Author Archives: Moritz Walter

3D Printering: G-Code Post Processing With Perl

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Most of our beloved tools, such as Slic3r, Cura or KISSlicer, offer scripting interfaces that help a great deal if your existing 3D printing toolchain has yet to learn how to produce decent results with a five headed thermoplastic spitting hydra. Using scripts, it’s possible to tweak the little bits it takes to get great results, inserting wipe or prime towers and purge moves on the fly, and if your setup requires it, also control additional servos and solenoids for the flamethrowers.

This article gives you a short introduction in how to post-process G-code using Perl and Slic3r. Perl Ninja …read more

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Reverse Swear Box Curses (For) You

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If you are running out of swear words to comment the magic smoke coming from your electronics, [Howard] has just the right weekend project for you: The reverse swear box. Most swear boxes would have you drop in a coin as penance for uttering your choice phrases. Instead, at the touch of a button, this obscure but classy device randomly suggests a four letter swear word and displays it on a 14-segment LED display for immediate or later use.

It’s built upon an ATmega168 and only requires a minimum of external components. The schematics and firmware for this project are …read more

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Pokemon Go Cheat Fools GPS with Software Defined Radio

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Using Xcode to spoof GPS locations in Pokemon Go (like we saw this morning) isn’t that much of a hack, and frankly, it’s not even a legit GPS spoof. After all, it’s not like we’re using an SDR to spoof the physical GPS signal to cheat Pokemon Go.

To [Stefan Kiese], this isn’t much more than an exercise. He’s not even playing Pokemon Go. To squeeze a usable GPS signal out of his HackRF One, a $300 Software Defined Radio, [Stefan] uses an external precision clock. This makes up for the insufficient calibration of the HackRF’s internal clock, although he …read more

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Pokemon Go GPS Cheat (If You Don’t Fear Getting Banned)

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Pokemon Go inherits a certain vulnerability to GPS location spoofing from it’s predecessor Ingress, but also the progress that has been made in spoof detection. Since taking advantage of a game’s underlying mechanisms is part of the winner’s game, why not hook up your smartphone to Xcode and see if you can beat Niantic this time? [Dave Conroy] shows you how to play back waypoints and activate your Pokemon Go warp drive.

The hack (therefore the Monospace) is based on the developers toolkits on Android and iOS, and also the easiest way to get banned from the game.  …read more

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Pokemon Go Egg Incubator Takes Your Eggs For A Spin

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Pokemon Go has done a great service to the world health. Or would’ve done, if we wouldn’t hack it all the time. The game suggests, you breed Pokemon eggs by walking them around, but [DannyMcMurray] has a better idea: Strapping your smartphone to the propeller of a fan and taking them for spin that way.

He shows how he built a Pokemon incubator using just a rubber band and a fan. This little trick saves you from physically leaving the house, but the process is still painstakingly slow: The time-lapse spin in the video results in about 0.01 km of …read more

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Sonic 3D Printer Auto Bed Leveling Makes Swoosh

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3D Printering: the final frontier. These are the voyages of another 3D printer hack. Its mission: to explore strange new ways of leveling a print bed.

So far, we’ve had servo probes, Allen key probes, Z-sled probes, inductive and capacitive contactless switches, just to name a few. All of them allow a 3D printer to probe its print bed, calculate a correction plane or mesh, and compensate for its own inherent, time variant, inaccuracies.

These sensors are typically mounted somewhere on the print head and introduce their own sensor offset, which has to be precisely calibrated for the whole thing …read more

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DIY Motion Control Camera Rig Produces Money Shots On A Budget

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Motion control photography allows for stunning imagery, although commercial robotic MoCo rigs are hardly affordable. But what is money? Scratch-built from what used to be mechatronic junk and a hacked Canon EF-S lens, [Howard’s] DIY motion control camera rig produces cinematic footage that just blows us away.

[Howard] started this project about a year ago by carrying out some targeted experiments. These would not only assess the suitability of components he gathered together from all directions, but also his own capacity in picking up enough knowledge on mechatronics to make the whole thing work. After making  himself accustomed to stepper …read more

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Hacker-Friendly SBCs: Which ones?

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We have run out of fruits to name all the single-board computers on the market, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy a rotten one. Bad documentation, incomplete specifications and deprecated firmwares are just some of the caveats of buying only by price and hardware features. To help you out in case you just need to find a great and open-enough SBC with community support, [Eric] has put together a decent list with 81 individually reviewed boards over at hackerboards.com.

With 81 boards, the list is as concise as it can be, ruling out almost half of the commonly available …read more

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Orbs Light to Billie Jean on this Huge Sequencer

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Sequencers allow you to compose a melody just by drawing the notes onto a 2D grid, virtually turning anyone with a moderate feel for pitch and rhythm into an electronic music producer. For  [Yuvi Gerstein’s] large-scale grid MIDI sequencer GRIDI makes music making even more accessible.

Instead of buttons, GRIDI uses balls to set the notes. Once they’re placed in one of the dents in the large board, they will play a note the next time the cursor bar passes by. 256 RGB LEDs in the 16 x 16 ball grid array illuminate the balls in a certain color depending …read more

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I2C Bit Injection Adds Memory Banks To Everything

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[Igor] wished to upgrade his newly acquired radio — a Baofeng UV-82 — with a larger memory for storing additional scanning channels, and came up with a very elegant solution: Replacing it’s EEPROM with a larger one and injecting the additional memory address bits into the I2C data line.

The cheap handheld radio comes with an 8192 bytes large 24c64 EEPROM, which allows it to store 128 channels along with a few other persistent settings. The radio’s firmware sends two-byte memory addresses over the I2C bus when accessing the 24c64, but since the 24c64’s largest address is B00011111 11111111, these addresses always roll in with …read more

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