Over on his YouTube channel the vivacious [Stephen Hawes] tells us that we never need to buy solder stencils again!

A big claim! And he is quick to admit that his printed solder paste isn’t presently quite as precise as solder stencils, but he is reporting good success with his technique so far.

[Stephen] found that he could print PCBs with his fiber laser, populate his boards with his LumenPnP, and reflow with his oven, but… what about paste? [Stephen] tried making stencils, and in his words: “it sucked!” So he asked himself: what if he didn’t need a stencil? He built a Gerber processing, G-code generating, machine-vision implemented… website. The LumenPnP Pasting Utility: https://paste.opulo.io/

The WebAssembly running in the Chrome tab itself connects to the LumenPnP and performs the entire pasting job automatically, with machine-vision fiducial calibration. Automatic alignment with fiducials was critical to the project’s feasibility, and he achieved it using machine-vision from the OpenCV library.

In the video heshows us how to jog the camera to the home fiducial, load the Gerber files, and initialize the job. He’s implemented camera jogging by clicking on the image from the camera to indicate the desired target location, which looks like a very handy feature to have!

Some initial setup just needs to be done once at the beginning to setup your board, additional board prints can then self-calibrate from the fiducials. The Z-index for the dispenser needs to be calibrated, and other job settings include nozzle offset calibration, dispense degrees, retraction degrees, and dwell milliseconds.

If you’re interested in other options for solder stencils be sure to read Solder Stencil Done Three Ways.

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hackaday.com/2025/07/30/the-lu…

In the retrocomputing world, [DosDude1] is a name spoken with more than a little respect. He’s back again with a long-awaited hack for PowerPC Macintosh: soldered RAM upgrades!

[DosDude1] is no stranger to soldering his way to more storage– upgrading the SSD on an M4 Mac Mini, or doubling the VRAM on an old GPU. For a PPC Mac, though, it is not enough just to solder more RAM onto the board; if that’s all it was, we’d have been doing it 20 years ago. Once the RAM is in place, you have to have some way to make sure the computer knows the RAM is in place. For a WinTel machine, getting that information to the BIOS can be as easy as plugging in the right resistors.
This is part of the BootROM dump. It’s easy to see why nobody figured this out before.
PowerPC Macintoshes don’t have BIOS, though. Instead, what’s required is a hack to modify the machine’s BootROM, and write an edited version back into the motherboard’s EEPROM. No one knew how to make that work, until now. [DosDude1] credits a document discovered by [LightBulbFun] on “Boot Flash System Configuration Block” for the secret sauce to hacking the HEX configuration. For example, adding four more 128 MB DIMMS to max out an iBook G3 was a matter of finding the Hex value for number of soldered chips–apparently it was at offset 0x5C. Change this from 0x01 to 0x02 tells the board to look for all 6 chips. Then it’s a matter of flashing the edited hex dump EEPROM, which can be done with a programmer or the flashrom command under Linux.

Solder, flash, reboot– RAM. That’s not the only upgrade in this clamshell. This wasn’t G4 from the factory!
While a few extra hundred MB of RAM isn’t exactly bringing this machine into the 21st century, it is a great quality-of-life upgrade to make old budget hardware match the best of the era. This isn’t magic: if you’re increasing the density, rather than filling up footprints as [DosDude1] demonstrates, you’ve got to make sure the board has got address lines to spare or there’s a way to bodge them in. (128 MB was the max for this one.) The footprints obviously have to match, too, and so do the specs. You’re not going to be putting extra gigabytes of DDR5 into a machine designed with OS9 in mind, but then, you probably don’t need to. It’s already got more than 640 KB, after all, and that’s enough for anybody.

Found via r/VintageApple on Reddit.

hackaday.com/2025/07/30/solder…

We’ve been loving the variety of entries to the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge. Many a clock has been entered, to be sure, but also some projects that step well outside simple timekeeping. Case in point, this AM transmitter from [oldradiofixer.]

The software-only transmitter uses an ATTiny85 processor to output an AM radio signal in the broadcast band. It transmits a simple melody that you can tune in on any old radio you might have lying around the house. Achieving this was simple. [oldradiofixer] set up the cheap microcontroller to toggle pin PB0 at 1 MHz to create an RF carrier. Further code then turns the 1MHz carrier on and off at varying rates to play the four notes—G#, A, G#, and E—of the Twilight Zone theme. This is set up to repeat every second—hence, it’s a perfectly valid entry to the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge!

