2025 One Hertz Challenge: Drop the Beat (But Only at 60 BPM)
Mankind has been using water to mark the passage of time for thousands of years. From dripping stone pots in Ancient Egypt to the more mechanically-complicated Greco-Roman Clepsydrae, the history of timekeeping is a wet one — and it makes sense. As an incompressible fluid, water flows in very predictable patterns. If you fill a leaky pot with water and it takes an hour to drain, it will also take an hour the next time you try. One Hertz Challenge entrant [johnowhitaker] took this idea in a different direction, however, with an electromechanical clock that uses dripping water as an indicator.
This clock uses a solenoid to briefly pop the plunger out of a water-filled syringe. This allows a drop to fall from the tip, into a waiting beaker. In addition to the satisfying audio indication this produces, [johnowhitaker] added a bit of food coloring to the dripping water for visual flair. The entire thing is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico and a motor driver board, so if you’ve got some spare parts lying about and would like to build your own be sure to head over to the project page and grab the source code.
While this clock isn’t exactly here for a long time (either the syringe will eventually empty or the beaker will overflow), it’s certainly here for a good time. [John] and commenters on his project even have ideas for the next steps: a 1/60 Hz beaker changer, and a 1/600 Hz spill cleaner. Even so, the first couple of drops hitting the beaker produce a lovely lava lamp-esque cloud that is a joy to watch and has us thinking about other microfluidics projects we’ve seen.
And remember — it’s not too late to enter the 2025 One Hertz Challenge!
Models of Wave Propagation
[Stoppi] always has interesting blog posts and videos, even when we don’t understand all the German in them. The latest? Computer simulation of wave propagation (Google Translate link), which, if nothing else, makes pretty pictures that work in any language. Check out the video below.
Luckily, most browsers will translate for you these days, or you can use a website. We’ve seen waves modeled with springs before, but between the explanations and the accompanying Turbo Pascal source code, this is worth checking out.
We can’t explain it better than [Stoppi] who writes:
The model consists of individual atoms with the mass m, which are connected to each other by springs with the spring constant k. To start, I deflect the first atom sinusoidally. According to this, the individual atoms obey Newton’s equation of motion F = m·a, whereby Hook’s spring law F = k·Δl is used for the force F. I solved these differential equations iteratively using the Euler method. The movement of the atoms is restricted in the y-direction. At the beginning, the number of atoms, their mass m and the spring constant k must be entered. In addition, you can choose between transverse or longitudinal deflection and whether you want the reflection at the free or fixed end.
Can you get better simulations? Of course. But will this help you develop more intuitive understanding? Maybe. If you are interested in simulating the physical world, don’t forget TinkerCad has added that capability.
youtube.com/embed/eAZvdjsBR8c?…
Skateboard Wheels Add Capabilities to Plasma Cutter
Although firmly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist now, the skateboard wasn’t always a staple of popular culture. It had a pretty rocky start as surfers jankily attached roller skating hardware to wooden planks searching for wave-riding experiences on land. From those rough beginnings it still took decades of innovation until Rodney Mullen adapted the ollie for flatground skating before the sport really took off. Skateboard hardware is quite elegant now too; the way leaning turns the board due to the shape of the trucks is immediately intuitive for even the most beginner riders, and bearing technology is so high-quality and inexpensive now that skateboard hardware is a go-to parts bin grab for plenty of other projects like this plasma cutter modification.
[The Fabrication Series]’s plasma cutter is mounted to a CNC machine, allowing for many complex cuts in much less time than it would take to do by hand. But cutting tubes is a more complicated endeavor for a machine like this. This is where the skateboard hardware comes in: by fabricating two custom pivoting arms each with two skateboard wheels that push down on a tube to hold it in place, the CNC machine can roll the tube along the table in a precise way as the plasma cutter works through it.
Of course, cutting a moving part is a little more complicated for the CNC machine than cutting a fixed piece of sheet metal, so [The Fabrication Series] walks us through a few ways of cutting pipe for various purposes, including miters and notches. The first step is to build a model of the pipes, in this case using Onshape, and then converting the 3D model of the pipes into a sheet metal model that the CNC machine can use. It does take a few cuts on the machine to fine-tune the cuts, but in no time the machine is effortlessly cutting complex shapes into the pipe. Don’t have a plasma cutter at all? You can always build your own from scratch.
Thanks to [JohnU] and [paulvdh] for the tip!
youtube.com/embed/F9LiEK-DjPk?…
Destructive Testing of ABS and Carbon Fiber Nylon Parts
The good part about FDM 3D printing is that there are so many different filament types and parameters to choose from. This is also the bad part, as it can often be hard to tell what impact a change has. Fortunately we got destructive testing to provide us with some information here. Case in point [Functional Print Friday] on YouTube recently testing out a few iterations of a replacement part for a car.
The original part was in ABS, printed horizontally in a Bambu Lab FDM printer, which had a protruding element snapped off while in use. In addition to printing a replacement in carbon fiber-reinforced nylon (PAHT-CF, i.e. PA12 instead of the typical PA6), the part was now also printed at a 45° angle. To compare it with the original ABS filament in a more favorable way, the same part was reprinted at the same angle in ABS.
Another change was to add a machine screw to the stop element of the part, which turned out to make a massive difference. Whereas the original horizontal ABS print failed early and cleanly on layer lines, the angled versions put up much more of a fight, with the machine screw-reinforced stop combined with the PA12 CF filament maxing out the first meter.
The take-away here appears to be that not only angles are good, but that adding a few strategic metal screws can do wonders, even if you’re not using a more exotic filament type.
youtube.com/embed/5k6YLlyV9ds?…
2025 One-Hertz Challenge: Clock Calibrator
Wall clocks! Are they very accurate? Well, sometimes they are, and sometimes they lose minutes a day. If you’ve got one that needs calibrating, you might like this device from [Lauri Pirttiaho].
Most cheap wall clocks use very similar mechanisms based around the Lavet-type stepper motor. These are usually driven by a chip-on-board oscillator that may or may not be particularly accurate.
[Lauri] desired a way to tune up these cheap clocks by using GPS-level timing accuracy. Thus began a project based around a CY8KIT evaluation board from Cypress. The microcontroller is paired with a small character LCD as a user interface, and hooked up to a cheap GPS module with an accurate 1-pulse-per-second (1PPS) timing output. The concept is simple enough. Clock drift is measured by using counters in the microcontroller to compare the timing of the GPS 1PPS output and the pulses driving the Lavet-type stepper motor. The difference between the two can be read off the device, and used to determine if the wall clock is fast or slow. Then one need only use a trimmer capacitor to tweak the wall clock’s pulse rate in order to make it more accurate.
Few of us spend much time calibrating low-cost wall clocks to high levels of accuracy. If that sounds like a fun hobby to you, or your name is Garrus, you would probably find [Lauri]’s device remarkably useful. Believe it or not, this isn’t the first clock calibrator we’ve seen, either. Meanwhile, if you’ve brewed up your own high-accuracy timing hardware, feel free to let us know on the tipsline.
Be More Axolotl: How Humans May One Day Regrow Limbs and Organs
Although often glossed over, the human liver is a pretty amazing organ. Not just because it’s pretty much the sole thing that prevents our food from killing us, but also because it’s the only organ in our body that is capable of significant regeneration. This is a major boon in medicine, as you can remove most of a person’s liver and it’ll happily regrow back to its original volume. Obviously this is very convenient in the case of disease or when performing a liver transplant.
Despite tissue regeneration being very common among animals, most mammalian species have only limited regenerative ability. This means that while some species can easily regrow entire limbs and organs including eyes as well as parts of their brain, us humans and our primate cousins are lucky if we can even count on our liver to do that thing, while limbs and eyes are lost forever.
This raises many questions, including whether the deactivation of regenerative capabilities is just an evolutionary glitch, and how easily we might be able to turn it back on.
Regenerating Vs Repair
Even in the absence of a regenerative ability, animals can heal injuries, which generally means the growth of fibrous tissue called scar tissue. This can be observed very clearly on our skin, where certain old injuries tend to remain clearly visible as the scar tissue replaces skin tissue. While made of the same collagen protein as skin tissue, the fiber organization is different and serves no real purpose beyond sealing up a lesion. Scar tissue can form elsewhere in the body too, where it can impede function, as in the heart and lungs.
Both regeneration and repair are a form of healing in an organism, but only the former restores the original functionality, whereas the latter is the biological equivalent of slapping on a duct tape patch and calling it good. This ‘repair’ outcome is effectively an incomplete regeneration process, where instead of the affected site creating the conditions for normal growth – leading to a good-as-new result – you only get the basic scaffolding while certain biochemical pathways are never or insufficiently activated.
Although it’s often said that the human liver is the sole organ capable of regeneration in our species, it could be argued that our blood vessels are a much better example of regeneration. Within minutes after receiving a cut or bad scrape, any damaged blood vessels are plugged and macrophages along with other specialized cells begin to move into the area as the inflammatory phase begins.
At the end of this phase, angiogenesis commences, which involves existing blood vessels growing new blood vessels into the affected area. In a developing embryo, this is the stage that follows the earliest development of the initial blood vessels through vasculogenesis. In this regard, blood vessels can be said to regenerate themselves in the case of injury. They can also expand into tissues where e.g. hypoxia conditions are present, which triggers the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) signaling path.
In the case of wound healing this signal path is stimulated due to the hypoxia condition that exists at the injury site. Although the HIF-related HIF-1α subunit is constantly expressed, oxygen-dependent prolyl hydroxylases (PHDs) normally degrade it and thus downregulating the further responses down this chain.
Another aspect here is the re-epithelization, whereby surrounding skin cells move towards the wound, multiplying until the signals that induce this growth are downregulated below a critical threshold. Based on research the same HIF pathway is implicated here. For example, in a 2015 study in Science Translational Medicine Yong Zhang et al. reported that forced upregulation of HIF-1α was able to induce full regeneration of a hole punched in the ears of mice who normally just show scarring.
