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https://hackaday.com/2025/05/16/wireless-doorbell-extension-features-home-wound-coil/
|
Wireless Doorbell Extension Features Home-Wound Coil
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"home hacks"
] |
[
"coil",
"ding-dong doorbell",
"solenoid",
"wireless doorbell"
] |
Today in the it’s-surprising-that-it-works department we have a
ding dong doorbell extension
from [Ajoy Raman].
What [Ajoy] wanted to do was to extend the range of his existing doorbell so that he could hear it in his workshop. His plan of attack was to buy a new wireless doorbell and then interface its transmitter with his existing doorbell. But his approach is something others might not have considered if they had have been tasked with this job, and it’s surprising to learn that it works!
What he’s done is wrap a new coil around the ding dong doorbell’s solenoid. When the solenoid activates, a small voltage is induced into the coil. This then gets run into the wireless doorbell transmitter power supply (instead of its battery) via a rectifier diode and a filter capacitor. The wireless doorbell transmitter — having also had its push-button shorted out — operates for long enough from this induced electrical pulse to transmit the signal to the receiver. To be clear: the wireless transmitter is fully powered by the pulse from the coil around the solenoid. Brilliant! Nice hack!
We weren’t sure how reliable the transmitter would be when taken out of the lab and installed in the house so we checked in with [Ajoy] to find out. It’s in production now and operating well at a distance of around 50 feet!
Of course we’ve published heaps of doorbell hacks here on Hackaday before, such as this
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) doorbell
and this
light-flashing doorbell
. Have you hacked your own doorbell? Let us know on the
tips line
!
| 12
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128334",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:26:23",
"content": "That’s a neat solution.One of the first projects I built was a copy of this one:https://frenck.dev/diy-smart-doorbell-for-just-2-dollar/Connected it to home assistant and have these google homes around my house and in my workshop. It’s great. My google home’s only work for the doorbell these days as so many features have been removed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128356",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T10:28:30",
"content": "I would rather have the pushbutton-doorbell circuit left connected as in the original circuit and sense the doorbell activation directly on the sounder. This way if the ESP or power supply stop working you still have a doorbell.",
"parent_id": "8128334",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128368",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:10:10",
"content": "That’s another option. It wouldn’t help me in my case. I didn’t have a doorbell at all and the notification that there is someone at the door with a picture from my security camera is send through telegram to my phone and audible through the google home’s. I don’t have a gong connected. So if the power supply or ESP stop working, I wouldn’t know.",
"parent_id": "8128356",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128452",
"author": "lthemick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:29:18",
"content": "Nice hack!That’s said, when I read this:What he’s done is wrap a new coil around the ding dong doorbell’s solenoidI thought he was going to use the solenoid to push the button on the transmitter remote… Stealing power from the original one is a much cleverer solution oh yeah and then post",
"parent_id": "8128368",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128591",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T21:35:09",
"content": "Will tgebregular doorbell work without power rhough?The ESP failing certainly can happen. The doorbell failing too. So now we’re left with ESP software failing as an additional point of failure. While true, not very likely to be a problem imo … of course you do still control the bell via the esp, not relying fully on HA only …",
"parent_id": "8128356",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128335",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:26:34",
"content": "Why?Just use relay. Power it from dorbell and connect to button of remote one.Replace battery every ~3 years.Works just fine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128550",
"author": "Chris J",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T19:39:58",
"content": "That would work. His wired doorbell runs off of mains voltage 220v, there is no transformer (wierd). That kinda relay is special order. He was able to pull this off with stuff everyone has in their parts bin.",
"parent_id": "8128335",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129189",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T12:24:45",
"content": "He has 220V version on his paper it seems, and yet in India the mains voltage is 230V50Hz not 220V.He seem to be an older guy though, from the time they had 220V I expect :)Bit unrelated but inspired by this I measured my own mains, last time I did it was a low 226V (suppose to be 230) and now it’s 234V.Interesting also to see that the UK uses 230V officially (probably aligned from the times they were EU) but the Isle of Man has 240V. From what I hear the UK has 240V in practice though.",
"parent_id": "8128550",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128337",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:47:37",
"content": "Is a hack.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128341",
"author": "John Little",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T09:03:51",
"content": "It’s a very neat solution!In the “steal energy from the bell” category, I’m charging a capacitor on mine, which powers an ESP-01 for enough milliseconds to send a message to Home Assistant via ESP-NOW.https://community.home-assistant.io/t/smartifying-a-12v-ac-dumb-doorbell-with-an-esp-01-and-espnow-communication/739835Project’s been on my low priority queue for a year but at least for sending alerts to my phone, it reliably does so.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128372",
"author": "solipso",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:25:38",
"content": "I´m Lovin It!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128459",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T15:20:23",
"content": "It’s creative. It’s effective. It’s a nice hack. I do like the bypassing of the button, and the elimination of the battery as a maintenance/failure point. (If I were writing clickbait titles, I’d have been tempted to call it a “virtual battery” or other similar nonsensical word grouping. “Coin cell manufacturers hate this virtual battery trick, but there’s nothing they can do about it!”)Once on the battery-free train, my brain –belonging to a lazy person as it does– would have jumped to directly tapping into the AC that powers the doorbell solenoid. The tedium of winding a coil wouldn’t even have been a glimmer of a thought. That is, unless I wasseriouslybent on zero modifications to the original system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.155188
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/not-a-sewing-machine-a-multimedia-briefcase/
|
Not A Sewing Machine: A Multimedia Briefcase
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Teardown"
] |
[
"cassette",
"filmstrip",
"Singer"
] |
When you think of Singer, you usually think of sewing machines, although if you are a history buff, you might remember they diversified into calculators, flight simulation, and a few other odd businesses for a while. [Techmoan] has an unusual device from Singer that is decidedly not a sewing machine. It is a 1970s-era multimedia briefcase called the
Audio Study Mate
. This odd beast, as you can see in the video below, was a cassette player that also included a 35mm filmstrip viewer. Multimedia 1970s-style!
The film strip viewer is a bright light and a glass screen with some optics. You have to focus the image, and then a button moves the film one frame. However, that’s for manual mode. However, the tape could encode a signal to automatically advance the frame. That didn’t work right away.
Luckily, that required a teardown of the unit to investigate. Inside was a lot of vintage tech, and at some point, the auto advance started working somewhat. It never fully worked, but for a decades-old electromechanical device, it did pretty well.
We do, sometimes, miss what you could pull off with
35mm film
.
| 11
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128339",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:58:21",
"content": "Nice n all but damn, that Swiss Army knife…. Who has pockets that big?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128358",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T10:28:47",
"content": "No one, I think it’s a collector’s edition. Mat has used that one in his Techmoan videos for a lot of years now, it doesn’t leave his little recording area.",
"parent_id": "8128339",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128381",
"author": "Steve Tedder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:00:53",
"content": "During WWII Singer made some .45 Automatic pistols. Highly sought after now!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128577",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T21:03:50",
"content": "That would be one hell of a button holer!",
"parent_id": "8128381",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128403",
"author": "davemq",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:10:17",
"content": "I recall using one of these, or something similar, somewhere in my school days (late 1960s to mid 1980s).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128416",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:23:38",
"content": "oooh.. I’m seeing a micro beamer module lighting up the screen, and the speaker grille swiwel down to reveal a keyboard :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128454",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:33:37",
"content": "Boombox with a film. Haven’t seen those before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128489",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T16:58:24",
"content": "There were a variety of automated filmstrip/audio systems when I was in elementary school, but I never saw this version.There was also a toy that may have been covered here that synchronized a short filmstrip (mounted on a cardboard strip) to a phonograph record. All styled to look like a TV. Show-N-Tell, or something like that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128497",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T17:36:51",
"content": "I was going to comment the same thing about the phono filmstrip thing. As I recall with the ones we used, there was a bit of a flag at the top of the cardboard filmstrip frame. The strip slipped into a slot in the top of the unit and dropped down as a the story (or whatever) advanced.I think I recall an audible tone triggering the slide advance.I doubt my memory of this because it seems like there were just a small number of slides on the strip: for reasons unknown, 7 sticks in my head.",
"parent_id": "8128489",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128501",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T17:41:32",
"content": "Aha. I’ll bet it was this that I remember.Show N Tell by G.E.:https://www.google.com/search?q=Show+%E2%80%98N+Tell+from+G.E.#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:126aef95,vid:-MzmVFAPhLI,st:0",
"parent_id": "8128497",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8131830",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2025-05-24T14:12:08",
"content": "Had one that worked with a record player. Called a show and tell. Neat to see this version.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.048969
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/voyager-1s-primary-thrusters-revived-before-dsn-command-pause/
|
Voyager 1’s Primary Thrusters Revived Before DSN Command Pause
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Space"
] |
[
"Voyager 1"
] |
As with all aging bodies, clogged tubes form an increasing issue. So too with the 47-year old Voyager 1 spacecraft and its hydrazine thrusters. Over the decades silicon dioxide from an aging rubber diaphragm in the fuel tank has been depositing on the inside of fuel tubes. By switching between primary, backup and trajectory thrusters the Voyager team has been managing this issue and kept the spacecraft oriented towards Earth. Now this team has performed another amazing feat
by reviving the primary thrusters
that had been deemed a loss since a heater failure back in 2004.
Unlike the backup thrusters, the trajectory thrusters do not provide roll control, so reviving the primary thrusters would buy the mission a precious Plan B if the backup thrusters were to fail. Back in 2004 engineers had determined that the heater failure was likely unfixable, but over twenty years later the team was willing to give it another shot. Analyzing the original failure data indicated that a glitch in the heater control circuit was likely to blame, so they might actually still work fine.
To test this theory, the team remotely jiggled the heater controls, enabled the primary thrusters and waited for the spacecraft’s star tracker to drift off course so that the thrusters would be engaged by the onboard computer. Making this extra exciting was scheduled maintenance on the Deep Space Network coming up in a matter of weeks, which would have made troubleshooting impossible for months.
To their relief the changes appears to have worked, with the heaters clearly working again, as are the primary thrusters. With this fix in place, it seems that Voyager 1 will be with us for a while longer, even as we
face the inevitable end
to the amazing Voyager program.
| 43
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128261",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:10:50",
"content": "board computer -> onboard computerswhich would troubleshooting – > which would make troubleshootingchanges appears -> changes appear",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128294",
"author": "Vincent Pribish",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:22:11",
"content": "thank you for your service",
"parent_id": "8128261",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128272",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:48:32",
"content": "“jiggled” – one of many technical terms I use on a regular basis.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128363",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T10:44:15",
"content": "It always makes me think of the character Arkwright from the 1970s sitcom Open All Hours. He had a 1970s comedy stutter and one of his catchphrases was “Ju-ju-just j-j-jiggle it a bit”, referring to the ever misbehaving till that looked like it came from the Victorian era and endangered any fingers that came near it.",
"parent_id": "8128272",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128366",
"author": "Thijzer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:08:47",
"content": "“Give the television set a smack on the side and it’s in working condition again.”Something like that?",
"parent_id": "8128272",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128568",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T20:27:45",
"content": "It’s hard to do from ~15 billion miles away.I’ve heard it called Newton’s Method. Apply an action (smack it) and check the reaction.",
"parent_id": "8128366",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128634",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T01:03:08",
"content": "My favorite is “percussive maintainence”",
"parent_id": "8128568",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128404",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:10:19",
"content": "I don’t get how they jiggled them remotely? If their mass budget included 2lbs for a standard jiggling tool , surely they’d have used that for a backup heater? :P",
"parent_id": "8128272",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128299",
"author": "Timo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:44:50",
"content": "Can’t believe they got the old thrusters working again after all these years. Voyager just keeps going!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128304",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T05:09:01",
"content": "You gotta keep rooting for the ol gal, she’s really something special",
"parent_id": "8128299",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128312",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T05:50:05",
"content": "Well, it keeps going no matter what…",
"parent_id": "8128299",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128364",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T10:55:10",
"content": "Voyager is a testament to the KISS principle.Ok, it was high-tech and complex for the time. ;) But simple, compared to the available technology now.Can you imagine that in 48 years your Samsung S25 phone starts to act up a little, but you get it to continue to work for another 5 years by jiggling a button?",
"parent_id": "8128299",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128367",
"author": "Thijzer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:09:33",
"content": "Like a Nokia 3310",
"parent_id": "8128364",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128387",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:23:19",
"content": "It’s actually not. They were super-risky when launched. Extremely short development cycle and launched with extremely recent tech (CMOS static RAM).The whole story would be too unbelievable for a movie. Both had launch anomalies (V1barelymade it), one of them literally lost half the memory shortly after launch, and both of them had multiple “panic” moments right before critical encounters. And that was just the primary mission!Good engineering and a lot of luck.",
"parent_id": "8128364",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128391",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:34:44",
"content": "Oh Pat, you strike again! 🙂 Early CMOS was very fragile, especially RAM, I would say.The whole 4000 series of semiconductors was prone to damage through electro-static discharge (ESD). It was widely know among hobbyists.Later chips of the old 74 series (TTL series, originally) then had acted as replacement to 4000 parts.But that being said, it wasn’t about the fundamental technology. That was fine, it was understood.It was the ruggedness (or lack thereof) of early CMOS chips that caused issues and failures.The circuits within, from a logical point of view, were well done already.Modern CMOS chips have protective circuits against ESD built-in.",
"parent_id": "8128387",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128593",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T21:40:18",
"content": "What are you talking about? This was the first space usage of CMOS RAM. They literally wrote papers on how it performed. They had guesses as to how it would work in, say, Jupiter’s environment, but they were guesses. It wasn’t safe. It couldn’t be. They didn’t have the time.This was literally part of the anniversary talk Ed Stone gave on it a number of years ago (before he sadly passed).You need to remember when Voyager was developed. It was during an era when cuts were rapidly happening.",
"parent_id": "8128391",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128307",
"author": "John Q. Publc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T05:30:17",
"content": "It would be interesting to see a picture of Earth from its current position.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128370",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:19:43",
"content": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot",
"parent_id": "8128307",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128467",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T15:51:22",
"content": "Take a look at the final character you typed – it looks like that. :)",
"parent_id": "8128307",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128317",
"author": "Darry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T06:32:48",
"content": "I was born the 1977, the year the Voyager probes launched.They may not outlive me, but I won’t bet on that. 2036ish seems to be an upper limit, so far, AFAICT, but I wonder if any further creative workarounds might extend that somehow.Either way, they are clearly much more reliable than I am, much lower maintenance and more communicative too. :)Seriously, this as an awesome achievement, the kind that we should reflect and try to build upon, especially at times when the future may seem bleak.There are always possibilities.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128383",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:10:43",
"content": "Don’t feel so bad, they’re actually just as broken. Both of them have large amounts of memory loss, V2’s speech is weird and slurred, and they don’t have nearly the energy they did when they were younger and have had to give up tons of their hobbies just to keep going.",
"parent_id": "8128317",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128386",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:22:48",
"content": "Well, technically, wouldn’t it be possible to send radio relays?Going faster than voyager may be hard if ever possible, but we still have some range now, so as long as we don’t wait an other 10 year to launch the relay, we should be able to (almost) double the communication range at max (doubling latency too I presume, but, hey, it’s very very far from everything).I always wondered why we didn’t send a “geo orbital” communication satellite/relay around every planet of our solar system.I mean, it wouldn’t cost THAT much, and could be so useful…",
"parent_id": "8128317",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128397",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:49:29",
"content": "Hi, the problem is more of a political than a technological.It takes nothing more than the power of a C64 to go to moon, for example.We have the technology. For 40 years, at least.But not the will to invest, to support such projects.Let’s see what they did to Arecibo.They did let it rot, many of us ordinary people had awaited the collapse before it happened.Then the news made it so as if it was a surprise no one saw coming. Sigh.If humanity would act as one, work together, like they slightly began in the 2000s, such space projects were no burden at all.",
"parent_id": "8128386",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128412",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:17:35",
"content": "No. There’s no space relay that you could realistically build that would outperform the DSN. They’re ridiculously huge.But: Voyager’s hard limits are power and hydrazine. Both of them are finite and running out. There are no magic tricks around that. Comms is not a serious issue.",
"parent_id": "8128386",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128826",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T16:23:03",
"content": "The earthside antenna for Voyager is 34 meters diameter, and that’s what we’d need for a relay. For a rigid single piece antenna, that’s beyond current launch capability. I suppose a patchwork rigid antenna could be assembled in orbit and boosted to follow Voyager. That would be terribly expensive and there’s no guarantee Voyager would still be working.Much less expensive would be to double the diameter of the earthside antenna(s), which would double the effective range.",
"parent_id": "8128412",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130064",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T17:09:48",
"content": "“That would be terribly expensive and there’s no guarantee Voyager would still be working.”It’d also be a nightmare because you’d have to either double the number of antennas (one forward, one back) or add a ton of maneuvering fuel to be able to swivel back and forth. And that’s ignoring the difficulty of boosting something to follow Voyager in the first place (they got gravity assists),andignoring the fact that there are 2 of them in wildly different directions!“Much less expensive would be to double the diameter of the earthside antenna(s), which would double the effective range.”Yup. Plus, of course, the most important part – we’re not limited by comms. They’ll die before we lose the ability to hear them. We would be able to engineering data from them through about 2050, and even if power wasn’t a problem their hydrazine will have run dry well before then.But the mission will be shut down before then. You have to let it go.",
"parent_id": "8128826",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128638",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T01:25:36",
"content": "Also:“I always wondered why we didn’t send a “geo orbital” communication satellite/relay around every planet of our solar system.”Because it wouldn’t help. Even ignore the fact that the relays would be tiny and much lower power. You’re thinking about the solar system as being in a line. It’s not. It’s farther to go from Neptune to Jupiter to Earth than just straight.Funny stat: what planet is closest to Earth, on average? It isn’t Venus. It isn’t Mars. It’s Mercury. Closest planet toNeptune? Not Uranus. Mercury again.Just go straight to Earth. On average it’s always the shortest path.Wedohave satellite relays for ground stuff on Mars. There it makes sense.",
"parent_id": "8128386",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128322",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T07:20:50",
"content": "“As with all aging bodies, clogged tubes form an increasing issue.”Most old men can relate to that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128596",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T21:59:19",
"content": "It’s never more obvious who won the X/Y chromosome lottery then in old age.Which isn’t to say that men have it easy…Just that old age for women ishorrific.Biology not cultureOn the other hand:Basic root of gender injustice in the world:Women have half the money and all the pussy.",
"parent_id": "8128322",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128884",
"author": "NiHaoMike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T20:12:24",
"content": "Just old men? Heart disease and strokes are also a very common cause of death among women.",
"parent_id": "8128322",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128331",
"author": "Coding",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:20:44",
"content": "Every single one of these stories floors me anew. They’re debugging and fixing things at an insanedistance with the crazy lag and super limited options available, and I’m struggling to make my JavaScript work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128598",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T22:01:49",
"content": "You’re using the worst steaming POS coding tool on the planet and you have the nerve to bitch?Pick a better tool.I suggest GWBasic or DBase3+.",
"parent_id": "8128331",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128340",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:58:40",
"content": "Can we make it come back? It deserves to be in a museum. One of humanities’ greatest achievements",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128343",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T09:16:59",
"content": "Hi, there’s at least one sister model at an museum, I think..",
"parent_id": "8128340",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128345",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T09:25:00",
"content": "weare not deserving of it returning.",
"parent_id": "8128340",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128376",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:48:15",
"content": "Hi! This is indeed sort of true, I think.The 1970s were the height of western civilization, culture wise.It was a time of people being both spiritual and scientific.The way they talked and acted, the level of morals/ethics.Human social development and technological development were more balanced, maybe.The 80s/90s were still “ok”, but the 1970s were more thoughtful, more elegant at times (not always).Probably because people were less being influenced by TV, had to use their imagination more often, think on their own.While simultanously had access to any source of information if they really cared (such as radio, X.25 networks, BBSes, public libraries, public telephoned, lexicons for kids/teens etc).The Voyager probes are a memento of this moment of our human history, they are a time capsule.The technology of the 1970s was a mix of tube era and early solid-state technology.The circuits were hand-made using discrete components.The longlived OSCAR 7 amateur satellite is also from that time and merely had failed in the 80s due to power loss rather than a defect (it’s now back to life via solar power).I know that many won’t agree, but I think the 1970s were a special moment in several ways.It was a time when certain things were possible, when “going were no man has gone before” was a noble thing to aim for.When humanity was aiming for the stars, still.It wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine (gender roles etc), of course, but humanity had behaved a little bit more mature at the time, maybe.You had people interested in things like playing chess or watching the stars with a telescope in the backyards.You had hams talking over radio and building strange things.Or kids playing outside and simply being kids.Anyway, I don’t mean to glorify things but if we look back to the media of the time,we see people being engaged into playing hours of Zork, StarTrek and text-adventures. Or who had built chess computers.It’s quite different to our modern times.Things like C64 or Apple II are using technologies of the 70s.That being said, I believe that the transition between eras is fluent.The 1970s flew into the early 80s and the late 80s into early 90s.So maybe, depending on how we look at it, the greatest things of the 80s were a legacy of the 1970s. :)",
"parent_id": "8128345",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128388",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:30:58",
"content": "Interesting point of view.I set it to the 80’s-90’s, but also, I’m French, and back in the days, each country had it’s own development and technologies.But you indeed make sense, and I use basically the same local “values” (tech level, way of thinking about the future, etc.) to determine when things started to stagnate.That being said, all is not lost, far from it.And we also have wonderful things today.It just seems like the discovery of informatics lead the humankind to “take a break and enjoy modernity for a bit”.With all the… ‘less desirable things’ that came with stagnation.But I’m sure we will soon start a new wave of discoveries and go back to a more “future is bright” time.",
"parent_id": "8128376",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128419",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:29:10",
"content": "Arecibo failed because the science wasn’t there to support the infrastructure. That’s just the basic facts: there were things it could do that nothing else could, but not a ton, and the maintenance cost was high.If you doubt me, consider Hubble; there, the maintenance cost is even higher but there are still people considering options because the science return is still very high.I could point to a ton of other large scale “mega” science programs too. The VLA is only a few years younger than Arecibo but again, it’s maintained because the science return is higher.",
"parent_id": "8128376",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128468",
"author": "Gianluca",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T15:52:45",
"content": "Love this comment",
"parent_id": "8128376",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128524",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T18:13:11",
"content": "This is a very elegant comment. Thank you. Give me hope.",
"parent_id": "8128376",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128351",
"author": "NerdWorld",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T09:55:04",
"content": "Someday we will go out and fetch it as a major artifact of our earliest explorations.",
"parent_id": "8128340",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128365",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T10:59:07",
"content": "Do you think so? I think a better memorial would be to leave it travelling and build an observation centre at a safe distance. Obviously retrieval would be easier earlier, but being able to see Voyager still voyaging would be far more significant to me.",
"parent_id": "8128351",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128418",
"author": "Jamieson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:28:00",
"content": "Or something will return it to us carbon units.",
"parent_id": "8128351",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,546.480643
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/automatic-transmission-for-manual-transportation/
|
Automatic Transmission For Manual Transportation
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"automatic transmission",
"bicycle",
"bike",
"gear ratio",
"torque converter"
] |
The drivetrain of most modern bicycles has remained relatively unchanged for nearly a century. There have been marginal upgrades here and there like electronic shifting but you’ll still mostly see a chain with a derailleur or two. [Matthew] is taking a swing at a major upgrade to this system by
replacing the front derailleur with a torque converter
, essentially adding an automatic transmission to his bicycle.
Most of us will come across a torque converter in passenger vehicles with automatic transmissions, but these use fluid coupling. [Matthew] has come up with a clever design that uses mechanical coupling instead using a ratchet and pawl mechanism. There are two gear ratios here, a 1:1 ratio like a normal bicycle crank and a 1.5:1 ratio that is automatically engaged if enough torque is applied to the pedals. This means that if a cyclist encounters a hill, the gear automatically shifts down to an easier gear and then will shift back once the strenuous section is finished.
[Matthew] machined all the parts for this build from scratch, and the heavy-duty solid metal parts are both impressive but also show why drivetrains like this haven’t caught on in the larger bicycling world since they’re so heavy. There have been some upgrades in internally geared hubs lately though, which do have a number advantages over traditional chain and derailleur-based bikes with the notable downside of high cost, and there have been some other interesting developments as well like
this folding mechanical drivetrain
and
this all-electric one
.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!
| 31
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128226",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T23:11:30",
"content": "NO.Slushboxes were a bad idea for cars.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128246",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T00:59:40",
"content": "Wow there’s a term I haven’t heard in a while. I generally agree, and students should still be required to learn on manual, it’s better for overall mindfulness",
"parent_id": "8128226",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128291",
"author": "css",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:12:40",
"content": "It says right in the summary here that it’s NOT a fluid coupling (aka slushbox); it’s a mechanical ratchet. Other than the tiny fraction of a second while the pawl flips, one gear or the other is 100% engaged all the time with nothing slipping.",
"parent_id": "8128226",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128466",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T15:49:48",
"content": "What witchcraft is this that you know the contents of the summary?",
"parent_id": "8128291",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128565",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T20:21:46",
"content": "Looking at the design, the gear teeth are aligned in such a way that slippage at most would be equivalent to the backlash of the smaller gear.What I am more concerned with is the sound in low.gear.",
"parent_id": "8128291",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128236",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T23:50:49",
"content": "Automatic transmission ?Is this for using your bike in North America ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128672",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T04:58:34",
"content": "lol",
"parent_id": "8128236",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128238",
"author": "Nomen Nescio",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T00:08:34",
"content": "huh, a bike tech “innovation” i don’t outright hate on sight, those are rare-ish.it’s basically a two-chainring front gear arrangement with the front “derailer” automated based on crankarm torque, i guess? i’d like to have seen more details of how that switching/ratcheting system works.i suppose it actually might have some use cases, for some riding styles at least. not all riding, but perhaps enough to find a niche. although i can foresee a separate little devil hiding behind every gear tooth and bearing ball, never mind all the other details, but i don’t think there’snecessarilyany totally unsolvable issues with it. barring maybe that infernal ratchet-clicking noise in high gear, dunno how you’d shut that up.wonder who else have tried this in the past, and how and why it failed for them? because bike design is an old enough field that this obvious of an idea just cannot have never been tried before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128248",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T01:21:06",
"content": "The classic bicycle chain and derailleur is one of those fantastic examples of an “optimal design,” up there with the rifled barrel and the aeroshell and several others. Additions and tweaks can occasionally be made, usually for the purpose of spinning up a new patent to sell… But generally they will still be in use and look very similar in 300 years.The laws of nature have created an emergent form which is by far the best one, doesn’t require extremely advanced technology to discover, and the threshold to exceed it is high enough that it won’t go out of style until we discover gravity manipulation or whatever ultra-futuristic technique. So we are stuck with it.This creates a very unique temptation for the engineer. Everyone wants to usurp an optimal design, it brings eternal renown to the inventor. There are all sorts of new designs for transferring power from the crank to the rear sprocket… But it’s going to be incredibly difficult to defeat the economy, efficiency, simplicity, repairability, weight, compactness, and dozens of other qualities that the chain and derailleur absolutely nails, and nailed a long time ago.You can apply lots of advanced tech to the problem and still lose to what people figured out in the nineteenth century. But it makes for a great education and entertainment to look into the long line of innovations and oddball mechanisms people have attempted over the years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128264",
"author": "NSFW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:13:50",
"content": "See also: shoelacesIt just blows my mind that nobody has invented something better. But I try alternatives pretty much every chance I get, and it’s true: nobody has invented something better. Side-zipper boots are pretty great, but mine still have laces to fine-tune the fit.",
"parent_id": "8128248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128266",
"author": "finallycommenting",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:23:23",
"content": "Elastics and Velcro are better but Velcro makes you look old.",
"parent_id": "8128264",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128321",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T07:03:30",
"content": "Velcro and elastic both suck.",
"parent_id": "8128266",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128279",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:08:00",
"content": "On closer inspection, these are loafers",
"parent_id": "8128264",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128286",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:44:53",
"content": "+1",
"parent_id": "8128279",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128281",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:25:24",
"content": "I paid 5$ for a pair of Shimano (gears) shoes a thrift store. I am not into high end biking just year round street use. When I pulled those 3 Velcro flaps down and pressed them tight I realized I’d never go back to that extreme dexterous litigation again. Velcro, good enough to keep you stuck to your spaceship during an EVA. Haven’t worn a tie in half a century. I have slip on shoes now as well. Seeing all those XXXXs on shoes is ugly too. Zipper on a shoe what a joke, it’d jam up for sure and is not adjustable.Having to tell a young piano mover when the hip style of floppy strings was vogue and could be stepped on by any of us while coming down the ramp they had to go. Scissors or tuck ’em in. I used to have a few gear-string events till they got cut short. For safety’s sake cut ’em short and then you won’t to deal with them at all. Tying them more than once in a day, fail.",
"parent_id": "8128264",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128298",
"author": "adobeflashhater again",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:41:06",
"content": "I’ll have to admit having become rather fond of the bunggie laces, but very specifically the ones you need to loosen and re-tighten them each time you put on or remove your shoes. The squeeze and slide a clamp style.If you want a more progressive tension curve? Run a double set of laces in the shoe (assuming the eyelets will fit two laces) Lets you have a comfy fit but yet the steeper tension curve helps keep the shoes from being as prone to slipping off with a twisting step or some other maneuver.",
"parent_id": "8128264",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128278",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:06:50",
"content": "I moved to a very flat city and did away with derailleurs all together. One speed, fixed hub. I do have a single front brake in there for… being annoying I guess? Haven’t touched it in 5 years.My bike with a steel frame is bulletproof, I do zero maintainence and it is so light I can pick it up one handed and carry it up three flights of stairs to the office. I’ve had the frame set for almost 15 years, paid maybe $300 for it plus another $100 for wheels and the rest of the hardware I had laying around..If that isn’t perfected technology I don’t know what is..I am so fortunate to ride a coupe hundred yards to a nice bike path then near work the brief non-path part is through residential area with nice wide bike lanes.",
"parent_id": "8128248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128301",
"author": "adobeflashhater again",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:57:05",
"content": "I haven’t really paid attention to this stuff in years. But used to be (if long enough) the derailleurs travel limit screws could be run enough to push the derailleur chain guides in a bit.Often you could get them shifted enough to set to align with a second sprocket in the stack.This was a trick for if your ( under tension type ) shifting cable ever broke.And yes, we ($ort of broke boomer) kids actually did this type stuff sometimes on the road.Now days you can’t carry a pocket knife anywhere, that we kids used to turn (abuse) screws.So you’ll need to have a tiny screwdriver twist wired under your seat or somewhere hidden. Use a bread tie wire or something that you can untie with your bare fingers and -not- a zip tie.Might need to change to a bit longer derailleur stop screws, assuming this idea still is applicable for you.Happy pedaling on your “classic” (cough, old ) iron, to all.",
"parent_id": "8128278",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128421",
"author": "Quinn Evans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:34:04",
"content": "I just carry a pocket knife. Unless a law actually changes, I’m not going to let shame turn my tools into weapons.",
"parent_id": "8128301",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128378",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:56:03",
"content": "I’ve been riding fixed for many many years. I love it. I live in the Netherlands and this country is as flat as a ruler. I pump up the tires and every few years, I replace the tires as they are worn out or dried out. Oh and once a year a tiny bit of lube on the chain. Have owned one of them for 20 years and that’s all the maintenance I’ve done. It lives outside.",
"parent_id": "8128278",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128854",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T18:52:01",
"content": "The ovoid gear to even out the pedaling cadence is probably the most recent actual improvement on the bicycle. Simple to understand and implement, and assuming you already have a derailleur or other chain slack gathering mechanism it does not introduce any more points of failure.It could be produced by a hobbyist using a machine cut blank and some hand tools or a lathe. But I’m not sure if the patent still prevents copy-cat products.",
"parent_id": "8128248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128251",
"author": "Robert G Runyon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T01:31:10",
"content": "The simplicity of a wireless pinion is definitely my choice in complicated bike transmission. This is intriguing, but just.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128289",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:55:02",
"content": "The only way an automatic would work on a bike would be to have to accurate GPS so the bike would know to downshift before the hill not part way up. I found a discarded bike I wondered why, it had a flyweight shifter built in the rear wheel. It was almost unrideable. Always changing unless you kept steady speed in between the shift points. No thanks I scrapped it. The shifts were unexpected and dangerous at times. Automatics in cars sense throttle position or engine vacuum so they know something is about to change.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128457",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T15:14:23",
"content": "yeah that’s exactly what was in my mind as i tried to imagine what it would be like to use this thing. but i’m a single speed guy so wanting to pair any amount of torque with any RPM is pretty ingrained in me. i can only guess that people must be able to learn how to use an automatic transmission (though perhaps not the one in this article)",
"parent_id": "8128289",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128295",
"author": "Clara",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:29:15",
"content": "As soon as I saw the grinding wheel being used on a lathe, with nothing to keep grit off the ways, I stopped watching. I don’t much care for gore videos.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128320",
"author": "I ride bicycle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T07:01:40",
"content": "This was already commercially available from Sachs 50 Yeats ago. Since SRAM has aquired Sachs it is sold under the name SRAM automatix. It is mostly used in bikes for little childreen, since they do not yet comprehend how to manually shift gears.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128392",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:36:03",
"content": "What about when you wantto increase speed on the flatterrain? Will it downshift and stay, preventing achievement?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128451",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:27:50",
"content": "Kudos for the effort and result, and I wish I had the patience to learn how to do all that machining.This thing looks every bit as heavy as my bike’s Pinion 12 speed gear box.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128856",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T18:58:01",
"content": "I don’t think a torque converter is involved in this product. It is just an automatic gearbox.I like the ones that use a governor to shift a standard derailleur. Like the LandRider AutoShift.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128858",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T18:59:17",
"content": "Or the AutoBike SmartShift 2000https://www.disraeligears.co.uk/site/autobike_smartshift_2000_derailleur.html",
"parent_id": "8128856",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128871",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T19:27:40",
"content": "IMHO, IF I am to design such a thing (entire drivetrain) for a bike, I’d probably look into a small flywheel inside the pedal hub that also doubles as a magneto that drives electric motor in one of the the wheel hubs. Wait, no, I’d probably have two wheel hubs, again, with a reverse magneto inside (and not permanent magnet brushless thingie, which seem to be the cheapest thing I can procure for under $300 total).Reason being, throttling electricity is not only simpler, it is also lightweight and doesn’t require mechanical solutions (with their own predictable limits, btw). I’ll also have spare electricity for things like lights/blinkers/controller aplenty. Oh, and adding a supercapacitor bank for helping out up a hill (while generating extra whilst rolling downhill). I suspect ordinary/ubiquitous op amps can do the “computing” and I also highly suspect that this has been done before by people smarter (and more capable) than me, just supercapacitors (and lipos) weren’t invented just yet, so their solutions languished in relative obscurity.Not because I have some electrical engineering background (not a lot, but enough), but because my whole life I’ve been riding both kinds of bikes, single-speed and advanced speeds mentioned aplenty, and I hated both for their idiosyncrazies (pun intended). Neither one is robust enough to my liking (low-maintenance, ideally, maintenance-once-upon-a-blue-moon), and the local economies of scale what makes one more affordable than the other (sadly, the mentioned nightmare with the derailleur), but this is one place where there is way too much noise and the best solution is steamroll everything (ie, ignore) and start from scratch.Now about robustness, yes, anything electrical tends to burn out and quit at the moments least expected. Yes, a proper safety shutdown kind of Plan B has to be built in, which brings another point – maybe even op amps are not ideal, and it can be just ordinary coils and few solid-state stuffs like diodes and relays. Back to magneto, it only needs a “starting voltage” to make it work, while AA battery may not have enough juice to kick-start a 12v magento (not enough power to power the internal coil), supercapacitor sure will.Thinking “I am not the first one down this rabbit hole” and “just HOW complicated THIS can be?”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.401805
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/laced-peeling-back-pcb-layers-with-chemical-etching-and-a-laser/
|
LACED: Peeling Back PCB Layers With Chemical Etching And A Laser
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Reverse Engineering"
] |
[
"etching PCBs",
"laser engraving"
] |
Once a printed circuit board (PCB) has been assembled it’s rather hard to look inside of it, which can be problematic when you have e.g. a multilayer PCB of an (old) system that you really would like to dissect to take a look at the copper layers and other details that may be hidden inside, such as Easter eggs on inner layers. [Lorentio Brodeso]’s
‘LACED’ project
offers one such method, using both chemical etching and a 5 Watt diode engraving laser to remove the soldermask, copper and FR4 fiberglass layers.
This project uses sodium hydroxide (NaOH) to dissolve the solder mask, followed by hydrogen chloride (HCl) and hydrogen peroxide (H
2
O
2
) to dissolve the copper in each layer. The engraving laser is used for the removing of the FR4 material. Despite the ‘LACED’ acronym standing for
Laser-Controlled Etching and Delayering
, the chemical method(s) and laser steps are performed independently from each other.
This makes it in a way a variation on the more traditional CNC-based method, as
demonstrated by [mikeselectricstuff]
(as shown in the top image) back in 2016, alongside the
detailed setup video
of how a multi-layer PCB was peeled back with enough resolution to make out each successive copper and fiberglass layer.
The term ‘laser-assisted etching’ is generally used for e.g.
glass etching with HF or KOH
in combination with a femtosecond laser to realize high-resolution optical features,
‘selective laser etching’
where the etchant is assisted by the laser-affected material, or the related
laser-induced etching
of hard & brittle materials. Beyond these there is a
whole world
of laser-induced or laser-activated etching or functionalized methods, all of which require that the chemical- and laser-based steps are used in unison.
Aside from this, the use of chemicals to etch away soldermask and copper does of course leave one with a similar messy clean-up as when etching new PCBs, but it can provide more control due to the selective etching, as a CNC’s carbide bit will just as happily chew through FR4 as copper. When reverse-engineering a PCB you will have to pick whatever method works best for you.
Top image: Exposed inner copper on multilayer PCB. (Credit:
mikeselectricstuff
, YouTube)
| 9
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128183",
"author": "Lorentio Brodesco",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:08:39",
"content": "I’m Lorentio Brodesco, the creator of LACED, and I feel compelled to leave a response because, frankly, this article significantly underrepresents the essence and technical depth of the project.Key elements are entirely omitted — most notably, the achieved vertical resolution of 3–10 microns per pass, which was a central breakthrough. The method is portrayed as “just another approach” and is inaccurately compared to mechanical CNC milling, despite the fact that LACED is opto-chemical, non-mechanical, and far more precise than any consumer-grade mill.Furthermore, it is not mentioned that the entire setup used to achieve this level of precision costs under €200, making it one of the most accessible methods available today for PCB layer isolation and analysis. The article also does not consider that the frequently referenced carbide-tipped CNC bit is fundamentally unsuitable for this kind of analysis: it cuts FR4 and copper indiscriminately, which introduces a serious risk of mechanical damage to underlying traces. The laser approach, on the other hand, does not ablate copper, allowing controlled removal of dielectric layers without compromising signal paths.Nearly half of the article veers off-topic into a discussion about mechanical engraving, completely missing the point of LACED’s methodology and the 30+ pages of open-source documentation that outline its scientific basis, reproducibility, and application to multi-layer PCBs.This is not a minor tweak to an old technique. LACED is a novel, accessible process combining low-cost lasers with controlled chemical etching — offering micron-level layer separation, compatible with high-layer-count PCBs, and achievable by anyone willing to experiment carefully.I respect the effort to showcase new work, but I’d encourage a deeper technical look when publishing. This project wasn’t meant to be a curiosity — it’s meant to be a tool. And it already is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128288",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:54:18",
"content": "Thank you for writing this. I have similar thoughts about the majority of hackaday articles. They are very often interesting, but I wish the author had spent more time on truly understanding the subject – and then communicate it.",
"parent_id": "8128183",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128309",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T05:34:02",
"content": "On the other hand, Hackaday articles don’t need to be a duplicate of the material on the project page itself. Explaining the significance from another perspective and comparing it to alternatives is worthwhile itself.",
"parent_id": "8128288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128302",
"author": "Niko",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:58:44",
"content": "Man, KIs are getting so good. I wouldn’t be able to say “I am butthurt that I’m less significant than I think.”",
"parent_id": "8128183",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128308",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T05:30:33",
"content": "The walls of text and the aggressive marketing (see below) of this project on multiple sites and probably forums and wasn’t enough apparently, since despite the undoubtedly lengthy interactions, the person behind it still hasn’t gotten the hint.I’m not going to let ChatGPT render some refutation to the above, since I just don’t have the nerve for it, but as someone who’s looked into actual laser-assisted chemical ething (LACE (1)): the name “laced” alone feels deliberately misleading.You had the oppportunity to present the board imaging and said: all you need is cupric chloride etchant (2), a sander and a vacuum cleaner, have at it”. Maybe cut off a section, polish the side and precisely measure the copper and prepreg thicknesses and you’re good to go, as is being done regularly. No lasers needed.Also, when you use LLMs, you don’t get to brag about “30+ pages” about two established and quasi trivial processes that do not meet any criteria for novelty, neither individually nor used sequentially.(1)https://hackaday.io/project/156522-step-and-scan-digital-microlithography/log/146551-laser-assisted-chemical-etching(2)https://www.instructables.com/Stop-using-Ferric-Chloride-etchant!–A-better-etc/—– hackaday tips line–https://bitbuilt.net/forums/index.php?threads/laced-%E2%80%93-%C2%B5precision-pcb-delayering-for-under-%E2%82%AC200.6908/-https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/1kjrhon/from_sanding_a_ps1_motherboard_by_hand_to/…",
"parent_id": "8128183",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128450",
"author": "Jan-Willem",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:22:31",
"content": "Thanks for your pointers. I expected quite a bit from the project after reading OP’s comment. While the project is interesting, it took me several passes to understand he is not using lasers to assist chemical etching. It’s ‘just’ etching the board to remove the copper, and revealing the next copper layer with a laser.At ten passes, 15 minute per pass, the whole process takes over a day to complete, which isn’t a problem, but it’s not recognized in the text that the process is extremely tedious. Mostly as these aren’t the lasers you should leave running without supervision, nor without the proper enclosure, ventilation, and PPE.",
"parent_id": "8128308",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128326",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T07:42:44",
"content": "Don’t worry. Nobody actually reads the articles. They’re mostly just grandstanding in the comments. Which nobody reads either.",
"parent_id": "8128183",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8140459",
"author": "chaseadam",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T20:33:02",
"content": "Thanks for all the great work and chiming in on why this is more than just another reversing technique. After sanding a few pcbs to reverse them, I am very excited about this option, especially that it is relatively nontoxic and very affordable. I got the laser you used and set it up last night.",
"parent_id": "8128183",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128213",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T22:25:20",
"content": "Lorentio neatly pre-empted much of what I was going to say: “Why would you want to use a complex, time consuming process with somewhat hazardous chemistry AND destroy the board in the process, when you could just x-ray it?” (the answers are: accessibility, cost, and resolution, in case it’s not obvious).You’re still left with sludge in the place of a board at the end of the process, but this is something patient people without access to an x-ray system can do.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.104277
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/mylar-space-blankets-as-rf-reflectors/
|
Mylar Space Blankets As RF Reflectors
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Radio Hacks"
] |
[
"antenna",
"HF",
"mylar",
"reflector"
] |
Metalized Mylar “space blankets” are sold as a survivalist’s accessory, primarily due to their propensity for reflecting heat. They’re pretty cheap, and [HamJazz] has performed some experiments on their RF properties. Do they reflect radio waves as well as they reflect heat? As it turns out,
yes they do
.
Any antenna system that’s more than a simple radiator relies on using conductive components as reflectors. These can either be antenna elements, or the surrounding ground acting as an approximation to a conductor. Radio amateurs will often use wires laid on the ground or buried within it to improve its RF conductivity, and it’s in this function that he’s using the Mylar sheet. Connection to the metalized layer is made with a magnet and some aluminium tape, and the sheet is strung up from a line at an angle. It’s a solution for higher frequencies only due to the restricted size of the thing, but it’s certainly interesting enough to merit further experimentation.
As you can see in the video below, his results are derived in a rough and ready manner with a field strength meter. But they certainly show a much stronger field on one side resulting from the Mylar, and also in an antenna that tunes well. We would be interested to conduct a received signal strength test over a much greater distance rather than a high-level field strength test so close to the antenna, but it’s interesting to have a use for a space blanket that’s more than just keeping the sun away from your tent at a hacker camp.
Perhaps it could even form a parabolic antenna
.
Thanks [Fl.xy] for the tip!
| 11
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128143",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:55:15",
"content": "They make mylar umbrellas as well. Wonder how one of those would perform.. Or if you could tweak it with different springy ribs or positions for the latch so that it better approximates a parabola",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128770",
"author": "Winston",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T11:39:54",
"content": "Although not RF, I’ve used a cloth umbrella as a directional microphone just for the sake of trying it.",
"parent_id": "8128143",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128160",
"author": "AbraKadabra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:43:56",
"content": "Umbrella antennahttps://hackaday.com/2023/11/16/umbrella-antenna-protects-you-from-rain-but-not-the-way-you-think/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128242",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T00:32:59",
"content": "I remember going out side at a certain time announced in the paper about 1960 and seeing Echo 2 moving across the night sky. It was a reflective balloon designed to bounce radio signals off of and over the horizon.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128244",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T00:57:20",
"content": "Reminds me of something I saw where they used a transparent tarp filled with water as a lens.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128380",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:00:38",
"content": "Ah yes, that’s sometimes listed among survival techniques for starting a fire (well a bag more than a tarp, but same principle).",
"parent_id": "8128244",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128296",
"author": "JP",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:33:21",
"content": "Umbrella antennahttps://dalybulge.blogspot.com/2022/06/my-hrpt-setup.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128482",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T16:48:18",
"content": "The most famous umbrella antenna was woven by old ladies out of gold plated wire and fixed to the moon buggy, it linked with earth. The bumbershoot hygain.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128911",
"author": "Marv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T22:31:39",
"content": "My remembrance of a Mylar space blanket was H-film. This was a Mylar film with Gold on both sides. I first saw this at the OSO facility in Colorado, in the 60’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8129084",
"author": "trapicki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T10:39:51",
"content": "You might take oxidation of the aluminium into consideration!I use the metalized blankets to keep sun and heat off my roof windows. Simply usung water, a surfactant and a squeegee did the job. Unfortunately some moisture was left trapped, and over time with some oxygen it corroded the aluminium to aluminium oxide. Since Star Trek movie 4 we know this is a transparent material, much to my dismay. Moreover, The AlO bonded to the glas…The blankets are not more then Aluminium sputtered mylar sheets. The golden side is the mylar, the silver side is the aluminium. Store dry!The sheets I got where 17 g per square meter and can be glued together with contact glue, preferrably with some extra solvent for minimized glue thickness. Was researching for a hot air ballon where every gram counts.So at least you could create bigger and more complex shapes, coat a parabolic dish for some sun heat cooking experiments.But make sure the Al side stays away from corrosion.I wonder how these are used in space with the agressive monoatomic oxygen. Gold instead of Aluminium?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132448",
"author": "Simon Stribling",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T16:39:40",
"content": "G’day everyone — huge thanks for sharing my video on the Mylar space blanket antenna!This whole wild ride started almost by accident. I spent 13 years living in Whistler, BC, doing a lot of backcountry hiking — and like many hikers, I always carried a Mylar blanket for warmth in emergencies.Then it hit me: what if this thing could also be used to call for help?I started playing with metal tape on the blanket — thinking maybe it could be both a thermal layer and a basic antenna. Once I saw the insane RF reflection patterns… the obsession began. WOOOOHOOOO!Thanks again for the share — I’d love to hear your ideas, feedback.Cheers!Simon (VA7BIX / @HamJazz)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.200253
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/remembering-more-memory-xms-and-a-real-hack/
|
Remembering More Memory: XMS And A Real Hack
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"8086",
"8088",
"ems",
"pc",
"protected mode",
"unreal mode",
"XMS"
] |
Last time we talked about how the original PC has a limit of 640 kB for your programs and 1 MB in total
. But of course those restrictions chafed. People demanded more memory, and there were workarounds to provide it.
However, the workarounds were made to primarily work with the old 8088 CPU. Expanded memory (EMS) swapped pages of memory into page frames that lived above the 640 kB line (but below 1 MB). The system would work with newer CPUs, but those newer CPUs could already address more memory. That led to new standards, workarounds, and even a classic hack.
XMS
If you had an 80286 or above, you might be better off using extended memory (XMS). This took advantage of the fact that the CPU could address more memory. You didn’t need a special board to load 4MB of RAM into an 80286-based PC. You just couldn’t get to with MSDOS. In particular, the memory above 1 MB was — in theory — inaccessible to real-mode programs like MSDOS.
Well, that’s not strictly true in two cases. One, you’ll see in a minute. The other case is because of the overlapping memory segments on an 8088, or in real mode on later processors. Address FFFF:000F was the top of the 1 MB range.
PCs with more than 20 bits of address space ran into problems since some programs “knew” that memory access above that would wrap around. That is FFFF:0010, on an 8088, is the same as 0000:0000. They would block A20, the 21st address bit, by default. However, you could turn that block off in software, although exactly how that worked varied by the type of motherboard — yet another complication.
XMS allowed MSDOS programs to allocate and free blocks of memory that were above the 1 MB line and map them into that special area above FFFF:0010, the so-called high memory area (HMA).
The 640 kB user area, 384 kB system area, and almost 64 kB of HMA in a PC (80286 or above)
Because of its transient nature, XMS wasn’t very useful for code, but it was a way to store data. If you weren’t using it, you could load some TSRs into the HMA to prevent taking memory from MSDOS.
Protected Mode Hacks
There is another way to access memory above the 1 MB line: protected mode. In protected mode, you still have a segment and an offset, but the segment is just an index into a table that tells you where the segment is and how big it is. The offset is just an offset into the segment. So by setting up the segment table, you can access any memory you like. You can even set up a segment that starts at zero and is as big as all the memory you can have.
A protected mode segment table entry
You can use segments like that in a lot of different ways, but many modern operating systems do set them up very simply. All segments start at address 0 and then go up to the top of user memory. Modern processors, 80386s and up, have a page table mechanism that lets you do many things that segments were meant to do in a more efficient way.
However, MS-DOS can’t deal with any of that directly. There were many schemes that would switch to protected mode to deal with upper memory using EMS or XMS and then switch back to real mode.
Unfortunately, switching back to real mode was expensive because, typically, you had to set a bit in non-volatile memory and reboot the computer! On boot, the BIOS would notice that you weren’t really rebooting and put you back where you were in real mode. Quite a kludge!
There was a better way to run MSDOS in protected mode called Virtual86 mode. However, that was complex to manage and required many instructions to run in an emulated mode, which wasn’t great for performance. It did, however, avoid the real mode switch penalty as you tried to access other memory.
Unreal Mode
In true hacker fashion,
several of us figured out something
that later became known as Unreal Mode. In the CPU documentation, they caution you that before switching to real mode, you need to set all the segment tables to reflect what a segment in real mode looks like. Obviously, you have to think, “What if I don’t?”
Well, if you don’t, then your segments can be as big as you like. Turns out, apparently, some people knew about this even though it was undocumented and perhaps under a non-disclosure agreement. [Michal Necasek] has
a great history about the people who independently discovered it
, or at least, the ones who talked about it publicly.
The method was doomed, though, because of Windows. Windows ran in protected mode and did its own messing with the segment registers. If you wanted to play with that, you needed a different scheme, but that’s another story.
Modern Times
These days, we don’t even use video cards with a paltry 1 MB or even 100 MB of memory! Your PC can adroitly handle tremendous amounts of memory. I’m writing this on a machine with 64 GB of physical memory. Even my smallest laptop has 8 GB and at least one of the bigger ones has more.
Then there’s virtual memory, and if you have solid state disk drives, that’s probably faster than the old PC’s memory, even though today it is considered slow.
Modern memory systems almost don’t resemble these old systems even though we abstract them to pretend they do. Your processor really runs out of cache memory. The memory system probably manages several levels of cache. It fills the cache from the actual RAM and fills that from the paging device. Each program can have a totally different view of physical memory with its own idea of what physical memory is at any given address. It is a lot to keep track of.
Times change. EMS, XMS, and Unreal mode seemed perfectly normal in their day. It makes you wonder what things we take for granted today will be considered backward and antiquated in the coming decades.
| 28
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128116",
"author": "George",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:12:46",
"content": "We used 8088 and 8086 a lot for embedded systems we designed. IAR compiler had a banked memory model. Easy to turn on. Then each memory area (RAM and ROM) has a section that was always present and another section that was controlled be a bank number. A register help the bank number. The linker put all the code together and added bank switching call to any module not linked into the current bank. You could design almost any size preeminent and banked. For example:RAM 2k words permanent and 2K banked. ROM 8K permanent and 16K banked.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128121",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:30:14",
"content": "What was the advantage of banking, when all RAM and ROM banks would have been able to fit into one segment in 8086/8088?For 8080/8085 I could imagine such concept.",
"parent_id": "8128116",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128131",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:05:43",
"content": "OK, I misunderstood there was only one banked 2k slice of RAM and 16k of ROM. Of course, with many slices, banking in required slice in the 2k/16k space makes sense.IAR C was great. We used Aztec C-86 (very good) and Microtech MCC85 (usable).",
"parent_id": "8128121",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128138",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:45:26",
"content": "No MIX Power C ?",
"parent_id": "8128131",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128165",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:59:23",
"content": "Probably a good compiler to generate PC/MSDOS software. Back then we did not have resources to evaluate all C compilers for embedded design – Aztec was our choice then.",
"parent_id": "8128138",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128124",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:32:57",
"content": "Back then PC memory was a big mess. My first PC was an 80386SX with either 2 or 4MB (I forgot) and MS-dos 4.01, and I was not really able to do much with all that memory. I’m not sure if windows 3.1 was able to use that memory normally. I think it took up to windows 95 (Ten years after release of the 80386!) before there was an OS from microsoft that could handle the memory without workarounds.Very similar things with both HDD’s and uSD cards. They’ve bumped into the maximum addressing space, and then they invent a new standard that has a whopping extra 4 bits of so of addressing space. This lead to lots of problems, such as a new memory card not working in your camera, or your PC not being able to use your whole HDD. “They” probably did this on purpose, with each “new standard” released an opportunity to make more money.But luckily, this is now all finally mostly a ghost of the past. I’m also just chugging along on my Linux box, which “just works” and I’ve lost interest in keeping up with what sort of progress is made in the PC world. Every 10 to 15 years my PC gets a bit slow, and then it’s time to buy a new one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128137",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:44:18",
"content": "“But luckily, this is now all finally mostly a ghost of the past.”DOS ain’t dead. It lives on forever, just like C64 and Amiga! :D",
"parent_id": "8128124",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128157",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:32:07",
"content": "Windows ’95 was indeed arguably the first mainstream OS to support all 32 bit windows applications running in a 32 bit address space.Windows 3.1 was a lot more sophisticated than people remember, though, I think. It’s “386 enhanced mode” was entirely capable of addressing 4MB of RAM, or even much more (despite using 32-bit addressing, my understanding is that 256MB, not 4GB was the functional limit, likely because 256MB already seemed absurd).However, windows programs themselves were still 16 bit*, so they couldn’t natively take advantage of all that memory.(*unless they were compatible with the windows 32-bit subset, “win32s”, after that was introduced.. but I’m still not sure you can count that as “native”)",
"parent_id": "8128124",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128191",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:33:51",
"content": "Hi! Windows 3.x really was interesting, despite its flaws.Win32s was an early testbed for Win32 development, too.It was available to most developers before Windows NT was.Applications which have relocation tables and use no threading can run on Win32s.Win32s 1.25 and 1.30 even surpassed NT 3.1 in terms of application compatibility.They also ran on OS/2 Warp’s Win-OS/2, I think.What’s also interesting: Watcom’s Win386 extender for Windows 3.0.It provided an 32-Bit version of Win16 API on top of real Win16 API.Applications written for it are true 32-Bit applications, like with Win32s, but still have a Win16 header.That means that Windows 3.1/9x/NT will treat them as 16-Bit applications.That’s why they have same restrictions as ordinary Windows 3.x applications,with the exception of 32-Bit memory managment within the applications.Here, the later Win32s applications might be less being limited in comparison.On Windows NT they might be run via NTVDM/WoW like ordinary Win16 applications are being run.Which makes me wonder if they ever ran on Windows NT 4 on RISC machines.Because, the RISC versions of NT 4 had an i486 emulator for DOS/Windows 3.1 support.That’s something that x86 Win32 applications couldn’t do without help (FX!32 etc). The had to be native executables.:The RISC versions of Windows NT merely had provided 80286 (initially) or i486 emulation for legacy applications, but not Win32 applications.",
"parent_id": "8128157",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129639",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T17:06:07",
"content": "What about NT on MIPS64? I know it was officially dropped for NT 4, but feel like we had a workstation running it anyway. I largely remember it being impossible to run anything on, and not seeming to have hardly any legacy application support.The machine was running an Immersadesk, which made the incompatibility a real problem and eventually the machine was replaced with an SGI 320 with Win2K I think. … Which was arguably as bad, maybe worse? IRIX was much easier to deal with than either if these hybrids.",
"parent_id": "8128191",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129952",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T12:49:05",
"content": "Hi there! You seem to know more about me here, I’m afraid! 😅I could imagine that the 64-Bit platform was used as a testbed for Itanium, too, but it’s just a guess.",
"parent_id": "8129639",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128195",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:41:52",
"content": "Windows 3.1 also had featured WinMem32 API,which was a third method to 32-Bit applications (besides Win32s and Win386).But there’s not much information about it, I’m afraid..",
"parent_id": "8128157",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129635",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T16:51:22",
"content": "I used applications that required them, but cannot remember what they were at this point.",
"parent_id": "8128195",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8129949",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T12:41:28",
"content": "Hi again, this article about internals of Windows 3.1 is very well done, I think.https://www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html",
"parent_id": "8128157",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128135",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:38:59",
"content": "“However, MS-DOS can’t deal with any of that directly.There were many schemes that would switch to protected mode to deal with upper memoryusing EMS or XMS and then switch back to real mode.Unfortunately, switching back to real mode was expensive because, typically,you had to set a bit in non-volatile memory and reboot the computer! On boot,te BIOS would notice that you weren’t really rebooting and put you back where you were in real mode. Quite a kludge!”That’s true. But there’s more.The 80286 was a problem the 80s, but nolonger in the late 80s and 90s.Himem.sys v2.06 (ca. 1989) added a new code path and avoided the CPU reset.Himem.sys included in MS-DOS 5/6 is smart and used LOADALL instruction to access memory past 1MB.So the 80286 never has to leave real-mode, strictly speaking, if a modern himem.sys is used.Himem.sys has multiple code paths and different “handlers” for A20 Gate.On a 386 and up, it uses the 386 version of LOADALL or switches gracefully between real-mode and protected-mode.It tries to auto-detect from over 20 different PC types, but can also be forced to use a specific handler.Other DOSes, such as PC-DOS and DR-DOS and Novell DOS 7 are similarily smart here.Except PTS-DOS or Paragon DOS, I think.It tries to uses small memory footprint and its himem.sys is quite tiny.It’s unlikely that it is as smart or has as many machine handlers.More info:https://www.os2museum.com/wp/himem-sys-unreal-mode-and-loadall/Speaking under correction.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128283",
"author": "A Guyla",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:29:29",
"content": "Unreal mode was very handy for DOS programs that needed to access PCI devices (obviously later when PCI entered the market).Very handy for markets that still used DOS (US Military) and wanted to use PCI I/O cards.When working with BIOS in later years (2005) it was definitely surprising to still see source code marked 198x. This of course makes sense because this was what was necessary for compatibility all the way back to the beginning.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128347",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T09:31:34",
"content": "+1Though there’s one thing I’d like to add to mention.The BIOSes in the 90s and 2000s were highly advanced and modular.BIOS vendors such as Award or AMI sold BIOS kits to OEMs, which could be customized.Also, the BIOS didn’t remained stuck in 1981 as the media might say.The PC/AT BIOS added a lot more interrupt service calls, such as INT15h.The PS/2 BIOS did, as well, but the PS/2 line wasn’t adopted by industry.In the 90s, the BIOSes used 32-Bit instructions even in Real-Mode.Some also used compression to fit in the first megabyte or used the Cloaking technology by Helix.That meant the actual BIOS code was running past 1MB, but a stub (akin to a remote control) remained below 1MB.To be visible by DOS in Real-Mode.Then there were additions like Protected-Mode BIOS, APM support, network boot (PXE) and so on..The development of the BIOS over the past decades was very fascinating.Too bad intel removed CSM (BIOS) from UEFI specs..It was such a great hack! :)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_Netroom",
"parent_id": "8128283",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128359",
"author": "jalnl",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T10:36:25",
"content": "Quite a lot of technical inaccuracies here.1) “However, you could turn that block off in software, although exactly how that worked varied by the type of motherboard” – not quite true. All motherboards of the era supported access via the keyboard controller (which was just a GPIO chip really that had a spare line). Later some other methods were devised. See e.g.https://wiki.osdev.org/A20_Line.2) “XMS allowed MSDOS programs to allocate and free blocks of memory that were above the 1 MB line and map them into that special area above FFFF:0010, the so-called high memory area (HMA).” – Nope, the HMA is always available (once the A20 line is enabled). XMS allowed copying memory from/to above 1MiB to a buffer below it. Both XMS and enabling HMA is part of HIMEM.SYS, perhaps that’s where the confusion lies.3) “Because of its transient nature, XMS wasn’t very useful for code, but it was a way to store data. If you weren’t using it, you could load some TSRs into the HMA to prevent taking memory from MSDOS.” – True, but these lines are presented as if talking about the same. XMS was useful for data only (well, you could still use “overlays”, a technique that loaded code on demand), HMA was normal reachable memory, so you could in theory put TSRs there (though you’d let DOS handle that or get into trouble).4) “There is another way to access memory above the 1 MB line: protected mode.” – XMS (at least on a 286) also uses protected mode to access the >1MiB memory, so not exactly “another” way.5) “Modern processors, 80386s and up” – yup, the modern 386 :D. Note that x86-64 CPUs don’t have segmentation at all anymore, just paging.6) “There were many schemes that would switch to protected mode to deal with upper memory using EMS or XMS and then switch back to real mode.” – No, EMS never “switched to protected mode (…) and then switch back”, that was just XMS on a 286. EMS used virtual 86 mode (and hence the need for VCPI/DPMI when having EMM386 loaded and starting a protected mode executable).7) “Unfortunately, switching back to real mode was expensive because, typically, you had to set a bit in non-volatile memory and reboot the computer!” – on a 286 only. 386es can gracefully transition between protected mode and real mode.8) “Well, if you don’t, then your segments can be as big as you like.” – to the maximum of 4 GiB of course (for 32-bit CPUs).9) “The method was doomed, though, because of Windows.” – Sure, but by that time, you either dual booted or ran Windows games. Unreal mode was widely used in the early and mid 90s (Doom being the prime example.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128385",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:16:18",
"content": "Hi thanks for your write up. 😃👍I think we should be forgiving to the author, though.It’s not easy to simplify the matter so that ordinary people can understand it.For example, Extended Memory and XMS aren’t exactly same thing.The AT BIOS had featured an INT15 routine to access Extended Memory years before himem.sys/XMS were around.The ancient RAM Drive driver in PC-DOS 3 (VDISK.SYS) used it, I think.XMS is just a software specification, similar to EMS.Also, “flat mode” on i386 and up works by “disabling” segmentation.But the segmentation unit in the MMU doesn’t stop working, it just nolonger has work to do.The “trick” was to change segmentation size from 64KB to 4GB, the whole physical address space of the i386.So segmentation is still there, but has no effect.Last but not least, I got Windows 3.0 to once run in Standard-Mode on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 (early 86_64).Windows 3.0, at least, which uses krnl286 and 16-bit Protected-Mode, which uses segmentation.I have no idea how situation is with newer processors.Speaking under correction.Btw, here’s an interesting link.https://www.os2museum.com/wp/himem-sys-unreal-mode-and-loadall/",
"parent_id": "8128359",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129870",
"author": "jalnl",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T09:52:31",
"content": "Thanks for the additions, I was aware of these but didn’t want to complicate it even more :).As for “flat real mode”, the trick was to switch to protected mode, extend the segment registers to 4GiB, and switch back to real mode. The segment size was preserved, making it possible to address 4GiB in real mode. For protected mode it basically works the same (it’s what DOS4/GW used), set up all segments to 4GiB, but no switching back to real mode.",
"parent_id": "8128385",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129951",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T12:46:29",
"content": "You’re welcome! ^^",
"parent_id": "8129870",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8130738",
"author": "turol",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T12:19:13",
"content": "Unreal mode was widely used in the early and mid 90s (Doom being the prime example.)Doom did not use unreal mode, it used DOS4GW. There were not many games that used unreal mode, Ultima 7 being one of the notable exceptions. It was more common with productivity software and demoscene.",
"parent_id": "8128359",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128390",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:34:40",
"content": "640KB is all you needNow in 2025 64GB is all you needFind a motherboard that’s not a server board that supports 128GBIf you really want to brag get 64GB of Sram Instead of ddr, basically having low level cache as ram no memory refresh and can run at the full 3-4 ghz cpu clock, runs bfv and gta v much faster",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128393",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:36:40",
"content": "When is the 128 bit cpu going to drop64 or 72 bit address space128bit data spaceLotta cpu pins unless it’s multiplexed, that has a timing/speed and performance hit….",
"parent_id": "8128390",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128394",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:39:16",
"content": "Just take two existing 64 bit aluOne for the upper 64 bit and other for lowerDo half the math for each set, then simply add the two into one 128 bit word, so internally sorted as two 64 bit words",
"parent_id": "8128393",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128442",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:11:54",
"content": "By that point you’d be grabbing for a GPU or something similarBut with a GPU, things run in parallel and the instructions aren’t as typically complex as a cpu, but you can access a lot more memory at once, but you can do cpu style computing on a GPU, like risc the code might take up some more disk space….",
"parent_id": "8128394",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128787",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T13:00:20",
"content": "Good questions.The x87 floating point unit has 80-Bit accuracy since the 80s.Modern SIMDs such as SSE and AVX have more bitness than the ALU, too.There’s AVX512, an extension to AVX with 512-Bit, for example.The AltiVec unit for certain PowerPC processors has 128-Bit, for example.In the 90s, MMX was 64-Bit already.It was being followed soon by 3DNow! and SSE.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instruction,_multiple_data#Hardwarehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMX_(instruction_set)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltiVec",
"parent_id": "8128393",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128873",
"author": "Bill Hensley",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T19:37:44",
"content": "Back in those days I worked for an engineering software company. We had a simulation program whose binary image was about 6MB. Everybody wanted a PC version – marketing, sales, customers, the boss, etc. We spent a summer trying to create an overlay map that would fit the whole thing into 640K. Remember overlays? Probably not. You analyzed the call tree of the program and built a map that instructs the linker to put the subroutine binaries into overlapping segments. When a subroutine is called, the overlay code automatically swaps in the segments between the calling routine and the called routine. Lots of disk I/O if you don’t create an efficient overlay map!When we got stuck, we would trim out a lower priority feature of the program to squeeze the program into less memory. By the time we were done it was below the minimum viable functionality so the project was abandoned.The 80386 changed the game. A company called Phar Lap Software had created a DOS Extender product and a suite of compilers to produce 32 bit protected mode code. Customers just had to buy a 386 with at least 8MB of RAM, admittedly a huge amount in those days, but it got your engineers off your mainframe.It worked great, even though the FORTRAN compiler was a bit buggy. For each build I had to compile one routine to assembly instead of directly to object code. Then I manually fixed the bug (a near jump that needed to be a far jump) and assembled the affected routine. I suppose Phar Lap eventually fixed the compiler but I remember having to do the manual fix for a long time.Within a few years almost all the customers were using the PC version instead of a mainframe or minicomputer version. Great! But then they wanted a Windows version! I’ll leave that story for another time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,545.952745
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/fpv-drone-takes-off-from-a-rocketing-start/
|
FPV Drone Takes Off From A Rocketing Start
|
Ian Bos
|
[
"drone hacks"
] |
[
"3d printing",
"amateur rocketry",
"DIYdrones",
"drone fpv"
] |
Launching rockets into the sky can be a thrill, but why not make the fall just as interesting? That is exactly what
[I Build Stuff]
thought when attempting to build a self-landing payload. The idea is to release a can sized “satellite” from a rocket at an altitude upwards of 1 km, which will then fly back down to the launch point.
The device itself is a first-person view (FPV) drone running the popular Betaflight firmware. With arms that swing out with some of the smallest brushless motors you’ve ever seen (albeit not
the
smallest motor
), the satellite is surprisingly capable. Unfortunately due to concerns over the legality of an autonomous payload, the drone is human controlled on the descent.
Using collaborated efforts, a successful launch was flown with the satellite making it to the ground unharmed, at least for the most part. While the device did show capabilities of being able to fly back, human error led to a manual recovery. Of course, this is far from the only rocketry hack we have seen here at Hackaday. If you are more into making the flight itself interesting, here is a record breaking one from
USC students
.
Thank you [Hari Wiguna] for the great tip!
| 24
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128102",
"author": "JJ Alpha",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:24:59",
"content": "Awesome, MIRV FPVs, if the war keeps up it will be 20% more horrific in a few months",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128441",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:11:28",
"content": "I think the uplink is the limiting factor right now. Hence the new fiberoptic drones.",
"parent_id": "8128102",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128109",
"author": "John Hanson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:52:36",
"content": "The ultimate challenge is send a payload up to 100,000 feet via balloon and having it fly back to launch point. Very tough, probably not doable at the hobbyist level .",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128122",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:31:34",
"content": "depends on whether you’ll end up needing a 10:1 or 50:1 glide ratio",
"parent_id": "8128109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128151",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:11:57",
"content": "I suspect at that point you would want a more airfoil-style drone and not a quadcopter. Maybe it lands with a simple parachute once it has traversed the horizontal distance",
"parent_id": "8128109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128154",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:21:45",
"content": "…And of course civilian GPS will be an issue at that altitude, won’t it? Is it permissible to have a radio beacon at the launch site it can simply home in on",
"parent_id": "8128151",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128182",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:03:39",
"content": "The Ublox M10 GPS modules that are commonly used on drones have an altitude limit of 80km, so they will work fine for a balloon. They do have speed and acceleration limits that will probably be an issue for a rocket though.",
"parent_id": "8128154",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128173",
"author": "RYAN DEWSBURY",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T20:31:19",
"content": "That has been done many times before by hobbyists. It is probably much easier to do now since you don’t need to DIY the entire flight control system.https://hackaday.com/2005/01/12/homebrew-autonomous-high-altitude-glider/https://hackaday.com/2013/03/10/launching-a-glider-from-space/",
"parent_id": "8128109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128768",
"author": "Winston",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T11:35:04",
"content": "There is on YouTube at least one glider dropped from a balloon at 103,000 feet which successfully glided down with onboard GPS which was used to plot its path, but it wasn’t a return to launch site effort. Long ago I saw a very professionally filmed successful effort at a return to launch site from a US desert site, but I cant find it so I don’t know what altitude it reached.A drone might just tumble at first in the thin air at 100,000 feet until it reached dense enough air to have some control authority.",
"parent_id": "8128109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130864",
"author": "fhunter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T18:13:04",
"content": "Absolutely doable, that was even done before (with various gliders, though).",
"parent_id": "8128109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128127",
"author": "n",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:58:07",
"content": "Watching the G data the drone seemed to be at approximately freefall the entire time? Disingenuous, at best, if so.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128133",
"author": "Lucas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:27:28",
"content": "the video noted mentioned that he didn’t notice how close it was to the ground and didn’t turn on the motors on time (the mechanism did deploy the motors) and they demonstrated the drone flying separately",
"parent_id": "8128127",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128156",
"author": "n",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:32:05",
"content": "Yes I saw. It still didn’t change the measured G until it hit the ground.",
"parent_id": "8128133",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128152",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:14:13",
"content": "the drone was able to right itself and descend upright. I’ll give him points for that.",
"parent_id": "8128127",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128142",
"author": "Vincent Pribish",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:54:56",
"content": "dude has a punchable voice",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128303",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T05:03:00",
"content": "i don’t know about punchable, but the combination of a deadpan delivery and expressive language grinds my ears",
"parent_id": "8128142",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128153",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:18:23",
"content": "I’ve long thought that hybrid rocket/quadcopters will be a popular concept in warfare twenty minutes into the future… Not only rockets which deploy drones, but certainly drones which can quickly jettison their wings and propellers and transition into a rocket once it is in position and aimed.Drone defense will become a lot more difficult once they are capable of going supersonic the instant they enter line-of-sight. Those ECM jammers and net guns will not be enough if they are already moving ballistically.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128155",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:27:13",
"content": "…Somebody will eventually make a cluster munition which scatters dozens of these little guys, and they actively seek things out on the ground instead of just falling randomly. At least that means less stuff will be left over in the ground to blow off some kid’s leg three decades after the war has ended.And it might allow it to get around the disarmament conventions with some creative lawyering.",
"parent_id": "8128153",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128199",
"author": "Grawp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:54:51",
"content": "That is old tech. Loitering munition had been a thing even before Orcs invasion. And no need to drop anything if you are a halfbreed between fixed wing plane and rocket already.Also optic fibers sometimes measuring dozens of km areextremely widelybeing used in the war. Jammers already can’t do a thing about them.",
"parent_id": "8128153",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128212",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T22:20:34",
"content": "Maybe … but did you as a hobbiest try it :) ? Always ‘new’ when it is the first time ‘you’ design it, try it within the guidelines of model rocketry of course. The wheel of time keeps spinning and new people try ‘new’ (old) things again.Neat project!",
"parent_id": "8128199",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128249",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T01:27:59",
"content": "Indeed the interesting moment will be when a hobbyist tries it and gets past the security detail of a major figure",
"parent_id": "8128212",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128445",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:15:12",
"content": "There is a cost to the fiber optic versions though, in form of much smaller warheads.",
"parent_id": "8128199",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128214",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T22:29:25",
"content": "Fly by fiber drones are already pretty immune to ECM jammers etc.https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fly+by+fiber+drones+ukraine",
"parent_id": "8128153",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128209",
"author": "Sooner Boomer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T22:15:17",
"content": "Check out “SWOSU Argonia Cup” on YouTube. The Argonia Cup Challenge is a competition for college teams. It started off as a challenge to launch a high power rocket containing a golf ball and return the golf ball to a pre-determined location on the range. Southwest Oklahoma State Univ. nailed it directly on the “X” several times, winning the competition, using an FPV drone they designed and built. The competition requirements have now changed due to the precise ability of the drone.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.330375
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/falling-down-the-land-camera-rabbit-hole/
|
Falling Down The Land Camera Rabbit Hole
|
Jenny List
|
[
"chemistry hacks",
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] |
[
"edwin land",
"photography",
"polaroid"
] |
It was such an innocent purchase, a slightly grubby and scuffed grey plastic box with the word “
P O L A R O I D
” intriguingly printed along its top edge. For a little more than a tenner it was mine, and I’d just bought one of Edwin Land’s instant cameras. The film packs it takes are now a decade out of production, but my Polaroid 104 with its angular 1960s styling and vintage bellows mechanism has all the retro-camera-hacking appeal I need. Straight away I 3D printed an adapter and new back allowing me to use 120 roll film in it, convinced I’d discover in myself a medium format photographic genius.
But who wouldn’t become fascinated with the film it should have had when faced with such a camera? I have form on this front after all, because a similar chance purchase of a defunct-format movie camera a few years ago
led me into re-creating its no-longer-manufactured cartridges
. I had to know more, both about the instant photos it would have taken, and those film packs. How did they work?
A Print, Straight From The Camera
An instant photograph reveals itself. Akos Burg, courtesy of
One Instant
.
In conventional black-and-white photography the film is exposed to the image, and its chemistry is changed by the light where it hits the emulsion. This latent image is rolled up with all the others in the film, and later revealed in the developing process. The chemicals cause silver particles to precipitate, and the resulting image is called a negative because the silver particles make it darkest where the most light hit it. Positive prints are made by exposing a fresh piece of film or photo paper through this negative, and in turn developing it. My Polaroid camera performed this process all-in-one, and I was surprised to find that behind what must have been an immense R&D effort to perfect the recipe, just how simple the underlying process was.
My dad had a Polaroid pack film camera back in the 1970s, a big plastic affair that he used to take pictures of the things he was working on. Pack film cameras weren’t like the motorised Polaroid cameras of today with their all-in-one prints, instead they had a paper tab that you pulled to release the print, and a peel-apart system where after a time to develop, you separated the negative from the print. I remember as a youngster watching this process with fascination as the image slowly appeared on the paper, and being warned not to touch the still-wet print or negative when it was revealed. What I was looking at wasn’t a negative printing process as described in the previous paragraph but something else, one in which the unexposed silver halide compounds which make the final image are diffused onto the paper from the less-exposed areas of the negative, forming a positive image of their own when a reducing agent precipitates out their silver crystals. Understanding the subtleties of this process required a journey back to the US Patent Office in the middle of the 20th century.
It’s All In The Diffusion
The illustration from Edwin Land’s patent US2647056.
It’s in
US2647056
that we find a comprehensive description of the process, and the first surprise is that the emulsion on the negative is the same as on a contemporary panchromatic black-and-white film. The developer and fixer for this emulsion are also conventional, and are contained in a gel placed in a pouch at the head of the photograph. When the exposed film is pulled out of the camera it passes through a set of rollers that rupture this pouch, and then spread the gel in a thin layer between the negative and the coated paper. This gel has two functions: it develops the negative, but over a longer period it provides a wet medium for those unexposed silver halides to diffuse through into the now-also-wet coating of the paper which will become the print. This coating contains a reducing agent, in this case a metalic sulphide, which over a further period precipitates out the silver that forms the final visible image. This is what gives Polaroid photographs their trademark slow reveal as the chemistry does its job.
I’ve just described the black and white process; the colour version uses the same diffusion mechanism but with colour emulsions and dye couplers in place of the black-and-white chemistry. Meanwhile modern one-piece instant processes from Polaroid and Fuji have addressed the problem of making the image visible from the other side of the paper, removing the need for a peel-apart negative step.
Given that the mechanism and chemistry are seemingly so simple, one might ask why we can no longer buy two-piece Polaroid pack or roll film except for
limited quantities of hand-made packs
from One Instant. The answer lies in the complexity of the composition, for while it’s easy to understand how it works, it remains difficult to replicate the results Polaroid managed through a huge amount of research and development over many decades. Even
the Impossible Project
, current holders of the Polaroid brand, faced a significant effort to completely replicate the original Polaroid versions of their products when they brought the last remaining Polaroid factory to production back in 2010 using the original Polaroid machinery. So despite it retaining a fascination among photographers, it’s unlikely that we’ll see peel-apart film for Polaroid cameras return to volume production given the small size of the potential market.
Hacking A Sixty Year Old Camera
Five minutes with a Vernier caliper and openSCAD, and this is probably the closest I’ll get to a pack film of my own.
So having understood how peel-apart pack film works and discovered what is available here in 2025, what remains for the camera hacker with a Land camera? Perhaps the simplest idea would be to buy one of those One Instant packs, and use it as intended. But we’re hackers, so of course you will want to
print that 120 conversion kit I mentioned
, or find an old pack film cartridge and stick a sheet of photographic paper or even a Fuji Instax sheet in it. You’ll have to retreat to the darkroom and develop the film or run the Instax sheet through an Instax camera to see your images, but it’s a way to enjoy some retro photographic fun.
Further than that, would it be possible to load Polaroid 600 or i-Type sheets into a pack film cartridge and somehow give them paper tabs to pull through those rollers and develop them? Possibly, but all your images would be back to front. Sadly, rear-exposing Instax Wide sheets wouldn’t work either because their developer pod lies along their long side. If you were to manage loading a modern instant film sheet into a cartridge, you’d then have to master the intricate paper folding arrangement required to ensure the paper tabs for each photograph followed each other in turn. I have to admit that I’ve become fascinated by this in considering my Polaroid camera. Finally, could you make your own film? I would of course say no, but incredibly
there are people who have achieved results doing just that
.
My Polaroid 104 remains an interesting photographic toy, one I’ll probably try a One Instant pack in, and otherwise continue with the 3D printed back and shoot the occasional 120 roll film. If you have one too, you might find
my 3D printed AAA battery adapter
useful. Meanwhile it’s the cheap model without the nice rangefinder so it’ll never be worth much, so I might as well just enjoy it for what it is. And now I know a little bit more about his invention, admire Edwin Land for making it happen.
Any of you out there hacking on Polaroids?
| 24
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128132",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:26:59",
"content": "I recently bought a typewriter. Then I bought another one…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128163",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:54:58",
"content": "I went through so many packs of film for this camera in college.Fake IDs were a nice side hustle.I ended up selling the ‘business’ (Board w. 4 names and camera) to an ex MP.Who got busted, fool had operated from a dorm room and kept all the bad shots.Many of his clients were also busted, those fools confessed because maybe there face was in the pile.I denied everything, but it meant the cops knew my name…Graduated and moved.First rule for life…Never admit to nothing.Picture trimability is a big advantage of this camera vs SX-70 style.Of course modern fake IDs are just printed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132420",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T15:11:02",
"content": "Polaroid was heavily in the business of creating systems to produce authentic IDs (not to be confused with the new Real IDs)",
"parent_id": "8128163",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128190",
"author": "Gareth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:25:14",
"content": "We had a monochrome Polaroid setup at college with a custom hood which fitted over the oscilloscope screen – for instant screenshots…No fancy storage scopes for us!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128348",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T09:40:34",
"content": "This used to be the way to get high-resolution images out of an electron microscope. At high resolution the image can only be scanned very slowly, so the output would be switched to a CRT which displayed it to a Polaroid camera. There was a project here a few years ago where a hacker who had bought his own electron microscope (!!) converted it to read the slow-scan signals directly from the electronics onto his computer.",
"parent_id": "8128190",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129889",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T10:37:40",
"content": "Ha I saw that one. Talk about bragging rights, found a whole electron microscope setup with an old crt monitor at auction and got it running again. I’ve never done that!",
"parent_id": "8128348",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128253",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T01:40:43",
"content": "One problem with the 220 conversion back is that it wastes film quality. The lens in a Land Camera is designed for the negative and print to be the same size, so it doesn’t need to be as sharp or finely color-corrected as the lens for a 220 camera whose images will be printed much larger than the negative. So yes you’ll get a print, but it won’t be as sharp as you normally expect for 220 film.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128498",
"author": "cyberbuffalo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T17:37:09",
"content": "Except those lenses could be absolutely sharp enough to make larger prints. People would strip the backing and create large negatives from various packfilms. MAYBE the cheaper cameras with the plastic lenses but even some of those are my favorite cameras ever made with lens as sharp as anything (looking at you, Polaroid ProPack)",
"parent_id": "8128253",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128661",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T03:06:14",
"content": "I used the Polaroid positive negative film, which was based on Kodak Panatomic X and used it to make 50 x 60“ prints. You could put your nose right up to it and not see any grain but the detail was amazing. I was using a Polaroid back on a speed graphic, but Polaroid sold professional grade cameras that could easily duplicate that.",
"parent_id": "8128498",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128789",
"author": "Peter Neilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T13:06:16",
"content": "I’ve got a 545 back for my Speed Graphic, but haven’t seen film in 20 years. It was fun, way back then, using wide f stops to drop out the background on an up-close shot. Arrange it all on the ground glass before wasting film for a shot. There even was sepia film,, Type 56, good for working on shots of 19th-century re-enactors.",
"parent_id": "8128661",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128274",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:55:39",
"content": "Huh, Dad had one of those. Instructions said put the photo between two aluminium plates stored in the back and which doubled as the manual. For some reason dad did so then put photo and plates under his armpit but that was for cold days (which made the photo develop more slowly) but dad did so even when the sun was scorching. We made faces as we were handed the developed photos as if they smelled bad. Dad never failed to get angry = )",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129608",
"author": "PerniciousSnit",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T15:31:27",
"content": "Clever dad! Taking advantage of a convenient thermally regulated environment to remove temperature variations from the process under conditions where the temperature being too high, or too low, may affect the chemistry it needs to work.",
"parent_id": "8128274",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130880",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T18:56:32",
"content": "The instruction to put the plates under your arm pit are actually in the camera manual!",
"parent_id": "8129608",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8130687",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T09:28:44",
"content": "What about conductive (say gold/silver) plates polished and buffed to nanometric superflat mirror finish vs aluminum?",
"parent_id": "8128274",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128607",
"author": "Doug",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T23:09:30",
"content": "I still own one of these, a range finder model. I cannot remember the product number, but my favorite film back produced both a positive print and a usable negative when you peeled it apart. Only a few of those negatives got enlarged, but they were glorious.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128658",
"author": "Jim D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T02:47:04",
"content": "I remember being a kid in the 60’s and I had a Polaroid Swinger camera. You squeezed the button a little and if you saw the word ‘Yes’ pop up in the view finder, you had enough light to take a good shot. Lol.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128696",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T07:10:26",
"content": "Can we derive the bitting of your car key from that first Photo? ;-)I’m not entirely sure but that looks like a key beard (bit?!) sticking out below the bellows (to prop up the camera for the shot?).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129890",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T10:39:28",
"content": "Ha yeah, editor blur that part out… This is probably one of the only crowds that would try and do it",
"parent_id": "8128696",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8131589",
"author": "Jenny List",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T17:57:02",
"content": "I think the car itself isn’t worth the effort.",
"parent_id": "8128696",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132423",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T15:16:18",
"content": "It’s not about the car though, it’s all about the challenge involved.",
"parent_id": "8131589",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8132899",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-28T12:04:40",
"content": "Probably not – not to mention all the effort around it (where is it, when can one steal it, etc.).I just found it funny that I “found” a key in that image consideringhttps://hackaday.com/category/lockpicking-hacks/and specifically the TSA master keys. :-)… and wanted to let whoever made that photo know about that tiny flaw in their personal “OPSEC” ;-)",
"parent_id": "8131589",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8129714",
"author": "Skip",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T21:12:27",
"content": "I have only 2x Fuji film packs left for my Polaroid Land 250 pack camera, breaks my heart!I mostly shoot film these days just to keep my sanity in a digital world! Analog Forever 📷",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135965",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-06-06T12:19:31",
"content": "When I was in college in the 70s (Illinois Wesleyan University) I studied astronomy/astrophysics. I had keys for the observatory (16 inch scope) and photo lab. I shot a lot of film on weekends and helped fix government donated used equipment. One day I found in a box a strange looking Polaroid camera. It had no lens, had a shutter cable release and a black plastic tube. I was told it never worked. I took it apart and cleaned and lightly lubed the cable release and contacted Polaroid for more info. They sent me an instruction book. The camera was a Polaroid Astrophotography camera that used black and white film packs. My instructor didn’t believe the camera was worth using but bought me 2 film packs. The following Saturday night was a good steady clear night so I was set for a solo observing session. To do a shoot with the camera first the object was centered in the eyepiece of the scope, then the black “Focusing Tube” (Polaroid term) was placed over that with the scope eyepiece inside it. Then you looked through the Focusing Tube and adjusted the sharpness of the image. When ready the Polaroid camera body was sat on the tube which was seated in the hole where a regular lens would have been. Press and hold the shutter cable for the appropriate time for the shot, pull the film out and wait the 60 seconds, peel apart and there were decent astrophotos. Grainy but decent. My best shots were of lunar crater Grimaldi (which moves in and out of the lunar terminator shadow) and Saturn and the rings. The graininess of film prevented very good definitions of the ring bands but instead of hours in the photo lab, I had shots of Saturn in 60 seconds. I found out the film pacts had previously been discontinued and were out of stock so I only got to use the camera twice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136141",
"author": "Ikawa",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T04:10:22",
"content": "Hacked up 2 land cameras (low end plastic body and a 180 lens) with a broken Instax 210 to only utilize the rollers/ejection system. Had to do some 3d printing to get the lens and viewfinder to line up with the film then slapped it all together with some duct tape. Works great!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.267376
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/welcome-your-new-ai-lego-overlord/
|
Welcome Your New AI (LEGO) Overlord
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Toy Hacks"
] |
[
"ai",
"lego",
"LLM"
] |
You’d think a paper from a science team from Carnegie Mellon would be short on fun. But the team behind
LegoGPT
would prove you wrong. The system allows you to enter prompt text and produce physically stable LEGO models. They’ve done more than just a paper. You can find a
GitHub
repo and a running
demo
, too.
The authors note that the automated generation of 3D shapes has been done. However, incorporating real physics constraints and planning the resulting shape in LEGO-sized chunks is the real topic of interest. The actual project is a set of training data that can transform text to shapes. The real work is done using one of the LLaMA models. The training involved converting Lego designs into tokens, just like a chatbot converts words into tokens.
There are a lot of parts involved in the creation of the designs. They convert meshes to LEGO in one step using 1×1, 1×2, 1×4, 1×6, 1×8, 2×2, 2×4, and 2×6 bricks. Then they evaluate the stability of the design. Finally, they render an image and ask GPT-4o to produce captions to go with the image.
The most interesting example is when they feed robot arms the designs and let them make the resulting design. From text to LEGO with no human intervention! Sounds like something from a bad movie.
We wonder if they added the more advanced LEGO sets, if we could ask for our own
Turing machine
?
| 13
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128023",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:28:37",
"content": "Millions of dollars, high tech equipment, some of the worlds greatest minds, a top university, and yes we have finally done it. Children’s toys can now be constructed by robots.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128036",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T12:35:08",
"content": "And the first webcam monitored a percolator",
"parent_id": "8128023",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128043",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T13:22:53",
"content": "For awhile there was the Amazing Cooler Cam webpage.",
"parent_id": "8128036",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128096",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:13:46",
"content": "Children ‘and adults’ toys can now be constructed by robots. Taking the creativity out of the process. I still say we are heading toward Idiocracy as the final goal with this AI stuff. … Let the AI do it…",
"parent_id": "8128023",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128144",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:58:06",
"content": "The end goal is not to have skynet playing with building blocks so toddlers can be free from their labors to watch more cocomelon. Toys and play are an effective way to develop more advanced capabilities. It’s why we play with toys when we are growing up too.",
"parent_id": "8128096",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128035",
"author": "ybanrab",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T12:33:40",
"content": "Surely a missed opportunity to use the prompt “A double-decker couch”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128081",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:21:41",
"content": "👍",
"parent_id": "8128035",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128112",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:01:50",
"content": "I tried “double decker couch” on the demo and didn’t succeed. The result is more of a lump than a couch. The queue 30min long so I don’t feel like attempting again.Stability may also be a problem. Basically the same issue as overhangs and bridging in 3d printing. These are designed to be stable and placed one brick at a time so it may not be possible to make the span. If I were making a double-decker from lego I’d make the bottom and frame first, then the top couch independently, then place top couch on top. The AI generator would need to build an archway one brick at a time.",
"parent_id": "8128035",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128044",
"author": "Optimist",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T13:24:28",
"content": "Robot arm types in “build a fully functioning, AI driven robot arm”. The end game is nigh",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128146",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:03:56",
"content": "Building the processor out of legos might be a challenge. Maybe train it on minecraft redstone projects",
"parent_id": "8128044",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128178",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T20:47:02",
"content": "I wondered how long it would be before someone wrote “legos”.The plural of Lego is Lego. Or LEGO, if you prefer. Or LEGO® if you must.",
"parent_id": "8128146",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128084",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:25:10",
"content": "I tried writing some software to generate LEGO sculptures that had different appearances from different angles, like the block characters on the front cover of Hofstatder’s “Godel, Escher, Bach”, so each of the orthogonal perspective drawings had a meaningful outline. But the results were not easy to impossible to build, because stuff lacked support and was not easy to figure out how to assemble. This might be a neat way to do something like that but with robust designs, and provide a build instruction set as well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128134",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:29:17",
"content": "Next (logical to me) fork on the same road – introduce specially marked lego bricks that each stand for some kind of a command. Programming in the real world, sort of, kind of, but you get the idea. Say, each “command brick” is a FORTH word, so scanning the thing with some kind of cheap camera mated to simple sequencing software running on, say, ESP32-CAM thingie automagically generates the FORTH program of sorts. Either that, or a humble headless Unix shell generates piped command. Programming without a keyboard, so to speak.Somehow I suspect this has been tried before.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.004357
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/15/smart-terrarium-run-by-esp32/
|
Smart Terrarium Run By ESP32
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] |
[
"ESP32",
"plant life",
"plants",
"terrarium"
] |
A terrarium is a little piece of the living world captured in a small enclosure you can pop on your desk or coffee table at home. If you want to keep it as alive as possible, though, you might like to implement some controls. That’s precisely what
[yotitote] did with their smart terrarium build
.
At the heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller. It’s armed with temperature and humidity sensors to detect the state of the atmosphere within the terrarium itself. However, it’s not just a mere monitor. It’s able to influence conditions by activating an ultrasonic fogger to increase humidity (which slightly impacts temperature in turn). There are also LED strips, which the ESP32 controls in order to try and aid the growth of plants within, and a small OLED screen to keep an eye on the vital signs.
It’s a simple project, but one that serves as a basic starting point that could be readily expanded as needed. It wouldn’t take much to adapt this further, such as by adding heating elements for precise temperature control, or more advanced lighting systems. These could be particularly useful if you intend your terrarium to support, perhaps, reptiles, in addition to tropical plant life.
Indeed, we’ve seen similar work before, using a Raspberry Pi
to create a positive environment to keep geckos alive!
Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own advanced terrarium at home, don’t hesitate to
let us know.
| 8
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127998",
"author": "PatG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T09:24:05",
"content": "I’m doing something similar for my mushroom grow-tent :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128003",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T09:56:14",
"content": "Culinary or recreational?",
"parent_id": "8127998",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128010",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T10:44:28",
"content": "Please be careful with these things.I’ve read a few horror stories of animals dying because of a simple software glitch, or a faulty sensor. Even if your terrarium only has plants, you’ve probably put a lot of time and effort into making something beautiful, and it would bee a shame to see it destroyed because of a faulty sensor or software glitch.Similar for 3D printers. A common fault was that the temperature sensor got pulled out of the heater, and the heater never turned off, resulting in the whole thing catching fire and possibly burning down your house. After that happened a few times, software loops were added to judge whether the input from the thermometer made sense (I.e, does the temperature go up when the heater is turned on?)In general, always analyze the whole system (both hardware and software) and consider what happens if any of the parts fail. Also, If you want to use software. Making the software more robust is a fun programming exercise.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128017",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:12:32",
"content": "As they say, you are much better off when you design for the rainy days.",
"parent_id": "8128010",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128027",
"author": "NFM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:34:03",
"content": "A trick on the hardware side that I used for my fish tank was to use two smaller heaters that together can provide enough heat for the whole tank, but not enough to overheat the tank individually.That way if one thermostat failed on, the other heater would just regulate accordingly and prevent cooked fish from a single point of failure.",
"parent_id": "8128010",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128046",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T13:37:49",
"content": "And if one thermostat fails “on”. Would you notice it?",
"parent_id": "8128027",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128053",
"author": "Ken",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:17:29",
"content": "The lilly-go t-relay works really well for these applications. I have a few setup for plants and greenhouse controls.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128463",
"author": "fehlfarbe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T15:38:45",
"content": "I built a similar thing with a web interface about 6 years ago and it’s been running stable ever since and luckily hasn’t flooded my living room yet :Dhttps://github.com/fehlfarbe/terraesp",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.705391
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/fancy-adding-a-transputer-or-two-to-your-atari-st/
|
Fancy Adding A Transputer Or Two To Your Atari ST?
|
Dave Rowntree
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"atari st",
"ATW800",
"fpga",
"inmos",
"Mega-ST",
"Tang 20k",
"transputer",
"VME"
] |
Has anybody heard of the ATW800 transputer workstation? The one that used a modified Atari ST motherboard as a glorified I/O controller for a T-series transputer? No, we hadn’t either, but transputer superfan [Axel Muhr] has created the
ATW800/2, an Atari Transputer card, the way it was meant to be.
The transputer was a neat idea when it was conceived in the 1980s. It was designed specifically for parallel and scientific computing and featured an innovative architecture and dedicated high-speed serial chip-to-chip networking. However, the development of more modern buses and general-purpose CPUs quickly made it a footnote in history. During the same period, a neat transputer-based parallel processing computer was created, which leveraged the Atari ST purely for its I/O. This was the curious
ATW800 transputer workstation
. That flopped as well, but [Axel] was enough of a fan to take that concept and run with it. This time, rather than using the Atari as a dumb I/O controller, the card is explicitly designed for the Mega-ST expansion bus. A second variant of the ATW800/2 is designed for the Atari VME bus used by the STe and TT models—yes, VME on an Atari—it was a thing.
The card hosts an FPGA module, specifically the
Tang 20k
, that handles the graphics, giving the Atari access to higher resolutions, HDMI output, and GPU-like acceleration with the right code. The FPGA also contains a ‘synthetic’ transputer core, compatible with the
Inmos T425
, with 6Mb of RAM to play with. Additionally, the board contains an original Inmos C011 link adapter chip and a pair of size-1
TRAM slots
to install two physical transputer cards. This allows a total of two transputers, each with its dedicated RAM, to be installed and networked with the synthetic transputer and the host system. The FPGA is configured to allow the host CPU and any of the transputers direct access to the video RAM, so with proper coding, the same display can mix 68K and parallel computing applications simultaneously. The original ATW800 couldn’t do that!
In addition to the transputer support and boosted graphics, the card also provides a ROM big enough to switch between multiple Atari TOS versions, USB loop-through ports to hook up to a
lightning-ST
board, and a MicroSD slot for extra local storage. What a project!
If you don’t know what the transputer is (or was),
read our quick guide
. Of course, forty-year-old silicon is rare and expensive nowadays, so if you fancy playing with some hardware, might we suggest
using a Pi Pico instead
?
