Print A Sacrificial Magnet Square

January 2, 2018 by 15 Comments

Here’s your quick and dirty hack for the day. Sometimes you just need something that will work for what you’re trying to do, and you don’t want to go through the motions of doing what’s prescribed. When this happens, it’s a cheap, disposable tool that fits the bill. No, we’re not talking about Harbor Freight—we mean those need-driven tools you make yourself that get the job done without fuss. If you’re really lucky, you can use them a couple of times before they break.

This is one of those tools. [Jake’s Workshop] wanted to be able to quickly tack a corner weld without getting out the clamps, so he thought, why not print some magnet squares? [Jake] hollowed out the triangle to save filament, but this also gives it a nice advantage over store-bought magnet squares: instead of grasping and pulling it off,  you can hook your finger through it and then hang it on the pegboard for next time.

[Jake] got lucky with the pocket sizes and was able to press fit the magnets in place, but it would be worth it to add a drop of CA glue to help with strain. He seems to have forgotten to upload the files for his various styles, but a hollow triangle with chamfers and magnet pockets should be easy enough to replicate in OpenSCAD or  SolidWorks, which he used in the video below.

There’s something special about a cheap tool you make yourself. Even though you know it won’t last forever, it’s just more meaningful than some cheap, rage-inducing tchotchke or assemblage from a place where the air is ~85% offgasses. We love necessity-driven self-built tools around here so much that we gave them their own Hacklet.

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Remember When Scratch-Built Robots Were Hard?

January 2, 2018 by 10 Comments

Even simple robots used to require quite a bit of effort to pull together. This example shows how far we’ve come with the tools and techniques that make things move and interact. It’s a 3D printed rover controlled by the touchscreen on your phone. This achieves the most basic building block of wheeled robotics, and the process is easy on you and your pocketbook.

We just can’t stop loving the projects [Greg Zumwalt], aka[gzumwalt], is turning out. We just saw his air-powered airplane engine and now this little rover perks our ears up. The design uses the familiar trick of two powered wheels with a ball bearing to avoid problems with differential turning. But the simplicity is all in the implementation.

This bot is 3D printed using eight very simple pieces: four gears, two axles, a cap and a single tray to mount everything. The cap captures the ball bearing which pokes out a hole in the bottom of the tray to form an omnidirectional wheel. Two 9G servos modified for continuous rotation. The mating teeth of the gears are found on the wheel sections which have grooves for neoprene O-rings to provide traction. The entire thing is driven by an ESP8266 in the form of an Adafruit Feather Huzzah. This is programmed using the Arduino IDE and your phone can connect directly or through a WiFi router.

We’re not crazy, right? Robots didn’t used to be this easy to pull together? This goes for the power of 3D printing versus traditional basement fabrication methods, but in the availability of powerful yet inexpensive embedded systems and the available tools and libraries to program them. Kudos to you [Greg] for showing us how great the currently available building blocks are in the hands of anyone who wants to channel their engineering creativity. He certainly has… this chassis ultimately powers Santa’s sleigh.

Need a bigger printing challenge? Here’s a 3D printed rover that goes all-in with the suspension system.

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SID Organ Pulls Out All The Stops

January 2, 2018 by 15 Comments

Someone left this organ out in the rain, but [Tinkartank] rescued it and has given it a new life as a SID controller. What’s a SID, you ask? That’s the sound chip Commodore used in the C64, a remarkable chip revered among retro gamers that was way ahead of its time.

He threw out everything but the keyboard assembly for the build. Each key press now drives a momentary button, and those are all wired up to an Arduino Mega through some I/O expansion boards left over from another project. The Mega drives the MOS6581 SID chip which generates those sweet chiptunes. There are four CV outs for expanding the organ’s horizons with Eurorack modules.

Our favorite part is the re-use of the stop knobs — particularly that they are actuated the same way as before. The knobs still technically control the sound, but in a new way — now they turn pots that change the arpeggio, frequency, or whatever he wants ’em to do.

The plans for the future revolve around switching to a Teensy to help out with memory issues. Although it’s a work in progress, this organ already has a ton of features. Be sure to check them out after the break.

Once you dive down the chiptunes rabbit hole, you might want to take them everywhere.  When you get to that point, here’s a portable SID player. A SIDman, if you will.

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Samy Kamkar: Reverse Engineering For A Secure Future

January 2, 2018 by 15 Comments

Show of hands: how many of you have parked your car in the driveway, walked up to your house, and pressed your car’s key fob button thinking it would open the front door? We’ve probably all done it and felt a little dopey as a result, but when you think about it, it would be tremendously convenient, especially with grocery bags dangling off each arm and the mail clenched between your teeth. After all, we’re living in the future —  shouldn’t your house be smart enough to know when you’re home?

