We’ll admit it. The closer a project is to completion, the less enthusiasm we have for it. Once the main design is clearly going to work on a breadboard, we’re ready to move on to the next one. We don’t mind the PCB layout, especially with modern tools. However, once the board is done, you have to do the case. Paradoxically, this was easier in the old days because you just picked some stock box, drilled some holes, and while it looked terrible, it was relatively easy.

Today, the bar is much higher. You’ll probably 3D print or laser cut an enclosure. If it looks no better than what you did in the 1970s, you won’t win many admirers. We routinely cover projects that could easily pass for commercial products. So how do you do it?

The Parts

The enclosure may even be the easy part. There are plenty of scripts and generators that will make you a nice box that meets your specifications. You can probably even get the holes made as you build. Back in the day, it was a challenge to cut odd-shaped holes for things like serial port connectors. Now, no problem. The printer or laser will just make a hole with any shape you like. You may even want to try a new angle on 3D printing.

Mounting the PCB isn’t that hard, either. With 3D printing, you can create standoffs, but even if you laser cut, you can easily use conventional standoffs. In a pinch, we’ve used long bolts with nuts.

The real problem, it seems to us, is the front panel. Only Star Trek can get away with front panels containing a bunch of knobs and dials with no markings. And although we call them “front” panels, sometimes you need markings on the back or even the sides, too.

Front Panel Options

There are companies that will make front panels for you, and those are usually silk-screened with legends. You could, of course, silk screen yourself if you have the ability to do that. What are your other options?
Labels can’t match a laminated cover.
Labels aren’t going to cut it anymore. However, you can use rub on letters if you are very careful. We’ve used water slide paper — the same kind you see in model kits. You can find water slide paper that will run through computer printers.

Another option is to do the toner transfer trick you often see for PCBs, but use it on your front panel. Since that takes heat, it isn’t going to work on 3D-printed panels, though. For that matter, you can just use a PCB as a front panel and then make it the same way you make other boards. Silk screening is easy, then, and here’s a secret: you can make PCBs with no copper on them at all! You can even use them for the entire enclosure.

We have seen good-looking laminated color prints that look better than labels. If you don’t want to do your own printing, sign companies can print Dibond aluminum, which works well. You can laser engrave acrylic and fill the engraved areas with ink or wax for contrast or even use a two-tone material made for laser etching.

The video below uses multicolor 3D printing to create custom panels in a way we haven’t seen before. These panels go in an airplane simulator and are made to have good visibility in different lighting conditions.

youtube.com/embed/WIdHBMIfGhQ?…

Over To You…

What’s your go-to method for creating marks on panels? When do you go through the trouble? After all, if you are building a one-off piece of gear for your own use, maybe a label maker is all you really need. Let us know in the comments. The good news is that there are many ways to make great-looking panels now. The bad news is now we are expected to make them!

[Ben Krasnow] of the Applied Science channel recently released a video demonstrating his process for getting copper-plated traces reliably embedded into sintered nylon powder (SLS) 3D printed parts, and shows off a variety of small test boards with traces for functional circuits embedded directly into them.

Here’s how it works: The SLS 3D printer uses a laser to fuse powdered nylon together layer by layer to make a plastic part. But to the nylon powder, [Ben] has added a small amount of a specific catalyst (copper chromite), so that prints contains this catalyst. Copper chromite is pretty much inert until it gets hit by a laser, but not the same kind of laser that sinters the nylon powder. That means after the object is 3D printed, the object is mostly nylon with a small amount of (inert) copper chromite mixed in. That sets the stage for what comes next.

The results are durable as well; the effort needed to tear a battery holder off being at least as much as for a regular FR4 PCB.
Activating the copper chromite is all about dumping enough energy into the particles, and that gets done with a pulsed laser. This is how the traces are “drawn” onto the printed object, and these traces will be copper-clad in the next step.

Once the copper chromite catalyst is activated by the second laser, the whole 3D printed object is put into a chemical bath for electroless copper plating. Again, only the places hit by the pulsed laser end up plated. Places not hit by the second laser remain inert.

