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More people working from home has had an impact on the cost and availability of USB webcams, so [Jeff Geerling] got around the issue with a DIY solution that rang in around $100. It consists of a Raspberry Pi and HQ camera module acting as a USB webcam , and there is no messy streaming of ffmpeg over the network masquerading as a camera device or anything. It works just as a USB camera should. [Jeff] chose a Raspberry Pi Zero and HQ camera module for his unit, making a tidy package that might not be quite as small as commercial webcams, but is certainly perfectly respectable as a USB camera. That being said, there are a few drawbacks, namely the lack of a microphone or autofocus, latency issues at higher resolutions, and the need to shut down the Pi cleanly. Check out the GitHub repository for everything needed to set up your own, including a complete hardware list and some options for mounting. [Jeff] also tested whether the camera would work with the new keyboard-embedded Raspberr

Refining precious metals is not as simple as polishing rocks that have been dug out of the ground. Often, complex chemical processes are needed to process the materials properly or in high quantities, but these processes leave behind considerable waste. Often, there are valuable metals left over in these wastes, and [NerdRage] has gathered his chemistry equipment to demonstrate how it’s possible to recover these metals . The process involved looks to recover copper and nitric acid from copper nitrate, a common waste byproduct of processing metal. While a process called thermal decomposition exists to accomplish this, it’s not particularly efficient, so this alternative looks to improve the yields you could otherwise expect. The first step is to react the copper nitrate with sulfuric acid, which results in nitric acid and copper sulfate. From there, the copper sulfate is placed in an electrolysis cell using a platinum cathode and copper anodes to pass current through it. After the pro

A solar eclipse is coming up in just a few weeks, and although with its path of totality near the southern tip of South America means that not many people will be able to see it first-hand, there is an opportunity to get involved with it even at an extreme distance. PhD candidate [Kristina] and the organization HamSCI are trying to learn a little bit more about the effects of an eclipse on radio communications, and all that is required to help is a receiver capable of listening in the 10 MHz range during the time of the eclipse . It’s well-known that certain radio waves can propagate further depending on the time of day due to changes in many factors such as the state of the ionosphere and the amount of solar activity. What is not known is specifically how the paths can vary over the course of the day. During the eclipse the sun’s interference is minimized, and its impact can be more directly measured in a more controlled experiment. By tuning into particular time stations and record

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Ubuntu Security Notice 4651-1 - Tom Reynolds discovered that due to a packaging error, the MySQL X Plugin was listening to all network interfaces by default, contrary to expectations. This update changes the default MySQL configuration to bind the MySQL X Plugin to localhost only. This change may impact environments where the MySQL X Plugin needs to be accessible from the network. The mysqlx-bind-address setting in the /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf file can be modified to allow network access. Various other issues were also addressed. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/2HRxsbY

Ubuntu Security Notice 4650-1 - Alexander Bulekov discovered that QEMU incorrectly handled SDHCI device emulation. An attacker inside the guest could use this issue to cause QEMU to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code on the host. In the default installation, when QEMU is used with libvirt, attackers would be isolated by the libvirt AppArmor profile. Sergej Schumilo, Cornelius Aschermann, and Simon Wrner discovered that QEMU incorrectly handled USB device emulation. An attacker inside the guest could use this issue to cause QEMU to crash, resulting in a denial of service. Various other issues were also addressed. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3lnW0H6

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5249-01 - Fixed two jQuery vulnerabilities Improved Ansible Tower's web service configuration to allow for processing more simultaneous HTTP requests by default Updated several dependencies of Ansible Tower's User Interface to address Updated to the latest version of python-psutil to address CVE-2019-18874 Added several optimizations to improve performance for a variety of high-load simultaneous job launch use cases Fixed workflows to no longer prevent certain users from being able to edit approval nodes Fixed confusing behavior for social auth logins across distinct browser tabs Fixed launching of Job Templates that use prompt-at-launch Ansible Vault credentials. Issues addressed include code execution and cross site scripting vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/2VivEfd

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5246-01 - MariaDB is a multi-user, multi-threaded SQL database server. For all practical purposes, MariaDB is binary-compatible with MySQL. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/39w9M8q

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5237-01 - Mozilla Firefox is an open-source web browser, designed for standards compliance, performance, and portability. This update upgrades Firefox to version 78.5.0 ESR. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3ltXwb6

