APK LIST ANDROID APP FREE DOWNLOAD

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2020

Commodore SX-64 Keyboard Upgraded from Trash to Treasure

June 30, 2020

Released in 1984, the Commodore SX-64 Executive Computer was one of the first portable luggable color computers. It cost twice as much as a Commodore 64, had a tiny 5″ diagonal screen, and couldn’t actually support both 5¼” drives as advertised. On the upside, people say it had a slightly better keyboard than its classic cousin. [Drygol] agreed to restore the keyboard from a friend’s Commodore SX-64 sight-unseen, and boy was this thing in bad shape . Most people would probably consider the condition a shame and write it off as a lost cause, since two of the corners were missing most of their plastic. But [Drygol] isn’t most people. [Drygol] had mad restoration skills to begin with, and this project honed them to a razor’s edge. Plenty of the other vintage computer restorations [Drygol] has done required plastic welding, which uses heat or a lot of friction to smooth over cracks. Some of those have not stood the test of time, so he’s now in the habit of stabilizing cracks with brass

FreeDVDBoot Opens Up The PlayStation 2 Like Never Before

June 30, 2020

For many generations, home consoles have featured copy protection. Aiming to stop users from playing pirated games as well as running homebrew code, hackers often race to find vulnerabilities shortly after each new launch. Of course, finding workarounds can sometimes be more of a marathon than a sprint. [Grifter]’s new hack may come many years after the PlayStation 2 has since faded from store shelves, but remains impressive nonetheless. The goal was to find a way to run unsigned code on the PlayStation 2 without using any complex external hardware. Hacked memory cards, network interfaces, and other trickery were ruled out. Instead, sights were set on using the only other way in to the console – through the DVD drive. The only burnable media the PS2 DVD drive will normally read comes in the form of DVD video discs. Thus, [grifter]’s search began in the code of the on-board DVD player software. After finding potential overflow targets in the code, it was possible to exploit these to r

Automating The Disinfection Of Large Spaces With Robots

June 30, 2020

What do you do when you have to disinfect an entire warehouse? You could send a group of people through the place with UV-C lamps, but that would take a long time as said humans cannot be in the same area as the UV-C radiation, as much as they may like the smell of BBQ chicken. Constantly repositioning the lamps or installing countless lamps would get in the way during normal operation. The answer is to strap UV-C lights to a robot according to MIT’s CSAIL , and have it ride around the space. As can be seen in the video (also embedded after the break), a CSAIL group has been working with telepresence robotics company Ava Robotics and the Greater Boston Food Bank ( GBFB ). Their goal was to create a robotic system that could autonomously disinfect a GBFB warehouse using UV-C without exposing any humans to the harmful radiation. While the robotics can be controlled remotely, they can also map the space and navigate between waypoints. While testing the system, the team used a UV-C dos

Experimenting with Vibratory Wind Generators

June 30, 2020

We’ve all got a pretty good mental image of the traditional wind-powered generator: essentially a big propeller on a stick. Some might also be familiar with vertical wind turbines, which can operate no matter which way the wind is blowing. In either case, they use some form of rotating structure to harness the wind’s energy. But as demonstrated by [Robert Murray-Smith], it’s possible to generate electrical power from wind without any moving parts . With simple components, he shows how you can build a device capable of harnessing the wind with nothing more than vibrations. Alright, so we suppose that means the parts are technically moving, but you get the idea. In the video after the break, [Robert] shows two different devices that operate under the same basic principle. For the first, he cuts the cone out of a standard speaker and glues a flat stick to the voice coil. As the stick moves back and forth in the wind, the coil inside of the magnet’s field and produces a measurable volta

The Challenges Of Monitoring Water Streams And Surviving Mother Nature

June 30, 2020

Small waterways give life in the form of drinking and irrigation water, but can also be very destructive when flooding occurs. In the US, monitoring of these waterways is done by mainly by the USGS, with accurate but expensive monitoring stations. This means that there is a limit to how many monitoring stations can be deployed. In an effort to come up with a more cost-efficient monitoring solution, [Rohan Menon] and [Ian Vernooy] created Aquametric, a simple water level, temperature and conductivity measuring station. The device is built around a Particle Electron that features a STM32 microcontroller and a 3G modem. An automotive ultrasonic sensors measures water level, a thermistor measures temperature and a pair of parallel aluminum plates are used to measure conductivity. All the data from the prototype is output to a live dashboard . The biggest challenges for the system came with field deployment. The great outdoors can be rather merciless with our ideas and electronic devices

