3D Printed Spirograph Makes Art Out Of Walnut

May 2, 2025 by Tyler August 9 Comments

Who else remembers Spirograph? When making elaborate spiral doodles, did you ever wish for a much, much bigger version? [Fortress Fine Woodworks] had that thought, and “slapped a router onto it” to create a gorgeous walnut table.

Hands holding a 3d printed sanding block, shaped to fit the grooves routed in the table which is visible in the background. — This printed sanding block was a nice touch.

The video covers not only 3D printing the giant Spirograph, which is the part most of us can easily relate to, but all the woodworking magic that goes into creating a large hardwood table. Assembling the table out of choice lumber from the “rustic” pile is an obvious money-saving move, but there were a lot of other trips and tricks in this video that we were happy to learn from a pro. The 3D printed sanding block he designed was a particularly nice detail; it’s hard to imagine getting all those grooves smoothed out without it.

Certainly this pattern could have been carved with a CNC machine, but there is a certain old school charm in seeing it done (more or less) by hand with the Spirograph jig. [Fortress Fine Woodworks] would have missed out on quite the workout if he’d been using a CNC machine, too, which may or may not be a plus to this method depending on your perspective. Regardless, the finished product is a work of art and worth checking out in the video below.

Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone use a Spirograph to mill things. It’s not the first giant-scale Spirograph we’ve highlighted, either. To our knowledge, it’s the first time someone has combined them with an artful walnut table.

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Supercon 2024: Turning Talk Into Action

May 2, 2025 by Lewin Day No comments

Most of us have some dream project or three that we’d love to make a reality. We bring it up all the time with friends, muse on it at work, and research it during our downtime. But that’s just talk—and it doesn’t actually get the project done!

At the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, Sarah Vollmer made it clear—her presentation is about turning talk into action. It’s about how to overcome all the hurdles that get in the way of achieving your grand project, so you can actually make it a reality. It might sound like a self-help book—and it kind of is—but it’s rooted in the experience of a bonafide maker who’s been there and done that a few times over.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 319: Experimental Archaeology, Demoscene Oscilloscope Music, And Electronic Memories

May 2, 2025 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

It’s the podcast so nice we recorded it twice! Despite some technical difficulties (note to self: press the record button significantly before recording the outro), Elliot and Dan were able to soldier through our rundown of the week’s top hacks.

We kicked things off with a roundup of virtual keyboards for the alternate reality crowd, which begged the question of why you’d even need such a thing. We also looked at a couple of cool demoscene-adjacent projects, such as the ultimate in oscilloscope music and a hybrid knob/jack for eurorack synth modules.

We dialed the Wayback Machine into antiquity to take a look at Clickspring’s take on the origins of precision machining; spoiler alert — you can make gas-tight concentric brass tubing using a bow-driven lathe. There’s a squishy pneumatic robot gripper, an MQTT-enabled random number generator, a feline-friendly digital stethoscope, and a typewriter that’ll make you Dymo label maker jealous.

We’ll also mourn the demise of electronics magazines and ponder how your favorite website fills that gap, and learn why it’s really hard to keep open-source software lean and clean. Short answer: because it’s made by people.

Download the zero-calorie MP3.

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A human hand in a latex glove holds a test tube filled with red liquid labeled H5N1. In the background is an out of focus image of a chicken.

Preparing For The Next Pandemic

May 2, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 69 Comments

While the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t an experience anyone wants to repeat, infections disease experts like [Dr. Pardis Sabeti] are looking at what we can do to prepare for the next one.

While the next pandemic could potentially be anything, there are a few high profile candidates, and bird flu (H5N1) is at the top of the list. With birds all over the world carrying the infection and the prevalence in poultry and now dairy agriculture operations, the possibility for cross-species infection is higher than for most other diseases out there, particularly anything with an up to 60% fatality rate. Only one of the 70 people in the US who have contracted H5N1 recently have died, and exposures have been mostly in dairy and poultry workers. Scientists have yet to determine why cases in the US have been less severe.

To prevent an H5N1 pandemic before it reaches the level of COVID and ensure its reach is limited like earlier bird and swine flu variants, contact tracing of humans and cattle as well as offering existing H5N1 vaccines to vulnerable populations like those poultry and dairy workers would be a good first line of defense. So far, it doesn’t seem transmissible human-to-human, but more and more cases increase the likelihood it could gain this mutation. Keeping current cases from increasing, improving our science outreach, and continuing to fund scientists working on this disease are our best bets to keep it from taking off like a meme stock.

