Monthly Archives: December 2016

Move A Robotic Hand With Your Nerve Impulses

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

Many of us will have seen robotics or prosthetics operated by the electrical impulses detected from a person’s nerves, or their brain. In one form or another they are a staple of both mass-market technology news coverage and science fiction.

The point the TV journalists and the sci-fi authors fail to address though is this: how does it work? On a simple level they might say that the signal from an individual nerve is picked up just as though it were a wire in a loom, and sent to the prosthetic. But that’s a for-the-children explanation which is rather …read more

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Posted in bci, bruce land, Medical hacks, mind control, nerve control, prosthetic hand | Leave a comment

Anti-Emulation Tricks on GBA-Ported NES Games

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

Emulation is a difficult thing to do, particularly when you’re trying to emulate a complex platform like a game console, with little to no public documentation available. Often, you’ll have to figure things out by brute force and dumb luck, and from time to time everything will come unstuck when a random piece of software throws up an edge case that brings everything screeching to a halt.

The Classic NES series was a handful of Nintendo Entertainment System games ported to the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s. What makes them unique is a series of deliberately obtuse programming …read more

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Posted in emulation, emulator, game boy, game boy advance, gaming, handhelds hacks, nes, nintendo gameboy hacks | Leave a comment

PSA: Don’t Let Kids Eat Lithium Batteries

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

We get a lot of press releases at Hackaday, but this one was horrific enough that we thought it was worth sharing. Apparently, some kids are accidentally eating lithium coin cell batteries. When this happens with bigger cells, usually greater than 20 millimeters (CR2032, CR2025, and CR2016) really bad things happen. Like burning esophaguses, and even death.

The National Capital Poison Center has done some research on this, and found that 14% of batteries swallowed over the past two years came from flameless candles like the ones above. We know some of our readers also deal with batteries in open …read more

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Posted in batteries, coin cell, flameless candle, Medical hacks, PSA, safety | Leave a comment

8008 Exposed

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

[Ken Shirriff] is no stranger to Hackaday. His latest blog post is just the kind of thing we expect from him: a tear down of the venerable 8008 CPU. We suspect [Ken’s] earlier post on early CPUs pointed out the lack of a good 8008 die photo. Of course, he wasn’t satisfied to just snap the picture. He also does an analysis of the different constructs on the die.

Ever wonder why the 8008 ALU is laid out in a triangle shape? In all fairness, you probably haven’t, but you might after you look at the photomicrograph of the die. …read more

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Posted in 8008, decapsulation, die, ic, ken shirriff, Microcontrollers, photomicroscopy | Leave a comment

33C3: Works for Me

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

The Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) is the largest German hacker convention by a wide margin, and it’s now in its thirty-third year, hence 33C3. The Congress is a techno-utopian-anarchist-rave with a social conscience and a strong underpinning of straight-up hacking. In short, there’s something for everyone, and that’s partly because a CCC is like a hacker Rorschach test: everyone brings what they want to the CCC, figuratively and literally. Somehow the contributions of 12,000 people all hang together, more or less. The first “C” does stand for chaos, after all.

What brings these disparate types to Hamburg are the intersections …read more

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Posted in 33C3, ccc, chaos communication congress, conference, cons, Featured, games, Hackerspaces | Leave a comment

Sorting Resistors with 3D Printing and a PIC

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

If you aren’t old enough to remember programming FORTRAN on punched cards, you might be surprised that while a standard card had 80 characters, FORTRAN programs only used 72 characters per card. The reason for this was simple: keypunches could automatically put a sequence number in the last 8 characters. Why do you care? If you drop your box of cards walking across the quad, you can use a machine to sort on those last 8 characters and put the deck back in the right order.

These days, that’s not a real problem. However, we have spilled one of those …read more

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Posted in 3d Printer hacks, bruce land, cornell, Microcontrollers, Resistor sorter, resistors, tool hacks | Leave a comment

Mike Szczys on the State of the Hackaday

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

Hey, that’s me! I had the honor of giving a talk at the Hackaday SuperConference in November about our editorial direction over the past year and looking towards the next. At any given time we have about 20-25 people writing articles for Hackaday. We depend on their judgment, experience, and skill to keep Hackaday fresh. It would be wonderful if you would join me in thanking all of the writers and editors for a great year by leaving your well-wishes in the comments.

Take a look at the video of the talk, then join me below for a few more …read more

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Posted in 2016 Hackaday SuperConference, cons, Hackaday Columns, Hackaday's Editorial Vision, State of the Union | Leave a comment

Reflow Soldering at Another Level

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

We’re used to reflow soldering of our PCBs at the hacker level, for quite a few years people have been reflowing with toaster ovens, skillets, and similar pieces of domestic equipment and equipping them with temperature controllers and timers. We take one or two boards, screen print a layer of solder paste on the pads by using a stencil, and place our surface-mount components with a pair of tweezers before putting them in the oven. It’s a process that requires  care and attention, but it’s fairly straightforward once mastered and we can create small runs of high quality boards.

But …read more

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Posted in assembly, Featured, reflow, reflow soldering, Skills, smd, smd parts, soldering | Leave a comment

Fully 3D Printed Snow Blower

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

For anyone living in cooler climates, the annual onslaught of snow means many hours shoveling driveways and sidewalks. After a light snow, shoveling might seem a waste of time, while a snow blower would be overkill. If only there were a happy middle ground that required minimal effort; perhaps an RC snow groomer with a 3D printed snow blower would work.

We featured an earlier version of this project last year. This year’s model features a slipper clutch — combined with a differential from a heavy RC truck — to forestall damage to the attachment if you happen to hit …read more

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Posted in 3d Printer hacks, misc hacks, remote controlled, Shoveling, snow, snow blower, Snow Cat | Leave a comment

33C3: If You Can’t Trust Your Computer, Who Can You Trust?

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

It’s a sign of the times: the first day of the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress (33C3) included two talks related to assuring that your own computer wasn’t being turned against you. The two talks are respectively practical and idealistic, realizable today and a work that’s still in the idea stage.

In the first talk, [Trammell Hudson] presented his Heads open-source firmware bootloader and minimal Linux for laptops and servers. The name is a gag: the Tails Linux distribution lets you operate without leaving any trace, while Heads lets you run a system that you can be reasonably sure is secure. …read more

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Posted in 33C3, cons, heads, libreboot, openboot, security, security hacks, tails, trusted computing | Leave a comment