Just saw this scope over at Make. Don’t know much about the specifics and so I will definitely wait until someone does some tests with it. But $300 for a full functioned dual-channel scope? Incredible. Check it out here.
via Make
After years of searching for a good deal, last month I bought a beautiful used Bridgeport milling machine for the shop. Awesome!
I bought it in Bridgeport, CT from a guy selling a lot of equipment from a mold making shop that closed. Originally interested in a small M-head Bridgeport with a small work surface, I saw this variable speed beauty and couldn’t resist.
I got a great deal with all this, and was able to throw in all kinds of extras! A vise in good shape, a rotary table, a high-quality drill bit chuck, a box of misc. mills and a bunch of collets! Here it is at the warehouse with all the good stuff:
And transporting wasn’t as much a problem as I thought. I drove a Penske truck up to the warehouse in Bridgeport, popped the head off (with much friendly help from the forklift operator) and they loaded the beast onto the truck with a pallet. Strapped that sucker down & good to go:
Off-loading was not TOO bad. It would have been a bit easier if I had (a) borrowed a forklift, or (b) asked for any help whatsoever. But amazingly I did get it off the truck and into my shop with nothing more than a pallet jack. The tricky part was compensating for the fact that the truck was too low for the loading dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I had to back the truck up on ramps I made from some 2 x 10 boards lying around. Then I had to work the pallet slowly toward the back of the truck (since I was working against a bit of a slope). This took some time, moving forward a few inches at a time, and screwing a board to the floor of the truck to keep everything from sliding back again. Anyway, it all worked out. Here it is safely on the loading dock:
Once in the shop, I borrowed a friend’s chain hoist & popped the head back on:
Moved everything in place with the pallet jack, and all was done!
Hooray! Time to get to work:
Most viruses try to do stuff like steal passwords, credit card numbers, or secret information. Very few try to actually affect our physical world. The Stuxnet virus, on the other hand, was developed for one purpose: to surreptitiously and gradually destroy centrifuges at a specific nuclear facility in Iran. It was deployed via usb sticks, expoited four zero-day weaknesses in Windows, and executed subtle but damaging changes in centrifuge speeds in very specific machines. There’s a great article over at Wired about how computer security analysts (in particular Liam O Murchu at Symantec) analyzed & eventually determined the purpose of this unique malware.
via slashdot
Canal Rubber is one of those indispensable supply stores here in nyc, one of the last remaining useful resources in lower Manhattan. I was just picking up some rubber sheeting today (a quick – but hot – bike ride away) and spotted this beauty behind the counter. They’ve faithfully reproduced the storefront sign on a coffee mug! They just got their first batch of them made and I think its gorgeous.
I think we’ve all been reading about the increasing onslaught of hacker penetration that has been going on lately. In a new angle on possible techniques, This piece in the Register describes how computer penetration testing firm Netragard successfully gained access into one of their clients’ PCs. They were forced into a unique solution by their client’s demand that they try to gain access without using the more common network-related intrusion methods (social media, telephony, etc). They also couldn’t break in & use the computers either, so an unobtrusive hardware solution was arrived at. In the photo above you’ll see their method in the underside of a common Logitech mouse. Inside is a Teensy USB development board (such as I have posted about before) along with a USB flash drive. Since the Teensy can be seen by your PC as a keyboard device they were able to program the device to execute keyboard commands that installed nasty intrusion software into the PC hard drive which within a few days remotely connected to Netragard’s servers through the internet.
To get the hardware into the company, they packaged the mouse with fake promotional documents and sent it to an employee, who of course tried it out.
How relevant is this type of intrusion? Check out this article over at Bloomberg. In particular:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran a test this year to see how hard it was for hackers to corrupt workers and gain access to computer systems. Not very, it turned out.
Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60 percent plugged the devices into office computers, curious to see what they contained. If the drive or CD case had an official logo, 90 percent were installed.
!!!
via Adafruit
Adafruit industries is quickly becoming one of my favorite resources for electronics and in particular for electronics related knowledge.
