Different Differentials & The Pitfalls Of The Easy Swap

April 25, 2017 by Zoe Skyforest 70 Comments

I dig cars, and I do car stuff. I started fairly late in life, though, and I’m only just starting to get into the whole modification thing. Now, as far as automobiles go, you can pretty much do anything you set your mind to – engine swaps, drivetrain conversions, you name it – it’s been done. But such jobs require a high level of fabrication skill, automotive knowledge, and often a fully stocked machine shop to match. Those of us new to the scene tend to start a little bit smaller.

So where does one begin? Well, there’s a huge realm of mods that can be done that are generally referred to as “bolt-ons”. This centers around the idea that the install process of the modification is as simple as following a basic set of instructions to unbolt the old hardware and bolt in the upgraded parts. Those that have tread this ground before me will be chuckling at this point – so rarely is a bolt-on ever just a bolt-on. As follows, the journey of my Mazda’s differential upgrade will bear this out.

The car in question, currently known as the “Junkbox MX-5” until it starts running well enough to earn a real name. It somehow looks passable here, but in person I promise you, it looks awful. Credit: Lewin Day

It all started when I bought the car, back in December 2016. I’d just started writing for Hackaday and my humble Daihatsu had, unbeknownst to me, just breathed its last. I’d recently come to the realisation that I wasn’t getting any younger, and despite being obsessed with cars, I’d never actually owned a sports car or driven one in anger. It was time to change. Continue reading “Different Differentials & The Pitfalls Of The Easy Swap” →

Neural Networks: You’ve Got It So Easy

April 24, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 25 Comments

Neural networks are all the rage right now with increasing numbers of hackers, students, researchers, and businesses getting involved. The last resurgence was in the 80s and 90s, when there was little or no World Wide Web and few neural network tools. The current resurgence started around 2006. From a hacker’s perspective, what tools and other resources were available back then, what’s available now, and what should we expect for the future? For myself, a GPU on the Raspberry Pi would be nice.

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IoT Security Is Hard: Here’s What You Need To Know

April 21, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 69 Comments

Security for anything you connect to the internet is important. Think of these devices as doorways. They either allow access to services or provides services for someone else. Doorways need to be secure — you wouldn’t leave your door unlocked if you lived in the bad part of a busy city, would you? Every internet connection is the bad part of a busy city. The thing is, building hardware that is connected to the internet is the new hotness these days. So let’s walk through the basics you need to know to start thinking security with your projects.

If you have ever run a server and checked your logs you have probably noticed that there is a lot of automated traffic trying to gain access to your server on a nearly constant basis. An insecure device on a network doesn’t just compromise itself, it presents a risk to all other networked devices too.

The easiest way to secure a device is to turn it off, but lets presume you want it on. There are many things you can do to protect your IoT device. It may seem daunting to begin with but as you start becoming more security conscious things begin to click together a bit like a jigsaw and it becomes a lot easier.

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Automate The Freight: Drones Across The Sea

April 20, 2017 by Dan Maloney 105 Comments

When you think about which of the many technological advances of the 20th century had the most impact on the global economy, which one would you rank as the most important? Would it be the space program, which gave rise to advances in everything from communications satellites to advanced composite materials? Or would it be the related aerospace industry, which stitched the world together so tightly that you can be almost anywhere on the planet within 24 hours? Or perhaps it’s the Internet, the global platform for buying almost anything from almost anyone.

Those are all important, but for the most economically impactful technology of the 20th century, I’d posit that the lowly shipping container and the containerized cargo industry that grew around it win, hands down.

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Moving Forth With Mecrisp-Stellaris And Embello

April 19, 2017 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

In the last episode, I advocated a little bit for Forth on microcontrollers being a still-viable development platform, not just for industry where it’s usually seen these days, but also for hackers. I maybe even tricked you into buying a couple pieces of cheap hardware. This time around, we’re going to get the Forth system set up on that hardware, and run the compulsory “hello world” and LED blinky. But then we’ll also take a dip into one of the features that make Forth very neat on microcontrollers: easy multitasking.

To work!

Hardware

Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth runs on a great number of ARM microcontrollers, but I’ll focus here on the STM32F103 chips that are available for incredibly little money in the form of a generic copy of the Maple Mini, often called a “STM32F103 Minimum System Board” or “Blue Pill” because of the form-factor, and the fact that there used to be red ones for sale. The microcontroller on board can run at 72 MHz, has 20 kB of RAM and either 64 or 128 kB of flash. It has plenty of pins, the digital-only ones are 5 V tolerant, and it has all the usual microcontroller peripherals. It’s not the most power-efficient, and it doesn’t have a floating-point unit or a DAC, but it’s a rugged old design that’s available for much less money than it should be.

Similar wonders of mass production work for the programmer that you’ll need to initially flash the chip. Any of the clones of the ST-Link v2 will work just fine. (Ironically enough, the hardware inside the programmer is almost identical to the target.) Finally, since Forth runs as in interactive shell, you’re going to need a serial connection to the STM32 board. That probably means a USB/serial adapter.

This whole setup isn’t going to cost much more than a fast food meal, and the programmer and USB/serial adapter are things that you’ll want to have in your kit anyway, if you don’t already.

You can power the board directly through the various 3.3 and GND pins scattered around the board, or through the micro USB port or the 5V pins on the target board. The latter two options pass through a 3.3 V regulator before joining up with the 3.3 pins. All of the pins are interconnected, so it’s best if you only use one power supply at a time.

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The Surface Area To Volume Ratio Or Why Elephants Have Big Ears

April 18, 2017 by Manuel Rodriguez-Achach 48 Comments

There are very few things that are so far reaching across many different disciplines, ranging from biology to engineering, as is the relation of the surface area to the volume of a body. This is not a law, as Newton’s second one, or a theory as Darwin’s evolution theory. But it has consequences in a diverse set of situations. It explains why cells are the size they are, why some animals have a strange morphology, why flour explodes while wheat grains don’t and many other phenomena that we will explore in this article.

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Microswitches: Past The Tipping Point

April 17, 2017 by Dan Maloney 46 Comments

You find them everywhere from 3D printers to jet airliners. They’re the little switches that detect paper jams in your printer, or the big armored switches that sense when the elevator car is on the right floor. They’re microswitches, or more properly miniature snap-action switches, and they’re so common you may never have wondered what’s going on inside them. But the story behind how these switches were invented and the principle of physics at work in the guts of these tiny and useful switches are both pretty interesting.

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