At Hackaday, it is always clock time, and clock time is a great time to check in with [shiura], whose 3D Printed Perpetual Calendar Clock is now at Version 2. A 3D printed calendar clock, well, no big deal, right? Grab a few steppers, slap in an ESP32 to connect to a time server, and you’re good. That’s where most of us would probably go, but most of us aren’t [shiura], who has some real mechanical chops.
There’s also a 24-hour dial, because why not?
This clock isn’t all mechanical. It probably could be, but at its core it uses a commercial quartz movement — you know, the cheap ones that take a single double-A battery. The only restriction is that the length of the hour axis must be twelve millimeters or more. Aside from that, a few self-tapping screws and an M8 nut, everything else is fully 3D printed.

From that simple quartz movement, [shiura]’s clock tracks not only the day of the week, the month and date — even in Febuary, and even compensating for leap years. Except for the inevitable drift (and battery changes) you should not have to adjust this clock until March 2100, assuming both you and the 3D printed mechanism live that long. Version one actually did all this, too, but somehow we missed it; version two has some improvements to aesthetics and usability. Take a tour of the mechanism in the video after the break.

We’ve featured several of [shiura]’s innovative clocks before, from a hybrid mechanical-analog display, to a splitless flip-clock, and a fully analog hollow face clock. Of course [shiura] is hardly our only clock-making contributor, because it it always clock time at Hackaday.

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With each passing year, phishing attacks feature more and more elaborate techniques designed to trick users and evade security measures. Attackers employ deceptive URL redirection tactics, such as appending malicious website addresses to seemingly safe links, embed links in PDFs, and send HTML attachments that either host the entire phishing site or use JavaScript to launch it. Lately, we have noticed a new trend where attackers are distributing attachments in SVG format, the kind normally used for storing images.

SVG format

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics using XML. This is how an SVG file appears when opened in image viewing software.

SVG image

But if you open it in a text editor, you can see the XML markup that describes the image. This markup allows for easy editing of image parameters, eliminating the need for resource-intensive graphics editors.

This is what an SVG file looks like when opened in a text editor

Since SVG is based on XML, it supports JavaScript and HTML, unlike JPEG or PNG. This makes it easier for designers to work with non-graphical content like text, formulas, and interactive elements. However, attackers are exploiting this by embedding scripts with links to phishing pages within the image file.

Sample SVG file with embedded HTML code. The tag introduces HTML markup

Phishing email campaigns leveraging SVG files

At the start of 2025, we observed phishing emails that resembled attacks with an HTML attachment, but instead utilized SVG files.

Phishing email with an SVG attachment

A review of the email’s source code shows that the attachment is identified as an image type.

The file as displayed in the email body

However, opening the file in a text editor reveals that it is essentially an HTML page with no mention of vector graphics.

Code of the SVG file

In a browser, this file appears as an HTML page with a link that supposedly points to an audio file.

SVG file viewed as HTML

Clicking the link redirects the user to a phishing page masquerading as Google Voice.

Phishing page mimicking Google Voice

The audio track at the top of the page is a static image. Clicking “Play Audio” redirects the user to a corporate email login page, allowing attackers to capture their credentials. This page, too, mentions Google Voice. The page also includes the target company’s logo, aiming to lower the user’s guard.

Login form

In a separate instance, mimicking a notification from an e-signature service, attackers presented an SVG attachment as a document that required review and signature.

Phishing e-signature request

Unlike the first example, where the SVG file acted as an HTML page, in this case it contains JavaScript that, when the file is opened, launches a browser window with a phishing site featuring a fake Microsoft login form.

Code of the SVG file

Phishing login form

Statistics

Our telemetry data indicates a significant increase in SVG campaigns during March 2025. We found 2,825 of these emails in just the first quarter of the year.

Emails with SVG attachments, January through March 2025 (download)

In April, the upward trend continued: in the first half of the month, we detected 1324 emails with SVG attachments – more than two-thirds of March’s figure.

Takeaways

Phishers are relentlessly exploring new techniques to circumvent detection. They vary their tactics, sometimes employing user redirection and text obfuscation, and other times, experimenting with different attachment formats. The SVG format provides the capability to embed HTML and JavaScript code within images, which is misused by attackers. Despite not being widespread at the time of this study, SVG attachment attacks are showing a clear upward trend. These attacks, while currently relatively basic – much like HTML attachment scenarios – involve SVG files containing either a phishing link page or a redirection script to a fraudulent site. However, the use of SVG as a container for malicious content can also be employed in more sophisticated targeted attacks.

