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Hackaday Links: March 18, 2018

March 18, 2018 by 10 Comments

Oh, boy. You know what’s happening next weekend? The Midwest RepRap Festival. The greatest 3D printing festival on the planet is going down next Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon in beautiful Goshen, Indiana. Why should you go? Check this one out. To recap from last year, E3D released a new extruder, open source filaments will be a thing, true color filament printing in CMYKW is awesome, and we got the world’s first look at the infinite build volume printer. This year, The Part Daddy, a 20-foot-tall delta bot will be there once again. It’s awesome and you should come.

We launched the 2018 Hackaday Prize this week. Why should you care? Because we’re giving away $200,000 in prizes. There are five challenges: the Open Hardware Design Challenge, Robotics Module, Power Harvesting, Human-Computer Interface, and Musical Instrument Challenge. That last one is something I’m especially interested in for one very specific reason. This is a guitorgan.

Building a computer soon? Buy your SSD now. Someone fell asleep on the e-stop at a Samsung fab, and now 3.5% of global NAND production for March has been lost.

Need to put an Arduino in the cloud? Here’s a shield for that. It’s a shield for SIMCom’s SIM7000-series module, providing LTE for a microcontroller. Why would you ever need this? Because 2G is dead, for various values of ‘dead’. 3G is eventually going to go the same way.

A bridge collapsed in Florida this week. A pedestrian walkway at Florida International University collapsed this week, killing several. The engineering efforts are still underway to determine the cause of the accident, but some guy from Canukistan posted a pair of informative videos discussing I-beams and pre-tensioned concrete. It’s going to be months until the fault (and responsibility) will be determined, but until then we have the best footage yet of this collapse. It’s dash cam footage from a truck that rolled up to the red light just before the collapse. This is one that’s going to go down in engineering history along with the Hyatt Regency collapse.

Need to test your app? Here’s a delta robot designed for phones. You would be shocked at how popular this robot is.

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Hackaday Links: March 11, 2018

March 11, 2018 by 18 Comments

Guess what’ll be wrapping up in just two weeks? The Midwest RepRap Festival, the largest con for open source 3D printing in the world. MRRF is going down in Goshen, Indiana on March 23rd through March 25th. Tickets are free! If you’re looking for a hotel, I can speak from experience that the Best Western is good and close to the con, and I haven’t heard anything bad about the Holiday Inn Express.

Want to go to a convention with even weirder people? Somehow or another, a press release for Contact In The Desert, the largest UFO conference in the world, ended up in my inbox. It’s on the first weekend in June near Cochilla. Why is this significant? Because the greatest people-watching experience you’ll ever see, AlienCon 2018, is happening in Pasadena just two weeks later. The guy with the hair from Ancient Aliens will be at both events. Why are they having a UFO conference where military planes fly all the time? Wouldn’t it be better to rule out false positives?

The entirety of Silicon Valley tech culture is based upon the principle of flouting laws and regulations. We have reached a new high water mark. Swarm Technologies, a ‘stealth startup’ working on ‘Internet of Things’ satellites recently sent up four 0.25U cubesats on an ISRO flight. The satellites were deployed and are currently in orbit. This is somewhat remarkable, because the FCC, the government body responsible for regulating commercial satellites, dismissed Swarm’s application for launch on safety grounds. As reported by IEEE Spectrum, this is the first ever unauthorized launch of commercial satellites.

The TRS-80 Model 100 was one of the first, best examples of a ‘notebook’ computer. It had a QWERTY keyboard, an LCD, and ran off a few AA batteries for 20 hours. It’s the perfect platform for a Raspberry Pi casemod, and now someone has finally done it. [thecodeman] stuffed a Pi into a broken model M100 and replaced the old LCD with a 7.8″ 400×1280 pixel display. The display is the interesting part here, and it comes from EarthLCD, part number earthlcd-7-4001280.

The Flite Test crew is famous for their foam board RC airplanes, but they have historically had some significantly more interesting builds. Can you fly a cinder block? Yep. Can you fly a microwave and have it pop popcorn? Yep. Their latest crazy project is a flying Little Tikes Cozy Coupe, the ubiquitous red and yellow toy car meant to fit a toddler. The wings are made out of cardboard, the motors — both of them — generate thirty pounds of thrust each, and you can weld with the batteries. Does it fly? Yes, until the wings collapsed and the Cozy Coupe plummeted to the ground. Watch the video, it’s a great demonstration of designing a plane to rotate off the ground.