This indicates that boosting the HIF signaling pathway might be a viable way to prevent scarring and induce full regeneration of certain types of wounds to the skin.
Blastema Limbo
The HIF signaling pathway is an example of a basic regeneration pathway involving a single organ (i.e. the skin). Things get more complicated when there’s the removal of something to the extent of a limb. Among mammals regenerating ability is limited, with some species like rabbits still possessing the ability to regenerate holes in their ears while other species, including humans, are not creating the requisite blastema of undifferentiated cells after an amputation.
The axolotl is one of the most studied species when it comes to tissue regeneration. Similar to other salamanders they possess a remarkable ability to regenerate many parts of their body, with the axolotl capable of regenerating their limbs, gills, eyes and parts of their brain. Although annelids (segmented worms) and echinoderms like starfish are capable of even more extreme forms of regeneration, axolotls are significantly more akin to us mammals than either of those.
Incidentally, similar research in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) has led us to the highly conserved Hippo signaling pathway. This particular signaling path is essential in determining how big an organ is supposed to be, such as when a human liver is chopped up in vivo and has to regrow back to its original size.
New Limb Cap
When an axolotl suffers severe injury like the loss of a limb or a gill, the surface where the amputation occurred gets covered up by epidermal cells, forming the wound epithelium (WE). This is the point where for human and other mammals the process pretty much ends with a stump covered up by skin. In the case of the axolotl, however, this WE keeps gathering epidermal cells, forming the apical epithelial cap (AEC).
Inside this AEC the tissues then undergo dedifferentiation into a blastema – led by signals from macrophages – effectively resetting the tissues here to a much earlier, embryonic state of development. Under the influence of Hox genes which regulate the body’s layout, the AEC subsequently grows as it would have done previously with the very young axolotl until the entire limb, gill, eye, etc. has been regrown.
The trick is thus to take these identified signaling pathways, establish in how far they have been preserved in other animals – like us primates – and whether we can easily re-enable them in some way, whether permanently or temporarily. After all, it worked once when we were still embryos, ergo by resetting the cellular clock on part of our bodies it would simply run through the same biochemical steps again.
Still A Lumpy Road Ahead
Of course, this involves developmental biology, biochemistry and genetic research, meaning that clear answers are rarely found and require immense amounts of research and study to unravel how all of these signaling pathways work, while maybe finding a few more ones along the way. The upshot of course is that the field of regenerative medicine can have massive implications for human health, ranging from the ability to treat many (genetic) disorders related to faulty signaling pathways to the ability regrow limbs, eyes and more.
It’s likely that regenerating skin and directly related tissues in human patients will be one of the first widescale applications of these findings, with recently Weifeng Lin et al. publishing a study in Science involving regrowing a damaged outer ear (pinna) of mice and rats through the addition of retinoic acid (RA), a key element in embryonic development. Specifically they identified that in non-regenerative species of rats and mice the Aldh1a2 gene was not expressed as much as it was in species who do regenerate, which reduces the amount of available RA from the retinaldehyde precursor.
Although there’s a lot that can be said about the pros and cons of turning back on genes that haven’t been active since we were either an embryo or a still-growing-child, understanding these biochemical pathways offers us the prospect of bypassing them in order to restore that which once was thought to be lost forever. Even if we won’t be regrowing limbs yet next year, we might be giving people back their pinna, digits, faces and erase old scars before we know it.
“Closeup of Axolotl in Hand” by [Yaiol AI]
“Purple Tropical Axolotl” by[ Raphael Brasileiro]
Fire Ant all’attacco: come un bug in vCenter apre le porte all’inferno IT
Sygnia segnala che il vettore di attacco iniziale di Fire Ant CVE-2023-34048, sfrutta la vulnerabilità di scrittura fuori dai limiti nell’implementazione del protocollo DCERPC di vCenter Server che consente l’esecuzione di codice remoto non autenticato. I ricercatori di sicurezza hanno identificato arresti anomali sospetti del processo ‘vmdird‘ sui server vCenter, indicando lo sfruttamento di questa vulnerabilità critica.
Dopo aver ottenuto la compromissione, gli autori della minaccia implementano strumenti sofisticati, tra cui lo script open source vCenter_GenerateLoginCookie.py, per falsificare i cookie di autenticazione e aggirare i meccanismi di accesso. Gli aggressori raccolgono sistematicamente le credenziali vpxuser, ovvero account di sistema creati automaticamente da vCenter con privilegi amministrativi completi sugli host ESXi.
Questo furto di credenziali consente lo spostamento laterale nell’intera infrastruttura di virtualizzazione, poiché gli account vpxuser restano esenti dalle restrizioni della modalità di blocco. Gli autori della minaccia sfruttano anche il CVE-2023-20867, una vulnerabilità di VMware Tools che consente l’esecuzione di comandi host-to-guest non autenticati tramite il cmdlet Invoke-VMScript di PowerCLI.
Capacità di persistenza e metodi di evasione
Fire Ant dimostra notevoli capacità di persistenza attraverso molteplici tecniche di distribuzione di backdoor. Il gruppo installa vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) dannosi con livelli di accettazione impostati su “partner” e distribuiti utilizzando il flag -force per ignorare la convalida della firma. Questi VIB non autorizzati contengono file di configurazione che fanno riferimento a file binari nella cartella ‘/bin‘ e script personalizzati incorporati in ‘/etc/rc.local.d/’ per l’esecuzione all’avvio.
Inoltre, gli aggressori implementano una backdoor HTTP basata su Python denominata autobackup.bin che si collega alla porta 8888 e fornisce funzionalità di esecuzione di comandi remoti. Questo malware modifica ‘/etc/rc.local.d/local.sh’ sugli host ESXi per un’esecuzione persistente. Per eludere ulteriormente il rilevamento, Fire Ant termina il processo vmsyslogd, il demone syslog nativo di VMware, disabilitando di fatto sia la scrittura dei log locali che l’inoltro dei log remoti.
Gli autori della minaccia dimostrano sofisticate capacità di manipolazione della rete compromettendo i bilanciatori di carico F5 tramite lo sfruttamento CVE-2022-1388 e distribuendo webshell su ‘ /usr/local/www/xui/common/css/css.php ‘ per il bridging di rete. Utilizzano webshell di tunneling Neo-reGeorg su server web interni basati su Java e distribuiscono il rootkit Medusa su punti pivot Linux per la raccolta delle credenziali e l’accesso persistente.
Fire Ant utilizza i comandi netsh portproxy per l’inoltro delle porte attraverso endpoint attendibili, aggirando di fatto gli elenchi di controllo degli accessi e le restrizioni del firewall. Il gruppo sfrutta inoltre il traffico IPv6 per aggirare le regole di filtraggio incentrate su IPv4, dimostrando una conoscenza approfondita degli ambienti di rete dual-stack e delle comuni lacune di sicurezza nelle infrastrutture organizzative.
Le organizzazioni devono dare urgentemente priorità alla protezione dei propri ambienti VMware tramite l’applicazione completa di patch, un monitoraggio avanzato delle attività dell’hypervisor e l’implementazione di funzionalità di rilevamento avanzate che vadano oltre le tradizionali soluzioni di sicurezza degli endpoint.
L'articolo Fire Ant all’attacco: come un bug in vCenter apre le porte all’inferno IT proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Learn Computing? Head for MonTana!
We’ve often thought that it must be harder than ever to learn about computers. Every year, there’s more to learn, so instead of making the gentle slope from college mainframe, to Commodore 64, to IBM PC, to NVidia supercomputer, you have to start at the end. But, really, you don’t. You can always emulate computers from simpler times, and even if you don’t need to, it can be a lot of fun.
That’s the idea behind the MonTana mini-computer. It combines “…ideas from the PDP-11, MIPS, Scott CPU, Game Boy, and JVM to make a relatively simple 16-bit computer…”
The computer runs on Java, so you can try it nearly anywhere. The console is accessed through a web browser and displays views of memory, registers, and even something that resembles a Game Boy screen. You’ll need to use assembly language until you write your own high-level language (we’d suggest Forth). There is, however, a simple operating system, MTOS.
This is clearly made for use in a classroom, and we’d love to teach a class around a computer like this. The whole thing reminds us of a 16-bit computer like the PDP-11 where everything is a two-byte word. There are only 4K bytes of memory (so 2K words). However, you can accomplish a great deal in that limited space. Thanks to the MTOS API, you don’t have to worry about writing text to the screen and other trivia.
It looks like fun. Let us know what you’ll use it for. If you want to go down a level, try CARDIAC. Or skip ahead a little, and teach kids QBasic.
A History of Pong
Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.
The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play games on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.
But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.
Between 1952 and 1961, computers were coming into their own. In the UK, a man named Douglas used the CRT display of EDSAC to play naughts and crosses — also known as tic-tac-toe to Americans. Interestingly, the display was sort of “bit mapped” as it showed the bits in one of the machine’s mercury delay lines. The program featured an algorithm-driven computer player that was capable of beating humans.
Meanwhile, in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Willy Higginbotham used an analog computer and an oscilloscope to allow two people to play “tennis” against each other. There was no computer player, but still. You can see a video below. The machine didn’t survive, but the Lab built a replica in 1997.
youtube.com/embed/6PG2mdU_i8k?…
By 1961, MIT had Spacewar running on a DEC PDP-1, which became fairly famous. However, it would take Ralph Baer — remember him? — to bring the game into your home.
In 1966, he revisited his old idea and had built seven prototype games by 1968, aided by $2,500 from his employer and a couple of engineers. The resulting “brown box” game (so called because the final prototype had a simulated wood case created using brown tape) was shopped around until Magnavox decided to produce it. By the way, Baer would go on to also invent Simon and a few other games, but that’s another story.
