Category Archives: news

Flash a Light Bulb, Win a Prize

Posted on June 26, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

How many geeks does it take to flash a lightbulb? Judging from the list of entries in the 2017 Flashing Light Prize, so far only seven. But we suspect Hackaday readers can add to that total.

The goal is almost as simple as possible: build something that can flash an incandescent light bulb for at least five minutes. The system actually has to power the bulb’s filament, so no mechanical shutters are allowed. Other than that, the sky is the limit — any voltage, any wattage, any frequency and duty cycle, and any circuit. Some of the obvious circuits, like …read more

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Posted in contests, flasher, incandescent, light bulb, multivibrator, news, oscillator | Leave a comment

A Goldmine Of Radio Shack Goodies Is Up For Auction

Posted on June 24, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Where did you buy the parts for your first electronic project? That’s a question likely to prompt a misty-eyed orgy of reminiscences from many Hackaday readers, if ever we have heard one. The chances are that if you are from North America or substantial parts of the English-speaking world, you bought them from a store that was part of the Radio Shack empire. These modestly sized stores in your local mall or shopping centre carried a unique mix of consumer electronics, CB radio, computers, and electronic components, and particularly in the days before the World Wide Web were one of …read more

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Posted in auction, misc hacks, news, radio shack, realistic, tandy, trs-80 | Leave a comment

EV3DEV Lego Linux Updated

Posted on June 24, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

The ev3dev Linux distribution got an update this month. The distribution targets the Lego EV3 which is a CPU Lego provides to drive their Mindstorm robots. The new release includes the most recent kernel and updates from Debian 8.8. It also contains tools needed for some Wi-Fi dongles and other updates.

If you haven’t seen ev3dev before, it is quite simply Linux that boots on the EV3 hardware using an SD card. You don’t have to reflash the computer and if you want to return to stock, just take out the SD card. You can also use ev3dev on a …read more

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Posted in ev3, ev3dev, lego, linux, linux hacks, news, robots hacks | Leave a comment

Nominal Lumber Sizes Land Home Depot And Menards In Hot Water

Posted on June 23, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Hard times indeed must have fallen upon the lawyers of the American mid-west, for news reaches us of a possible class-action lawsuit filed in Chicago that stretches the bounds of what people in more gainful employment might consider actionable. It seems our legal eagles have a concern over the insufficient dimensions of their wood, and this in turn has caused them to apply for a class action against Home Depot and Menards with respect to their use of so-called nominal sizing in the sale of lumber.

If you have ever bought commercial lumber you will no doubt understand where this …read more

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Posted in legal, lumber, news, nominal sizing, wood | Leave a comment

SHA 2017 Talk Schedule Revealed

Posted on June 16, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

It’s always an exciting moment when an event schedule is released, and since events in our community don’t come much larger than this August’s SHA Camp in the Netherlands, you can imagine that the announcement of their schedule of lectures of talks is something of an event in itself. The event runs over five days, and you can browse the schedule itself to make your picks.

The SHA team have made their own picks, but with so many stages and speakers they are only a tiny selection. Running a Hackaday eye over the schedule, here are the ones that caught …read more

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Posted in cons, hacker camp, news, SHA Camp, sha2017, talk schedule | Leave a comment

Raspberry Pi Malware Mines BitCoin

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

According to Russian security site [Dr.Web], there’s a new malware called Linux.MulDrop.14 striking Raspberry Pi computers. In a separate posting, the site examines two different Pi-based trojans including Linux.MulDrop.14. That trojan uses your Pi to mine BitCoins some form of cryptocurrency. The other trojan sets up a proxy server.

According to the site:

Linux Trojan that is a bash script containing a mining program, which is compressed with gzip and encrypted with base64. Once launched, the script shuts down several processes and installs libraries required for its operation. It also installs zmap and sshpass.

It changes the password of the

…read more

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Posted in bitcoin, cybersecurity, Dr.Web, news, Raspberry Pi, security hacks, trojan, trojanhorse | Leave a comment

Formlabs Announces a Desktop SLS 3D Printer

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Formlabs have just announced the Fuse 1 — a selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printer that creates parts out of nylon. Formlabs is best known for their Form series of resin-based SLA 3D printers, and this represents a very different direction.

SLS printers, which use a laser to sinter together models out of a powder-based material, are not new but have so far remained the domain of Serious Commercial Use. To our knowledge, this is the first time an actual SLS printer is being made available to the prosumer market. At just under 10k USD it’s definitely the upper end …read more

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Posted in 3d printer, 3d Printer hacks, formlabs, fuse 1, laser sintering, news, selective laser sintering, sls | Leave a comment

Impression Products V. Lexmark International: A Victory For Common Sense

Posted on June 4, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

A few months ago we reported on a case coming before the United States Supreme Court that concerned recycled printer cartridges. Battling it out were Impression Products, a printer cartridge recycling company, and Lexmark, the printer manufacturer. At issue was a shrinkwrap licence on inkjet cartridges — a legal agreement deemed to have been activated by the customer opening the cartridge packaging — that tied a discounted price to a restriction on the cartridge’s reuse.

It was of concern to us because of the consequences it could have had for the rest of the hardware world, setting a potential precedent …read more

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Posted in court case, Current Events, drm, eff, hardware, impressum, legal, Lexmark, news, supreme court | Leave a comment

Hijacking the Sonoff OTA Mechanism

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

ITEAD’s Sonoff line is a range of Internet-of-Things devices based around the ESP8266. This makes them popular for hacking due to their accessibility. Past projects have figured out how to reflash the Sonoff devices, but for [mirko], that wasn’t enough – it was time to reverse engineer the Sonoff Over-The-Air update protocol.

[mirko]’s motivation is simple enough – a desire for IoT devices that don’t need to phone home to the corporate mothership, combined with wanting to avoid the labor of cracking open every Sonoff device to reflash it with wires like a Neanderthal. The first step involved connecting the …read more

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Posted in ESP8266, home automation, home hacks, internet of things, IoT, news, OTA, over-the-air update, slider, sonoff | Leave a comment

Microchip’s PIC32MZ DA — The Microcontroller With A GPU

Posted on May 30, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

When it comes to displays, there is a gap between a traditional microcontroller and a Linux system-on-a-chip (SoC). The SoC that lives in a smartphone will always have enough RAM for a framebuffer and usually has a few pins dedicated to an LCD interface. Today, Microchip has announced a microcontroller that blurs the lines between what can be done with an SoC and what can be done with a microcontroller. The PIC32MZ ‘DA’ family of microcontrollers is designed for graphics applications and comes with a boatload of RAM and a dedicated GPU.

The key feature for this chip is a …read more

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Posted in gpu, microchip, Microcontrollers, news, pic32, PIC32MZ, PIC32MZ DA | Leave a comment