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Hackaday Links: March 4, 2018

March 4, 2018 by 7 Comments

Guess what’s happening next weekend? The SoCal Linux Expo. SCALE is in its 16th year, and is the second greatest convention happening this year at the Pasadena Convention Center. The first, of course, is AlienCon this summer, with a special guest appearance by the guy with the hair on Ancient Aliens. What’s cool at SCALE? Tons of stuff! Tindie and Hackaday will have a booth, you’ll be able to check out the new stuff from System 76, and this is where I first picked up my most cherished possession, a Microsoft (heart) Linux sticker. NEED A TICKET? Cool, use the code ‘HACK’ to get 50% off!

[Muth] over on hackaday.io has been working on a very, very, very cool high voltage display. It’s a ИГГ1-64x64M, or a Gazotron, or something. What is it? It’s a two-color (green and red) 64×64 pixel VFD bitmap display. You want the king of all vacuum-based displays? Here you go. Progress on driving this display is slow, but it’s happening, and it will result in the coolest clock ever created.

Need a pick and place machine? Don’t want to shell out thousands for a Neoden? Here’s an Indiegogo campaign for the Open Placer, a machine that works with OpenPNP software. It’s got vision and a 295x195mm working area.

A few months ago, news came from Havana that the US embassy was under attack. Staffers at the US embassy in Cuba were feeling sick and apparently suffered neurological damage. Explanations ranged from poisoning to some sort of non-lethal weapon. Now, there might be a banal explanation. Researchers at the University of Michigan think it could simply be two ultrasonic sensors placed just the right distance apart. Acoustic interference happens, and that inaudible 35kHz signal becomes a maddening audible signal.

Last week, we had a great talk with OSH Park about PCBs. These Hack Chats are getting out of control, but at least we have a transcript. The biggest takeaway? They’re out of jellybeans, but OSH Park is working on new stickers.

Open Hardware Summit is the greatest con for all things Open Hardware. This year, it’s going to be in Boston. The Summit will be held on September 27th, 2018 at MIT Stratton Student Center. If you’d like to get there a week and a half early, the MIT ham flea market is the third Sunday of the month.

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Hackaday Links: February 25, 2018

February 25, 2018 by 18 Comments

Hipster hardware! [Bunnie] found something interesting in Tokyo. It’s a LED matrix display, with a few PDIP chips glued onto the front. There are no through-holes or vias, and these PDIPs can’t be seen through on the back side of the board. Someone is gluing retro-looking chips onto boards so it looks cool. It’s the ‘gluing gears to everything therefore steampunk’ aesthetic. What does this mean for the future? Our tubes and boxes of 74-series chips will be ruined by a dumb kid with a hot glue gun when we’re dead.

Is it Kai-CAD or Key-CAD? Now you can share your troubles with the greatest problem in Electronic Design Automation with others.

Speaking of unimaginable problems in EDA suites and PCB design tools, here’s a Git-based visual version control thingy for Eagle. Cadlab.io is a version control system for Github and Eagle that offers visual diff of PCB layouts and schematics. Neat? Yes, especially if you have more than one person working on a board.

How about a 3D printed business card embosser? [Taekyeom] designed and printed a pair of 3D rollers, one of which is embossed with the ‘negative’ of a design, the other with the ‘positive’ of a design. When rolled against each other, these rollers mesh and putting a piece of paper through the pinky pinching machine embosses paper. Add a frame, a handle, and a few zip ties for belts, and you have a fully 3D printed paper embosser.

There’s a new ransomware that encrypts your files and won’t allow you to access them until you pay someone some crypto. Big news, huh? Well, yes, actually. The HC7 Planetary ransomware is apparently the first bit of ransomware that accepts Etherium. ETH is all grown up now.