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Gli aggressori utilizzano sempre più spesso metodi di promozione sui motori di ricerca per attirare gli utenti verso siti dannosi. Vengono utilizzati sia il “black SEO” sia gli annunci a pagamento, il tutto per garantire che le risorse dannose appaiano il più in alto possibile nei risultati di ricerca.

Questo approccio è chiamato SEO poisoning. I criminali mascherano contenuti dannosi da siti legittimi, sfruttando la fiducia nei marchi noti. In particolare, sono state identificate campagne in cui siti web falsi imitavano pagine di download di applicazioni popolari, come Firefox, WhatsApp e Telegram, e raccoglievano informazioni riservate da utenti ignari.

I ricercatori dell’ESET hanno analizzato delle campagne in cui i truffatori promuovevano falsi annunci Google per attirare le vittime su siti web falsi. Alcuni di essi erano in grado di assumere il controllo completo dei dispositivi della vittima.

Il settore finanziario continua a rappresentare un obiettivo particolarmente interessante. Nel 2022 si sono verificati casi in America Latina in cui sono stati distribuiti annunci pubblicitari dannosi sotto le mentite spoglie di Mastercard. Un altro esempio è un attacco di phishing sotto il marchio della compagnia di autobus argentina La Veloz del Norte, che ha portato al furto di dati personali e di pagamento degli utenti che cercavano di acquistare i biglietti.

L’intelligenza artificiale apre anche nuove opportunità per gli aggressori. I truffatori utilizzano attivamente la pubblicità per promuovere falsi servizi che si suppone siano basati sull’intelligenza artificiale, come i falsi siti ChatGPT. Il loro obiettivo è ottenere i dati della carta di credito. Spesso tali siti vengono progettati con i loghi di partner noti per apparire più convincenti.

I motori di ricerca si stanno impegnando per contrastare questo fenomeno. In un rapporto di Google Ads Safety 2023, gli esperti dell’azienda hanno bloccato o rimosso oltre 5,5 miliardi di annunci. Tuttavia, alcune minacce continuano a trapelare nei risultati di ricerca.

Per ridurre al minimo i rischi, gli esperti consigliano di controllare attentamente gli indirizzi dei siti web prima di cliccare su un link, di utilizzare soluzioni antivirus, di abilitare l’autenticazione a due fattori e di controllare gli annunci pubblicitari tramite gli strumenti integrati di Google.

La manipolazione dei motori di ricerca dimostra quanto sia importante fare attenzione ogni volta che si clicca su un link. Nonostante lo sviluppo della tecnologia e dell’intelligenza artificiale, la ricerca classica è ancora popolare.

L'articolo SEO Poisoning: Quando Google Diventa il Primo Alleato dei Cybercriminali proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

La semplice installazione di una scheda SIM in un router può causare perdite finanziarie imprevedibili: lo si è scoperto dopo un incidente in Estonia, dove un utente ha ricevuto una fattura di quasi mille euro per aver inviato più di 10 mila SMS in pochi giorni.

Come riportato dalla pubblicazione di Digigeenius, la causa dell’attività imprevista è stata un router mobile infetto con supporto 4G/5G. Non si sa esattamente come il dispositivo sia stato compromesso, soprattutto considerando che è stato acquistato all’estero e da una fonte sconosciuta.

I router mobili, spesso utilizzati per creare hotspot portatili, possono inviare SMS: si tratta di una funzionalità standard destinata alle notifiche o ai messaggi tecnici. Tuttavia, spesso il malware sfrutta questa opportunità per inviare spam o messaggi fraudolenti, il che comporta costi aggiuntivi. Ciò è particolarmente rilevante per gli utenti che inseriscono schede SIM con servizi voce e SMS non disattivati ​​dall’operatore.

Molti piani hotspot mobili prevedono solo il traffico dati. Tuttavia, non tutti gli operatori limitano i servizi vocali e di testo e spesso gli utenti non sono consapevoli dei potenziali rischi. Sono proprio questi casi a diventare un comodo punto di accesso per gli attacchi, quando i router si trasformano silenziosamente in strumenti nelle mani dei criminali informatici.