1972: A Game Odyssey
Magnavox liked the brown box and signed a deal to produce a game based on it. In May 1972, Odyssey hit store shelves. By today’s standards, it wasn’t much. Just one or two paddles and a moving dot. Graphics and color were plastic overlays on your screen. Check out those controllers in the promotional video below.
youtube.com/embed/jLGBtkKPj2U?…
In a year, the box sold 69,000 units. By 1975, there were 350,000 out in the world. The $99.95 price was high for those days. They did some test marketing with the system, then called Skill-O-Vision, and decided to add some generic board games that seemed pretty pointless. If you wanted the shooting game that was part of the prototypes, that was extra.
Oh, and if you are under a certain age, you might have to stretch your imagination of what an 18-inch TV looks like. It was a different world and arcades in those days had electromechanical devices like pinball machines, bowling machines, and very rare games that had real electronics in them.
Pong?
You might notice that the video doesn’t mention Pong. The reason? While what we call Pong was one of the 12 games on the Odyssey, it wasn’t called that. That name was from Atari and Nolan Bushnell (who later started Chuck E. Cheese).
Bushnell wanted to create electronic games after working while in college for an amusement park where he’d seen electromechanical arcade games. He set out with a partner, Ted Dabney, to form a company to create a game similar to Spacewar. Called Computer Space, it arrived in amusement parks and similar venues in 1970 with the help of partner company Nutting Associates.
youtube.com/embed/o019DYaSxUQ?…
The game was a commercial flop. However, Bushnell wanted to try again. He hired Allan Alcorn. Here’s where the story gets strange.
The goal was to build a driving game for Bally, but Alcorn had no experience with games. Bushnell claims that he had played tennis on a PDP-1 in college and decided to get Alcorn to create a tennis game as a warm-up project. However, there is considerable evidence that Bushnell had, in fact, seen the Magnavox Odyssey and was looking to copy it.
Whatever the truth is, a prototype Pong game wound up in a local bar late in 1972, about three months after the Odyssey was on store shelves. It was such a hit that the coin acceptor filled up in only a few days.
Bushnell originally shopped the game to Bally, where he wanted to use it to fulfill his existing contract, and to Midway. However, once he realized it was a hit, he decided Atari should produce it themselves. He told Bally that Midway didn’t want it. Then he told Midway that Bally didn’t want it. As a result, both declined to buy the machine. A few months later, Atari started producing Pong arcade games for sale.
Back Home
This led to Magnavox suing Atari. Atari capitulated and struck a deal to be considered a licensee for $1.5 million and other concessions.
During the same time, Magnavox was also feeling the pinch of production costs. The box, which had cost $37 to produce, was up to $47, and there was no appetite for raising the $100 price tag. To make it more affordable, they also turned to integrated circuits (the original was full of discrete devices and was entirely analog).
Chips for the Win
Magnavox used Texas Instruments to develop a chip set for its new 1975 games. TI developed more advanced chips, and by combining chips, you could make new kinds of games. By 1976, TI began selling these parts to the general public. However, they would ultimately not succeed because another company had arguably done a better job: General Instruments.
General Instruments created the single-chip Pong game. The AY-3-8500 was nearly everything you needed to create a Pong game. In fact, it could also play soccer, squash (one or two players), and two rifle games, with the right equipment. You could add a few components to get color and a few more to get four players instead of two.
These chips were cheap and made it extremely simple to create a workable video game. If you had a way to sell them, this was the answer. Coleco was the first, but not the last, to be a customer. We’ve heard there were over 200 products from the era that utilized the IC, including the Odyssey 2000 and 3000, Radio Shack’s TV Scoreboard, and Sears’ Hockey Pong. The chips were also popular among hobby builders. Prior to that, it was a big project to make even a simple game (like the one on page 61 of the November 1972 Popular Electronics magazine).
The AY-3-8500 wasn’t, however, the only game in town — no pun intended. National Semiconductor had its own entry into the market. MOSTek was another entrant. They all played the same basic games with a bouncing ball and some controllers. None of these could stand against General Instruments’ momentum. We saw one of these recently in one of the many little-known attempts to cash in on the video game craze.
A company called Universal Research produced the F4301 in 1976. It featured two tennis-like games, as well as two unique car racing games. This helped it a bit, but it was still no match for the simple designs possible with the General Instruments devices. Even TI finally threw in the towel and produced a clone of the General Instrument chip.
There were so many of these made that they are still easy to find and use. Even on a breadboard. Can’t imagine how you’d do this without a chip? Simulate it.
The Future
Who could have imagined where games on video screens would go? In 1978, Space Invaders hit the arcade scene. But that’s an entirely different subject.
Caterina sta arrivando? Lava, stira e piega e comunica con gli altri elettrodomestici in casa
Il sogno di tutti è avere un assistente in casa che faccia lavori fisici come il celebre film “io e Caterina” non è vero? Sappiate che non ci siamo molto lontani.
27 luglio 2025 – Il futuro delle faccende domestiche avrà sicuramente un volto – anzi, un corpo – umanoide, ma per ora serve ancora un operatore umano dietro le quinte. È quanto emerge dalla presentazione ufficiale di HIVA Haiwa, il nuovo prototipo di robot sviluppato da Haier Group, gigante cinese noto per i suoi elettrodomestici smart.
Come riportato dal portale IT Home, HIVA Haiwa è progettato per svolgere attività domestiche come lavare i pavimenti, avviare la lavatrice, stirare e piegare i vestiti. Tuttavia, c’è un dettaglio importante: il robot non esegue queste operazioni in completa autonomia, ma è controllato a distanza da specialisti di Haier. Questa scelta rientra nella fase di apprendimento del robot, che attraverso l’esperienza operativa accumula dati per migliorare le proprie capacità e, in futuro, diventare (si spera) più indipendente.
Un robot umanoide “domestico”, ma con limiti
HIVA Haiwa misura 165 cm di altezza e pesa circa 70 kg. È dotato di due braccia meccaniche e si sposta grazie a una piattaforma mobile a ruote. Grazie ai suoi 44 gradi di libertà, può afferrare e maneggiare oggetti posizionati fino a 2 metri dal pavimento, rendendolo potenzialmente molto versatile in un ambiente domestico.
Il design del robot ricorda un altro prototipo sviluppato da Haier Brothers Robotics Technology, una sussidiaria del gruppo Haier Smart Home, in collaborazione con Beijing Xingdong Jiyuan Technology. Le due aziende hanno stretto un accordo di cooperazione nel marzo 2025 con l’obiettivo di creare robot specializzati per scenari smart home.
Verso una casa sempre più intelligente
Secondo quanto dichiarato da Haier, l’intento finale non è solo avere un robot che pulisce, ma integrare HIVA Haiwa nell’ecosistema della smart home, dove potrà coordinarsi con altri dispositivi intelligenti: elettrodomestici, sensori, impianti domotici e sistemi di monitoraggio. L’idea è che, grazie all’intelligenza artificiale e all’interconnessione, questi robot possano diventare veri assistenti domestici, capaci di gestire in autonomia gran parte delle incombenze quotidiane.
Per il momento, però, HIVA Haiwa resta un progetto sperimentale, ancora lontano da un utilizzo commerciale diffuso. Nonostante ciò, la strada tracciata da Haier e dai suoi partner mostra chiaramente come i robot potrebbero trasformare il concetto stesso di “casa intelligente” nei prossimi anni.
L'articolo Caterina sta arrivando? Lava, stira e piega e comunica con gli altri elettrodomestici in casa proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User
After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System – X11 for short – on account of it being old and decrepit. Or at least that’s what the common narrative is, because if you dig into the chatter surrounding the ongoing transition there are some real issues that people have with the 16-year old spring chicken – called Wayland – that’s supposed to replace it.
Recently [Brodie Robertson] did some polling and soliciting commentary from the community, breaking down the results from over 1,150 comments to the YouTube community post alone.
The issues range from the expected, such as applications that haven’t been ported yet from X11 to Wayland, to compatibility issues – such as failing drag and drop – when running X11 and Wayland applications side by side. Things get worse when support for older hardware, like GeForce GT610 and GT710 GPUs, and increased resource usage by Wayland are considered.
From there it continues with the lack of global hotkeys in Wayland, graphics tablet support issues, OBS not supporting embedded browser windows, Japanese and other foreign as well as onscreen keyboard support issues that are somehow worse than on X11, no support for overscanning monitors or multiple mouse cursors, no multi-monitor fullscreen option, regressions with accessibility, inability of applications to set their (previously saved) window position, no real automation alternative for xdotool, lacking BSD support and worse input latency with gaming.
Some users also simply say that they do not care about Wayland either way as it offers no new features they want. Finally [Brodie] raises the issue of the Wayland developers not simply following standards set by the Windows and MacOS desktops, something which among other issues has been a point of hotly debated contention for years.
Even if Wayland does end up succeeding X11, the one point that many people seem to agree on is that just because X11 is pretty terrible right now, this doesn’t automatically make Wayland the better option. Maybe in hindsight Mir was the better choice we had before it pivoted to Wayland.
youtube.com/embed/yURfsJDOw1E?…
The tech-shaped hole in the transatlantic trade deal
IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and this is my current state of mind as the "summer lull" keeps on throwing up major event after major event. Pace yourself, people.
— The European Union and the United States agreed to a tariff deal. Almost none of it will affect the digital sector, so expect further tension ahead.
— The US and China put out separate visions for global AI governance. The differences will force countries to pick one side or the other.
— Energy consumption related to artificial intelligence, data centers and cryptocurrencies is expected to double between 2022-2026.
Let's get started:
Commodore 64 on New FPGA
When it comes to getting retro hardware running again, there are many approaches. On one hand, the easiest path could be to emulate the hardware on something modern, using nothing but software to bring it back to life. On the other, many prefer to restore the original hardware itself and make sure everything is exactly as it was when it was new. A middle way exists, though, thanks to the widespread adoption of FPGAs which allow for programmable hardware emulation and [Jo] has come up with a new implementation of the Commodore 64 by taking this path.
The project is called the VIC64-T9K and is meant as a proof-of-concept that can run the Commodore 64’s VIC-II video chip alongside a 6502 CPU on the inexpensive Tang Nano 9k FPGA. Taking inspiration from the C64_MiSTer project, another FPGA implementation of the C64 based on the DE10-Nano FPGA, it doesn’t implement everything an original Commodore system would have had, but it does provide most of the core hardware needed to run a system. The project supports HDMI video with a custom kernel, and [Jo] has used it to get a few demos running including sprite animations.
