Against The Cloud

February 19, 2022 by Elliot Williams 58 Comments

One of our writers is working on an article about hosting your own (project) website on your own iron, instead of doing it the modern, cloudy-servicey way. Already, this has caused quite a bit of hubbub in the Hackaday Headquarters. Who would run their own server in 2022, and why?

The arguments against DIY are all strong. If you just want to spin up a static website, you can do it for free in a bazillion different places. GitHub’s Pages is super convenient, and your content is version controlled as a side benefit. If you want an IoT-type data-logging and presentation service, there are tons of those as well — I don’t have a favorite. If you want e-mail, well, I don’t have to tell you that a large American search monopoly offers free accounts, for the low price of slurping up all of your behavioral data. Whatever your need, chances are very good that there’s a service for you out there somewhere in the cloud.

And that’s awesome if you only want the service provided. But what if you want to play around? Or learn how it all works under the hood? This is Hackaday!

For instance, you could run your own mail server just for your friends and family. The aforementioned search monopolist will probably flag all of your e-mail as spam, partly because they don’t trust small e-mail providers, and partly because that’s the “m” in monopoly. But if you can get folks to whitelist the addresses, you’ll be in business. And then you open up a world of fun and foolery. You can write hooks to automatically handle mail, or you can create an infinite number of mail accounts, even on the fly as per Spamgourmet, the most awesome anti-spam tool of the last 30 years. Or you can invent your own. Run a mailing list for your relatives. Or do something stupid.

I used to run a service where, when a particular account received an e-mail, the attached photo was pushed up to a website with the subject line as the caption. Instant photo-blog, of the strangest and least secure sort. Getting it running was a few lines of Bash scripting, and an afternoon of fun. Is there a service that does this, already existing in the cloud? Probably. One that allows you a little privacy and doesn’t track your every move? Maybe. But even if there is, would I have learned about sendmail by using this service? Nope!

I hear you saying “security” under your breath, and you’re right. This system was secured by lock made of purest obscurity. But still, in seven years of running the service, nobody guessed the magic e-mail address, not once. Knowledge of the e-mail address was essentially a password, but if I needed extra security I probably could have implemented it in a few lines of Bash anyway. The webpage itself was static HTML, so good luck with that, Hackerman! (The site’s been down for a while now, so you missed your chance.)

If you just want a service, you can be served. But if you want to be a server, a first-class Internet citizen, with your own cloud in the sky, nothing’s stopping you either. And in contrast to using someone else’s computers, running your own is an invitation to play. It’s a big, Internet-connected sandbox. There are an infinity of funny ideas out there that you can implement on your own box, and a lot to learn. If you hack on someone else’s box, it’s a crime. If you hack on your own, it’s a pleasure.

I know it’s anachronistic, but give it a try. (PDF, obscenity, uncorrected typos.) Be your own cloud.

Simple Dev Board Module Socket

February 12, 2022 by Chris Lott 16 Comments

When you’re building a quick prototype or a one-off project it’s nice to be able to securely mount the various modules and development boards. Sometimes these boards have mounting holes, but often they don’t. As an example from the latter category, digital music instrument maker and performer [DIYDSP] shows us how to build a simple socket to mount an STM32 Nucleo-32 module.

The socket is built on a standard pad-per-hole piece of vector board cut to the desired size. Pairs of female pin header strips are soldered down to the board. The inner pair of headers is for the module, the outer pair is for your interconnections. The headers are connected up with short solder bridges, and [DIYDSP] recommends you extend the outer pair several pins longer than necessary. These extras can be used for additional power or ground points, or on some boards they could connect to the debug header pins. He prefers to use female sockets because that lessens the odds that an accidentally bent pin will short something out.

Final step is to drill your mounting holes in the desired location, and no more development boards free-floating and held up only by wires. Do you have any tips for mounting these kinds of modules, either individually as shown here or onto PCBs? Let us know in the comments.

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One Tool Twists Wires, And Skewers Shish Kebabs

February 11, 2022 by Chris Lott 19 Comments

Twisting stranded wire with your fingers in preparation for tinning and/or soldering is almost a reflex for folks making electronic assemblies. But what if the wires are too close to get your fingers around, or you have the fingers of a sumo wresters? Well [DIYDSP] has a solution for you (see video below the break) that’s easy to make from a shish kebab skewer that’s probably rolling around your kitchen drawer. The reason that [DIYDSP] wanted to twist such closely spaced wires was to solder a length of 0.1 in O.C. stranded ribbon cable directly onto a PCB pin header pattern.

The method is very simple. Drill a long hole in the factory-cut flat end, followed by using a countersink bit to give a conical taper to guide the wires in. [DIYDSP] found that a 1/16 inch (1.6 mm) drill bit was a bit too large to grip the types of wires he was using, and finally settled on a 0.6 mm bit. If you are using larger wires, you should experiment to get the right size, or just build a handful of these of differing diameters since they’re so easy to make — just mark them clearly so you don’t accidentally grill shish kebabs with them on the BBQ.

The resulting tool is not unlike the business end of a hand-held wire-wrap tool, but works different principle and is a fraction of the cost. If you do any amount of interconnect wiring with stranded wires, then you should check out this video and whip up a couple of these to throw in your tool box.

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Camping For $25: Thrift Store Hacks To Keep Cozy

February 5, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 18 Comments

A hacker is somebody who’s always thinking creatively to solve problems, usually using what they have on hand. Sometimes that means using a 555 to build a CPU, and other times it means using a dead flashlight to start a fire. In the video below the break, [Kelly] shows us a series of hacks you can use while camping in the woods for a night to keep you warm, dry, and well fed!