Esiste un intero mercato di router economici di dubbia provenienza che sono vulnerabili agli attacchi, soprattutto se il loro firmware non viene aggiornato, le password di fabbrica non vengono modificate o i pannelli amministrativi vengono lasciati aperti. Casi simili sono stati registrati in passato, anche negli Stati Uniti. Ad esempio, la botnet che utilizzava una vulnerabilità nel TP-Link MR6400, trasformando i dispositivi infetti in un servizio di invio di SMS di massa con lo scopo di ingannare gli utenti.

La sicurezza di tali router è discutibile anche perché spesso diventano parte di botnet più ampie, attraverso le quali sono possibili altre minacce informatiche, dal phishing agli attacchi ad altri dispositivi in ​​rete. I ricercatori sottolineano che gli attacchi possono iniziare con una semplice ipotesi di password, soprattutto se il dispositivo ha un pannello di controllo aperto su Internet.

È possibile proteggersi da tali minacce seguendo alcune semplici regole: utilizzare solo router di produttori noti, aggiornare regolarmente il firmware, disabilitare l’accesso web da Internet, chiudere tutte le porte inutilizzate, assicurarsi di modificare le password di fabbrica, riavviare periodicamente il dispositivo e monitorare le impostazioni della scheda SIM e del piano tariffario.

Particolare attenzione va prestata alle funzioni SMS: se non vengono utilizzate, si consiglia di disattivarle subito dopo l’installazione della scheda SIM.

Tuttavia, se il router è già infetto, diventa estremamente difficile interferire con il suo funzionamento e qualsiasi impostazione può essere ignorata dal malware. Ecco perché la prevenzione e la scelta corretta delle attrezzature rimangono fattori chiave.

L'articolo Basta una SIM nel router e un malware per svuotarti il conto proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

I ricercatori hanno svelato un nuovo modulo di linguaggio AI chiamato xTrimoPGLM in grado sia di comprendere che di creare sequenze proteiche utilizzando un unico approccio di apprendimento. Questa soluzione offre un modo fondamentalmente nuovo di lavorare con i dati biologici, a livello di sequenze di amminoacidi, come se si trattasse di testo in linguaggio naturale.

I modelli precedentemente esistenti che studiavano le proteine ​​si basavano su diversi metodi di pre-addestramento: alcuni ripristinavano le regioni mancanti (autocodifica), altri prevedevano l’amminoacido successivo (autoregressivo).

Tuttavia, ognuno di loro era bravo solo in un compito: comprendere la struttura di una proteina o generarne di nuove. xTrimoPGLM combina entrambe le strategie ed è il primo a imparare da un obiettivo comune, abbracciando entrambi gli approcci contemporaneamente. Ciò ha consentito al modello di raggiungere dimensioni senza precedenti: 100 miliardi di parametri e un trilione di token di addestramento.

I risultati sono impressionanti: xTrimoPGLM ha ottenuto i risultati migliori in 18 diverse attività di analisi proteica, tra cui classificazione, proprietà e previsione delle interazioni. Inoltre, il modello consente di comprendere la struttura delle proteine ​​a livello atomico e viene utilizzato come base per un nuovo modello 3D che prevede la struttura delle proteine ​​con una precisione superiore a strumenti simili basati su modelli linguistici.

Ma non solo analisi: il modello può anche creare. È in grado di generare nuove proteine ​​seguendo i principi delle sequenze naturali. Dopo un ulteriore addestramento su set di dati specializzati, è addirittura possibile eseguire una generazione mirata con proprietà specifiche, il che apre la strada allo sviluppo di nuovi farmaci ed enzimi.

I pesi del modello e i set di dati sono già pubblicati sulla piattaforma HuggingFace e sono a disposizione dei ricercatori, rendendo xTrimoPGLM un contributo significativo allo sviluppo di modelli di base proteici e ampliando gli orizzonti dell’intelligenza artificiale nelle scienze della vita.

L'articolo Capacità generative: xTrimoPGLM crea nuove sequenze proteiche proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Water is an excellent coolant, but the flip side is that it is also an excellent solvent. This, in short, is why any water cooling loop is also a prime candidate for an interesting introduction to the galvanic metal series, resulting in severe corrosion that commences immediately. In a recent video by [der8aer], this issue is demonstrated using a GPU cold plate. The part is made out of nickel-plated copper and features many small channels to increase surface area with the coolant.
The surface analysis of the sample cold plate after a brief exposure to distilled water shows the deposited copper atoms. (Credit: der8auer, YouTube)
Theoretically, if one were to use distilled water in a coolant loop that contains a single type of metal (like copper), there would be no issue. As [der8auer] points out, fittings, radiators, and the cooling block are nearly always made of various metals and alloys like brass, for example. This thus creates the setup for galvanic corrosion, whereby one metal acts as the anode and the other as a cathode. While this is desirable in batteries, for a cooling loop, this means that the water strips metal ions off the anode and deposits them on the cathode metal.