Reverse engineer par excellence Samy Kamkar might think so, but given his recent experiences with cars smart enough to know when you’re standing outside them, he’d probably have some reservations. Samy dropped by the 2017 Hackaday Superconference in November to discuss the finer points of exploiting security flaws in passive car entry systems, and also sat down with our own Elliot Williams after his talk for a one-on-one interview. Samy has some interesting insights on vehicle cybersecurity, but the practical knowledge he’s gained while exploring the limits of these systems teach some powerful lessons about being a real-world reverse engineer.

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44 Layers Of Katharine Burr Blodgett

January 2, 2018 by 22 Comments

Whether you realize it or not, Katharine Burr Blodgett has made your life better. If you’ve ever looked through a viewfinder, a telescope, or the windshield of a car, you’ve been face to face with her greatest achievement, non-reflective glass.

Katharine was a surface chemist for General Electric and a visionary engineer who discovered a way to make ordinary glass 99% transparent. Her invention enabled the low-cost production of nearly invisible panes and lenses for everything from picture frames and projectors to eyeglasses and spyglasses.

Katharine’s education and ingenuity along with her place in the zeitgeist led her into other fields throughout her career. When World War II erupted, GE shifted their focus to military applications. Katharine rolled up her sleeves and got down in the scientific trenches with the men of the Research Lab. She invented a method for de-icing airplane wings, engineered better gas masks, and created a more economical oil-based smokescreen. She was a versatile, insightful scientist who gave humanity a clearer view of the universe.

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LED Fabrication From Wafer To Light

January 2, 2018 by 19 Comments

Building a circuit to blink an LED is the hardware world’s version of the venerable “Hello, world!” program — it teaches you the basics in a friendly, approachable way. And the blinky light project remains a valuable teaching tool right up through the hardware wizard level, provided you build your own LEDs first.

For [emach1ne], the DIY LED was part of a Master’s degree course and began with a slice of epitaxial wafer that goes through cleaning, annealing, and acid etching steps in preparation for photolithography. While gingerly handling some expensive masks, [emach1ne] got to use some really cool tools and processes — mask aligners, plasma etchers, and electron beam vapor deposition. [emach1ne] details every step that led to a nursery of baby LEDs on the wafer, each of which was tested. Working arrays were cut from the wafer and mounted in a lead frame, bonded with gold wires, and fiat lux.

The whole thing must have been a great experience in modern fab methods, and [emach1ne] should feel lucky to have access to tools like these. But if you think you can’t build your own semiconductor fab, we beg to differ.

[via r/engineering]

When A Skimmer Isn’t A Skimmer

January 2, 2018 by 163 Comments

I have a confession to make: ever since the first time I read about them online, I’ve been desperate to find an ATM skimmer in the wild. It’s the same kind of morbid curiosity that keeps us from turning away from a car accident, you don’t want to be witness to anyone getting hurt, but there’s still that desire to see the potential for danger up close. While admittedly my interest is largely selfish (I already know on which shelf I would display it), there would still be tangible benefits to the community should an ATM skimmer cross my path. Obviously I would remove it from the machine and prevent others from falling prey to it, and the inevitable teardown would make interesting content for the good readers of Hackaday. It’s a win for everyone, surely fate should be on my side in this quest.

So when my fingers brushed against that unmistakable knobby feel of 3D printed plastic as I went to insert my card at a local ATM, my heart skipped a beat. After all these years, my dream had come true. Nobody should ever be so excited about potentially being a victim of fraud, but there I was, grinning like an idiot in the farmer’s market. Like any hunter I quickly snapped a picture of my quarry for posterity, and then attempted to free it from the host machine.

But things did not go as expected. I spend most of my free time writing blog posts for Hackaday, so it’s safe to say that physical strength is not an attribute I possess in great quantity, but even still it seemed odd I couldn’t get the skimmer detached. I yanked it in every direction, tried to spin it, did everything short of kicking it; but absolutely no movement. In fact, I noticed that when pulling on the skimmer the whole face plate of the ATM bulged out a bit. I realized this thing wasn’t just glued onto the machine, it must have actually been installed inside of it.

I was heartbroken to leave my prize behind, but at the very least I would be able to alert the responsible party. The contact info for the ATM’s owner was written on the machine, so I emailed them the picture as well as all the relevant information in hopes that they could come check the machine out before anyone got ripped off.

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