Hackaday Links: August 15, 2021

August 15, 2021 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Unless you’re in the market for a new car, household appliance, or game console, or if you’re involved in the manufacture of these things, chances are pretty good that the global semiconductor shortage hasn’t directly impacted you yet. But we hobbyists might be due for a comeuppance as the chip shortage starts to impact our corner of the market. We suppose it’s natural that supplies of the chips needed to build Arduinos and Raspberry Pis would start to dry up, as semiconductor manufacturers realign their resources to service their most lucrative markets. Still, it was all sort of abstract until now, but seeing dire quotes from the likes of Adafruit, Pololu, and Sparkfun about the long lead times they’re being quoted — some chips won’t be seen until 2023! — is disheartening. As are the reports of price gouging and even hoarding; when a $10 part can suddenly command $350, you know something has gone seriously wrong.

But have no fear — we’re certain the global chip shortage will have no impact on the planned 2027 opening of the world’s first space hotel. Voyager Station — once dubbed Von Braun Station but renamed for some reason — looks for all the world like Space Station V in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, or at least half of it. The thing is enormous — witness the Starship docked in the center hub, as well as the several dozen shuttle-like craft — escape pods, perhaps? — attached to the outer rim. The renders are imaginative, to say the least — the station looks very sleek, completely unfettered by such banalities as, say, solar panels. We get that a private outfit needs to attract deep-pocketed investors, and that one doesn’t do that by focusing on the technical details when they can sell a “premium experience”. But really, if you’re going to space, do you want basically the same look and feel as a premium hotel on Earth, just with a better view? Or would you rather feel like you’ve actually traveled to space?

Speaking of space, did you ever wonder what the first programmable calculator in space was? Neither did we, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t find this detailed story about the HP-65 that was sent up on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 pretty fascinating. The ASTP was the last hurrah of Apollo, and an often underappreciated engineering challenge. Linking up the two spacecraft safely was not trivial, and a fair number of burn calculations had to be made in orbit to achieve rendezvous and docking, as well as to maintain orbit. The HP-65, a programmable calculator that went for about $750 at the time (for the non-space-rated version, of course) had several programs loaded onto its removable magnetic cards, and the Apollo crew used it to verify the results calculated by the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).

Facebook, a company that exists by providing people with a product they don’t need but now somehow can’t live without, is now dipping a toe into weird, weird waters: reverse-passthrough virtual reality. The idea, we take it, is that as users more widely adopt VR and integrate it into their daily lives, the VR headsets everyone will be wearing will make face-to-face contact more difficult. So what better way to solve that problem than by projecting a live image of the VR user’s eyes onto a screen outside the VR rig, for any and all to see? Pure genius, and not the least bit creepy. They’ve perhaps got a bit of work to go before achieving their goal of “seamless social connection between real and virtual worlds”.

And speaking of eyes, it’s good to know that developers are still hard at work keeping the most vital applications running at peak efficiency on today’s hardware. Yes, the venerable XEyes, a program for the X Window System on Unix-like operating systems that draws a pair of googly eyes on the screen to follow your mouse movements, has finally moved to version 1.2.0. It’s been 11 years since the 1.1.0 upgrade, so it was a long time coming. If you haven’t had the chance to play with XEyes, fear not — just about any Linux machine should be able to show you what you’ve been missing. Or, you know, you could even run it on a camera as the video below the break shows.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: August 15, 2021” →

Goals And Goalposts

August 14, 2021 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

In the winter, I hatched a vague plan to learn some of the modern unmanned aerial vehicle tech. Everybody needs an autonomous vehicle, and we’ve got some good flying fields within walking distance, so it seemed like it could work. Being me, that meant buying the cheapest gear that could possibly work, building up the plane by myself, and generally figuring out as much as possible along the way. I learn more by making my own mistakes anyway. Sounds like a good summer project.

Fast-forward to August, and the plane is built, controller installed, and I’ve spent most of the last month trying to make them work well together. (The firmware expects a plane with ailerons, and mine doesn’t have them, but apparently I’d rather tweak PID values than simply add a couple wing servos.) But it’s working well enough that it’s launching, flying autonomous waypoint missions, and coming home without any intervention. So, mission accomplished, right?

Nope. When I’m enjoying a project, I have a way of moving the goalposts on myself. I mean, I don’t really want to be done anyway. When a friend asked me a couple weeks ago what I was planning to do with the plane, I said “take nice aerial videos of that farm over there.” Now I see flight opportunities everywhere, and need to work on my skills. The plane needed an OLED display. It probably still needs Bluetooth for local configuration as well. Maybe a better long-range data link…

This is creeping featurism and moving-the-goalposts in the best of ways. And if this were a project with a deadline, or one that I weren’t simply enjoying, it would be a problem. Instead, having relatively low-key goals, meeting them, and letting them inspire me to set the next ones has been a blast. It makes me think of Donald Papp’s great article on creating hacking “win” projects. There he suggests creating simple goals to keep yourself inspired. I don’t think I could have planned out an “optimal” set of goals to begin with — I’ve learned too much along the way that the next goal isn’t obvious until I know what new capabilities I have. Creeping is the only way.

What about you? Do you plan your hobby projects completely in advance? Not at all? Or do you have some kind of hybrid, moving-the-goalposts sort of strategy?

Retrotechtacular: LA’s Hilarious Subway Safety Film From 1992

August 13, 2021 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

Subways! They’ve been around for an awfully long time; almost as long as modern railways themselves, believe it or not. Building underground was undertaken in earnest by those in the 19th century, who set out to build networks of stations to allow residents to get around a city quickly and effectively.

