Creating An Electronic Board For Catan-Compatible Shenanigans

[Sean Boyce] has been busy building board games. Specifically, an electronic strategy boardgame that is miraculously also compatible with Settlers of Catan.

[Sean’s] game is called Calculus. It’s about mining asteroids and bartering. You’re playing as a corporation attempting to mine the asteroid against up to three others doing the same. Do a good job of exploiting the space-based resource, and you’ll win the game.

Calculus is played on a board made out of PCBs. A Xiao RP2040 microcontroller board on the small PCB in the center of the playfield is responsible for running the show. It controls a whole ton of seven-segment displays and RGB LEDs across multiple PCBs that make up the gameboard. The lights and displays help players track the game state as they vie for asteroid mining supremacy. Amusingly, by virtue of its geometry and some smart design choices, you can also use [Sean]’s board to play Settlers of Catan. He’s even designed a smaller, cheaper travel version, too.

We do see some interesting board games around these parts, because hackers and makers are just that creative. If you’ve got your own board game hacks or builds in the works, don’t hesitate to let us know!

YKK’s Self-Propelled Zipper: Less Crazy Than It Seems

The self-propelled zip fastener uses a worm gear to propel itself along the teeth. (Credit: YKK)
The self-propelled zip fastener uses a worm gear to propel itself along the teeth. (Credit: YKK)

At first glance the very idea of a zipper that unzips and zips up by itself seems somewhat ridiculous. After all, these contraptions are mostly used on pieces of clothing and gear where handling a zipper isn’t really sped up by having an electric motor sluggishly move through the rows of interlocking teeth. Of course, that’s not the goal of YKK, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of zip fasteners. The demonstrated prototype (original PR in Japanese) shows this quite clearly, with a big tent and equally big zipper that you’d be hard pressed to zip up by hand.

The basic application is thus more in industrial applications and similar, with one of the videos, embedded below, showing a large ‘air tent’ being zipped up automatically after demonstrating why for a human worker this would be an arduous task. While this prototype appears to be externally powered, adding a battery or such could make it fully wireless and potentially a real timesaver when setting up large structures such as these. Assuming the battery isn’t flat, of course.

It might conceivably be possible to miniaturize this technology to the point where it’d ensure that no fly is ever left unzipped, and school kids can show off their new self-zipping jacket to their friends. This would of course have to come with serious safety considerations, as anyone who has ever had a bit of their flesh caught in a zipper can attest to.

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Sigrok Website Down After Hosting Data Loss

When it comes to open source signal analysis software for logic analyzers and many other sensors, Sigrok is pretty much the only game in town. Unfortunately after an issue with the server hosting, the website, wiki, and other documentation is down until a new hosting provider is found and the site migrated. This leaves just the downloads active, as well as the IRC channel (#sigrok) over at Libera.chat.

This is not the first time that the Sigrok site has gone down, but this time it seems that it’s more final. Although it seems a new server will be set up over the coming days, this will do little to assuage those who have been ringing the alarm bells about the Sigrok project. Currently access to documentation is unavailable, except via the WaybackMachine’s archive.

A tragic reality of FOSS projects is that they are not immortal, with them requiring constant time, money and effort to keep servers running and software maintained. This might be a good point for those who have a stake in Sigrok to consider what the project means to them, and what it might mean if it were to shutdown.

This Week In Security: XRP Poisoned, MCP Bypassed, And More

Researchers at Aikido run the Aikido Intel system, an LLM security monitor that ingests the feeds from public package repositories, and looks for anything unusual. In this case, the unusual activity was five rapid-fire releases of the xrpl package on NPM. That package is the XRP Ledger SDK from Ripple, used to manage keys and build crypto wallets. While quick point releases happen to the best of developers, these were odd, in that there were no matching releases in the source GitHub repository. What changed in the first of those fresh releases?

The most obvious change is the checkValidityOfSeed() function added to index.ts. That function takes a string, and sends a request to a rather odd URL, using the supplied string as the ad-referral header for the HTML request. The name of the function is intended to blend in, but knowing that the string parameter is sent to a remote web server is terrifying. The seed is usually the root of trust for an individual’s cryptocurrency wallet. Looking at the actual usage of the function confirms, that this code is stealing credentials and keys.

