Cracking A Combo Lock In Under 30 Seconds

May 17, 2015 by James Hobson 21 Comments

Forget the combination to your combo lock? Well if you’ve got a 3D printer, an Arduino, a servo and a stepper motor handy — you can build your own Combo Breaker pretty easily. It’s capable of solving any Master combination lock in 8 tries or less.

The creator [Samy Kamkar] is a privacy and security researcher, who absolutely loves finding holes in security. We actually just heard from him at our very own Hack a Day Prize: Los Angeles event, where he talked about his wireless keyboard sniffer he built into a cellphone charger.

He’s previously shown us how to crack a combo lock in 8 tries or less using an online calculator he made. This project is just an extension of that to automate the whole process.

As always he gives an extremely thorough explanation of the project in his build log video — including designing the 3D printed parts! If you wanna build your own it’ll cost just under $100 and you can grab all the necessary info and source files from his GitHub.

[Thanks for the tip Justin!]

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Ultrasonic Misting Vapor Polisher For 3D Printed Parts

May 16, 2015 by George Graves 33 Comments

If you’ve ever seen 3D printed parts form an extrusion type printer, one of the first things you’ll notice is the texture. It’s caused by the printer laying down its plastic layer after layer. This surface texture isn’t always desirable, so people have found a few ways to smooth the 3D printed part out. For example if you are using ABS, you can rinse or “paint” the part with acetone. Another method of smoothing is heat up some acetone in a container, and let the acetone vapors do work to smooth the finished part.

[Mike] from engineerdog.com thinks he may have found a more elegant solution using an inexpensive ultrasonic humidifier you can buy online for about $40 USD. This room humidifier uses a piezoelectric transducer that can vibrate liquids at a high frequency to produce a mist. [Mike] removed the transducer and electronics from the humidifier and mounted it into a paint can. This is where the acetone is stored, and turned into a vapor by the transducer. An aquarium pump is used to transfer the highly concentrated vapors into the polishing chamber (an extra large pickle jar.) He added a spring loaded, electrical timer (the kind you might find in the bathroom at an office building) to make his vapor polisher as easy to use as a microwave oven.

[Mike] concludes his post with some strength testing of parts before and after acetone treatment, and was surprised to find that the parts were weaker after the treatment. You can read more about that on his blog and see a video of the vapor polisher after the break.

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Printing Photorealistic Images On 3D Objects

May 13, 2015 by Theodora Fabio 36 Comments

Hydrographic Printing is a technique of transferring colored inks on a film to the surface of an object. The film is placed on water and activated with a chemical that allows it to adhere to an object being physically pushed onto it. Researchers at Zhejiang University and Columbia University have taken hydrographic printing to the next level (pdf link). In a technical paper to be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 in August, they explain how they developed a computational method to create complex patterns that are precisely aligned to the object.

Typically, repetitive patterns are used because the object stretches the adhesive film; anything complex would distort during this subjective process. It’s commonly used to decorate car parts, especially rims and grills. If you’ve ever seen a carbon-fiber pattern without the actual fiber, it’s probably been applied with hydrographic printing.

The physical setup for this hack is fairly simple: a vat of water, a linear motor attached to a gripper, and a Kinect. The object is attached to the gripper. The Kinect measures its location and orientation. This data is applied to a 3D-scan of the object along with the desired texture map to be printed onto it. A program creates a virtual simulation of the printing process, outputting a specific pattern onto the film that accounts for the warping inherent to the process. The pattern is then printed onto the film using an ordinary inkjet printer.

The tiger mask is our personal favorite, along with the leopard cat. They illustrate just how complex the surface patterns can get using single or multiple immersions, respectively. This system also accounts for objects of a variety of shapes and sizes, though the researchers admit there is a physical limit to how concave the parts of an object can be. Colors will fade or the film will split if stretched too thin. Texture mapping can now be physically realized in a simple yet effective way, with amazing results.

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Robo Lamp Is Too Damn Cute!

May 12, 2015 by James Hobson 17 Comments

Remember the Pixar lamp? Well, [Rick] from [Phlegmatic Prototyping] decided to build his own.