There’s an interesting side note here. Electroless copper plating is a well understood process used by every PCB manufacturer in the world. But the recipes are all proprietary and [Ben] tried without success to mix up an effective batch. In the end, a talk with OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped crack the case by suggesting a procedure that worked, saving [Ben] a ton of time. Skip to 8:10 in the video if you want to know all about that.

The result is a 3D printed nylon object into which solder-able copper traces are well and truly embedded. The test pieces work out great, but even better, there’s no reason the objects and traces even have to be planar. All it would take is a pulsed laser able to focus on a curved surface in order to create curved traces on a 3-dimensional part.

We’ve seen copper-plated 3D printed PCBs before, but this is something very different and really elegant. The whole workflow has a lot of moving parts, but once controlled it’s remarkable repeatable.

[Ben] has actually tried putting copper traces on SLS printed parts before, but with only limited success. Recent advances in technology and tools have really made the process sing. Watch it all in action in the video, embedded below.

youtube.com/embed/UIqhpxul_og?…

Ieri, 19 giugno, il noto criminale informatico IntelBroker ha postato sul forum degli hacker BreachForums una violazione, sostenendo che i sistemi di T-Mobile, una delle più grandi società di telecomunicazioni al mondo, sono stati recentemente compromessi e che molti dati riservati sono stati violati.

IntelBroker, noto per i suoi attacchi informatici contro DC Health Link, General Electric, HP Enterprise, Five Eyes, Europol e, più recentemente, AMD e Apple, afferma di vendere “codice sorgente, file SQL, immagini, dati Terraform, certificati t-mobile.com e programmi Silo.”.

Per confermare le sue parole, l’hacker ha pubblicato degli screenshot con diritti di amministratore sul server Confluence e sui canali Slack interni dell’azienda.

Il colosso delle telecomunicazioni ha rapidamente negato le accuse di hacking e furto del codice sorgente: “I sistemi T-Mobile non sono stati compromessi. Stiamo indagando attivamente su un possibile problema con un fornitore di servizi di terze parti.”

L’azienda ha inoltre sottolineato di non aver trovato alcuna prova di una fuga di dati dei clienti o di codice sorgente e che le affermazioni dell’aggressore circa l’accesso all’infrastruttura aziendale non erano vere. È possibile che i dati forniti dall’hacker siano in realtà vecchi screenshot dell’infrastruttura T-Mobile ospitati su server di terze parti, da dove sono stati rubati.

Recentemente, IntelBroker ha segnalato molti nuovi hack. In effetti ce ne sono così tanti che si può supporre che tutti i dati siano stati ottenuti da un’unica fonte. Una fonte del genere potrebbe essere SnowFlake, che in precedenza ha subito un attacco informatico su larga scala ai conti dei suoi clienti, colpendo almeno 165 aziende.

Comunque sia, scopriremo la verità più avanti, ma questa non è la prima volta che T-Mobile indaga su potenziali compromissioni dei dati. Il caso con IntelBroker è stato il terzo negli ultimi due anni.

Così, nel gennaio 2023, l’azienda ha denunciato il furto dei dati personali di 37 milioni di clienti. E nel maggio 2023 si è saputo di una fuga di dati di centinaia di clienti, durata più di un mese, a partire dal febbraio di quell’anno.

L'articolo IntelBroker rivendica un attacco a T-Mobile! Possibile attacco in supply-chain a SnowFlake? proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

The next European Commission should carry out a review of its digital rulebook mid-term and revise the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), says an internal briefing document seen by Euractiv.

euractiv.com/section/platforms…

The draft law to detect and remove online child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was removed from the agenda of Thursday's (20 June) meeting of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER), who were supposed to vote on it.

euractiv.com/section/law-enfor…

Today EU governments will not adopt their position on the EU regulation on “combating child sexual abuse”, the so-called chat control regulation, as planned, which would have heralded the end of private messages and secure encryption. The Belgian Council presidency postponed the vote at short notice. Once again the chat control proposal fails in Council. Pirate Party MEP, digital freedom fighter and negotiator for his group in the European Parliament, Patrick Breyer, cheers:

“Without the commitment and resistance of countless individuals and organizations in Europe, the EU governments would have decided today in favour of totalitarian indiscriminate chat control , burying the digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption. A big thanks to all who have contacted politicians and spoken out in the past few days. The fact that we have prevented the orwellian chat control for the time being should be celebrated!

