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Showing posts from May, 2021

Teaching a Machine to Be Worse at a Video Game Than You Are

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Is it really cheating if the aimbot you’ve built plays the game worse than you do? We vote no, and while we take a dim view on cheating in general, there are still some interesting hacks in this AI-powered bot for Valorant . This is a first-person shooter, team-based game that has a lot of action and a Counter-Strike vibe. As [River] points out, most cheat-bots have direct access to the memory of the computer which is playing the game, which gives it an unfair advantage over human players, who have to visually process the game field and make their moves in meatspace. To make the Valorant -bot more of a challenge, he decided to feed video of the game from one computer to another over an HDMI-to-USB capture device. The second machine has a YOLOv5 model which was trained against two hours of gameplay, enough to identify friend from foe — most of the time. Navigation around the map was done by analyzing the game’s on-screen minimap with OpenCV and doing some rudimentary path-finding . ...

Building Fallout’s Super Sledge

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The Fallout series of games has a variety of ridiculous weapons, not least the Super Sledge — a rocket propelled sledgehammer that looks about as dangerous for the wielder as it does for the opponent. [JAIRUS OF ALL] decided he had to recreate this build in real life, risks be damned. Unwilling to go the single-use, solid rocket route for his build, [JAIRUS] instead elected to go with an electric ducted fan, supplemented with a propane supply for added flames. It’s not really a rocket of any form, and it’s unlikely the burning propane adds any real thrust, but it does shoot huge flames out the back and it is terrifying. The EDF idle speed can be set by a potentiometer on a servo tester hooked up to a speed controller, while there’s a valve for adjusting propane flow. A switch can then be used to boost the EDF speed higher and increase the propane flow, increasing the violence of the flow out the back of the hammer. Notably, [JAIRUS] doesn’t actually demonstrate swinging the hammer a...

[Emily]’s Eerie Educational Electric Eyeball Entertains

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Like many of us, [Emily’s Electric Oddities] has had a lot of time for projects over the past year or so, including one that had been kicking around since late 2018. It all started at the Hackaday Superconference, when [Emily] encountered the Adafruit Hallowing board in the swag bag. Since that time, [Emily] has wanted to display the example code eyeball movement on a CRT, but didn’t really know how to go about it. Spoiler alert: it works now . See? It’s educational. Eventually, [Emily] learned about the TV out library for Arduino and got everything working properly — the eyeball would move around with the joystick, blink when the button is pressed, and the pupil would respond visually to changes in ambient light. The only problem was that the animation moved at a lousy four frames per second. Well, until she got Hackaday’s own [Roger Cheng] involved. [Roger] was able to streamline the code to align with [Emily]’s dreams, and then it was on to our favorite part of this build — t...

Tiny Gasoline Engine Fitted With A Custom Billet Waterpump

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We don’t typically use gasoline engines smaller than 50 cc or so on a regular basis. Below that size, electric motors are typically less messy and more capable of doing the job. That doesn’t mean they aren’t cute, however. [JohnnyQ90] is a fan of tiny internal combustion engines, and decided to whip up a little water pump for one of his so it could do something useful besides make noise. The pump is built out of billet aluminium, showing off [JohnnyQ90]’s machining skills. The two pieces that make up the main body and cover plate of the pump are impressive enough, but the real party piece is the tiny delicate impeller which actually does the majority of the work. The delicate curves of the pump blades are carefully carved out and look exquisite when finished. The pump’s performance is adequate, and the noise of the tiny gasoline engine makes quite a racket, but it’s a great display of machining skill. If so desired, the pump could also do a great job for a small liquid delivery sys...

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4968-2

Ubuntu Security Notice 4968-2 - USN-4968-1 fixed a vulnerability in LZ4. This update provides the corresponding update for Ubuntu 14.04 ESM and Ubuntu 16.04 ESM. It was discovered that LZ4 incorrectly handled certain memory operations. If a user or automated system were tricked into uncompressing a specially- crafted LZ4 file, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause LZ4 to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. Various other issues were also addressed. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3i1Xvgl

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2147-01

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2147-01 - GLib provides the core application building blocks for libraries and applications written in C. It provides the core object system used in GNOME, the main loop implementation, and a large set of utility functions for strings and common data structures. Issues addressed include an integer overflow vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3yLrKOF

IPS Community Suite 4.5.4.2 PHP Code Injection

IPS Community Suite versions 4.5.4.2 and below suffer from a PHP code injection vulnerability. The vulnerability exists because the IPS\cms\modules\front\pages\_builder::previewBlock() method allows to pass arbitrary content to the IPS\_Theme::runProcessFunction() method, which will be used in a call to the eval() PHP function. This can be exploited to inject and execute arbitrary PHP code. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an account with permission to manage the sidebar (such as a Moderator or Administrator) and the "cms" application to be enabled. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3fYb2mr