It’s a simple project, but one that demonstrates the basics of AM radio transmission quite well. The microcontroller may not put out a powerful transmission, but it’s funny to think just how easy it is to generate a broadcast AM signal with a bit of software and a length of wire hanging off one pin. Video after the break.

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hackaday.com/2025/07/30/2025-o…

[Remy van Elst] found an obsolete bike navigation system, the Navman Bike 1000, in a thrift store for €10. The device was a rebadged Mio Cyclo 200 from 2015. Can a decade-old GPS be useful? Well, the answer depends on a little reverse engineering.

There were some newer maps available, but they wouldn’t download using the official software. Out comes WireShark and mitmproxy. That allowed [Remy] to eavesdrop on what was going on between the box and its home server. From there he could intercept the downloaded software image, which in turn yielded to scrutiny. There was one executable, but since the device mounted as a drive, he was able to rename that executable and put his own in using the same name.

The device turns out to run Windows CE. It could even run DOOM! Once he was into the box with a file manager, it was fairly straightforward to add newer software and even update the maps using OpenStreetMaps.

This is a great example of how a little ingenuity and open source tools can extend the life of consumer electronics. It isn’t always as easy to find an entry point into some device like this. Then again, sometimes it’s a little easier than maybe it should be.

We’d all but forgotten Windows CE. We see many people using WireShark, but fewer running mitmproxy. It sure is useful.

hackaday.com/2025/07/30/one-ma…

I responsabili del Python Package Index (PyPI) hanno emesso un avviso su una campagna di phishing rivolta agli utenti. Gli aggressori mirano a reindirizzare le vittime verso siti falsi camuffati da PyPI e a rubare le loro credenziali. Gli aggressori avrebbero inviato email con oggetto “[PyPI] Verifica email” provenienti da noreply@pypj[.]org. In altre parole, il dominio imita pypi.org e la lettera “j” sostituisce la “i”.

“Non si tratta di una violazione della sicurezza di PyPI in sé, ma piuttosto di un tentativo di phishing e di abuso della fiducia che gli utenti ripongono in PyPI”, scrive Mike Fiedler, amministratore di PyPI. Le email contengono un link e invitano gli utenti a cliccarci sopra per verificare il proprio indirizzo email. Il link porta a un sito di phishing mascherato da PyPI e progettato per raccogliere credenziali.

Si noti che, dopo aver inserito i dati sul sito falso, la richiesta viene inviata al sito PyPI legittimo. Questo consente di ingannare le vittime e convincerle che tutto sia in regola, sebbene in realtà le loro credenziali cadano nelle mani degli aggressori.

PyPI ha affermato di stare già valutando possibili metodi per contrastare l’attacco. Nel frattempo, i responsabili hanno invitato gli utenti a controllare attentamente gli URL nei loro browser prima di effettuare l’accesso e ad astenersi dal cliccare sui link se hanno ricevuto email simili in passato.

“Se hai già seguito il link e inserito le tue credenziali, ti consigliamo di cambiare immediatamente la password PyPI”, scrive Fidler. “Controlla la cronologia di sicurezza del tuo account per verificare se ci sono anomalie.”

Al momento non è chiaro chi sia dietro questa campagna, ma è molto simile agli attacchi di phishing che hanno colpito gli utenti di npm nelle ultime settimane. Ricordiamo che, nel caso di npm, gli aggressori utilizzano anche il typosquatting con il dominio npnjs[.]com (invece del vero npmjs.com). Gli aggressori inviano anche email agli sviluppatori in merito alla presunta necessità di verificare il loro indirizzo email per rubarne le credenziali.

Questi attacchi hanno compromesso numerosi pacchetti popolari, alcuni dei quali vengono scaricati 30 milioni di volte a settimana.

L'articolo Dopo NPM, ora è il turno di PyPI: Fate attenzione utenti Python a questa nuova campagna di phishing proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

@Il Fedimercatino / Flohmarkt /Flohra
@Firenze

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