Built with a mix of Verilog and VHDL, it was designed as a learning tool for [Jo] to experiment with the retro hardware, and also brings a more affordable FPGA board to the table for Commodore enthusiasts. If you’re in the market for something with more of the original look and feel of the Commodore 64, though, this project uses the original case and keyboard while still using an FPGA recreation for the core of the computer.
BreachForums torna online! 7,3 milioni di post e 340k utenti ripristinati
le piante infestanti, se non vengono estirpate dalle radici rinasceranno, molto più vigorose di prima. Questo è il cybercrime e questa è la nuova rinascita, la quinta in assoluto dalle radici di RaidForums!
BreachForums, il noto forum di discussione sulla criminalità informatica scomparso dalla clearnet dopo un sequestro da parte delle forze dell’ordine, è tornato online questa settimana. A guidare il rilancio sarebbero gli stessi amministratori originali, che hanno riportato attivo l’intero archivio storico: account utente, messaggi privati e reputazioni sono rimasti intatti.
Infatti, le vecchie coppie di credenziali (username e password) risultano nuovamente funzionanti, segno che l’intero database è stato ripristinato e reso disponibile agli utenti. Questa riapparizione inattesa ha suscitato preoccupazione tra i ricercatori di sicurezza, mentre ha rassicurato gli utenti criminali del forum (ad esempio nel gruppo jacuzzi su telegram), molti dei quali avevano ormai dato per persi i propri dati e la reputazione accumulata.
Il forum mostra oltre 7,3 milioni di post distribuiti in circa 13.000 thread, cifre identiche all’istantanea catturata poco prima della chiusura. Ciò sembra confermare le parole degli amministratori: “I vostri account, i vostri post, la vostra reputazione: nulla è andato perso o modificato”.
Il ritorno è stato ufficializzato in un post firmato dall’amministratore noto come “NA”. Nella comunicazione, si precisa che nessun membro dello staff principale sarebbe stato arrestato durante la chiusura avvenuta mesi fa.
Secondo quanto dichiarato, il dominio del forum era stato sospeso volontariamente lo scorso aprile dopo che una vulnerabilità zero-day in MyBB (il software alla base del sito) era stata sfruttata contro diverse community. Gli amministratori affermano di aver corretto il bug e di aver recuperato il dominio una volta chiarite quelle che definiscono “idee sbagliate” diffuse da utenti rivali e competitor.
Nonostante il tentativo di trasmettere normalità – “Per quanto ci riguarda, è tutto come al solito” – la rapidità del ritorno alimenta sospetti tra gli investigatori. Dopo l’operazione condotta dall’FBI a marzo, in molti pensavano che il mercato di database rubati e malware ospitato da BreachForums fosse stato smantellato per sempre.
Invece, a distanza di meno di quattro mesi, sono ricomparsi gli stessi handle utente, i portafogli in criptovaluta e i punteggi di reputazione. Un fatto che lascia intendere che gli operatori avessero backup sicuri esterni e non abbiano mai consegnato le chiavi di crittografia.
Per rafforzare la fiducia dei circa 340.000 membri registrati, BreachForums ha introdotto un “sistema di moderazione rinnovato” e ha promesso aggiornamenti costanti sulla situazione legale che coinvolge la piattaforma. Nel messaggio si accenna anche a “cambiamenti nelle prossime settimane” pensati per aumentare la trasparenza, anche se diversi analisti del settore ritengono si tratti solo di una mossa di facciata.
Il ritorno di BreachForums evidenzia, ancora una volta, la resilienza delle community criminali online e la difficoltà per le autorità di neutralizzare in modo permanente i mercati dedicati a database violati, malware e informazioni sensibili.
L'articolo BreachForums torna online! 7,3 milioni di post e 340k utenti ripristinati proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Experience Other Planets with the Gravity Simulator
As Earthlings, most of us don’t spend a lot of extra time thinking about the gravity on our home planet. Instead, we go about our days only occasionally dropping things or tripping over furniture but largely attending to other matters of more consequence. When humans visit other worlds, though, there’s a lot more consideration of the gravity and its effects on how humans live and many different ways of training for going to places like the Moon or Mars. This gravity simulator, for example, lets anyone experience what it would be like to balance an object anywhere with different gravity from Earth’s.
The simulator itself largely consists of a row of about 60 NeoPixels, spread out in a line along a length of lightweight PVC pipe. They’re controlled by an Arduino Nano which has a built-in inertial measurement unit, allowing it to sense the angle the pipe is being held at as well as making determinations about its movement. A set of LEDs on the NeoPixel strip is illuminated, which simulates a ball being balanced on this pipe, and motion one way or the other will allow the ball to travel back and forth along its length. With the Earth gravity setting this is fairly intuitive but when the gravity simulation is turned up for heavier planets or turned down for lighter ones the experience changes dramatically. Most of the video explains the math behind determining the effects of a rolling ball in each of these environments, which is worth taking a look at on its own.
While the device obviously can’t change the mass or the force of gravity by pressing a button, it’s a unique way to experience and feel what a small part of existence on another world might be like. With enough budget available there are certainly other ways of providing training for other amounts of gravity like parabolic flights or buoyancy tanks, although one of the other more affordable ways of doing this for laypeople is this low-gravity acrobatic device.
youtube.com/embed/rBDQSQoTuvk?…
IO E CHATGPT E09: Costruire una routine di apprendimento continuo
In questo episodio analizziamo come costruire una routine di apprendimento continuo con strumenti di intelligenza artificiale generativa.
zerodays.podbean.com/e/io-e-ch…
The Power-Free Tag Emulator
Most of you know how an NFC tag works. The reader creates an RF field that has enough energy to power the electronics in the tag; when the tag wakes up, two-way communication ensues. We’re accustomed to blank tags that can be reprogrammed, and devices like the Flipper Zero that can emulate a tag. In between those two is [MCUer]’s power-free tag emulator, a board which uses NFC receiver hardware to power a small microcontroller that can run emulation code.
The microcontroller in question is the low-power CW32L010 from Wuhan Xinyuan Semiconductor, a Chinese part with an ARM Cortex M0+ on board. Unfortunately, that’s where the interesting news ends, because all we can glean from the GitHub repository is a PCB layout. Not even a circuit diagram, which we hope is an unintended omission rather than deliberate. It does, however, lend itself to the fostering of ideas, because if this designer can’t furnish a schematic, then perhaps you can. It’s not difficult to make an NFC receiver, so perhaps you can hook one up to a microcontroller and be the one who shares the circuit.
Hackaday Links: July 27, 2025
Sad breaking news late this Sunday afternoon of the passing of nerd icon Tom Lehrer at 97. Coming up through the culture, knowing at least a few of Tom’s ditties, preferably “The Elements” or “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” was as essential to proving one’s bona fides as committing most Monty Python bits to memory. Tom had a way with words that belied his background as a mathematician, spicing his sarcastic lyrics with unusual rhymes and topical references that captured the turbulence of the late 50s and early 60s, which is when he wrote most of his well-known stuff. First Ozzy, then Chuck Mangione, now Tom Lehrer — it’s been a rough week for musicians.
Here we go again. It looks like hams have another spectrum grab on their hands, but this time it’s the popular 70-cm band that’s in the crosshairs. Starlink wannabe AST SpaceMobile, which seeks to build a constellation of 248 ridiculously large communication satellites to offer direct-to-device service across the globe, seeks a substantial chunk of the 70-cm band, from 430 to 440 MHz, to control the satellites. This is smack in the middle of the 70-cm amateur radio band allocation here in the US, but covers the entire band for unlucky hams in Europe and the UK. The band is frequently used for repeaters, which newbie hams can easily access using a cheap hand-held radio to start learning the ropes.
We dug into some of AST’s filings with the US Federal Communications Commission to try to tease out some details, which was about as much fun as it sounds. From what we gather, AST is already licensed by the FCC for 430-440MHz for its five-satellite test constellation, so that’s a done deal. What they seek now is a modification of their license to support the full constellation, which would put 243 additional satellites that are three times the size of those already deployed into low-Earth orbit between 520 and 685 kilometers. The request for 430-440MHz is for emergency telemetry and tracking purposes outside the United States. While this seems like it would have a limited impact, experience has shown that it’s usually worse in practice than it seems on paper.
The ways that some megacorporations find to spend money often boggles the mind, especially for those of us down here at the more modest end of the economic spectrum. But Microsoft spending close to two billion dollars on poop takes that to a whole new level. The company agreed to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of manure, sewage sludge, and agricultural waste over the next twelve years and turn it into a slurry (yum). The poop-shake will then be pumped deep underground to sequester the carbon dioxide and methane that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere, offsetting the greenhouse emissions racked up by the company’s data centers. One assumes that the destination for this material will be some sort of impervious geological formation, such as the ones that trapped the natural gas created by ancient rotting vegetation, or it would defeat the purpose. So essentially, Microsoft is creating new natural gas deposits that could be tapped by future generations. It’s a circle of life.
Did this week seem to fly by for you? It did for us, and perhaps the fact that Tuesday was the second-shortest day in recorded history had something to do with it. The 22nd was 1.34 milliseconds shorter than a nominal 86,400-second day — that’s 15.5 parts per billion for those playing along at home — thanks to a burst of rotational speed. The record for the shortest day was set last July, when the 5th clocked in a blazing 1.66 milliseconds faster than the nominal 24-hour day. As for the cause of this burst of speed, explanations range from redistribution of mass thanks to melting polar ice to weird things happening inside the liquid core of the planet, but whatever it is, it just means less sleep for us.