Thanks to [krupkaj] for the tip!
| 9
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127960",
"author": "Tom G",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T06:34:55",
"content": "The modern version of the Transputer and Occam are alive and kicking: buy them at DigiKey.They are the XMOS xCORE processors (4000MIPS/chip, expandable) and xC.Unique benefit: they givehardrealtime processingguarantees, so you can time your codebeforethe hardware is available. Key techniques: no cache, no interrupts, multicore with message passing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127982",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T08:15:07",
"content": "Has anybody heard of the ATW800 transputer workstation?Yes!Occam and programming Transputers were part of my bachelors degree. We didn’t have fancy Atari Workstations, more of a open chassis thing, but it had more Transputers, and we could reconfigure the layout to optimize it for the processing problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127993",
"author": "hugob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T08:53:15",
"content": "I worked for an Atari reseller, and did a lot of work with the ATW800 system. I attended a Helios OS course by Tim King at Perihelion in the UK near Kent, visisted the development centre in Cambridge UK. Those were the days.Then, together with a German man (Christian Schormann??), I ported the Mirashading 3-D renderer to the the transputer systems running Helios OS. This source code was in Pascal, so it was ported using Prospero Pascal, also by a UK company. Pure Pascal is a good choice for educational purposes, but not for real life projects. But it worked, and it was fun to see scenes being rendered in slices on your screen in parallel.But Inmos, the company that created the transputer, could not deliver on time the successor of the T800 called the T8000. And the 486 PC became faster every month, and with 25 MHz it was already faster than a 32 cpu tranputer system equipped with cpu’s running at 1 MHz, while doing this at a fraction of the cost. So the commercial interest in the transputer died.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128065",
"author": "andre",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:52:22",
"content": "285 / 5.000Hi Hugob, that sounds very interesting. Is any of the old stuff still available? I work on the ATW800/2 team, specifically for the transputer software, so they’re interested in everything. Or do you perhaps still have contact with Christian Schormann? Regards, Andre",
"parent_id": "8127993",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128997",
"author": "hugob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T07:41:22",
"content": "Hi Andre, no, sorry, the company went bankrupt and three ATW800 workstations and a Sang PC with two cards (one with 4 T800, and one card with one T800 running the X-Server), ended on the garbage belt, because they were considered worthless. I never had contact again with Christian.I just found this document:http://www.transputer.net/iset/isbn-013929134-2/tthb.pdf. Co-authored by Tim King.For Sang, see page 184Regards, Hugo",
"parent_id": "8128065",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128000",
"author": "lproven",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T09:45:37",
"content": "Of course I know about it! I saw a real one once, and also a Transputer board in a Sinclair QL.I wrote an article about the Abaq’s unique OS, HeliOS.https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/06/heliosng/It is FOSS now. Back in the day, later versions could run on multiple CPU architectures. It is an ideal fit for modern manycore CPUs, if someone only updated it and got it running on Arm64 or x86-64…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128095",
"author": "GeekDot",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:11:37",
"content": "“I wrote an article about the Abaq’s unique OS, HeliOS.”And still you’re writing it wrong ;-) It’s “Helios” – there are no intercaps, even it’s tempting.And thanks Dave… I need to get myself a “Superfan” T-shirt now 😅",
"parent_id": "8128000",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128136",
"author": "David 132",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:39:34",
"content": "Helios/HeliOS… to settle this, may I propose the XKCD compromise?https://xkcd.com/1167/“HeLiOs” 😜(Hi Liam, good to see you read some of the same sites I do when you’re not master of all things FOSS on El Reg)",
"parent_id": "8128095",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128056",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:23:24",
"content": "I’m looking for Archipel Volvox software for Indigo host.http://regnirps.com/VolvoxStuff/Volvox.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.574687
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/inside-starlinks-user-terminal/
|
Inside Starlink’s User Terminal
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Teardown"
] |
[
"reverse engineering",
"satellite",
"Starlink"
] |
If you talk about Starlink, you are usually talking about the satellites that orbit the Earth carrying data to and from ground stations. Why not? Space is cool. But there’s another important part of the system: the terminals themselves. Thanks to [DarkNavy], you don’t have to tear one open yourself to
see what’s inside
.
The terminal consists of two parts: the router and the antenna. In this context, antenna is somewhat of a misnomer, since it is really the RF transceiver and antenna all together. The post looks only at the “antenna” part of the terminal.
The unit is 100% full of printed circuit board with many RF chips and a custom ST Microelectronics Cortex A-53 quad-core CPU. There was a hack to gain root shell on the device. This led to SpaceX disabling the UART via a firmware update. However, there is
still a way to break in
.
[DarkNavy] wanted to look at the code, too, but there was no easy way to dump the flash memory. Desoldering the eMMC chip and reading it was, however, productive. The next step was to create a virtual environment to run the software under Qemu.
There were a few security questions raised. We wouldn’t call them red flags,
per see
, but maybe pink flags. For example, there are 41 trusted ssh keys placed in the device’s authorized_keys file. That seems like a lot for a production device on your network, but it isn’t any smoking gun.
We’ve watched the cat-and-mouse between Starlink and people hacking the receivers with interest.
| 34
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127925",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:21:16",
"content": "41 trusted ssh keysAt a guess, they are the exact same public ssh keys on all StarLink terminals globally. I can not see anything that could possibly go wrong with that :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127959",
"author": "Cyk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T06:34:34",
"content": "Probably one for the spooks of every country that allows the use of Starlink.",
"parent_id": "8127925",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128021",
"author": "Lena",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:24:23",
"content": "I’m not sure I’ve seen the word “spook” used like that before, could you explain what you mean by that?",
"parent_id": "8127959",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128028",
"author": "yngndrw",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:34:23",
"content": "It just means a spy.",
"parent_id": "8128021",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128078",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:13:51",
"content": "Yes, but.. (apologies in advance for my pedantic linguistic elaboration)It also implies a specific type of spy, though I don’t think the meaning universally agreed upon.To me, and I think to people in the US and UK generally, it’s a spy that works for a government intelligence/espionage agency, like the CIA, NSA, MI6, or your country’s equivalent. It implies to some extent that they’re involved in foreign intelligence gathering rather than domestic (“CIA Spook” is classic, but “FBI Spook” sounds odd).In the past, it was used more generally to mean spy in the sense of “secret agent” or “undercover agent”, not necessarily one who works for the government. It may be used that way today in other countries, I’m not sure.In any case, it’s both a perjorative (even more than spies, spooks can be presumed to engage in morally questionable activities) and a bit of a backhanded compliment (spooks are competent, anonymous, high level spies)If you disagree, and it means something different to you, I’d love to know. Language is fascinating that way.",
"parent_id": "8128028",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128072",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:56:41",
"content": "ref:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spooks_(TV_series)",
"parent_id": "8128021",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128077",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:13:35",
"content": "They were called spooks in the industry way before that. Maybe the late ’60s.",
"parent_id": "8128072",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128270",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:40:16",
"content": "Quite a bit earlier.References to use referring to “undercover agents date back to at least 1942. Some Tuskegee black pilots actually calling themselves SpookWaffen.Most likely Dutch origin, it may have been a term for will’o’wisp. Sometimes in the early 1800’s the term moved from Pennsylvania Dutch to English as a type of ghost, then shifted to cover people. By the 1900’s was used as a label for people instead. An insult to white jazz performers, a questionable name applied to frightened black men, a derogatory term for both female and male students, even inexperienced pilots.",
"parent_id": "8128072",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128129",
"author": "Ant",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:01:55",
"content": "He means International spies Karen",
"parent_id": "8128021",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128411",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:17:19",
"content": "‘Spooks’ or ‘haunts’ were actually an intelligence term used when the CIA was created to describe the way someone stalked their subject in surveillance. This was a post-WWI term from the 1920’s, back when all the detective novels started being written from veteran’s stories.",
"parent_id": "8128021",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127929",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:33:12",
"content": "I wonder does each StarLink terminal have the exact same private (and public) ssh host keys (usually seen with “sudo ls -l /etc/ssh/ssh_host__key“). Every host should have unique host keys. Host keys that are shared is a bad idea, because they can result in being vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127930",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:34:49",
"content": "There should be an asterisk between the two “_”‘s above, but I guess word press stripped it away.",
"parent_id": "8127929",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127932",
"author": "fuzzyfuzzyfungus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:58:23",
"content": "This wouldn’t be the first time that a project has had multiple people working at slightly cross purposes, so I can’t rule it out on that basis; but it would be a bit surprising if they were reusing host keys when they went to the trouble of dropping the A110 in there.That chip’s whole thing is being aggressively unique per device in a remotely verifiable way(with mutual TLS being STMicro’s focus; but including support for keypair algorithms that SSH uses); so not taking it up on that, potentially even to the point where the host key is not visible to the host OS and authentication is handled within the A110 so as to make cloning harder, seems like it would be a waste.",
"parent_id": "8127929",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128271",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:45:56",
"content": "And that’s why this is interesting, will we find out they are undermining their own security design? If not, why are they relying of hard coded keys? After all, that could just be in the configuration machine during the automated QA.…Or maybe they bought a design with no idea how to use it. That would be tons of fun right?",
"parent_id": "8127932",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128275",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:00:37",
"content": "The host keys are generated on “first boot” of the factory image.The auth public keys are the shared ones. They come down through updates. Which makes 40+ keys even more strange. Private keys that are no longer active should be removed. Either they aren’t, or they have a scary amount of active key pairs.There’s also other public keys in etc/ssh but not in auth hosts. Three without a matching private key. I assume verifying update signatures and such.Here’s to hoping they have a well thought out and set up key management process.",
"parent_id": "8127929",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8183661",
"author": "Sol",
"timestamp": "2025-09-24T14:44:25",
"content": "Maybe 40+ keys is just to confuse?Which of the 40 is the real Mr. Key.Are there any hacks of newer devices?",
"parent_id": "8128275",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127992",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T08:50:37",
"content": "I can’t imagine what they must be paying for such a massive impedance controlled PC boardAlso anyone knows what the RF front end IC is? A part number maybe?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128018",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:17:34",
"content": "They’re really not expensive in bulk. I’d actually be surprised if it’s impedance controlled, though, it’s easier to just design to the stack up and deal with the tolerance variations.Given the fact that they don’t shield like, anything, my guess is they’re dealing with it via the time tested method of “more power.”",
"parent_id": "8127992",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128059",
"author": "jv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:30:38",
"content": "They manufacture the PCBs themselves (Recently boasted that they are going to be the biggest PCB manufacturer in the US) Makes easier to tune design/manufacturing.The RF frontend is a STMicro, not public:https://x.com/olegkutkov/status/1726718563627786631?t=CJQ_4sr17RqcddtYgFw58g",
"parent_id": "8127992",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128062",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:39:17",
"content": "Not too keen on the integral GPS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128098",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:16:19",
"content": "How else would you propose to get the location and time data required to connect to the constellation?I mean, it does make sense to duplicate the GPS function in the starlink system itself, and eliminate dependence on a system you can’t control. But you still end up with the same effect: The system requires knowledge of the location of the dish in order to work at all.",
"parent_id": "8128062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128106",
"author": "dependable2981525a2d",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:43:11",
"content": "Why? GPS by itself does not pass on its location. Are you concerned that the device having GPS provides it with precise location that could then be sent out? GPS would help the receiver find the subset of satellites to communicate with. With no GPS its location could be determined using the Starlink satellites in a similar manner. The result, the receiver knows its location.Just like when using cell phones, GPS or the lack of it does not mean the receiver can or cannot have its location identified.",
"parent_id": "8128062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128267",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:25:03",
"content": "Just makes it easier and faster. Plus GPS chips are near commodities.",
"parent_id": "8128106",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128254",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T01:42:13",
"content": "Starling have been boasting they can offer a gps alternative. They already know the precise location of every terminal without the use of gps.",
"parent_id": "8128062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8131611",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T18:32:41",
"content": "Starlink satellites doesnt carry accurate enough timekeeping devices to rival GPS. They would have to be synchronized to a starlink provided timekeeper with the necessary accuracy, itself trivial, but actually doing it vs claiming to be able to do it are two separate things.",
"parent_id": "8128254",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128474",
"author": "Ryan Waldron",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T16:13:48",
"content": "The GPS is not to help connect to the starlink satellites, it is to find out where you are using the service so they can be a typical greed driven company and charge you more to use the service in one place over another, even though it costs them nothing more.Just look at their plans and you will see.",
"parent_id": "8128062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128130",
"author": "Jim Hark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:03:24",
"content": "Typo, the author meant, “per se”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128149",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:09:53",
"content": "You know how language is evolving to be more inclusive, right?So, it’s plural.se(itself) ,see(themself):-)(no, right, Latin isn’t evolving. It’s a dead language. Strike all that.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128282",
"author": "Winner47",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:28:58",
"content": "The tin foil hat folks have arrived to the thread!Stop all the hating and admit StarLink is cool technology.Elon is the same genius he always was, only now he’s joined the common sense crowd!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128379",
"author": "Benn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:56:22",
"content": "I’m going to push back a little on calling Musk a genius. If you have any evidence of this, I’d be interested in taking a look.",
"parent_id": "8128282",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128435",
"author": "Pepper's Ghost",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:55:26",
"content": "I don’t think anyone disputes that StarLink has cool aspects; it’s just that people who can afford OneWeb are probably going to weigh up the pros and cons.I presume there will be other competitors along shortly.Some of us have very low bandwidth requirements; we could probably get by with Meteor Burst Communications!",
"parent_id": "8128282",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128413",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:20:42",
"content": "It was actually in italics, so I just read it as “Per Saayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy” in a very sassy way that I think is equal in intent.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128548",
"author": "Bruce Perens K6BP",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T19:38:59",
"content": "If you are interested in security, you are NOT using the router that came with Starlink, or you have carefully firewalled it from the rest of your network and you don’t use cleartext for anything. To say that this is a transport you cannot trust is a gross understatement.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8131612",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T18:33:48",
"content": "This applies to every network device. Everything is compromized unless you run VPN from a reputable company.",
"parent_id": "8128548",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,546.657777
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/led-layer-makes-plywood-glow/
|
LED Layer Makes Plywood Glow
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Art",
"Microcontrollers"
] |
[
"bending acrylic",
"bending plywood",
"CO2 laser cutter",
"custom plywood",
"epoxy",
"PY32",
"RGB LED"
] |
Plywood is an interesting material: made up of many layers of thin wood plys, it can be built up into elegantly curved shapes. Do you need to limit it to just wood, though? [Zach of All Trades] has proved you do not, when he embedded a light guide, LEDs, microcontrollers and touch sensors
into a quarter inch (about six millimeter) plywood layup
in the video embedded below.
He’s using custom flexible PCBs, each hosting upto 3 LEDs and the low-cost PY32 microcontroller. The PY32 drives the RGB LEDs and handles capacitive touch sensing within the layup. In the video, he goes through his failed prototypes and what he learned: use epoxy, not wood glue, and while clear PET might be nice and bendy, acrylic is going to hold together better and cuts easier with a CO2 laser.
The wood was sourced from a couple of sources, but the easiest was apparently skateboard kits– skateboards are plywood, and there’s a market of people who DIY their decks. The vacuum bag setup [Zach] used looks like an essential tool to hold together the layers of wood and plastic as the epoxy cures. To make the bends work [Zach] needed a combination of soaking and steaming the maple, before putting it into a two-part 3D printed mold. The same mold bends the acrylic, which is pre-heated in an oven.
Ultimately it didn’t
quite
come together, but after some epoxy pour touch-up he’s left with a fun and decorative headphone stand. [Zach] has other projects in mind with this technique, and its got our brains percolating as well. Imagine incorporating strain gauges to drive the LEDs so you could see loading in real time, or a sound-reactive speaker housing. The sky’s the limit now that the technique is out there, and we look forward to see what people make of it.
The last time we heard from [Zach of All Trades] he was
comparing ten cent micro-controllers
; it looks like the PY32 came out on top. Oddly enough, this seems to be the first hack we have featuring it. If you’ve done something neat with ten cent micros (or more expensive ones) or know someone who did, don’t forget to
let us know! We love tips
. [Zach] sent in the tip about this video, and his reward is gratitude worth its weight in gold.
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8128009",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T10:39:34",
"content": "very elegant. without the headphone its an art piece by itself.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128025",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:33:01",
"content": "Damn, that’s some craftmanship here!All the “I had this problem, and here is my solution” are really pleasant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128273",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:50:26",
"content": "Reminds me of making skateboards back in woodshop class",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128293",
"author": "Paulio",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T04:15:47",
"content": "High-end commercial at a makers price.Kudos to Zach for a well executed project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.929012
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/trackside-observations-of-a-rail-power-enthusiast/
|
Trackside Observations Of A Rail Power Enthusiast
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[] |
The life of a Hackaday writer often involves hours spent at a computer searching for all the cool hacks you love, but its perks come in not being tied to an office, and in periodically traveling around our community’s spaces. This suits me perfectly, because as well as having an all-consuming interest in technology, I am a lifelong rail enthusiast. I am rarely without an Interrail pass, and for me Europe’s railways serve as both comfortable mobile office space and a relatively stress free way to cover distance compared to the hell of security theatre at the airport. Along the way I find myself looking at the infrastructure which passes my window, and I have become increasingly fascinated with the power systems behind electric railways. There are so many different voltage and distribution standards as you cross the continent, so just how are they all accommodated? This deserves a closer look.
So Many Different Ways To Power A Train
Diesel trains like this one are for the dinosaurs.
In Europe where this is being written, the majority of main line railways run on electric power, as do many subsidiary routes. It’s not universal, for example my stomping ground in north Oxfordshire is still served by diesel trains, but in most cases if you take a long train journey it will be powered by electricity. This is a trend reflected in many other countries with large railway networks, except sadly for the United States, which has electrified only a small proportion of its huge network.
Of those many distribution standards there are two main groups when it comes to trackside, those with an overhead wire from which the train takes its power by a pantograph on its roof, or those with a third rail on which the train uses a sliding contact shoe. It’s more usual to see third rails in use on suburban and metro services, but if you take a trip to Southern England you’ll find third rail electric long distance express services. There are even four-rail systems such as the London Underground, where the fourth rail serves as an insulated return conductor to prevent electrolytic corrosion in the cast-iron tunnel linings.
These tracks in the south of England each have a 750 VDC third rail. Lamberhurst, CC BY-SA 4.0.
As if that wasn’t enough, we come to the different voltage standards. Those southern English trains run on 750 V DC while their overhead wire equivalents use 25 kV AC at 50Hz, but while Northern France also has 25 kV AC, the south of the country shares the same 3 kV DC standard as Belgium, and the Netherlands uses 1.5 kV DC. More unexpected still is Germany and most of Scandinavia, which uses 15 kV AC at only 16.7 Hz. This can have an effect on the trains themselves, for example Dutch trains are much slower than those of their neighbours because their lower voltage gives them less available energy for the same current.
This Dutch locomotive is on its 1.5 kV home turf, but it’s hauling an international service headed for the change to 3 kV DC in Belgium.
In general these different standards came about partly on national lines, but also their adoption depends upon how late the country in question electrified their network. For example aside from that southern third-rail network and a few individual lines elsewhere, the UK trains remained largely steam-powered until the early 1960s. Thus its electrification scheme used the most advanced option, 25 kV 50 Hz overhead wire. By contrast countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands had committed to their DC electrification schemes early in the 20th century and had too large an installed base to change course. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to upgrade though, as for example in India where 25 kV AC electrification has proceeded since the late 1950s and has included the upgrade of an earlier 1.5 kV DC system.
A particularly fascinating consequence of this comes at the moment when trains cross between different networks. Sometimes this is done in a station when the train isn’t moving, for example at Ashford in the UK when high-speed services switch between 25 kV AC overhead wire and 750 V DC third rail, and in other cases it happens on the move through having the differing voltages separated by a neutral section of overhead cable. Sadly I have never manged to travel to the Belgian border and witness this happening. Modern electric locomotives are often equipped to run from multiple voltages and take such changes in their stride.
Power To The People Movers
The 4-rail 750VDC system on the London Underground.
Finally, all this rail electrification infrastructure needs to get its power from somewhere. In the early days of railway electrification this would inevitably been a dedicated railway owned power station, but now it is more likely to involve a grid connection and some form of rectifier in the case of DC lines. The exception to this are systems with differing AC frequencies from their grid such as the German network, which has an entirely separate power generation and high voltage distribution system.
So that was the accumulated observations of a wandering Hackaday scribe, from the comfort of her air-conditioned express train. If I had to name my favourite of all the networks I have mentioned it would be the London Underground, perhaps because the warm and familiar embrace of an Edwardian deep tube line on a cold evening is an evocative feeling for me. When you next get the chance to ride a train keep an eye out for the power infrastructure, and may the experience be as satisfying and comfortable as it so often is for me.
Header image: SPSmiler,
Public domain
.
| 59
| 14
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127177",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:19:08",
"content": "“This is a trend reflected in many other countries with large railway networks, except sadly for the United States, which has electrified only a small proportion of its huge network.” — and Canada, which has not only zero electrified mainlines, it tore out the little bit of electrification that was performed in the 20th Century. At least the USA kept the northeast corridor.Actually the US has kept a lot more rail in general. I think a majority of the trackage ever built in Canada has been torn up, including a crucial section of one of the transcontinental routes.In this era when we all love to call out the USA for all their foibles, I want to call out my own country for somehow being worse. (Don’t get me started on VIA Rail. It’s like they set a goal to be worse than Amtrak. Yes, it IS possible to be worse than Amtrak.)All of this to say– I’m both fascinated and incredibly envious of your observations, Jenny.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127179",
"author": "Shallow Water Rambler",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:22:09",
"content": "We call it “Damntrak” down here.",
"parent_id": "8127177",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130425",
"author": "Tim McNerney",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T15:19:56",
"content": "(Perhaps you are referring to Amtrak’s stellar maintenance and on-time record.) To be fair…For our international readers, Amtrak only owns a fraction of the tracks they run on, mainly between Boston and Washington D.C. Most of the U.S. passenger rail network is actually owned by various freight railroads, who have no interest in electrification. Freight trains make it tough for Amtrak to stay on schedule. Metropolitan commuter railroads who didn’t electrify 100 years ago are contemplating electrification, but it’s hard to find funding for overhead catenary. Hybrid and quick-charge batter schemes have been proposed, but I have yet to see one. Here diesel is still king.",
"parent_id": "8127179",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127439",
"author": "Paul A LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T01:03:59",
"content": "Both Canada and the US face two issues that are almost unique:1) Population density. The US ranks 180th in the world (37/sq.km) and Canada 230th (4.5/sq. km). Japan (340), the UK (286), Germany (242), China (151), France (122) – pretty much any country with extensive rail service has a population density many times higher then either country.2) Sheer size. Halifax to Vancouver is 4,444 km, while New York to Los Angeles 2,944 km. A Shinkansen travelling at top speed in a straight line will take about 14 hours to cross Canada, 9 hours to cross the US. Not only is it quite a bit faster to fly, the infrastructure required is significantly less expensive.While both countries have limited geographical areas that have potential for high speed rail, the reality is that is neither country will have the extensive rail infrastructure of Europe, Japan, or China any time in the foreseeable future.Oh, and I have ridden both Amtrak and Via. I’ll take Via any day.",
"parent_id": "8127177",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127541",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T07:30:56",
"content": "Quicker to fly might just about be true on average in the US and Canada compared to a new high speed rail network if one existed there – especially when you only consider the actually flying part in isolation. However getting to and from the airport and all the stages in the airport before you go anywhere else with baggage, security etc and the real world cost to fly and maintain all that infrastructure required to do it…A new high speed rail network in many cases you’d be able to walk or take other public transport like the local slower underground/branch line rails to the major train station much quicker than getting to the airport. And then it is just change trains and get comfortable (in a much more comfortable and quiet space) for a pretty darn fast, and energy efficient transit (so in a just world it would end up vastly cheaper too) to then again also have a probably shorter trip on the slower last mile networks at the other end.Sure the train wouldn’t be travelling as fast as the aircraft in peak speed terms, but you get up to speed quicker in your journey and likely end up much closer to your destination, with less wasted time recovering your bags etc.. Which brings the cross over for total journey times to being most would end up at least comparable by the train and only the longest possible hops or ones that the rail network doesn’t have a direct route but your local airport does being clear winners for flying.Though as the initial cost to build a high quality high speed rail network is substantial its not likely to be done unless the US government decides to fund it, and that doesn’t look likely any time soon. Longer term investments are pretty much only done by governments in today’s world, and with the huge upfront cost a rail network is definitively more of a long term investment.",
"parent_id": "8127439",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127733",
"author": "tinfish",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:10:43",
"content": "The population density thing is what happens when you average out the US/Canada’s population over its entire landmass … which as pointed out is big. However, that assumes that people are evenly spread out along the country. We do in fact have several corridors where people live close together enough that HSR would be worth it; the Northeast, Cascadia, California, Midwest, and Toronto-Ontario come to mind. If we’re considering country size, China also has more land than the US (one of the first phrases some Chinese language classes often teach is “China is bigger than America”). HSR can absolutely work in a large country if you build it where lots of people need to move about. [Not Just Bikes] as a video explaining this, although he talks more about urbanism in it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ",
"parent_id": "8127439",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127742",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:35:11",
"content": "And unfortunately, many of those have expensive land and existing rail lines owned by race-to-the-bottom freight carriers.",
"parent_id": "8127733",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128815",
"author": "Eiki Martinson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T15:01:04",
"content": "Weirdly enough Florida turned out to be one of the first corridors to actually get HSR in the form of Brightline, which uses the existing Florida East Coast freight line with some upgrades. I’ve ridden it quite a bit and it’s a joy to use.",
"parent_id": "8127742",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127855",
"author": "MW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:52:33",
"content": "California has a 10+ year old high speed rail project that may eventually run SF to LA. I say may because the project is massively behind schedule and over budget.",
"parent_id": "8127733",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127763",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:18:05",
"content": "why we americans prefer to get our selves and our stuff searched, herded into flying sardine cans where they treat you like children, and then get charged to the point of poverty for the privilege is beyond me.seems our railroads are mostly used for freight. so everything is set up to be slow and efficient on diesel-electric. retrofitting those trains with pantographs for pure electric should be straightforward (they can power off their engines for those stretches). but given the ranges they have to cover and the areas where there are no power grids to tap into, it makes sense why that conversion has never happened.",
"parent_id": "8127439",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127825",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:25:53",
"content": "Not sure why people think we wouldn’t have a TSA for rail. As soon as a Tokyo happens, you’ll be taking off your shoes every time you get on a train.We “love” “security” no matter how much stuff they miss or how many times they are proven to be ineffective.",
"parent_id": "8127763",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128201",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T22:03:36",
"content": "Boy do I wish we ACTUALLY treated people like children instead of half-assing it.“Sir, you are in boarding group D. Standing 2 inches away from the boarding gate while we are just now boarding group A is bad manners. Say you are sorry and go sit in-time out until I come get you.”But nooooooo. That would make them feel bad.So instead we let half of our systems operate at 40% efficiency so we don’t offend the jerks…",
"parent_id": "8127763",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128228",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T23:13:36",
"content": "Fully 20% of passengers that use a wheelchair to get on the plane early also require one to get off.",
"parent_id": "8128201",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127848",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:24:18",
"content": "Every argument about rail infrastructure in reference to density applies to highways as well. The fact is, we don’t care; we build them anyway. Somehow it works out.",
"parent_id": "8127439",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128229",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T23:20:29",
"content": "That’s just not true.Car passengers don’t have to batch up.Most cars are not on a schedule.Cars don’t generally block, trains do.Road intersections are not outrageously expensive, hence rare. Rail switches $$$. Hence roads are much more fractal.But your mind is made up…Like I said in the photovoltaics thread:‘Please kick the next swamp German lecturing the USA about trains square in the nuts.’",
"parent_id": "8127848",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130188",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T23:06:09",
"content": "Most of the infrastructure is in place already though, and needs investment anyway because of decades of advising the subject while dumping money and land into vehicle infrastructure that costs similarly to maintain it more on average. And yes, it does. Rail infrastructure is simply more expensive per lump sum, not at all over time. Excessive trucking on public roads is a huge economic drain because of the maintenance deficit alone.And no, electric trucks aren’t the answer, the trains are already mostly electric and get the efficiency of economies of scale.As for having to plan?…. Are you unable to decide when you need to go to the store? Or are you really just so used to driving that you don’t have a real frame of reference for commuter rail. People would still have cars, you would just drive them less, damage them less, have less accidents, pay less on fuel, etc.",
"parent_id": "8128229",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8130185",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T22:59:14",
"content": "The fact that cities exist and are the major population centers seems to have evaded your notice. Also, freight rail is already everywhere and should have been upgraded many decades ago, but special interests have repeatedly halted that despite public support. Musk’s vacuum tunnels being the biggest major example, they sucked dry fl both federal and California funds intended for infrastructure and rail specifically.",
"parent_id": "8127439",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127178",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:20:44",
"content": "A good write up! Most folks don’t put a second thought into the logistics of getting around or the infrastructure needed to support it. I see it mentioned most often in defense white papers about CIKR attacks.If they ever get the thorium based Small Modular Reactors ironed out we may start seeing the electrified rail model flipped on its head. Where the locomotives are putting power back into the system when they have a lighter load. Supposedly the SMRs can be fit onto a tractor trailer rig so its a small jump from there to a rail based system.A thorium locomotive would be a decent intermediate step to getting Europe (and one day hopefully the U.S.) onto the same electrified rail system standard. It would also allow electrified trains to operate on unpowered rail systems as well as act as mobile backup generators during power outages/shortages. Its a pipe dream at this point though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127187",
"author": "Hobbes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:58:09",
"content": "The reactor vessel of an SMR fits on a lorry. That leaves a lot of infrastructure around the reactor that is still very large and cumbersome.Nuclear-powered trains were thought about in the 1960s. Look up the X-12. This weighed 360 tons and needed 15 axles.I think France got it right: for their nuclear trains, they put the ‘nuclear’ part next to the track instead of on it.",
"parent_id": "8127178",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130190",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T23:10:43",
"content": "Exactly, and diesel-electric trains are great, so great they are used everywhere in the world within generator travel distance of electrical infrastructure.The excuses for not expanding it are the same ones that were used by companies to buy it and shut down lorry services to run buses instead. It’s just about getting money.",
"parent_id": "8127187",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127231",
"author": "kELAL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:29:53",
"content": "That’s exactly the line of thinking you get from manager types who believe that, somehow, laws of physics are negotiable. The never-ending source of boondoggles.TL;DR: Laws of physics are NOT in favour of putting unwieldy things onto moving things, if you can avoid them.THE single reason why EVs remain net-positive compared to their ICE counterparts, EVEN if charged with 100% fossil fuel derived electricity, and despite their unwieldy battery pack is plain and simple: power stations stay put. This way, all the tech to eliminate emissions and/or improve efficiency isn’t watered down by unholy trade-offs due to size and/or weight constraints.And track bound vehicles are, by far, the best candidates for external power sources, a.k.a.: minimal unwieldy bits PLUS all the benefits of stationary power sources.",
"parent_id": "8127178",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127369",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T21:20:04",
"content": "Don’t forget about marine power. Shipboard engines are nearly indistinguishable from stationary ones, since the size and weight limits are much higher than for road or track vehicles.",
"parent_id": "8127231",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127455",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:12:00",
"content": "I can’t decide if you have no imagination, or are a luddite.I was speculating, not advocating for immediate implementation of nuclear power on rails. Nuke tech has come a long way in the last 50 years. Its short sighted at best not to push for a flexible power architecture, especially with a safer fuel. Refusing to “what if” simply because that’s the way its always been is how we got the bloated military industrial complex and those boondoggles you’re so worried about.",
"parent_id": "8127231",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127846",
"author": "KenN",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:06:51",
"content": "… no, it’s still a pass on this idea.The cool thing about electricity-powered trains is that the power can be generated in any fashion, and switched easily. And it can be using excess capacity of generating stations, especially at off-peak times.Little nukes? Sure – if it would be cost-effective, then implement as stationary self-contained, possibly modular units that can be relocated if required. Having the reactors on trains means the whole rail power infrastructure has to be able to receive and redistribute excess power from the trains, which is probably too complex and expensive to be feasible.Also… SnowPiercer.",
"parent_id": "8127455",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130192",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T23:18:58",
"content": "An aside on this. Diesel-electric trains can and in some cases already provide many of these functions in sometimes, including providing emergency power. Having a giant generator and the means to haul everything out needs directly to a town or site is invaluable.That doesn’t mean I want nuke trains per-say, but it’s possible something like a compact liftr could someday be swapped in place of the Diesel generator. Safely. Do I think this should be used to power the grid instead of local power though? … no, there’s a host of reasons why, but the biggest one is the grid itself.",
"parent_id": "8127846",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127857",
"author": "doobs",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:53:57",
"content": "Do you speak to people this way in person?Your tone is exceedingly condescending and demeaning.That’s not a good look on anyone.",
"parent_id": "8127455",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127644",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:35:05",
"content": "Small nuclear reactors have existed for decades, with one sized and with suitable output to power a train being not very far fetched at all. They also do potentially bring the advantages suggested, and in the case of locomotives you generally want them to be as heavy as you can possibly make them inside the loading gauge so they have some traction, so really its only the size of your existing rail infrastructure that would provide a limitation, and in most places not a very restrictive one really. In many ways very much comparable to a diesel locomotive where all the refining of the fuel is done elsewhere and the locomotive just has to turn it into power.Nuclear power is actually pretty easy to scale down (though the best reactor types and fuels will change with scale), and none have great technical drawback in proper operation. Too costly perhaps and politically likely to be lethally radioactive no matter how safe even in catastrophic accidents this particular variety of reactor is. So I can’t see it ever happening, as nuclear as a concept just gets so much push back from the majority of the population who only think of scary bombs and that famous shoddy Soviet reactor and assume all power generation with the nuclear title are much the same thing…",
"parent_id": "8127231",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129725",
"author": "ImpressiveChange",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T22:21:38",
"content": "the issue is the cooling I believe. or they operate like the steam locomotives of yesteryear with tenders of water (and a scoop that can be lowered into a trough to pick more up)",
"parent_id": "8127644",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130197",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T23:31:40",
"content": "You do not want them “as heavy as possible”, rails do in fact have limits you can reach, and that’s why the US hadn’t built one yet. And the limitations mentioned were entirely about infrastructure. Nuclear plants, being steam generators, are only efficient to run above certain scales. Getting rid of steam would be a big accomplishment for small reactors, but is not likely to ever rival the expansion force steam provides a turbine.Let’s say it does become possible though, either with a compact turbine configured for the lower output or something else. The next step is building it into a single train car… , and not the way the Soviets would have done it. Companies in this sector are eager to make disposable reactors, but those are a bad option, and too large anyway. The reactor will have to be something that can auto-terminate and safely shut down in a reversible way… Which rules out LIFTR designs unless someone has a way to thaw the lines once the salts freeze.tldr; We’re not there yet, not by quite a bit.",
"parent_id": "8127644",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127183",
"author": "DeTommie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:39:16",
"content": "Not only the voltage differs between the Netherlands and Belgium, but also the driving direction. The Netherlands has right-hand drive while Belgium drives on the left.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128618",
"author": "nope",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T23:52:50",
"content": "No they don’t? They’re both on the right side now.",
"parent_id": "8127183",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127209",
"author": "Michel Wurtz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:57:05",
"content": "Well, you forget some diesel+electric trains : you run on overhead electricity until the line stops and while running, you switch to the diesel generator inside the engine. Very practical on some old networks, but don’t forget to lower the pantograph : I known some train drivers that forget that and then were a bit annoyed to explain that they lost it thanks to the next low bridge/tunnel :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127216",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:05:50",
"content": "For freight at the bare minimum, I would like the rail system in the US to be improved, but the problem over here is economics.Public commuter trains can just about get enough funding in large metropolitan areas (but not really because they’re generally poorly maintained and don’t pull in enough money to pay for themselves even when they charge), but without freight no one wants to maintain (much less expand) the longer lines and so we can’t really use passenger trains on those lines.Worse, we can’t get any more freight on the rails and off the roads without first expanding the lines to reach more communities and second taxing the large trucks proportional to the damage they cause to the roads (said taxes being things like vehicle registration) because it will always be cheaper to do the entire journey in a semi (as opposed to just the final delivery) if the burden of road maintenance is equally shared by all users.So for now most trains will continue to hug the coasts and long trips will be in the car or in the air.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127260",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:27:07",
"content": "“…pay for themselves…” is the root cause of the problem. We need to recognize as a society that environmentally and fiscally responsible modes of transit are beneficial to everyone, and then put our combined resources into making those happen. Caring for the common weal is pretty much the job of a society.The idea is not that “every train trip must turn a profit”, it’s to provide the most good for the most people, while slowing the use of fuel and reducing emissions. All of which benefit all of us in one way or another.",
"parent_id": "8127216",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127637",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:17:18",
"content": "yeah imo this is the bigger part of most transportation struggles in the US…it’s not that we don’t have enough investment in bus / train / boat, but that car / truck is so severely subsidized. people usually make economically-sensible decisions",
"parent_id": "8127216",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128202",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T22:05:06",
"content": "That’s just not true…the Freight rail stuff.By almost any measure US freight rail is better then Europe’s.It’s basically a topography problem, you can optimize passenger or freight.Buy your ticket, take your chances.Freight rail is far from perfect.Trucks fill the gap in flexibility everywhere.Like rail takes loads barges can’t.Also note:Local commuter systems are always infected with politician nephew/niece syndrome.Which is a persistent, repeated in many areas, problem with local government, not light rail itself.Big problem in Germany, for example.Just less bold then NYC…During covid the NYC subway system found 2 checks going out for every actual employee.Others never showed up (for decades), connected to corrupt local government.That wouldn’t fly in Germany, but nepotism still required.",
"parent_id": "8127216",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130202",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T23:52:39",
"content": "Nothing is perfect, and it always will be that way. Commuter rail and freight are significantly more cost effective than other methods and indeed, gaps can be filled in on the roads, but instead maintenance is constantly deferred because wealthy people on average don’t want rail.And your side note on corruption or nepotism? That’s what oversight is for, and it has to be enforced. Instead regulators that would do this are (until this year) quietly kneecapped and defunded or administratively prevented from performing their role. Despite that regulators do catch people, until they are all fired of course.Regarding MTA giving out “two paychecks”? That’s false. Yep, you were lied to, and you didn’t even know the name of the organization. MTA doesn’t have extra money you know. It’s possible for an employee to get a corrective paycheck (which can even be negative btw), if there is an error, and during the height of COVID it’s possible MTA ended up splitting generally authorized leave checks from the regular pay. I’m guessing you’ve never handled payroll, but when you have a lot of people and multiple administrations things can get complicated. Did some employees commit overtime fraud? Maybe, but that’s the same as asking if store managers file overtime when they leave at 5. It happens, but it’s not a conspiracy. Ever fill out a time card with more than 5 processing codes for category and entity? Sometimes you even run out of space.",
"parent_id": "8128202",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8130199",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T23:37:26",
"content": "I know you know this, but *not” taxing road freight is just corporate welfare with no restrictions. The amortized cost of road maintenance is only going up, and they aren’t paying their share at all, not locally, not to the state, and not federally. They do pay some tolls, but tolls aren’t a functional replacement for getting freight of off the roads.If they was a responsible federal administration right now, they would be putting money into infrastructure and rail expansion to alleviate load on not only roads, but adding bridges and dangerous city congestion.But of course you are right, nobodywantsto do it.",
"parent_id": "8127216",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127229",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:26:48",
"content": "IMHO, As far as the US goes, we are stuck in the bronze age economics that doesn’t allow for proper modernization.Translation – any network is as good as its connections. Transit hubs. This is where it gets into the bronze age economics – competing networks do NOT want to connect to each other. I believe this is called myopic monopoly, inability to see the growth beyond 3-year investment plans. The only way out of this is having average Sam’s taxes paying for such things, but taxes are ALREADY tied up subsidizing all kinds of Amtracks and their networks, so expanding anything will not fly well, more taxes (obviously, corporations are excluded from paying taxes – thank you, donald for making it crystal clear) for the average Sam, etc.Japan had this EXACT (well, to a degree) situation in the 1960s, and they needed the way out, and they did – strategic long-term planning. It took them nearly 50 years to build up the combination of public-paid and private – and they forced private to connect with public, no negotiations. Hence, some sinkansen lines are public, some private, and they connect where they should, at the busiest intersections where they are needed. China learned from Japan and declared sinkansen on steroids, and they did just at thing, same story, much, much faster, busy hubs where they are needed the most, connecting routes.What’s missing in the US is the will to acknowledge that we are not just 25 years, we are full 50 years behind Japan, not to mention EU countries. We are even behind Canada – they are planning high speed rail Toronto – Ottawa – Montreal (potentially Quebec City, too). With some proper planning they may even connect Detroit, which means they’ll link up with Chicago too. Have we had sane and thoughtful planners in the DC we’d, too, be planning high speed Buffalo – Boston, thus, allowing canadians to plan for the eventual linking up with THAT line, but we don’t and we won’t. Because airplanes is the New Monopoly that is about as bad as the Truckers Union and it won’t allow any alternatives. Bronze age economy. Nobody invents iron alloys because just no, not even to those who already mine and forge iron. Just no.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127248",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:05:26",
"content": "Canada is really just planning to match what you already have in the Acela Corridor– note no pesky mention of how fast the latest vaporware HSR project ALTO will go–and has been talking about it at least as long as California has been working on their HSR, with just as much result.And hey, at least America still has a functioning freight network, at least compared to Canada.",
"parent_id": "8127229",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127643",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:31:53",
"content": "That I agree to – but at the very least the speed rail is considered. Amtrak, what Amtrak, its CEO just stepped down, and he wasn’t the only one making sure Amtrak remains the monopoly at any cost necessary, even if it means we are stuck in the 1990s. How do I know? By talking to a retired Amtrak engineer, that’s how. He had a LOT of coarse words for the upper management, even though his retirement package is royal (compared with other industries). Engineer, not some kind of supervisor or manager faking himself as an engineer.Our functioning cargo network is mostly sponsored by my taxes. Because competition is long gone. Northeast is really TWO megamonsters, Amtrak and CSX, anyone else is either a subsidiary of, ie, owned by, or strangled into local niches from which they absolutely CANNOT grow into anything (like Delaware’s lone cargo line that’s cornered into mostly insignificant routes that can’t compare with anything trucks can deliver better and faster).Concidence has it I chanced to personally speak to one of the few (now retired) canadian engineers who mastered the logistics in the 1970s and 1980s . This was long before Via Rail, and they’ve handled not just the southeast, but entire rail to Vancouver. According to him, they had tough time competing with what US had at the time, the most technologically advanced network of MANY companies, and Canada could only match that with proper planning, which they actually did. Rewind to present, when I had the conversation with him, and he, too, acknowledged that both Canada and the US now suck about as badly, though, canadian public transit was what kept things humming along, whereas US went completely private (cars) and that about introduced built-in cap on growth (one can only build that many roads to accommodate that many cars … cars in general are not exactly very efficient – too much space taken by empty cars with one driver, for example, more roads are needed, whereas a humble bus that sits under 50 will easily outperform 50 cars in total – and be SAFER, too, etc). Why am I bringing this up? Because he is still around (btw, even after retirement, he teaches at McGill, he is a professor) and the talent and the expertise is there, all it takes is proper planning that makes things happen (and hires the RIGHT people for the job, not managers, not ubermensch politicians, not talkers about politicians who usually ride these gravy trains to better their careers).",
"parent_id": "8127248",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127245",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:56:50",
"content": "@authorSouthern France uses 1.5KV DC not 3KV DC3KV DC is used in Italy (the whole network except for the high speed lines which use 25KV AV 50 Hz)You can get the whole European picture in this nice article (in Italian)https://scalaenne.wordpress.com/2019/01/06/tensioni-ferroviarie-europee/Also it’s a while thathttps://www.openrailwaymap.orgcan show the lines in different colours by speed/gauge/electrical power and so on. Just select the appropriate filter from the menu.Is worth to mention that Italy pioneered the the threephase power train (with two overhead wires) from 1902 and lasted in few north/western lines until 1976 (I was there when the last line was switched to 3KV )It was not a simple problem to run AC trains in an era w/o inverters/choppers and other electronics, but the problem was solved brilliantly using some tricks.There is an English wikipedia page about the argument, but is way more effective to look at the italin one and translate it with an online translatorhttps://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trazione_trifase",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127377",
"author": "Gianluca",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T21:41:43",
"content": "Ho appena letto questo (e gli altri articoli sui treni). Sito figo!https://rollingsteel.it/come-funziona-locomotiva-avviatori-automatici-motori-a-spazzole-e-reostati/",
"parent_id": "8127245",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127565",
"author": "cvoinescu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:38:50",
"content": "Fun map, but it ignores electrification in Eastern Europe (mostly 25 kV 50 Hz). It falsely lumps large chunks under the grey “non electrificata” label. Wikipedia has a better map:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/25_kV_AC_railway_electrification",
"parent_id": "8127245",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127685",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:11:06",
"content": "Well “not covered” would have been a better legend. But I also posted the link to openrailwaymap for a reason.There you can get info, not just about the main railways, but also about the uncommon ones, like light railways, trams, narrow gauge lines and so on.You can get also info about the various safety systems and signaling (which is another big pandora vase)",
"parent_id": "8127565",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127256",
"author": "Felix",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:20:26",
"content": "Nice to see railway electrification get some attention. Even among train nerds it often gets overlooked.There’s a brilliant and highly detailed Wikipedia article actually about Amtrak’s north east corridor (called something like “the Amtrak 25Hz System”) that was so good I decided to try and slowly fill up Wikipedia articles about British railway lines that had almost no information on the topic.This lead me down the rabbit hole of the interesting ways electrified railways interact with national electricity grids. Old school low voltage DC systems from before WW2, typically operate their own high voltage 3-phase AC distribution systems. Southern England is actually criss-crossed by a large network of (mostly) 33kV lines operated by the railway that connect to utility grid at around 36 locations (most of which are 132kV substations). Transport for London operate a ring network across the city at 22kV connecting to grid supplies at about 6 or 7 locations as well as a backup power station at Greenwich, these are then transformed down to a network of 11kV lines that follow the routes of Underground lines powering the DC traction substations. The network probably also powers the DLR, maybe the trams, and also domestic supplies for TfL run railway stations on other railways (like Elizabeth Line).The low frequency AC lines are of course most exciting with the German single phase transmission network also spanning Austria and Switzerland at voltages of 110kV or 132kV. But there’s a similar situation on the North East Corridor (south of new york) where the 12kV 25hz system is supported by 132kV single phase distribution lines located on the same electrification masts as the OLE! An arrangement that, i think, is completely unique.One of the main savings around the modern standard of 25kV at utility frequency is that it doesn’t require the railway to set up and maintain it’s own distribution network since the traction voltage is high enough that substations can be set far enough apart to receive power directly from the public utility. That higher voltage also means power can be moved around the railway using overhead lines, so they system operates two functions simultaneously, distributing power across moderately long distances and powering trains. (Older systems were also put in place in a context where the public utility grid may not have fully existed).The 25kV mains frequency system has it’s own challenges though, in that it is a single phase system while the grid is a three phase system. This means it has to connect to the grid at 132kV at least, oftentimes even at 275 or 400kV, typically the highest voltages used. This is so that the draw on a that single phase is not too much to disbalance the grid. Also, subsequent grid connections are connected to different phases to provide some balance that way. This has the consequence of different electrification sections having to be completely insulated from one another (lest the phases are allowed to short circuit), and for trains to be able to coast between sections unpowered and without creating an arc. In addition, 25kV trains are more expensive are heavier than low voltage counterparts because they must carry a transformer and rectifier themselves.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127274",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:49:33",
"content": "BTW 25KV (50Hz) trains are lighter than 15KV (16.66Hz) ones used in Germanophon countries, because transformers get more efficient at higher frequencies, so smaller ones can be used.Perhaps on bi/multistandard trains, the AC transformer is often reused as a DC filter, so is not all wasted weight.",
"parent_id": "8127256",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127270",
"author": "David P",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:45:29",
"content": "The Tyneside area light rail system (The Metro) has 1.5kVDC overhead line power, unique in the UK I believe.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127328",
"author": "rewolff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:38:51",
"content": "Dutch locomotive .. home stretch …Ehh. story goes that on the Amsterdam Brussels line NS (Dutch railways) made a deal with NMBS (Belgian railways): NS pays for the passenger cars and NMBS would take care of the locomotives… Then when demand had picked up and it was time to make the trains longer (more passenger cars) NMBS said: All yours!So technically the locomotives on Amsterdam Brussels are al Belgian.Hmm. This is probably out of date: I just checked images of the train and I saw lots of other/new material (and not the locomotives I thought were pulling that line).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127591",
"author": "Jenny List",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:07:08",
"content": "That locomotive is in NS colours, so I went with that. The on-train staff are all Belgian though. These slow trains have a loco at each end and use old 1980s NS rakes of coaches. I quite like them, though the high-speed line has those new Dutch units.",
"parent_id": "8127328",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127358",
"author": "Louis Poche",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:51:43",
"content": "I always wondered why the London underground used a fourth rail… now I know :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127463",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:35:38",
"content": "We don’t have trains in my country, you insensitive clods.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127551",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:08:30",
"content": "“because their lower voltage gives them less available energy for the same current.”Power, not energy.This is basic EE.Please correct it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127639",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:21:21",
"content": "they’re dealing with the same 24 hours in the day so it seems like energy is restricted as well",
"parent_id": "8127551",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127695",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:31:08",
"content": "energy per 24 hours is still power, not energy.Trains don’t drive 24/7 so at times they are consuming no power and other times they might be doing regenerative braking. So it doesn’t make sense to see it as an energy limit.",
"parent_id": "8127639",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128034",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T12:09:41",
"content": "“because their lower voltage gives them less available energy for the same current.”“Power, not energy.This is basic EE.Please correct it.”a) Energy is the capacity to do work. Energy is power integrated over time.one joule = one watt-secondb)Power is the rate at which work is done, or energy is transmitted.watt = joules/secondEnergy and power are closely relatedbut are not the same physical quantity. Energy is the ability to cause change; power is the rate energy is moved, or used.(c) P=ΔE / ΔtP is the average power output, measured in watts (W)ΔE is the net change in energy of the system in joules (J) – also known as work.Δt is the duration – how long the energy use takes – measured in seconds (s)…Multiplying a value of power and the period of time over which it is used gives an amount of energy. This is why you pay your power company for the amount of energy used per unit time period, and NOT for the amount of power available [a kilowatt is a unit of power but a kilowatt-hour (1 kilowatt times 1 hour) is a unit of energy. ]This is not only basic EE, but basic physics.Please correct it.",
"parent_id": "8127551",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128332",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:20:48",
"content": "“Please correct it.”1) my comment is not wrong, EE is part of physics.2) you cannot edit comments on hackaday3) your comment looks like AI-generated",
"parent_id": "8128034",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128547",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T19:37:02",
"content": "Part of EE is physics.All engineering is multidisciplinary.Much too complicated for most physicists.They just can’t think that flexibly.Engineering is made up of:Applied practical knowledge, most from science, but much from trail and error.Math.Business/finance.Art.You have to be a good engineer to get to ‘art’.",
"parent_id": "8128332",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8143498",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2025-06-30T16:40:04",
"content": "Americans have no idea what a long time is.Europeans have no idea what a long distance is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.172718
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/studying-qr-code-degradation/
|
Studying QR Code Degradation
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Repair Hacks"
] |
[
"cliff edge",
"error correction",
"qr code"
] |
It’s fair to say that QR codes are a technology that has finally come of age. A decade or more ago they were a little over-hyped and sometimes used in inappropriate or pointless ways, but now they are an accepted and useful part of life.
They’re not without their faults though, one of which is that despite four increasingly redundant levels of error correction, there comes a point at which a degraded QR code can no longer be read.
[HumanQR] is soliciting these broken QR codes for research purposes
and inclusion in an eventual open-source database, and they’ll even have a shot at repairing your submissions for you.
It’s a problem inherent to all digital media, that once the limit of whatever error correction they contain has been reached, they arrive at
a cliff-edge at which they go immediately from readability to non readability
. The example given in the linked article is a locator tag on a stray cat, it had been rubbed away in part. Improving its contrast, sharply defining its edges, and improving the definition of its fiducials was able to revive it, we hope leading to the cat being returned home.
The idea is that by studying enough damaged codes it should be possible to identify the means by which they become degraded, and perhaps come up with a way to inform some repair software. Meanwhile if you are interested, you might want to learn more about how they work,
the hard way
.
| 30
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127106",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:06:44",
"content": "Sadly, many QR codes are broken before they even get printed. Someone had the brilliant idea to start abusing the data redundancy mechanism to put whatever logo in the middle of it, make them colorful, round the squares, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127203",
"author": "0xfred",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:41:48",
"content": "That particularly annoys me. Having a logo in the middle of a QR code looks stupid and people that do it don’t seem to grasp that they’ve impacted the readability of it too.",
"parent_id": "8127106",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127370",
"author": "ziew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T21:20:48",
"content": "You do realize that QR code has different error correction levels? I’d assume you can increase redundancy when putting a logo in the middle to keep the number of correctable errors on a similar level.",
"parent_id": "8127203",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130765",
"author": "fhunter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T13:49:51",
"content": "And then they need better camera/closer shot to be read.",
"parent_id": "8127370",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127262",
"author": "Conrad Farnsworth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:28:34",
"content": "I literally had that same thought today.",
"parent_id": "8127106",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127666",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:22:12",
"content": "Try reading a QR code off of a piece of tech where the code is printed in dark gray on a black cabinet. Several manufacturers were doing that with barcodes and now have done that with QR’s.",
"parent_id": "8127106",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127701",
"author": "zeebee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:43:08",
"content": "While yes, overlaying an image on the middle of a QR code will reduce the error-correction capabilities of the code, changing the colours or rounding the corners of the cells (afaik) does not.QR code readers are looking for contrast between the ‘black’ and ‘white’ cells, as the actual colour reported by the camera can be different depending on lighting conditions etc. So while it will reduce the range of lighting conditions the code will work under, changing the colour won’t affect the data. Similarly, QR readers are usually only actually looking at the centre-most pixel of each cell, so you can round the corners of the cells without damaging the data, or even add other stuff in the intercellular space:https://www.reddit.com/r/touhou/s/DZahuS5XYSMore to the point though, why is it sad if people add images to the middle of a QR code? Sure, if a codeneedsto last a long time under harsh conditions (on an inventory management sticker for example), it’s unwise to mess with the error-correction. For other applications though, if it still scans, and it’s intended to be used for a shorter period time than it will take for the data to degrade, what’s the harm?Is it really abuse of a feature? Or just using the features in a new, unexpected way?",
"parent_id": "8127106",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127108",
"author": "Stephen wolf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:13:10",
"content": "Wouldn’t this be a failure of the physical media’s not the digital of the qrcode? Everything physical will degrade over time. My own body is proof of that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127121",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:45:03",
"content": "I have used QR code breaking to my advantage, when replying to official traffic violation notices.They use a QR code to they can efficiently scan the document into their database.So I corrupt it with small blobs of ink, and check it with my phone scanner to make sure there’s enough degradation.This then forces them to enter the data by hand, which then causes them to miss deadlines for fining, etc.You can use the same technique with document barcodes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127148",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:56:56",
"content": "Have you considered just not routinely breaking traffic laws?",
"parent_id": "8127121",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127196",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:25:45",
"content": "And also, not tampering with official documents, impeding law enforcement, perverting the course of justice etc. etc.",
"parent_id": "8127148",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127948",
"author": "Nice Try FBI",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T05:49:37",
"content": "alt. hecc to being a revenue stream; any law whose consequence is a fine is a tax on being working-class",
"parent_id": "8127196",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127159",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:23:55",
"content": "You have a very inefficient government.We just get a fine, have to pay it first and only after that is done you can contest the fine and maybe get your money back.The term for paying and contesting is just a few weeks, whereas the appeal may take months to proceed.",
"parent_id": "8127121",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127166",
"author": "O. Kay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:36:52",
"content": "Chances are he could just pay the fine but choses to use this method as a form of civil disobedience.",
"parent_id": "8127159",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127405",
"author": "Dj Biohazard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:03:58",
"content": "Tell me you’re Dutch without saying you’re Dutch. :’)",
"parent_id": "8127159",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127184",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:39:40",
"content": "How would brute forcing the illegible part work? Seems to me it could be a viable solution for some.Even providing the incomplete data available in a human readable form could allow the incredible amount of processing power in the grey matter to tease out some clues.In the missing cat example merely knowing the name of the pet tracking/reporting service would be enough to report the missing animal.Although we could also suggest that RFID or tattoo is probably a more robust pet ID method, not to mention a description of the animal and where it was lost is more than sufficient in most cases. 🤷🏼♂️Maybe if you intend the QR to last it should be cast in metal or milled into the plastic instead of screen printed. I’m also going to call it that the physical medium needs to be considered if the QR is supposed to be depended on in harsh environments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127186",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:48:22",
"content": "Also my face hurts, the example is a QR on a Bluetooth tracker. Just why? What is wrong with just putting an email or phone number on the cat’s collar.I am not sure the Bluetooth or the QR are the proper application of technology in that case. I still don’t think the QR code was the failure, the failure came in applying the tech as the only tracking.",
"parent_id": "8127184",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127191",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:11:27",
"content": "I don’t really have a strong opinion one way or the other but one possible reason to go with a QR code over a human readable label is that it does have error correction, obviously there are limits to that correction, that’s what this article is about, but consider the alternative. If two digits of a phone number get scratched off you’re out of luck unless you want to cold call 100 people. You might not even realize that an email address is one if the @ symbol gets lost. QR has error correction that would easily recover from losses like that.",
"parent_id": "8127186",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127197",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:28:41",
"content": "RFID in the tag as well as the pet, QR is easier because people can just scan it and get correct contact details instead of having to read and spell an email address, but when it’s worn off it’s obviously not going to work. Though I do wonder if just deeper engraving would be a better way to ensure longevity of the code.",
"parent_id": "8127191",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127304",
"author": "Redacted",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:51:09",
"content": "But isn’t a QR code an open goal for phishing ?",
"parent_id": "8127191",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127535",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:58:25",
"content": "Kinda, but I think the opportunities for phishing presented by the collar tag on a pet are pretty limited so I’d be fairly confident that I could scan it.",
"parent_id": "8127304",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127208",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:56:18",
"content": "The cat door isn’t able to read the email or phone number on the cats collar though. Most use bluetooth or rfid/nfc.",
"parent_id": "8127186",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127406",
"author": "andarb",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:07:54",
"content": "My only reference experience is working with very basic error correction in RF transmissions. The standard contains NO error correction, but has CRC error detection. Interestingly, for every single-bit error possible in this standard, you can calculate the precise location of the error in the bitstream from the CRC, and therefore toggle that bit to correct it.My experience was that while you can build a seemingly correct “answer” by brute force, for every erroneous bit, the number of possible “answers” that fit the “question” goes up exponentially. So if you’re error correcting, say, “ABCDEFG”, you received “ABCDEzG”. Brute force might have two possible answers, one is the transmitted message, one is “ABCDEGG” but there’s no way to know which is correct without extra information – a human would guess that “ABCDEFG” is the correct version, but the algorithm probably couldn’t.",
"parent_id": "8127184",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127202",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:40:37",
"content": "I don’t know if this article ever featured on here (if I didn’t originally come across it here it was probably on slashdot), but it seems like a relevant (and extreme) example of recovering a damaged QR code:https://medium.com/free-code-camp/lets-enhance-how-we-found-rogerkver-s-1000-wallet-obfuscated-private-key-8514e74a5433",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127218",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:10:59",
"content": "There is another way QR can go bad: obsolete link. Example, a prank QR code that load Rick n roll video. If the user deletes the video, Youtube shuts down the account, or they change the link format without auto-redirect to new link, then using QR would result in a 404.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127555",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:28:12",
"content": "Link rot is the term. It is a serious problem. Many websites don’t take it seriously to preserve links. If you want to look up specs of a product older than 5 years it is often removed from the website or it is moved to a different section. Even the internet archive can not recover some pages.There should be a list of rules for the internet.",
"parent_id": "8127218",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127347",
"author": "Kevin N",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:27:43",
"content": "At first I was going to suggest using soft-decision Reed-Solomon decoding, but from the picture of the cat’s tag I see that the problem is that bits aren’t faded, but that they’ve been obliterated. For this you want to use erasure decoding. Reed-Solomon codes are well-suited to this. You need to mark the obliterated bits as “erasures” rather than 1s or 0s and the error-correction decoder can correct a lot more bits when erasures are marked. If there are 8 erasures, for example, you can think of these as having 2**8=256 possible original encodings and you can try those and choose the Reed-Solomon codeword that has the smallest Hamming distance from one of those. (This is built into the erasure decoding algorithm, however, and needn’t be done explicitly.)The problem with [HumanQR’s] method is that he’s enhanced the contrast, making the erasures black and thus assigning them a high-confidence value of 0 rather than a no-confidence value of ‘x’ (erasure).To use this scheme you’d need to use the erasure decoding algorithm and a means of marking the erasures. In this particular case there are also scratches which did not totally obliterate bits and repairing these by hand might also help a little.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127350",
"author": "Kevin N",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:35:09",
"content": "Actually, looking again at the high-contrast “repaired” image, I see that it is a negative image and the obliterated bits have actually been replaced with white. That is probably why it is working, because it seems like more white than black ink has been removed (the remaining ink is all black), so making the assumption that the erasures are all white is a simple first attempt at a repair.",
"parent_id": "8127347",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127562",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:33:28",
"content": "Smart thinking. When reconstruction something all knowledge can be useful.",
"parent_id": "8127350",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127863",
"author": "Idiot",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T21:24:30",
"content": "Get a life ..pls…all of ya….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.286463
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/simulating-high-side-bootstrap-circuits-with-ltspice/
|
Simulating High-Side Bootstrap Circuits With LTSpice
|
Dave Rowntree
|
[
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"bootstrapping",
"LTSpice",
"power supplies",
"simulation"
] |
LTSpice is a tool that every electronics nerd should have at least a basic knowledge of. Those of us who work professionally in the analog and power worlds rely heavily on the validity of our simulations. It’s one of the basic skills taught at college, and essential to truly understand how a circuit behaves. [Mano] has quite a collection of videos about the tool, and
here is a great video explanation of how a bootstrap circuit works
, enabling a high-side driver to work in the context of driving a simple buck converter. However, before understanding what a bootstrap is, we need to talk a little theory.
Bootstrap circuits are very common when NMOS (or NPN) devices are used on the high side of a switching circuit, such as a half-bridge (and by extension, a full bridge) used to drive a motor or pump current into a power supply.
A simple half-bridge driving illustrates the high-side NMOS driving problem.
From a simplistic viewpoint, due to the apparent symmetry, you’d want to have an NMOS device at the bottom and expect a PMOS device to be at the top. However, PMOS and PNP devices are weaker, rarer and more expensive than NMOS, which is all down to the device physics; simply put, the hole mobility in silicon and most other semiconductors is much lower than the electron mobility, which results in much less current. Hence, NMOS and NPN are predominant in power circuits.
As some will be aware, to drive a high-side switching transistor, such as an NPN bipolar or an NMOS device, the source end will not be at ground, but will be tied to the switching node, which for a power supply is the output voltage. You need a way to drive the gate voltage in excess of the source or emitter end by at least the threshold voltage. This is necessary to get the device to fully turn on, to give the lowest resistance, and to cause the least power dissipation. But how do you get from the logic-level PWM control waveform to what the gate needs to switch correctly?
The answer is to use a so-called bootstrap capacitor. The idea is simple enough: during one half of the driving waveform, the capacitor is charged to some fixed voltage with respect to ground, since one end of the capacitor will be grounded periodically. On the other half cycle, the previously grounded end, jumps up to the output voltage (the source end of the high side transistor) which boosts the other side of the capacitor in excess of the source (because it got charged already) providing a temporary high-voltage floating supply than can be used to drive the high-side gate, and reliably switch on the transistor. [Mano] explains it much better in a practical scenario in the video below, but now you get the why and how of the technique.
We see videos about LTSpice quite a bit,
like this excellent YouTube resource
by [FesZ] for starters.
| 14
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127066",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T08:37:32",
"content": "As a motorbike rider, I try to avoid low side and high side driving as the plague. :DBut this is what Hackaday is doing for me: as (digital) computer scientist, I am gradually learning about analog electronics and power supply design after all. ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127194",
"author": "Bill Hensley",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:23:14",
"content": "I’ll second that, although I always feel as though I skipped a few grades in school when I read articles like this. And yet, slowly I learn!",
"parent_id": "8127066",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127091",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T10:16:23",
"content": "Simulating a half bridge driver and analyzing how it works is a good thing. However, for a practical circuit, it’s more common to simply use a MOSFET driver IC for it. Such an IC provides:High side and low side Fet driver (with peak currents upto 3A for fast switching).Shoot though prevention with built in delays, so you can’t short circuit your half bridge due to for example a software fault.Galvanic isolation.These IC’s are very common, and used in all sorts of motor controllers, and you can also use them in synchronous SMPS circuits. An example of such an IC is the IR2102 (Cost EUR96ct each for 100+).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127110",
"author": "had37b8e5c7066e",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:23:52",
"content": "the IR2102 doesn have shoot through prevention nor does it have galvanic isolation …",
"parent_id": "8127091",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127156",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:21:30",
"content": "It’s got a 600V insulation barrier between the logic inputs and the high side FET driver. But this is indeed not a complete isolation. You’re also right about shoot through prevention. Not present in IR2102, but IR2103 does have circuitry for dead time generation and shoot through prevention.",
"parent_id": "8127110",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127517",
"author": "Tim Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:09:15",
"content": "You’ll be interested (or alarmed..!) to know that these type of parts are not insulated at all.In fact, HVICs are constructed with the high-side circuitry atop a thick, lightly-doped junction: hence the high standoff voltage, but this junction becomes forward-biased for Vs or Vbs < Vss. The junction can be subdivided of course, allowing HV MOSFETs to be built across the barrier; a pair, cascoded, serve for level shifting. Pulsed commutation is usually used, I believe, to save on quiescent current and power dissipation (since they draw from Vbs directly to Vss).Newer families are available with 30V or more of transient immunity, in the reverse direction. Obviously(?), communication is unavailable during such excursion (the high side remains latched in its initial state before communication is lost, as you’d expect from a pulse coupling scheme). For higher voltages, true isolated types are required (which also indeed include true monolithic designs; TI’s capacitive-coupled and ADI’s inductive-coupled families are typical).",
"parent_id": "8127156",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127102",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T10:54:56",
"content": "Aren’t PFETs just as good these days? I thought NFETs being lower Rds was something that was true maybe 10 years ago. Bootstrapping drivers are so much trouble, I just use PFETs on the high side, NFETs on the low side and implement dead time myself (in the code).Then again, I do power electronics only as a hobby, and low power IIoT stuff professionally so my opinions are skewed",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127112",
"author": "had37b8e5c7066e",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:26:51",
"content": "nfets are still better and cheaper and when you need to switch higher voltages gatedrive for a pfets gets just as messy",
"parent_id": "8127102",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127125",
"author": "halherta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:51:46",
"content": "P Channel in high side and N channel on low sidevonly works when VDD is less than VGSmax; which is about 20V.If you need higher supply voltages, you’ll More expensive P channel MOSFETs, or high side drivers.",
"parent_id": "8127102",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127269",
"author": "Kelly",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:39:29",
"content": "No link to the .asc file?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127392",
"author": "mgsouth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T22:16:47",
"content": "I got extremely frustrated with using LTSpice or ngspice to model SMP. Runs were continually dying with transient issues. No doubt due to ignorance (other people use them), but a show-stopper for me. I’ve had much better success with Xyce, from Sandia National Labs. (It’s almost like they have a lot of experience modeling high intensity transients or something.) I think it’s also a lot smarter about calculating the time steps in general; usually it finishes in a fracton of the time that LT or ng take, with fewer steps, and just as accurate.The downside is that there are some differences in the semantics and execution of the netlist dot commands, and sometimes for the device models themselves. Some models from the MicroCap libary (esp. older ones) won’t load. They’ve usually been fairly simple to patch. But you can’t just drop Xyce into KiCad as its built-in modeler.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127512",
"author": "Tim Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:00:55",
"content": "Lockup or “timestep too small” is always a setup and modeling issue — though not always one that can be solved. Numerical solution is a notoriously difficult problem, after all.The usual causes are:– Degenerate nodes or loops (near-singular matrix; LTSpice’s default RSHUNT and CSHUNT settings usually avoid a fully singular matrix), caused by connecting capacitors in series without “bleeder” resistors, or inductors in parallel without DCR– Unrealistic dynamics from poorly modeled (or wholly absent) parasitics (all real circuits have R, L and C, between all points — we mustimplementthe speed of light in SPICE)– Extremely dynamic (read: poorly modeled) active devices; for example any time you see a IF() statement in SPICE, it’s almost certainly a harbinger of shitty convergence. TABLE statements can be poorly used as well.Favoring the smoothness brought by the application of continuous (including continuous N derivatives for N-order integration!) functions, and parasitics, a smoother solver usually helps, too (GEAR order 2+).These all come at a price (slower integration), of course. A sufficiently advanced circuit can always find some incredibly tight and complex loop to grind into; this isn’t a well-defined problem. (An alternative solution suggests itself: don’t make pathological circuits in the first place! They probably don’t work well IRL either.)Finally there are various parameters to adjust (fewer of these in LTSpice, but the classic 3f5/XSPICE set I know well):– RSHUNT and GMIN address nonlinearity of the system;– ABSTOL, VNTOL and CHGTOL affect numeric accuracy (it may be worth setting these to about RELTOL times the smallest expected respective amount/change in the circuit);– TRTOL is how fast the integration adjusts to nonlinearity (i.e. how sharply timestep is increased or reduced to account for increasing error);– RELTOL is a general (relative) tolerance; lower is more precise, but will take longer to run; larger will produce chunkier waveforms and show poorer stability/accuracy (stability in terms of energy conservation; an RLC circuit’s Q factor for instance);– ITL4 is the Transient iteration limit; you’ll need to specify higher value in more complex circuits.– And, for Transient Analysis, set initial and maximum timestep respectively. If you want to keep smooth, well sampled waveforms, consider reducing maximum timestep.",
"parent_id": "8127392",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127660",
"author": "mgsouth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:16:30",
"content": "Thank you! The notes about parameters are especially helpful. This would make a great series of posts for HaD or your blog.",
"parent_id": "8127512",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127521",
"author": "Tim Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:17:50",
"content": "Hand-crafting a bootstrap driver isn’t the most useful thing, overall, but it’s good fundamentals, and might even come in handy for a quick breadboarding when something simple needs lashing up and driver ICs aren’t to hand. Last year, I ran through a few discrete design exercises that readers may find of interest (I would also encourage building and running the simulations!):https://hackaday.com/2024/10/13/building-an-automotive-load-dump-tester/In particular, this part:https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/Articles/Hysteretic.html#expBetween this and part 3, the choice between bootstrap and isolated drivers is also discussed. The circuit is still (mostly) discrete, using a few more transistors, but with much improved functionality.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,546.98917
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/the-zx-spectrum-logic-analyzer/
|
The ZX Spectrum Logic Analyzer
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"logic analyzer",
"pi pico",
"rp2040",
"Spectrum ZX"
] |
We know [Happy Little Diodes] frequently works with logic analyzer projects. His recent
wireless logic analyzer for the ZX Spectrum
is one of the oddest ones we’ve seen in a while. The heart of the system is an RP2040, and there are two boards. One board interfaces with the computer, and another hosts the controller.
The logic analyzer core is powered by a common
open-source analyzer
from [Eldrgusman]. This is one of the nice things about open source tools. Most people probably don’t need a logic analyzer that plugs directly into a ZX Spectrum. But if you do, it is fairly simple to repurpose a more generic piece of code and rework the hardware, if necessary.
You used to pay top dollar to get logic analyzers that “knew” about common CPUs and could capture their bus cycles, show execution, and disassemble the running code. But using a technique like this, you could easily decode any processor, even one you’ve designed yourself. All you need to do is invest the time to build it, if no one else has done it yet.
[Happy Little Diodes] is a
big fan of the [Eldrgusman] design
. What we would have given for a logic analyzer like this
forty years ago
.
| 8
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127040",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T07:11:01",
"content": "I was thinking to use ECG (EKG) as a logic analyzer. I have collected some ECG parts from surplus. It is technically a logic analyzer already, but kinda expensive if you look at original price.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127087",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T10:02:57",
"content": "ECG as in “Electro CardioGram” ? More a DSP than a logic analyzer, IMHO….",
"parent_id": "8127040",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127107",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:08:48",
"content": "The biggest issue you might run into is ECG systems are slow, as they are designed for biosystems.",
"parent_id": "8127040",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127111",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:24:07",
"content": "I was thinking about using a bicycle pump as a detonator, since the both look alike, both have a wooden handle connected to some sort of plunger that goes up/down, both have some kind of sqwibbly thing with a clamp of some sort coming out of the side and in many cases, the older ones have a wooden base. Still, I wasn’t quite sure, so I googled and it was confirmed that these are indeed equal/exchangeable as they are both used of blowing things up.",
"parent_id": "8127040",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127089",
"author": "Happy Little Diodes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T10:09:49",
"content": "Thanks Al, happy to be tinkering with odd things, that’s where the fun is",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127129",
"author": "Quinn Evans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:58:21",
"content": "You can even use the Spectrum as a coprocessor for code that you want to run at a fraction of the speed with no memory",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127518",
"author": "Smf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:10:40",
"content": "So a logic analyser with an edge connector rather than probes?I was hoping this would allow me to run logic analyser software on the spectrum",
"parent_id": "8127129",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8132337",
"author": "Paul Chirulescu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T09:53:45",
"content": "The interconnect board made by [Happy Little Diodes] where the two Logic Analyzers board are shown to be inserted is nowhere to be found… So the info is interesting, but useless. Just a nice movie…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.219024
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/a-single-pixel-camera-without-moving-parts-using-compressed-sensing/
|
A Single-Pixel Camera Without Moving Parts Using Compressed Sensing
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"digital cameras hacks",
"Science"
] |
[
"compressed sensing",
"single pixel camera"
] |
One of the reconstructed images, using all 4,096 matrix patterns as input, next to the original object. (Credit: okooptics, Jon Bumstead)
There’s a strange allure to single-pixel cameras due to the simultaneous simplicity and yet fascinating features that they can offer, such as no set resolution limit. That said, the typical implementations that use some kind of scanning (MEMS) mirror or similar approach suffer from various issues even when you’re photographing a perfectly stationary and static scene due to their complex mechanical nature. Yet there’s a way around this, involving a LED matrix and a single photoresistor, as covered by [Jon Bumstead]
in an article
with
accompanying video
.
As he points out, this isn’t a new concept, with research papers cited that go back many years. At the core lies the signal processing technique called
compressed sensing
, which is incidentally also used with computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. Compressed sensing enables the reconstruction of a signal from a series of samples, by using existing knowledge of the signal.
In the case of this single-pixel camera, the known information is the illumination, which is a
Hadamard matrix
pattern displayed on the 64 x 64 pixel LED matrix, ergo 4,096 possible patterns. A total of 4,096 samples are thus recorded, which are subsequently processed with a Matlab script. As pointed out, even 50% of the maximum possible matrices can suffice here, with appropriately chosen patterns.
While not an incredibly fast method, it is fully solid-state, can be adapted to use other wavelengths, and with some tweaking of the used components probably could cut down the sampling time required.
| 18
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127012",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T02:53:46",
"content": "I would like to have seen him try illuminating 1 pixel at a time, and just assign the photodetector value to the corresponding pixel. That’s less time efficient than using the patterns, but I think it would also have worked.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127046",
"author": "Rémy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T07:21:29",
"content": "Yes , it would have worked but the whole point of compress sensing is to go faster. Imagine you have a 2D ultrasound sensor, you can do a classic imaging scheme to get the result on one sensor then the other or you can find clever ways to sample the space…. Reminds me of my phd time in the 2010’s when it was the hot new thing and everyone ended up sampling in a fourrier space…",
"parent_id": "8127012",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127132",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:02:10",
"content": "I imagine they did this to align everything. Would have been a good control to include but regardless it’s still a cool demonstration of something that’s prodominanly an academic research area",
"parent_id": "8127012",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127140",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:30:38",
"content": "So, like the old flying spot scanners used for some early forms of television.",
"parent_id": "8127012",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127155",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:18:59",
"content": "Of course it would have worked. But it would have taken 64 times longer: What took a few minutes here would take a few hours using that naive approach. That’s the magic of compressed sensing.",
"parent_id": "8127012",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128250",
"author": "okooptics",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T01:28:53",
"content": "I did point by point scanning too, but didn’t show the results. It does work to create an image. Good point, it would have been nice to see it side by side. It looks very similar, but actually less full image artifacts. If there was a measurement error, it would only affect one pixel in the image. The problem was due to my homebuilt setup.",
"parent_id": "8127012",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127028",
"author": "Laurent Jacques",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T05:21:13",
"content": "Great work! Very complete.I believe the single white pixel you get at the top left corner is a reconstruction bias. It should dissapear if you center your measurements. Hadamard patterns form a basis only if the patterns are +-1 and not 0/1 as imposed by the optics. However, one can basically subtract to each measurement one the measurement obtained with a fully white pattern to simulate +-1 patterns.For information, you may already know it but random patterns can work as well (if they are also centered) but then the reconstruction method must be totally different; it becomes non linear and a single sum doesn’t work. In this case, you need to solve an optimization program whose solution is the image. This is explained is certain text books and papers on compressive sensing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128252",
"author": "okooptics",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T01:40:30",
"content": "Thanks for this note! I was wondering about this error. I hope I understand your point on subtracting the fully white pattern. I have this data because it is the first pattern for each dataset, so I will try it out.I learned from another comment that I didn’t use the correct reconstruction algorithm for the random patterns. I need to learn more about this topic. Definitely disappointed about my misunderstanding because I made a point in the video about how many random patterns would be required to reconstruct an image. Do you know if the random patterns can be as efficient as Hadamard matrices in terms of SNR or some image quality metric vs. number of patterns used?",
"parent_id": "8127028",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128396",
"author": "techronomicon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T12:45:36",
"content": "Ahh don’t be disappointed, in fact this discovery should be encouraging!Since you got great results while doing some aspects “wrong”, this suggests you did everything else very well, and now have a clear path to improvement.It’s also worth considering how you got such great results, whilst not perfectly replicating the “conventional” approach, as there could be previously dismissed details which your approach is leveraging unintentionally!If you can characterize these details you could find improvements or alternative/innovative pathways to increase performance, beyond the capabilities of existing solutions!",
"parent_id": "8128252",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127061",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T08:24:42",
"content": "Hadamard matrices have only +1 and -1 values. The LEDs can only provide positive light intensity, so only 1 or 0. So it is not a true Hadamard matrix. He must be using a trick.One optimization I could think of to speed up the measurement would be to find the borders of the image first so you can use a smaller matrix. This can be done by a horizontal and a vertical scan of a line. You will get x min and max and y min and max.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128265",
"author": "okooptics",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:19:30",
"content": "Thanks for this point. Laurent Jacques’ comment was related to this topic. I just set -1 to 0 for the images displayed on the LED matrix.",
"parent_id": "8127061",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127062",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T08:26:23",
"content": "Great work!The LED matrix certainly uses PWM and there’s probably also some delay while the driving signal scans all the LEDs through the matrix. You can clearly see artifacts at 5’22 and 5’33 for example (while there’s probably also the camera’s rolling shutter involved). So i wonder if PWM + scanning delay could interfere with the measurements involved here and lower the reconstruction result quality?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128263",
"author": "okooptics",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:12:10",
"content": "Thanks! you are definitely right about the measurement errors. I had to slow down acquisition, primarily because the synchronization between the pi and arduino wasn’t great. Of course, the photoresistor was slow too.",
"parent_id": "8127062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127152",
"author": "st2000",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:02:37",
"content": "Did not see the slow response time of photo resistors mentioned in the video or comments above. Just so [Jon Bumstead] and people trying this are aware, the response time for a photo resistor (AKA light-dependent resistor (LDR), photo conductive cell or Cadmium Sulfide (CdS) cell) can be as long as one second (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoresistor). This burned me back in a college project years ago. And I’ve never forgotten it. Photo diodes do not suffer from this problem.[Jon Bumstead] has a scope, so it would be easy for him to test the rise and fall response time of the photo resistor he uses. Still, it might be interesting to test if the resolution improves for slower scan times and degrades for faster scan times.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127419",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:48:01",
"content": "That is horrifically slow. Photodiode and their common transimpedence amplifiers aren’t light speed, but compared to >100ms they may as well be",
"parent_id": "8127152",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127677",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:46:52",
"content": "What’s your definition of “light speed”? Even the cheap and ponderously slow jellybean BPW34 photodiode has a risetime of less than 10 nanoseconds, about the time it takes for light to traverse a small room. Photodiodes built for speed (like for fiber communications) are a thousand times faster and are still cheap.Running this compressed-sensing rig at the speed a fast photodiode will permit (microseconds instead of minutes) will run into photon starvation issues: simple the counting statistics. That said, yes, there is ample opportunity for speed increases here, even with the LDR sensor.",
"parent_id": "8127419",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127326",
"author": "Bear Naff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:36:20",
"content": "It’s worth noting that the first video camera was a single-pixel device. This camera was designed to pair with the early electromechanical televisor, a primitive television system that used a single pixel for sensing and display!Both camera and display utilized a spinning disk with holes drilled along a spiral line from the center to the edge. The holes were arranged such that only one of them would pass below a viewing window. On the other side of the disc from the viewing window, there would be a bulb whose brightness was controlled via the incoming radio signal.That signal was generated by a similar combination of bulb using an identical disc to selectively illuminate small parts of a scene with what was called a “flying spot”. Light would reflect off the scene and be captured by a light sensor before that signal was amplified and transmitted. The biggest and most persistent technological hurdle was maintaining perfect synchronization between the disc used by the camera and the displays.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128268",
"author": "okooptics",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T02:34:09",
"content": "I just tried this out. Thanks again for the explanation. I have a couple examples here.https://www.okooptics.com/hadamardbiasSome datasets have multiple white pixels along the first row. Subtracting the white frame measurement seems to always fix the first white pixel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.34225
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/work-eat-sleep-repeat-become-a-human-tamagotchi/
|
Work, Eat, Sleep, Repeat: Become A Human Tamagotchi
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"Games",
"News",
"Toy Hacks"
] |
[
"dystopia",
"led",
"led matrix",
"maslow",
"pixel",
"python",
"raspberry pi",
"tamagotchi"
] |
When [Terence Grover] set out to build a Tamagotchi-inspired simulator,
he didn’t just add a few modern tweaks.
He ditched the entire concept and rebuilt it from the ground up. Forget cute wide-eyed blobby animals and pixel-poop. This Raspberry Pi-powered project ditches nostalgia in favour of brutal realism: inflation, burnout, capitalism, and the occasional existential crisis. Think Sims meets cyberpunk, rendered charmingly in Python on a low-res RGB LED matrix.
Instead of hunger and poop meters, this dystopian pet juggles Maslow’s hierarchy: hunger, rest, safety, social life, esteem, and money. Players make real-life-inspired decisions like working, socialising, and going into education – each affecting the stats in logical (and often unfair) ways. No free lunch here: food requires money, money requires mind-numbing labour, and labour tanks your rest. You can even die of
overwork à la Amazon warehouse
. The UI and animation logic are all hand-coded, and there’s a working buzzer, pixel-perfect sprite movement, and even mini-games to simulate job repetition.
It’s equal parts social commentary and pixel art fever dream. While we have covered
Tamagotchi recreations
some time ago, this one makes you the needy survivor. Want your own dystopia in 64×32? Head over to
[Terence Grover]’s Github
and fork the full open source code. We’ll be watching. The Tamagotchi certainly is.
| 10
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127030",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T05:50:09",
"content": "From the title I expected this to be an AI that gives you the commands that you would give to a Tamagotchi. No more deciding things yourself!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127063",
"author": "Terence",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T08:27:34",
"content": "Thanks for talking about it! Great article <3",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127065",
"author": "jon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T08:34:41",
"content": "The build and the video is good. But the swearing is a bit too much.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127086",
"author": "PinheadBE",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T09:59:33",
"content": "“Black Mirror”, anyone ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127582",
"author": "Kev12",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T09:17:17",
"content": "yes!",
"parent_id": "8127086",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127584",
"author": "Terence Grover",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T09:19:20",
"content": "There’s a reference of it in the video!",
"parent_id": "8127086",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127128",
"author": "John Wade",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:58:20",
"content": "Makes me scared. The github doesn’t look to the latest version…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127583",
"author": "Terence",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T09:18:45",
"content": "The main branch is the simulation to run on a computer. The other branch is where all the goodies are!",
"parent_id": "8127128",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127310",
"author": "J ODell",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:08:20",
"content": "Your “dying of overwork” link says nothing about Amazon, or death from overwork. Unless you are trying to make a joke about viruses dying under UV exposure.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127581",
"author": "Kev12",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T09:15:47",
"content": "very fun video, too short article. More technical would be great to read",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.389942
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/unwinding-an-unusual-slide-rule/
|
Unwinding An Unusual Slide Rule
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"otis king",
"slide rule"
] |
If the
Otis King slide rule
in [Chris Staecker’s] latest video looks a bit familiar, you might be getting up there in age, or you might remember seeing us talk about one
in our collection
. Actually, we have two floating around one of the Hackaday bunkers, and they are quite the conversation piece. You can watch the video below.
The device is often mistaken for a spyglass, but it is really a huge slide rule with the scale wrapped around in a rod-shaped form factor. The video says the scale is the same as a 30-inch scale, but we think it is closer to 66 inches.
Slide rules work using the idea that adding up logarithms is the same as multiplying. For example, for a base 10 logarithm, log(10)=1, log(100)=2, and log(1000)=3. So you can see that 1+2=3. If the scales are printed so that you can easily add and then look up the antilog, you can easily figure out that 10×100=1000.
The black center part acts like a cursor on a conventional slide rule. How does it work? Watch [Chris’] video and you’ll see. We know from experience that one of these in good shape isn’t cheap. Lucky that [Chris] gives us a
3D printed version
so you can make your own.
Another way to reduce the scale is to go
circular
, and you can make one of those, too.
| 15
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126979",
"author": "Tom G",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T22:00:57",
"content": "Ah, the diddy pocket slide rule. Why not get a “full-size” one?The Fuller calculator has a scale that is nominally[1] equivalent to a 1000inch/25.4m scale standard straight slide rule. Over 14000 were made during the 94 year production run, ended when the HP35 put the final nail in slide rules in general.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuller_calculatorThere are always some for sale on fleabay, but look carefully at the condition of the scale; many are OK, some are good, some are unusable.[1] Personally I think that is marketing speak; the scale’s length is 500inch long.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126983",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T22:19:00",
"content": "I used to, and still kind of, went on about how multiplying numbers is pretty trivial with paper and pencil and will give you the exact solution instead of the roughly +/- 1% or so (depending on where on the log scale you are working). I also maintain that adding numbers is only slightly “easier” than multiplying numbers. And if you are at all doing complex computations, then certainly multiplying numbers with paper and pencil should be well within your wheelhouse.So I never really understood how a slide rule is “better” with adding logs instead of just paper and pencil. faster maybe, but with the trade off of uncertainty that is most likely fine anyway. And at least in my scientific career, “exact” solutions were way more critical than rapid estimates. Almost nothing was time-sensitive that the extra couple minutes to do computations on paper was any kind of downside..UNTIL I started using the slide rule for trig functions! The it is waaaayyyy faster then using sine tables and stuff. Plus the ability to chain calculations together became super handy. I mean, it is all academic anyway these days but I could easily buy that “back in the day” slide rules were super rad. Not at all for simple arithmetic but when you start dealing with engineering functions, trig functions and actually working with logs (ln or base 10.. doesn’t matter) themselves instead of as a proxy for simple multiplication, they are king.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127070",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T08:49:33",
"content": "Pencil and paper for exact results are fine…except when taking an hour-long chemistry exam with 30 problems…And in all my chemistry courses as well as grad school research I recall only one instance where more than four significant figures were needed. Three sig figs was far more common. The approximate answer given by a slide rule was ordinarily sufficient.",
"parent_id": "8126983",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127789",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:18:36",
"content": "Especially for multiple-choice exams!",
"parent_id": "8127070",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127171",
"author": "Fungus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:53:23",
"content": "More like 0.5% with a 10″ slide rule.Plus you can divide, do square roots, trigonometry, etc., and calculate powers if you have a log-log rule.",
"parent_id": "8126983",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127409",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:18:10",
"content": "On the C and D scales of a 10″ rule, there’s no reason you shouldn’t always be able to get 0.1%. Otherwise, it does depend partly on the slide rule, and of course on which scale we’re talking about, and which end of the scale. It seems like slide-rule manufacturers would have tried to make their products accurate enough that the only limitation would be a good user’s close-up vision and judgement of proportion, for example that the cursor is 11/20ths (55%) of the way to the next tiny mark. Unfortunately, I’ve been disappointed more than once. The most recent is a Concise model 300 circular slide rule I got recently just for fun, since I’ve never had, or even personally seen, a circular one; but when you line up the 1’s on the C and D scales, it’s very visibly off at the other side of the circle, especially in the 2.5 to 3 area, and the 3.000 on the C scale points at about 3.003 on the D scale, as you can see in the last picture of it on my slide-rules page athttp://wilsonminesco.com/SlideRules/SlideRules.html.At the left end of the LL1 scale, you should be able to get a lot more than 2-3 digits, like 1.01068. That’s not to say the last digit will necessarily be correct; but it’ll be more accurate than if you didn’t try at all.There is a way to microadjust, with extreme accuracy, not just the cursor, but the slide also, a vernier-like way I’ve never seen anyone do in any of the online instructional videos. I come up short trying to describe it in text. I guess I should make my own video, or at least a sharp still photo.",
"parent_id": "8127171",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127782",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:00:24",
"content": "The real challenge with circular slide rules is getting the center points for all of the scales to coincide with the mechanical pivot, which is where most of the error comes in. A linear rule only has to be adjusted on one axis, but that second axis on a circular ‘rule’ is the bastard.",
"parent_id": "8127409",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127082",
"author": "Paul McGuinness",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T09:40:11",
"content": "I have one of these I picked up on eBay years ago… cool retro gadget.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127139",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:20:50",
"content": "Sorry, can’t post while drooling …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127174",
"author": "Fungus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:05:08",
"content": "I’ve got a couple. The thing about the Otis King is … it’s not accurate. The scales were drawn by hand and they’re a bit off, making the extra length moot.It was a good idea though, and a cool gadget.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127770",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:42:15",
"content": "867 by 309. Why does that sound familiar?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8131357",
"author": "Tom Savage",
"timestamp": "2025-05-23T01:36:47",
"content": "That’s Jenny’s number.",
"parent_id": "8127770",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127785",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:14:41",
"content": "When comparing geometries for slide rules, it’s a tradeoff of volume vs. area vs. maximum dimension (length), where excess volume means bulk, excess area means you can’t put it in a given pocket even by letting it stick out the top, and excess length means you can’t put it in your backpack, lunchbox, or whatever fixed-size container you prefer. The cylindrical rule is the winner for length, and pretty good for area, but it sucks for volume (think about the tradeoffs between cylindrical lithium-ion 18650 cells and flat lithium-polymers). Maybe this could be mitigated by making the core accessible for storing small items and pencils. The circular (disc) does well on volume and good for length, but is poor in area, with most of the middle area being unusable. The straight rule has low volume and okay area, but the worst length. When it comes to accuracy, with only one degree of freedom you can’t beat a straight rule for repeatability and accuracy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127820",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:19:39",
"content": "I can’t help but be reminded of the Hewlett-Packard frequency meters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_meter) that we used for precisely determining the frequencies of microwave oscillators, where we didn’t have a prescaler/counter that could handle them. These were transparent cylindrical devices with input and output coaxial or waveguide connectors. Signal connects to input, output goes to power meter. Twist the top of the cylinder, which had a helical scale with an effective length of several meters, and look for a dip on the power meter.Heck, we even had a procedure for plotting out the spectrum of a pulsed magnetron, by plotting the frequency and depth of each dip, which I did only one time, ever. When you’re looking for dips that are about 500 kHz apart on a 2700 MHz maggie, you start to appreciate that kind of precision.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128879",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T19:45:56",
"content": "Now for a sundial to go with it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMrhNv0qj8ghttps://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1068443",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.445623
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/your-own-core-rope-memory/
|
Your Own Core Rope Memory
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"core memory",
"Core rope memory",
"magnetics",
"memory"
] |
If you want read-only memory today, you might be tempted to use flash memory or, if you want old-school, maybe an EPROM. But there was a time when that wasn’t feasible. [Igor Brichkov] shows us how to
make a core rope memory
using a set of ferrite cores and wire. This was famously used in early UNIVAC computers and the Apollo guidance computer. You can see how it works in the video below.
While rope memory superficially resembles core memory, the principle of operation is different. In core memory, the core’s magnetization is what determines any given bit. For rope memory, the cores are more like a sensing element. A set wire tries to flip the polarity of all cores. An inhibit signal stops that from happening except on the cores you want to read. Finally, a sense wire weaves through the cores and detects a blip when a core changes polarity. The second video, below, is an old MIT video that explains how it works (about 20 minutes in).
Why not just use core memory? Density. These memories could store much more data than a core memory system in the same volume. Of course, you could write to core memory, too, but that’s not always a requirement.
We’ve seen a resurgence of
core rope projects
lately. Regular
old core
is fun, too.
| 14
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127843",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:05:04",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/2022/01/13/soviet-era-auto-dialler-uses-magnetic-rope-core-memory/Probably the best use that existed in civil applications you could actually buy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127875",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T22:31:34",
"content": "Core rope memory strikes me as the most absurd ideas for how to make memory as well as the most brilliant. I say this because of the shear simplicity of it. All you really need is some common materials and you suddenly have the ability to store data. Sure, it’s not power efficient or even compact but it works.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127881",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T23:31:31",
"content": "Mercury delay line memory is crazier to me because it’s literally just a tube full of mercury that looks like a mini nuclear reactor that somehow stores bits",
"parent_id": "8127875",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127928",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:31:16",
"content": "Not magic but ripples",
"parent_id": "8127881",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127970",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T07:30:32",
"content": "To store information, you can also use self-holding relays instead.If you have three relays, a simple pulse toggle flip-flop can be built.Not efficient, but useful in a post-apocalyptic world. :)Primitive example:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5k9SVVx2wcROM memory can be made using diode matrices, as well, not just core memory.A diode matrix also keeps information when there’s high radiation or strong energy fields.Boards with diode matrices are large, but if you have space it’s not a problem.",
"parent_id": "8127875",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128048",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T13:50:08",
"content": "“Sure, it’s not power efficient or even compact but it works.”The cores you see here are fairly large but from the old nasa videos they used a much smaller core. Not as small as core memory but closer to that than used here.It isn’t compact compared to the not yet invented ICs, it is far more compact than using transistors. Even todays TO-92 packages are larger.Also don’t forget that the “rope” part of rope memory is due to not requiring any pcb or 2d mounting, the cores end up spaced out over the wire bundles, and can be wrapped or bunched up to fit in a smaller 3d space.",
"parent_id": "8127875",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128113",
"author": "fuzzyfuzzyfungus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:02:13",
"content": "I’d be interested to know just how compact it could be made; were someone to put modern techniques to work.The requirements of hard drives and tape mean that there’s a lot of expertise in thin films with tailored magnetic properties; and the IC people know how to put down very, very, detailed metal and insulator layers. I suspect that mixing those two processes, at very least, wouldn’t be cost effective vs. mask ROM or flash; and it would quite possibly be less dense or more power hungry even in principle; but it seems like you would definitely be able to get a massive increase in density vs. conventionally assembled core rope memory.",
"parent_id": "8127875",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127887",
"author": "Big D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T23:43:55",
"content": "Love the background ambience of monitoring HAM",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127924",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:19:48",
"content": "When I was a teenager in Minneapolis, Control Data was paying people (often mothers looking for extra income) to thread wires through core memory in their own garages. I eventually ended up working as an component engineer for Collins Radio, and one of the components I was responsible for was the very tiny cores Collins was putting into thin film hybrid circuits for Art Collins’ attempt at making computers (an obsession that eventually bankrupted the company). I still have a few of those cores after 55 years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128014",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:05:59",
"content": "I picked up an unusual RTTY(?) Morse code converter console at a hamfest a couple of years ago. It has an 8 bit wide core rope memory in it. I posted some pictures of it on VCfed at the time:https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/what-is-this-post-photos-of-mystery-items-here-vintage-computers-only.58631/post-1285480",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128161",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T19:49:25",
"content": "Stranger even that core ROM, I think, is printed circuit board ROM, made famous in the HP 9100 series,http://www.hp9825.com/html/the_hp_9100_rom.htmlA ROM made entirely of printed copper traces, no cores or diodes involved.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128221",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T22:47:22",
"content": "thanks for posting this. I have been looking for something similar for months in order to play with making a cheaper mechanical keyboard without diodes but without sacrificing performance.",
"parent_id": "8128161",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8189703",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2025-10-08T21:31:49",
"content": "Hello! I’m trying to replicate the single coil system you’ve demonstrated here. I’ve been able to build the circuit and know the oscillator is working as I can see the square wave on a scope just like yours. But when I thread a jumper through the coil and connect it to the scope I’m not seeing any signal on channel 2 like yours at 3:00 (it’s currently just noise). Any ideas or information you have on why this may be happening would be greatly appreciated. (Also do you have a circuit diagram or parts list?)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8189704",
"author": "Kay",
"timestamp": "2025-10-08T21:34:11",
"content": "Hello! I’m trying to replicate the single coil system you’ve demonstrated here. I’ve been able to build the circuit and know the oscillator is working as I can see the square wave on a scope just like yours. But when I thread a jumper through the coil and connect it to the scope I’m not seeing any signal on channel 2 like yours at 3:00 (it’s currently just noise). Any ideas or information you have on why this may be happening would be greatly appreciated. (Also do you have a circuit diagram or parts list?)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.494765
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/2025-pet-hacks-contest-automatic-treat-dispenser-makes-kitty-work-for-it/
|
2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Automatic Treat Dispenser Makes Kitty Work For It
|
Tyler August
|
[
"contests",
"home hacks"
] |
[
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"cat wheel",
"continuous rotation servo",
"ESP32 wroom",
"treat dispenser"
] |
Treat dispensers are old hat around here, but what if kitty doesn’t need the extra calories — and actually needs to drop some pounds? [MethodicalMaker] decided to
link the treat dispenser to a cat wheel, and reward kitty for healthy behaviors
. The dispenser can be programmed to make the cat run long enough to burn the calories of its treat. Over time, kitty can be trained to run longer between treats to really melt off the pounds.
The wheel itself is an off the shelf model called “One Fast Cat”; apparently these are quite cheap second hand as most cats don’t really see the point in exercise. [MethodicalMaker] glued evenly-spaced magnets along the rim in order to track the rotation with a hall effect sensor. A microcontroller is watching said sensor, and is programmed to release the treats after counting off a set number of revolutions. Control over the running distance and manual treat extrusion is via web portal, but the networking code had difficulty on the Arduino R4 [MethodicalMaker] started with, so he switched to an ESP32 to get it working.
The real interesting part of this project is the physical design of the treat dispenser: it uses a double-auger setup to precisely control treat release. The first auger lives inside a hopper that holds a great many treats, but it tended to over-dispense so [MethodicalMaker] methodically made a second auger that sits beneath the hopper. The handful of treats extruded by the first auger are dispensed individually by the second auger, aided by a photosensor inside the exit chute to count treats. This also lets the machine signal when it needs refilling. For precise control, continuous servos are used to drive the augers. Aside from the electronics, everything is 3D printed; the
STLs are on Printables
, and the
code is on GitHub
.
