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SEEDStack

SEEDStack - Open 3D printable seed/sprouting systemDIY Food Hacking

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picoReflow - DIY PID Reflow Oven Controller based on RaspberryPiDIY Reflow Soldering

PiGI

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Mission-Log

Global Cloudmap Distribution Service Disruption

Last available cloudmap from 2015-12-04

In case you're one of those people using xfce-planet or otherwise depend on our global cloudmap service (introduced here), you'll probably already have noticed that the image wasn't updated for 6 days now. The service itself is running on our side, but it seems as if MTSAT (covering 145E) doesn't send any more images since 2015-12-04. We'll try to get some more information about the outage to provide fresh, free and silky-smooth cloudmaps for everyone again. Sorry for any inconvenience, but we don't manage those birds, unfortunately…

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2015/12/10 13:55 · chrono · 200 Comments
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Another ARA-2000 rebuild and LNA approach

It's always rewarding to see that distributing and sharing open knowledge & tools ultimately leads to much more individual empowerment and faster technological evolution/innovation than “protection” of “Intellectual Property” ever could:

OK3ZB copied and used the AWRA-Cutting-Helper, did a successful rebuild of the Active-Wideband-Receiving-Antenna and came up with a new LNA approach:

More details and photos on: http://blog.brichacek.net/klon-sirokopasmove-aktivni-anteny-ara-2000/

Go!Go!Go!

2015/08/18 08:32 · chrono · 57 Comments
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Review: Managed Low-Power Switch DGS-1100-8

In a past Mission-Log, we've reviewed the power consumption of "green" Ethernet Switches (consumer-grade/unmanaged) that could be used in off-grid environments and they performed really well. Compliant with IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet, these switches consume less energy by cutting down on power consumption when the traffic volume is low and automatically measure the length of the connected cables to adjust power usage, when cables are shorter than 20 meters. In addition, they monitor the link status of every port and drastically reduce power consumption when a port has no link. With more technology and infrastructure, the need increased for more Ethernet features like VLANs, trunks and many other features, usually offered only by expensive, loud and very power hungry managed/enterprise switches.

Luckily this situation has changed and we could test and already deploy a new pair of managed but very low power and fanless (silent) switches: The D-Link DGS-1100 Family, which also come in a sturdy metal case and with the benefit of a (limited - due to legal issues on a per country basis) lifetime warranty.

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2015/07/07 12:17 · chrono · 34 Comments
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Carbon suppliers in Germany

One of the most time consuming aspects of many DIY projects is identifying and sourcing materials. Living in a globalized world and having the ability to link everything online has made this a lot easier. Today, it is by far much more convenient and budget friendly to directly shop in Asia, cutting out all of the so called “added value” (which is just a nice euphemism for making stuff artificially expensive to the end user, so that politicians can claim to “create jobs” and society can try to keep up the illusion of the necessity of full-time employment and camouflaged slavery for everyone).

The last F3l1ks sprint included the task to evaluate carbon fiber as a printing surface, so we had to get carbon and wanted to give the german market another chance. We've found about 15 carbon product manufacturers online with focus on manufacturers and not simple re-sellers. One thing became pretty clear: If you don't have a web-shop or at least a website with information about your products, you simply don't exist anymore. These 15 sources all got the same eMail, describing our needs and specifications in detail (carbon fiber sheets in 0.3 and 0.5mm with the specific size of the printbed and temperature considerations) to get a fair quote with the option to send us test material for free.

Out of these 15, only 7 sent a reply. From these, 2 dropped directly out as being re-sellers, not offering any individual service. One just sent as link to their shop for some carbon foil, clearly not even having read our eMail. One shop replied that they have sent out testing material, but it never arrived and we never heard from them again, another was just trying to rip us off. That left only one carbon supplier on our list, but they came trough all the way:

  • Fast and very friendly communication
  • Material and individual cutting for absolutely fair prices:
    • 269 x 299 x 0.25 mm Sheet: 13.95 EUR
    • 269 x 299 x 0.5 mm 17.95 EUR
  • Sending out test sheets in 0.25 AND 0.5 mm (with tracking) for FREE
  • Also doing custom CNC jobs if needed

when you are looking for carbon fiber sources in Germany, you can repeat the whole process as we did (took about 3 weeks to give slower candidates a fair chance) or go directly to:

http://www.carbon-posten.de/

where you get fair prices and good customer service. And of course we'd like to thank the whole team again for sending us testing sheets for free for our tests and are looking forward to working together in the future, for custom carbon CNC jobs.

2015/06/18 07:58 · chrono · 38 Comments
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Mission Update: Going Dark

Dear friends, followers, sponsors, supporters and random fellow hacker, who might have found this surfing on the waves of the net: It is with great sadness and regret that I have to announce this but the day has finally come and the “new” basecamp is no more. Over the course of the last 6 month it has been a constant struggle of tiresome scrambling to find an alternative. Thankfully and more or less last-minute, someone stepped up and offered an alternative to living under a bridge: A room in a basement of some industrial complex. Well, ghetto-kids can't be choosers.

Although, at this moment, it might look like the shittiest place I have ever had to live before, I am only grateful and will try to make the best of it, as always, with the skill and determination of a soldier, the focus and dedication of a monk and the creativity and resourcefulness only a hacker mindset can cook up. The time and resources lost for this move will make a launch this year rather unlikely, if we cannot find either one big or many small sponsor(s) for the aquarius.

