Drivers For 3D Printers And Why We Need Them

August 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 93 Comments

Manufacturers of 3D printers have a lot to do before they catch up with makers of the cheapest 2D, paper-based printers. If you’ve ever taken an inkjet apart, you’ll most likely find some sort of closed-loop control on at least one of the axes. The 2D printer will tell you when you’re out of ink, when a 3D printer will go merrily along, printing in air without filament. File formats? Everything is Gcode on a 3D printer, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of page description languages for 2D printers.

The solution to some of these problems are drivers – software for a 3D printer that slowly consumes the slicing of an object, printer settings, and placing an object on the bed. It’s coming, and the people who are responsible for making your 2D printer work with your computer are busy at work messing up the toolchain for your 3D printer.

The latest version of CUPS (C Unix Printing System) adds support for 3D printers. This addition is based on meetings, white papers, and discussions in the Printer Working Group (PWG). There has already been a lot of talk about what is wrong with the current state of 3D printer toolchains, what can be improved, and what should be completely ignored. Let’s take a look at what all of this has accomplished.

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Google’s OnHub Goes Toe To Toe With Amazon Echo

August 19, 2015 by Mike Szczys 46 Comments

Yesterday Google announced preorders for a new device called OnHub. Their marketing, and most of the coverage I’ve seen so far, touts OnHub as a better WiFi router than you are used to including improved signal, ease of setup, and a better system to get your friends onto your AP (using the ultrasonic communication technique we’ve also seen on the Amazon Dash buttons). Why would Google care about this? I don’t think they do, at least not enough to develop and manufacture a $199.99 cylindrical monolith. Nope, this is all about the Internet of Things, as much as it pains me to use the term.

OnHub boasts an array of “smart antennas” connected to its various radios. It has the 2.4 and 5 Gigahertz WiFi bands in all the flavors you would expect. The specs also show an AUX Wireless for 802.11 whose purpose is not entirely clear to me but may be the network congestion sensing built into the system (leave a comment if you think otherwise). Rounding out the communications array is support for ZigBee and Bluetooth 4.0.

I have long looked at Google’s acquisition of Nest and assumed that at some point Nest would become the Router for your Internet of Things, collecting data from your exercise equipment and bathroom scale which would then be sold to your health insurance provider so they may adjust your rates. I know, that’s a juicy piece of Orwellian hyperbole but it gets the point across rather quickly. The OnHub is a much more eloquent attempt at the same thing. Some people were turned off by the Nest because it “watches” you to learn your heating preferences. The same issue has arisen with the Amazon Echo which is “always listening”.

Google has foregone those built-in futuristic features and chosen a device to which almost everyone has already grown accustom: the WiFi router. They promise better WiFi and I’m sure it will deliver. What’s the average age of a home WiFi AP at this point anyway? Any new hardware would be an improvement. Oh, and when you start buying those smart bulbs, fridges, bathroom scales, egg trays, and whatever else it’ll work for them as well.

As far as hacking and home automation, it’s hard to beat the voice-activated commands we’ve seen with Echo lately, like forcing it to control Nest or operate your Roku. Who wants to bet that we’ll see a Google-Now based IoT standalone device quickly following the shipment of OnHub?

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Covert Cricket Score Tracker Gets Around Office Rules

August 15, 2015 by Richard Baguley 15 Comments

[Rohit Gupta] was looking for a stealthy way to keep up with the scores for his favorite game: cricket. Unfortunately, his office blocked access to most sites where he could watch the game, so he came up with a covert way to track the score on a small LCD screen. Using a Raspberry Pi and the web scraping program BeautifulSoup, he wrote a program that grabbed the score once a minute, and displayed it on a screen salvaged from a Nokia 5510 cell phone, driven through the Adafruit 5510 Python display library. Web scraping is a technique where a program grabs a web page, scrapes all of the content off it and processes it so only the data that is needed remains.

[Rohit] doesn’t name the web site that he scraped the score from, but there are two good reasons for that. Firstly, this hack relies on his office not blocking it, and secondly, many web sites frown on web scraping like this, as doing it too often can overload their servers, and you obviously don’t see the ads that the site is running. So, it is a technique that should be used with some caution. That aside, this is a great example of a stealthy way to display information that you want to track, but without obnoxious (and obvious) alerts popping up on screen. And, given that cricket games can often go on for several days, that’s a good way to keep track of the game you love and keep your job.

Need a little primer on web scraping? Check out this guide.

