Real Time Trends Network

For poor [workshop from scratch], winter brings the joy of a cold workshop. Since the building is structurally made from tin, warming up the room is difficult. Naturally, the solution was to construct a homemade wood furnace . The build starts off with an angle grinder being taken to a compressed air tank. After sawing off the top and sanding down the edges, the builder slices out an opening and welds together some rods into a stand for the center. He then proceeds to weld some external frames for the furnace, as well as a chimney stack, some nifty covers joined by hinges, and a fan/temperature regulator to keep the fire going. Most of the pieces seem to come from scrap metal lying around the workshop, although the degree to which the entire project comes together is quite smooth. Some filter and spray paint do the trick for cleaning up the furnace and making it look less scrappy. The last step? A stack of wooden logs and a blow torch to start the fun. Outside of the furnace, an LCD

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Malware embedded in office documents has been a popular attack for years. Many of those attacks have been fixed, and essentially all the current attacks are unworkable when a document is opened in protected view. There are ways around this, like putting a notice at the top of a document, requesting that the user turn off protected view. [Curtis Brazzell] has been researching phishing, and how attacks can work around mitigations like protected view. He noticed that one of his booby-trapped documents phoned home before it was opened. How exactly? The preview pane. The Windows Explorer interface has a built-in preview pane, and it helpfully supports Microsoft Office formats. The problem is that the preview isn’t generated using protected view, at least when previewing Word documents. Generating the preview is enough to trigger loading of remote content, and could feasibly be used to trigger other vulnerabilities. [Curtis] notified Microsoft about the issue, and the response was slightly

Four highschool students in Lyon France are building a CPR robot , with the aim of removing the endurance problem faced by those delivering this form of essential first aid. By every after action report, CPR is an emotionally and physically exhausting way to save a life. When someone’s heart stops beating their breathing stops too. After that there’s a very small window in which to keep just enough oxygen in the blood to prevent brain damage and organ failure. A person has to precisely position their hands and press, repeatedly, with enough force to break someone’s sternum in order to keep their heart pumping; sometimes for over fifteen minutes waiting for rescue to arrive. On top of that, depending on which school of thought they learned the technique, they may be required to also force air into the patients lungs. While this pushes the boundary of human endurance, a robot would not have the same issue. In fact, many of the existing problems are solved. CPAP Machines can force air

When you zoom in on a fractal you find it is made of more fractals. Perhaps that helped inspire the Harvard 3D printers that have various arrays of mixing nozzles. In the video below you can see some of the interesting things you can do with an array of mixing nozzles. The coolest, we think, is a little multi-legged robot that uses vacuum to ambulate across the bench. The paper , however, is behind a paywall. There are really two ideas here. Mixing nozzles are nothing new. Usually, you use them to mimic a printer with two hot ends. That is, you print one material at a time and purge the old filament out when switching to the new filament. This is often simpler than using two heads because with a two head arrangement, both the heads have to be at the same height, you must know the precise offset between the heads, and you generally lose some print space since the right head can’t cross the left head and vice versa. Add more heads, and you multiply those problems. We’ve also seen mixin

Using SPICE to simulate an electrical circuit is a common enough practice in engineering that “SPICEing a circuit” is a perfectly valid phrase in the lexicon. SPICE as a software tool has been around since the 70s, and its open source nature means there are more SPICE tools around now to count. It also means it is straightforward enough to use with other software as well, like integrating LTspice with Python for some interesting signal processing circuit simulation . [Michael]’s latest project involves simulating filters in LTspice (a SPICE derivative) and then using Python/NumPy to both provide the input signal for the filter and process the output data from it. Basically, it allows you to “plug in” a graphical analog circuit of any design into a Python script and manipulate it easily, in any way needed. SPICE programs aren’t without their clumsiness, and being able to write your own tools for manipulating circuits is a powerful tool. This project is definitely worth a look if you h

