Kritik sah

Although generally glass isn’t associated with touch-sensitive surfaces, the addition of an ITO (indium tin oxygen) coating adds the exciting property of not only being transparent to the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also of being electrically conductive. The logical result is that fine folk like [Sokol] simply had to use their newly acquired ITO-coated glass to make a button out of . Here the easy option is of course to just use it as a capacitive sensor where the conductive ITO layer is used for the capacitive charge and the glass provides the insulator, but here we see it demonstrated how to create a pressure-sensitive implementation instead. The measured conductivity on the ITO-coated glass in the video is pretty good, at just over 20 Ohm. This thus makes said capacitive button very easy to achieve. To make it a touch-sensitive button, two pieces of glass are used, with the ITO sides facing. Paper is used to create a spacer, after which the slight ...

We’ve likely all looked at a simple problem in our lives and thought that it would be an easy fix, only to realize that the project is enormously more complicated than we first realized. Whether that’s starting a home improvement project, doing a quick repair to a bicycle or car, or trying to install an obscure piece of software on a Linux machine, the amount of time we budget for these tasks often ends up woefully underestimated. [ Oscar ]’s night light needs to have its brightness set every night, and it seems easy enough to get a microcontroller to automate that, right ? Well, upon opening the small device, the first issue is that there is no labeling on any of the parts, so simply adding a jumper on to existing microcontroller pins without damaging anything wouldn’t easily be possible. Adding a secondary microcontroller is the next logical step, but the power supply in the night light is extremely underpowered so using even the smallest Raspberry Pi or off-t...

One thing our futuristic world is largely lacking in is droids and robot companions and the like. [solitary dev] is helping to rectify that problem by building a little robot called TongDou . As [solitary dev] tells it, TongDou is a “tiny open-source desktop gremlin.” An ESP32-S3 serves as TongDou’s brain, buried inside a tasteful brass tube chassis. An OLED display is TongDou’s face, and he uses a pair of wheels driven by gearmotors for locomotion. A speaker plays back pre-recorded voice lines, while a 24GHz radar and an IMU enables TongDou to keep track of the space it’s moving through. They are publishing the design files on Github so other makers can build their own if so desired. [solitary dev] hopes to develop TongDou into something to make a “workspace feel less dead.” It’s not dissimilar from the way studios used to use robots to liven up otherwise hackneyed movies and TV shows, and we could absolutely use some of that whimsy in...

The NES Advantage was a cool bit of hardware back in 1987, bringing an arcade stick to the home console gaming experience. Naturally they don’t get much use these days, unless of course they’ve been modded to work with modern systems, as [Aaron] has done. [Aaron]’s goals were straightforward. The stick should work with modern systems over Bluetooth, but the mod should not involve cutting the case or making any new holes. All controls, including Turbo and Slow Motion, still had to work, too, and there would be no adding extra buttons for configuration or control. To achieve this, [Aaron] whipped up a custom PCB which replaces the original cable attached to the NES Advantage. Power is via a small LiPo cell, charged via a TP4056 and paired with a TPS63900 buck-boost converter. An ESP32-WROOM-32E interfaces all the original controls, reading the stick’s CD4021 shift registers to do so. It then either emulates a Switch Pro Controller over Bluetooth Classic, for use ...

The elusive brainstem is a small, yet critical part of our brain: the slightest damage to it could prove fatal. But how it works is not fully understood today. Indian Scientists at SGBC (Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre) work to change that by producing the most detailed map of it ever seen . Instead of more costly methods, this map was created with a high-resolution microscope. Starting with three samples, (45W fetus, 9Y and 54Y) the brain stems were imaged using MRI and BFI (Block Face Imaging), then sliced into 20/40µm pieces, imaged, annotated using in-house software and added to the dataset. From a combination of these images, MRI and BFI scans, they created a 3D model of the brainstem that you can explore in your browser. The new research gives vital data needed for neurological research, and could help advance research on a wide range neurological diseases from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s. You can find the paper here , which has not yet been peer reviewed at time o...

Betacam is not the Betamax you may have had at home– it was a professional format that lived on into the 21st century, in the “SP” form. In many places, it would have been the last tape format in use. So it is perhaps understandable that [ldursw] decided to recreate an obsolete and unobtainable IC to save a Sony broadcast-grade editing Video Tape Recorder (VTR). Still mad, perhaps, but in a way we very much appreciate. The Sony BVW-75 VTR had an odd flaw where the output lacked colour, unless paused with dynamic tracking off. Then colour would appear, but only in odd stripes. Clearly the chroma circuit was at fault. Some sluthing found that a sync separator IC– that separates the sync pulses that keep everything moving together, if the name didn’t give it away– wasn’t behaving correctly. More sluthing found that the chip in question was no longer available. Luckily, the concept of a sync separator hasn’t quite given up the ghost, and ano...