It’s actually the third iteration of the project, the first being made from a cheap camera sensor, an ATMega328, a computer mouse and laser cut parts. The second iteration… sounds like it was the Pixar Lamp — and due to possible copyright infringement [Rick] decided not to show it off. Which brings us to number three, Robolamp the Third.

Quite obviously not the Pixar lamp now, [Rick] designed the whole thing in 3D CAD and had it printed at Shapeways. It uses a CMUCAM5 vision sensor that detects color hues, allowing the lamp to track colorful objects, like an orange, which ends up looking painfully cute. Just take a look at the video.

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Printed Tentacles For PCB Probing

May 9, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 15 Comments

Every hacker workbench has one or more of those “helping hand” devices to aid in soldering and assembly. When it comes to testing and debugging though, it could get tricky if you have to start handling test probes while looking at the meter display or fiddling with knobs on the oscilloscope. Sometimes one has to test a board that has just pads for test points. Or maybe you need to directly probe pins on an IC. Checking multiple signals on I2C, SPI, Serial or USB is not too easy with just two hands. [Giuseppe Finizia] is an electronic engineer at the Scientific Investigations Department of the Carabinieri in Italy. He works as a senior analyst in the Electronic Forensics Unit and deal’s with technical investigations on seized electronic devices. To help him in his investigative work, he designed and built a 3D printed PCB workstation with octopus-like tentacles that provides all the additional fingers needed.

The tool is basically a base with adjustable clamps where the test PCB can be fixed. Around the base, up to twelve articulated “tentacles” can be fixed. Various test accessories are attached to the ends of these tentacles – Alligator Clips for holding electronic parts, IC Hook Clip Grabbers, Micro SMD Grabber Test Clips and some others that he is still working on. [Giuseppe] used MOI 3D modeling software to design his device, and the files are available on Thingiverse for download. He does warn that printing all the parts, specially the tentacle units, can be quite tricky on a regular 3D printer. He used a ZORTRAX M200 printer in high resolution mode and Z-HIPS filament. However, it may be easier to just use machine shop flexible coolant pipe for the tentacles. This may require some sort of modification to the base mounts and the business end of the tentacles though.

Thanks to [CFTechno] for sending in this tip.

Printing Puppy Prosthetics

May 4, 2015 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

When [aimzzz] met this puppy born without arms, the need for some assistive hardware was obvious. We love it that rapid prototyping techniques have become so accessible that something like building a wheelchair for a puppy is not just affordable, but a lot of fun too!

The main part of the projects is a cradle which will be comfortable for the dog. 3D printing is a great choice here because it can be customized to suit the needs of a particular dog. We remember seeing another dog named Derby who has 3D printed legs that make room for the biological legs that aren’t functioning correctly. In the case of this wheelchair, the cradle could be altered make room for legs.

The rest of the build is purely mechanical. Aluminum tubing, tubing connectors, and wheels combine with the printed cradle (and some padding material) to make for one sweet ride. It takes a bit of training to get used to, but as you can see after the break this makes mobility quite easy and intuitive for the pup.

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3D Printed Headgear Turns You Into A Sim

May 1, 2015 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Stop what you’re doing and dust off that 3D Printer, you’re going to want this headgear for your next party. [Daniel Harari] has created the perfect start of a phenomenal The Sims costume with this Bluetooth-enabled plumb bob.

The iconic crystalline shape will be familiar to anyone ever exposed to the game. It served as a handle and indicator for each virtual character in the popular life-simulation video game. On a short build deadline (a party), [Daniel] found a model of the shape he wanted on Thingiverse. He printed it in translucent green PLA so that LEDs inside would make it glow.

A headband and an aluminum pipe connect this to the wearer. Inside the printed enclosure is a an intricately packaged set of electronics that include an Arduino pro mini, low-side transistors to control six RGB LEDs, and an HC-05 Bluetooth module to connect to his phone. Batteries were mounted on the side of the pipe but we bet a bit of head scratching could re-imaging the battery type and get it inside the enclosure as well.

[Daniel] muses about adding brainwave sensing to control the LEDs. For this build he didn’t even need to write an app; he was able to get an already available color-picker to work. We’d like to see this combined with sentiment; a concept starting to gain popularity which samples social media and ascertains mood to change the display base what is found.

You realize what’s missing from his writeup? We couldn’t find any pictures of him wearing the thing!