Mysterious Files PH

Got an idea and want to make a simple 3D model, but don’t want to install a full-fledged CAD modeling suite and queue up a few hours of tutorial videos? Check out SketchForge, a 3D modeling program that runs locally in one’s browser without any need for an account, or external services.

SketchForge takes a more WYSIWYG approach to 3D modeling by making it easy to put an object together with primitive shapes, and making it extra easy to specify dimensions and align parts with one another. There’s also a sketch feature that makes it easier to create more complex shapes by making a 2D drawing, then extruding or revolving it into a solid. We like that it has STEP format export as an option, making it easy to import your creation into another CAD program of your choice later. Most 3D printer slicers natively support the STEP format nowadays, too.

It’s a bit reminiscent of Tinkercad in concept, but entirely local. It’s still new, but there’s a demo online that gives a good idea of its capabilities if you’d like to give it a spin.

We’re reminded of CaDoodle, another project that takes the “Tinkercad, but local” approach but as a standalone executable, instead of browser-based.

One thing our futuristic world is largely lacking in is droids and robot companions and the like. [solitary dev] is helping to rectify that problem by building a little robot called TongDou.

As [solitary dev] tells it, TongDou is a “tiny open-source desktop gremlin.” An ESP32-S3 serves as TongDou’s brain, buried inside a tasteful brass tube chassis. An OLED display is TongDou’s face, and he uses a pair of wheels driven by gearmotors for locomotion. A speaker plays back pre-recorded voice lines, while a 24GHz radar and an IMU enables TongDou to keep track of the space it’s moving through. They are publishing the design files on Github so other makers can build their own if so desired.

[solitary dev] hopes to develop TongDou into something to make a “workspace feel less dead.” It’s not dissimilar from the way studios used to use robots to liven up otherwise hackneyed movies and TV shows, and we could absolutely use some of that whimsy in the real world. We’ve featured other fun desktop companions before, too. Video after the break.

Elliot Williams and Al Williams got together to compare notes on the most interesting posts this week on the site. As usual, there are just too many choices, so you’ll have to settle for just the few that can fit in a podcast. The guys were excited about 3D printing — both FDM and SLA — as well as a few camera projects. Ever wanted your own starship? They do, too, and you’ll hear about it along with portable radar and more.

Want to make flexible PCBs? Fill up a carbon dioxide tank? Or play Doom via regular expressions? Tune in, and you’ll find out about those stories and more.

Follow along with the links, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments! Better still, drop us a note in the mailbag, and you might hear your question on a future episode. You can record audio or send us a message, and one of the hosts will read it on your behalf.

Direct download in IR color-corrected DRM-free MP3.

Episode 380 Show Notes:

News:

• Samsung’s SmartThings API Terminates Free Access

Mailbag:

• [Marcel] wants more info about the next Hackaday Europe, and delivers a great excuse for not making it this year.
• A note about IRCs and QSL managers from [Reese Johnson].
• QSL Bureau
  • Drop your comments and questions in audio or text format to mailbag@hackaday.com, and you might hear it on a future podcast!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• New Method Accelerates Color 3D Printing
  • New Method Accelerates Color 3D Printing
  • sentientstardust / ImageMap-Calibration-Tool · GitLab
  • FullSpectrum Is Like HueForge For 3D Models, But Bring Your Toolchanger
• Behold The Most Beautifully Ambitious Starship Simulator Yet
  • GitHub – orbitersim/orbiter: Open-source repository of Orbiter Space Flight Simulator · GitHub
• Taking Tri-Camera True-Color Infrared Videos
  • Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky – Wikipedia
  • Cromemco Cyclops – Wikipedia
  • Do You Dream In Color?
• Building A Portable Weather Radar
  • Pluto Might Not Be A Planet, But It Is An SDR Transceiver
  • GitHub – plutoplus/plutoplus: The repo maintain PlutoSDR+ · GitHub
• The Orphaned Sources At The Hacker Camp: What Happened Next
• Flexible PCBs: Not Only For The Few

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • ICCU Monitor Logs Data In E-GMP EV Failures
  • Filling High Pressure CO2 Tanks From Sugar Fermentation Gas
  • Why Is Textile Work Not Taught To Engineers?
  • Team Repair Breaks Things To Teach People How To Fix Them
• Al’s Picks:
  • DOOM Using Regular Expressions
  • Improving The Microcontroller Gaming Performance With PicoGame
  • Regain Some Trust In Unknown USB Drives

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Thingino Teaches Cheap IP Cameras New Tricks
• Giving Resin 3D Printers Another Shot After Six Years

When you need to match paint colors, one of the tools you’ll reach for is a deck of reference colors. Another might be a colorimeter. But what if you want both? [hallko1234] created just that by reverse-engineering and then patching a CR4501 colorimeter.