Your Own Open Source ASIC: SkyWater-PDF Plans First 130 nm Wafer in 2020

June 30, 2020

You might have caught Maya Posch’s article about the first open-source ASIC tools from Google and SkyWater Technology . It envisions increased access to make custom chips — Application Specific Integrated Circuits — designed using open-source tools, and made real through existing chip fabrication facilities. My first thought? How much does it cost to tape out? That is, how do I take the design on my screen and get actual parts in my hands? I asked Google’s Tim Ansel to explain some more about the project’s goals and how I was going to get my parts. The goals are pretty straightforward. Tim and his collaborators would like to see hardware open up in the same way software has. The model where teams of people build on each other’s work either in direct collaboration or indirectly has led to many very powerful pieces of software. Tim’s had some success getting people interested in FPGA development and helped produce open tools for doing so. Custom ASICs are the next logical step. Who N

Aggressive Indoor Flying Thanks To SteamVR

June 30, 2020

With lockdown regulations sweeping the globe, many have found themselves spending altogether too much time inside with not a lot to do. [Peter Hall] is one such individual, with a penchant for flying quadcopters. With the great outdoors all but denied, he instead endeavoured to find a way to make flying inside a more exciting experience. We’d say he’s succeeded. The setup involves using a SteamVR virtual reality tracker to monitor the position of a quadcopter inside a room. This data is then passed back to the quadcopter at a high rate, giving the autopilot fast, accurate data upon which to execute manoeuvres. PyOpenVR is used to do the motion tracking, and in combination with MAVProxy, sends the information over MAVLink back to the copter’s ArduPilot. While such a setup could be used to simply stop the copter crashing into things, [Peter] doesn’t like to do things by half measures. Instead, he took full advantage of the capabilities of the system, enabling the copter to fly aggressi

The Segway is Dead, Long Live the Segway

June 30, 2020

Before it was officially unveiled in December 2001, the hype surrounding the Segway Human Transporter was incredible. But it wasn’t because people were excited to get their hands on the product, they just wanted to know what the thing was. Cryptic claims from inventor Dean Kamen that “Ginger” would revolutionize transportation and urban planning lead to wild speculation. When somebody says their new creation will make existing automobiles look like horse-drawn carriages in comparison, it’s hard not to get excited. Dean Kamen unveils the Segway There were some pretty outlandish theories. Some believed that Kamen, a brilliant engineer and inventor by all accounts, had stumbled upon some kind of anti-gravity technology. The kids thought they would be zipping around on their own Back to the Future hover boards by Christmas, while Mom and Dad were wondering what the down payment on a floating minivan might be. Others thought the big secret was the discovery of teleportation, and that w

Quadcopter With Stereo Vision

June 30, 2020

Flying a quadcopter or other drone can be pretty exciting, especially when using the video signal to do the flying. It’s almost like a real-life video game or flight simulator in a way, except the aircraft is physically real. To bring this experience even closer to the reality of flying, [Kevin] implemented stereo vision on his quadcopter which also adds an impressive amount of functionality to his drone. While he doesn’t use this particular setup for drone racing or virtual reality, there are some other interesting things that [Kevin] is able to do with it. The cameras, both ESP32 camera modules, can make use of their combined stereo vision capability to determine distances to objects. By leveraging cloud computing services from Amazon to offload some of the processing demands, the quadcopter is able to recognize faces and keep the drone flying at a fixed distance from that face without needing power-hungry computing onboard. There are a lot of other abilities that this drone unlo

Towards a 3D-Printed Neutrino Detector

June 30, 2020

Additive manufacturing techniques like fused deposition modeling, aka 3D printing, are often used for rapid prototyping. Another advantage is that it can create shapes that are too complex to be made with traditional manufacturing like CNC milling. Now, 3D printing has even found its way into particle physics as an international collaboration led by a group from CERN is developing a new plastic scintillator production technique that involves additive manufacturing . A scintillator is a fluorescent material that can be used for particle detection through the flashes of light created by ionizing radiation. Plastic scintillators can be made by adding luminophores to a transparent polymer such as polystyrene and are usually produced by conventional techniques like injection molding. Design of the ND280 scintillation detector. The scintillator cubes are read out by wavelength shifting fibers. One end of the fiber is viewed by a photosensor, another end is covered by a reflector. Credit