OK, sit down, everyone — we don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself when you learn the news that actually yes, your phone has been listening to your conversations all along. Shocking, we know, but that certainly seems to be what an outfit called Cox Media Group (CMG) does with its “Active Listening” software, according to a leaked slide deck that was used to pitch potential investors. The gist is that the software uses a smartphone’s microphone to listen to conversations and pick out keywords that it feeds to its partners, namely Google, Facebook, and Amazon so that they can target you with directed advertisements. Ever have an IRL conversation about something totally random only to start seeing references to that subject pop up where they never did before? We sure have, and while “relationship mining” seemed like a more parsimonious explanation back in 2017, the state of tech makes eavesdropping far more plausible today. Then there’s the whole thing of basically being caught red-handed. The Big Three all huffed and puffed about how they were shocked, SHOCKED to learn that this was going on, with reactions ranging from outright denial of ever partnering with CMG to quietly severing their relationship with the company. So much for years of gaslighting on this.

In other dystopian news, the American Radio Relay League just wrote a $1 million check to end a ransomware attack. According to an ARRL statement, unidentified “threat actors” found their way into computer systems at the group’s Newington, Connecticut headquarters and related cloud-based systems, which allowed them to install encryption packages on laptops, desktops, and servers running a variety of operating systems. The ARRL’s crisis team managed to talk the cyberattackers down from their original demand of several million dollars to just a million, which all things considered was probably the path of least resistance and lowest cost. It’s a shame that things have come to that, but here we are.

The long saga of Starliner’s first crewed test flight is finally over, as the beleaguered spacecraft pushed back from the International Space Station and headed back to a midnight landing in New Mexico on Saturday. The return was sans crew, of course, with NASA being unwilling to risk the lives of astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore in a spacecraft that hadn’t really performed up to snuff on the way up to the ISS. As if the leaky thrusters weren’t enough, just before the hatches were closed Wilmore reported weird noises coming from a speaker in Starliner. He managed to capture the sounds on his mic for Mission Control, which for all the world sounded like someone repeatedly banging on a pipe in the distance. The weird thing about the sound is the regularity, which sounded a little faster than one per second. We’re keen to see if NASA shares any in-depth engineering information on this and all the other Starliner anomalies now that the craft is back on the ground.

If you’ve ever had to do extensive overhead work, such as sanding or painting ceilings, or working under a car on a lift, you know the burn that starts to set in after just a short while of holding your arms over your head. Up to now, the only way to fix that was either hit the gym and work on upper body strength, or find another way to make a living. But now that we’re living in the future, you can just strap on your own exoskeleton backpack and take a load off the robotic way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ExoActive exoskeleton comes from Festool, best known for its wonderfully well-engineered premium tools that often command a premium price. The ExoActive is battery-powered and straps on like a backpack with extensions that support the upper arms. It can be set to different work heights and provides a boost in lifting power, taking some of the weight off your shoulder girdle and transmitting it to your lower back. Unlike other exoskeletons we’ve seen breathless press releases for, this one seems like something you can buy right now. Sure, it’s expensive, but it’s a fraction of the cost of shoulder surgery.

And finally, Animagraffs is back with an incredibly detailed look inside the inner workings of a 16th-century sailing vessel. The video really captures what it took to build vessels that could (just barely) sail around the world for the first time. We loved the explanation of the rigging, especially the differences between the standing rigging and the running rigging. If you don’t know your clewline from your backstay, this Blender tour de force will set you straight.

What can you do with a cheap Linux machine with limited flash and only a single free GPIO line? Probably not much, but sometimes, just getting root to prove you can is the main goal of a project. If that happens to lead somewhere useful, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

Like many interesting stories, this one starts on AliExpress, where [Easton] spied some low-cost WiFi repeaters, the ones that plug directly into the wall and extend your wireless network another few meters or so. Unable to resist the siren song, a few of these dongles showed up in the mailbox, ripe for the hacking. Spoiler alert: although the attempt on the first device had some success by getting a console session through the UART port and resetting the root password, [Easton] ended up bricking the repeater while trying to install an OpenWRT image.

The second attempt, this time on a different but similar device, proved more fruitful. The rudimentary web UI provided no easy path in, although it did a pretty good job enumerating the hardware [Easton] was working with. With the UART route only likely to provide temptation to brick this one too, [Easton] turned to a security advisory about a vulnerability that allows remote code execution through a specially crafted SSID. That means getting root on these dongles is as simple as a curl command — no hardware hacks needed!

As for what to do with a bunch of little plug-in Linux boxes with WiFi, we’ll leave that up to your imagination. We like [Easton]’s idea of running something like Pi-Hole on them; maybe Home Assistant would be possible, but these are pretty resource-constrained machines. Still, the lessons learned here are valuable, and at this price point, let the games begin.

