Many of us use touch pads daily on our laptops, but rarely do we give much thought about what they really do. In fact they are a PCB matrix of conductive pads, with a controller chip addressing it and sensing the area of contact. Such a complex and repetitive pattern can be annoying to create by hand in an EDA package, so [Timonsku] has written a script to take away the work.

It starts with an OpenSCAD script (originally written by Texas Instruments, and released as open source) that creates a diamond grid, which can be edited to the required dimensions and resolution. This is then exported as a DXF file, and the magic begins in a Python script. After adjustment of variables to suit, it finishes with an Eagle-compatible board file which should be importable into other EDA packages.

We’ve never made a touchpad ourselves, but having dome other such repetitive PCB tasks we feel the pain of anyone who has. Looking at this project we’re struck by the thought that its approach could be adapted for other uses, so it’s one to file away for later.

This isn’t the first home-made touchpad project we’ve brought you.

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If you’re coming to Hackaday Europe 2025, you’ve got just over a week to get your bags packed and head on out to Berlin. Of course you have tickets already, right? And if you were still on the fence, let us tempt you with our keynote talk and some news about the Friday night meetup, sponsored by Crowd Supply.

But first, the keynote! You might know David Cuartielles as one of the four founders of Arduino. As a telecommunications engineer and doctor in design, he has devoted the last 25 years to experimenting with different educational models centered on the creation of interactive artifacts and platforms.

His talk, “What if the future (of electronics) was compostable?”, asks the question of whether or not we can take our physical projects and make them more ecologically friendly, and looking at Arduino’s approach of bio-degradable electronics and AI-enabled industrial technologies.

Bring a Hack

Come join us for informal Bring-a-Hack drinks starting up at 18:00 Friday night, May 14th, at the Jockel Biergarten, Ratiborstraße 14C. It’s always a great time to hang out a little bit while there are no presentations to feel like you’re missing out on. If you’ve got a project that fits in your backpack, brink it along and show us all. And if you just feel like relaxing over a beverage and some Biergarten fare, that’s great too! We’ll see you there.

hackaday.com/2025/03/06/hackad…

Gruppo hacker del famigerato gruppo Lazarus, legato alla Corea del Nord, è riuscito a riciclare oltre 1 miliardo di dollari, rubati dall’exchange di criptovalute Bybit. Tuttavia, una parte dei fondi rubati resta ancora sotto osservazione da parte degli analisti, il che fa sperare in un loro parziale recupero.

Secondo i ricercatori di Lookonchain, Nansen e Arkham, gli hacker hanno svuotato completamente il loro portafoglio, che al momento dell’attacco conteneva quasi 1,5 miliardi di dollari. La maggior parte di questi fondi è stata riciclata tramite l’exchange decentralizzato THORChain, che di recente ha avuto problemi finanziari.

Il 4 marzo, il CEO di Bybit Ben Zhou ha rivelato che dei quasi 500.000 ETH e dei relativi derivati ​​rubati (per un valore di circa 1,09 miliardi di dollari), il 77% era ancora sotto controllo, il 20% era scomparso dai radar e il 3% era stato congelato.

Gli analisti hanno scoperto che l’83% degli ETH rubati è stato convertito in Bitcoin (BTC) utilizzando 6.954 portafogli. Zhou ha sottolineato che le prossime settimane saranno decisive per il congelamento dei beni, poiché i fondi rubati inizieranno a confluire in borse centralizzate, piattaforme di trading over-the-counter (OTC) e servizi P2P.

Una parte dei fondi rubati è scomparsa tramite lo scambio di criptovalute ExCH, che poco dopo incidente è entrata in conflitto con Bybit. Gli hacker hanno utilizzato anche un servizio proxy associato a OKX. Il presidente di OKX, Hong Fang, ha osservato che l’azienda sta aggiornando attivamente la lista nera degli indirizzi sospetti e ha ricordato che tutte le transazioni nei portafogli elettronici restano tracciabili.

Inoltre, anche i cacciatori di ricompense sono coinvolti nella lotta per riavere indietro i propri fondi. Secondo LazarusBounty.com, ci sono già 19 persone registrate che stanno aiutando a congelare i beni e l’importo delle ricompense pagate ha superato i 2 milioni di dollari.

Il gruppo Lazarus ha dimostrato ancora una volta la sua reputazione di uno dei gruppi di hacker più pericolosi al mondo, riciclando miliardi a un ritmo senza precedenti. Il loro schema coinvolgeva migliaia di portafogli, exchange decentralizzati e piattaforme underground, minacciando la sostenibilità del mercato delle criptovalute.

La portata dell’attacco evidenzia fino a che punto possono arrivare i criminali informatici quando i meccanismi di controllo e di sicurezza non riescono a tenere il passo con i loro metodi.

L'articolo Lazarus ricicla 1 miliardo di dollari in criptovalute in 2 settimane nel colpo del secolo! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

We’ll take a guess that most readers have a set of digital calipers somewhere close to hand right now. The cheapest ones tend to be a little unsatisfying in the hand, a bit crusty and crunchy to use. But as [Matthias Wandel] shows us, these budget tools are quite hackable and a lot more precise than they appear to be.

[Matthias] is perhaps best known around these parts for making machine tools using mainly wood. It’s an unconventional material for things like the CNC router he loves to hate, but he makes it work through a combination of clever engineering and a willingness to work within the limits of the machine. To assess those limits, he connected some cheap digital calipers to a Raspberry Pi by hacking the serial interface that seems to be built into all of these tools. His particular calipers output a pair of 24-bit words over a synchronous serial connection a couple of times per second, but at a level too low to be read by the Pi. He solved this with a clever resistor ladder to shift the signals to straddle the 1.8 volt transition on the Pi, and after solving some noise problems with a few strategically placed capacitors and some software debouncing, he was gathering data on his Pi.

Although his setup was fine for the measurements he needed to make, [Matthias] couldn’t help falling down the rabbit hole of trying to milk better resolution from the calipers. On paper, the 24-bit output should provide micron-ish resolution, but sadly, the readings seem to fluctuate rapidly between two levels, making it difficult to obtain an average quickly enough to be useful. Still, it’s a good exercise, and overall, these hacks should prove handy for anyone who wants to dip a toe into automated metrology on a budget.

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Thanks to [Dragan] for the tip.

hackaday.com/2025/03/06/hackin…