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5234-01 - Mozilla Firefox is an open-source web browser, designed for standards compliance, performance, and portability. This update upgrades Firefox to version 78.5.0 ESR. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/36mEhf5

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5238-01 - Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client. This update upgrades Thunderbird to version 78.5.0. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3mngFwv

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5232-01 - Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client. This update upgrades Thunderbird to version 78.5.0. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3fRzJQY

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5236-01 - Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client. This update upgrades Thunderbird to version 78.5.0. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3qe7VuZ

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5233-01 - Mozilla Firefox is an open-source web browser, designed for standards compliance, performance, and portability. This update upgrades Firefox to version 78.5.0 ESR. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/2VjwGb2

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5231-01 - Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client. This update upgrades Thunderbird to version 78.5.0. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/2HRx5hA

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5240-01 - Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client. This update upgrades Thunderbird to version 78.5.0. Issues addressed include bypass, cross site scripting, and use-after-free vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3mmilpW

Intelbras Router RF 301K version 1.1.2 suffers from an authentication bypass vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3oalhGC

ATX MiniCMTS200a Broadband Gateway version 2.0 suffers from a credential disclosure vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/33wUIDL

WordPress Heroic Knowledge Base plugin versions 3.0.1 and below appear to suffer from a remote SQL injection vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/2Jr9cOk

Red Hat Security Advisory 2020-5159-01 - An issue with golang has been addressed where ReadUvarint and ReadVarint can read an unlimited number of bytes from invalid inputs. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3qe8oxf

It’s probably a dream most of us share, to stumble upon a dusty hall full of fascinating abandoned tech frozen in time as though its operators walked away one day and simply never returned. It’s something documented by some Russian urban explorers who found an unremarkable office building with one of its floors frozen sometime around the transition from Soviet Union to Russian Federation. In it they found their abandoned tech, in the form of a cross-section of Soviet-era computers form the 1970s onwards . As you might expect, in a manner it mirrors the development of civilian computing on the capitalist side of the Iron Curtain over a similar period, starting with minicomputers the size of several large refrigerators and ending with desktop microcomputers. The minis seem to all be Soviet clones of contemporary DEC machines. with some parts of them even looking vaguely familiar. The oldest is a Saratov-2, a PDP/8 clone which we’re told is rare enough for no examples to have been believ

A fact universally known among the Hackaday community is that projects are never truly done. You can always spin another board release to fix a silkscreen mistake, get that extra little boost of performance, or finally spend the time to track down that weird transient bug. Or in [ultraembedded’s] case, take a custom FPGA player from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 720 . The hardware used is a Digilent Arty A7 and PMOD boards for I2S2, VGA, and MicroSD. We previously covered this project back when it was first getting started. Getting from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 720 — 31% more pixels — required implementing a higher performance JPEG decoder that can read in the MPJEG frames, pushing out a pixel every 2.1 clock cycles. The improvements also include a few convenience features such as an IR remote. The number of submodules inside the system is just incredible, with most of them being implemented or tweaked by [ultraembedded] himself. For the FPGA Verilog, there’s the SD/MMC interface, the JPEG decoder

Useless machines are generally built as a fun pastime, as they do nothing of value by their very definition. The most popular type generally involves a self-cancelling switch. However, there’s plenty of other useless machines to build, and we think [Jeffery’s] build is particularly creative. The build consists of an XY gantry that moves a standard computer mouse. To control the gantry, a Raspberry Pi feeds the system G-Code relative to the motion of a second mouse plugged into the single-board computer. It’s pretty standard fare overall, with the Pi sending commands to an Arduino that runs the various stepper motors via a CNC controller shield. Yes, it’s a mouse that moves a mouse – and on the surface, this appears to be a very useless machine. However, we could imagine it being useful for remote control of a very old system that uses a non-standard mouse that is otherwise difficult to emulate. Additionally, it wouldn’t take much extra work to turn the XY gantry into a competent pen-