For now the surveillance extremists among the EU governments and Big Sister Ylva Johansson have failed to build a qualified majority. But they will not give up and could try again in the next few days. When will they finally learn from the EU Parliament that effective, court-proof and majority-capable child protection needs a new approach?

Now the critical governments should finally do their homework and agree on a joint list of requirements. It is not enough to defend encryption. The indiscriminate, error-prone screening of private messages is the most toxic part of the draft regulation, but the problems go far beyond that. We therefore need a new approach that focuses on preventive child protection instead of mass surveillance and paternalism! The last ‘compromise proposal’ put forward by the Council Presidency needs to be fundamentally revised in at least 4 points:

1) No indiscriminate chat control: Instead of blanket message and chat control, the judiciary should only have the power to order searches in the messages and uploads of suspects. This is the only way to avoid a disproportionate mass surveillance order inevitably failing in court and achieving nothing at all for children.

2) Protect secure encryption: So-called client-side scanning to infiltrate secure encryption must be explicitly ruled out. General declarations of support for encryption in the text of the law are worthless if scanning and extraction take place even before encryption. Our personal devices must not be perverted into scanners.

3) Protect anonymity: Remove mandatory age verification by all communications services to save the right to communicate anonymously. Whistleblowers risk being silenced if they have to show ID or face to the communications service before leaks.

4) No app censorship and digital house arrest for young people: It is completely unacceptable to exclude young people from apps such as Whatsapp, Instagram or games in order to protect them from grooming. Instead, the default settings of the services must become more privacy-friendly and secure.

The push for indiscriminate chat control is unprecedented in the free world. It divides child protection organizations, abuse victims, other stakeholders and governments. It’s time for a fresh start that relies on consensus, as proposed by the European Parliament. I am convinced that we can protect children and all of us much better.”

Background:

According to the latest text proposal users of apps and services with chat functionalities wouldbe asked whether they accept the indiscriminate and error-prone scanning and, if necessary, leaking of their privately sent images, photos and videos. Previously unknown images and videos would also be screened using “artificial intelligence”. If a user objects to the scanning, they would no longer be able to send or receive any images, photos, videos or links (Article 10). Despite paying lip service to encryption, end-to-end encrypted services would have to implement chat control by installing monitoring functions that are to take effect “before data transmission” (so-called client-side scanning, Article 10a). The scanning of text messages for indications of grooming, which has hardly been used to date, has been removed from the proposal, as was the scanning of voice communication. The chats of employees of security agencies and the military would be exempted from the error-prone chat control scanners.

At a meeting on 24 May, the Council’s Legal Service made it clear that mass chat monitoring without suspicion is still being proposed and remains a violation of fundamental rights.

On 16 June it has been revealed by Der SPIEGEL that most of the chats leaked voluntarily by US-based Big Tech companies are not criminally relevant.

Further information:

The wording of today’s voting proposal:
patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/u…

The European Parliament’s approach to protecting children online:
patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha…

How we would be affected by chat control:
patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha…

Myths/arguments in favour of chat control debunked:
patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha…

Arguments against chat control:
patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha…

Why message and chat control is particularly harmful to children and victims of abuse:
patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha…

Alternatives to chat control:
patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha…

patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-cont…

Uno scritto davvero interessante, prepotente e sincero senza freni e rivelatore, per uno scrittore fra i più interessanti dello spaghetti weird. @L’angolo del lettore

iyezine.com/michele-borgogni-t…

Michele Borgogni - Terror Supermarket

Michele Borgogni - Terror Supermarket - Terror Supermarket: Michele Borgogni iper realista e descrive cosa potrebbe succedere in un supermercato se cadessero le flebili barriere ipocrite - Terror Supermarket