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We know, we know – “Kirlian photography” is a term loaded with pseudoscientific baggage. Paranormal researchers have longed claimed that Kirlian photography can explore the mood or emotional state of a subject through the “aura”, an energy field said to surround and emanate from all living things. It’s straight-up nonsense, of course, but that doesn’t detract from the beauty of plasma aficionado [Jay Bowles]’ images produced by capacitive coupling and corona discharge . Technically, what [Jay] is doing here is not quite Kirlian photography. The classic setup for “electrophotography” is a sandwich of photographic film, a glass plate, and a metal ground plate. An object with a high-voltage, high-frequency power supply attached is placed on top of the sandwich, and the resulting corona discharge exposes the film. [Jay]’s version is a thin chamber made of two pieces of solvent-welded acrylic and filled with water. A bolt between the acrylic panes conducts current from a Tesla coil – perha

You might associate Jonathan Barnbrook with album covers. His studio has designed plenty, from John Foxx to Cult with No Name, and every David Bowie album since 2002, including the musician’s final work, Blackstar.  Now he’s created the cover for his own album in collaboration with his partner in life and work, Anıl Aykan. The electronic music duo goes by the name Fragile Self and as debuts go, this isn’t a quiet entrance. The album comes in three formats: a CD with origami-esque pop-up packaging, a vinyl with cutout cover, and a 480-page tome with digital download. ‘In an age of music being everywhere practically for free, buying a physical product is a good way to support the artist and get something tangible back to them,’ says Barnbrook. The vinyl’s cover is structured around the Thematic Apperception Test, a psychological evaluation developed in the 1930s, whereby patients were shown ambiguous imagery and asked to construct a narrative in response. Inside the book, we

Working in a university or research laboratory on interesting, complicated problems in the sciences has a romanticized, glorified position in our culture. While the end results are certainly worth celebrating, often the process of new scientific discovery is underwhelming, if not outright tedious. That’s especially true in biology and chemistry, where scaling up sample sizes isn’t easy without a lot of human labor. A research group from Reading University was able to modify a 3D printer to take some of that labor out of the equation, though . This 3D printer was used essentially as a base, with the printing head removed and replaced with a Raspberry Pi camera. The printer X/Y axes move the camera around to all of the different sample stored in the print bed, which allows the computer attached to the printer to do most of the work that a normal human would have had to do. This allows them to scale up massively and cheaply, presumably with less tedious inputs from a large number of grad

It seems that tensegrity structures are trending online, possibly due to the seemingly impossible nature of their construction. The strings appear to levitate without any sound reason, but if you bend them just the right way they’ll succumb to gravity.  The clue is in the name. Tensegrity is a pormanteau of “tension” and “integrity” . It’s easiest to understand if you have a model in your hand — cut the strings and the structure falls apart. We’re used to thinking of integrity in terms of compression. Most man-made structures rely on this concept of engineering, from the Empire State Building to the foundation of apartment building. Tensegrity allows strain to be distributed across a structure. While buildings built from continuous compression may not show this property, more elastic structures like our bodies do. These structures can be built on top of smaller units that continuously distribute strain. Additionally, these structures can be contracted and retracted in ways that “comp

Chain sprockets are a key drivetrain component in a lot of builds. Unfortunately they can be difficult to source, particularly for those outside the reach of retailers like McMaster-Carr. In such situations, you might consider making your own. The toothed profile on a chain sprocket can be produced in a simple manner by drawing a base circle, along with a series of circles spaced appropriately for the chain in question. This involves measuring the pitch and roller diameter of the chain. With these measurements in hand, a template can be created to produce the sprocket. From there a series of holes are drilled to rough out the basic shape of the teeth, before the sprocket is then cut down to its appropriate outer diameter. The finishing work consists of chamfering the sprocket’s thickness, as well as the filing the sharp edges of the teeth for smooth engagement. It’s a quick and easy method for producing sprockets with well-defined, accurate profiles. We’ve featured other rough and r