What do you mean? “qwerty1234” seems like a perfectly fine password to us! Or maybe not, now that a 158-year-old company in the UK has ceased operations thanks to a weak email password. Knights of Old, a trucking company in Northamptonshire (wait — if it’s England, does that make it a “lorrying” company? Or maybe it’s just a drayage?), got hit with a ransomware attack that leveraged an employee’s easily guessed email password. Once in, the attackers did the usual file encryption thing before issuing their demand for £5 million. That amount was beyond the company’s means, so they just noped out and folded up operations. It seems a little hinky to us that a 700-employee company would just throw in the towel like that without trying to at least negotiate with the attackers, but on the other hand, we’d have loved to see the look on their faces when the company just said, “Nah, we’re good.” At least they didn’t put much effort into the attack.
And finally, if you’ve got Kaizen-envy but don’t know where to start, take a look at Tool Trace. It’s a service that purports to create Kaizen foam inserts for organizing your tool drawers directly from a photo. All you’ve got to do is arrange the tools the way you want them in the drawer and take a picture. You need to include a sheet of paper in the photo for scale, either A4 or 8-1/2″x11″, and the app will spit out a DXF or SVG file of the shadowbox outlines. It’s Gridfinity-compatible, too, in case foam alone isn’t anal enough for you. You can then either cut the foam yourself or send the files out to a commercial outfit for manufacturing. We’ve always coveted an ultra-organized toolbox, so this might be fun to try, but it does seem like it has strong potential to trigger a descent into madness. We’ll let you know how it goes.
2025 One Hertz Challenge: RPI TinynumberHat9
This eye-catching entry to the One Hertz Challenge pairs vintage LED indicators with a modern RPi board to create a one-of-a-kind clock. The RPI TinynumberHat9 by [Andrew] brings back the beautiful interface from high end electronics of the past.
This project is centered around the red AL304 and green ALS314V 7-segment display chips. These 7-segment displays were produced in the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union; you can still find them, but you’ll have to do some digging as they are only becoming more rare. [Andrew] included the data sheet for these which was a good find, it is written in Russian but doesn’t hold any surprises, these tiny LEDs typically forward current is 5mA at 2V. One of the things that jumps out about these LEDs is the gold leads, a sure sign of being a high-end component of their day.
When selecting a driving chip for the LEDs, [Andrew] looked at the MAX7219 and HT16K33; he settled on the HT16K33 as it supports I2C as well as allows the easy addition of buttons to the HAT. Due to being driven by I2C, he was also able to add a Qwiic/Stemma I2C connector, so while designed initially to be a HAT for a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board, it can be connected to other things in the Qwiic/Stemma ecosystem.
Thanks [Andrew] for submitting this beautiful entry into the One Hertz Challenge. We love unique 7-segment displays, and so it’s pretty awesome to see 40-year-old display tech brought into the present.
A Very Tidy Handheld Pi Terminal Indeed
As single board computers have become ever smaller and more powerful, so have those experimenting with them tried to push the boundaries of the machines they can be used in. First we had cyberdecks, and now we have handheld terminals. Of this latter class we have a particularly nice example from [Random Alley Cat]. It takes a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and a handful of other parts, and makes them with a 3D printed case into something very professional indeed.
One of the problems with these designs has always been tidily packing away all the parts with their cables, and it’s one she solves by making a chassis to hold all the parts, and a case which fits around that. In a stroke the case no longer has to provide a dual function, allowing for a much easier internal layout. Her screen is a Pimoroni Hyperpixel, the keyboard is an Xbox 360 accessory, and the power supply is an off the shelf Pi UPS board and battery.
We particularly like the accesses on the underside of this machine to access the Pi ports, and the ventilation holes and external case details. It’s not perfect, as she says in the video below it’s not the best Linux keyboard. but we could really see ourselves using this.
If you follow handheld cyberdecks, we have a few treats for you on these pages. Not all of them run Linux, for example.
youtube.com/embed/9gSm7LS8cqE?…
Thanks [Sysop] for the tip!
Game Boy Camera in Wedding Photo Booth
For those of a certain age the first digital camera many of us experienced was the Game Boy Camera, an add-on for the original Game Boy console. Although it only took pictures with the limited 4-tone monochrome graphics of this system, its capability of being able to take a picture, edit it, create drawings, and then print them out on the Game Boy Printer was revolutionary for the time. Of course the people who grew up with this hardware are about the age to be getting married now (or well beyond), so [Sebastian] capitalized on the nostalgia for it with this wedding photo booth that takes pictures with the Game Boy Camera.
The photo booth features the eponymous Game Boy Camera front-and-center, with a pair of large buttons to allow the wedding guests to start the photography process. The system takes video and then isolates a few still images from it to be printed with the Game Boy Printer. The original Game Boy hardware, as well as a Flask-based web app with a GUI, is all controlled with a Raspberry Pi 4. There’s also a piece of Game Boy hardware called the GB Interceptor that sits between the Game Boy console and the camera cartridge itself which allows the Pi to capture the video feed directly.
The booth doesn’t stop with Game Boy hardware, though. There’s also a modern mirrorless digital camera set up in the booth alongside the Game Boy Camera which allows for higher resolution, full color images to be taken as well. This is also controlled with the same hardware and provides a more modern photo booth experience next to the nostalgic one provided by the Game Boy. There have been many projects which attempt to modernize this hardware, though, like this build which adds color to the original monochrome photos or this one which adds Wi-Fi capability.
youtube.com/embed/9KqTbu14pp0?…
A Cable Modem, The Way All Network Gear Should Be Mounted
Home routers and cable modems are now extremely powerful devices, but they all suffer from the attention of their manufacturers’ design and marketing departments. Instead of neatly packaging them in functional cases, they impose aesthetics and corporate identity on them, usually resulting in a curvy plastic case that’s difficult to integrate with other network infrastructure. [The Eccentric Workshop] did something about this with their new Arris modem, by creating a new 19″ rack mount for it.
Unusually for such a device, the plastic case was easy to dismantle. There’s a PCB inside, and a light guide for its LEDs. A new lower-half case and light guide were designed and 3D printed, and the whole was then mounted in a 1U rack case. The special part of this hack perhaps lies in the front panel, a very professionally cut and laser etched affair complete with an Arris logo as though it were meant to be this way.
We also like having our infrastructure and other things in a rack here at Hackaday, and fondly remember the days when some surprisingly affordable boxes came with metal wings for rack mounting. It’s always possible to use a rack tray, but something like this is so much more attractive.
A Non-Sony Playstation Motherboard Replacement
As hardware ages, it becomes harder and harder to keep it in service. Whether that’s because of physical aging or lack of support from the company who built it in the first place, time is not generally good for electronics, especially when it comes to our beloved retro gaming systems. The first Playstation, for example, is starting to see some of the deleterious effects of having originally been built in the 90s, and [LorentioB] has a new, third-party motherboard to bring to the table to keep these systems online as well as adding some features in that Sony removed.
The motherboard is known as the nsOne, meaning Not Sony’s One since this is the first motherboard built by a single person outside of Sony. It’s not based on any FPGAs or emulators and is completely compatible with all of the original hardware, chips, and other circuitry of the original Playstation. Based on the PU-23 series, it even revives the removed parallel port, which Sony removed after the first versions of the hardware because of region locking concerns and other pro-consumer issues. Every chip footprint and connector was reverse engineered manually, using optical sanding, scanning, and net-by-net tracing.
For such a complex piece of hardware this is quite the feat, and for anyone who wants to restore old hardware or add the parallel port back on to their system this could be a game changer. [LorentioB] is not quite finished yet but hopes to have a finished version shortly. As far as fully opening up the system goes, there are some software hacks to look at that allow more games to run on the system and some hardware hacks that open the system up as well.
2025 One-Hertz Challenge: Shadow Clock
You can buy all kinds of conventional clocks that have hands and numbers for easy reading. Or, like [Fabio Ricci], you could build yourself something a little more esoteric, like this neat shadow clock.
The heart of the build is an ESP8266 microcontroller, which gets the current time via Wi-Fi by querying an NTP time server. It also uses a DS3231 real-time clock module as a backup, keeping accurate time even when a network connection is unavailable.
Time is displayed via a 60-pixel ring of WS2812B addressable LEDs. These 60 LEDs correspond to the usual per-minute graduations that you would find on a regular clock. Current hour is displayed by lighting the corresponding LED red, while minutes are shown in blue and seconds in white. It’s called a “shadow clock” because of its method of activation. IR distance sensors are used to activate the time display when a hand or finger is placed near the clock. As Fabio puts it, “shadow play” will make the clock display the time. Otherwise, it switches to be a simple round device on the wall that displays colorful animations.
It’s a neat build that looks quite unassuming as a decor piece, and yet it also serves as an easy-to-read timepiece. We’ve seen LEDs put to all sorts of good uses in clock builds around these parts. Meanwhile, if you’ve found your own unique way to display the time—either in readable fashion, or totally oblique—don’t hesitate to let us know.
Vintage Plasma Display Shows Current Rad Levels
It’s hard to argue that Soviet-Era nuclear engineering may have some small flaws, what with the heavily-monitored exclusion zone around Chernobyl No.4. Evidently, their industrial designers were more on-the-ball, because [Alex] has crafted the absolute most stylish fallout monitor we’ve ever seen, with ESP32 and a vintage Soviet-designed plasma display to indicate radiation levels in the exclusion zone.
Since the device is not located within the zone, [Alex] is using the ESP32 to access sensor values published via an API at SaveEcoBot. He also includes a Geiger counter module for the background level at the current location. That’s straightforward enough– integrating the modern microcontroller with the vintage plasma display is where the real hacking comes in. Though they might not be as vintage as you think: apparently the Elektronika MS6205 remained in production until 2005, but 2005 is still vintage. [Alex] notes in the instructions on hackaday.io that we’re actually looking for a post-1995 model to follow along.
The Elektronika MS6205 is based on a 100×100 pixel plasma matrix, but it is operated as a text-only display with Latin and Cyrillic characters in ROM. The ROM also includes some extra symbols and Greek letters (the gamma will come in handy for this application) that can be unlocked by cutting a trace on the board and replacing it with a bodge wire. Igniting the display requires 250V, which will require more work for North Americans than it does in Ukraine. Driving the display requires interfacing with the 7-bit data bus and 8-bit address bus, but [Alex] has made the wiring and code available on the project site if you’re interested in these devices. If you want to watch it in action and get more background, check out the video embedded below.
