Propeller Backpack For Lazy Skiers

April 7, 2017 by 21 Comments

At first glance, it looks eerily similar to Inspector Gadget’s Propeller Cap, except it’s a backpack. [Samm Sheperd] built a Propeller Backpack (video, embedded after the break) which started off as a fun project but almost ended up setting him on fire.

Finding himself snowed in during a spell of cold weather, he found enough spare RC and ‘copter parts to put his crazy idea in action. He built a wooden frame, fixed the big Rimfire 50CC outrunner motor and prop to it, slapped on a battery pack and ESC, and zip-tied it all on to the carcass of an old backpack.

Remote control in hand, and donning a pair of Ski’s, he did a few successful trial runs. It looks pretty exciting watching him zip by in the snowy wilderness. Well, winter passed by, and he soon found himself in sunny California. The Ski’s gave way to a bike, and a local airfield served as a test track. He even manages to put in some exciting runs on the beach. But the 10S 4000 mAH batteries seem to be a tad underpowered to his liking, and the motor could do with a larger propeller. He managed to source a 12S 10,000 mAH battery pack, but that promptly blew out his Aerostar ESC during the very first static trial.

He then decided to rebuild it from ground up. A ten week welding course that he took to gain some college credits proved quite handy. He built a new TiG welded Aluminium frame which was stronger and more lightweight than the earlier wooden one. He even thoughtfully added a propeller safety guard after some of his followers got worried, although it doesn’t look very effective to us. A bigger propeller was added and the old burnt out ESC was replaced with a new one. It was time for another static trial before heading out in to the wide open snow again. And that’s when things immediately went south. [Samm] was completely unaware as the new ESC gloriously burst in to flames (8:00 into the third video), and it took a while for him to realize why his video recording friend was screaming at him. Check out the three part video series after the break to follow the story of this hack. For a bonus, check out the 90 year old gent who stops by for a chat on planes and flying (8:25 in the third video).

But [Samm] isn’t letting this setback pin him down. He’s promised to take this to a logical finish and build a reliable, functional Propeller Backpack some time soon. This isn’t his first rodeo building oddball hacks. Check out his experiment on Flying Planes With Squirrel Cages.

We seem to be catching a wave of wind-powered transportation hacks these days. Hackaday’s own [James Hobson] spent time in December on a similar, arguably safer, concept. He attached ducted fans to the back of a snowboard. We like this choice since flailing limbs won’t get caught in these types of fans.

Continue reading “Propeller Backpack For Lazy Skiers” →

File Format Posters

April 7, 2017 by 28 Comments

It’s not uncommon for hackers to have a particular delectation for unusual interior decoration. Maybe it’s a Nixie tube clock, or a vacuum fluorescent display reading out the latest tweets from a favorite chatbot. If this sounds like your living room already, perhaps you’d like some of these file format posters to adorn your walls.

The collection of images includes all kinds of formats — GIF, ZIP and WAV are all represented, but it even gets into some real esoterica — DOLphin format executables are here if you’re a total GameCube fanatic. Each poster breaks down the format into parts, such as the header, metadata and descriptor sections, and come in a variety of formats themselves — most available in SVG, PDF and PNG.

If we’re totally honest, these aren’t all designed for hanging on your wall as-is — we’d consider putting some work into to optimize the color palettes and layouts before putting these to print. But regardless, they’re an excellent visual representation of data structures that you might find particularly useful if you need to do some reverse engineering down the track.

If you still have wall space available after seeing this, here’s the electronic reference poster that should fill it.

[Thanks to JD for the tip!]

Vintage Telegraph Sounder Clicks Again

April 6, 2017 by 9 Comments

It’s sad, when you think about it: a retired railroad telegraph operator, who probably once pounded out code at 40 words per minute, with a collection of vintage sounders silently gathering dust on a shelf. [kthrace] decided to do something about that, and built this Morse sender to bring those old sounders back to life.

As archaic as Morse might seem, it’s a life skill, one the 92-year old former brass-pounder for whom this was built was eager to practice again. There are code practice oscillators, of course, but dits and dahs are no substitutes for the electromagnetic clicks and clacks that once filled this old fellow’s days. There’s not much information on the circuit, but it looks like [kthrace] chose a RedBoard to read Morse from an SD card and drive some relays to support up to four sounders; that’ll make a racket! The case is custom made and nicely complements the wood and brass of the J.H. Bunnell and Co. sounder, which still sounds great after all these years.

Test your Morse skills in the video below – copying code is a lot harder from a sounder than from an oscillator. Find yourself in need of practice? We’ve got you covered.

