Author Archives: Moritz Walter

Single Board Revolution: Preventing Flash Memory Corruption

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An SD card is surely not an enterprise grade storage solution, but single board computers also aren’t just toys anymore. You find them in applications far beyond the educational purpose they have emerged from, and the line between non-critical and critical applications keeps getting blurred.

Laundry notification hacks and arcade machines fail without causing harm. But how about electronic access control, or an automatic pet feeder? Would you rely on the data integrity of a plain micro SD card stuffed into a single board computer to keep your pet fed when you’re on vacation and you back in afterward? After …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Smart USB Hub And IoT Power Meter

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[Aleksejs Mirnijs] needed a tool to accurately measure the power consumption of his Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, which is an important parameter for dimensioning adequate power supplies and battery packs. Since most SBC projects require a USB hub anyway, he designed a smart, WiFi-enabled 4-port USB hub that is also a power meter – his entry for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

[Aleksejs’s] design is based on the FE1.1s 4-port USB 2.0 hub controller, with two additional ports for charging. Each port features an LT6106 current sensor and a power MOSFET to individually switch devices on and off as required. …read more

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Microsoft Live Account Credentials Leaking From Windows 8 And Above

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Discovered in 1997 by Aaron Spangler and never fixed, the WinNT/Win95 Automatic Authentication Vulnerability (IE Bug #4) is certainly an excellent vintage. In Windows 8 and 10, the same bug has now been found to potentially leak the user’s Microsoft Live account login and (hashed) password information, which is also used to access OneDrive, Outlook, Office, Mobile, Bing, Xbox Live, MSN and Skype (if used with a Microsoft account).

The bug itself seems to be present in all Windows systems since Windows 95, although only Windows 8 and above are effectively compromised. To see if your machine is affected, you …read more

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A Crash Sensor For Delta 3D Printers

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It doesn’t happen that often, but this is the last time that [Lucas] comes back from hours of unattended 3D printing to find a large portion of plastic spaghetti mess and a partly disassembled Kossel. The crash sensor he designed will now safely halt the printer if it detects that something went wrong during the print.

Unattended 3D printing is even more thrilling if your delta printer’s effector platform attaches to the delta arms through magnetic joints. While magnetic joints have their benefits, a small irregularity in the printing process can cause them to detach. The unknowing printer will then …read more

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Squirrel Café To Predict The Weather From Customer Data

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Physicist and squirrel gastronomer [Carsten Dannat] is trying to correlate two critical social economical factors: how many summer days do we have left, and when will we run out of nuts. His research project, the Squirrel Café, invites squirrels to grab some free nuts and collects interesting bits of customer data in return.

Animals are said to have a predictive sense for natural events, and [Carsten’s] experiment is about verifying this. The hypothesis [Carsten] is trying to prove with this setup is the following:

The amount of nuts taken by red squirrels from a squirrel feeder correlates with upcoming winter

…read more

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3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM

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Non-planar layer Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is any form of fused deposition modeling where the 3D printed layers aren’t flat or of uniform thickness. For example, if you’re using mesh bed leveling on your 3D printer, you are already using non-planar layer FDM. But why stop at compensating for curved build plates? Non-planar layer FDM has more applications and there are quite a few projects out there exploring the possibilities. In this article, we are going to have a look at what the trick yields for us.

Smooth, Curved Surfaces

Non-planar-layer FDM allows for smooth, curved surfaces, which otherwise would …read more

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Cyclist’s LED Pixel Clock Has No Fat Around The Middle

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If you like LED clocks and illuminated bicycle wheels, [Harald Coeleveld] has just the right weekend project for you. His RGB pixel LED clock is as simple as it is beautiful, and it can be built in no time: The minimalist and sporty design consist of not much more than a LED strip wrapped around a bicycle wheel rim.

[Harald] took 2 meters of addressable WS2812 LED strip (with 30 LEDs per meter, we assume), wrapped it around a 27″ bicycle rim padded with a foam strip, and obtained 60 equally spaced RGB LEDs on a ring, ideal for displaying …read more

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Pokemon Go – Bot Edition

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A wild Python appeared, and it wants to play Pokemon Go. Python bots are taking over the game when you can’t, and they are good. Since you’re likely to bump into one sooner or later, here’s an overview:

One of the first workable bots and the origin of a lot of (dirty) code, as well as the (not dirty at all) Pokemon Trainer Club client secret, is [Mila432’s] Pokemon Go Bot. One of his initial goals was to make better sense of the API, which worked out better than he hoped.

Not wanting to impetuously destroy the numerous helpful applications …read more

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Pokemon Go Physical Pokeball Catches ‘Em All

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There’s something irresistible about throwing Pokeballs at unexpectedly appearing creatures. But wait. When did you actually, physically throw a Pokeball? Swiping over colored pixels wasn’t enough for [Trey Keown], so he built a real, throwable, Pokemon-catching Pokeball for Pokemon Go.

For his build, [Trey] acquired an off-the-shelf foam Pokeball, from which he removed the original “light and sound” guts and some of the foam filling to make space for actual, real Pokemon a TI SensorTag 2.0. This little, self-contained IoT development board comes with BLE and an accelerometer, so on the hardware side, there wasn’t much more to do than …read more

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Robomintoner Badminton Bot To Defeat Amateur Humans

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Watching robots doing sports is pretty impressive from a technical viewpoint, although we secretly smile when we compare these robots’ humble attempts to our own motoric skills. Now, a new robot named Robomintoner seeks to challenge human players, and it’s already darn good at badminton.

This is not the first time we see a racquet attached to an omnidirectional motion platform or a racquet attached to a linear motion gantry, but it’s the first time we see this special combination of both. The clever design allows the robot to move autonomously over the entire playing field on its omnidirectional wheels, …read more

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