Saving 25,000 Electronics Manuals And Could Use Help

August 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Textfiles.com is the largest repository of BBS archives and digital writings in the world, and admin [Jason Scott] has a nearly single-minded devotion to saving the documents of and relating to our electronic age. Now, he’s in a bit of a pickle. He found 25,000 manuals for all kinds of electronic items. The collection goes back to the 30s, [Jason] wants to save them, and the current owner of the collection needs the space. Have you ever noticed how terrible books are to move?

Included in this collection just outside Baltimore, MD are thousands of manuals for various pieces of equipment going back to the 1930s. There are Tektronix manuals, HP manuals, and instructions and schematics for equipment that hasn’t been made in a very, very long time. [Jason] put up a Flickr gallery of the library in all its glory. There’s bound to be some very interesting stuff in there.

Of course the acquisition of tens of thousands of out of print manuals will never go smoothly. [Jason] needs to start emptying out the shelves on Monday. The current plan is to go through all the manuals, remove the duplicates, and shuffle them over to a storage unit about a mile away until they can be dealt with properly. If you’re around Baltimore, or more specifically Finksburg, MD, [Jason] could use a few hands to clear out this archive on Monday.

Dutch Student Team Aims To Launch Rocket To 50KM

August 14, 2015 by Richard Baguley 15 Comments

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of DARE, the [Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering] team, who are looking to launch a rocket to 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) to break the European amateur rocketry record later this year.

This brave crew of students from the Delft Technical University is boldly going where no European amateur has gone before with a rocket of their own design called Stratos II, a single stage hybrid rocket which is driven by a DHX-200 Aurora engine. This self-built engine uses a combination of solid Sorbitol and candlewax fuel, with liquid Nitrous Oxide as the oxidizer. The rather unlikely sounding combination should produce an impressive 12,000 Newtons of maximum thrust, and a total of 180,000 Ns of impulse. It’s difficult to make a proper comparison, but the largest model rocket motor sold in the US without a special license (a class G) has up to 160 Ns of impulse and the largest engine ever built by amateurs had 411,145 Ns of impulse.

The team did try a launch last year, but the launch failed due to a frozen fuel valve. Like any good engineering team, they haven’t let failure get them down, and have been busy redesigning their rocket for another launch attempt in the middle of October, Their launch window begins on October 13th at a military base in southern Spain, and we will be watching their attempt closely. Godspeed, DARE!

In commercial space news, yesterday NASA tested the RS-25 engine that will be used in the Space Launch System — the rocket it’s developing to take astronauts to the moon and mars. Also, the NTSB report on the tragic crash of SpaceShipTwo was released a few weeks ago. The report found that the feather mechanism was unlocked by the copilot at the wrong time, leading to the crash. Future system improvements will be put in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Update – The Stratos II is a single-stage rocket, not a two-stage, as an earlier version of this article described. 8/16/15

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Octopart And Altium Join Forces

August 14, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

Octopart, the search engine for electronic parts, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Altium.

This acquisition is neither Altium’s first parts database purchase, nor is it Octopart’s first interaction with Altium. Ciiva, a parts and datasheet search engine was acquired by Altium a few years ago, and Altium Circuit Maker features an interface to the Octopart database.

Under the deal, Octopart will remain independent of Altium and operate out of their NYC office, and plans are for the part search engine to remain free and open.

Disclosure: Hackaday’s parent company, Supplyframe, also runs FindChips.com and Parts.io, component search tools.

Oracle CSO To Customers: Leave The Vulnerabilities To Us

August 11, 2015 by Adam Fabio 60 Comments

[Mary Ann Davidson], chief security officer of Oracle, is having a bad Tuesday. The internet has been alight these past few hours over a blog post published and quickly taken down from oracle’s servers. (archive) We’re not 100% sure the whole thing isn’t a hack of some sort. Based on [Mary’s] previous writing though, it seems to be legit.

The TL;DR version of Mary’s post is that she’s sick and tired of customers reverse engineering Oracle’s code in an attempt to find security vulnerabilities. Doing so is a clear violation of Oracle’s license agreement. Beyond the message, the tone of the blog says a lot. This is the same sort of policy we’re seeing on the hardware side from companies like John Deere and Sony. Folks like [Cory Doctorow] and the EFF are doing all they can to fight it. We have to say that we do agree with [Mary] on one point: Operators should make sure their systems are locked down with the latest software versions, updates, and patches before doing anything else.

[Mary] states that “Bug bounties are the new boy band”, that they simply don’t make sense from a business standpoint. Only 3% of Oracles vulnerabilities came from security researchers. The rest come from internal company testing. The fact that Oracle doesn’t have a bug bounty program might have something to do with that. [Mary] need not worry. Bug Bounty or not, she’s placed her company squarely in the cross-hairs of plenty of hackers out there – white hat and black alike.