If you don’t have a cat wheel,
DIY is an option
. If you don’t have a cat, we’ve also
highlighted dog treat dispensers
. If you don’t have either, check with your local animal shelter; we bet good money there are oodles ready to adopt in your town, and then you’ll have an excuse to
enter one of your projects into our ongoing Pet Hacks Contest
.
| 10
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127810",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:05:31",
"content": "Make it human sized and dispense donuts and you have the next new fitness fad.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127852",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:32:53",
"content": "You would need to jog at least 20 minutes to get a donut. It might be easier to start with a smaller treat– timbits maybe? (That’s doughnut holes for you non-Canucks out there.)",
"parent_id": "8127810",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127849",
"author": "Puff Kitty",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:25:28",
"content": "Keep the treats principle, but use the lazy cat’s energy to recharge a USB bank. Let’s use cats to recharge our phones!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127962",
"author": "Anon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T06:54:55",
"content": "Needs refilled? Can we please stop it with this grammatical nonsense? Is it too much to ask a writer to use proper English?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128479",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T16:41:52",
"content": "We can stop! We did stop. We fixed it.",
"parent_id": "8127962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127980",
"author": "Jelle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T08:07:49",
"content": "I wonder if it would work better if the timing of treat-dispensing became more random after the cats have learned it? And/or sound a bell (or other nice sound) before dispensing a treat. Do it long enough and the bell becomes the reward itself.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128016",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:10:32",
"content": "“most cats don’t really see the point of exercise”. Quite. The exercise my cat gets is either pouncing on a string I pull or running around for no apparent reason. I’ve always been a bit doubtful about these cat-sized hamster wheels.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128050",
"author": "Joxua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T13:57:04",
"content": "Please make this for humans and plug it into the electrical grid.End obesity and produce electricity.Save the world",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128168",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T20:23:00",
"content": "Cats ARE automatic dog treat dispensers.Double yum!Still warm.Dogs get so happy they find their human and give them a big sloppy kiss.Also note bright red, cheap, super transfer lipstick on cats butthole experiment.You’ll never un-see all the places your cat’s bunghole touches in one day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128233",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T23:33:47",
"content": "That butthole lipstick experiment sounds like some the IgNobel prize committee would be interested in.",
"parent_id": "8128168",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,547.547714
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/rtems-statement-deepens-libogc-license-controversy/
|
RTEMS Statement Deepens Libogc License Controversy
|
Tom Nardi
|
[
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Nintendo Wii Hacks",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"gamecube",
"homebrew",
"libogc",
"nintendo",
"RTEMS",
"software license",
"wii"
] |
Earlier this month
we covered the brewing controversy over libogc
, the community-developed C library that functions as the backbone for GameCube and Wii homebrew software. Questions about how much of the library was based on leaked information from Nintendo had been circulating for decades, but the more recent accusations that libogc included code from other open source projects without proper attribution brought the debate to a head — ultimately leading Wii Homebrew Channel developer Hector Martin to archive the popular project and use its README as a central point to collect evidence against libogc and its developers.
At the time, most of the claims had to do with code being taken from the Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) project. Martin and others in the community had performed their own investigations, and found some striking similarities between the two codebases. A developer familiar with both projects went so far as to say that as much as half the code in libogc was actually lifted from RTEMS and obfuscated so as to appear as original work.
While some of these claims included compelling evidence, they were still nothing more than accusations. For their part, the libogc team denied any wrongdoing. Contributors to the project explained that any resemblance between libogc code and that of either leaked Nintendo libraries or other open source projects was merely superficial, and the unavoidable result of developing for a constrained system such as a game console.
But that all changed on May 6th, when the
RTEMS team released an official statement on the subject
. It turns out that they had been following the situation for some time, and had conducted their own audit of the libogc code. Their determination was that not only had RTEMS code been used without attribution, but that it appeared at least some code had also been copied verbatim from the Linux kernel — making the license dispute (and its solution) far more complex.
Permissive vs Restrictive
At first glance, this all might seem like something of a non-issue. After all, libogc, RTEMS, and the Linux kernel are all open source projects. Surely, the point of releasing these projects as open source in the first place was to facilitate and even encourage the sharing of source code. In a sense, this could be looked at as the system working as intended.
Indeed, it’s not the reuse of code that’s really the issue here. The problem stems from the licenses by which the respective projects have made their source code available, and more specifically, how well those licenses integrate with each other.
When the complaint was that libogc was using large swaths of code from RTEMS, the path towards compliance was simple as latter project was released under what’s known as a permissive license, namely, the
2-Clause BSD License
. As the name implies, permissive licenses such as this give the user broad rights on how they can reuse the code
For example, one could take BSD-licensed code, merge it as-is into a closed source project, and sell the resulting software for profit without violating the license. All the original project asks in return is that you give proper attribution. In this case, that means acknowledging you used code from said project in the documentation, and including a copy of the license.
Returning to libogc, the issue at hand could be resolved with a single commit to the project’s GitHub repository. A simple notice that the project used code from RTEMS and a copy of the BSD license is all it would take to satisfy the requirements. That the libogc developers will not make even such a simple concession in the face of overwhelming evidence that they did indeed reuse code is frankly indefensible; a sentiment expressed in the statement from the RTEMS developers:
RTEMS is open source and this means RTEMS can be copied and used as long as the license conditions are met and copyright is maintained. We are at a loss why there has been removal of license details and copyright and a general disregard to apply appropriate attributions. As a result the RTEMS license and copyright holders reserve their rights in relation to the copying of RTEMS code.
That being said, the revelation that libogc would appear to include code from the Linux kernel complicates matters considerably. Unlike RTEMS, Linux is licensed under the GPL v2 — a license that is not only far more restrictive, but viral in nature.
The Case for Kernel Code
It’s that viral aspect of the license that promises to give libogc the most trouble. If they did indeed use code from the Linux kernel, that would mean there are only two solutions. Either the offending code must be removed, or the entire project will need to be re-licensed under the GPL v2.
For a codebase as old as libogc, changing the license would be a massive undertaking, as every person who’s added code to the project would have to agree to have their individual contribution re-licensed. The libogc repository lists dozens of contributors, and that’s only since project was added to GitHub. As there appears to be no
CREDITS
file that lists the contributions before the advent of Git, there may be no way to know at this point how many contributors there actually are and what they added.
So the question of whether or not libogc uses Linux code is going to be critical to determining how the project moves forward. The RTEMS statement doesn’t go into great detail about this claim, simply stating that the “spinlock implementation is copied directly from Linux circa 2.4 or 2.6 release series.” Sure enough, when comparing the file
spinlock.h
file from the latest version of libogc to
linux-2.6.0/include/asm-ppc/spinlock.h
there are indeed functions which are nearly identical:
That said, this may not be as damning as it seems. To play Devil’s advocate, one could argue that the terse nature of assembly code means that a certain level of similarity is unavoidable between the two implementations. Of course, convention can only get you so far. It’s one thing to independently arrive at the same assembly code, but this explanation becomes harder to believe when you consider the identical variable names and comments.
What’s Next?
As of this writing, the libogc project has not made an official statement on the situation. We reached out to maintainer Dave [WinterMute] Murphy before going to press with this article, but he declined to comment, saying that he first needed to confer with the original developer of the library, Michael [shagkur] Wiedenbauer.
At the same time, our contacts within the RTEMS project have indicated they believe they have sufficient evidence to have libogc removed from GitHub if necessary. However, they’re understandingly hesitant to disrupt the Wii homebrew community over an issue that could ultimately be resolved with a simple discussion. While the potential use of Linux code does add a considerable wrinkle to the overall situation, if the libogc project would at least acknowledge the use of RTEMS code and properly attribute it after all these years, it would at least be a step in the right direction.
We’ll continue to keep an eye on the situation, and bring you updates as we have them. In the meantime, we think the final line of the RTEMS statement nicely summarizes the biggest takeaway from this whole mess:
Our goal now is to provide education on how the behavior engaged in by the devkitPro/libOGC project is a very good example of what
not
to do.
| 41
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127791",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:21:39",
"content": "Relicensing libogc from permissive license to GPL shouldn’t be that much of a trouble. It may be more difficult for projects depending on it.The similarity to linux 2.4.10 spinlock.h is almost 100%. And because the spinlock type signatures are linux-specific, it is unlikely that code is from any other source.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127802",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:49:33",
"content": "“Relicensing libogc from permissive license to GPL shouldn’t be that much of a trouble.”Uh… there’s no guarantee it’s evenpossible? You literally have to get permission from everyone who contributed. They gave the code initially under the original license, you can’t just decide as a non-entity ‘group’ of active users to change it.Way better off finding replacements for infringing files that can be compatibly-licensed. Still a mess.",
"parent_id": "8127791",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127831",
"author": "Tom Nardi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:40:51",
"content": "Between the lack of contributor history that would make re-licensing all but impossible and the potential that there’s even more “borrowed” code hiding (be it from Nintendo or other open source projects), it may well be that libogc is tainted beyond the point of repair.At the same time, I don’t know that there’s the will out there to create a new library for the Wii (let alone the GameCube). Can’t say I’m overly optimistic that this story has a happy ending for the community.",
"parent_id": "8127802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130556",
"author": "Astoria",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T21:42:02",
"content": "Several members of the Dreamcast homebrew community are currently working on porting KallistiOS to the Gamecube. Early work is promising so far.There’s something funny about the Dreamcast bailing out the Gamecube.",
"parent_id": "8127831",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128099",
"author": "Dylan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:22:00",
"content": "They gave the code initially under the original licenseStolethe code",
"parent_id": "8127802",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127883",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T23:38:46",
"content": "came here to say this. it’s likely that most of the codebase could remain dual-licenced GPLv2 and libogc-licence, while the bits from linux and perhaps the stuff closely tied to it could be GPLv2-only.“relicencing” is kind a misnomer, as you CANNOT remove the licence terms someone committed code under. ever. if they’re permissive enough though, you could distribute it under another licence as well, like the GPL. plenty of code in the linux code us under a mix of licences in addition to the GPLv2.",
"parent_id": "8127791",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127921",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T02:50:42",
"content": "You absolutely can remove the license terms someone committed coder under,if they individually agree to do so. If you cannot get in touch with a particular contributor or they refuse, you remove their code, which can admittedly be an un-fun thing to have to do.But this hand-wringing about how relicensing libogc would be too onerous given “dozens” of contributors and the lack of an explicitCREDITSfile is patently ridiculous.MAME existed as a project for 18 years and hadhundredsof contributors by the time it was decided, in 2015, that the project needed a more permissive license. During those 18 years, it was released under a semi-custom license which purported to prohibit commercial use of the codebase.After realizing that this did not deter bootleggers, and merely prohibited good-faith organizations from using its code, there was a concerted push to locate, contact, and solicit permission from every single person who had ever contributed code to the project. This was achieved through a combination of SVN and Git logs as well as release notes dating back across that entire time.Ultimately, all but two individuals were able to be contacted, and everyone who was able to be contacted understood reason, and agreed to relicense under either 3-clause BSD, GPLv2, or LGPLv2+.Point blank, if the libogc teamwantedto relicense, theycould, but theywon’t, as it wouldn’t play well with [WinterMute]’s desire to portray themself and the rest of the libogc team as poor, set-upon victims.",
"parent_id": "8127883",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128671",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T04:58:32",
"content": "Why are you so obsessed with tracking down individual contributors? It’s a colossal pain in the ass and of zero benefit.This project is already around 25 years old and the stolen linux code could have contributors that go back as far as the early 90’s. There’s even a good chance the latter will say no, since they would’ve been explicitly contributing to a copyleft project (linux) and not a nominally permissive one (libogc).Regardless, tracking everyone down would be an absolute pain no matter what, which is why it’s unbelievably rare in the open source world. In this case it’s a total waste of time when it’s much easier and perfectly acceptable to just go GPLv2(+ libogc_licence).That is, unless you’re building a commercial product on top of libogc that relies on the current licence structure, hmmmm?",
"parent_id": "8127921",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129592",
"author": "PerniciousSnit",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T14:37:26",
"content": "They’re obsessed with tracking down contributors because, absent a copyright assignment to the project by the original author, the copyright remains with the original author.Short of waiting many decades, or getting a law passed that allows copyrights to be taken away from their current owners you’re SOL.It vexes me that you think that it being tedious to reach the original copyright holders should, or would, get you around the legal part of the problem and allow you to usurp the original authors’ rights.Wishing it was different won’t help. Willful copyright violation is the most expensive kind. That’s what your advocating.",
"parent_id": "8128671",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127951",
"author": "Daevangelion",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T06:05:10",
"content": "the spinlock code is apparently dead weight according to someone tasked with an audit, and can be removed, issue for existing releases might be a problem if it was linked into a binary, although assuming it wasn’t actually used, that can be fixed by a bit of ELF surgery to remove the unused assembly objects",
"parent_id": "8127791",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128673",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T05:00:23",
"content": "honestly, people should just learn to recompile their binaries. keep your tool chain up to date and functional, hell run a CI for crying out loud.",
"parent_id": "8127951",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127837",
"author": "nothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:52:52",
"content": "The way things are becoming, it would be tempting to release open projects under a “pirate” license. You know, “you can steal this code however you want whatever, but trying to copywrite it or re-license it results in futility because we or anyone else will steal it again”. And make it viral too: anything it’s attached to or incorporated in is also fair game. If only that were possible…Open source is already being stolen/gutted by large corporations, and infighting like licensing compatibilities will hasten its death.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127884",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T23:40:55",
"content": "You can’t apply any terms to code that isn’t copyrighted. A creative lawyer could say that, since you’re saying people can’t apply copyright to the code, if that includes yourself as well you disclaim all copyrights to the code and thus cannot enforce any terms on anyone else at all.",
"parent_id": "8127837",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127904",
"author": "Not Nintendo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T01:00:05",
"content": "Says who?Nice try diddy…",
"parent_id": "8127884",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128070",
"author": "Blue Footed Booby",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:56:02",
"content": "Code is copyrighted automatically, by virtue of having been written. You don’t have to file anything. That lawyer would be lying.",
"parent_id": "8127884",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128674",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T05:01:19",
"content": "You can disclaim what ever you want, depending on how you do it. See the Unlicence.",
"parent_id": "8128070",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128196",
"author": "pigster6",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:50:26",
"content": "a) this is jurisdiction specificb) most countries (probably not all, IDK) have default protection for creative work. That default is that all creative work (code is that) is automatically protected to full extent meaning if you don’t grant explicit rights to others, by for example attaching a license, than others simply have no rights. This means that if you find some code on the internet without a license and without any other explicit statement from the author about what is allowed, you simply can’t use that code (or any other creative work). That is why it is so important to always attach a license to the code you publish on the internet if you want it to be useful to others.Also there is this deep rabbit hole with public domain concept and problems it creates if specified explicitly. TLDR; Always use a license.",
"parent_id": "8127884",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127901",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T00:47:16",
"content": "What you are describing is, effectively, a “copyleft” license.They are not uncommon in open source already.The major “drawback” is that if you use a copyleft license, there is roughly zero chance your stuff will be used commercially",
"parent_id": "8127837",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128675",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T05:02:02",
"content": "tbh, who the hell is still trying to sell commercial software for the wii",
"parent_id": "8127901",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128101",
"author": "Dylan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:23:55",
"content": "Isn’t that basically what GPL and other copy-left licenses are?Modify, view, and redistribute all you want, just don’t put your modifications behind closed doors?",
"parent_id": "8127837",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127841",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:00:03",
"content": "My question is, how long until Hackaday gets a takedown notice for the cover art. It’s a cool illustration from a clearly talented artist, but Nintendo is notoriously litigious. That and Nintendo likes to shut down even the discussions around homebrew software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127851",
"author": "Ray Knight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:32:24",
"content": "The cover art is clearly within the Fair Use doctrine “that allows the limited use of copyrighted material without permission for specific purposes like criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research”.",
"parent_id": "8127841",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128619",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T23:56:16",
"content": "Fair use protections only apply to individuals and organizations that can afford to defend themselves in court.Being in the right doesn’t matter — most people can’t survive the process of being sued, so to change your behavior an organization like Nintendo doesn’t have to threaten towina lawsuit, they just have to threaten to bring one.",
"parent_id": "8127851",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127869",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T21:36:42",
"content": "Literally, LITERALLY everyone involved in this weird internecine tussle has the same goal: to unlock the power of computing hardware for the people who want to use it. Putting that goal at risk in the service of intellectual property protection is as absurd as it is graceless.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127886",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T23:43:30",
"content": "Except nintendo. :PBut if you thing this is insane, you should see all the times people have gotten their underwear in a twist over copyleft licences that are mutually incompatible but try to achieve the same goals. The original MPL licence(s) come to mind, as well as a well known example involving a certain licence derived from it.",
"parent_id": "8127869",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127888",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T23:44:05",
"content": "yeah its called moderation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127893",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T00:03:46",
"content": "seems more like exuberance to me",
"parent_id": "8127888",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128007",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T10:22:26",
"content": "this explanation becomes harder to believe when you consider the identical variable names and comments.We are speaking of Linux code here, there aren’t any stuff called comment in that code. And the variable name are 2 letters long. Hard to justify copyright infringement if you choose to call your iterator “i” or your read write lock “rw”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128031",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:54:25",
"content": "Anybody have a PPC developers manual around? Decent chance half the code is directly from such a manual.If the manual outlines how to do various types of locking and provided a substantial sequence of the machine instructions the chances of the code being otherwise copyrightable by anyone else is negligible. And it wouldn’t be particularly unusual since proper locking protocols require very specific instructions and sequencing, usually provided by the manufacturer who designed the CPU.(This also makes it particularly difficult to be under copyright. If there’s really only 1 correct way to do it, and only a few ways to express it, the copyrightability of that code goes down significantly.)Do I think the project was sloppy ? Absolutely.",
"parent_id": "8128007",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128061",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:38:50",
"content": "Maybe ChatGPT wrote it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128097",
"author": "Mr. Hottake",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:15:27",
"content": "When software was determined to be covered under copyright law with the status of literary works while avoiding the doctrine of first sale I laughed and thought it wouldn’t last a year……Now here we are.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128141",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T18:51:25",
"content": "Who was that guy who made a generative algorithm that basically wrote a very veeery long melody which included essentially all imaginable combinations of tones, then released it to public domain so that people couldn’t sue each other over riffs or hooks or melodies any longer?I wonder what the limits of such a technique are. Obviously a lot of processing and memory is involved. Would you be able to do it to a programming language? If not, how much better hardware do we need before we can?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128432",
"author": "Coda Highland",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:50:07",
"content": "Unfortunately, that technique doesn’t work for copyright, for several reasons. Copyright applies to creative works, and it protects how the work was intended to be used. A list of every possible combination of notes is not creative; it’s exhaustive. The organization of how all of the pieces of that omni-melody fit together could maybe have qualified, but the individual pieces don’t establish prior art. This means it doesn’t do anything to make future melodies uncopyrightable. What that project did was to draw attention to the absurdity of the situation with lawsuits like the “Flame” melody as social commentary.",
"parent_id": "8128141",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128285",
"author": "none ra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T03:40:41",
"content": "So pointless. All this over software self-styled hack software. Its unofficial software putting hardware to use outside the manufacturers wishes. Nintendo being infamaous for their general dislike of this kind of thing in the first place. Yet people have some expectation that they are going to be aware and care about some FOSS licenses which are rarely enfoced?Also people are going to have a royal fit over whats coming with the now years of ‘vibe coding’ being practiced. Trying to pretend that FOSS software will be able to police that avalanche is foolish. It comes down to the same thing it always has.. if you want to make FOSS software .. make it and stop worrying about trying to control whats done with it because you can’t. If you want to control it, keep it closed source and keep that source secure.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128455",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T14:41:01",
"content": "i wish the mods would tell us why so many iterations of this sort of comment has been deleted on this article. i don’t care about free speech but i want to understand what’s going on here. itlookslike a conscious choice to censor speech by content, as if we are not allowed to admit verbally that license violation is a part of life. is that really what’s happening???or is a third party able to achieve that effect on here by reporting comments?it’s just helpful to the community to know the rules",
"parent_id": "8128285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128676",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T05:04:11",
"content": "Probably because saying nintendo won’t enforce their licences is dangerously close to advocating for piracy, with a very litigious company in the mix.",
"parent_id": "8128455",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128681",
"author": "Tom Nardi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T05:46:55",
"content": "Comments that suggest we shouldn’t be concerned with projects that violate open source licenses because:Licenses are too hard to figure outOther people/companies are doing itBro, I’m just vibin over hereAre idiotic and add nothing to the discussion. I would have deleted this one too had I seen it earlier.I don’t care who creates the software, or for what purpose — if you use somebody else’s code and can’t be bothered to follow the rules of the license (to say nothing of willfully disregarding said license and trying to cover up the fact you used their code) we are going to call you out on it.",
"parent_id": "8128455",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128791",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T13:14:30",
"content": "i disagree, but the point is: until now you had not called it out, but rather silently deleted it. it’s an awful approach to discourse. to condemn piracy is one thing, but to condemn admitting that people who want to unlock their wii are probably not concerned with licensing is a bizarre choice.anyways, thanks for clarifying.",
"parent_id": "8128681",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128924",
"author": "josh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T00:07:27",
"content": "you can include both rtems libogc and linux code together its just the final binary will be gplv2",
"parent_id": "8128681",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128932",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T00:39:12",
"content": "Capitalist, socialist, or anarchist, sooner or later you are forced to respect your fellow human being.",
"parent_id": "8128681",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8130243",
"author": "ProphetZarquon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T04:18:44",
"content": "There’s a great way to avoid these problems:Attribution only. Attribution always.Intellectual “property” restriction is immoral.Reject exclusivity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.632514
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/raduga-the-retro-computer-from-behind-the-curtain/
|
RADUGA: The Retro Computer From Behind The Curtain
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"USSR",
"z80"
] |
When [Kasyan] was six years old, he saw a
RADUGA computer
, a Russian unit from the 1990s, and it sparked his imagination. He has one now that is a little beat up, but we feel like he sees it through his six-year-old eyes as a shiny new computer. The computer, which you can see in the video below, was a clone of the Spectrum 48K.
The box is somewhat klunky-looking, and inside is also a bit strange. The power supply is a — for the time — state-of-the-art switching power supply. Since it wasn’t in good shape, he decided to replace it with a more modern supply.
The main board was also not in good shape. A Zilog CPU is on a large PCB with suspicious-looking capacitors. The mechanical keyboard is nothing more than a array of buttons, and wouldn’t excite today’s mechanical key enthusiast.
The computer isn’t working yet. [Kasyan] is looking for someone who has the exact schematic, although he’s found a similar one and identified at least some of the problems on the board.
The USSR did a lot of
work with early computing
, but we don’t hear as much about it. That’s surprising, as they had a very active
home computer scene
.
| 7
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127740",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:26:02",
"content": "Wonderful machine! 😃💙These computer designs have something retro futuristic to them, I think.The only thing I don’t really understand why they did bother to support color.I mean, IBM’s CGA and the ZX Spectrum both look most eyefriendly in their hi-res modes and in monochrome.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127788",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:16:11",
"content": "Schematic is here:https://hww.github.io/rainbow_computer/storyboard/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127807",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:03:06",
"content": "I love things like this about Iron Curtain computers, we don’t hear much about them but they are fascinating.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127808",
"author": "Juris Perkons",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:04:41",
"content": "Everyone who was in to diy electronics at that time and place(s), everyone was making “Speccy” clones. Including me. From simple 48K ones with RGB+sync output (we were hacking in to a middle of schematics of soviet color TVs for that) to 128K versions, multi-boot eeproms, floppy disc drives and AY sound chips.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127868",
"author": "Sergey Kiselev",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T21:35:27",
"content": "During late 1980 and early 1990 there was a crazy demand for home computers in the Soviet Union:Earlier in 1980’s a few DIY designs were published – starting with Micro-80 (“Radio” magazine, 1983), Radio-86RK (“Radio” magazine, 1986), Specialist (“Modelist-Constructor” magazine, 1987), UT-88 (“Junior technician” magazine supplement “for crafty hands” or something like that, 1988). All of these computers were based on a soviet 8080 clone – KR580VM80A CPU.Industry also started to catch up, and manufactured a few computers roughly based on Radio-86RK design, as well as Electronika BK-0010 computer, which had a PDP-11 compatible CPUs. The main disadvantage of all these computers was pretty simple – they lacked software, most importantly – games. So it wasn’t long that a few people figured how to clone ZX Spectrum, partially implementing the ULA functionality using discrete logic, and hacking the firmware (BASIC) and the games to work with the modified hardware. Several such ZX Spectrum derived designs appeared, and there assembled by amateurs who could find the components, and eventually by cooperatives, small businesses, and even large defense industry factories.The “home computer scene”, you’re referring to basically contained of the systems listed above, with perhaps some lucky individuals having MSX-compatible computers (imported to Russia’s far east mostly from Japan), PC compatibles (a few computer models were manufactured in the Soviet Union, although later mostly imported). The article you’ve linked describes computers from other eastern bloc countries. These designs were not known or popular in the Soviet Union…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127968",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T07:20:49",
"content": "Hi! This is both fascinating and sad same time.But why the KR580VM80A and not the U880?The i8080 was poorer than Z80 and was never meant to be in first place.The “fathers” of the i8080 had left intel in order to found Zilog and fix the i8080 design.The result was the Z80, the finished processor that the i8080 was meant to be.PS: Why ZX Spectrum and not ZX81?ZX81 was fun and the simple graphics didn’t hurt the eyes.",
"parent_id": "8127868",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128313",
"author": "Sergey Kiselev",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T06:07:37",
"content": "In late 1970’s Soviets made a decision to clone Intel 8xxx series. To avoid extra effort, they didn’t clone Z80, 6502, MC6800, MC68000, etc. at that time. Therefore KR580VM80 – the 8080 clone was relatively available. Soviets also manufactured 8086 and later 8088 clones.The U880 was an East German design. It wasn’t commonly available in the Soviet Union. Later in early 90’s Soviets did make their own Z80 clone – KR1858VM1, mostly to satisfy the demand for ZX Spectrum clones (according to some, early KR1858VM1 used U880 die, but at least ones that I tested don’t behave like U880).P.S. You’re correct that Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 were designed by the same people. But I don’t think the Z80 “fixes” the 8080. It is rather a development of the 8080. Advances in the chip manufacturing process allowed Z80 to use single 5V power supply, implementing more registers and institutions, and integrating the clock generator and the bus controller (Z80 has almost twice more transistors than 8080)",
"parent_id": "8127968",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,547.673442
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/version-control-to-the-max/
|
Version Control To The Max
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"Rant",
"version control",
"virtualization"
] |
There was a time when version control was an exotic idea. Today, things like Git and a handful of other tools allow developers to easily rewind the clock or work on different versions of the same thing with very little effort. I’m here to encourage you not only to use version control but also to go even a step further, at least for important projects.
My First Job
The QDP-100 with — count ’em — two 8″ floppies (from an ad in Byte magazine)
I remember my first real job back in the early 1980s. We made a particular type of sensor that had a 6805 CPU onboard and, of course, had firmware. We did all the development on physically big CP/M machines with the improbable name of Quasar QDP-100s. No, not that
Quasar
. We’d generate a hex file, burn an EPROM, test, and eventually, the code would make it out in the field.
Of course, you always have to make changes. You might send a technician out with a tube full of EPROMs or, in an emergency, we’d buy the EPROMs space on a Greyhound bus. Nothing like today.
I was just getting started, and the guy who wrote the code for those sensors wasn’t much older than me. One day, we got a report that something was misbehaving out in the field. I asked him how we knew what version of the code was on the sensor. The blank look I got back worried me.
Seat of the Pants
Version control circa 1981 alongside a 3.5-inch floppy that held much more data
Turns out, he’d burn however many EPROMs were required and then plow forward developing code. We had no idea what code was really running in the field. After we fixed the issue, I asked for and received a new rule. Every time we shipped an EEPROM, it got a version number sticker, and the entire development directory went on an 8″ floppy. The floppy got a write-protect tab and went up on the shelf.
I was young. I realize now that I needed to back those up, too, but it was still better than what we had been doing.
Enter Meta Version Control
Today, it would have been easy to label a commit and, later, check it back out. But there is still a latent problem. Your source code is only part of the equation when you are writing code. There’s also your development environment, including the libraries, the compiler, and anything else that can add to or modify your code. How do you version control that? Then there’s the operating system, which could interact with your code or development tools too.
Maybe it is a call back to my 8″ floppy days, but I have taken to doing serious development in a virtual machine. It doesn’t matter if you use QEMU or VirtualBox or VMWare. Just use it. The reason is simple. When you do a release, you can backup the entire development environment.
When you need to change something five years from now, you might find the debugger no longer runs on your version of the OS. The compiler fixed some bugs that you rely on or added some that you now trip over. But if you are in your comfy five-year-old virtual environment, you won’t care. I’ve had a number of cases where I wish I had done that because my old DOS software won’t run anymore. Switched to Linux? Or NewOS 2100
tm
? No problem, as long as it can host a virtual machine.
Can’t decide on which one to use? [How to Simple] has some thoughts in the video below.
How About You?
How about it? Do you or will you virtualize and save? Do you use containers for this sort of thing? Or do you simply have faith that your version-controlled source code is sufficient? Let us know in the comments.
If you think Git is just for software,
think again
.
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[
{
"comment_id": "8127687",
"author": "jens",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:17:05",
"content": "We use docker / podman containers that contain all the environment including external code and libraries which obviously could also disappear in the future.The docker file can be versioned as well, the resulting containers stored and backuped.And every code version is linked to one single container version which has been used to build it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127691",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:19:31",
"content": "Virtual machines don’t really fix the problem.When you upgrade your host operating system, the old guest extensions often stop working. If your toolchain (FPGA vendors are especially bad with this!) requires a license, even a free one, that will have expired and will try to call out to servers that have changed. The operating system will do its best to force you to upgrade things. And virtual machines just make development so much more miserable to do.Instead try to make the build system reproducible, without resorting to just archiving everything. CI builds go a long way towards this, but only for a few years until the runner image is deprecated and old dependency versions disappear from repositories. You need a shareable, documented build environment anyway if you expect to ever have more than one developer in the project.As a last resort, have your whole system backup solution keep a few snapshots that you can boot and run if you really have to.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127813",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:09:44",
"content": "I agree with you on the documentation front, but would argue that containerized or virtualized build environments are still superior to manually setup ones in terms of being reproducible. Manual recreation from documentation should be more of a last resort. I like the CI approach best too — a docker container is a lot closer to a well documented environment than a simple archived VM is.If you are really desperate, or REALLY want to make sure you can build later, a day of engineering time buys at least a couple of laptops. Air gapping and storing (or shipping!) a couple copies of a workstation is always an option, and I have seen it done. It’s gross but it works.While it’s not always possible, especially with things like FPGA tools, the license issue is the single biggest reason I stringently advocate for the use of open tool chains. Commercial tool support just won’t be there long term. Past versions of GCC or clang will, and going back to a previous OS release is generally doable as well in the worst case.The bottom line to all of this is really complexity. That’s something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention these days. Did you get rid of all the dependencies you don’t REALLY need? Did you minimize the number of oddball third party tools you use to automate build steps in favor of long lived and popular tools that will still be around in a decade? Documentation is a piece of the puzzle, but in a lot of cases we don’t document systems because we don’t even understand all the variables anymore.",
"parent_id": "8127691",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127833",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:42:17",
"content": "“If your toolchain (FPGA vendors are especially bad with this!) requires a license, even a free one, that will have expired and will try to call out to servers that have changed.”At least for all the FPGA vendors I’ve worked with, the software doesn’t try to verify a license over the network unless it’s a floating license (obviously). And at least for Xilinx those don’t actually ‘expire’ (they’re not like maintenance stuff, that obviously sucks), they just expire for new versions.Which is a good thing, because therealdownside to the vendors is that upgrading the software isn’t always ‘safe’ – it’s not remotely backwards compatible and there’s no way to make it so. As in, a core that you were using in a prior version might just up and disappear. So if you’ve got a design it’s usually smart to just lock it to a specific version.Of course theseconddownside to that it is that when they started doing the Linux versions using Yocto derivatives… noweverythingblew up, because the Yocto stuff pulls files from the network, and there’s no guarantee those will exist. So you’re mostly required to match toolchain to yocto/oe stuff, which means… pray?Sigh.",
"parent_id": "8127691",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129602",
"author": "Tom Buskey",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T15:02:53",
"content": "I was making a DVD to install Openstack . The tools would pull from the internet and many of my users were in places with flakey access. So I put the packages on the DVD.During my install, I created a package repo on the local system. I added DNS names for the remote repos to /etc/host pointing to localhost or whatever IP the host had.Now, the DVD doesn’t need any internet access to install. In addition, I froze the install to specific working versions. It’s not hard to do a package upgrade after the install.8 years later, I can still reinstall that version of Openstack as I customized it.",
"parent_id": "8127833",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127696",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:33:47",
"content": "Nix (yes, I know this is the new “I use Arch, BTW”) is a great way to have dev env version control. It’s fairly easy to get into without resorting to the Nix wizardry that many in the community love. The only place where it isn’t great is for peripheral access, EG if you need to interface with an external programmer, debugger, serial adapter, etc, but even then it’s not any worse than a container or vm.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127731",
"author": "gDanix",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:06:33",
"content": "I use Guix, BTW :)",
"parent_id": "8127696",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127814",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:11:09",
"content": "I have been intrigued by the Nix concept, but this is the first time I have seen it mentioned in the context of build environment reproduction. Your comment might have finally pushed me over the edge of giving it a try. Thanks for that!",
"parent_id": "8127696",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127698",
"author": "Will B.",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:41:52",
"content": "Setting up my first new computer in 5 years last week, I VERY much wanted to put my entire dev environment in a VM. I had nothing but issues. VirtualBox should’ve been fine, but wasn’t. And something in the host OS (Windows 11) is now messed up and my only solution is a complete reinstall. Which I don’t really have time for right now, but eventually will have to be done.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127700",
"author": "Will B.",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:42:55",
"content": "To be clear, the dev environment is also Windows. (Because our servers are Windows, yes, yes, I know.Not my choice.)",
"parent_id": "8127698",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127704",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:50:40",
"content": "new computer setup is always pain. part of my motivation for moving to VMs was that I was really quite tired of setting up new machines, and finding relevant drivers (which may not even exist for modern OSs), and all the other concomitant platform-specific stuff.So in a way you can view the pain of the setup experience for your whatever VM solution as an effort concentrator: get your system working for your hypervisor, and then after that profit! by being able to use your archive of maybe 100 or so dev VMs that will work in that hardware abstracted platform.",
"parent_id": "8127698",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127778",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:57:13",
"content": "What am I missing? What if the relevant drivers continue not even existing? is your client forced to forever run the product in a VM? With the added pain of setting up and learning how to use the VM. Yes, I know “pain” is a strong word. I really feel I’m missing something here but I now nothing of VMs except that they exist.",
"parent_id": "8127704",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127781",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:59:04",
"content": "“know nothing” THAT’s pain.",
"parent_id": "8127778",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127795",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:27:55",
"content": "” is your client forced to forever run the product in a VM?”Oh. I’m there already. Xilinx’s dev environment for chips that they’re literally still selling requires you to install a VM because they don’t support any modern OS. There are hacks to try to work around that but they periodically fail as the new OSes get updated and trying to keep ahead of it is exhausting.",
"parent_id": "8127778",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127871",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T22:12:36",
"content": "the VM is for your dev environment. let me give a concrete example and temporarily disregard some anachronisms, because this real-world example is from the past.* part of my product integrates with 3rd party Point-Of-Sale systems. They typically run on Windows systems, so to develop that component I need a deployed POS. I support 8 or so POS’s from different vendors. Some are C#, some are VB, some are Delphi (no I’m not kidding). One is Java.* part of my product runs on mobile phones — an iPhone and an Android variety. iPhone’s dev env (xcode) requires a real-deal MacOS. Android (at the time) requires Linux.* part of my product runs on on RackSpace virtualized servers. These are CentOS and occasionally Ubuntu.* I am in possession of one Macbook Pro.So, by having VMs for all those disparate machine configurations, I am able to develop the entire system on one computer.Think of a VM as a computer-in-a-file. You can store your configured computer in a (very large) file and put it on a hard drive and give a copy to your coworkers. It has all the relevant dev tools installed. It also hasonlythe relevant dev tools installed, so you don’t have conflicts in that Micro requires C# 3.5x and Aloha requires C# 4.x. Etc.If I hire a new dev, I can hand them a copy of the dev env and they are productive on the first day.In other cases this can also be vital if the vendor of the dev tools moves on and doesn’t, say, support the version that only runs on Windows 7 but in fact you really need because you’re supporting some old chips in the field.hth!",
"parent_id": "8127778",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127815",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:16:05",
"content": "In 2025 I am coming to view Windows like I viewed Linux in 2001 — it’s works, but it’s usually the less stable and more painful path to a system you want to do real work on. Never thought that day would come.It’s painful to do the first time, but I have gotten Win 11 up and running in a Linux host environment. The trick is making sure to use a UEFI bios image and make sure to include a virtual TPM.I occasionally get stuck working with Windows too… but only when the job market is bad.",
"parent_id": "8127698",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127699",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:42:47",
"content": "Oh! the days before version control. I came up in hardware, so I didn’t even know about version control other than manually PKZIP’ing stuff with a timestamped name. I distinctly remember when my spell correcting fingers caused me to unzip rather than zip and I looked on in paralyzed horror as my day’s work was reverted before my eyes in a scrolling death list of “here’s some work you can kiss goodbye!”And VC systems were expensive! (e.g. PVCS) But my life was changed in 1994 when I broke down and bought a copy of SourceSafe from (then) One Tree Software for the low price of $600 or so. Being able to move through time and also diff’ing was such a revelation. Obviously I have moved on to git and for personal projects I really like Fossil. I don’t think folks use ‘distributed’ version control for the ‘distributed’ part, but rather having to support ‘distributed’ development forced creating diff algorithms that were much smarter. I mean, you could branch and merge just fine with CVS and Subversion, but woe be unto thee if you have a merge conflict.Regarding dev envs, these days I virtualize VMWare, and have been doing so since the early 2000s. When I was in the bay area in 2000 a friend was telling me about this new company that made a thing that allows you to run two OS’s on your machine at the same time, and maybe I should join them. “I can dual boot already”. “No, they’re runningatthesametime*!” “OK, but who would want to do that?” lol. It was super useful when I was doing malware detection because it was like a condom for the computer, and ‘snapshots’ were vaguely like version control for the system. Later I would use the VMs as ‘dev kit in a box’ and just hand them out to new hires. No more “I’m installing my dev env” and following woefully outdated “how to set up your box” wiki docs. Also the work we did involved 3rd party integrations, so the various base images could have just the relevant tools for whatever system was being worked on. No conflicts with other system’s requirements. And you didn’t have to worry about whether the host system was Windows, Mac, or Linux.These days I would like to use containers. You can do that for a lot of stuff, but not everything. Hope you like Linux because there you are, and UI… well. A lot has progressed to browser based so maybe. But I personally have too much invested in archives of dev system images now that it’s unlikely I will change from VMWare anytime soon. I did explore free things like VirtualBox but I find the USB support lacking and it to be a bit slow. At the same time VMWare is not at all free, and frankly seems to be on a downward trajectory in terms of reliability and speed. So I’m open to revisiting the strategy.But time travel is definitely the wave of the future. Or the past. Or in branching off into a parallel universe.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127757",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:15:36",
"content": "BT,DT. In Windows it’s ‘pkunzip’ instead of ‘pkzip’, in Unix it’s ‘tar xv’ instead of ‘tar cv’, which is a REALLY easy mistake.",
"parent_id": "8127699",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127873",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T22:16:16",
"content": "and all my hand-crafted asm for a DSP routines that ran ~ 80x faster than the C versions because I avoided segment register loads on a 386 scrolled past my eyes to their doom.:sad-trombone:",
"parent_id": "8127757",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128923",
"author": "Heem",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T00:00:48",
"content": "“I don’t think folks use ‘distributed’ version control for the ‘distributed’ part, but rather having to support ‘distributed’ development forced creating diff algorithms that were much smarter. I mean, you could branch and merge just fine with CVS and Subversion, but woe be unto thee if you have a merge conflict.”YES! I started using Git for home projects for all the right reasons – versioning, diff, tagging and being able to go to stable versions but the distributed part is of no interest to a sole developer. If I’m wrong and there is a non obvious use please tell me, happy to learn.",
"parent_id": "8127699",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129980",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T14:02:12",
"content": "you get it. distributed is important for federated development — e.g. different orgs with independent governance working on forks of a codebase, but wanting to exchange updates from time-to-time. Out of the scope of most single organizations, and certainly sole developers.I used the model once when I had a team that were non-engineers paralyzed with fear that their commits would break something, so I had them work in forks and I would review their submissions. They got over this fear in about 6 mo when they felt comfortable with branching, and so we quit doing that because it was a lot of bother for me personally.On the topic of smaller projects, if you’re sporting I would suggest giving “Fossil SCM” a tire-kicking. (It can bidirectionally sync with git, so you can safely try it out without fully switching over.) I like it because it’s one monolithic executable, has an embedded browser based GUI, has embedded server, issue tracking, wiki, forums, chat, etc. A code repository is also a single file. There exists a free hosting provider.But you can’t go wrong with git, which is de facto now. And you get free public hosted repos on github and free private hosted repos on bitbucket.Hard to believe that just a couple decades ago we paid a lot for this, and had employees whose whole job was the care and feeding of such systems. Now it’s all for free.",
"parent_id": "8128923",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127708",
"author": "johng75",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:01:28",
"content": "I did a similar thing a long time ago. Created my build machine VMs, then exported the VM system, burnt it onto a CD and the Document Controlled the disk. That way, if the goverment agencies that regulated us asked “how or where was this made?”, I could point directly to a specific part in our control.Now, Github action runners achieve that same thing. The github action workflow defines out exactly what will be installed to build, release, and deploy the code. When a commit or PR is created, a container VM spins up, installs the specific libraries needed, then the whole app builds, wraps up and spits out the artifacts and provides the whole documentation for how we got from point A to point B.It would be nice if more projects did the same. Irks me sometimes to find a project that I want to try out, but they only have the code designed for some weird very specific version of a compiler with a weird very specific version of a library and their instructions for setting up to build the code is “install these dependencies” but don’t say exactly which versions and when you do so half don’t play nice with different versions of other dependencies. So you finally figure out that you need libraryA 5.13 because it is the only version that works with libraryB 1.222.222q which only works with libraryC 1.2 or 1.4, but not 1.3 and then you find out that libraryD only works with libraryB 1.222.222p…. ugh.Nah, it should have a workflow script that builds a container that slots all the exact tools needed to build in.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127723",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:40:24",
"content": "Prior to using git I created periodic zip files with version numbers. If two people were working on a project we would manually merge with win merge. This took too much storage and time so we moved to git. Different work folders per developer were replaced by branches and zip files by commits (optionally with version tags). Submodules allow us to reuse parts of the code in multiple projects in a way that could be versioned too. .gitignore prevented storing build-artifacts and local tool chain artifacts from being committed. Commit timestamps have helped me many times to figure out how much time I roughly spend on each project.When building I also save the commit hash in firmware and give a warning or error if there are uncommitted changes (which also happens at an incorrect commit for a submodule). Even if you forget to bump the version number the commit hash doesn’t lie.Binaries of released versions are archived.I also version hardware. Often by using spare MCU pins. The firmware is aware of the board revision. This allows backwards compatible firmware to be written.Tool chain is archived too. Every I download a new version of a part of the tool chain I archive it first and also document the new version in readme.It sucks that applications keep getting larger, because companies stopped caring about download sizes. If you archive different versions of tools and binaries it can easily take up a lot of drive space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127736",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:22:19",
"content": "I routinely use git and target containers these days.It’s imperfect, but it is highly repeatable.My actual pipeline is very limited though, no massive build chain, just simple build scripts.Using podman for containers, their yml files (kube play) to create pods (collections of containers) and occasional, but forced rebuilds from scratch to prove the pipeline is functioning as-expected.So can save a built container and transport it to production and know it’ll run.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127748",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:47:04",
"content": "i haven’t found any solution better than simply writing the code to a reasonably high standard (many different aspects to that metric) and then it’s only moderately hard to deal with bitrot.recent thorn in my side is modern gcc rejects (error diagnostic) a lot of things that used to be just warnings, like unprototyped functions and pointers to mismatched types. i know there must be a convenient commandline option to get gcc to be accepting of both old and new idioms at the same time. but instead, for the old versions i care about, i have simply fixed the problems that really should have been done right in the first place.i can only imagine what kind of nightmare it is to work with code developed targetting a 6 hour old version of rust. or basically anything that builds on top of a package manager. android, for example…every single time i sit down to it, everything has been obsoleted. i do kind of wish i had a VM with the 2012 android dev kit still on it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127766",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:23:19",
"content": "I am there with versions of gcc. Over time the (new) warnings and errors have caught a few bugs (none critical) each time a new gcc version released. Fixed. This last one found a few old style function declarations (from the 80s) that we had missed to convert which the newest compiler no longer accepts. Simple to correct. I like my code to compile ‘clean’ with no warnings. I did have to suppress one warning as it would be real pain to address … and there was no problem. The problem was code reusing big buffers for small strings and it thought the code needed as big a buffer for the result string it was being strcat’ed too. Obviously not a bug. Suppressed the warning (after evaluation of them all that were kicked out).",
"parent_id": "8127748",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127824",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:25:04",
"content": "hahah yeah i’ve got parts of my life where there are pages upon pages of sprintf warnings. the other new warnings are pretty nice!",
"parent_id": "8127766",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128090",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:50:04",
"content": "Dear god I hate the moving target that is Android. Even if I could compile my old code, it won’t run on a modern Android phone.",
"parent_id": "8127748",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128556",
"author": "Geert van Dijk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T19:47:18",
"content": "How so? I thought (and continue to think) that’s pretty decently covered by the approach with API levels, right? Or how old is this code exactly?",
"parent_id": "8128090",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127752",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:07:37",
"content": "For work, we use git. BT/IT automatically backs up systems periodically in case have to go back. At home for my projects, I use git for the important ones (to me) and usually copy off to another system with the date before changing code. Like projectX_20250505_1152 . I always do this anyway before I make major changes … just in case. Never failed me yet… And disk space is cheap.I remember the EPROM days. Everyone that went out had a label on top with name/revision and position (if multiple sockets). Of course the label also covered the erase window. And of course FedEx Next Day to job site. Finally Flash came along … and email to send zips of needed programs… Until zips got blocked by IT, and then setup ftp site to grab updated software from home base and so on. Fun!Also learned to always put a header on each code file. Every change to file is documented in the header with who and when. 1.001 RJC 05/05/2025 Blah blah blah …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127754",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:12:17",
"content": "OMG. “in an emergency, we’d buy the EPROMs space on a Greyhound bus.”Flashback to where I was at the destination, digging through a pile of boxes at Greyhound to find the one with my name on it.But THAT was the good old days. Flash forward to hand-carrying spare boards, a 1200′ magtape and a toolbox on a plane Seattle to Vancouver BC to Denver to Calgary because that was the only route the travel agent could find that would get me there within 24 hours, customs and immigration both ways looking at me trying to figure out what kind of scam I was running and putting me in a small room..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128181",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T20:59:31",
"content": "Your travel agent was a clown.You book the flight to your destination with a connecting flight to some expensive far destination.The airline computer bumps some schmo for your super profitable last minute trip.You then cancel to leg to Dubai/Tokyo/Sydney and try not to smile when the schmo is yelling at the gate agent.I knew one dude that repeatedly overbooked flights on purpose just to collect enough travel vouchers to take his family to Hawaii.Most guys with that many miles (to be able to last minute overbook and then collect the price as a voucher) don’t have time.But he had a half day wasted anyhow w a long connection later, so he got on, then ‘begrudgingly’ volunteered to get off of 3 or 4 flights in a row, only danger was one wouldn’t be full.",
"parent_id": "8127754",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127758",
"author": "primogatto",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:16:15",
"content": "For version control of development environments, I’d suggest looking into Nix and/or Guix. They allow for development environments to be defined in configuration files and are designed to lead to reproducible environments, no need to backup a whole VM, you can just check the required config files for Nix / Guix into version control along with your code.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128074",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:57:40",
"content": "This is similar to something like Vagrant, isn’t it?Downside to stuff like that is that you’re relying on the Internet to keep things available for you. This works for a few years (hopefully) but once you start getting to like, 4-5+ years it’s increasingly likely something breaks. Once you get to a decade it starts becoming a lot harder.And if a decade sounds like overkill – the issue is that if you don’t control the build environment or the development time is long, you essentially can get “latencies” that build up and cut that ‘decade’ down to a lot shorter. For instance: you start working with a tool in 2022 that used other builds from 2020, it takes you 2-3 years in development, now you’re trying to download releases and tools from 5 years ago.",
"parent_id": "8127758",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127764",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:18:32",
"content": "“How about it? Do you or will you virtualize and save? Do you use containers for this sort of thing? Or do you simply have faith that your version-controlled source code is sufficient?”God, I wish it was possible with FPGA development. At least with Xilinx, version control is basically “pray.” There’s no real way to fully recreate a build because of the randomness involved in the place & route (you can kinda-sortatry, but it’s not perfect). You just have to save all the actual build checkpoints, which can be around 0.5 GB per build. Oh, and that’s already compressed and binary, so yeah. You’re just screwed.Saving the build environment and tools also eats up space faster than you can imagine. Those at least compress somewhat, but you’re still talking multiple gigabytes. Yes, storage space is cheap: it’s notthatcheap. Even multiple terabytes get chewed up fast.A while ago I just took the path of saying look, it’s just not possible to have a perfectly version-controlled system that multiple people can use, so you make it so that other people can at leastlogicallyrecreate the build, even if it won’t be exactly the same.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127793",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:26:54",
"content": "“I’m here to encourage you not only to use version control but also to go even a step further, at least for important projects.”From writers…https://opensource.com/article/19/4/write-gitTo Graphic artists…https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29292/version-control-for-graphics",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127842",
"author": "Dude bro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:02:33",
"content": "“There’s also your development environment, including the libraries, the compiler, and anything else that can add to or modify your code. How do you version control that?”Just don’t do that part. Those are build-time concernsPut everything needed to get to a running state in source control. No system configs, no by hand actions.It should require only one command/button press/keystroke to go from a new environment with nothing set up to having a running debug session",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127844",
"author": "Jim Shortz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:06:03",
"content": "Great idea!I recently had to service a system I developed in 2012. It was based on legacy hardware at the time, so the development environment required Visual Studio 4 and associated SDKs for Windows Mobile. IthinkI got all this to run on Windows 7 back then, but I don’t even use a Windows machine anymore.I built a VM using Windows 2000 and eventually got it all working again. I hope I saved it :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128235",
"author": "kfazz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T23:44:47",
"content": "For hobby projects I keep a gitea instance on the home nas. Useful stuff goes to GitHub. Most of the old android 4.x stuff is unbuildable these days, which is a bit sad, but the hardware is also mostly gone. Stuff like libreelec/Lakka/coreboot ports usually also bitrot. Sometimes a git rebase main and few flash / debug cycles will get it current again, but most hardware ends up with the last build that ‘worked enough’ forevermore.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128327",
"author": "El Gru",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T07:46:30",
"content": "Data is forever.Code is ephemeral.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8129605",
"author": "Tom Buskey",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T15:13:15",
"content": "I had developers using Solaris on ClearCase. They created their whole versioned tool chain as a view. Without needing a sysadmin (me) to install packages, etc. and slow them down.Of course, it hammered the ClearCase server and network. And the admin of that system never saw a reason to budget an upgrade for the 8 years I was there. Or move a large database to another system…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130222",
"author": "Jack Dansen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T01:35:29",
"content": "If you want to run something locally and access it with clipboard and such, VirtualBox is pretty great. If you want an actual professional server hosting solution, please give Proxmox a look. It’s very good.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.967746
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/a-brain-transplant-for-a-philips-smart-lamp/
|
A Brain Transplant For A Philips Smart Lamp
|
Tyler August
|
[
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] |
[
"ESP32-C6",
"smart light",
"zigbee"
] |
As the saying goes, modern problems require modern solutions. When the modern problem is that your smart light is being hijacked by the neighbors, [Wejn]’s modern solution is to
reverse engineer and replace the mainboard.
The light in question is a Phillips Hue Ambiance, and [Wejn]’s excellently-documented six part series takes us through the process of creating a replacement light driver. It’s a good read, including reverse-engineering the PWM functions to get the lights to dim exactly like stock, and a dive into the Zigbee protocol so his rebuild light could still talk to the Philips Hue hub. The firmware [Wejn] wrote for the ESP32C6 he chose to use for this
project is on GitHub
, with the
PCB in a second repo
.
We want to applaud [Wejn] for his excellent documentation and open-sourcing (the firmware and PCB are under GPL v3). Not only do we get enough information to replicate this project perfectly if we so choose, but by writing out his design process, [Wejn] gives everyone reading a good head start in doing something similar with other hardware. Even if you’re scratching your head wondering why a light switch isn’t good enough anjymore, you have to appreciate what [Wejn] is offering the community.
We’ve covered domestic brain transplants in the past — which is easier in this sort of light than the
close confines of a smart bulb
. If you’re still wondering why not just use a light switch, perhaps you’d rather
hack the light to run doom instead
.
Before you go, can we just take a moment to appreciate how bizarre the world has become that we have a
DOOM
-capable computer to run fancy light fixture? If you’re using what might have been a decent workstation in days of yore to perform a painfully mundane task,
let us know on the tips line.
| 25
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127617",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:19:25",
"content": "“Even if you’re scratching your head wondering why a light switch isn’t good enough anymore…”Ahh… you’ve read my mind. This is scary…“smart light is being hijacked by the neighbors”What… that’s even scarier!But then the irony of it all, as the linked website states: “And since we use the dumb wall switch to turn our lights on/off…” So all that smart stuff, just to do what and why and when?Regarding the project, it’s a technical puzzle, it has a micro-controller, it has LED’s, I like it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127623",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:36:28",
"content": "There’s something of a saying…Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.",
"parent_id": "8127617",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127656",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:09:33",
"content": "But the Tech/Engineer in us want our “Jetson” home of the future. ( We only have 37 more years to go until we have the full Jetson life when George turns 40 in 2062. )",
"parent_id": "8127623",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127688",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:17:38",
"content": "Yes, as an engineer I tend to fix things as simply as possible. When my vacuum cleaner switch broke, I just purchased a inline switch at the hardware store and installed it in the cord.On the other hand, I also recently installed an inverter system w/batteries to keep my sump pumps running in case power goes it.But I have a wired network throughout the house for ‘critical infrastructure’ on top of my wifi (my solar panels had to use a wifi extender due to the distance, as my controller is in a shed)",
"parent_id": "8127623",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128085",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:27:42",
"content": "We aren’t easily allowed firearms in the UK and in general I wouldn’t want one but I could make an exception if it were for pacifying disobedient inkjets…",
"parent_id": "8127623",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127658",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:12:20",
"content": "Don’t these smart lamps allow for all sorts of different colors?Maybe they like to change the lighting color or temperature on command.",
"parent_id": "8127617",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127674",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:39:57",
"content": "Yeah, they can also synchronise with Ambilights on televisions.",
"parent_id": "8127658",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127625",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:37:16",
"content": "Using a dumb light switch isn’t that dumb, unless of course you use it with a smart light. That’s just a ridiculously bad setup even without the ridiculously bad design of that Philips Hue lamp.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127642",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:28:03",
"content": "The dumb switch is there just in case the smart light turns against it’s owner.",
"parent_id": "8127625",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127654",
"author": "erffrfez",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:06:59",
"content": "… and is the cause of this problem.(easier fix is tape or similar over the dumb switch so it is still available but isn’t used by default and a zigbee (or similar) switch to control the light)",
"parent_id": "8127642",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127745",
"author": "MrChristian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:41:01",
"content": "We’ve replaced all of our dumb switches with lutron switches, which have worked really well for us. One of our rooms are all smart bulbs that really would rather be controlled directly vs. a dumb switch.I also have a setup where I’m able to hijack the Lutron Pico remotes to directly control smart home devices.For that room, I’ve removed the dumb switch, connected the wires so the circuit is always “ON”, and then mounted the pico remote in the former switches place, with an automation for the lights.Looks and acts the same as all the lutron remotes, but plays well with the smart bulbs, and if needed it’s easy to go back to “dumb” switch.",
"parent_id": "8127654",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130392",
"author": "erffrfez",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T13:48:58",
"content": "the “For that room” part reads to me as very similar to the “tape over or cover the dumb switch” as above, but not so easily reversible",
"parent_id": "8127745",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128058",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:29:24",
"content": "Having a dumb or off switch reinforces the human control element…. something that Colossus/Guardian and Skynet didn’t have.",
"parent_id": "8127642",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127659",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:16:26",
"content": "Re: the mention of a hijacked smart light……I remember a comedian who talked with a monotone voice a long time ago talked about a wall switch in his new house that didn’t seem to do anything. He said “every time I walked by it I’d flip it on flip off…flip it on flip it off…..I did that for a month until I got a letter from a lady in Germany that said.. knock it off.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127684",
"author": "Bim Zively",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:07:58",
"content": "That’s comedian Stephen Wright, if you wanted find his work.You really described that joke well, I could hear him say it.",
"parent_id": "8127659",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127722",
"author": "Snarkenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:32:57",
"content": "Stephen Wright is a genius!",
"parent_id": "8127659",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127690",
"author": "Wejn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:18:44",
"content": "So, yeah, we use the dumb switch to turn it on and off. And we use the zibgbee part to change the brightness, temperature, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127743",
"author": "MrChristian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:35:19",
"content": "I bought a philips hue bridge + lights combo years back to integrate in to my smart home setup. It was “fine”, but the cost didn’t seem worthwhile, and better options came along.I kept using them though, because they worked and I’d already spent the money.Recently (last few weeks) they’ve been erratic/unresponsive. Turns out that you now need to create an account, register your bridge with philips (TOS include sending data whether you like it or not), etc etc etc. All so you can continue to control it from Homekit. Unhappily, I complied.Except it continues to be erratic, unresponsive from homekit (but fine from the Hue app, provided you’re logged in!).So now I’ll happily tell anyone who will listen, based on my experience, don’t buy their crap, and replace it if it makes sense to do so.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127756",
"author": "Damage",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:15:16",
"content": "I’ve had 2 Hue strips in my living room for 6 years now, connected to Zigbee2MQTT, and they’re among my most reliable devices.",
"parent_id": "8127743",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127854",
"author": "MrChristian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:46:37",
"content": "Yeah, I can’t speak to the hardware itself if you’re willing to add some DIY. Good to know that it may still be useful if I’m willing to start incorporating real zigbee (I have some Aqara stuff).But if you play within their sandbox, at least as of recently, IMO it’s crap.",
"parent_id": "8127756",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127941",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T05:17:39",
"content": "In order to have any idea what you idea of reliable is, please mention your other devices in the list…My bike is pretty reliable too, whenever I ride more then 5 miles with it the chains breaks… every time, it’s like clock work, you can rely on it.Just kidding, but I could not resist. It’s really 4 miles.",
"parent_id": "8127756",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127767",
"author": "Stix",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:29:25",
"content": "Hopefully next up: a zigbee light switch that can control hue. Or rather: a pcb that goes into the wall box and connects to my current light switch because I want to keep the aesthetics of my light switches’ faceplates…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127953",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T06:14:36",
"content": "I’ve put Shelly devices behind many of the dumb switches in my house. It turns them into smart switches. They can be controlled by a home automation system like Home Assistant, but they still let you turn the light on/off like a normal switch…even if your automation system crashes. And no cloud.",
"parent_id": "8127767",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127956",
"author": "Person",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T06:25:11",
"content": "I am all about this project the execution is very clean looking. However, I hope this was as a means of learning or rather “can I?”Phillips and most Smart light solutions providers explicitly dissuade users from using physical light switches.As I understand its discouraged partly due to the fact the the MCU and PSU don’t like being physically toggled on and off as much and it can shorten the lifespan of the light(I sort of doubt this)BUTAs you can see is the case with Phillips…The physical switch is an input that the software interprets!The “Correct” answer to the problem is conveniently to give Phillips more moneyIn my last house I installed HUE RGB lights in every recessed can (around 24 in total)At the time I wanted to ensure that my smart light setup was going to be reliable and not confusing to visitors.What I did is I purchased one of their remotes for each light switch in the house and setup the smart lights to work exactly as the everything was physically wired.I then made this design which let me mount the smart switches on top of each lightswitchhttps://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4648775Protip… when you install Hue lights… ALWAYS track each light’s Serial Number and location in a document. If you need to reset the light back to factory default that information will be needed",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128086",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:30:33",
"content": "He seems to have missed a rather simple solution to this, if the Philips Hue is anything like the Amazon compatible lights my partner had (disabled, wheelchair user and often bed bound) the whole idea is to leave the light switchonso you pair it once and then control it via the app/home hub/whatever.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,547.883557
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/14/turning-a-chromebox-into-a-proper-power-efficient-pc/
|
Turning A Chromebox Into A Proper Power-Efficient PC
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"computer hacks",
"google hacks"
] |
[
"chromebox",
"ChromeOS"
] |
Google’s ChromeOS and associated hardware get a lot of praise for being easy to manage and for providing affordable hardware for school and other educational settings. It’s also undeniable that their locked-down nature forms a major obstacle and provides limited reusability.
That is unless you don’t mind doing a bit of hacking. The Intel Core i3-8130U based Acer CXI3 Chromebox that the
[Hardware Haven] YouTube channel got their mittens
on is a perfect example.
The Acer CXI3 in all its 8th-gen Intel Core i3 glory. (Credit: Hardware Haven, YouTube)
This is a nice mini PC, with modular SODIMM RAM, an NVMe storage M.2 slot as well as a slot for the WiFi card (or SATA adapter). After resetting the Chromebox to its default configuration and wiping the previous user, it ran at just a few watts idle at the desktop. As this is just a standard x86_64 PC, the only thing holding it back from booting non-ChromeOS software is the BIOS, which is where
[MrChromebox]
‘s exceedingly useful replacement BIOSes for supported systems come into play, with
easy to follow instructions
.
Reflashing the Acer CXI3 unit was as easy as removing the write-protect screw from the mainboard,
running the Firmware Utility Script
from a VT2 terminal (
Ctrl+Alt+F2
on boot and
chronos
as login) and flashing either the RW_LEGACY or UEFI ROM depending on what is
supported
and desired. This particular Chromebox got the full UEFI treatment, and after upgrading the NVMe SSD, Debian-based Proxmox installed without a hitch. Interestingly, idle power dropped from 2.6 watts under ChromeOS to 1.6 watts under Proxmox.
If you have a Chromebox that’s supported by [MrChromebox], it’s worth taking a poke at, with some solutions allowing you to even dualboot ChromeOS and another OS if that’s your thing.
| 21
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127561",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:31:55",
"content": "Great, now I want it too! (I have no use for it, I already have a ryzen 5 3550H server running 24/7)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127592",
"author": "Lore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:07:21",
"content": "A write protectscrew? That’s hilarious 😂",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127597",
"author": "Mark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:30:54",
"content": "It’s like the “No Smoking” screws. Once you remove the screws and throw away the sign, then you can smoke.",
"parent_id": "8127592",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127628",
"author": "Pablo J R",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:45:02",
"content": "Like the physical tab allowing recording in audio cassettes long time ago",
"parent_id": "8127592",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127632",
"author": "cjay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:54:52",
"content": "And video cassettes, but they were at least analogue, mechanical devices and it’s difficult to beat a mechanically actuated switch for simplicity",
"parent_id": "8127628",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127680",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:57:25",
"content": "It is actually rather common on Chromebooks/Chromeboxes I believe. My Toshiba Chromebook had a physical screw as well for a write-protect before I flashed it. Now it’s running Debian pretty well.",
"parent_id": "8127592",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127692",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:24:56",
"content": "I had a Core i7 one with a bad BIOS chip, had to desolder one from another dead motherboard. Thanks to MrChromebox I had something I could write to the ‘new’ chip. Unfortunately it was a 16MB chip, not 8, so I simply doubled the BIOS and wrote it twice 😂. I think the machine serial may have been all 00000 after that, I can’t remember if it was able to be extracted from the partial dump of the bad chip.So the protect screw is sometimes not the way it gets flashed. But yeah, they just have the copper under the screw split, half ground plane as usual, and half leading off to the write protect pin. Pretty elegant if you ask me, Chromebooks claim is security, and you can’t have that with a software re-writeable BIOS.",
"parent_id": "8127592",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127730",
"author": "Lore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:55:47",
"content": "The more I think about it, the more it actually makes sense as a convenient way of doing it, particularly during manufacturing.",
"parent_id": "8127692",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127746",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:41:53",
"content": "The screw touches the flash’s nWE pin (or something in this style). So the parameters for the system (stored on the flash) are write protected by hardware, there’s no software that can nuke the system, which is, honestly, both smart and secure against an appliance that’s connected 24/7. When you unscrew the “protection”, you can remove the write protection with some code and enable the alternative firmware bit. In that case, the system will accept to boot from an unsigned/unsecure bootloader (UEFI or legacy BIOS), stored on your harddrive.",
"parent_id": "8127592",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128054",
"author": "Vespalite",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T14:19:16",
"content": "If i recall correctly you can set it in software to ignore the state of the screw using a suzyQ-cable on a USB-C type Chromebook and via one of the 3 Uarts on the debug header of the older models.",
"parent_id": "8127746",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128089",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:36:07",
"content": "I like the idea, particularly re-purposing the mounting screw. But how many (tenths of a) cent do I save by using a screw instead of headers/jumpers or a switch? Is it more reliable, or is it more vulnerable to mis-use? Maybe this could save vertical space for portable designs.",
"parent_id": "8127592",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128111",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:54:57",
"content": "It’s not about the cost of the part, but the cost of the extra assembly step. Placing the single jumper of flipping the switch would either require a human worker, or an expensive jig and robot, which makes it cost more per unit than the part would.These sort of “Chromeboxes” are actually pretty low volume products. Companies like Acer run the model for 1-2 years and then switch it out for something else. This is because they don’t want any particular product of theirs to “accumulate” on the market – for various reasions (see “confusopoly” for one).",
"parent_id": "8128089",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127662",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:18:26",
"content": "Does Acer still crank out dollar store quality hardware?I haven’t messed with one of their PCs in over ten years. I made a little side money in school doing entry level IT work and I think I made more money backing up and wiping Acer products than I did anything else. Walk down the “tech” aisle at any thrift store and if they accept computers there will be a few Acer’s sitting there.That said, if you can make one of these boxes into a reliable IT component for that little money and effort, then go for it. I occasionally get lucky with a Harbor Freight tool and they last me for years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127689",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:18:04",
"content": "They make a range, some of it is rebranded Thinkcenter grade Lenovo.I have flipped quite a few PCs using their $9-20 motherboards and a Xeon processor. It’s the non-standard power plug, but that is easily fixed, I either make a custom cable if it’s a modular supply, or pick up a $2 adapter to 24-pin.I have found their cases to be of decent quality and sturdy. But then again I ventilate them using a hole saw on the ABS, an angle grinder with a cut off wheel on the frame, and some painted expanded metal bonded behind the hole, looks almost factory, at least not bad.",
"parent_id": "8127662",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127672",
"author": "Oscar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:32:41",
"content": "Thank you, this is great! For a long time I used a hacked chromebook as a daily driver, using Coreboot installed using mrchromebox’s scripts :)Let’s reuse more hardware",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127676",
"author": "Oscar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:45:33",
"content": "Here’s the list of supported devices, for people looking to try it.Here’s a page summarizing the BIOS support, and OS support:https://docs.chrultrabook.com/docs/firmware/supported-devices.html",
"parent_id": "8127672",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127739",
"author": "Francis Theodore Catte",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:24:46",
"content": "Same! My last three daily-driver laptops have all been de-Googled Chromebooks, with the latest being a quite capable Thinkpad C13 Yoga with the Ryzen 5 3500C/8GB of RAM that only cost me $150USD.",
"parent_id": "8127672",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127679",
"author": "quietfox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:56:11",
"content": "This looks like it would be a much more robust, and potentially cheap, option for running Octoprint. Time to start poking the marketplaces.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8132293",
"author": "bootstrap",
"timestamp": "2025-05-26T02:34:17",
"content": "kinda surprised these weren’t cheaper, oh well that’s another task for Father Time to take care of",
"parent_id": "8127679",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127694",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:29:01",
"content": "Point of order, the chrome boxes I had used M.2 SATA drives.I’m not sure if this Chromebox supports NVMe, in the thumbnail for the video it looks like 2 notches to me, which is usually SATA, but sometimes 2 lanes NVMe (I’ve only dealt with Optane drives using x2 PCIe, and they come in 2280, not 2242 form factor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127747",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:45:29",
"content": "You can also convert a ARM chromebook with postmarketOS (ARM processor aren’t supported by MrChromebox. Recently did it, it’s a PITA to do, but it works and it works well. To be honest, since ChromeOS is running linux, you are, paradoxically, more likely to have a perfectly working laptop from a Chromebook than a Windows only laptop converted to Linux.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.094419
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/semiconductor-simulator-lets-you-play-ic-designer/
|
Semiconductor Simulator Lets You Play IC Designer
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Software Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"IC design",
"semiconductor",
"simulator"
] |
For circuit simulation, we have always been enthralled with the Falstad simulator which is a simple, Spice-like simulator that runs in the browser. [Brandon] has a simulator, too, but it simulates semiconductor devices. With help from [Paul Falstad], that
simulator also runs in the browser
.
This simulator takes a little thinking and lets you build devices as you might on an IC die. The key is to use the drop-down that initially says “Interact” to select a tool. Then, the drop-down below lets you select what you are drawing, which can be a voltage source, metal, or various materials you find in semiconductor devices, like n-type or a dielectric.
It is a bit tricky, but if you check out the examples first (like this
diode
), it gets easier. The main page has many examples. You can even build up entire subsystems like a ring oscillator or a DRAM cell.
Designing at this level has its own quirks. For example, in the real world, you think of resistors as something you can use with great precision, and capacitors are often “sloppy.” On an IC substrate, resistors are often the sloppy component. While capacitor values might not be exact, it is very easy to get an extremely precise ratio of two capacitors because the plate size is tightly controlled. This leads to a different mindset than you are used to when designing with discrete components.
Of course, this is just a simulation, so everything can be perfect. If, for some reason, you don’t know about the Falstad simulator,
check it out now
.
| 8
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126964",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T19:18:42",
"content": "Sothat’swhy the DAC in Successive-Approximation-Register ADCs is a C2C instead of R2R ladder.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126971",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T20:18:58",
"content": "I am very curious of as Ken Shirriff’s opinion of this, as he’s discovered so many variations of integrated logic circuits from the chips he’s examined. Does this allow you to simulate the sophisticated Intel designs, or only simplest ones?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8131286",
"author": "nm",
"timestamp": "2025-05-22T19:36:08",
"content": "You really think you’re going to simulate billions of transistors in your browser?",
"parent_id": "8126971",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126990",
"author": "Lorentio Brodesco",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T23:02:53",
"content": "These are exactly the kinds of software/simulators and games that truly support learning in a simple and interactive way. It may look like ‘just’ a simulator, but in the right hands — with the right drive to learn — it can be the foundation for a future integrated circuit designer. Really great work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127119",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:38:40",
"content": "Reminds of Hard Chip.https://store.steampowered.com/app/3033160/Hard_Chip_Demo/",
"parent_id": "8126990",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127147",
"author": "ford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:56:18",
"content": "it can be the foundation for a future integrated circuit designerI’m dubious about that. All chip design today is done with AI and CAD software so complex that it litarary runs on supercomputer-grade PCs.Early 1970s era of drawing chips on paper is well and truly gone.",
"parent_id": "8126990",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127669",
"author": "alex",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:24:34",
"content": "While I agree that it is unlikely for it to be commercially viable to hand draw chips, I don’t think that learning about how they are designed is a waste of time. After all, a designer who has strong fundamentals in designing for their chosen field will find CAD a multiplier not a replacement.And lets not disregard the hobbyists. I don’t see woodworking with hand tools going out of style any time soon, even though it is not commercially viable for most. I can see some retro computing nerds LARPing as a 1970’s chip designer and making a ‘new’ computer.",
"parent_id": "8127147",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126992",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T23:23:01",
"content": "He’s mine",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.190316
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-mingkwai-typewriter/
|
Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The MingKwai Typewriter
|
Kristina Panos
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] |
[
"endgame keyboard",
"media control",
"MingKwai typewriter",
"Munson",
"portable endgame",
"portable keyboard",
"seeed xiao",
"the Munson typewriter"
] |
Sometimes, a little goes a long way. I believe that’s the case with
this tiny media control bar
from [likeablob] that uses an ESP32-C3 Super Mini.
Image by [likeablob] via
Hackaday.IO
From left to right you’ve got a meta key that allows double functions for all the other keys. The base functions are play/pause, previous track, and next track while the knob handles volume.
And because it uses this Wi-Fi-enabled microcontroller, it can seamlessly integrate with Home Assistant via ESPHome.
What else is under the hood? Four low-profile Cherry MX Browns and a rotary encoder underneath that nicely-printed knob.
If you want to build one of these for yourself,
all the files are available on GitHub
including the customizable enclosure which [likeablob] designed with OpenSCAD.
Portable Endgame, If It Exists
Perhaps [Palpatine]’s one mistake in creating
this 36-key portable endgame
is believing in the idea of the endgame in the first place. But I’m not here to judge.
Image by [Palpatine] via
reddit
Oh wait, yes I am! I really like this keyboard, and I think it would look right at home on the desk of the centerfold below it, although it’s supposed to be a go-anywhere contraption. Be sure to check out the gallery on this one to see it folded together for transport.
It would seem that [Palpatine] learned some nice tricks while designing this keyboard. Have you heard of 10440 batteries? They’re 3.7 V and usually cheaper than the square Li-Po batteries of the same size.
This bad boy is based on the Seeed Xiao nRF52840, which [Palpatine] believes is worth spending a little bit of extra money on instead of nice!nano clones, while being cheaper than an actual nice!nano would be.
As far as open-sourceness goes, [Palpatine] seems willing to share their design files, although they don’t seem to have been published anywhere at this time.
The Centerfold: White Light Might Bite At Night
Image by [Embarrased-Yak-3766] via
reddit
So this one isn’t quite as wide as usual, but it’s definitely more white than usual
. I suppose that wiiiide monitor makes up for the missing pixels.
What do you think? Crisp and clean, or cold and clinical? I can’t decide. I definitely feel snowbound vibes, and I want to sleep in.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Munson
Image by [Martin Howard] via
Antique Typewriters
The delight of
the Munson typewriter
is in the exposed internal workings, which come to life when the machine is in use. Those octagonal key tops aren’t too shabby, either.
You may have noticed that this machine has no typebars. Instead, it uses a horizontal cylinder about the size of a finger. The cylinder slides from side to side and rotates to find the chosen character. Then a hammer strikes from behind the paper, pushing it against the ribbon and the type cylinder.
Much like the later IBM Selectrics and the daisy wheel machines of the 1970s and ’80s, one could easily change the font by swapping out the all-steel type cylinder. The Munson has two Shift keys, one for upper case and another for figures, so only three rows of keys are needed.
The Munson came out in 1890 and was well-received. It won the highest medal awarded at the World’s Fair Chicago, 1893, but the machines are hard to find these days. Eight years after its introduction, the design of the Munson was acquired by the Chicago Writing Machine Co. and rebranded the Chicago.
Finally, the MingKwai Typewriter Emerges From Obscurity
So you get a Historical Clackers two-fer this week; lucky you! After more than half a century,
this fascinating Chinese typewriter
turned up while a couple was cleaning out her grandfather’s basement in New York.
Jennifer Felix and her husband Nelson posted photos on a Facebook group trying to ID the machine. A flurry of enthusiastic comments flooded the forum, with many people offering to buy the machine.
Photo by Elisabeth von Boch, courtesy of Stanford Libraries; image via
This Is Colossal
As it turns out, it’s a MingKwai — the only one in existence. And it’s now in the hands of Stanford Libraries.
This machine was invented in 1947 by a writer, translator, and linguist named Lin Yutang. The MingKwai, which means “clear and fast”, was the first compact concept Chinese typewriter to have a keyboard that was capable of producing 80,000+ characters.
How is that even possible? Mechanical sort and search. Seriously! Check this out: the 72-key board is made up of strokes and shapes, and the characters are arranged in linear order, like an English dictionary. To use it, you would press one of the 36 top keys and one of the 28 bottom keys simultaneously. This triggered a series of rotations in the internals and would bring eight characters into view in a small window that Lin called the “magic eye”. Finally, you would choose your desired character using the numbered keys in the bottom row.
The only known prototype was built by the Carl E. Krum company. Lin was unable to drum up commercial interest to produce it at scale, so he sold the rights and the prototype to Mergenthaler Linotype Company, where Jennifer Felix’s grandfather worked as a machinist. So it never went into production, and the prototype went home with with Grandpa.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
.
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126928",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:41:29",
"content": "That whiteout station would fit in the film THX-1138. Imagine an endless white void with a desk far in the distance, and as you get closer you see a white desk with an all-white computer, with one lone guy wearing all white working on it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126956",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:53:31",
"content": "“10440” aka “AAA” cell.Just don’t pop them in a device expecting 1.5 V/cell…“AA” (14500) are also available.Curiously, “A” size cells seem to have died out in the NiCd era. They were slightly smaller than the ubiquitous 18650 now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127246",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:04:24",
"content": "That Munson is not exactly the “Chicago Typewriter” that I drool over, but it is still gorgeous nonetheless!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127296",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:35:02",
"content": "On the Munson, given that it has a rubber paper platen, I can’t understand how a hammer can strike the paper from behind. Looking at the other pictures in the museum didn’t help. My only guess is that the entire platen strikes the type cylinder, and that it depends upon the thin metal shield to only allow the chosen character to press the ribbon into the paper.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.147259
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/print-pla-in-pla-with-a-giant-molecular-model-kit/
|
Print PLA In PLA With A Giant Molecular Model Kit
|
Tyler August
|
[
"chemistry hacks"
] |
[
"3D printable",
"Chemistry",
"educational toy",
"molecule"
] |
It isn’t too often we post a hack that’s just a pure 3D print with no other components, but for this
Giant Molecular Model kit
by [3D Printy], we’ll make an exception. After all, even if you print with PLA every day, how often do you get to play with its molecular bonds? (If you want to see that molecule, check out the video after the break.)
There are multiple sizes of bonds to represent bond lengths, and two styles: flexible and firm. Flexible bonds are great for multiple covalent bonds, like carbon-carbon bonds in organic molecules. The bonds clip to caps that screw in to the atoms; alternately a bond-cap can screw the atoms together directly. A plethora of atoms is available, in valence values from one to four. The two-bond atom has 180 and 120-degree variations for greater accuracy. In terms of the chemistry this kit could represent, you’re only limited by your imagination and how long you are willing to spend printing atoms and bonds.
[3D Printy] was kind enough to release the whole lot as CC0 Public Domain, so we might be seeing these at craft fairs, as there’s nothing to keep you from selling the prints. Honestly, we can only hope; from an educational standpoint, this is a much better use of plastic than endless flexy dragons.
If you’d prefer your chemistry toys help you do chemistry, try
this fidget spinner centrifuge.
Perhaps you’d rather be
teaching electronics instead?
| 1
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126986",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T22:43:24",
"content": "Print quality on those is pretty great! These things are surprisingly expensive to buy. It brings me a lot of joy to see jumbo versions freely available to download an d print at will",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.307818
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/radio-apocalypse-meteor-burst-communications/
|
Radio Apocalypse: Meteor Burst Communications
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Radio Hacks",
"Slider"
] |
[
"burst",
"cold war",
"ion",
"ionosphere",
"meteor",
"propagation",
"radio"
] |
The world’s militaries have always been at the forefront of communications technology. From trumpets and drums to signal flags and semaphores, anything that allows a military commander to relay orders to troops in the field quickly or call for reinforcements was quickly seized upon and optimized. So once radio was invented, it’s little wonder how quickly military commanders capitalized on it for field communications.
Radiotelegraph systems began showing up as early as the First World War, but World War II was the first real radio war, with every belligerent taking full advantage of the latest radio technology. Chief among these developments was the ability of signals in the high-frequency (HF) bands to reflect off the ionosphere and propagate around the world, an important capability when prosecuting a global war.
But not long after, in the less kinetic but equally dangerous Cold War period, military planners began to see the need to move more information around than HF radio could support while still being able to do it over the horizon. What they needed was the higher bandwidth of the higher frequencies, but to somehow bend the signals around the curvature of the Earth. What they came up with was a fascinating application of practical physics: meteor burst communications.
Blame It on Shannon
In practical terms, a radio signal that can carry enough information to be useful for digital communications while still being able to propagate long distances is a bit of a paradox. You can thank Claude Shannon for that, after he developed the idea of channel capacity from the earlier work of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley. The resulting Hartley-Shannon Theorem states that the bit rate of a channel in a noisy environment is directly related to the bandwidth of the channel. In other words, the more data you want to stuff down a channel, the higher the frequency needs to be.
Unfortunately, that runs afoul of the physics of ionospheric propagation. Thanks to the physics of the interaction between radio waves and the charged particles between about 50 km and 600 km above the ground, the maximum frequency that can be reflected back toward the ground is about 30 MHz, which is the upper end of the HF band. Beyond that is the very-high frequency (VHF) band from 30 MHz to 300 MHz, which has enough bandwidth for an effective data channel but to which the ionosphere is essentially transparent.
Luckily, the ionosphere isn’t the only thing capable of redirecting radio waves. Back in the 1920s, Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka observed that the ionospheric propagation of shortwave radio signals would change a bit during periods of high meteoric activity. That discovery largely remained dormant until after World War II, when researchers picked up on Nagoka’s work and looked into the mechanism behind his observations.
Every day, the Earth sweeps up a huge number of meteoroids; estimates range from a million to ten billion. Most of those are very small, on the order of a few nanograms, with a few good-sized chunks in the tens of kilograms range mixed in. But the ones that end up being most interesting for communications purposes are the particles in the milligram range, in part because there are about 100 million such collisions on average every day, but also because they tend to vaporize in the E-level of the ionosphere, between 80 and 120 km above the surface. The air at that altitude is dense enough to turn the incoming cosmic debris into a long, skinny trail of ions, but thin enough that the free electrons take a while to recombine into neutral atoms. It’s a short time — anywhere between 500 milliseconds to a few seconds — but it’s long enough to be useful.
A meteor trail from the annual Perseid shower, which peaks in early August. This is probably a bit larger than the optimum for MBC, but beautiful nonetheless. Source:
John Flannery
,
CC BY-ND 2.0
.
The other aspect of meteor trails formed at these altitudes that makes them useful for communications is their relative reflectivity. The E-layer of the ionosphere normally has on the order of 10
7
electrons per cubic meter, a density that tends to refract radio waves below about 20 MHz. But meteor trails at this altitude can have densities as high as 10
11
to 10
12
electrons/m
3
. This makes the trails highly reflective to radio waves, especially at the higher frequencies of the VHF band.
In addition to the short-lived nature of meteor trails, daily and seasonal variations in the number of meteors complicate their utility for communications. The rotation of the Earth on its axis accounts for the diurnal variation, which tends to peak around dawn local time every day as the planet’s rotation and orbit are going in the same direction and the number of collisions increases. Seasonal variations occur because of the tilt of Earth’s axis relative to the plane of the ecliptic, where most meteoroids are concentrated. More collisions occur when the Earth’s axis is pointed in the direction of travel around the Sun, which is the second half of the year for the northern hemisphere.
Learning to Burst
Building a practical system that leverages these highly reflective but short-lived and variable mirrors in the sky isn’t easy, as shown by several post-war experimental systems. The first of these was attempted by the National Bureau of Standards in 1951. They set up a system between Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Sterling, Virginia, a path length of about 1250 km. Originally built to study propagation phenomena such as forward scatter and sporadic E, the researchers noticed significant effects on their tests by meteor trails. This made them switch their focus to meteor trails, which caught the attention of the US Air Force. They were in the market for a four-channel continuous teletype link to their base in Thule, Greenland. They got it, but only just barely, thanks to the limited technology of the time. The NBS system also used the Iowa to Virginia system to study higher data rates by pointing highly directional rhombic antennas at each end of the connection at the same small patch of sky. They managed a whopping data rate of 3,200 bits per second with this system, but only for the second or so that a meteor trail happened to appear.
The successes and failures of the NBS system made it clear that a useful system based on meteor trails would need to operate in burst mode, to jam data through the link for as long as it existed and wait for the next one. The NBS tested a burst-mode system in 1958 that used the 50-MHz band and offered a full-duplex link at 2,400 bits per second. The system used magnetic tape loops to buffer data and transmitters at both ends of the link that operated continually to probe for a path. Whenever the receiver at one end detected a sufficiently strong probe signal from the other end, the transmitter would start sending data. The Canadians got in on the MBC action with their JANET system, which had a similar dedicated probing channel and tape buffer. In 1954 they established a full-duplex teletype link between Ottawa and Nova Scotia at 1,300 bits per second with an error rate of only 1.5%
In the late 1950s, Hughes developed a single-channel air-to-ground MBC system. This was a significant development since not only had the equipment gotten small enough to install on an airplane but also because it really refined the burst-mode technology. The ground stations in the Hughes system periodically transmitted a 100-bit interrogation signal to probe for a path to the aircraft. The receiver on the ground listened for an acknowledgement from the plane, which turned the channel around and allowed the airborne transmitter to send a 100-bit data burst. The system managed a respectable 2,400 bps data rate, but suffered greatly from ground-based interference for TV stations and automotive ignition noise.
The SHAPE of Things to Come
Supreme HQ Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), NATO’s European headquarters in the mid-60s. The COMET meteor-bounce system kept NATO commanders in touch with member-nation HQs via teletype. Source:
NATO
The first major MBC system fielded during the Cold War was the Communications by Meteor Trails system, or COMET. It was used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to link its far-flung outposts in member nations with Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE, located in Belgium. COMET took cues from the Hughes system, especially its error detection and correction scheme. COMET was a robust and effective MBC system that provided between four and eight teletype circuits depending on daily and seasonal conditions, each handling 60 words per minute.
COMET was in continuous use from the mid-1960s until well after the official end of the Cold War. By that point, secure satellite communications were nowhere near as prohibitively expensive as they had been at the beginning of the Space Age, and MBC systems became less critical to NATO. They weren’t retired, though, and COMET actually still exists, although rebranded as “Compact Over-the-Horizon Mobile Expeditionary Terminal.” These man-portable systems don’t use MBC; rather, they use high-power UHF and microwave transmitters to scatter signals off the troposphere. A small amount of the signal is reflected back to the ground, where high-gain antennas pick up the vanishingly weak signals.
Although not directly related to Cold War communications, it’s worth noting that there was a very successful MBC system fielded in the civilian space in the United States: SNOTEL.
We’ve covered this system
in some depth already, but briefly, it’s a network of stations in the western part of the USA with the critical job of monitoring the snowpack. A commercial MBC system connected the solar-powered monitoring stations, often in remote and rugged locations, to two different central bases. Taking advantage of diurnal meteor variations, each morning the master station would send a polling signal out to every remote, which would then send back the previous day’s data once a return path was opened. The system could collect data from 180 remote sites in just 20 minutes. It operated successfully from the mid-1970s until just recently, when pervasive cell technology and cheap satellite modems made the system obsolete.
| 15
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126866",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:08:09",
"content": "Well using HF you can control a drone anywhere on the globe with as low as 10W of power given the right conditions and bandUse the ghz band via a sattlink simply for video and high bandwidth data, and with Ai if it loses signal you can just upload the mission plan so, if contact is lost it can still fly on its own via GPS and pinging cell towers….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126867",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:09:43",
"content": "But nowadays with sattlinks even HF band is getting a little outdatedSince if you got a 20ghz sattlink you can pretty much cram everything you need on that wavelengths with bandwidth to probably spare, especially with digital encoding",
"parent_id": "8126866",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126887",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T15:05:08",
"content": "It’s always good to have backup communication methods.",
"parent_id": "8126867",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126926",
"author": "Wallace Owen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:32:35",
"content": "Principal use case for meteor burst communications is extremely secure communications, immune to eavesdroppers, used by the Strategic Air Command. Specifically for the case where our satellites have been rendered inoperable (by enemy or coronal mass ejection/Carrington event).",
"parent_id": "8126867",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127095",
"author": "phuzz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T10:40:30",
"content": "I suppose that in the event of a mass-shootdown of satellites, there’d be a lot more debris burning up in the atmosphere, acting as artificial ‘meteor bursts’, making this method even more useful.",
"parent_id": "8126926",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8181705",
"author": "TollHolio",
"timestamp": "2025-09-19T12:59:48",
"content": "What you say is true, but slow.HF is still used for speed. Bandwidth is low but the round trip time is seriously dropped vs sat links.See High Frequency Trading for more info that is non classified. But Military figured this out a long time ago.",
"parent_id": "8126867",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126913",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T16:26:33",
"content": "There was a data communication system for long haul truckers in the ’90s that used meteor scatter to send short data packets. You would see trucks with antennas that looked like 1/4 wave whips for the 6 meter ham band. I assume it lost favor when cellular data became affordable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126924",
"author": "Wallace Owen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:28:09",
"content": "I used meteor burst communications in the 80’s to transmit US Navy ship positions back to CINCLant via a master station located at Bermuda, for an exercise in the Carribean Op Area. We averaged 5000 bits a day, statistically. Packet size was 16 bytes, wityh 12 bytes for payload. I packed the lat/lon and time (tens of seconds since midnight GMT) into that 12 bits.The Air Force had a different reason to love Meteor Burst communications: a nuke detonated in the atmosphere provides a gigantic ionization layer, allowing almost continuous communication when the apocalypse is ‘in-progress’.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127101",
"author": "Hegseth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T10:54:39",
"content": "Nowadays we just use Signal and Telegram to send coordinates.",
"parent_id": "8126924",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126929",
"author": "alloydog",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:42:42",
"content": "Learning to burst: I once had a QSO on 2-metres, using a thunderstorm to bounce over London. Had to keep the overs very short and an eye on the S-meter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126941",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:12:53",
"content": "With all these systems in use, I bet there was conflict over limited number of meteor bursts. If the meteor trails are mirrors that only reflect a given range of frequencies, that means that two senders trying to flash it at the same time with the same frequency will clobber each other. And since meteors are intermittent, there could be multiple different senders all waiting around for each one.I suppose the important frequencies fall into a range that is at least partially reserved for government use?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126954",
"author": "Wallace Owen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:46:15",
"content": "Our system was configured so our master node would send “can you hear me?” messages, and if it got a reply the contents was in the reply.The master station would send an ack or nak, and if a remote station received the ack/nak without error it would either resend the last message or send a new message.This back-and-forth would continue for as long as signals with sufficient strength were being reflected back.There is an annulus around the base station – 800 nautical miles to 1300 nautical miles, outside of which the signal drops off quickly.",
"parent_id": "8126941",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8129655",
"author": "Mike W0BTU",
"timestamp": "2025-05-18T18:15:36",
"content": "I used meteor scatter some years ago on the low end of the 2 meter amateur radio band. From Toledo, Ohio to Utah, one trail must have lasted a whole minute! It even supported an SSB QSO.Almost as fun as aurora CW contacts. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130164",
"author": "brad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T21:31:53",
"content": "hams are working meteor bounce most morings on 50.260mhz in mode msk144 mode pretty easy to hear them with a small yagi or sometimes just a vertical antenna.monitor the activity using the mode msk144 at “pskreporter”signal map webpage.photo shows how to set the reporter for meteor bounce signals. lots of them today!https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_0sADkjfDiWyRzqdMDS_pbi5g2vGEMND/view?usp=sharing",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136224",
"author": "Denny",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T13:44:46",
"content": "EI was involved in METSCAT in the 8o’s. I have since learned there are now no companies marketing product. I am involved in a Crisis Management group in the Pac NW and we could this technilogy now if it exists.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.367386
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/whats-in-a-washer/
|
What’s In A Washer?
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Misc Hacks"
] |
[
"Belleville washer",
"washers"
] |
Some things are so common you forget about them. How often do you think about an ordinary resistor, for example? Yet if you have a bad resistor, you’ll find it can be a big problem. Plus, how can you really understand electronics if you don’t know all the subtle details of a resistor? In the mechanical world, you could make the same arguments about
the washer
, and [New Mind] is ready to explain the history and the gory details of using washers in a recent video that you can see below.
The simple answer is that washers allow a bolt to fit in a hole otherwise too large, but that’s only a small part of the story. Technically, what you are really doing is distributing the load of a threaded fastener. However, washers can also act as spacers or springs. Some washers can lock, and some indicate various things like wear or preloading conditions.
Plain washers have a surprising number of secondary functions. Spring washers, including
Belleville washers
, help prevent fasteners from loosening over time. Wave washers look — well — wavy. They provide precise force against the bolt for preloading. Locking washers are also made to prevent fasteners from loosening, but use teeth or stops instead of springs.
There are plenty of standards, of course, that mostly match up. Mostly.
If you like knowing about odd washers, you might also want to know about
the bolts
that pass through them.
| 15
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126823",
"author": "Fiteboss",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:03:11",
"content": "Really never expected to see a photo of a machine tool drawbar on Hackaday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126843",
"author": "Kman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:19:47",
"content": "Forbidden machinist lore goes deep!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126846",
"author": "Ali",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:31:02",
"content": "When you try to make it sound like some secret knowledge but it’s actually stuff taught during second semester at university, right after first semester calculus weeds out those not interested in studying what they’ve signed up for.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126912",
"author": "Padrote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T16:23:59",
"content": "wow this dude must have aced washers 125",
"parent_id": "8126846",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127006",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T01:49:11",
"content": "No it isn’t taught. Know how I know? There are still people at the end who don’t know you need to use an Allen key to tighten an Allen socket head bolt. I wish I was kidding.",
"parent_id": "8126846",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127104",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T11:00:02",
"content": "Maybe to mechanical and industrial engineering folk. Us computer and software people are lucky to get a few classes of machine shop",
"parent_id": "8126846",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8129757",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T02:59:07",
"content": "They even replaced the microcontroller workshop with a software engineering workshop in my curriculum the year it was supposed to be held. The only hardware I had to touch to get my CS degree was a keyboard.",
"parent_id": "8127104",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126848",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:43:04",
"content": "Who needs a washer when you use a self-sealing stem bolt. 😁",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126949",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:37:39",
"content": "A DS9 fan, I see…",
"parent_id": "8126848",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126999",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T00:16:47",
"content": "I thought this was an article on washing machines.",
"parent_id": "8126949",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126853",
"author": "hardwerker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:48:36",
"content": "“Spring washers, including Belleville washers, help prevent fasteners from loosening over time”Well, not really :-)https://youtu.be/IKwWu2w1gGk?feature=shared",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126883",
"author": "Frankie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:50:51",
"content": "Yeah, especially b/c the header image is showing belleville washers in a typical application (what looks like applying a preload closing force to a spring collet), which is not about preventing fasteners from loosening over time!",
"parent_id": "8126853",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126923",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:22:53",
"content": "Yeah, most lock washers (or Belleville washers being used as lock washers) are next to or worse than useless. There’s a NASA paper that digs into it in a less marketing-ey way. I can’t find it right now, but their fastener design manual goes over the highlightshttps://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900009424/downloads/19900009424.pdf",
"parent_id": "8126853",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126962",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T19:17:11",
"content": "When he said its obvious what they do I thought yeah it is and hit the stop button.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127008",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T02:15:23",
"content": "I’m glad to see all these expert commenters stop by from hackaday’s sister website washer-a-day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.418579
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/12/rebooting-an-1973-art-installation-running-on-a-nova/
|
Rebooting An 1973 Art Installation Running On A Nova
|
Dave Rowntree
|
[
"Art"
] |
[
"Data General Nova",
"neon lamp",
"PT8211",
"Raspberry Pi 4",
"SIMH",
"synthesiser",
"Teensy 4.0",
"ws2811"
] |
Electronics-based art installations are often fleeting and specific things that only a select few people who are in the right place
or time
get to experience before they are lost to the ravages of ‘progress.’ So it’s wonderful to find a dedicated son who has recreated his father’s 1973 art installation, showing it to the world in a miniature form. The
network-iv-rebooted project
is a recreation of an installation once housed within a departure lounge in terminal C of Seattle-Tacoma airport.
You can do a lot with a ‘pi and a fistful of Teensies!
The original unit comprises an array of 1024
GE R6A neon lamps
, controlled from a Data General Nova 1210 minicomputer. A bank of three analog synthesizers also drove into no fewer than 32 resonators. An 8×8 array of input switches was the only user-facing input. The switches were mounted to a floor-standing pedestal facing the display.
For the re-creation, the neon lamps were replaced with 16×16 WS2811 LED modules, driven via a Teensy 4.0 using the
OctoWS2811 library
. The display Teensy is controlled from a Raspberry Pi 4, hooked up as a virtual serial device over USB. A second Teensy (you can’t have too many Teensies!) is responsible for scanning a miniature 8×8 push button array as well as running a simulation of the original sound synthesis setup. Audio is pushed out of the Teensy using a
PT8211 I
2
S audio DAC
, before driving a final audio power amp.
Attempting to reproduce accurately how the original code worked would be tricky, if downright impossible, but fear not, as the network-iv-rebooted
is
running the original code. Since the artist was astute enough to keep not only the engineering drawings and schematics, but also the original paper tape of the Nova 1210 program, it could be successfully run using the
SIMH Nova emulator
. The simulator needed to be modified to support the optional ‘device 76’ GPIO device added to the Nova 1210 for handling the extra connectivity. This was a small price to pay compared to the alternative. That said, most of the heavy lifting on the I/O side is performed by the pair of Teensies, with modern coding methods making life a lot easier.
Mechanics and code for the reproduction are being collected on
this GitHub repo
for those interested in building a clone. The
opus20 page
has a few photos and details of the original installation
, but many more pieces can be found on
the sculptures page
, complete with a neat video tour, which we also include below. Check out those circuit sculptures! Groovy!
We’ve
recently featured some retro electronic art
,
drooled over some circuit sculptures
, and
swooned at some PCB art
. We just can’t get enough!
