Keeping A Mazda’s Radio On After The Engine Shuts Off

November 22, 2023 by 51 Comments

Have you ever pulled into a car park with your favorite song blaring, only to lament the fact that the music cut out when you stopped the engine? Some modern cars are smart enough to keep the radio on until you open the door. [ssh16] decided to hack that very functionality into their Mazda MX-5.

The device uses a microcontroller to read the CAN bus of the vehicle. The microcontroller also has the ability to keep the vehicle’s ACC (accessory) relay energized at will. Thus, when the engine is turned off, the microcontroller keeps the ACC relay on, maintaining power to the stereo and infotainment system. Then, after ten minutes, or when it receives a CAN message that the driver’s door has been opened, it cuts power to the relay, shutting the accessories off. It’s a simple build, but one that [ssh16] executed cleanly. By putting the microcontroller on a neat PCB with a harness that can clip into the stock Mazda one, it’s possible to install the hack without needing to cut any wires. Plus, with a small modification, it was even possible to use the same hack with a Mazda CX-5.

Whether you’re jamming out to a cool song, or you just want to finish a phone call over Bluetooth, it’s a nifty feature to have in a vehicle. We’ve seen some other neat infotainment hacks before, too. Video after the break.

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How The WS2812 Is Made

November 19, 2023 by 28 Comments

[Scotty Allen] of Strange Parts is no stranger to Chinese factory tours, but this one is now our favorite. He visits the font of all WS2812s, World Semi, and takes a good look at the machines that make two million LEDs per day.

The big deal with the WS2812s, and all of the similar addressable LEDs that have followed them, is that they have a logic chip inside the LED that enables all the magic. And that means die-bonding bare-die ICs into each blinky. Watching all of the machines pick, place, glue, and melt bond wire is pretty awesome. Don’t miss the demo of the tape-and-frame. And would you believe that they test each smart LED before they kick it out the door? There’s a machine that clocks some data in and reads it back out the other side.

Do we take the addressable LED for granted today? Probably. But if you watch this video, maybe you’ll at least know what goes into making one, and the next time you’re blinking all over the place, you’ll spill a little for the epoxy-squirting machine. After all, the WS2812 is the LED that prompted us to ask, three years ago, if we could live without one.
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The Case For A Technology Aware Lobby Correspondent

November 17, 2023 by 24 Comments

We cover all manner of stories here at Hackaday, including awesome hardware hacks, the latest trends and inventions, and in-depth guides to fascinating technologies. We also cover a few news stories from the wider world outside our community, usually when they have some knock-on effect that has an impact on us. Recently this last category of stories has included laws which present a threat to online encryption and privacy in the UK and in the European Union, for example. They’re not the most joyful of news, but it’s vital for everyone with an interest in online matters to be informed about them.

A Long And Inglorious History

A quad flat-pack computer chip, made by VLSI
The infamous Clipper chip. Travis Goodspeed, CC BY 2.0

Those of us who have followed the world of technology will know that badly thought out laws with a negative impact on technology have a long and inglorious history. Some like the infamous backdoored Clipper chip encryption device die an inglorious death as industry or the public succeed in making them irrelevant, but others such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA live on for decades and present an ongoing malign influence. Most recently our ongoing coverage of dubious drone stories included a hefty dose of equally dubious action from lawmakers.

When considering these pieces of legislation it’s easy to characterise the politicians who advance them as gullible idiots easily swayed by any commercial lobbyist with a fistful of cash. But the reality is far more nuanced, while some of them may well be tempted by those lobbyists  they are in most cases neither gullible nor foolish. Instead they are better characterised as clueless on technical issues, and thus easily swayed by received opinion rather than by technological reality. If there’s a fault in the system it’s that the essential feedback which provides the checks and balances is missing, and oddly while sitting here writing this story, the responsibility for this comes close to home. The solution doesn’t lie in changing the politicians, but in changing how they are treated by journalists. Continue reading “The Case For A Technology Aware Lobby Correspondent” →

Hackaday Podcast 244: Fake Chips, Drinking Radium, And Spotting Slippery Neutrinos

November 17, 2023 by 2 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up to discuss the best hacks of the previous week, at least in our opinions.

After chasing the angry bird away from Kristina’s office, we go to the news and learn that we’re in the middle of a solar conjunction Essentially, the Sun has come between Earth and Mars, making communication impossible for about another week. Did you know that this happens every two years?

Then it’s time for a new What’s That Sound, and although Kristina had an interesting albeit somewhat prompted guess, she was, of course, wrong.

