Why Game Boy IPS Screens Flicker
The Nintendo Game Boy was a very popular handheld in its time, but its display technology has not aged gracefully. Ripping out the original screen and dropping in a modern IPS LCD is a popular mod, but that often comes with a weird flicker now and then. [makho] is here to explain why.The problem was that the Game Boy didn’t have any way to do transparency in the original hardware. Instead, sprites that were supposed to be a little bit transparent were instead flickered on and off rapidly. The original LCD was so slow that this flicker would be largely hidden, with the sprites in question looking suitably transparent. However, switch to a modern IPS LCD with its faster refresh rate, and the flickering will be readily visible. So it’s not a bug — it’s something that was intentionally done by developers that were designing for the screen technology of the 1980s, not the 2020s.IPS screens have become th...

This Week in Security: 1Password, Polyglots, and Roundcube
This week we got news of a security incident at 1Password, and we’re certain we aren’t the only ones hoping it’s not a repeat of what happened at LastPass. 1Password has released a PDF report on the incident, and while there are a few potentially worrying details, put into context it doesn’t look too bad.The first sign that something might be amiss was an email from Okta on September 29th — a report of the current list of account administrators. Okta provides authentication and Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities, and 1Password uses those services to manage user accounts and authentication. The fact that this report was generated without anyone from 1Password requesting it was a sign of potential problems.And here’s the point where a 1Password employee was paying attention and saved the day, by alerting the security team to the unrequested report. That employee ha...

Retrotechtacular: Crash Testing Truck Attenuators, for Science
There are those among us who might bristle at something from the early 1980s qualifying for “Retrotechtacular” coverage, but it’s been more than 40 years since the California Department of Transportation’s truck-mounted attenuators crash testing efforts, so we guess it is what it is.If you’re worried that you have no idea what a “truck-mounted attenuator” might be, relax — you’ve probably seen these devices attached to the backs of trucks in highway work zones. They generally look like large boxes attached to frames at the rear of the truck which are intended to soften the blow should a car somehow not see the giant orange truck covered with flashing lights and drive into the rear of it at highway speeds. Truck-mounted attenuators are common today, but back in 1982 when this film was produced, the idea was still novel enough to justify cras...

3D Printed Dump Truck Carries Teeny Loads
What do you do when you already have a neat little radio-controlled skid-steer loader? Well, if you’re [ProfessorBoots], you build a neat little dump truck to match!The dump truck is built out of 3D printed components, and has proportions akin to a heavy-duty mining hauler. The dump bed and wheels were oversized relative to the rest of the body to give it a more cartoonish look.An ESP32 is the brains of the operation. The build is powered by a nifty little 3.6 V rechargeable lithium-ion battery with an integral Micro USB charge port. It’s paired with a boost converter to provide a higher voltage for the servos and motors. Drive is to the rear wheels, thanks to a small DC gear motor. Unlike previous skid-steer designs from [ProfessorBoots], this truck has proper servo-controlled steering. The printed tires are wrapped in rubber o-rings, which is a neat way to make wheels that grip without a lot of fuss....

The Dar es Salaam Hacker Scene and Gamut Detection
We’re on a sort of vacation in Tanzania at the moment and staying in a modest hotel away from the tourist and government district. It’s a district of small shops selling the same things and guys repairing washing machines out on the sidewalk. The guys repairing washing machines are more than happy to talk. Everybody’s amazingly friendly here, the hotel guy grilled us for an hour about our home state. But I really didn’t expect to end up in a conversation about computer vision.In search of some yogurt and maybe something cooler to wear, we went on a little walk away from the hotel. With incredible luck we found a robotics shop a few blocks away. Mecktonix is a shop about two meters each way, stuffed full of Arduinos, robots, electronics components, servos, and random computer gear, overseen by [Yohanna “Joe” Harembo]. Nearby is another space with a laser engraver and 3D ...

Hackaday Podcast 242: Mechanical Math, KaboomBox, and Racing the Beam
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up from their separate but equally pin drop-quiet offices to discuss the best hacks of the previous week. Well, we liked these one, anyway.First up in the news, it’s finally time for Supercon! So we’ll see you there? If not, be sure to check out the talks as we live-stream them on our YouTube channel!Don’t forget — this is your last weekend to enter the 2023 Halloween Hackfest contest, which runs until 9 AM PDT on October 31st. Arduino are joining the fun this year and are offering some spooky treats in addition to the $150 DigiKey gift cards for the top three entrants.It’s time for a new What’s That Sound, and Kristina was able to stump Elliot with this one. She’ll have to think of some more weirdo sounds, it seems.Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with an insanely compl...