[Kelly] started his camping trip not in the woods, but rather at a local thrift store. Instead of packing along hundreds of dollars in gear, his aim was to keep costs low. Very low. With some searching he was able to find a blanket, cooking utensils, rope, knife, tarp, and several other camp necessities for just $25.

A good campfire is a necessity of course, and [Kelly]’s full of great ways to start a fire even if all you have is a lighter with no butane or an old flashlight with dead batteries. The purpose of the video is to show how anyone can get their bush craft on even when all they have is a few dollars and a little know-how, which he generously shares. And after watching, we’re sure you’ll agree that he met his mark.

Will you raid the local second hand store before your next camping trip? After seeing this video, you just might! And while you’re there, make sure to grab the things you’ll need to make your own camping-friendly French press so you have some good coffee while you’re out camping in your… uh… Corolla?

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Cables Too Long? Try Cable Management Via DIY Coiling

January 23, 2022 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

Annoyed by excessively-long cables? Tired of the dull drudgery and ugly results of bunching up the slack and wrapping it with a twist-tie? Suffer no longer, because the solution is to make your own coiled cables!

[Dmitry] is annoyed with long, unruly cables and shared a solution he learned from the DIY keyboards community: coil them yourself with a piece of dowel, a hair dryer, and about 10 minutes of your time. However, it’s just a wee bit more complicated than it may seem at first glance.

The process begins with wrapping a cable around a mandrel, then heating it as uniformly as possible to thermoform the jacket, but the instructional video (embedded below) says that all by itself that isn’t quite enough to yield lasting results. After heating the cable and letting it cool, the coils will be formed but it will not hold the new shape very well. The finishing touch is to “reverse” the direction of the coils, by re-wrapping it backward around the mandrel, inverting the coils upon themselves. This process is awkward to explain, but much simpler to demonstrate. This video by [DailySetupTech] explains this process around the 2:30 mark. That final step is what yields a tightly-wound, springy coil.

The nice part about using this process as a cable management technique is that it is possible to coil only a portion of a cable, leaving the exact amount of uncoiled slack required for a given application. Keep it in mind the next time some cables need managing. And if you don’t want to coil a cable but still need it out of the way, you might find this design for a DIY cable chain made from a tape measure useful.

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A DIY CAD Mouse You Can Actually Build

January 18, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 48 Comments

When you spend a lot of time on the computer doing certain more specialised tasks (no, we’re not talking about browsing cat memes on twitter) you start to think that your basic trackpad or mouse is, let’s say, lacking a certain something. We think that something may be called ‘usability’ or maybe ease-of-use? Any which way, lots of heavy CAD users gush over their favourite mouse stand-ins, and one particularly interesting class of input devices is the Space Mouse, which is essentially patented up-to-the-hilt and available only from 3DConnexion. But what about open source alternatives you can build yourselves? Enter stage left, the Orbion created by [FaqT0tum.] This simple little build combines an analog joystick with a rotary knob, with a rear button and OLED display on the front completing the user interface.

The idea is pretty straightforward; you setup the firmware with the application you want to use it with, and it emits HID events to the connected PC, replacing the mouse or keyboard input. Since your machine will take input from multiple sources, it doesn’t replace your mouse, it augments it. It may not be very accurate for detailed PCB layout work, but for moving around in a 3D view, or dialling in a video edit, this could be a very useful addition to your workstation, so why not give it a try? The wiring is simple, the parts easily found and cheap, and it’s only a few printed parts! This scribe is already printing the plastics right now, if you listen carefully you might be able to make out the sound of the Lulzbot in background.

There are many other takes on this idea, with varying levels of complexity, like this incredible build from [Ahmsville] that sadly doesn’t make the PCBs available openly, and here’s one we covered earlier mashing the expensive 3DConnexion spacemouse into a keeb.

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The Year Of Owning It

January 8, 2022 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

Talking over the year in review on the Podcast, Tom Nardi and I were brainstorming what we thought was the single overarching trend in 2021, and we came up with many different topics: victories in the right to repair, increasingly dystopian service contracts, a flourishing of cyberdecks, and even greater prevalence of reverse engineering style hacks. And then we realized: they are all different faces of the same beast — people just want to own the devices that they own.

Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, our modern Internet-connected-everythings have two sides. On one side, we get so much additional functionality from having everything on the net. But on the other, if your car is always connected, it gives Toyota a means to make you pay a monthly fee to use a car fob, and if you have to use Cricut’s free online service to upload designs to the cutter, they can suddenly decide to start charging you. It allows Samsung to not only spy on whatever you’re currently watching on your smart TV, but to also brick it if they want to. More and more, we don’t actually own (in the sense of control) the devices that we own (in the sense of having purchased).

We don’t have to take it lying down. On the one hand, consumer protest made Cricut walk back their plans, and may do the same with Toyota. We can achieve a lot, collectively, by just talking about our grievances, and letting the firms in question know how we feel — naturally also with our wallets. But as hackers and all-around techie types, we can do even more. When something is broken because of a bad service, we can often fix it with firmware or by standing up our own version of the service. We can pwn them.

But there’s even more to the cyberdeck and the extreme DIY movements of the last few years than just the defense against lock-in or the liberating of hardware. There’s also the pride of truly owning something because you made it. Not just owning it because you bought it, or owning it because you control it, but owning it because you understand it and because you gave birth to it.

Whichever way you’re into owning your own, I think that’s the single overarching trend of 2021 — both on the positive and proactive side and the negative and reactive. Talking about it, reverse engineering it, or building it yourself, 2021 was the year of owning it.