Mysterious Files PH

Are you familiar with pop tubes? Resembling the corrugated section of a bendy straw, they are at the core of PopTuber, an intriguing research project from the Actuated Experience Lab at the University of Chicago.

PopTuber shows how five motors and some specialized gears are all it takes to bend pop tubes into complex and stable 3D shapes. One can design the shapes in software, feed a pop tube into the shaper, and watch the device do the work. Importantly, the device can just as easily reset and re-use the tube. Watch the video (embedded below the page break) to see it in action and get a feel for what it can do.

In concept, it’s a little like a wire-bending machine, although wire benders are bulkier in comparison, more complex to scale, and unbending a wire is a separate process with its own hardware.

This project explores possibilities for a machine that can crank out complex curves on demand, such as oddball user interfaces, physical prototyping, and even a strange sort of physical display. But the real forward-thinking and interesting question researchers asked is whether this idea could be a form of programmable matter. The project shows that five actuators in a relatively compact package are all that’s needed to shape (and reset) a pop tube of arbitrary length in a programmable way, and it can scale easily to different sizes.

Using pop tubes in this way reminds us of an origami-inspired method we covered for making a tube form stable, complex shapes. But it’s also different because origami- and kirigami-inspired methods bake the transformation into the material itself, whereas PopTuber can create arbitrary shapes on demand.

Running an optical character recognition (OCR) server might sound like it would need some powerful hardware, like a rack-mounted, water-cooled machine, or at least a nice desktop or laptop. But if you have the time, anything could be used. [Hemant] has a long-running personal project that processes a lot of image data over a long time, and set up the OCR server on an iPhone 8 running entirely with solar power, rather than turn to more typical hardware.

Part of what makes this task feasible for low-powered hardware is Apple’s Vision framework, which uses machine learning to aid in things like character recognition (among other tasks). It will run on an iPhone just as easily as a Mac. The phone’s built-in battery already provides the first step of an off-grid setup. This build relies on a separate power bank to integrate the phone with the solar panel more easily. On the software side, [Hemant] reports that the true challenge wasn’t setting up the server as much as it was keeping the iPhone from sleeping or stopping his program from running full-time.

A system like this running off-grid, especially considering the costs of the solar panel and power bank, might seem counterproductive. But when comparing electricity costs for running the same software on his server, he estimates he saves about $10 per month with this setup, which has a payback of somewhere around 2-3 years. Not too bad for a phone that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill. Old phones can be surprisingly good choices for servers, too. It helps if they can run Linux, but plenty of phones will support server applications, even when running their native OS.

If you’re located in the Northeast United States and thought you heard an explosion yesterday afternoon, it wasn’t just your imagination — multiple sources have now confirmed that a 1 meter (3 foot) meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere and broke up in the air off the coast of Massachusetts, releasing the energy equivalent of 300 tons of TNT.

Well, maybe. The latest update from NASA says it might actually qualify as a meteorite, with radar data indicating that debris from the space rock may have fallen into Cape Cod Bay. For those unfamiliar, the difference between a meteor and a meteorite is whether or not any of the object survived its encounter with the atmosphere and made it down to the surface.

There’s an argument to be made that a larger asteroid would have likely set off some alarm bells as it approached the planet, but the fact that this deep space interloper showed up unannounced is a sobering reminder that our ability to detect incoming threats isn’t nearly as robust as we’d like. Fortunately, it looks like the event didn’t result in any serious damage or injury.

Speaking of mid-air threats, here’s a reminder of what not to do on an airliner: on Saturday a flight departing Newark airport for Spain had to turn around when it was discovered a Bluetooth device bearing the name “BOMB” was onboard. There was no actual explosive device found on the plane when it was searched upon its return, and reports are that the whole incident was the result of an Ill-conceived device name on a portable speaker.

The details on this one are interesting, as a first-hand account posted to Reddit would seem to indicate that both the flight crew and teams back at United Airlines headquarters in Chicago were able to see the Bluetooth devices on the plane in real-time. The passengers were actually given several chances to turn off their devices before the order was given to turn the plane around, and at one point the crew claimed they were even able to see the number of Bluetooth devices that were still active.

Admittedly, it could have been as simple as one of the crew members using an app on their phone to see how many discoverable Bluetooth devices they could pick up and reporting their findings back to the home office. But in the modern security climate, it’s not hard to imagine that the aircraft has some form of integrated Wireless Intrusion Detection System (WIDS). Something to keep in mind the next time they ask you to put your gadgets into airplane mode during takeoff.

It seems like every week we’ve been reporting on some service going dark, and today is no different. As pointed out by OMG Ubuntu, Canonical will be shutting down the Ubuntu Pastebin service in June. In fact, originally it was supposed to go offline today, but they’ve pushed the date back by a month due to the response from the community. Turns out giving your users just a few days to pack up their belongings before kicking them to the digital curb isn’t popular. Who knew?

Now granted Hackaday is geared more towards hardware than software, but a search through the database would seem to indicate we’ve never once run a post that linked to Ubuntu Pastebin in the 18 years the service has been available. Conversely, we had pages of results when searching our back catalog for instances of the classic pastebin.com. So we’re actually curious about this one and would love to hear from the readers: how many of you were actually using this service regularly, and will you miss it?

