With the ever-increasing capabilities of smart phones, action cameras, and hand-held gimbals, the battle for the best shots is intensifying daily on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Hyperlapse sequences are one of the popular weapons in the armoury, and [Daniel Riley] aka [rctestflight] realised that his autonomous boat could be an awesome hyperlapse platform.

This is the third version of his autonomous boat, with version 1 suffering from seaweed assaults and version 2 almost sleeping with the fishes. The new version is a flat bottomed craft was built almost completely from pink insulation foam, making it stable and unsinkable. It uses the same electronics and air boat propulsion as version 2, with addition of a GoPro mounted in smart phone gimbal to film the hyper lapses. It has a tendency to push the bow into the water at full throttle, due to the high mounted motors, but was corrected by adding a foam bulge beneath the bow, at the cost of some efficiency.

Getting the gimbal settings tuned to create hyperlapses without panning jumps turned out to be the most difficult part. On calm water the boat is stable enough to fool the IMU into believing that it’s is not turning, so the gimbal controller uses the motor encoders to keep position, which don’t allow it to absorb all the small heading corrections the boat is constantly making. Things improved after turning off the encoder integration, but it would still occasionally bump against the edges of the dead band inside which the gimbal does not turn with the boat. In the end [Daniel] settled for slowly panning the gimbal to the left, while plotting a path with carefully calculated left turns to keep the boat itself out of the shot. While not perfect, the sequences still beautifully captured the night time scenery of Lake Union, Seattle. Getting it to this level cost many hours of midnight testing, since [Daniel] was doing his best to avoid other boat traffic, and we believe it paid off.

We look forward to his next videos, including an update on his solar plane.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/autonomous-boat-for-awesome-video-hyperlapses/

[nodemcu12ecanada] is serious about saving water, which is why they built this strange lawnmower that can cut grass taller.

Short lawns are one of those clever marketing victories, like convincing people to eat a lot of sugar, that’s been doing more harm than good ever since the victory was won. Short grass is weak grass, with shallow roots, weakness to weeds, and a lot of water requirement. On top of that the grass is always in a state of panic so it grows extra fast to get to a more “natural” height. It’s great if you want to sell fertilizer, seeds, and lawnmowers. Maybe not so great for the environment.

Most lawnmowers can’t even be set high enough for healthy grass so [nodemcu12ecanada] took three electric weed whackers and bolted them to an angle iron frame. It has a lot of advantages. It’s light. You don’t need to sharpen a blade. It’s quiet. It’s electric. It’s strange appearance will scare your neighbors off from borrowing any of your tools. We love it!

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/diy-lawnmower-doesnt-cut-grass-short/

It’s that time of year again here in Germany. The mulled wine flows all night long at the Christmas markets, the Krampus runs wild in the streets, and hackers are perched frantically behind their keyboards and soldering irons, trying to get their last minute projects “finished” for the 36th annual Chaos Communication Congress (36C3) in Leipzig.

We’ll have an assembly for all fans and friends of the Jolly Wrencher, so if you’re coming to Congress, you can come join us or at least stop by and say hi. [Elliot] and [Sven] and a number of Hackaday.io luminaries will be on hand. (Ask us about secret stickers and an as-yet unannounced upcoming Hackaday conference.)

Even if you’re not able to make it, you should keep your eyes on Hackaday from the 27th to the 30th, because we’ll be reporting on the best of Congress. But you don’t have to take our word for it: the Chaos Computer Club makes all of the talks available on livestream during the event, many with simultaneous translation, and final edited versions often appearing just a few hours afterwards.

We’ve looked through the schedule, and it’s going to be a hum-dinger! Gather ’round the glowing box with your friends at your own local hackerspace, or call in sick from work and make yourself some popcorn. This is must-see nerd TV.

Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, swing by our assembly if you’re going to be in Leipzig for the last few days of 2019. See you there!

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/hackaday-is-going-to-the-36th-chaos-communication-congress/

Easy access to reliable electrical power is something a lot of us take for granted, but in developing countries or after natural disaster, it can be a rare commodity. [Daniel Connelly] has been working hard to develop infrastructure people can build themselves, and his latest project is a 200 W water turbine (video after the break) that can be built for about $50.