Whatever the next pandemic turns out to be, smartwatches could help flatten the curve and surely hackers will rise to the occasion to fill in the gaps where traditional infrastructure fails again.

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This Week In Security: AirBorne, EvilNotify, And Revoked RDP

May 2, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 2 Comments

This week, Oligo has announced the AirBorne series of vulnerabilities in the Apple Airdrop protocol and SDK. This is a particularly serious set of issues, and notably affects MacOS desktops and laptops, the iOS and iPadOS mobile devices, and many IoT devices that use the Apple SDK to provide AirPlay support. It’s a group of 16 CVEs based on 23 total reported issues, with the ramifications ranging from an authentication bypass, to local file reads, all the way to Remote Code Execution (RCE).

AirPlay is a WiFi based peer-to-peer protocol, used to share or stream media between devices. It uses port 7000, and a custom protocol that has elements of both HTTP and RTSP. This scheme makes heavy use of property lists (“plists”) for transferring serialized information. And as we well know, serialization and data parsing interfaces are great places to look for vulnerabilities. Oligo provides an example, where a plist is expected to contain a dictionary object, but was actually constructed with a simple string. De-serializing that plist results in a malformed dictionary, and attempting to access it will crash the process.

Another demo is using AirPlay to achieve an arbitrary memory write against a MacOS device. Because it’s such a powerful primative, this can be used for zero-click exploitation, though the actual demo uses the music app, and launches with a user click. Prior to the patch, this affected any MacOS device with AirPlay enabled, and set to either “Anyone on the same network” or “Everyone”. Because of the zero-click nature, this could be made into a wormable exploit. Continue reading “This Week In Security: AirBorne, EvilNotify, And Revoked RDP” →

Is This The Truck We’ve Been Waiting For?

May 2, 2025 by Tyler August 172 Comments

Imagine a bare-bones electric pickup: it’s the size of an old Hilux, it seats two, and the bed fits a full sheet of plywood. Too good to be true? Wait until you hear that the Slate Pickup is being designed for DIY repairability and modification, and will sell for only $20,000 USD, after American federal tax incentives.

Using the cellphone for infotainment makes for a less expensive product and a very clean dash. (Image: Slate Motors)

There are a few things missing: no infotainment system, for one. Why bother, when almost everyone has a phone and Bluetooth speakers are so cheap? No touch screen in the middle of the dash also means the return of physical controls for the heat and air conditioning.

There is no choice in colors, either. To paraphrase Henry Ford, the Slate comes in any color you want, as long as it’s grey. It’s not something we’d given much though to previously, but apparently painting is a huge added expense for automakers. Instead, the truck’s bodywork is going to be injection molded plastic panels, like an old Saturn coupe. We remember how resilient those body panels were, and think that sounds like a great idea. Injection molding is also a less capital-intensive process to set up than traditional automotive sheet metal stamping, reducing costs further.

That being said, customization is still a big part of the Slate. The company intends to sell DIY vinyl wrap kits, as well as a bolt-on SUV conversion kit which customers could install themselves. The plan is to have a “Slate University” app that would walk owners through maintaining their own automobile, a delightfully novel choice for a modern carmaker.

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Pinoutleaf: Simplifying Pinout References

May 2, 2025 by Matt Varian 10 Comments

We all appreciate clear easy-to-read reference materials. In that pursuit [Andreas] over at Splitbrain sent in his latest project, Pinoutleaf. This useful web app simplifies the creation of clean, professional board pinout reference images.

The app uses YAML or JSON configuration files to define the board, including photos for the front and back, the number and spacing of pins, and their names and attributes.For example, you can designate pin 3 as GPIO3 or A3, and the app will color-code these layers accordingly. The tool is designed to align with the standard 0.1″ pin spacing commonly used in breadboards. One clever feature is the automatic mirroring of labels for the rear photo, a lifesaver when you need to reverse-mount a board. Once your board is configured, Pinoutleaf generates an SVG image that you can download or print to slide over or under the pin headers, keeping your reference key easily accessible.

Visit the GitHub page to explore the tool’s features, including its Command-Line Interface for batch-generating pinouts for multiple boards. Creating clear documentation is challenging, so we love seeing projects like Pinoutleaf that make it easier to do it well.