One-Piece Tank Chassis Pushes Print-in-Place To New Heights

January 20, 2023 by 30 Comments

What’s better than 3D printing a tank chassis with working tracks? How about 3D printing the entire thing, moving parts and all, as a single piece? That’s [3D Honza]’s PiPBOT-1, and it’s the culmination of a whole lot of design work.

The design prints flat, then folds up into its final form.

[3D Honza] has been sharing progress pictures and videos on his Twitter account, and just recently released the first version of his design. Version 1.0 is just the mechanics, but he’s already at work on version 2.0 which includes the ability to attach servos to drive the treads. At this writing, the design is currently downloadable directly from his site and includes CAD files, which is great to see.

One part of the design we’d like to draw your attention to is the chunky hinge that doubles as a kind of axial structure making up the body. This allows the tank to print in an unfolded state with the treads and wheels flat on the print bed. After printing, the tank gets folded up a bit like a taco to attain its final form. It’s a clever layout that allows the unit to be printed according to a filament-based 3D printer’s strengths, printing as a single piece that transforms into a small tank chassis, complete with working treads, in a few seconds.

When it comes to vehicles and bots, whether to choose wheels or tracks is a serious question our own Lewin Day has explained thoroughly. And for those of you who choose tracks, this design is great for small devices but don’t forget it’s always possible to go bigger when it comes to 3D-printed tanks.

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Extrusion For The Pottery Shop

January 20, 2023 by 2 Comments

Extrusion is a process for forming materials by forcing them through an opening, which can allow for complex shapes. Aluminum extrusion beams are what most of us are probably thinking of, but plenty of other things are made from extruded material like pipe, heat sinks, and even macaroni. Extrusion can also be used for modelling clay to create uniform sections of rounded clay as a starter material for producing other pottery, and [Justins Makery] has built a custom extruder to do just that.

The build starts with welding together a metal frame to hold the press, and uses a wooden wagon handle to drive the extruder. The handle can be moved up or down the frame to increase the range of motion thanks to a custom bearing and slots cut into the frame’s post. The piston mechanism itself is built out of aluminum plate with a cylinder loosely fitted to it to allow for easy cleaning, and the top of the piston uses a loose-fitting plastic cap cut out of an old cutting board.

With everything in pace, the extruder can make cylinders of clay of any desired thickness thanks to swappable dies. While it doesn’t produce the end result of the workshop directly, it definitely helps to provide the potter with clay of uniform dimensions used for building other pieces of pottery, much like how aluminum extrusions are used to build all kinds of other things as well.

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Machining With Electricity Explored In The Hack Chat

January 20, 2023 by 16 Comments

As a Hackaday reader, it’s safe to assume you’ve got a better than average understanding of electricity. There’s also an excellent chance you’re familiar with machining, and may even have a lathe or old mill in the workshop. But combining the two, and actually machining a piece of metal with electricity, isn’t something that many home gamers can boast first-hand experience with.

Daniel Herrington

Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an interest. To help answer the burning (or at least, sparking) questions from the community, CEO and founder of Voxel Innovations Daniel Herrington stopped by this week’s Hack Chat to talk about the cutting edge of both electric discharge machining (EDM) and the closely related field of electrochemical machining (ECM). While his company uses the technology to produce components at incredible scales, Daniel got his start tinkering in the garage like so many of us, enabling him to provide both a professional and hobbyist prospective on the technologies.

Naturally, the first big question to be addressed was the difference between EDM and ECM. Put simply, electric discharge machining uses high-voltage to literally blast away material from the workpiece. The resulting finish is generally rough, and progress through the material tends to be slow, but it’s relatively simple to implement.

In contrast electrochemical machining could be thought of as a sort of reverse electroplating process, as the material being removed from the workpiece is dissolved and transferred to the cathode — though in practice the flow of pressurized electrolyte keeps it from actually plating the negatively charged tool. ECM is a faster process than EDM and allows for an exceptionally smooth surface finish, but is considerably more challenging from a technical perspective. Continue reading “Machining With Electricity Explored In The Hack Chat” →

Hackaday Podcast 202: CNC Monks, Acrobot, Bootleg Merch, And The Rise And Fall Of Megahex

January 20, 2023 by 1 Comment

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos stood around and marveled at machinery in its many forms, from a stone-cutting CNC to an acrobatic robot to an AI-controlled Twitch v-tuber. But before all of that, we took a look at the winners of our FPV Vehicle Contest, poured one out for Google Stadia, and Elliot managed to stump Kristina once again with this week’s What’s That Sound. Will you fare better?

Later, we drooled over an open-source smart watch, argued screen printing versus stenciling when it comes to bootleg Hackaday merch, and got into the finer points of punycodes.

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!

And/or download it and listen offline.