These sorts of monochrome plasma displays have a lot of charm, and are absolutely worth reverse-engineering if you get your hands on different model. If you like the vibe of this display, you might also be interested in Vacuum Fluorescent Displays, which can be easier to find in the West.
Thanks to [Alex] for the tip. Like the tireless IEA workers at Chernobyl, we’re always monitoring the radiation level of our tips line.
youtube.com/embed/YcflcFGWDy8?…
Engrave a Cylinder Without a Rotary Attachment? No Problem!
Laser-engraving a cylindrical object usually requires a rotary attachment, which is a motorized holder that rotates a cylindrical object in sync with the engraver. But [Samcraft] shows that engraving all around a mug can be done without a motorized rotary holder.
The basic idea is to split the design into a number of separate engraving jobs, each containing one element of the overall design, then setting the mug into a 3D printed jig and manually rotating it between jobs. To demonstrate, [Samcraft] selects a series of line-art flowers and plants which are ideal for this approach because there’s no need to minutely register the individual engravings with one another.
What about focus? [Samcraft] found that a design up to 45 mm wide could be engraved onto the curved surface of his mug before focus suffers too much. It’s true that this technique only works with certain types of designs — specifically those with individual elements that can be separated into tall and thin segments — but the results are pretty nice.
Laser engravers are a very serious potential eye hazard, and we are not delighted to see the way the shield around [Samcraft]’s engraver cannot close completely to accommodate the mug while the laser is active. But we’re going to assume [Samcraft] has appropriate precautions and eye protection in place off-camera, because laser radiation and eyeballs absolutely do not belong together, even indirectly.
youtube.com/embed/PNWyCt6-Fu0?…
2025 One-Hertz Challenge: A Clock Sans Silicon
Just about every electronic device has some silicon semiconductors inside these days—from transistors to diodes to integrated circuits. [Charles] is trying to build a “No-Silicon digital clock” that used none of these parts. It looks like [Charles] is on the way to success, but one might like to point out an amusing technicality. Let’s dive in to the clock!
Instead of silicon semiconductors, [Charles] is attempting to build a digital clock using valves (aka tubes). More specifically, his design relies on seven dekatrons, which are the basic counting elements of the clock. By supplying the right voltages to the various cathodes of the dekatrons, they can be made to step through ten (or sometimes twelve) stable states, used as simple memory elements which can be used as the basis for a timepiece. [Charles] will set up the first dekatron to divide down mains frequency by 5 or 6 to get down to 10 Hz, depending on whether the supply is 50 Hz or 60 Hz. The next dekatron will step down 10 times to 1 Hz, to measure seconds. The next two will divide by ten and six to count minutes, while a further two will divide the same way to create an impulse per hour. A final dekatron will divide by 12 to count the hours in a day.
Naturally, time will be displayed on Nixies. While silicon semiconductors are verboten, [Charles] is also considering the use of some germanium parts to keep the total tube count down when it comes to supporting hardware. Also, [Charles] may wish to avoid silicon, but here’s the thing about tubes. They use glass housings, and glass is made of silicon.
Cheeky technicalities aside, it’s a great project that promises to create a very interesting clock indeed. Progress is already steaming along and we can’t wait to see the finished product. We’ve seen dekatrons put to good use before, too. If you’re cooking up your own practical projects with mid-century hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know!
Signal Injector Might Still be Handy
Repairing radios was easier when radios were simple. There were typically two strategies. You could use a signal tracer (an amplifier) to listen at the volume control. If you heard something, the problem was after the volume control. If you didn’t, then the problem was something earlier in the signal path. Then you find a point halfway again, and probe again. No signal tracer? You can also inject a signal. If you hear it, the problem is before the volume. If not, it is after. But where do you get the signal to inject? [Learn Electronics Repair] sets out to make a small one in a recent video you can see below.
Both signal tracers and injectors were once ubiquitous pieces of equipment when better options were expensive. However, these days, you can substitute an oscilloscope for a signal tracer and a signal generator for an injector. Still, it is a fun project, and a small dedicated instrument can be handy if you repair a lot of radios.
The origin of this project was from an earlier signal injector design and a bet with a friend about making a small version. They are both working on their designs and want people to submit their own designs for a little ad hoc contest.
We always preferred a signal tracer since it is more passive. Those were typically just audio amplifiers with an optional diode in the input to demodulate RF. A computer amplified speaker and a diode can do the job, as can an LM386. Or, you can build something complex, if you prefer.
youtube.com/embed/BaHocLOD6N8?…
DDoS ancora contro l’Italia. NoName057(16) colpisce altri 6 obiettivi italiani
Gli hacker di NoName057(16) continuano le loro attività ostili contro diversi obiettivi italiani, attraverso attacchi di Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS).
NoName057(16) è un gruppo di hacker che si è dichiarato a marzo del 2022 a supporto della Federazione Russa. Hanno rivendicato la responsabilità di attacchi informatici a paesi come l’Ucraina, gli Stati Uniti e altri vari paesi europei. Questi attacchi vengono in genere eseguiti su agenzie governative, media e siti Web di società private
- Comune di aymavilles
- Progetti e iniziative del Comune di Milano
- Città di Catania
- Aeronautica Militare Italiana (segnalata come dead on ping, cioè non raggiungibile)
- Porti di Olbia e Golfo Aranci
- Autorità di Sistema Portuale del Mare Adriatico Centrale
Che cos’è un attacco Distributed Denial of Service
Un attacco DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) è un tipo di attacco informatico in cui vengono inviate una grande quantità di richieste a un server o a un sito web da molte macchine diverse contemporaneamente, al fine di sovraccaricare le risorse del server e renderlo inaccessibile ai suoi utenti legittimi.
Queste richieste possono essere inviate da un grande numero di dispositivi infetti da malware e controllati da un’organizzazione criminale, da una rete di computer compromessi chiamata botnet, o da altre fonti di traffico non legittime. L’obiettivo di un attacco DDoS è spesso quello di interrompere le attività online di un’organizzazione o di un’azienda, o di costringerla a pagare un riscatto per ripristinare l’accesso ai propri servizi online.
Gli attacchi DDoS possono causare danni significativi alle attività online di un’organizzazione, inclusi tempi di inattività prolungati, perdita di dati e danni reputazionali. Per proteggersi da questi attacchi, le organizzazioni possono adottare misure di sicurezza come la limitazione del traffico di rete proveniente da fonti sospette, l’utilizzo di servizi di protezione contro gli attacchi DDoS o la progettazione di sistemi resistenti agli attacchi DDoS.
Occorre precisare che gli attacchi di tipo DDoS, seppur provocano un disservizio temporaneo ai sistemi, non hanno impatti sulla Riservatezza e Integrità dei dati, ma solo sulla loro disponibilità. pertanto una volta concluso l’attacco DDoS, il sito riprende a funzionare esattamente come prima.
Che cos’è l’hacktivismo cibernetico
L’hacktivismo cibernetico è un movimento che si serve delle tecniche di hacking informatico per promuovere un messaggio politico o sociale. Gli hacktivisti usano le loro abilità informatiche per svolgere azioni online come l’accesso non autorizzato a siti web o a reti informatiche, la diffusione di informazioni riservate o il blocco dei servizi online di una determinata organizzazione.
L’obiettivo dell’hacktivismo cibernetico è di sensibilizzare l’opinione pubblica su questioni importanti come la libertà di espressione, la privacy, la libertà di accesso all’informazione o la lotta contro la censura online. Gli hacktivisti possono appartenere a gruppi organizzati o agire individualmente, ma in entrambi i casi utilizzano le loro competenze informatiche per creare un impatto sociale e politico.
È importante sottolineare che l’hacktivismo cibernetico non deve essere confuso con il cybercrime, ovvero la pratica di utilizzare le tecniche di hacking per scopi illeciti come il furto di dati personali o finanziari. Mentre il cybercrime è illegale, l’hacktivismo cibernetico può essere considerato legittimo se mira a portare all’attenzione pubblica questioni importanti e a favorire il dibattito democratico. Tuttavia, le azioni degli hacktivisti possono avere conseguenze legali e gli hacktivisti possono essere perseguiti per le loro azioni.
Chi sono gli hacktivisti di NoName057(16)
NoName057(16) è un gruppo di hacker che si è dichiarato a marzo del 2022 a supporto della Federazione Russa. Hanno rivendicato la responsabilità di attacchi informatici a paesi come l’Ucraina, gli Stati Uniti e altri vari paesi europei. Questi attacchi vengono in genere eseguiti su agenzie governative, media e siti Web di società private
Le informazioni sugli attacchi effettuati da NoName057(16) sono pubblicate nell’omonimo canale di messaggistica di Telegram. Secondo i media ucraini, il gruppo è anche coinvolto nell’invio di lettere di minaccia ai giornalisti ucraini. Gli hacker hanno guadagnato la loro popolarità durante una serie di massicci attacchi DDOS sui siti web lituani.
Le tecniche di attacco DDoS utilizzate dal gruppo sono miste, prediligendo la “Slow http attack”.
La tecnica del “Slow Http Attack”
L’attacco “Slow HTTP Attack” (l’articolo completo a questo link) è un tipo di attacco informatico che sfrutta una vulnerabilità dei server web. In questo tipo di attacco, l’attaccante invia molte richieste HTTP incomplete al server bersaglio, con lo scopo di tenere occupate le connessioni al server per un periodo prolungato e impedire l’accesso ai legittimi utenti del sito.
Nello specifico, l’attacco Slow HTTP sfrutta la modalità di funzionamento del protocollo HTTP, che prevede che una richiesta HTTP sia composta da tre parti: la richiesta, la risposta e il corpo del messaggio. L’attaccante invia molte richieste HTTP incomplete, in cui il corpo del messaggio viene inviato in modo molto lento o in modo incompleto, bloccando la connessione e impedendo al server di liberare le risorse necessarie per servire altre richieste.
