While we don’t feature many woodworking projects here, we always love learning from people who really know their stuff in any medium. [Brian Oltrogge] showed us a hands-off way to shape aluminum with this 3D print sand-casting project and now brings us a very hands-on kayak project.
We have seen kayaks made from plastic wrap and 3D printed parts, and in the video after the break, [Brian Oltrogge] is building a scale model to validate a wood kayak design created with Rhino 3D and Grasshopper. Besides being a joy to watch the craft of the project, the video is full of great hacks. The “buck” that the wood is formed over sits on CNC cut stands that slot into it. The thickness of three layers of laminated veneer fits the 1:4 scale model perfectly representing 3/4” plywood, and the laser-cut parts use the exact pattern that the final full-size CNC will.
There are also some great tool hacks hidden in the video. [Brian Oltrogge] tells us about a spiral scroll saw blade that can cut in any direction, but as a bonus tip, we also can see a clamp compressing the saw while the blade is tensioned. Watch the video through the end to see some clever wall-mounting brackets too.
The video doesn’t tell us what a Stitch & Glue boat is or how the full-scale will be assembled. To find out more about that, see this charmingly odd vintage film from Chesapeake Light Craft.
This is newsworthy in itself because despite several years and significant resources being devoted to the problem of drones hitting planes, demonstrable cases remain vanishingly rare. The machine in this case being a police one will we expect result in many fewer column inches for the event than had it been flown at the hands of a private multirotor pilot, serving only to heighten the contrast with coverage of previous events such as the Gatwick closure lacking any drone evidence.
It’s picking an easy target to lay into the Your Regional Police over this incident, but it is worth making the point that their reaction would have been disproportionately larger had the drone not been theirs. The CTV news report mentions that air traffic regulators were unaware of the drone’s presence:
NAV Canada, the country’s air navigation service provider, had not been notified about the YRP drone, Transport Canada said.
Given the evident danger to aviation caused by their actions it’s not unreasonable to demand that the officers concerned face the same penalties as would any other multirotor pilot who caused such an incident. We aren’t holding our breath though.
[AchillesVM] decided to build a tabletop electric fan so it would track him as he moves around the room. Pan and tilt control is provided by a pair of servos controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3b+. How does it know where [AchillesVM} is? It captures the scene using a Raspberry Pi v2 Camera and uses OpenCV’s default face-tracking algorithm to find him. Well, strictly speaking, it tracks anyone’s face around the room. If multiple faces are detected, it follows the largest — which is usually the person closest to the fan.
The whole processing loop runs at 60 ms, so the speed of the servo mechanism is probably the limiting factor when it comes to following fast-moving house guests. At first glance it might look like an old fan from the 1920s, in fact [AchillesVM] built the whole thing by himself, 3D-printing case and using a few off-the-shelf parts (like the 25 cm R/C plane propeller).
It’s a work in progress, so follow his GitHub repository (above) for updates. Hopefully, there will be a front-mounted finger guard coming soon. If you like gadgets that interact with you as you move about, we’ve covered the face-tracking confectionery cannon back in 2014, and the head-tracking water blaster last year. In the “don’t try this” file goes the build that started a career — the eye-tracking laser robot.
For readers that might not spend their free time watching spools of PLA slowly unwind, The Spaghetti Detective (TSD) is an open source project that aims to use computer vision and machine learning to identify when a 3D print has failed and resulted in a pile of plastic “spaghetti” on the build plate. Once users have installed the OctoPrint plugin, they need to point it to either a self-hosted server that’s running on a relatively powerful machine, or TSD’s paid cloud service that handles all the AI heavy lifting for a monthly fee.
Unfortunately, 73 of those cloud customers ended up getting a bit more than they bargained for when a configuration flub allowed strangers to take control of their printers. In a frank blog post, TSD founder Kenneth Jiang owns up to the August 19th mistake and explains exactly what happened, who was impacted, and how changes to the server-side code should prevent similar issues going forward.
TSD allows users to remotely manage and monitor their printers.
For the record, it appears no permanent damage was done, and everyone who was potentially impacted by this issue has been notified. There was a fairly narrow window of opportunity for anyone to stumble upon the issue in the first place, meaning any bad actors would have had to be particularly quick on their keyboards to come up with some nefarious plot to sabotage any printers connected to TSD. That said, one user took to Reddit to show off the physical warning their printer spit out; the apparent handiwork of a fellow customer that discovered the glitch on their own.
