Custom Hat Gives Vintage Mitutoyo Calipers A New Lease On Life

August 2, 2024 by 16 Comments

Metrology fans are usually at least a little bit in love with Mitutoyo, and rightfully so. The Japanese company has been making precision measuring instruments for the better part of 100 years, and users appreciate their precision almost as much as the silky smooth feel of their tools. If you can afford it, a Mitutoyo caliper is quite an addition to your toolbox.

As good as they are, though, they’re not perfect, which is what led to this clever Mitutoyo digital caliper hack by [turbanedengineer]. The calipers in question, a digital set from the early 1980s, happen to have a unique history with a tangential Hackaday angle — they belonged to [Dhaval], mechanical engineer and avid motorcyclist who happens to be the late elder brother of our own [Anool Mahidharia].

The tool, in need of a little TLC, made its way to [turbanedengineer] who first restored the broken battery contacts. Once powered up again, it became apparent that while the caliper’s native metric measurements were spot on, the internal conversion to inches was considerably off. This led [turbanedengineer] to the data port on the tool, which is intended to send serial data to an external computer for logging measurements. After a little experimentation to nail down the data format, he prototyped a tiny circuit using an ATtiny85 and an OLED display that reads the caliper data, converts metric to inches, and displays both measurements on the screen. The prototype led to a more permanent version, which cleverly sits over the original display and taps into the data port without any free wires. The video below shows the very slick results.

Our hearts go out to [Anool] and his family for their loss, and we tip our hats to [turbanedengineer] for his thoughtful and respectful hack of a storied tool. We know that anthropomorphizing tools makes no rational sense, but we think it’s safe to say that a tool like this has a soul, and it’s probably happy to be back in the game.

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Over-molding Wires With Hot Glue And 3D Printed Molds

August 2, 2024 by 50 Comments

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: water always finds a way in. That’s particularly problematic for things like wire splices in damp environments, something that no amount of electrical tape is going to help. Heat shrink tubing might be your friend here, but for an electrically isolated and mechanically supported repair, you may want to give over-molding with a hot glue gun a try.

The inspiration for [Print Practical]’s foray into over-molding came from a video that’s making the rounds showing a commercially available tool for protecting spliced wires in the automotive repair trade. It consists of a machined aluminum mold that the spliced wires fit into and a more-or-less stock hot glue gun, which fills the mold with melted plastic. [Print Practical] thought it just might be possible to 3D print custom molds at home and do it himself.

His first attempt didn’t go so well. As it turns out, hot glue likes to stick to things — who knew? — including the PETG mold he designed. Trying to pry apart the mold after injection was a chore, and even once he got inside it was clear the glue much preferred to stay in the mold. Round two went much better — same wire, same mold, but now with a thin layer of vegetable oil to act as a release agent. That worked like a charm, with the over-mold standing up to a saltwater bath with no signs of leaking. [Print Practical] also repaired an iPhone cable that has seen better days, providing much-needed mechanical support for a badly frayed section.

This looks like a fantastic idea to file away for the future, and one that’s worth experimenting with. Other filament types might make a mold better able to stand up to the hot glue, and materials other than the ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer found in most hot glue sticks might be explored. TPU over-molds, anyone? Or perhaps you can use a printer as an injector rather than the glue gun.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 282: Saildrones, A New Classic Laptop, And SNES Cartridges Are More Than You Think

August 2, 2024 by 1 Comment

In this episode, the CrowdStrike fiasco has Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi pondering the fragility of our modern infrastructure. From there the discussion moves on to robotic sailboats, the evolving state of bespoke computers, and the unique capabilities of the Super Nintendo cartridge. You’ll also hear about cleaning paintings with lasers, the advantages of electronic word processors, stacking 3D printed parts, and the joys of a nice data visualization. They’ll wrap the episode up by marveling at the techniques required to repair undersea fiber optic cables, and the possibilities (and frustrations) of PCB panelization using multiple designs.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, the Hackaday Podcast is available in DRM-free MP3 for offline listening.

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A circular concrete pond in a garden. A small round fountain jets water out in the center and a solar panel and control box are visible attached to the end of the pond opposite the camera. On the top left is the text, "3D printed, Solar powered, and Arduino controlled" in yellow

Solar Fountain Aerates Garden Pond

August 2, 2024 by 8 Comments

Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions to a problem don’t meet your expectations. That’s what led [TomGoff] to build his own solar pond fountain.

This build features a lot of creative reuse of materials [TomGoff] already had on hand, like the end of a cable reel for the platform and a wheelbarrow inner tube for flotation. A 3D printed nozzle in the center of this apparatus is attached to a 12 V water pump and the whole thing is controlled by an Arduino running 30 seconds on and 3 minutes off to conserve battery power.

A hand-built perfboard contains a light dependent resistor (LDR) to tell the Arduino not to run at night, the relay for the pump, and a battery charge monitor. Be sure to check out the full write-up to see the video of the Tinkercad electronics simulation as well as the code. A 20 W solar panel keeps the whole thing charged so you don’t have to run mains power out to your pond.