Backdoor.Win32.WinShell.a Code Execution

Backdoor.Win32.WinShell.a malware suffers from a code execution vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3fyEH6C

Ubuntu OverlayFS Local Privilege Escalation

The document in this archive illustrates using the included proof of concept exploit to achieve root on Ubuntu systems using a flaw in the OverlayFS file system. The exploit itself does not have author attribution as the proof of concept came through SSD Disclosures. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3p3dfkI

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2145-01

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2145-01 - The runC tool is a lightweight, portable implementation of the Open Container Format that provides container runtime. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/34M26LX

PHP 8.1.0-dev Backdoor Remote Command Execution

PHP version 8.1.0-dev unauthenticated remote command execution proof of concept exploit that leverages the backdoor. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3fRythe

Backdoor.Win32.Whirlpool.a Buffer Overflow

Backdoor.Win32.Whirlpool.a malware suffers from a buffer overflow vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/2R8UIHd

Backdoor.Win32.NetControl2.293 Code Execution

Backdoor.Win32.NetControl2.293 malware suffers from a code execution vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3fzs1ML

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2144-01

Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-2144-01 - Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that runs virtually anywhere. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3paJPkz

Backdoor.Win32.Netbus.12 Information Disclosure

Backdoor.Win32.Netbus.12 malware suffers from an information leakage vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3uFkKzk

Backdoor.Win32.NerTe.772 Code Execution

Backdoor.Win32.NerTe.772 malware suffers from a code execution vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3p4nvJo

Backdoor.Win32.NerTe.772 Authentication Bypass / Code Execution

Backdoor.Win32.NerTe.772 malware suffers from bypass and code execution vulnerabilities. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3uD6Uxm

Trojan.Win32.Scar.dulk Insecure Permissions

Trojan.Win32.Scar.dulk malware suffers from an insecure permissions vulnerability. from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3wJLbW7

A Look Back on the Oroville Dam with Practical Engineering

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Back when it first happened, we covered the Oroville Dam near-disaster . Heavier-than-expected rainfall in California back in early 2017 led to running the dam’s primary spillway at much higher-than-normal levels. February 17, 2017, the operators noticed something odd about the water flow down the spillway, and when they turned off water flowing down the spillway, it was made obvious that they had a major problem on their hands. Several chunks of concrete were missing, and the water had begun gouging into the earth beneath the spillway. It would need repairs before it was properly up to the task of discharging water, but it was still raining. The rising water level in Lake Oroville put operators in a tricky situation, as they needed to discharge water in the least damaging way possible. They decided to use the emergency spillway to keep water levels at safe levels. Unfortunately, the secondary spillway began to deteriorate even more quickly than the primary had, and continued use cou...

US Nuclear Weapon Bunker Secrets Spill From Online Flashcards Since 2013

from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3yR1xht

Have I Been Pwned Teams With FBI, Gives Open Source Access To Code

from Packet Storm https://ift.tt/3vCk4wb

Thin Coatings Require an Impressive Collection of Equipment and Know-How

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Let’s be honest — not too many of us have a need to deposit nanometer-thick films onto substrates in a controlled manner. But if you do find yourself in such a situation, you could do worse than following [Jeroen Vleggaar]’s lead as he builds out a physical vapor deposition apparatus to do just that. Thankfully, [Jeroen] has particular expertise in this area, and is willing to share it. PVD is used to apply an exceedingly thin layer of metal or organic material to a substrate — think lens coatings or mirror silvering, as well as semiconductor manufacturing. The method involves heating the coating material in a vacuum such that it vaporizes and accumulates on a substrate in a controlled fashion. Sounds simple, but the equipment and know-how needed to actually accomplish it are daunting. [Jeroen]’s shopping list included high-current power supplies to heat the coating material, turbomolecular pumps to evacuate the coating chamber, and instruments to monitor the conditions inside the c...

A Chainsaw Gives This Winch Some Grunt

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For a satisfying Youtube watching session there is noting like some quality machine shop work, and that’s exactly what [Made In Poland] supply with their conversion of a small 12V winch to power from a chainsaw . The finished product contains not much more than the gearbox and shaft components from the original, but the mesmerising sight of rusty steel stock being transformed into dimension-perfect components which come together to form an entirely new assembly is as always a draw. The conversion starts with the removal and disassembly of the motor to reveal its shaft and the locking mechanism for the drum. The shaft is then turned down and a collar manufactured to couple it to the drive spline on a chainsaw. We’re pleased to see that the chainsaw isn’t modified in this build, instead the blade is simply unscrewed and the winch attached in a reversible process. Finally, the original drum is deemed too small for the application, so a new drum is fabricated. We see the result on a Poli...