According to Jiang, the issue stemmed from how TSD associates printers and users. When the server sees multiple connections coming from the same public IP, it’s assumed they’re physically connected to the same local network. This allows the server to link the OctoPrint plugin running on a Raspberry Pi to the user’s phone or computer. But on the night in question, an incorrectly configured load-balancing system stopped passing the source IP addresses to the server. This made TSD believe all of the printers and users who connected during this time period were on the same LAN, allowing anyone to connect with whatever machine they wished.
New code pushed to the TSD repository limits how many devices can be associated with a single IP.
The mix-up only lasted about six hours, and so far, only the one user has actually reported their printer being remotely controlled by an outside party. After fixing the load-balancing configuration, the team also pushed an update to the TSD code which puts a cap on how many printers the server will associate with a given IP address. This seems like a reasonable enough precaution, though it’s not immediately obvious how this change would impact users who wish to add multiple printers to their account at the same time, such as in the case of a print farm.
While no doubt an embarrassing misstep for the team at The Spaghetti Detective, we can at least appreciate how swiftly they dealt with the issue and their transparency in bringing the flaw to light. This is also an excellent example of how open source allows the community to independently evaluate the fixes applied by the developer in response to a discovered flaw. Jiang says the team will be launching a full security audit of their own as well, so expect more changes getting pushed to the repository in the near future.
We were impressed with TSD when we first covered it back in 2019, and glad to see the project has flourished since we last checked in. Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose, but we hope the team’s handling of this issue shows they’re on top of things and willing to do right by their community even if it means getting some egg on their face from time to time.
We love depth-sensing cameras and every neat hack they enabled, but this technological novelty has yet to break through to high volume commercial success. So it was sad but not surprising when CRN reported that Intel has decided to wind down their RealSense product line.
As of this writing, one of the better confirmations for this report can be found on the RealSense SDK GitHub repository README. The good news is that core depth-sensing RealSense products will continue business as usual for the foreseeable future, balanced by the bad news that some interesting offshoots (facial authentication, motion tracking) will be declared “End of Life” immediately and phased out over the next six months.
This information tells us while those living out on the bleeding edge will have to scramble, there is no immediate crisis for everyone else, whether they be researchers, hobbyists, or product planners. But this also means there will be no future RealSense cameras, kicking off many “What’s Next?” discussions in various communities. Like this thread on ROS (Robot Operating System) Discourse.
Three popular alternatives offer distinctly different tradeoffs. The “Been Around The Block” name is Occipital, with their more expensive Structure Pro sensor. The “Old Name, New Face” option is Microsoft Azure Kinect, the latest non-gaming-focused successor to the gaming peripheral that started it all. And let’s not forget OAK-D as the “New Kid On The Block” that started with a crowdfunding campaign and building an user community by doing things like holding contests. Each of these will appeal to a different niche, and we’ll keep our eye open in the future. Let’s see if any of them find the success that eluded the original Kinect, Google’s Tango, and now Intel’s RealSense.
Hackaday Prize 2021 entry FlowIO Platform promises to be to pneumatics what Arduino is to Electronics. The modular platform comprises a common controller/valve block, a selection of differently sized pumps, and a few optional connectivity and sensing blocks. With Arduino software support as well as as Javascript and web-GUI, there’s a way to program this no matter what the level of experience the user has.
This last point is a critical one for the mission [Ali Shtarbanov] from the MIT Media Lab is setting out for this project. He reminds us that in decades gone by, there was a significant barrier to entry for anyone building electronics prototypes. Information about how to get started was also much harder to by before the internet really got into gear.
It’s a similar story for software, with tools like Scratch and Python lowering the barrier to entry and allowing more people to get their toes wet and build some confidence.
But despite some earlier work by projects like the Soft Robotics Toolkit and Programmable-Air, making a start on lowering the bar for pneumatics support for soft robotics, and related applications, the project author still finds areas for further improvement. FlowIO was designed from the ground-up to be wearable. It appears to be much smaller, more portable and supports more air ports and a greater array of sensing and connectivity than previous Open Source work to date.
Creative Commons Hardware
Whilst you can take all the plans (free account signup required) and build yourself a FlowIO rig of your very own, the project author offers another solution. Following on from the Wikipedia model of free sharing and distribution of information, FlowIO offers its hardware for free, for the common good. Supported by donations to the project, more hardware is produced and distributed to those who need it. The only ask is that redundant kits are passed on or returned to base for upgrade, rather than landfill.
Have you ever thought about all the complexities of a Single Sign On (SSO) implementation? A lot of engineering effort has gone into hardened against cross-site attacks — you wouldn’t want every site you visit to be able to hijack your Google or Facebook account. At the same time, SSO is the useful ability to use your authentication on one service to authenticate with an unrelated site. Does SSO ever compromise that hardening? If mistakes are made, absolutely, as [Zemnmez] discovered while looking at the Apple ID SSO system.