^{Massimo Argo (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Tomorrow (Thursday) EU governments are to vote on a bill (officially called “child sexual abuse regulation” but known as “chat control”) that would require automated searches in and disclosure of private chats, including end-to-end encrypted chats, that might contain illegal photos or videos.[1] If a user refuses this “upload moderation” of their chats, they would be blocked from receiving or sending images, videos and URLs. 48 politicians from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands have published a letter to their governments calling for rejection of the latest version of the chatcontrol proposal, arguing that mass surveillance violates fundamental rights and would fail in court.[2] Signal and Threema have announced they would end their services in the EU if forced to implement the proposed automated monitoring (so-called “client-side scanning”). Whatsapp head Will Cathcart warned “scanning peoples messages like the EU is proposing breaks encryption”.[3] Last night NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was the latest to weigh in on X, calling the proposal “a terrifying mass surveillance measure”.

[4]It is not yet clear whether the proponents among EU governments will be able to convince enough EU governments to make a qualified majority, which is why tomorrow’s agenda item is marked as “possible”.[1] Against this backdrop Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer, who co-negotiated the European Parliament’s position on the proposal[5], has published a call on citizens to reach out to EU governments, listing several governments that may yet be undecided.

[6]“Europeans need to understand that they will be cut off from using commonplace secure messengers if chat control is adopted – that means losing touch with your friends and colleagues around the world”, warns Breyer. “Do you really want Europe to become the world leader in bugging our smartphones and requiring blanket surveillance of the chats of millions of law-abiding Europeans? The European Parliament is convinced that this Orwellian approach will betray children and victims by inevitably failing in court. We call for truly effective child protection by mandating security by design, proactive crawling to clean the web and removal of illegal content – none of which is contained in the Belgium proposal governments will vote on tomorrow. We have one day left to make our governments take a different approach of effective and rights-respecting protection while saving our privacy and security online!”

[1] Agenda for tomorrow’s meeting: data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/d…
[2] Open letter by EU lawmakers: patrick-breyer.de/en/lawmakers…
[3] Statement by head of Whatsapp: x.com/wcathcart/status/1803178…
[4] Statement by Edward Snowden: x.com/Snowden/status/180312759…
[5] Summary of the European Parliament’s position: patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/cha…
[6] Breyer’s call for action: patrick-breyer.de/en/council-t…

Breyer’s website on the chat control proposal: chatcontrol.eu/en/feed

patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-cont…

Questo Memories Have Faces esce a quasi dieci anni di distanza da Inside Out Your Mind, ultimo vagito su trentatré della band, dimostrandosi, a mio modesto avviso, ancora superiore al suo già di per sé brillantissimo predecessore;  a riprova, se mai ce ne fosse bisogno, di come passione, competenza e sacro fuoco non abbandonino chi di certe sonorità si è reso uno dei più credibili e quotati alfieri.

@Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/the-loons-memories…

The Loons - Memories Have Faces

The Loons - Memories Have Faces - The Loons - Dream In Jade Green - The Loons

^{Il Santo (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Ad ulteriore dimostrazione di quanto ho scritto in occasione delle sue precedenti uscite, i nove pezzi di questo nuovo album si aprono con suggestioni tra il deserto e lo spazio infinito di Dirty Ground passando poi all'andamento doloroso di Light the Incense.
@Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/black-snake-moan-l…

Black Snake Moan - Lost In Time 

Black Snake Moan - Lost In Time  - Black Snake Moan - Lost In Time: - Black Snake Moan

^{Il Santo (In Your Eyes ezine)}

“The healer” su Thrill Jockey Records è il quinto disco sulla lunga distanza per i Sumac, gruppo di punta del rumorismo e della totale libertà musicale. Il gruppo formato da Nick Yacyshyn, Brian Cook e Aaron Turner torna a disegnare ardite parabole nei consumati cieli della musica moderna. @Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/sumac-the-healer

Sumac - The healer

Sumac - The healer - Sumac: una delle più particolari e meravigliose esperienze sonore che possiate compiere in questi tempi aridi. - Sumac

^{Massimo Argo (In Your Eyes ezine)}