Why is it always a helium leak? It seems whenever there’s a scrubbed launch or a narrowly averted disaster, space exploration just can’t get past the problems of helium plumbing. We’ve had a bunch of helium problems lately, most famously with the leaks in Starliner’s thruster system that have prevented astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from returning to Earth in the spacecraft, leaving them on an extended mission to the ISS. Ironically, the launch itself was troubled by a helium leak before the rocket ever left the ground. More recently, the Polaris Dawn mission, which is supposed to feature the first spacewalk by a private crew, was scrubbed by SpaceX due to a helium leak on the launch tower. And to round out the helium woes, we now have news that the Peregrine mission, which was supposed to carry the first commercial lander to the lunar surface but instead ended up burning up in the atmosphere and crashing into the Pacific, failed due to — you guessed it — a helium leak.

Thankfully, there’s a bit more technical detail on that last one; it seems that a helium pressure control valve, designated PCV2 and controlling helium to pressurize an oxidizer tank, got stuck open thanks to “vibration-induced relaxation” in threaded components within the valve. So, launch vibrations shook a screw loose inside the valve, which kept it from sealing and over-pressurized an oxidizer tank with helium to the point of tank failure — kablooie, end of mission. All of these failures are just another way of saying that space travel is really, really hard, of course. But still, with helium woes figuring so prominently in so many failures, we’re left wondering if there might not be an upside to finding something else to pressurize tanks.

Back on terra firma, we got a tip from a reader going by the name of [Walrus] who is alarmed by an apparent trend in the electronics testing market toward a subscription model for the software needed to run modern test gear. Specifically, the tip included a link to a reseller offering a deal on an “Ultimate Software Bundle” for Tektronix 4 Series Mixed-Signal Oscilloscopes. The offer expired at the end of 2023 and prices aren’t mentioned, but given that a discount of up to $5,670 with purchase of a scope was advertised, we’d imagine the Ultimate Software Bundle comes at a pretty steep price. The chief concern [Walrus] expressed was about the possibility that used instruments whose software is tied to a subscription may have little to no value in the secondary market, where many up-and-coming engineers shop for affordable gear. We haven’t had any personal experience with subscription models for test equipment software, and a quick read of the Tektronix site seems to suggest that subscriptions are only one of the models available for licensing instrument software. Still, the world seems to be moving to one where everything costs something forever, and that the days of a “one and done” purchase are going away. We’d love to hear your thoughts on subscription software for test gear, especially if we’ve misread the situation with Tek. Sound off in the comments below.

In this week’s edition of “Dystopia Watch,” we’re alarmed by a story about how police departments are experimenting with generative AI to assist officers in report writing. The product, called Draft One, is from Axon, a public safety technology concern best known for its body-worn cameras and tasers. Using Azure OpenAI, Draft One transcribes the audio from body cam footage and generates a “draft narrative” of an officer’s interaction with the public. The draft is then reviewed by the officer, presumably corrected if needed, and sent on to a second reviewer before becoming the official report. Axon reports that it had to adjust the LLM’s settings to keep AI hallucinations from becoming part of the narrative. While we can see how this would be a huge benefit to officers, who generally loathe everything about report writing, and would get them back out on patrol rather than sitting in a parking lot tapping at a keyboard, we can also see how this could go completely sideways in a hurry. All it will take is one moderately competent defense attorney getting an officer to admit under oath that the words of the report were not written by him or her, and this whole thing goes away.

And finally, getting three (or more) monitors to all agree on what white is can be quite a chore, and not just a little enraging for the slightly obsessive-compulsive — it’s one of the reasons we favor dark mode so much, to be honest. Luckily, if you need a screen full of nothing but #FFFFFF pixels so you can adjust color balance in your multi-monitor setup, it’s as easy as calling up a web page. The White Screen Tool does one thing — paints all the pixels on the screen whatever color you want. If you need all white, it’s just a click away — no need to start up MS Paint or GIMP and futz around with making it bezel-to-bezel. There are plenty of other presets, if white isn’t your thing, plus a couple of fun animated screens that imitate Windows update screens — let the office hijinks begin! You can also set custom colors, which is nice; might we suggest #1A1A1A and #F3BF10?

If there’s a reason that fancy holographic displays that respond to gestures are a science fiction staple, it’s probably because our current display technology is terrible. Oh sure, Retina displays and big curved gaming monitors are things of wonder, but they’re also things that occupy space even when they’re off — hence the yearning for a display that can appear and disappear at need.