That fact should stick in your mind as you sample this glorious retro video from 1992. “L.A. Underground – Safety in the Extreme” is a guide for Californians, aiming to educate residents about the new B Line subway that opened the following year. The video acts as if the subway is a new fangled, mysterious thing, with a couple of confusing off-the-wall moments as well. If you’re a transport enthusiast or get excited about weird public films, this one’s for you.

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Hackaday Podcast 131: Have A Heart, Transputer Pi, Just The Wing, And A Flipped Cable Fries Radio

August 13, 2021 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams recount the past week in hardware hacking. There’s a new Tamagochi hack that runs the original ROM on plain old microcontrollers like the STM32. Did you know you can blast the Bayer filter off a camera sensor using a powerful laser and the sensor will still work? We didn’t. There was a lot of debate this week about a commercial jet design alteration that would remove windows — but it’s for the good cause of making the plane more efficient. We marvel at what it takes to pump blood with an artificial heart, and go down the troubleshooting rabbit hole after the magic smoke was let out of a radio.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

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This Week In Security: John Deere, ProxyLogin Detailed, And Pneumatic Tubes

August 13, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 14 Comments

We’ve covered the right-to-repair saga, and one of the companies that have become rather notorious is John Deere. The other side to the poorly managed interconnected mess is security issues. There’s a certain irony to how this story started: Somebody noticed that John Deere equipment didn’t have any CVEs at all. A normal person might think that this must mean their products are super secure, but a security researcher knows that something more interesting is afoot. Our old friends [Sick Codes], [John Jackson], and a host of others saw this as a sure sign that there were plenty of vulnerabilities to be found, and it seems they were correct.

Vulnerabilities included a handful of cross-site scripting attacks, an authentication bypass via request smuggling, misconfigured security, SQL injections, RCEs and more. Put together, these vulnerabilities allowed for full control of the John Deere system, including the ability to manipulate all the equipment connected to the system.

During the Defcon presentation, linked below, [Sick Codes] recalled the moment when they realized they were working on an important problem. Rather than complain about not getting paid for the vulnerabilities found, a contributor simply noted that he valued having food to eat. A coordinated attack on JD equipment could cause big problems for a bunch of farms across a country.

They ended up contacting CISA, due to a lack of serious response from the vendors. CISA took the threat seriously, and the problems starting getting fixed. This isn’t a problem limited to one company. Case had similar issues that have also been fixed, and it was implied that other vendors have similar problems that are still in the process of being addressed. Continue reading “This Week In Security: John Deere, ProxyLogin Detailed, And Pneumatic Tubes” →

Review: Mini AMG8833 Thermal Camera

August 12, 2021 by Jenny List 29 Comments

In our ceaseless quest to bring you the best from the cheaper end of the global electronics markets, there are sometimes gadgets that we keep an eye on for a while because when they appear they’re just a little bit too pricey to consider cheap.

Today’s subject is just such a device, it’s a minimalist infra-red camera using the 8 pixel by 8 pixel Panasonic AMG8833 thermal sensor. This part has been around for a while, but even though any camera using it has orders of magnitude less performance than more accomplished models it has remained a little too expensive for a casual purchase. Indeed, these mini cameras were somewhere above £50 ($70) when they first came to our attention, but have now dropped to the point at which they can be found for somewhere over £30 ($42). Thirty quid is cheap enough for a punt on a thermal camera, so off went the order to China and the expected grey parcel duly arrived.

The interface on this camera is about as simple as it gets.

It’s a little unit, 40 mm x 35 mm x 18 mm, constructed of two laser-cut pieces of black plastic held together by brass stand-offs that hold a PCB between them, and on the front is a cut-out for the sensor while on the rear is one for the 35mm OLED display.At the side on the PCB is a micro USB socket which serves only as a power supply. It’s fair to say that this is a tiny unit.

Applying power from a USB battery bank, the screen comes up with a square colour thermal picture and a colour to temperature calibration stripe to its left. The colours adapt to the range of temperatures visible to the sensor, and there is a crosshair in the centre of the picture for which the temperature in Celsius is displayed below the picture. It’s a very straightforward and intuitive interface that requires no instruction, which is handy because the device has none. Continue reading “Review: Mini AMG8833 Thermal Camera” →

Should You Be Able To Repair It? We Think So.

August 11, 2021 by Jenny List 179 Comments

You own it, you should be able to fix it. So much equipment on sale today has either been designed to be impossible to maintain, unnecessarily too complex to maintain, maintainable only with specialist tooling only available to authorised service agents, or with no repair parts availability. It’s a hot-button issue in an age when sustainability is a global concern, so legislators and regulators worldwide now finally have it in their sights after years of inaction and it’s become a buzzword. But what exactly is the right to repair, and what do we want it to be?

Is It Designed For Repair?

A Nestle Dolce Gusto machine — For some reason, pod coffee makers are especially resistant to repair. Andy1982, CC BY 3.0

The first question to consider is this: does it matter whether or not you have the right to repair something, if it’s designed specifically with lack of repairability in mind? Consider a typical domestic pod coffeemaker such as a Tassimo or similar: despite being physically quite a simple device, it is designed to be especially complex to dismantle and reassemble. You just can’t get into it when something goes wrong.

Should it be the preserve of regulators to require design for easy repair? We think so. There are other forces working on the designers of home appliances; design-for-manufacture considerations and exterior appearance concerns directly affect the firm’s bottom line, while the end users’ repair experience is often at the bottom of the list, even though the benefit at a national level is obvious. That’s what laws are for.
Continue reading “Should You Be Able To Repair It? We Think So.” →