The core of the system is a wheel and motor from a hoverboard. What looks like 110 mm PVC tubing is connected together in a U-shape that can be mounted over the wall of a man-made channel. The inlet side is shorter than the outlet, and the system must be filled with water to allow the flow to start, like a siphon. The first two versions had the impeller sitting on the end of the outlet tube. V1 used a scrap plastic radial impeller of unknown origin, and did not work at all. V2 had a 3D printed impeller that worked pretty well, but the rotation speed wasn’t high enough to produce the voltage that [Daniel] wanted.

V3 used a large computer fan that was mounted in the short horizontal piece of section of tubing at the top of the system. It worked spectacularly well, producing about 55 V AC over a single phase of the motor, which should hopefully end up producing about 90 V DC and 200-500 W after rectifying the 3-phase motor output. This only however indicative, we would really like to see it tested with different loads connected. The output will also be dependent on the flow rate and head pressure of a particular stream/channel/river, and [Daniel] admits that they had pretty much ideal conditions for their tests. If hoverboard motors are hard to come by, a motorcycle alternator should also work well.

[Daniel] is still working out the kinks of the system, but as with his other designs on OpenSourceLowTech he will release the full open source design and tutorials as soon as he is ready. We are looking forward to seeing the system implemented out in the wild. For off-grid power, home built and 3D printed wind generators are another popular topic around here, if you don’t have a handy channel nearby.

 

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/open-source-50-water-turbine-from-repurposed-parts/

When [DonHo] sang about tiny bubbles, he probably wasn’t thinking of them embedded in glycerine. But that’s where the bubbles in [ShinodaY]’s clock reside. The viscous fluid holds the bubbles better allowing the time to be read more easily. You can watch the relaxing display in the video below.

The theory of operation is simple and reminds us somehow of a reverse Tetris game. Solenoid valves at the base release air bubbles to form a row of the display. The bubbles rising makes room for the next row. The display has as many columns as there are air outlets at the bottom. Spacing the bubble pixels is as simple as adjusting the timing between air bubbles.

An ESP8266 controls the whole thing thanks to an I/O expander. Some Neopixel LEDs make the whole thing look cooler.

This is the second version of the clock. The first version (see the second video, below) used water, and we think you’ll agree the glycerine makes all the difference.

The project is as much aquarium work as electronics. We also had to wonder what else you could display like this? Maybe some crude graphics or tweets? Perhaps using it as a form of interesting game would be cool, especially if it were significantly scaled upwards.

For example, we remember one very large bubble display (note: the outbound link has changed). You can even make a 3D display — sort of.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/tiny-bubbles-in-the-clock/

After a decade in development, the Boeing CST-100 “Starliner” lifted off from pad SLC-41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station a little before dawn this morning on its first ever flight. Officially referred to as the Boeing Orbital Flight Test (Boe-OFT), this uncrewed mission was intended to verify the spacecraft’s ability to navigate in orbit and safely return to Earth. It was also planned to be a rehearsal of the autonomous rendezvous and docking procedures that will ultimately be used to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station; a capability NASA has lacked since the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle.

Unfortunately, some of those goals are now unobtainable. Due to a failure that occurred just 30 minutes into the flight, the CST-100 is now unable to reach the ISS. While the craft remains fully functional and in a stable orbit, Boeing and NASA have agreed that under the circumstances the planned eight day mission should be cut short. While there’s still some hope that the CST-100 will have the opportunity to demonstrate its orbital maneuverability during the now truncated flight, the primary focus has switched to the deorbit and landing procedures which have tentatively been moved up to the morning of December 22nd.

While official statements from all involved parties have remained predictably positive, the situation is a crushing blow to both Boeing and NASA. Just days after announcing that production of their troubled 737 MAX airliner would be suspended, the last thing that Boeing needed right now was another high-profile failure. For NASA, it’s yet another in a long line of setbacks that have made some question if private industry is really up to the task of ferrying humans to space. This isn’t the first time a CST-100 has faltered during a test, and back in August, a SpaceX Crew Dragon was obliterated while its advanced launch escape system was being evaluated.