Continue reading “Vintage Telegraph Sounder Clicks Again” →

That Sucks! Death Of A Tesla Coil

April 6, 2017 by 17 Comments

[Electroboom] always has some entertaining videos. He recently tried to run his Tesla coil in a vacuum. The video shows some interesting results, along with his usual bleeped out expletives as he drills into his hand and suffers other indignities in the name of electronics.

Unfortunately, a bit of extra bolt caused the coil to arc internally, eventually leading to the impressive device shuffling off its mortal… um, well, let’s just say its untimely demise. Along the way, though, you get to see some interesting techniques for building a silicone seal for the vacuum chamber, and some neat Tesla coil tricks with a closed off syringe.

Continue reading “That Sucks! Death Of A Tesla Coil” →

Two-Piece Boxes Thanks To Laser-Cut Flex Hinges

April 6, 2017 by 14 Comments

It sounds like a challenge from a [Martin Gardner] math puzzle from the Scientific American of days gone by: is it possible to build a three-dimensional wooden box with only two surfaces? It turns out it is, if you bend the rules and bend the wood to make living hinge boxes with a laser cutter.

[Martin Raynsford] clearly wasn’t setting out to probe the limits of topology with these boxes, but they’re a pretty neat trick nonetheless. The key to these boxes is the narrow to non-existent kerf left by a laser cutter that makes interference fits with wood a reality. [Martin]’s design leverages the slot and tab connection we’re used to seeing in laser-cut boxes, but adds a living flex-hinge to curve each piece of plywood into a U-shape. The two pieces are then nested together like those old aluminum hobby enclosures from Radio Shack. His GitHub has OpenSCAD scripts to parametrically create two different styles of two-piece boxes so you can scale it up or (somewhat) down according to your needs. There’s also a more traditional three-piece box, and any of them might be a great choice for a control panel or small Arduino enclosure. And as a bonus, the flex-hinge provides ventilation.

Need slots and tabs for boxes but you’re more familiar with FreeCAD? These parametric scripts will get you started, and we’ll bet you can port the flex-hinge bit easily, too.

Remotely Get Root On Most Smart TVs With Radio Signals

April 6, 2017 by 58 Comments

[Rafael Scheel] a security consultant has found that hacking smart TVs takes nothing much more than an inexpensive DVB-T transmitter, The transmitter has to be in range of the target TV and some malicious signals. The hack works by exploiting hybrid broadcast broadband TV signals and widely known about bugs in web browsers commonly run on smart TVs, which seem run in the background almost all the time.

Scheel was commissioned by Cyber security company Oneconsult, to create the exploit which once deployed, gave full root privileges enabling the attacker to setup and SSH into the TV taking complete control of the device from anywhere in the world. Once exploited the rogue code is even unaffected by device reboots and factory resets.

Once a hacker has control over the TV of an end user, he can harm the user in a variety of ways, Among many others, the TV could be used to attack further devices in the home network or to spy on the user with the TV’s camera and microphone. – Rafael Scheel

Smart TV’s seem to be suffering from  IoT security problems. Turning your TV into an all-seeing, all-hearing surveillance device reporting back to it’s master is straight out of 1984.

A video of a talk about the exploit along with all the details is embedded below.
Continue reading “Remotely Get Root On Most Smart TVs With Radio Signals” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Pocket Serial Terminal

April 6, 2017 by 37 Comments

When you have a microcontroller or other microcomputer on the bench in front of you and it lacks the familiar keyboard and display of a modern desktop computer, what do you do when you wish to program it or otherwise issue commands? Unless you are a retro computer enthusiast who longs for a set of Altair-style toggle switches, the chances are you’ll find its serial port and attach a terminal.

Serial terminals, devices containing a screen and keyboard hooked up to send and display text from a serial port, used to be a staple of computing, but as standalone devices, they’re now rather rare. In most cases nowadays using a serial terminal will mean opening up a terminal emulator in your modern OS, Linux, Windows, or MacOS, but there is still a use for standalone hardware. [Kuldeep Singh Dhaka] certainly thinks so, because he’s making an extremely nice portable terminal with an LCD screen.

The terminal emulates a venerable DEC VT-100 terminal, but since it’s built around an STM32F105 ARM microcontroller we’re sure it could emulate other models with appropriate software. It takes either a USB or a PS/2 keyboard, so we’d expect to see it paired with a suitably tiny portable keyboard when it in use. There is no source code available for it yet since this is very much still a project in development that we’re featuring now because it is a 2017 Hackaday Prize entry, but he assures us that code will be on its way and it will be GPL licenced.

He’s even posted a video that we’ve placed below the break of the device in operation, connected to a machine running MicroPython. We’d probably turn off that beep, though.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Pocket Serial Terminal” →