They also make stuff. Like these nifty LED cufflinks – iCufflinks – that they’ve just released. The LED inside pulses just like your mac’s sleep indicator, which they say is “reverse engineered.” I admire anybody who admits to reverse engineering Apple tech without worrying about Steve Jobs’ long arm of the lawyer…
Anyway they’re the first tasteful example of wearable electronics. Period.
via Crunchgear
I’ve been away from the blog for a bit – been doing some nifty stuff which I’ll relate when I can. In the meantime this is one thing I did over the weekend:
Sometimes I even make things for my own home. I’ve been slowly renovating our new apartment in Brooklyn, including making all the kitchen cabinetry. In a small kitchen its a challenge to design for best space use, and the question “what to do with all those friggin corner cabinets?” always comes up. After long debate I put a lazy susan in one and a slide-out trashcan in the other. See how fancy that drawer is? Yes there will be a front finish panel over it (maybe white – or a shade of red…)
For some reason we got a trash can that has an infrared lid opener. This was partly because it fit PERFECTLY and partly because a friend has one and after thinking it a bit silly we decided it was kind of nifty. So we ordered one from Amazon – a Nine Stars DZT-42-1. (as an aside I would like to mention how expensive simple trash cans can be if you need very particular dimensions to fit in cabinets – so I didn’t feel bad with the price of this one)
Trash can worked right out of the box fine & dandy – wave your hand in front and the lid opens smartly (inside is an IR distance sensor with circuitry). Only problem was (and I have to say I anticipated this) that when it is put in the drawer and slid closed, the electronics senses the cabinet closing around it and tries to open the lid. Well, nothing is easy so out comes my Arduino and assorted electronics gear to try to fix this. Its really a simple problem so I was able to come up with several working ideas which are not worth going into but my basic premise is as it always is when I do a project:
Find the simplest solution that will look awesome.
So first of all, it has to be all contained in the lid of the trash can. No wires coming out, nothing to get caught or broken when changing trash bags. Also – it has to work from the 6V battery pack in the trash unit. And of course power consumption should be kept to a minimum and it should look seamless.
The more I thought about it the more I was over-designing with the Arduino. Why use 600,000 – 1 MILLION transistors to do the job that ONE transistor can do? So I threw it away (not really!) and turned to a good old analog circuit. The most basic thing straight out of a Forrest Mims electronics workbook from my childhood: a simple light sensitive switch with a few resistors, a diode, a photoresistor and an NPN Transistor. Pull out the drawer, light hits the can and turns on the hand sensor with a relay. Bada bing:
See the photoresistor to the left of the interface. There is also a hole in the side to adjust a trim pot for light/dark sensitivity.
I’d be very happy if I was doing this for a client, simple solution and seamless integration.
Here is a pic of the final product of the metal bending project, which went out the door last week. I made a few changes to the bender which resolved the primary problem with my setup. Because the bend required a lot of force, the top of the tool would twist in response to the bending pressure. This caused the bend to be slightly skewed and so my corner would not be square on the horizontal plane. To resolve this I did two things – beefed up the width of the bender’s back and top (which helped) – and second, because the results still weren’t perfect, I put in the angled brace you see in the left of the picture. After this was done, the bends were excellent.
Want one of these. Wow.
via notcot
It is not easy to create a seamless USB interface device using the Arduino environment. From my somewhat limited experience with Arduino (and Mac OS X in my case), any USB interfacing you do will be read as a serial device, making it a clunky method to create devices as essential as keyboards or game controllers.
It looks like those days may be over though. There’s an awesome example over at the Make website of a new development/interface board called Teensy USB. They hacked the Staples “Easy” button to insert synonyms to the word “awesome” in any document being written.
Both models have an AVR ATMEGA processor, and it looks to be quite compatible with the Arduino environment and many software platforms. Arduino compatability is achieved through the Teensyduino add-on and the microcode loading software - Teensy Loader – is available for Mac OS X, Linux, Win XP & Win 7/Vista.
Sadly I have not yet been able to try this but I can already think of a few projects in which I WOULD have used it. More soon….
(via slashdot)