Questo tipo di attacco è particolarmente difficile da rilevare e mitigare, poiché le richieste sembrano legittime, ma richiedono un tempo eccessivo per essere elaborate dal server. Gli attacchi Slow HTTP possono causare tempi di risposta molto lenti o tempi di inattività del server, rendendo impossibile l’accesso ai servizi online ospitati su quel sistema.
Per proteggersi da questi attacchi, le organizzazioni possono implementare soluzioni di sicurezza come l’uso di firewall applicativi (web application firewall o WAF), la limitazione delle connessioni al server e l’utilizzo di sistemi di rilevamento e mitigazione degli attacchi DDoS
L'articolo DDoS ancora contro l’Italia. NoName057(16) colpisce altri 6 obiettivi italiani proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Arriva Koske: il malware per Linux sviluppato con l’Intelligenza Artificiale
Gli analisti di AquaSec hanno scoperto un nuovo malware per Linux. Il malware si chiama Koske e si ritiene sia stato sviluppato utilizzando l’intelligenza artificiale. Utilizza immagini JPEG di panda per iniettarsi direttamente nella memoria. I ricercatori descrivono Koske come una “minaccia Linux sofisticata” il cui comportamento adattivo suggerisce che il malware è sviluppato utilizzando modelli linguistici di grandi dimensioni (LLM) o framework di automazione.
L’obiettivo principale di Koske è implementare miner ottimizzati per CPU e GPU che utilizzino le risorse di elaborazione dell’host per estrarre varie criptovalute. Poiché durante lo studio del malware sono stati scoperti indirizzi IP e frasi serbi negli script, nonché la lingua slovacca nel repository GitHub in cui si trovavano i miner, gli esperti non sono stati in grado di stabilire un’attribuzione esatta.
Gli aggressori ottengono l’accesso iniziale sfruttando configurazioni errate di JupyterLab che consentono l’esecuzione di comandi. Quindi, caricano due immagini panda in formato .JPEG sul sistema della vittima, che vengono archiviate su servizi legittimi come OVH Images, FreeImage e PostImage. Queste immagini contengono il payload dannoso.
È importante sottolineare che gli hacker non utilizzano la steganografia per nascondere malware all’interno delle immagini. Si affidano invece a file poliglotti, che possono essere letti e interpretati in diversi formati. Negli attacchi Koske, lo stesso file può essere interpretato come un’immagine o uno script, a seconda dell’applicazione che lo apre o lo elabora.
Le immagini del panda contengono non solo l’immagine stessa, con le intestazioni corrette per il formato JPEG, ma anche script shell dannosi e codice scritto in C, che consentono di interpretare separatamente entrambi i formati. In altre parole, aprendo un file di questo tipo, l’utente vedrà solo un simpatico panda, ma l’interprete dello script eseguirà il codice aggiunto alla fine del file.
I ricercatori scrivono che ogni immagine contiene un carico utile ed entrambi vengono lanciati in parallelo. “Un payload è codice C che viene scritto direttamente in memoria, compilato ed eseguito come oggetto condiviso (file .so) e funziona come un rootkit”, spiegano gli esperti. “Il secondo payload è uno script shell che viene eseguito anch’esso dalla memoria. Utilizza le utilità di sistema standard di Linux per rimanere invisibile e persistente, lasciando una traccia minima.”
Lo script garantisce anche la stabilità della connessione e aggira le restrizioni di rete: riscrive /etc/resolv.conf per utilizzare i DNS di Cloudflare e Google, e protegge questo file con chattr +i. Il malware reimposta anche le regole di iptables, cancella le variabili di sistema relative al proxy ed esegue un modulo personalizzato per forzare l’avvio dei proxy funzionanti tramite curl, wget e richieste TCP dirette.
È proprio per questa adattabilità e questo comportamento che i ricercatori suggeriscono che il malware potrebbe essere stato sviluppato utilizzando LLM o piattaforme di automazione. Prima di distribuirsi al computer della vittima, il malware valuta le capacità dell’host (CPU e GPU) per selezionare il miner più adatto: Koske supporta il mining di 18 diverse criptovalute, tra cui Monero, Ravencoin, Zano, Nexa e Tari.
Se una valuta o un pool non è disponibile, il malware passa automaticamente a un’opzione di backup dal suo elenco interno, il che indica anche un elevato grado di automazione e flessibilità.
L'articolo Arriva Koske: il malware per Linux sviluppato con l’Intelligenza Artificiale proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Personalization, Industrial Design, and Hacked Devices
[Maya Posch] wrote up an insightful, and maybe a bit controversial, piece on the state of consumer goods design: The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. Her basic thesis is that the “form follows function” aesthetic has gone too far, and all of the functionally equivalent devices in our life now all look exactly the same. Take the cellphone, for example. They are all slabs of screen, with a tiny bezel if any. They are non-objects, meant to disappear, instead of showcases for cool industrial design.
Of course this is an extreme example, and the comments section went wild on this one. Why? Because we all want the things we build to be beautiful and functional, and that has always been in conflict. So even if you agree with [Maya] on the suppression of designed form in consumer goods, you have to admit that it’s not universal. For instance, none of our houses look alike, even though the purpose is exactly the same. (Ironically, architecture is the source of the form follows function fetish.) Cars are somewhere in between, and maybe the cellphone is the other end of the spectrum from architecture. There is plenty of room for form and function in this world.
But consider the smartphone case – the thing you’ve got around your phone right now. In a world where people have the ultimate homogeneous device in their pocket, one for which slimness is a prime selling point, nearly everyone has added a few millimeters of thickness to theirs, aftermarket, in the form of a decorative case. It’s ironically this horrendous sameness of every cell phone that makes us want to ornament them, even if that means sacrificing on the thickness specs.
Granted, buying a phone case isn’t necessarily creative in the same way as hacking a phone is, but it at least lets you exercise a bit of your own design impulse. And it frees the designers from having to make a super-personal choice like this for you. How about a “nothing” design that affords easy personalized ornamentation? Has the slab smartphone solved the form-versus-function fight after all?
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!
Read QR Codes on the Cheap
Adding a camera to a project used to be a chore, but modern camera modules make it simple. But what if you want to read QR codes? [James Bowman] noticed a $7 module that claims to read QR codes so he decided to try one out.
The module seems well thought out. There’s a camera, of course. A Qwiic connector makes hooking up easy. An LED blinks blue when you have power and green when a QR code shows up.
Reading a QR code was simple in Python using the I2CDriver library. There are two possible problems: first, if the QR code contains a large amount of data, you may exceed the I2C limit of 254 bytes. Second, despite claiming a 110-degree field of view, [James’] testing showed the QR code has to be almost dead center of the camera for the system to work.
What really interested us, though, was the fact that the device is simply a camera with an RP2040 and little else. For $7, we might grab one to use as a platform for other imaging projects. Or maybe we will read some QR codes. We’d better pick up a few. Then again, maybe we can just do it by hand.
Google trasforma il web in una vetrina per l’AI! Un disastro a breve per l’economia digitale
Google sta trasformando il suo motore di ricerca in una vetrina per l’intelligenza artificiale, e questo potrebbe significare un disastro per l’intera economia digitale. Secondo un nuovo studio del Pew Research Center, solo l’1% delle ricerche che mostrano un riepilogo basato sull’intelligenza artificiale finisce per cliccare sulla fonte originale. Ciò significa che la stragrande maggioranza degli utenti non visita nemmeno i siti da cui provengono le informazioni.
La funzionalità AI Overview è stata introdotta nel 2023 e ha rapidamente iniziato a dominare i risultati di ricerca, sostituendo il tradizionale modello dei “10 link blu”. Invece di testi in tempo reale di giornalisti e blogger, gli utenti ricevono un riepilogo generato da algoritmi. Il problema è che questi riepiloghi non solo riducono il traffico sui siti, ma spesso portano ad altre fonti meno affidabili.
Questo è ciò che è successo con l’indagine di 404 Media sulle tracce generate dall’intelligenza artificiale per conto di artisti defunti. Nonostante le proteste e le successive azioni di Spotify, le ricerche su Google hanno inizialmente mostrato un riepilogo basato sull’intelligenza artificiale basato su un blog secondario, dig.watch , anziché sul materiale originale. In modalità Panoramica AI, l’articolo di 404 Media non è apparso affatto, ma solo sugli aggregatori TechRadar, Mixmag e RouteNote.
I produttori di contenuti originali stanno perdendo lettori, fatturato e la capacità di operare in modo sostenibile. Anche i contenuti di qualità stanno affogando in informazioni riconfezionate e create senza l’intervento umano. La creazione di falsi aggregatori di intelligenza artificiale è diventata onnipresente: ottengono traffico senza investire nel giornalismo.
A peggiorare le cose, l’IA Panoramica è facile da ingannare. L’artista Eduardo Valdés-Hevia ha condotto un esperimento pubblicando una teoria fittizia di encefalizzazione parassitaria. Nel giro di poche ore, Google ha iniziato a mostrarla come un fatto scientifico. Ha poi coniato il termine “Ingorgo da IA” – e ancora una volta, ha ottenuto lo stesso risultato. In seguito, è riuscito a mescolare malattie reali con altre fittizie, come la Dracunculus graviditatis – e l’IA, ancora una volta, non è riuscita a distinguere tra finzione e realtà.
Altri esempi: Google che dice agli utenti di mangiare la colla a causa di una barzelletta su Reddit, o che riporta la morte del giornalista ancora in vita Dave Barry. L’algoritmo non riconosce umorismo, satira o bugie, ma le presenta con assoluta certezza. Il pericolo non sta solo negli errori, ma anche nella scalabilità. Come osserva Valdés-Hevia, bastano pochi post su forum con un linguaggio “scientifico” perché una bugia venga spacciata per verità. Google diventa così inconsapevolmente uno strumento per diffondere disinformazione.