We’re blessed to have cloud-based calendars that store all the relevant data on our hyper-busy lives for easy access anywhere and everywhere. However, sometimes a hard copy is nice for when you’re tired of looking at screens. In this vein, [lokthelok] produced a compact device that prints out your schedule on the daily. The device uses an ESP32 to connect to WiFi, and then query Google Apps for a given user’s calendar details on a daily basis. After grabbing the data, it’s fed out to a thermal printer connected over serial at 9600 baud. As a twist, [lokthelok] has produced two versions of firmware for the project. The master version simply scrapes calendar data and outputs it neatly. The Useless version goes further, jumbling up appointments and printing them out of order. If you’ve got nothing on for the day, it will instead spool out the remainder of the thermal paper on the roll. It’s a build that would make a handsome desk toy, though we suspect tossing out each day’s calendar

While concerns over COVID-19 probably kept many a guest room empty this Thanksgiving, things were a little different aboard the International Space Station. The four-seat SpaceX Crew Dragon is able to carry one more occupant to the orbiting outpost than the Russian Soyuz, which has lead to a somewhat awkward sleeping arrangement: there are currently seven people aboard a Station that only has six crew cabins. To remedy the situation, Commander Michael Hopkins has decided to sleep inside the Crew Dragon itself , technically giving himself the most spacious personal accommodations on the Station. This might seem a little hokey, but it’s actually not without precedent; when the Shuttle used to dock with the ISS, the Commander would customarily sleep in the cockpit so they would be ready to handle any potential emergency. Speaking of off-world visitation, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft is nearly home after six years in space . It won’t be staying long though, the deep-space probe is only in the

One of the more interesting display technologies of the moment comes from Sharp, their memory display devices share the low power advantages of an e-ink display with the much faster updates we would expect from an LCD or similar. We’ve not seen much of them in our community due to cost, so it’s good to see one used in an MQTT dashboard project from [ Raphael Baron ]. The hardware puts the display at the top of a relatively minimalist 3D printed encloseure with the LOLIN32 ESP32 development board behind it, and with a plinth containing a small rotary encoder and three clicky key switches in front. The most interesting part of the project is surprisingly not the display though, because despite being based upon an ESP32 development board he’s written its software with the aim of being as platform- and display-independent as possible. To demonstrate this he’s produced it as a desktop application as well as the standalone hardware. A simple graphical user interface allows the selection o

Every time manufacturers bring a new “unpickable” lock to market, amateur and professional locksmiths descend on the new product to prove them wrong. [Shane] from [Stuff Made Here] decided to try his hand at designing and building an unpickable lock , and found that particular rabbit hole to be a lot deeper than expected. (Video, embedded below.) Most common pin tumbler locks can be picked thanks to slightly loose fits of the pins and tiny manufacturing defects. By lifting or bumping the pins while putting tension on the cylinder the pins can be made to bind one by one at the shear line. Once all the pins are bound in the correct position, it can be unlocked. [Shane]’s design aimed to prevent the pins from being set in unlocked position one by one, by locking the all pins in whatever position they are set and preventing further manipulation when the cylinder is turned to test the combination. In theory this should prevent the person doing the picking from knowing if any of the pins w

Induction heaters can make conductive objects incredibly hot by generating eddy currents within the metal. They’re used in a wide variety of industrial processes, from furnaces to welders and even heat treatments. [Schematix] whipped up his own design, and put it through its paces on the bench. The build in question is a fairly compact design, roughly shoebox-sized when fitted with its six-turn coil. Running off anything from 12 V to 48 V, the heater put out at a massive 1.4 kW in testing. At this power level, the high current draw led the power traces to heat up enough to melt solder, and eventually burn out. [Schematix] plans to rebuild the heater with added copper wiring along these traces to support the higher power levels without failure. The heater is able to quickly heat ferrous metals, though was not able to meaningfully dump power into aluminium under testing. This is unsurprising, as non-ferrous metals primarily undergo only Joule heating from induction, forgoing the hyster

3D printers are capable of creating complex geometries with a minimum of fuss, but one of the tradeoffs is the long period of time it takes to print a part. Often, printers are left to run for many hours with a minimum of supervision to complete their tasks. This can leave printers idling for long periods of time after their work is finished. Noting this, [TheGrim] put together the Advanced Printer Control. The aim of the APC is to monitor 3D printers, and shut them off when their work is complete. The aim is to avoid leaving printers running for hours after their prints are finished, which causes needless wear on fans and screens which can have a limited life. This is achieved by putting an ESP8266 in charge of the printer’s AC power supply, via a triac. It measures the current drawn by the printer when idling and in use to set a baseline. Then, whenever the printer drops back to idle levels, a timer begins. When the timer runs out, the printer is switched off. There’s also an option