If you need more solar projects for your garden, how about this Charmander lamp or a solar powered irrigation system?

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This Week In Security: Echospoofing, Ransomware Records, And Github Attestations

August 2, 2024 by 5 Comments

It’s a bit of bitter irony, when a security product gets used maliciously, to pull off the exact attack it was designed to prevent. Enter Proofpoint, and the EchoSpoofing attack. Proofpoint offers an email security product, filtering spam and malicious incoming emails, and also handling SPF, DKIM, and DMARC headers on outgoing email. How does an external service provide those email authentication headers?

One of the cardinal sins of running an email server is to allow open relaying. That’s when anyone can forward email though an SMTP server without authentication. What we have here is two nearly open relays, that wound up with spoofed emails getting authenticated just like the real thing. The first offender is Microsoft’s Office365, which seems to completely skip checking for email spoofing when using SMTP relaying from an allowed IP address. This means a valid Office365 account allows sending emails as any address. The other half relies on the way Proofpoint works normally, accepting SMTP traffic from certain IP addresses, and adding the authentication headers to those emails. There’s an option in Proofpoint to add the Microsoft Office 365 servers to that list, and apparently quite a few companies simply select that option.

The end result is that a clever spammer can send millions of completely legitimate looking emails every day, that look very convincing even to sophisticated users. At six months of activity, averaging three millions emails a day, this campaign managed just over half a billion malicious emails from multiple high-profile domains.

The good news here is that Proofpoint and Guardio discovered the scheme, and worked with Microsoft to develop the X-OriginatorOrg header that is now applied to every email sent from or through the Office365 servers. This header marks the account tenant the email belongs to, giving vendors like Proofpoint a simple way to determine email validity. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Echospoofing, Ransomware Records, And Github Attestations” →

Getting A Laser Eye Injury And How To Avoid It

August 2, 2024 by 28 Comments

Most people love lasers, because they can make cats chase, read music from a shiny disc, etch and cut materials, and be very shiny in Hollywood blockbusters, even when their presence makes zero sense. That said, lasers are also extremely dangerous, as their highly focused nature and wide range of power levels can leave a person dazzled, blinded or dead from direct and indirect exposure. A lapse in laser safety was how [Phil Broughton] ended up with part of his retina forever marked, as he describes his adventures with an overly enthusiastic laser company sales person.

Quanta Ray PRO350 with frequency doubling, emitting a 532nm beam – Sales brochure image from Quanta Ray, unknown date
Quanta Ray PRO350 with frequency doubling, emitting a 532 nm beam – Sales brochure image from Quanta Ray, unknown date

It didn’t take much, just this sales person who made a really poor decision while trying to please some customers and nearly ended with multiple adults, a local school, pilots at a nearby airfield getting their retinas blasted out due to an absolutely harebrained idea to use a fairly high-powered Quanta-Ray Nd:YAG laser on reflective surfaces in the open.

This was in 1999, and fortunately [Phil] only suffered some fairly minor damage to his retina from the laser beam reflection. What happened to the customers (who wore argon laser safety glasses) or the sales critter (who left soon after) is not described, but both may have received some bad news when they had their eyes checked shortly after at the ophthalmologist.

These kind of stories are a stark reminder that laser safety is not optional. Lasers producing a visible (400 – 700 nm) wavelength above Class 2 should only be operated in a fully secured environment, with safety glasses for the appropriate laser wavelength. Class 2 lasers producing a non-visible wavelength can cause permanent damage because the blink reflex of the eye does not offer any protection here.

As even some dodgy laser pointers are being (illegally) sold online are actually Class 2, this should make it clear that laser eye injury can happen to anyone, and it only takes a second to change someone’s life forever.

An odd looking apparatus for cleaning floppy disks. A neon green disk tray is suspended on metal linear rails in a vertical orientation. It can move back and forth through a set of cleaning heads and a set of drying fans. There are some control buttons on the font as well as a string of addressable LEDs and two speakers.

Rube Goldberg Floppy Disk Cleaner

August 2, 2024 by 5 Comments

Floppies were once the standard method of information exchange, but decades of storage can render them unreadable, especially if mold sets in. [Rob Smith] wanted to clean some floppies in style and made a Disco Rube Goldberg-Style device for the job.

Starting with a disk caddy on linear rails, [Smith] has a track for the floppy to follow. First it goes through a set of pads with cleaning solution on them, and is then dried off with heating elements. To make it more fun, the device has LEDs and a set of speakers at the bottom to treat the disk to a more complete car wash-esque experience.

Cotton swabs and a cleaning solution are all you really need to do the job by hand, but if you have a lot of floppies, that can get tedious quickly. [Smith] compares his machine’s performance to doing it by hand with both IPA and a dish soap solution showing that his machine does indeed clean the disks and usually makes them more readable than they were before. He cautions that it might be best to make multiple copies of the disk during the cleaning process as it isn’t always constructive though.

Thinking about archiving that stack of floppies under your workbench? While Linux doesn’t support the drives anymore, we’ve covered a couple different methods in the past and the importance of reading the flux.

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