Retrotechtacular: The Master Hands Of The Early Automotive Industry

February 6, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

When motion pictures came along as a major medium in the 1920s or so, it didn’t take long for corporations to recognize their power and start producing promotional pieces. A lot of them are of the “march of progress” genre, featuring swarms of workers happy in their labors and creating the future with their bare hands. If we’re being honest, a lot of it is hard to watch, but “Master Hands,” which shows the creation of cars in the 1930s, is somehow more palatable, mostly because it’s mercifully free of the flowery narration that usually accompanies such flicks.

“Master Hands” was produced in 1936 and focuses on the incredibly labor-intensive process of turning out cars, which appear to be the Chevrolet Master Deluxe, likely the 1937 model year thanks to its independent front suspension. The film is set at General Motors’ Flint Assembly plant in Flint, Michigan, and shows the entire manufacturing process from start to finish. And by start, we mean start; the film begins with the meticulous work of master toolmakers creating the dies and molds needed for forging and casting every part of the car. The mold makers and foundrymen come next, lighting their massive furnaces and packing the countless sand molds needed for casting parts. Gigantic presses stamp out everything from wheels to frame rails to body panels, before everything comes together at the end of the line in a delicate ballet of steel and men.

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Human-Interfacing Devices: Packing For The Descriptor Heist

February 6, 2024 by Arya Voronova 4 Comments

We started with figuring out HID descriptors a week ago, and I’ve shown you how to send raw HID packets using a MicroPython fork. We do still have the task in front of us – making a touchscreen device. For that, let’s give you the tools to capture an existing descriptor from a touchscreen, then show you how to tweak it and how it turns out in the end.

Packing For The Heist

When it comes to this kind of adventure, we can’t go without tools and weapons – it could be dangerous! Without them, you could even abandon your project halfway! Here’s enough high-precision tools and ammunition to last you through whatever obstacles you might encounter. Except for the web-based tools, these tools are for Linux, but please remember that you can always use a virtual machine or a Raspberry Pi. Nobody would use Windows for a heist anyway, what’s with all the telemetry and such.

The first tool is for reading descriptors – we need one to learn from, it’s just like a keycard you can flash to a security guard and scan at the vault entry. Of course, with RFID, you want to have enough examples, compare bits between a few cards and all. For now, HID descriptors don’t have authenticity checks, but it looks like that might just change in the future. Leave it to Apple and Microsoft to add them, as usual. On Linux, seeing descriptors is simple – as root, go into /sys/bus/usb/devices/, find your device by its lsusb device tree path, then follow the directory with the VID/PID in it. That directory will contain a report_descriptor file – hexdump it. The entire command could look like this:

sudo hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02X "' /sys/bus/usb/devices/3-6.2/3-6.2\:1.1/0003\:0C40\:8000.0022/report_descriptor

Again, you might need root to even find this path, so use sudo -i if you must. The format string in the hexdump command gives you parser-friendly output. Specifically, for parsing, I use this webpage – it’s wonderful, even adding tabs that delineate different sections of the descriptor, making its output all that more readable! You can also save this webpage locally, it’s a very neat tool. Other than that, you can try other local tools like this one!

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Biomedical Engineering Hack Chat

February 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, February 7 at noon Pacific for the Biomedical Engineering Hack Chat with Nyeli Kratz!

Although medical doctors and engineers generally work in completely different domains, there’s a fair amount of overlap between the disciplines. At the end of the day, they both solve problems, and while doctors clearly focus on the biological aspects of disease, there just might come a point where the problem has to be addressed with engineering principles. From the intricate design of an artificial hip to the electrical interface between an amputee’s nervous system and a prosthetic limb, biomedical engineers can make a tremendous contribution to positive patient outcomes.

Nyeli Kratz, a recent biomedical engineering grad, has worked on quite a few engineering solutions to diseases. Many of her projects, like this stand-up mobility aid or a wheelchair attachment that lets a tetraplegic father interact with his newborn child, seem aimed at making it easier for patients to interact with the world. She’ll stop by the Hack Chat to talk about these projects in particular as well as what the engineer brings to the table when it’s time to design hardware that heals.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 7 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Hackaday Europe 2024 Is On, And We Want You!

February 5, 2024 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

Hackaday Europe is on again for 2024, and we couldn’t be more excited! If you’re a European hacker, and have always wanted to join us up for Supercon in the states, here’s your chance to do so without having to set sail across the oceans. It’s great to be able to get together with our continental crew.

Just like last time, we’ll be meeting up in Berlin at Motionlab, Bouchestrasse 12 for a weekend of talks and workshops. On paper, the event runs April 13th and 14th, but if you’re in town on Friday the 12th, we’ll be going out for drinks and socializing beforehand. Saturday starts up at 9 AM and is going to be full of presentations, with food throughout and our own mix of hacking and music running until 2 AM. Sunday starts up a little bit later with brunch and as many lightning talks as we can fit into the afternoon.

And as always, we want you to bring a project or two along to show and tell. Half the fun of an event like this, where everyone is on the same wavelength, is the mutual inspiration that lurks in nearly every random conversation. It’s like Hackaday, but in real life!

So without further ado: get your tickets right here! We have a limited number of early-bird tickets at $70, and then the remainder will go on sale for $142 (plus whatever fees).

Call for Participation

So who is going to be speaking at Hackaday Europe? You could be! We’re also opening up the Call for Participation right now, both for talks and for workshops. Whether you’ve presented your work live before or not, you’re not likely to find a more appreciative audience for epic hacks, creative constructions, or you own tales of hardware, firmware, or software derring-do.

Workshop space is limited, but if you want to teach a group of ten or so people your favorite techniques or build up a swarm of small robots, we’d love to hear from you.