We likely won’t have all the answers until the Starliner touches down at the White Sands Missile Range and Boeing engineers can get aboard, but ground controllers have already started piecing together an idea of what happened during those first critical moments of the flight. The big question now is, will NASA require Boeing to perform a second Orbital Flight Test before certifying the CST-100 to carry a human crew?

Let’s take a look at what happened during this morning’s launch.

A Matter of Time (and Fuel)

It’s important to understand that there was no catastrophic failure aboard the CST-100 this morning. The spacecraft and the United Launch Alliance Atlas V that carried it into space were operating normally during what has been described as a perfect launch. But upon separating from the booster rocket and continuing on its own independent flight, the CST-100 failed to achieve the necessary altitude to rendezvous with the ISS. While the craft is still fully functional, it simply doesn’t have enough propellant onboard to correct the situation.

Boeing currently believes the failure lies with the spacecraft’s Mission Event Timer (MET), an internal clock that starts running as soon as the spacecraft leaves the launch pad and is used to orchestrate automated systems during the mission. For reasons that are not yet known, the MET either failed or was not properly synchronized, which led to the engines not firing according on schedule. To make matters worse, the CST-100’s Reaction Control System (RCS) depleted the vehicle’s propellant reserves by attempting to make maneuvers that were unnecessary at the time.

Quite simply, the Starliner was confused about what tasks it was supposed to be performing after separation from the Atlas V booster. Normally, ground control would have been able to see the error and intervene, but as luck would have it, the event occurred during an expected communications blackout.

Once ground control reestablished communications with the vehicle and got it back on course, it became clear the planned rendezvous with the Station was out of the question. Both NASA and Boeing have been quick to point out that, had there been a human crew aboard this mission, they would likely have been able to switch over to manual control and resolve the issue on their own.

Because of this, there’s some debate as to how this situation will play out in terms of the CST-100’s certification for human flight. While issues with the autonomous systems obviously need to be addressed, astronauts are trained to handle precisely these sort of computer glitches. For better or for worse, there’s a long history of human crews having to take over when their vehicle’s systems have gone haywire.

In a post-launch interview, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine downplayed the issue, hinting that the failure doesn’t necessarily mean the CST-100 isn’t ready to start carrying human occupants:

What it really comes down to is automation. What we were trying to do is make sure we could do this entire mission end-to-end completely automated and that didn’t work. But here’s what’s important, the spacecraft is in orbit, the spacecraft is safe. If we would have had astronauts on board, they would have been safe. In fact, if we had astronauts on board, they probably would have taken over manually and would be flying to the International Space Station right now.

Critical Next Steps

While the Starliner won’t be able to demonstrate the critical rendezvous and docking maneuvers, the test is far from a complete loss. Being the first flight of a completely new spacecraft, the fact that the craft was able to reach orbit and maneuver on its own is itself a considerable success. Indeed, when SpaceX performed the first flight of their Dragon spacecraft in 2010, the vehicle only flew in space for a little over three hours before returning to Earth. The Dragon didn’t even attempt to reach the ISS until its second flight two years later. One could argue that the fact the CST-100 will remain in orbit for several days means that Boeing still outperformed rival SpaceX as far as inaugural missions go.

But that assumes the CST-100 touches down safely on Sunday. Should the vehicle fail to perform its deorbit burn, break up on reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, or be unable to land safely, NASA will have no choice but to reevaluate the spacecraft’s flight readiness and further delay the Commercial Crew program. As it stands, if the next Starliner mission carries a human crew, it will do so with an untested ability to actually rendezvous and dock with the Space Station; a concerning reversal of the safety-first principles the agency has operated under since the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/boeings-starliner-fails-to-reach-space-station/

As far as hacker clock builds go, the more obscure the parts involved, the better. By this yardstick, [sjm4306] has a great piece on his hands with this Numitron-based build.