A short video about James Seawright’s other pieces:
| 19
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126792",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T09:33:20",
"content": "I think usagi electric is working on bringing up exactly one of those NOVA minicomputers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126960",
"author": "mrmike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T19:04:20",
"content": "I’ve been watching Tech Tangents on Youtube fiddle with a Data General microNova… lots of fun..",
"parent_id": "8126792",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126795",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T09:52:53",
"content": "“A 1973 Art Installation” not “An 1973 Art Installation”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126817",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T11:31:11",
"content": "Thanc jou vor tis konstructife comend, Im sjure te wort iz novv an beter plaace.Juzt emagine iv tis eror waz nod fiksed. Buy thu weigh, jou vorgot too mentjon the fect thad te ekstra capitol az uset in te wort “Art” end te wort “Installation” doez nod add too the senteze ant therevore kood bee remofed kompletelee. Than agian… itz art… it sjoet bee stranche, sjoet nod id.",
"parent_id": "8126795",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126861",
"author": "Anathae",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:00:48",
"content": "Thank you for your own constructive comment. The effort in developing a phonetically understandable but counter to convention encoding has had the desired effect on local entropy. Good job.",
"parent_id": "8126817",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126991",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T23:19:14",
"content": "Sure, Jan.",
"parent_id": "8126817",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126804",
"author": "Matt Cramer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T10:36:35",
"content": "At first I read that headline as rebooting an art installation on a 1973 (Chevy) Nova.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126876",
"author": "Maxbash",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:37:00",
"content": "That’s the only Nova I was aware of from that time. Many know that “no va” in Spanish means it doesn’t go. I bet this computer didn’t sell well in Spanish speaking countries either.",
"parent_id": "8126804",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127137",
"author": "Sunoo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:18:13",
"content": "Just like how no English speaker wants to see a therapist because why would they want to go to the rapist?And the Chevy Nova sold fine in Spanish speaking countries.",
"parent_id": "8126876",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126821",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T11:47:30",
"content": "That display is showing Conway’s “Game of Life”.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_LifeI programmed it on a CDC CYBER and displayed on a 24×80 DEC VT-05 when I was in grad school.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126827",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:07:12",
"content": "Checking out the other sculptures, I find Passing Reflections, which I distinctly remember seeing at Logan Airport. Not sure if it’s still in Terminal C, but The Internet says it was still there in 2005. I’ll have to check next time I go there.(and I used to work at DG, though post-NOVA 1210)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126860",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:57:59",
"content": "It’s nice to see legacy art recreated. One thing I didn’t follow was if the original was interactive allowing the public to use the switch panel. The second video of art was different…I guess the definition of art lies in the eye of the beholder. The music is somewhat reminiscent of “Krell” music (Forbidden Planet).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127870",
"author": "swingbozo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T22:06:26",
"content": "The original did indeed have a 16×16 button console. As a kid I could never figure out what exactly the buttons did. I found out just recently it was the “Game of Life.” You had to press at least three buttons to get it to react, which finally makes sense now that I know what the real rules are.",
"parent_id": "8126860",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126920",
"author": "3453453dgdfgdgre",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:05:40",
"content": "https://www.seawright.net/sculpture/opus20Here are some pictures I found of the original. It did have a control panel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126947",
"author": "Kelly",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:30:47",
"content": "Reminds me of… and it oh does use Conway’s GoL algo. 1024 (64×16) of 3W neon lamps!The music is creepy, although in the 1970’s many movies were FUD about super computers going crazy – see Colossus: The Forbin Project {1970}.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126978",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T21:26:03",
"content": "I remember seeing that display at Sea-Tac in early 1976, on a layover on my way to Alaska for a fun-filled year at a remote RADAR station. I saw it several more times over the years, the last couple of which it wasn’t working. And then it was gone.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127339",
"author": "Murray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:10:30",
"content": "Did anyone ever use neon indicators as a form of RAM? You could have a holding voltage, and a higher write voltage, current sensors could read indicator states? The negative resistive curve makes them perfect for a memory of sorts. Pretty too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127375",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T21:40:23",
"content": "Maybe not directly as memory, but the Burroughs Self-Scan series of plasma displays used this characteristic to implement a shift register. Each row of dots operated independently, shifting bits down the whole length of the display, and once all of the data had been read in, this was transferred to separate cells that were the visible portion of the display.http://ferretronix.com/tech/nixie/pdf/ss_theory.pdf",
"parent_id": "8127339",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8135586",
"author": "Sykobee",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T12:41:47",
"content": "I hope there is a pouet.net submission for this. Might be one of the earlier entries!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.542453
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/simulating-cable-tv/
|
Simulating Cable TV
|
Al Williams
|
[
"home entertainment hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] |
[
"cable TV"
] |
[Wrongdog Recons] suffers from a severe case of nostalgia. His earlier project simulated broadcast TV, and he was a little surprised at how popular the project was on GitHub. As people requested features, he realized that he could create a simulated cable box and
emulate a 1990s-era cable TV system
. Of course, you also needed
a physical box
, which turned into another project. You can see more about the project in the video below.
Inside is, unsurprisingly, a Raspberry Pi. Then you have to pretend to be a cable TV scheduler and organize your different video files for channels. You can interleave commercials and station breaks.
One addition was a scheduler so you could set up things like football games only play during football season. You can also control timing so you don’t get beer commercials during Saturday morning cartoons.
We were especially impressed with the program guide channel that lets you see what’s playing, just like an old-style cable system. The simulation even plays trash TV in the morning and bizarre commercials post-midnight.
If you are tired of having to decide what to watch, this might be for you. If you want to simulate the earliest pay TV,
you’ll need a coin slot
. We wonder if the simulator could do a
local origination weather channel
.
| 16
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126757",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T06:10:54",
"content": "brownie points if you use fake commercials from the likes of robocop and others.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126764",
"author": "Norman Stansberry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T06:52:01",
"content": "I would buy that for a dollar",
"parent_id": "8126757",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126855",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:51:12",
"content": "Who needs fake commercials when you can do “Cal worthington and my dog spot” commercials?!",
"parent_id": "8126757",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127153",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:05:07",
"content": "i mean there are commercials that i would classify as high art. super bowl commercials for example. but if ocp comes up offering the latest convenience, so much the better. kind of mixed them in.there was this alt history movie mocumentary where the south won the civil war (c.s.a. or some such). it had fake commercials interspersed throughout with products from a pro slavery modern world. lots of wtf momements.the robocop tv series had some good ones as well. comedy shows (snl and others) sometimes also had fake commercials.",
"parent_id": "8126855",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126797",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T09:55:43",
"content": "The brother of a coworker does storage unit auction buying and reselling. Last year he scored a storage unit that had an interesting bit of kit. Someone had wired 50 raspberry pi’s to 50 atsc modulators. After an afternoon of tinkering around we managed to get the thing up and running and attached to a set of NAS drives that were also in the storage unit. It was pretty cool.Digging through the other items in the unit he figured out its intended purpose. There was a bunch of paperwork and brochures for a summer camp. It seems the previous owner was setting up a makeshift cable TV network for the camp, I think when it came time to create 50 channels worth of screened, censored, and scheduled content they realized just how much they had really bitten off and scrapped the project.We played around with the system for a few hours to test the functionality of it all. Then they sold off the parts on ebay for a tidy sum. Those modulators sell for $300+ new.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126828",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:11:03",
"content": "I know WAY too much about the Jerrold 400/450 cable boxes and how the headend authorises them to descramble the various channels. Useless information now, but lots of fun figuring it out at the time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126863",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:02:06",
"content": "Our hometown cable company used the Jerrold boxes…..it brings back memories of the occasional late nights staring at the scrambled signal of the porn channel…",
"parent_id": "8126828",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126875",
"author": "kaidenshi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:35:38",
"content": "I think I saw a nipple!…never mind it was just an elbow.Growing up in the 80s was wild.",
"parent_id": "8126863",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126919",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:03:02",
"content": "There was a smaller chip in a socket that when I pulled it out it slipped and one end was still in place and a clear picture was on the screen! I found out from others that a diode in the last 2 pins was all it took to make it clear. This was Jerrold stuff a box with a 30 or so position switch to tune. We’d run longer cables around the room and have chair side tuning without remote control, instead of “set top” operation.",
"parent_id": "8126863",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127001",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T00:46:20",
"content": "That was a 32×8 PROM that held the box’s network address.",
"parent_id": "8126919",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126871",
"author": "Puddle Pirate Extraordinare",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:19:22",
"content": "Reminds me of how my friends and I spent a lot of time on earlier versions of the “dark web” trying to hack the smart cards old satellite TV boxes used. We got it to work a few times but it was never permanent. We’re talking late 90s early 00s era hardware, so the boxes were still using phone lines to order pay-per-view movies.Once Bit Torrent really got up and running directly pirating the content we wanted was way easier.",
"parent_id": "8126828",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126906",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T15:52:22",
"content": "Nostalgia for the (mostly and reasonably) well-made media content, why yes.Translation – during the heydays of the analog era (I’d say good strech, 1950s through must be mid-1980s) it took quite an investment to set up and run a TV or a cable channel. Investment meant selection of the talent and experience, and also there were entire sub-industries embedded within the industry, technology needed R&D and engineers, scripts needed writers, studios needed personnel, news needed good-looking anchors people will like, make up artists, etc etc. It was a huge industrial complex, partially inherited from the radio days, and had quite a competition – Hollywood, so it had to stay on its toes (so did Hollywood). Tidbit – just like the music recording studios had cadres of part-time recording musicians and stacks of pre-recorded albums they could sell, TV studios had cadres of actors and pre-recorded programs, so there was quite a pool of extra content to draw off of in case “regular programming” falls short and gets pulled off the air. Those stacks of extra content was also getting aged rather fast, so HAD to be used somewhere, somehow, hence, some programs were nearly free to air, pre-recorded and edited, just give us some advertising money and we will air it tonight.Rewind to the MP3 revolution and the massive fallout from it, not just the music recording studios, ANYTHING that had to do with the media content was collapsing, directly or indirectly, and this included the extra content that was suddenly no longer needed (or worthy keeping around, as much of it was aged). Only the largest most-entrenched behemoths survived, GMs/Fords of the industry, and they consolidated what hasn’t fell apart just yet, and trashed the rest. Now we are down to what, two or three mega-corporations controlling/reselling pretty much the vast majority of the media content. (obviously, for-profit ones; the rest is insignificant in comparison and barely make a splash). Archived content … editors, what editors, a high school graduate with more or less good command of english language can edit anything.Though, I am an optimist, and I think that we are actually in the midst of reinventing good media content, oddly enough, by direct popular vote no less (what’s popular on them youtube/tiktok/etc); however, comparing this with the mid-1980s is unfair – far, far less talent, far, far more artificial/superficial/unclear/odd, etc etc. The content had changed quite a great deal since then, and while the idea of unlimited access to anything under the sun is liberating, however with it comes its predictable evil twin – THE NOISE. Of course the noise level was about the same during the analog era, however, except for the indie channels and piratttradios, it didn’t have much of a distribution; now that the floodgates are wide open, it flows freely together with Good Content.Back when human editors (good or bad) were mostly (not always, but oftentimes) filtering what’s to be shown (or heard on the radio) through limited media outlets, the media in general still had some human touch … and talent … and experience … and class … obviously, if it is a big investment, you do NOT want uneducated/inexperienced crowd running the expensive show. Now that there is basically no way it can ever go back, some people (yours truly included) would like to have at least SOME media outlets that are still human-filtered/edited by talented and experienced editors.Hence, playlists … back to the MP3 revolution, they won by the direct/popular vote … people want to list what they want to hear/see … they skip what they don’t want … it remains to be seen if this is (playlisting) is The New Indirect Way of returning the talent the human touch and the class … nostalgic or not. Let’s wait and see (and I predict that some of those playlists will be made by retired editors of the 1980s … in roundabout way returning the “human touch”).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127144",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:53:39",
"content": "i havent been able to get into watching tv via streaming. enldess lists of shows ive never heard of with actors i dont know and when i do find something that looks interesting, it turns out to be drivel and to make matters worse ads pop up mid scene (classic tv worked around ads quite cleverly and they didnt ruin the show like they do now). im mostly watching 3 shows a year now and otherwise watching classic shows.",
"parent_id": "8126906",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127180",
"author": "TerryMatthews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T14:24:32",
"content": "I agree with a lot of what you said and would like to add the bit my nostalgic friend and I came up with that the market is so flooded that nothing is special, has time to be savored, or become a cult classic (outside of meme culture). I remember getting excited about summer movies in the 70s and 80s and holiday specials that were special and not just 5 unaired hours of a supplement podcast. At this point, one only needs to look at the dizzying displays of the streaming sites. I guess the final nail in original and entertaining broadcast tv were reality shows and the 8 billion spinoffs along with the personal self as a BRAND. So it is all a big ass money grab for advertising dollars that if you do the math exist nowhere in the ad companies, ad hosts, nor the tech giants that sponsor them. I think everyone keeps moving fast, grabbing money and buying butt lifts before folks notice the hustle and no one can grab the ass implants back lol. Just the 80s on steroids in a lot of ways. Vapid materialism but on a much larger scale. It is kind of like now it is hard to find a town without a regentrified area with a riverwalk and food truck and bubble tea cafe… I guess my final old man yells at cloud bit would be that I cannot remember a good 90% of what I see now, both because of saturation and my brain knows if I miss something I can internet it and not have to wait until next seasons reruns on ota tv lol. I cannot tell you how many times we have watched the entire series of What We Do and it is almost like watching a new episode everytime. Sure some catch phrases stick but it is not like Ghostbusters where I could recite it line by line and shot by shot. Oh well I know every generation goes thru this since video killed the radio star and money for nothing and chicks for free. Ah that feels better.",
"parent_id": "8126906",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127002",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T01:19:07",
"content": "Need a Parental Control Lock with a Key on a side of the box.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127329",
"author": "EntirelyTooMuchTV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:40:51",
"content": "Needs at least one “channel” that is normally “scrambled”, except every so often it is unexpectedly available for some random amount of time (one week, one month), and then goes back to being scrambled.The thrill of flipping through channels and hey! HBO is running a free week!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.476774
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/you-wouldnt-download-a-helmet/
|
You Wouldn’t Download A Helmet?
|
Fenix Guthrie
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"airbag",
"airbags",
"bike hack",
"bike helmet"
] |
Odds are, if you have ridden a bicycle for any amount of time, you have crashed. Crashes are fast, violent and chaotic events that leave you confused, and very glad to have a helmet. But what if there was another way of protecting your head? [Seth] decided to find out by taking a look at
the Hövding airbag helmet
.
The Hövding sits around your neck and looks somewhat akin to a neck pillow. It uses accelerometers situated in the fore and aft of the device to detect what it thinks is a crash. If a crash is detected, it will release a charge of compressed helium to inflate an airbag that wraps around the user’s head protecting a larger amount of the head then a traditional helmet. It also inflates around the wearer’s neck providing neck bracing in the impact further improving safety. The inflation process is incredibly fast and violent, very much akin to a car’s airbag. [Seth] demonstrated this on the process on two occasions to great effect, and to his amazement. While the idea of relying on computers to protect your head may sound ridiculous, studies have shown that the Hövding is
safer than a regular helmet in certain situations.
Unfortunately the deployment process was irreversible making the product single use. Moreover, the Hövding would deploy in a crash regardless of if you hit your head or not. While Hövding offered a crash replacement at a discount, this would have created large amounts of e-waste.
The Hövding helmet next to various commuter helmets
However, the design is not perfect. During the product’s use there were 27 reports of the device not deploying — particularly when struck by a vehicle. More reports exist of the device deploying erroneously when it detected, for example, bending over too quickly as a crash. It could not meet the US safety standards for helmets and therefore it was never allowed to be sold in the US.
Hövding argued that it was a helmet equivalent and should be exempt from those standards to no avail. Studies suggested that it
was not able to properly protect against sharp corner impacts
similar to the anvil tests used by the United States as the airbag would bottom out in such circumstances.
Ultimate Hövding’s failure as a business came down to software. As the project continued, scope broadened and the device’s firmware grew more complicated. New features were introduced including USB-C charging, OTA updates and phone crash notifications. However, this also appears to have resulted in a firmware bug that caused some units to not deploy, and were potentially sold this way with Hövding’s knowledge. This led the Swedish Consumer Agency to temporarily ban the product along with a stop-use and recall on all Hövding 3s. While the ban was lifted by a judge, the damage was done, consumer trust in Hövding was gone and they filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Unfortunately, this left the existing customers of the Hövding high and dry, without a working app, update method, or crash replacement program.
Airbags are complex and amazing pieces of safety equipment, and while this is the first bike airbag recall we have covered,
it’s not the first airbag recall we have seen.
| 33
| 15
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127504",
"author": "Oscar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T05:31:44",
"content": "Living in Stockholm when these were popular, it was clear that it was simply a class and style symbol. It was a way to distinguish yourself from the poor bikers, without actually driving a car.€300, single-use, extremely complex and fragile. What a waste of resources.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127640",
"author": "AbraKadabra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:25:53",
"content": "And does not offer any protection from direct head strikes, for example, a low hanging branch or street sign jutting out a bit too far. Wiley Coyote safety gear that the Road Runner will soon take advantage of.",
"parent_id": "8127504",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127705",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:58:29",
"content": "Even in the video, it activates AFTER his friend hits him in the back with a basketball. Not a problem with a solid helmet.",
"parent_id": "8127640",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128338",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T08:53:16",
"content": "If you are hitting your head on signage you are in desperate need of a full crash helmet at all times… Its a static object you should have seen long long before you actually pass, so should have no trouble taking whatever degree of avoiding action is required. Branches are a little more acceptable as they can move so much, but the really mobile ones are also really quite thin and light – helmet not required, and might actually make a collision with one worse as most cycle helmets have lots of vent holes to catch on it.IMO neither of those really should ever come up as ‘helmet needed’ in the real world for any cyclist actually fit to be on a bike outside of highly controlled environments. Where this airbag concept in the real world is going to be effective enough (as long as it triggers) to best the fixed helmets for protection in most accidents – the only thing it likely won’t fair so well with is your head coming down on a very sharp object – say into the corner of an open car door, but with the neck gripping it does, how much more wrapped around your head it is when deployed to cover a wider impact angle, and the much greater degree of crumple to absorb any more distributed impact slowly…",
"parent_id": "8127640",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128172",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T20:30:28",
"content": "All bike helmets are ‘single use’.The question is what defines a use.Stupid expensive bikes have had the status symbol thing covered for many decades.That and the branded tour de frog team spandex the shell heads like to wear while LARPing.",
"parent_id": "8127504",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127539",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T07:15:55",
"content": "Love it!Hope they catch on so much we can see them accidentally go off in future Adam Sandler movies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127547",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T07:49:20",
"content": "It’s a total shame that they had to go bankrupt. I just loved them and my wife had hers activate in a dangerous but non accident situation. Great product, overall great design. Stoked that the assets were not picked up for a revival…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127590",
"author": "KT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:00:09",
"content": "Regular bike helmets are also single use if they are impacted.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127598",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:33:53",
"content": "Yeah, I guess the distinction is around the incidents that could involve impacts but eventually don’t. It is a curious idea to plan to get into so many near misses that that is a big issue.",
"parent_id": "8127590",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127653",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:06:37",
"content": "But they cost 10x less. Heck around here they give them away free if you attend a free road safety seminar.",
"parent_id": "8127590",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127667",
"author": "KT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:22:43",
"content": "Yes indeed, I agree that this airbag helmet is stupid. But have seen seen wayyyyy too many sketchy looking bike helmets in thrift stores and such.People don’t know that even if it takes minor or unnoticible damage you can’t rely on it like you could before.My best friend’s life was saved by a helmet in an accident that unfortunately left her with paralysis (but still alive), so I am very pro helmet safety.Dumb techno solutions are dumb, just wear a good helmet properly folks <3",
"parent_id": "8127653",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127787",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:15:55",
"content": "“My best friend’s life was saved by a helmet in an accident”Was it a bike helmet and a bike accident? According to cyclehelmets.org, such claims are usually not true. Even if the helmet broke, all it means is that it failed.https://www.cyclehelmets.org/1209.html",
"parent_id": "8127667",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127934",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T04:16:01",
"content": "That website’s entire purpose is to “prove” helmets are unnecessary. I’m not going to trust it’s selection criteria for it’s references.",
"parent_id": "8127787",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127600",
"author": "G-man",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:35:46",
"content": "I’ve never worn a bicycle helmet and this one-use device that may not even deploy wouldn’t convince me either.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127619",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:25:55",
"content": "Not sure I can trust a man to tell us about his inflatable helmet when he doesn’t know his balls :)That was clearly a basketball not a football thrown at him!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127641",
"author": "ca_heckler",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:26:01",
"content": "That thumbnail from the video sure reminded me of the minions with white helmets in Spaceballs, LOL",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127649",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:50:42",
"content": "Why would an airbag need software updates? Why would an airbag need an app? Why do we keep seeing this same story play out over and over again?At least they didn’t charge a subscription this time.https://hackaday.com/2021/05/18/do-you-really-own-it-motorcycle-airbag-requires-additional-purchase-to-inflate/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127803",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:53:02",
"content": "As they collect data on actual cases, true positives, false positives and false negatives, they can improve the deployment trigger signals for to help ensure it goes off at the right time.",
"parent_id": "8127649",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127828",
"author": "JT Kirk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:29:56",
"content": "Why would God need a starship?",
"parent_id": "8127649",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127657",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:12:12",
"content": "I dunno about rapidly deploying airbags near the head. Those things can inflate with considerable force; like an impact in and of itself. We found that out with vehicular airbags.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127665",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:21:30",
"content": "automotive airbags inflate with an explosive sodium azide charge. They rapidly inflate and then deflate as they absorb impact forces.There is no explosion with these. Think of them more like a helmet shaped balloon. They just rapidly inflate with a helium cartridge, The force potential is not at all comparable to an automotive airbag.",
"parent_id": "8127657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128175",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T20:37:58",
"content": "Good tip, don’t try to use this to launch something on the next holiday.Use a car steering wheel airbag for pyro fun.Beware, the range is more than you expect.A car steering wheel airbag can launch a bowling ball a good 100 ft with bounces and the right angle.Best not to be there when the ball goes through the window.",
"parent_id": "8127665",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127706",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:59:27",
"content": "When I saw this, Brian Wells was the first thing that came to mind.",
"parent_id": "8127657",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127668",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:22:57",
"content": "Based on the description of events in the article it sounds like it’s nowhere near a tragedy that they failed and more like a company getting rightfully destroyed.Failing safety tests and arguing for exemptions is gross enough but that they’d sell safety devices with finicky updates and potentially aware they were broken deserves the corporate death penalty.We’d be better off if more companies were killed off and their IP put onto public domain when they committed grave offenses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127671",
"author": "Oscar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T13:30:07",
"content": "We’d be better off if more companies were killed off and their IP put onto public domain when they committed grave offenses.In fact, why wait for them to commit a grave offence? :) The people already know how to build everything we need – let’s get rid of the companies today.",
"parent_id": "8127668",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127867",
"author": "jack lecou",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T21:30:30",
"content": "Failing safety tests and arguing for exemptions is gross enough…I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization.IIUC, they were NOT simply arguing for a blanket exemption from standards, but rather an adjustment of the standardized test setup to better reflect the fundamentally different way their helmet worked.Which seems to me to at least be a colorable argument. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe the standardized test setup was perfect, or fully captures the distribution of real-world dangers. Such things often aren’t and don’t, and make a lot of assumptions which might not be justified, particularly when someone comes along using a fundamentally different approach to the problem.So an adjustment to the testing like using a less sharply pointed anvil seems pretty reasonable, particularly if it’s backed up by crash statistics. (I know in my daily ride, most of the surfaces I’d be concerned about hitting are pretty blunt. How often does one actually land head-first on a pickelhaube, after all?)If you look at the test results using the modified protocols, their gear was indeedwaybetter at reducing the kind of shock and torsion that causes concussions. Almost an order of magnitude better than foam helmets, which can only tackle that problem with gimmicky inserts a couple of millimeters thick. Hövding may have had some implementation and business issues, but a big air cushion wrapped around your head is really not a fundamentally bad idea, and I’m a little bit sad about this news myself.",
"parent_id": "8127668",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127712",
"author": "Gonzotron",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:06:38",
"content": "Did Wynonas Big Brown Beaver start plating in anyone elses head when they say the thumbnail?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127716",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:14:26",
"content": "If only there was a proven and reliable technology from the motorcycle world to activate wearable airbags…Like, say, a cord attached to your vehicle.If only….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128243",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T00:49:39",
"content": "I suspect the mechanics of pedal cycle incidents and motor cycle incidents are different enough that that’s at best an incomplete solution.There are fundamental differences, like bicycles are not necessarily separated from their riders during crashes, bicycle riders are more physically active while riding limiting the tethering points, and bicycle riders are not accustomed to turning off their bicycles.",
"parent_id": "8127716",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127718",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:17:45",
"content": "Interesting idea but it seems ridiculous when a regular helmet is arguably better, simpler, AND cheaper. Are people really so bothered by helmets? I barely even notice I’m wearing one. The only downside is that you have to store it, put it on and take it off, but this product has the exact seam issues.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127784",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:13:39",
"content": "Yep. In over 100,000 miles of riding, I have never had an incident where a helmet helped anything; but I need a hat anyway, and it might as well be a helmet, even though bicycle helmets don’t offer nearly the protection that a motorcycle helmet or race-car helmet does.",
"parent_id": "8127718",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127823",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:23:11",
"content": "Yeah… Probably not going to download a helmet. Doesn’t seem like the thing you’d want to scrimp and save on. Also I don’t think I’d trust the airbag mechanism, and I’d rather have a windscreen and some shades that I could deploy when I’m staring down the sun in the morning and evening. So a permanent physical helmet is handy for many reasons besides safety.Lastly, if you look at heatmaps of fatal head strikes in two-wheeled-vehicle crashes, the hottest spot is right on the chin. 3/4 helmets do not count, a lot of motorcyclists don’t understand this. I see riders who fifteen years ago would just let the wind run through their hair are now wearing these little retro 3/4 pudding bowls.. You may as well just pretend it is 1973 and ride without gear at that point, because statistically it’s not going to help you in the majority of crashes.And of course ~zero bicyclists wear full helmets. I wonder if that will ever become a trend. I get it, it’s a big hassle for just pedaling around on a bike.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127861",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T21:07:24",
"content": "I wouldn’t? I’d download enough helmets for the battle of the Pelennor Fields.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.749923
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/whats-an-lcr-databridge/
|
What’s An LCR Databridge?
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Teardown"
] |
[
"aim",
"LCR meter",
"Racal-Dana",
"z80"
] |
[Thomas Scherrer] has an odd piece of vintage test equipment in his most recent video. An
AIM LCR Databridge 401
. What’s a databridge? We assume it was a play on words of an LCR bridge with a digital output. Maybe. You can see a teardown in the video below.
Inside the box is a vintage 1983 Z80 CPU with all the extra pieces. The device autoranges, at least it seems as much. However, the unit locks up when you use the Bias button, but it isn’t clear if that’s a fault or if it is just waiting for something to happen.
The teardown starts at about six minutes in. Inside is a very large PCB. The board is soldermasked and looks good, but the traces are clearly set by a not-so-steady hand. In addition to AIM, Racal Dana sold this device as a model 9341. The
service manual
for that unit is floating around, although we weren’t able to download it due to a server issue. A search could probably turn up copies.
From the service manual, it looks like the CPU doesn’t do much of the actual measurement work. There are plenty of other chips and a fast crystal that work together and feed an analog-to-digital converter.
LCR meters used to be somewhat exotic, but are
now fairly common
. It used to be common to measure reactance using
a grid dip meter
.
| 6
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127471",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T03:00:32",
"content": "I had to look up what “LCR” stood for. I probably could have eventually guessed, but the context of the article was, for me, a bit off.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127511",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T05:57:37",
"content": "Not sure what to say to that, LCR refers to the most basic elements of electronics, L inductance, C capacitance and R resistance and the article seemed fine to me.",
"parent_id": "8127471",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127646",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:36:37",
"content": "yeah i immedately knew exactly what LCR stood for when i read the headline, but when i read the article it felt at first like i was in a different world. it’s because the headline was a question and the first paragraph didn’t answer it :)",
"parent_id": "8127471",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127556",
"author": "MurF",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:28:31",
"content": "Takes me back 20 years to when I used to have one of these in the lab. Was a big thing, but got the job done. I remember it worked well on the bench, as sorting and measuring parts was easy and you could use the devices top for sorting etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127729",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:55:05",
"content": "We have a big old Hewlett Packard LCR meter from this era and we have spent 20x its original (high) purchase price on getting it calibrated yearly, because that’s a non-trivial process and cost. They’re complex machines.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127735",
"author": "Tom Jíra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:12:38",
"content": "Before 90s, when cheap-ish o’scopes started to be available for mundane hillbillies like me here in the CZ, the GDOs were a tool of choice for majority of both professional and amateur repairmen and tinkerers. Easy to build, readily available and although not a total panacea, it was pretty useful bit of kit. Nobody needed digital connected LCR bridges apart from science and military labs. A 6F32, handful of passives, beeswax potted coils and Gustáv Husák was your uncle. Those were the days…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.582913
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/a-web-based-controller-for-your-garage-door/
|
A Web Based Controller For Your Garage Door
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Misc Hacks"
] |
[
"ESP32",
"garage door",
"garage door opener",
"magnetic switch"
] |
Garage doors! You could get out of your vehicle and open and close them yourself, but that kinda sucks. It’s much preferable to have them raise and lower courtesy some mechanical contrivance, and even better if that is controlled via the web.
[Juan Schiavoni] shows us how to achieve the latter with their latest project.
The web-based controller is based around a Xiao ESP32 microcontroller board, chosen for its baked-in WiFi connectivity. It’s set up to host its own web interface which you can login to with a password via a browser. If you have the correct authorization, you can then hit a button to open or close the garage door.
To interface the ESP32 with the garage door itself, [Juan] went the easy route. To trigger opening or closing the door, the ESP32 merely flicks an IO pin to toggle a transistor, which is hooked up to the button of the original garage door opener. Meanwhile, the ESP32 is also hooked up with a magnetic switch which is activated by a magnet on the garage door itself. This serves as a crude indicator as to the current status of the door—whether currently open or closed. This is crucial to ensure the indicated door status shown in the web app remains synced with the status of the door in reality.
It’s a simple project, and reminds us that we needn’t always do things the hard way. [Juan] could have figured out how to hook the ESP32 up with some radio chips to emulate the original garage door opener, but why bother? hooking it up to the original remote was far easier and more reliable anyway. We’ve seen
a good few garage door hacks over the years
; if you’ve got your own unique take on this classic, don’t hesitate to notify the
tipsline!
[Thanks to Stillman for the tip!]
| 17
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127412",
"author": "Chris Cecil",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:28:24",
"content": "Good work.I was planning something very similar at one point except I was just going to use a small relay across the pushbutton switch on the wall instead of opening a remote, or emulating the radio.Just needs to be in the wifi range.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127440",
"author": "a3x",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T01:06:58",
"content": "I used homeassistant and esphome to program my esp8266. I’ve got the garage and side door monitored using a magnet and a couple of reed switches. Homeassistant is convenient because I can open/close the door from anywhere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127726",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T15:47:58",
"content": "Awesome. I did about the same, but I’m using a ping sensor looking down from the ceiling to determine garage open/closed. When the garage is open, the door is about 1m away from the ceiling.",
"parent_id": "8127440",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127453",
"author": "Brad Granath",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T01:49:02",
"content": "Skipping the wireless remote and tying in to the pushbutton terminals on the back of the opener, would be even simpler.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127466",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:42:32",
"content": "Yet another garage door opener project. I made one too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127481",
"author": "Leonardo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T04:03:45",
"content": "Just use home assistant…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127515",
"author": "kalten",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:05:33",
"content": "Nice project but the utter laziness of able bodied people will never cease to amaze me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127538",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T07:14:52",
"content": "laziness is the mother of invention",
"parent_id": "8127515",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127702",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:45:02",
"content": "Hold on, you’re saying garage door remotes trigger your “People are so lazy” response?",
"parent_id": "8127515",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127732",
"author": "kalten",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T16:09:32",
"content": "Yes.It’s no wonder the US leads the western world in obesity charts.",
"parent_id": "8127702",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127760",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:16:53",
"content": "That’s true, but I can’t tell if you’re trolling. If not, I think you’ve mixed correlation and causation in this case. I’ve implemented this, but I’m fit (for 50+).The problem for me to fix was that multiple people use this garage door on a daily basis, and for various reasons it’s left open on occasion. My system closes the door automatically at a certain hour (provided there are no obstructions) and alerts me remotely when it has been left open. I now have the ability to close it remotely.",
"parent_id": "8127732",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127856",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T20:53:04",
"content": "If not being lazy requires I fritter away my time and attention on doing every little task in the most onerous way possible instead of using that time and attention on the things in life I care about, then I’ll take being called lazy.",
"parent_id": "8127732",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127755",
"author": "Padrote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:13:22",
"content": "the implication is that you should be able to open the garage door by lifting it yourself? I hope that’s what you’re saying. because that would be funny.",
"parent_id": "8127702",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127834",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:43:22",
"content": "In ’72 I found a remote and tuned it (one tone-one RF channel) to my parents new garage door. Oh, those were easy to hack! I’d show it to fellow students at Purdue across the 2 towns saying it’s probably the only use of a garage remote on bicycle! So fun to coast that last block and press the button inside my jacket pocket, slide right in home. Lazy? I am still riding. Since most garages are attached though, would you want this stuff for your front door?",
"parent_id": "8127702",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127596",
"author": "rnDoug",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:29:49",
"content": "Fun project! I’ve been running essentially the same setup except using ESPHome and Home Assistant. I went with a relay board vs the transistor and can control/monitor 2 doors, have temp/humidity, and also monitor the status of my side gate.I originally coded my own interface similar to the article, but ESPHome/Home Assistant offers a lot more functionality. I can get alerts when the door has been left open, turn on the outside and basement lights when the door is opened, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127606",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T10:52:44",
"content": "I bought one of these on Amazon for like $15. Works flawlessly. It’s just a wifi controlled relay with an app.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127636",
"author": "RoganDawes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:14:27",
"content": "Sure, youcanbuy something similar. But the experience of building it yourself is priceless.",
"parent_id": "8127606",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,548.846855
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/thermal-monocular-brings-the-heat-at-10x/
|
Thermal Monocular Brings The Heat At 10X
|
Al Williams
|
[
"digital cameras hacks"
] |
[
"ir camera",
"telescope"
] |
[Project 326] is following up on his thermal microscope with a thermal telescope or, more precisely, a
thermal monocular
. In fact, many of the components and lenses in this project are the same as those in the microscope, so you could cannibalize that project for this one, if you wanted.
During the microscope project, [Project 326] noted that first-surface mirrors reflect IR as well as visible light. The plan was to make a Newtonian telescope for IR instead of light. While the resulting telescope worked with visible light, the diffraction limit prevented it from working for its intended purpose.
Shifting to a Keplerian telescope design was more productive. One of the microscope lenses got a new purpose, and he sourced new objective lenses that were relatively inexpensive.
The lens sets allow for 5X and 10X magnification. The lenses do reduce the sensitivity, but the telescope did work quite well. If you consider that the lenses are made to focus cutting lasers and not meant for use in imaging devices, it seems like an excellent result.
Missed the
thermal microscope
? Better catch up! Do you need a thermal camera?
Ask a duck
.
| 5
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127341",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:12:27",
"content": "Huh… Really thought the mirrors would work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127420",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:57:03",
"content": "The diffraction limit for IR and in general is a bane. Both it and conservation of etendue are why optics shops are in business. Okay that’s a hyperbole, but I’ve personally spent hundreds of dollars relearning those phenomena…",
"parent_id": "8127341",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127394",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T22:27:01",
"content": "Read the title to fast. “Thermonuclear brings the heat”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127697",
"author": "Max",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T14:36:56",
"content": "Very interesting but I do not get why diffraction should limit the Newtonian telescope scheme and not the keplerian. Can you help understand ?ThanksMax",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128237",
"author": "JEREMY BJORLIE",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T00:04:18",
"content": "It should not Max, however the resultant flirtonian gonzosco peesed off rhe see eye eh? they didn’t like that being available for tom & divk, they only wanted harey.go forth fraugaolin & build rhe telehq%bumbob, you’ll have an awesome extra surprise every time you look through it.El’s hadd eye",
"parent_id": "8127697",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,548.796953
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/a-toolchanging-delta-3d-printer/
|
A Toolchanging Delta 3D Printer
|
Aaron Beckendorf
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"delta 3D printer",
"delta printer",
"toolchanger",
"toolchanging"
] |
We’ve seen quite a few delta 3D printers, and a good number of toolchanging printers, but not many that combine both worlds. Fortunately,
[Ben Wolpert]’s project fills that gap
with a particularly elegant and precise delta toolchanger.
The hotend uses three steel spheres and triangular brackets to make a repeatable three-point contact with the toolhead frame, and three pairs of corresponding magnets hold it in place. The magnets aren’t in contact, and the three magnets on the toolhead are mounted in a rotating ring. A motorized pulley on the printer’s frame drives a cable which runs through a flexible guide and around the rotating ring.
The whole setup is very reminiscent of the
Jubilee toolchanging system
, except that in this case, the pulley rotates the ring of magnets rather than a mechanical lock. By rotating the ring of magnets about 60 degrees, the system can move the pairs of magnets far enough apart to remove the hotend without much force.
The rest of the toolchanging system is fairly straightforward: each tool’s parking area consists of two metal posts which slot through corresponding holes in the hotend’s frame, and the motherboard uses some RepRapFirmware macros to coordinate the tool changes. The only downside is that a cooling fan for the hotend still hadn’t been implemented, but a desk fan seemed to work well enough in [Ben]’s tests. The files for the necessary hardware and software customizations are all available
on GitHub
.
We’ve only seen a similar toolchanging system for a delta printer
once before
, but we have seen a
great variety
of
toolchangers
on the more common Cartesian systems. Don’t like the idea of changing extruders? We’ve also seen a
multi-extruder printer
that completely eliminates tool switching.
| 3
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127413",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:29:09",
"content": "DeltaMaker has had this for a while. Pretty much same concept.https://www.deltamaker.com/blogs/news/halo-toolchanger-percision-test",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127542",
"author": "overflo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T07:33:44",
"content": "Deltaprinters are so cool.Good job, Thanks for sharing dear.😻",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8186575",
"author": "Philippe Coulon",
"timestamp": "2025-10-02T11:36:21",
"content": "Why not rotate the tools and not the lock on the print head ?Pros : no cable lighter head.Cons : 2 motors 2 mechanisms.I like it though !Maybe it’s my obsession with reducing the weight of the head in a delta…..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.209402
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/remembering-memory-ems-and-tsrs/
|
Remembering Memory: EMS, And TSRs
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] |
[
"8086",
"8088",
"ems",
"IBM PC",
"TSR"
] |
You often hear that Bill Gates once proclaimed, “640 kB is enough for anyone,” but, apparently, that’s a myth — he never said it. On the other hand, early PCs did have that limit, and, at first, that limit was mostly theoretical.
After all, earlier computers often topped out at 64 kB or less, or — if you had some fancy bank switching — maybe 128 kB. It was hard to justify the cost, though. Before long, though, 640 kB became a limit, and the industry found workarounds. Mercifully, the need for these eventually evaporated, but for a number of years, they were a part of configuring and using a PC.
Why 640 kB?
The original IBM PC sported an Intel 8088 processor. This was essentially an 8086 16-bit processor with an 8-bit external data bus. This allowed for cheaper computers, but both chips had a strange memory addressing scheme and could access up to 1 MB of memory.
In fact, the 8088 instructions could only address 64 kB, very much like the old 8080 and Z80 computers. What made things different is that they included a number of 16-bit segment registers. This was almost like bank switching. The 1 MB space could be used 64 kB at a time on 16-byte boundaries.
So a full address was a 16-bit segment and a 16-bit offset. Segment 0x600D, offset 0xF00D would be written as 600D:F00D. Because each segment started 16-bytes after the previous one, 0000:0020, 0001:0010, and 0002:0000 were all the same memory location. Confused? Yeah, you aren’t the only one.
What happened to the other 360 kB? Well, even if Gates didn’t say that 640 kB was enough, someone at IBM must have. The PC used addresses above 640 kB for things like the video adapter, the BIOS ROM, and even just empty areas for future hardware. MSDOS was set up with this in mind, too.
The 640K user area, 384K system area, and almost 64K of HMA in a PC (80286 or above)
For example, your video adapter used memory above 640 kB (exactly where depended on the video card type, which was a pain). A network card might have some ROM up there — the BIOS would scan the upper memory looking for ROMs on system boot up. So while the user couldn’t get at that memory, there was a lot going on there.
What Were People Doing?
Speaking of MSDOS, you can only run one program at a time in MSDOS, right? So what were people doing that required more than 640 kB? You weren’t playing video. Or high-quality audio.
There were a few specialized systems that could run multiple DOS programs in text-based windows, DesqView and TopView, to name two. But those were relatively rare. GEM was an early Windows-like GUI, too, but again, not that common on early PCs.
Sidekick activated
However, remember that MSDOS didn’t do a lot right out of the box. Suppose you had a new-fangled network card and a laser printer. (You must have been rich back then.) Those devices probably had little programs to load that would act like device drivers — there weren’t any in MSDOS by default.
The “driver” would be a regular program that would move part of itself to the top of memory, patch MSDOS to tell it the top of memory was now less than it was before, and exit. So a 40 kB network driver would eat up from 600 kB to 640 kB, and MSDOS would suddenly think it was on a machine with 600 kB of RAM instead of 640. If you had a few of these things, it quickly added up.
TSRs
Then came Sidekick and similar programs. The drivers were really a special case of a “terminate and stay resident” or TSR program. People figured out that you could load little utility programs the same way. You simply had to hook something like a timer interrupt or keyboard interrupt so that your program could run periodically or when the user hit some keys.
Sidekick might not have been the first example of this, but it was certainly the first one to become massively successful and helped put Borland on the map, the people who were mostly famous or would be famous for Turbo Pascal and Turbo C.
Of course, these programs were like interrupt handlers. They had to save everything, do their work, and then put everything back or else they’d crash the computer. Sidekick would watch for an odd key stroke, like Ctrl+Alt or both shift keys, and then pop up a menu offering a calculator, a notepad, a calendar, an ASCII table, and a phone dialer for your modem.
Sidekick caught on and spawned many similar programs. You might want a half dozen or more resident programs in your daily MSDOS session. But if you loaded up a few TSRs and a few drivers, you were quickly running out of memory. Something had to be done!
EMS
EMS board were “expanded memory.” There actually were a few flavors, not all of which caught on. However, a standard developed by Intel, Microsoft, and Lotus did become popular.
The Captain286 EMS board used SIMMs, unlike most of its contemporaries
In a nutshell, EMS reserved — at least at first — a 64 kB block of memory above the 640 kB line and then contained a lot of memory that you could switch in and out of that 64 kB block. In fact, you generally switched 16 kB at a time, so you could access four different EMS 16 kB pages at any one time.
This was complex and slow. The boards usually had some way to move the block address, so you had to take that into account. Later boards would offer even more than 64 kB available in upper memory or even allow for dynamic mapping. Some later boards even had sets of banking registers so you could context switch if your software was smart enough to do so.
EMS was important because even an 8088-based PC could use it with the right board. But, of course, newer computers like the IBM AT used 80286 processors and, later, even newer processors were common. While they could use EMS, they also had more capabilities.
Next Time
If you had a newer computer with an 80286 or better, you could directly access more memory. Did you notice the high memory area (HMA) in the memory map? That’s only for newer computers. But, either way, it was not fully supported by MSDOS.
Many boards for the newer computers could provide both EMS and just regular memory. The real issue was how could you use the “regular memory” above the 1MB line? I’ll tell you more about that next time, including a trick independently discovered by a number of hackers at about the same time.
| 48
| 19
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127254",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:18:18",
"content": "I had a 386 with options in the BIOS to assign some of the memory to hardware EMS. Probably a C&T NEAT (CS8281?) but I don’t remember.I had 6 of those 386sx33 motherboards with 4MB – 16MB of RAM in each of them. But I ended up letting go of them in the early 2000’s because I didn’t have space for a retro computer collection. Big mistake, those boards would have been valuable to anyone putting together a retro game system. The turbo button was sufficient for getting Wing Commander to run correctly. And it could be assigned to a hotkey in BIOS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127261",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:27:48",
"content": "What were people doing? RAM disks. If you wanted your TurboPascal to compile quickly, you configured some of your memory to act as a floppy disk, but a really, really fast one. Even if you had a hard disk, the RAM disks were quite a bit faster. Compiles took seconds rather than multiple minutes. Of course, the data on the RAM disk would vanish when the computer crashed, so you had to save to a more permanent media, but for some applications it was magic.When CAD became possible on PCs, extended/expanded memory on DOS was a necessity. But this is getting ahead of the story, as you couldn’t do CAD until 286 at least.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127268",
"author": "Grumpy Old Coot",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:38:41",
"content": "One of the funny bits of trivia about early AutoCAD versions is that they were ‘parasite’ operating systems that did all sorts of bizarre and interesting things to make MS-DOS ‘sit down, shut up, and get off my lawn!’ DOOM did similar tricks, but not to the same extent.",
"parent_id": "8127261",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127276",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:53:38",
"content": "Yeah, I didn’t start with AutoCAD until r11. I was on VAXes with PCs for Tektronix graphic terminal emulation before that.",
"parent_id": "8127268",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127321",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:27:45",
"content": "Hello! To my knowledge, AutoCAD 2.x released in mid-80s runs on an original IBM PC with 8088 and no 8087, at the very least.Though a 286 was highly being recommended for serious work at the time, so I partially do agree. :)A math co-processor makes a big difference, too, no matter if 8088/8086 or NEC.An humble PC/XT with x87 did outperform an AT or slow 386, even.– So in the later years, when Turbo XTs became more common and the 8087 had dropped in price, CAD was once again making sense on PC/PC/XTs.Later AutoCAD versions did require an math co-processor or an emulator.I think versions R9 and R10 were those.By contrast, AutoSketch 2 (and 3) shipped with two disks in the box, plain 8086 version and 8086+8087 version.The DOS versions of R11/R12/R13 and some versions of R10 were now 32-Bit (AutoCAD 386), I think.The Windows 3.x versions used Watcom Win386 Extender and had required a 386 or higher, too.",
"parent_id": "8127261",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127386",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T22:02:20",
"content": "It may depend on what kind of CAD you’re talking about. Where I was working from 1985-92, I started out doing PCB layout by hand. When we decided to go for CAD, we shopped around, got lots of demo discs, and lacking experience in CAD, all we could finally conclude was the OrCAD seemed to have been out longer than the others, so it probably had things together better. Wrong! Wow, it had more bugs than an ant hill; and each update to fix a bug seemed to introduce two more. When I joined a small start-up company after that, I had no temptation to bootleg a copy of OrCAD. Instead, I shopped around again, now having some experience behind me. Our budget was very small. My first choice was MaxiPC, at about $2K, and a close second was EazyPC Pro, from Number One Systems in England, at only $375. These were DOS-based, and I think they both worked with an 8088. They also had a non-Pro version that was $99 IIRC, but although it was written in assembly language and did screen re-draws nearly instantly on a low-end PC, it simply did not have enough capability for what we needed. The company got me the Pro version. On that, with a ‘286 with 1MB of RAM (640KB for the user’s DOS applications), I did PC boards up to 12 layers and 500 parts, without running out of memory. I still use it sometimes, under DOSbox-X, on my Linux machine. (It produces the older Gerber and Excellon file types, but I have a quick way to convert them to the newer standard, pulling a few tricks in the process, to accomplish things this CAD wasn’t originally intended to be able to do.) This CAD had bugs too, but I and one other intensive user in the US kept reporting them, and the company was very responsive in fixing them, without introducing new ones in the process.",
"parent_id": "8127261",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127553",
"author": "Stephen Casey",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:23:51",
"content": "I’m surprised to hear that OrCAD let you down. I used it intensively from 1989, though their 386+ releases, all the way until they abandoned it for the catastrophically bad Windows offering in the mid ’90s.I have very fond memories of the DOS OrCAD system. In fact, coincidentally, I found a box of floppies only last weekend and got it running again under Windows 11 (to be fair, an XP VM was in the mix!) and loaded up some old designs, just to see how much I’ve improved my skills since the early days. Sadly, I don’t think I have 😂 It was nice to see my old friend running again. The muscle memory was still intact.",
"parent_id": "8127386",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128105",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:42:25",
"content": "Hi. Printer spooler also was a memory hungry application.Especially in a network environment.Btw, EMS also worked with a swap file.Here, LIMulators supported EMS 3.2 for plain data storage.“Above Disc” was such an example.Btw. there also was a freeware program named “EMM286” in the early 90s (not EMM386).It simulated EMS (LIM4) on a 286 through XMS/Himem.sys.It was slow because it used copying rather than mapping.But to users without chipset EMS it was useful.(Windows didn’t work with it as far as I know, but some graphics programs, CAD software and databases could use it.)",
"parent_id": "8127261",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127278",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:58:53",
"content": "EMS reserved — at least at first — a 64 kB block of memory above the 64 kB lineTypo? Should be 640 kB line, right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127293",
"author": "Al Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:21:28",
"content": "Aggh…fixed",
"parent_id": "8127278",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127357",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:48:45",
"content": "While we’re being pedantic, it’s SIMMs not SIMs. Single in-line memory modules.",
"parent_id": "8127293",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127281",
"author": "KC8KVA",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:01:56",
"content": "Reminds me of when you had to low level format an MFM drive through Debug using G=C800:5",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127797",
"author": "MW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:33:39",
"content": "Oh, gawd… LOL. Thanks for causing that memory to resurface from the cobweb infested corners of my brain!",
"parent_id": "8127281",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128108",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T16:52:32",
"content": "Hi, this often worked with 8-Bit MFM/RLL controller cards, because they had their own HDD BIOS (as an option ROM).The 16-Bit models usually relied on PC/AT BIOS.Nowadays, we’re using XT-IDE Universal BIOS instead.The 8-Bit XT-IDE cards are popular, too.They all using a Compact Flash card or an IDE drive.",
"parent_id": "8127281",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127292",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:21:09",
"content": "Back in the day I wrote a TSR that would read the users position in a text graphic based online game, and would calculate the angle and distance so it could drop a bomb on that specific location. (You’d move your tank to the location, hit a key and bomb yourself. Cost a tank but won you the game.)A friend of mine wrote a tsr that would just scan the entire block of memory for the map and automatically drop a bomb in the enemy base. Needless to say, he won every round he ran the TSR.Zoid would later work in the gaming industry.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127359",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:51:53",
"content": "Heh. I wrote a TSR that would dump the MCGA frame buffer to a file when PrScr was pressed. IIRC it would dump the palette too.",
"parent_id": "8127292",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127298",
"author": "Perry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:40:58",
"content": "640KB is an arbitrary limit. XT based computers could have up to 736KB of conventional memory if you has the right motherboard. EGA/VGA adapters put their buffer at A000, which limited conventional memory. On an XT with MDA the memory is at B000, so you could have 704KB, but with CGA the frame buffer was at B800 and thus you could get another 32KB of RAM on many boards. Some XT boards were equipped with 3 SIMM slots (768KB) and would enumerate that much.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127323",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:31:38",
"content": "+1OS/2 Warp had offered 736KB for DOS boxes, if the user was okay with being limited to CGA graphics.There’s an option in the settings for DOS and Win-OS/2..",
"parent_id": "8127298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128019",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T11:21:47",
"content": "Many MS-DOS compatibles had 704KB of RAM as standard or supported it.Such as the BBC Master 512 or Sharp PC 7100.The PC-Ditto emulator for Atari ST featured 703KB of RAM.With an CGA+MDA (or Hercules) dual-monitor configuration, 704KB are possible without issues.VGA cards can also be used to increase memory to 704KB or 736KB of RAM.With the limitation that merely text-mode and CGA graphics mode can be used.Products such as QRAM or QEMM had included utilities to make EGA/VGA framebuffer in A segment usable as conventional memory.This “hack” was useful to get compilers with large projects going that otherwise ran out of memory.Speaking of hacks, users in the 80s did hit the memory limit really soon.Power users in ~1987 already tinkerered with UMB cards and tried to upload drivers into UMA.This was when PC-DOS 3.30 was current. It’s not a new phenomenon.They used hardware such as the HiCard and loadhigh software.Way back in 1985 public domain utilities existed that updated the BIOS to see 704KB of RAM (if physically available).After a soft reset, 704KB was reported to DOS.This was years before DR DOS 5 had introduced UMB/HMA support circa 1990.",
"parent_id": "8127298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127302",
"author": "ChipMaster",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:50:31",
"content": "I’m not sure that the “640K” Gates commentisa myth. I can’t site any sources. But I can certainly see Gates talking to the IBM engineers about the architecture and making that “640K” comment as the engineers decided to reserve the upper 384K for ROMs and expansion cards.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127319",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:19:53",
"content": "Did Bill Gates or Microsoft influence the first IBM PC’s hardware design? I would think it far more likely that IBM worked on the hardware first and then told Microsoft how to interface to it. Besides, you could also get CP/M-86 for the first PC.",
"parent_id": "8127302",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127322",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:31:21",
"content": "It’s just roughly a 2/3 split between user/system. The 1 MB total comes from the processor itself, so the only thing you’re left with is deciding that split.Systems still do this today, you just don’t notice because 1. the address space is so huge and 2. paging allows reserved chunks of memory to be wherever you want anyway. /proc/iomem looks hilarious nowadays.What’s funny is the “[EMS swapping memory in and out] was complex and slow” comment considering paging is basically the same thing on steroids.",
"parent_id": "8127319",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127330",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:42:30",
"content": "The EMS boards with backfilling option were almost like MMUs.:The PC RAM, except for a minimum required for booting, was being moved from mainboard over to the EMS board.Under DESQview it then was possible to swap in/out almost all conventional memory along with big applications.If you swapped 512KB of RAM, 2 MB of EMS RAM was a practical minimum, I assume.",
"parent_id": "8127322",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127568",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T08:42:52",
"content": "I think you might have misunderstood my comment. The 640kB RAM, 384kB IO split is a hardware design decision, because IO can be placed as low as 0xA000:0x0000. One of the comments here says you can squeeze out a bit more if you use an MDA video card, but the principle still holds.I’m pretty sure that IBM made that decision prior to Microsoft’s involvement and besides, why would IBM listen to MS’s hardware design ideas when MS were just a small software company and PC-DOS was just one option? Also, it’s fairly well-known that IBM thought of the 5150 as their proper entry into micro computing, not as the architecture that would dominate personal computers for decades. Also, computer churn was very high in the late 1970s and early 1980s – what basis did IBM have for thinking their PC would last longer than a couple of years? So, IBM had little need to anticipate more than 640kB and little need to consult Microsoft about it.Assuming that typical memory requirements grew at about 0.5 bits per year and 64kB was normal for a business machine in 1980. Then 512 is 6 years’ worth of lifetime.Onto EMS swapping. Yes, it’ll be slower than using segmentation. There’s two main reasons for that. Firstly, 8086 segmentation allows a program to directly access any amount of code, far call and far ret are as efficient as they need to be. But you can’t do that if you try to run code in expanded memory, because calls and returns need to be to a different window and saving and restoring the bank for a given window needs at least 4 more instructions:in ax,[DstWindow]push axmov ax,TargetBankout [DstWindow],axfar call DstWindow+FuncOffset ;now IP:CS:OldDstBank are on the stack.Return is the reverse.Data access has similar problems. You need 32-bit pointers again, but they’re split up in a different way, on 16k boundaries. You’re also limited to accessing 16kB at a time, so arrays and data structures most likely are constrained by that; whereas with segmentation, they can be a full 64kB each and on any 16b boundary. Switching banks takes 2 instructions (load the new bank value, out it to the window) compared with 1 with segmentation (mov es,).As challenging as segmentation is, EMS is far more challenging.",
"parent_id": "8127322",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127621",
"author": "MIKE",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:26:39",
"content": "When the first IBM PC was designed, it was normal that newer models made were incompatible with previous ones from the same manufacturer. Tandy and Commodore had incompatible models sold at the same time. The IBM PC was designed in a rush, and the idea was clearly to evolve the system to a better and more powerful one.What happened that a lot of software was made for the IBM PC and required hardware compatibility.Apple, with the Apple II had the same proble when made the Apple III, butwith the Macintosh made a totally incompatible system and continued to make Apple II and a compatible IIGS . With the Macinosh LC models was possible to add an Apple II emulation card to run older software, so Apple was able to transition the user base on the new platform.With IBM there were a lot of clones that made compatibles. When tried to make an upgrade of the architecture with PS/2 line it failed. The idea for IBM was to have systems that could run in compatibility mode (with the CBIOS and PC/DOS) but also use a new operating system and a different BIOS runnin in protected mode (ABIOS and OS/2).That plan failed for a lot of reson, so the IBM PC architecure became quite complex.",
"parent_id": "8127568",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130111",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T19:44:06",
"content": "Not sure you understood my response: I’m saying that it’s not really even an IBM decision. It’s Intel. You’re starting out with a 1 MB address limit. You want memory-mapped devices in there, so you have to decide a user/system split, and a 2/3 user 1/3 system split was a pretty common split.As the other poster mentioned it was pretty normal that each time you got a new or different model, things were incompatible. No one expected the PC to blow up with clones and such. Once it did and it expanded into the future to more advanced processors, the 640 kB limit became an obvious limit. But at the time it had more to do with the processor than what people would “need.”I mean, if IBM had made it 75/25, you’d just end up with “768k should be enough for anyone.” I mean, we bumped into memory limits below 4 GB with 32-bit processors due to memory mapping, too. The only difference now is the doubling to 64-bits makes the memory space absurd.",
"parent_id": "8127568",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127307",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:55:39",
"content": "I remember the time I stripped a pallet full of government-surplus TRS-80 Model 3s of their 41256 and 414256 chips to fully populate an EMS board (as well as update the mainboard and VGA card) for my first 8086 computer. Cost me all of about $5 for the pallet at a time where the chips were fairly expensive retail.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127315",
"author": "rewolff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:15:39",
"content": "Speaking of MSDOS, you can only run one program at a time in MSDOS, right? So whatwere people doing that required more than 640 kB? You weren’t playing video. Or high-quality audio.A friend of mine complained about “unexpected crashes”. Turns out his machine was equipped with one or two 64k chips where 256kbit chips were expected. So first 256k of ram: Just fine. Next 64k: (up to 320) fine, as long as you never write anything at 320-512kb. So 256-512 had a couple of bits in each byte that would “wrap” at each 64k boundary.Anyway… this worked fine until one day his wordperfect (word processor) ended up using enough memory to exceed 320k…. So…. back in those days it was possible for a wordprocessor to use more than half of 640k. Bit bigger document and you’d be able to hit 640 just fine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127317",
"author": "rewolff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:16:12",
"content": "It seems the “quote” didn’t work as I intended. Sorry.",
"parent_id": "8127315",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127345",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:20:21",
"content": "Back in the day I wrote a memory test to pick this specific error up. Oh those far simpler days.",
"parent_id": "8127315",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127338",
"author": "Julia Longtin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:04:21",
"content": "Why did this article get a photo of a display controller?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127353",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:39:11",
"content": "It’s a fun article. In the mid-80s, before I’d ever used an IBM PC (we were still using 8-bit computers, perhaps with some bank-switching), I couldn’t really comprehend how the 8088 used segments to address memory.Then someone at the local computer club (the Nottingham Microcomputer Club, UK), explained that the 8088 simply takes the value of a 16-bit segment register, multiplies it by 16 and adds a 16-bit offset.EA=SegmentReg*16+OffsetAnd then I understood how awful it was. On top of that there isn’t a segment register for each address register, but just 4 global segment registers which the programmer can mix and match with 4 address registers; 4 combinations of a pair of address registers and/or offsets. Complex, and weird.I think segmented memory is somewhat different to bank-switched because it does at least expand the address space. Bankswitching limits access of code and data to 64kiB at any one time. However, an 8086 can usefully address pretty much any amount of code and at least 128kB of data, before Large model complexities really kick in. In that sense it’s mimicking the split code/data address space of the pdp-11.Expanded memory of course is simply bank-switched in a 64kiB address space and classic bank-switching tricks were needed to run code from it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127500",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T05:24:44",
"content": "Hi there! EMS 3.2 was limited to 64KB, but EEMS/LIM4 wasn’t anymore.Given LIM4 hardware, an EMS manager could provide, say, an 256KB page frame.EMM386 did this for Windows 3.x if you had run MemMaker and had chosen to support Windows..(Windows 3.x knows Small-Frame EMS and Large-Frame EMS.)But anyway, we’re in the 90s now..In the 80s, EMS support in 286 chipsets was rather basic (but still NEAT).EMS 3.2 hardware with LIM4 memory manager, in principle.By contrast, dedicated EMS boards from late 80s were often LIM4 capable.Such as AST Rampage series (AST made EEMS).Speaking under correction here.",
"parent_id": "8127353",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127506",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T05:39:37",
"content": "About the x86 segment thing.It was useful for machine translating of 8080 code, I think.Many early PC-DOS programs were ported over from CP/M-80 platform.That’s why A20 Gate was needed, too, to support CALL5 interface.That being said, in practice, DOS was doing all the hard work most of time.It had an executable loader that tried to take care of the worst problems and patch the known trouble makers (applying loadfix etc).That’s why the later DOS 5/6 versions can be useful on PC/XTs and old ATs, even.It’s not just about the HMA feature or FAT16 all the time.For a long time, most users (hobbyists) wrote little COM programs and never had to leave their segment.Turbo Pascal 4 (DOS) was first to support EXE files, Turbo Pascal 3 used COM files and supported overlay files.QuickBasic 4.5 uses one segment, too, but can be forced to switch it.PDS 7.x supports EMS and has better memory-managment.",
"parent_id": "8127353",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127588",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T09:41:51",
"content": "Re: EMS 4. So, if EMS 3.2 is 4x 16kB windows (making 64kB), then EMS 4 is basically 4x 64kB windows (making 256kB). But it’s still going to be more clumsy than the 8086/8088’s native segmentation, because you still have to select a segment for the EMS area and also write to the bank registers on the EMS card (or NEAT chipset).About the “x86 segment thing”. People make up all sorts of excuses for the segmentation design. It’s possible that segments made porting 8080 code easier, but 256b segment boundaries would have been just as good for that and better for large model code (16MB addressing, no need to shift by 4, a shift by 8 is easier). The major reason though for segments was that Intel were a fan of the operating system MULTICS and had already made the iAPX432 segment-oriented.That’s also why the 80286 made their protected mode segment oriented, when they could have just overlaid paging. They could have put segments on 256 byte boundaries (that would have provided 16MB of virtual and physical addressing), then translate the upper 12 bits through a far simpler page table, backed by a small TLB.If Intel had used paging, then the 80286 would have been 100% upward compatible with the 8086 and it would have been a simpler design. So, it wasn’t so much that Intel were so focused on compatibility, but that they had a Segmentation ideology.I think A20 gate only appeared with the 80286. There was no A20 to gate on the 8086 (memory addresses would just wrap), but on the 286 the hardware didn’t wrap addresses even if you were in real mode. OK, so I’ve just looked up the CALL 5 issue in Wikipedia.So, on an 8-bit CP/M system, addresses 0x5 to 0x7 contained an INT instruction followed by the CP/M segment size (or rather, TPA size I guess). On CP/M that would max out at 0xFEF0 (or maybe 0xFF00). But the BDOS entry point on CP/M-80 corresponded to INT 30h on a PC at address 0xC0. So, they needed 3 bytes that could invoke INT 30h, and provide a TPA of 0xFEF0. That meant executing a CALL FEF0h and that could only work if it wrapped around the top of the address space, back to 0xC0.What a mess.It’s quite a sad indictment that despite having access to 1MB of address space, hobbyist programmers had to treat their PCs largely like an old 8-bitter. I think I would have home-brewed a version of Forth that could do far calls (i.e. by using 16-bit tokens to point to 32-bit addresses):;IP in DS:SI, SS used for data stack, return stack and tokens, BP^return stack, SP^Data StackEnter: ;is a far call to here.ADD BP,4MOV [BP],SIMOV [BP-2],DS ;save old DS:SI (IP)MOV SI,BXADD SI,2 ;Point to threaded code.MOV BX,ESMOV DS,BXNext:MOV BX,[SI]ADD SI,2LES BX,SS:[BX]JMP ES:[BX]Exit: ;reverse operation.MOV DS,[BP-2]MOV SI,[BP]SUB BP,4JMP Next",
"parent_id": "8127506",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127614",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:13:54",
"content": "Thank you for your reply!I must admit that your expertise is much greater than mine.In defense to the 80286 I can only say that its development had slightly pre-dated the IBM PC and that it was made with other applications in mind.Things like PBX systems, databases, industrial control systems etc.OSes such as XENIX 286, Concurrent DOS 286 or OS/2 v1.3 were positive examples, I think.These systems ran quite quick and stable, also in comparison to 386-based systems.It’s Protected-Mode used segments to implement pointers, which as such weren’t too shaby.The memory protection through segmentation was nice, too. In addition to the ring scheme.Code blocks could be marked as program/executable and data/non-executable.Buffer overflows couldn’t cause a security breach so easily.On PCs of today, it needed DEP and NX bit to bring back that feature for systems that use beloved “flat memory model”.Btw, when 80286 was freshly designed, MS-DOS and IBM PC were still irrelevant and niche.That’s why it needed the 80386 to fix the shortcomings.Today, we often overlook this, I think.We assume that IBM PC was important all time,but don’t know that the IBM PC originally had 64KB, ROM BASIC a cassette port and no floppy drive.It was a home computer at first, with the option to be expanded to an office computer.Which it totally became just two years later. With 256KB RAM, 360KB floppy drive etc.But in 1981/1982, it wasn’t yet.Here in Europe the Victor 9000/Sirius-1 was the first MS-DOS PC that was available.The IBM PC 5150 was being officially sold by IBM from 1983 onwards, I think.So here in Europe, the Sirius-1 almost became the IBM PC equivalent over here.Similarily, years later, the PC1512/PC1640 sorta became our equivalent to the Tandy 1000.Of course, looking back, programming the 68000 was more elegant.But it also wasn’t quite as powerful as an 80286.Personally, I liked the 68010 which had a tiny buffer and virtual memory support.It’s perhaps the closest in terms of features to 80286, besides 68020.",
"parent_id": "8127588",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127403",
"author": "JIm the Olde-Skool HW Power user.",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:00:35",
"content": "In the 80’s, a clone of MS-DOS appeared from Digital Research. As one might guess: it was named DR-DOS. This DOS version had the ability to access the empty areas above 640k (provided you installed the memory in that area). And suddenly you had 768kb to play with… Maybe more depending on your video and networking setup.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127416",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:34:24",
"content": "My first PC was an 80386SX with either 2MB or 4MB RAM, and it was difficult to do something useful with that extra memory. I did install some RAM disk program once that was able to use it, and that was useful. For school assignment I had a Z80 cross assembler and emulator, and I used the RAM disk for the assembled output. This cut the assemble & test loop from around 15 seconds to 2 seconds or less.And that segmented memory was probably one of the most stupidest decisions in the whole history of PC’s. Or maybe the switch from CPM to DOS. After (I think) Xerox invented the windowed GUI with mouse, it was only a matter of time before something similar ran on any (desktop) PC.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128114",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:02:17",
"content": "“My first PC was an 80386SX with either 2MB or 4MB RAM, and it was difficult to do something useful with that extra memory.”In the 90s, when DOS 6 was current, many DOS programs had used Himem.sys (XMS) or EMS.The Sierra game compilations used extra memory, for example.Picture viewers such as CompuShow 2000 supported extra memory, AutoSketch 3 used EMS. Or MOD players, such as MOD-Master.Windows 3.x ran well with 4 MB and up, as well.Especially on a 286 in Windows Standard-Mode, which had no virtual memory support.GEM applications such as Ventura Publisher used EMS, too.The usefulness of XMS memory is something that’s not very apparent until you don’t have XMS, I think.On a Turbo XT with V20 processor, many modern DOS programs fail to run because EMS and/or XMS aren’t available.That’s why I bought a Lo-Tech EMS card and an UMB card. It helps to run many programs properly.",
"parent_id": "8127416",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128117",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T17:13:10",
"content": "“Or maybe the switch from CPM to DOS.After (I think) Xerox invented the windowed GUI with mouse,it was only a matter of time before something similar ran on any (desktop) PC”DOS had quickly introduced a better filesystem (FAT12) and supported directories, I think.That’s why it was so popular. MS-DOS 2.11 was much more developed than CP/M in most ways.It even tried to adopt certain Unix specific things.Like an Unix-style separator.Or support for devices (AUX, CLOCK, PRN).Btw, an fascinating little DOS was DOS Plus 1.2, I think.It was CP/M-86 with a DOS compatibility layer named PC-MODE.A bit like WINE on Linux, if you will.DOS Plus could run both CP/M-86 programs and DOS programs.CP/M-86 programs could run with limited multitasking, even.Directories were simulated to CP/M-86.The BBC Master 512 and the Amstrad PC1512 shipped with DOS Plus (and GEM).The Amstrad version runs on IBM PC compatibles, too.It’s useful because it can handle both CP/M and DOS filesystems.",
"parent_id": "8127416",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127452",
"author": "AKAROY",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T01:46:06",
"content": "6845 brings back memories…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127501",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T05:26:50",
"content": "And nightmares. ;)",
"parent_id": "8127452",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127531",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:46:00",
"content": "Sooo…. I co-wrote a complete Voicemail solution in A86 assembler as a TSR. The main ‘line’ code ran in 64kb, and used XMS memory (swapping out chucks into the 64kb .com app as needed). The were other TSRs for different functions, but everything ran in <256kb of real memory. The whole solution ran under DOS6.2 and would use Rhetorex ISA voice cards and happily run 3000 users across 16 analog lines on a 486DX100This was in 1993, and the last one stopped being used in 2023!The key to it all was that we created a tiny helper TSR that generated INT2F (with AX set to CC02) whenever DOS was ‘safe’ (in TSRs you have to bereallycareful about when to write to the disk etc.) – This meant that all the TSRs could hook into this and function.The coolest part of the code was that each time the tick occured, we’d look at the voicecards to see if there was an ‘event’, process that event and then call a function called “callback” – This basically popped the return address off the stack, store this and the registers in XMS memory and then call IRET to exit the Interupt, when the next safe ‘tick’ occured, we’d pull the return address (and register values) back from XMS and continue exactly where we left off.The documentation is sparse, but if there is an interest, I may well be pursuaded to open-source this if someone has a DOS project/forum that might be interested.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127912",
"author": "Marc Brooks",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T01:37:33",
"content": "I wrote a bunch of TSRs in the day. From communication managers to handle medical lab instruments to pop-up background text editors that we leveraged for user-definable online helpThe best TSR I wrote though was the smallest too…see we had computers sharing a server printer (way before Ethernet) and folks printing hundreds of pages of medical lab reports to pinfeed dot matrix printers. Since the pages needed to be aligned to the paper feed (so you don’t print across the perforation) it was important to keep the page top aligned.The wrinkle in the plan was the habit of the lab techs to do a quick screen print of some results for a quick report…when they did that (via a Shift -PrtSc) it would route to the BIOS via INT05 and dump the screen buffer 80 characters by 24 lines to the printer. This isn’t a problem on a local printer, because you just hit the Form Feed button to scroll the paper to the top of the next page…but on a shared printer (probably in the other room) the problem was that those 24 lines weren’t a 66 line page, so the page alignment went wonky and if someone started a huge report run it would all be misaligned.So the TSR I wrote hooked the INT05 (screen print) and called the original handler (dumping 24 lines) and when that BIOS code finished, emitted a single FORM FEED character to advance the printer to the top of the next page. Problem solved!The TSR occupied 16 bytes when resident.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127961",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T06:42:54",
"content": "Nice! The ‘safe timer-tick’ TSR I mentioned above was about 8k I recall, which was still pretty good for the time :-) – It had to hook into 05h, 10h, 20h, 21h, 2fh and maybe a few others and had to use a lot of unofficial/undocumented calls to check the OS state before allowing stuff to be done. It’s funny how I’ve not touched that code for maybe 20 years, but still remember the interrupts and how everything worked! :-)",
"parent_id": "8127912",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128369",
"author": "Okko Willeboordse",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T11:15:21",
"content": "I wrote a TSR with Turbo Pascal and Assembler in the 90s that turned the screen upside down. It flipped the character set in the graphics card memory and then the screen every timer tick.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128564",
"author": "Leonetto Ferrari",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T20:20:29",
"content": "It was hell. I remember buying. Yes, legit commercial copy. Windows 3.0 on how so many 514 floppies, it was like 12, just for the purpose of making use of those 2mb on mine 386sx. It didn’t work I remember, was no use for running high base memory required stuff. Had to wait for Win32 stuff for that, but we had pentium by them. Crazy times anyway.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130108",
"author": "James E. Bradley",
"timestamp": "2025-05-19T19:38:02",
"content": "As I recall, the original IBM PC also allocated 128k to a rudimentary basic in bios. This was basically wasted, as there wasn’t enough there do do much with it. My TI Professional computer didn’t waste the 128k and used it for lower memory, so the TIPC had 768k available.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,548.991313
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/13/the-worlds-longest-range-led-flashlight/
|
The World’s Longest Range LED Flashlight
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"LED Hacks"
] |
[
"led flashlight",
"long range"
] |
[ApprehensiveHawk6178] reports that they have made
the world’s longest range LED flashlight
! While technically “handheld”, you’re gonna need both hands for this monster. According to the creator, it draws 1.2 kW (20 A @ 60 V) to deliver 100,000 lumens and approximately 20,000,000 candelas.
This spotlight is made from 48 white LEDs, wired in 16S3P configuration, and is powered by a similarly beefy 20S2P battery pack. That 1.2 kW power draw generates a lot of heat which is dissipated with an array of heat sinks and five cooling fans. Total cost was in the order of $2,000 USD.
It can be controlled via Bluetooth, and can run from its batteries for 30 minutes at full power. If you’d like to geek out over the specs click-through and read the discussion, a lot of technical detail is given and there are a bunch of photos showing the internals and assembly.
We’ve seen
high-output LED lights with water cooling in the past
, and wonder if that might be the next step for this particular build.
Thanks to [kms] for the tip.
| 39
| 17
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8127198",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:32:40",
"content": "https://xkcd.com/1603/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127205",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:46:21",
"content": "my first thougt as well.",
"parent_id": "8127198",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127507",
"author": "bemusedHorseman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T05:40:20",
"content": "“What if we tried more power?”",
"parent_id": "8127198",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127945",
"author": "JAMI D CAMPBELL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T05:41:03",
"content": "Needs more cowbell",
"parent_id": "8127507",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127536",
"author": "nath",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T06:58:51",
"content": "Also :https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/",
"parent_id": "8127198",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127210",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:57:46",
"content": "But, but, but they sell 1,000,000 lumen torches and 36 PB SSD’s on aliexpress for $19.99. Oh my god the sellers have been telling big dirty rotten fibs with their claimed specifications!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127217",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:08:08",
"content": "Hah, I was about to make a comment in a similar vein. Amazon is packed with listings for drop-shipped flashlights with outrageous lumen output claims. Tons of other products like that (power tools, to name one) with obviously fraudulent specs, but Amazon doesn’t seem to care.",
"parent_id": "8127210",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127247",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:04:59",
"content": "Amazon will never care until they get fined for it, doing something would cost them money where doing nothing makes them money. Gotta pay for Bozos rocket trips somehow.What amazes me is that they haven’t just started to play with the unit prefixes to sell to everyone who doesn’t understand them. I’ve yet to see a 1,000,000 uAh battery or similar advertised, the marketing aholes could have their big numbers whilst not technically lying about spec.",
"parent_id": "8127217",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127253",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:10:29",
"content": "They’re based in China. What part of lying about the spec do you think they care about?! 😂More seriously, they probably don’t see it as lying in the way we would, but as a way to communicate “better than previous version”.",
"parent_id": "8127247",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127271",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:46:06",
"content": "Presumably there are no liars in your country?",
"parent_id": "8127253",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127966",
"author": "Cynar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T07:16:19",
"content": "I’ve noticed a cultural difference that is at play on this. In the west, we see the scammer as bad, for trying to scam someone. In china it seems more that it’s the scammee that is stupid for getting caught out. The view is more neutral on the scammer.When these 2 mentalities collide, we end up with the absurd scams we see with specs.",
"parent_id": "8127253",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127324",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:33:26",
"content": "It took me a while to realize that the mAh figure given on a powerbank is the mAh of the 3.7V battery, not of the 5V output. mWh would be a more honest (comparable) figure.",
"parent_id": "8127247",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127393",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T22:22:23",
"content": "honest (and easily comparable) does not shift product :)But I agree with you. I wish every SSD had an easily accessible TBW figure, so that I would have a better idea when it would change from RW to RO with my abusive usage pattern (extreme number of writes with tiny files – If I’m totally honest I try to keep that on a mounted RAM disk – but I have screwed up and killed more than most people).",
"parent_id": "8127324",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127224",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:16:25",
"content": "They also sell lipo pack the size of a stick of gum that has bazillion Ah and a 386 exobyte SSD for under $10.Caveat emptor: buyer beware",
"parent_id": "8127210",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127900",
"author": "Clyde Gombert",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T00:43:59",
"content": "I have 1 I bought in SA about 8 + years ago 10.000.000 candle light power. Here I paid under R400, what’s that to the $. Then it was about R12 something to the $. They scamming",
"parent_id": "8127210",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127263",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T17:29:14",
"content": "Jeez. I get the drive to DIY it. But if the point is just to throw lumens, at what point do you just say “enough faffing around” and just use a standard arc lamp and single reflector like a real searchlight uses?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127301",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:47:02",
"content": "Modern day Bat signal.",
"parent_id": "8127263",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127288",
"author": "mark hammond",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T18:11:48",
"content": "And at 83.3 lumens / watt, should be able to 2.5 x that with a decent white led mains bulb.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127312",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:11:23",
"content": "How does adding more identical LEDs increase the range? (I’m serious – not a sarcastic/ironic question)I mean I guess multiple lasers of exactly the same wavelength can be optically merged so the intensity/strength literally increases but with wide(r) band LEDs of questionable similarity?What’s the factor? How much further do double the LEDs shine (same brightness)?(no I don’t watch such click bait vids)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127395",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T22:28:43",
"content": "The loss of power would be R^-2 in a vacuum since the light is expanding out in a cone.So if 1 LED was satisfactorily bright at a distance of x, then 2 LEDs would be satisfactorily bright at a distance of y:1 * x^-2 = 2 * y^-2solving for positive y:y = x * sqrt(2)Doubling the LEDs gives you ~40% more effective range.(Real world effect will be worse due to haze, diffraction, and battery limitations.)",
"parent_id": "8127312",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127427",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T00:12:28",
"content": "Depends on how far apart the sources are, what their divergence is, and what medium they transmit through. I imagine this does increase the brightness/range a bit, but it’s nothing like a factor of 2x for this configuration for two leds vs 1.That beam is diverging pretty fast. It’s intense I wouldn’t look at it that for sure, but it is absurd for funsies",
"parent_id": "8127312",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127313",
"author": "ethzero",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:12:15",
"content": "Aka, how to flirt with a pulsar.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127414",
"author": "JJW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:31:05",
"content": "Light is additive. Thus, ganging LEDs is conceptually limitless, with budget, power, cooling and variable focus being the only things to keep most folks back from realizing kitchen table solutions that can illuminate the clouds at night.WLEPs that can shoot focussed, visible light beams out to 2 KM in a chassis the 1/3rd the size of a candlestick have been around for at least 7 years now at affordable prices. 3D printing a mount that gangs four of them into a makeshift “Tiny Monster” has some incredible, ultra-long throw potential, complicated only by the mechanism needed to converge the beams at specific distances.",
"parent_id": "8127313",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127327",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T19:36:39",
"content": "These are neat – there are two little blue-violet lasers that shoot at a teensy chunk of phosphor, and wow can you focus THAT point source. Got one sitting in a drawer… Not that it’s incredibly bright, but it could make an incredible beam. Would like to see what 50 of them would do.https://www.lasercomponents.com/us/product/laserlight-surface-mount-devices/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127365",
"author": "Logan Flynn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T21:09:54",
"content": "How much do those run? Website doesn’t show a price",
"parent_id": "8127327",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127927",
"author": "Kluge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:27:49",
"content": "Yeah… But if you scroll down to the bottom, they do say each of their products “are worth every dollar”…So they all cost at least a buck 😁",
"parent_id": "8127365",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127389",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T22:14:38",
"content": "Those are neat, but aren’t much tighter than the Osram devices the OP uses: 2 degrees vs 3 degrees with a 35 mm optic. And they still have that nasty blue spike in the spectrum.",
"parent_id": "8127327",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127337",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:03:50",
"content": "no video? Who cares then.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127364",
"author": "Pmm",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T21:04:38",
"content": "Prefer lux over mcd, mcd make a thrower not , alot of light that image but very floody also.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127387",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T22:05:23",
"content": "This willy-nilly comment mod system really does dissuade one from reasonable discourse.That, and the broken “Email me new comments” function.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127487",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T04:31:27",
"content": "Yeah it’s impossible to have a conversation in these comments.",
"parent_id": "8127387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127408",
"author": "J. Peterson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T23:14:18",
"content": "Cue the SUN! (ref. The Truman Show)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127618",
"author": "Mel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T11:19:44",
"content": "Gonna need a bigger torch",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127638",
"author": "Robin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:19:57",
"content": "Power and optical power is only part of having long range, I don’t see any mention about focus with is a huge part of having long range.If it’s not focused then there are plenty of handheld lasers that will have a longer range",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127645",
"author": "Awais",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T12:35:17",
"content": "The funny thing is that there already 100000 lumen flash since 2020 which is imalent Ms 18 and which is cost 549$ and work 1.20 h 😂😂😂😂 and yes there also ms32 which is 200000 lumin and cost just over 629$. This guy is selling 100000 lumen in 2025 at 2000$ 🥴🥴😝😝😂😂😁😁",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127899",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T00:41:45",
"content": "I have a pet hate of these projects. Not specifically for the person involved, but because this level of light intensity has the potential to blind… The owner, the unsuspecting animals in the trees, random walkers within a reasonable fall off.There’s just no point. Anyone can throw power and LEDs at a project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127923",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T03:11:37",
"content": "Agreed it’s silly and pointless. But blind? Seriously? Better not go outside on a sunny day then. Sunlight deposits more lumens on every square meter than this light produces.",
"parent_id": "8127899",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127943",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T05:21:32",
"content": "Honestly the most impressive figure is the battery life. Thirty minutes of that kind of current is pretty fantastic. I mean it is basically a scooter battery hooked up to a big bank of diodes but still",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130245",
"author": "Bruce Perens",
"timestamp": "2025-05-20T04:26:36",
"content": "Not that the specs of this are for real, but the longest range one would be a laser. With really good collimation. You should be able to send a beam toward the Apollo reflectors on the moon, and get a few photons back. Now that’s a flashlight I’d buy! You’d need a big light bucket of a telescope and a really good detector, too. Imagine being able to say your flashlight reaches the Moon and back.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.122538
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/reading-the-color-of-money/
|
Reading The Color Of Money
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"Reverse Engineering"
] |
[
"money",
"reverse engineering"
] |
Ever wondered what happens when you insert a bill into a vending machine? [Janne] is back with his latest project: reverse engineering a
banknote validator
. Curious about how these common devices work, he searched for information but found few resources explaining their operation.
To learn more, [Janne] explored the security features that protect banknotes from counterfeiting. These can include microprinting, UV and IR inks, holograms, color-shifting coatings, watermarks, magnetic stripes, and specialty paper. These features not only deter fraud but also enable validators to quickly verify a bill’s authenticity.
[Janne] purchased several banknote validators to disassemble and compare. Despite varied exteriors, their core mechanisms were similar: systems to move the bill smoothly, a tape head to detect magnetic ink or security strips, and optical sensors to inspect visible, UV, and IR features. By reverse engineering the firmware of two devices, he uncovered their inner workings. There is a calibration procedure they use to normalize their readings, then it will analyze a bill through a sophisticated signal processing pipeline. If the data falls within a narrow acceptance range, the device authenticates the bill; otherwise, it rejects it.
Head over to his site to check out all the details he discovered while exploring these devices, as well as exploring the other cool projects he’s worked on in the past. Reverse engineering offers a unique window into technology Check out
other projects
we’ve featured showcasing this skill.
| 9
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126722",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T02:36:07",
"content": "Seeing how Passports are made is also interesting.https://youtu.be/bnKyw5-_E6o",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126807",
"author": "R",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T10:52:49",
"content": "I’ll post this here because it’s something I witnessed but haven’t been able to explain. This was 10 or 15 years ago, the company I worked at had just moved into a newly constructed headquarters where everything was new – including the printers and vending machines. I guess it was a snow day because the company owner brought his middle school aged daughter and a friend to work that day. I was the company geek so they’d come by my desk looking for stuff to play with. Everytime they got bored they’d come back by so eventually I thought of something to keep them busy enough so I could work – I gave them some small bills and introduced them to the company print room with a 20ft long industrial copier that dld everything a print store could offer. I knew this obviously wouldn’t work. The copier would get partially through the print then detect it was being used to copy a real US bill and abort the process. Every time they had an issue they’d come back by and I’d give them some possible solutions- simple things like folding the bills, flipping the paper, making copies of one portion at a time, etc. Eventually they surprisingly had some properly aligned, full size front and back bills but they were upset because they said the vending machine wouldn’t take them. I knew this would be the case so I wasn’t bothered by their attempts but I still needed something to send them away for a while on other task so I recommended wadding the fake bills up in a ball then feeding them to the machine (I’d noticed years before, like many other people, that crisp new bills are often rejected). About 15 minutes later I heard the girls running up the hall giggling then they came in my office and dropped about a dozen bags of Doritos on my desk, shouting “It worked!”. I was baffled but also horrified by the prospect of losing my job, so I confiscated the evidence and fake bills and swore them to secrecy.I still have no idea how that actually worked on a modern vending machine. Any ideas?",
"parent_id": "8126722",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126870",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:17:26",
"content": "I suspect that the bill sensors in some vending machines are not that discriminate unlike change machines. Hopefully you shredded the evidence. As I recall high end copiers embed in the picture a traceable serial or ID number.There are still stories of dumb people making their own money. A person tried to pass a homemade 100K bill at at Walmart. They passed “GO” and went straight to jail. I decided to try to get change for a fake $20 at a small town gas station in the South….the old man at the counter gave me 2 Three’s and Fourteen…😁",
"parent_id": "8126807",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126981",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T22:05:55",
"content": "Copies & printers add “yellow dots” to your printout, recording model, serial number, date, time etc. They’ve been doing that for a long time.Money has little rings, usually yellow or green known as the ” EURion constellation” that copiers and some vending machines detect. These have also been around for a long times, at least 25 years.",
"parent_id": "8126870",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127456",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:12:55",
"content": "Yup. Amusing enough, a while back I found some printers are a little too sensitive to the “EURion constellation”. One time, I was trying to print a particular page from a clothing retailer website and my (at that time) newer color laser printer would just abort the print. My old monochrome LaserJet 4 printed the page just fine. The color printer would print other pages just fine. I finally discovered that one particular image of the item was the problem and that image wouldn’t print. It was just an image of a jacket, but it just happen to trigger the constellation detection. Perhaps someone deliberately embedded the constellation into that image? Perhaps, but then why only that one image and not all them, then?",
"parent_id": "8126981",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126851",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:46:35",
"content": "What if you made a business card or something that had all the same security features as a bank note, and fools these validators, but on outward appearance does not look like or try to pass itself off as money at all? It’s obviously illegal to try to spend it as money, but would it be illegal to make?Judge: If you’re not trying to counterfeit money, why does it have all the same features?Me: I don’t want people making counterfeits of my business card.I know, I know, I’ll see myself off to prison.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126930",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:46:53",
"content": "If identities can be stolen.",
"parent_id": "8126851",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126933",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:49:41",
"content": "(How come all the comments look like they were AI generated)Anyway.. that would be completely legal, but also would not work since size and spacing would be part of the security system and would prevent fooling the system surely.But if the mechanism ignored size and spacing then it would be all legal since the law has specific wording.Not that you can’t be completely legal and blameless andsoforth and be sure to avoid jail that way, there is too much evidence that that is not the case..",
"parent_id": "8126851",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126996",
"author": "Vendor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T23:48:06",
"content": "If you’re working on the same note acceptor shown in the image (looks like a CoinCo), I know of some companies that would be very grateful for updated bank note definitions for these. Currently, the manufacturer sends an flimsy encrypted programmer with a limited number of writes and charges $10 per upgrade. Definitely a pain point when you have an install base of thousands.On the flip side, you can usually get these dirt cheap because they’re older and most operators switched to GBA validators. GBA released (for free) a set of images you can load on to a USB drive (and plug in to the validator) to teach the validator about new notes in each denomination.As a hint, validators also do length/edge detection with visible light. Caused headaches for validator vendors when Australia released bank notes with a (mostly) clear plastic middle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.045612
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/hackaday-links-may-11-2025/
|
Hackaday Links: May 11, 2025
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] |
[
"ai",
"arctic",
"court",
"deep-fake",
"galaxies",
"hackaday links",
"Hubble",
"Indian Ocean",
"jwst",
"Kosmos 482",
"legal",
"Meltdown",
"nuclear",
"pressurized water reactor",
"PWR",
"thermal paste",
"venus",
"victim"
] |
Did artificial intelligence just
jump the shark
? Maybe so, and it came from the legal world of all places, with
this report
of an AI-generated victim impact statement. In an apparent first, the family of an Arizona man killed in a road rage incident in 2021 used AI to bring the victim back to life to testify during the sentencing phase of his killer’s trial. The video was created by the sister and brother-in-law of the 37-year-old victim using old photos and videos, and was quite well done, despite the normal uncanny valley stuff around lip-syncing that seems to be the fatal flaw for every deep-fake video we’ve seen so far. The victim’s beard is also strangely immobile, which we found off-putting.
In the video, the victim expresses forgiveness toward his killer and addresses his family members directly, talking about things like what he would have looked like if he’d gotten the chance to grow old. That seemed incredibly inflammatory to us, but according to Arizona law, victims and their families get to say pretty much whatever they want in their impact statements. While this appears to be legal, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it appealed, since the judge tacked an extra year onto the killer’s sentence over what the prosecution sought based on the power of the AI statement. If this tactic withstands the legal tests it’ll no doubt face, we could see an entire industry built around this concept.
Last week
, we warned about the impending return of Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe that was supposed to go to Venus when it was launched in 1972. It never quite chooched, though, and ended up circling the Earth for the last 53 years.
The satellite made its final orbit on Saturday morning
, ending up in the drink in the Indian Ocean, far from land. Alas, the faint hope that it would have a soft landing thanks to the probe’s parachute having apparently been deployed at some point in the last five decades didn’t come to pass. That’s a bit of a disappointment to space fans, who’d love to get a peek inside this priceless bit of space memorabilia. Roscosmos says they monitored the descent, so presumably they know more or less where the debris rests. Whether it’s worth an expedition to retrieve it remains to be seen.
Are we really at the point where we have to worry about counterfeit thermal paste?
Apparently, yes
, judging by the effort Arctic Cooling is putting into authenticity verification of its MX brand pastes. To make sure you’re getting the real deal, boxes will come with seals that rival those found on over-the-counter medications and scratch-off QR codes that can be scanned and cross-referenced to an online authentication site. We suppose it makes sense; chip counterfeiting is a very real thing, after all, and it’s probably as easy to put a random glob of goo into a syringe as it is to laser new markings onto a chip package. And Arctic compound commands a pretty penny, so the incentive is obvious. But still, something about this just bothers us.
Another very cool astrophotography shot this week, this time
a breathtaking collection of galaxies
. Taken from the Near Infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope with help from the Hubble Space Telescope and the XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory, the image shows thousands of galaxies of all shapes and sizes, along with the background X-ray glow emitted by all the clouds of superheated dust and gas between them. The stars with the characteristic six-pointed diffraction spikes are all located within our galaxy, but everything else is a galaxy. The variety is fascinating, and the scale of the image is mind-boggling. It’s galactic eye candy!
And finally, if you’ve ever wondered about what happens when a nuclear reactor melts down, you’re in luck with
this interesting animagraphic
on the process. It’s not a detailed 3D render of any particular nuclear power plant and doesn’t have a specific meltdown event in mind, although it does mention both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Rather, it’s a general look at pressurized water reactors and what can go wrong when the cooling water stops flowing. It also touches on potentially safer designs with passive safety systems that rely on natural convection to keep cooling water circulating in the event of disaster, along with gravity-fed deluge systems to cool the containment vessel if things get out of hand. It’s a good overview of how reactors work and where they can go wrong. Enjoy.
| 6
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126718",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T02:21:06",
"content": "It is important to note that the AI victim statement doesn’t reflect anything that the victim might have said or believed, since the victim wasn’t there to participate in its creation. Rather, it’s reflects what the sister and brother-in-law thought he might have said and believed. His grieving sister and brother-in-law, natch. Had the victim had an unfortunate flaw such as an obsession with video games or porn or gambling or twelve year old potential sex partners, even had he failed to keep such things secret from the family, I somehow doubt the AI would have been told to include them in its simulation. Which raises the whole thing from merely dishonest to more than a little ghoulish.It’s especially unfortunate because at the moment, creating such an AI model of yourself (with a real effort at introspection and brutal honesty) is about as close as we can come to real-life uploading, at least creating some sort of presence to represent your intentions in the world after your biological body can’t do it for you any more. Several science fiction stories have taken this approach to interesting effect. But these dingbats have rendered the whole idea even more suspect at best, because anybody can represent a model as being a faithful approximation of so-and-so, when so-and-so isn’t around themselves to vouch for its provenance any more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126830",
"author": "Hugh Mann",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:13:05",
"content": "I wouldn’t be allowed to dress an actor up and bring them into the courthouse to make a victim statement. I’d be thrown so far out of the courtroom it isn’t even funny. This AI abuse just led to someone being sentenced unfairly and unjustly, and it’s shit.I hope there’s an appeal and they drop this sentence down, because this is downright garbage.",
"parent_id": "8126718",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126837",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:53:17",
"content": "Close to Hogwarts portraits of past headmasters, but not so close. Yet.",
"parent_id": "8126718",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126754",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T05:53:23",
"content": "Arctic Silver doesn’t have much performance advantage over other thermal pastes, this is all purely marketing to give the product a veneer of prestige (we’re not just a thermal paste, we’re the thermal paste everyone tries to copy! Make sureyouhave the “real deal”!) It’ll do that job even if there isn’t a single competing product that copies their trade dress.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127000",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T00:33:41",
"content": "I only buy it because its the cheapest 🙃.Although where it really matters you can use also very inexpensive PTM7950 it’s $5-10 from Amazon for example, and in theory never dries out as it is a phase change plastic 🤷🏼♂️.You can get a pound of grey goop for 1/10 the price and stick it in tubes for a tidy profit, so I can see where the Silver purveyors would be upset.Tech Ingredients did a great scientific video on how to make amazing thermal paste: you are filling cracks, so you need a mix of smaller and smaller diameter material suspended in silicon oil. That is all. It’s not magic and the recipe isn’t hidden in Abe Lincoln’s desk drawer at the Smithsonian. The ingredients are available commercially at reasonable prices if you want to experiment with different mixtures.Although if your goal is cooling then maybe de-lid and use liquid metal on a water block and forget the paste alltogether.",
"parent_id": "8126754",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126966",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T19:28:34",
"content": "Apropos that AI statement, I already read it somewhere. Thought it was an interesting but useless gimmick…And now is a thing?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.167648
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/open-source-elint-accidentally-from-nasa/
|
Open Source ELINT Accidentally From NASA
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Space"
] |
[
"ELINT",
"jamming",
"SMAP"
] |
You normally think of ELINT — Electronic Intelligence — as something done in secret by shadowy three-letter agencies or the military. The term usually means gathering intelligence from signals that don’t contain speech (since that’s COMINT). But [Nukes] was looking at public data from NASA’s SMAP satellite and made an interesting discovery. Despite the satellite’s mission to measure soil moisture, it also
provided data on strange happenings in the radio spectrum
.
While 1.4 GHz is technically in the L-band, it is reserved (from 1.400–1.427 GHz) for specialized purposes. The frequency is critical for radio astronomy, so it is typically clear other than low-power safety critical data systems that benefit from the low potential for interference. SMAP, coincidentally, listens on 1.41 GHz and maps where there is interference.
Since there aren’t supposed to be any high-power transmitters at that frequency, you can imagine that anything showing up there is probably something unusual and interesting. In particular, it is often a signature for military jamming since nearby frequencies are often used for passive radar and to control drones. So looking at the data can give you a window on geopolitics at any given moment.
The data is out there, and a
simple Python script
can pull it. We imagine this is the kind of data that only a spook in a SCIF would have had just a decade or two ago.
Jamming tech is
secretive but powerful
. SMAP isn’t the only satellite to have its mission
unexpectedly repurposed
.
| 9
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126713",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T02:02:11",
"content": "Interesting but the source is – let’s say – a little “odd”.a handful of posts since Jan 2024an empty about page:https://radioandnukes.substack.com/aboutlittle wired distinction/separation between Crimea and Ukraine when Crimea is a part of Ukraine (possibly means nothing but I noticed it AND a commenter under the linked article felt it odd too).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126944",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:21:23",
"content": "Hah, sure Crimea is part of Ukraine, but uhm, how come anybody that visits it is banned from entering Ukraine ever and threatened left and right by the Ukrainian authorities? Seems contradictory.",
"parent_id": "8126713",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127877",
"author": "cmholm",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T22:47:08",
"content": "Because to enter Crimea nowadays requires either being part of a UA military operation, or entering illegally from Russia. The former is a party a foreigner is unlike to be invited to, and the UA governmentreallywants to discourage the latter.",
"parent_id": "8126944",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127051",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T07:31:32",
"content": "Anywhere to get higher resolution maps, or is this it?",
"parent_id": "8126713",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127896",
"author": "NSFW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T00:24:13",
"content": "FWIW, the dog watermark on the map image looks like a recurring character in NAFO artwork. They’re a pro-Ukraine group/tribe/subculture/idunno that’s on a few social media sites, Reddit and Xitter especially. Not sure what their real-world impact is (or if they have any at all) but they are a steady source of quality satire and memes.Also, the most appealing proposal that I have ever seen:https://www.reddit.com/r/NAFO/comments/1jybzpr/this_is_superior_peace_plan_for_ukraine/",
"parent_id": "8126713",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126833",
"author": "Tanner Bass",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:19:35",
"content": "The magnitudes of the hotspots all seem to fall into neat categories, possibly indicating that whatever force put them up has certain levels of equipment that they send out depending on the expected level of activity that needs to be jammed.It also seems to indicate that these systems are “dumb” in that they have no fine tuning for power level.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126881",
"author": "Snarkenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:49:08",
"content": "“Corporal, deploy the Mark 14 Jammer!”“What power level, Sarge?”“Turn it all the way up. We need to be invisible!”",
"parent_id": "8126833",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126900",
"author": "Guest",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T15:31:08",
"content": "What’s the discovery here ? And there is nothing “accidental” about providing info on radio interferences. Maps of RFI have been published for years by the SMOS, Aquarius and SMAP missions (e.g.https://salinity.oceansciences.org/smap-radiometer.htm). Space agencies have been working to mitigate illegal civilian sources using the signals measured by these instruments. SMAP was specifically designed with advanced RFI detection capabilities. Most people with interest in the science data have been accutely aware of the major flare up in RFI over Ukraine since both armies engaged in major drone countermeasures .",
"parent_id": "8126833",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127084",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T09:56:30",
"content": "This is great! Anywhere to get higher resolution maps, or is this it?",
"parent_id": "8126900",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,549.292957
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/learn-15-print-in-place-mechanisms-in-15-minutes/
|
Learn 15 Print-in-Place Mechanisms In 15 Minutes
|
Dave Rowntree
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"design",
"flexures",
"living hinge",
"Mechanisms",
"springs"
] |
3D printed in-place mechanisms and flexures, such as living hinges, are really neat when you can get them to print correctly. But how do you actually do that? YouTuber [Slant 3D] is here with a
helpful video demonstrating the different kinds of springs and hinges
(Video, embedded below) that can be printed reliably, and discusses some common pitfalls and areas to concentrate upon.
Living hinges are everywhere and have been used at least as long as humans have been around. The principle is simple enough; join two sections to move with a thinned section of material that, in small sections, is flexible enough to distort a few times without breaking off. The key section is “a few times”, as all materials will eventually fail due to overworking. However, if this thing is just a cheap plastic case around a low-cost product, that may not be a huge concern. The video shows a few ways to extend flexibility, such as spreading the bending load across multiple flexure elements to reduce the wear of individual parts, but that comes at the cost of compactness.
