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Early on in the pandemic we wrote about how some makers of medical equipment, such as ventilators, were making it difficult to impossible to let hospitals fix their own ventilators. Many have used software locks -- DRM -- and refuse to give the information necessary to keep those machines online.
And thus, it was only inevitable that piracy would step in to fill the void. Vice has the incredible story of a rapidly growing grey market for both hacked hardware and software to keep ventilators running:
In the case of the PB840, a ventilator popularized about 20 years ago and in use ever since, a functional monitor swapped from a machine with a broken breathing unit to one with a broken monitor but a functioning breathing unit won’t work if the software isn’t synced. And so William uses the homemade dongle and Medtronic software shared with him by the Polish hacker to sync everything and repair the ventilator. Medtronic makes a similar dongle, but doesn’t sell it to the general public or independent repair professionals. It’s only available to people authorized by the company to do repairs.
Read When Piracy Literally Saves Lives via Techdirt
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Unless you’ve held on to an old tube TV, did the hack that lets you use a light gun with an LCD via Wiimote receiver and a couple of microcontrollers, or live close to one of those adult arcades, you might be really jonesing to play Duck Hunt by now. It’s time to renew that hunting license, because [Danko] has recreated the game for NodeMCU boards, and it’s open season.Instead of ducks, you get to shoot cute little Twitter-esque birds of varying sizes and point values, and a tiny cab-over truck if you wish. There’s a 60-second free-for-all, and then time is up and your score is displayed. As a special bonus, there’s no smug dog to laugh at you if don’t hit anything. Be sure to check out the demo and build video after the break.
Read Tiny Duck Hunt Looks Like Big Fun via Hackaday
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Read Do Drones Help Democratize Surveillance? via Slashdot
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Sometimes fiction inspires reality—such is the case here with Bryn Dole's Weasley Family clock replica. It uses a Raspberry Pi to replicate the general functionality, going as far as to update in real-time based on your family's actual location data.
If you aren't familiar with the Harry Potter franchise, the clock is found in the home of the Weasley family. Each section of the clock represents a location rather than a point in time. There is a hand for each member of the family which moves magically into position based on where they are at a given moment. If you aren't sure where they are, you can find out in a glance using the clock.
In this project, the location information is gathered and processed using an application called Life 360. This data determines where each individual hand should dial in on the clock. Dole decided to use a grandfather clock found in a thrift store, fitted with a poster of the original clock artwork from the movie.
Read Raspberry Pi Weasley Family Clock from Harry Potter Runs Like Magic via Tom's Hardware
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Let’s face it, robots are cool. They’re also going to run the world some day, and hopefully, at that time they will take pity on their poor soft fleshy creators (a.k.a. robotics developers) and help us build a space utopia filled with plenty. I’m joking of course, but only sort of.
In my ambition to have some small influence over the matter, I took a course in autonomous robot control theory last year, which culminated in my building a Python-based robotic simulator that allowed me to practice control theory on a simple, mobile, programmable robot.
Read A beginner’s guide to robot programming with Python via The Next Web
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The South Florida Science Center recently added a new ten-inch telescope and turned to [Andres Paris] and his brother to replace the hand-cranked dome door system. They turned to an Arduino along with some beefy motor drivers. You can see some videos of the beast in operation, below.
According to a Reddit post, the brothers picked up a 5A 12V motor but decided to overdesign and selected an H-bridge that would handle 20A peak current. An IR remote allows the operator to open and shut the door and reed switches sense the extremes of the door’s motion.
Read Arduino Drives Astronomy Dome | Hackaday via Hackaday
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