Finally, those in the market may be interested to hear that Wells Fargo will start offering mortgages for 3D printed homes produced by the Texas-based ICON Technologies. They’ve even got a special incentive program lined up for the extruded domiciles, offering a lender credit that can offset some of the closing costs.

This might not sound like that big of a deal, but apparently most banks have been understandably skeptical of the technology and the long-term market for 3D printed homes up to this point. After all, it was just a few years ago that a recently completed 3D printed home in Iowa had to be demolished after the structure fell short of safety standards. As pointed out by CNBC, previous communities produced with ICON’s concrete printing technology had to be financed through the developer.

We’re still not sure that 3D printed homes make a whole lot of sense, but making the technology more accessible is surely a net positive. Even if the current state of the art in house squirting isn’t quite there, you know how the old saying goes: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single layer.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

When we think of CRT camera viewfinders, most of us probably imagine the tiny CRTs you’d find in a 1980s camcorder. They’re super cute and a load of fun to play with, but they’re very much a consumer device. Professional cameras of the type you’d find in a studio had their own viewfinders, which were a lot closer to a small TV. They’re about as high quality as it gets for a monochrome CRT, and [Evan Monsma] has done the conversion to a general-purpose monitor.

On one side, this is a very straightforward hack, simply a case of tracing wires to identify the power and video pins. Given a tool battery, the monitor fires up and gives a super-sharp picture. What we like about this is the wooden base he’s made for the thing, at the same time rough-and-ready, and professional-looking from the outside. It has a routed space for the cables, and once mounted flush with the monitor base and given a bit of wood stain, it looks almost as though it was manufactured that way.

It’s likely most of us won’t find a broadcast viewfinder in the trash, instead settling at best for a little Chinese portable TV. But it’s still interesting to see these unusual devices. Perhaps it might make a good cyberdeck.

Thanks [Luis] for the tip!

What’s one to do with some nice little relays of questionable pinout, and prototyping board? How about a quietly clicky 4-bit counter using relay logic with tons of buttons?

[Agatha Mallett] made the counter after finding herself in possession of a quantity of relays burdened by terrible documentation (the datasheet shockingly lacks a pinout, and doesn’t even mention the coil being unidirectional). But since the relays are also small and of decent quality, they were a good candidate for a small relay logic-based project.

The key to the build is implementing D-type flip-flops using relays. This is done by holding the coil voltage of each relay between its set and release voltage levels. A small voltage bump will energize the coil, closing the relay and leaving it closed. Conversely, a small negative spike releases the coil, leaving it open. This forms the basis of the counter, and [Agatha] has a separate write-up all about the details of using relays in this way.

Implementing this was rather less straightforward than it may sound because it relies on balancing the coils of many relays on a figurative knife-edge of voltage, but not every component is perfectly identical. A tweaked resistor or capacitor here and there was needed before things settled into reliability.

The end product has indicator LEDs, buttons to increment or clear the current count, and it even has buttons to set or clear individual bits. This is a project that begs to be interacted with, and there’s a short video on the project page so you can watch it go through its paces.

Thanks to [Jess] for the tip!

You would think a guitar amplifier would be a straightforward piece of analog electronics. But, of course, these days, everything has firmware, including [mforney]’s Yamaha THR10c. The service manual showed both a UART and JTAG header on the schematic, so as many of us would, he took that as a challenge.

Of course, the production board doesn’t have headers for these ports, but that’s not a real problem. The serial port seemed quiet, but the JTAG port was more productive. This revealed two binary images: a bootloader and the main firmware. Once you have the code, it is a straightforward, if not laborious, process to reverse engineer what the code does.

The next step is to figure out how to load new firmware. You can see in the post that this was done, and custom features sprang into life with custom-patched firmware.

We never get tired of seeing people dig into consumer devices like this. Things like JTAG and the wide availability of JTAG tools have made it easier but no less fun. Of course, there are even more features [mforney] has in mind, but now that’s just a matter of coding.

Mini game controllers with buttons and joysticks that move like the real deal are a pretty cool keychain and fidget toy, but at least for some of us there’s this intrusive thought that tells us that it would be so much cooler if it actually was a functional game controller. Enter [Brux] tearing into a miniature GameCube controller and adding the required guts.

The keychain/fidget toy is made by Backpack Buddies and is one of a range of similar toys that feature buttons you can press and joysticks that move, giving a pretty good start on the externals of the controller. Once cracked open at the seam, some interior redecorating had to be performed to clear space and add something to mount switches onto. Here [Brux] opted to glue SMD switches to custom 3D components in lieu of a PCB. These were subsequently wired up with thin enameled wire, before attaching the original buttons to them following some more plastic surgery.

Some tiny joystick innards were then installed before gluing on the final buttons and joystick caps. As for how it all connects to a real GameCube, here an RP2040 was used to handle the translation of control inputs to the GameCube controller protocol. Then a GameCube controller was sacrificed for its cable and controller connector, but as can be seen in the video it does all work and creates the perfect controller for guests.