Aw, snap, 3D printers with automatic tool changing. This is a project from E3D that shows off magnetic (?) extruders and hot ends for 3D printers. You can change your hot end (and nozzle, and filament) in mid-print. What does this mean? Well, swapping filament is the most obvious use case, but the Prusa system might have this nailed down. What is more interesting is swapping hotends, allowing you to print in multiple temperatures (and different materials), and maybe even different nozzle sizes. This is coming to MRRF, the greatest 3D printing con on the planet. MRRF is happening in March 23-25th in beautiful scenic Goshen, Indiana.

A hardware demoscene? Yes, it’s true! #badgelife is a hardware demoscene wrapped up around wearable conference badges. We just had a meetup in San Francisco this week, and the talks were amazing. [Kerry Scharfglass] talked about scaling one Diamond Age badge to one hundred Diamond Age badges. [Whitney Merrill] talked about building badges for the Crypto and Privacy village at Defcon. If you’re into electronics, you are, by default, into manufacturing and this is the best education in manufacturing and logistics you will ever get. The true pros know how to reduce air freight costs by two hundred percent!

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Hackaday Links: February 18, 2018

February 18, 2018 by 50 Comments

Hacker uses pineapple on unencrypted WiFi. The results are shocking! Film at 11.

Right on, we’ve got some 3D printing cons coming up. The first is MRRF, the Midwest RepRap Festival. It’s in Goshen, Indiana, March 23-25th. It’s a hoot. Just check out all the coverage we’ve done from MRRF over the years. Go to MRRF.

We got news this was going to happen last year, and now we finally have dates and a location. The East Coast RepRap Fest is happening June 22-24th in Bel Air, Maryland. What’s the East Coast RepRap Fest? Nobody knows; this is the first time it’s happening, and it’s not being produced by SeeMeCNC, the guys behind MRRF. There’s going to be a 3D printed Pinewood Derby, though, so that’s cool.

జ్ఞ‌ా. What the hell, Apple?

Defcon’s going to China. The CFP is open, and we have dates: May 11-13th in Beijing. Among the things that may be said: “Hello Chinese customs official. What is the purpose for my visit? Why, I’m here for a hacker convention. I’m a hacker.”

Intel hit with lawsuits over security flaws. Reuters reports Intel shareholders and customers had filed 32 class action lawsuits against the company because of Spectre and Meltdown bugs. Are we surprised by this? No, but here’s what’s interesting: the patches for Spectre and Meltdown cause a noticeable and quantifiable slowdown on systems. Electricity costs money, and companies (server farms, etc) can therefore put a precise dollar amount on what the Spectre and Meltdown patches cost them. Two of the lawsuits allege Intel and its officers violated securities laws by making statements or products that were false. There’s also the issue of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich selling shares after he knew about Meltdown, but before the details were made public. Luckily for Krzanich, the rule of law does not apply to the wealthy.

What does the Apollo Guidance Computer look like? If you think it has a bunch of glowey numbers and buttons, you’re wrong; that’s the DSKY — the user I/O device. The real AGC is basically just two 19″ racks. Still, the DSKY is very cool and a while back, we posted something about a DIY DSKY. Sure, it’s just 7-segment LEDs, but whatever. Now this project is a Kickstarter campaign. Seventy bucks gives you the STLs for the 3D printed parts, BOM, and a PCB. $250 is the base for the barebones kit.

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Hackaday Links: February 11, 2018

February 11, 2018 by 20 Comments

Are you a student? Are you part of a hackerspace? We have a contest going on right now where you can win a fancy new Prusa i3 MK3. The Repairs You Can Print contest is a challenge to do something useful with that machine that spits out tugboats. We’re looking for functional repairs of items around your house, office, or garage. Did you repair something with a 3D printer? Then you too can get in on the action! Enter now! Check out the entries!

You may know Flite Test as the group who do everything surrounding remote control flight (mostly fixed wings, a nice counter to the quadification of the hobby over the last few years). Flite Test designs and sells airplanes made out of Dollar Tree foam board, they have yearly, bi-coastal meetups, and they’re all-around awesome dudes. Now, they want to build the Disneyland of RC flight. [Josh Bixler], the face of Flite Test and a guy who has a plane named after him, wants to buy a golf course and turn it into the world’s best RC flying park, with a ~2000 foot grass strip for general aviation. We’re looking at their crowdfunding campaign, and it looks promising it might be funded by the time this goes live.