There’s little that can compare to the sheer obnoxious thrill of mashing the DJ siren when its your turn behind the decks. We’ve certainly been guilty of abusing the privilege at local house parties, and unsurprisingly have not been invited back. If we ever get another shot, though, we’d be glad to have [lonesoulsurfer]’s dub siren at the ready. This is a build for the old-school purists. There’s no microcontrollers or digital hardware here. The synth relies on two 555 timer ICs as the oscillators and an LM741 op-amp. These parts harken right back to the dawn of the integrated circuit era, and still do a great job in this application. There’s also a cheap reverb/echo module added in to fatten up the sound. It’s all laced up in an old CB radio enclosure, with the classic woodgrain applique doing much to add to the aesthetic. It’s a build that’s simple enough for the electronics beginner, and would make a great tactile, analog addition to any DJ’s rig. If you need some wubwubs to go wi

Walking robots have a rich history both on and off the storied pages of Hackaday, but if you will pardon the expression, theirs is not a field that’s standing still. It’s always pleasing to see new approaches to old problems, and the Landbeest built by [Dejan Ristic] is a great example . It’s a four-legged walker with a gait dictated by a cam-and-follower mechanism that allows it to perform the full range of leg movement with only one motor. Each cam can control more than one leg in synchronisation, and in his most recent prototype, there are two such mechanisms that work on opposite corners of a four-legged machine. The legs are arranged in such a way that the two corner-to-corner pairs pivot at their centres in a similar manner to a pair of scissors; allowing a servo to steer the robot as it walks. The result certainly isn’t as graceful as [Theo Janssen]’s Strandbeest , from which it evidently takes inspiration for its name, but it’s no less capable for it. After the break you can

We’ve done quite a bit with Google Sheets and signal processing: we’ve generated signals, created filters, and computed quadrature signals. We can pull all that together into an educational model for two SDRs talking to each other, but it’s going to require two parts: modulation and demodulation. Guess what? We can do that with a spreadsheet. The first step is to generate a reference clock for the carrier. You’ll need a cosine wave (I) and sine wave (Q). Of course, you also need the time base. That’s columns A-C in the spreadsheet and works like other signal generation we’ve seen. The Plot Thickens Think about the IQ plot of what we have so far. Plotting IQ means putting I on the X axis of a graph and Q on the Y axis. When I=1, Q=0. That’s a spot right on the X axis at X=1. The same thing happens, but flipped around when I=-1. It also happens when I=0 and Q=1, but rotated 90 degrees. The key is that, in each case, the length of the vector is 1. Every spot, in fact, will have a leng

We have just concluded a successful Hackaday Superconference where a highlight for many was digging into this year’s hardware badge . Shaped in the general form of a Game Boy handheld gaming console, the heart of the badge is a large FPGA opening up new and exciting potential for badge hacking. Beyond our normal tools of compiling custom code or modifying hardware with a soldering iron, we now have the option to change core hardware behavior with Verilog. And people explored this new frontier to great effect, as seen at the badge hacking ceremony. (Video embedded below.) FPGAs are not new, technically speaking , why are they exciting now? We can thank their recent growth in capability, their rapidly falling cost, and the relatively new availability of open source toolchains. These developments elevated FPGA into one of the most exciting trends in hardware today, so this year’s badge master [Sprite_TM] built an open FPGA playground for several hundred of his closest Supercon friends.

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Few things carry as much sentimental value for the French as an Hermès Carré. The maison’s signature silk scarf – created in 1937 and baptised ‘Carré’ for its recognisable square shape – is a staple in many young women’s lives, often passed from mother to daughter, still in its original orange box, or given as a milestone birthday gift. It’s cherished as much by bourgeoises from the 16è arrondissement who wrap it around their necks as by headscarved bohemians. So much so, in fact, that the mere mention of a Carré is enough. No need to even say Hermès .  So it was high time – after a world tour taking on New York, Milan, Toronto, Singapore and Los Angeles – for the brand’s Carré Club to arrive in its home city of Paris with a brand new format. Until 8 December, a spacious pop up exhibition situated at the Carreau du Temple, in the heart of the Marais, celebrates the design of the iconic accessory. Conceived as an interactive installation, it includes several separate areas, each one f

