Where You Are Influences What You Invent

October 16, 2021 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

[Timon] just bought a new PCB holder setup for his desk. It’s one of those spring-loaded jobbies that uses strong magnets to hold it up off of a work surface, and is made of metal so that you can reflow solder with it. It might be a clone of the PCBite, but frankly I’ve seen similar projects everywhere — it’s hard to say who is copying whom these days. And anyway, that’s not the point.

What struck me about the holders was their tops: they’re repurposed 3D printer nozzles. That’s a fantastic idea because they’re non-magnetic, heat tolerant, relatively uniform, and probably dirt cheap in Shenzhen, where the designer of this board almost certainly lives. Maybe he or she even works in a 3D printer factory? Who knows? But the designer almost certainly looked around for something that would fit the bill, and found the nozzles.

Indeed, there’s been a lot of innovation in all things board-holding coming out of China over the last decade. I can remember when the state of the art was a vise-like affair. (I still like my homebrew Stickvise clone for low, square jobs.)

But with cell phone repairs requiring the ability to hold and reflow ever stranger board shapes, there’s been a flourishing of repositionable holders. The pawn-pillar designs are cool, but their utility rests firmly in how strong the magnets are. (I wouldn’t buy the one linked, for instance, without trying it first-hand.) I really like the look of these jobbies, which have springs to maintain tension. (Will the 3D-printed plastic jaws hold up to multiple reflows?) Anyway, it’s no coincidence that the inventors of these devices are in the cellphone-repair capital of the universe.

The old saying is that necessity is the mother of invention. But what if, like with real estate, it’s location, location, location? You dream up solutions to problems around you, using parts that you’ve got on-hand. If that sounds a little fatalistic, consider that you can also change your surroundings, either physical or even virtual. Are you in the middle of the right challenges and opportunities?

Hackaday Podcast 140: Aqua Battery, IBM Cheese Cutter, Waiting For USB-C, And Digging ADCs

October 15, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chew the fat over the coolest of hacks. It’s hard to beat two fascinating old-tech demonstraters; one is a mechanical IBM computer for accurate cheese apportionment, the other an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) built from logic chips. We gawk two very different uses of propeller-based vehicles; one a flying-walker, the other a ground-effect coaster. Big news shared at the top of the show is that Keith Thorne of LIGO is going to present a keynote at Hackaday Remoticon. And we wrap the episode talking about brighter skies from a glut of satellites and what the world would look like if one charging cable truly ruled all smartphones.

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 (55 MB)

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This Week In Security: The Apache Fix Miss, Github (Malicious) Actions, And Shooting The Messenger

October 15, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 10 Comments

Apache 2.4.50 included a fix for CVE-2021-41773. It has since been discovered that this fix was incomplete, and this version is vulnerable to a permutation of the same vulnerability. 2.4.51 is now available, and should properly fix the vulnerability.

The original exploit used .%2e/ as the magic payload, which is using URL encoding to sneak the extra dot symbol through as part of the path. The new workaround uses .%%32%65/. This looks a bit weird, but makes sense when you decode it. URL encoding uses UTF-8, and so %32 decodes to 2, and %65 to e. Familiar? Yep, it’s just the original vulnerability with a second layer of URL encoding. This has the same requirements as the first iteration, cgi-bin has to be enabled for code execution, and require all denied has to be disabled in the configuration files. Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Apache Fix Miss, Github (Malicious) Actions, And Shooting The Messenger” →

Basics Of Remote Cellular Access: Watchdogs

October 14, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 21 Comments

When talking about remote machines, sometimes we mean really remote, beyond the realms of wired networks that can deliver the Internet. In these cases, remote cellular access is often the way to go. Thus far, we’ve explored the hardware and software sides required to control a machine remotely over a cellular connection.

However, things can and do go wrong. When that remote machine goes offline, getting someone on location to reboot it can be prohibitively difficult and expensive. For these situations, what you want is some way to kick things back into gear, ideally automatically. What you’re looking for is a watchdog timer!