Smartphone App for Leftover Vaccinations

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South Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency  launched a pilot program yesterday to minimize vaccination waste using a nationwide smartphone app. People who are over 30 years of age can search for leftover doses on their smartphones. If any are available, they can book an appointment immediately within the app, and then get to the medical center within hours to receive the injection. One can tag up to five nearby inoculation centers to receive an instant message when a dose becomes available. These leftover doses arise from people who have missed their appointment, but also just as you would expect when considering the short shelf life of the opened vaccine, the number of doses per vial, and modulo arithmetic. Within hours of the program rolling out, people began complaining about server problems and the lack of available doses. But this is a pilot program, after all, so some glitches are to be expected. The full program is supposed to begin on June 9th, although it...

Better Solvents Could Lead to Cleaner, Greener Perovskite Solar Cells

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Regardless of appearances, almost all scientific progress comes at a price. That which is hailed as a breakthrough technology that will save the planet or improve the lots of those living upon it almost always comes at a cost, which sometimes greatly outweighs the purported benefits of the advancement. Luckily, though, solving these kinds of problems is what scientists and engineers live for, and in the case of the potentially breakthrough technology behind perovskite solar cells (PSCs), that diligence has resulted in a cleaner and safer way to manufacture them . We’ve covered the technology of perovskites in the past, but briefly, as related to photovoltaic cells, they’re synthetic crystals of organometallic cations bonded to a halide anion, so something like methylammonium lead tribromide. These materials have a large direct bandgap, which means a thin layer of the stuff can absorb as much solar energy as a much thicker layer of monocrystalline silicon — hence the intense interest...

Hackaday Links: May 30, 2021

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That collective “Phew!” you heard this week was probably everyone on the Mars Ingenuity helicopter team letting out a sigh of relief while watching telemetry from the sixth and somewhat shaky flight of the UAV above Jezero crater. With Ingenuity now in an “operations demonstration” phase , the sixth flight was to stretch the limits of what the craft can do and learn how it can be used to scout out potential sites to explore for its robot buddy on the surface, Perseverance. While the aircraft was performing its 150 m move to the southwest, the stream from the downward-looking navigation camera dropped a single frame. By itself, that wouldn’t have been so bad, but the glitch caused subsequent frames to come in with the wrong timestamps. This apparently confused the hell out of the flight controller, which commanded some pretty dramatic moves in the roll and pitch axes — up to 20° off normal. Thankfully, the flight controller was designed to handle just such an anomaly, and the aircraf...

Neural Networks Emulate Any Guitar Pedal for $120

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It’s a well-established fact that a guitarist’s acumen can be accurately gauged by the size of their pedal board- the more stompboxes, the better the player. Why have one box that can do everything when you can have many that do just a few things? Jokes aside, the idea of replacing an entire pedal collection with a single box is nothing new. Your standard, old-school stompbox is an analog affair, using a combination of filters and amplifiers to achieve a certain sound. Some modern multi-effects processors use software models of older pedals to replicate their sound. These digital pedals have been around since the 90s, but none have been quite like the NeuralPi project. Just released by [GuitarML], the NeuralPi takes about $120 of hardware (including — you guessed it — a Raspberry Pi) and transforms it into the perfect pedal. The key here, of course, is neural networks. The LSTM at the core of NeuralPi can be trained on any pedal you’ve got laying around to accurately reproduce its ...

Bicycle Flywheel Stores A Bit of Energy, Not Much

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Kinetic energy recovery systems have often been proposed as a useful way to improve the efficiency of on-road vehicles, and even used to great effect in motorsports for added performance. [Tom Stanton] decided to build one of his own, outfitting a simple bicycle with a flywheel system for harvesting energy. (Video, embedded below.) The system consists of a 300 mm steel flywheel mounted in the center of the bike’s frame. It’s connected to the rear wheel via a chain and a clutch which [Tom] assembled himself using bicycle disc brake components. The clutch is controlled by a handlebar lever, allowing the rider to slow the bike by charging the flywheel, or to charge the flywheel to maximum speed by pedalling hard with the clutch engaged. The actual utility of the flywheel is minimal; [Tom] notes that even at its peak speed of 2200 RPM, the flywheel stores a small fraction of the energy content of a AA battery. Practical demonstration shows the flywheel is only able to deliver a small p...