Now, we’re not sure if [Maker Mac70]’s floating display is the answer to your sci-fi dreams, but it’s still pretty cool. And, as with the best of tricks, it’s all done with mirrors. The idea is to use a combination of a partially reflective mirror, a sheet of retroreflective material, and a bright LCD panel. These are set up in an equilateral triangle arrangement, with the partially reflective mirror at the top. Part of the light from the LCD bounces off the bottom surface of the mirror onto a retroreflector — [Mac] used a sheet of material similar to what’s used on traffic signs. True to its name, the retroreflector bounces the light directly back at the semi-transparent mirror, passing through it to focus on a point in space above the whole contraption. To make the display interactive, [Mac] used a trio of cheap time-of-flight (TOF) sensors to watch for fingers poking into the space into which the display is projected. It seemed to work well enough after some tweaking; you can check it out in the video below, which also has some great tips on greebling, if that’s your thing.

We suspect that the thumbnail for the video is a composite, but that’s understandable since the conditions for viewing such a display have to be just right in terms of ambient light level and the viewer’s position relative to the display. [Mac] even mentions the narrow acceptance angle of the display, touting it as a potential benefit for use cases where privacy is a concern. In any case, it’s very different from his last sci-fi-inspired volumetric display, which was pretty cool too.

A common design language for watches has evolved ever since they first started popping up in the 1500s. Whether worn on the wrist or in a pocket, watches are relatively slim front to back, with the display mounted on the face. That’s understandable given the imperatives of human anatomy. Still, it’s not the only way to arrange things, as this very cool LED matrix watch with an edge-mounted display demonstrates.

True, the unique form factor of this watch wasn’t really the point of the whole project. Rather, [Vitali]’s design was driven by a couple of things. First off were the extremely cool Hewlett Packard HDSP-2000 displays, with four 5×5 LED matrices shining through the clear cover of a DIP-12 package. Also visible through the cover are the shift registers that drive the matrices, complete with gold bonding wires.

The main attraction for [Vitali], though, was the challenge of working within the limits of the ATtiny85 he chose to run the watch. The MCU’s limited IO made hardware multiplexing necessary, no mean feat given the limited resources and real estate available. He still managed to pack everything in, with the unique edge-mount display coming from the LEDs bridging the space between the two main PCBs. Everything fits into a nice wood veneer case, although we think it looks just fine without it. [Vitali] puts it through its paces in the short video below.

Hats off to [Vitali] for a great-looking project that pushed his limits. We just love these displays, too; of course, it’s not the first time we’ve seen them put to similar use.

The Sun has been remarkably active lately, so much so that it might have set a new sunspot record. According to the sun watchers at the Space Weather Prediction Center, on August 8, the Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped a picture that was positively bedazzled with sunspots. Counting methods vary, but one count put the sunspot number at a whopping 337 that day. That would be the largest number since 2001, during the peak of Solar Cycle 23. The sunspot number is highly correlated with solar storms and coronal mass ejections; more spots mean more magnetic activity and more chance for something to go very, very wrong. We’ve been pretty lucky so far with Solar Cycle 25; despite being much more active than the relatively lazy Cycle 24 and much stronger than predicted, most of this cycle’s outbursts have been directed away from Earth or only dealt us a glancing blow. Seeing all those spots, though, makes us think it’s only a matter of time before we get hit with something that does more than make pretty lights.

Having done our share of roofing, we can safely say it’s a pretty tough job. Everything is heavy, it’s either boiling hot or freezing cold, and one moment’s inattention can make for a very bad day. Plus, the fiberglass shards in your skin at the end of the day can be incredibly annoying. On the other hand, a good roofing job is a thing of beauty, and there’s immense satisfaction in having been the one to do it. But, with apologies to Steve Miller, time keeps on slipping into the future, humans are expensive and unreliable, and someone will eventually try to automate humans out of pretty much every job.

It’s roofing’s turn now with the aptly named Rufus auto roof robot. It’s a hybrid robot with a base unit containing a hopper for shingles and a SCARA arm that positions, aligns, and nails down the shingles. The base unit, in turn, is moved around the surface of the roof by a capstan-drive cable robot, with cables anchored to the corners of the roof.

It’s an interesting idea, but one that’s going to take some development to make it practical. For one thing, we can see safety regulators having a fit over those cables, which will be a tripping hazard for the workers who have to keep the bot fed with shingles and nails. Also, a roof that’s completely free of obstructions like vent stacks, skylights, or chimneys is a rare roof indeed, and it seems like the cable system would foul on such obstructions very easily. Still, you’ve got to start somewhere, and it’ll be interesting to see how this develops. Or maybe we’ll just throw Atlas at it.