It starts with a problem: every time [hallko1234] needed to check a color, he had to take a reading, write it down, run to the office, match it with a table, and then walk all the way back. That sounds like too much effort. The natural solution, of course, is to automate the process.

So he did. The CR4501 will happily give you its entire firmware over the debug port, after which it was time for analysis in Ghidra. Some hiccups, brickings and accidental erasure of calibration data later, he finally had a working version. The end result is a simple screen that, after every time you measure, displays the closest RAL color code and how close it is.

On the off chance someone else has the same colorimeter, he even made an online tool to install it for you.

The elusive brainstem is a small, yet critical part of our brain: the slightest damage to it could prove fatal. But how it works is not fully understood today. Indian Scientists at SGBC (Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre) work to change that by producing the most detailed map of it ever seen.

Instead of more costly methods, this map was created with a high-resolution microscope. Starting with three samples, (45W fetus, 9Y and 54Y) the brain stems were imaged using MRI and BFI (Block Face Imaging), then sliced into 20/40µm pieces, imaged, annotated using in-house software and added to the dataset. From a combination of these images, MRI and BFI scans, they created a 3D model of the brainstem that you can explore in your browser.

The new research gives vital data needed for neurological research, and could help advance research on a wide range neurological diseases from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s.
You can find the paper here, which has not yet been peer reviewed at time of writing.

Via BBC.

Betacam is not the Betamax you may have had at home– it was a professional format that lived on into the 21st century, in the “SP” form. In many places, it would have been the last tape format in use. So it is perhaps understandable that [ldursw] decided to recreate an obsolete and unobtainable IC to save a Sony broadcast-grade editing Video Tape Recorder (VTR). Still mad, perhaps, but in a way we very much appreciate.

The Sony BVW-75 VTR had an odd flaw where the output lacked colour, unless paused with dynamic tracking off. Then colour would appear, but only in odd stripes. Clearly the chroma circuit was at fault. Some sluthing found that a sync separator IC– that separates the sync pulses that keep everything moving together, if the name didn’t give it away– wasn’t behaving correctly. More sluthing found that the chip in question was no longer available. Luckily, the concept of a sync separator hasn’t quite given up the ghost, and another part was available. It just didn’t fit, used a different voltage, and had an inverted output. No biggie! [ldursw] added a voltage regulator, an inverter, and a video amplifier chip, then after breadboard testing put them on a PCB with pins that match the original IC’s form-factor, making it a plug-in replacement.

That’s a GitHub link at the start of this article, by the way, so he’s open sourced the solution for anyone who needs a Toshiba TA7357P video sync separator. We don’t know who else needs this, but we’re willing to bet that whoever does, really needs it. On behalf of whoever that might be, we offer sincere thanks to [ldursw] for the hack, and for submitting it to our tips line.

This reminds us a little bit of a tape deck repair we featured previously, reviving another Sony format– D-1 tapes–to archive old media.

As useful as USB-to-M.2 SSD adapters are, sometimes you come across a bit of a dud. A case in point is the Orico-branded TCM2-C3 that features both an attractive clear case and in its earlier revisions a JMicron controller-based circuit that apparently degrades over time, causing erratic boot behavior. After implementing a fix a few years ago, [Mark Furneaux] can happily report that the thus fixed enclosures are still working.

These faulty board revisions feature the JMicron JMS583 controller IC, which has a 1.0V core voltage input pin. Apparently to save power, Orico designed the board to target the minimum ~-0.95V core voltage per the datasheet. Apparently due to component drift or degradation, this lower core voltage is after a while often not enough any more to start the controller, which thus translates into an unresponsive USB device and presumably some panic about lost data.

Although [Mark] doesn’t describe the fix in detail, it entails bumping up this core voltage to something closer to the nominal 1.0V, which restores functionality at the cost of presumably a measurable amount of extra heat production by said controller.

Later versions of the Orico TCM2-C3 enclosure switched from this JMicron controller to a Realtek one, which so far appears to be noticeably more reliable. Although Orico kept the same model name, the transparent enclosure makes it at least a snap to see which revision you are dealing with.