Aircraft Compass Teardown

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We didn’t know what a C-2400 LP was before we saw [David’s] video below, but it turned out to be pretty interesting. The device is an aircraft compass and after replacing it, he decided to take it apart for us. Turns out, that like a nautical compass, these devices need adjustment for all the metal around them. But while a ship’s compass has huge steel balls for that purpose, the tiny and lightweight aviation compass has to be a bit more parsimonious. The little device that stands in for a binnacle’s compensators — often called Kelvin’s balls — is almost like a mechanical watch. Tiny gears and ratchets, all in brass. Apparently, the device is pretty reliable since the date on this one is 1966. The brass compensation device was stripped, but you can still buy the unit for about $80, so it was possible to repair the device. [Dave], however, put a more modern compass in his cockpit. Of course, these days you don’t actually need a floating magnet to make a compass. Turns out, the Ear...

Tiny PCB Motor Robot Is Making It’s First Wobbly Moves

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[Carl Bugeja] has been working on his PCB motors for more than three years now, and it doesn’t seem like he is close to running out of ideas for the project. His latest creation is a tiny Bluetooth-controlled robot built around two of these motors. One of the main challenges of these axial flux PCB motors is their low torque output, so [Carl] had to make the robot as light as possible. The main board contains a microcontroller module with integrated Bluetooth, an IMU, regulator, and two motor drivers. The motor stator boards are soldered to the main board using 90° header pins. The frame for the body and the rotors for the motors are 3D printed. A set of four neodymium magnets and a bearing is press-fit into each rotor. The motor shafts are off-the-shelf PCB pins with one end soldered to the stator board. Power comes from a small single-cell lipo battery attached to the main board. The robot moves, but with a jerking motion, and keeps making unintended turns. The primary cause of t...

Small Swedish Stores are Miniature Oases in a National Food Desert

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It all started one night in 2016 after [Robert Ilijason] dropped the last remaining jar of baby food in the house, breaking it. On the 20-minute drive to the nearest supermarket, he had an idea: what if there were small, 24-hour convenience-level grocery stores that could fill the glaring need for access to basics across the country? Sweden has lost a few thousand smaller grocery stores in the last 25 years or so, mostly in rural areas. For many people living outside the cities, the nearest place to buy milk is several miles away, at a huge supermarket that’s either in a city, or close to it. After [Robert] built Sweden’s first 24-hour unmanned convenience store, the idea received quite a bit of attention media attention. Five years and a pandemic later, the concept is still going strong. A chain of 30 of these bite-sized bodegas have popped up all over Sweden, run by a company called Lifvs. They have no staff at all, not even a cashier . Instead, shoppers unlock the door with thei...

Spell Checking Your Programming from the Linux Command Line

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For most of us who didn’t do well in high school English class, spell checkers are a real game-changer. Sure, you can still swap a “to” and a “too,” but a spell checker will catch a lot of typos. But what about in your source code? You usually don’t spell check source code and even if you did, the rules are funny. After all, “my_proejct” is a perfectly fine variable name, but you probably meant “my_project.” That’s where a program called typos comes in. It aims to be a spell checker for source code that is fast enough and with a low enough false positive rate that you can run it against changed code and reject spelling problems. Sure, if “my_proejct” is a one-time typo, the compiler or interpreter will probably catch it. But it won’t catch comments and it also won’t catch something you spell wrong consistently. For that you need something like typos. You can include a custom dictionary and also per-language dictionaries. It is aware of camel case and snake case and knows to ignore...

Chainsaw Cuts More Than Timber

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We often take electricity for granted, to the point of walking into a room during a power outage and still habitually flipping the light switch. On the other hand, there are plenty of places where electricity isn’t a given, either due to poor infrastructure or an otherwise remote location. To get common electric power tools to work in areas like these requires some ingenuity like that seen in this build which converts a chainsaw to a gas-driven grinder that can be used for cutting steel or concrete . (Video, embedded below.) All of the parts needed for the conversion were built in the machine shop of [Workshop from scratch]. A non-cutting chain was fitted to it first to drive the cutting wheel rather than cut directly, so a new bar had to be fabricated. After that, the build shows the methods for attaching bearings and securing the entire assembly back to the gas-powered motor. Of course there is also a custom shield for the grinding wheel and also a protective housing for the chain ...

Retrotechtacular: The Drama of Metal Forming

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It may seem overwrought, but The Drama of Metal Forming actually is pretty dramatic. This film is another classic of mid-century corporate communications that was typically shown in schools, which the sponsor — in this case Shell Oil — seeks to make a point about the inevitable march of progress, and succeeds mainly in showing children and young adults what lay in store for them as they entered a working world that needed strong backs more than anything. Despite the narrator’s accent, the factories shown appear to be in England, and the work performed therein is a brutal yet beautiful ballet of carefully coordinated moves. The sheer power of the slabbing mills at the start of the film is staggering, especially when we’re told that the ingots the mill is slinging about effortlessly weigh in at 14 tons apiece. Seeing metal from the same ingots shooting through the last section of a roller mill at high speed before being rolled into coils gives one pause, too; the catastrophe that wou...