Moving on from springs, the second part of the video describes a few strategies for print-in-place hinges, describing how they fail, and what to do to mitigate. Again, robustness comes at a cost, in this case, increased bulk, but with 3D printing, you get what you pay for. Overall, it’s a nice, concise guide to the topic and well worth a mere seventeen minutes of your time, we reckon.
We see 3D printed flexure mechanisms a lot ’round here,
like this for example
. But
how precise are they
? Finally, we think this
3D printed spherical flexure joystick
is cool, but must have been a bit tricky to model!
Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for the tip!
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126745",
"author": "Deividas Strole",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T05:20:28",
"content": "3D printing flexures and living hinges is such a cool challenge! Slant 3D’s video does a great job breaking down the process and pointing out common pitfalls. It’s amazing how small adjustments can make such a big difference in durability. If you’re into 3D printing, this is a must-watch!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126977",
"author": "ethzero",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T21:04:40",
"content": "(Just keep saying to yourself, “that’s NOT Rob McElhenney”)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127017",
"author": "Boody's Design Service, Dale Boody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T03:46:17",
"content": "Great article on exciting capabilities of 3D printing! My only disagreement is with your comment about coil springs. While it is true that FDM is not a good process for coil springs, powder based SLS works great. When ever possible, we print the spring as a connected integral part with the mechanism. BDS",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127195",
"author": "George Graves",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T15:25:38",
"content": "Slant 3d has a series of videos where he basically yells at his customers for designing things “incorrectly” and making his life more difficult. It’s quite cringe inducing – but in a can’t-look-away sort of way. He also claims that 3d printing will take over injection molding soon. Yet he had to stop making his line of branded filimate becuase he couldn’t source the plastic spools for shipping. It’s all very odd.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.250588
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/exploring-the-rp2350s-uart-bootloader/
|
Exploring The RP2350’s UART-Bootloader
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Microcontrollers"
] |
[
"microcontroller",
"rp2350",
"uart",
"UART bootloader"
] |
The RP2350 has a few advantages over its predecessor, one of which is the ability to load firmware remotely via UART, as [Thomas Pfister]
has documented on his blog
and in the video below.
[Thomas] had a project that needed more PWM than the RP2350 could provide, and hit upon the idea of using a second RP2350 as a port expander. Now, one could hard-code this, but dealing with two sets of firmware on one board can be annoying. That’s where the UART bootloader comes in: it will allow [Thomas] to program the port-expander RP2350 using the main microcontroller. Thus he only has to worry about one firmware, speeding up development.
There are limits to this technique: for one, your code must fit into the RP2350’s RAM– but the chip has 512 kB. While 640 kB should be enough for anyone, 512 kB is plenty for the port-expander [Thomas] is working on. The second drawback is that your device now has a boot time of a second or so, since the UART connection is not exactly high-bandwidth. Third, using UART on the same pins as the bootloader within the program is a bit tricky, though [Thomas] found a solution that may soon be in the SDK.
[Thomas] also wanted to be able to perform this trick remotely, which isn’t exactly UART’s forte. RS-485 comes to the rescue, via TI’s THVD1450. That worked reliably at the 10m cable length used for the test. [Thomas] sees no reason it could not work over much longer distances. ([Thomas] suggests up to 100 m, but the baud rate is fairly low, so we wouldn’t be surprised if you could push it quite a bit further than that. The standard is good out to a kilometer, after all.) For all the wrinkles and links to tips and solutions, plus of course [Thomas]’s code, check out the blog. If you want to listen to the information, you can check out the video below.
We’re grateful to [Thomas] for letting us know about his
project via the tip line,
like we are to everyone who
drops us a tip
. Hint, hint.
Given that it is the new chip on the block, we haven’t seen too many hacks with the RP2350 yet, but
they’re starting to trickle in
. While a UART bootloader is a nice feature to have,
it can also introduce a security risk
, which is always something to keep in mind.
| 12
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126616",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T15:50:22",
"content": "It might be interesting for a cubesat.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126623",
"author": "0xdeadbeef",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T16:19:10",
"content": "While 640 kB should be enough for anyoneHah, nice reference.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126730",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T02:53:03",
"content": "I wonder if that reference will survive billg’s departure from this world. It might…",
"parent_id": "8126623",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126630",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T16:46:59",
"content": "“[Thomas] had a project that needed more PWM than the RP2350 could provide, and hit upon the idea of using a second RP2350 as a port expander” Why? there are plenty of dedicated IC’s that support multiple PWM channels vis SPI or I2C.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126636",
"author": "TheWebMachine",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:31:20",
"content": "TL;DR: Sometimes the microcontroller picks you…I built a project not that long ago involving 2 controllers like this out of necessity. One wasbuilt intoan e-ink display to drive that and was intended to be the brains of the operation, but it wasn’t capable enough to also trigger 8 separate motor relays (I was one free pin short 😭). I couldn’t exactly replace that controller since it was built-in. So, I offloaded relay control and timing logic to a Pico over I²C. Now, any time I need to alter the firmware, I usually have to flash two devices, which is a pain since they are linked and talking to each other…I always have to make sure OTA code loadsbeforeanything touches I²C in case I changed something with the format, else risk one or both MCUs hanging shortly after boot, having to open the unit and manually flash both over USB to get back to a working state.That project would have been a great use case for UART bootloading and I’ll definitely be keeping this in mind for the future!",
"parent_id": "8126630",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126637",
"author": "Phil Barrett",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:32:20",
"content": "I/O expanders usually cost more than the RP2350 (the A version is around a buck). There are a number of designs using an RP2040 or RP2350 as an I/O expander.If there was a way (iirc some discussions on this point) to be able to program the FW into Flash then it would be even better.",
"parent_id": "8126630",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126638",
"author": "Thomas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:33:59",
"content": "Yeah, but I’ll need multiple boards, and the cable might get a bit longer, so I’ll dasy-chain them via RS-485 and they’ll just grab their commands from the line. That’s why. :)",
"parent_id": "8126630",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126888",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T15:06:09",
"content": "haha i definitely agree butthe reason specifically that i love my rp2040 pico boards is that they’re “so cheap you can use them as an I/O relay.” they’re exactly at that point where, realistically at my production volumes and lead times (i.e., fooling around), i can’t imagine a cheaper product. if i don’t happen to have one sitting around then in practice even a 74138 ($0.69 digikey) or whatever is simply not cost-competitive with a $4 board that i already have a pile of.the fact that they’re so powerful is nice but what really drew them to me is that they’re as expendable as a pic12 was 15 years ago",
"parent_id": "8126630",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126721",
"author": "Tharre",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T02:35:47",
"content": "Interestingly, if you look at the initial commit of the bootrom repository you’ll find design documents that talk about a I2C bootloader option as well. Not sure why they ultimately dropped that feature, but the QSPI pins still have the I2C interfaces multiplexed to them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126760",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T06:25:19",
"content": "‘Noymt having to deal with second firmware’ is balloney though. You just fkash it drom uart instead of eeprim now …Oth very nice!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126897",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T15:19:33",
"content": "Could this use the debug port instead? The advantage being that the target chip has all its normal pins fully available. The PicoProbe is already a RP2 chip and programs another RP2 chip. Leaving the debug interface open would leave your code open, but if you’re making an open source project then why not do it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128400",
"author": "Luke Wren",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T13:01:55",
"content": "It certainly could, but SWD is a little more complex to drive than just stuffing a binary into a UART. There are boards out there using SWD to bootstrap RP2040s (like Pimoroni’s PicoVision), and that method works on RP2350 too, but the UART has an easier on-ramp, and leaves the SWD available for you to debug the binary you loaded.",
"parent_id": "8126897",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,549.527578
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/tearing-down-a-forgotten-video-game/
|
Tearing Down A Forgotten Video Game
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] |
[
"pong",
"video game"
] |
Remember Video Volley? No? We don’t either. It looks like it was a very
early video game console
that could play tennis, hockey, or handball. In this video, [James] tears one apart. If you are like us, we are guessing there will be little more than one of those General Instrument video game chips inside.
These don’t look like they were mass-produced. The case looks like something off the shelf from those days. The whole thing looks more like a nice homebrew project or a pretty good prototype. Not like something you’d buy in a store.
Even inside, the wiring looks decidedly hand-built. The cheap phenolic PCB contained a surprise. The box does have a dedicated “pong” chip. But it isn’t from General Instruments! It’s a National Semiconductor chip instead.
The controllers are little more than sliding potentiometers in a box with a switch. We wonder how many of these were made and what they sold for new. If you know anything, let us know in the comments.
We still see the occasional project around a
General Instruments chip
. If you really want a challenge for a homebrew pong,
ditch the pong chip
and all the other ICs, too. If you want to read more about the history of the pong chip, you’ll probably enjoy this
blog post
from [pong-story].
| 5
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126560",
"author": "Chris Pepin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T11:20:56",
"content": "Pong machines are the 70’s equivalent of the all-in-one TV game joysticks of the 2000’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126652",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T18:25:44",
"content": "Pong consoles. Building them was more fun than playing them..",
"parent_id": "8126560",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126589",
"author": "hartl",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T14:04:09",
"content": "A really strange device. PAL circuitry similar to the Philips Odyssey 2001 (MM57105, 4.43MHz Xtal) and US style 300Ω RF terminals don’t match, there are not many countries where you could sell this combination.The MM57105 appeared in some electronics magazines outside the US, e.g. Elektor DE 1977-11, Elektuur NL 1977-12.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126736",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T03:58:14",
"content": "TD Manufacturing, Dallas Texas that was probably part of the game development scene there back in the day.More here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcfD-CYNid8",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127240",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T16:47:22",
"content": "I think I had one of these in 1980 or so…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.478961
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/11/boxie-a-gameboy-esque-audio-player/
|
Boxie – A Gameboy-Esque Audio Player
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"audio player",
"cartidge",
"ESP32-S3",
"nimh"
] |
This little audiobook player is a stellar example of the learning process behind a multifaceted project blending mechanical, electrical, and software design. [Mario] designed this
audiobook player
, dubbed Boxie, for his 3-year-old son to replace the often-used but flawed Toniebox.
The inspiration for Boxie was the Toniebox, a kid-friendly audiobook player. While functional, the Toniebox had drawbacks: it required internet connectivity, limited media selection, and had unreliable controls. Enter Boxie, a custom-built, standalone audiobook player free from web services, designed to address these issues with superior audio quality and toddler-friendly controls.
Boxie’s media is stored on microSD cards inserted into a slot on the device. To make this manageable for a toddler, he designed a PCB with a standard microSD card interface, ensuring easy swapping of audiobooks. The enclosure, crafted via 3D printing, is durable and compact, tailored for small hands.
The cartridges slide into the body of the Boxie. This presented a problem, most cartridge media utilize edge connectors. Strictly speaking, his DIY cartridges didn’t have those and couldn’t use traditional cartridge reader components. First trying pogo pins, he ran into several issues, most notably the inability to hold up to the wear and tear of a 3-year-old. A clever hack to add robustness was achieved when he switched to using a series of battery springs to interface with the cartridge.
Inside the Boxie lives an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, which provides the smarts to read all the controls, play audio from the inserted cartridge. The main housing also contains the battery, DAC, amp, and speaker. Mario faced a fair number of new challenges on this project, including designing a battery charging circuit and building his own ESP32-S3 board with support for charging NiMH batteries.
All of the 3D designs, PCB files, and source code are
available on his GitHub account
. If you’re interested in making a Boxie for a young one in your life, be sure to go check out his detailed write-up. If you enjoyed this project, be sure to check out the other DIY
audio players
we’ve featured.
| 8
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126513",
"author": "jme",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:35:33",
"content": "This is a fantastic project!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126528",
"author": "Atoomnet",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:02:38",
"content": "Maybe this project also works for people with high XP that are developing loss of skill, but are familiar with how the game-boy worked.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126554",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:49:34",
"content": "Nice project, and dad got a great stash of tools out of it too!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126590",
"author": "ziew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T14:04:12",
"content": "I wonder how well will SD cards handle connecting data pins before power pins. There’s a reason why power pins^H^H^H^Hpads are longer. And I guess teaching toddlers to insert the cartridge at a proper angle could be a bit challenging.Probably just bending two of the battery spring could help. But a proper cartridge clearance and pad sizes on PCB would be a bit more robust. I guess.Otherwise awesome project. I’d consider making it if not for the fact that my kids already learned to read.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126781",
"author": "Mario Zechner",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T08:26:45",
"content": "The software waits for the card connected pin to go high, then waits another 500ms to start communicating over the data lines. Surprisingly, this works reliably and turned out to be toddler proof.",
"parent_id": "8126590",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126948",
"author": "ziew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:35:25",
"content": "Oh, I had no idea that one of the data pins doubles as card detection. That’s actually pretty smart. And I appreciate the response to my nitpicking ;-)",
"parent_id": "8126781",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126753",
"author": "Cyk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T05:47:32",
"content": "Just a hint: If you want to build something like this, but don’t want to deal with all the hassle installing the compiler and using the esp-idf, you can do all of this (and many more things) with Annex RDS:Annex is a Basic interpreter for ESP32, that can easily be installed via a web flasher, and already comes with a ton of features, like web editor with debugger, filesystem, AD card support, tons of displays and sensors, mp3 playback (even streaming), etc..It even supports lvgl, so you can build professionally looking GUIs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126784",
"author": "Weasel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T08:46:34",
"content": "Thats actually pretty smart. How about an upgrade to some sort of data transmission via NFC or some sorts? Allowing to ditch the contacts completely and making it waterproof.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.581486
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/another-old-thinkpad-gets-a-new-motherboard/
|
Another Old ThinkPad Gets A New Motherboard
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"IBM Thinkpad",
"motherboard",
"x200"
] |
The Thinkpad line of laptops, originally from IBM, and then from Lenovo, have long been the choice of many in our community. They offer a level of robustness and reliability missing in many cheaper machines. You may not be surprised to find that this article is being written on one. With such a following, it’s not surprising that a significant effort has gone into upgrading older models. For example, we have [Franck Deng]’s
new motherboard for the Thinkpad X200 and X201
. These models from the end of the 2000s shipped as far as we can remember with Core 2 Duo processors, so we can imagine they would be starting to feel their age.
It’s fair to say the new board isn’t a cheap option, but it does come with a new Core Ultra 7 CPU, DDR5 memory, M.2 interfaces for SSDs alongside the original 2.5″ device, and USB-C with Thunderbolt support. There are a range of screen upgrade options. For an even more hefty price, you can buy a completely rebuilt laptop featuring the new board. We’re impressed with the work, but we have to wonder how it would stack up against a newer Thinkpad for the price.
If you’re curious to see more of the same,
this isn’t the first such upgrade we’ve seen
.
Thanks [Max] for the tip.
| 18
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126531",
"author": "Geoffrey Dowen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:18:35",
"content": "I just purchased @ T14 gen 1",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126559",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T11:19:01",
"content": "The great X200 was a Core2 Duo based machine, but the not so great X201waswas already a 1St gen Core (Arrancare)",
"parent_id": "8126531",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126545",
"author": "Jae",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:19:29",
"content": "I recently acquired a P15 Gen 1. It came with some extras added. It’s a machine I never imagined I’d own. Or appreciate owning, for that matter. Just…amazing. I’m running Fedora 42 on it and it’s blazing. Plan on having it for some time. Nice to know rebuilding these is an option.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126547",
"author": "Matthew Welland",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:25:51",
"content": "Has anyone tried putting a small raspberry pi into an older ThinkPad? I love the feel and keyboard of my very old ThinkPad and the power of a pi would be sufficient for what I use that machine for.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126724",
"author": "Ac",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T02:39:13",
"content": "Something i learned during the pandemic shortage: A pi4 is about 1/2 as fast as a midline Lenovo from 2012.While there’s a Pi 5 now, it’s not broadly competitive with a PC.",
"parent_id": "8126547",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126561",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T11:21:15",
"content": "Damn auto correction… Arrandale! not Arrancare",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126577",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:05:39",
"content": "I still love my X200, but it just got too slow, relatively speaking. It’s still in service and remains a backup, but my daily driver is now a X390: slightly larger, a little thinner, different ports, but great battery life. (aside: (Objectively the X390 is better than the X200 in all respects except the replaceable battery).This motherboard swap looks like it would be great, but for the cost… The X390 is cheaper than the X200 motherboard upgrade offered here.And the replaceable battery honestly isn’t an issue: Genuine X200 batteries are unobtainium, and afermarket ones are junk. The X390 battery is replaceable with a screwdriver in 2 minutes, so replacement is actually trivial. 3 years of abuse on mine and it still logs 102% of factory spec though, so I have not needed a replacement.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126585",
"author": "The Solutor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:49:51",
"content": "No, not better by all respect.The X390 has still the idiotic 16/9 display that infected the IT world for a decade, thanks God in the last few years 16/10 (and 5/3) displays are coming back",
"parent_id": "8126577",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126620",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T16:03:05",
"content": "Agreed the squarer displays are better for some things, but I would not call the 16:9 “idiotic”. It’s a fine aspect ratio for a small laptop: permits a full-size keyboard with a full-width display, while keeping the depth and overall volume of the device still reasonable.(he says, typing away on a 3440×1440 ultrawide at the moment…)",
"parent_id": "8126585",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126644",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T18:05:24",
"content": "Nothing wrong with 16:9, or the even wider ultrawide ratios – the real issue on smaller devices is the screen vertically has to be sufficient for your needs – so pick the right size screen really and you are golden. After that it can be very handy to have even a thin sliver of extra width from the wider ratio screens – you can put your messaging program, taskbar, media controls type stuff, and if you have more width still you can then have side by side windows of a decent width so your work and the reference you are using can both be on screen at once etc.4:3 type very square displays really don’t do anything particularly wonderful in the small sizes, but they work fine, and all my portables but the steamdeck are still 4:3 (with the most used one being a core2duo). But especially as during the ‘infected’ era as you are calling it machines get larger and yet lighter as a rule so instead of a 10.1″ square display you get a machine that weighs the same or less while coming with a 15″ or so diagonal so effectively just free extra screen in the width…",
"parent_id": "8126585",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126626",
"author": "Tom Buskey",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T16:23:26",
"content": "Add an SSD, max the ram and install Linux (not with GNOME or btrfs) and these will outperform most chromebooks.I upgraded from T61 (8GB DDR2 ram, 2 core) to a T420 (16GB DDR3, 4 core) to reduce power and its paid for itself over a year.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126645",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T18:08:14",
"content": "Yeah these old machine are still very capable, though outperform chromebooks for most users is probably not true – these days video media seems to be the most important things and these older chips don’t have the accelerators for the modern file formats, if they have the graphical potential to really handle video at all, where the chromebook will probably handle those videos. But otherwise…",
"parent_id": "8126626",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126674",
"author": "Clind",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T20:36:41",
"content": "Yep, exactly what I did to the X201 I’m still using (web and office on at my remote work site) and what I did as well to the X60s my wife is still using for the same purpose…These machines offer a really attractive form factor and if treated decently are kind of immortal :DAlso both of these machines have the possibility for alternative MB that offer wonderful upgrade path, the price is just out of any economical sense. A pity !",
"parent_id": "8126626",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126680",
"author": "Mini",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T21:32:40",
"content": "T480s for me is my daily driver always..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126798",
"author": "Digwith2bones",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T09:57:04",
"content": "If only Lemovo could fix their fans – have 2 X60 and 2 X200 and now 3 X1 carbons all second hand and do what is requured easily but the fans mostly work but are noisy and can stop and stutter",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126825",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:05:24",
"content": "That’s odd. X40,x41,x200,x390, 2x X1 here, with cumulative 60+ years of operation. Not a single fan failure among them. Maybe environmental factors for your failures? One of our X1s collects a lot of lint because its user loves to leave it on the couch, pillows, etc., and I have to vacuum it out every year or two.",
"parent_id": "8126798",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126884",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:53:53",
"content": "i feel like about 10 years ago the amount of processing power you can get in the cheapest ‘laptop CPU’ became sufficient for my purposes. i’m thinking of like a first generation ARM chromebook with samsung exynos ARM and 2GB of RAM. i still run exactly the same software on my laptop.but i haven’t seen battery life and heat improve much. and since i don’t want any greater power, i think it’s not unreasonable for me to hope for continuing improvement in other specs. i think what i’m looking for is a genuine cellphone cpu in an SBC. not an ARM designed for laptops or for TVs, but an actual cellphone cpu where idle and lightly-loaded consumption was the overriding design consideration to the point where it doesn’t even get warm if you don’t run a videogame or browser.that’s the kind of thing i dream of when i imagine replacing a laptop mainboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128785",
"author": "Franck Deng",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T12:33:30",
"content": "thank you for your post!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,549.639077
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/an-llm-for-the-raspberry-pi/
|
An LLM For The Raspberry Pi
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Raspberry Pi"
] |
[
"LLM",
"microsoft"
] |
Microsoft’s latest Phi4 LLM has 14 billion parameters that require about 11 GB of storage. Can you run it on a Raspberry Pi? Get serious. However, the
Phi4-mini-reasoning model
is a cut-down version with “only” 3.8 billion parameters that requires 3.2 GB. That’s more realistic and, in a recent video, [Gary Explains] tells you how to add this LLM to your Raspberry Pi arsenal.
The version [Gary] uses has four-bit quantization and, as you might expect, the performance isn’t going to be stellar. If you are versed in all the LLM lingo, the quantization is the way weights are stored, and, in general, the more parameters a model uses, the more things it can figure out.
As a benchmark, [Gary] likes to use what he calls “the Alice question.” In other words, he asks for an answer to this question: “Alice has five brothers and she also has three sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?” While it probably took you a second to think about it, you almost certainly came up with the correct answer. With this model, a Raspberry Pi can answer it, too.
The first run seems fairly speedy, but it is running on a PC with a GPU. He notes that the same question takes about 10 minutes to pop up on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM.
We aren’t sure what you’d do with a very slow LLM, but it does work. Let us know what you’d use it for, if anything, in the comments.
There are some
other small models if you don’t like Phi4
.
| 32
| 15
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126456",
"author": "Experienced Experimenter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T02:38:47",
"content": "There are more choices available for limited memory systems. Qwen3 8B is remarkably competitive to that 14B and to the 70Bs for its size.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126529",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:16:21",
"content": "Interestingly, Llama 3.3 70B, is the only one, of those I’ve tried, that answered a few variations of the Alice question correctly first time. GBT could do it, but only after being asked, what about Alice, some failed entirely, even after multiple hints, they just kept insisting on their own correctness.",
"parent_id": "8126456",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126536",
"author": "combinatorylogic",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:36:42",
"content": "I see no point in even trying to make LLMs reason correctly. What for? Much better to force them to translate any reasoning problem they face into Prolog or SMT, offload the reasoning to a tool, then translate back the result. Even the smallest LLMs can do it well.",
"parent_id": "8126529",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126558",
"author": "combinatorylogic",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T11:05:10",
"content": "Just tested the smallest Gemma-3, Qwen3 and Phi-4 models with Prolog on the Alice question, all managed to produce the right result (via a standard trial-and-error sandbox loop). Some took longer than the others, Qwen yapped about its own reasoning for a while until finally got to Prolog, but all got to the right answer.",
"parent_id": "8126529",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126671",
"author": "Timo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:54:54",
"content": "There is also a 0.6B model that’s really quite surpring!",
"parent_id": "8126456",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126487",
"author": "rtyrtyhrt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T06:18:16",
"content": "Can I run any model on my computer localy?for examplehttps://huggingface.co/models",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126570",
"author": "tom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T12:10:30",
"content": "Yeah, check out LMstudio.You can use any model that’ll fit into your RAM or VRAM, but if you want anything approaching “real time”, then it really needs to be VRAM. A 4060Ti 16GB is probably the best current gen mid-low end option.You might be able to get Intel or AMD cards working but it may be a nightmare. CUDA is very polished: anything GTX900 series or later will run “straight out of the box”, I’ve even run stablediffusion on a 650GT without issue.Arm based Macs are also very popular for running LLMs since they have a unified pool of RAM which extremely high speed and low latency, while (for the higher RAM specs) costing around 10x less than a GPU with the same amount.",
"parent_id": "8126487",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127462",
"author": "Brock",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:32:51",
"content": "I find lmstudio’s vulkan runtime kinda sucks. Running koboldcpp with no special tricks, literally just ./filefromgithubrepo and selecting my backend+model+context size, on amd 780m igpu minipc with Ryzen 7940HS and 2 sticks of no name ddr5 ram (64 gb total) kobold correctly realizes the igpu can take half the total ram for offload whereas lmstudio either refuses to offload at all or crashes when it exceeds the 2 gb default allocation. It also runs slow as molasses while koboldcpp zips along with input processing at 132 tokens a second and generation at just over 5 a second. It’s super usable real time on koboldcpp, it’s a ask a question and come back in 15 minutes kinda experience on lmstudio.On cuda though LM Studio is easily the most polished experience you can have, no argument there.",
"parent_id": "8126570",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126587",
"author": "Al Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:53:00",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/2025/01/08/running-ai-locally-without-spending-all-day-on-setup/(lots of other choices in the comments of that post, too).",
"parent_id": "8126487",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126506",
"author": "Alun Morris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:04:36",
"content": "To my surprise both chatCPT and gemini get the Alice question wrong and answer 3. Perplexity says 4.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126535",
"author": "Another guy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:30:34",
"content": "This shouldn’t be surprising. AI models are physically incapable of performing mathematical operations, they only produce a sentence by selecting the next most-likely word.If it produces the right answer, it’s chance, and you could fairly easily “persuade” it to output the right answer – or any arbitrary answer for that matter.",
"parent_id": "8126506",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126568",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T12:02:02",
"content": "Hence the wolfram plugin for ChatGPT.",
"parent_id": "8126535",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126808",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T10:55:17",
"content": "ChatGPT does get it wrong on my end too. Grok answers it correctly.",
"parent_id": "8126506",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126538",
"author": "Paul G",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:49:23",
"content": "I’d use it to accompany me watching University Challenge, no matter how badly I do, I’d probably win.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126569",
"author": "macsimki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T12:02:18",
"content": "were are we in the bell curve regarding this ai/llm thing?first search engines gave correct answers to a wrong understood question, now we have a system giving incorrect answers to perfectly understood questions.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126573",
"author": "pwdaugy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T12:41:24",
"content": "Here is something interesting:I just asked Copilot the same question it responded three, when I pointed out the answer is four, because Alice is also his sister, it asserted I was correct. Asking ChatGPT, it took slightly longer to analyze the question but it came back with the correct answer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126581",
"author": "Rog77",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:17:34",
"content": "There is am ARM port of MS Bitnet, and some of those models would entirely in RAM on a Pi.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126583",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:37:13",
"content": "Fascinating. The electricity required, 10 minutes to generate a response, is a good illustration of the resources LLM’s require. Id love to see the math, but I suspect Google and OpenAI are hemorraging cash to keep this train going.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126677",
"author": "djedux",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T20:47:23",
"content": "This has been my thought about AI from the beginning: is it worth the electric power (largely oenerated with air polluting fossil fuels) to get a partially correlt answer a little faster than a reasonably intelligent human can do running on glucose, a very clean fuel?",
"parent_id": "8126583",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126682",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T21:38:17",
"content": "That’s why people are working on making things more efficient.https://venturebeat.com/ai/alibabas-zerosearch-lets-ai-learn-to-google-itself-slashing-training-costs-by-88-percent/",
"parent_id": "8126583",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126608",
"author": "Harry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T14:54:02",
"content": "I’ve been running LLM with 12b-14b model with 16GB Pi5 + 1TB NVME. Set Virtual Memory at 16GB for 32GB RAM effective. Latest Ollama even does vision!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126609",
"author": "Don Mitchinson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T14:59:19",
"content": "What if Alice is Alice Cooper?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126658",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:04:51",
"content": "In that case, he doesn’t have 3 sisters but only one and no brother. Took me 2mn to check wikipedia, faster than the Pi’s working time.",
"parent_id": "8126609",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126705",
"author": "Sage",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T00:18:32",
"content": "‘she also had’",
"parent_id": "8126609",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126656",
"author": "Matthew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:00:15",
"content": "Although I only have a 5800XT, I do have an RTX Super.Will Phi4 be able to compete with Gemini 2.5 Pro as I have that as my current LLM (paid version so I use it on my Pixel 7a as well).I’ve seen lots of videos saying Gemini 2.5 pro is heads above everything.Even going head to head with ChatGPT 4, Gemini 2.5 pro just crushes it on everything.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126766",
"author": "Adam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T07:01:42",
"content": "Phi-4 is smaller, thus worse than Gemini 2.5 Pro. Compare on ArtificialAnalysis.ai",
"parent_id": "8126656",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126686",
"author": "Deividas Strole",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T22:14:04",
"content": "It’s impressive that a Raspberry Pi 5 can even run a 3.8B parameter LLM like Phi-4 mini, even if it takes 10 minutes to answer a simple question. While not practical for real-time use, it’s a great demo of how far edge computing has come—and a fun way to experiment with LLMs on a budget.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126768",
"author": "Adam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T07:04:23",
"content": "RPi 5 is rubbish compared to an average smartphone, which can run a small LLM locally in seconds, not minutes. You can try it in web browser using Candle Phi Wasm, ONNX Runtime Web or MediaPipe.",
"parent_id": "8126686",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126697",
"author": "Ontube",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T23:40:29",
"content": "Just trying with Axelera ai cards. On the Pi",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126732",
"author": "mitchell_cj",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T03:08:27",
"content": "A timely post considering i just today received my order of a couple of OrangePi RV2. RISC-V seems to be the future of vector instructions. I’m not sure what 2 TOPS gets me with little LLM’s but who doesn’t love having some new tech to poke and prod. They even have multiple LLM models available for it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127467",
"author": "mitchell_cj",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:42:54",
"content": "Update: Qwen2-int4-0.5b (477MB) thinks for ~4 seconds then outputs at 13 tokens per second. Really fast, Not too smart though.",
"parent_id": "8126732",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126751",
"author": "Bryden",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T05:39:40",
"content": "I did this last weekend, but with TinyLlama and a RPI3B, 2gb of swap and it was answering questions a lot faster than 10mins. Amazing what an old hunk of junk can still achieve.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.921845
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/restoring-a-sinclair-c5-for-the-road/
|
Restoring A Sinclair C5 For The Road
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"5d",
"Clive Sinclair",
"Sinclair C5"
] |
The Sinclair C5 was Sir Clive’s famous first venture into electric mobility, a recumbent electric-assisted tricycle which would have been hardly unusual in 2025. In 1985, though, the C5 was so far out there that it became a notorious failure. The C5 retains a huge following among enthusiasts, though, and among those is [JSON Alexander,
who has bought one and restored it
.
We’re treated to a teardown and frank examination of the vehicle’s strengths and weaknesses, during which we see the Sinclair brand unusually on a set of tyres, and the original motor, which is surprisingly more efficient than expected. Sir Clive may be gone, but this C5 will live again.
We’ve had the chance to road test a C5 in the past, and it’s fair to say that we can understand why such a low-down riding position was not a success back in the day. It’s unusual to see one in as original a condition as this one, it’s more usual to see
a C5 that’s had a few upgrades
.
| 26
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126421",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:36:44",
"content": "Restoring it, good idea. Putting it on the road, not so much.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126534",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:29:38",
"content": "The Sinclair C5 seems basically a paddle assist trike, and I can see driving it on a paved bike path shouldn’t be much of an issue. A bike path where cars aren’t allowed is ideal. I’m aware separated traffic is not universal, but stating [JSON Alexander] can’t safely drive it safely anywhere is a stretch.I just quickly browsed Marktplaats, and see these go for around €500 in the Netherlands. They are not as expensive as I expected. While not cheap, it’s in the same range as a very basic bike.",
"parent_id": "8126421",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126544",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:16:23",
"content": "I’m also from the Netherlands. Quite a lot of years ago I was interested in a recumbent bike, but in the end I never bought one. There are plenty of places where you can drive such a bike safely, but city traffic is not among them. Because they are too low, you can’t look over cars to see the surrounding traffic, and you’re also too easily hidden behind (parked) cars for the rest of the traffic to see you. Because of this you sometimes see an orange flag on top of these things. And because of their limited use, you’d probably need another bike too. Still, I think a recumbant bike can be nice. For example if you home to work route is fit for it. For me 10 to 15 km is the perfect distance to cycle to work. It takes a bit over half an hour, keeps you in shape, and the cycling puts a mental distance between the work day and your private life.",
"parent_id": "8126534",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126661",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:29:57",
"content": "how are you supposed to paddle without water? :)",
"parent_id": "8126534",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126698",
"author": "Dave Everett",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T23:54:49",
"content": "It’s from England, plenty of water falling from the sky.",
"parent_id": "8126661",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8145873",
"author": "Benjamin Lee Brooks",
"timestamp": "2025-07-06T09:58:43",
"content": "Any idea if these count as a standard ebike or would you need to apply for registration as a brommer?",
"parent_id": "8126534",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126643",
"author": "Yet Another Robert Smith",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:44:54",
"content": "I rode a recumbent trike to work every day for years without incident despite spotty bike lane coverage.Like all cycling, the fear surrounding recumbents doesn’t reflect the actual danger.",
"parent_id": "8126421",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126434",
"author": "The Hairy Hacker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T00:14:00",
"content": "Amstrad bought Sinclair so we had one at Amstrad Towers as a magazine prize. The guys in R&D took it for a spin around a deserted level. SWIM spun it a bit fast around a support pillar and rolled it. That’s when we discovered the lead acid batteries had a tendency to leak when inverted, and the lucky winner got one slightly corroded on the inside…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126473",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T04:39:44",
"content": "Why????Wait I know the answer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126499",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T07:29:57",
"content": "I have no desire for a C5 but I’m experiencing workshop envy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126537",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:41:45",
"content": "Hackerspaces are great for that. All the room for big projects, and most of the common tools you’ll need. As it’s a shared workspace, you can’t leave your Sinclair C5 on the table for long periods, but it should motivate you to finish the project before anyone is bothered by it. Depending on the space, a couple of days while the space isn’t too busy is usually fine.Recently, Hackerspace Bitlair moved, and there are certainly people taking full advantage of the extra space we have now. Some are working on a wooden go-kart/soapbox, and another works on overhauling a mobility scooter.",
"parent_id": "8126499",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126504",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T07:59:47",
"content": "Yay! I tried one of these back in the day. Lovely idea, but the fundamental concept failed to account for cars…Still waiting for my hoverboard, flying car, and monorail…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126551",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:33:02",
"content": "And weather.When it starts to rain, you’re sitting in a slowly filling plastic tub and you’ll get soggy bottom from the water collecting in the seat.",
"parent_id": "8126504",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126562",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T11:31:13",
"content": "You want a roof? You need to upgrade to the AMAZING AUTOMITE!",
"parent_id": "8126551",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126694",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T23:07:39",
"content": "If I remember correctly, the C5 did come with a tarp you can stretch out over the hole and stick your head out through a hole in the tarp – might have been an accessory. You’d need some sort of a cover anyways to park it outside, because it will get rained on.",
"parent_id": "8126562",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126779",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T08:13:47",
"content": "Oh, no not al all. Sinclair thought of everything. There is a hole in the seat (just as any decent plastic garden chair has). And there are holes in the bottom.But seriously, you do not want to get caught in the rain with this thing, it’s 40 years old, only drive it on days with dry weather, avoid holes/puddles and you’ll be fine. It’s a classic.",
"parent_id": "8126551",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126566",
"author": "G-man",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T11:48:10",
"content": "I had one for years and would happily take it to town and so light shopping. Get wet? I’m not made of sugar, you get just as wet on a bike.Instead of fitting the daft orange flag on the back, I fitted a pair (back-to-back) of solar panels on posts.Other road users had no problem spotting me as they were all staring at me!Quite a few guys modded these to have disc brakes, modern motors etc and, without too much hassle, 25mph.Fun fact: the land speed record for electric vehicles was once held by the C5",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126578",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:06:49",
"content": "Fun Fact,Even if it had reached the claimed topspeed of 150mph it would have come in woefully short of the 257 mph record set the previous october by Ohio State University’s buckeye bullet.However, The record that was to be attempted was not the worlds fastest electric vehicle but rather the worlds fastest three wheel vehicle.Despite having been documented at over 120mph on the Rover test track. Regulations deemed it unsafe for official Guinness testing and no official record was ever awarded.",
"parent_id": "8126566",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126579",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:08:03",
"content": "edit: Should have read “However, The record that was to be attempted was not the worlds fastest electric vehicle but rather the worlds fastest three wheel ELECTRIC vehicle.”",
"parent_id": "8126578",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127162",
"author": "C5DEPOT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:28:50",
"content": "I have neverheard that it wasnt recognised or that it was unsafe. How do you know this bit? Ive never come across it in my research.",
"parent_id": "8126578",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127543",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T07:35:41",
"content": "I know this due to a personal relationship but to avoid meaningless anecdote….From Lynch motors website (the manufacturer of the motors used in the attempt):”We were very proud when Adam Harper used our Lynch electric motors to power the Sinclair C5 ‘Alien’ over 20 years ago, to showcase what our electric motor can achieve. The C5, owned by Luton businessman Paul Andrews, was adapted to reach 150 miles per hour and planned to make it into the Guinness World Records for the fastest electric vehicle. Though the attempt was thwarted by regulations, there is a video out there somewhere of this 80’s icon of an electric road vehicle, reaching over 120 miles an hour on a Rover test track. ”You can be sure if it had been a recognized world record holder Lynch motors, of all involved, would be bragging about that fact.",
"parent_id": "8127162",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126696",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T23:12:06",
"content": "you get just as wet on a bike.On a bike, you’re not sitting in a slowly filling tub of water that soaks through the bottom of your pants as the rain water ends up on the seat cushions.",
"parent_id": "8126566",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126702",
"author": "DurDurDur",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T00:09:58",
"content": "Oh no not the seat cushions!If only there were some material one could cover foam with that would prevent water from soaking in. You know, like the vinyl used on motorcycle seats.Its also really too bad that there is no way to prevent a tub shaped water from filling up, like some sort of opening that would allow water to drain out.It must be really hard to feel so smart, to feel like you have all the answers in the world to every subject, but be so lacking in common sense and basic logic that youre incapable of solving the most basic issues that arise. Its no wonder silly Clive’s Sinclair failed.",
"parent_id": "8126696",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126972",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T20:19:28",
"content": "What happens when you’re sitting on the hole in the seat, and the rain comes down?A saddle sheds water, a seat collects it. No matter if the seat cushions are covered in vinyl, your butt isn’t (unless you’re that kind of a person).",
"parent_id": "8126702",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127039",
"author": "DurDurDur",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T06:56:05",
"content": "Dudes never been in a boat.The cushions sit on a seat base. The seat base is designed with a slope towards the back where drain holes are located. Also if you butt is in the seat, the water lands in your lap. Most of the water will run off the sides (unless you;re that kind of person).Seriously dude, if you cant figure out a basic solution to a basic problem then maybe you shouldnt weigh in on every post and on every topic. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt",
"parent_id": "8126972",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127163",
"author": "C5DEPOT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T13:30:06",
"content": "A great project and these make more sense today than they did at the time. Perfectly usable and still road legal. I restore these and make upgraded parts. Just last weekend we had a record 47 C5s complete a 13 mile from Ipswich to Felixstowe.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.783809
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/move-over-lithopane-3d-printed-3d-photos-with-gaussian-splats/
|
Move Over, Lithophane: 3D Printed 3D Photos With Gaussian Splats
|
Tyler August
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d print",
"DLP printer",
"gaussian splat",
"resin"
] |
If you had asked us yesterday “How do you 3D Print a Photo”, we would have said “well, that’s easy, do a lithophane”– but artist, hacker and man with a very relaxing voice [Wyatt Roy] has a much more impressive answer:
Gaussian splats, rendered in resin.
Gaussian splats are a 3D scanning technique aimed at replicating a visual rather than geometry, like the mesh-based 3D-scanning we usually see on Hackaday. Using photogrammetry, a point cloud is generated with an associated 3D Gaussian function describing the colour at that point. Blend these together, and you can get some very impressive photorealistic 3D environments. Of course, printing a Gaussian smear of colour isn’t trivial, which is where the hacking comes in.
14-face isospheres do a good job of replicating the complicated Gaussian, as seen with this experimental long-exposure shot.
[Wyatt] first generates the Gaussian splats with an app called Polycam, which outputs inscrutable binary .ply files. With AI assistance of dubious quality, [Wyatt] first created a python script to decompile this data into an ASCII file, which is then fed into a Rhino script to create geometry for printing. Rather than try and replicate the Gaussian splat at each point perfectly, which would melt his PC, [Wyatt] uses 14-face isospheres to approximate the 3D Gaussian functions. These then get further postprocessing to create a printable mesh.
Printing this isn’t going to be easy for most of us, because [Wyatt] is using a multi-color DLP resin printer. The main body is clear resin, and black or white resin used for the space defined by the isospheres created from the Gaussian Splat. When the interior color is white, the effect is quite similar to those acrylic cubes you sometimes see, where a laser has etched bubbles into their depths, which makes us wonder if that might be a more accessible way to use this technique.
We talked about
Gaussian splats when the technique was first announced
, but it’s obvious the technology has come a long way since then. We did feature a
hack with multicolor resin prints last year,
but it was much more manual than the fancy machine [Wyatt] uses here. Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for the tip.
| 24
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126403",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T20:51:37",
"content": "And he didn’t notice that his idea of Gaussian splats is wrong? They are not the Gaussian distribution curve rotated around the x axis, which looks like an onion. He has to take that function, give it the distance from the center of the splat as parameter, and will receive the density of the blob at that distance. It’s more like the electron orbitals you learn about in chemistry.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126524",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:55:39",
"content": "Yeah, that shape is really weird. What you’re looking for is a fuzzy sphere, where the density falls off as a Gaussian in any direction.(Or heck, I bet you could approximate it any sort of other way that would work well for your situation, or the math, depending on which you’re aiming for.)",
"parent_id": "8126403",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126542",
"author": "Pavel Melnikov",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:10:31",
"content": "Fuzzy ellipsoid, to be more pedantic)",
"parent_id": "8126524",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126663",
"author": "Wyatt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:39:26",
"content": "Love pedantry! And precision! So wait — you’re all exactly the kind of people whose input i actually want for the next iteration of this project — what 3D shape wouldyouchoose to represent a gaussian? – Wyatt, the guy in the video",
"parent_id": "8126542",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126605",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T14:30:00",
"content": "I think this fellow is an artist, so I think it’s to his credit to recognize that the “Gaussian” in “Gaussian” splat related to the normal distribution. That said, the solution he stumbled upon– an ellipsoidal isosphere– did a good job of erasing his misconceptions.",
"parent_id": "8126403",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126664",
"author": "Wyatt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:41:46",
"content": "Hi Tyler! Thank you for writing this, and resonating with my project! Genuinely curious what mesh shape you’d make a ‘gaussian’ — the reason i initially chose that onion-shaped thing was that i’m printing it in semi-transparent material, which means that opacity is modulated according to thickness, meaning that the pointy bits turn almost transparent. Like a digital gaussian. Thoughts?",
"parent_id": "8126605",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126662",
"author": "Wyatt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:38:17",
"content": "THAT makes sense. Thank you! The only question is… what would that function look like if you HAD to constrain a mesh around it? Ithinkit might look like an onion? – Wyatt, the guy in the video",
"parent_id": "8126403",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126411",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T22:01:15",
"content": "lithophane",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126420",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:33:06",
"content": "indeed.not to mention that 3D printed lithophanes use 3D relief + light to generate a projection of a2Dphotograph.Isupposeyou could argue that a 3D printed “3D photograph” is an improvement on this technique, but I don’t personally see it that way. A sculpture is not an improvement on a painting, they’re both perfectly fine forms of art.",
"parent_id": "8126411",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126525",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:56:57",
"content": "Fixed. Thanks!",
"parent_id": "8126411",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126415",
"author": "Christopher Drum",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T22:31:50",
"content": "Just print the 3D model itself? Am I missing some quality of this technique that captures something nuanced that the full color 3D model doesn’t have? He seems absolutely amazed at being able to “hold this moment in time” but that would be true even if he’d just printed the color splat as a standard 3D model. I don’t… get it…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126526",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:59:30",
"content": "What you’re missing is that the splats technique is usable for point clouds, like those which come out of 3D scanners.If you want to print a standard 3D model, you have to take the point cloud and turn it into a mesh, and then slice it, etc. The splats idea cuts out the middleman by smoothing out the point cloud directly, which is probably a more appropriate technique when you have a printer that does basically the same, like these resin printers do.",
"parent_id": "8126415",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126624",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T16:21:43",
"content": "Motion blur, transparency, like smoke for example, visible objects smaller than the resolution of the printer are the first things that come to mind that a standard printed 3D model would not be able to represent.The the rest is about having a different toolset for art making, which would take a few thousand words to explain.",
"parent_id": "8126415",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126665",
"author": "Wyatt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:43:00",
"content": "High gets it :) – Wyatt, the guy in the video",
"parent_id": "8126624",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126418",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:03:19",
"content": "as seen with this experimental long-exposure shotDisplayed in a 225×122 pixel bitmap without a link to any higher resolution to actually see ****all about it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126516",
"author": "Thomas Anderson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:40:40",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/jujurhino.pngjust remove the stuff after “?” in any link to an image on this site to get the full resolution version.",
"parent_id": "8126418",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126527",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:00:29",
"content": "We also usually link directly to the source image, so you should be able to click on it. This one got missed, but it’s fixed now.",
"parent_id": "8126516",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126425",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:44:54",
"content": "or thishttps://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/liquid-silicone-3d-printing-is-no-joke/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126438",
"author": "Michael A Mansouri",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T00:30:50",
"content": "That is not a DLP resin printer, that is a Stratasys Polyjet printer. They use piezoelectric printheads to jet resin onto the deck and, cure it with a UV lamp on the same carriage. I am not sure what model but I know the J8/J7 series can do full color and multi material printing.",
"parent_id": "8126425",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126606",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T14:32:12",
"content": "Thank you! I spent too long trying to figure out how on earth he could do multi-color like this with DLP. That makes far more sense.",
"parent_id": "8126438",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126667",
"author": "Wyatt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:46:02",
"content": "You’re right — I’m printing these on an Object 260 Connex, which isn’t DLP — thank you!https://support.stratasys.com/en/Printers/PolyJet-Legacy/Objet260-Connex-1-2-3",
"parent_id": "8126606",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126470",
"author": "JJW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T04:30:56",
"content": "The past few weeks, I’ve been using a Miraco Plus to 3D scan. Using infrared reflected back from the scanned objects it creates a point cloud of every object which it maps to “blobs” of color captured photogrammetrically.I tried scanning our pet rabbit, which would keep moving his ears as I circled around him with the scanner. After doing a fusion of the point clouds, the resulting rendering is of one rabbit with four sets of ears facing in different directions.I suppose that’s a 4D capture — the 3D scanner’s version of a long exposure! I found that if I could capture the orientation of his fur (via the texture mapping) that reflects light differently depending on angle of capture, I could get each set of ears to catch the light (in a subsequent 3D print) in sequence as the figurine is rotated — and using silk PLA for heightened effect.The result is stunning. As I move the figurine, the light highlights a different set of ears giving the illusion that it is moving a pair of ears to follow the light.It’s quite mesmerizing, and a remarkable way to capture movement in a stationary object. 🤗",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126668",
"author": "Wyatt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:46:55",
"content": "This is so cool! Link? I want to see! -Wyatt, the guy in the video",
"parent_id": "8126470",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126498",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T07:26:08",
"content": "The ideea of 3D object in a transparent block is not new. You could have anything: a plane, your child’s head, and so on. It was done using lasers.In this case you can add colour to the printer (there is already an article about full colour 3D printing on an image, where also transparency is used).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.851985
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/best-practices-for-fdm-printing/
|
Best Practices For FDM Printing
|
Al Williams
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3D design",
"3d printing"
] |
If you’ve been designing parts for 3D printing, you probably have some tricks and standards for your designs. [Rahix] decided to write out
a well-thought-out set of design rules for FDM prints
, and we can all benefit.
One of the things we liked about the list is that it’s written in a way that explains everything. Every so often, there’s a box with a summarized rule for that topic. At the end, there’s a list of all the rules. The rules are also in categories, including part strength, tolerance, optimization, integration, machine elements, appearance, and vase mode.
For example, section two deals with tolerance and finish. So, rule R2.8 says, “Do not use circular holes for interference fits. Use hexagon or square holes instead.”
We also appreciate that [Rahix] touched on some of the counter-intuitive aspects of designing for FDM printing. For example, you might think adding voids in your part will reduce the filament and time required to print it, but in many cases it can have the opposite effect.
Some of these — maybe even most of these — won’t surprise you, but you still might take away a tidbit or two. But having it all down in a checklist and then the ability to scroll up and find the rationale for the rule is great.
Do you have any rules you’d add? Or change? Let us know. Meanwhile, we were eyeing our favorites about adding
machine elements to prints
.
| 38
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126372",
"author": "Echo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T18:26:49",
"content": "Did not expect to learn much new, but I ended up liking its style and attentionto details.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127018",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T03:52:51",
"content": "“Covers the basics well, and I ended up liking its style and attention to detail.”Ftfy, Even a bloated corpse even might have sounded less critical with it’s exhausted praise.",
"parent_id": "8126372",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126387",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:03:59",
"content": "the excerpted diagram for threaded parts is a frustrating example of a bad mentality to have when 3d printing.the difference in tensile strength between vertical and horizontal printing is almost nothing compared to the dramatic unsuitability of most 3d printed plastics for static tension, full stop. if it’s holding tension, both are insufficient and it doesn’t matter whether one is 20% stronger by not carrying stress through layer adhesion. if you’re so close to “is plastic strong enough for this” that the difference in printing orientation matters then you should be using a metal bolt duh.but if you’re going to 3d print threads, the factor that will encourage the horizontal orientation is your printer’s overhang behavior. threads-as-overhangs is asking for a different kind of problem than a truncated cylinder-as-overhang.it seems to me like they’re obscuring the real substantive unavoidable difference between printing orientations by meditating on some strength difference that is almost irrelevant",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126408",
"author": "doobs",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T21:41:16",
"content": "Feel free to craft your own treatise on a repeatably better way of doing things.I’m sure the Hackaday would highlight it…..",
"parent_id": "8126387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126414",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T22:23:47",
"content": "He doesn’t need to write his own treatise. The article itself described better ways to do it. Greg A merely pointed out how bad it is to rely on plastic threads alone. Sorry you didn’t grasp that.",
"parent_id": "8126408",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126443",
"author": "Alex99a",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T01:19:02",
"content": "Well-meaning comments pointing out an issue often receive a belligerent response like that. Just because I may not be able to do better doesn’t mean I can’t recognize a potential problem.",
"parent_id": "8126408",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126588",
"author": "Busticati",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:54:32",
"content": "Maybe some people can see through the veneer of “well-meaning” and recognise the underlying intent to grandstand based on nothing substantive. A so called wisdom-signalling if you will…",
"parent_id": "8126443",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126625",
"author": "Michael B.",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T16:23:07",
"content": "A comment containing the phrase “bad mentality” is not a well-meaning comment.",
"parent_id": "8126443",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126688",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T22:31:57",
"content": "A comment containing the phrase “bad mentality” is not a well-meaning comment.Why? Here we do have a bad mentality because it’s focusing on optimizing the process without considering the wider implications.Consider a person who is trying to invent a perpetual motion machine, but friction keeps getting in their way, so they start to focus on ways to eliminate friction. Will this help them invent a perpetual motion machine, or was the attempt futile to begin with? That is what “bad mentality” means – misguided and faulty ideas and thought processes that lead to future frustration and further problems because they’re missing the point.Pointing this out can be very well meaning indeed.",
"parent_id": "8126443",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127024",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T04:43:49",
"content": "@Busticati Hardly. Yes,somepeople grandstand, but here (the site) that’s definitely not a significant enough problem to act like this. In this thread? That’s nothing at all.Somebody said something in a way that was poorly worded and contextually unnecessary given their only point we are talking about general approaches in tooling, the issue is discussed in the article, and everything does has a place somewhere, even printed screws.",
"parent_id": "8126443",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126472",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T04:35:17",
"content": "Thank you for proving you’ve actually never read a single engineering manual in your life.",
"parent_id": "8126387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126857",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:54:44",
"content": "look, i’m going to be straight up here. i have no idea what you mean by ‘engineering manual’, and honestly i’d appreciate it if you’d fill me in with your idea.i’ve read a ton of ‘data sheets’, where they will tell you that the tensile strength of plastic across layer adhesion is 0 and the tensile strength within a layer is 20% or 300% more than that and it’s up to the engineer to determine if 1.20 times 0 or 4.00 times 0 is bigger than their tensile load.i’ve also read a bunch of ‘application notes’ or ‘best practices’, where theyoughtto tell you straight up “don’t use plastic for tensile loads.” and in such a document, they would tell you not to print threads vertically even if there’s no tensile load, because the overhang will deform them.is there a third kind of document you have in your mind, which maybe i haven’t read?",
"parent_id": "8126472",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126476",
"author": "daveb",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T04:51:34",
"content": "Meh.. use the appropriate material for the appropriate loads. Plastic is fine for static tension, just not as high a static tension as metal. That is still better when you have better layer adhesion than when you don’t. This has been tested and shown many times.",
"parent_id": "8126387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126693",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T23:01:54",
"content": "Pure plastics without fillers or other reinforcing materials will give in to static tension – it’s just a matter of time. If your product is supposed to last for a year, then you can design with some tension, but if it’s supposed to maintain the tension “forever” then you simply cannot design the part in plastic.",
"parent_id": "8126476",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127022",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T04:35:34",
"content": "It only takes a tiny bit of thought to discount this. We are talking light duty (often very, very lightly) with next to no operational stresses compared to what would be expected of a metal screw.Of course a screw should be picked for a job it can do, but these are perfectly fine for most small objects. You are also skipping over aspects of design just as important or moreso.Sure, these things will fail, eventually. But “eventually” might be more than long enough. A poorly made outdoor children’s toy might last… decades with minor repairs? A phone cradle on the wall with plastic screws could easily outlast the phone you asked using in it.Note that your metal screw in the wrong application could easily cause anearlierfailure as it’s lack of deformation causes it damage to surrounding material.",
"parent_id": "8126693",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126839",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T12:56:41",
"content": "the difference between plastic and metal in this function is something like 1000 to 1. the difference in printing orientation is much less than 2 to 1.it’s bad to meditate on the small end of amdahl’s law.",
"parent_id": "8126476",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126480",
"author": "maf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T05:26:56",
"content": "Agreeing, if the difference in strength is only 20%, meaning there is virtually no safety margin.But: directly above the figure a factor 3 in strength is mentioned!Surely, there is a certain threshold tensile load before creepage starts?Factor 3 tensile strength from layer orientation should give you a fighting chance to avoid creepage in one orientation, even if layer adhesion is the limiting factor in the other orientation.",
"parent_id": "8126387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126556",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:51:24",
"content": "Surely, there is a certain threshold tensile load before creepage starts?No. It just happens more slowly. At low enough loads it might take a century, but creep it will.",
"parent_id": "8126480",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126639",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:34:58",
"content": "Nope. Plastic creep is a real thing at any level of tension. It’s just a matter of time.",
"parent_id": "8126480",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126850",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:46:14",
"content": "you’re imagining a world where you print it vertically, it fails, and then you print it horizontally and it succeeds because 20% or 300% more strength is sufficient.but, as others have pointed out, 1.200 = 4.000 = 0. tensile loading plastic is not going to work in any orientation.BUTthe true fact is, if you print it vertically, your threads will be garfed from overhang deformation. the whole tensile strength meditation is a distractioneven if you truly do have a featherweight loading",
"parent_id": "8126480",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126852",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:48:05",
"content": "ugh formatting. 1.20 times 0 = 4.00 times 0 = 0. 20% or 300% improvement on 0 is still 0",
"parent_id": "8126850",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127023",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T04:42:55",
"content": "This point was better made, even with the number formatting. Definitely, most things these are used in will be featherweight, or close enough that the failure will not likely be an issue.Maybemounting a chandelier is a terrible idea, but we can in fact point and laugh when that happens, because a flag should have been tripped there somewhere.I know! We just need all slicers to also include industrial fine element analysis, of course it has to run in realtime on the 10 year old laptop for the printer which was fished out of the garbage./s",
"parent_id": "8126850",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126584",
"author": "Busticati",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T13:41:15",
"content": "Sounds to me like you didn’t even bother to read the whole article in order to find some triviality tomeditatebloviate on and share your profound engineering wisdom…",
"parent_id": "8126387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126692",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T22:52:54",
"content": "Plastic creep is measurable down to 5% of the UTS in common plastics. What that tells you is, your plastic parts will creep and ultimately will not hold tension, so engineering a plastic screw that should hold appreciable sustained force is really an exercise in futility.It is a real issue in engineering with plastics, and one that should not be ignored, yet is commonly ignored by engineers because the exact information is not readily available. This leads to a ton of bad designs that eventually fail.",
"parent_id": "8126584",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126742",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T05:00:44",
"content": "LOL. Just because he identified a real problem doesn’t mean only stopped reading when he found it. What is with you anyway? Dude is clearly smarter than you are, so maybe that’s the real issue here.",
"parent_id": "8126584",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126854",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:50:19",
"content": "look someone posts their engineering advice then i’m going to post my engineering advice. that’s the platonic ideal of the purpose of the comments section. if you don’t like my advice, i’ll give you a full refund",
"parent_id": "8126584",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127464",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:41:10",
"content": "I present Exhibit A: The Nylon Screw. You can buy them. In the shops. They’re made of, wait, are you sitting down? They’re made of… plastic.",
"parent_id": "8126854",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8138059",
"author": "Ray Morris",
"timestamp": "2025-06-12T01:01:31",
"content": "That was my first thought. I use nylon fasteners in certain applications because they are lightweight and strong for their weight.It occurs to me, possibly the most common use of nylon bolts is toilet seats. At least here in the US, toilet seats are always attached with nylon bolts. And they always get loose and wobbly within a year or two. Oops.I did a little research. Today I learned that while I like nylon fasteners, I should plan to tighten them periodically.",
"parent_id": "8127464",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126925",
"author": "Jared",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T17:30:08",
"content": "Well said.I use printed threads ALL the time, even printed NPT threads that fully sealed an outdoor enclosure. However I never rely on printed threads to serve a function (static tension) that the thermoplastic cannot inherently provide.Attempting to optimize a feature for a function it cannot provide is misleading and ultimately a waste of time.",
"parent_id": "8126387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126398",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:59:22",
"content": "I have done quite a bit of design for fff parts, and while I already know many of the tips presented here, I particularly appreciate the mechanical engineering basis for why the tips are useful. I don’t have a mechanical engineering background, and so I don’t typically understand the forces impacting design very well. The example of vase mode for the tray was also quite interesting. I’m really curious about the source of some of the photos. The part on zip tie channels looks like it contains pneumatics and optical fibers…I’m happy to have spent quite a while reading Rahix’s well written guide!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126399",
"author": "FEW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:59:45",
"content": "I have done quite a bit of design for fff parts, and while I already know many of the tips presented here, I particularly appreciate the mechanical engineering basis for why the tips are useful. I don’t have a mechanical engineering background, and so I don’t typically understand the forces impacting design very well. The example of vase mode for the tray was also quite interesting. I’m really curious about the source of some of the photos. The part on zip tie channels looks like it contains pneumatics and optical fibers…I’m happy to have spent quite a while reading Rahix’s well written guide!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126401",
"author": "Brad",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T20:18:17",
"content": "One of the best writeups on the topic I have ever seen – great job!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126431",
"author": "Justin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T00:02:35",
"content": "I’ve been FFM printing for a decade (mostly functional but not super high mechanical load parts) and have a degree in mechanical engineering and I still learned a few things from this – well worth the time to read.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127020",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T04:17:19",
"content": "Agreed, one thing that has really gotten to me working with educational systems and materials is how you gain a progressively more complete crystallized perspective of the nature and components of the things being taught, including the edges reaching into far more advanced topics. They aren’t always gems of insight, but sometimes simply hearing a description crafted differently enough from the ones you have heard a thousand times is enough to give that insight to you directly.",
"parent_id": "8126431",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126495",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T06:57:41",
"content": "Awesome guide. I feel inspired just looking through it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126533",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T09:23:04",
"content": "Really? I found it to be well-written and well-structured. I guess you felt compelled to write something here but couldn’t think of anything useful.A lot of the techniques he covers I had discovered myself. The rest I found helpful and interesting, and I’ll try to bear them in mind if I design something that could take advantage of them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126611",
"author": "G-man",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T15:32:20",
"content": "While not learning anything new, it was a good read – 10 years ago I would have paid for that!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126640",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:36:22",
"content": "LOL. What a crock.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.666984
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/man-and-machine-vs-man-vs-machine/
|
“Man And Machine” Vs “Man Vs Machine”
|
Elliot Williams
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] |
[
"art",
"artificial intelligence",
"laser cutter",
"machine",
"mastery"
] |
Every time we end up talking about 3D printers, Al Williams starts off on how bad he is in a machine shop. I’m absolutely sure that he’s exaggerating, but the gist is that he’s much happier to work on stuff in CAD and let the machine take care of the precision and fine physical details. I’m like that too, but with me, it’s the artwork.
I can’t draw to save my life, but once I get it into digital form, I’m pretty good at manipulating images. And then I couldn’t copy that out into the real world, but that’s what the laser cutter is for, right? So the gameplan for this year’s Mother’s Day gift (reminder!) is three-way. I do the physical design, my son does the artwork, we combine them in FreeCAD and then hand it off to the machine. Everyone is playing to their strengths.
So why does it feel a little like cheating to just laser-cut out a present? I’m not honestly sure. My grandfather was a trained architectural draftsman before he let his artistic side run wild and went off to design jewellery. He could draw a nearly perfect circle with nothing more than a pencil, but he also used a
French curve set
, a
pantograph
, and a
rolling architect’s ruler
when they were called for. He had his tools too, and I bet he’d see the equivalence in mine.
People have used tools since the stone age, and the people who master their tools transcend them, and produce work where the “human” shines through despite having traced a curve or having passed the Gcode off to the cutter. If you doubt this, I’ll remind you of the technological feat that is the piano, with which people nonetheless produce music that doesn’t make you think of the hammers or of the tremendous cast metal frame. The tech disappears into the creation.
I’m sure there’s a parable here for our modern use of AI too, but I’ve got a Mother’s Day present to finish.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
!
| 10
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126342",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T17:10:18",
"content": "“People have used tools since the stone age, and the people who master their tools transcend them, and produce work where the “human” shines through despite having traced a curve or having passed the Gcode off to the cutter. ”Absolutely, just try looking for something on AI and writing and watch the firestorm ensue. People will have to preserve their reputations and stay mum on the subject. Till the inevitable when things happen under people’s noses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126419",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:19:13",
"content": "How do you make AI into a tool in the same sense?At best it’s a reference to work done by other people, since it can only replicate whatever is already done by people, or mix it up in a way that isn’t factual but random. An actual ruler will give you a straight line within its tolerances, while the AI will give you unreliable instructions about how to construct a ruler.",
"parent_id": "8126342",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126571",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T12:19:52",
"content": "I think the difference may be that you use a tool to do the work, whereas the more exalted claims about AI are more that they do the work for you.",
"parent_id": "8126419",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126669",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:51:47",
"content": "Yeah. I don’t think we know yet.I’ve seen some AI videos where they’re really leaning into the uncanny-valleyness of it all, and that works out very well. But it won’t work for all styles/moods. But that’s also a sign that they’re on the right track too, right? Because something that works for everything works for nothing.",
"parent_id": "8126419",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126373",
"author": "BryanZoot",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T18:33:05",
"content": "“So why does it feel a little like cheating to just laser-cut out a present?”It’s not cheating. You are simply using a tool to accomplish a task. You’ve already done the leg work with the design and artwork. Cutting your design into a beautiful shape is only the last step of the creative process. A process started when you did the design. Be proud. A lot of people can’t get that far.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126670",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:52:15",
"content": "Well, I got my son to do the art, because he’s good at that. :) But yeah. Agreed.",
"parent_id": "8126373",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126389",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:13:01",
"content": "it’s not cheating the question is just whether it’s art.to take the piano example…some people have a significant musical skill and can create something recognizaby musical using the full spectrum of instruments that they know. a low quality or poorly maintained instrument will challenge them but you will often still be able to recognize their artistic skill even through that handicap.someone who can draw will like to use their preferred tool, whether that’s a pen or a mouse. but if they are forced outside of their preferences you will probably still be able to recognize that they can draw. but if you can’t draw, then a tool that’s easier for you to use can barely mask that fact.keep in mind i’m speaking as a multi-instrumentalist with some classical training and a lot of diverse musical theory experience and yet still a lack of musical skill that shines through no matter what instrument i pick up. yeah i can compensate for an awful lot of weaknesses by using a sequencer-synthesizer but it only takes a few moments of listening even to that product to discern my lack :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126612",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T15:33:50",
"content": "I think it was an interview with Tom Morello where he describes how he learned to play guitar and was good enough to have other people pay to listen to him play. And that was cool and all but he said something like he later became not just a musician but an artist. That took way more work.I’m sure in all our respective fields (music, tech, etc) we all know plenty of people that are good enough techs but there is always “that guy (or girl)” that is clearly the artist.",
"parent_id": "8126389",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126869",
"author": "Dustbuster7000",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T14:15:39",
"content": "Of course it’s art. All human creative output that serves no imperative survival function is art. Whether it’s “good art” is another question for which there is apparently no definitive answer. Regardless of what the “creatives” will tell you.",
"parent_id": "8126389",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126709",
"author": "Jdams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T01:49:39",
"content": "Wait wait wait, Al is your son?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.439039
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/poe-powered-gpib-adapter-with-ethernet-and-usb-c-support/
|
PoE-powered GPIB Adapter With Ethernet And USB-C Support
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"ethernet",
"gpib",
"power over ethernet",
"test equipment"
] |
In the world of (expensive) lab test equipment the GPIB (general purpose interface bus) connection is hard to avoid if you want any kind of automation, but nobody likes wrangling with the bulky cables and compatibility issues when they can just use Ethernet instead. Here
[Chris]’s Ethernet-GPIB adapter
provides an easy solution, with both Power over Ethernet (PoE) and USB-C power options. Although commercial adapters already exist, these are rather pricey at ~$500.
Features
of this adapter include a BOM total of <$50, with power provided either via PoE (802.3af) or USB-C (5V-only). The MCU is an ATmega4809 with the Ethernet side using a Wiznet W5500 SPI Ethernet controller. There is also a serial interface (provided by a CH340X USB-UART adapter), with the firmware based on the
AR488 project
.
The adapter supports both the VXI-11.2 and Prologix protocols, though not at the same time (due to ROM size limitations). All design documents are available via the GitHub repository, with the author also selling assembled adapters and providing support
primarily via the EEVBlog forums
.
| 10
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126310",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T13:07:54",
"content": "Wow – this could not come more timely as I recently acquired a trusty old HP 53131A frequency counter in pristine condition (super bright VFD, clean, no smell, caps looking good so far). Looking around the Prologix adapters seemed like a valid option but their pricing felt way off for my hobbyist needs – so now I can spend my money on this project for GPIB, an aftermarket 3 GHz upgrade (option 030), an aftermarket OCXO upgrade (option 010) for standalone operations (both open hardware designs by circuitvalley.com to be found on AliExpress and eBay), and a GPSDO with TCXO to calibrate the then option 010 OCXO in the frequency counter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126332",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T16:10:25",
"content": "The issue is that not all HPIB ports/equipment will behave as expected, and the software side is often a bit of a fools errand.The older model Agilent 82357B USB-GPIB adapters are around $100, and will actually work on most platforms. I use this with the HP 3457A and HP 6625A setup to run through automated testing.The BG7TBL 10MHz GPSDO can be good if you plan for the periodic GPS satellite updates (will take time to re-lock every few days), good weather, and avoid buying a broken clone. The BG7TBL FA2 frequency analyzers also work well for UHF, but only if you don’t need an actual edge counter.Cheers =)",
"parent_id": "8126310",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126338",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T16:36:00",
"content": "Yeah – the BG7TBL devices seem to be the go-to “prosumer” option as far as I can tell from my research so far. Can anyone tell me / us more about the background of BG7TBL? They are available on all major platforms as well.For starters I got a cheap 60€ GPSDO which I definitely would like to compare to a BG7TBL (and some higher tier standards like Rubidium or Cesium). I have not made friends with some calibration lab guys yet – but that’s the next goal on my bucket list.BTW: What are your thoughts on the BG7TBL versions? GPS, GLONASS, BAIDU, GALILEO etc.? Seems they can be (de-)activated via the serial port? Any experience regarding impact on the OCXO? Or Allan deviation / phase noise?",
"parent_id": "8126332",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126393",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:28:13",
"content": "The EEVblog has a detailed list of current/legacy models, how the NEO-7M function with the internal OCXO, and which older models had firmware issues.Anecdotally, the pps output has some jitter (better than some gps modules, but not great). Yet the 10MHz sign-wave for my SDR, counter, and scope is probably the most accurate reference I have on the bench. I was able to catch the slow drift of my equipment’s calibrated internal clocks with age.Note too, I was able to replicate the box orientation-change clock-drift test after about 23 minutes to warm up, and get basic lock.If I recall, the original project years back was based on a German Ham Hobby groups work, but they took down their own site pages after they were commercially cloned with zero citation. It is bitter-sweet recommending the popular GPSDO clones, as the original team that created the design never saw general community support (will post the archive.org link if I remember their names at some point.)Cheers =)73VE7NTP",
"parent_id": "8126338",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126320",
"author": "Kofen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T14:22:13",
"content": "Thanks for the shoutout! If any one wants to order one and is either on too low post count on eevblog or do not want to register, I created this quick and dirty online form so you have an alternative.Go to: kofotronic.com",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126323",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T14:58:53",
"content": "A vast amount of truly excellent instrumentation is sitting on shelves or in storage or in surplus stores due to HPIB. This is a pretty neat solution!One would guess it can also be a Commodore floppy controller, and maybe at a more usable speed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126333",
"author": "TRL7",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T16:10:52",
"content": "Oh man, I wish this had been out a few years ago. I just sold my beloved HP54602B, one of the reasons being that I couldn’t easily automate it. Ah, the time wasted with ancient NI-GPIB-USB drivers…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126689",
"author": "bootstrap",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T22:45:00",
"content": "I use the Prologix ones, recently tried buying an alleged “new old stock” one to save a few bucks but it failed to operate properly. Contacted Prologix support and though they were helpful the root cause was that I had purchased a counterfeit item. I purchased a genuine adapter from Prologix, and set about trying to get a refund for the counterfeit item. To my surprise the seller accepted my complaint and refunded me in full immediately, thought he did not admit anything related to counterfeit he also sent another item as a replacement.This arrived some months later and as I already had the genuine item in service I wasn’t in a hurry to test it out. However to my continued surprise this second ‘counterfeit’ item does in fact work correctly. So I got a “buy one get the second half price” sort of deal in the end. I don’t recommend you try it the way I did.PoE would be a nice to have",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126809",
"author": "Kofen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T11:02:53",
"content": "Curious about conterfeit prologix, have never heard of it before, do you by any chance have a photo of the innards of the fake one? Curious to see what they used.",
"parent_id": "8126689",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8189370",
"author": "Mark O'BRIEN",
"timestamp": "2025-10-08T14:34:33",
"content": "Hello Kofen, you have done a great job and a great service. I would like to talk to my HP3458A remotely, and you have solved this, however, I could not access your //kofotronic.com/ website to purchase",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.590486
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/10/web-dashboard-and-ota-updates-for-the-esp32/
|
Web Dashboard And OTA Updates For The ESP32
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"admin dashboard",
"embedded web server",
"ESP32",
"gui",
"mongoose",
"OTA",
"over-the-air update",
"REST interface",
"web-based interface"
] |
Today we are happy to present
a web-based GUI for making a web-based GUI
! If you’re a programmer then web front-end development might not be your bag. But a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for administration and reporting for your microcontroller device can look very professional and be super useful. The
Mongoose Wizard
can help you develop a device dashboard for your ESP32-based project.
In this article (and
associated video
) the Mongoose developers run you through how to get started with their technology. They help you get your development environment set up, create your dashboard layout, add a dashboard page, add a device settings page, add an over-the-air (OTA) firmware update page, build and test the firmware, and attach the user-interface controls to the hardware. The generated firmware includes an embedded web server for serving your dashboard and delivering its REST interface, pretty handy.
You will find no end of ESP32-based projects here at Hackaday which you could potentially integrate with Mongoose. We think the OTA support is an excellent feature to have, but of course there are
other ways
of supporting that functionality.
Thanks to [Toly] for this tip.
| 10
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126273",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T09:43:33",
"content": "Needs a way to sign the firmware or only upload after authentication with a username and password on the flash menu in the browser. Other than that solid work. (watched without sound, if I missed that feel free to correct me)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126549",
"author": "cpq",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:29:30",
"content": "Any REST API, including OTA API, can be authenticated – seehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGCFen7VwaI",
"parent_id": "8126273",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126278",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T10:01:22",
"content": "I usually just use plain old sockets with ESP32/ESP8266 and write a python script (UI with PyQt5, if needed) to connect to it and get the dataAnything that I may be missing out on by not using a web interface?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126282",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T10:55:54",
"content": "Nothing wrong, you are doing perfectly what suits you. Not all data needs to be interacted with by a human. And where that interaction happens is your choice too. E.g. if you have 20 sensors, data collection is better to be done first before data representation.If you only have one device, a dedicated webUI on that device may be the way to go. You see this everywhere: Docker containers being orchestrated by a Kubernetes instance, or stand alone containers. In the end you determine the use case.",
"parent_id": "8126278",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126297",
"author": "Patrik",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T11:58:39",
"content": "Mongoose is also something very different, a mongo db ose for nodejs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126299",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T12:05:43",
"content": "One thing the article doesn’t mention is that Mongoose appears to support a lot more than just the ESP32, including Pi pico and STM Neucleo boards. Will definitley be checking this out more thouroughly when I get a chance.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126550",
"author": "cpq",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T10:32:30",
"content": "That’s correct, Mongoose can run on a huge variety of microcontrollers",
"parent_id": "8126299",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126314",
"author": "rthjurthjrt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T13:28:04",
"content": "I need emergency system. wifi-mesh for thousend devices, communications offgrid and sending message like email or twitter",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126452",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T02:05:42",
"content": "IMHO, IDE wars of the 2000/2010 now dragged themselves into 2020s.I recall how HTML and browsers supposed to make GUI uniform on ALL OSes/platforms, tough luck, now there are tools that generate HTML (and glue-on code and CSS and this and that) to make it uniform on all OSs/platforms.Just a decade ago JQuery was like “yes, we do ENTIRE GUI in one library”, then there was facebooks’ Bootstrap “yep, we do everything, just plug and play” and others, many, too many to keep track (each comes with its own exclusive set of quirks and idiocies that you discover as you go).What are we up to now, IDE wars are still ongoing, but now there are no-code code-generating wars. I thought WordPress had this territory covered, but I am guessing wrong, it only muddied the waters.I am not old, but remember that Plan 9 (OS) had the right attitude – outsource GUI to the client comp and just do plain processing back and forth so that even a dialup connection would suffice. Perhaps time to revisit the old faithful – do we REALLY need entire GUI stack just to handle ordinary and well-worn-out (and well-known) controls (pushbuttons … dials … dropdowns … text boxes …)? Could there be a lightweight universal lightweight toolbox of controls that just work out of the box? Come on, plain vanilla HTML, decades of revising are all for what, so that it is no longer enough?(frustrated and mostly unhappy programmer of all KINDS of GUIs for all kinds of users, technical, managers, dumb terminals, etc – I started with MS DOS text GUIs, so kinda think it should just circle back to the ASCII text interface and be over with – because it just flies when it needs to fly).Something like that. Discard after ignoring.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126811",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T11:07:40",
"content": "Mongoose OS is also very useful project. But i think they are bit laging behind with porting to latest ESP32 MCUs…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.487792
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/the-apple-ii-mousecard-irq-is-synced-to-vertical-blanking-after-all/
|
The Apple II MouseCard IRQ Is Synced To Vertical Blanking After All
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] |
[
"apple II",
"interrupts"
] |
Recently [Colin Leroy-Mira]
found himself slipping into a bit of a rabbit hole
while investigating why only under Apple II MAME emulation there was a lot of flickering when using the (emulated) Apple II MouseCard. This issue could not be reproduced on real (PAL or NTSC) hardware. The answer all comes down to how the card synchronizes with the system’s vertical blanking (VBL) while drawing to the screen.
The Apple II MouseCard is one of the many
peripheral cards
produced for the system, originally bundled with a version of MacPaint for the Apple II. While not a super popular card at the time, it nevertheless got used by other software despite this Apple system still being based around a command line interface.
According to the card’s documentation the interrupt call (IRQ) can be set to 50 or 60 Hz to match the local standard. Confusingly, certain knowledgeable people told him that the card could not be synced to the VBL as it had no knowledge of this. As covered in the article and associated
MAME issue ticket
, it turns out that the card is very much synced with the VBL exactly as described in The Friendly Manual, with the card’s firmware being run by the system’s CPU, which informs the card of synchronization events.
| 5
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126258",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T06:58:44",
"content": "Defy the so-called experts!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126280",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T10:45:35",
"content": "In fact… it was already known how they did. Here it explainshttps://folklore.org/Apple_II_Mouse_Card.html?sort=date",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126285",
"author": "Colin Leroy-Mira",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T11:06:23",
"content": "It was, but despite that, some knowledgeable people strongly believed it to be false. Diving all the way down to the 68705 code makes things clear once and for all.",
"parent_id": "8126280",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126298",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T12:04:36",
"content": "This is interesting, because I worked on a CRT terminal with a capacitive keyboard (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and timesharing was a thing). People would place the keyboard on top of the terminal to save space, and the capacitive keyboard would pick up the CRT flyback pulses and generate garbage characters. This was widely seen as a Bad Thing.Luckily for me, the whole thing was designed around a MC6802 processor with a 6845 CRT control chip, and the HSYNC pulses were available. I modified the keyboard scan routine to scan only after it had seen a flyback pulse. There was time to scan two keyboard rows during the horizontal scan, then a pause to accomodate the flyback pulse, then two more keyboard scans…etc.Worked like a charm.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126444",
"author": "Quinn Evans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T01:19:45",
"content": "Thank you for sharing this. This is the kind of hack around hardware limitations I love hearing about.",
"parent_id": "8126298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,551.962877
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/the-nuclear-war-you-didnt-notice/
|
The Nuclear War You Didn’t Notice
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"cold war",
"cyclotron",
"periodic table",
"transfermium"
] |
We always enjoy [The History Guy], and we wish he’d do more history of science and technology. But when he does, he always delivers! His latest video, which you can see below, focuses on the Cold War pursuit of creating
transfermium elements
. That is, the discovery of elements that appear above fermium using advanced techniques like cyclotrons.
There was a brief history of scientists producing unnatural elements. The two leaders in this work were a Soviet lab, the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, and a US lab at Berkeley.
You’d think the discovery of new elements wouldn’t be very exciting. However, with the politics of the day, naming elements became a huge exercise in diplomacy.
Part of the problem was the difficulty in proving you created a huge atom for a few milliseconds. It was often the case that the initial inventor wasn’t entirely clear.
We were buoyed to learn that American scientists named an element(Mendelevium) after a Russian scientist as an act of friendship, although the good feelings didn’t last.
We wonder if a new element pops up, if we can get some votes for Hackadaium. Don’t laugh. You might not need a
cyclotron
anymore.
| 7
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126218",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:22:04",
"content": "The administrators and professors at Berkeley were heartwarmingly friendly with the Soviets? You don’t say! I’m shocked, I tell you!The header photo and the ones in the video are super cool. Can’t find any other versions of it with reverse image search.. I wonder which analog repository of photographs it came from",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126279",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T10:30:38",
"content": "Shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that scientists communicate and respect each other, it’s only those with political motivations who hate based on ethnicity, borders etc.",
"parent_id": "8126218",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126394",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:35:56",
"content": "otoh, everyone has political motivations. scientists are not immune to the economic processes that produce political motivations.",
"parent_id": "8126279",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126228",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:57:15",
"content": "The guys that worked on nuclear chemistry were generally pretty conservative by Berkeley standards.Anyway, I was friends with some of the nuclear chemistry grad students in the 1980s and they didn’t have a great opinion of the Dubna lab. Go figure.I didn’t like how dismissive he was of Californium. It’s the name of the school (University of California). Berkeley is merely the city it’s in. Go Bears!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126229",
"author": "Miles Archer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T03:00:23",
"content": "Oh, and if you’re looking for the photo, try here:https://photos.lbl.gov/bp/#/folder/198646/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126241",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T05:18:53",
"content": "“We wonder if a new element pops up, if we can get some votes for Hackadaium.”Hackadaium McAdayFace?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126343",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T17:11:36",
"content": "Essfourium? Lazarium? Possible names for a hypothetical element with atomic number one fifteenth.Elizondium? The element whose very existence is denied by the Defense Department.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.716253
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/antique-mill-satisfies-food-cravings/
|
Antique Mill Satisfies Food Cravings
|
Tyler August
|
[
"News"
] |
[
"manual machining",
"pantograph",
"waffles breakfast"
] |
Everyone knows what its like to get a hankering for a specific food. In [Attoparsec]’s case, he wanted waffles. Not any waffles would do, though; he needed waffles in the form of a labyrinth. Those don’t exist, so he had to
machine his own waffle maker
.
When computers were the size of rooms, these stood in where we’d use CNC today.
Most of us would have run this off on a CNC, but [Attoparsec] isn’t into CNCing–manual machining is his hobby, and he’s not interested in getting into another one, no matter how much more productive he admits it might make him. We can respect that. After a bit of brain sweat thinking of different ways to cut out the labyrinth shape, he has the opportunity to pick up an antique Deckle pantograph mill.
These machines were what shops used to do CNC before the ‘computer numeric’ part was a thing. By tracing out a template (which [Attoparsec] 3D prints, so he’s obviously no Luddite) complex shapes can be milled with ease. Complex shapes like a labyrnthine wafflemaker. Check out the full video below; it’s full of all sorts of interesting details about the machining process and the tools involved.
If you don’t need to machine cast iron, but are interested in the techniques seen here,
a wooden pantorouter might be more your speed
than a one-tonne antique. If you have a hankering for waffles but would rather use CNC, c
heck out these design tips
to help you get started. If pancakes are more your style,
why not print them
?
Shoutout to [the gambler] for sending this into the tip line. We think he struck the jackpot on this one. If you
have a tip, don’t be shy
.
| 16
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126188",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:46:53",
"content": "Just to watch the syrup slowly find it’s way out.Excellent.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126392",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:19:06",
"content": "Theseus brand maple syrup.",
"parent_id": "8126188",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126190",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:51:55",
"content": "I watched this the other day while eating a couple eggo’s from the toaster",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126193",
"author": "ThisUser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:00:10",
"content": "I’m often jealous of the skills and tools of other makers…Also,https://retrotechjournal.com/2003/03/23/building-a-custom-waffle-iron/Andhttps://kelseyscottportfolio.weebly.com/waffle-iron.htmlfor additional inspirations",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126199",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:16:13",
"content": "Haven’t seen a Tyler August article before maybe that’s just me but nice write up..Using old iron to make a waffle iron has some poetry to it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126234",
"author": "Awgunner",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T03:51:11",
"content": "the US mint still uses pantographs for making the dies to mint coins",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126250",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T06:01:45",
"content": "I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in FreeCAD to design my own CNC router (I drew at least 6 different machines before deciding on which configuration I’m going to finally build, and still tweaking details for the final version), but still I sort of like these old pantograph mills. They also seem to be in fashion lately. I saw one from Inheritance machining, then from that mythbuster guy, and now from attoparsec. Or, I now realize it started with the pantograph router from Matthias Wandel, which has also been commercialized into an aluminimum version.As Attoparsec mentions at the end of this video, there is a bit of a learning curve. For example @10:05 he explains inner corners always have a radius of the size of the mill, and that’s true, but later on he uses a conical mill, and that has a quite small tip radius. If he had printed his template with sharp corners, he could have run his conical stylus up in the corners and created quite sharp inner corners in the cast iron. This is also what CNC software such as V-carve does, and in due time I think FreeCAD’s path workbench will also learn to do this.I was surprised at the size of the engraving letter templates he bought (@ 08:38) and he soon discovered only a few fit on his machine. Not much luck for words of more then a handful of letters. I recommend he uses this templates to make new letters at 1/3 to 1/5 the size.I also recommend that anyone using (or interested in) this type of machine watches the Matthias Wandel (Woodgears) video’s. He uses some nice tricks such as the length of extension of a conical guide pin to make cuts with a specific width, and to control the final width of cut precisely.At the moment my mind is wandering into copy mills. These things have a stylus with a hydraulic or electrical contact that can automatically follow a template.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126405",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T21:11:16",
"content": "He can mill words as long as he wants, but it just involves more manual shifting of the workpiece.",
"parent_id": "8126250",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126252",
"author": "Mhajicek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T06:10:42",
"content": "So he used a CNC printer to make a template to copy-mill to avoid using a CNC…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126358",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T17:26:13",
"content": "While it was acknowledged in the video, it’s good to reiterate the hobby of metal working on manual machines is quite a bit different from using a CNC machine or ordering the parts from a factory. I like the compromise the author found. Where you still get quite accurate parts, but get to do the machining yourself.I don’t have experience with CNC myself, but see that you need quite a big and expensive machine to be reliable enough to do the work without babysitting. As where a 3D printer is a common and reliable tool, these days. I have to say, manual machining with 3D printed fixtures seem to work quite well.It’d be quite a different video if he ordered the parts from a popular online machining shop.",
"parent_id": "8126252",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126264",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T07:35:34",
"content": "I’m not ashamed to admit I first read “Antique Mill Satisfies Food Carvings”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126370",
"author": "Yet Another Robert Smith",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T18:17:31",
"content": "Indeed it would have been much easier to machine a labyrinth into the top of a cooked pancake.",
"parent_id": "8126264",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126302",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T12:06:40",
"content": "“…he has the opportunity to pick up an antique Deckle pantograph mill.”We have all had the opportunity to pick up a mill, but few of us have been able to. He must be very strong./I’ll be here all week…tip your waitress.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126304",
"author": "PeTe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T12:27:22",
"content": "It’s nice to see more hackers on fediverse:https://clacks.link/@attoparsec",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126319",
"author": "WonkoTheSaneUK",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T14:19:55",
"content": "[Adam Savage] posted about getting a very similar mill on his youtube channel a few days ago.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pku2VRADLGk",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126679",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T21:01:33",
"content": "Deckel, not Deckle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,551.541245
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/inside-a-selective-voltmeter/
|
Inside A Selective Voltmeter
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] |
[
"Harmon",
"rms",
"selective voltmeter"
] |
[Martin Lorton] has a vintage
Harmon 4200B selective voltmeter
that needed repair. He picked it up on eBay, and he knew it wasn’t working, but it was in good condition, especially for the price. He’s posted four videos about what’s inside and how he’s fixing it. You can see the first installment below.
The 4200B is an RMS voltmeter and is selective because it has a tuned circuit to adjust to a particular frequency. The unit uses discrete components and has an analog meter along with an LCD counter.
The initial tests didn’t work out well because the analog meter was stuck, so it wouldn’t go beyond about 33% of full scale.
Since there are four videos (so far), there is a good bit of information and detail about the meter. However, it is an interesting piece of gear and part 3 is interesting if you want to see inside an analog meter movement.
By the fourth video, things seem to be working well. You might want to browse the manual for the similar
4200A manual
to get oriented.
Forgot why we measure RMS? You
weren’t the only one
.
RMS conversion in meters
is a big topic and there are many ways to do it.
| 0
| 0
|
[] | 1,760,371,552.034203
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/a-single-chip-computer-for-the-8051-generation/
|
A Single Chip Computer For The 8051 Generation
|
Jenny List
|
[
"classic hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] |
[
"8051",
"8052",
"MCS-51 BASIC"
] |
The Intel 8051 series of 8-bit microcontrollers is long-discontinued by its original manufacturer, but lives on as a core included in all manner of more recent chips. It’s easy to understand and program, so it remains a fixture despite much faster replacements appearing.
If you can’t find an original 40-pin DIP don’t worry, because
[
mit41301
] has produced a board in a compatible 40-pin format
. It’s called the single chip computer not because such a thing is a novelty in 2025, but because it has no need for the support chips which would have come with the original.
The modern 8051 clone in use is a CH558 or CH559, both chips with far more onboard than the original. The pins are brought out to one side only of the board, because on the original the other side would interface with an external RAM chip. It speaks serial, and can be used through either a USB-to-serial or Bluetooth-to-serial chip. There’s MCS-BASIC for it, so programming should be straightforward.
We can see the attraction of this board even though we reach for much more accomplished modern CPUs by choice. Several decades ago the original 8051 on Intel dev boards was our university teaching microcontoller, so there remains here a soft spot for it. We certainly see other 8051 designs, as for example
this Arduino clone
.
| 36
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126117",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T19:05:59",
"content": "Starting out with a controller that features definite CPU-cycle and memory-resource constraints, will teach you a great deal about how to code efficiently. That’s something completely lost to the ‘programmers’ of today. Hence, we typically now see bloated, inefficient software running on what would otherwise be very, very performant hardware.Consider starting-out by learning (speed of light) C on a tiny processor. The skills you will learn by doing so, may put you ahead of the curve later in your career. You’ll also develop a very fond appreciation for more advanced hardware, where agonising over every cycle and memory byte is (sometimes) less of a requirement.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126200",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:27:01",
"content": "Nobody should have to stick their hand in a jar of nettles as an initiation rite just because some arrogant person, decades ago, chose to do so.I always advocate for learning C/C++ first, because learning the ins and outs of manual memory management tends to teach a healthy level of fear and respect for the garbage collector in Java/C#, or at the very least the fundamental realization that it isn’t magic, and nothing is free when it comes to CPU cycles. This is something which is pragmatically beneficial – it makes these people better programmers.I’ve been working in software development for over two decades, and quite frankly, I believe the field could do with fewer people trying to ward off newbies, with ostensibly “good” intentions (to whom?), by spelling doom and gloom about “these kids these days” not knowing CPU-cycle or memory-resource constraints.With the massively microcoded CPUs that we have these days, with microcode that can change at the drop of a hat due to a firmware update, the best possible standpoint is one of gratitude that silicon engineers are still managing to wring incremental IPC improvements across generations.“[We] now see bloated, inefficient software running on what would otherwise be very, very performant hardware”? Sure! Totally! It would be an absolute panacea if a modern x86-UEFI system were treated identically to the Commodore 64 we grew up with. It would also come at the cost of more or less every modern convenience that we enjoy, unless you’re dead-set on living your life off the grid with technology that hasn’t moved past roughly 1990. That is ideologically beneficial – it makes you feel good, but has no practical benefit within the overall scope of software development. The people who care and who excel at refining down the number of cycles taken by a snippet of code will always exist. But that’s not a barrier to entry for coding.Whether you like it or not, software development stands on some level of shoulders, and these shoulders increase in breadth with hardware complexity. Not everyone can pull a Terry A. Davis and make their own personal Temple OS. Some people just want to get things done.Get real, get with the program, and – most importantly – get over yourself.",
"parent_id": "8126117",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126224",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:35:43",
"content": "” I always advocate for learning C/C++ first, ” You should advocate learning assembler first. There is no better way to learn the ins and outs.",
"parent_id": "8126200",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126232",
"author": "Nathan E Evans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T03:21:43",
"content": "To be fair… You’re both right… The problem isn’t the language it’s the constraints.If you want to be an efficient coder use less external libraries, watch your arrays and other variables.. use pointers..pass and reference your variables, and objects properly and try and keep your code clean and efficient.Doesn’t really matter what language you learn…",
"parent_id": "8126224",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126243",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T05:22:21",
"content": "“There is no better way to learn the INs and OUTs”I see what you did there, and I’m here for it.",
"parent_id": "8126224",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126301",
"author": "Jon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T12:06:36",
"content": "Two words: punch cards.",
"parent_id": "8126224",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126445",
"author": "Paul Duncan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T01:20:51",
"content": "Oh don’t be silly! It’s paper tape. Ideally written by a Teletype 33. God help you if you’re carrying a stack of cards and you drop them. You’ll be suggesting Fortran 77 next!",
"parent_id": "8126301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126231",
"author": "sbrk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T03:14:05",
"content": "I’ve been working in software development for over two decadesTalk to me after another two and you’ll think differently. You’re still in the “this is great!” stage with a bunch of energy. Wait until the bloat exceeds your internal thresholds and you’ll start talking just .. like .. us.",
"parent_id": "8126200",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126236",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T04:30:50",
"content": "I don’t like it how people became so aggressive all the time.What happened to polite interaction? 🙁Why is human development not at the height of technology?",
"parent_id": "8126200",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126255",
"author": "VG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T06:21:44",
"content": "Why was that person arrogant decades ago for doing it like that? I wasn’t aware they had options back then. They were limited by the hardware and they had to do things in the most efficient way. Calling it arrogant is quite the stretch.Why would you encourage newbies to be careless by not thinking too much, even more in the present day when the AI slop is taking over?",
"parent_id": "8126200",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126309",
"author": "WTF Detector",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T13:04:39",
"content": "The arrogance came later and reeks off the attitude of an unfortunate number of fellow oldbie coders, a level of bitterness because “kids these days” don’t have to stick their own hands in the nettle jar, and bah gawd back in mah day hurmph glurmph durph.You’re correct that people were limited by the hardware they had back then. We’re not now. There’s no inherent value in living what amounts to a monastic life, hardware- or software-wise, unless you choose to. I love doing low-level programming because I choose to, but at my day job I do UI/UX coding because I choose to do that, too. I once had the CTO at my job ask why I’m twiddling my thumbs working on menus rather than doing engine or architecture coding – it was intended as a compliment, but it also highlighted the unfortunate attitude that’s so prevalent in software development: That just because someone can do, and wants to do, a perceptually simple task A (which UI/UX is not, people unfamiliar with it just think it is), they’re incapable of doing complex task B.Speaking of, you’re also presenting a false dichotomy. Newbies shouldn’t overthink things, so therefore they shouldn’t think at all? That’s not what I said. I didn’t stutter. In any decent organization there are people like me filling senior-level ranks who enjoy drilling down into the nitty-gritty with a profiler and figuring out precisely where all the performance is going in some innocuous-looking routine. But that is not something that junior- or intermediate-level programmers should have to bother themselves with. If they want to, that’s great, it puts them on the fast track for a promotion, but I’m not going to expect the world out of people who are just barely getting their feet wet.Also, who brought up AI? You did. But on that point, who really cares if someone leans too heavily on LLM-generated garbage for writing code? At the end of the day they’ll either use it as a crutch until their metaphorical foot heals and their skill-set catches up, or they’ll run into the brick wall where skill and LLM-generated code diverge. If you have programmers in your organization that are leaning too heavily on generative trash, that speaks just as ill of the policies where you work as it is the fact that someone like that would even be hired.I’m reminded of the downright religious worship that people have for “Uncle” Bob Martin’s “Clean Code”. A tome which has a set of pretty good ideas, to be applied at the appropriate times, but which so many coders choose instead to treat as dogma. It’s religion for the areligious, and much like so many other holy texts, it has unfortunate resulted in what amounts to holy wars. Functions should fit within an 80×25 monospaced window? Sure, ideally, yeah, but we’re not hammering away at a DEC VT-100 anymore. We have 4K monitors, portrait-orientable, and employers willing to pay for such hardware – why not use it? The principle of functions being isolated, scrutable, and reading as a linear set of imperative statements is a good one, but the difference between a good coder and a great coder is the ability to know the rules, but also know when to waive them.[deL] was completely right in their second paragraph, but the first one exhibits an attitude that I would very much like to see less of. “Programmers of today” meet the hardware, capabilities, and expectations of today. It’s not that deep. If you want to code with a hand behind your back, great, but other people are free not to, and they’re not lesser programmers for choosing not to.",
"parent_id": "8126255",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126337",
"author": "rs",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T16:32:14",
"content": "I’ve been in the development business in a wide range of roles (and product purposes) for closing in on 40 years now. Stuff including server software, real-time data acquisition, machine and guidance control systems, business communications software, language interpretation, even a few games… and these types of arguments will never stop cracking me up.I had a fun one just a couple weeks ago where I was talking to a fellow ham radio operator about a web application for contact logging I was whipping up for my own personal use. He’s a retired microcontroller programmer, and wanted to know what language I was using. Of course, he scoffed when I told him Node. “You should write that in assembly.” … I knew it was coming, and I still split my side laughing. Yeah, that’s exactly the best approach to a rapid development, database driven web app. “You do that. Let me know how it goes.”Everything has it’s place. The way “you” have always done a thing isn’t always THE best way (or even applicable!), and part of the allure of the art and science of development is that there’s always more than one way to skin the metaphorical cat.There are business needs to getting things done, too. And if you get paid to deliver on time, you’re going to sacrifice what could be your best work to keep the mortgage paid. …or, heck, pick a hundred other scenarios where the business demand trumps a thing you know you should be doing.That said, the CONCEPTS of good memory management, efficient code, minimizing clock cycles… All of those should be taught, understood, and practiced, but you know what? Sometimes it really doesn’t matter all that much, and if someone being a little sloppy means the door gets opened for them to learn and grow, and creates a path for the great developers of the future? I’ll grumble about the poor code now, but welcome the end result. There are definitely more important things to get worked up about.",
"parent_id": "8126309",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126318",
"author": "dallytaurNadia",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T14:03:27",
"content": "I just don’t want to see people use electron to program a simple application don’t know why we need to JavaScript interpreter on a system architecture where JavaScript sandboxing and security features I’m not really required on a desktop applicationI understand that we sit on top of the shoulders of Giants in situations where an interpreted language should be used over a compiled language I feel like electron is really just the lazy project developers way to create desktop application using the hacked up up version of website they made",
"parent_id": "8126200",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126275",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T09:54:47",
"content": "What I didn’t say, that some appear to have assumed that I did, was that there’s a case for both ‘bottom’ and ‘top’ programmers. One employer wants instant results for a one-off problem, so the use of Python libraries might be appropriate. Another employer wants to save on silicon for a million-off production run, so low-level, super efficient code is the answer.Position yourself as a dime-a-dozen ‘top’ programmer however, and you’ll be infrequently and poorly compensated, will be ever dependent on others, and clueless when things go wrong. Take the longer, all encompassing route to becoming a ‘bottom’ programmer, and you might work your way up to coding for GPU clusters that crunch radio-astronomical data. The choice is yours.On the matter of civility, and personal (or in this case anonymous) reputations: …I’m outa here.",
"parent_id": "8126117",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126286",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T11:08:01",
"content": "…the moderation wasn’t ever really up to par here, anyway.",
"parent_id": "8126275",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126450",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T01:54:11",
"content": "With the 8051, IMO the best option is to use assembly. The bit-level I/O instructions are a joy to use and allow one to write very efficient code, usually obviating the need for external memory, and thus freeing up those pins for I/O. Back in the day I wrote 1000’s of lines of ASM-51, but today if you’re going to use an external memory chip then just use some more modern hardware and a high level language",
"parent_id": "8126117",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126122",
"author": "mm5316",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T19:44:32",
"content": "The BASIC-8052 revamp looks really good. I could not see what is on the underbelly of the board, USB-TTL, and I’m missing the decoupling caps. Having a BASIC interpreter is really useful, especially for learning to code.{Strange somebody’s comment got nuked about doing this old school 1980’s style to save a few bytes… those days are thankfully gone, lots of memory and clock cycles}",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126131",
"author": "_sol_",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T20:13:04",
"content": "You can see some of the underbelly here:https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/8343561711385550585.jpgJust not real clear.",
"parent_id": "8126122",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126634",
"author": "Basti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:25:27",
"content": "bascom-8051 is not an interpreter – its a compiler. Performance is close to ASM",
"parent_id": "8126122",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126133",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T20:16:12",
"content": "“The Intel 8051 series of 8-bit microcontrollers is long-discontinued by its original manufacturer, but lives on as a core included in all manner of more recent chips.”Proprietary video editing board long relegated to history. Information hard to find, but deep in the system diagram was an intel core.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126147",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T21:30:32",
"content": "There might be a soft spot for it … but with so many better options out there (from my point of view) why go backward — except for nostalgia purposes I suppose. I had to go look up CH 558 and 559 as I never heard of these chips except in this article. Again, learn something every day.As for Basic, well, I admit I recently wrote a Basic interpreter for fun to play some of the old text games on a Pico, but prefer c/assembly/Python for all current programming needs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126155",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T21:57:59",
"content": "At 40¢ each they may be the right hammer/nail 🤷🏼♂️The article was a little(/s) coy, I googled CH552t (the chip in the picture) and adafruit has this to say:16MHz and 3.3V logic, built-in 16K program FLASH memory and, 256-byte internal RAM plus 1K-byte internal xRAM (xRAM supports DMA.4 built-in ADC channels, capacitive touch support, 3 timers / PWM channels, hardware UART, SPI, and a full-speed USB device controller.Does this mean USB on your retro computer? I don’t know, but the bit about the RAM not being connected makes me think you could plug this in to quickly check old computers for RAM/socket/PCB problems. If it works you can start troubleshooting from there instead of looking at power and display.",
"parent_id": "8126147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126173",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T23:29:50",
"content": "You may have a point with an RP2040 running at what, about $1.",
"parent_id": "8126155",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126567",
"author": "Timmeh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T11:59:01",
"content": "Maybe it’s nostalgia for you but I have a front panel for a mid-2010s DVR in my spare parts bin that is driven by a modern 8051 replacement. They’re very much still in use.",
"parent_id": "8126147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126152",
"author": "Frankens43",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T21:45:38",
"content": "I seem to recall many keyboards that used the 8051 chip.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126157",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T22:17:19",
"content": "If you mean PC type keyboards your memory is misleading you, they tended to use 8048/9 chips",
"parent_id": "8126152",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126168",
"author": "David Riemenschneider",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T23:19:51",
"content": "Any one used Intel’s PLM-51 to write sofware for the 8051 or remember programing 8751s and using an UV lamp to erase to try again?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126294",
"author": "solipso",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T11:52:35",
"content": "Yeah, 8748/8751 was my mom’s daily horse in those old days. I remember those evenings – her, sitting in her office with a PC-XT, amber monitor, development board, EPROM programmer, and an UV eraser with a couple of 87C51s baking in it. I even found the programmer in some box a year or two ago. Rest in peace, mamele.",
"parent_id": "8126168",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126172",
"author": "Stanson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T23:28:47",
"content": "There is no any problems in getting modern 8051 clone or even just original i8051 in any package you want.Situation is way worse with replacement of i8048 that often could be found in vintage electronics from car ECUs to home aplliances and computer peripherals of 80-s era. There just no any modern pin and instruction compatible devices. It is possible to download code from 8048 if you have another working device around where 8048 could be desoldered and put into programmer. But then you have to disassemble code and rewrite for MCU of your choice. Not always an easy task. And of course you will have to make PCB to mimic 8048 pinout.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126180",
"author": "JSL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:08:25",
"content": "I’ve done 8051 development (in C), and I’ve played with the 8052, which was an 8051 chip with additional built-in ROM with a BASIC interpreter. (I would not refer to any sort of BASIC programming as anything other than “play.”)So it looks like this board is a substitute for the 8052 and not the 8051.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127351",
"author": "Lloyd",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T20:35:47",
"content": "“ANY” sort of BASIC programming is “play”?As a former Access/Excel/Word/VBA Database Applications Developer, I beg to differ",
"parent_id": "8126180",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126195",
"author": "GarberPark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:01:07",
"content": "I’ve heard (more than once) that Basic-51 was developed by one of the members of the band Looking Glass, famous for the song “Brandy (you’re a fine girl”).Am I nuts?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126270",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T09:09:57",
"content": "The original Basic-52 had a hidden programmers ego message saying “John Katausky”. Later that was removed to make room for bug fixes.",
"parent_id": "8126195",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8178543",
"author": "jkata",
"timestamp": "2025-09-11T22:12:25",
"content": "You’re not totally nuts haha, he wasn’t a part of the band but knew the singer through his mother and sold the original version of the song to her at a party for $1000 dollars. OH3MVV is also correct and his name was John Katausky.",
"parent_id": "8126195",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126289",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T11:25:35",
"content": "You also have 1 less content contributor for your ‘authors’ to plagiarize.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8135642",
"author": "scruss2",
"timestamp": "2025-06-05T13:54:02",
"content": "MCS-BASIC is quite fun on the tiny CH55x chips. It will run on the CH552, but leaves about 600 bytes for your program. It would be nice if there was a way of saving the program (there’s no external flash/eeprom option) and nicer still if the serial communications used the CH55x USB ACM device instead of an external UART, but fun doesn’t have to mean practical …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.149302
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/supercon-2024-an-immersive-motion-rehabilitation-device/
|
Supercon 2024: An Immersive Motion Rehabilitation Device
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] |
[
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"cons",
"medical device",
"rehabilitation"
] |
When you’ve had some kind of injury, rehabilitation can be challenging. You often need to be careful about how you’re using the affected parts of your body, as well as pursue careful exercises for repair and restoration of function. It can be tedious and tiring work, for patients and treating practitioners alike.