And then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with a really cool digital pen that packs all the sensors. We learned about the world’s largest musical instrument, and compared it to the Zadar Sea Organ in Croatia, which if you’ll recall was once a What’s That Sound.

From there we take a look at fake buck converters, radioactive water as a health fad, and a garage door company that has decided to take their ball and go home. Finally we talk about how slippery neutrinos are, and discuss Tom’s time at JawnCon.

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!

Download and savor at your leisure.

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A large, teardrop-shaped van with a wide, friendly face sits in a grassy field. A grey canvas pop top is opened on its top and solar panels extend from either side of its roof, making it look somewhat like a large insect with wings extended.

An Off-Grid EV Camper Van

November 14, 2023 by 34 Comments

Despite our predilection for creature comforts like electricity, it can be nice to get away from it all from time-to-time. Students from Eindhoven University of Technology developed Stella Vita to let you glamp from the power of the sun alone.

Solar-powered vehicles have been plying the highways for decades, but we’re only now getting vehicles with multiple seats that could potentially be used for transport outside of protected race conditions. While production vehicles that can charge off the sun are yet to appear in any appreciable numbers, universities are continuing to push the envelope of what’s possible in a solar car.

Stella Vita is a whale shark-esque camper van designed to be as aerodynamic as possible while still housing all the accoutrements one would want when car camping including a large bed, inductive cooktop, fridge, shower, sink, toilet, and standing room via a pop top. The 2 kW solar array expands to 4 kW when parked via two wings extending from the pop top that also function as awnings for your base camp. By keeping the car lightweight (1,700 kg or 3,700 lb) and aerodynamic, it can go about 600 km (370 mi) on a single charge with its 60 kWh battery.

While it’s still experimental, the team took Stella Vita on a road trip of 3,000 km (1,900 mi) to the south of Spain and were able to get there with only a couple charging stops to account for technical difficulties. A full charge on solar alone takes 2-3 days, which we can see being a convenient amount of time to stop in one spot for your outdoor adventures before heading home or to your next destination.

If you want to build a slightly smaller off-grid camper that’s fueled by coffee instead, you might want to check out this bike camper or this other example.

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There’s No AI In A Markov Chain, But They’re Fun To Play With

November 14, 2023 by 69 Comments

Amid all the hype about AI it sometimes seems as though the world has lost sight of the fact that software such as ChatGPT contains no intelligence. Instead it’s an extremely sophisticated system for extracting plausible machine generated content from the corpus on which it is trained. There’s a long history behind machine generated text, and perhaps the simplest example comes in the form of a Markov chain. [Ben Hoyt] takes us through how these work, and provides some Python code so that you can roll your own.

If you’re uncertain what a Markov chain is, consider the predictive text on your phone. It works by offering the statistically most likely next word in your sentence, and should you accept all of its choices it will deliver sentences which are superficially readable but otherwise complete nonsense. He demonstrates with very simple short source texts how a collocate probability map is generated for two-word phrases, and how from that a likely next word can be extracted. It’s not AI, but it can be a lot of fun to play with and it opens the door to the entire field of computational linguistics. We haven’t set one loose on Hackaday’s archive yet but we suspect it would talk a lot about the Arduino.

We’re talking about Markov chains here with respect to language, but it’s also worth remembering that they work for music too.

Header: Bad AI image with Dall-E prompt, “Ten thousand monkeys with typewriters”.

Synthesizing 360-degree Views From Single Source Images

November 10, 2023 by 17 Comments

ZeroNVS is one of those research projects that is rather more impressive than it may look at first glance. On one hand, the 3D reconstructions — we urge you to click that first link to see them — look a bit grainy and imperfect. But on the other hand, it was reconstructed using a single still image as an input.

Most results look great, but some — like this bike visible through a park bench — come out a bit strange. A valiant effort for a single-image input, all things considered.

How is this done? It’s NeRFs (neural radiance fields) which leverages machine learning, but with yet another new twist. Existing methods mainly focus on single objects and masked backgrounds, but a new approach makes this method applicable to a variety of complex, in-the-wild images without the need to train new models.

There are a ton of sample outputs on the project summary page that are worth a browse if you find this sort of thing at all interesting. Some of the 360 degree reconstructions look rough, some are impressive, and some are a bit amusing. For example indoor shots tend to reconstruct rooms that look good, but lack doorways.

There is a research paper for those seeking additional details and a GitHub repository for the code, but the implementation requires some significant hardware.