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The Compute Module Comes Of Age: Say Hello To The Real Cutting Edge Of Raspberry Pi

October 14, 2021 by Jenny List 66 Comments

If we wanted to point to an epoch-making moment for our community, we’d take you back to February 29th, 2012. It was that day on which a small outfit in Cambridge put on the market the first batch of their new product. That outfit was what would become the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the product was a run of 10,000 Chinese made versions of their very first single board computer, the Raspberry Pi Model B. With its BCM2835 SoC and 512 megabytes of memory it might not have been the first board that could run a Linux distribution from an SD card, but it was certainly the first that did so for pocket money prices. On that morning back in 2012 the unforseen demand for the new board brought down the websites of both the electronics distributors putting it on sale, and a now-legendary product was born. We’re now on version 4 of the Model B with specs upgraded in almost every sense, and something closer to the original can still be bought in the form of its svelte stablemate, the Pi Zero.

How Do You Evolve Without Casualties?

The original Pi Model B+ from 2014. The form factor has had a few minor changes, but hardware-wise the Pi 4 follows this pretty closely. Lucasbosch, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The problem with having spawned such a successful product line is this: with so many competitors and copies snapping at your heels, how do you improve upon it? It’s fair to say that sometimes its competitors have produced more capable hardware than the Pi of the moment, but they do so without the board from Cambridge’s ace in the hole: its uniquely well-supported Linux distribution, Raspberry Pi OS. It’s that combination of a powerful board and an operating system with the minimum of shocks and surprises that still makes the Pi the one to go for after all these years.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Curved Typewriter

October 13, 2021 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Aerodox Flies on Wireless Wings

[Simon Merrett] didn’t know anything about keyboards when he started this project, but he didn’t let that stop him. [Simon] did what any of us would do — figure out what you like, learn enough to be dangerous, and then start fiddling around, taking all that inspiration and making a mashup of influences that suits your needs.

The Aerodox design became a cross between the ErgoDox‘s key layout and the logic and communication of the Redox Wireless, itself a reduced-size version of the ErgoDox. Interestingly, [Simon] chose the ErgoDox’s dimensions and spacing, and not those of the Redox. Like a lot of people out there, I found the ErgoDox to be too big for my hands, mostly in that the thumb cluster is too far away from the mainland. It’s nice to see that it suits some people, though.

[Simon] worked up a custom hot-swap footprint that makes the board reversible, much like the ErgoDox. Each half has an NRF51822 for a brain, and there’s a third one that acts as a receiver. This external NRF board is connected over UART to an Arduino Pro Micro, which acts as the USB HID and runs QMK. It’s an interesting journey for sure, so go dig into the logs.

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Showdown Time For Non-Standard Chargers In Europe

October 12, 2021 by Jenny List 115 Comments

It seems that few features of a consumer electronic product will generate as much rancour as a mobile phone charger socket. For those of us with Android phones, the world has slowly been moving over the last few years from micro-USB to USB-C, while iPhone users regard their Lightning connector as the ultimate in connectivity. Get a set of different phone owners together and this can become a full-on feud, as micro-USB owners complain that nobody has a handy charging cable any more, USB-C owners become smug bores, and Apple owners do what they’ve always done and pretend that Steve Jobs invented USB. Throwing a flaming torch into this incendiary mix is the European Union, which is proposing to mandate the use of USB-C on all phones sold in its 27 member nations with the aim of reducing considerably the quantity of e-waste generated.

Minor annoyances over having to carry an extra micro-USB cable for an oddball device aside, we can’t find any reason not to applaud this move, because USB-C is a connector born of several decades of USB evolution and brings with it not only the reversible plug but also the enhanced power delivery standards that enable fast charging no matter whose USB-PD charger you are using. Mandating USB-C will put an end to needlessly overpriced proprietary cables, and bring eventual unity to a fractured world. Continue reading “Showdown Time For Non-Standard Chargers In Europe” →