Juan Diego Zambrano, Abdelrahman Farag, and Ivan Hernandez have been working on new technology to aid those going through this challenging process.
Their talk at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon
covers an innovative motion monitoring device intended to aid rehabilitation goals in a medical context.
Motion Project
As outlined in the talk, the team took a measured and reasoned approach to developing their device. The project started by defining the problem at hand, before proposing a potential solution. From there, it was a case of selecting the right hardware to do the job, and developing it alongside the necessary software to make it all work.
The Arduino Nano BLE33 had most of the necessary functionality for this project, out of the box.
The problem in question regarded helping children through rehabilitative therapies. Structured activities are used to help develop abilities in areas like motor skills, coordination, and balance. These can be particularly challenging for children with physical or developmental difficulties, and can be repetitive at the best of times, leading to a lack of engagement. “We wanted to solve that… we wanted to make it more interactive and more useful for the therapies and for the doctors,” Ivan explains, with an eye to increasing motivation for the individual undergoing rehabilitation.
Other challenges also exist in this arena. Traditional rehabilitation methods offer no real-time feedback to the individual on how they’re performing. There is also a need for manual monitoring and record keeping of the individual’s performance, which can be tedious and often relies on subjective assessments.
The device was demonstrated mounted on a patient’s chest, while being used in a game designed for balance work.
Having explored the literature on game-based therapy techniques, the team figured a wearable device with sensors could aid in solving some of these issues. Thus they created their immersive motion rehabilitation device.
At the heart of the build is an Arduino Nano BLE33, so named for its Bluetooth Low Energy wireless communications hardware. Onboard is an nRF52840 microcontroller, which offers both good performance and low power consumption. The real benefit of this platform, though, is that it includes an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and magnetometer on board and ready to go. The IMU in question is the BMI270, which combines a high-precision 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope into a single package. If you want to track motion in three dimensions, this is a great way to do it.
For user feedback, some additional hardware was needed. The team added a vibration motor, RGB LED, and buzzer for this reason. Controlling the device is simple, with the buttons on board. In order to make the device easy to use for therapists, it’s paired with a Windows application, programmed in C#. It’s used for monitoring and analysis of the wearer’s performance during regular rehabilitation activities.
The user’s motions are recorded while playing a simple game, providing useful clinical data.
The talk explains how this simple, off-the-shelf hardware was used to aid the rehabilitation experience. By gamifying things, users are prompted to better engage with the therapy process by completing tasks monitored by the device’s sensors. Fun graphics and simple gameplay ideas are used to make a boring exercise into something more palatable to children going through rehabilitation.
The team go on to explain the benefits on the clinical side of things, regarding how data collection and real time monitoring can aid in delivery. The project also involved the creation of a system for generating reports and accessing patient data to support this work, as well as a fun connection assistant called Sharky.
Overall, the talk serves as a useful insight as to how commonly-available hardware can be transformed into useful clinical tools. Indeed, it’s not so different from the gamification we see all the time in the exercise space, where smartwatches and apps are used to increase motivation and provide data for analysis. Ultimately, with a project like this, if you can motivate a patient to pursue their rehabilitation goals while collecting data at the same time, that’s useful in more ways than one.
| 1
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126409",
"author": "Daniel Larrosa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T21:48:43",
"content": "Very nice project! Also useful and generous, for the benefit of those in need.The idea of gamification as a motivation for physiotherapy reminded me of something I read in the Reader’s Digest, many years ago: in a physical rehabilitation clinic for senior citizens (e.g. victims of stroke) they used old slot machines (the ones with the lateral lever you had to pull) to lure them to do their arm exercises as they played (no coins needed, of course).Best regards,A/P Daniel F. LarrosaMontevideo – Uruguay",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.079099
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/diy-driving-simulator-pedals/
|
DIY Driving Simulator Pedals
|
Matthew Carlson
|
[
"Peripherals Hacks"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"foot pedals",
"racing simulation"
] |
In the driving simulator community, setups can quickly grow ever more complicated and expensive, all in the quest for fidelity. For [CNCDan], rather than buy pedals off the shelf, he
opted to build his own
.
[Dan] has been using some commercial pedals alongside his own DIY steering wheel and the experience is rather lackluster in comparison. The build starts with some custom brackets. To save on cost, they are flat with tabs to let you know where to bend it in a vise. Additionally, rather than three sets of unique brackets, [Dan] made them all the same to save on cost. The clutch and throttle are a simple hall effect sensor with a spring to provide feedback. However, each bracket provides a set of spring mounting holes to adjust the curve. Change up the angle of the spring and you have a different curve. The brake pedal is different as rather than measure position, it measures force. A load cell is perfect for this. The HX711 load cell sensor board that [Dan] bought was only polling at 10hz. Lifting a pin from ground and bodging it to VDD puts the chip in 80hz, which is much more usable for a driving sim setup.
[Dan] also cleverly uses a 3d printed bushing without any walls as resistance for the pedal. Since the bushing is just the infill, the bushing stiffness is controlled by the infill percentage. Aluminum extrusion forms the base so [Dan] can adjust the exact pedal positions. To finish it off, a bog standard Arduino communicates to the PC as a game controller.
The
project is on GitHub
. Perhaps the next version will have active feedback,
like this DIY pedal setup
.
| 8
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125842",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T23:58:15",
"content": "Bottom hinged pedals allow the foot to actuate the pedal in an arc similar to the one your ankle moves in.Activating them from school bus driving seat height and too far away is cringe.🤷🏼♂️ To each their own, ergonomics isn’t just a town in Sweden though.Glad someone is trying to make these simulators more accessible, the prices on the commercially available ones are usually way out of line for what you get: some ABS shells and pedals with a 50¢ potentiometer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125911",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:04:38",
"content": "neat project and i’ve read up a lot on them, what I do not understand is why most use of a load cell sensor over a magnetic encoder like the as5600 or the newer mt6701? I’m sure there is a simple reason please let me know if you know why.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125916",
"author": "Steve B",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:18:55",
"content": "Braking is about controlling force on the pedal not the pedal position hence the use of load cell.",
"parent_id": "8125911",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125921",
"author": "Cuthbert",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:39:22",
"content": "A position sensor is suitable for the throttle, since that only needs to know the position of the accelerator pedal.But brakes are more about theforce onthe pedal than theposition ofthe pedal. A load cell can measure a response from gentle braking to the full strength of your leg pushing as hard as you can on the pedal. The difference in the position of the brake pedal between these extremes is only a matter of a few cm, but a huge difference in force.The bushings are mixed and matched to provide the “feel” of a (real, hydraulic) brake pedal but transmit the braking force to the load cell.",
"parent_id": "8125911",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125962",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:21:41",
"content": "Glad you asked, there is a simple reason.Car brake pedals aren’t moving in a linear way, as brakes don’t work based on the movement, but the pressure that is put on the brakes that compresses the oil in the braking system, which these pedals are trying to copy in feel. You might not be able to measure the actual difference using a magnetic encoder at higher pressure. The force goes up exponentially based on force and the pedal movements are minimal at higher braking. And you would still need something to push against that can withstand high pressure. With just a magnetic encoder you would not be able to drive around a lap properly as it’s not feeling similar. Sure, it’s possible to make a super simple brake system with a magnetic encoder and a piece of rubber in the back, but it’s a lot more work, it will fail in the long run, the feeling of the pedal keeps changing as the rubber deteriorates and it will never feel properly. And even IF you can get it to work, it’s still a major issue as different vehicles feel different which is easier to adjust with a load cell. So yeah it’s cheap but unless being cheap is the main reason, you will never be happy with it.Take a normal car and drive it around a track. Then get into an F1 car and before the corner, apply the same force on the brake pedal as you would with a normal car and you are going straight off the track as the brakes have barely touched the rotors. The average man can’t brake properly when put in an F1 car. Even experienced racers can’t. A big tough guy that goes to the gym a lot, can probably get it to brake 80% of it’s actual capacity. You need to train a lot to be able to handle the brakes. So to mimic it a bit, you want to put more load on the pedal to make it feel a tiny bit more F1.If you look at the higher end pedals, for example the Heusinkveld Ultimate pedals, they even use hydraulics inside the brake pedal to mimic the feel of a car, next to a loadcell as the input. Those accept 140KG/308LBS of force on the brake pedal with a 200KG/440LBS load cell, which would snap a Logitech pedal kit in half.",
"parent_id": "8125911",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126059",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:28:53",
"content": "Great design under your right foot but having to use the other foot to keep everything from sliding away is incomplete design. Attach the pedals to a large hinged in the middle piece of plywood to be able to sit chair on and have the pedals on the other end. Pluses for hanging the pedals pivots from the top instead of on the floor as others have commented, like most cars and trucks. Gas pedals used to be on the floor but rocks got stuck in the pivot causing big problems.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126178",
"author": "Luis Barradas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T23:58:38",
"content": "Next the pedals for an Helicopter Simulator. Please.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126841",
"author": "R",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T13:06:38",
"content": "Nice setup but if I had to nitpick, the resistance of most clutch pedals isn’t linear. This might be by design so it’s easier to hold the clutch fully engaged while stopped in traffic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.315811
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/edison-phonograph-plays-the-cylinders/
|
Edison Phonograph Plays The Cylinders
|
Al Williams
|
[
"home entertainment hacks"
] |
[
"amberol",
"edison",
"phonograph"
] |
You might be old enough to remember record platters, but you probably aren’t old enough to remember when records were cylinders. The Edison Blue Amberol records came out in 1912 and were far superior to the earlier wax cylinders. If you had one today, how could you play it? Easy. Just build [Palingenesis’]
record player
. You can even hear it do its thing in the video below.
The cylinders are made of plaster with a celluloid wrapper tinted with the namesake blue color. They were more durable than the old wax records and could hold well over four minutes of sound.
The player is mostly made from wood cut with a mill or a laser. There are some bearings, fasteners, and — of course — electronics. The stylus requires some care. Conventional records use a lateral-cut groove, but these old records use a vertical-cut. That means the pickup moves up and down and has a rounder tip than a conventional needle.
Rather than try to control the motor to an exact speed, you get to set the speed with a potentiometer and see the resulting RPM on a small display. Overall, an involved but worthwhile project.
We recently looked at some
players
that would have been new about the same time as the blue record in the video. We don’t think you could modify one of these to play
stereo
, but if you do, let us know immediately!
| 9
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125786",
"author": "Jonathan Whitaker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:07:58",
"content": "Good timing! I started trying to cobble together a player yesterday, now I have a reference 😁",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125808",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T21:17:19",
"content": "A former coworker had a few of the wax cylinder records, I wanted to get one and hack a old linear tracking record players to play it. Unfortunately I was never able to acquire one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125827",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T22:25:43",
"content": "I am sure you have to be super careful with the cylinders during ‘testing’. Wouldn’t want to ruin those old recordings.That said, lots of laser cut parts there to get right. Good job.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125910",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:00:40",
"content": "“Edison Blue Amberol Records” are virtually indestructible compared to the older wax cylinders so it’ll be fine.",
"parent_id": "8125827",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125857",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T01:09:04",
"content": "That sounds pretty good for an Edison cylinder.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125869",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T03:10:53",
"content": "The trick with vertical cut is to use a stereo cartridge and wire it out of phase.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125927",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:58:15",
"content": "that stylus arm movement is quite jerky. I’d have like to use a leadscrew there. i’d imagine there’s a fixed gear ratio between that and the cylinder voice thread.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126035",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:01:19",
"content": "Question for you guys who do a lot of laser cutting: is there a way to stabilize the plywood after it is cut so it won’t warp with changes in humidity and temperature?My experience with laser cut plywood is limited to maintaining an old makerbot 3D printer from back when they used to build them that way, and that thing warped like crazy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126632",
"author": "dependable2981525a2d",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T17:07:29",
"content": "I’ve been waiting for vinyl loving audiophiles to re-discover cylinders. A standard LP runs at a constant angular velocity resulting in the needle in the groove moving at a linear velocity that varies greatly from the outside to the inside of the record. Attempts were made to create CLV records, but any variance in speed results in degradation of the sound output.Cylinders on the other hand are constant linear and angular velocity. If made with the same material as an LP, with the same needle and pickup then a potentially superior playback could be achieved. The choice of cylinder diameter and rotational speed could be chosen to have the optimal needle speed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.273512
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/let-the-wookie-win-with-this-diy-holochess-table/
|
Let The Wookie Win With This DIY Holochess Table
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Games",
"hardware"
] |
[
"chess board",
"holographic",
"holographic display",
"star wars",
"volumetric display"
] |
If you have seen
Star Wars
, you know what is being referenced here. Holochess appeared as a diversion built into the Millennium Falcon in the very first movie, way back in 1977. While not quite as iconic a use of simulated holograms as tiny Princess Leia begging for hope, it evidently struck a chord with [Maker Mac70], given the impressive effort he’s evidently gone through to
re-create the game table from the film.
The key component of this unit is a plate from Japanese firm ASKA3D that scatters light from displays inside the table in just such a way that the diverging rays are focused at a point above its surface, creating the illusion of an image hovering in space. Or in this case, hovering at the surface of a acrylic chessboard. Granted, this technique only works from one viewing angle, and so is not a perfect recreation of a sci-fi holoprojector. But from the right angle, it looks
really
good, as you can see in the video below.
There are actually six SPI displays, driven by an Arduino GIGA, positioned and angled to project each character in the game. Placing two of the displays on 3D printed gantries allows them to move, allowing two creatures to battle in the center of the table. As [Maker Mac70] admits, this is quite a bit simpler than the Holochess game seen in the film, but it’s quite impressive for real world hardware.
If this all seems a little bit familiar, we covered
an earlier floating display
by [Maker Mac70] last year. This works on similar principles, but uses more common components which makes the technique more accessible. If chess isn’t your forte, why not
a volumetric display that plays
DOOM
? If you’re interested in real holograms, not Sci-Fi, our own [Maya Posch] did a
deep dive you may find interesting
.
| 9
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125767",
"author": "Igor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:13:57",
"content": "You only need a wookie to play with",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126963",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T19:18:07",
"content": "huh, my comment on genetically engineered mice was remove for mysterious reason. strange.",
"parent_id": "8125767",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125773",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:28:59",
"content": "So it’s kind of made out of one of those flying saucer shaped optical toys that Edmund scientific used to sell? Olds may remember this.There was an aperture in the top and I suspect the interior was mirrored, and I think you’d put an object inside and it would appear as if it was above the aperature.Clever.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125779",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:50:16",
"content": "“So it’s kind of made out…” I’d watch the video if I were you. He made it all from scratch…Neat project!",
"parent_id": "8125773",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125824",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T22:15:12",
"content": "Okay but it seems to be the same operating principle.Here’s a modern one.https://www.arborsci.com/products/3d-mirascope-illusion-makerIt is a neat project.",
"parent_id": "8125779",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125874",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T03:47:04",
"content": "It is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the mirascope.It uses a transmissive flat plate over the object, not reflective curved dishes above and below the object.",
"parent_id": "8125824",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125861",
"author": "aplundell",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T01:31:53",
"content": "Kind of, but mirrorscopes produced a 3d image floating in space. This is a flat 2D display that appears to be floating in space.",
"parent_id": "8125773",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126136",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T20:40:52",
"content": "Best title of the week, BTW.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127805",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T18:57:53",
"content": "Aska3D tech is really cool.https://aska3d.com/ja/technology.htmlI got a chance to see this in real life, and it works very well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.471274
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/the-owon-hds160-reviewed/
|
The Owon HDS160 Reviewed
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Reviews",
"Teardown"
] |
[
"HDS160",
"oscilloscope",
"owon",
"scopemeter"
] |
These days, if you are in the market for a capable digital voltmeter, you might as well consider getting one with an oscilloscope built-in. One choice is the
Owon HDS160
, which [Kerry Wong] covers in the video below. The model is very similar to the HDS120, but the multimeter in the HDS160 has more counts–60,000 vs 20,000 as you might expect from the model number.
The internal chip is an HY3131, which is rated at 50,000 counts which is odd since the meter is 60,000 counts, but presumably the meter uses some capability of the chip, possibly putting it out of spec. The oscilloscope is the same between the two models. Almost everything else works the same, other than the capacitance measuring feature, as the video shows.
The difference in cost between the two units isn’t much, so if you are shopping, the small extra cost is probably worth it. Not that a 20,000 count meter isn’t perfectly fine for most normal uses.
[Kerry] really
likes scopemeters
. He gets excited about
bench scopes
, too.
| 11
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125696",
"author": "Sok Puppette",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T15:55:52",
"content": "The internal chip is an HY3131, which is rated at 50,000 counts which is odd since the meter is 60,000 counts, but presumably the meter uses some capability of the chip, possibly putting it out of specOr they could be outright lying. That’s kind of least hypothesis here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125709",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:28:16",
"content": "That’s kind of difficult to lie about on a meter because it has a direct effect on the digits displayed, the resolution, when ranges change etc so it should be really easy to check.",
"parent_id": "8125696",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125720",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:21:27",
"content": "HY3131 has a SPI interface to some external uC. It certainly does not have a display driver for a high-resolution display as used in the Owon. Sniffing this SPI bus is quite easy, but it does take some effort. The additional uC could fudge the numbers. Do some scaling and filtering.Looks like Keysight U1282A (An EUR 750 meter) also uses HY3131 and this is also a 60k count meter. This makes it more likely that the 60k count is some feature of the HY3131, but the difference is quite curious.",
"parent_id": "8125709",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125727",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:47:23",
"content": "I strongly doubt Keysight would lie but I do wonder if there’s some processing trickery going on with the data from the HY3131",
"parent_id": "8125720",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125866",
"author": "Trent P",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T02:54:55",
"content": "The first ADC in the HY3131 is 24 bits. So, we could call this 16 million count meter. But the effective number of noise free bits is certainly less than 24. Normal practice with ADCs like this would be average of filter the raw data and to use only some of the most significant bits of the output.They are probably not quantizing the data quite as much as was assumed when the chip was called at “50,000 count” meter.",
"parent_id": "8125727",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125734",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T18:04:27",
"content": "i’m sure there’s people who love having a portable scope or one with a fully-isolated ground. but i think a lot of the demand for these, especially the cheap ones, is people who want to buy just one inexpensive tool to check all of the boxes. anyways, that was me years ago.and i found it to just be a generally infuriating user experience. after years of fighting with its sponge buttons and deeply nested menus, i happened across a youtube video of someone adjusting the x/y offset and scale by turning a dedicated knob and my mind was blown. i got a “cheap” $300 bench scope and it’s a totally different tool. i use it more often because it’s easier to use.and on the other side, i got frustrated with my cheapo meter and i bought the entry level fluke meter (which cost more than this OWON unit) and it’s just a marvel to have a physical mode select knob. not sure paying extra for a fluke was worth anything but it categorically does not have the flaws of the meter before it :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125789",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:11:06",
"content": "Having a bench scope that I enjoy I got one of those battery hand held ones as an extra. Its cheap, porta le, isolated, boots quickly … no, I would not use it for lpng measuring sessions. Bit to quickly check sometjing? Perfect.Same with multimeters. O got a bunch, from those 5€ ones to a proper fluke and even a GW1.21. If im not sure ehat to expect? Lets use the cheapy in case it gets blown up …",
"parent_id": "8125734",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125798",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:34:43",
"content": "hahaha my one complaint with the fluke is it’s still possible to forget the probes are connected for current mode when i’ve turned the knob to voltage mode. so far its protection circuit has done an admirable job and i have simply gotten lucky with the loads i’ve shorted out. knock on wood.and that’s the only time i’m worried about blowing up my meter..you’re giving me an idea…maybe i should get a $5 meter and use it exclusively for current measurements (which are much less frequent in my life)",
"parent_id": "8125789",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125831",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T22:59:09",
"content": "I was an aide at my College Auto tech course. One of my tasks was putting 3A inline fuses in the Fluke test leads. The stock plasma safe fused were $15 each and they blew out a lot as the students worked.Personally I think a different high-vis probe for current might make more sense (pun intended). Maybe even give it a different (triangle?) shaped handle to help you remember which measurement you are taking.",
"parent_id": "8125798",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125894",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T07:17:22",
"content": "I keep a third yellow banana plug to crocodile clip connected for current measurements.",
"parent_id": "8125831",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125799",
"author": "Daniel Dunn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:36:33",
"content": "I love mine, I think if I were to buy everything from scratch, I’d get one of these and a cheap pen type multimeter for convenient low precision stuff, although I wish the pen meters were just a bit more advanced.It is of course somewhat annoying to sift through menus all the time, but it’s not like I’m using it all that often, most of the measurements I need to make are just basic voltage or resistance measurements.But then again, I’ve never owned a full size bench scope, I’ve just used them a bit at work, maybe if I spent more time with them I wouldn’t want to go back.",
"parent_id": "8125734",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,552.517706
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/flow-visualization-with-schlieren-photography/
|
Flow Visualization With Schlieren Photography
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art"
] |
[
"photography",
"Schlieren",
"science",
"shimmer"
] |
The word “Schlieren” is German, and translates roughly to “streaks”. What is streaky photography, and why might you want to use it in a project? And where did this funny term come from?
Think of the heat shimmer you can see on a hot day. From the ideal gas law, we know that hot air is less dense than cold air. Because of that density difference, it has a slightly lower refractive index. A light ray passing through a density gradient faces a gradient of refractive index, so is bent, hence the shimmer.
Heat shimmer: the refractive index of the air is all over the place. Image:
“Livestock crossing the road in Queensland, Australia”
by [AlphaLemur]
German lens-makers started talking about “Schelieren” sometime in the 19
th
century, if not before. Put yourself in the shoes of an early lensmaker: you’ve spent countless hours laboriously grinding away at a glass blank until it achieves the perfect curvature. Washing it clean of grit, you hold it to the light and you see aberration — maybe spatial, maybe chromatic.
Schliere
is the least colourful word you might say, but a
schliere
is at fault. Any wonder lens makers started to develop techniques to detect the invisible flaws they called
schlieren?
When we talk of schlieren imagery today, we generally aren’t talking about inspecting glass blanks. Most of the time, we’re talking about a family of fluid-visualization techniques. We owe that nomenclature to German physicist August Toepler, who applied these optical techniques to visualizing fluid flow in the middle of the 19
th
century. There is now a whole family of schlieren imaging techniques, but at the core, they all rely on one simple fact: in a fluid like air, refractive index varies by density.
Toepler’s pioneering setup is the one we usually see in
hacks nowadays
. It is based on the
Foucault Knife Edge Test
for telescope mirrors. In Foucault’s test, a point source shines upon a concave mirror, and a razor blade is placed where the rays focus down to a point. The sensor, or Foucault’s eye, is behind the knife edge such that the returning light from the pinhole is interrupted. This has the effect of magnifying any flaws in the lens, because rays that deviate from the perfect return path will be blocked by the knife-edge and miss the eye.
[Toepler]’s single-mirror layout is quick and easy.
Toepler’s photographic setup worked the same way, save for the replacement of the eye with a photographic camera, and the use of a known-good mirror. Any density changes in the air will refract the returning rays, and cause the characteristic light and dark patterns of a schlieren photograph. That’s the “classic” schlieren we’ve covered before, but it’s not the only game in town.
Fun Schlieren Tricks
A little color can make a big difference for any kind of visualization. (Image:
“
Colored schlieren image
“
by [Settles1])
For example, a small tweak that makes a big aesthetic difference is to replace the knife edge with a colour filter. The refracted rays then take on the colour of the filter. Indeed, with a couple of colour filters you can colour-code density variations: light that passes through high-density areas can be diverted through two different colored filters on either side, and the unbent rays can pass through a third. Not only is it very pretty, the human eye has an easier time picking up on variations in colour than value. Alternatively, the light from the point source can be passed through a prism. The linear spread of the frequencies from the prism has a similar effect to a line of colour filters: distortion gets color-coded.
A bigger tweak uses two convex mirrors, in two-mirror or Z-path schlieren. This has two main advantages: one, the parallel rays between the mirrors mean the test area can be behind glass, useful for keeping sensitive optics outside of a high-speed wind tunnel. (
This is the technique NASA used to use
.) Parallel rays also ensure that the shadow of both any objects and the fluid flow are no issue; having the light source off-centre in the classic schrilien can cause artifacts from shadows. Of course you pay for these advantages: literally, in the sense that you have to buy two mirrors, and figuratively in that alignment is twice as tricky. The same colour tricks work just as well, though, and was in often use at NASA.
The z-fold allows for parallel rays in the test area.
There’s absolutely no reason that you could not substitute lenses for mirrors, in either the Z-path or classical version, and people have to good effect in both cases. Indeed, Robert Hooke’s first experiment involved visualizing the flow of air above a candle using a converging lens, which was optically equivalent to Toepler’s classic single-mirror setup. Generally speaking, mirrors are preferred for the same reason you never see an 8” refracting telescope at a star party: big mirrors are way easier to make than large lenses.
T-38s captured in flight with NASA’s AirBOS technique. Image credit : NASA.
What if you want to visualize something that doesn’t fit in front of a mirror? There are actually several options. One is background-oriented schrilien,
which we’ve covered here.
With a known background, deviations from it can be extracted using digital signal processing techniques. We showed it working with a smart phone and a printed page, but you can use any non-uniform background. NASA uses the ground: by looking down,
Airborn Background Oriented Schlieren (AirBOS)
can provide flow visualization of shockwaves and vortices around an airplane in flight.
In the days before we all had supercomputers in our pockets, large-scale flow-visualization was still possible; it just needed an optical trick. A pair of matching grids is needed: one before the lamp, creating a projection of light and dark, and a second one before the lens. Rays deflected by density variations will run into the camera grid. This was used to good effect by Gary S. Styles
to visualize HVAC airflows in 1997
Can’t find a big mirror? Try a grid.
Which gets us to another application, separate from aerospace. Wind tunnel photos are very cool, but let’s be honest: most of us are not working on supersonic drones or rocket nozzles. Of course air flow does not have to be supersonic to create density variations; subsonic wind tunnels can be equipped with schlieren optics as well.
HVAC as you’ve never seen it before. Imagine those were ABS fumes? (Image from
Styles, 1997
.)
Or maybe you are more concerned with airflow around components? To ID a hotspot on a board, IR photography is much easier. On the other hand, if your hotspot is due to insufficient cooling rather than component failure? Schlieren imagery can help you visualize the flow of air around the board, letting you optimize the cooling paths.
That’s probably going to be easiest with the background-oriented version: you can just stick the background on one side of your project’s enclosure and go to work. I think that if any of you start using schlieren imaging in your projects, this might be the killer app that will inspire you to do so.
Another place we use air? In the maker space. I have yet to see someone use schlieren photography to tweak the cooling ducts on their 3D printer, but you certainly
could
. (It has been used to see
shielding gasses in welding, for example
.) For that matter, depending what you print, proper exhaust of the fumes is a major health concern. Those fumes will show up easily, given the temperature difference, and possibly even the chemical composition changing the density of the air.
Remember that the key thing being imaged isn’t temperature difference, but density difference. Sound waves are density waves, can they be imaged in this way? Yes! The standing waves in
ultrasonic levitation rigs
are a popular target. Stroboscopic effects can be used for non-standing waves, though keep in mind that the sound pressure level is the inverse of frequency, so audible frequencies
may not be practical if you like your eardrums.
Image from [wolfgang]’s
excellent Harvard Physics demo video.
Sugar water (from the disolving cube) is higher in density than pure water. Image from Shell Historical Film Archive.
Schlieren photography isn’t limited to air. Density variations in liquids and solids are game, too. Want to see how multiple solutions of varying density or tempeature are mixing? Schlieren imaging has you covered. Watch convection in a water tank? Or, if you happen to be making lenses, you could go right back to basics and use one of the schlieren techniques discussed here to help you make them perfect.
The real reason I’m writing about these techniques aren’t the varied applications I hope you hackers can put them to: it’s an excuse to collect all the pretty pictures of flow visualization I can cram into this article. So if you read this and thought “I have no practical reason to use this technique, but it does seem cool” – great! We’re in the same boat. Let’s make some pretty pictures. It still counts as a hack.
| 9
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125681",
"author": "Meek the Geek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T14:44:29",
"content": "After seeing the video seeing the invisible by Physics explainedhttps://youtu.be/GCloRHSyaGU?si=WP0jMG2irE3eJ35GI had to try building the setup for our Physics lab as a demonstration. I will try the colour filteridea, but the PRISM in fron of the light source gets tried out today.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125701",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:11:53",
"content": "That candle photo reminds me first digital camera I was using. It was early 2000 and whenever there was a photo containing candle there was a vertical bright line from flame to top of the picture. I am guessing there was no infra red filter and thanks to aliasing you could see was hot air going up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125804",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:54:18",
"content": "You’re not talking about CCD smearing, are you?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw9wBcVYQzA",
"parent_id": "8125701",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126103",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:44:46",
"content": "Thanks – this was probably this.Although I looked and example images and see some differences (line was going only up). Could be my memory fails a bit. Once I find that camera will try to replicate that effect with two candles (one behind some object) to confirm.Thanks again!",
"parent_id": "8125804",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125703",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:13:33",
"content": "I think by far the cheapest way to get a Schlieren image (of itself) is to open the door of a parked car on a hot day and look at the top edge where the light falls in. Some of the nearby shadow gets refracted-in showing the flow of hot air out of the car.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125872",
"author": "Isaac Wingfield",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T03:41:50",
"content": "The Eidophor television projector used Schlieren optics to produce very large screen images (45 foot diagonal) with excellent sharpness and color fidelity (takes three Schlieren setups for color). You just add a 15 kilowatt xenon short arc lamp for a light source and some dichroic filters to get RGB. Oh, and a desk-sized box of electronics and a diffusion pump vacuum system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126089",
"author": "Garrett",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:54:05",
"content": "The T-34s in that photo are definitely T-38s.(although now I want to see T-34s)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126245",
"author": "Tom Nardi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T05:43:10",
"content": "Fixed. If you’re close enough to see the heat coming off of a T-34 — you’re probably going to have a bad time.",
"parent_id": "8126089",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126115",
"author": "Dole Hahmer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T19:05:09",
"content": "A very easy way to do a similar effect is to do the same thing about halfway between a projector and the wall you’re projecting on. This produces a shadowgraph, but it’s essentially the same phenomenon. Give it a try!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.424173
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/a-constant-fraction-discriminator-for-sub-nanosecond-timing/
|
A Constant-Fraction Discriminator For Sub-Nanosecond Timing
|
Aaron Beckendorf
|
[
"hardware"
] |
[
"constant fraction discriminator",
"pulse",
"signal processing"
] |
Detecting a signal pulse is usually basic electronics, but you start to find more complications when you need to time the signal’s arrival in the picoseconds domain. These include the time-walk effect: if your circuit compares the input with a set threshold, a stronger signal will cross the threshold faster than a weaker signal arriving at the same time, so stronger signals seem to arrive faster. A constant-fraction discriminator solves this by triggering at a constant fraction of the signal pulse, and [Michael Wiebusch] recently presented a
hacker-friendly implementation
of the design (
open-access paper
).
A constant-fraction discriminator splits the input signal into two components, inverts one component and attenuates it, and delays the other component by a predetermined amount. The sum of these components always crosses zero at a fixed fraction of the original pulse. Instead of checking for a voltage threshold, the processing circuitry detects this zero-crossing. Unfortunately, these circuits tend to require very fast (read “expensive”) operational amplifiers.
This is where [Michael]’s design shines: it uses only a few cheap integrated circuits and transistors, some resistors and capacitors, a length of coaxial line as a delay, and absolutely no op-amps. This circuit has remarkable precision, with a timing standard deviation of 60 picoseconds. The only downside is that the circuit has to be designed to work with a particular signal pulse length, but the basic design should be widely adaptable for different pulses.
[Michael] designed this circuit for a gamma-ray spectrometer, of which
we’ve seen
a
few examples
before. In a spectrometer, the discriminator would process signals from
photomultiplier tubes
or
scintillators
, such as we’ve covered before.
| 3
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125637",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:09:01",
"content": "Proper component matching and layout for consistent timing and impedance matching to avoid reflections in delay line. A clean source would work better, maybe some analog clamping or RC differentiators?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125664",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:40:22",
"content": "The paper does describe 50 ohm matching.",
"parent_id": "8125637",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125670",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:58:31",
"content": "That’s pretty clever and neat. And a bit of genius to use commodity LVDS receivers for the detectors.One real-world application that isn’t mentioned in the paper is positron emission tomography (PET) imaging: Here, a positron annihilation event is detected by the coincidence of the two 511 keV gamma rays that are emitted — this tells you the event happened somewhere along the line between the two detectors that registered the event. In PET scanners, many thousands of detectors are used, so many millions of such possible pairs of detectors (and lines of response) exist.While simply thedetectionof the two gammas is sufficient to say the event occurred, you want to get the time window as small as possible to ensure that the two detection events came from the same positron decay, and not two separate events that happen to be in the same detection window (producing a false positive).Narrow time windows decreases the false positive rate, and also allows you to increase the activity of the source, to decease image acquisition time and improve counting statistics (=signal to noise ratio).What’s really cool is when you can get sub-nanosecond time discrimination: Now you can tellwherealong that detection line the event happened, which adds additional information to the image reconstruction process, further improving image quality. In practice, centimeter-scale (30-60 ps) localization of the event along the line of response is possible, dramatically improving the image quality over previous systems that could discriminate only to nanoseconds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.559399
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/3d-printed-tpu-bellows-with-pla-interface-layers/
|
3D Printed TPU Bellows With PLA Interface Layers
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"bellows",
"TPU"
] |
Of all FDM filament types, flexible ones such as TPU invite a whole new way of thinking, as well as applications. Case in point the
TPU-based bellows
that the [Functional Part Friday] channel on YouTube recently demonstrated.
The idea is quite straightforward: you print TPU and PLA in alternating layers, making sure that the TPU is connected to its previous layer in an alternating fashion. After printing, you peel the PLA and TPU apart, remove the PLA layers and presto, you got yourself bellows.
There were some issues along the way, of course. Case in point the differences between TPU from different brands (Sainsmart, Sunlu) that caused some headaches, and most of all the incompatibility between the Bambu Lab AMS and TPU that led to incredibly brittle TPU prints. This required bypassing the feed mechanism in the AMS, which subsequently went down a rabbit hole of preventing the PTFE tube from getting sucked into the AMS. Being able to print TPU & PLA at the same time also requires a printer with two independent extruders like the Bambu Lab H2D used here, as both materials do not mix in any way. Great news for H2D and IDEX printer owners, of course.
As for practical applications for bellows, beyond printing your own 1900s-era camera, accordion or hand air bellows, you can also create lathe way covers and so on.
| 22
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125583",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:29:43",
"content": "Great idea for all those soft robot actuators!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125614",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T10:08:11",
"content": "Those sound like enclosed volumes of PLA. With channels in the PLA support, can it be rinsed out?https://www.researchgate.net/post/In_which_green_solvents_does_PLA_dissolve_easily_and_efficientlysounds almost plausible",
"parent_id": "8125583",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125621",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T10:54:45",
"content": "Maybe printing only thin strips of PLA for support will help, then you can crush them and get them out through small holes. Or make a “closeable” actuators, made from two parts.",
"parent_id": "8125614",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125641",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:25:41",
"content": "Does TPU work with PVA?",
"parent_id": "8125621",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128810",
"author": "Em",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T14:49:22",
"content": "PVA dissolves in water, but TPU absorbs water :( so not ideal",
"parent_id": "8125641",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128808",
"author": "Em",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T14:48:25",
"content": "How do you think they should seal the parts together? I feel like the seams would be weak and cause leaks :(",
"parent_id": "8125621",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125636",
"author": "Mike Brown",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:07:18",
"content": "I was able to achieve a similar part without dual nozzles or the use of PLA. Designed a shock boot cover out of TPU, printing it in “VASE Mode” (Prusa Slicer, ie single wall thickness). The caveat being the top could not have an overhang.It worked perfectly right off the printer, no post processing or waste. VERY flexible l, where the boot could be compress to near flat, then rebound to its native shape.Thanks for posting the video – a different approach for a different application.",
"parent_id": "8125583",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128812",
"author": "Em",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T14:51:03",
"content": "did you print the folds horizontally like in the video? not sure how you would be able to achieve that without PLA layers (but I would love to know!)",
"parent_id": "8125636",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125618",
"author": "krf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T10:32:49",
"content": "I wonder if water soluble filament like PVA could be used instead of PLA. Won’t be able to verify this anyway with P1S, but interesting project for the future.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125888",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T06:24:45",
"content": "If you’d ever used PVA, then you’d know the answer. Have a professional cleaning station along with an Ultimaker at work – nightmare process to dissolve and clean up the messy gunk. I’d rather cut my arm off with a pen knife.",
"parent_id": "8125618",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128614",
"author": "Em",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T23:30:13",
"content": "TPU absorbs water so I wouldn’t recommend PVA!",
"parent_id": "8125618",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125629",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T11:39:09",
"content": "Glad there’s a definition else I was going to print out some AI.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125642",
"author": "Mojo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:28:37",
"content": "Just in time. I was looking for a solution for protecting the bearing rods on my new cnc machine. Perhaps a custom bellow of TPU might work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125677",
"author": "Benjamin Goldberg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T14:21:49",
"content": "Time to print an accordion!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126044",
"author": "ethzero",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:49:32",
"content": "Weird Al would be proud.",
"parent_id": "8125677",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125682",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T14:47:14",
"content": "The geometry of the “conventional” bellows replicated here in 3D printing lends itself to manual fabrication with folds and cuts and seams. But 3D printing allows all sorts of novel geometries — It seems boring and unimaginative simply to replicate a shape that was originally chosen largely for ease of manual fabrication and limitations of the materials used.So, this opens a whole new space for fabrication of functional compliant enclosures. I look forward to seeing what people’s imaginations (or generative design or AI minions) can come up with.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125850",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T00:29:04",
"content": "Most of the geometry constraint comes from needing to fold down and collapse. There’s a lot of bellows components out there that are made in other ways than with sewn seams (some are casted for instance) and they use the same geometry, because it’s pretty ideal.",
"parent_id": "8125682",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125865",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T02:39:25",
"content": "Is it ideal though? For example, the volume ratio from full-extended to fully-compressed is pretty awful — lots of dead volume in that core space. Would there be other fold geometries that would satisfy that criterion better? (yes, there are) What are the tradeoffs?It’s an interesting problem space to explore.",
"parent_id": "8125850",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128615",
"author": "Em",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T23:31:03",
"content": "Do you have any better fold geometries in mind?",
"parent_id": "8125865",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125705",
"author": "Zombocom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:17:06",
"content": "Would be cool for those old field cameras",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125776",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:46:11",
"content": "As mentioned in the last paragraph.Just be sure not to use transparent TPU…Black PLA is transparent in the near infrared. If that’s true for TPU too, you’ll want to consider that for camera use (i.e., don’t use an near infrared-sensitive detector).",
"parent_id": "8125705",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125826",
"author": "Ronnie",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T22:25:24",
"content": "Nice stuff for protecting my lathe & mill from chips (both types ;-) ). thx for the tip !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.754338
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/hackaday-podcast-episode-320-a-lot-of-cool-3d-printing-diy-penicillin-and-an-optical-twofer/
|
Hackaday Podcast Episode 320: A Lot Of Cool 3D Printing, DIY Penicillin, And An Optical Twofer
|
Kristina Panos
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] |
[
"Hackaday Podcast"
] |
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the universe to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
In Hackaday news,
the 2025 Pet Hacks Contest
rolls on. You have until June 10th to show us what you’ve got, so head over to Hackaday.IO and get started today!
On What’s That Sound, Kristina actually got it this time, although she couldn’t quite muster the correct name for it, however at Hackaday we’ll be calling it the “glassophone” from now on. Congratulations to [disaster_recovered] who fared better and wins a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with a complete and completely-documented wireless USB autopsy. We take a look at a lovely 3D-printed downspout, some DIY penicillin, and a jellybean iMac that’s hiding a modern PC. Finally, we explore a really cool 3D printing technology, and ask what happened to typing ‘www.’.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in
DRM-free MP3
and savor at your leisure.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 320 Show Notes:
News:
The Pet Hacks Challenge rolls on!
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [disaster_recovered] for the glass armonica pick!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Wireless USB Autopsy
3D Printed Downspout Makes Life Just A Little Nicer
DIY Penicillin
Jellybean Mac Hides Modern PC
Liquid Silicone 3D Printing Is No Joke
Creative PCB Business Cards Are Sure To Make An Impression
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
3D Printed TPU Bellows With PLA Interface Layers
Germany’s Cabinentaxi: The Double-Sided Monorail That Wasn’t Meant To Be
PCB Renewal Aims To Make Old Boards Useful Again
Kristina’s Picks:
A Neat E-Paper Digit Clock (or Four)
All-Band Radio Records Signals, Plays MP3s
3D Printed Spirograph Makes Art Out Of Walnut
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Optical Contact Bonding: Where The Macro Meets The Molecular
Flow Visualization With Schlieren Photography
What Happened To WWW.?
| 0
| 0
|
[] | 1,760,371,552.601848
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/oscilloscope-digital-storage-1990s-style/
|
Oscilloscope Digital Storage, 1990s Style
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"analog shift register",
"oscilloscope",
"tektronix"
] |
You’re designing an oscilloscope with modest storage — only 15,000 samples per channel. However, the sample rate is at 5 Gs/s, and you have to store all four channels at that speed and depth. While there is a bit of a challenge implied, this is quite doable using today’s technology. But what about in the 1990s when
the Tektronix TDS 684B
appeared on the market? [Tom Verbure] wondered how it was able to do such a thing. He found out, and since he wrote it up, now you can find out, too.
Inside the scope, there are two PCBs. There’s a CPU board, of course. But there’s not enough memory there to account for the scope’s capability. That much high-speed memory would have been tough in those days, anyway. The memory is actually on the analog board along with the inputs and digitizers. That should be a clue.
The secret is the ADG286D from National Semiconductor. While we can’t find any info on the chip, it appears to be an analog shift register, something all the rage at the time. These chips often appeared in audio special effect units because they could delay an analog signal easily.
In practice, the device worked by charging a capacitor to an input signal and then, using a clock, dumping each capacitor into the next one until the last capacitor produced the delayed output. Like any delay line, you could feed the output to the input and have a working memory device.
The scope would push samples into the memory at high speed. Then the CPU could shift them back out on a much slower clock. A clever design and [Tom] gives us a great glimpse inside a state-of-the-art 1990s-era scope.
While we haven’t seen the ADG286D before, we have looked at
analog shift registers
, if you want to learn more.
| 13
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126045",
"author": "MattAtHazmat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:54:00",
"content": "Great series of scopes- I think they are the last Tek series that were not Windows based- And many in the series could get a memory upgrade by the FAE running a disk- Had to buy this from Tek about (the year) 2000 on a TDS784C. No hardware changes- just enabling the built in hardware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126061",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:29:56",
"content": "yes, the CCD captured the analog signal at high speed allowing the then-slow ADCs to convert at a more leisurely pace. my old 2430 worked that way to wit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126069",
"author": "Adrian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:53:05",
"content": "FISO (fast in, slow out) seems to be the magical search term. There are a few related patents from Tektronix, for example US4648072A. The switch matrix and phase shifted clocks could explain the interleaving of samples. The pattern repeating every ~195 samples could be varying RDSon of the different switching paths.",
"parent_id": "8126061",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126096",
"author": "Tom Verbeure",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:18:20",
"content": "Nice! I wish I had known about the FISO magical search term before writing the blog post. It uncovers a lot of additional info including other patents, such as US6091619A.",
"parent_id": "8126069",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126209",
"author": "K",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:52:30",
"content": "I was in the advanced development group at Tek when the FISO was being developed and that was well after the 2430. The FISO part was used in Tek scopes for 30 years. And was only recently retired. It made Tek a lot of money.",
"parent_id": "8126061",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126077",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:17:12",
"content": "oooh, didn’t know my bench scope had that feature!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126092",
"author": "Tom Verbeure",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:11:14",
"content": "[Tom Verbure] : you dropped an ‘e’ !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126100",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:32:35",
"content": "What makes you so certain?;-)",
"parent_id": "8126092",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126105",
"author": "Tom Verbeure",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:44:51",
"content": "Not to brag, but I’m kind of a world authority on the subject!",
"parent_id": "8126100",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126160",
"author": "mark999",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T22:20:34",
"content": "The first high speed digitizers I’m aware of used basically a CRT, but using a diode array instead of phosphor, and scanning the array with another electron beam. Those could reach at least 100GS/s (tek 7912AD), though for only a very limited number of samples.I wonder what’s used nowadays for the very top-of-the-line scopes – are they able to directly convert to digital and store, or do they once again have something magical that allows captures to exceed the memory bandwidth?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126292",
"author": "MattAtHazmat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T11:39:55",
"content": "I’ve used one of that (similar) series, the 7250 (rebranded French Intertechnique IN7000). Quite finicky, and the horizontal scale ended up really non-linear. If any of the CRTs used in acquisition failed, you were SoL. Ours was went out of calibration so there was a hand drawn horizontal scale to override the graticule marks on the CRT. This was the early 90’s and absolutely NO spare parts existed.The 7250 was Huge and HEAVY (132 pounds).",
"parent_id": "8126160",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126339",
"author": "Tim Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T16:43:29",
"content": "Have heard that modern ones use, in addition to very high speed digitizers, a multi-band approach. I recall seeing waveguide in one of Shariar’s teardown vids.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3w_EWgGQukmight be one?",
"parent_id": "8126160",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126416",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T22:51:26",
"content": "Between this HaD article, and another recent one on a modernized GPIB adapter, it’s like someone is trying to inspire me to restore my TDS 540.Although I have no idea whether my ‘scope is performing similar tricks to sample signals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.693572
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/this-week-in-security-encrypted-messaging-nsos-judgement-and-ai-cve-ddos/
|
This Week In Security: Encrypted Messaging, NSO’s Judgement, And AI CVE DDoS
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] |
[
"ai",
"CVEs",
"supply chain attack",
"This Week in Security"
] |
Cryptographic messaging has been in the news a lot recently. Like
the formal audit of WhatsApp
(
the actual PDF
). And the results are good. There are some minor potential problems that the audit highlights, but they are of questionable real-world impact. The most consequential is how easy it is to add additional members to a group chat. Or to put it another way, there are no cryptographic guarantees associated with adding a new user to a group.
The good news is that WhatsApp groups don’t allow new members to read previous messages. So a user getting added to a group doesn’t reveal historic messages. But a user added without being noticed can snoop on future messages. There’s an obvious question, as to how this is a weakness. Isn’t it redundant, since anyone with the permission to add someone to a group, can already read the messages from that group?
That’s where the lack of cryptography comes in. To put it simply, the WhatsApp servers could add users to groups, even if none of the existing users actually requested the addition. It’s not a vulnerability per se, but definitely a design choice to keep in mind. Keep an eye on the members in your groups, just in case.
The Signal We Have at Home
The TeleMessage app has been pulled from availability, after
it was used to compromise Signal communications of US government officials
. There’s political hay to be made out of the current administration’s use and potential misuse of Signal, but the political angle isn’t what we’re here for. The TeleMessage client is Signal compatible, but adds message archiving features. Government officials and financial companies were using this alternative client, likely in order to comply with message retention laws.
While it’s possible to do long term message retention securely, TeleMessage was not doing this particularly well. The messages are stripped of their end-to-end encryption in the client, before being sent to the archiving server. It’s not clear exactly how, but those messages were accessed by a hacker. This nicely demonstrates the inherent tension between the need for transparent archiving as required by the US government for internal communications, and the need for end-to-end encryption.
The NSO Judgement
WhatsApp is in the news for another reason, this time
winning a legal judgement against NSO Group
for their Pegasus spyware. The
$167 Million in damages casts real doubt
on the idea that NSO has immunity to develop and deploy malware, simply because it’s doing so for governments. This case is likely to be appealed, and higher courts may have a different opinion on this key legal question, so hold on. Regardless, the era of NSO’s nearly unrestricted actions is probably over. They aren’t the only group operating in this grey legal space, and the other “legal” spyware/malware vendors are sure to be paying attention to this ruling as well.
The $5 Wrench
In reality,
the weak point of any cryptography scheme is the humans using it
. We’re beginning to see real world re-enactments of
the famous XKCD $5 wrench
, that can defeat even 4096-bit RSA encryption. In this case, it’s the application of old crime techniques to new technology like cryptocurrency. To quote Ars Technica:
We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution
The flashy stories involve kidnapping and torture, but let’s not forget that the most common low-tech approach is simple deception. Whether you call it the art of the con, or social engineering, this is still the most likely way to lose your savings, whether it’s conventional or a cryptocurrency.
The SonicWall N-day
WatchTowr is back with
yet another reverse-engineered vulnerability
. More precisely, it’s two CVEs that are being chained together to achieve pre-auth Remote Code Execution (RCE) on SonicWall appliances. This exploit chain has been patched, but not everyone has updated, and the vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild.
The first vulnerability at play is actually from last year, and is in Apache’s
mod_rewrite
module. This module is widely used to map URLs to source files, and it has a filename confusion issue where a url-encoded question mark in the path can break the mapping to the final filesystem path. A second issue is that when
DocumentRoot
is specified, instances of
RewriteRule
take on a weird dual-meaning. The filesystem target refers to the location inside
DocumentRoot
, but it first checks for that location in the filesystem root itself. This was fixed in Apache nearly a year ago, but it takes time for patches to roll out.
SonicWall was using a rewrite rule to serve CSS files, and the regex used to match those files is just flexible enough to be abused for arbitrary file read.
/mnt/ram/var/log/httpd.log%3f.1.1.1.1a-1.css
matches that rule, but includes the url-encoded question mark, and matches a location on the root filesystem. There are other, more interesting files to access, like the
temp.db
SQLite database, which contains session keys for the currently logged in users.
The other half of this attack is a really clever command injection using one of the diagnostic tools included in the SonicWall interface.
Traceroute6
is straightforward, running a traceroute6 command and returning the results. It’s also got good data sanitization, blocking all of the easy ways to break out of the
traceroute
command and execute some arbitrary code. The weakness is that while this sanitization adds backslashes to escape quotes and other special symbols, it stores the result in a fixed-length result buffer. If the result of this escaping process overflows the result buffer, it writes over the null terminator and into the buffer that holds the original command before it’s sanitized. This overflow is repeated when the command is run, and with some careful crafting, this results in escaping the sanitization and including arbitrary commands. Clever.
The AI CVE DDoS
[Daniel Stenberg], lead developer of curl, is putting his foot down
. We’ve talked about this before, even chatting with Daniel about the issue when
we had him on FLOSS Weekly
. Curl’s bug bounty project has attracted quite a few ambitious people, that don’t actually have the skills to find vulnerabilities in the curl codebase. Instead, these amateur security researchers are using LLMs to “find vulnerabilities”. Spoiler, LLMs aren’t yet capable of this task. But LLMs are capable of writing
fake vulnerability reports that look very convincing at first read
. The game is usually revealed when the project asks a question, and the fake researcher feeds the LLM response back into the bug report.
This trend hasn’t slowed, and the curl project is now
viewing the AI generated vulnerability reports as a form of DDoS
. In response, the curl Hackerone bounty program will soon ask a question with every entry: “Did you use an AI to find the problem or generate this submission?” An affirmative answer won’t automatically disqualify the report, but it definitely puts the burden on the reporter to demonstrate that the flaw is real and wasn’t hallucinated. Additionally, “AI slop” reports will result in permanent bans for the reporter.
It’s good to see that not all AI content is completely disallowed, as it’s very likely that LLMs
will
be involved in finding and describing vulnerabilities before long. Just not in this naive way, where a single prompt results in a vulnerability find and generates a patch that doesn’t even apply. Ironically, one of the tells of an AI generated report is that it’s too perfect, particularly for someone’s first report. AI is still the hot new thing, so this issue likely isn’t going away any time soon.
Bits and Bytes
A supply chain attack has
been triggered against several hundred Magento e-commerce sites
, via at least three software vendors distributing malicious code. One of the very odd elements to this story is that it appears this malicious code has been incubating for six years, and only recently invoked for malicious behavior.
On the WordPress side of the fence,
the Ottokit plugin was updated last month to fix a critical vulnerability
. That update was force pushed to the majority of WordPress sites running that plugin, but that hasn’t stopped threat actors from attempting to use the exploit, with
the first attempts coming just an hour and a half after disclosure
.
It turns out
it’s probably not a great idea to allow control codes as part of file names
. Portswigger has a report of a couple ways VS Code can do the wrong thing with such filenames.
And finally, this story comes with a disclaimer: Your author is part of Meshtastic Solutions and the Meshtastic project. We’ve talked about Meshtastic a few times here on Hackaday, and would be remiss not to point out
CVE-2025-24797
. This buffer overflow could theoretically result in RCE on the node itself. I’ve seen at least one suggestion that this is a wormable vulnerability, which may be technically true, but seems quite impractical in practice. Upgrade your nodes to at least release 2.6.2 to get the fix.
| 3
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8126162",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T22:47:07",
"content": "This nicely demonstrates the inherent tension between the need for transparent archiving as required by the US government for internal communications, and the need for end-to-end encryption.How does this demonstrate anything?! What tension? There is none.Just use pup-key-crypto to encrypt the to-be-archived messages before they are send to the server.What am I missing?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126396",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T19:41:57",
"content": "You are missing the transition between archived but private, FOIA available, and actually public.Fully open and accessible is a nice fantasy, like capitalism or communism are, but they all get ruined whenever people are involved.The only way to make a system that humans can’t abuse it to make it inaccessible to humans.",
"parent_id": "8126162",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126402",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T20:43:53",
"content": "You are missing the transition between archived but private, FOIA available, and actually public.Can you elaborate?Any private messenger (eg. WhatsApp, Signal, Threema) could offer the option to do a backup of every message. Only an external server and a public key would be required. The received and decrypted message would just be re-encrypted with the user’s pup-key and saved on the server.In the context of a government all users would get their own public key while the private keys are securely stored (offline). Whenever there’s eg. a FOIA request the required stored messages can be decrypted and made completely public or just shown to a limited audience(?). Selectable by time/date/receiver because that metadata still exist, sender could be added additionallyFully open and accessible is a nice fantasy, like capitalism or communism are, but they all get ruined whenever people are involved.Fully open and accessible?! What?Capitalism is and never was “a nice fantasy”. A working open self regulating free market is one.Since we have those different terms, capitalism & free market (& more), I see capitalism’s core principles as A) infinite private ownership (capital, etc.) and B) maximum profit being the only goal.Those two principles alone incentives some of the worst human behaviors.",
"parent_id": "8126396",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,552.797165
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/triggering-lightning-and-safely-guiding-it-using-a-drone/
|
Triggering Lightning And Safely Guiding It Using A Drone
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"drone hacks",
"Science"
] |
[
"drone",
"lightning"
] |
Every year lightning strikes cause a lot of damage — with the high-voltage discharges being a major risk to buildings, infrastructure, and the continued existence of squishy bags of mostly salty water. While some ways exist to reduce their impact such as lightning rods, these passive systems can only be deployed in select locations and cannot prevent the build-up of the charge that leads up to the plasma discharge event. But the
drone-based system recently tested
by Japan’s NTT
,
the world’s fourth largest telecommunications company, could provide a more proactive solution.
The idea is pretty simple: fly a drone that is protected by a specially designed metal cage close to a thundercloud with a conductive tether leading back to the ground. By providing a very short path to ground, the built-up charge in said cloud will readily discharge into this cage and from there back to the ground.
To test this idea, NTT researchers took commercial drones fitted with such a protective cage and exposed them to artificial lightning. The drones turned out to be fine up to 150 kA which is five times more than natural lightning. Afterwards the full system was tested with a real thunderstorm, during which the drone took a hit and kept flying, although the protective cage partially melted.
Expanding on this experiment, NTT imagines that a system like this could protect cities and sensitive areas, and possibly even use and store the thus captured energy rather than just leading it to ground. While this latter idea would need some seriously effective charging technologies, the idea of proactively discharging thunderclouds is perhaps not so crazy. We would need to see someone run the numbers on the potential effectiveness, of course, but we are all in favor of (safe) lightning experiments like this.
If you’re wondering why channeling lightning away from critical infrastructure is such a big deal,
you may want to read up on Apollo 12
.
| 43
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125953",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T11:55:27",
"content": "The drones turned out to be fine up to 150 kA which is five times more than natural lightningThat means natural lightning is 30kA. I always imagined it to be a lot more, for whatever reason. Something like hundreds of thousands of A",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125957",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:16:12",
"content": "it’s the voltage the problem, not the current",
"parent_id": "8125953",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125991",
"author": "SlowBro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:02:18",
"content": "I always thought it was the wattage. One point twenty-one gigawatts!!",
"parent_id": "8125957",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126259",
"author": "lj",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T07:10:56",
"content": "Jiggawatts!",
"parent_id": "8125991",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126023",
"author": "Leithoa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:45:09",
"content": "What? No!You need both to be a problem.It’s the difference between standing in lake Erie and standing under Niagara falls.",
"parent_id": "8125957",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125973",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:05:31",
"content": "A natural lightning is 1.21GW according to a “documentary” on time travel I’ve watched on TV.",
"parent_id": "8125953",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125992",
"author": "SlowBro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:03:09",
"content": "Great Scott!",
"parent_id": "8125973",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126189",
"author": "McFortner",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:47:29",
"content": "That’s heavy, man.",
"parent_id": "8125992",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125998",
"author": "John Benham",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:14:46",
"content": "From what I can recall from a very serious dive I did into the literature back into the 80s, the highest recorded discharge at that time was around 450kA. However the current was inferred from the residual magnetization created in samples placed adjacent to the engineered discharge path. I’m not sure if that measurement method has stood the test of time, as it’s basis always sounded a bit iffy to me.Also I remember that one of the early ’70s ESA geomagnetic measurement satellites had to be hauled off the stack at Canaveral and de-gaussed yet again after the gantry took a lightning hit a few hours before launch, generating some inter-organizational friction in the process.",
"parent_id": "8125953",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126203",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:37:54",
"content": "30,000 amps at that voltage is a cosmic amount of power. Taking 30 kiloamps and the average voltage of 300 million gives us 9e+12 Watts, which even to me seems like it’s probably too much and one of the figures is wrong",
"parent_id": "8125953",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125955",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:14:05",
"content": "They’ve been doing it for decades with what are effectively model rockets. Kennedy Space Center had a program not only for mitigation, but a scientific study of lightning. There are also programs to use moderately powerful lasers to create an ion channel in the atmosphere in order to ground out charge potentials; creating artificial plasma streamers, precursors in the formation of a bolt of lightning.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125963",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:23:11",
"content": "Rockets are single use only (but pretty cheap, only some paper, propellant and cheap clay nozzle). This drone could survive many hits and can fly until the storm ends.",
"parent_id": "8125955",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126002",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:21:00",
"content": "This makes me wonder about a helium balloon flying above the cloud layer so the balloon itself doesn’t have to withstand the strike. That probably doesn’t work where I live, because the thundercloud tops are in the 20,000 meter range, but in a lot of places the majority of the weather seems to happen within 8000 meters of ground level.",
"parent_id": "8125963",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126009",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:29:13",
"content": "once the cable gets iced it will drop.",
"parent_id": "8126002",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126029",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:49:09",
"content": "Run a current in the cable to keep it hot. Maybe even have some sort of super-capacitor bank to gather a small fraction of the energy when lightning does hit it, and then release this energy over time along a higher resistance wire (paralleled to the low resistance lightning conductor cable) to keep the thing above 0 celsius.",
"parent_id": "8126009",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126074",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:09:49",
"content": "You have independently reinvented “barrage balloons” and all of the inherent hazards they cause for airplanes.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon",
"parent_id": "8126002",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126079",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:19:33",
"content": "On the down side, their demo unit melted on the first try. And then you’re defenseless for the rest of the storm.Disposable model rocket engines cost a few dollars each and won’t leave you stranded if the storm exceeds the drone’s EM defenses.",
"parent_id": "8125963",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126204",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:41:58",
"content": "Would be interesting to see the engineering process which makes a drone which can fly for a full storm and not melt down or get battered to pieces by winds… Also whether there are environmental effects to consider when discharging all that energy from the troposphere down a wire in one spot instead of letting nature play out",
"parent_id": "8125963",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126206",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:44:43",
"content": "Also: what gauge copper wire do you need to repeatedly withstand that amperage over that distance? Is the wire re-usable, or does it vaporize after each strike?",
"parent_id": "8125963",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126004",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:24:54",
"content": "I remember an article posted here where some Russians were doing it with a kite.They connected the ground end to the HV output of a small TV in order to attract the lightning, and that apparently works.IIRC, they mentioned that the UV emitted at the ground point of the strike was strong enough to peel the paint off of some of their equipment.UV strong enough to peel paint. That’s a little scary.",
"parent_id": "8125955",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126483",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T05:53:08",
"content": "Martin Uman did great workhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Umanhttp://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/general.html#11https://web.archive.org/web/20131219194554/http://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/Sterling Colegate fired rockets into tornadoes to help the research of Bernard Vonnegut—Kurt’s older brother:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=afhKGEFyat4https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_Colgate",
"parent_id": "8125955",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125959",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:18:30",
"content": "Attempting to capture the energy is futile; while the instantaneous power is very high, the length is very short and strikes are very infrequent, so the energy power strike and average energy over a long time (days to weeks) is very low.Google says a strike can be between 0.2 and 7 GJ; the high end of that translates to 2MWh, which can power an average household for about 2 months. Realistically, only a small portion of that energy can be captured, and the device to do so would be extremely expensive, since only capacitors could possibly store that energy fast enough.Putting down a few solar panels would be way cheaper for the same power output.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125967",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:48:44",
"content": "To be fair, solar panels don’t usually work well in a thunderstorm.",
"parent_id": "8125959",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126030",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:49:28",
"content": "And, I suspect, super terrible at absorbing a lightning strike.",
"parent_id": "8125967",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125974",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:06:08",
"content": "Your thinking is stuck inside the box. Why try to capture it electrically? As a plasma discharge, it is very hot. If that heat could be used to expand some fluid, and that expanding fluid could be channeled through one or more turbines, the energy could be extracted over a longer period of time (or over a much larger surface area) mechanically, then converted to electricity (or compressed air, or even back to heat, but at a lower temperature for a longer duration).",
"parent_id": "8125959",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125983",
"author": "Wilbur Andrews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:41:47",
"content": "The question then becomes how to get that plasma discharges heat to your turbine effectively, you would need to be in the ‘eye’ of the storm so to speak to get the max effect on the turbine. If you could aly out where the storms go on a regular basis, then you could build facilities in those areas but that’s alot of if’s and but’s to overcome.",
"parent_id": "8125974",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126207",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:47:25",
"content": "Problems I see:1. If it is still a plasma discharge, then it is vaporizing some part of the apparatus and thus the thing isn’t reusable. Otherwise it would be current.2. How do you efficiently transfer heat from a plasma discharge into a liquid if it is a mile long and nearly vertical? That’s going to be a difficult water jacket to design, or else it’s only going to capture a teeny tiny fraction of the heat",
"parent_id": "8125974",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126008",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:27:05",
"content": "This assumes you’re capturing lightning strikes. If your system is up there in the cloud before the voltage rises high enough to exceed the breakdown voltage of air, it could run off the lower voltage difference over a longer time: maybe a very large number of cloud to cloud discharges rather than one big cloud to ground strike.All the research I’ve seen on this previously has been on initiating single cloud to ground strikes, but the reasoning behind sharp lightning rods on buildings was that they were dissipative to prevent the strike ever happening in the first place, and that might be a more useful way to try to harvest power.Or put a generator on the pendulum of a Franklin’s Bells setup! (j/k I’ve built these and unless you had thousands of them you’re not going to get anything usable. But there is a significant amount of electron flow.)",
"parent_id": "8125959",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126128",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T19:55:17",
"content": "But there is a significant amount of electron flowI do not think so:“a lightning bolt is typically around 15 C, although for large bolts this can be up to 350 C” –https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb#In_everyday_termsThe number of electrons in a lightening strike is much less than the typical alkaline AA battery from being fully charged to discharged (5000 C ≈ 1400 mA⋅h). The big difference between a battery and a lightening strike is the potential energy released from traveling high up in the atmosphere to ground and we have no way to capture that.",
"parent_id": "8126008",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126208",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:50:00",
"content": "This also assumes the voltage differential is between the cloud and the ground. The differential goes all the way up to space. Most of lightning is above the cloud. In some theories, the cloud is kind of like a huge version this drone in that it is giving that voltage differential a low-resistance path to ground.",
"parent_id": "8126008",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126024",
"author": "Blake HANNAFORD",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:45:54",
"content": "Hey! This article needs to cite the OG lighting catcher Ben Franklin! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_experiment)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126041",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:36:31",
"content": "Could you send those Gigajoules into a big water tank and then heat your house for a couple weeks off the hot water?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126210",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:54:28",
"content": "Only if you could prevent those joules from radiating away over however many thousands of meters it travels before it gets to ground, blasting out heat and light and sound before it even reaches the drone. But even the bit that reaches the ground is enough to fuse a fairly impressive amount of sand into glass, so it might heat water up for a while. Not a couple weeks worth.And the short time over which the energy is applied is a problem. It’s kind of why pulsed lasers are useful. If you pour that much energy into water that fast, it is likely to ablate away a tiny amount of the top layer and all your energy disappears in an explosion of steam, leaving very little which actually soaks into the bulk mass and warms it up.",
"parent_id": "8126041",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126052",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:13:36",
"content": "“although the protective cage partially melted.”Sounds like they should be using a titanium alloy because they are light weight and all have an absurdly high melting point.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126056",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:26:21",
"content": "“…and possibly even use and store the thus captured energy rather than just leading it to ground.”Nikola Tesla had wanted to do this with a long antenna and a switch periodically turned on by a wind turbine and crank shaft. Although, that one just relied on atmospheric potential so I don’t know if he was really thinking about storms.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126141",
"author": "blue67",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T21:07:54",
"content": "I’m surprised the wire leading from the drone to the ground was not also damaged like the cage. At least I didn’t see any mention of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126214",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:09:17",
"content": "I was wondering that too. I see no mention of it, but I haven’t searched very hard. I would assume that the wire was sacrificial and blew out like a fuse after each strike… If it is beefy enough to transmit more than a gigawatt without turning into a rapidly-expanding cloud of charged particles, surely it is too heavy for a solitary drone to lift hundreds of meters of it into the air.At least that would be my armchair assumption. After all, even the cage melted, and that’s only a very short section of the circuit and doubtlessly thicker than the wire.Time to repeat the experiment with a Chinook and a spool of massive cable. If the wire is single-use and the cage melts (and surely the drone will fail too after a few runs) I do not see the advantage of this over a very cheap small sounding rocket",
"parent_id": "8126141",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126171",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T23:25:45",
"content": "Just thinking out loud here:since the distance between drone and clouds is (how?) much closer the potential difference required for a strike shrinks accordingly.-> the voltage diff of any strike is smaller.could part of that energy be stored in a giant capacitor?I’m thinking of a lake in an isolating geological formation. (does something like this even exist?)pre-lightning it would have the same potential as the earth/ground around it (so it would still count as ground for the lightning).post-strike maybe one could harvest that stored energy (and get the lake back on “ground” potential)?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126192",
"author": "Michael Kortsen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:59:47",
"content": "Buildings and infrastructure are one thing, but if this could prevent wildfires that’d be huge.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126216",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:17:57",
"content": "Haha oh man. This kind of thinking is exactly why we should have a very strict taboo against letting engineers try to “save the world.”Imagine what happens after we have an effective way to prevent random lightning strikes over vast amounts of wilderness for several decades, and then for whatever reason that ability atrophies, or its budget is cut, or there’s a war or political shift–anything. What is the next lightning strike gonna do?If it has been happening for billions of years and life has adapted to it, the safest bet is to allow it to keep happening. Chesterton’s fence. Maybe using it to protect a couple specific areas is kosher, or in certain regions during severe wind storms to prevent a city from burning down (cough L.A.) but then you have to actually go and burn out all that brush that the lightning would have naturally taken care of and has been taking care of for eons. You could say “of course we have to do that!” …But thus far we haven’t been doing that.",
"parent_id": "8126192",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127068",
"author": "nacacytacycykutazcytataztacyta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T08:39:47",
"content": "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte“Pyrophile” plants are plants which require fire in order to complete their cycle of reproduction.Wildfires removing some ticks.",
"parent_id": "8126216",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126263",
"author": "Hump",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T07:28:31",
"content": "There was a test in the Swiss mountains to do it with lasers :https://actu.epfl.ch/news/deflecting-lightning-with-a-laser-lightning-rod-2/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126484",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T05:55:23",
"content": "Positive Giant superbolts can terminate into blue jets.Kapitsa waves could be dangerous?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,552.939667
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/09/scan-your-caliper-for-physical-part-copies/
|
Scan Your Caliper For Physical Part Copies
|
Al Williams
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printing",
"cad"
] |
We’ve certainly seen people take a photo of a part, bring it into CAD, and then scale it until some dimension on the screen is the same as a known dimension of the part. We like what [Scale Addition] shows in the video below. In addition to a picture of the part, he also
takes a picture of a vernier caliper gripping the part
. Now your scale is built into the picture, and you can edit out the caliper later.
He uses SketchUp, but this would work on any software that can import an image. Given the image with the correct scale, it is usually trivial to sketch over the image or even use an automatic tracing function. You still need some measurements, of course. The part in question has a vertical portion that doesn’t show up in a flat photograph. We’ve had good luck using a flatbed scanner before, and there’s no reason you couldn’t scan a part with a caliper for scale.
This is one case where a digital caliper probably isn’t as handy as an old-school one. But it would be possible to do the same trick with any measurement device. You could even take your picture on a grid of known dimensions. This would also allow you to check that the distances at the top and bottom are the same as the distances on the right and left.
Of course, you can get 3D scanners, but they have
their own challenges
.
| 60
| 13
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125900",
"author": "Michael Karliner",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:15:10",
"content": "When I need to copy a part that may be in a location away from my workbench, I just photo it with a £1 coin for scale (other currencies are available).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125902",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:24:36",
"content": "Just looked at the Royal mint website – what a weird collection of diameters!https://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/coin-design-and-specifications/",
"parent_id": "8125900",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125908",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:44:11",
"content": "Interesting approach, but how do you adjust for inflation?",
"parent_id": "8125900",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125937",
"author": "OldTechGuy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T10:47:05",
"content": "I don’t hand these out often, but you’ve earned +1 Internet points with that comment!",
"parent_id": "8125908",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126501",
"author": "Zacchaeus a Crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T07:39:56",
"content": "That was in fact golden.",
"parent_id": "8125937",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126148",
"author": "Conor Stewart",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T21:39:31",
"content": "I often just put a ruler beside it and try and make sure the camera is as parallel to the surface as possible and as far away as reasonable, that way the X and Y dimensions are as close as possible and you only need one axis for scale.",
"parent_id": "8125900",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126374",
"author": "JMR",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T18:47:34",
"content": "Why don’t we have caliber paper? A series of known points with a QR code and an app that turns it into a scaled drawing.",
"parent_id": "8126148",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126802",
"author": "Hassi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T10:24:16",
"content": "We have, its called ‘shaper trace’.",
"parent_id": "8126374",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126184",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:29:45",
"content": "A round coin is an excellent scale indicator. I’ve used one (Australian 20c coin) many times when photographing WWII military vehicles I intend to produce a scale model of, or markings on these vehicles I want to produce a decal of.Being round, a construction line can be drawn across the coin’s diameter in the photo that is always parallel to the focal plane of the camera, which is needed when scaling panels that are not perfectly perpendicular to the camera.",
"parent_id": "8125900",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126422",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:38:30",
"content": "While you can always find a parallel line to the camera’s focal plane from a round object, I doubt you can actually find it with any accuracy in practice.The coin will be stretched and squished by the lens distortion and the perspective error, so you kinda have to guess what diameter line actually lines up with the image plane. You can measure the coin crosswise to find out how much the photograph is distorted somewhere close to the coin, but that doesn’t apply to all parts of the image.",
"parent_id": "8126184",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128653",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T02:36:19",
"content": "Professional photographer here, well retired now, but anyway:The super duper easy way to make sure that the camera and the surface are parallel to each other is to place a mirror on the surface, and adjust the position of the camera so the reflected image of tha lens is in the center of the frame. I keep a small mirror in my camera bag just for that. Works great with a phone camera in the library too.I suppose a paper ruler stuck to one edge would make it even more handy.",
"parent_id": "8126422",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128655",
"author": "hugh crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T02:37:58",
"content": "By frame, I mean the image in the camera if that was not clear.",
"parent_id": "8128653",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125903",
"author": "Hazzarstar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:32:28",
"content": "We used the same trick on a much bigger scale useing a known grid to design and fit grill guards to semi trucks so it even at a very large size",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125904",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:33:41",
"content": "Now your scale is built into the pictureIt’s already built into the picture because you know the scanner’s linear resolution. It’s pixels to inches directly, so you can measure it in any image editing software.This trick with the calipers applies to photographs where the focal distance is unknown. But, if you set up your camera at a known distance and zoom it all the way in, you can pretty much make the same direct conversion of pixels to inches on the resulting image after measuring it once.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125909",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:53:44",
"content": "Also, photographing your calipers with the part in between does not give you accurate measurements because of lens distortion (barrel distortion). To reduce this effect, and make parallel lines parallel, you have to take the photograph with a small aperture using a long lens – in other words you need to zoom in from a distance.The example in the video with a camera phone (no real zoom) taken from mere inches away, and not controlling for having the image sensor parallel to the desk or the surface of the part, will give you wildly varying results. Parts that are straight or surfaces that are parallel will appear tapered or diamond shaped etc.If you model the part directly off of the photo like that, you basically have to guess what the varying distances are really supposed to be, which means it’d be faster to skip the photographing and just eyeball it directly off the actual part and the caliper readings.",
"parent_id": "8125904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125923",
"author": "medix",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:43:30",
"content": "Relying on sensor data from the scanner is often not reliable because of image scaling (which you may or may not have control over). You need to know the magnification of the system, and the easiest way to do this is to scan something of a known length.Scanners have corrected optics to account distortion, though you should only assume the best accuracy for surfaces that lie flat against the scanner bed. Additionally for small parts near the center of the FOV the distortion will be minimal. Either way, this approach is often more than good enough.",
"parent_id": "8125909",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125947",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T11:20:00",
"content": "“You need to know the magnification of the system, and the easiest way to do this is to scan something of a known length.”Like, oh I dunno, the scale on a set of calipers?",
"parent_id": "8125923",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125969",
"author": "medix",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:56:41",
"content": "Haha, that’s what I was hinting at, especially given this statement:“It’s already built into the picture because you know the scanner’s linear resolution. It’s pixels to inches directly, so you can measure it in any image editing software.”",
"parent_id": "8125947",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126037",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:28:44",
"content": "If I scan at 300dpi I have all the reference I need. 300 pixels = 1 inch. Which can be trivially verified by printing the scanned image at 300dpi and placing the part onto the print, they’ll match.",
"parent_id": "8125923",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126121",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T19:39:45",
"content": "You need to know the magnification of the systemYou only ever need to check it once and then you know it.",
"parent_id": "8125923",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126110",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:52:19",
"content": "The important part for a technique like this is that the part is in focus and minimally distorted so the tracing into CAD is suitably accurate, what happens to the measuring device distortion wise at the edge of the frame really isn’t important at all until it gets too blurred to actually read the scale.The measurement shouldn’t really change even with distortion. As while the distortion might make it slightly harder to read the scale it is distorted pretty evenly with the moving line and the static basically touching the distortion difference between them makes little difference – either at that interface between lines these two or those two line up best – so which one is the least stair stepped. You’d probably find most folks can get a more accurate measure on the finer verniers in the picture than with their own unassisted eyeballs as you can easily zoom in on the picture! Also the less precise verniers and calipers in general are not really “accurate” measuring devices anyway – good enough for the task perhaps, especially if its woodwork, but still all those long levers to flex and twist…",
"parent_id": "8125909",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126124",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T19:48:34",
"content": "The distortion isn’t limited to the edges of the image, especially if you fail to line the object flat with the sensor plane.The measurement shouldn’t really change even with distortion.Yes they would. Go ahead and photograph a graph paper from 12 inches away with your cellphone camera, then pick a random square and use your favorite image editing software to measure the diagonals to see whether it is actually square in the picture. Check multiple – they’ll all be different.",
"parent_id": "8126110",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126268",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T08:39:29",
"content": "I’m talking about reading the caliper to get dimensions as done here – you put the part in the minimally distorted part of the image, which is usually a pretty big circle in the centre that will be more than good enough, at least if calipers are accurate enough to measure with in the first place… The distortion just flat out doesn’t matter being only bad well away from the part, and not interfering with the ability to read the measuring device that is setting a dimension in your CAD model.",
"parent_id": "8126124",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126423",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:40:01",
"content": "I’m talking about reading the caliperBut you can do that by simply looking at it.",
"parent_id": "8126124",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126424",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:42:26",
"content": "The distortion just flat out doesn’t matterAgain, I encourage you to actually try it out and see for yourself. Take a picture of a graph paper with your phone camera and measure how square the squares are in the image.",
"parent_id": "8126124",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126511",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:22:43",
"content": "@Dude It really really doesn’t matter (though I’d not use a phone camera by choice) any camera taking a photo of a small part with a little care in the setup will be accurate enough with the part in the centre of the image if calipers where accurate enough to measure it anyway.Calipers even really good ones are not reliable repeatable measuring devices with how much bend they can have in them as you clamp on the part. Often only really only go to the nearest 0.1mm reliably, though with care and a good set you should be able to do better they are still not the micrometer and surface plates of measuring – So the distortions in the middle of your lens are in the same sort of ballpark to likely an order of magnitude less than the accuracy as your measuring tool – making it irrelevant. Its errors in the tolerance window you are measuring to, at least if you put any effort into taking that picture.",
"parent_id": "8126124",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126312",
"author": "Duhhhg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T13:13:05",
"content": "Yep. This right here. I bought an old flatbed scanner to battle the issue for flat-ish objects.",
"parent_id": "8125909",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126330",
"author": "MeMyselfAndI",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T15:45:09",
"content": "My phone’s camera can zoom in far more than I need it to for reducing parallax. It used to be true that phones didn’t have any real zoom to speak of. That hasn’t been the case for several years.Galaxy Ultra series of phones has a very respectable optical zoom.",
"parent_id": "8125909",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126426",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:48:10",
"content": "has a very respectable optical zoom.They don’t. They just crop and resample the image (“digital zoom”), or have a second or third camera with the focal distance fixed long, and then they blend the images in software. The multi-camera version presents a problem, because the images that are blended together aren’t captured from the same vantage point, so you get weird parallax errors depending on what the software decides to do.",
"parent_id": "8126330",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125956",
"author": "mvadu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:14:07",
"content": "I have not watched the video as I have been following this method myself for years. In Fusion when you bring in the picture to sketch you have an option to calibrate the dimensions. You need a known distance there. If you have a grid or a scale or a coin which you can easily click and enter the distance Fusion will take care of rest of the image. Unless you are taking the image from very abtuse angle the image dimensions should be same across entire image pane.",
"parent_id": "8125904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126082",
"author": "Alexander Pruss",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:26:52",
"content": "But then you have to write down the distance so you don’t forget. Also, your camera needs to have a focal plane marker so you know what distance to measure from, and you need to make sure your lens’s nominal focal length is accurate. I doubt how accurate the nominal endpoints of a zoom lens are. And there is focus breathing.https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/91601/are-lenses-marked-with-the-true-focal-length",
"parent_id": "8125904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126219",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:25:46",
"content": "You could easily verify and finely calibrate this measurement by scanning your calipers once, and then you’d just need to toss a part on the scanner and apply the conversion. No need to fiddle with calipers after that.You could look up the linear resolution, but I wouldn’t trust that figure to be sub-millimeter accurate.",
"parent_id": "8125904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126244",
"author": "Blaine Halee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T05:40:09",
"content": "Exactly this. Just scan at 1000dpi and scale is super easy.",
"parent_id": "8125904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125907",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:40:28",
"content": "I usually lay the object flat on a piece of 5mm grid paper.A limitation is parallax error because of the thickness of the object. Punching a hole in the paper and lifting it so it’s sort of parallel with the top surface of the object helps.It also helps if you have a physically big distance between the camera and your object. Then use the zoom function at maximum level to get more usable pixels.Another trick is to use your calipers to measure a few critical dimensions, and then make a simple sketch and write those dimensions on the grid paper too before you make the photograph.But normally I have the objects, camera, calipers and my PC all within easy reach. When away, putting anything in the picture that gives a size reference helps. This can be a coin or a pen, or a hand or foot, or whatever other object with known size is available. Results are always best if the reference object is similar in size as the object to be digitized, and also at the same distance from the camera.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125913",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:09:08",
"content": "What if you take two photos: one with the part and another with the grid paper at a set distance, then superimpose the two. You can intersect the grid at any depth through the object.Or, if you wanna go one-shot with it, use a half-mirror in a box to overlay an image of the grid on the object. Again, where you place the object relative to the mirror makes the grid intersect the object at a different depth.",
"parent_id": "8125907",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125924",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:44:45",
"content": "Bad Idea. Differences in distance to the camera will get you different scale factors. Using a mirror and box also sound complicated, with no added benefit.If you want to go fancy, you can go in the direction of “structured light” or other 3D scanner techniques (Photogrammetry is also fun) But that’s all beyond the scope of this article.",
"parent_id": "8125913",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126127",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T19:53:38",
"content": "Well obviously you wouldn’t be holding the camera in your hand.",
"parent_id": "8125924",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125915",
"author": "Hobbes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:12:56",
"content": "I’ve done this by placing a ruler next to the object.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125919",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:34:20",
"content": "I did something like this the other day.A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about a sewing machine table. It had close up photos of the hinges and other things.Someone saw those photos, and posted a comment asking for a dimensioned sketch of the hinge. They had an identical cabinet that was missing the hinges.I no longer had that cabinet – it belonged to someone else and I couldn’t go borrow it again.In looking at the photos, I saw that there was a piece of brass tube in the picture. I’d used the tube as a tool to remove an escutcheon from the cabinet.The tube is exactly 5mm in diameter.I pulled the photo into Inkscape, scaled the picture so that the tube was exactly 5mm wide, then traced the hinge. Presto: properly scaled drawing of a part I no longer had to hand.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125922",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:40:18",
"content": "I do this often but flatbed scanners still have parallax and it’s sometimes hard to determine the exact edge due to the lighting.I think it’s possible to get better results with a good camera set up and a few tricks (like using a mirror to ensure the lens is perfectly parallel, adjusting the incident light angle to sharpen the edges).Maybe I should make a video on the topic!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125925",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:48:11",
"content": "I’d watch itI don’t fully understand what this hack is for. Is it in case you forgot to measure something? I keep calipers and my part near me while I do CAD.",
"parent_id": "8125922",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126428",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:54:05",
"content": "It’s basically measuring everything at once, so you can lay your lines down to the picture rather than measuring everything in separate. If done right, it saves time, if done wrong it creates wonky parts that never measure up to the original.",
"parent_id": "8125925",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125936",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T10:42:22",
"content": "He uses SketchUpHOW?? How in 2025 do people still use that garbage software? I learned to do CAD on it but then I found the world of solid modeling, parametric modeling, feature-based modeling, etc and now SketchUp is a joke to me. I used to get so frustrated at the simplest things like changing a hole size or position. Hard to do without sketches or feature-based sketches.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125939",
"author": "GGWorks",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T10:48:53",
"content": "WHat would you reccomend I realy like Rhino but its $$$$$$",
"parent_id": "8125936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125951",
"author": "doobs",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T11:45:14",
"content": "LOL!I was thinking the same thing.Although I have to admit, I used it for a while. Until I started doing 3D printing. The “models” that SketchUp create will give slicer fits.",
"parent_id": "8125936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125976",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:22:45",
"content": "My buddy uses SketchUp almost exclusively. It’s what he started with so it’s his fastest easiest tool. “I’m just trying to slam out a print, I don’t wanna learn a new tool”.",
"parent_id": "8125936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126086",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:49:14",
"content": "Similar here, I use two pieces of 3d CAD software, one that’s available (for free to almost anyone who cares to find it and register) from my employer and another which is free from a major UK parts distributor, of the two my favouirite is the far simpler parts distie one because I can knock out working designs in far less time.",
"parent_id": "8125976",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126430",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T00:00:59",
"content": "Sketchup is about doing complex things the simple way, being the only way. You just have to get good at it.All the other software is about learning to use very specific tools to achieve very specific tasks, which means there’s a learning curve and limits to what you can do if your task doesn’t fall exactly within the tools you’re using.It’s like, you can draw any shape with a pencil – you just have to know how to draw. You can also draw any shape with a stencil – you just have to have exactly the right stencil. Sketchup is like the pencil – you can do pretty much everything you can imagine, but you got to do it the hard way.",
"parent_id": "8125936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126738",
"author": "uxorious",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T04:08:38",
"content": "HAHA! Up until last year when I finally took a Fusion class, I had been using Microsoft Visio for all my CAD drawings. I literally have 2 decades worth of cable assembly drawings, laser cutting templates, mechanical drawings, etc, etc. A good friend of me hounded me routinely for the past 15 years about it.",
"parent_id": "8125936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125944",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T11:08:26",
"content": "How is photogrammetry coming along for this? It’s always been my favorite since it just takes lots of pictures and some processing time to get what should be a very accurate 3D model.Is it getting easier to get good results?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125945",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T11:09:56",
"content": "The comments here seem to miss a key point: It is a measurement technique that works. It is optimal? not always, but you can’t always bring the part back to the lab, put it on the digital control, 1micron resolution, 75mm field telecentric lens equipped measurement centre. This is a nice way to get decent precision without worrying about keeping track of what measure goes with what feature.I have done this any number of times in the field, where the part can’t come out until the replacement is made, or the feature is otherwise inaccessible, or the part is too large to carry back to the CAD station. Back in the day (I’m aging myself) a Polaroid camera was mandatory kit for field work, in part for this type of task. I much prefer digital cams. We have now reached the point with cell phones where all of the AI image processing crap and lack of raw data has made them less useful in some cases. I have gone back to my old Canon after a few cases where the feature I needed got processed into uselessness by jpeg conversion and uncontrollable features on the phone.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126102",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:41:19",
"content": "Indeed, unless the phone gives access to the raw take from the sensors I’m not interested in using it, even though its got better over the years the AI still goes bonkers from time to time – for instance a buddy had a few photos of taking his nipper and parents to a motor museum that happens to have a FAB 1 from the modern Thunderbirds movie and at those dual front wheels in the background a shot it is just garbled awfully, as it knows its a car and is trying to turn two wheels into one I assume…I don’t mind having the automatic and magic processing modes available at all, making getting that quick low effort picture for whatever reason easy, pulling the focus to something at least close automatically etc… But when you actually want a good result you want something rather more unprocessed if not the actually RAW, so the device really should store that – can always process it afterwards if you want…",
"parent_id": "8125945",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125980",
"author": "Titus431",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:28:50",
"content": "So basically he’s using the caliper as a high precision banana.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126076",
"author": "Petebeat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:17:11",
"content": "The trickiest part of this is when they have to calibrate those calipers at the factory w.o squashing the bananas.",
"parent_id": "8125980",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126221",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:29:11",
"content": "I wonder what level of precision is realistically achievable if you only use various random bananas (or even the same one but you have to deal with it becoming brown and squishy and shriveled so there is measurement drift)… Could you build a decent sailboat? A house? Could you average several bananas at all time to increase repeatability? How sophisticated could you get?",
"parent_id": "8125980",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126433",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T00:07:54",
"content": "You could take a photograph of the banana, and the place copies of that around.",
"parent_id": "8126221",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126106",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:45:04",
"content": "i use this kind of approach when i don’t have any choice, like discerning gross geometry from an outdoor photo. but i don’t like it specifically for 3d printing because the image is never quite in the same plane as the object — neither orthogonal nor centered. so there’s perspective distortion. in practice for me at least it turns squirrelly and imprecise. plus, it’s almost always easy for me to measure the device directly with calipers, especially for the example object here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126771",
"author": "Duderino",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T07:09:18",
"content": "Buy a cutting mat. Put cutting mat on your bench. Put thing on cutting mat. Take picture.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.114349
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/hacky-shack-the-trs-80-model-i-story/
|
Hacky Shack? The TRS-80 Model I Story
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"tandy",
"trs-80"
] |
The 1970s saw a veritable goldrush to corner the home computer market, with Tandy’s Z80-powered TRS-80 probably one of the most (in)famous entries. Designed from the ground up to be as cheap as possible, the original (Model I) TRS-80 cut all corners management could get away with. The story of the TRS-80 Model I is the
subject of a recent video
by the [Little Car] YouTube channel.
Having the
TRS-80
sold as an assembled computer was not a given, as kits were rather common back then, especially since Tandy’s Radio Shack stores had their roots in selling radio kits and the like, not computer systems. Ultimately the system was built around the lower-end 1.78 MHz Z80 MPU with the rudimentary
Level I BASIC
(later updated to Level II), though with a memory layout that made running the likes of CP/M impossible. The Model II would be sold later as a dedicated business machine, with the Model III being the actual upgrade to the Model I. You could also absolutely access online services like
those of Compuserve
on your TRS-80.