The releases were made by a Ripple developer’s account. It’s not clear exactly how the attack happened, though credential compromise of some sort is the most likely explanation. Each of those five releases added another bit of malicious code, demonstrating that there was someone with hands on keyboard, watching what data was coming in.

The good news is that the malicious releases only managed a total of 452 downloads for the few hours they were available. A legitimate update to the library, version 4.2.5, has been released. If you’re one of the unfortunate 452 downloads, it’s time to do an audit, and rotate the possibly affected keys. Continue reading “This Week In Security: XRP Poisoned, MCP Bypassed, And More”

A false colour image of the region of sky containing the CMZ.

Unsolved Questions In Astronomy? Try Dark Matter!

Sometimes in fantasy fiction, you don’t want to explain something that seems inexplicable, so you throw your hands up and say, “A wizard did it.” Sometimes in astronomy, instead of a wizard, the answer is dark matter (DM). If you are interested in astronomy, you’ve probably heard that dark matter solves the problem of the “missing mass” to explain galactic light curves, and the motion of galaxies in clusters.

Now [Pedro De la Torre Luque] and others are proposing that DM can solve another pair of long-standing galactic mysteries: ionization of the central molecular zone (CMZ) in our galaxy, and mysterious 511 keV gamma-rays.

The Central Molecular Zone is a region near the heart of the Milky Way that has a very high density of interstellar gases– around sixty million times the mass of our sun, in a volume 1600 to 1900 light years across. It happens to be more ionized than it ought to be, and ionized in a very even manner across its volume. As astronomers cannot identify (or at least agree on) the mechanism to explain this ionization, the CMZ ionization is mystery number one.

Feynman diagram: Space-time vectors for electron-positron annihilation
Feynman diagram of electron-positron annihilation, showing the characteristic gamma-ray emission.

Mystery number two is a diffuse glow of gamma rays seen in the same part of the sky as the CMZ, which we know as the constellation Sagittarius. The emissions correspond to an energy of 515 keV, which is a very interesting number– it’s what you get when an electron annihilates with the antimatter version of itself. Again, there’s no universally accepted explanation for these emissions.

So [Pedro De la Torre Luque] and team asked themselves: “What if a wizard did it?” And set about trying to solve the mystery using dark matter. As it turns out, computer models including a form of light dark matter (called sub-GeV DM in the paper, for the particle’s rest masses) can explain both phenomena within the bounds of error.

In the model, the DM particles annihilate to form electron-positron pairs. In the dense interstellar gas of the CMZ, those positrons quickly form electrons to produce the 511 keV gamma rays observed. The energy released from this annihilation results in enough energy to produce the observed ionization, and even replicate the very flat ionization profile seen across the CMZ. (Any other proposed ionization source tends to radiate out from its source, producing an uneven profile.) Even better, this sort of light dark matter is consistent with cosmological observations and has not been ruled out by Earth-side dark matter detectors, unlike some heavier particles.

Further observations will help confirm or deny these findings, but it seems dark matter is truly the gift that keeps on giving for astrophysicists. We eagerly await what other unsolved questions in astronomy can be answered by it next, but it leaves us wondering how lazy the universe’s game master is if the answer to all our questions is: “A wizard did it.”

We can’t talk about dark matter without remembering [Vera Rubin].

Virtual Nodes, Real Waves: A Colpitts Walkthrough

If you’ve ever fumbled through circuit simulation and ended up with a flatline instead of a sine wave, this video from [saisri] might just be the fix. In this walkthrough she demonstrates simulating a Colpitts oscillator using NI Multisim 14.3 – a deceptively simple analog circuit known for generating stable sine waves. Her video not only shows how to place and wire components, but it demonstrates why precision matters, even in virtual space.

You’ll notice the emphasis on wiring accuracy at multi-node junctions, something many tutorials skim over. [saisri] points out that a single misconnected node in Multisim can cause the circuit to output zilch. She guides viewers step-by-step, starting with component selection via the “Place > Components” dialog, through to running the simulation and interpreting the sine wave output on Channel A. The manual included at the end of the video is a neat bonus, bundling theory, waveform visuals, and circuit diagrams into one handy PDF.

If you’re into precision hacking, retro analogue joy, or just love watching a sine wave bloom onscreen, this is worth your time. You can watch the original video here.

Continue reading “Virtual Nodes, Real Waves: A Colpitts Walkthrough”