As useful as USB-to-M.2 SSD adapters are, sometimes you come across a bit of a dud. A case in point is the Orico-branded TCM2-C3 that features both an attractive clear case and in its earlier revisions a JMicron controller-based circuit that apparently degrades over time, causing erratic boot behavior. After implementing a fix a few years ago, [Mark Furneaux] can happily report that the thus fixed enclosures are still working. These faulty board revisions feature the JMicron JMS583 controller IC, which has a 1.0V core voltage input pin. Apparently to save power, Orico designed the board to target the minimum ~-0.95V core voltage per the datasheet. Apparently due to component drift or degradation, this lower core voltage is after a while often not enough any more to start the controller, which thus translates into an unresponsive USB device and presumably some panic about lost data. Although [Mark] doesn’t describe the fix in detail, it entails bumping up this core voltage to s...

If you ever make it to DNA Pizza in San Francisco, you may feel as though you’re being watched. The Eye of the Pizza is Upon You. Or, it was, until the out-of-production and now very expensive spherical projector gave up the ghost during a power outage. It’s back, though ! Thanks to proprietor [Jamie Zawinski] and some cheap, absolutely-not-supposed-to-be-in-there replacement parts. The saga started long ago, back in 2017, when [Jamie] got ahold of a Gekkin WorldEye hemispherical projector . It looks like those were meant for the educational market, to show planets and the like, but [Jamie] instead put a big eye on it, thanks in part to work by [PaintYourDragon]. It looked great, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. There it sat, staring down patrons for nine long years, until the power company did what is known in the business as “an oopsie” and turned the WorldEye into an expensive paperweight. Not to be deterred, [Jamie] got the cheapest projec...

What do you do when you need to get data into an airgapped machine? Well, you might find yourself limited to basic input devices to interact with the computer in question. As [Nikolay Valentinovich Repnitskiy] demonstrates, though, you can do some fun stuff amidst such limitations. [Nikolay] created what he calls a “unidirectional network” connection via a keyboard. Specifically, he took two Dell SK-8115 keyboards, and stripped them down to their controller PCBs. On one, he soldered photoresistors to a couple of the keyboard matrix pins, such that they’d fire a keypress when lit up. He then placed the other keyboard PCB such that the Num Lock and Caps Lock LEDs are lined up with the photoresistors. This made it possible to have one PC flash the keyboard LEDs in order to “type” on the other machine. This can be used to move data on to it, such as a little program which [Nikolay] prepared which can be made executable and used to further break into the machin...

[John Dingley] has a Sony ZV-E10 camera that is excellent, but the design lacks a built-in electronic viewfinder. This means it relies entirely on its rear-mounted touchscreen for framing shots. This is troublesome because [John] often films in bright sunlight, and sometimes from a perspective other than normal eye level. His solution? Use a pair of XREAL video glasses as a handsfree viewfinder . Cable management can be a real challenge, even if a project’s technical elements are solved. The XREAL glasses look a bit unusual, but they can be worn and used like regular sunglasses. They accept external video and importantly, allow the wearer to see the video feed while still having awareness of their surroundings. Seems like a perfect match for the camera, but as [John] discovered, there are quite a few implementation hurdles involved. For starters, the camera and glasses do not speak the same format. The camera outputs HDMI via a distressingly fragile micro-HDMI connector, but th...

[Hans Scharler] came into a neat find recently—the playfield from a 1970s Atari Superman game. It’s the sort of thing that’s too nice to throw away, but isn’t really enough to reassemble into a viable full machine without a great deal of effort. Thus, [Hans] went a different route— turning it into a beautiful piece of wall art.  The first step of the build was to collect missing parts; in particular, all the plastic inserts for the playfield that had been lost at some point. Everything was cleaned up and mounted, along with some modified flippers to complete the look. Custom pop bumpers were 3D printed to act as LED-lit light guides rather than as functional pinball components. [Hans] then set about dotting the board with plenty of WS2811 addressable LEDs in a bullet form factor. Everything was placed under the command of a WLED controller, and it’s synced up to [Hans’s] CheerLights MQTT server to boot. More build details are available on the Pinside post...

