Kritik sah

[Laena] and her colleagues at the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science in Melbourne, Australia used a Raspberry Pi to make a low-cost electrochemiluminescence (ECL) detector to measure inflammation markers, which could be used to detect cardiovascular disease or sepsis early enough to give doctors a better chance at saving a patient’s life. ECL reactions emit light as a result of an electrically-activated chemical reaction, making them very useful for detecting biochemical markers in blood, saliva, or other biological samples.  ECL setups are fundamentally fairly straightforward. The device includes a voltage reference generator to initiate the chemical reaction and a photomultiplier tube (PMT) to measure the emitted light. The PMT outputs a current which is then converted to a voltage using a transimpedance amplifier (TIA). That signal is then sampled by the DAQCplate expansion board and the live output can be viewed in ppLOGGER in real-time. Using the RPi allowed the tea...

[Chris Gammell] moderated the KiCad 2022 End-of-Year Recap with several KiCad developers and librarians. They reviewed what’s been bubbling up in the nightly KiCad 6 builds, what we can expect from KiCad 7, and even answered some questions from the user community. Over the course of 2022, the KiCad project has grown both its development team and library team. The project even has a preliminary support commitment from the CERN Drawing Office! Improvements to the KiCad Schematic Editor include smart wire dragging that simplifies moving components around within schematic diagrams. Components selected in the schematic now remain selected while switching to the PCB Editor. Internal documentation of schematics has advanced with support for fonts, embedded graphics, and the inclusion of hypertext links to datasheets and other reference materials. New features for PDF generation offer interactive files and links between sheets. A new search panel within the KiCad PCB Editor supports findin...

Say, you’re starting your electronics journey with a few projects in mind. You have an ESP8266 board like the Wemos D1, a LiIon battery, you want to build a small battery-powered sensor that wakes up every few minutes to do something, and you don’t want to delve into hardware too much for now. Well then, does [Mads Chr. Olesen] have a tutorial for you! Here, you’ll learn the quick and easy way to get your sensor up and running, learn a few tricks for doing sleep Arduino environment, and even calculate how long your specific battery could last. You’ll need a TP4056 board, providing charging and battery protection features, a jumper, and maybe a pushbutton – the Fritzing diagram shows everything you’d like to know. From there, you have examples on using deep sleep, do pushbutton or sensor-driven wakeup, manage WiFi, and even read the battery voltage – all of these are a single line of code away, and you learn the few important caveats there are. In the end, there’s even an embedded ca...

Sometimes you pick a project because the world needs it to be done. Or maybe you or a friend need it. Or maybe you don’t really need it, but it fulfills a longstanding dream. In my mind, the last stop before you reach “why am I doing this” is the “just because” hack. The ideal “just because” hack is limited in scope. You don’t want to spend years on a whimsical project, and because of this a “just because” hack isn’t usually motivating enough to keep you going that long anyway, except for the tenacious few. A “just because” doesn’t necessarily have to be an easy win, but it makes sense for you to see your way out before you get in too deep. I’m not sure if it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or not, but in the last week or so in the Hackaday universe, a lot of people have been singing the praises of “just because” hacks. ( Check out this one discussion , for instance.) Mostly, it’s a combination of them turning out better than initially thought, or it’s about the learning that came...

Ever want to play with an FPGA, but don’t have the hardware? Now, if you have one of those ever-abundant Pi Picos, you can start playing with Verilog without getting an FPGA board. The FakePGA project by [tvlad1234], based on the Verilator toolkit, provides you with a way to compile Verilog into C++ for the RP2040. FakePGA even integrates RP2040 GPIOs so that they work as digital pins for the simulated GPIOs, making it a significant step up from computer-aided FPGA code simulation [tvlad1234] provides instructions for setting this up with Linux – Windows, though untested, could theoretically run this through WSL. Maximum clock speed is 5KHz – not much, but way better than not having any hardware to test with. Everything you’d want is in the GitHub repo – setup instructions, Verilog code requirements, and a few configuration caveats to keep in mind. We cover a lot of projects where FPGAs are used to emulate hardware of various kinds, from ISA cards to an entire Game Boy .  CPU ...