All presenters get in free, of course, and we’ll give you an early-bird price even if we can’t fit you into the schedule. So firm up what you’d like to share, and get your proposal in before Feb 22.

The Badge

Part of the fun of an event like this is sharing what you’re working on with a rare like-minded crowd. True story: we came into last year’s Hackaday Berlin event with a raw idea for our own Superconference badge, that we needed to have done by November. Talks with [Schneider] about the lovely badge for the Chaos Communications Camp inspired us to use those sweet round screens, and a chat with [Stefan Holzapfel] convinced us of the possibility to run an audio DAC at DC.

So it’s fitting that we’ll be bringing the Vectorscope badge to Berlin, with some new graphics of course. If you didn’t catch it at Supercon, it’s a emulation of an old-timey X-Y mode oscilloscope and a DAC to drive it in software. Folks had a great time hacking it at Supercon, and you will too. It’s analog, it’s digital, and it’s got room for a lot of art. We’d love to see what you bring to it!

Thanks and See You Soon!

Of course, we can’t put on an event like this without help from our fantastic sponsors, so we’d like to say thanks to DigiKey for sponsoring not only the stateside Superconference, but also Hackaday Europe 2024. And as always, thanks to Supplyframe for making it all possible.

April is coming up fast, so get your proposals in and order your tickets now! We can’t wait to see you all.

Fail Of The Week: PCB LED Cube Fails Successfully

February 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Remember LED cubes? We sure do — they were all the rage for a while, and then it seemed like everyone just sort of lost interest in them. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, not least of which is likely the amount of work it takes to put one together from discrete LEDs and separate pieces of wire. Could there be a better way?

Of course there could, and [Sasa Karanovic] thought he had it all figured out with this PCB-based LED cube. At first glance, it seems to make perfect sense; after all, weren’t PCBs invented to take the place of all that pesky point-to-point wiring in the early days of electronics? The boards [Sasa] designed are pretty cool, actually. They’ve each got room for 16 addressable WS2812 LEDs in 5 mm packages, with every possible bit of substrate removed to block the minimum amount of light. That left very little room for traces on the 2-mm-wide arms, so the PCBs had to have four layers, which raised eyebrows at the PCB house when [Sasa] submitted the design.

Such an airy and open design obviously has the potential for mechanical issues, which [Sasa] addressed by adding pads at three corners of each board; a vertical PCB connects to each LED board to provide mechanical support and distribute signals to the LEDs. The cube seems solid enough as a result, and even when handled the LED boards don’t really flop around too much. See the cube in action in the video below.

What’s nice about this design is the perfect spacing between the LEDs in all three dimensions, and the way everything lines up nice and straight. That would be really hard to do with wire, even for the most practiced of circuit sculptors. [Sasa] seems to agree, but still deems the build a failure because the PCBs block too much of the view. We suppose he’s got a point, and we’re not sure how well this would scale to an 8×8 cube. We’re not sure how we’d feel about paying for PCBs that are mostly air either, but as failures go, this one still manages to be pretty successful. Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: PCB LED Cube Fails Successfully” →

Hackaday Links: February 4, 2024

February 4, 2024 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

Things may not have gone as planned last week for the flying cellphone on Mars, but just because Ingenuity‘s flying career is over doesn’t mean there’s no more work to do. NASA announced this week that it’s going to try a series of “wiggle” maneuvers on Ingenuity‘s rotors, in an attempt to get a better look at the damage to the blade tips and possibly get some clues as to what went wrong. The conjecture at the moment seems to be that a large area of relatively featureless terrain confused the navigation system, which uses down-facing cameras to track terrain features. If the navigation program couldn’t get a bead on exactly how far above the ground it was, it’s possible the copter came in too hard and caused the rotor tips to dig into the regolith. There seems to be some photographic suggestion of that, with what looks like divots in the ground about where you’d expect the rotor tips to dig in, and even scraps of material that look out of place and seem to be about the same color as the rotor blades. All this remains to be seen, of course, and we’re sure that NASA and JPL are poring over all available data to piece together what happened. As much as we hate to say goodbye to Ingenuity, we eagerly await the post-mortem.

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Will There Be Any Pi Left For Us?

February 2, 2024 by Jenny List 72 Comments

Our world has been abuzz with the news that Raspberry Pi are to float on the London Stock Exchange. It seems an obvious move for a successful and ambitious company, and as they seem to be in transition from a maker of small computers into a maker of chips which happen to also go on their small computers, they will no doubt be using the float to generate the required investment to complete that process.

New Silicon Needs Lots Of Cash

An RP1 chip on a Raspberry Pi 5. — The most important product Raspberry Pi have ever made.

When a tech startup with immense goodwill grows in this way, there’s always a worry that it could mark the start of the decline. You might for instance be concerned that a floated Raspberry Pi could bring in financial whiz-kids who let the hobbyist products wither on the vine as they license the brand here and there and perform all sorts of financial trickery in search of shareholder value and not much else. Fortunately we don’t think that this will be the case, and Eben Upton has gone to great lengths to reassure the world that his diminutive computers are safe. That is however not to say that there might be pitfalls ahead from a hobbyist Pi customer perspective, so it’s worth examining what this could mean.

As we remarked last year, the move into silicon is probably the most important part of the Pi strategy for the 2020s. The RP2040 microcontroller was the right chip with the right inventory to do well from the pandemic shortages, and on the SBCs the RP1 all-in-one peripheral gives them independence from a CPU house such as Broadcom. It’s not a difficult prediction that they will proceed further into silicon, and it wouldn’t surprise us to see a future RP chip containing a fully-fledged SoC and GPU. Compared to their many competitors who rely on phone and tablet SoCs, this would give the Pi boards a crucial edge in terms of supply chain, and control over the software.

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