A while ago, [Peter Jansen], the guy who built a tricorder and a laser-cut CT scanner, made a magnetic camera. This Hall Effect camera is a camera for magnetism instead of light. Now, this camera has been fully built and vastly improved. He’s capturing ‘frames’ of magnetism in a spinning fan at 2000 Hz (or FPS, terminology kind of breaks down here), and it’s beautiful.

Oh thank God we can finally buy GPUs again. Try buying them with Bitcoin.

In the last few years, CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, has expanded. Originally, this was one of the treaties that banned the import or export of rhino horn, but recently this expanded to the export of rosewood thanks to increased demand in China for rosewood furniture. The laws of unintended consequences kicked into effect, and importing anything made out of rosewood is now a mess of permits and inspections at the border, including musical instruments. Travelling orchestras, for example, are at risk of having their string section confiscated because of rosewood tuning pegs. Cooler minds may now be prevailing, and there’s some hope the regulations may be changed during the next meeting of the CITES convention next year.

As noted a few months ago, there was a possibility of Broadcom buying Qualcomm for one… hundred… Billion dollars. This offer was rejected, with Qualcomm saying the offer wasn’t high enough. Broadcom fired back with an offer of $82 per share, or $121B. This offer was rejected this week.

Need some EMC testing? [Zach]’s got your back. He’s reserved some time in a 10m EMC chamber for testing NeuroBytes this week. If you have an Open Source project that needs a pre-test scan for unintentional radiator, you can get in on the action. This is just a pre-test, you’re not getting certification, and you’re not going to test anything with radios, and you need to ship [Zach] your stuff. But still, free test time. Woo.

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Hackaday Links: February 4th, 2018

February 4, 2018 by 14 Comments

Here’s something remarkably displeasant. Can you cook a steak with glue? [Dom] and [Chris] from ExplosiveDischarge have cooked a steak using a huge, huge amount of two-part epoxy. The chemistry behind this is just the exothermic reaction when two-part epoxy kicks off, and yes, the steak (a very thin cut) was sufficiently wrapped and protected from the hot sticky goo. What were the results? An overcooked steak, actually. This isn’t a sous vide setup where the temperature ramps up to 50°C and stays there — the temperature actually hit 80°C at its peak. There are a few ways to fix this, either by getting a thicker cut of steak, adding some bizarre water cooling setup to keep the temperature plateaued at a reasonable temperature.

This is your weekly reminder for the Repairs You Can Print contest.

We’ve got a twofer for awesome remote-controlled hovering stuff. The first is a 1:8 scale Harrier. This plane designed and built by [Joel Vlashof] will be a reasonably accurate model of a Harrier, capable of VTOL. It’s built around a huge 130mm EDF, powered by 2x6s lipos, and stabilized with a kk2.1 flight controller with VTOL software. This is as accurate a Harrier that you’re going to get in such a small format, and has the cool little spinny vanes that allow the beast to transition from vertical to horizontal flight.

Want some more cool hovering things? [Tom Stanton] is building a remote controlled Chinook. Yes, that helicopter with two main rotors. The usual way of doing this is with proper helicopter control systems like collectives and Jesus nuts. [Tom]’s building this version with standard quadcopter technology, mounting a motor to a servo, and doubling it up, and mounting it on a frame. In effect, this RC Chinook is the tail boom of a tricopter doubled up on a single frame. It does fly, and he’s even built a neat foamboard body for it.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is going to do something next Tuesday, sometime in the afternoon, east coast time. Whatever happens, it’s going to be spectacular.

Hey, it’s time for a poll. I need to decide between ‘tide pod’ and ‘solo jazz’. For what I’m doing, the cost and effort are the same, I just need to know which is more ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ, cool, or whatever. Right now it’s 50:50. One must be crowned victorious!

Here’s the stupidest thing you’re going to see all year. That’s someone looping a quadcopter in front of a Frontier A320 (Probably. Seems too big for a 319 and too small for a 321) on approach. This guy is 3.6 miles East of runway 25L at McCarran Internation in Las Vegas, at an altitude far above the 400-foot limit. Judging from the video and the wingspan, this quad came within 200 feet of a plane carrying at least 150 people. It’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen, so don’t do it. It’ll be great to see the guy responsible for this in jail.