In the shift away from fossil fuel energy sources, there has been a huge expansion in solar power. We’ve seen solar thermal plants in the desert and photovoltaic panel farms covering huge areas of land, but perhaps the most potential comes from placing the panels on rooftops. In some parts of the world this is encouraged through a system of subsidies, as is the case in Italy. But what if your building is part of a protected world heritage site such as the Roman city of Pompeii? The answer comes in the form of traditional roof tiles that hide their photovoltaic elements under a polymer skin that looks for all the world like a traditional Roman pan tile. As is so often the case with such products, the manufacturer’s description page is cagey about the details in the name of protecting their invention. What they do tell us is that the tile uses conventional solar cells mounted underneath the polymer layer, which is described as “ opaque at the sight but translucent to sun rays “. This ...

Electron is software for running web-written apps in the same way as native ones, and has gotten plenty of bad press for its RAM appetite around these parts. But while the execution might leave something to be desired, the concept itself is quite solid —  if you’ve already got code written for the web, a quick and easy way to bring it over to the desktop would be very valuable. Which is why [CanadaHonk] is building a framework called Gluon , which aims to turn your web pages into desktop apps with little to no effort. We’ve seen their work a few months ago with the OpenASAR project, hacking the Discord desktop app to speed it up. Drawing from that experience, Gluon is built to be lean – with apps having low RAM and storage footprints, lightning-speed build times, and a no-nonsense API. One of the coolest parts is that it’s able to use your system-installed browser, and not a bundled-in one like Electron. Firefox support is firmly on the roadmap, too, currently in experimental s...

The ubiquity of ransomware continues, this time with The Guardian announcing they were partially shut down from an attack. Staff are working from home as the incident is being investigated and data is recovered. Publishing seems to be continuing, and the print paper ran as expected. There have been a couple reports published recently on how ransomware and other malware is distributed, the first being a public service announcement from the FBI , detailing what might be a blindly obvious attack vector — search engine advertising. A bad actor picks a company or common search term, pays for placement on a search engine, and then builds a fake web site that looks legitimate. For bonus points, this uses a typosquatted domain, like adobe[dot]cm or a punycode domain that looks even closer to the real thing. The FBI has a trio of recommendations, one of which I whole-heartedly agree with. Their first suggestion is to inspect links before clicking them, which is great, except for the punycod...

If you were ever looking for a small relaxing evening project that you could then use day-to-day, you gotta consider the Pico Hat Pad kit by [Natalie the Nerd] . It fits squarely within the Pi Pico form-factor, giving you two buttons, one rotary encoder and two individually addressable LEDs to play with. Initially, this macropad was intended as an under-$20 device that’s also a soldering practice kit, and [Natalie] has knocked it out of the park. You build this macropad out of a stack of three PCBs — the middle one connecting the Pi Pico heart to the buttons, encoders and LEDs, and the remaining ones adding structural support and protection. All the PCBs fit together into a neat tab-connected panel — ready to be thrown into your favorite PCB service’s shopping cart. Under the hood, this macropad uses KMK, a CircuitPython-based keyboard firmware, with the configuration open-source. In fact everything is open-source, just the way we like it. If you find yourself with an unexpected...

The modern TV news studio is a masterpiece of live video and CGI, as networks vie for the flashiest presentation. BBC News in London is no exception, and embraced the future in 2013 to the extent of replacing its flesh-and-blood camera operators with robotic cameras. On the face of it this made sense; it was cheaper, and newsroom cameras are most likely to record as set range of very similar shots. A decade later they’re to be retired in a victory for humans , as the corporation tires of the stream of viral fails leaving presenters scrambling to catch up. A media story might seem slim pickings for Hackaday readers, however there’s food for thought in there for the technically minded. It seems the cameras had a set of pre-programmed maneuvers which the production teams could select for their different shots, and it was too easy for the wrong one to be enabled. There’s also a suggestion that the age of the system might have something to do with it, but this is somewhat undermined by th...

