A 3D printed roller coaster model with light strips modelling the trains

How To Make A Model Roller Coaster Without Any Moving Parts

July 20, 2022 by Robin Kearey 5 Comments

Roller coasters are not only great fun to ride, they’re also fascinating pieces of engineering. Building your own full-size coaster is sadly beyond most people’s means, so the average enthusiast will have to settle for simulation or modelling of their own designs. [Jon Mendenhall] is one of those who specialize in building model roller coasters and simulating their motion in intricate detail. His latest project is a scale model of VelociCoaster, a Jurassic Park-themed ride in Universal’s Islands of Adventure, that simulates the coaster’s ride without using any moving parts.

[Jon] achieves this by re-creating the trains’ motion using LED strips. A total of 3000 LEDs are spread along more than nine meters of track and make a mesmerizing light show of several trains whizzing along the track, accelerating and slowing down exactly like the real thing.

In his video, [Jon] explains the process of generating an accurate 3D model of the track starting from nothing more than an overhead view of the park as well as photos taken from various angles. The surrounding terrain and buildings are also included in his 3D model, as are the 128 supports that hold the track in place. The terrain and building were made from plywood and foam using a CNC machine, while the track and supports were 3D printed.

A Teensy microcontroller runs the whole show, with the LED strips split into five separate sections to allow a high enough frame rate for smooth animations. An infrared remote is used to start and stop the ride, as well as to adjust the speed; the model supports running the trains at a physically accurate speed, but because this looks rather dull, the regular setting is about three times as fast.

Looking for more roller coaster models? [Jon] made a similarly impressive model with a powered train before, and we’ve seen several models that actually coast along their tracks.

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Down The Intel Microcode Rabbit Hole

July 19, 2022 by Al Williams 13 Comments

The aptly-named [chip-red-pill] team is offering you a chance to go down the Intel rabbit hole. If you learned how to build CPUs back in the 1970s, you would learn that your instruction decoder would, for example, note a register to register move and then light up one register to write to a common bus and another register to read from the common bus. These days, it isn’t that simple. In addition to compiling to an underlying instruction set, processors rarely encode instructions in hardware anymore. Instead, each instruction has microcode that causes the right things to happen at the right time. But Intel encrypts their microcode. Of course, what can be encrypted can also be decrypted.

Using vulnerabilities, you can activate an undocumented debugging mode called red unlock. This allows a microcode dump and the decryption keys are inside. The team did a paper for OffensiveCon22 on this technique and you can see a video about it, below.

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World’s Biggest Foam RC Plane Takes To The Skies, But Only Barely!

July 18, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 17 Comments

What do you do when you have a whole warehouse sized facility and an industrial sized CNC foam cutter? Clearly, the only choice is to build giant RC aircraft, and that’s exactly what the folks at [FliteTest] teamed up with the illustrious [Peter Sripol] to accomplish. Did it work? Yes. Did it work well? We’ll let you be the judge after taking a gander at the video below the break.

[Peter Sripol], known for building manned ultralight electric aircraft from foam, was roped in as the designer of the aircraft. A very light EPS foam is used to cut out the flying surfaces, while a denser green foam board is sourced from the local home building store to construct the fuselage.

The build is anything but ordinary, and kids are involved in the construction, although the video doesn’t elaborate on it very much. You can see evidence of their excitement in the graffiti on the wings and fuselage- surely a huge success on that front! As for flying? Four large motors provide locomotion, and it’s barely enough to keep the beast flying. A mishap with the Center of Gravity demands a last minute design change which renders the rudder almost useless. But, it does fly, and it is a great step toward the next iteration. Just like every good hack!

If you want to see a manned foam electric aircraft, check out [Peter Sripol]’s DIY Electric Ultralight MK4.

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Turning Irregular Shapes

July 16, 2022 by Anne Ogborn 33 Comments

In case you’re not closely following Egyptian Machinist YouTube, you may have missed [Hydraulic House]. It’s gotten even harder to find him since he started posting under[بيت الهيدروليك]. Don’t let the Arabic put you off, he delivers it all in pantomime.

A recent drop is “How To Turn Irregular Shapes On The Lathe“. We’re not sure, but think the part he’s working on is the front suspension of a 3 wheeled auto-rickshaw. The first metal at the center is over 30cm from the bottom. No problem, he just makes a long driven dead center from a bit of scrap material and goes on with his business.