Since I have no more personal belongings other than clothes and everything else is packed up and stored shipshape in containers, research focus will now ultimately shift back to survival again, so many non-survival related projects will not receive their required sprints until that situation stabilizes over time or one of the funding projects will finally lead to success.

As a consequence, a big chunk of our live metrics are going to be offline from now on, internet access will be sparse at best, so the lab/printer livestream will be offline too. Our network services like the wiki, pads, cloudmaps and the CAPCOM will continue to run.

2015/05/27 09:07 · chrono · 27 Comments

My favorite place to watch the sun set: The ISS

The sight of a setting sun is always an inspiring and comforting observation to me, much more so at about 400 km above the surface of the earth at a speed of about 27.000 km/h: On the ISS. Since I caught a nice one yesterday, I wanted to share the experience with you:


If you're currently located in central europe, watch the sky, once the sun has set. We currently have a very favorable ISS orbit to terminator crossing constellation, there should be another couple of days where we can see them fly by, with a little luck even more than one time, depending on your location.

2015/04/21 05:58 · chrono · 32 Comments
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The dark side of Food-Hacking

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2015/04/06 13:10 · chrono · 3 Comments
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HOWTO: Hacking seamless SVG background tiles

Image creation/manipulation is an essential part of UI design and, with Photoshop gone, GIMP and Inkscape came to the rescue. Almost all graphics used in the Apollo-NG realm are created with Inkscape. With many people already using Inkscape and it being a vector oriented tool creating SVGs, it was just a matter of time until the SVG standard and its implementations matured and spread. Some features, such as SMIL animation and SVG Fonts are not as widely supported. There are many SVG authoring tools, and export to SVG is supported by all major vector graphics authoring tools.

SVG 2 is currently under development, and will add new ease-of-use features to SVG, as well as more closely integrating with HTML, CSS, and the DOM, and deprecating features not supported by all browsers. The SVG Working Group is currently working in parallel on a set of modules for extending prior specifications and adding functionality to CSS, and the new SVG 2 specification will combine those modules with the rest of the SVG framework to work across the full range of devices and platforms.

Let's see about bypassing even Inkscape and learn with a simple real-world example about programming UI elements directly, as opposed to manually drawing in Inkscape and thereby giving our code the means to control the design itself, making another step towards better SDUI.

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2015/04/06 11:02 · chrono · 95 Comments
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Monday Night Hacking

Tonight's work will be another live-stream, hacking on F3l1ks. After the 3d-printer-extruder-peek-insulator-meltdown, it seemed prudent to verify that the temperatures, shown and logged by octoprint are actually the temperatures of the bed or the hot-end.

In theory it works like this: The Bed and the hot-ends have so called thermistors built-in, which are, in simple terms, just a certain kind of resistors that change their resistance (in ohm) proportional to their temperature. A specific temperature will result in a specific and predictable resistance. When we know the linearity and parameters/curve of the thermistor we can use the ADC of any uC to measure the Voltage which will change proportionally with the resistance. With a little math we can convert the digital value back to °C. So far my understanding of the principle and could/should also be reviewed in the Firmware code (reminder).

Theory is all good, but in theory the PEEK element also never should have melted. But it did. Now it's time to gather and verify data to make sure it wasn't some error in the firmware configuration, wiring or setup that led to instrumentation errors, where the temperature readouts actually were much lower than the actual temperatures to reach way above 245°C to melt the PEEK. So let's wire up an external thermometer with a K-Type temperature sensor and verify the data of the bed and the hot-end thermistors through the whole chain:

Thermistor → Cable → Connector → ADC → Firmware → USB → OctoPrint → VFCC

Since the cam and metrics shipping is already in place you can follow it live:

2015/03/30 18:38 · chrono · 13 Comments
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Personal Log: Digital Exorcism

When you leave the commercial/proprietary software ecosphere and jump into open-source operating systems, you will have to learn how to handle daemons. And once you've created a couple of those daemons yourself, taught them what to do and let them work in production, you gain a lot of experience and confidence in dealing with all kinds of daemons.

Yesterday, a couple of friends from the awesome http://co-munity.net/ecobytes project seemed to be in some sort of possible DDoS trouble and asked for my advice and experience to mitigate the issue. Now, to me, it is a very amazing experience to simply get root access to a lot of machines lately, operated by people which I have never physically met but in this case we are connected by elf-pavlik. And in today's world, voluntarily giving root access to someone else, is the ultimate token of trust or/and friendship. So I'd like to thank you guys for that vote of confidence.

Since it was supposed to be a DDoS, I've had my input filters clamped too early and saw that something was going on and a lot of traffic was moving but it somehow seemed wrong compared to other DDoS investigations I had to do in the past. After some failed attempts to block/null-route a couple of offensive networks, our analysis focus shifted to traffic distribution where we saw that one of the VMs seemed to be the top talker. And it also became clear that the traffic wasn't coming in, it was going out. I didn't take care to look at flow direction at all because I already assumed it was incoming traffic (DDoS).

Here's where Dashboards like this come in handy. You have all relevant metrics at a glance and can compare the current to some “normal” state in the past. Matching graphs and colors visually takes much less time than working on the console to aggregate everything manually for a quick situation overview.

It then quickly became apparent, that one of the VMs was the top talker so we moved onto that box and what started out as DDoS mitigation turned into digital exorcism. You know, when there are daemons that are possessed and controlled by some evil spirit to create some form havoc, mostly motivated purely by the ultimate overlord of all evil: Financial Profit. And what do you do when dealing with evil daemons? You go Exorcist on them.

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2015/03/28 10:37 · chrono · 16 Comments
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