The nickel-plated cold plate should be immune to this if the plating were perfect. However, as demonstrated in the video, even a brief exposure to distilled water at 60°C induced strong galvanic corrosion. Analysis in an SEM showed that the imperfect nickel plating allowed copper ions to be dissolved into the water before being deposited on top of the nickel (cathode). In a comparison with another sample that had a coolant with corrosion inhibitor (DP Ultra) used, no such corrosion was observed, even after much longer exposure.

This DP Ultra coolant is mostly distilled water but has glycol added. The glycol improves the pH and coats surfaces to prevent galvanic corrosion. The other element is benzotriazole, which provides similar benefits. Of course, each corrosion inhibitor targets a specific environment, and there is also the issue with organic films forming, which may require biocides to be added. As usual, water cooling has more subtlety than you’d expect.

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hackaday.com/2025/04/20/preven…

China played host to what, presumably, was the world’s first robot and human half-marathon. You can check out the action and the Tiangong Ultra robot that won in the video below. The event took place in Beijing and spanned 21.1 km. There was, however, a barrier between lanes for humans and machines.

The human rules were the same as you’d expect, but the robots did need a few concessions, such as battery swap stops. The winning ‘bot crossed the finish line in just over 160 minutes. However, there were awards for endurance, gait design, and design innovation.

Humans still took the top spots, though. We also noted that some of the robots had issues where they lost control or had other problems. Even the winner fell down once and had three battery changes over the course.

Of the 21 robots that started, only six made the finish line. We don’t know how many of the 12,000 humans finished, but we are pretty sure it was more than six, so we don’t think runners have to worry about robot overlords yet. But they’re getting better all the time.

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We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of the detection of biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using the Kepler space telescope because it lies in the habitable zone around its red-dwarf star. Initial observations with Hubble indicated the presence of water vapor, and follow-up investigations using the James Webb Space Telescope detected all sorts of goodies in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. But more recently, JWST saw signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), organic molecules which, on Earth, are strongly associated with biological processes in marine bacteria and phytoplankton.

The team analyzing the JWST data says that the data is currently pretty good, with a statistical significance of 99.7%. That’s a three-sigma result, and while it’s promising, it’s not quite good enough to seal the deal that life evolved more than once in the universe. If further JWST observations manage to firm that up to five sigma, it’ll be the most important scientific result of all time. To our way of thinking, it would be much more significant than finding evidence of ancient or even current life in our solar system, since cross-contamination is so easy in the relatively cozy confines of the Sun’s gravity well. K2-18b is far enough away from our system as to make that virtually impossible, and that would say a lot about the universality of biochemical evolution. It could also provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox, since it could indicate that the galaxy is actually teeming with life but under conditions that make it difficult to evolve into species capable of making detectable techno-signatures. It’s hard to build a radio or a rocket when you live on a high-g water world, after all.

Closer to home, there’s speculation that the famous Antikythera mechanism may not have worked at all in its heyday. According to researchers from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata in Argentina, “the world’s first analog computer” could not have worked due to the accumulated mechanical error of its gears. They blame this on the shape of the gear teeth, which appear triangular on CT scans of the mechanism, and which they seem to attribute to manufacturing defects. Given the 20-odd centuries the brass-and-iron device spent at the bottom of the Aegean Sea and the potential for artifacts in CT scans, we’re not sure it’s safe to pin the suboptimal shape of the gear teeth on the maker of the mechanism. They also seem to call into question the ability of 1st-century BCE craftsmen to construct a mechanism with sufficient precision to serve as a useful astronomical calculator, a position that Chris from Clickspring has been putting the lie to with his ongoing effort to reproduce the Antikythera mechanism using ancient tools and materials. We’re keen to hear what he has to say about this issue.

Speaking of questionable scientific papers, have you heard about “vegetative electron microscopy”? It’s all the rage, having been mentioned in at least 22 scientific papers recently, even though no such technique exists. Or rather, it didn’t exist until around 2017, when it popped up in a couple of Iranian scientific papers. How it came into being is a bit of a mystery, but it may have started with faulty scans of a paper from the 1950s, which had the terms “vegetative” and “electron microscopy” printed in different columns but directly across from each other. That somehow led to the terms getting glued together, possibly in one of those Iranian papers because the Farsi spelling of “vegetative” is very similar to “scanning,” a much more sensible prefix to “electron microscopy.” Once the nonsense term was created, it propagated into subsequent papers of dubious scientific provenance by authors who didn’t bother to check their references, or perhaps never existed in the first place. The wonders of our AI world never cease to amaze.

