Brick-Laying Machine Builds Without Mortar

October 28, 2023 by Kristina Panos 45 Comments

Move over, 3D printed houses. There’s a new game in town, and it is able to use standard concrete blocks to build the walls of a house in just one day.

Australian company FBR’s Hadrian X is a tablet-controlled system that follows CAD models to lay the blocks one by one. As you can see in the video after the break, the blocks are laid so quickly that there’s no time for mortar, so they dip the bottom of each block in construction adhesive instead. In the second video after the break, you can watch Hadrian-X build a curved wall.

There are several things to consider when it comes to outdoor robots, such as wind and unwanted vibration. In order to correct for these nuisances, FBR came up with Dynamic Stabilisation Technology (DST). While we don’t have a lot of details on DST, the company calls it “a highly accurate system that continuously adjusts the position of a robot’s end effector to ensure it is always held with stability at the correct point in 3D space.”

Curious about printed housing? Here’s the current-ish state of affairs.

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Open Source Key Programmer For HiTag2 Keys

October 28, 2023 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Hitag transponders have been used in a wide variety of car keys as a protective measure against hot-wiring and theft. They’re also a reason why it’s a lot more expensive to get car keys duplicated these days for many models that use this technology. However, there is now an open source programmer that works with these transponder keys, thanks to [Janne Kivijakola].

The hack uses an old reader device salvaged from a Renault in a scrapyard, hooked up to an Arduino Mega 2560 or Arduino Nano. With this setup, key transponders can be programmed via a tool called AESHitager, which runs on Windows. It’s compatible with a variety of Hitag transponders, including Hitag2, Hitag3, and Hitag AES, along with the VVDI Super Chip and certain types of BMW keys.

If you’ve been having issues with coded keys, this project might just be what you need to sort your car out. Everything you need is available on GitHub for those wishing to try this at home. We’ve seen some interesting hacks in this space before, too. Video after the break.

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Impostor Syndrome: It’s Not Your Fault!

October 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 68 Comments

[Crispernaki] and I have something in common. We both saw this awesome project that made a scroll wheel out of a VHS head back in 2010, and wanted to make one. We both wanted to put our own spin on the gadget, (tee-hee), discovered that it was harder than either of us wanted to commit to, and gave up.

Flash forward about a million Internet years, and [crispernaki] finally made his and wrote it up. The only problem is that it was too easy. In 2010, making USB gadgets was a lot more involved than it is today. (Back then, we had to chisel device descriptors on stone tablets.) Nowadays, the firmware is just a matter of importing the right library, and the hardware is a magnetic rotation sensor breakout board, a magnet, and super glue. Cheap, and easy.

All of this led our hero to feeling insecure. After all, a hack that beat him a dozen years ago turned out to be dead easy today. Maybe it was too easy? Maybe he wasn’t a “real” hacker? These are the signs of impostor syndrome – that feeling that just because you aren’t the world’s best, or climbing the highest mountain, or hacking the hardest project, you’re not worthy.

Well, listen up. Impostors don’t finish projects, and impostors don’t write them up to share with all the rest of us. By actually doing the thing – hacking the hack – all chances of being a fake are ruled out. The proof is sitting there on your desk, in all its Altoids-tin glory.

And it’s not your fault that it was too easy this time around. You can’t do anything to turn back the hands of time, to make the project any harder these days, or to undo the decade of hacker technical progress on the software side, much less change the global economy to make a magnetic sensor unobtainable again. The world improved, you got your hack done, and that’s that. Congratulations! (Now where do I buy some of those on-axis magnets?)

Plasma Cutting And 3D Printing Team Up To Make Bending Thick Sheet Steel Easier

October 28, 2023 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Metalworking has always been very much a “mixed method” art. Forging, welding, milling, grinding; anything to remove metal or push it around from one place to another is fair game when you’ve got to make something fast. Adding in fancy new tools like CNC plasma cutting and computer-aided drafting doesn’t change that much, although new methods often do call for a little improvisation.

Getting several methodologies to work and play well together is what [tonygoacher] learned all about while trying to fabricate some brackets for an electric trike for next year’s EMF Camp. The parts would have been perfect for fabrication in a press brake except for the 4 mm thickness of the plate steel, which was a little much for his smallish brake. To make the bending a little easier, [tony] made a partial-thickness groove across the plasma-cut blank, by using a reduced power setting on the cutter. This worked perfectly to guide the brake’s tooling, but [tony] ran into trouble with more complicated bends that would require grooves on both sides of the steel plate.