Reviving Old Recipe for Faraday Wax Keeps Vacuum Experiments Going

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Science today seems to be dominated by big budgets and exotics supplies and materials, the likes of which the home gamer has trouble procuring. But back in the day, science was once done very much by the seats of the pants, using whatever was available for the job. And as it turns out, some of the materials the old-timers used are actually still pretty useful. An example of this is a homemade version of “Faraday Wax” , which [ChristofferB] is using for his high vacuum experiments. As you can imagine, getting a tight seal on fittings is critical to maintaining a vacuum, a job that’s usually left to expensive synthetic epoxy compounds. Realizing that a lot of scientific progress was made well before these compounds were commercially available, [ChristofferB] trolled through old scientific literature to find out how it used to be done. This led to a recipe for “Faraday Wax”, first described by the great scientist himself in 1827. The ingredients seem a little archaic, but are actually ...

Robot Moves In Any Direction On Ball Wheels

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The ability to move in any direction and turn on the spot is a helpful feature on robots that operate indoors around other objects. [James Bruton] demonstrated one possible solution in the form of a robot chassis that can move in any direction with three ball-shaped wheels . The video after the break is part two of this series. Part one covered the ball wheels themselves, consisting of a pair of half-spheres that can rotate independently with a small roller in the center of each and a driven shaft through the center of the sphere. Three of these are arranged at 120° intervals around the center of the robot, with the main shafts driven by geared DC motors using belts. To move in a straight line some basic trigonometry is used to calculate the required relative speed of each wheel. An Arduino Mega is used to do the necessary calculation when receiving input from the wireless controller. The motion is remarkably smooth, and we’d be interested to see how it compares with Mecanum  a...

Living Robots: Revisiting BEAM

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You’re hit by the global IC shortage , reduced to using stone knives and bearskins, but you still want to make something neat? It’s time to revisit BEAM robots . Biology, electronics, aesthetics, and mechanics — Mark Tilden came up with the idea of minimalist electronic creatures that, through inter-coupled weak control systems and clever mechanical setups, could mimic living bugs. And that’s not so crazy if you think about how many nerves something like a cockroach or an earthworm have. Yet their collection of sensors, motors, and skeletons makes for some pretty interesting behavior. My favorite BEAM bots have always been the solar-powered ones. They move slowly or infrequently, but also inexorably, under solar power. In that way, they’re the most “alive”. Part of the design trick is to make sure they stay near their food (the sun) and don’t get stuck. One of my favorite styles is the “photovore” or “photopopper”, because they provide amazing bang for the buck . Back in the heyda...

Solar Plane Is Like One Big Flying Solar Panel

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Solar-powered plane concepts typically focus on high-efficiency glider-type designs, so as to make the best possible use of the limited power available from the sun. [rctestflight] wanted to try a different school of thought, instead building a relatively inefficient plane that nonetheless packed a huge amount of solar panels on board. The plane consisted of a pizza-box style design, with a simple foam rectangular wing that was absolutely covered in solar panels. The plane was controlled with an off-the-shelf autopilot, and fitted with cheap, no-brand MPPT modules to handle charging the batteries. The plane faced difficulties in flight, most often with stability, which led to the autopilot getting the plane lost on one occasion. However, one flight was achieved with a full one hour and thirty minute duration, indicating the solar panels were helping to extend flight times beyond what was capable with batteries alone. Further research on the ground showed that the cheap MPPT modules ...

3D Printed Flip Dots

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Displays have come a long way in the last few decades, but none can deliver the mesmerizing visual and audio experience of a large flip dot display. Both old panels and new panels can be expensive and difficult to source, so [Larry Builds] made his own flip dots with the help of 3D printing . Flip dots are driven by a pair of electromagnetic posts that attract or repel a magnet embedded in the dot, and [Larry Builds] version is no different. For the electromagnets, he used M3 threaded rod with enamel wire wound around them using a drill. At first, he used a large magnet in the center of the 3D printed dot, but the magnetic field was large and strong enough to flip the surrounding dots in an array. He then changed the design to a small 4 mm diameter magnet in the edge that aligns directly with the electromagnets. This design looks very similar to those used by Breakfast for their massive installations . By modifying electromagnets and adding spacers around the magnets, he was able to ...