The Numitron was a type of display popular in the 1970s, and often used in aircraft avionics and other high-end hardware. The display is a 7-segment type, but using filaments instead of LEDs. [sjm4306] was able to lay his hands on four of these devices, along with some bulbs to act as the digit seperator and AM/PM indicator. Due to being incandescent in nature, multiplexing wasn’t a practical option, with lower duty cycles drastically dimming the display. Instead, a 32-bit cascaded shift register was used to enable all the segments to be driven at the same time.

It’s a great build that uses some genuine original display hardware to create a clock with a compelling vintage aesthetic. This would make a great gift to a pilot from the era, or any hacker that likes the unusual display technologies of yesteryear. You can even build a Numitron watch, if you’re so inclined. Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/numitron-clock-is-a-tidy-70s-throwback/

We’ve all seen the IoT device security trainwrecks: those gadgets that fail so spectacularly that the comment section lights up with calls of “were they even thinking about the most basic security?” No, they probably weren’t. Are you?

Hackaday Contributor and all around good guy Kerry Scharfglass thinks about basic security for a living, and his talk is pitched at the newcomer to device security. (Embedded below.) Of course “security” isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition; you need to think about what threats you’re worried about, which you can ignore, and defend against what matters. But if you’ve never worked through such an exercise, you’re in for a treat here. You need to think like a maker, think like a breaker, and surprisingly, think like an accountant in defining what constitutes acceptable risks.

Kerry works through three products, an IoT medical training device, a smart deadbolt, and an IoT dockless shared scooter. While you might think that the medical device would demand high security, it was actually the simplest on his list. It’s used by medical professionals on-site, in a controlled environment, and there’s not much else you can do with it. They took some effort to make flashing the wrong firmware difficult, including flashing only over USB, but basically they decided that the bare-minimum of security was acceptable.

Contrast the medical device with the IoT lock. The lock is all about security and securing your house. Worse, if it fails, it would lock you out of your house. And the threat surface is large. Imagine using the lock on your door to let people in to your AirBnB rental — now you have a stranger with extended physical access to the device, who could even dismount it without looking too odd.

There are privacy concerns, denial of service attacks, and the possibility to use it to pivot into your home network. Needless to say, the firmware update mechanism here was a lot more complex, involving authentication and encryption, and Kerry goes into the whole chain here.

Finally, the scooter. The device itself is cool, stealable, a public safety hazard if it fails, and if you could figure out a way to turn them off remotely, you know videos would show up on YouTube. In short, it’s a security nightmare. Half of this was solved by having the scooter techs frequently get hands on the devices. Firmware can only be flashed locally with a cable. The techs could see if anything was added to the PCBA. Etc. The other half was solved by dedicating a separate microcontroller to the throttle and brakes, disconnecting the most important driving functions from the IoT stuff.

What’s most interesting about the scooter case study is all the things the company chose not to fight against. User stupidity? Nope. Theft? They only have an expected life of 6 months anyway, and aftermarket “brains” are available on Amazon for anyone who really wants to steal it.

There are tons of other threats, but the overarching theme of Kerry’s talk is identifying which risks you can mitigate, and which you can’t. Focusing your efforts on the basic stuff gets you past the basic threats. And that’ll keep the companies that Kerry worked for from ending up shamed in the Hackaday comment section.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/kerry-scharfglass-secures-your-iot-things/

Macros are meant to make our lives easier, but they live up to this promise with mixed results. Generally speaking, a macro is a special combination of keys on the keyboard that execute a custom task — their goal is to speed up your productivity by getting away from mousing through menus. But once a macro requires more than two keys, they can get a bit cumbersome to input. I have personally found that repeated use of macros that require ctrl+shift can potentially cause problems. I don’t know about you (and your repetitive stress mileage may vary), but personal injury is the polar opposite of what I want from something that’s supposed to be convenient.

The more I thought about how nice it would be to have a field of dedicated one-punch macro keys, the more incomplete my life seemed without it. Every uncomfortable three-key shortcut I chorded was more motivational than the last.