Head up, hams — another spectrum land grab appears to be underway. This one is a little hard to follow, but what we see is that a company called NexNav, which is currently licensed for a Location and Monitoring Service in the 900-MHz band, wants to split the 902 MHz to 928 MHz band and start blasting out high-powered signals on the upper part of the band, apparently for a new 5G position system that will serve as a backup to satellite location systems like GPS. The problem is that amateur radio operators have a secondary allocation in that band, which, despite the company’s unsupported claims to the contrary, will most likely be swamped by their 2,000-watt effective radiated power signals. LoRaWAN fans might also take note of the proposed change, which would likely make life difficult for them and other ISM-band users. It might be time to write some strongly worded letters.

And finally, what a time to be alive! While Boeing has figured out how to turn the ISS into a low-earth orbit Gilligan’s Island by unintentionally extending an eight-day visit into an open-ended stay, down here on Earth, we’re tackling the real problems, like how to safely eat Doritos in space. Luckily, the food scientists at Frito-Lay put their top people on the problem and came up with “Cool Ranch Zero Gravity Doritos,” which substitute a flavored oil spray for the normal finger-staining powdered spice blend that would get everywhere in an environment where gravity doesn’t pull it down onto your shirt or into your neck-beard. And to keep cornmeal crumbs from getting loose, they shrunk the triangular chips down to about a third the size of a regular Dorito, so you can just stuff the whole chip in your mouth without biting it first.

We have many thoughts on this, primarily that being unable to stuff at least three regular-size Doritos in your mouth at one time should be grounds for disqualification from spaceflight and that they literally could have chosen any flavor to send to space, but they had to make it Cool Ranch, which raises many questions of its own. But mainly, we’re just sad that this is what has become of spaceflight — and yes, we know about Tang, but this seems a lot worse.

NEMA-17 steppers are (almost) a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere, they’re well-known to hackers and makers, and yet they’re still a bit hard to integrate into projects. That’s because the motor alone isn’t much use, and by the time you find or build a driver and integrate it with a microcontroller, you’ve probably expended more effort than you will on the rest of the project. This USB-C PD stepper driver aims to change that.

What caught our eye about [Josh Rogan]’s PD Stepper is his effort to make this a product rather than just a project. The driver is based on a TMC2209 for silent operation and a lot of torque thanks to the power delivery capabilities of USB-C PD. The PCB is very nicely designed and has an AS5600 rotary magnetic encoder for closed-loop operation. There’s also an ESP32-S3 on-board, so WiFi and Bluetooth operation are possible — perfect for integration into Home Assistant via ESPHome.

[Josh]’s mechanical design is top-notch, too, with a machined aluminum spacer that fits on the back of a NEMA-17 motor perfectly and acts as a heat spreader. A machined polycarbonate cover protects the PCB and makes a very neat presentation. [Josh] has kits available, or you can roll your own with the provided build files.

Really, [OzzieGerff] had us at “LEGO.” But then he took it to another place entirely and built a completely mechanical, nearly 100% LEGO version of Snake. And it’s just as cool as it sounds.

Mind you, it’s a little hard to grok how this whole contraption works, which has been in the works for a while, but we’ll try to summarize as best we can. The most important aspect of this build is that there are no electronics at all — everything is done with mechanical linkages, with some Technics pneumatic components and a couple of electric motors to provide the oomph. The three main components are the input section, which consists of a two-axis joystick, a tail buffer, which keeps track of the length of the snake’s tail as gameplay progresses, and the largest component, the 16×16 display.

The joystick translates user inputs into pneumatic signals which pass through a mechanical filtering unit that prevents the head of the snake from doubling back on itself. The filtered inputs then pass into the screen reader, a complex device that probes the status of a given pixel on the display and determines the status of the snake’s head. If it touches a snake pixel, the game’s over. Hitting a blank pixel moves the head of the snake by one and takes one pixel off the end, while a food pixel extends the snake’s length.

Keeping track of the length of the snake is the job of the buffer, which uses Technics tank tracks and levers. Setting a one is done by flipping the lever to one side as it passes under the write head; a read head further down the track senses which way the lever is flipped and translates it into a pneumatic signal. The buffer has four channels, one for each possible direction the snake’s head could be moving. The signals drive a screen writer, which moves a pyramidal follower across a series of push-rods that flip the corresponding pixel on the display to show the proper icon. Simplicity itself? No, but the video below will make things a lot clearer.

It doesn’t look like [Ozzie] is quite done with this game, as he doesn’t show any actual gameplay yet. We’d love to see and hear that — we suspect it’ll make quite a racket. We’ll be keeping an eye out for this one, but while we wait, check out this rope braiding machine or watch Lego break steel.

Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for spotting this one for us.

For those of us who lived through the early 8-bit computing revolution — the tail end, in our case — it’s hard to believe that there’s a second wave of retrocomputing nostalgia underway. But as this bit-banged TRS-80 birthday bonus pack shows, the first generation did a pretty good job passing the retro torch.

With his father’s 70th birthday coming up and full of “borrowed nostalgia” for the good old days, [Josh Sucher] scored a TRS-80 off eBay and experimented with what could be possible. After 50-odd years, the machine needed a bit of TLC, including a new power supply, some keyboard repairs, and the usual recapping. He also had to soup the machine up a bit, given that its original capabilities were so limited.

Chief among these mods was a rudimentary IP stack thanks to a TRS-IO card, which emulates a lot of functionality of the original TRS-80 Expansion Module and adds an ESP-32 for WiFi capability. This allowed [Josh] to get a neat “Dadbot” chatbot going on the machine, using years of his dad’s text messages to train the model. There’s also a game of Go, an RPG based on his parents’ lives, and a local news and weather app. Most impressive, though, is the bit-banged audio app that uses the TRS-80’s cassette interface to play a passable rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” The video below has the full demo.

It’s clear that this lengthy project was a labor of love, and we approve of the results. It’s been a long, long time since we first caught wind of the TRS-80 through the Radio Shack catalog, and projects like this make us feel like scratching up one for ourselves to play with.

[via Hacker News]

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in a slow-motion ballet of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to tootle their horn trumpets melodiously if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.

From the “Tech Doesn’t Make Everything Better” department, we’ve got news of a vulnerability in high-end racing bicycles that opens up a new vector for cheating. While our bike has been sitting sadly idle for the last twenty-odd years, apparently shifting technology has changed a lot, to the point where high-end derailleurs are no longer connected to handlebar-mounted shift lever by Bowden cables but now have servos that are linked to the shifters via Bluetooth. Anyone with more than a few minutes of experience with Bluetooth accessories and their default “123456” passwords can see where this is going. While there are no specific instances of cheating detailed in the story, one can imagine the hilarity to be had with a Flipper Zero while sitting on the side of a road at a course upgrade. To be sure, there are other ways to cheat, but we’re not sure we see the advantages of wireless shifting that offset the risks in this case.

Only 94 percent? A recent study claims to have quantified business spreadsheet errors, finding that 94% have critical problems. They came to this conclusion by mining literature from journal articles dating back to 1987, but rather than looking for papers with associated spreadsheets and analyzing them for errors, they looked for papers that discussed spreadsheet quality assurance. So this is sort of a meta-study, which makes us doubt the 94% finding. Still, we’d say it’s a safe bet that there are a lot of spreadsheets out there with critical errors, and that spreadsheet abuse is pretty rampant overall.

They say that if you’re not looking for your next job, you’re just waiting to get fired. That’s pretty much a tautology since there are only two — OK, three — ways out of any job, but it’s still good to always be looking for your next opportunity. So you might want to check out eejobboard, which allows you to do a parametric job search in the electrical engineering space. Pretty cool stuff.

And finally, we don’t have any information on this other than what you see in the video, but we’d love to learn more about these hardware FFTs. The video shows two implementations, one using a Zync 7020 FPGA, and one that uses over a thousand 74HC-series chips to do the same thing. If anyone out there knows the OP on this one, we’d love to get in touch.

While high-voltage transmission lines are probably the most visible components of the electrical grid, they’re certainly among the least appreciated. They go largely unnoticed by the general public — quick, name the power line closest to you right now — at least until a new one is proposed, causing the NIMBYs and BANANAs to come out in force. To add insult to injury, those who do notice the megastructures that make modern life possible rarely take a moment to appreciate the engineering that goes into stringing up hundreds of miles of cable and making sure it stays up.

Not so the Bonneville Power Administration, the New Deal-era federal agency formed to exploit the hydroelectric abundance of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, which produced this 1950 gem detailing the stringing and sagging of power lines. Unsurprisingly, the many projects needed to wire together the often remote dams to the widely distributed population centers in an area that was only just starting to see growth began in the BPA’s offices, where teams of engineers hunched over desks worked out the best routes. Paper, pencil, and slide rules were the tools of the trade, along with an interesting gadget called a conductor sag template, a hardware implementation of the catenary equation that allowed the “sagger” to determine the height of each tower. The conductors, either steel-cored aluminum or pure copper, were also meticulously selected based on tensile strength, expected wind and ice loading, and the electrical load the line was expected to carry.