Applause is greatly revered as a symbol of warmth and adoration from a crowd. TV shows that film in front of a live audience often cue their audiences to clap in order to generate the desired auditory atmosphere. Of course, you don’t have to rely on squishy humans to do all the work. [Dillon] built a machine of dubious utility – one which generates mechanical applause when activated by the sound of clapping . (Video, embedded below.) Somewhat unsurprisingly, the project was built for a Useless Machine contest, but that doesn’t diminish its value as a learning exercise. An Arduino runs the show, using a microphone module to listen out for loud noises such as claps. If two claps are detected in the nominated timeframe, the machine begins to flash its “APPLAUSE” lights and clap its hands. The Arduino achieves this with the help of a relay, which switches on a motor spinning a belt-driven cam which seperates the hands. The hands are then pulled back together to clap via a length of stretc

These days, there’s plenty of options if you want to get a GPS tracker for your vehicle. Unfortunately, they come with the sort of baggage that’s becoming increasingly common with consumer tech: subscription fees, third-party snooping, and a sneaking suspicion that you’re more commodity than customer. So [Viktor Takacs] decided to take things into his own hands and create an open GPS tracker designed for privacy minded hackers . As [Viktor] didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, his design leverages several off-the-shelf modules. The core of the tracker is the ESP32, which gives him plenty of computational power while still keeping energy consumption within reasonable levels. There’s also a NEO-6M GPS receiver which works at the same 3.3 V level as the ESP32, allowing the microcontroller to read the NMEA sentences without a level shifter. He decided to go with the low-cost SIM800L GSM modem, but as it only works on 2G networks, provisions have been made in the board design to swap it out

As many a radio amateur will tell you, ham radio is a hobby with as many facets as there are radio amateurs. It should be an exciting and dynamic place to be, but as those who venture forth into it sometimes sadly find out, it can be anything but. Tightly-knit communities whose interests lie in using $1,000 stations to chase DX (long-distance contacts), an advancing age profile, and a curious fascination of many amateurs with disaster communications. It’s something [Robert V. Bolton, KJ7NZL] has sounded off about in an open letter to the amateur radio community entitled “ Ham Radio Needs To Embrace The Hacker Community Now More Than Ever “. In it he laments that the influx in particular of those for whom disaster preparedness is the reason for getting a licence is to blame for amateur radio losing its spark, and he proposes that the hobby should respond by broadening its appeal in the direction of the hacker community. The emphasis should move from emergency communications, he says, a

As many a radio amateur will tell you, ham radio is a hobby with as many facets as there are radio amateurs. It should be an exciting and dynamic place to be, but as those who venture forth into it sometimes sadly find out, it can be anything but. Tightly-knit communities whose interests lie in using $1,000 stations to chase DX (long-distance contacts), an advancing age profile, and a curious fascination of many amateurs with disaster communications. It’s something [Robert V. Bolton, KJ7NZL] has sounded off about in an open letter to the amateur radio community entitled “ Ham Radio Needs To Embrace The Hacker Community Now More Than Ever “. In it he laments that the influx in particular of those for whom disaster preparedness is the reason for getting a licence is to blame for amateur radio losing its spark, and he proposes that the hobby should respond by broadening its appeal in the direction of the hacker community. The emphasis should move from emergency communications, he says, a

Where does he get such wonderful toys? [Glenn] snagged parts of a Grass Valley Kalypso 4-M/E video mixer control surface from eBay and since been reverse engineering the button and display modules to bend them to his will . The hardware dates back to the turn of the century and the two modules would have been laid out with up to a few dozen others to complete a video mixing console. [Glenn’s] previous adventures delved into a strip of ten backlit buttons and gives us a close look at each of the keyswitches and the technique he used to pull together his own pinout and schematic of that strip. But things get a lot hairier this time around. The long strip seen above is a “machine control plane” module and includes a dozen addressible character displays, driven by a combination of microcontrollers and FPGAs. The square panel is a “Crosspoint Switch Matrix” module include eight individual 32 x 32 LCDs drive by three dedicated ICs that can display in red, green, or amber. [Glen] used an S