A KVM is a great tool for administering a number of different computers without cluttering one’s desk with extra peripherals, or for having to re-connect the keyboard, video, and mouse to each new machine as needed. For local administration this can save a ton of time and headache. For remote administration, though, a virtual KVM is needed, and although these solutions are pricey it’s possible to build one around a Raspberry Pi for a fraction of the cost. This one adds even more functionality by also switching the ATX signals from the motherboard and simplifying cable management to boot. While the PiKVM that we’ve featured before does include the ability to switch these signals to remotely power the computer on or off or reset it, as well as monitor the status LEDs, this project from [vileer] simplifies the design somewhat. By using the built-in USB 3.0 multiplexer, these signals can be integrated with the USB 2.0 needed for the keyboard and mouse into the same RJ45 cable, eliminati...

[PWalsh] was using his lasercutter to cut acrylic, expecting the cuts to have a pleasantly smooth edge. Alas, the edges turned out to be wobbly and sandpaper-like, not smooth in the slightnest. Bummer! Internet suggested a stepper motor swap, but not much in the way of insights – and that would’ve been a royal pain for sure. How would you approach debugging such a problem? Well, [PWalsh] didn’t want to swap crucial components willy-nilly, going the scientific way instead, and breaks it down for us. Having compiled an extensive list of possible places to look for a fault in, he started going through fundamental assumptions. Do other lasercutters experience this issue? No, even the cheap ones can cut things properly. Is it water level causing intermittent cooling? Nope, not that. Is it the stepping settings? Tweaked, not that. Laser pulsing frequency? No dice. Air assist? Yes! Somehow, air assist was causing the jagged edges, and merely unplugging it turned the cut edge into a smooth...

If nothing else good came out of 2020, we can say that we at least have “ Instrument of the People ” — some 1967-era footage of Gibson Guitars’ “craftory”, which was discovered sometime in the fall of 2020. It appears a bit boring at first — a suit slowly approaches the camera on a dimly-lit factory floor and you half-expect an ‘oh, I didn’t see you there’ type of introduction, but no. When he reaches the foreground, he finds a candy apple-red Gibson semi-hollow body guitar waiting for him. After giving the thing a quick once over, he assesses the straightness of the neck and then begins shredding on it, fingerpicking style. If you like this or any type of guitar music, then hang on to your headstock, because it lilts nonstop throughout this 20-minute tour as we see a parade of nameless, and often headless, players showing their stuff on various styles of Gibson both electric and acoustic. The narrator gets down to business soon enough, and we find out that the first of roughly 150...

While packing merch for a recent gig, I realised I had the opportunity to do something a little fun. I’d released an album on tape, and spent a little extra to ensure the cassette itself was a thing of beauty. It deserved to be seen, rather than hidden away in a case on a shelf. I wanted to turn this piece of musical media into a necklace. Of course, cassette tapes aren’t meant to be used in this way. Simply throwing a chain through the cassette would lead to tape reeling out everywhere. Thus, I fired up some CAD software and engineered a solution to do the job! Here’s how I built an adapter to turn any cassette tape into a cool necklace. Find the design on Thingiverse , and more details below! Wear it Proud My plan was simple. I would create a plastic device that would insert into the two reels of the cassette tape, holding them in place. A pair of caps would then be screwed on from the other side to hold the plastic device in the cassette tape. This device would then have a ho...

