Linux Fu: Gum Up Your Script

March 29, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

We often write quick bash scripts and judging by the comments, half of us use bash or a similar shell to pop out quick, useful scripts, and half of us think that’s an abomination, and you should only use bash for your command line and resort to something more like a traditional language to do anything else. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably cursing your allegiance when you need to make your bash scripts more interactive.

Gum can help. It’s a utility that can handle your script input and output with a little flair while requiring almost no effort on your part.

The command looks simple, but it has twelve subcommands, each with myriad options. But you can break down the functions into a few simple categories. The input commands let you prompt for a line of input or a bunch of lines of input. You can also create a pick list or a yes/no type of prompt. There’s also a file picker and a filter, sort of like fzf.

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The 2023 Hackaday Prize Is Ten, First Challenge Is Educational

March 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

If you were anywhere near Hackaday over the weekend, you certainly noticed that we launched the tenth annual Hackaday Prize! In celebration of the milestone, we picked from our favorite challenges of years past and came up with four of our favorite, and even one new one just to keep you on your toes. But the first challenge round is running right now, so get your hacking motors turning.

Re-engineering Education

The first challenge this year showcases educational projects, but broadly construed. Hackers tend to learn best by doing. In the Re-engineering Education challenge, we want you to help give others a chance to learn new skills. Whether you’re building a DIY radio kit, a breadboard-it-yourself computer, or even a demonstrator robot arm, if it helps pass on your hard-earned skills, we want you to enter it here.

It’s fresh on my mind because we were just playing with one this weekend, but [deshipu]’s Fluffbug robot project is a great inspiration for non-traditional education. What better way to discover the intricacies of four-legged walking machine gaits than to have one to play with on your desktop? It’s not going to take over the world, but if you can make it walk, you’ve learned something.

More obviously educational is [Joan Horvath]’s Hacker Calculus, an entry in last year’s Prize. The connections between a function’s height, and the area or volume that it integrates up to can be awfully abstract. Printing out 3D models of the resulting shapes can really help to bring the point home. Or maybe you could really drive home the speed of a comet in its orbit with a physical model? They’ve got you covered, but also ideas for generating your own plastic math toys.

When we think educational computer builds, the amazing reproduction of the WDC-1 “Working Digital Computer” by [Michael Gardi] springs instantly to mind, but perhaps it goes too far down the rabbit hole. Just another rung up on the complexity ladder gets you the Blinking Computer by [Tony Robinson]. Or if you want to figure out how an almost-commercial Z80 computer works from the ground up, consider the Baffa 2.

So what skills do you have that you want to teach other hackers? Can you embody that in a project?

All the Challenges

If you don’t have education in your sights, have a look at the rest of the 2023 Hackaday Prize Challenge rounds. We’re sure you’ll find something you like.

To enter, simply set up a project on Hackaday.io. When the challenge is running, you’ll be able to enter. Full rules over at the 2023 Hackaday Prize landing page.

Challenge	Date	The Details
Re-engineering Education	March 25 – April 25	Educational projects of all stripes welcome. If the goal is to teach, enter it here.
Assistive Tech	April 25 – May 30	The Assistive Tech challenge calls for projects that help people with disabilities to learn, work, move around, and simply live their lives to the fullest.
Green Hacks	May 30 – July 4	Help reduce our impact on the planet. Do more with less, or help clean up the mess.
Gearing Up	July 4 – August 8	Hackers build their own tools. What have you made that makes your making easier? Share it with us.
Wildcard	August 8 – September 12	This is where anything goes. The wildcard challenge lets your projects speak for themselves.