This week Jonathan chats with Francois Proulx about SmokedMeat! That’s the third in a trio of Open Source security tools from Boost Security, and this one is the red team tool to demonstrate vulnerabilities. Why are Continuous Integration vulnerabilities such a persistent problem, and what’s on the horizon that may help? Watch to find out! https://github.com/boostsecurityio/poutine https://github.com/boostsecurityio/bagel https://github.com/boostsecurityio/smokedmeat Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel ? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here . Direct Download in DRM-free MP3. If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode . Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast: Spotify RSS Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed und...

Regular expressions (regexes) are an amazingly powerful way to perform operations on collections of e.g. text. Regexss can also be considered to be a programming language, even a Turing complete one. Ergo it’s perfectly acceptable to thus design a way to use regexes to run and play a game of DOOM , as [Artem Lytkin] recently did . The GitHub project page can be found here , containing the Python-based code that allows the demonstration to run, as well as the other components, including the C runtime and the 96.6 MB text string that defines a CPU’s registers, RAM, a framebuffer, the  DOOM engine compiled to this custom CPU’s instruction set and the WAD file for the game itself. The C-based driver applies the fixed, ordered list of find-and-replace rules to this string, which after more than ten-thousand of such substitutions later results in a single frame of the game. At about 80,000 substitutions per second on the given test system, that gets you to a sort-of playa...

It’s been said for centuries that you cannot think on an empty stomach, and that love goes through the stomach. Although these may seem like merely cute jabs at the simplicity of human nature, recent research in rat models by [Logan Tierno Lauer] et al. indicates that the gut may be more influential in something as fundamental as memory formation and cognitive function than previously assumed. Key to the gut-brain connection is the vagus nerve , an essential part of the autonomic nervous system that wires the brain into the body’s organs, including the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. It provides both sensory and motor fibers, so that the brain can literally sense the state of said GI tract, with various triggers as result. One of these is – as demonstrated in the paper – the release of acetylcholine ( aCh ) an important neurotransmitters in the CNS for cognitive functions including attention, memory and motivation. Using in vivo fiber photometry it was found that...

The ability to write Python on microcontrollers with the likes of MicroPython and later CiruitPython has made them much more accessible. [MakerClassCZ] brings that to game development with PicoGame. Like any good project, it starts with a problem that needs solving. Put simply, the existing CircuitPython libraries aren’t too impressive for gaming. The DisplayIO library tends to do full display refreshes, which are slow on such tiny displays, and the Stage library just wasn’t flexible enough for [MakerClassCZ]’s liking. So he built his own. PicoGame, like the others, implements the performance-sensitive things in C, but does partial updates for the screen, on its own massively increasing the framerate. On the other end, it uses fixed-point math–much cheaper than soft-float–and makes an active effort to keep the RAM usage low so Python can have it. What’s even more clever is using the downtime between sending one tiny portion of frame to calculate th...

A talk from the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK caught our eye, in which [Amy Jeskins] looked at the overlooked engineering skill of pattern cutting . She takes us through the mechanics of creating a pattern for a piece of clothing, and asks why it is not a skill taught to engineers. She’s a specialist in theatrical costume, and the talk takes us through some examples of her work before looking at the history of tailoring and pattern making. She explores flat cutting and draping a pattern on a form before coming into the present day with CAD packages designed for clothing work. It’s the social aspect of the talk that’s perhaps the most interesting, looking at how it has become a gendered skill and thus not something considered where it should belong, as engineering. We’re reminded of one of the most important additions for a healthy hackerspace, a textile room, as we’ve seen people there bridge this divide from both directions. If you have ne...

Back in the early 1980s when 8-bit home computers became affordable educational toys for children, the traditional paper publishing industry did its best to keep up. For a few brief years, there were children’s books dedicated to the innards of a computer in meticulous detail, and courtesy of [Jason Jacques] we have a chance to look at one of the lesser-known ones . The British publisher Ladybird made a series of four computer books, and while the first three had content for both the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro, the last in the series only featured the BBC. [Jason] took that book and re-imagined the missing Sinclair Spectrum version. The surprise is how deep it dives into the architecture of an 8-bit computer, and it’s refreshing to see something that’s not unduly dumbed-down for kids. We’re guessing that this would have appealed to the 5% of kids who ran with their computers rather than just playing  Jet Set Willy back then, and we’re sure a few...

