spring4Shell

April 1, 2022 by 4 Comments

[Editor’s note: There is a second, fake iteration of this column out today. This is obviously the real column.]

An alert from CISA, combined with an unsealed pair of indictments, sheds some new light on how Russian hackers pursue high-value targets. The key malware here is Triton, essentially a rootkit designed for the Tricon safety systems, widely deployed at refineries and other infrastructure facilities. One of the early deployments of this was to a Saudi oil plant in 2017. This deployment seems to have been botched, as it caused malfunctions and shut the plant down for about a week.

The new information is confirmation that the same operators, out of the “Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics”, attempted to target US facilities with the same campaign. The Wired coverage initially struck me as odd, as it detailed how these Russian attackers researched US refineries, looking for the most promising targets. How exactly did US intelligence agencies know about the research habits of agents in Russia? The details of the indictment has the answer: They were researching US refineries by downloading papers from the US Department of Energy. As the IP addresses of this Russian research group is known and tracked, it was easy enough for US agencies to make the connection.

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Bend It Like (Sonar) Beacon With A Phased Array

February 23, 2022 by 7 Comments

Ultrasonic transducers are incredible, with them you can detect distances, as well as levitate and peer through objects. They can emit and receive ultrasonic soundwaves (typically above 18khz) and just like all waves, they can be steered via a phased array. [Bitluni] was trying to accurately measure distances but found the large field of view of the sensor was just too imprecise, so he made a phased array of transducers.

The inspiration came from a Hackaday Supercon talk from 2019 about phased arrays. [Bitluni] walks through an excellent explanation of how the array works with a bucket of water and his finger, as well as a separate simulation. By changing the phase offset of the different array members, the beam can effectively be steered as interference muffs the undesired waves. Using a set of solenoids, he created a test bench to validate his idea in a medium he could see; water. The solenoids fire a single pulse into the water creating a wave. You can see the wave move in the correct direction in the water, which validates the concept. A simple PCB sent off to a fab house with a stencil offers a surface to solder the transducers and drivers onto. An ESP32 drives the 8 PWM signals that go to the transmitters and reads in the single receiver via a small amplifier. Still not content to let the idea be unproven, he sets up the receiver on his CNC gantry and plots the signal strength at different points, yielding beautiful “heat maps.”
bitluni's heatmap for his sonar array

It sweeps a 60-degree field in front of it at around 1-3 frames per second. As you might imagine, turning sound wave reflections into distance fields is a somewhat noisy affair. He projects the sonar display on top of what we can see in the camera and it is fun to see the blobs line up in the correct spot.

We noticed he built quite a few boards, perhaps in the future, he will scale it up like this 100 transducer array? Video after the break.

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Coin-Operated Graphing Calculator Console

February 16, 2022 by 8 Comments

Longtime hacker [Peter Jansen] was so impressed with a piece in The Onion from last year that he decided to build this coin-operated Texas Instruments graphing calculator console on a whim (video below the break — warning vertical orientation).

With nothing more to go on than the fake mock-up pictured from the original satirical article, [Peter] was able to scale the dimensions from the photo making a few reasonable assumptions. He built the project over the holidays, enlisting his father and daughter as helpers. The cabinet is framed in 2×3 lumber and faced with wood veneer covered plywood and vinyl overlays for the graphics.

The computing power is from a Raspberry Pi with an Arduino Uno serves as an I/O processor. It was a bit tricky to control a calculator with only two knobs, but he makes it work. However, at 25 cents per plot with no apparent hard-copy capability, this console calculator might be a bit pricey for all but casual plotting over a few beers at the local pub.

You might remember [Peter] from some of his hacks we featured over the years, like his home-brew CT scanner or placing fourth in the first Hackaday Prize contest in 2014 with the open sourced tricorder project.

 

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