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Hackaday Berlin Was Bonkers

March 27, 2023 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

In celebration of the tenth running of the Hackaday Prize, we had a fantastic weekend event in Berlin. This was a great opportunity for all of the European Hackaday community to get together for a few days of great talks, fun show-and-tells, and above all good old fashioned sitting together and brainstorming. Of course there was the badge, and the location – a gigantic hackerspace in Berlin called MotionLab – even had a monstrous laser-eye octopus suspended from a gantry overhead. Everyone who came brought something to share or to show. You couldn’t ask for more.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the talks, so we’ll run down the highlights for you here. [Jenny List] is writing up a bunch of the badge hacks as we speak, so we’ll skip that for now. For the full experience, you just had to be there, but we’ll share with you what pictures we got. Enjoy!

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Hackaday Links: March 26, 2023

March 26, 2023 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Sad news in the tech world this week as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. Along with Robert Noyce in 1968, Moore founded NM Electronics, the company that would later go on to become Intel Corporation and give the world the first commercially available microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971. The four-bit microprocessor would be joined a few years later by the 8008 and 8080, chips that paved the way for the PC revolution to come. Surprisingly, Moore was not an electrical engineer but a chemist, earning his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1954 before his postdoctoral research at the prestigious Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. He briefly worked alongside Nobel laureate and transistor co-inventor William Shockley before jumping ship with Noyce and others to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which is where he made the observation that integrated circuit component density doubled roughly every two years. This calculation would go on to be known as “Moore’s Law.”

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Hackaday Podcast 211: Pocket Sundial, Origami Llama, PCB Spacemouse

March 24, 2023 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Contributor Emeritus Kristina Panos chewed the fat about the coolest hacks of the previous week. But first, a bit of news — our Low Power Challenge fizzled out this week, and boy did we have a lot of entries at the last minute. We love to see it though, and we’re going to get judging ASAP.

Don’t forget, this weekend is Hackaday Berlin! Livestreaming for this one may be iffy, but we’ll have the talks up for you eventually, so don’t fret too much if you can’t make it in the flesh this time.

Kristina definitely got What’s That Sound this week, but her answer will of course be bleeped out. Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with a 6-DoF controller that does everything in interesting ways and a printed shredder that eats like a goat. From there we cover bolt dispensers, coffee grinders with Bluetooth weighing, camera calibration, and a $50 pen plotter that’s definitely a hack. Finally, we discuss the virtues of physicality when it comes to SIM cards and recorded music.

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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This Week In Security: USB Boom! Acropalypse, And A Bitcoin Heist

March 24, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 4 Comments

We’ve covered a lot of sketchy USB devices over the years. And surely you know by now, if you find a USB drive, don’t plug it in to your computer. There’s more that could go wrong than just a malicious executable. We’ve covered creative and destructive ideas here on Hackaday, from creative firmware to capacitors that fry a machine when plugged in. But what happened to a handful of Ecuadorian journalists was quite the surprise. These drives went out with a bang.

That is, they literally exploded. The drives each reportedly contained a pellet of RDX, a popular explosive in use by militaries since the second World War. There have been five of these hyperactive USB devices located so far, and only one actually detonated. It seems that one only managed to trigger half of its RDX payload. Because of this, and the small overall size of a USB drive, the explosion was more comparable to a firecracker than a bomb. Continue reading “This Week In Security: USB Boom! Acropalypse, And A Bitcoin Heist” →

PCIe For Hackers: Link Anatomy

March 23, 2023 by Arya Voronova 17 Comments

Last time, we looked over diffpairs, their basics, routing rules and the notorious tolerances of PCIe when it comes to diffpairs. Now, let’s take a look at the exact signals that make PCIe tick, as well as give you an overview of which sockets you can get PCIe on.

I separate PCIe sockets into two categories – desktop sockets, which are the usual 1x, 16x, or perhaps x4 PCIe sockets we see on desktop motherboards — and mobile sockets: mPCIe and M.2. There are also sockets like ExpressCard that are still found on some older laptops, but they have definitely fallen out of relevance. On mobile, M.2 is the way forward when it comes to PCIe – if you’re interested, I’ve written a short series talking about everything M.2 before.

On these sockets, most signals will be optional and some signals will be socket-specific, but there are some signals required in any PCIe device. Of course, the first group of required signals is the PCIe diffpairs themselves.

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