By no means is this the only cool video. We liked his video on a remote pumped hydraulic jack and one on making your own hydraulic valves.

If you’re into machinist-y things, don’t miss him. Every video is full of pretty nifty tricks, sometimes made with a zany disregard of some basics like “maybe better to have done the welding before mounting in the lathe”, turning with a cutoff tool (I think), and occasionally letting go of the chuck key. It’s definitely ‘oh, get on with it’ machine shop work.

We love videos from professionals in the developing world making with relatively simple tools. Often hobby hackers are in the same position, milling with a lathe and some patience instead of a giant Okuma. Not long ago we posted this article about making helical parts , with the same ‘imagination and skill beats more machinery any day’ vibe.

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Homebrew Stream Deck Pedal Emulates The Real Thing

July 14, 2022 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Pedals are a great way to control functions on your computer. You’re rarely using your feet for anything else, so they can handle some tasks, freeing up your hands. This Elgato Stream Deck controller from [DDRBoxman] does just that.

[DDRBoxman] wanted to control Elgato Stream Deck much like the offical pedal sold by the company. Thus, some hacking was in order. Using Wireshark with the Elgato pedal helped to determine the communication method of the real hardware.

Once the protocol was figured out, it was just a task of getting the Raspberry Pi Pico to replicate the same functionality. With the help of the tinyusb library, [DDRBoxman] was able to emulate the real Elgato device successfully. Paired with a 3D-printed footswitch design from Adafruit, and the project was functional and complete.

We’ve seen great foot pedal devices over the years, from a simple macro device to a super-useful page turner for sheet music. If you’ve been hacking away at your own nifty input devices, be sure to drop us a line!

Visual Cryptography For Physical Keyrings

July 14, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 14 Comments

Visual cryptography is one of those unusual cases that kind of looks like a good idea, but it turns out is fraught with problems. The idea is straightforward enough — an image to encrypt is sampled and a series of sub-pixel patterns are produced which are distributed to multiple separate images. When individual images are printed to transparent film, and all films in the set are brought into alignment, an image appears out of the randomness. Without at least a minimum number of such images, the original image cannot be resolved. Well, sort of. [anfractuosity] wanted to play with the concept of visual cryptography in a slightly different medium, that of a set of metal plates, shaped as a set of keyrings.

Two image ‘share pairs’ needed as a minimum to form an image when combined

Metal blanks were laser cut, with the image being formed by transmitted light through coincident holes in both plate pairs, when correctly aligned. What, we hear you ask, is the problem with this cryptography technique? Well, one issue is that of faking messages. It is possible for a malicious third party, given either one of the keys in a pair, to construct a matching key composing an entirely different message, and then substitute this for the second key, duping both original parties. Obviously this would need both parties to be physically compromised, but neither would necessarily notice the substitution, if neither party knew the originally encrypted message. For those interested in digging in a little deeper, do checkout this classic paper by Naor and Shamir [pdf] of the Wiezmann Institute. Still, despite the issues, for a visual hack it’s still a pretty fun technique!

Want to learn a little more about crypto techniques you can do at home? Here’s our guide. Encryption too hard to break, but need a way to eavesdrop? Just punt out a flawed system, and you’re good to go.

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Apple AirTags Hacked And Cloned With Voltage Glitching

July 14, 2022 by Lewin Day 34 Comments

Apple AirTags are useful little devices. They essentially use iPhones in the wild as a mesh network to tell the owner where the AirTag is. Now, researchers have shown that it’s possible to clone these devices.

The research paper explains the cloning process, which requires physical access to the hardware. To achieve the hack, the Nordic nRF52832 inside the AirTag must be voltage glitched to enable its debug port. The researchers were able to achieve this with relatively simple tools, using a Pi Pico fitted with a few additional components.

With the debug interface enabled, it’s simple to extract the microcontroller’s firmware. It’s then possible to clone this firmware onto another tag. The team also experimented with other hacks, like having the AirTag regularly rotate its ID to avoid triggering anti-stalking warnings built into Apple’s tracing system.

As the researchers explain, it’s clear that AirTags can’t really be secure as long as they’re based on a microcontroller that is vulnerable to such attacks. It’s not the first AirTag cloning we’ve seen either. They’re an interesting device with some serious privacy and safety implications, so it pays to stay abreast of developments in this area.

[Thanks to Itay for the tip!]