While it was appreciated that the TRS-80 (lovingly called the ‘Trash-80’ by some) had a real keyboard instead of a cheap membrane keyboard, the rest of the Model I hardware had plenty of issues, and new FCC regulations meant that the Model III was required as the Model I produced enough EMI to drown out nearby radios. Despite this, the Model I put Tandy on the map of home computers, opened the world of computing to many children and adults, with subsequent Tandy TRS-80 computers being released until 1991 with the
Model 4
.
| 44
| 19
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125885",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T06:01:18",
"content": "Trash-80 indeed. One look from me across the room and it rebooted, losing work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125988",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:53:14",
"content": "That infernal card-edge connector to the EI.I hacked mine a bit, and painted the cases because I thought the ‘battleship grey’ was so boring.Eventually I broke it to the point I couldn’t figure out and had to take it in. Henceforth the clerks called me “the boy with the green computer”.",
"parent_id": "8125885",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125892",
"author": "TimT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T07:03:02",
"content": "Well the only problem I ever had from mine was the “T” key quit working. Got it fixed and it worked great until I switched to a Commodore 64.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125895",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T07:31:43",
"content": "“Dear Sir, I wish o make a complain. The ” key on my RS-80 has sopped working. Is i possible o repair i? Yours faihfully, im.”",
"parent_id": "8125892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125896",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T07:37:55",
"content": "Bwahahaha excellen",
"parent_id": "8125895",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126039",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:32:13",
"content": "I once had a keyboard on a laptop fail in such a way that it would insert the number 9 randomly while typing, to include quite often when I hit the backspace key.The text it produced was quite unhinged.",
"parent_id": "8125895",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125897",
"author": "Christopher M Burch",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T07:42:57",
"content": "Did it sulk?",
"parent_id": "8125892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126094",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:15:24",
"content": "“Got it fixed and it worked great until I switched to a Commodore 64.”You mean: as soon as you bought the C64, the TRS-80 broke down? It must have loved you and died from heartbreak. ;)",
"parent_id": "8125892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126248",
"author": "Taper",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T06:01:31",
"content": "Ah, the TRS-80 Model I! I always enjoy telling people how it was my family’s first computer when we got it in 1987.Yeah, it was then 10 years old. My first adventure in retrocomputing, you could say. (The next year we got an Apple IIgs, which remained the family computer until I built a 80386 machine in ’94.)",
"parent_id": "8126094",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125898",
"author": "Feinfinger (super villain in nostalgy mode)",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T08:10:47",
"content": "I really had no problems with mine. Having the schematics, it was obvious how to extend the RAM, add lowercase chars, abuse the cassette IO bits as serial interface, add some more frequencies to the CPU clock, … and when the disk drives were attached, heaven broke loose with available other languages, even CP/M if you cared for getting 64k instead of stopping with 48k RAM. The only thing I did not add was a better video circuit. 64×16 did not fit CP/M well. Basically that still is my main reason to feel nostalgia mainly for CP/M (which I later preferred to run on systems with 80 CpL) instead of the TRS-80. But it would have been doable.Later I got a C64 because my father got infected by those and expected support. The C64 was far less fun for me. Unbearable keyboard, even less CpL than the M1, not really a serious palette of languages, but at least later the C128 again had a Z80 inside… ;-PYMMV, mine surely does, so … PEACE!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125929",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T10:02:32",
"content": "After having read about the coming microcomputer revolution in electronics magazines for years, I got my first taste of programming at 14. Every afternoon after school, I rode my bicycle to the local Tandy store, and spent countless hours tapping on a TRS-80 4K Level 1 display computer, before a bemused audience of shoppers. It was a dream escape from a wretchedly dysfunctional school and home life.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125942",
"author": "OldTechGuy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T11:02:03",
"content": "I remember when these first came out and they had one at a local store. I had just begun my computing adventure the school year before, writing BASIC using a model 33 Teletype that was modem-connected to an HP 9000 minicomputer run by the school district. My school had only 3 terminals, and I would arrive an hour before classes started to use one. The idea of having a computer that was mine alone and always available was quite thrilling! That didn’t happen until about 5 years later when I was able to get a Commodore PET 4016 with an employee discount; US $577 (about 2k in today’s money)!P.S. I worked at a dealership and upgraded it to an 8032 with the hour of it being delivered to us ;^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126040",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:36:22",
"content": "Similar, in that my career start was in high school that I learned Basic on Teletypes hooked to a Vax. However didn’t get my ‘own’ computer until college which was a DEC Rainbow. By then Basic was long gone, and Pascal was in. On subject, at high school there was a couple of Trash 80s in the lab along with the teletypes which we poked at a few times.",
"parent_id": "8125942",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126073",
"author": "Ray O'Leary",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:01:22",
"content": "A DEC rainbow is a pretty sweet “first computer”",
"parent_id": "8126040",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126046",
"author": "davelnewton",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:57:06",
"content": "HP 9000? They came out mid-80s (HP-UX 🤮)And getting a new PET after 1980+ is nuts!",
"parent_id": "8125942",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126942",
"author": "OldTechGuy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T18:13:27",
"content": "You’re right! I think it was in fact an HP 2000; the fact that I did support on the 9000’s later clouded my memory! After that, they replaced it with an IBM of some sort; it was very unreliable. Finally by high school, it was replace by something called a Magnasyn (sp?)Also should have mentioned I got the PET somewhere between ’79 and ’80. It was great because I had all the schematics and parts from work, and was fun to hack on. I even tried to add an Atari POKEY chip (we serviced Atari, Compaq, Apple, etc.) once, but to no avail.",
"parent_id": "8126046",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125979",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:28:06",
"content": "The TRS-80 is my retrocomputer of choice. I found one at a garage sale some years ago, and got deep into the hardware both to repair it, and build up some of the peripherals it didn’t come with. More than anything else, it taught me about how computers really work at the low level (fetch–execute cycle, address decoding, assembly, etc.).Being raised on Arduino lets you do some cool stuff, but you don’t have to know how it works.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126655",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T18:57:22",
"content": "Sure, but “don’t have to” and “can’t in any practical sense” are different, don’t knock the tools kids have these days for having an easy mode when the rest is still there. Being able to teach a 8 year old how to independently build their own i/o systems more or less from the ground up is pretty gratifying.",
"parent_id": "8125979",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125982",
"author": "Wes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:37:30",
"content": "That was my 1st computer too. I still have it & another model 1. I also have a number of CoCo’s too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126032",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:55:37",
"content": "One of my best friends in high school got one. It was cool, but outside my budget (largely because I wanted a ’75 Firebird). I told him I’d get a home computer when they were under $100 and within two years the ZX81 was available as a kit!",
"parent_id": "8125982",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125986",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:48:28",
"content": "I cut my teeth on the Model I in 1980, and have not stopped writing code. I spent my entire summer’s earnings from bussing tables on a 16K system. My mother was appalled, and my step-father urged me to consider the $99 Timex-Sinclair. If I had to use that ‘keyboard’ I might have quit.I soon shifted to assembler since I was more electronics-oriented. I wrote a cassette tape ‘merge’ utility for managing libraries of subroutines. (The theory is that you would ‘merge’ your various pre-existing routines from a library tape into a new project to jump start work). Excruciatingly slow, of course, but I published it in a magazine unbeknownst to my parents. My biological dad started getting calls from all over the country inquiring about the program since we share the same name, and was initially confused but then realized saying “oh, you are trying to reach my son”. Folks asking me to port it to other systems. It was a bit awkward.It’s a pity I had absolutely no business sense or interest — I thought code was just something you wrote to make the hardware go. Who would pay for such a thing?I do remember the graphic used in the headline for this article and being a little bit annoyed because that system had nowhere nearly the resolution needed to produce the image depicted.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126026",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:46:18",
"content": "Of all images you could have used for the header, that stupid Compuserve ad was the worst you could have picked, because TRS-80 graphics were NEVER that good! With 128 x 48 fat and not-at-all-square white pixels on black, it had the “world’s worst graphics” of the 80s machines. Game writers like Big 5 did what they could, but compared to the Apple at school and the Commodores in other people’s homes, TRS-80 kids just had to be embarrassed. I mean, just look at the official TRS-80 versions of Frogger, Zaxxon, or Donkey Kong. Owners knew that ad was false advertising.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126306",
"author": "greenbit",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T12:53:02",
"content": "Ironically, the funny little hot chassis television with the TRS80 badge over the holes where the channel knobs were missing, actually had to display a 512×192 dot raster just to show those clunky ‘pixels’.",
"parent_id": "8126026",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126657",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T19:00:38",
"content": "I had forgotten about this, the “why” of the whole arrangement was very confusing to me as a kid.",
"parent_id": "8126306",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126043",
"author": "_sol_",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T15:47:49",
"content": "I had a Model I. Terrible keyboard bounce but fixable with a hardware modification.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126048",
"author": "AC7ZL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:04:08",
"content": "I honestly don’t understand the hate from some commentators here.I had a TRS-80 Mod I that I earned as a kid, piece-by-piece, through hard work (primarily mowing lawns) and later through trade and acquisition of broken stuff other people didn’t want.The cabinet screws were removed the day after the warranty ran out, and by the time my “trash 80” days were through, I’d max’d the RAM, added floppy drives, com port, modem, added a numeric keypad, lower-case, reverse video, the rare speech recognition accessory, and the rare Votrax speech synth box, (though I eventually added an SC-O1 internal to the keyboard). I used a modified DEC LA36 as a printer. I even connected a TRS-80 to an IBM keypunch. An article about that appears on my website.Yes, the expansion edge connector was less than perfect. If you kept it clean it was fine and I never lost any work. By modern standards, the “graphics” capabilities were stone-age. But I can tell you I was never “embarrassed” because my system didn’t play some stupid video game.Tandy did what all manufacturers do (some better than others): Design a product that successfully balanced the mutually exclusive goals of high performance/feature-rich with cost. Were there better computers available at the time? Yes. I’d have installed a VAX 11/780 in my bedroom if there was any way to procure one by cutting grass. But that wasn’t going to happen. In the end, a computer you have is worth infinitely more than one you don’tIn the end, while I won’t say this computer is THE reason I later became an EE, the skills I learned on that machine enhanced my skills and capabilities. My boyhood investment in the machine ( that some here claim sucks) ultimately fed me, clothed me, and paid my bills for years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126080",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:24:10",
"content": "is it hate, or fond recollection of shared suffering? the Model II was much more ‘seriously’ designed, but largely failed — I assume for cost.the simplicity of the system, the openness in providing schematics, and the abundance of reverse-engineered details in “the alternate source”, “xxx & Other Mysteries”, and myriad Dennis Bathory Kitsz articles made it ripe for hackers with a self-funded budget and no fear of a soldering iron.",
"parent_id": "8126048",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126088",
"author": "AC7ZL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:51:42",
"content": "But that’s my point… I didn’t “suffer” anything. For what it was, the Mod I was a fantastic machine.Since you mentioned the Model II, I’d add this:The owner of a local medical business purchased a Mod II system, and then realized he had no earthly idea how to make it work. He called the Radio Shack he’d purchased it from and asked if they could recommend anyone to help him. The manager thumbed through his address list (remember how Radio Shack always asked for your address when they wrote up a receipt?) and pulled up my name. He told the business owner, “go call this kid.” That kid was me. So I’d add to my accolades for the Mod I, that it was directly responsible for me landing my first real job with a printed paycheck, and I didn’t even have to show up to an interview.I worked for that business 3 or 4 years, until they were bought out by another operation. I helped them with spreadsheets, database stuff, and custom programs I wrote to provide data extraction ( for data the stock programs couldn’t provide.) The Mod II had 8″ floppies and a really nice Daisywheel printer on it, but I didn’t like it as much as my Model I, to be honest.At the time, I discovered a nuance to the 8-inch drives you might find interesting. We had the occasional power-outage . If that happened while a floppy was in the drive (whether reading, writing, or doing nothing) the odds were better than 4:1 that the floppy would be corrupted.Through some epiphany, I determined that this corruption did NOT occur when the power dropped, but rather, when it came back on! This inspired me to create box with a cord, a couple of duplex outlets, and a relay set up in a latching configuration. You plugged it in, pressed a “reset” button, the relay would latch “on,” and the outlets would go live. If the power subsequently dropped, the relay would drop out, and even if the power returned, the outlets would remain dead until you purposefully reset them. That would give you the opportunity to remove any disks in the drive before resetting my contraption.If they’d been available at the time, I’d have specified a small UPS, but with our Model II’s plugged into my gizmo, I never experienced another power-induced corruption on the floppy disk, again.I later helped them set up a Tandy 16B running Xenix (Unix)… we had four “dumb” terminals attached to that system. It even had a <gasp!> 8 MEG hard drive! The 16B featured both a Z80 and a Motorola 68000, if I remember correctly. You could boot to TRSDOS (and even CPM) to run on the Z80, but when Xenix was up, it ran on the 68000, while the Z80 performed I/O. I’d LOVE to have a working example of that system, even now. It was pretty cool.",
"parent_id": "8126080",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126095",
"author": "George Phillips",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:16:46",
"content": "The Model II did not fail; it was hugely successful. It wasn’t a replacement for the Model I but intended for the small business market. It was competing more with minicomputers where it was considerably less expensive.It was followed by the Model 12 and then the Model 16 and 6000 which featured a 68000 processor and could run Xenix.",
"parent_id": "8126080",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126108",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:47:30",
"content": "I suppose that is true now that you mention the continuity of the line to the other models.",
"parent_id": "8126095",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126182",
"author": "AC7ZL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:17:13",
"content": "I had forgotten about the Model 12…. Never had opportunity to mess with that one, though.",
"parent_id": "8126095",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126057",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:28:34",
"content": "Many years ago, I bought an Atari joystick that connected to the I/O port on the Model I or Model III. As I remember, it was somewhat pricey. When it arrived, I found that it was simply one small IC and an edge connector on a PCB, wired to the joystick. The part number was sanded off the IC. I was angry at the price, so I reverse engineered it. Turns out it was only a quad NAND gate. I don’t remember how it was wired.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126065",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:41:57",
"content": "teehee; the lowercase mod sold for $100 but you could buy the 2112 1kx1 sram from radio shack themselves for something like 2-3 bucks and do it yourself! (OK earlier units also needed a new chargen rom, but later ones did not)",
"parent_id": "8126057",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126062",
"author": "Michael Morlan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:32:17",
"content": "Ah, yes. The Model I was my first computer while working at my local Radio Shack as a high-schooler. Taught myself interpreted BASIC. Wrote some simple games on the CoCo. Then, bought the Model 4 with the high-rez upgrade and kept going. Took a funny, regressive semester back at school, programming with an acoustic-coupled terminal to a mainframe using punch-tape for code storage. What a joke! :-)Added the IBM-PC clone with the RF monitor that showed color with some black-and-white phase trickery. Went on to a career as a programmer/analyst with dBase III+, Pic Basic on a mini-computer, and beyond.Loved my Trash-80 days.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126237",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T04:35:28",
"content": "“Added the IBM-PC clone with the RF monitor that showed color with some black-and-white phase trickery.”These are NTSC artifact colors, I think. Also works via composite.In retro computing, the term “Composite CGA” also is sometimes used.The Apple II used a similiar trick, I think. Games used it to get around color limitation.",
"parent_id": "8126062",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126083",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:30:47",
"content": "It’s a curiosity that US Patent 4,564,902 for the Model I was issued Jan 14, 1986, five years after the product’s discontinuation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126308",
"author": "greenbit",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T13:02:27",
"content": "I remember wondering at the time (82?) how it was that machines like the LNW-80 could exist, while in the Apple world, things like the Franklin were hounded into oblivion.",
"parent_id": "8126083",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126087",
"author": "HalfNormal",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T17:51:36",
"content": "We had TRS 80 computers in high school for computer lab. My best friend had one at home and I decided to go above and beyond for my homework and worked days at his house perfecting my program. I saved the work to cassette tape and then threw my books and programs behind the back seat of my 63 Volkswagen bug. They have a generator not an alternator. My tapes were right on top of it and it erased all my hard work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126093",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:13:02",
"content": "You forget that it also defined the ‘keyboard and computer in a wedge-shaped box” (kaciawsb) format, which became the inspiration for the next generation of home computers like the VIC20, Commodore C64 and Atari 600/800 XL. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126181",
"author": "Lonnie Stoudt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T00:16:43",
"content": "Even Apple’s Lisa held onto some of that “works & keyboard in shared box” design ethos… at least Apple eventually learned how to design a sweet keyboard somewhere around 2007… still screwing up pretty bad for being the ones who commercialized the Mouse, tho…",
"parent_id": "8126093",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126311",
"author": "greenbit",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T13:08:59",
"content": "And then for the Model III, R.S. went for the PET style, everything in one big piece. Too bad it didn’t open up as easily as the PET though.",
"parent_id": "8126093",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126107",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T18:46:09",
"content": "I wrote my first lines of code on my neighbours VIC20 (typed them in from the manual). But learned to program on a TRS-80. The computer lab of my high school had like 8 TRS-80’s and 2 Apple II’s. Programming lessons were given with the TRS-80’s, and I learned to program. A few months after, my dad bought our neighbour’s old Nascom 1 (which he had replaced with the VIC20). And by then I was able to write programs myself. And I’ve been a ‘programmer’ ever since. :)I have fond memories of the TRS-80’s. I finally got my hands on one that wasn’t working, somewhere around 2018. Fixed it up, but well, found out that it was history past. It wasn’t quite so amazing as I remembered. So I sold it again, and hopefully made someone else happy with it.I remember reading a review of the TRS-80 model 1 in Byte (I think), where the writer was lyrical about the TRS-80 being one of the first “turnkey” computers. You bought it, unpacked it, set it up, switched it on, and you could immediately start working. Quite an improvement over the Altair 8800, which was the other affordable computer at the time. Or for that matter, the Nascom 1, which you even had to solder together before you could even start thinking of using it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126144",
"author": "electronixblog9",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T21:12:58",
"content": "I worked at Mostek around that timeframe. Folks in the memory (RAM) groups readily said that Tandy bought barrels of rejected memory ICs for the TRS-80. That’s how it got the name TRASH 80.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126429",
"author": "Enginear1",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T23:54:08",
"content": "I had a Video Genie from EACA. I loved it. It was my second computer, after getting a ZX80 about a year previously. The Video Genie was 100% compatible with the TRS80, and had an integral cassette deck, and faux wooden end cheeks.It was my pride and joy, and that, and my ZX80, were the start of a long and happy career. I still have the ZX80. Sadly I got rid of the Video Genie about 30 years ago. At the same time that I threw away an Apple II, that had been given to me by a friend, and I had never even unpacked. That was an error!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.022833
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/08/understanding-linear-regression/
|
Understanding Linear Regression
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Machine Learning"
] |
[
"linear regression",
"math"
] |
Although [Vitor Fróis] is explaining
linear regression
because it relates to machine learning, the post and, indeed, the topic have wide applications in many things that we do with electronics and computers. It is one way to use independent variables to predict dependent variables, and, in its simplest form, it is based on nothing more than a straight line.
You might remember from school that a straight line can be described by: y=mx+b. Here, m is the slope of the line and b is the y-intercept. Another way to think about it is that m is how fast the line goes up (or down, if m is negative), and b is where the line “starts” at x=0.
[Vitor] starts out with a great example: home prices (the dependent variable) and area (the independent variable). As you would guess, bigger houses tend to sell for more than smaller houses. But it isn’t an exact formula, because there are a lot of reasons a house might sell for more or less. If you plot it, you don’t get a nice line; you get a cloud of points that sort of group around some imaginary line.
There are mathematical ways to figure out what line you should imagine, but you can often eyeball it, too. The real trick is evaluating the quality of that imaginary line.
To do that, you need an error measure. If you didn’t know better, you’d probably think expressing the error in terms of absolute value would be best. You know, “this is 10 off” or whatever. But, as [Vitor] explains, the standard way to do this is with a squared error term R
2
. Why? Read the post and find out.
For electronics, linear regression has many applications, including interpreting sensor data. You might also use it to generalize a batch of unknown components, for example. Think of a batch of transistors with different Beta values at different frequencies. A linear regression will help you predict the Beta and the error term will tell you if it is worth using the prediction or not. Or, maybe you just want to make the
perfect cup of coffee
.
| 7
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125926",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T09:53:48",
"content": "Knowledge of regression, curve fitting and statistics is immensely helpful for engineers and software folk. Spend a few afternoons just exploring these fields and you will gain amazing tools to do whatever you want with them.I don’t know why they are never given the attention they deserve in univ",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125971",
"author": "zero",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T13:02:04",
"content": "At least in Germany, e.g. in normal Computer Science, you take directly a Mashine Learning or AI course or what I had, was “Statistics with R”, where we learned the theory and had practical use in R of several statistics – including lin. regression or model fitting etc.",
"parent_id": "8125926",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126068",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:52:03",
"content": "Can’t remember what language we used in Ireland a long time ago, but statistics was a heavy part of any “Computing” (Comp Science) course.",
"parent_id": "8125971",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126017",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T14:39:32",
"content": "xkcd #2048 is exceptionally relevant to this. Doing linear regression well with a big dataset is difficult! I do this all the time at work and honestly I often show a scatter plot without any lines and say here’s what the data is doing, you all decide whether it’s within bounds or not, and then for each specification we’re trying to match, we have established statistical analyses for determining limits and confidence intervals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126070",
"author": "Ray O'Leary",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:54:52",
"content": "https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2048:_Curve-Fitting",
"parent_id": "8126017",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126269",
"author": "Meni",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T09:09:45",
"content": "Check out Do it yourself line fit athttps://www.geocities.ws/diylf/DIYLF.htmlThis is a tool for teaching linear regression",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127080",
"author": "Nmg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T09:17:14",
"content": "Please learn and always mention the assumptions when using linear regression. It’s often used incorrectly because assumptions aren’t checked.",
"parent_id": "8126269",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,553.15694
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/supercon-2024-a-hackers-guide-to-analog-design-in-a-digital-world/
|
Supercon 2024: A Hacker’s Guide To Analog Design In A Digital World
|
Navarre Bartz
|
[
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] |
[
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"analog",
"analog design",
"analog electronics"
] |
We often think of analog computing as a relic of the past, room-sized monstrosities filled with vacuum tubes doing their best to calculate Monte Carlo simulations or orbital velocities. Analog isn’t as dead as it might seem though, and analog mix signal design engineer [Nanik Adnani] gave us a
crash course on analog circuits at Supercon 2024
.
For those of us less familiar with analog circuits, [Adnani] helpfully offered a definition of analog circuit design as “the design of electronics that create or manipulate continuously variable signals.” It turns out, that even our nice, clean digital signals are actually more analog by the time they interact with the real world. This comes down to various factors like substrate losses, conductors, impedance, and even capacitance. Given the difference in scale between a logic gate and the actual pins the signal comes out of from an integrated circuit, it becomes clear that the amount of current the pin can handle versus the logic gate inside the chip is quite different. In order to bridge the gap, chips use a physical interface, or PHY, which happens to be an analog interface which allows the logic on the chip to communicate off the chip.
[Adnani] explained how every digital protocol in common usage requires some degree of analog circuits including LoRa, USB,
CAN
, etc. Most chips handling these protocols have a separate analog team designing the analog circuit which requires slightly different metal layer design, so while determining the exact function of an analog circuit can be difficult to determine from an X-ray of the chip, finding where they are compared to the digital components is quite simple.
Like with most things we hackers delve into, the best way to learn is by doing after picking up a few basics, and [Adnani] reiterates this throughout his talk. One of the more unexpected examples was his grandmother’s tricked-out walker. It has RGB lighting, a water gun, and a car horn. The car horn required a PHY to step things up from the 40 mA from the microcontroller to the 8 A required to drive the horn.
Some other examples from the talk are this PHY for
storing data on a cassette
by [Zack Nelson], a guitar pedal [Adnani] designed himself for tape out, and
analog bird circuits by [Kelly Heaton].
Analog still has a well-known place in music for various components as well.
The last piece of course, is how do you learn analog circuits when everyone around you lives in the digital realm? [Adnani] recommends starting by hitting the books as internet posts can often be a game of telephone, and getting the values wrong on capacitors or the like is a lot more problematic in an analog circuit. Some of his suggestions are as follows (
~13 min into the video
):
Design of Analog CMOS Circuits
– start here
Sedra and Smith
– if you like math
The Art of Electronics
– board level design
CMOS Circuit Design, Layout, and Simulation
– trying to tapeout a chip
Analog Integrated Circuit Design
– advanced concepts
[Adnani] says, “I had one professor tell me that all you really need is the first four or five chapters of
Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits
by Behzad Rezavi and then you can start building things.” If videos work better for you better, then [Adnani] recommends checking out [
Moritz Klein
], [
Carsten Wulff
], and [
Ali Hajimiri
] who all have robust offerings on the subject.
At the end of the day, you won’t really learn it until you try to build something, so get a box of components and start tinkering. Simulation can also be beneficial, so [Adnani] recommends trying out your circuits in LTspice for discrete simulations and Ngspice if you want to tape out. While taping out a design for a few hundred bucks seems pricey, it’s a lot cheaper than a university course in many regions of the world. [Adnani] ends with an exhortation that if a humble undergraduate can do analog work, then any hacker can too, so maybe give it a whirl on your next project!
| 9
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125070",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T18:01:19",
"content": "“… if a humble undergraduate can do analog work, then any hacker can too…”This statement is what is commonly known as anon sequitur.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125150",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T21:46:19",
"content": "Some are the same people.However there is no gatekeeper for ‘hacker’.Especially when times are weird, weirds will claim the ‘Hacker’ title without doing the work.‘Analog’ is a deep subject and the math is hairy.Lots of innumerates among self described ‘Hackers’.Also: lots of innumerates among undergraduates…Just not in the Engineering school (for long).You can’t even take Circuits 1 without DiffEq.No ‘calc for business majors’ mouth breathers in the room.",
"parent_id": "8125070",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125092",
"author": "Greg Mathews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T19:40:21",
"content": "If you want to learn analog design, start by learning differential equations, Laplace transform and transfer functions. Otherwise you’re tryharding the same way as in high school physics where you’re told to memorize some bullshit equations and ask no questions instead of simply understanding how Newton and others came upon them and derived them from math fundamentals.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125101",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T19:56:32",
"content": "I have terrible memory though, I can’t remember all the billion sinX d/dx = cosX formulaeAny advice for me? I’m not particularly interested in analog design, I just want to get better at math and have a broader toolset to solve problems",
"parent_id": "8125092",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125152",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T21:53:11",
"content": "Unless you’re studying medicine (MD=’memorized degree’), if you find yourself memorizing, you are doing it wrong.Take/pass the physics/calc sequence.It’s not easy, but so what?Nothing that comes after it is easy either, but the people that never get it are blind.",
"parent_id": "8125101",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125139",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T21:02:26",
"content": "You can learn to design analog circuits by learning things by rote, but you won’t have as deep an understanding ofwhythings work they way they do. That lack of understanding can be very limiting. But for the non-paid hacker who is in it for the love of making things but not so much the love of understanding things, learning by rote can be enough to have an enjoyable hobby.",
"parent_id": "8125092",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125120",
"author": "Pardalis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T20:27:00",
"content": "Digital? Any idiot can count to one!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126226",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:42:06",
"content": "He just haven’t meet many idiots.",
"parent_id": "8125120",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125689",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T15:12:06",
"content": "There was a reason why older analog computers were stuck in their niche – stability and limited scaling up. It was not easy to generate a stable voltage reference for all occasions; also the most important thing to work with, floating numbers representation, couldn’t be scaled up pass certain limit.I still see the analog-vs-digital as the endless vhs-vs-beta that has already been decidedly settled in favor of digital, it is stable and scales up very well, however, what was dropped in the process (say, differentials calculated nearly instantly in parallel using few op amps – AND zero coding) required additional crunching that could have been avoided, have someone invested into hybrid processors that would have both seamlessly integrated. Same processors then probably won’t need dedicated ICs for the interface, as with some forward R&D they’d simply have ADC/DAC builtin.There were alternative computers of sorts in the past – I remember reading about the ternary computing (bit may have three states instead of one) and how that sounds closer to the hybrid computing. One particular implementation I’ve seen was the three bit states can be negative, zero and positive (and, obviously, it was using ternary math). The other implementation was simpler, closer to binary, zero, some kind of upper voltage limit, and a median voltage, and, as coincidence has it, modern binary computers have “floating value” between defined binary zero and defined binary one. Usually it is treated as “indeterminate/has-to-be-forced-into-either-zero-or-one” with the pull-up or pull-down resistor, which, imho, is a kludge to start with – the signal will ALWAYS have some kind of analog nature to it, because that’s how our world truly is, it is non-linear analog.Regardless, analog things, like clock radios, will be around, since they just work reliably when need to work. I’d say we are in for a decade of reinventing analog, computing or not, and coming up with better solutions where it is long due. Wireless, classic example, will never be truly digital, it simply cannot be, hence, back to basics, differential equations, Fourier transformation, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.250511
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/ai-brings-play-by-play-commentary-to-pong/
|
AI Brings Play-by-Play Commentary To Pong
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Games"
] |
[
"ai",
"LLM",
"pong"
] |
While most of us won’t ever play Wimbledon, we can play Pong. But it isn’t the same without the thrill of the sportscaster’s commentary during the game. Thanks to [Parth Parikh] and an LLM, you
can now watch Pong matches with commentary during the game
. You can see the very cool result in the video below — the game itself starts around the 2:50 mark. Sadly, you don’t get to play. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to wire yourself in with a little programming.
The game features multiple AI players and two announcers. There are 15 years of tournaments, including four majors, for a total of 60 events. In the 16th year, the two top players face off in the World Championship Final.
There are several interesting techniques here. For one, each action is logged as an event that generates metrics and is prioritized. If an important game event occurs, commentary pauses to announce that event and then picks back up where it left off.
We really want to see a one- or two-player human version of this. Please
tell us
if you take on that challenge. Even if you don’t write it, maybe the AI
can write it for you
.
| 6
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125031",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T15:54:38",
"content": "Is it really commentary if it’s 90% filler?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125034",
"author": "purplepeopleated",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T15:59:37",
"content": "… have you seen a pro level tennis match?",
"parent_id": "8125031",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125038",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:11:33",
"content": "Tennis matches basically have only two primary audio components:– Empty commentary– Sexual moans",
"parent_id": "8125034",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125166",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:41:36",
"content": "Wish we could add McEnroe tirades to that list!",
"parent_id": "8125038",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125526",
"author": "drypaperhammerbro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T05:09:11",
"content": "…or any pro level sport?",
"parent_id": "8125034",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125274",
"author": "El Gru",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T07:14:58",
"content": "Love it when Al posts AI stories. =)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.200147
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/optical-contact-bonding-where-the-macro-meets-the-molecular/
|
Optical Contact Bonding: Where The Macro Meets The Molecular
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] |
[
"optical contact binding"
] |
If you take two objects with fairly smooth surfaces, and put these together, you would not expect them to stick together. At least not without a liberal amount of adhesive, water or some other substance to facilitate a temporary or more permanent bond. This assumption gets tossed out of the window when it comes to optical contact bonding, which is a process whereby two surfaces are joined together without glue.
The fascinating aspect of this process is that it uses the intermolecular forces in each surface, which normally don’t play a major role, due to the relatively rough surfaces. Before intermolecular forces like Van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonds become relevant, the two surfaces should not have imperfections or contaminants on the order of more than a few nanometers. Assuming that this is the case, both surfaces will bond together in a way that is permanent enough that breaking it is likely to cause damage.
Although more labor-intensive than using adhesives, the advantages are massive when considering that it creates an effectively uninterrupted optical interface. This makes it a perfect choice for especially high-precision optics, but with absolutely zero room for error.
Intermolecular Forces
Thirty-six gauges wrung together and held horizontally. (Credit:
Goodrich & Stanley
, 1907)
As creatures of the macro world, we are largely only aware of the macro effects of the various forces at play around us. We mostly understand gravity, and how the friction of our hand against a glass prevents it from sliding out of our hand before shattering into many pieces on the floor. Yet add some water on the skin of our hands, and suddenly there’s not enough friction, leading to unfortunate glass slippage, or a lid on a jar of pickles that stubbornly refuses to open because we cannot generate enough friction until we manage to dry our hands sufficiently.
Many of these macro-level interactions are the result of molecular-level interactions, which range from the glass staying in one piece instead of drifting off as a cloud of atoms, to the system property that we refer to as ‘
friction
‘, which itself is also subdivided into static stiction and dynamic friction. The system of friction can be considered to be analogous to contact binding when we consider two plates with one placed on top of the other. If we proceed to change the angle of these stacked plates, at some point the top plate will slide off the bottom plate. This is the point where the binding forces can no longer compensate for the gravitational pull, with material type and surface finish affecting the final angle.
An interesting example of how much surface smoothness matters can be found in
gauge blocks
. These are precision ground and lapped blocks of metal or ceramic which match a specific thickness. Used for mainly calibration purposes, they posses the fascinating property due to their smooth surfaces that you can make multiple of them adhere together in a near-permanent manner in what is called
wringing
. This way you can combine multiple lengths to create a single gauge block with sub-millimeter accuracy.
Enabling all this are
intermolecular forces
, in particular the Van der Waals forces, including dipole-dipole electrostatic interactions. These do not rely on chemical or similar properties as they depend only on aspects like the mutual repulsion between the electron clouds of the atoms that make up the materials involved. Although these forces are very weak and drop off rapidly with distance, they are generally independent of aspects like temperature.
Hydrogen bonds can also occur if present, with each type of force having its own set of characteristics in terms of strength and effective distance.
Make It Smooth
Surface roughnesses of a SiO2 wafer (left, ≈1.01 nm RMS) and an ULE wafer (right, ≈1.03 nm RMS) (Credit: Kalkowski et al., 2011)
One does not simply polish a surface to a nanometer-perfect sheen, though as computer cooling enthusiasts and kin are aware, you can get pretty far with a smooth surface and various grits of sandpaper all the way up to ridiculously high levels. Giving enough effort and time, you can match the surface finish of something like gauge blocks and shave off another degree or two on that CPU at load.
Achieving even smoother surfaces is essentially taking this to the extreme, though it can be done without 40,000 grit sandpaper as well. The easiest way is probably found in glass and optics production, the latter of which has benefited immensely from the semiconductor industry. A good demonstration of this can be found in a
2011 paper
(
full PDF
) by Fraunhofer researchers G. Kalkowski et al. as published in
Optical Manufacturing and Testing
.
They describe the use of optical contact bonding in the context of glass-glass for optical and precision engineering, specifically low-expansion fused silica (SiO
2
) and ultra-low expansion materials. There is significant overlap between semiconductor wafers and the wafers used here, with the same nanometer level precision, <1 nm RMS surface roughness, a given. Before joining, the surfaces are extensively cleaned of any contaminants in a vacuum environment.
Worse Than Superglue
Once the surfaces are prepared, there comes the tricky part of making both sides join together. Unlike with the gauge blocks, these super smooth surfaces will not come apart again without a fight, and there’s no opportunity to shimmy them around to get that perfect fit like when using adhesive. With the demonstrated method by Kalkowski et al., the wafers were joined followed by heating to 250 ℃ to create permanent Si-O-Si bonds between the two surfaces. In addition bonding pressure was applied for two hours at 2 MPa using either N
2
or O
2
gas.
This also shows another aspect of optical contact binding: although it’s not technically permanent, the bond is still just using intermolecular forces, and, as shown in this study, can be pried apart with a razorblade and some effort. By heating and applying pressure, the two surfaces can be annealed, forming molecular bonds and effectively turning the two parts into one.
Of course, there are many more considerations, such as the low-expansion materials used in the referenced study. If both sides use too dissimilar materials, the bond will be significantly more tenuous than if the materials with the same expansion properties are used. It’s also possible to use chemically activated direct bonding with a chemical activation process, all of which relies on the used materials.
In summary, optical contact bonding is a very useful technique, though you may want to have a well-equipped home lab if you want to give it a spin yourself.
| 19
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125041",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:20:50",
"content": "“Wonder-bond powers, activate”!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125247",
"author": "Tinothy X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T05:15:24",
"content": "“To be precise…..”",
"parent_id": "8125041",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125053",
"author": "Anathae",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:54:03",
"content": "I wonder how long before applied engineering or someone similar on YouTube does this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125096",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T19:42:56",
"content": "This is more of a Huygen’s Optics kind of thing, and even he has serious trouble grinding anywhere near that precise. Maybe if the interface surface is spherical it’s easier?Really this is more a technique I expect to start seeing out of the expensive end of Japanese optics houses. Sticking groups of elements together with no cement sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would get used to reduce glare in a camera lens.",
"parent_id": "8125053",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125174",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T23:12:13",
"content": "The possibilities in the high end consumer audio realm are mind boggling.",
"parent_id": "8125096",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125321",
"author": "Kyle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:02:50",
"content": "This technique also seems incredible useful for specific application-focused improvement of small optics(cell phone camera lens, etc) for increased light transmission and stray light reduction. Also lens filter design where you have stackups of layers and want to reduce/eliminate any losses or interference between materials. But I’d still expect most of it out of high volume or bespoke engineering companies.",
"parent_id": "8125096",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125054",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:54:23",
"content": "Remember guys:If humans could get stuck together while mating (like dogs) you’d be there now…I’ll see myself out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125063",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T17:23:46",
"content": "Stiction is a portmanteau of the words “static” and “friction” which means “static stiction” is similar to calling it an “ATM machine” instead of an ATM.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125175",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T23:14:19",
"content": "If there’s an ATM machine why am I leaving the house?",
"parent_id": "8125063",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125308",
"author": "justsayin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T10:45:46",
"content": "How would you generate your PIN number?",
"parent_id": "8125175",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125134",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T20:43:18",
"content": "You might want to start treating others with that same respect.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125160",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:29:31",
"content": "I also was surprised by that sentence, but I guess a good friend does machine stuff to micron level accuracy (or precision… or maybe both?) routinely. So perhaps my knowledge is not typical.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125280",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T07:46:33",
"content": "This phenomena is also a quite big problem in vacuum environmnents, where metals (and other materials? can form spontaneous welds. I think to recall that gauges should never be stored when in the wrung together configuration, as they can also form (partial) welds, which lead to damage.Similarly, in many solids, even metals atoms don’t always stay where they are. Cristal structure can change, materials (including metals) can creep, (which is a serious issue for load cells) Growing of tin (or zink) whiskers lead to damage of electronic circuits. And especially in semconductor manufacuring a whole lot of problems had to be solved due to similar issues.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125282",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T07:52:28",
"content": "Amateur astronomers who grind and polish telescope mirrors often become unpleasantly aware of the phenomenon. As finer abrasives are used, the contact between mirror and the grinding tool increases to the point that the two may suddenly stick together. I can personally attest that getting them apart can be an exercise in annoyance and frustration.The old “Amateur Telescope Making” books by Ingalls describe numerous methods that have been used—successfully and otherwise—to separate the two. Most ATMs are understandably reluctant to use a razor blade near an optical surface that may represent hundreds of hours of work…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125307",
"author": "justsayin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T10:41:35",
"content": "Oxygen at 2MPa and 250C .. at the same time? That’s got to approach fluorine levels of churlish behaviour. Make mine N2, please.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125369",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:03:34",
"content": "i was also struck by the opening sentence about my intuition, because my intuition is indeed that things often stick together in crazy ways.it reminds me of something i recently read, which was obvious once i thought about it. when you’re looking at the strength of a fastener, you can often get a ‘good enough’ understanding of the situation by disregarding friction. like, consider a screw between two blocks. you’ve got the shear strength of the screw’s shaft, and the strength of the walls of the holes that it goes through. you might want to take into account the flexing of the screw as well, because that will focus the force on a portion of those walls.but often the screw is tightened down and holding the pieces together in compression. for example, a countersunk drywall screw in two pieces of wood will deform the pieces of wood enough that they will exert a static force trying to return to their original shape. and that will produce a ton of friction between the two pieces of wood and that friction actually bears the shear force…the fastener usually only needs to hold up to the tension of compressing the wood.of course that’s hard for me to mathematically reason about but it’s ever-present. for example, if you have a sewn seam in fabric, i have known that it gets a lot stronger if you sew several parallel lines of stitches. i had a hard time modeling the forces in my head, imagining the shear and tension strength of the thread, imagining whether the second line would even see force at all until the first line has failed or stretched. it all became clear to me when i realized, this is producing a larger friction patch between the two pieces, and that friction is a big part of the strength.and of course it’s the 101 of understanding knots",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125416",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:25:58",
"content": "I build a lot of stuff, and fix and modify a lot of stuff, and dissasemble anything that has no use, as is.Like old hard drives, and wow the disks are shiny and flat, and while I never tried to wring them together, just placing two together means that if you pick.up the top one, the bottom one sticks….but will slide around like its attached with perfect bearings or something,if it’s tilted or shaken, this effect will survive a lot of handling and bench wear, before it stops.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126515",
"author": "MM",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T08:39:13",
"content": "Optical contact bonding is used in the optical industry, for example, to attach prisms precisely and with a small angle angle to a glass tool. This achieves small angular errors. After the polishing process, the parts can be separated by a short heat shock. Optical bonding was also used to mount flat elements precisely and stably in an optical setrometer (as far as I know in the Aladin spectrometer in a satellite).Interesting are the theoretical models that try to explain the effects (vacuum fluctuations, Casimir effect), which are unfortunately not mentioned in the article.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8127138",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T12:19:30",
"content": "I didn’t know that about the Aladin. I would have assumed optical adhesives would be more practical in most situations. Then again, if you are sending a spectrometer into space every optical component better be extremely well tolerenced.Casimir effect is likely somewhat present I’ll have to read more, but the chemical interactions are compelling. Much of the post processing they are doing is an attempt to form chemical bonds anyways.",
"parent_id": "8126515",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,553.376118
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/improving-flying-drones-by-mimicking-flying-squirrels/
|
Improving Flying Drones By Mimicking Flying Squirrels
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"drone hacks"
] |
[
"quadcopter",
"squirrel"
] |
With the ability to independently adjust the thrust of each of their four motors, quadcopters are exceptionally agile compared to more traditional aircraft. But in an effort to create an even more maneuverable drone platform, a group of South Korean researchers have studied
adding flying squirrel tech to quadcopters
. Combined with machine learning, this is said to significantly increase the prototype’s agility in an obstacle course.
Flying squirrels (tribe
Pteromyini
)) have large skin flaps (patagium) between their wrists and ankles which they use to control their flight when they glide from tree to tree, along with their fluffy squirrel tail. With flights covering up to 90 meters, they also manage to use said tail and patagium to air brake, which prevents them from smacking with bone jarring velocities into a tree trunk.
By taking these principles and adding a similar mechanism to a quadcopter for extending a patagium-like membrane between its rotors, the researchers could develop a new controller (thrust-wing coordination control, TWCC), which manages the extending of the membranes in coordination with thrust from the brushless motors. Rather than relying on trial-and-error to develop the controller algorithms, the researchers trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) which was pre-trained prior to first flights using simulation data followed by supervised learning to refine the model.
During experiments with obstacle avoidance on a test-track, the RNN-based controller worked quite well compared to a regular quadcopter. A disadvantage is of course that the range of these flying squirrel drones is less due to the extra weight and drag, but if one were to make flying drones that will perch on surfaces between dizzying feats of agility in the air, this type of drone tech might just be the ticket.
| 12
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8124962",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T11:17:53",
"content": "Did they optimize the flying parameters of non-squirrel version too?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124977",
"author": "Shara",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:15:31",
"content": "Blue graph",
"parent_id": "8124962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124963",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T11:21:10",
"content": "Flying squirrels are very cute, I love them",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124979",
"author": "Rocky",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:46:00",
"content": "And now here’s something we think you’ll really enjoy…..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125030",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T15:47:22",
"content": "Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of this hat! (RRROOOAAARRR!)",
"parent_id": "8124979",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125057",
"author": "MensaDropout",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T17:07:02",
"content": "Must be in my other hat.",
"parent_id": "8125030",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125064",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T17:25:13",
"content": "OK… now make the robot squirrel part. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125097",
"author": "brucedesertrat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T19:46:32",
"content": "Then the robot moose…",
"parent_id": "8125064",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125156",
"author": "aaronfish",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:08:42",
"content": "And the robot spies.earpiece chirpsOh I’m told we did that step first, then definitely I demand my robot moose and squirrels.",
"parent_id": "8125097",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125132",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T20:40:47",
"content": "They could also do what flying squirrels do and just glide for a distance to save energy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125359",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:26:37",
"content": "yeah that was my first thought too but it would be hard to do it without a big change to their premise…all of their thrust is orthogonal to the membrane, so in cases where you want an air brake it is a no-brainer but to use it as a lifting wing you’d want at least one motor pointing in the direction of travel. which is neat but that’s a different project :)",
"parent_id": "8125132",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125253",
"author": "ScubaBearLA",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T05:41:47",
"content": "“That’s not flying, that’s falling with style!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.424197
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/hardware-built-for-executing-python-not-pythons/
|
Hardware Built For Executing Python (Not Pythons)
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"hardware",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"determinism",
"programming",
"python",
"pyxl",
"speed"
] |
Lots of microcontrollers will accept Python these days, with CircuitPython and MicroPython becoming ever more popular in recent years. However, there’s now a new player in town. Enter PyXL, a project to
run Python directly in hardware for maximum speed
.
What’s the deal with PyXL? “It’s actual Python executed in silicon,” notes the project site. “A custom toolchain compiles a .py file into CPython ByteCode, translates it to a custom assembly, and produces a binary that runs on a pipelined processor built from scratch.” Currently, there isn’t a hard silicon version of PyXL — no surprise given what it costs to make a chip from scratch. For now, it exists as logic running on a Zynq-7000 FPGA on a Arty-Z7-20 devboard. There’s an ARM CPU helping out with setup and memory tasks for now, but the Python code is executed entirely in dedicated hardware.
The headline feature of PyXL is speed. A comparison video demonstrates this with a measurement of GPIO latency. In this test, the PyXL runs at 100 MHz, achieving a round-trip latency of 480 nanoseconds. This is compared to MicroPython running on a PyBoard at 168 MHz, which achieves a much slower 15,000 nanoseconds by comparison. The project site claims PyXL can be 30x faster than MicroPython based on this result, or 50x faster when normalized for the clock speed differences.
Python has never been the most real-time of languages, but efforts like this attempt to push it this way. The aim is that it may finally be possible to write performance-critical code in Python from the outset.
We’ve taken a look at Python in the embedded world before, too, albeit in very different contexts.
| 42
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8124935",
"author": "bateske",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T08:29:41",
"content": "Wow all that work and still several times slower than C",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124937",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T08:44:44",
"content": "It’s a start. And a good one.",
"parent_id": "8124935",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124955",
"author": "baltar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T10:31:53",
"content": "It’s about as fast as PIC16F1517. All that effort could’ve been spent far more productively, for example watching Czech Casting.",
"parent_id": "8124935",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125046",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:37:42",
"content": "Why I gave up jogging, all that sweat and still can’t beat Usain Bolt in a race 😤",
"parent_id": "8124935",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125184",
"author": "Bubba",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T00:03:03",
"content": "This. Why not just learn c… c’mon",
"parent_id": "8124935",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124936",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T08:38:00",
"content": "It’s not executing or running any Python. This is someone’s clever custom ISA and there is no python bytecode anymore once the actual program executes. The source language just happens to be python, by the end it is something entirely else for the custom processor which just looks like an FPGA that is fed data by an ARM device.Whilst this is smart and intelligent, the promise what it does is misleading a little, probably not intentional. Given the cruft of several chips optimizing something into something entirely new, the speed gains seem rather unsurprising. I am sure some assembly genius can just take an MCU at a certain MHz speed and even laugh about my C code.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124960",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T11:15:07",
"content": "Yeah exactly my thoughts. This can be achieved by writing a compiler which would turn python in instructions for whatever architecture it must run on. Its the same as writing C or C++. It still compiles to instructions in the endGoing by the title of the post I assumed they had built a custom processor which executed Python in hardware, like ARM Jazelle or those old Forth chips. Although again, that’s not too different from writing C but they did have special hardware which actually ran java bytecode in hardware, so its different too",
"parent_id": "8124936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124976",
"author": "Hans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:09:04",
"content": "We’ll have to see what makes the hardware part so special in this. I don’t really care about a “Python processor” much like we also don’t have a “C++ processor” or “Java processor”. The latter has been tried and failed.But I would give this a fair chance versus the Java attempt, because the way Java/C#/etc. runs on modern systems makes more sense (e.g. JIT compilers which can always optimize for the host ISA). Doing the Python > bytecode > C > machinecode step statically makes sense, but I do wonder what magic sauce is in that bytecode > C > machinecode part, and perhaps more importantly, how fast that would have executed on that 168MHz ARM chip instead. I bet its not going to be 14.7us.",
"parent_id": "8124936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124978",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:41:46",
"content": "Java processors aren’t considered a failure, at least not by the numbers. They are embedded in the chips found in essentially every payment card issued in the last decade, with billions of them deployed around the globe.",
"parent_id": "8124976",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125033",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T15:58:37",
"content": "I think I checked the board and it was 250 USD in the OP. So if that won’t execute code fast after optimizing it multiple times, I’d be feeling tricked ;)I fully see the hacker who did this is clearly intelligent, but it’s not really a cheap way.",
"parent_id": "8124976",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124988",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:13:03",
"content": "Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.Why not execute the bytecode directly?That would have been closer than this.But that’s still a lot of work, just not what I expected reading the headlines.",
"parent_id": "8124936",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124938",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T08:45:55",
"content": "If you are going to compile it you might as well use C/C++.Still a cool concept. I can’t wait for the source code to be released.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124956",
"author": "runpyxl",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T10:35:28",
"content": "Python is also compiled — typically to CPython bytecode.PyXL takes that bytecode and translates it into a custom instruction set that’s executed in hardware.So while there’s a compilation step, it doesn’t turn Python into a static language like C — PyXL preserves dynamic typing and stack semantics, but runs them far more efficiently.",
"parent_id": "8124938",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125576",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:18:58",
"content": "A CPU cannot run bytecode so I don’t consider that compilation, but translation to an intermediate format.",
"parent_id": "8124956",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124989",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:18:49",
"content": "I write C and C++, but if I could write python and compile it would be much faster to write initially.Thats part of the reason I’m using tinygo for a current project. Compiled, a GC, and a decent amount of python like syntax",
"parent_id": "8124938",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125579",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:21:38",
"content": "I agree python is much faster. I use it to write scripts and tools for the PC. But I use C/C++ for embedded devices.",
"parent_id": "8124989",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124939",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T08:49:43",
"content": "Nice work, I would love to have spare braincells (and time) to get into FPGA. Seems like a fun project. ARM did once have instructions to accelerate the JVM. One thought, would not a compiler for python do a better job? I don’t do python so no idea how good the compliers for it are. I can’t see why a good compiler could not make it run as good as C code????",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124954",
"author": "Darren",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T10:31:19",
"content": "A classic example of trying to use the wrong tool for the job. Perhaps the likes of CircuitPython and MicroPython are fine for simple projects where performance is not a concern and provides an easy path into microcontrollers for people who already know some python. There come a point however where you have to learn something new to achieve your goals.Python seems to be following a similar path to BASIC, it was the language of choice for beginners to learn programming and some very good software was developed using it, then we had things like the BASIC Stamp that enabled people to use BASIC on a microcontroller, but eventually, if you wanted to progress to building more complex projects, you had to move on from BASIC.I have no problem with Python, it is a perfectly good language that I use myself for many things, but it just isn’t a good fit for microcontrollers, learn something new instead of trying to force your preferred language to do things it isn’t intended for.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124994",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:30:16",
"content": "I beg to differ. Having micropython on a microcontroller presents some advantages:– when developing you can use pye (python editor) on the controller itself and edit files directly. No compiler and flashing needed. When the code is working and ready, it can be incorporated into micropython source, then available after flashing– performance-critical parts can be rewritten in C and wrapped with Python. then you have the best of both worldsFor rapid prototyping, it´s a damn efficient workflow.",
"parent_id": "8124954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125417",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:26:54",
"content": "In my experience prototyping in a different language usually ends up taking mure development time.I don’t understand what is peoples objection to C on a small microcontroller. It’s an easy language to learn and most problems people run into are through general lack of discipline. Moreover, at low level many things are a lot easier – for instance switching between a string and array of bytes which in C are one and the same thing",
"parent_id": "8124994",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125004",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T14:03:55",
"content": "I have to beg to differ. Not just a learning language or ‘have to move on’. It is a perfectly good language for some microcontrollers (like RP2040 and RP2350) for most things. I’ve yet had to drop down to C (and I know this language very well) to improve performance for something I am doing. There is a point where performance is ‘good enough’ now. To read a temperature, to trip a relay, to read open/close status, etc. We are not back in the day where you had to get the last bit of speed and memory use out of the code. With PIO and multi-core you even have more options. Obviously don’t use Python where it won’t fit (use C/Assemby or other favorite compiled language), but don’t be afraid to use Python more and more as the new controllers get more powerful. It is a win for ease of use. That’s of course in my humble opinion.",
"parent_id": "8124954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125009",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T14:24:25",
"content": "“We are not back in the day where you had to get the last bit of speed and memory use out of the code. ”Micro$oft effect: If it’s bloated and runs poor, you(user) need MORE POWER(to make up for our poor coding)I am old enuff to remember what could be done(very well) on a C64 or 8086.Quantity not quality is now the rule.",
"parent_id": "8125004",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125011",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T14:33:56",
"content": "“Quantity not quality is now the rule.”Just like what has happened to Amateur(ham) Radio over the last 20++ years.-and-Many Linux distros are also moving that way :((looking at you Ubuntu)",
"parent_id": "8125009",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125149",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T21:43:48",
"content": "I don’t see it that way (the M$ effect) . I see it as power available for the $. You have a ‘very cheap’ $5.00 to $8.00 part in hand. It does exactly what you want it to do in Python — not pushing any performance issues in doing so. Plus, modules in Python have already been created for just about every sensor or device you can think of with either CircuitPython or microPython . No need to re-invent the wheel here and drop to ‘C’ or Assembly and hack the registers. As long as does the job and is ‘reliable’, I really don’t see why Python is looked down on to use. In a recent project I even plugged a RP2350 into a small robotics board, so I could use it’s servo interface over i2c. Gave me control of 8 servos and two motors (not used in my project) without having to use Pico pins to do pwm and get power and ground to servos. Use the tech that is available I say. Time is to short to battle the low level hardware … if you don’t have to. Anyway, the Pico was again loafing along using Python with plenty of flash and memory to spare. And for the cheap cheap price … why not??? :)",
"parent_id": "8125009",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125441",
"author": "Blodgar",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:02:01",
"content": "Fumble-thumbs accidental “Report Comment”Please ignore, HD!",
"parent_id": "8125149",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125585",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:33:36",
"content": "I partially agree.Software is getting more and more bloated which pushes users to more and more powerful hardware. An endless cycle.However older hardware also lacked important features. This caused software to become more complicated to work around these limitations or emulate the required features. Limited pointer size required segmented code, bank switching, long jumps, etc.We need more elegant software.",
"parent_id": "8125009",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126164",
"author": "David S.",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T23:01:56",
"content": "I’ve seen several YouTube videos taking Contra Force and other older games and showing how, with a few simple patches, they could be optimized immensely. (See Displaced Gamers channel.) Amazing things could be done on older systems, but that doesn’t mean they were always or even usually done. In some ways, the limitations of older systems made quantity over quality worse; it’s a lot easier to pop out a 32-level platformer that gamers will play after SMB1, but a lot harder to make a passable quality Skyrim knock-off.We could talk about the UNIX effect, where original UNIX had a lot of fixed-sized buffers, usually with no check on buffer overflow. Code running in Python or Java can use flexible containers and flexible strings, with garbage collection to mitigate memory leaks. If it’s bloated and runs poorly, but unlike the efficient alternative, it runs without crashes, I think that’s a quality win.At the end of the day, if I’m writing code that will go in a microcontroller for a million products, there’s a good chance I want to go with a compiled language and optimize for the cheapest microcontroller available. If there’s going to be one made, spending a dozen hours of programmer time for to replace a Raspberry Pi 4 with something cheaper is wasteful. On a different scale, it’s important for a movie player to optimize so that 4K video can be played on cheaper systems. If the developers of LyX (a LaTeX editor) spent a hundred hours making it use half the memory and half the CPU, nobody would care; it runs just fine. Use that hundred hours on usability or features.",
"parent_id": "8125009",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125091",
"author": "Jared",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T19:37:47",
"content": "You haven’t really contested the idea that “CircuitPython and MicroPython are fine for simple projects where performance is not a concern and provides an easy path into microcontrollers”The examples of tasks you’ve given are trivial, they do not use a fraction of a percent of the capability of a modern MCU, and are tasks that would otherwise be accomplished via simple analog components or ICs.Keep in mind a 20 year old ATmega2560 with 256kb of program memory and 8kb of RAM can run an 8 cylinder gasoline engine with sequential fuel and spark. The fact that you can write a basic IO program using a Python toolchain is inconsequential, you’re hardly utilizing the MCU to any real extent.",
"parent_id": "8125004",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125395",
"author": "Conor Stewart",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:08:08",
"content": "I see people give simple examples like that for micropython all the time, I doubt they know what microcontrollers are actually capable of. Some of the examples they give (if a microcontroller had to be used) could likely be handled by a processor working in the low kHz range (if that), yet they think it impressive they can run it on a 32 bit, 100+MHz processor.Yes MCUs are cheap enough now that it makes sense to use python for some simple projects and even more so when it comes to SBCs running an OS but if you are doing anything that intensive or making something as a product then micropython just isn’t a good option. It is much slower and much less space efficient. The industries that use python the most, like AI or data analysis, they use python to call C functions, that is the only reason it is feasible to use.I tried a leetcode exercise in python, just a simple one, It was something simple like returning the maximum and minimum from a list. I first approached it logically in python, going through the list and comparing it against the current maximum and minimum, it was very slow and many many times slower than their best time, then I learned about the “pythonic” way to do it and it was a lot faster but made very little intuitive and obvious sense and required a lot of knowledge about python libraries and functions, like hash maps and built in sorting functions. Then I tried it in C and just did it logically and simply and it got close to the best time first attempt and was a fraction of the pythonic solutions time. My point being that python is good if you know all these functions and libraries which are written in a language like C. You can’t just approach it logically or mathematically and get good performance whereas with C and other languages a logical and mathematical approach often is best. I would say that in a lot of cases it can make python more difficult to write if you care about performance and more difficult to read.",
"parent_id": "8125091",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125796",
"author": "Jon Nordby",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:30:58",
"content": "MicroPython modules can also be written in C, and often are for computationally intensive code. You can use the built-in ones, install general third party ones like ulab (for numpy) or emlearn-micropython for ML/DSP, or write your own.One can even install such native modules at runtime using “mip install”. Or bake them into the firmware. So what you suggest is plenty feasible already :) Non-trivial MicroPython projects are often a combination of C and Python. Or one could say all projects – as most of the low-level HAL modules shipped by default are implemented in C, along with the interpreter itself, of course.",
"parent_id": "8125395",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125100",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T19:55:53",
"content": "I agree completely. Python was for me a means to doing some work that required less mental investment than a compiled language. I assumed that C/C++ would take too long to grasp and be unwieldy. In the end I found that C was suitable for math/algorithmic work, but not a good choice for file input/output and raw data encoding from scratch (for png or wav for example). Python has perfect modules with easy and clean function calls. The math is far too slow in Python. I need to do computations that are time consuming. And C is the only feasible one unless Im willing to wait days/weeks to run in Python vs hours/days in C.",
"parent_id": "8124954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125114",
"author": "jononor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T20:20:23",
"content": "You can combine C and Python with MicroPython, to get the best of both worlds. Write the computationally intensive parts in C and expose them as modules, then do the high level logic in Python.",
"parent_id": "8125100",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124983",
"author": "kkugler",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:52:39",
"content": "I develop FPGA modules and write embedded code for a living. At 100MHz the Zynq-7000 can toggle/read IO in ~150-200ns through the general purpose AXI interface between the PS-PL using canned peripherals from Xilinx, and 100-150 is using custom perioherals. It can be done in under 100ns if you stay in the PS only and use MIO GPIO. And the C code for that specific task is about the same number of lines as the python example.Don’t get me wrong, I use Python almost daily for testing and data analytics and it’s great for quickly whipping something up; but if performance really matters to you then just learn C for your embedded system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124996",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:39:00",
"content": "The missing information is, MicroPython can run 50 times faster than MicroPython with a couple built-in decorators and some style rules. From a demonstration by Damien George in 2018, I recently ran the examples on some new ESP32 boards and got the same results as the 2018 tests on STM32F407.It simply involves using local variables and functions and/or the @micropython.native decorator.2018 demonstration here.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHec4qL00x0",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125797",
"author": "jononor",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:33:23",
"content": "Yup, MicroPython has a bunch of tools to write more performant code. All the way down to Assembler and C modules, if one wishes!",
"parent_id": "8124996",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125116",
"author": "oldradiofixer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T20:22:54",
"content": "it’s a fun exercise but what i’d call “a solution in search of a problem.” the two questions i’d ask myself before starting this project would be:1/ python is a pretty fast interpreted language that has its place, but is there a really good reason to make python fast instead of just picking some other lanuage/execution model that’s inherently better suited to high performance applications?2/ what aspects of the python language/execution model might be factored out and implemented in hardware so that multiple interpreted languages benefit, e.g. math coprocessor, object oriented mmu, general purpose byte code interpreter that can be targeted by multiple languages, and so forth?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125143",
"author": "Kaylee Kerin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T21:17:23",
"content": "I’ve been using a similar compiler tool chain concept for Thinkulator Dynamic, but instead I am targeting the native instruction set from off the shelf microcontrollers. It has benefits and drawbacks for sure. With a good UX, you can abstract the compile/load step away, letting you change things just as rapidly as a spreadsheet.This does make it MUCH less frustrating to change code on the fly. But it does not seem like they took this step yet.Them introducing their own CPU instruction set sounds similar to the old “It runs Java” gimmick, with the same challenges. It will be interesting that see how they take it, but it does remove some of the runtime reconfigurability with how they have implemented it so far.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125161",
"author": "Slartibart",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:34:42",
"content": "And predictably as ever the no-true-Scotsman crowd came rushing like flies drawn to a fresh turd.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125186",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T00:07:24",
"content": "There’s very little of that in the discussions today, more of an attempt to quantify it on one hand, and how to get the most out of things like this on the other. No need for the pessimism.",
"parent_id": "8125161",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125357",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:13:29",
"content": "i’m with the guys who say, if you cared about performance, you wouldn’t be using python…and the ones who say, if you restrict yourself away from the idioms everyone actually uses in python, getting it to be fast isn’t too much of an accomplishment.but i’m simply bewildered by this project. it seems like compiling python is a real accomplishment. and investigating which kinds of ISA features would be handy for you if you were writing a python compiler is also interesting. for example, there’s papers out there about hardware reference counting.but this project, instead of making headway on the isolated components of the challenge, claims to do everything in one project. that would make this either one incredibly impressive project, or a bit of sleight of hand. given that the performance boast at the center of it is itself apples-to-oranges (!!!), i think the whole point is to write on a webpage the dubious sentence “PyXL runs Python directly in hardware — no VM, no OS, no JIT.” and they didn’t actually solve these interesting separate problems but in fact made a pidgin compiler that only supports enough for their contrived test case.i’m a negative nellie who perks up at compiler and ISA research and this smells like it ain’t that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125371",
"author": "Kaylee Kerin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:12:25",
"content": "Agreed. This is kinda fun (in the same way chips that run Java Bytecode were fun). It’s valuable in that it showed how the cheaper toolchain side could be done, and useful for connecting to people who might want to collaborate on taking it further..Still cool, but not yet useful. If they can take this further, and turn it into a product – they might put me out of business before I get my own solution on the market :LOL:",
"parent_id": "8125357",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125360",
"author": "rtfhrthrt",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:31:36",
"content": "ruby is faster(about crystal I dont wrote)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.843415
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/nebula-mouse-the-6-dof-you-build-yourself/
|
Nebula Mouse: The 6-DOF You Build Yourself
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"Peripherals Hacks"
] |
[
"6-DOF",
"axis",
"mouse",
"nebula",
"nRF52840",
"seeed xiao",
"space mouse"
] |
Let’s say your CAD workflow is starving for spatial awareness. Your fingers yearn to push, twist, and orbit – not just click.
Enter the Nebula Mouse
. A 6-DOF DIY marvel, blending 3D printing, magnets, and microcontroller wizardry into a handheld input device that emulates the revered 3DConnexion SpaceMouse – at a hacker price. It’s wireless, RGB-lit, powered by a chunky 1500 mAh cell, and fully configurable through standard apps. The catch? You print and build it yourself, with a little help of [DoTheDIY]’s design files.
This isn’t some half-baked enclosure on Thingiverse. The Nebula’s internals are crafted with the kind of precision that makes you file plastic for hours just to fit weights correctly. Hall effect sensors track real-world movement in all axes; a Seeed Xiao nRF52840 handles Bluetooth duty. It’s hefty (280 g), intentional, and smartly designed: auto-wake, USB-C, even a diffused LED bezel for night-time geek cred. Just beware that screw lengths matter. Misplace a 20 mm and you’ll hear the soft crack of PCB grief. No open firmware either – you’ll get compiled code only, unlocked per build
via Discord
.
In short: it’s not open source, but it is deeply open-ended. If your fingers itch after having seen
the SpaceMouse teardown
of last month, this might be what you’re looking for.
| 31
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8124905",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T05:54:16",
"content": "Open source alternatives:https://hackaday.io/project/187172-os3m-mousehttps://www.instructables.com/Space-Mushroom-Full-6-DOFs-Controller-for-CAD-Appl/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125006",
"author": "DreamHazard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T14:15:14",
"content": "MVP!While this is a nice idea for something to build, I’m of the opinion that a closed-source for-profit project is not in the spirit of HAD.Much better to see open source alternatives that don’t come from some rando charging for the compiled firmware on discord, which doesn’t feel dodgy at all",
"parent_id": "8124905",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125236",
"author": "Travis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T04:35:26",
"content": "I see nothing in the discord that indicates that there is a charge for the firmware.But don’t interpret that as a pass. The Discord indicates that the device ID is hard coded in the firmware file you will receive, which can serve legitimate purposes, like tracking if some one is selling your product and on the creators case it seems the issue is “In the early stages of development, I noticed commercial interest in the project, so I introduced a keylock to safeguard it.”I interpret that to mean that they don’t want say someone with manufacturing capability to just rip his project off and mass produce it. I figure the HAD crowd should be pretty familiar with how open sourced hardware can easily take control away from the creator. I don’t blame the chap for wanting to protect something while also sharing it with an audience.My bigger issue is that because it is effectively closed source, I’d need to know that the firmware is not doing something weird and some unknowable internet rando is the person that is to be held responsible.Maybe they can submit the firmware to EFF to play any concerns there.",
"parent_id": "8125006",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125018",
"author": "Comfy Cherry",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T15:15:29",
"content": "I remembered seeing a video for a diy one a while ago that used magnets so here’s another free diy alternativehttps://www.instructables.com/DIY-Space-Mouse-for-Fusion-360-Using-Magnets/",
"parent_id": "8124905",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124912",
"author": "70sjukebox",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T06:37:53",
"content": "“No open firmware either – you’ll get compiled code only, unlocked per build via Discord.”Closed source and discord as a prerequisite, no thank you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125014",
"author": "Luccamakesthings",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T14:50:05",
"content": "I hope someone releases open software for this. Closed firmware gives me the ick.",
"parent_id": "8124912",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124913",
"author": "MCorgano",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T06:41:06",
"content": "What exactly keeps someone from building this hardware assembly, and then putting open sourced software on it? Like porting a software solution from a different open sourced device",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125245",
"author": "Apoorv Chaudhary",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T05:09:48",
"content": "That will be great. If it helps, I can release the schematics so others can develop their code.",
"parent_id": "8124913",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125335",
"author": "volt-k",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:08:00",
"content": "Nothing. Go on.(Seriously, that would be great!)",
"parent_id": "8124913",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125506",
"author": "APOORV CHAUDHARY",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T02:04:29",
"content": "Have added schematics to the plan now",
"parent_id": "8125335",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124914",
"author": "daveb",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T06:44:53",
"content": "closed source and bluetooth .. worst of both worlds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124918",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T06:55:20",
"content": "that’s beautiful but getting a firmware from a rando on discord it’s looking for troubles, nothing stop the person to just inject keystrokes in your system…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124931",
"author": "Mathias",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T08:00:49",
"content": "You have to pay for the firmware right? Because “with each plan you will be able to activate 2 Nebula mouse after build.”I wonder what “a hacker price” is. You have to order 3 custom boards from JLC, Laser cut metal weights, source a bunch of stuff (battery, cables, custom made spring). And then you still have to pay for the firmware. (How much?)The 3d printed parts are basically free. But I’d be surprised if you can build a single piece for less then 100€, unless you have a good Lasercutter and solder all the boards yourself.The project page states “This is a very advance level project and build will require good problem solving skill, So only proceed if you can challenge yourself”. So I doubt it is really to safe a lot of money, more a “DIY because I can”.Maybe if you live in India or something. But even at minimum wage, you’re probably better of doing 12 hours of work and just buying a space mouse wireless.I’m sure, if you build 50 of these, you could sell them at 50$ with a nice margin. But single quantities are expensive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124971",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:00:31",
"content": "And you can find real Spacemice on eBay and the like for ~$100-$150 all day long, my coworker just got one a few weeks ago.",
"parent_id": "8124931",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125000",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:43:31",
"content": "Or less, HP has branded models, $20-60.Also older models work if you drop their driver files in the new software’s plugin folder.",
"parent_id": "8124971",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125049",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:42:47",
"content": "That’s a good tip. Thanks.I’ve got a 10+ year old USB spacemouse that still works on the old computer but refuses to run (with old drivers) on a new one.I can see it, use it as a joystick etc, drivers won’t denoise it.I mean, great durable hardware!But scummy forced upgrades and e-waste generation from the manufacturer.Not even good business!Before this, I had sold a dozen for them.",
"parent_id": "8125000",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125249",
"author": "Giin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T05:27:00",
"content": "Hmmm… It seems to me a crystal ball design would be rather optimal, if it could be pulled off. Small sphere that tracks your finger positions as you move you hand around it in any direction or rotation, smart enough to recognize a finger tap as a mouse click. Always wondered why there was nothing like that :p",
"parent_id": "8125000",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124982",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:48:22",
"content": "Yeah this got me looking. I’ve never used/heard of the OEM hardware. Two seconds on google and the spacemouse equivalent to this is about $160 shipped, the super rad one with a bunch of extra buttons and stuff is a bit over $400. I’m a little hesitant to say it but isn’t very much money for what looks like an essential tool to do your job. Heck mechanics and stuff spend that much on a couple of snap on wrenches and they probably have nowhere near as much available cash as a white collar CAD designer..I like that this project featured here exists but I’m not sure why it exists- if you are deep enough into CAD to need a 6 DOF input device, either your employer will buy one, or you can and expense that off, or if you are a serious hobbyist dropping $200 is peanuts compared to license fees for CAD itself anyway. It is kind of like being a photographer but taking ages to building an inferior camera that probably costs more and makes worse photos. Plus you have to pay to use it. Maybe that’s the definition of a hobby or a bad analogy (I’m well aware building your own cameras and stuff is a hobby itself) but I think that is different than this “product.”.So what I’m sadly left with is what many of these things end up being- ulterior motives and a front for clickbait youtube video where the product isn’t the 3d mouse, its clicks and views, or else as noted elsewhere, closed source code subscription model, or some other similar ick-inducing thing. I do home I’m wrong though.",
"parent_id": "8124931",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125410",
"author": "Cory Johnson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:56:26",
"content": "“only proceed if you can challenge yourself”Sounds like an excuse for poor engineering.",
"parent_id": "8124931",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124972",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:00:48",
"content": "These are cool but why can’t we have a small plastic cube or sphere battery powered device with Accelerometer + gyroscope and have it connected over bluetooth and report its position.You can hold it in your hand and rotate or move it around to rotate/translate the CAD model you’re viewing. Maybe a few small buttons which can enable rotation/translation when held, so that you can map it to muscle memory (you press the button and move the device and then release the button)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124991",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:25:39",
"content": "You acurately described WiiMote and VR controllers, both of which exist. Also could run software on something like a cheap Android phone, it has all the needed sensors. Even could use camera and internal magnemometer to track a spacemouse like device.",
"parent_id": "8124972",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125008",
"author": "Dielectric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T14:18:00",
"content": "I had something like that a way long time ago. Seemed like a great idea but is actually pretty tiring after a while. IIRC it was called a gyromouse? Similar problem with big touchscreens, fine for ordering a Big Mac but body mechanics are tough to get right for long term use.",
"parent_id": "8124972",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125056",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T17:01:51",
"content": "I like Shapelab w Rift for artsy-fartsy type shape design.Just as you describe, but the off hand is sort of a tool/color pallet selector.Good undo functions, which you will need.The meshes produced are a mess, but there are tools to fix that.Like all VR, limit time under hat.",
"parent_id": "8124972",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124990",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T13:21:33",
"content": "You can get branded HP SpaceMouse for $20 used. Would be surprised if this beata that price.I like the project, not sure about premise of cost saving. And ultimately it’s the software where the important part is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125067",
"author": "Titus431",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T17:42:25",
"content": "For profit close sourced clone, duplicating functionality, look and feel == attention from 3Dconnexion. I would expect a C&D quite soon …I’m too lazy to look but I bet there’s a reason there are no major competitors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125400",
"author": "shiura",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:22:58",
"content": "I agree with you. I am the author of “space mushroom”,https://www.instructables.com/Space-Mushroom-Full-6-DOFs-Controller-for-CAD-Appl/and when I made it, I paid attention to not infringing on 3Dconnexion’s intellectual property rights. Although the shape and working principle are different, I did not use their software. Some people tried to make this “space mushroom” work with the 3Dconnexion’s driver and/or app, but I think there is probably a clause in the EULA of the 3Dconnexion software that prohibits this (use the software with the other hardware), so I did not go in that direction.",
"parent_id": "8125067",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125355",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:02:47",
"content": "interesting liminal space between a product and a project. the juxtaposition of closed source firmware with an unforgiving diy build gives me the icks. one thing it ain’t is open-ended. only thing i know for sure is i wish the writers here would be more careful with their word choices because meaning is important to readers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125454",
"author": "De Zwitser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:16:49",
"content": "otherwise, there is this diy space mouse from Salimhttps://www.instructables.com/DIY-Space-Mouse-for-Fusion-360-Using-Magnets/it might not be advanced or state of the art but it works, affordable for a maker/hacker and opensource",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125528",
"author": "APOORV CHAUDHARY",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T05:35:40",
"content": "That version from Salim will not work, with 1x 3d sensor TLV493D you cannot do 6-DOF. Making a nice video spending time on finishing/painting showing how it is made and documenting steps does not mean the product works as expected. That guy does not show for 10 seconds how the product works, how smooth is the motion, its just an marketing video. I just see people adoring the build video and not looking at the real fact that Salim has cleverly hidden that his implementation does not come anywhere close to spacemouse, He just gives a small hint on this at the end of video.there is a reason i am using 3x TLI493 sensor which give 3×3 axis data so that 6-DOF can be calculated.Most of the 6-DOF mouse implementations do not even come close to spacemouse like Os3m, Orbion , Implementation by Salim.",
"parent_id": "8125454",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125632",
"author": "De Zwitser",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T11:50:34",
"content": "fair enough.your marketing tho, is pretty bad.sell it if you are confident enough about capability and reliability.we won’t deny the R&D behind but it is up to you to defend it the right way. makers are not gamers.",
"parent_id": "8125528",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8177500",
"author": "Robin Edgar",
"timestamp": "2025-09-09T18:52:24",
"content": "I got a 3d connexion one of these once. The control panel was a whole new level of horrible. To assign keyboard shortcuts to a rotation axis was possible, but finding out how was a real pain. Turning it into a joystick emulator was a config file mess. Remappers worked spottily at best. Documentation was terrible and often not available. Such a shame, as it is a really beautifully built piece of hardware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.571448
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/3d-print-your-own-injection-molds-ejector-pins-and-all/
|
3D Print Your Own Injection Molds, Ejector Pins And All
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printing",
"injection mold",
"injection molding"
] |
3D printing is all well and good for prototyping, and it can even produce useful parts. If you want real strenght in plastics, though, or to produce a LOT of parts, you probably want to step up to injection molding. As it turns out, 3D printing can help in that regard, with injection molding company [APSX] has given us a look at how it printed
injection molds for its APSX-PIM machine.
The concept is simple enough—additive manufacturing is great for producing parts with complex geometries, and injection molds fit very much under that banner. To demonstrate, [APSX] shows us a simple injection mold that it printed with a Formlabs Form3+ using Rigid 10K resin. The mold has good surface finish, which is crucial for injection molding nice parts. It’s also fitted with ejection pins for easy part removal after each shot of injection molded plastic. While it’s not able to hold up like a traditional metal injection mold, it’s better than you might think. [APSX] claims it got 500 automatic injection cycles out of the mold while producing real functional parts. The mold was used with the APSX-PIM injection molding machine squirting polypropylene at a cycle time of 65 seconds, producing a round part that appears to be some kind of lid or gear.
This looks great, but it’s worth noting it’s still not cheap to get into this sort of thing. On top of purchasing a Formlabs Form3+, you’ll also need the APSX-PIM V3, which currently retails
for $13,500 or so.
Still, if you regularly need to make 500 of something, this could be very desirable. You could get your parts quicker and stronger compared to running a farm of many 3D printers turning out the same parts.
We’ve seen similar projects along these lines before
. The fact is that injections molds are complicated geometry to machine, so being able to 3D print them is highly desirable. Great minds and all that. Video after the break.
| 20
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8124882",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T03:26:45",
"content": "The random full screen flashing in the video was rather unpleasant. Would have been nice to see the design process.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125145",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T21:23:25",
"content": "The sound too from none to max. It’s an awfully edited video.",
"parent_id": "8124882",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124883",
"author": "steven-×",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T03:29:38",
"content": "We have had some success with our Form 3 making prototype molds as well. Hopefully other can benefit from this writeup.We also have a Stratsys Objet 260. I’ve made molds out of it but it was a bit disappointing. It’s awesome for fixtures and prototypes though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126490",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T06:39:06",
"content": "One of the things you might want to look into would be, say, to reverse engineer lost molds from yesteryear:The original AMT U.S.S. Enterprise model in 1/650 had a better bridge assembly than later re-pops.A historyhttps://liftoffworks.com/?p=1147https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234931067-jay-chladeks-2012-builds-might-as-well-catalog-them/With tariffs looming, Round2/AMT might be interested in a back-engineered kitwith computer adjustments…nacelle mounts a tad farther back.You could have a line of different Starships with computer tweaks—maybe for the aftermarket.",
"parent_id": "8124883",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124885",
"author": "Aleblazer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T03:44:49",
"content": "Any reason you would need a Form 3 vs any other resin printer?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125207",
"author": "Kenny Winker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T01:42:54",
"content": "That’s just what the people in the video used. If you want to stray from their formula you can use other resin printers or even fdm printers with high temp plastics",
"parent_id": "8124885",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124892",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T03:54:47",
"content": "Durability aside, would a 3D printed plastic mold retain its dimensions over all the parts made in its lifetime? Any heat deformation?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124900",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T05:07:09",
"content": "Yes, that’s why the lifetime is limited to a small number of parts.30+ years ago I saw my first 3D printer at IMTS, where the salesman was selling a resin printer. It was cured by X-Y galvanometers and a UV laser. I was absolutely blown away.The salesman was saying he had an automotive client who 3D printed a temporary mold, and they could get a few hundred parts from it. A normal metal mold would get tens of thousands of parts before wearing out. They’d normally have plenty of advance notice to order a replacement from the tool and die makers. Which is important because it took about 4-6 weeks to get a new mold made.But sometimes accidents happen and the molds are damaged or break, and when all the spares have been used, the production line halts. Or in another case, production was halted because testing had discovered a fan shroud would fit during assembly but couldn’t be replaced once the engine was installed, so they came up with a quick modification, printed some test parts, then printed a temporary mold.Being able to create a temporary mold to produce 400 parts was enough to keep the production line moving while waiting for the replacement die. Or at least enough to keep it moving until the next temporary resin printed die arrived.They’d do anything to get production back on line faster. Which is why they tried this in the first place. And it’s why the salesman was convinced he’d make millions selling 3D printers to industrial users around the globe.",
"parent_id": "8124892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124929",
"author": "Christopher de Vidal",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T07:49:33",
"content": "Could metal molds be formed from a kind of lost wax process? Use a low temp filament.",
"parent_id": "8124900",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124975",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T12:03:46",
"content": "Possibly but they’d still need final machining as you’d have to make them oversize to account for shrinkage. Much less machining than starting from a billet though, but more work overall due to the mold making and casting process.",
"parent_id": "8124929",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125187",
"author": "Michael Jonathan Weiner",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T00:10:11",
"content": "This is the most friendly and productive thread I’ve seen on the Internet in a very long time.",
"parent_id": "8124975",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125005",
"author": "dandiemer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T14:06:02",
"content": "You could just skip that step entirely and use a laser sintering printer to make the part directly out of metal.",
"parent_id": "8124929",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125080",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T18:49:22",
"content": "We are looking at a printer that is almost $300k",
"parent_id": "8125005",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125044",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:30:30",
"content": "You can get a small number of parts from a plastic mold.But you can get thousands of parts from an aluminum mold insert.Many, many thousands if you hard anodize it, even shooting glass filled nylon.Less time and effort and much better results.Inserts are still somewhat disposable, but they all are.Keep the mold operations guy on a leash, they like to ruin inserts with pry bars and call it ‘extra effort’.Also Aluminum is a much better heat conductor.60 seconds+ cycle times for a small simple part isridiculouslybad.Only very slightly better then not running at all, economically likely WORSE.You can cut the aluminum insert in less time than printing the plastic one.Aluminum cuts like warm butter.Also complex geometries?Not really…Simple two part mold inserts can (almost) always be made with 3 axis CNC, or you wouldn’t be able to eject the parts. (Shallow undercuts for part retention are easy enough.)Making the blank is a separate step, but you can batch those.",
"parent_id": "8124900",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125209",
"author": "kenny winker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T01:47:41",
"content": "60s cycle time means you can do nearly 500 parts in an 8 hour day… which is the entire lifespan of the mold. With 3d printing you’d be lucky to get 10 parts",
"parent_id": "8125044",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125439",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T19:58:00",
"content": "I also note the 60 second cycle time is a limit of the toy IMM machine.",
"parent_id": "8125209",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125043",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T16:30:12",
"content": "Thanks for the quick video. I’m tired of the 22 minute long deep dive to see the 20 interesting seconds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125153",
"author": "Kevin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:00:06",
"content": "Working as a mould tool designer this has been coming up regularly for decades. But the reality is that 3D printed moulds have extremely limited uses. Most of the examples are carefully staged parts designed specifically to work. Metal 3D printed mould inserts are really getting interesting with conformal cooling, but are generally more expensive than a traditional machined mould tool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125697",
"author": "Kara",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T15:56:16",
"content": "If you have the skillset about mold making and you make your mold correctly in high resolution printer, your results can be much better. Some people may not prefer to use cnc machining just for 500 parts. The concept is solid. I don’t whine about the little flashings on the part and the machine sound.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8130698",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T10:00:33",
"content": "I’m guessing if you already had an injection moulding machine you could make a carrier plate that retains the small 3D printed mould and allows for quick change, rather than absolutely needing to buy that specific $13k machine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.631114
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/magic-on-your-desk-via-maglev-toy/
|
Magic On Your Desk Via MagLev Toy
|
Tyler August
|
[
"classic hacks"
] |
[
"levitation",
"Magnetic levitation",
"magnets",
"stm32"
] |
Magnets aren’t magic, but sometimes you can do things with them to fool the uninitiated — like levitating. [Jonathan Lock] does that with
his new maglev desk toy
, that looks like at least a level 2 enchantment.
This levitator is USB-powered, and typically draws 1 W to 3 W to levitate masses between 10 g and 500 g. The base can provide 3 V to 5 V inductive power to the levitator to the tune of 10 mA to 50 mA, which is enough for some interesting possibilities, starting with the lights and motors [Jonathan] has tried.
In construction it is much like the commercial units you’ve seen: four permanent magnets that repel another magnet in the levitator. Since such an arrangement is about as stable as balancing a basketball on a piece of spaghetti, the permanent magnets are wrapped in control coils that pull the levitator back to the center on a 1 kHz loop. This is accomplished by way of a hall sensor and an STM32 microcontroller running a PID loop. The custom PCB also has an onboard ESP32, but it’s used as a very overpowered USB/UART converter to talk to the STM32 for tuning in the current firmware.
If you think one of these would be nice to have on your desk, check it out on [Jonathan]’s GitLab. It’s all there, from a detailed build guide (with easy-to-follow animated GIF instructions) to CAD files and firmware. Kudos to [Jonathan] for the quality write-up; sometimes documenting is the hardest part of a project, and it’s worth acknowledging that as well as the technical aspects.
We’ve written about magnetic levitation before, but
it doesn’t always go as well as this project
. Other times,
it very much does.
There are also other ways to accomplish the same feat,
some of which can lift quite a bit more
.
| 9
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125310",
"author": "Jonathan Lock",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:11:19",
"content": "Thanks for the write-up Tyler! It’ll be fun to see if anyone either builds one of their own or extends on this, e.g. doing something useful with the ESP32 or something more interesting than just lighting LEDs on the levitator.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128185",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:11:23",
"content": "Amazing work Jonathan! I would love to buy some of the PCBs. Would you consider posting the boards on Tindie so I can support the project?",
"parent_id": "8125310",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128315",
"author": "Jonathan Lock",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T06:27:31",
"content": "Thanks Daniel! Hmm, after (an admittedly very brief glance) it looks like setting up a Tindie sellers account would basically mean that I would source assembled boards from somewhere, and then repackage/sell them to buyers from Tindie? To be fully honest I’m sorry to say my day job takes time enough as is without adding additional demands 😅 That said, if you want to get a hold of some assembled boards I’ve personally ordered fully-assembled boards from PCBway and had a good experience, and all the files needed for ordering are available in the repository. I assume any EMS would be more than capable of assembling the boards, as there’s nothing particularly demanding. It might also be helpful to set up a page where others (like yourself) can discuss/contribute/etc, do you have any suggestions for what would be a suitable place for something like that?",
"parent_id": "8128185",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125361",
"author": "reghrege",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:35:29",
"content": "ask to make a decent magnetic bearing.One that will allow the wheel to move without friction.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125408",
"author": "Joey Bruce",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:47:45",
"content": "“F’ing Magnets, how do they work?!” -William Gilbert, 1543 AD",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125419",
"author": "G-man",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:27:57",
"content": "I’ve had a rotating 9″ Earth in the corner of the room for years and still love seeing it spin. I’m not sure about trying to make something from scratch though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127994",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T09:01:08",
"content": "Just wondering, why not to use esp32, why its required to have stm32 in this build?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128316",
"author": "Jonathan Lock",
"timestamp": "2025-05-16T06:29:57",
"content": "This is partly due to me starting with an STM32 and adding the ESP32 towards the end of the project (after some friends suggested that an ESP32 could allow for eg. WiFi support), and partly due to me being more well-versed in the STM32 ecosystem. In principle I don’t think there’s anything that would preclude a similar setup using only an ESP32.",
"parent_id": "8127994",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128184",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T21:09:46",
"content": "I would love to buy the PCB and send a few bucks to the project. Could someone get some boards up on Tindie?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.682452
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/tracking-the-sun-nah/
|
Tracking The Sun? Nah!
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Solar Hacks"
] |
[
"east west array",
"solar power",
"solar tracker"
] |
If you want solar power, you usually have to make a choice. You can put a solar panel in a fixed location and accept that it will only put out the maximum when the sun is properly positioned. Or, you can make the panels move to track the sun.
While this isn’t difficult, it does add cost and complexity, plus mechanical systems usually need more maintenance. According to [Xavier Derdenback], now that solar panels are cheaper than ever, it is
a waste of money to make a tracking array
. Instead, you can build a system that looks to the east and the west. The math says it is more cost effective.
The idea is simple. If you have panels facing each direction, then one side will do better than the other side in the morning. The post points out that a tracking setup, of course, will produce more power. That’s not the argument. However, for a given power output, the east-west solution has lower installation costs and uses less land.
Letting the post speak for itself:
East-West arrays are simple. They consist of parallel strings of PV modules that are oriented in opposing directions, one facing East and the other West. The current of the whole array is the summation of these string currents, effectively letting East-West arrays capture sunlight from dawn till dusk, similar to a tracked array.
So what do you think? Are solar trackers old hat? If you want one, they
don’t have to be very complex
. But still easier to just double your panels.
| 43
| 15
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125285",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T08:17:54",
"content": "Tracking systems for solar panels have always been a very niche phenomena because of this. Even 20 years ago when solar panels were still expensive, tracking systems were rare. And it’s not only installation cost, and (regular) maintenance. It’s also the bulk of a moving system that is impractical in a lot of situations. The only large scale application of solar trackers is with systems that concentrate solar energy before conversion.Pointing solar panels southward (in the northern hemisphere) has been common, but I guess that east / west orientations (or south-east / south-west) is becoming more common in the long term. Here in the EU (and I heard also Australia) the amount you get for generating solar power is becoming variable, with at some moments even negative prices. and those moments are of course during peak delivery. With more East / West pointing panels, generation of solar energy would be more spread over the day.One thing I’ve find both flabbergasting and annoying is the existence of “solar farms”, where precious land area is used for nothing else but solar panels. I’d say ground is too precious to waste it for such applications. Putting these things on roofs is a good place for them. Making the whole roof out of solar panels (for new houses) would be even better. Putting a few of them in pastures apparently also make sense as it provides a shady area for the grazing animals, but I never looked into further details.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125292",
"author": "Norman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T08:54:57",
"content": "I recently watched a youtube video about using bifacial solar panels vertically mounted in an east/west orientation. The results were pretty positive. However, a very simple tracking system might make this much better. If the panel had a mounting with three, fixed positions: inclined to the east in the morning, horizontal around midday, and incline to the west in the afternoon/evening. The change of position could be done with a timer. The logic and electronics to adjust the time according to the season should be pretty simple. I leave it to the more mechanically aware to say if this might work. A simple flip for east inclination to west would be simpler and, maybe, near as efficient. No timer necessary, just flip at midday.video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqizLQDi9BM",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125296",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:06:22",
"content": "“Precious land area”? There’s an entire planet’s worth of land. And the bits that get the most sun tend to be the least used.",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125301",
"author": "squeeks",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:28:41",
"content": "We want the power where the land is used and people are… Ideally on structures that already exist, rather than squatting on land that could be used for other things.",
"parent_id": "8125296",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125341",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:22:51",
"content": "There are a lot of applications for power where there are no people.Such as carbon sequestration. The company “Verdox” (not an advertisement) has figured out an electrochemical way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and we could pump liquid CO2 back into the ground where it would be converted into carbonates.Such as fuel production. Slowly make fossil fuels and store it locally, send a tanker out once a month to gather the proceeds.Such as ammonia production. Currently this uses 5% of the world’s energy production (for fertilizer), slowly make ammonia and send a tanker out once a month to gather the proceeds.And I read just last week that some Chinese researchers created robots that can install solar panels. Without human labor. (I assume this is “mostly” without human labor.)The idea of building a factory in the middle of nowhere to gather solar power, and then using that power to install more panels, and then using the excess power to do something valuable…is no longer science fiction.",
"parent_id": "8125301",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125425",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:51:57",
"content": "we could pump liquid CO2 back into the groundMy understanding of CO2 is that it can only be liquid under high pressure. Pumping it into the ground and expecting it to remain a liquid until it reacts chemically seems unlikely.",
"parent_id": "8125341",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125428",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T19:03:27",
"content": "“Pumping it into the ground and expecting it to remain a liquid until it reacts chemically seems unlikely.”You don’t expect it to remain a liquid.",
"parent_id": "8125341",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125443",
"author": "none ra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:07:21",
"content": "@chris mapleYou realize that things underground ARE at higher pressure right. Right?",
"parent_id": "8125341",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125302",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:42:30",
"content": "Here in the Netherlands, we have 520 people per square km and there really is not much empty space.Sure, plenty of empty deserts. Mostly empty. There have been several plans for big solar installations in the northern Sahara, but due to political instability in the area, no one is willing to build such an installation over there, and I can’t blame them.Saudi Arabia and thereabouts are some pretty big solar installations, even though oil is (still) cheap there.It is possible to build some HVDC lines from the Sahara to the EU. There already are some pretty long HVDC lines. It would be curious whetherhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Linkwould ever get built…I also just bumped into the proposed:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_ProjectBut for small installations, I agree with Hacaday article that it’s (probably) not cost effective to build moving installations for solar.",
"parent_id": "8125296",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125337",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:17:42",
"content": "I read an article (https://solarmagazine.nl/nieuws-zonne-energie/i40452/daken-niet-vol-alle-stroom-die-we-met-zonnepanelen-kunnen-oogsten-moeten-we-oogsten) that states that in the Netherlands about 20% of household roof surface has solar panels. Not all that 80% remaining roof is technically or economically possible, e.g. north-facing, shadowed roofs, roofs that are not strong enough or that aren’t allowed to have solar panels (i.e. directly under a runway), and some homeowners just haven’t cared enough.In my appartment building, the roof is in a legal limbo, it is co-owned by both the HOA ánd the people on the upper floor (who are allowed by the HOA to install a roof terrace, just not by the municipality) and constructing solar panels will infringe on those owners’ property rights. We have not been able to find a legal advisor that was able to find a legally stable way out of that.For larger roofs on warehouses etc, I once read (can’t find the link) that close to the full economic percentage is leveraged, as there are a lot of roofs that are built too light to bear the extra weight of solar panels, and insurers sometimes forbid it due to fire risk.",
"parent_id": "8125302",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125306",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T10:40:22",
"content": "‘Straya has loads of ‘waste’ land with AAA solarization. The issue is distance, and a lack of power transmission infrastructure. Once we ring the planet with superconductive power transmission lines, then the storage problem also goes away. I’m just musing.",
"parent_id": "8125296",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125332",
"author": "Dylan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:51:50",
"content": "They’re already out of land in Europe tho, and have resorted to putting panels out at sea",
"parent_id": "8125296",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125297",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:21:44",
"content": "There are solar farms where the solar panels are more elevated and spaced than usual, and the shaded ground under them is used to grow strawberries. Any other culture that need partial shade can thrive under solar panels",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125298",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:25:53",
"content": "The least used is also often the least populated and the furthest from cities, so transport/conversion losses and infrastructure costs become prevalent.",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125329",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:32:21",
"content": "I pointed my small setup (4 panels) West due to trees on the next property that didn’t give me due south sky access. When I added another 10 there were angled to face Southwest.You will need another microinverter, so that’s added to the panel cost.I dont mind ground mount solar farms that much, but we really do need to get more panels on the roofs of homes. My 10-panel setup supplies me 4kw, which is not a huge amount, its over 50% of my energy use in the spring & fall. On the other hand, with my reports receive, I can tell you which days we had rain!Here are some photos in this Quora answer:https://www.quora.com/Today-is-Earth-Day-How-are-you-contributing/answer/Steve-Heckman-1",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125336",
"author": "BigBoxSolarYeah",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:15:40",
"content": "I’m a fan of covering parking lots. In the US the parking lots for retail stores in suburban areas is easily twice the square feet of the stores they serve. Both the tarmac and the vehicles generate heat. We are not going to give up our individual vehicles or big box stores any time soon, so lets cover that mostly unused space with panels to provide shade for the surface and vehicles while generating energy to run the businesses.https://maps.app.goo.gl/b8xcScnVF5f2ts4MAhttps://maps.app.goo.gl/xZVoVKvpZsRfRtoz8",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125386",
"author": "BlackTriangle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:41:16",
"content": "We could generate enough solar power to replace the US’s energy use just replacing the space we use to grow corn for ethanol (about 27 million acres.) Taking a national average of about 5.5 sun hours, and a utilization rate of about 1MW per 10 acres, that’s 2.7TW of solar. 5420.25 TWH per year, or about 20% of the US’s total ENERGY use.",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125561",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T07:41:41",
"content": "Solar power is certainly variable especially in the north europe, plenty of sun during summer, no sun during winter.",
"parent_id": "8125285",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125287",
"author": "Kenny",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T08:38:38",
"content": "The post points out that a tracking setup, of course, will produce more power. That’s not the argument. However, for a given power output, the east-west solution has lower installation costs and uses less land.There’s power per panel and power per land area.A single-axis tracking row of panels does not need more space than the panels laid flat on the ground, bar a pivot at either ends in the simplest design, but produces something like 25% more power than a fixed array.A fixed east/west array collects the exact same amount of energy as a fixed east or fixed west array with the same number of panels – varied orientation just distributes the power output over the day.As such, the east/west array will need to pack 20% tighter than the single axis tracker to have the same power output with the same land and even tighter to do so withlessland.They will pack tightly at very steep angles, but it seems like using them near flat was part of the pitch for its simplicity.Considering that any east/west panel configuration could also be made to increase the angle for tracking (e.g., by lifting the top or lowering the bottom, creating gaps), which while less efficient than proper tracking uses no more space than the east/west configuration that was modified, it seems impossible for east/west to be more land effective than a compact tracker.Might still be cheaper in some places of course. Although, a fixed panel oriented something other than due east or due west might be much more appropriate at some latitudes and intended load patterns, please check with a solar calculator.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125420",
"author": "Matthias",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:37:25",
"content": "They will pack tightly at very steep angles, but it seems like using them near flat was part of the pitch for its simplicity.There is only so much solar irradiance on a given area, if you cover the land 100% with flat laying panels, you get all the energy you can get. By tilting the panels you cast a shadow, from which the next row must stay clear. So (static or dynamic) tilting only increases the output, if you can’t place the panels next to each other in the first place.",
"parent_id": "8125287",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125289",
"author": "kpc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T08:44:49",
"content": "It will of course depend on the location, but here in the Netherlands you hardly see tracking systems. A lot of the energy is generated during cloudy days. This reduces much the effect of the theorethical cosine theta reduction. Purely from an irradiation perspective, you loose only about 10 % when laying them flat, compared to oriented at peak angle. You of course would loose self-cleaning. See for example the following graph for angle dependancy.https://voltasolar.nl/wp-content/uploads/opbrengst-instralingsschijf-zonnepanelen.webp",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125295",
"author": "kpc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:00:31",
"content": "Sorry, I need to correct myself a little. The graph is comparing orientation of fixed positions, it is not comparing to a tracking system. On a quick search I found roughly 20% gain from a tracker compared to a fixed system in the UK, which is at roughly the same latitude an probably has similar cloud coverage. Given the price of a tracker, you better place 20% more panels.",
"parent_id": "8125289",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125309",
"author": "DOugl",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:04:10",
"content": "Or they can all be optimized for power output during peak solar exposure and the power stored in batteries so it can be slowly discharged as the sun sets.As soon as someone adds smallish batteries to mount in tandem with micro-inverters , between the solar panel and micro-inverter, the problem is solved for many. Will cost a little more but the system automatically scales with each added solar panel, micro-inverter, battery module.I was going to do that but opted to invest $20k and just install a 12kW hybrid inverter and 50kWh of LFP batteries to go with the 7.5kW of solar panels(2 strings, 1 optimized for winter elevation). No grid used since Nov 2024 and now we charge not only our two EVs but also 2 of the neighbors EVs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125324",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:15:29",
"content": "Charging four EVs on that? Impressive. It implies you don’t drive a whole lot: The amount of energy you get from that array would make maybe 15 miles/day for each. (though I’ll admit “a whole lot” depends on where you live — our family car sees half that usage, so an EV is pointless for us.)",
"parent_id": "8125309",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125345",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:29:52",
"content": "People ask whether it would be effective to install solar panels on the roof of an EV.Tesla pointed out that if the car was in direct sunlight all day it would add the equivalent of 20 miles to the range each day.A 7.5 kW array at 550 watts is about 14 panels, or 280 added miles divided by 4 EVs is about 70 miles added each day.That’s not bad as a daily addition. I frequently drive more than 70 miles, but not every single day.",
"parent_id": "8125324",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125388",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:42:39",
"content": "I’m not following that arithmetic.Tesla’s numbers are in ‘spherical cow’ territory.7.5 kWpeak at a 16% capacity factor (the going average here around the 43rd parallel), is 1.2 kW, 29 kWh/d, or 7.2 kWh per car. After panel-inverter-storage-inverter-distribution-charger-storage-standby (i.e., real) losses, that’s around 15 miles range.",
"parent_id": "8125345",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125376",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:30:36",
"content": "yeah that’s something that always stands out about cars…every car has a different portion of long trips vs short trips and busy days vs idle days. at the extremes, they look like totally different problem spaces. you see someone at the other extreme and naturally say “that’s hardly a car at all”",
"parent_id": "8125324",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125374",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:23:06",
"content": "“with the 7.5kW of solar panels(2 strings, 1 optimized for winter elevation).”Okay, obviously manual solar tracking east/west isn’t possible, but I don’t get why you wouldn’t make a setup whose elevation can be altered during the year. I mean, it’s not like twice-yearly maintenance is a huge deal.",
"parent_id": "8125309",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125339",
"author": "WhyOvercomplicateThings",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:18:08",
"content": "Solar trackers do not need to be full pan-tilt affairs. A single tilt point allowing the panels to move east to west, a small DC geared motor, and a couple small side panels to drive the motor. Done.This does full pan-tilt, but could be simplified even further:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL9PcGu_xrA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125342",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:23:52",
"content": "From my experience, the discussion of if you should fit solar is over, it works and works so much better that you would expect. As this article points out, when you fit it put as many panels up as you can. They call it ‘over panelling’. The panels are the cheapest part of the system.I have a modest system, 12 panels 6 on each side of the roof. Both are not in the ideal direction which is why I fitted as much as I could. 5.2kWh of solar. This time of year I see peek 3.2kWh which blew my mind. Over the year I use 2500 kWh and generate 2000 kWh. I have a 12kHw battery and inverter outputs max 6kWh. I have no gas, all electric. Energy bill down from £2000 a year too £700. Also, if you can, get the ‘island mode’ fitted. No more power cuts for me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125351",
"author": "Uranium",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:46:57",
"content": "Can someone explain why they don’t just place the solar panels flat? When the east panel gets more power the west one gets less so it’s just a zero sum, isn’t it? Does it make a difference if we get out 200W/SQM (from the perspective of the sun) if it’s on one solar panel or spread out to three solar panels because they are at an angle relative to the sun?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125378",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:46:19",
"content": "i think generally the panels are flat in practice…just tilted north-south for your latitude. but if you can fit more panels by orienting them in different directions then that will be a win in capacity. the idea is to take the money you might spend on a motor / moving mount and spend that instead on more panels. it’s the greater number of panels not necessarily the directions they face",
"parent_id": "8125351",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125397",
"author": "Brian M",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:14:44",
"content": "Tilting the panels produces more power per day and spreads it more evenly across the day. If your battery charger or inverter can’t handle the noon production, it is wasted.",
"parent_id": "8125351",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125370",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:05:50",
"content": "Tracking rigs are basically like steerable dish antennas, not very practical. Also there are the seasons to worry about so your solution must to account for them as well. 9 times out of 10 is better to just overbuild and install more panels obviously if you can afford it. The last rig I worked with gave us a very consistente output all year long, moreso having 300+ days of sun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125442",
"author": "none ra",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:05:08",
"content": "‘old hat’ ? quite the opposite. Until we massively break the economy to the point where we cant get them at a reasonable price motors, metal, and controllers are cheap. Especially compared to the cost of power conditioning, sotrage, and conditioning that also get put in place.Also solar tracking doesn’t take more land in most setup. Not like you can put the next solar panel in the shadow of the 1st anyway. This is just someone trying to argue for simple. Simple does have a benefit but that commentary is overstating it and trying too hard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125463",
"author": "PPJ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:47:22",
"content": "Shouldn’t that depend on application? If you need more power but have less space you track sun, otherwise you go with fixed installation?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125471",
"author": "Niels Baloe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:29:33",
"content": "I have a small book with a schematic for a simple tracking system without any extra electronica. It has 2 small identical vertivke solar panels sideways on the horizontal direction, both connected to the motor that turns the solar panel. If one of these solar panels gets more sun, it automaticly runs the motor, and in that way the panel is always horizontally pointed toward the sun.I bet you could also place 2 horizontal panels to put the vertical direction towards the sun too ;)The real problem is: storm. There are no easy solutions for directional systems when it comes ti surviving a storm.And nothing beats heat pipes, which get 60% efficiency (instead of 20% for solar) without moving parts!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125481",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:11:09",
"content": "I have solar PV and thermal, but I am no fool and know that there are natural events that can render them useless for long periods of time so I have looked into back ups and optimisation options. Solar thermal will still operate in conditions where PV is effectively useless. As for tracking, the right sort of lenticular array over the cells may improve early and late in the day output levels.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125484",
"author": "Hiro Protagonist",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:22:39",
"content": "“Tracking rigs are basically like steerable dish antennas”There should be a law that says you can’t build a solar “tracking rig” until you’ve talked to an astronomer first.To track the sun all you need is rotation on a single axis, and the control is no more complex than a clock. The tilt of that axis is the important bit – it needs to parallel the axis of the earth’s rotation.It’s called an equatorial mount.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125704",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:17:03",
"content": "“To track the sun all you need is rotation on a single axis,”uh… noTo track the sun over the period of one day, you need a single axis.To track the sun over the period of one year, you need two.",
"parent_id": "8125484",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125794",
"author": "Hiro Protagonist",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T20:30:08",
"content": "In a world where we are talking about mounting solar panels facing east and west, tracking the sun on single equatorial axis should be “good enough”.",
"parent_id": "8125704",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125486",
"author": "Ralph Doncaster (nerd ralph)",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:36:03",
"content": "Using bifacial panels is far more cost effective. Current mainstream TOPCON panels have a bifaciality of 80%, and have no material difference in price compared to monofacial panels.I see two solvable problems with bifacial PV. The first is the lack of good simulation software with local weather data. For places that usually get snow in the winter, the increase in albedo is large compared to grass or even crushed rock.The second problem is mounting systems. I’m experimenting with vertical bifacial PV, and have had to build the mounting systems myself. For fixed-tilt, I can choose from multiple mounting systems such as Clenergy, Fastrack, and Polar Racking.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127777",
"author": "Garrut",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T17:56:31",
"content": "Never one solution fit for all case.Exposition, available roof/land, local regulations…all this are game changer.I’ve been testing solar panels for now 1 year In off grid in different settings ( south, east-west and now tracker) . the tracker seems to be by far the cheapest way to power my home, essentially because i direct use the most energy i need from the panel, or the backup generator if not enough sun/power. I only use power from battery for ligth, computer and phone, to avoid battery cycling and therefore keep good life expectancy.The tracker give me ability to have energy available all day long, for cheap money : 35 € in steel and aluminium bar, recycled propane tank ( base) 2 recycled actuator from a electrical gate, 8€ Arduino, 4€ in 2 l298 modules, 4€ Buck concerter, perhaps 15 welding stick and 2l gazoline for the generator.The tracker give me the full potential of the panel according to the weather , due to better elevation and orientation. I have enough energy to run hungry appliance sooner and later (without firing the generator) than the east-west set up without speaking of the south setup.it’s early to say it’s better but stats of the generator are in a falling curve. Now, how will be the maintenance of the Moving parts of the tracker ? I suppose less than the generator, and less tedious than climbing on the roof once a month to adjust the elevation of the east-west setup.For info, i trashed the East-west stup essentially due to local regulations, but it was enough good for me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.761875
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/adorable-robot-steals-the-show/
|
Adorable Robot Steals The Show
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Tech Hacks"
] |
[
"arduino",
"movie prop",
"remote control"
] |
An ongoing refrain with modern movies is “Why is all of this CG?”– sometimes, it seems like practical effects are simultaneously a dying art, while at the same time modern technology lets them rise to new hights. [Davis Dewitt] proves that second statement with his
RC movie star “robot” for an upcoming feature film
.