And finally, from the heart of Silicon Valley comes a tale of cyber hijinks as several crosswalks were hacked to taunt everyone’s favorite billionaires. Twelve Palo Alto crosswalks were targeted by persons unknown, who somehow managed to gain access to the voice announcement system in the crosswalks and replaced the normally helpful voice messages with deep-fake audio of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg saying ridiculous but plausible things. Redwood City and Menlo Park crosswalks may have also been attacked, and soulless city officials responded by disabling the voice feature. We get why they had to do it, but as cyberattacks go, this one seems pretty harmless.

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Forth is popular on small computers because it is simple to implement, yet quite powerful. But what happens when you really need to shrink it? Well, if your target is the 6502, there’s milliForth-6502.

This is a port of milliForth, which is a fork of sectorforth. The sectorforth project set the standard, implementing a Forth so small it could fit in a 512-byte boot sector. The milliForth project took sectorforth and made it even smaller, weighing in at only 336 bytes. However, both milliForth and sectorforth are for the x86 architecture. With milliForth-6502, [Alvaro G. S. Barcellos] wanted to see how small he could make a 6502 implementation.

So how big is the milliForth-6502 binary? Our tests indicate: 1,110 bytes. It won’t quite fit in a boot sector, but it’s pretty small!

Most of the code for milliForth-6502 is assembly code in sector-6502.s. This code is compiled using tools from the cc65 project. To run the code lib6502 is used for 6502 emulation.

Emulation is all well and good as far as it goes, especially for development and testing, but we’d love to see this code running on a real 6502. Even better would be a 6502 built from scratch! If you get this code running we’d love to hear how it went!

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Le e-mail interne inviate dai dipendenti di Snapchat, la popolare app di messaggistica fotografica e video, dimostrano che l’azienda ha deliberatamente danneggiato adolescenti e giovani adulti, ovvero il pubblico a cui si rivolge.

Lo psicologo sociale e autore del best-seller Generation Anxious Jonathan Haidt ha pubblicato la scorsa settimana un articolo su Substack in cui detto che Snap Inc. riceve ogni mese migliaia di segnalazioni di “sextortion”, ovvero estorsione sessuale.

Insieme al ricercatore Zach Rush, ha presentato decine di estratti da rapporti interni, studi, e-mail e dichiarazioni pubbliche in cui i dipendenti e i consulenti di Snap riconoscono che Snapchat danneggia i minori. Secondo gli autori, queste confessioni possono essere raggruppate in cinque aree: uso compulsivo, accesso a droghe e armi, distribuzione di materiale pedopornografico e casi di rapporti intimi forzati, cyberbullismo e consapevolezza di danni e violazioni dell’età senza azioni appropriate da parte dell’azienda.

Così come nel caso Per quanto riguarda TikTok, Haidt e Rush affermano che i dipendenti di Snap erano ben consapevoli della portata del problema, ma non stavano adottando le misure necessarie. Alcune di queste problematiche sono note da tempo, come la funzione “streak“, che conta il numero di giorni consecutivi in ​​cui gli utenti condividono foto.

Ciò crea un falso senso di impegno e attaccamento negli adolescenti, e la perdita di questo “lato positivo” può essere percepita quasi come la perdita di un’amicizia. Allo stesso tempo, l’applicazione in sé rimane un mezzo di comunicazione superficiale: non garantisce un contatto reale e non sostituisce l’interazione dal vivo.

È noto che molti ex dirigenti di colossi della tecnologia, tra cui quelli che hanno partecipato alle riprese del documentario “The Social Dilemma“, non permettono ai propri figli di utilizzare gli smartphone. Sanno fin troppo bene cosa devono affrontare gli utenti, soprattutto quelli più giovani.

E se gli inventori di questi sistemi si rifiutano di affidarli ai propri figli, perché dovrebbero farlo i genitori comuni?

Gli autori del rapporto ritengono che sia giunto il momento di avviare una riflessione seria sulla dipendenza digitale e sulla responsabilità delle aziende tecnologiche.