Once the engineers had their say, the hard work of physically stringing the wires began out in the field. One suspects that the work today is much the same as it was almost eighty years ago, save for much more stringent health and safety regulations. The prowess needed to transfer the wires from lifting sheaves to the insulators is something to behold, and the courage required to work from ladders hanging from wires at certain death heights is something to behold. But to our mind, the real heroes were the logistics fellows, who determined how much wire was needed for each span and exactly where to stage the reels. It’s worth sparing a moment’s thought for the daring photographer who captured all this action, likely with little more than a leather belt and hemp rope for safety.

We’ve all got our favorite hand tools, and while the selection criteria are usually pretty subjective, it usually boils down to a combination of looks and feel. In our opinion, the king of both these categories when it comes to screwdrivers is those clear, hard acetate plastic handles, which are a joy to use — at least until the plastic starts to degrade and exude a characteristically funky aroma.

But perhaps we can change that if these experiments on screwdriver “mange” hold up. That’s [357magdad]’s unappealing but accurate description of the chemical changes that eventually occur in the strong, hard, crystal-clear handles of your favorite screwdrivers. The polymer used for these handles is cellulose acetate butyrate, or CAB, which is mostly the same cellulose acetate that replaced the more explode-y cellulose nitrate in things like pool balls and movie film, except with some of the acetate groups replaced with a little butyric acid. The polymer is fine at first, but add a little UV light and over time the outer layer of CAB decomposes into a white flaky cellulose residue while the butyric acid volatilizes, creating the characteristic odor of vomitus. Lovely.

In the video below, [357magdad] takes a look at different concoctions that all allegedly cure the mange. TL, DW; it was a dunk in household ammonia that performed the best, well ahead of other common agents like vinegar and bleach. The ammonia — or more precisely, ammonium hydroxide — works very quickly on the cellulose residue, dissolving it readily and leaving the handle mange-free and looking nearly new after some light scrubbing. None of the other agents came close, although acetone did manage to clear up the mange a bit, at the cost of softening the underlying CAB in a process that’s probably similar to acetone smoothing ABS prints.

As for the funky smell, well, the results were less encouraging. Nothing really got rid of the pukey smell, even a roll in baking soda. We suspect there won’t be much for that, since humans can detect it down to 10 parts per million. Consider it the price to pay for a nice-looking screwdriver that feels so good in your hand.

In today’s value-engineered world, getting a decade of service out of a cordless tool is pretty impressive. By that point you’ve probably gotten your original investment back, and if the tool gives up the ghost, well, that’s what the e-waste bin is for. Not everyone likes to give up so easily, though, which results in clever repairs like the one that brought this cordless driver back to life.

The Black & Decker “Gyrodriver,” an interesting tool that is controlled with a twist of the wrist rather than the push of a button, worked well for [Petteri Aimonen] right up until the main planetary gear train started slipping thanks to stripped teeth on the plastic ring gear. Careful measurements of one of the planetary gears to determine parameters like the pitch and pressure angle of the teeth, along with the tooth count on both the planet gear and the stripped ring.

Here, most of us would have just 3D printed a replacement ring gear, but [Petteri] went a different way. He mentally rolled the ring gear out, envisioning it as a rack gear. To fabricate it, he simply ran a 60° V-bit across a sheet of steel plate, creating 56 parallel grooves with the correct pitch. Wrapping the grooved sheet around a round form created the ring gear while simultaneously closing the angle between teeth enough to match the measured 55° tooth angle in the original. [Petteri] says he soldered the two ends together to form the ring; it looks more like a weld in the photos, but whatever it was, the driver worked well after the old plastic teeth were milled out and the new ring gear was glued in place.

We think this is a really clever way to make gears, which seems like it would work well for both internal and external teeth. There are other ways to do it, of course, but this is one tip we’ll file away for a rainy day.

Remember when dead batteries were something you’d just toss in the trash? Those days are long gone, thankfully, and rechargeable battery packs have put powerful cordless tools in the palms of our hands. But when those battery packs go bad, replacing them becomes an expensive proposition. And that’s a great excuse to pop a pack open and see what’s happening inside.

The battery pack in question found its way to [Don]’s bench by blinking some error codes and refusing to charge. Popping it open, he found a surprisingly packed PCB on top of the lithium cells, presumably the battery management system judging by the part numbers on some of the chips. There are a lot of test points along with some tempting headers, including one that gave up some serial data when the battery’s test button was pressed. The data isn’t encrypted, but it is somewhat cryptic, and didn’t give [Don] much help. Moving on to the test points, [Don] was able to measure the voltage of each battery in the series string. He also identified test pads that disable individual cells, at least judging by the serial output, which could be diagnostically interesting.  [Don]’s reverse engineering work is now focused on the charge controller chip, which he’s looking at through its I2C port. He seems to have done quite a bit of work capturing output and trying to square it with the chip’s datasheet, but he’s having trouble decoding it.