I love keyboard shortcuts, and not just because I prefer keyboard navigation in general. A lot of little things about writing for the web can be streamlined with shortcuts, like writing html tags and doing image manipulation. And I’m always looking for a better workflow to pin down my fleeting mental fragments, at least until that dark day that I can turn on Dropbox Thoughts and burn my brainwaves directly to disk.

Why a Foot Stool?

Most macro machines resemble keyboards and live on the desk surface. My desk surface is covered in loose papers, legal pads, folders, and felines, and I don’t want to worry about keeping another input device uncovered. Also, the cat and I don’t need another permanent fixture taking up valuable space. I was already using a footstool anyway because my desk is weirdly tall, and I have to raise the chair pretty high to sit comfortably at it and type.

One of the reasons I had for making a foot-fed keyboard specifically is to improve my focus. I wanted a way to have shortcuts that wouldn’t take my fingers away from the act of creating with words. The more shortcuts I have, the more time I can spend in the zone, perfecting my pun game. Most of the shortcuts are for post-making minutiae. For instance, see that subheading that begins the next section? It’s a specialized <h2> tag that plays nicely with images.

Once I managed to get it memorized, I got tired of typing them out, only to have WordPress convert them on the sly to a plain <h2> tags once in a while. I also have a shortcut that spits out an <a href> tag. Both of them use a for loop to move the cursor to the right spot, so I can just keep on typing. None of the shortcuts by themselves save a great deal of time, but the effect is cumulative.

Toe-Tapping Toolbox

Physically there are only four buttons on the stool, but there is a “bank” system that expands the stool it to 20 potential macros. Each button gets a new macro based on which of the buttons is illuminated — or the default where no button is lit — for a total of five banks. At the moment, I have more available macro real estate than I know what to do with. This is a good thing, like having empty drawers in a parts cabinet. It means I have room to grow.

When the stool is in the default bank, none of the LEDs are lit, though they do light momentarily when the button is pushed. I can access the different color banks by long-pressing the corresponding button. Once that’s done, the LED will stay lit until I change banks. One nice feature is that I can switch directly to another bank without going back to the default bank first. And I can get back to the default bank just by long-pressing the active color bank’s button again.

I wrestled a bit with trying to decide what kind of shortcuts to deposit in each bank. Would I be better served to group shortcuts by context, or by type? For now, they’re organized by type. The default bank is all ctrl+shift+letter combinations, and the red bank is all snippets — stuff like the fancy <h2> tag and the <a href> tag.

How It’s Made

I’ll be honest – I wanted this to be easy. The sooner I got this keystool under my feet, the sooner I could stamp out lost seconds and shortcut fatigue.

The brains of the operation is an ItsyBitsy M0, programmed in CircuitPython. It’s a huge help that the board already presents as an HID, and coding is as easy as editing a text file on a mass storage device. Sure, it feels good to program in Arduino or C or on bare metal, but the point of this was to boost productivity.

As soon as I think of a new shortcut I’d like to have at my toes, all I have to do is switch my text editor to main.py, write a new method, call the method in the appropriate bank, and save the file. Programmatically speaking, it’s quite a portable device.

Micro Macro Foot Stool

Within the first day of using the foot stool, I was hooked. But it only had the default bank and a grand total of four slots at that point. I wanted to keep improving on it, but I didn’t want to mess it up with my experimentation or stop using it in the meantime. I had no choice but to build a second, smaller version.

The only functional differences are that the micro macro foot stool uses a Trinket M0 instead of an ItsyBitsy M0, and there are no LEDs, so I can’t test changes to those.

A Learning Experience

I learned a few things making this stool, which is the mark of any good project. For one, I’d never drilled such huge holes before, or done much drilling in plastic. Now I can go forth and confidently drill any decently rigid plastic without fear. Enclosure-wise, the folding stool turned out to be quite hackable, because it comes apart easily and lays flat for drilling. Makes me wonder what else could be done to these stools.

Another perk was the chance to get down in the grass with CircuitPython. I hadn’t done a whole lot with it before this project, but it has snaked its way into my heart. I’m grateful to live in a time where a project like this can have such a low barrier to entry. Whether you want to build something like this to prevent repetitive stress injury or for better noob pwnage, CircuitPython makes it easy.