Ubuntu Security Notice 4649-1 - Jens Mueller discovered that xdg-utils incorrectly handled certain URI. An attacker could possibly use this issue to expose sensitive information. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3ml29Fm

Whitepaper called Weaponize GhostWriting Injection. This is part 5 of a 5 part series of papers. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3q8UHzr

Whitepaper called Disable Dynamic Code Mitigation (ACG). This is part 4 of a 5 part series of papers. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/36cMFhc

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Ubuntu Security Notice 4382-2 - It was discovered that FreeRDP incorrectly handled certain memory operations. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause FreeRDP to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3nWO6q6

Heroic Knowledge Base plugin versions 3.0.1 and below suffer from persistent cross site scripting vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/36hMPDO

Ruckus IoT Controller (Ruckus vRIoT) versions 1.5.1.0.21 and below suffer from a remote code execution vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3qhoczt

Best Support System version 3.0.4 suffers from a persistent cross site scripting vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3lhZ2gi

ZTE Blade Vantage Z839 Emode.APK android.uid.system local privilege escalation exploit. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3o3h3R3

WordPress Accesspress Social Icons theme version 1.7.9 suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3lhxszR

WonderCMS version 3.1.3 suffers from a persistent cross site scripting vulnerability. Original finding for persistent cross site scripting in this version of WonderCMS is attributed to Hemant Patidar. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3q9s6tV

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While there are a lot of objects from the Sims that we wish were real, we probably wish more than anything that everyone had a mood indicator hovering above their heads at all times. It would make working from home go a lot more smoothly, for instance. [8BitsAndAByte] made this Bluetooth-controlled plumb bob as part of their Sims Halloween costume , but we think it has real day-to-day value as this pandemic wears on, either as a mood ring or a portable free/busy indicator. The hardware is about as simple as it gets — an Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit controls a pair of NeoPixel rings, one for each half of the translucent 3D-printed plumb bob. Power comes from a 500mAh battery, and all the electronics are situated inside of an attractive hat. Check out the build video after the break. There’s more than one way to use color to convey information. This seven-segment temperature display does it with thermochromic film . from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/2JkczXs

One of the things we love best about the articles we publish on Hackaday is the dynamic that can develop between the hacker and the readers. At its best, the comment section of an article can be a model of collaborative effort, with readers’ ideas and suggestions making their way into version 2.0 of a build. This collegial dynamic is very much on display with TMD-2, [Michael Gardi]’s latest iteration of his Turing machine demonstrator . We covered the original TMD-1 back in late summer, the idea of which was to serve as a physical embodiment of the Turing machine concept. Briefly, the TMD-1 represented the key “tape and head” concepts of the Turing machine with a console of servo-controlled flip tiles, the state of which was controlled by a three-state, three-symbol finite state machine. TMD-1 TMD-1 was capable of simple programs that really demonstrated the principles of Turing machines, and it really seemed to catch on with readers. Based on the comments of one reader, [Newspap

The HackRF is an exceptionally capable software defined radio (SDR) transceiver, but naturally you need to connect it to a computer to actually do anything with it. So the PortaPack was developed to turn it into a stand-alone device with the addition of a touchscreen LCD, a few buttons, and a headphone jack. With all the hardware in place, it’s just a matter of installing a firmware capable enough to do some proper RF hacking on the go. Enter MAYHEM, an evolved fork of the original PortaPack firmware that the developers claim is the most up-to-date and feature packed version available . Without ever plugging into a computer, this firmware allows you to receive, decode, and re-transmit a dizzying number of wireless protocols. From firing off the seating pagers at a local restaurant to creating a fleet of phantom aircraft with spoofed ADS-B transponders, MAYHEM certainly seems like it lives up to the name. [A. Petazzoni] recently put together a detailed blog post about installing and u

There’s a sleek form factor for desktop computers known as an “all-in-one” that enrobes a computer in a monitor. While the convenience of having all your computing in a neat package has some nice benefits, it comes with an unfortunate downside. Someday the computer inside is going to be old and outdated in comparison to newer machines. While a new OS goes a long way towards breathing life into an old machine, [Thomas] has decided to take the path less travelled and converted an old iMac all-in-one into a discrete monitor . The iMac in question is the 20″ iMac G5 iSight (A1145) with an LG-Philips LM201W01-STB2 LCD panel. Looking back, [Thomas] would recommend just ordering an LCD driver controller kit from your favourite auction house. But for this particular modification, he decided to do things a little bit more manually and we’re quite glad he did. Luckily for [Thomas], the panel supports TMDS (which both DVI and HDMI are compatible with). So the next step was to figure out the sig