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Long known for its conceptual bias, the 46th edition of the Tokyo Motorshow was again filled with Japanese brands showing full-size vehicle prototypes imagining near and far-out futures. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics just around the corner, most of those makers, especially Toyota as a key sponsor, pulled out all the stops to showcase various eco-improved mobility solutions for all of society’s needs – not just the able-bodied and young – from electric kei cars , to self-driving minivans and large fuel cell limos. Read on for the Top Ten Tokyo 2019 Motor Show concepts, as curated by Wallpaper*. Lexus LF-30
:  Pitched as a circa 2030 future electric vision concept – thus the concept’s letters and numbers – the LF-30 is what a limo-sized EV could look like in ten years’ time. With designers seizing the packaging and space opportunities afforded by in-wheel electric motors and a more compact solid-state (as opposed to lithium-ion) battery powertrain, the driver-focused four-seat cabin

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Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm. Rather than a Terminator-style apocalypse, though, it seems to be more of a useful tool for getting computers to solve problems on their own. This isn’t just for supercomputers, either. You can load AI onto some of the smallest microcontrollers as well. Tensorflow Lite is a popular tool for this, but getting it to work on your particular microcontroller can be a pain, unless you’re using an Espruino . This project adds support for Tensorflow to this class of microcontrollers without having to fuss around with obtuse build tools. Basically adding a single line of code creates an instance, all without having to compile anything or even reboot. Tensorflow is a powerful software tool for microcontrollers, and having it this accessible now is a great leap forward. So, what can you do with this tool? The team behind this build is using Tensorflow on an open smart watch that can be used to detect hand gestures and many other things. The

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It’s very unlikely that anyone will ever knock the Bund off Shanghai’s list of head-turning destinations, but that hasn’t stopped the city’s entrepreneurial developers from trying. For now, at least, pundits remain optimistic about the potential of the old Shiliupu Dock, in particular a former grease factory set prettily on the Huangpu River, its vast complex rehabilitated into a mod mix of restaurants, clubs and cafés. Here, Hong Kong-based o&o studio have unified three ground floor units into a mood-lit watering hole specialising in handcrafted beer and whiskey. The motif of a full moon floating over the river runs subtly through the décor of circular bar shelves, mirrored discs, and clouds of glass hanging off the ceiling. The robot cocktail maker is entertaining in a, well, robotic way, but greater pleasures are to be found sampling the locally brewed pale ales and tucking into chef Liang Shang Yun’s fusion Asian menu such as beef stewed with fermented red beancurd, and lamb

When did you first hear concern expressed about the prospect of explosive growth of the internet resulting in exhaustion of the stock of available IP addresses? About twenty years ago perhaps? All computers directly connected to the internet must have an individual unique address, and the IPv4 scheme used since the 1980s has a 32-bit address space that provides only 4,294,967,296 possibilities. All that growth now means that IPv4 addresses are now in short supply, and this week RIPE, the body which allocates them in Europe, has announced that it no longer has any to allocate . Instead of handing new address blocks they will instead now provide ones that have been relinquished for example by companies that have gone out of business, and parties interested can join a waiting list. Is the Internet dead then? Hardly, because of course IPv6, the replacement for IPv4, has been with us for decades and has a much larger 128-bit address space. The problem is that there is a huge installed base

The home may be the hearth, but it’s not going to be a place of safety for too long. With the abundance of connected devices making their ways into our homes, increasing levels of data may allow for more accurate methods for remote surveillance. By measuring the strength of ambient signals emitted from devices, a site can be remotely monitored for movement. That is to say, WiFi signals may soon pose a physical security vulnerability. In a study from the University of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers built on earlier studies where they could use similar techniques to “see through walls” to demonstrate a proof-of-concept for passive listening . Attackers don’t need to transmit signals or break encryptions to gain access to a victim’s location – they just need to listen to the ambient signals coming from connectedd devices, making it more difficult to track bad actors down. Typically, connected devices communicate to an access point such as a router