After getting his hands on a rope driver module from the Apollo project era that had a big ‘Scrapped Module’ stamped on it, [Mike Stewart] was naturally left curious as to what exactly had failed in this module . Originally destined for the Apollo Guidance Computer, these Raytheon-manufactured modules were the pinnacle of space-grade high-tech of the 1960s, with requisite acceptance testing so as to not endanger a very expensive space mission. The cool part here is that the acceptance documents for the module in question (B16-B17) have been scanned in and can be found on the Internet Archive. With the part itself being potted and very much inaccessible, this document helpfully lays out the expected measurements on the module’s pins, as well as schematics and mechanical drawings. Unfortunately the reasons for the rejection were not recorded, so replicating the failing test results is required to understand the reason. NASA Rope Driver Module with suspicious explorati...

One of the disadvantages to collecting retro peripherals is that they’re not necessarily easy to use anymore. [eSPee77] changes that by retrofitting a Genius GM-6000 mouse with modern hardware , all while preserving the feel. To make this mouse without compromising on the feel of the original, means replacing the PCB with a new one while retaining the same buttons and encoders. So [eSPee77] did exactly that. At the heart of the conversion lies an nRF52840 on a custom PCB. It uses new optical sensors to read the existing quadrature encoders, and uses the same type of switch for the mouse buttons as the original. But from there, it diverges because–powered by the BLE capabilities of the nRF–this is actually a wireless mouse! And the modern features don’t end there, either. To support scrolling on a mouse which did not originally have it, you can press the middle mouse button while moving it forward/backward. Finally, as the cherry on the cake, it features an ...

For how useful USB thumb drives are for quickly toting around and copying files from one computer to another, they can be a bit of a security headache. Programs can be loaded on them with all kinds of malware; they can be obscured in some ways that are difficult to detect, and they can be set up to execute certain programs when they’re plugged in. The general wisdom is to simply avoid untrusted USB devices completely, but that sort of abstinence-only policy rarely works in the real world. If, for some reason, an untrusted USB device absolutely needs to be used, many of these security issues can be mitigated with this tool . Built by [Novamostra], the device is simple on the surface: it’s a Raspberry Pi Pico mated to a 2-in-1 USB splitter cable. But with the USB Neutralizer software they have written loaded onto the Pico, it automatically destroys the ability of any connected USB thumb drive to load files. The program works by deleting the first and last 34 Logical Block Add...

When you hear the word TV, you probably think of a big LED screen, maybe even the old CRT TVs, but in either case it’s something large and fairly complicated. However, thanks to the persistence of vision, it doesn’t have to be. In this handheld-sized project from [Ancient], the Scanwheel is born, a miniature mechanical TV that uses a spinning disk and some LEDs to produce an image. The electronics of the Scanwheel are pretty straightforward. The smarts come from a Raspberry Pi Pico, an A4988 motor driver, a couple of LEDs, and a small 21-02485 stepper motor. The Raspberry Pi Pico is used to command the motor speed as well as coordinate the LEDs to turn on at the right time. The case is 3D printed; the base includes space for the various support electronics as well as some small light baffles to ensure the LEDs don’t bleed over outside their intended area. The top of the case is a disk that includes 20 small holes spaced evenly around the perimeter at varying heights, allowing light t...

Optical cavities – two mirrors arranged to reflect light multiple times between them – form the basis of lasers and certain optical filters. Since any angle between the two mirrors results in light being scattered away, parallel alignment is essential, yet difficult to maintain. Nevertheless, [Timothy Giles] managed to 3D-print and align such an optical cavity , and used it to detect minute shifts in space and wavelength. The cavity has two semi-transparent mirrors facing towards each other. One mirror is held in a 3D-printed mount, and the other is attached to the diaphragm of a speaker with a hole drilled through the center. The hole avoids the speaker coil, and allows light exiting the optical cavity through the semi-transparent mirror to appear on a paper target, which is monitored by a webcam. On the other side of the optical cavity, a laser diode coupled to a single-mode fiber shines in through the other mirror. Alignment is challenging, but the webcam makes it easier; as the m...

At a time when so-called “artificial intelligence” seems inescapable, we were encouraged to see news that Amazon will be cracking down on third-party sellers that use AI-generated images for their product listings. They won’t be prevented from using the images, but they will need to clearly indicate that they don’t represent reality and were produced via artificial means. This comes in response to a recently enacted New York law that requires the disclosure of AI in advertisements. Will this be the end of the cat sleeping bag? But it’s not quite a clear cut as it might seem on the surface, as the New York law is actually about AI-generated people rather than products. Specifically, it’s designed to make it clear when a “synthetic performer” has been used in place of a human actor. As such, it would appear that the easiest way for Amazon sellers to dodge the new rule is to simply not include any humans in their AI slop images and videos...