If your answer to the question “When did you last shoot a roll of film” is “Less than two decades ago”, the chances are that you’re a camera enthusiast, and that the camera you used was quite old. Such has been the switch from film to digital, that the new film camera is a rarity. Pentax think there may be an opening in the older format though, as they’ve announced in the videos below the break that they’re working on a fresh range of film cameras to serve the enthusiast market . We don’t know the economics of the camera business, but we’re certainly interested to see what they come up with. In a world that’s still awash with cheap film cameras from a few decades ago, whatever they produce will have to be good, but given that it’s Pentax who are making the announcement we’re guessing the quality will be of a high standard. Perhaps more interesting in the revival of interest in film is that it comes at a point when designing and making your own camera has almost never been easier. If...

Thanks to modern microcontrollers, basic home automation tasks such as turning lights on and off, opening blinds, and various other simple tasks have become common DIY projects. But with the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning the amount of tasks that can be offloaded to computers has skyrocketed. This shopping cart that automates away the checkout lines at grocery stores certainly fits into this category. The project was inspired by the cashierless Amazon stores where customers simply walk into a store, grab what they want, and leave. This is made possible by the fact that computers monitor their purchases and charge them automatically, but creator [kutluhan_aktar] wanted to explore a way of doing this without a fleet of sensors and cameras all over a store. By mounting the hardware to a shopping cart instead, the sensors travel with the shopper and monitor what’s placed in the cart instead of what’s taken from a shelf. It’s built around the OpenMV Cam H7, a micr...

Folks from [Adafruit] are showing off a neat hack – USB host on RP2040, using the now-famous PIO peripheral. [Adafruit] builds a lot of RP2040 boards, and naturally, you gotta test them before you ship them to customers. They’ve been using very specific Teensies for that, and at some point, those became unobtainium. Based on the work of [sekigon-gonnoc] and with help of [Thach], they’ve made their TinyUSB library support bitbanging of USB over PIO, and successfully ported their test jig firmware to it! The base Pico-PIO-USB repo by [sekigon-gonnoc] shows a pretty impressive state of affairs – with low-speed and full-speed USB host and full-speed USB device modes supported, and quite a few examples to get you started. [Adafruit]’s work integrates this code into their TinyUSB stack, specifically focusing on MST (mass storage) features – as this is what you need to program a RP2040. Of course, they also provide a mass storage example to boot! Test jigs are pretty important to have...

Call it fake or simply new, but when [DusteD] set out to build a brand-new Commodore 64 with only new parts, it resulted in Project MaxFake64 that is electrically and binary compatible with any genuine C64 out there. While not really ‘fake’ in the sense that a C64 emulator is fake, it is in the sense that it uses no parts produced before this millennium. This might actually be easier than getting a used C64 in fully working condition these days. In total, the project contains an aftermarket C64 power supply by Electroware, a brand new C64C case, a C64 (ASSY NO 250407) mainboard based on the genuine board, a generic RF modular module, an FPGA-based  Kawari VIC-II replacement, a 6502 MPU using a 6502-to-6510 adapter by Monotech PCs, a dual-GAL-based PLA replacement, EPROMs for the kernal, character and BASIC ROMs (with in-socket hacks), and a SinSID Nano as (temporary) SID replacement. Issues discovered during the process include some cracking on the (transparent) C64C case and ...

Model railroaders typically observe their project from high above. It would be neat to see what the world looks like to the residents of your little town, but getting down to their point of view is difficult, especially if you’re working in one of the smaller scales. For those working in the N scale, there’s now an easy way of observing your project as the train driver would see it: [Vassily98] managed to squeeze a wireless camera into an N-scale railcar . The main challenge here was the extremely limited space available: the track in N-scale layouts is 9 mm wide, meaning that the whole system had to fit in just 23 x 20 mm 2 , the frontal area of a typical train car. One of the few cameras that fit within that profile was the RunCam Nano 4, which [Vassily98] connected to an ultra-tiny Team BlackSheep 5.8 GHz video transmitter. It’s a bit of a sqeueeze, but everything fits perfectly. Everything is powered through a 3.6 V lithium battery, rather than through the rails – cameras an...