Mechanical Scorpion Robot Is A Cute Little Critter
Plenty of robots stick to a pair of driven wheels to keep locomotion simple. If you’re bold though, or just like creepy crawlies, you might instead appreciate this cute scorpion robot build.Real scorpions have eight legs, but this design has just four legs, which keeps the parts count lower and control much simpler. It still looks a bit like a scorpion, though, by virtue of its cute little tail. It’s not just for show either—it mounts a camera which can be positioned at different angles via the tail’s servos. A Raspberry Pi Zero W is the brains of the operation, and allows the robot to be controlled via WiFi or Bluetooth.Naturally, there is some additional complexity to the walking design. A full ten servos are used across the multiple legs and tail linkages. Most of the parts are 3D printed, however, so it’s quite easy to build at home once you’ve got all the parts to hand...

PC Fan Controller Works on Most Operating Systems
For better or worse, most drivers for PC-related hardware like RGB components and fan controllers are built for Windows and aren’t generally of the highest quality. They’re often proprietary and clunky, and even if they aren’t a total mess they generally won’t work on Linux machines at all, or even on a headless setup regardless of OS. This custom fan controller, on the other hand, eschews the operating system almost entirely in favor of an open-source fan controller board that can be reached over a network instead.The project’s creator, [Sasa], experimented with fan splitters to solve his problems, but found that these wouldn’t be the ideal solution given the sheer number of fans he wanted in his various computers, especially in his network-attached storage machine. For that one he wanted ten fans, with control over them in custom groups that would behave in certain way...

Arduino powers basketball score tracker
We've had a few smart sporting elements on Gadget Master - smart football, smart golf club, smart tennis raquet, smart cricket ball - well, how about a smart basketball net?The post Arduino powers basketball score tracker appeared first on Electronics Weekly.

The Many Ways To Play Colossal Cave Adventure After Nearly Half a Century
Born from a passion for caving and the wish to turn this into a digital adventure for all ages, Colossal Cave Adventure has grown from its quiet introduction in 1976 by William Crowther into the expanded game that inspired countless others to develop their own take on the genre, eventually leading to the realistically rendered graphical adventures we can play today. Yet even Colossal Cave Adventure has recently got a refresh in the form of a 3D graphical version, which has led [Bryan Lunduke] to take a look at how to best revisit the original text adventure.Your Colossal Cave Adventure awaits… (Credit: Bryan Lunduke)For those who are on Linux or a BSD system, the easiest way is to hop over to the package manager and install Colossal Cave Adventure straight away with the package bsdgames on Debian-based systems, or colossal-cave-adventure on others. A port by Eric S. Raymond of...

Paperless RFID Tags Are Carbon-Based
RFID tags are great little pieces of technology, but unfortunately, the combination of paper, metal, and silicon means they are as bad as some modern pregnancy tests — single-use electronic devices that can’t be recycled.Some prototypes of the RFID tags.A team of design program graduates from London’s Royal College of Art aim to change that. They’ve devised a mostly-paper RFID tag that’s as safe to recycle as a piece of paper with a pencil doodle on it.The team’s startup, PulpaTronics have created a design that uses paper as its only material. The circuitry is marked on the paper with a laser set to low power, which doesn’t burn or cut the paper, but instead changes to composition to be conductive.PulpaTronics were also able to create a chip-less RFID tag much the same way, using a pattern of concentric circles to convey information. The company estimates that these tags will r...

Build An Easy Replica of HAL 9000
Adafruit’s PropMaker Feather is a microcontroller board designed specifically for building props with electronic features. Thus, what better way to show it off than by building a nifty replica of the most menacing AI ever to roam this solar system? That’s right, it’s the Adafruit HAL9000 build!Following the 80/20 rule, this version is intended to be reasonably authentic while remaining affordable and easy to build. It’s built around Adafruit’s existing Massive Red Arcade Button, which looks like a decent simulacra of HAL9000’s foreboding, perceptive lens. It’s placed in a case assembled from laser-cut acrylic, with a neat inkjet-printed label on top. Where previously, sound effects were courtesy of an Arduino Uno with a Wave Shield, this version uses the PropMaker Feather, based on the RP2040, instead. It’s actually possible to assemble with zero soldering thanks to quick-co...