This would be a great place for the Hackaday community to pitch in so he can perhaps get this battery unbricked. We have to admit feeling a wee bit responsible for this, since [Don] reports that it was our article on reverse engineering a cheap security camera that inspired him to dig into this, so we’d love to get him some help.

“Please say it wasn’t a regex, please say it wasn’t a regex; aww, crap, it was a regex!” That seems to be the conclusion now that Crowdstrike has released a full root-cause analysis of its now-infamous Windows outage that took down 8 million machines with knock-on effects that reverberated through everything from healthcare to airlines. We’ve got to be honest and say that the twelve-page RCA was a little hard to get through, stuffed as it was with enough obfuscatory jargon to turn off even jargon lovers such as us. The gist, though, is that there was a “lack of a specific test for non-wildcard matching criteria,” which pretty much means someone screwed up a regular expression. Outside observers in the developer community have latched onto something more dire, though, as it appears the change that brought down so many machines was never tested on a single machine. That’s a little — OK, a lot — hard to believe, but it seems to be what Crowdstrike is saying. So go ahead and blame the regex, but it sure seems like there were deeper, darker forces at work here.

Congratulations, new parents; on top of everything else you’re dealing with, including raging sleep deprivation, there’s a good chance that your bundle of joy has just been bricked. It seems that something called a Snoo, an unbelievably expensive “smart bassinette,” has had its most useful features hidden behind a paywall, and parents are hopping mad. And rightly so; selling something for $1,700 with all the features activated only to pull back two-thirds of them unless the owner coughs up another $20 a month is a little unreasonable. Then again, back in the day we’d have gladly given someone twenty bucks a day if it helped get the kid to sleep, which the Snoo seems to do admirably well. And really, how long is the kid going to be in the thing anyway? Couple of months, tops. What’s another hundred or two when you’ve already spent nearly two grand? Still, we’d love to see someone hack one of these things, or even just do a teardown to see what makes it tick.

Dog lovers, listen up: the dog is OK. But not so much the dog owner’s apartment, as the not-goodest boy managed to burn the place down by gnawing on a lithium-ion battery pack. The entire event, which happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in May, was captured on a security camera, which shows the moment the playful pup got his first mouthful of nastiness from a tooth penetrating the pack. The speed with which the fire took off is terrifying, but easy to understand since the dog bed where it started was essentially a big pile of tinder. Thankfully, the dog and his co-conspirators noped right out of the house through a doggie door, but it looks like the apartment was a total loss.

Have a project that needs a wiring harness? You might want to check out this cool harness designer. We haven’t had much chance to play with it yet, but it seems pretty cool. You select connectors, wire gauges, and lengths, and the app generates a BOM and wiring diagram.

And finally, in another case of the algorithm actually delivering for a change, we found this very good piece on the history of electrical distribution pylons. It’s heavily UK-centric, but that doesn’t get in the way at all. It not only goes over the history of pylons but also delves a bit into their engineering, both electrical and mechanical. As a bonus, it answers some of the questions you might never know you had, like what those little doo-dads attached to the wires near the insulators are.

Unfortunately, [Dave Niewinski]’s kids are still too little to go on a real roller coaster. But they’re certainly big enough to be tossed around by this giant robot arm roller coaster simulator.

As to the question of why [Dave] has a Kuka KR 150 robot in his house, we prefer to leave that unasked and move forward. And apparently, this isn’t his first attempt at using the industrial robot as a motion simulator. That attempt revealed a few structural problems with the attachment between the rider’s chair and the robot’s wrist. After redesigning the frame with stouter metal and adding a small form-factor gaming PC and a curved monitor in front of the seat, [Dave] was ready to figure out how to make the arm simulate the motions of a roller coaster.

Now, if you ever thought the world would be a better place if only we had a roller coaster database complete with 4k 60 fps video captured from real coasters, you’re in luck. CoasterStats not only exists, but it also includes six-axis accelerometer data from real rides of coasters across Europe. That gave [Dave] the raw data he needed, but getting it translated into robot motions that simulate the feeling of the ride was a bit tricky. [Dave] goes into the physics of it all in the video below, but suffice it to say that the result is pretty cool.

More after the break.

Before anyone gets the urge to call Family Services and report [Dave], know that he seems to have taken great care not to build something that’ll turn the kids into jelly. He describes the safety systems in an earlier video, but the basics are laser light curtains to keep the arm within a small safe window, an e-stop switch, and limiting the acceleration to 1 g even when the real coaster would be giving its riders a good beating. That’s probably less than something like this real backyard coaster generates.