The video takes us through the design process, including what it’s like to work with studio concept artists. As for the robot, it’s controlled by an Arduino Nano, lots of servos, and a COTS airplane R/C controller, all powered by li-po batteries. This is inside an artfully weathered and painted 3D printed body. Apparently weathering is important to make the character look like a well-loved ‘good guy’. (Shiny is evil, who knew?) Hats off to [Davis] for replicating that weathering for an identical ‘stunt double’.
Check out the video below for all the deets, or you can watch to see if
“The Lightning Code” is coming to a theater near you
. If you’re into films, this isn’t the first hack [Davis]
has made for the silver screen
. If you prefer “real” hacks to props, his
Soviet-Era Nixie clock would look great on any desk
. Thanks to [Davis] for letting us know about this project via
the tips line.
| 12
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125294",
"author": "IanS",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:00:23",
"content": "“Lightening” means getting less dark. “Lightning” is a an electrical discharge in the atmosphere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125323",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:14:26",
"content": "Good catch, thanks. Fixed.",
"parent_id": "8125294",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125303",
"author": "Rock Erickson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:46:28",
"content": "“Why is all of this CG?”Because a person with college degree in arts who is living in India or Pakistan will do all the required work for $2/h. To do it back home, in “practical” way would cost far more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8130696",
"author": "Johnu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-21T09:55:21",
"content": "If you watch a few Corridor Crew VFX videos you quickly realise that many directors / studios would rather film everything on a green screen and then pay VFX artists to glue it all together after the fact than actually plan out what they want & shoot it for real – often leaving a lot of quality behind and costing themselves way more in the process as now the VFX teams have to add every last detail in post rather than using a $5 prop or $50 practical effect on the day.",
"parent_id": "8125303",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125305",
"author": "Impressed",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T10:21:21",
"content": "The behind the scenes shots are pretty interesting, particularly when the director forgets and gives reading directions to the robot…. Superb compliment to his work driving it, as well as to the build",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125315",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:36:04",
"content": "“Why all these backward baseball caps?” Honestly looks really dumb. Especially indoors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125404",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:32:14",
"content": "If you have longish hair, an impossible shooting schedule, zero sleep or time to do much, have to put your face under the hood to see the rushes, or ever bend over to, say, do something to a 1-foot tall robot it kinda makes sense.",
"parent_id": "8125315",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125352",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:53:22",
"content": "Nice work, looks like a fun project that took the skills you have developed over the years of success and failure and turn it into something that will capture some childs imagination. You can’t ask for anything more out of a job.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125356",
"author": "Titus431",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:12:01",
"content": "This looks almost identical to the recently featured Disney BDX droids with their legs replaced with wheels.I mean the cute antenna, the head bob, everything. It feels like the director and designer just said “make one of these, only cheaper and faster”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125390",
"author": "Regent",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:47:41",
"content": "Wow, that’s a fantastic project, and a super cute (RC) robot.It would be a really fun project to build one of these with a bit of smarts added.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125421",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:39:29",
"content": "“COTS” = Common, off-the-shelf. Something easily found almost everywhere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8128905",
"author": "BD594",
"timestamp": "2025-05-17T21:58:21",
"content": "My 7 month old Yorkie Louie could kick Newt’s a$$….so he thinks. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.009348
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/diy-penicillin/
|
DIY Penicillin
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"antibiotic",
"bioreactor"
] |
We don’t often consider using do-it-yourself projects as a hedge against the apocalypse. But [The Thought Emporium] thinks we should
know how to make penicillin
just in case. We aren’t so sure, but we do think it is a cool science experiment, and you can learn how to replicate it in the video below.
If you want to skip the history lesson, you need to fast-forward to about the six-minute mark. According to the video, we are surrounded by mold that can create anti-bacterial compounds. However, in this case, he starts with a special strain of mold made to produce lots of antibiotics.
You may not have all the gear he uses, including a bioreactor to generate liters of mold. Even with a lot of mold, the yield of penicillin is relatively low. Since Purina doesn’t make mold chow, you’ll have to create your own food for the mold colony.
All the work he did wound up producing 125 milligrams of drug. Obviously, if you are going to save the post-apocalyptic world, you are going to need to scale that process up.
If you are the sole survivor, maybe your
AI companion can help out
.
| 16
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125214",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T02:11:22",
"content": "Only until the apocalypse. As the song says, “When the states and the cities fall … Black power and alcohol [and penicillin].”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125229",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T03:47:41",
"content": "Black powDer, maybe? What you said is not quite the same :)",
"parent_id": "8125214",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125267",
"author": "Anon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T06:40:19",
"content": "Blue bread mold, the story must be told, nothin’ keeps ya livin’ like the blue bread mold!",
"parent_id": "8125214",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125314",
"author": "Giake",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:28:25",
"content": "It’s been a while since I’ve run into a Leslie Fish reference in the wild!",
"parent_id": "8125214",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125265",
"author": "baps",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T06:35:23",
"content": "Would it?Its just mold.… i say that ignoring the fact that mushrooms and weed are illegal in a lot of places despite growing readily even without intervention",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125270",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T06:54:10",
"content": "Now for that pesky insulin … older patents are all in the public domain …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125312",
"author": "DCE",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:26:16",
"content": "Here you go:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_artichoke",
"parent_id": "8125270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125377",
"author": "andarb",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:42:11",
"content": "That’s inulin, missing the “s”. Fartichokes do not treat diabetes although may be a healthy dietary choice.",
"parent_id": "8125312",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126223",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T02:34:51",
"content": "Haha fartichokes… ain’t that the gospel truth. I think the cure is to tie up a diabetic so they only eat those and stay away from the sugary cocktails and donuts and eventually achieve a normal metabolism again. Obviously only works with the vastly most common form of diabetes, not the congenital ones… but in the heckin’ epic SHTF TEOTWAWKI apocalypse, I suspect that form of diabetes would very quickly become rare no matter what you did",
"parent_id": "8125377",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125358",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:19:16",
"content": "IMHO, also back to the willow bark, from whence the “original aspirin” was created.",
"parent_id": "8125270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125451",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:55:31",
"content": "It’s hard on the stomach, which is why the invented aspirin.",
"parent_id": "8125358",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125452",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:57:11",
"content": "Just ask your friendly, local butcher for a couple hundred pounds of pancreases.",
"parent_id": "8125270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125333",
"author": "2005",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:06:29",
"content": "Now I can activate my allergy whenever I want!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125334",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:07:40",
"content": "Why would it be illegal?Selling it, or administering it to someone would definitely be illegal. But making it?And in specific circumstances, such as giving it to someone in an emergency to save their life, I don’t think the legality would matter. Such as in New Orleans right after Katrina, when emergency services were spotty.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8174482",
"author": "anonymouse",
"timestamp": "2025-09-03T23:59:20",
"content": "Sigh, seems we have reached the point where doing anything helpful requires permission from the government(s)… And having a lawyer on hand is probably and excellent idea too.",
"parent_id": "8125334",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125466",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:17:14",
"content": "Useful resource, adding this to my “Rebooting Modernity” files.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.959054
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/five-oddest-op-amp-applications/
|
Five Oddest Op Amp Applications
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Parts"
] |
[
"analog",
"op amps",
"parts"
] |
You think of op amps as amplifiers because, no kidding, it is right in the name. But just like some people say, “you could do that with a 555,” [Doctor Volt] might say, “
you can do that with an op amp
.” In a recent video, you can see below, he looks at simulations and breadboards for five applications that aren’t traditional amplifiers.
Of course, you can split hairs. A comparator is sort of an amplifier with some very specific parameters, but it isn’t an amplifier in the classic sense.
In addition to comparators, there’s a flip flop, a few oscillators, and a PWM audio over optical transmitter and receiver. If you want to test your understanding of op amps, you can try to analyze the different circuits to see if you can explain how they work.
Op amps are amazing for analog design since you don’t have to build up high-quality amplifier blocks from discrete devices. Even the worst op amp you can buy is probably better than something you have the patience to design in a few minutes with a FET or a bipolar device. Fair to say that we do enjoy these
oddball op amp circuits
.
| 25
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125216",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T02:16:34",
"content": "A clue to why op amps aren’t simply a traditional amplifier (and never have been) can be found in their name, which is “operational amplifier”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125238",
"author": "Joe W",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T04:43:33",
"content": "“A comparator is sort of an amplifier with some very specific parameters”Yes, and a very standard op-amp circuit. As are flip-flops, Schmitt-Triggers.Is it good to show this to people and remind them that stuff can be pretty simple? Yes. And people should really look at the circuits and try to understand them. It’s been a while for me as well (2nd year EE, I think).",
"parent_id": "8125216",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125317",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:42:21",
"content": "On paper at arms length and squinting, a comparator might look like an op-amp, but woe betide you if you try to sub one in for the other in a real circuit and expect the desired performance (unless your expectations are low). Saturation recovery is a big difference, among other parameters.",
"parent_id": "8125238",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125257",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T05:52:15",
"content": "There is nothing “odd” about these circuits. They’re all pretty common opamp applications.But a word of caution about the schmitt trigger. This circuit can not be understood if you make the common but false assumption that “an opamp tries to make it’s inputs equal to each other”.A much better way to analyze opamp circuits, is to look at what an opamp actually does. It takes the difference between the two inputs, and amplifies that with a big number. (approx 100.000 is common). Next step is to take another specification of an opamp, and that is the maximum rate at which the output can change, this is called the “slew rate”.Combine these two, and you get: When the non inverting input is higher then the inverting input, the output goes up at the rate of the slew rate, if the inverting input is higher, then the output goes down with the slew rate.This analysis always works because it simply is what opamps do. It also helps with analyzing when there is for example a BJT at it’s output, which in some configurations “inverts” how an opamp works. The opamp itself does not know anything about the external circuitry. It just has it’s inputs and output (And it’s power supply, possible compensation nodes and other details that are not significant to understanding the basics of a circuit).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125268",
"author": "Clipp",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T06:43:50",
"content": "Excellent summary. Short ,detailed and easily understood.",
"parent_id": "8125257",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125364",
"author": "EH",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:42:57",
"content": "false assumption that “an opamp tries to make it’s inputs equal to each other”It’s true that it’s false about an op-amp in isolation. It’s misleading, and arguably false, that it’s false about circuit with an op-amp in negative feedback configuration.",
"parent_id": "8125257",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125473",
"author": "mike stone",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:35:22",
"content": "It’s still false, but can be useful as a first approximation. You can run into major problems trying to treat negative feedback circuits as true “make the inputs equal” systems though.First of all, the math breaks. An open-loop circuit with gain of 1e6 that produces 1V of output for Vpos-Vneg=1uV of input makes sense. So does a negative feedback circuit that naturally seeks the point where Vpos-Vneg=1/1+gain times the output. Trying to think in terms of Vpos-Vneg=0 makes you try to do all sorts of things that just don’t work.Barrie Gilbert (one of the big 20th century analog designers.. invented the multiplier circuit still used in most radios) wrote an article about why the standard assumptions for an ideal op amp — infinite input impedance, infinite gain, and infinite frequency response — fall apart when you really start thinking about them.. a device that actually did those things would be almost useless:https://www.edn.com/op-amp-myths-by-barrie-gilbert/",
"parent_id": "8125364",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125770",
"author": "TerryMatthews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:23:48",
"content": "I like this explanation a lot :)",
"parent_id": "8125257",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125320",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:50:40",
"content": "Silliest op-amp circuit I’ve done: An oscillator and driver solely to drive a capacitor-isolated voltage doubler, to power a digital panel meter that needed to be isolated. One-chip, $0.40 solution and I had it on hand, saved the $3 +1 day solution to get a ‘real’ one from Digikey. 15 years later, it’s still running.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125322",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:12:41",
"content": "My favorite “odd Op Amp circuit” Is the simple frequency discriminator.Don’t try this with a FET input op amp it won’t work. This only works with bipolar transistor front end op amps. Where I use to work we built a transmitter (FM) that used an RCA CA748 op amp as a frequency discriminator. The key to making this work was the parallel tuned circuit across the inverting and non inverting inputs. The circuit worked well into the lower UHF range.We had a line of transmitters that used this circuit for frequency control in our frequency locked loop transmitters, we also had a linear version that would generate a voltage proportional to the frequency. We used this provide reverse bias for a VCO for an L-band 100 channel FM transmitter.The transmitters wee modulated by using a varactor diode in that parallel tuned circuit I mentioned above.This was the preferred method of modulation although we did build transmitters that modulated by other means.I miss the days when the strange and weird things could be found in microwave circuits; now it’s just nameless, and faceless black silicon dots with stubs and combs and striplines….Thank you Conic Data Systems for the memories….Where’s Tom Cat???",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125394",
"author": "TollHolio",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:08:07",
"content": "Good old Conic.Scrapped a ton of their stuff into useful parts (lol) when I was growing up in San Diego in the 80s and 90s.Tons!",
"parent_id": "8125322",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125418",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:27:46",
"content": "There was a lot of good parts to be had.Back in those days if you worked on the production floor you had access to a lot of free stock parts for some of your own projects…. (nobody abused it)I left there for more money, and went to work in the two way radio business….There are times I regretted it….All it took was the six dollar per pay difference and the regrets vanished.I did manage to buy one of the transmitters I worked on back in the day.Found it on Ebay for about 2 percent of it’s original cost.now I have a working S-band transmitter (2277.0MHZ for $45.00 USD. Makes a nice paperweight. :)",
"parent_id": "8125394",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125523",
"author": "guido",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T04:35:47",
"content": "Any pictures to share? I am especially interested in the opamp circuit you described to understand for how that works.",
"parent_id": "8125418",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125638",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:12:43",
"content": "I have a few but they are not on the web.I have a few pieces from the era, prototype stuff and old limiter and discriminator boards.The way the system worked is like this…..A crystal that resonates in the 125MHZ range is multiplied and mixed with a VCO running at on half the output frequency. A harmonic of that crystal is mixed with the VCO to give us an IF of say 28.125MHZ. The IF signal is amplified in a limiter circuit, then fed to the discriminator. Just like in your Dad’s FM Hi-Fi rig the discriminator generates an error voltage when the VCO is not on frequency. That voltage kept within close boundaries due to the tendency for the circuit to “false lock”. This is not a big problem and is easy to deal with at the production level as every VCO is a little different. (hand built by good looking assemblers) To modulate this transmitter we put a varicap in the discriminator tank circuit and apply a little mod and the VCO is forced to track the discriminator’s excursions in resonant frequency. Oh by the way…..There is a Second Varacap diode in the discriminator to apply tempriture compensation to keep the transmitter on frequency Typical over -30 to +75C Although we did many, many transmitters that went down to -70C.This design works well for low speed data and video, it is flawed in several ways.First harmonics of the IF frequency mix with the multiplied crystal oscillator output. This will produce spurious signals in the transmitter’s modulation passband. The only to fix this is to shift the IF a few dozen KHZ. The other main issue is noise…. As the frequency locked loop approaches the output frequency the loop gain goes up, at the exact frequency the transmitter is suppose to be on the loop gain must be infinity. What ends up happening is the transmitter wonders around typically on one of our standard products tyis wondering was about 200 HZ second drift, random wondering about the center frequency. This turned out to be a big issue if you are using a PM and not an FM receiver. One of our customers make this mistake and ordered 175 of our 5 channel transmitters which they gave back to us and gave us some more money to design a PM version our transmitters. (already in R and D at that time) I managed to get this wondering down to 50HZ in some transmitters I did for a company supplying border surveillance gear to Israel.That transmitter had tight specs for spurious emissions -90DBC, and to make things miserable for me three channels that the customer fell in the danger zone for that spur problem i mentioned above. I had REQUESTED IN WRITING to have those channel crystal frequencies changed due to that problem.Well….I made them buy new crystals, added a mod to shift the transmitter IF on those channels and the transmitter worked like a million dollars.It did cause enough havoc having to change the crystals I received a visit from the Founder of the company who was still working as the VP for this division of Loral corp.In the end I managed to bring about an important change to how those transmitters were built, however too little too late. Thanks to new modulation techniques and new parts on the approved parts list the phase mod transmitter design went forward and a better product was produced.A short list of Conic Corp. accomplishments;First all solid state 2500W S-band power amplifier covering the whole S-band.First 100 and 200 channel synthesized L-band telemetry transmitters.First 105 channel synthesized L-band transmitter.We spent a few decades building telemetry transmitters for the Trident missle program. These transmitters were used during missile tests to show how well our stuff worked. I would point out during the seven plus years I worked there only one of these transmitters ever failed during a test.Like many companies of that time who were pushing the state of the art; the hacker spirit lived. Although overcoming the inertia of the engineering department can be a challenge (they hate change especially when it’s not their idea) I did have an ally in the engineering department, thanks TomCat.",
"parent_id": "8125523",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8126197",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T01:12:55",
"content": "By the way the above mentioned part was a 5 transistor array which we used, my mistake.The actual op amp used was a CA748. You could do some cool stuff with that part.Long time since 1981 when I first started working there.",
"parent_id": "8125322",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125330",
"author": "DCE",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:36:23",
"content": "*Operational amplifiersOperational amplifiers (op amps) are analog circuit blocks that take a differential voltage input and produce a single-ended voltage output^",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125363",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T14:41:42",
"content": "Check National Semi AN-32 here. From 1970.http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/components/national/_dataBooks/1973_National_Linear_Applications.pdf",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125375",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:24:23",
"content": "heh it’s a couple years ago now that i realized an op amp and a comparator are the same thing",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125393",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:57:12",
"content": "Except when you try to make one act like the other… They really are different things, with performance criteria optimized for the intended use. OK for demonstration and low-speed, low-performance projects, but otherwise poor substitutes for each other.",
"parent_id": "8125375",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125479",
"author": "mike stone",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:05:19",
"content": "You’re close.. they’re the same core circuit — a differential amplifier — tuned in opposite directions.Op amps are tuned to operate in the middle of their output range. They tend to get laggy and unresponsive if their output gets too close to either limit. They’re tuned to be slow, which gives them the flexibility to have reasonably linear gain. Most jellybean op amps you’ll see mentioned here at Hackaday have gain-bandwidth products between 1MHz and 10MHz, meaning their DC gain starts in the millions, but drops to 1 by the time your input frequency gets into the low megahertz range. They’re also designed to work well with their positive and negative input voltages almost equal.Comparators are tuned to keep the output at one rail or the other. A comparator whose output is somewhere between the rails is an unhappy device. They’re tuned to be fast. Even an old design like the LM311 is spec’d to respond in 100ns. And they hate having their inputs nearly the same voltage. Most datasheets will have a note saying you need at least 100mV of differential voltage to get the fastest response times.If you want to detect small voltage differences, you make what’s known as a precision comparator: run the inputs through an op amp for gain (usually with opposing diodes for feedback so the output never goes more than about 0.6V away from the input), then feed the output of that to a comparator. The op amp won’t take too long to produce a 100mV difference (100ns with a slew rate of 1V/us), and the comparator will take over from there.",
"parent_id": "8125375",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125649",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:46:46",
"content": "thank you! your comment actually helped me understand in a little more detail",
"parent_id": "8125479",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125430",
"author": "Dave Duckert",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T19:04:42",
"content": "OK, this one is pretty odd too. Check out this tongue in cheek circuit from a couple of die-hard analog guys.https://youtu.be/VXwOHzddzi8?si=dS0O6R6mnXJqbO_5",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125660",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:30:06",
"content": "The credits are awesome :-)",
"parent_id": "8125430",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125448",
"author": "Dave Duckert",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:36:43",
"content": "https://hackaday.io/project/191222-op-amp-logicwatch the linked video",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125658",
"author": "Keshlam",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:27:09",
"content": "Highly recommend Jung’sIC Op Amp Cookbook. Thick tome of solutions and explanations of how they work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,553.909729
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/a-new-smarter-universal-remote/
|
A New, Smarter Universal Remote
|
Matthew Carlson
|
[
"home hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] |
[
"ESP32",
"homeassistant",
"remote",
"smarthome"
] |
The remote for [Dillan Stock]’s TV broke,
so he built a remote
. Not just as a replacement but as something new. For some of us, there was a glorious time in the early 2000s when a smart remote was needed and there were options you could buy off the shelf. Just one handy button next to the screen had a macro programmed that would turn on the receiver, DVD player, and TV, and then configure it with the right inputs. However, the march of technological convenience has continued and nowadays soundbars turn on just in time and the TV auto switches the input. Many devices are (for better or worse) connected to WiFi, allowing all sorts of automation.
[Dillan] was lucky enough that his devices were connected to his home assistant setup. So this remote is an ESP32 running ESPHome. These automations could be triggered by your phone or via voice assistant. What is more interesting is watching [Dillan] go through the design process. Deciding what buttons there should be, where they should be placed, and how the case would snap together takes real effort. The design uses all through-hole components except for the ESP32 which is a module.
This isn’t the first thing [Dillan] has made with an ESP32, as he
previously revamped a non-standard smart lamp
with the versatile dev board. The
3d printable files
for the remote are free available. Video after the break.
| 21
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125162",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:36:03",
"content": "I was a big fan of the all-in-one you could buy dirt cheap from Radio Shack or Walmart. Even the ‘blue peanut” from Tivo was one of theirs. There were blank pads on the PCB and a 6-pin programming header that would accept a 1KB (SPI?) chip and some free community written software for custom macros and even custom protocols and signals.They were amazing, but since have gone away.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125164",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:38:44",
"content": "This project is a missed opportunity to add a chording or joystick/d-pad based text input imho.",
"parent_id": "8125162",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125185",
"author": "remoter",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T00:05:17",
"content": "JP1. The community and the files and tools are still available. Remotes can be found on ebay.I have some stashed Radioshack UEIC/One-for-All JP1 compatible remotes, particularly fond of the 15-1995 7 in One model with the RF -> IR Repeater Hub.JP1 is great, and enables really handy low level control, and extraordinary feature adds to the stock remote, yet still cant hold a candle to what the Harmony can do.",
"parent_id": "8125162",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125501",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T01:41:58",
"content": "I got a Harmony second hand recently I haven’t played with yet. If I recall correctly it was 5-8x the price, snd a lot of the features needed a base station. A non-starter for me as I needed a ” program once and let the monkeys destroy it” cheap one.",
"parent_id": "8125185",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125536",
"author": "ginandbacon",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T06:19:47",
"content": "Awesome project! Did something similar with the S3 Box, using the touchscreen of course. Not what I imagine were a lot of ADC readings. I’m hoping my unfolded circle R3 ships soon. Wasn’t cheap but Home Assistant was the first supported integration, all local, no account needed, you log into HA from the remote and tell it what to bring over, it has an ESP32, a dedicated mic and speaker, all buttons assignable and a dedicated volume/light slider. All open source with a free AapI for developers. They support a lot more stuff and it’s niche. Funny what happens when everything is free and open source, including the Android TV and ATV integrations. Everything has a link to GitHub. I’m pretty much using WiFi for everything, Bluetooth but it’s not needed and a few IR products still needed but I’ll just run the harmony integration. Why retrain everything when the hub is already in place and knows all the codes. Hardware is closed source but got to make money somewhere.",
"parent_id": "8125185",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125168",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:42:29",
"content": "Harmony solved this problem ages ago. Why do they have to kill good things?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125181",
"author": "remoter.phire@recursor.net",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T00:00:35",
"content": "My Harmony(s) still work the same way it always has, and the RF -> IR repeating WiFi Hubs integrate into Homebridge (and surely other software like Home Assistant) just fine. In my mind, there isnt a comparable replacement to migrate to. Cool project, but this aint it either.",
"parent_id": "8125168",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125300",
"author": "Pegaroo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T09:28:06",
"content": "There is another project called Omote might be worth a look",
"parent_id": "8125181",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125200",
"author": "Joaquin",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T01:13:13",
"content": "This! I still have a working Harmony set-up and I love it, but who knows how long it’s going to continue working? And I have not seen anything that can do as much to replace it with, it makes me sad.",
"parent_id": "8125168",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125343",
"author": "Lim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:24:44",
"content": "This looks interesting, though a little bit complicated:https://github.com/eengnr/openharmonie",
"parent_id": "8125200",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125196",
"author": "Dit. Hi hi",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T00:57:08",
"content": "I envy those who have mastered HA. I got as far as making a single simple node / flow before the plugin was changed and I slid back to the bottom of the learning curve. Something like this using esphome seems like a good excuse to give HA another try.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125281",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T07:47:06",
"content": "I frankly dread software updates these days. The developers at HA have the bad habit of introducing breaking changes all of the time. I find that extremely frustrating, when in most cases that could be avoided with just some simple foresight.If anything breaks, I just wait for the next update, and more times than not, it fixes itself.I wish that they make a parallel “Stable-Stable” release with just the fixes from the previous release and no partially working new features. I don’t mind waiting two or three months for a new feature if avoids me wasting time fixing something they have broken.ESPhome is just as bad, so once a device works, I stop all updates to it.",
"parent_id": "8125196",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125401",
"author": "Cory Johnson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:29:13",
"content": "Completely agree. HA really needs to work on stability and resilience. Stuff like lights shouldn’t break because of an update or the SBC running out of storage space. Also, it should update itself automatically out of the box, on all versions, including the container one. Right now HA requires way too much babying and maintenance. Fine if you’re a tinkerer, but ultimately most people just want something that just works, a set it and forget it deal. After 6 years using it, I’m regularly tempted to just rip it all out and go back to a non-smart setup, as those require absolutely zero maintenance.",
"parent_id": "8125281",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125235",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T04:33:48",
"content": "I don’t much like the “remote” form factor any more. All TVs I use are connected to some sort of computer anyway and the main use case is streaming, so almost all viewing experiences start by typing into a search bar. Typing without a proper keyboard sucks, so instead of a teensy little remote I use a wireless keyboard. Works a treat, everybody knows how to use one and the best part is, due to its size it doesn’t get lost as easily.Helps to keep the setup simple, i.e. scrap the whole mess of different input devices, just use one computer for everything. Keeping it simple helps so much especially making the whole thing accessible. Most users already struggle with selecting the proper input source so having only one goes a long way.As for the TV, I keep it dumb and disconnected. There’s only a socket actuator to switch it on and off. Everything else gets done by the computer. Very straightforward easy to use and still infinitely versatile setup.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125405",
"author": "Cory Johnson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:38:06",
"content": "I agree with your point on the form factor. A KBM setup definitely makes more sense for a TV hooked up to some sort of HTPC, but right now if you want to use a keyboard to turn on/off multiple devices and switch between them, you’re in for quite the weekend project. Same for controlling volume. Most keyboards have volume controls, but those are hardwired to the OS’s volume, which will be ignored by your receiver if you’re doing the right thing and bitstreaming audio.",
"parent_id": "8125235",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125450",
"author": "Sandro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:42:06",
"content": "Android streaming boxes are supposed to support voice dictation with the remote. This works great on my older boxes but seems more spotty on newer ones.",
"parent_id": "8125235",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125271",
"author": "fnord",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T06:56:04",
"content": "There is only one smart remote. It’s called TV-B-Gone.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125277",
"author": "Marian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T07:23:19",
"content": "Hear Hear!Or rather don’t. Because it’s off. And stays off. See?",
"parent_id": "8125271",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125347",
"author": "Dj Biohazard",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:33:21",
"content": "Can’t see, the screen’s off!",
"parent_id": "8125277",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125860",
"author": "nope",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T01:31:23",
"content": "Hey! I was watching that!",
"parent_id": "8125271",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125272",
"author": "Pugwash",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T07:00:26",
"content": "I had a Harmony for years but have recently moved to a Sofabaton as it does more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.066254
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/06/building-a-diy-chicken-incubator/
|
Building A DIY Chicken Incubator
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"classic hacks"
] |
[
"chicken",
"eggs",
"incubator"
] |
If you want to keep eggs warm to hatch, you’ll need an incubator. You could buy one off the shelf, but they’re not so complex — just a nicely-controlled warm box you could easily whip up yourself. As it turns out,
that’s precisely what [RCLifeOn] did.
The incubator is built out of wooden panels screwed together to make a simple box. The frame of the front door is also wood, but it features 3D printed hinges and handles, because that’s the easiest way to make hardware
when you’re a printing wizard like [RCLifeOn].
The box is fitted with controls for humidity and temperature to ensure the best possible conditions for hatching chicken eggs inside. As you might have guessed, a heated bed from a 3D printer was used to control the temperature inside. As for humidity, a sensor tracks the conditions in the box, and triggers an ultrasonic mister to increase the level as necessary. There’s also a little motion introduced via a moving platform run by a motor and some step-down gearing, which apparently aids in the hatching process.
[RCLifeOn] calls it “a machine that creates life,” and that honestly sounds about fair.
We’ve seen similar projects along these lines before, too.
[Thanks to Chris Muncy for the tip!]
| 16
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125081",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T18:50:17",
"content": "Nice tuning in to HaD and seeing hot chicks!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125467",
"author": "CAROL",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:21:47",
"content": "I’m not sure novice backyard chicken ranches are a good idea, and i see articles trending all over Google feed news. Bird flu is easily spread thru wild birds; it’s hard enough for market farmers to keep their chickens healthy. And it’s troubling to know living animals are getting caught up in an effort to save a little money at the supermarket. I’m hoping people will consider all the responsibilities they’re taking on. There is a true science to raising healthy animals for food production. There’s also a chunky expense to it. I dunno about promoting this idea.",
"parent_id": "8125081",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125094",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T19:42:35",
"content": "I don’t know much about chickens or eggs but I was once involved in a discussion about whether or not you could incubate eggs in a water bath as opposed to air. The idea being that it would be easier to maintain the temperature of some volume of water.From what I’ve looked at, this would probably not work as the eggs need to “breathe” by some amount – that there is some oxygen that passes through the shell.In any case, it would be a real disaster if the eggs were to hatch while submerged.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125290",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T08:44:49",
"content": "Bird or reptile eggs suffocate in water. Amphibian eggs dry up without water.",
"parent_id": "8125094",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125318",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T11:46:44",
"content": "I don’t think submerging eggs in water is a good idea.That being said, why not silicon heating pads?Not to cover all the eggs, but like an half of the surface (like 4 strips evenly spaced)?But if you want uncanny, go for shell less egg incubation.I saw a time-lapse of one hatching this way once. Unsettling.But the chick was okay (if wondering why it didn’t had to break it’s shell).I find an other one, I find it way less “careful” and more “let’s do science!”, but it shows some incredible viewshttps://youtu.be/xOLy6J1Sorg",
"parent_id": "8125094",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125137",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T20:54:34",
"content": "I can see it now: FSM is sitting back in the giant pasta bowl in the sky thinking “butIcan make DIY chickens!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125158",
"author": "eucalyptus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T22:18:57",
"content": "Very nice! I did the same thing for quails a few years ago, with roadside particle board, a 10€print bed as the heating element and PC fans… It looked like shit, but 23 quails out of 30 eggs in total were healthy. Now I want quails again lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125208",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T01:47:01",
"content": "Only about half of the eggs will be able to make eggs, the other half make noise. The world needs egg sexing instead of halving to cull the roosters. This is Planet Chicken at 10 to 20 billion alive at any one time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125350",
"author": "Aboxman",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T13:45:20",
"content": "Large producers use automated MRI scans, about 3000/minute.https://www.wattagnet.com/poultry-future/poultry-tech-summit-news/article/15744525/mri-may-help-egg-producers-with-inoxo-sexing-phenotyping",
"parent_id": "8125208",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125231",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T04:11:14",
"content": "Even though it is fun and cool to see people who normally would not get chickens or farm animals I’ll be the negative person here. And it is not even about the animals, it is about over complicating everything. This should be nothing more than a heated PID controlled environment and the rest should be done manually IMHO. The automatic rotation of the eggs is a horrible idea and the amount of just garbage that he did that is involved is beyond stupid. I enjoy his channel but this build was horrible. He did nothing new except introduce new ways to make sure your eggs fail at hatching.Again I am all for people having chickens and other animals it teaches a lot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125246",
"author": "pilgo",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T05:09:50",
"content": "Would you care to elaborate on why the auto turners are a bad idea? They’re pretty standard afaik and it beats having to remember to turn them imo",
"parent_id": "8125231",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125538",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T06:26:40",
"content": "Auto turners done correctly do work well. Home DIY ones like this tend to kill lots of chicks when they are trying to hatch. Baby chicks are tough little suckers but can also be killed by the most fragile of things too sadly :(",
"parent_id": "8125246",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125259",
"author": "Quinn Evans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T05:57:31",
"content": "Meanwhile we did this in the ’90s with… an incandescent light bulb.. and prevented overheating via ventilation holes providing passive cooling..",
"parent_id": "8125231",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125325",
"author": "Ol' MacDonald",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T12:16:24",
"content": "They did this in the 1890s with… nothing.And the 1790s…And the 1790s BC…And",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125372",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:22:16",
"content": "hahah i love the hack of this…10-15 years ago we were hacking together 3d printers and we might have looked all over for a suitable heater to hack into the bed. but now we’re looking for a general heater and the first one that comes to hand is made for a 3d printer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125654",
"author": "Beaker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:09:49",
"content": "What’s old is new again. Did this in the 90’s with a broken refrigerator (good insulation, lots of space), a halogen bulb for heat, a small fan, and a thermostat. The humidity management on this is nice, doing it humidity with dry and wet bulbs and uncovered ice cube trays took a while to get it dialed in (how much exposed water surface, how close to the fan).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.115842
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/jellybean-mac-hides-modern-pc/
|
Jellybean Mac Hides Modern PC
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"case",
"imac",
"mac",
"pc"
] |
The iMac G3 is an absolute icon of industrial design, as (or perhaps more) era-defining than the Mac Classic before it. In the modern day, if your old iMac even boots, well, you can’t do much with it. [Rick Norcross] got a hold of a dead (hopefully irreparable) specimen, and
stuffed a modern PC inside of it
.
From the outside, it’s suprizingly hard to tell. Of course the CRT had to go, replaced with a 15″ ELO panel that fits well after being de-bezeled. (If its resolution is only 1024 x 768, well, it’s also only 15″, and that pixel density matches the case.) An M-ATX motherboard squeezes right in, above a modular PSU. Cooling comes from a 140 mm case fan placed under the original handle. Of course you can’t have an old Mac without a startup chime, and [Rick] obliges by including an Adafruit FX board wired to the internal speakers, set to chime on power-up while the PC components are booting.
These sorts of mods have proven controversial in the past– certainly there’s good reason to want to
preserve aging hardware
–but perhaps with this generation of iMac it won’t raise the same ire as
when someone guts a Mac Classic.
We’ve seen the same treatment
given to a G4 iMac
, but somehow the lamp doesn’t quite have the same place in our hearts as the redoubtable jellybean.
| 19
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125524",
"author": "drypaperhammerbro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T05:03:49",
"content": "Neat case, shame the CRT was thrown out",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125547",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T07:03:20",
"content": "Yeah, think same. Unfortunately, people nolonger know how to handle CRT technology.If only AMOLED panels or laser-based panels would be available finally.The technological progress is so slow. LCD, TFT.. Such vintage technologies. Sigh.They were around when I was a kid, already.",
"parent_id": "8125524",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125555",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T07:25:59",
"content": "Well, very early in my career I learned how to repair CRT televisions and monitors, I’d have preferred to keep it too, but they take up so much space and are pretty much all knackered now with low emission, soggy focus and filled with unobtainable parts so even if the scan rates were compatible, I’d probably accept a vaguely period correct resolution and format TFT.",
"parent_id": "8125547",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125574",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:15:07",
"content": "If the CRT was already bad, no loss there as it’s next to impossible to repair CRT. If it was still working, I would have kept it in case someone local needs a replacement CRT",
"parent_id": "8125524",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125845",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T00:06:06",
"content": "hell if it worked id put it on ebay. projects need funding.",
"parent_id": "8125524",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125540",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T06:32:09",
"content": "I have a similar machine, mine is broken too, due to the heat and design issues they are all basically dying and with no schematics at hand if the CRT driving board is toast (like mine) you are pretty limited, my next step is to figure out if I can fit one of these CRT boards from aliexpress in it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125545",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T06:58:19",
"content": "“The iMac G3 is an absolute icon of industrial design” that’s up for debate, but it’s shape and colors are certainly fun and recognizable. But for many people of today, it looks like a silly prison TV with a build in DVD player and a keyboard.A real absolute icon is the “floppy disk” or 3.5″ diskette, it is not only iconic as representing the era it was used in, it is still used as an actual icon today. The irony is that the G3 did not support that icon by default, forcing users to buy an external drive to suit their needs. Ruining the “clean desktop policy” of the G3 concept. The added irony is that the “floppy” is still around and the revolutionary CD the G3 hosted is gradually being forgotten.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125548",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T07:04:39",
"content": "Not quite. The iMac gave birth to USB floppy drives, essentially! 😃",
"parent_id": "8125545",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125575",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:16:13",
"content": "USB floppy drive came along a few years after some Macintosh ditched floppy disk drive. I got a Powerbook Duo 280c, the Duo line were the first without internal disk drive.",
"parent_id": "8125548",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125620",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T10:49:17",
"content": "That was rather normal for notebooks, though.",
"parent_id": "8125575",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125680",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T14:38:14",
"content": "The floppy has gone past iconic. Centuries hence, when the last living cyborg on the edge of the oort cloud uploads their consciousness into holographic crystal media, the final thought recorded by the process will be “why does the button look like that?” 💾Yet, ironically, the CD is still in production and the floppy is not.",
"parent_id": "8125545",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125818",
"author": "T Roll",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T21:54:44",
"content": "Petition to change the save icon to a CD? :D",
"parent_id": "8125680",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125699",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:08:53",
"content": "I’m in the middle of putting a custom computer into an original G3 iBook case at the moment. I guess there’s something about these old Apple designs that’s really A-peal-ing!I’ll show myself out…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125721",
"author": "Hoby",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:23:39",
"content": "Since most of the modern components are smaller now, you should have plenty of room to put even a whole Mac Mini in there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125766",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:10:34",
"content": "The sad part is if you had to buy an ELO screen today even a 4:3 model would exceed the cost of the mac originally, those things are commercial grade and they darn well let you know it! I think one of the last ones I bought for work new was like 21 inch 16:9×1080 with touch screen and it was approaching 3 grand before postage",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125782",
"author": "stuart.meston@gmail.com",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:57:28",
"content": "I built a retro gaming PC from one of these last year. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi and I retained the original CRT display, speakers, and power button. The Pi is mounted to a 3d printed holder that sits where the original I/O board was, giving access to USB ports.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126272",
"author": "309Electronics",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T09:40:05",
"content": "Quite a nice project but he could have atleast tried to get the internal crt working or even swap the boards for one of those from aliexpress cause they can be cheap. Its basically just repurposing the shell the same way as saying ‘i got doom running on a preg test’ and only using the shell of the device and swapping all the electronics and the rest. Actionretro on youtube has got an old crt to work and he put it in an old macintosh 68k and while he swapped out the rest of the boards, he did still put in a CRT and he put in a mac mini (even when he first wanted to consider an LCD). I would have more liked it to be this way",
"parent_id": "8125782",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125841",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T23:49:14",
"content": "Still sad the CRT bit it. I probably wouldn’t swap CRT for LCD in most form factors. Not sure where it would be appreciated, maybe a digital scope?Glad to see the ingenuity, at least it’s a home user, and not a museum misrepresenting the past (if an old PC needs a display, leave the dead CRT there and plug in an obvious LCD screen to show the output.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125848",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T00:18:53",
"content": "i think if you can recycle mass produced e-waste its a good thing. i dont think the imac is sufficiently retro so as to go about preserving every scrap of one as an archeological artifact (that becomes important at some point, but not just yet). second i used them at school when they were new, and they were crap. the only thing they had going for them was their asthetic, and preserving the case keeps that while making it more useful than a dust magnet in the corner of a nerd den. i have fonder memories of the mac se and apple 2s (and the ti99 i lifted when i got the job of cleaning out the shed as part of a detention detail) they seemed to have in abundance even though they were already 10-20 years old when i went to school.besides the case is usually the last thing to go (ive got cases from machines i built 20 years ago long after the computers they housed gave up the ghost). other people have machines they want to restore and so long as you put the known working components up for sale on ebay or what not, you are actually providing a resource to other retro enthusiasts while also reducing e-waste.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.320508
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/superconductivity-news-what-makes-floquet-majorana-fermions-special-for-quantum-computing/
|
Superconductivity News: What Makes Floquet Majorana Fermions Special For Quantum Computing?
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"Floquet Majorana fermions",
"Josephson effect",
"quantum computing",
"superconductivity",
"topological superconductors"
] |
Researchers from the USA and India have proposed that
Floquet Majorana fermions may improve quantum computing by controlling superconducting currents
, potentially reducing errors and increasing stability.
In
a study
published in Physical Review Letters that was co-authored by [Babak Seradjeh], a Professor of Physics at Indiana University Bloomington, and theoretical physicists [Rekha Kumari] and [Arijit Kundu], from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, the scientists validate their theory using numerical simulations.
In the absence of room-temperature superconductors —
the Holy Grail of superconductivity
, everybody put your thinking caps on! — the low temperatures required lead to expense (for cooling) and errors (due to decoherence) which need to be managed. Using the techniques proposed by the study, quantum information may be modeled non-locally and be spread out spatially in a material, making it more stable and less error prone, immune to local noise and fluctuations.
Majorana fermions are named after Italian physicist [Ettore Majorana] who proposed them in 1937. Unlike most particles, Majorana fermions are their own antiparticles. In the year 2000 mathematical physicist [Alexei Kitaev] realized Majorana fermions can exist not only as elementary particles but also as quantum excitations in certain materials known as topological superconductors. Topological superconductors differ from regular superconductors in that they have unique, stable quantum states on their surface or edges that are protected by the material’s underlying topology.
Superconductivity is such an interesting phenomenon, where electrical resistance all but vanishes in certain materials when they are very cold. Usually to induce a current in a material you apply a voltage, or potential difference, in order to create the electrical pressure that results in the current. But in a superconductor currents can flow in the absence of an applied voltage. This is because of a peculiar quantum tunneling process known as the “Josephson effect”. It is hoped that by tuning the Josephson current using a superconductor’s “chemical potential” that we discover a new level of control over quantum materials.
Ettore Majorana picture: Mondadori Collection,
Public domain
.
| 13
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125520",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T03:54:06",
"content": "Numerical simulations are of course only valid if our equations describing reality are an accurate representation. Obviously it’s a reasonable hypothesis that is worth pursuing but it’s impossible to account for the unknown unknowns. At worst, an experiment will uncover an flaw in the simulation, at best, it will help identify the a fundamental misunderstanding, and somewhere in the middle it will work as expected.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126262",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T07:26:05",
"content": "I agree that looking at what the math does isn’t the same as looking at what the world does, but it’s all a part of the process.",
"parent_id": "8125520",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125525",
"author": "drypaperhammerbro",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T05:04:11",
"content": "Get out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125657",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:22:36",
"content": "Validating yourself with your own biases and kinks is harmless and might be an enjoyable way to pass the time, but it fundamentally does not prove anything, except maybe that the mechanics is working.Don’t expect other people to think you’ve produced anything useful, and forgive them for not shaking your hand in congratulations after you’re done.",
"parent_id": "8125525",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125596",
"author": "AB",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:08:43",
"content": "Here comes Moireee…(and graphene)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125631",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T11:43:10",
"content": "Maybe, I still see that quantum computing, if it’s going to be practical will need to ditch the supercooling requirement.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125693",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T15:31:58",
"content": "Quantum computing’s always going to need extreme environments or massive error correcting. Seriously, what do you want? You’re literally trying to work at the fundamental limits of the universe. You thought it’d beeasy?",
"parent_id": "8125631",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125711",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:42:45",
"content": "We used to believe the atom was a fundamental, unsplitabble particle.",
"parent_id": "8125693",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125762",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T18:49:53",
"content": "the question about its practicality is just whether it provides any unique capabilities to justify its expense. whatever that expense is hardly matters, if it doesn’t do anything unique at all.i’ve just seen a bunch of hand waving of the form “collapsing a waveform function is a complicated result of superpositions therefore quantum computers can do huge prime factoring problems in O(1) time QED”. it ain’t true but if it was then there’s certainly a market that would pay any amount for such a computer.",
"parent_id": "8125631",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125757",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T18:37:14",
"content": "I am kinda surprised that there are no known examples of custom-designed CPU chips that would work in liquid helium. Did I miss something?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125777",
"author": "NSFW",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:46:40",
"content": "Probably hard to beat for overclocking stunts.But, for anything else, if someone needs to do a lot of computing in a short time, the money they could spend on exotic CPUs and helium cooling is probably better spent on additional ordinary CPUs.",
"parent_id": "8125757",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125816",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T21:44:21",
"content": "How much power does that hypothetical CPU dissipate? Any more than a few milliwatts, you’ll be facing a pretty steep cost for the helium boiloff and/or cryocooler running cost. A watt of cooling at 4.2K cost $50,000 per year the last time I was looking at the bills (a couple of decades ago though).",
"parent_id": "8125757",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125853",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T00:46:09",
"content": "Right, that’s why mass-produced CPUs won’t work. I meant the custom-designed ones, the ones that would emit as little heat as possible, which also means the machine-code has be absolute top-notch, only the commands needed, and ideally none of the pointers pointing to the pointers that point to the pointers (Windoz is know for these) or 64-bit ASCII codes with useless zero padding.$50K per year is peanuts to average JP Morgan Chase or Geico. They spend billions in CEO stock options last I checked, so this is not something that average Fortune 500 would even sneeze at, unless it adds value to their stock price jacking/fixing.I bet if Seymour Cray would be around he’d hire an eager bunch of University of Waterloo students and build a prototype right there, in Canada, no problem.",
"parent_id": "8125816",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,554.254319
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/wireless-usb-autopsy/
|
Wireless USB Autopsy
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"CF-USB",
"CW-USB",
"usb",
"Wireless USB"
] |
It might seem strange to people like us, but normal people hate wires. Really hate wires. A lot. So it makes sense that with so many wireless technologies, there should be a way to do USB over wireless. There is, but it really hasn’t caught on outside of a few small pockets. [Cameron Kaiser] wants to
share why he thinks the technology never went anywhere
.
Wireless USB makes sense. We have high-speed wireless networking. Bluetooth doesn’t handle that kind of speed, but forms a workable wireless network. In the background, of course, would be competing standards.
Texas Instruments and Intel wanted to use multiband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) to carry data using a large number of subcarriers. Motorola (later Freescale), HP, and others were backing the competing direct sequence ultra-wideband or DS-UWB. Attempts to come up with a common system degenerated.
This led to two systems W-USB (later CF-USB) and CW-USB. CF-USB looked just like regular USB to the computer and software. It was essentially a hub that had wireless connections. CW-USB, on the other hand, had cool special features, but required changes at the driver and operating system level.
Check out the post to see a bewildering array of orphaned and incompatible products that just never caught on. As [Cameron] points out, WiFi and Bluetooth have improved to the point that these devices are now largely obsolete.
Of course, you can transport
USB over WiFi
, and maybe that’s the best answer, today. That is, if you really hate wires.
| 22
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125500",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T01:35:42",
"content": "As a hacker, I love cables for myself, but everyone else in my apartment building should feel free to use the RF spectrum if they want.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125514",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T02:53:27",
"content": "As a hacker, I love the RF spectrum, so everyone else should please use cables whenever they can.No, seriously, RF interference is getting really out of hand. In many crowded locations we have a critical-mass cocktail party effect, where all the devices have maxed out their output power to get over the din, just making worse, and retries and backoffs start making latencies unusable.Not to mention basically the mess of the whole HF spectrum due to crappy switching power supplies and the devil-spawn Powerline Ethernet.",
"parent_id": "8125500",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125713",
"author": "Timothy McNerney",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:04:24",
"content": "Hear, hear! Over the past 20 years, my suburban neighbors’ net enthusiasm has significantly degraded my WiFi to the point where I’ve had to snake wired ethernet to anything important. Meanwhile, I’d bet money someone nearby is watching HDTV over WiFi because, well, who can be bothered hassle with CAT-6? Oh shoot, my wife’s “cut cord” TV is doing just that, better fix it!",
"parent_id": "8125514",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125737",
"author": "John C",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T18:08:57",
"content": "A few weeks ago my TV service stopped working. My provider forced me to upgrade to WiFi TV with the promise the quality would increase. They lowered the monthly cost for not using the coax anymore. You know, the coax the builder installed when my house was built. Service quality has gone down.",
"parent_id": "8125713",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125504",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T01:52:58",
"content": "I dream of wires…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125519",
"author": "dremu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T03:48:01",
"content": "I am the final silence.The last electrician alive.And they called me ‘The Sparkle’.I was the best, I worked them all.I actually was inclined to reply with ‘Here in my wire I feel safest of all, it keeps me stable for days’ but that’s even weirder. And being weirder than Gary Numan is saying something.",
"parent_id": "8125504",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125635",
"author": "Al Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T11:59:29",
"content": "It’s the only way to live… in wires!",
"parent_id": "8125519",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125646",
"author": "Senile Data Systems",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:40:23",
"content": "+1New ways, new ways…",
"parent_id": "8125519",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125507",
"author": "Przemek",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T02:07:12",
"content": "You still need to run the power wires so I don’t see the point… If only there was a way to phase array signal and enough power to run the target device, this might make sense, but it probably is next to impossible to transmit wireless power over more than few millimeters without wasting most of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125573",
"author": "jrbloom",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:13:41",
"content": "This is for situations where your device is too far from you client to simply run a cable. You can still provide power to the device.That said, I’m struggling to identify a device class for which there isn’t already a more targeted remote protocol. Flash drives can be shared with nfs/samba etc. Remote keyboards/mice too far for a cable don’t make sense. Printers can already be shared out of the box.Test instruments with vendor specific protocols perhaps. Personally, I’d just remote in though.Still a useful piece of knowledge to keep in mind, should I hit a brick wall in the future.",
"parent_id": "8125507",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125608",
"author": "henrebotha",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:47:26",
"content": "I’m perennially annoyed at the fact that DIY arcade sticks have no settled “story” for wireless connectivity. Sure, you get the odd builder doing something with ESP32 or whatever. But there’s no wireless option that comes close to the glory of GP2040-CE. I would happily resort to USB-over-BT options if those were readily available (and competitive on latency). I don’t want to drag a 4 meter-long cable from the couch to the TV.",
"parent_id": "8125573",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125683",
"author": "r3vert",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T14:49:01",
"content": "Yeah this was the exact thing I was thinking about when I saw this article, I just wanna use my arcade stick on the TV without running a super long USB-C cable.",
"parent_id": "8125608",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125667",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:54:12",
"content": "I came across a use case the other day (for which I may try to DIY a solution, eventually): I found a mouse with a document scanner in it. It uses SLAM to track itself over the surface and automatically stitch a bunch of photos together into a whole document. It would be much more convenient as a wireless device, since the cable gets in the way of moving it around an open book I’m trying to scan. It’s already fairly large, though, so I’m not sure where the battery will go…",
"parent_id": "8125573",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126050",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:10:58",
"content": "I have done so many 50 Meter power amped runs I’ve lost count.The gear was usually extron and occasionally Kramer.So never had a drama.Sparkey just ran his 3.5 m accessory TPS run to where I needed it and sat down toying with his Stanley pliers all day after he was done.",
"parent_id": "8125573",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125723",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:32:59",
"content": "“You still need to run the power wires so I don’t see the point…”uhwhy?batteries exist?",
"parent_id": "8125507",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125867",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T02:59:02",
"content": "It starts out by saying, “normal people hate wires. Really hate wires. A lot.” I hate having to think about the state of charge of batteries, and recharge things regularly. If they’re low-enough powered to be able to use alkaline batteries and leave them for months or even years, without attention, that’s better; otherwise I’d prefer a wall wart with a DC-10 plug. One of the things I hate about USB is that there are 11 kinds of mutually incompatible connectors. So many things recharge by USB; and I have seven kinds of USB cords on my desk, and whichever one I have plugged into the PC’s only spare USB port is always the wrong one for whatever I need next.There’s also plenty of proof that all this wirelessly communicating stuff is slowly doing a lot of damage to our health. Even when it’s nowhere near strong enough to be ionizing, it does single- and double-strand DNA breaks, promoting cancer and other problems. I can provide plenty of documentation of that.",
"parent_id": "8125723",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126334",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T16:13:43",
"content": "“There’s also plenty of proof”Dude, the reason why there’s plenty of proof is because there’s literally not enough time to disprove every wackball idea out there. When you test for 1000 crazy things, you’ll get multiple 3-sigma results. That’s the way math works.“it does single- and double-strand DNA breaks, promoting cancer and other problems”Lifecauses single and double-stranded DNA breaks. That’s the way it works. There’s this big giant fusion generator bathing our planet in damaging radiation. There’s radioactive material seeping from the ground constantly.It’s actually hard to find things thatdon’tcause cancer, because cancer’s a side effect ofbeing alive.",
"parent_id": "8125867",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8126440",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T00:37:18",
"content": "You apparently don’t want to believe. It prompts me to round up my sources from scientists, studies, and lab tests, and make a web page linking them and giving a short description of each. I can’t take time to do it right now though. There’s too much. It’ll take you many hours to get through it all.",
"parent_id": "8126334",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125725",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:39:21",
"content": "How about repurposing USB dongles from the wireless keyboards?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125862",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T01:36:57",
"content": "Full USB over TCP/IP over WiFi should be possible with 2 STM32 and 2 ESP32 modules to form both ends of the link.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125961",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T12:20:02",
"content": "Why not QAM? It’s native to RF and scalable for bandwidth. Everyone with broadband cable modems uses it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126051",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T16:12:24",
"content": "Powered HDMI #😀",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.682979
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/liquid-silicone-3d-printing-is-no-joke/
|
Liquid Silicone 3D Printing Is No Joke
|
Tyler August
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printing",
"liquid printing",
"silicone"
] |
They might call it Levity, but there’s nothing funny about Rapid Liquid Print’s new silicone 3D printer. It has to be seen to be believed, and luckily [3D Printing Nerd] gives us lots of
beauty shots in this short video
, embedded below.
Smooth, and
fast
. This bladder took 51 minutes according to the RLP website.
Printing a liquid, even a somewhat-viscous one like platinum-cure silicone, presents certain obvious challenges. The Levity solves them with buoyancy: the prints are deposited not onto a bed, but into a gel, meaning they are fully supported as the silicone cures. The fact that the liquid doesn’t cure instantly has a side benefit: the layers bleed into one another, which means this technique should (in theory) be stronger in all directions than FDM printing. We have no data to back that up, but what you can see for yourself that the layer-blending creates a very smooth appearance in the finished prints.
If you watch the video, it really looks like magic, the way prints appear in the gel. The gel is apparently a commercially-available hydrogel, which is good since the build volume looks to need ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶5̶0̶0̶ ̶L̶ at least 125 L of the stuff. The two-part silicone is also industry-standard and off-the-shelf, though no doubt the exact ratios and are tweaked for purpose. There’s no magic, just a really neat technology.
If you want one, you can sign up for the waiting list at
Rapid Liquid Print’s website,
but be prepared to wait; units ship next year, and there’s already a list.
Alternatively, since there is no magic here, we’d love to see someone take it on themselves, the way once equally exotic
SLS printers have entered the DIY world
. There was a time when resin printers were new and exotic and
hobbyists had to roll their own, too
. None of this is to say we don’t respect the dickens out of the Rapid Liquid Print team and their achievement–it’s just that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
| 45
| 14
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125444",
"author": "KR3ATOR",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:14:52",
"content": "Cool tech and nice write-up!I suppose you mean it is more isotropic than FDM (instead of less)?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125446",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:16:32",
"content": "Indeed, the structure of the sentence is clear, and thus logically it must be. But I stumbled on that one too.",
"parent_id": "8125444",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125706",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T16:23:32",
"content": "And fixed. Thanks all.",
"parent_id": "8125446",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125447",
"author": "Dustbuster7000",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T20:28:55",
"content": "Definitely meant more isotropic. Or maybe less anisotropic.",
"parent_id": "8125444",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125456",
"author": "MacAttack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:31:04",
"content": "Hmmm, I think it’s correct as written, at least if I understand the printing process. Isotropic would imply that the structure is the same along rigid/set lines. But if the layers blend and ooze, then the structure is less “iso” ??",
"parent_id": "8125444",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125461",
"author": "MacAttack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:37:17",
"content": "Then again it’s strength that’s mentioned. Perhaps less isotropic in form but stronger in all directions (vs weak along layer lines) so more isotropic in strength?",
"parent_id": "8125456",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125468",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:23:37",
"content": "Isotropic means the same (iso) in all directions (tropic). So less isotropic means more difference between directions, whereas more isotropic means more the same in all directions, which is obviously what is trying to be explained. So it should definitely be MORE isotropic.",
"parent_id": "8125461",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125578",
"author": "ZeroTheHero",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:21:33",
"content": "Not to be the one… but… Isotropic means same in all directions, as such there can be no “more” (or less for that manner). Different levels of anisotropy on the other hands maybe make more sense…Nice article by the way",
"parent_id": "8125468",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125470",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:28:57",
"content": "Yes, indeed I did.I had initially written about structure, then edited it to be about strength, and apparently forgot to switch that word.That’s the sort of quality you’ll never get from an LLM!",
"parent_id": "8125444",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125457",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:31:51",
"content": "The Form 3 supports Silicone but its expensive.https://formlabs.com/store/materials/silicone-40a-resin/?srsltid=AfmBOopznaU22ij7KZd-gJmMnn_OHzGkGmEHHiKW5hLdVl9NfYqk1loA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125603",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:35:30",
"content": "This printer is looking to be more expensive imo, possibly by a lot. Material costs will be cheaper though, so at scale it could work out and the type of versatility is different.",
"parent_id": "8125457",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125459",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:35:38",
"content": "Wonderful idea and even better execution. I could see this replacing some industrial processing needs. I’d love to learn more about the strength of materials made this way, it’d be nice to have a mini version of this :) 500L is a lot of gel to spill",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125462",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:42:43",
"content": "This doesn’t look like 0.5 cubic meters at all. Apparently, the video author got “half-a-meter cube” (50x50x50cm) confused with “half-a-cubic-meter” (0.5m^3).The build volume is 50x50x50cm (data from the website), which is “only” 125L of hydrogel :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125465",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:59:26",
"content": "That box in the video doesn’t look like 50x50x50cm. More like 100x100x100cm or so. But that’s 1,000L. So maybe the box is 79.3700526×79.3700526×79.3700526cm?Or just 80x80x80cm, which would be 512L, which is 500L when you round it. ;)",
"parent_id": "8125462",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125492",
"author": "C. Scott Ananian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T00:25:11",
"content": "A 50cmx50cmx50cm build volume could easily become a 80cm-on-a-side box if the print head needs 15cm of clearance on each side… although that seems like a lot of clearance and you probably wouldn’t need anywhere near that much on the Z axis.",
"parent_id": "8125465",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125647",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:41:22",
"content": "Yeah, true. So the build volume could be 50x50x50cm, but the box might be 80x80x80cm with 15cm dead space on every side, requiring 512L of gel.I can imagine that the dead space is necessary to prevent distortion of the printing needle (Head? What would you call it?) due to the drag of the gel against the box’s surface. I can imagine that the forces on the needle could become significant when it moves close to the edge of the box, possibly even affecting the calibration.I hope I explain it understandable enough. :)",
"parent_id": "8125492",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125472",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:31:48",
"content": "Hmm. It doesn’t look like a 50cm box, but you’re right about the build volume. I’ll change it to “at least 125 L” since I think there might be some dead space in there that would be filled with gel.",
"parent_id": "8125462",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125474",
"author": "Sean",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:45:15",
"content": "No they are .5 meter, and 1 meter. They are huge. They are my favorite new vendor at work",
"parent_id": "8125462",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125604",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:38:32",
"content": "It looks huge, I’d like to work with one but this is clearly an entirely industrial market product.",
"parent_id": "8125474",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125464",
"author": "Raukk",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:47:40",
"content": "I swear I’ve seen something like this before, printing in jell, but I thought it was expanding foam or something other than silicone. Maybe it was the same company.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125606",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:40:43",
"content": "There’s an entirely different system that does essentially voxel prints via light in a gel, maybe you’re thinking of that?",
"parent_id": "8125464",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125477",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:00:02",
"content": "I wonder how well something less viscus would work. Printing in rapid drying liquid latex for instance. Maybe printing in cyanoacrylate on a bed of baking soda, so it would print almost like an SLS printer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125609",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:47:45",
"content": "This isn’t very viscous, and they are taking advantage of that for layer cohesion. Are you sure someone hasn’t done that with superglue though? Sounds very familiar.",
"parent_id": "8125477",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125480",
"author": "Jacob N",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:09:26",
"content": "As mentioned in the video, I’m sure they “made it look easy” but I can’t help but think that a DIY hacker community could take this idea on and churn out a garage-made version of this.I’ve seen DIY clay printers, for example, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this. Does anyone know of anyone who has attempted to make something like this? I don’t have the bandwidth to experiment but I could probably manage the time to at least build something if it were open-sourced, and I’d love to have the capability to print with silicone (directly; I’m aware of FDM mold-making).I’d absolutely love one of these Levity printers but I’m sure it’s well out of my budget, hence my desire to build. I also noticed they mention patents on their website though, so maybe that might discourage us hackers from attempting to roll our own.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125493",
"author": "daveb",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T00:29:14",
"content": "They will. We let the venture capitalists front the r/d and then copy it soon after release. Then about a year later the mass market chinese version will appear. Its just early in the cycle still. ;)",
"parent_id": "8125480",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125610",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:52:26",
"content": "Pretty sure that’s why their opening gambit is full-on industrial size production machines. It’ll slow direct copies and keep it off the radar until the checks clear.This isdefinitelygarage-doable, the key component has actually the slicer, followed by the needed silicone ratio for ideal curing in a hydrogel. It’s summer, roll out the back yard labs and start the engineers!",
"parent_id": "8125493",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125482",
"author": "Megan",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:18:34",
"content": "i’m really glad they printed everything with a flared base, that’s very responsible of them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125716",
"author": "George",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:12:54",
"content": "Oh my.",
"parent_id": "8125482",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126271",
"author": "PurposelyCryptic",
"timestamp": "2025-05-10T09:14:00",
"content": "My first thought as well haha",
"parent_id": "8125482",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125487",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:38:57",
"content": "No Joke…Must resist making GPL Richard Stallman ‘branded’ fleshlight liner joke…Don’t push ‘Comment’…Just hit back…Plenty of jokes in this subject.Each worse than the others.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125488",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:39:29",
"content": "Slipped.",
"parent_id": "8125487",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125496",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T01:02:35",
"content": "this definitely revolutionizes the diy sex toy scene. now if i can convince radiology to scan my booty and send me the pointcloud, i can make something that hits the spot every time.",
"parent_id": "8125487",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125589",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:53:19",
"content": "And you can literally go f**k yourself :-D",
"parent_id": "8125496",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125490",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:56:36",
"content": "Still cost of consumables especially against resin.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125612",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:57:26",
"content": "Not really, hydrogel isn’t expensive and it’s pretty reusable, and the silicone is much less expensive than resin.Also there’s no supports to remove and the type of suspension and curing has improved isotropy compared even to resin prints, so there is less post processing.Where resin wins is resolution and speed, that hasn’t changed.",
"parent_id": "8125490",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125607",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:44:43",
"content": "Regular caulk would not cure in that scenario, it does need access to air. This is using a conventional water based gel though, and conventional liquid silicone, for exactly what you describe. Only their slicer (proprietary) is novel in this case but the printer itself is a monster.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125651",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T12:57:20",
"content": "No siliconerequiresair itself. Condensation or tin cure silicones need water to cure, and air contains plenty of water for the purpose. A hydrogel will be a perfect environment to cure those silicones in.Or you can use a platinum cure silicone which contains its own catalyst when mixed and will cure even if completely sealed.",
"parent_id": "8125607",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125717",
"author": "Timothy McNerney",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T17:15:09",
"content": "…and indeed “platinum cure” came up in the video a lot.",
"parent_id": "8125651",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125653",
"author": "Heurist",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:01:36",
"content": "I imagine that this process could also work with liquid epoxy resin as long as you could get a gel and resin of compatible density.You would end up with some weird thing somewhere in between FDM and resin 3D printing.No supports required, and you might still be able to use UV setting resin, if the gel allows that frequency through.However you would need a large tank of gloop.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125659",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:29:08",
"content": "“None of this is to say we don’t respect the dickens out of the Rapid Liquid Print team and their achievement–it’s just that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”If I may be a bit pedantic, this isn’t really a compliment. The full saying is “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness”.",
"parent_id": "8125653",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125684",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T14:49:20",
"content": "If I may also be pedantic, I would point out that in the context of the full quote the Liquid Rapid Print is being referenced as “greatness”, which is indeed a compliment. The full context isn’t much of compliment to us hackers, though. I’ll take mediocrity if it lets me copy this sweet idea, though.",
"parent_id": "8125659",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125877",
"author": "Thomas",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T04:42:58",
"content": "Genuinely curious as to what they got away with patenting given that it feels like at least some prior art has existed for over a decade in academia.https://www.dezeen.com/2013/07/23/sci-arc-student-develops-freeform-3d-printing-with-undo-function/",
"parent_id": "8125684",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125882",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T05:54:54",
"content": "The cited work involved light cured resin, NOT silicone. That alone could be enough. Many patents include aspects that build upon prior art, you cant determine the validity of patent from a birds eye view, you must examine the SPECIFIC claims of a patent to determine if they are novel, unique, and eligible for protection.",
"parent_id": "8125877",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125781",
"author": "Bobby Tables",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T19:54:07",
"content": "This thing’s big brother!https://spritesmods.com/?art=jello3dprinter",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126719",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-05-12T02:26:11",
"content": "This may be helpfulhttps://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-origami-materials.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.622706
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/floss-weekly-episode-832-give-yourself-a-medal/
|
FLOSS Weekly Episode 832: Give Yourself A Medal
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] |
[
"CIRCL",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"Kunai"
] |
This week,
Jonathan Bennett
chats with
Alexandre
Dulaunoy
and
Quentin Jérôme
about
Kunai
and CIRCL! How does Kunai help solve Linux security monitoring? Why is eBPF the right place for one of these tools to run? And how is CIRCL helping Luxembourg and the world deal with the modern security landscape? Watch to find out!
https://github.com/kunai-project
https://circl.lu/
https://www.foo.be/
https://euvd.enisa.europa.eu/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
| 0
| 0
|
[] | 1,760,371,554.451083
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/germanys-cabinentaxi-the-double-sided-monorail-that-wasnt-meant-to-be/
|
Germany’s Cabinentaxi: The Double-Sided Monorail That Wasn’t Meant To Be
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"monorail",
"public transportation"
] |
The 1970s was a perfect time for alternative modes of transport to be trialed that might replace cars in the wake of the global oil crisis. One of these was the Cabinentaxi, or C-Bahn as it was later called, which was a variation on the standard suspended and monorail concepts.
It was a people mover concept, with ‘pods’ (or cabins) that’d ride either on top of or below the suspended track. It was tested intensively over the course of six years, performed admirably, and completely failed to materialize commercially due to budget crunch times around the world.
Recently [Tim Traveller]
went to the muddy farm field
that once housed the big test track (pictured above), of which nothing remains but the gates and a sign. Despite the fact that few people have heard of Cabinentaxi prior to seeing [Tim]’s video or reading this, there is a big
Wikipedia entry
on it, as well as a
(German language) site
dedicated to the technology.
What made the C-Bahn different from trains and buses were the smaller pods, high throughput capacity and ability to call a pod on demand at any of the stations. This kind of flexibility is what is seen more or less with today’s people moving systems at airports and some cities, except the C-Bahn was classified as a personal rapid transport (PRT), with on-demand pods that could travel between any two stations without stopping or delays. This is something that isn’t seen with public transport today, even if self-driving cars purport to one day do this kind of trick.
Considering that this technology died most due to economical circumstances, we remain hopeful to see its revival one day.
Top image: Cabinentaxi layout as it existed in 1978, with labels by the Tim Traveller YT channel.
| 14
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125382",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:16:58",
"content": "“Gadgetbahn”. What a great word. Probably because of Disneyland, I have always loved monorails and am just a little heartbroken that they aren’t really practical.This reminds me quite a lot of the Morgantown PRT that Tom Scott did a video about a number of years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaSaWfw07Sw).I like my cars and I like driving, but it’s such a bad fit for so much of what we do. Or perhaps more accurately there are so many better ways to accomplish transportation in relatively dense areas.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125384",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:37:41",
"content": "There were a number of these projects at that time. The prototype for this was on Boeing property south of Seattle.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125489",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:50:32",
"content": "Seattle also had something at the 1962 World’s Fair called the Bubbleator (and the monorail of course).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6rRa52vDJc",
"parent_id": "8125384",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125385",
"author": "lthemick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:38:05",
"content": "Germany has a loooong history of monorail development. My personal favorite is the Schwebebahn, the first electric monorail. It was built in Wuppertal, opened in 1901, right is still in daily use!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn?wprov=sfla1",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125387",
"author": "lthemick",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:41:42",
"content": "Worth a look: side-by-side video from one of the cars in 1902 next to a modern video over the same track:https://youtu.be/7TqqdOcX4dc",
"parent_id": "8125385",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125398",
"author": "David Given",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:16:26",
"content": "Long-term Tim Traveller viewers will know that this is technically called a ‘dangletrain’. (Also, he did a video on the Wuppertal one:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IFh6wFTJiQ)",
"parent_id": "8125385",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125391",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:48:09",
"content": "I’m sure I saw an urbex video about a tour of something very similar in Germany a couple of years ago?Built but never opened and small pods but I can’t remember what it was called",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125409",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:50:20",
"content": "Transrapid maybe? It finally got build in China.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid",
"parent_id": "8125391",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125411",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:04:35",
"content": "Do you mean the SK?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxESIzJhCU",
"parent_id": "8125391",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125414",
"author": "r",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:17:49",
"content": "DC should have installed something like this rather than the useless Light Rail they put in on H Street. It’s free and goes maybe 3 miles….and clogs up the traffic something crazy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125455",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T21:17:13",
"content": "I like that they use top and bottom of the beam, makes the most of the real estate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125584",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T08:31:31",
"content": "Detroit metro area almost had monorail system. A prototype were up and running between Fairlane mall and the nearby hotel. Ford’s monorail (technically not monorail as there’s no track, it was just flat narrow road) was to be expanded across Detroit metro area going as far west as Canton or near Ypsilanti.https://www.flickr.com/photos/rbglasson/1135955541is the cars used back then, no one seems to know where it is now.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_ACTCost killed the project. Detroit metro area has lots of roads and it’d be expensive to build elevated track over all the roads and buying up all the lands since I doubt average Joe would like to have a track running over his house.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125859",
"author": "nope",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T01:28:37",
"content": "If you looked on Google, you’d find results saying the CT Trolley museum still has them on display from 2023. If you ask the museum, they’ll tell you if they still have it in the collection.",
"parent_id": "8125584",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125668",
"author": "t6u56u56",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T13:54:36",
"content": "this is old POLISH invented not german",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.737449
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/07/big-chemistry-cement-and-concrete/
|
Big Chemistry: Cement And Concrete
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] |
[
"architecture",
"cement",
"Chemistry",
"concrete"
] |
Not too long ago, I was searching for ideas for the next installment of
the “Big Chemistry” series
when I found
an article
that discussed the world’s most-produced chemicals. It was an interesting article, right up my alley, and helpfully contained a top-ten list that I could use as a crib sheet for future articles, at least for the ones I hadn’t covered already, like the
Haber-Bosch process for ammonia
.
Number one on the list surprised me, though: sulfuric acid. The article stated that it was far and away the most produced chemical in the world, with 36 million tons produced every year in the United States alone, out of something like 265 million tons a year globally. It’s used in a vast number of industrial processes, and pretty much everywhere you need something cleaned or dissolved or oxidized, you’ll find sulfuric acid.
Staggering numbers, to be sure, but is it really the most produced chemical on Earth? I’d argue not by a long shot, when there’s a chemical that we make 4.4
billion
tons of every year: Portland cement. It might not seem like a chemical in the traditional sense of the word, but once you get a look at what it takes to make the stuff, how finely tuned it can be for specific uses, and how when mixed with sand, gravel, and water it becomes the stuff that holds our world together, you might agree that cement and concrete fit the bill of “Big Chemistry.”
Rock Glue
To kick things off, it might be helpful to define some basic terms. Despite the tendency to use them as synonyms among laypeople, “cement” and “concrete” are entirely different things. Concrete is the finished building material of which cement is only one part, albeit a critical part. Cement is, for lack of a better term, the glue that binds gravel and sand together into a coherent mass, allowing it to be used as a building material.
What did the Romans ever do for us? The concrete dome of the Pantheon is still standing after 2,000 years. Source: Image by
Sean O’Neill
from Flickr via
Monolithic Dome Institute
(CC BY-ND 2.0)
It’s not entirely clear who first discovered that calcium oxide, or lime, mixed with certain silicate materials would form a binder strong enough to stick rocks together, but it certainly goes back into antiquity. The Romans get an outsized but well-deserved portion of the credit thanks to their use of pozzolana, a silicate-rich volcanic ash, to make the concrete that held the aqueducts together and built such amazing structures as the dome of the Pantheon. But the use of cement in one form or another can be traced back at least to ancient Egypt, and probably beyond.
Although there are many kinds of cement, we’ll limit our discussion to Portland cement, mainly because it’s what is almost exclusively manufactured today. (The “Portland” name was a bit of branding by its inventor, Joseph Aspdin, who thought the cured product resembled the famous limestone from the Isle of Portland off the coast of Dorset in the English Channel.)
Portland cement manufacturing begins with harvesting its primary raw material, limestone. Limestone is a sedimentary rock rich in carbonates, especially calcium carbonate (CaCO
3
), which tends to be found in areas once covered by warm, shallow inland seas. Along with the fact that limestone forms between 20% and 25% of all sedimentary rocks on Earth, that makes limestone deposits pretty easy to find and exploit.
Cement production begins with quarrying and crushing vast amounts of limestone. Cement plants are usually built alongside the quarries that produce the limestone or even right within them, to reduce transportation costs. Crushed limestone can be moved around the plant on conveyor belts or using powerful fans to blow the crushed rock through large pipes. Smaller plants might simply move raw materials around using haul trucks and front-end loaders. Along with the other primary ingredient, clay, limestone is stored in large silos located close to the star of the show: the rotary kiln.
Turning and Burning
A rotary kiln is an enormous tube, up to seven meters in diameter and perhaps 80 m long, set on a slight angle from the horizontal by a series of supports along its length. The supports have bearings built into them that allow the whole assembly to turn slowly, hence the name. The kiln is lined with refractory materials to resist the flames of a burner set in the lower end of the tube. Exhaust gases exit the kiln from the upper end through a riser pipe, which directs the hot gas through a series of preheaters that slowly raise the temperature of the entering raw materials, known as rawmix.
The rotary kiln is the centerpiece of Portland cement production. While hard to see in this photo, the body of the kiln tilts slightly down toward the structure on the left, where the burner enters and finished clinker exits. Source: by nordroden, via Adobe Stock (licensed).
Preheating the rawmix drives off any remaining water before it enters the kiln, and begins the decomposition of limestone into lime, or calcium oxide:
The rotation of the kiln along with its slight slope results in a slow migration of rawmix down the length of the kiln and into increasingly hotter regions. Different reactions occur as the temperature increases. At the top of the kiln, the 500 °C heat decomposes the clay into silicate and aluminum oxide. Further down, as the heat reaches the 800 °C range, calcium oxide reacts with silicate to form the calcium silicate mineral known as belite:
Finally, near the bottom of the kiln, belite and calcium oxide react to form another calcium silicate, alite:
It’s worth noting that cement chemists have a specialized nomenclature for alite, belite, and all the other intermediary phases of Portland cement production. It’s a shorthand that looks similar to standard chemical nomenclature, and while we’re sure it makes things easier for them, it’s somewhat infuriating to outsiders. We’ll stick to standard notation here to make things simpler. It’s also important to note that the aluminates that decomposed from the clay are still present in the rawmix. Even though they’re not shown in these reactions, they’re still critical to the proper curing of the cement.
Portland cement clinker. Each ball is just a couple of centimeters in diameter. Source:
مرتضا
, Public domain
The final section of the kiln is the hottest, at 1,500 °C. The extreme heat causes the material to sinter, a physical change that partially melts the particles and adheres them together into small, gray lumps called clinker. When the clinker pellets drop from the bottom of the kiln, they are still incandescently hot. Blasts of air that rapidly bring the clinker down to around 100 °C. The exhaust from the clinker cooler joins the kiln exhaust and helps preheat the incoming rawmix charge, while the cooled clinker is mixed with a small amount of gypsum and ground in a ball mill. The fine gray powder is either bagged or piped into bulk containers for shipment by road, rail, or bulk cargo ship.
The Cure
Most cement is shipped to concrete plants, which tend to be much more widely distributed than cement plants due to the perishable nature of the product they produce. True, both plants rely on nearby deposits of easily accessible rock, but where cement requires limestone, the gravel and sand that go into concrete can come from a wide variety of rock types.
Concrete plants quarry massive amounts of rock, crush it to specifications, and stockpile the material until needed. Orders for concrete are fulfilled by mixing gravel and sand in the proper proportions in a mixer housed in a batch house, which is elevated above the ground to allow space for mixer trucks to drive underneath. The batch house operators mix aggregate, sand, and any other admixtures the customer might require, such as plasticizers, retarders, accelerants, or reinforcers like chopped fiberglass, before adding the prescribed amount of cement from storage silos. Water may or may not be added to the mix at this point. If the distance from the concrete plant to the job site is far enough, it may make sense to load the dry mix into the mixer truck and add the water later. But once the water goes into the mix, the clock starts ticking, because the cement begins to cure.
Cement curing is a complex process involving the calcium silicates (alite and belite) in the cement, as well as the aluminate phases. Overall, the calcium silicates are hydrated by the water into a gel-like substance of calcium oxide and silicate. For alite, the reaction is:
Scanning electron micrograph of cured Portland cement, showing needle-like ettringite and plate-like calcium oxide. Source:
US Department of Transportation
, Public domain
At the same time, the aluminate phases in the cement are being hydrated and interacting with the gypsum, which prevents early setting by forming a mineral known as ettringite. Without the needle-like ettringite crystals, aluminate ions would adsorb onto alite and block it from hydrating, which would quickly reduce the plasticity of the mix. Ideally, the ettringite crystals interlock with the calcium silicate gel, which binds to the surface of the sand and gravel and locks it into a solid.
Depending on which adjuvants were added to the mix, most concretes begin to lose workability within a few hours of rehydration. Initial curing is generally complete within about 24 hours, but the curing process continues long after the material has solidified. Concrete in this state is referred to as “green,” and continues to gain strength over a period of weeks or even months.
| 24
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8125379",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T15:58:26",
"content": "On picture #2, is it tilting down to the right or to the left?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125383",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:18:32",
"content": "Also, nice writeup. I wonder about the environmental impact of concrete production; I remember watching a documentary segment years ago about beach erosion due to harvesting of beach sand for concrete. Apparently, desert sand is not great for concrete because it is too small and smooth or something, which means concrete sand mostly comes from beaches and riverbeds.",
"parent_id": "8125379",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125392",
"author": "Leo Mallavarapu",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T16:51:28",
"content": "As a chemistry student , I visited a cement plant in MANGALAGIRI IN Andhra Pradesh in India. It happened to be a question in the final exam. I also remember reading an article about the construction of the HOOVER DAM, and the steps taken to address theheat that needed to be tackled over a long period of time. Very interesting article,Leo Mallavarapu",
"parent_id": "8125383",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125403",
"author": "Nicolas Raynaud",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T17:31:44",
"content": "Video on the topic:https://youtu.be/SB0qDQFTyE8?si=XEPB1M99XKHbnUi_&t=480",
"parent_id": "8125383",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125494",
"author": "Mbc",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T00:49:18",
"content": "The trouble with beach sand is the salt contamination… It weakens the concrete and causes the rebar to corrode quickly. River sand is where it’s at, but there’s precious little of that too.",
"parent_id": "8125383",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126575",
"author": "simpleman86JJ86",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T12:56:00",
"content": "Sand can be a by-product of rock quarrying. There are also deposits from ancient river/lake/ocean beds all around the US as well as glacial deposits. Most actual river sand and lake or ocean sand is environmentally regulated by ACOE.",
"parent_id": "8125383",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125811",
"author": "Dan Maloney",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T21:27:00",
"content": "Pretty sure it’s tilting down to the right, toward that enclosure. The upper end would be just out of frame on the left, where you’d see the hoppers and pre-calciners. Either way, it’s a very gentle slope, only 4 degrees or so — just enough to keep material moving as the drum rotates.As an aside, I drove past a rotary kiln once many years ago. I think it was in Pennsylvania, somewhere in the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area. It was right along the highway and you could see it for miles at night. It was truly gargantuan, looked like a giant dragon belching fire. Really impressive.",
"parent_id": "8125379",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125422",
"author": "Mark Randle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T18:42:30",
"content": "Nice and informative. Now I know more, but now I also need to know more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125475",
"author": "Niels Baloe",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T22:46:27",
"content": "So yes this is great, but the heating to 1500 is helping climate change a lot. Cement causes globally as much co2 als flying!!!! So we really need to stop using cement a.s.a.p..How? That is easy. Cross laminated timber for building multi-level buildings, regular wood skeleton construction for 0 to 3 level buildings (like we have done so for hundreds of years), and for most other purposes we nowadays have a huge variety of lime(stone) which is heated only up to 300 to 400 degrees celcius.I rebuilded my house and used 8000 kilo of clay and a few bags of pure limestone to finish all walls floors and ceilings..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125483",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:21:25",
"content": "So, like freeway overpasses, house foundations, underwater structures, dams, sports stadiums. All made of laminated wood huh? You’re advocating for much more limited lifetime solutions to currently solved problems. Glad the Parthenon wasn’t something like that. Or the Roman colosseum. Lots of examples.",
"parent_id": "8125475",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125509",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T02:11:00",
"content": "You have a really limited understanding of what concrete is used for if you think wood products can supplant it. And curing limestone requires CO2, a process that takes long enough that it is impractical for cast structural purposes … or for things like highways.",
"parent_id": "8125475",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125541",
"author": "Zahidkarim",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T06:34:59",
"content": "To address the issue of CO2, calcined clay cement can be a solution which is being experimented that will reduce emissions of CO2 during calcination as well as during burning process because calcining clay requires lesser calories",
"parent_id": "8125475",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125633",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T11:53:35",
"content": "Once some issues are solved.https://chatgpt.com/share/681c9b05-2c08-8005-8da2-d091757be8b5",
"parent_id": "8125541",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125593",
"author": "Jelle",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:04:56",
"content": "You are right that cement production is producing a lot of CO2 (but not in your easy proposed alternatives /methinks).Some of that CO2 comes from carbonates in the rock itself, which offsets nicely with the CO2 the concrete absorbs later. But the other source is fossil natural gas. We need a cleaner way to heat up the furnace to these insane temperatures.Perhaps direct solar heating could do it, but that may not be very practical for a plant that usually runs 24h a day. You would need a place with lots of sunshine and a process that can tolerate intermittent heat supply.Possibly this would be a good target for green hydrogen, split on site into large stores of hydrogen and oxygen, and available on tap for heating a conventional kiln.",
"parent_id": "8125475",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125478",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T23:01:02",
"content": "Cement absorbs CO2 during its curing process, a phenomenon known as carbonation. This absorption of CO2 occurs when the concrete reacts with the surrounding atmosphere, leading to the formation of stable carbonates within the concrete structure.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125491",
"author": "Ced",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T00:09:59",
"content": "As far as I know, the Colosseum and the remnants of the Port of of Rhodes, have had samples taking and tested. Last I heard, the concrete was passing 90klbs in density and still chemically curing, 2000+years later.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125825",
"author": "John Busby",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T22:22:21",
"content": "Good point. Try drilling into 75 year old to install anchors.",
"parent_id": "8125491",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125563",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T07:46:59",
"content": "The chemistry of cement and concrete is fascinating, there’s a process which uses supercritical CO2 to cure concrete and form a material that, if I remember and understood correctly, rapidly turns it into limestone with embedded aggregate that’s stronger and more resilient than “normal” concrete.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125613",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T09:58:51",
"content": "The ancient Maya used concrete, which had been independently developed in Central America. Unfortunately researching this is heavily polluted by references to “cement” in Mormon scripture which has led to claims that Joseph Smith was aware of pre-Columbian concrete archictecture before it was rediscovered by archaeologists.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125687",
"author": "Beowulf Shaeffer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T15:07:35",
"content": "Similar reason as to why you can’t find hardly any information about all the swords, armor, and architectural finds on the east coast of the US. (It was initially just a political inconvenience if the native tribes were descendants of a more obviously advanced civilization, so the US Geological Survey purposely destroyed a lot of sites and artifacts in the mid 1800s, before the “Mormon problem” became of any interest to the federal government.)This is also why nobody likes to talk about “carborized iron” (steel) swords found in Israel that date to about 600 BC.",
"parent_id": "8125613",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8125688",
"author": "Clive Diggins",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T15:08:23",
"content": "CliveThere is a process developed by Innovative Carbon Technologies that reduces the carbon footprint of concrete while increasing strength and workability. The Canadian company has been developing this effective and environmentally friendly way of enhancing the Portland cement within the mix that can be utilized for all concrete projects with little to no upcost to the end user.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126446",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T01:27:53",
"content": "I’m surprised there’s not a by [Brady] at [Practical Engineering ] in YouTube. Guy knows a thing or two about cement and concrete.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8126447",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-05-11T01:29:15",
"content": "A video by Brady I meant, oops. This thing cries for a way to edit comments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127460",
"author": "John the Civil Engineer",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T02:28:16",
"content": "This “legal” definition of the difference between cement and concrete was accepted by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court.“Cement is to Concrete, as flour is to fruicake.”Simple, but elegant enough for the non-Civil Engineer or Cement Chemist to appreciate.So simple, even an attorney could understand it…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.851845
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/a-delay-line-memory-demo-board/
|
A Delay Line Memory Demo Board
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"LED Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"delay line memory",
"memory"
] |
Delay line memory is a technology from yesteryear, but it’s not been entirely forgotten. [P-Lab] has developed
a demo board for delay-line memory
, which shows how it worked in a very obvious way with lots of visual aids.
If you’re unfamiliar with the technology, it’s a form of memory that was used in classic computers like the Univac-I and the Olivetti Programma 101. It’s a sequential-access technology, where data is stored as pulses in some kind of medium, and read out in order. Different forms of the technology exist, such as using acoustic pulses in mercury or torsional waves passing through coiled nickel wire.
In this case, [P-Lab] built a solid state delay line using TTL ICs, capable of storing a full 64 bits of information and running at speeds of up to 150 kHz. It also features a write-queuing system to ensure bits are written at the exact correct time — the sequential-access nature of the technology means random writes and reads aren’t actually possible. The really cool thing is that [P-Lab] paired the memory with lots of LEDs to show how it works. There are lights to indicate the operation of the clock, and the read and write cycles, as well as individual LEDs indicating the status of each individual bit as they roll around the delay line. Combined with the hexadecimal readouts, it makes it easy to get to grips with this old-school way of doing things.
We’ve seen previous work from[P-Lab] in this regard
using old-school core rope memory, too.
[Thanks to Giuseppe for the tip!]
| 9
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8124282",
"author": "Quinn Evans",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T12:12:00",
"content": "Acoustic delay lines (the coiled nickel wire mentioned) are great. Stomp hard enough next to the control box for the 3270s and corrupt everyone’s screen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124311",
"author": "hjf",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T13:24:52",
"content": "a ring buffer but instead of rotating the pointers, you’re rotating the world around them",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124414",
"author": "Martin Gillow",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T17:52:00",
"content": "I have been working on a 3D web simulation of the Pilot ACE, designed by Alan Turing which used mercury filled delay lines as memory. This board is a great way to demonstrate how delay lines worked! The simulation is to be released on 10th May 2025, 75 years to the day after it ran it’s very first program. You can see a demo of it running here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ums33JxsmSMIt will be released for everyone to try out one of the first computers built in the United Kingdom on 10th May 2025 athttps://pilotace.virtualcolossus.co.uk",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124916",
"author": "P-LAB",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T06:49:00",
"content": "Thank you! Your project is great too, and I can’t wait to play with it in a few days! :-)",
"parent_id": "8124414",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124599",
"author": "Fl.xy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T10:29:55",
"content": "Whoa, is that a regular vero board it’s built on? That thing is huge! Those 7 segments look like the type with built in BCD logic. Love those, makes things so much easier. Really wish someone would make a modern version. They’re rare as hummingbird dentures but I have a set in my 6800 Heathkit trainer. I really enjoy seeing projects like this, very educational.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124764",
"author": "P-LAB",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T18:09:04",
"content": "Thank you! :-)It’s an actual Veroboard, 30×30 cm, and the displays are the famous TIL311.I used them because they have the full hex decoding, unlike 7447 & co., so I also saved 5 ICs from the count.Too bad, their latch is a bit slow to get the READ_OK signal, so I also had to use a 74HC374… not a big issue, though.I’d also gladly support a modern and less energy-hungry version.",
"parent_id": "8124599",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124952",
"author": "Fl.xy",
"timestamp": "2025-05-06T10:09:55",
"content": "Maybe a breakout board that comfortably seats a regular 7 segment LED with a tiny cheap mcu handling the logic would be a possible way to recreate the TIL311 but it would be cool if some fab put it all on one die. Wonder what hurdles have kept them from being resurrected to be sold to at least the hobbyist market. Price, patents, or something else? I would definitely buy a set, lower power consumption would be a bonus. I occasionally see originals being sold at ham radio swap meets but the price usually represents the rarity.It’s great seeing someone put them to use in a project like yours. You are certainly a logic aficionado.",
"parent_id": "8124764",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124684",
"author": "Ken",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T14:55:39",
"content": "What a great visual demonstration – good work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124765",
"author": "P-LAB",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T18:09:31",
"content": "Thank you! :-)",
"parent_id": "8124684",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,554.784022
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/04/frnisi-dmc-100-a-clamp-meter-worth-cracking-open/
|
Frnisi DMC-100: A Clamp Meter Worth Cracking Open
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"clamp meter",
"dmc-100",
"flashlight",
"FNIRSI",
"probes"
] |
Not all clamp meters are the same, and this video shows just that. In
a recent teardown by [Kerry Wong]
, the new Fnirsi DMC-100 proves that affordable doesn’t mean boring. This 10,000-count clamp meter strays from the classic rotary dial in favour of a fully button-based interface – a choice that’s got sparks flying in the comments. And yes, it even auto-resumes its last function after reboot, like it knows you’re busy frying other fish.
What sets this meter apart isn’t just its snappy interface or surprisingly nice gold-tipped probes. It’s the layered UX – a hackable interface where short- and long-presses unlock hidden menus, memory functions, and even a graphing mode. A proper “hold-my-beer” moment comes when you discover it can split-display voltage and current and calculate real-time power (albeit with a minor asterisk: apparent power only, no power factor). Despite a few quirks, like accidentally triggering the flashlight when squeezing the jaw, it holds up well in accuracy tests. Even at higher currents where
budget meters
usually wobble.
| 17
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8124227",
"author": "Cricri",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T08:27:20",
"content": "Typo in title: FNIRSI, not FRNISI.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124235",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T09:15:34",
"content": "But if we’re being honest, that doesn’t matter.",
"parent_id": "8124227",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124379",
"author": "Jadon.B",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T16:11:45",
"content": "It’s that Chinese brand F-keyboardmash that makes slightly less shitty test equipment",
"parent_id": "8124235",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124249",
"author": "micropower8",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T10:07:17",
"content": "I call it Frinsi.",
"parent_id": "8124227",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124253",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T10:33:31",
"content": "“Do not use the device while it is charging”Is the USB-C jack live when the voltage leads are plugged and connected?I hope it doesn’t turn off when you charge it. I’d really love to put a Qi charger into it. I’ll follow up on its behavior unless someone beats me to it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124287",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T12:27:40",
"content": "I’d hope not live because even just leaving a cable attached would be hazardous. I think I’d rather have it lock out when a charge cable is attached or just not be rechargeable at all.",
"parent_id": "8124253",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124277",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T11:49:20",
"content": "Not bad for about $50. Test equipment has come far from our days.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124293",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T12:44:04",
"content": "I’m kinda impressed, it’s cheap enough and getting decent reviews that I’d add one to my toolkit for the handful of occasions I need to measure more than 10 amps. Shame it’s not got lower current ranges too but for the price it looks good",
"parent_id": "8124277",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124418",
"author": "jp314",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T17:59:21",
"content": "On clamp meters such as this, you can achieve a lower effective current range by looping the wire through it multiple times — e.g. can have 1 A range by looping 10 times.",
"parent_id": "8124293",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124434",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T18:37:57",
"content": "Oh now that’s useful if it works, thank you",
"parent_id": "8124418",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8127034",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T06:29:18",
"content": "Indeed.My mains test lead has 1 turn and 10 turn loops in the phase so I can get 1mA resolution, and a 100 turn loop in the ground to measure ground leakage with 100uA resolution.",
"parent_id": "8124418",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124289",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T12:39:19",
"content": "A product that labels one of its buttons “mune” doesn’t inspire much confidence.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124402",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T17:25:46",
"content": "Sure Willy would have been a lot better, but it didn’t fit the available space.",
"parent_id": "8124289",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8124388",
"author": "RF Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T16:32:44",
"content": "The MUNE label existed on units shipped as v1.2. The second unit I bought corrected this MENU spelling and was shipped as firmware 1.3. Tested RMS with non-sinusoidal waveforms and found it accurate (against Fluke) to about 1kHz, then it diverges. Couldn’t figure out how to zero out DC current, until a quick press of the power button revealed it. It isn’t Fluke quality, plastic, and standards (safety?) compliance, but it is 1/15 of the Fluke price meaning you can have more than 1.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124475",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T21:48:21",
"content": "If they are going to use a rechargeable battery, it would be nice if they would use a standard one like a 14500 or a BL-5C so it could be easily replaced. These will just become e-waste within a few years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125226",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T03:33:57",
"content": "It looks like a regular pouch cell, you should be able to find one that’ll fit for the next few decades. It probably wouldn’t be the right shape but you can find something that’ll fit.",
"parent_id": "8124475",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127015",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-05-13T03:09:43",
"content": "Heeeeeell no!The only thing worse than touch screen controls, is short/long press context sensitive controls.The SINGLE acceptable use for a long press is for actions you want to make harder to accidentally do, that aren’t used often.Long press to power off is fine.Long press to open the menu is NOT FINE.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,554.909512
|
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