Forse, con l’aumento delle cause legali e il cambiamento dell’opinione pubblica, più persone inizieranno a considerare il prezzo che pagano per essere costantemente presenti nel mondo digitale.

L'articolo Snapchat sapeva tutto: come l’app ha danneggiato milioni di adolescenti proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Despite the best efforts of the RepRap community over the last twenty years, self-replicating 3D printers have remained a stubbornly elusive goal, largely due to the difficulty of printing electronics. [Brian Minnick]’s fully-printed 3D printer could eventually change that, and he’s already solved an impressive number of technical challenges in the process.

[Brian]’s first step was to make a 3D-printable motor. Instead of the more conventional stepper motors, he designed a fully 3D-printed 3-pole brushed motor. The motor coils are made from solder paste, which the printer applies using a custom syringe-based extruder. The paste is then sintered at a moderate temperature, resulting in traces with a resistivity as low as 0.001 Ω mm, low enough to make effective magnetic coils.

Brushed motors are less accurate than stepper motors, but they do have a particularly useful advantage here: their speed can be controlled simply by varying the voltage. This enables a purely electromechanical control system – no microcontroller on this printer! A 3D-printed data strip encodes instructions for the printer as holes in a plastic sheet, which open and close simple switches in the motor controller. These switches control the speed, direction, and duration of the motors’ movement, letting the data strip encode motion vectors.

Remarkably, the hotend on this printer is also 3D-printed. [Brian] took advantage of the fact that PEEK’s melting point increases by about 110 ℃ when it’s annealed, which should allow an annealed hotend to print itself. So far it’s only extruded PLA, but the idea seems sound.

The video below the break shows a single-axis proof of concept in action. We haven’t been able to find any documentation of a fully-functional 3D printer, but nevertheless, it’s an impressive demonstration. We’ve covered similar printers before, and if you make progress in this area, be sure to send us a tip.

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hackaday.com/2025/04/20/the-mo…

Entry-level oscilloscopes are a great way to get some low-cost instrumentation on a test bench, whether it’s for a garage lab or a schoolroom. But the cheapest ones are often cheap for a reason, and even though they work well for the price they won’t stand up to more advanced equipment. But missing features don’t have to stay missing forever, as it’s possible to augment them to get some of these features. [Tommy’s] project shows you one way to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, at least as it relates to oscilloscopes.

Most of the problem with these lower-cost tools is their low precision due to fewer bits of analog-digital conversion. They also tend to be quite noisy, further lowering the quality of the oscilloscope. [Tommy] is focusing his efforts on the DSO138-mini, an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of 100 kHz and an effective resolution of 10 bits. The first step is to add an anti-aliasing filter to the input, which is essentially a low-pass filter that removes high frequency components of the signal, which could cause a problem due to the lower resolution of the device. After that, digital post-processing is done on the output, which removes noise caused by the system’s power supply, among other things, and essentially acts as a second low-pass filter.

In part 2 of the project, [Tommy] demonstrates the effectiveness of these two methods with experimental data, showing that a good percentage of the noise on a test signal has been removed from the output. All the more impressive here is that the only additional cost besides the inexpensive oscilloscope itself is for a ceramic capacitor that costs around a dollar. We were also impressed: [Tommy] is a junior in high school!

Presumably, you could apply these techniques to other inexpensive equipment, like this even cheaper oscilloscope based on the ESP32.

hackaday.com/2025/04/20/low-co…

In this series of 23 YouTube videos [Rich] puts the AMD Zynq-7000 SoC through its paces by building a development board from the ground up to host it along with its peripherals. The Zynq is part FPGA and part CPU, and while it has been around for a while, we don’t see nearly as many projects about it as we’d like.

Rich covers everything from the power system to HDMI, USB, DDR RAM, and everything in between. By the end, he’s able to boot PetaLinux.

The Zynq SoC includes an ARM Cortex-A9 Based APU and an Artix-7 FPGA (or a Kintex-7 FPGA on higher models). In case you missed it, Xilinx was recently acquired by AMD, which is why you might have remembered this as a Xilinx part.

We’ve heard from [Rich] before. Back in 2021 we saw his Arduino Brings USB Mouse To Homebrew Computer. Don’t miss his follow-up playlist: Building on my Zynq-7000 in which he takes his Zynq-7000 board even further.

If you’re interested in FPGA technology but need something more easy going to get you started, be sure to check out how to build a 6809 CPU on an FPGA. Or, if you need something even simpler, report for boot camp.

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Thanks to [Alex] for the tip!

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