Il problema è sistemico. Il traffico di ricerca, che è stato a lungo la base della sopravvivenza di media e blog, sta scomparendo. L’ottimizzazione SEO non funziona più e le piccole imprese , come i grandi media, stanno subendo perdite. Invece di una maggiore concorrenza, assistiamo a un flusso centralizzato di errori e disinformazione, rafforzato dalla fiducia nel marchio Google. Alcune aziende offrono alternative: motori di ricerca senza pubblicità e filtri di contenuto basati sull’intelligenza artificiale. Ma finché Google rimarrà lo standard, gli utenti non otterranno ciò che cercano, ma ciò che l’algoritmo decide di mostrare.
In un commento ufficiale, Google ha definito la metodologia di Pew “non rappresentativa” e ha osservato che “reindirizza miliardi di clic ogni giorno”. Ma i dati raccontano una storia diversa: con le recensioni basate sull’intelligenza artificiale, le persone aprono meno siti web.
E questo sta lentamente ma inesorabilmente distruggendo l’ecosistema della conoscenza umana su Internet.
L'articolo Google trasforma il web in una vetrina per l’AI! Un disastro a breve per l’economia digitale proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.
Listening To Ethernet Via Eurorack
Ethernet is how we often network computers together, particularly when they’re too important to leave on a fussy WiFi connection. Have you ever thought about listening to Ethernet signals, though? Well, you totally could, with the NSA selector from [wenzellabs].
The NSA selector is a Eurorack module, designed for use as part of a larger modular synthesizer. There are lots of fun jokes and references on the PCB, but the front panel really shows you what this module is all about. It’s got a pair of RJ45 jacks, ready to receive your Ethernet cables through which data is flowing. They’re paired with a single audio output jack. “Any bit on the network will be sent to the audio output,” [wenzellabs] explains.
The device operates in a relatively simple fashion. Network traffic from one jack is forwarded to the other, unmodified. However, it’s also spat out to a simple digital-to-analog converter and turned into audio. This thing doesn’t play digital audio formats or anything like that—it just turns raw Ethernet signalling into audible noise.
Raw signal noises might not sound very appealing, but let’s be real here. If you liked nice sounds, you wouldn’t be into Eurorack. Skip to 25:46 in the video below if you just want to hear the final product.
youtube.com/embed/vfgySTaM1TI?…
Thanks to [mazzoo] for the tip!
A Modern Version of Famous, Classic Speaker
Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time often had to go to great lengths to generate new types of sounds, and one of the most famous of these was the Leslie speaker, known for its unique tremolo and vibrato. Original Leslies could cost thousands now, though, so [Levi Graves] built a modern recreation.
The Leslie speaker itself got its characteristic sound by using two speakers. The top treble speaker was connected to a pair of horns (only one of which produced sound, the other was used for a counterweight) on a rotating platform. The second speaker in the bottom part of the cabinet faced a rotating drum. Both the horns and drum were rotated at a speed chosen by the musician and leading to its unique sound. [Levi] is actually using an original Leslie drum for his recreation but the sound is coming out of a 100-watt “mystery” speaker, with everything packaged neatly into a speaker enclosure. He’s using a single-speed Leslie motor but with a custom-built foot switch can employ more fine-tuned control over the speed that the drum rotates.
Even though modern technology allows us to recreate sounds like this, often the physical manipulation of soundwaves like this created a unique feeling of sound that can’t be replicated in any other way. That’s part of what’s driven the popularity of these speakers throughout the decades, as well as the Hammond organs they’re often paired with. The tone generators on these organs themselves are yet another example of physical hardware providing a unique, classic sound not easily replicated.
youtube.com/embed/eUIq9w_LypY?…
Building a Color Teaching Toy For Tots
Last year, [Deep Tronix] wished to teach colors to his nephew. Thus, he built a toy to help educate a child about colors by pairing them with sounds, and Color Player was born.
The build is based around the TCS34725, an off-the-shelf color sensor. It’s paired with an ESP32, which senses colors and then plays sounds in turn. [Deep Tronix] made this part harder by insisting on creating their own WAV playback system, using the microcontroller, an SD card, and its on-board digital-to-analog hardware.
The toy operates in three primary modes. Color-to-tone, color-to-sound, color-to-voice. Basically, a color is scanned, and then the Color Player creates a tone, plays back a pre-recorded audio sample, or spells out the name of the color that was just scanned.
[Deep Tronix] also included jolly mode, which just color cycles a few RGB LEDs. However, there’s a game inside jolly mode as well, created for an older nephew to play with. Enter the right button combination, and you unlock it. Then, the device suggests a color and you have to run around, find it, and scan it to score.
We love a good color game; somehow this build seems even more compelling than Milton Bradley’s classic Simon toy.
youtube.com/embed/ytrSYcFd_d0?…
youtube.com/embed/LAM36I9Wtz4?…
Zine Printing Tips From a Solopreneur
Zines (self-produced, small-circulation publications) are extremely DIY, and therefore punk- and hacker-adjacent by nature. While they can be made with nothing more than a home printer or photocopier, some might benefit from professional production while losing none of their core appeal. However, the professional print world has a few gotchas, and in true hacker spirit [Mabel Wynne] shares things she learned the hard way when printing her solo art zine.
[Mabel] says the most useful detail to nail down before even speaking to printers is the zine’s binding, because binding type can impact layout and design of an entire document. Her advice? Nail it down early, whether it’s a simple saddlestitch (staples through a v-shaped fold of sheets), spiral binding (which allows a document to lay flat), or something else.
Aside from paper and print method (which may be more or less important depending on the zine’s content) the other thing that’s important to consider is the finishing. Finishing consists of things like cutting, folding, and binding of the raw printed sheets. A printer will help arrange these, but it’s possible to do some or even all of these steps for oneself, which is not only more hands-on but reduces costs.
Do test runs, and prototype the end result in order to force unknown problems to the surface before they become design issues. Really, the fundamentals have a lot in common with designing and building kits or hardware. Check out [Mabel]’s article for the full details; she even talks a little about managing money and getting a zine onto shelves.
Zine making is the DIYer’s way to give ideas physical form and put them into peoples’ hands more or less directly, and there’s something wonderfully and inherently subversive about that concept. 2600 has its roots in print, but oddball disk magazines prove one doesn’t need paper to make a zine.
Massive Aluminum Snake Casting Becomes Water Cooling Loop For PC
Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However, few are using large artistic castings as radiators like [Mac Pierce] is doing.
The next problem was to figure out how to create a sealed water channel in the casting to use it as a radiator. This was achieved by machining finned cooling channels into the surface of the snake itself. A polycarbonate face plate was then produced to bolt over this, creating a sealed system. [Mac] also had to work hard to find a supply of aluminum-compatible water cooling fittings to ensure he didn’t run into any issues with galvanic corrosion.
The final product worked, and looked great to boot, even if it took many disassembly cycles to fix all the leaks. The blood-red coolant was a nice touch that really complemented the silvery aluminum. CPU temperatures weren’t as good as with a purpose-built PC radiator, but maxed out at 51 C in a heavy load test—servicable for [Mac]’s uses. The final touch was to simply build the rest of the PC to live inside the ouroboros itself—and the results were stunning.
We’ve featured a few good watercooling builds over the years. If you’ve found your own unique way to keep your hardware cool and happy, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!
2025 One Hertz Challenge: A Discrete Component Divider Chain
Most of us know that a quartz clock uses a higher frequency crystal oscillator and a chain of divider circuits to generate a 1 Hz pulse train. It’s usual to have a 32.768 kHz crystal and a 15-stage divider chain, which in turn normally sits inside an integrated circuit. Not so for [Bobricius], who’s created just such a divider chain using discrete components.
The circuit of a transistor divider is simple enough, and he’s simply replicated it fifteen times in surface mount parts on a PCB with an oscillator forming the remaining square in a 4 by 4 grid. In the video below the break we can see him measuring the frequency at each point, down to the final second. It’s used as the timing generator for an all transistor clock, and as we can see it continues that trend. Below the break is a video showing all the frequencies in the chain.
This project is part of our awesome 2025 One Hertz Challenge, for all things working on one second cycles. Enter your own things that go tick and tock, we’d live to see them!
youtube.com/embed/zaNHGXwlpiE?…
Hackaday Podcast Episode 330: Hover Turtles, Dull Designs, and K’nex Computers
What did you miss on Hackaday last week? Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Al Williams are ready to catch you up on this week’s podcast. First, though, the guys go off on vibe coding and talk about a daring space repair around Jupiter.
Then it is off to the hacks, including paste extruding egg shells, bespoke multimeters, and an 8-bit mechanical computer made from a construction toy set.
For can’t miss articles, you’ll hear about boring industrial design in modern cell phones and a deep dive into how fresh fruit makes it to your table in the middle of the winter.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/…
The DRM-free MP3 was stored in a public refrigerated warehouse to ensure freshness. Why not download it and add it to your collection?
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Episode 330 Show Notes:
News:
What’s that Sound?
- The sound last week is revealed! Congrats to [Brian].
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Paste Extrusion For 3D Printing Glass And Eggshells
- CeraMetal Lets You Print Metal, Cheaply And Easily
- TRAvel Slicer
- Hand-and-Machine Github
- Extruder-turtle
- Designing An Open Source Multimeter: The HydraMeter
- USB-C-ing All The Things
- 8 Bit Mechanical Computer Built From Knex
- A Lockpicking Robot That Can Sense The Pins
- 2025 One-Hertz Challenge: HP Logic Probe Brought Into The Future
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Fusing Cheap EBay Find Into A Digital Rangefinder
- Embedded LEDs For Soft Robots Made From Silicone
- Video Tape Hides Video Player
- Al’s Picks:
- Neon Lamp Detects Lightning Strikes
- Reverse Engineering A ‘Tony’ 6502-based Mini Arcade Machine
- Floating Buoy Measures Ocean Conditions
Can’t-Miss Articles:
- The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics
- A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain
hackaday.com/2025/07/25/hackad…