One can only imagine the wonders held within the crypto labs of organizations like the CIA or NSA. Therein must be machines of such sophistication that no electronic device could resist their attempts to defeat whatever security is baked into their silicon. Machines such as these no doubt bear price tags that only a no-questions-asked budget could support, making their techniques firmly out of reach of even the most ambitious home gamer.

That might be changing, though, with this $500 DIY laser fault injection setup. It comes to us from Finnish cybersecurity group [Fraktal], who have started a series of blog posts detailing how they built their open-source reverse-engineering rig. LFI is similar to other “glitching” attacks we’ve covered before, such as EMP fault injection, except that a laser shining directly on a silicon die is used to disrupt its operation rather than a burst of electromagnetic energy.

Since LFI requires shining the laser very precisely on nanometer-scale elements of a bare silicon die, nanopositioning is the biggest challenge. Rather than moving the device under attack, the [Fraktal] rig uses a modified laser galvanometer to scan an IR laser over the device. The galvo and the optical components are all easily available online, and they’ve started a repo to document the modifications needed and the code to tire everything together.

Of course, this technique requires the die in the device under study to be exposed, but [Fraktal] has made that pretty approachable too. They include instructions for milling away the epoxy from the lead-frame side of a chip, which is safer for the delicate structures etched into the top of the die. The laser can then shine directly through the die from the bottom. For “flip-chip” packages like BGAs, the same milling technique would be done from the top of the package. Either way, we can imagine a small CNC mill making the process safer and quicker, even though they seem to have done pretty well with a Dremel.

This looks like a fantastic reverse engineering tool, and we’re really looking forward to the rest of the story.

Thanks to [gnud] for the heads up on this one.

Fluke meters have been around for a long, long time. Heck, we’ve got a Fluke 73 that we bought back in 1985 that’s still a daily driver. But just because they’ve been making them forever doesn’t mean they last forever, and getting a secondhand meter back in the game can be a challenge. That’s what [TheHWCave] learned with his revival of a wonky eBay Fluke 25, an effort that holds lessons for anyone in the used Fluke market.

Initial inspection of the meter showed encouragingly few signs of abuse, somewhat remarkable for something built for the military in the early 1980s. A working display allowed a few simple diagnostics revealing that the ammeter functions seemed to work, but not the voltmeter and ohmmeter functions. [TheHWCave]’s teardown revealed a solidly constructed unit with no obvious signs of damage or blown fuses. Thankfully, a service schematic was available online, albeit one with a frustrating lack of detail, confusing test point nomenclature, and contradictory component values.

Despite these hurdles, [TheHWCave] was able to locate the culprit: a bad fusible power resistor. Finding a direct replacement wasn’t easy given the vagaries of the schematic and the age of the instrument, but he managed to track down a close substitute cheap enough to buy in bulk. He searched through 40 units to find the one closest to the listed specs, which got the meter going again. Fixing the bent pin also gave the meter back its continuity beeper, always a mixed blessing.

If you’re in the market for a meter but can’t afford the Fluke name, picking up a busted meter and fixing it up like this might be one way to go. But are they really worth the premium? Well, kinda yes.

Even though we somewhat uncharacteristically don’t have a cyberdeck contest currently underway, there’s never a bad time to get your [Gibson] on. That’s especially true when fate hands you an enclosure as perfect as the one that inspired this very compact Kali Linux cyberdeck.

Now, that’s not to say that we don’t love larger cyberdecks, of course. The ones built into Pelican-style shipping containers are particularly attractive, and it’s hard to argue against their practicality. But when [Hans Jørgen Grimstad], who somehow just sounds like a person who should be building cyberdecks, found a new-old-stock stash of US Army Signal Corps spare parts kits from the 1950s, designation CY-684/GR, he just had to spring into action. After carefully gutting the metal case of the dividers that once protected tubes and other parts, he had some PCB panels made up for the top and bottom. The bottom had enough room for a compact USB keypad, with room left over on the panel for a cooling fan and various connectors. A 7″ HDMI display was added to the panel on the top lid, while a Raspberry Pi 5 with a 500-GB NVMe SSD went below the lower panel. The insides are properly decorated with cyberpunk-esque regalia including a “Self Destruct” button. Sadly, this appears to be unimplemented in the current version, at least for the stated purpose; there’s always hope for version two.

While we love the look and feel of this build and the subtle nods to the cyberpunk aesthetic, it sure seems like you could get some serious work done with a deck like this. Hats off to [Hans] for the build, and here’s hoping he left some of those cool cases for the rest of us.