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Cassette Player Cupholder Is A Useful But Risky Idea

January 20, 2023 by 36 Comments

The cup was invented in 1570 BC. Despite this, infuriatingly, the cupholder didn’t become common in the automotive world until the early 2000s. Cars built in the years PCH (pre-cupholder) typically also had tape decks. Noticing this relationship, [thephatmaster] designed this useful cassette-deck cupholder accessory.

The design is simple, consisting of a 3D printed ring with a tab that neatly slides into an automotive stereo’s cassette slot. The design does require that the tape deck be empty prior to inserting the cup holder. Given that few cassette players from that era still work, this isn’t much of a drawback. Of course, if you really do need tunes, it wouldn’t be too difficult to integrate a Bluetooth cassette adapter into the printed design.

[thephatmaster] uses the cupholder in a Mercedes W202, and has posted a special inclined version to suit this model. The creator also notes that using it on vehicles like the Mercedes W210 can be a risk. The cupholder typically places the beverage directly above the transmission lever, where any spills can damage switches or other important electronics. Also, the cupholder isn’t designed to work with vertical tape decks, though modification for this layout may be possible.

This build may look silly or pointless to some. But if you’ve ever tried to pull a U-turn in an old manual car while precariously cradling a steaming latte between your legs, you’ll clearly see the value here. It only has to save one pair of pants before it’s paid for itself.

We’ve seen some other creative cupholder hacks before too, like this nifty laptop holder. If you’ve whipped up your own nifty car hacks, send them into the tipsline.

This Week In Security: Git Deep Dive, Mailchimp, And SPF

January 20, 2023 by 10 Comments

First up, git has been audited. This was an effort sponsored by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), a non-profit working to improve the security of Open Source projects. The audit itself was done by researchers from X41 and GitLab, and two critical vulnerabilities were found, both caused by the same bad coding habit — using an int to hold buffer lengths.

On modern systems, a size_t is always unsigned, and the same bit length as the architecture bit-width. This is the proper data type for string and buffer lengths, as it is guaranteed not to overflow when handling lengths up to the maximum addressable memory on the system. On the other hand, an int is usually four bytes long and signed, with a maximum value of 2^31-1, or 2147483647 — about 2 GB. A big buffer, but not an unheard amount of data. Throw something that large at git, and it will break in unexpected ways.

Our first example is CVE-2022-23521, an out of bounds write caused by an int overflowing to negative. A .gitattributes file can be committed to a repository with a modified git client, and then checking out that repository will cause the num_attrs variable to overflow. Push the overflow all the way around to a small negative number, and git will then vastly under-allocate the attributes buffer, and write all that data past the end of the allocated buffer.

CVE-2022-41903 is another signed integer overflow, this time when a pretty print format gets abused to do something unexpected. Take a look at this block of code:

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Building A NAS That Really Looks Like A NAS

January 20, 2023 by 19 Comments

Building your own network attached storage (NAS) for personal use isn’t all that difficult. A single board computer, a hard disk and a power supply in an enclosure is all the hardware you need. Then, choose from one of several open source NAS software solutions and you’re up and running. [tobychui] decided to notch things up by designing a NAS that really looks like a NAS. It’s tailored to his specific requirements and looks like a professional product to boot. The design features dual 3.5 inch HDD bays, a small footprint, is low cost, compatible with a variety of single board computers, and can handle high data transfer speeds by using RAM and SD card for buffering.

Not only has he done a great job with the hardware design, but he’s also developed a companion software for the NAS. “ArozOS” is a web desktop operating system that provides full-fledged desktop experience within a browser. ArozOS has a great user interface and features a lot of networking, file, disk management and security functions. He has also developed a launcher application to enable over-the-air (OTA) software updates.

Assembling the device will need some planning and preparation, even though most of the hardware is off the shelf. You will need a SATA to USB 2.0 adapter, a SBC (Orange Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 4, Orange Pi Zero 2, etc) , three buck converters — one each to provide 12 V to the two hard disks and a third to provide 5 V to the SBC. You’ll also need a 12 V / 6 A or 24 V / 3 A external power brick, or a USB-C 65 W GaN charger with a triggering module to set the desired voltage and current.

There is also one custom power distribution board which is essentially a carrier board to mount the buck converters and connectors for power and USB data. For the 3D prints, [tobychui] recommends printing at the highest resolution for a nice finish.

The off the shelf SATA to USB adapter will need to be taken apart before it can be fixed to the 3D printed SATA adapter plate and might pose the most challenge during construction, but the rest of the assembly is fairly straightforward. Once assembly is complete, [tobychui] walks you through installation of the ArozOZ software, mounting the drives and making them accessible over the network.

Have you got your data backup act in order ? If not, it’s still not too late to make it a new Year’s resolution. And if you need help figuring things out, check out New Year Habits – What Do You Do For Data Storage?

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