Plasma Cutting and 3D Printing Team Up to Make Bending Thick Sheet Steel Easier
Metalworking has always been very much a “mixed method” art. Forging, welding, milling, grinding; anything to remove metal or push it around from one place to another is fair game when you’ve got to make something fast. Adding in fancy new tools like CNC plasma cutting and computer-aided drafting doesn’t change that much, although new methods often do call for a little improvisation.Getting several methodologies to work and play well together is what [tonygoacher] learned all about while trying to fabricate some brackets for an electric trike for next year’s EMF Camp. The parts would have been perfect for fabrication in a press brake except for the 4 mm thickness of the plate steel, which was a little much for his smallish brake. To make the bending a little easier, [tony] made a partial-thickness groove across the plasma-cut blank, by using a red...

Open Source Key Programmer for HiTag2 Keys
Hitag transponders have been used in a wide variety of car keys as a protective measure against hot-wiring and theft. They’re also a reason why it’s a lot more expensive to get car keys duplicated these days for many models that use this technology. However, there is now an open source programmer that works with these transponder keys, thanks to [Janne Kivijakola].The hack uses an old reader device salvaged from a Renault in a scrapyard, hooked up to an Arduino Mega 2560 or Arduino Nano. With this setup, key transponders can be programmed via a tool called AESHitager, which runs on Windows. It’s compatible with a variety of Hitag transponders, including Hitag2, Hitag3, and Hitag AES, along with the VVDI Super Chip and certain types of BMW keys.If you’ve been having issues with coded keys, this project might just be what you need to sort your car out. Everything you need is available on Git...

Impostor Syndrome: It’s Not Your Fault!
[Crispernaki] and I have something in common. We both saw this awesome project that made a scroll wheel out of a VHS head back in 2010, and wanted to make one. We both wanted to put our own spin on the gadget, (tee-hee), discovered that it was harder than either of us wanted to commit to, and gave up.Flash forward about a million Internet years, and [crispernaki] finally made his and wrote it up. The only problem is that it was too easy. In 2010, making USB gadgets was a lot more involved than it is today. (Back then, we had to chisel device descriptors on stone tablets.) Nowadays, the firmware is just a matter of importing the right library, and the hardware is a magnetic rotation sensor breakout board, a magnet, and super glue. Cheap, and easy.All of this led our hero to feeling insecure. After all, a hack that beat him a dozen years ago turned out to be dead easy today. Maybe it was too easy? Maybe he wasn’t ...

Brick-Laying Machine Builds Without Mortar
Move over, 3D printed houses. There’s a new game in town, and it is able to use standard concrete blocks to build the walls of a house in just one day.Australian company FBR’s Hadrian X is a tablet-controlled system that follows CAD models to lay the blocks one by one. As you can see in the video after the break, the blocks are laid so quickly that there’s no time for mortar, so they dip the bottom of each block in construction adhesive instead. In the second video after the break, you can watch Hadrian-X build a curved wall.There are several things to consider when it comes to outdoor robots, such as wind and unwanted vibration. In order to correct for these nuisances, FBR came up with Dynamic Stabilisation Technology (DST). While we don’t have a lot of details on DST, the company calls it “a highly accurate system that continuously adjusts the position of a robot’s end effect...

EcoEDA Integrates Your Junk Bin into Your Designs
If you’re like us, there’s a creeping feeling that comes over you when you’re placing an order for parts for your latest project: Don’t I already have most of this stuff? With the well-stocked junk bins most of us sport and the stacks of defunct electronics that are almost always within arm’s length, chances are pretty good you do. And yet, we always seem to just click the button and place a new order anyway; it’s just easier.But what if mining the treasure in your junk bin was easier? If you knew right at design time that you had something in your stash you could slot into your build, that would be something, right? That’s the idea behind ecoEDA, a Python-based KiCAD plugin by [Jasmine Lu], [Beza Desta], and [Joyce Passananti]. The tool integrates right into the schematic editor of KiCAD and makes suggestions for substitutions as you work. The substitutions are ba...