His solution was to 3D print a couple of sacrificial guide blocks to fit the bed of the press brake. Each guide had a ridge to match up with a guide groove, this allowed him to cut his partial grooves for both bends on the same side of the plate but still align it in the press brake. Yes, the blocks were destroyed in the process, but they only took a few minutes to print, so no big deal. And it’s true that the steel tore a little bit when the groove ended up on the outside radius of the bend, but that’s nothing a bead of weld can’t fix. Good enough for EMF is good enough, after all.

The brief video below shows the whole process, including [tony]’s interesting SCARA-like CNC plasma cutter, which we’re a little in love with now. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen 3D prints used as tools in metalworking, of course, but we picked up some great tips from this one. Continue reading “Plasma Cutting And 3D Printing Team Up To Make Bending Thick Sheet Steel Easier” →

Paperless RFID Tags Are Carbon-Based

October 28, 2023 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

RFID tags are great little pieces of technology, but unfortunately, the combination of paper, metal, and silicon means they are as bad as some modern pregnancy tests — single-use electronic devices that can’t be recycled.

A team of design program graduates from London’s Royal College of Art aim to change that. They’ve devised a mostly-paper RFID tag that’s as safe to recycle as a piece of paper with a pencil doodle on it.

The team’s startup, PulpaTronics have created a design that uses paper as its only material. The circuitry is marked on the paper with a laser set to low power, which doesn’t burn or cut the paper, but instead changes to composition to be conductive.

PulpaTronics were also able to create a chip-less RFID tag much the same way, using a pattern of concentric circles to convey information. The company estimates that these tags will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 70%, when compared with traditional RFID tags. They’ll also cost about half as much.

RFID is used in many industries, but it’s also great for hacking. Here’s an 8-track player that harnesses the power of RFID tags to play songs off of an SD card.

Thanks for the tip, [gir.st]!

Build An Easy Replica Of HAL 9000

October 27, 2023 by Lewin Day 31 Comments

Adafruit’s PropMaker Feather is a microcontroller board designed specifically for building props with electronic features. Thus, what better way to show it off than by building a nifty replica of the most menacing AI ever to roam this solar system? That’s right, it’s the Adafruit HAL9000 build!

Following the 80/20 rule, this version is intended to be reasonably authentic while remaining affordable and easy to build. It’s built around Adafruit’s existing Massive Red Arcade Button, which looks like a decent simulacra of HAL9000’s foreboding, perceptive lens. It’s placed in a case assembled from laser-cut acrylic, with a neat inkjet-printed label on top. Where previously, sound effects were courtesy of an Arduino Uno with a Wave Shield, this version uses the PropMaker Feather, based on the RP2040, instead. It’s actually possible to assemble with zero soldering thanks to quick-connect wires and screw terminals on the PropMaker Feather.

Fundamentally, if you’re building a simple prop that needs audio or LEDs, the PropMaker Feather could be a useful tool for the job. Alternatively, consider building a HAL replica with more capability, like controlling your home. Just don’t give it too much responsibility—we all know how that ends. Video after the break.

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The Many Ways To Play Colossal Cave Adventure After Nearly Half A Century

October 27, 2023 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

Born from a passion for caving and the wish to turn this into a digital adventure for all ages, Colossal Cave Adventure has grown from its quiet introduction in 1976 by William Crowther into the expanded game that inspired countless others to develop their own take on the genre, eventually leading to the realistically rendered graphical adventures we can play today. Yet even Colossal Cave Adventure has recently got a refresh in the form of a 3D graphical version, which has led [Bryan Lunduke] to take a look at how to best revisit the original text adventure.

Your Colossal Cave Adventure awaits... (Credit: Bryan Lunduke) — Your Colossal Cave Adventure awaits… (Credit: Bryan Lunduke)

For those who are on Linux or a BSD system, the easiest way is to hop over to the package manager and install Colossal Cave Adventure straight away with the package bsdgames on Debian-based systems, or colossal-cave-adventure on others. A port by Eric S. Raymond of the 1995 version of the game can also be found as Open Adventure, and there’s a 1990-era DOS version you can experience on real hardware or even in a browser window, if that’s your thing. Or get it for your Amiga, Macintosh or OS/2. These days you can even get ready-to-use maps of the entire cave and surroundings, which along with walkthroughs can make things far too easy. Continue reading “The Many Ways To Play Colossal Cave Adventure After Nearly Half A Century” →