The band Kraftwerk hit the music scene with its unique electronic sound in the 70s in Germany, opening the door for the electronic music revolution of the following decade. If you’re not familiar with the band, they often had songs with a technology theme as well, and thanks to modern microcontroller technology it’s possible to replicate the Kraftwerk sound with microcontrollers as [Steven] aka [Marquis de Geek] demonstrates in his melodic build. While the music is played on a Stylophone and a Korg synthesizer, it is fed through five separate Arduinos, four of which have various synths and looping samplers installed on them (and presumably represent each of the four members of Kraftwerk). Samplers like this allow pieces of music to be repeated continuously once recorded, which means that [Steven] can play entire songs on his own. The fifth Arduino functions as a controller, handling MIDI and pattern sequencing over I2C, and everything is finally channeled through a homemade mixer.

If there is one thing that Sir Clive SInclair was famous for, it was producing electronic devices that somehow managed to squeeze near-impossible performance out of relatively meagre components. This gave us some impressive products, but it’s fair to say that sometimes this philosophy pushed the envelope a little too far. Thus even some of the most fondly remembered Sinclair products concealed significant flaws, and this extended to both their hardware and their software. Sir Clive never gave us this! The SInclair ZX spectrum’s ROM for example had more than its fair share of bugs, and its BASIC programming experience with single keypress was unique but also slow to run. It’s something [Jonathan Cauldwell] has addressed with his Arcade Game Designer ROM , a complete and ready to run replacement for the original Spectrum ROM that contains a scripting language, a compiler, editors for in-game assets, and a game engine upon which to run your games. It’s the ROM you wanted back in 1983,

Fancy, split keyboards are cool and all, and they can really help with repetitive strain injury issues depending on a lot of different factors. But the big, glaring problem is that they often lack nice features that regular keyboards have — things like a number pad, media buttons, or in [discordia]’s case, a ThinkPad-style pointing stick. Fortunately, there’s a perfect spot for one between the two halves of the Keyboardio Atreus . [discordia] is happy with the Atreus, but the whole layers thing can take some getting used to. Since Atreus only has 44 keys, it utilizes a layering system to change their function to cover all the keys you’d find on a full keyboard. After getting stuck in one rarely-used layer for a while, they decided to remedy the situation with some RGB LEDs to indicate the active layer. If you’ve got an Atreus that could use a few upgrades, check out [discordia]’s step-by-step instructions for adding a trackpoint and one-wire RGB LEDs. If you have an old enough Think

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are talking turkey about the world of hardware hacking. This short episode brings news updates about the Nintendo Game and Watch hacking progress, the sad farewell to Areceibo, the new chip from Espressif, and the awesome circuit sculptures from our recent contest. We wrap up the show with a lightning round of quick hacks. Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! Direct download (17 MB) Places to follow Hackaday podcasts: Google Podcasts iTunes Spotify Stitcher RSS Episode 095 Show Notes: New This Week: DOOM Running On The Nintendo Game & Watch Playing Super Mario Bros. 3 Playing Game Boy (Pokemon?) Espressif Leaks ESP32-C3: A WiFi SoC That’s RISC-V And Is ESP8266 Pin-Compatible The Battle For Arecibo Has Been Lost Eulogy To Arecibo: With Demise Of A Unique Scientific Facility, Who Will Carry The Torch? No Wonder

If you’ve recently braved the pandemic long enough to make a trip to a big box retailer, you may have spotted a few massive e-paper price tags affixed to large items like appliances. These seven inch displays were likely designed to be used in e-readers such as the Kindle, but through some surplus deal, are now shouting out clearance savings on last year’s washing machine. After checking out a particularly good price for a Samsung refrigerator at the local Home Depot, [YodaLogic] got to wondering if they could be bent to the hacker’s will. Now to be clear, [YodaLogic] didn’t steal any of these tags. It turns out you can pick them up on eBay for less than $15 a pop, or at least that’s what they cost before this article went out. It’s an exceptionally good price when you realize that these displays are actually capable of color…albeit only two. Apparently when the retailer orders the so-called “Chroma 74” tags, they can pick between either yellow or red as the secondary color. While no