I don’t wear shoes here in the Hackaday home office, but if I did, you can bet I would try using stompbox switches.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/macro-foot-stool-helps-me-get-a-leg-up-on-work/

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot WIlliams get together for the 47th and final Hackaday Podcast of 2019. We dive into the removable appendix on Prusa’s new “Buddy” control board, get excited over the world’s largest grid-backup battery, and commiserate about the folly of designing enclosures as an afterthought. There’s some great research into which threaded-inserts perform best for 3D-printed parts, how LEDs everywhere should be broadcasting data, and an acoustic organ that’s one-ups the traditional jug band.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (63 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• Google Play
• iTunes
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS

Episode 047 Show Notes:

New This Week:

• Join Elliot and Sven at 36C3 next week!
• Mike built the midTbot
  • Lack Of Space Is No Longer An Excuse For Not Having A Pen Plotter
  • Demo video and closeup images
  • Generating gcode directly
• We’re off next week but will be back on January 3rd!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Tidy Board Rework Uses Flex PCBs, No Wires
• Hackaday Superconference: Nick Poole On Boggling The Boardhouse
  • How To Build Beautiful Enclosures From FR4 — Aka PCBs
• Bottle Organ Breakdown
  • Forming Fipples And Accompanying Accoutrements
• Modulated Pilot Lights Anchor AR To Real World
  • LinkRay
  • Bokode, A New Barcode
  • Hackaday Explains: Li-Fi & Visible Light Communications
  • Joe Grand Is Hiding Data In Plain Sight: LEDs That Look Solid But Send A Message
• These Lessons Were Learned In Enclosure Design, But Go Far Beyond
• Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth From Threaded Inserts?
  • Threading 3D Printed Parts: How To Use Heat-Set Inserts

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Universal Interface Board Comes To The Rescue Of Bigger Projects
  • What Does An Electronics Tinkerer’s Workbench Need?
  • Escher: Etch-a-Sketch As A Service
• Mike’s Picks:
  • Use Blueprint Process To Print On Fabric With Lasers
  • A Modular System For Building Heavy Duty 18650 Battery Packs
  • Sleek, Sophisticated Skittle Sorter

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• The Hornsdale Power Reserve And What It Means For Grid Battery Storage
• Prusa Dares You To Break Their Latest Printer
  • (Erratum: eight years.  I say I’ve had a Prusa Mk II for “ten years”.  It’s circa 2012. Printed in plastic by Jo Pru himself, in Smurf Smoothie. It’s been a great ride!)

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/hackaday-podcast-047-prusa-controversy-bottle-organ-breakdown-pcbs-bending-backwards-and-listen-to-your-led/

The SDR revolution has brought a bonanza of opportunities for experimentation to the radio enthusiast, but with it has come a sometimes-confusing array of software for which even installation can be a difficult prospect for an SDR novice. If you’re bamboozled by it all then help may be at hand courtesy of [Luigi Cruz], who has packaged a suite of ready-to-go popular SDR software in an OS image for the Raspberry Pi.

On board the Raspbian-based OS image are SDR Angel, Soapy Remote, GQRX, GNURadio, LimeUtil, and LimeVNA. In hardware terms the RTL-SDR is supported, along with the LimeSDR, PlutoSDR, Airspy, and Airspy HF. All are completely ready-to-go and even have desktop shortcuts, so if the CLI scares you then you can still dive in and play. More importantly it’s designed for use with SDR transmitters as well as receivers, so the barrier for full SDR operation for radio amateurs has become significantly lower too.

This year has seen the seven-year anniversary of the RTL-SDR hack that probably did most to kickstart the use of SDRs in our community. Our colleague [Tom Nardi] wrote a retrospective that’s worth a look for its overview of some SDR tricks that have evolved over that time. Meanwhile if you don’t mind restricting your outlook somewhat, it’s possible to turn the Raspberry Pi 3 into an SDR all without any extra hardware.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/all-your-sdr-software-in-a-handy-raspberry-pi-image/