The origin of the term “breadboard” comes from an amusing past when wooden bread boards were swiped from kitchens and used as a canvas for radio hobbyists to roll homemade capacitors, inductors, and switches. At a period when commercial electronic components were limited, anything within reach was fair game. [Andy Flowers], call sign K0SM, recently recreated some early transmitters using the same resources and techniques from the 1920s for the Bruce Kelley 1929 QSO Party. The style of the transmitters are based on [Ralph Hartley]’s oscillator circuit built for Bell Telephone in 1915. Most of the components he uses are from the time period, and one of the tubes he uses is even one of four tubes from the first Transatlantic contact in 1923. Apart from vacuum tubes ( which could be purchased ) and meters (which could be scrounged from automobiles) [Flowers] recreated his own ferrite plate and outlet condensers for tuning the antennas. The spiderweb coils may not be as common today, but

Trains are great for hauling massive amounts of cargo from point A to point B, and occasionally, point C on weekends. But they’re not really known for climbing hills well, and anything vertical is right out. Regardless, [Can Altineller] knows what he wants and set to work, creating the 3D Printed Wall Train . The first step was to get the train to stick to a vertical surface. This was achieved with the use of neodymium magnets in the train, which are attracted to laser-cut steel plates beneath the plastic tracks. The train itself consists of a custom 3D printed locomotive, outfitted with a motor and step-down gears that drive all four wheels. Said wheels are of a conical shape, and covered with rubber to provide enough grip to overcome gravity. The project is a progression from [Cal]’s earlier four-motor build . The final result is a charming wall display, with the four-wheel drive train merrily tugging its carriages around the circular course ad infinitum. It’s a fun build, and we’d

Running until 4 December, The Susan & Cliff Freeman Collection auction features kitschy vintage handbags, accessories and perfume from the 1920s to 1980s. Reminded of the recent playful runways of designers – think Balenciaga , Comme des Garçons , Gucci – we’re raising our bidding paddles. When the power couple founded Cliff Freeman & Partners – one of the most successful New York advertising agencies during the 1980s and 90s – Susan and Cliff Freeman were celebrated for their creativity and passion for design. Famous for their eccentric taste, the Freemans extensively collected representations of mid-20th century popular culture that embodied the glamour of roaring twenties and fabulous fifties which feature throughout the auction. Anne-Marie Pommard Champagne Carrier Handbag Collection highlights include a number of handbags by 1940s surrealist designer Anne-Marie, designed to look like telephones, castles, champagne bottles and more. It was not uncommon for VIP gue

Making upgrades to a popular product line might sound like a good idea, but adding bigger/better/faster parts to an existing product can cause unforeseen problems. For example, dropping a more powerful engine in an existing car platform might seem to work at first until people start reporting that the increased torque is bending the frame. In the Raspberry Pi world, it seems that the “upgraded engine” in the Pi 4 is causing the WiFi to stop working under specific circumstances . [Enrico Zini] noticed this issue and attempted to reproduce exactly what was causing the WiFi to drop out, and after testing various Pi 4 boards, power supplies, operating system version, and a plethora of other variables, the cause was isolated to the screen resolution. Apparently at the 2560×1440 setting using HDMI, the WiFi drops out. While you could think that an SoC might not be able to handle a high resolution, WiFi, and everything else this tiny computer has to do at once. But the actual cause seems to

When fiddling around with old computers, you can occasionally find yourself in a sticky situation. What may be a simple task with today’s hardware and software can be nearly impossible given the limited resources available to machines with 20 or 30 years on the clock. That’s where [bison] recently found himself when he needed to configure a device over serial, but didn’t have any way of installing the appropriate terminal emulator on his Fujitsu Lifebook C34S. His solution, since he had Python 2.6 installed on the Debian 6 machine, was to write his own minimal serial terminal emulator . He intended for the code to be as terse as possible so it could be quickly typed in, should anyone else ever find themselves in need of talking to a serial device on Linux but can’t get screen or minicom installed. The code is very simple, and even if you never find yourself needing to fire up an impromptu terminal, it offers an interesting example of how straightforward serial communications really