We’ve become so used to seeing SpaceX boosters land themselves back on the pad with clockwork reliability, that it’s easy to forget it took them a good number of attempts to get right. Inspired by SpaceX’s work, [Joe Barnard] of [BPS.Space] started working to replicate it at the model scale five years ago, with no engineering education or experience. On the latest attempt with a brand-new thrust vectoring Scout E rocket, he has gotten tantalizingly close to doing a controlled propulsive landing with a solid-fuel rocket motor. We’ve all been thrilled to see the SpaceX rockets return to earth, landing elegantly on a floating pad. But those are liquid-fueled. The trick with a solid-fuel rocket motor is it can’t be throttled directly, which is a challenge when you need precision control to land. Thanks to [Joe]’s custom AVA flight computer and the remarkably consistent thrust curve of the Estes F15 black powder motors he used, it becomes a matter of igniting the descent motor at the rig

There are millions of IoT devices out there in the wild and though not conventional computers, they can be hacked by alternative methods. From firmware hacks to social engineering, there are tons of ways to break into these little devices. Now, researchers at University of Maryland have published a new hack to allows audio capture using lidar reflective measurements . The hack revolves around the fact that audio waves or mechanical waves in a room cause objects inside a room to vibrate slightly. When a lidar device impacts a beam off an object, the accuracy of the receiving system allows for measurement of the slight vibrations cause by the sound in the room. The experiment used human voice transmitted from a simple speaker as well as a sound bar and the surface for reflections were common household items such as a trash can, cardboard box, takeout container, and polypropylene bags. Robot vacuum cleaners will usually be facing such objects on a day to day basis. The bigger issue is w

Years ago, [Leo Neumann]’s girlfriend gave him a 1970s chess computer game that was missing almost everything but the super cool clicky keyboard. Noting the similarity of chess move labeling to chord notation, [Leo] decided to turn it into something even nerdier — a jazz chord game where you jam with the computer . To play the game, you and the computer take turns entering jazz chords that progress musically from the last one played. The hardware is simple — a Raspberry Pi Zero and a WM8960 audio hat with amplifier in speakers. [Leo] also put in a slightly larger display than the original and printed a new bottom half for the case. We love the look of this build, especially the groovy custom line font [Leo] designed. On the software side, [Leo] made a Python prototyping environment using PYO Module and Kivy UI. Not content with other approaches to tonal consonance, [Leo] played a couple thousand chords and rated them according to their progressive harmony. Shake out those jazz hands

An electronic tachometer is a straightforward enough device, in which the light reflections from a white spot on a rotating object are detected and counted over time, measuring the revolutions per minute (RPM). It’s a technique that has its roots in analogue electronics where the resulting pulses would have fed a charge pump, and it’s a task well suited to a microcontroller that simply counts them. But do you need an all-singing, all-dancing chip to do the job? [Stefan Wagner] has done it with a humble ATtiny13 . His TinyTacho is a small PCB with an IR LED and photodiode on one end, a small OLED display on its front, and a coin cell holder on its rear. The electronics may be extremely simple, but there’s still quite some effort to get it within the ATtiny’s meagre resources. Counting the revolutions is easy enough, but the chip has no I 2 C interface of its own and some bitbanging code is required. You can find all the design files and software you need in a GitHub repository , and he

Buying tools is all well and good, but it doesn’t suit the ethos of Youtube channel [Workshop From Scratch]. Building what you need is much more the go, and that’s demonstrated ably with this home-built electric workshop crane . The crane is put together in a straightforward manner using basic steelworking techniques. Plates and bars are machined with a drill press, bandsaw and grinder, though we could imagine you could use hand tools if you were so inclined. An ATV winch is pressed into service to do the heavy lifting, powered by a set of 12V lead acid batteries placed in the base. This design choice does double duty as both a mobile power supply for the crane, and acts as a counterweight in the base. The final result looks sharp in its orange paint finish, and does a good job of moving heavy equipment around the workshop. The legs are reconfigurable, so that even very heavy loads can be lifted with appropriate counterweight placed on the back. It’s a significant upgrade on the earl