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https://hackaday.com/2021/06/25/hackaday-podcast-124-hard-drivin-with-graphene-fooled-by-lasers-etching-with-poison-acid-and-all-the-linux-commands/ | Hackaday Podcast 124: Hard Drivin’ With Graphene, Fooled By Lasers, Etching With Poison Acid, And All The Linux Commands | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the dangerous projects on display this week, including glass etching with hydrofluoric acid and pumping 200,000 A into a 5,000 A fuse. A new board that turns the Raspberry Pi into an SDR shows off the power of the secondary memory interface (SMI) present in those Broadcom chips. We also discuss the potential for graphene in hard drives, and finish up with a teardown of a very early electronic metronome.
You know you want to
read the show notes
!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(55 MB or so.)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 124 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
We had seven correct answers, it was the sounds of VLF Whistlers — also called sferics or ionospheric whistlers
Sferics, Whistlers, And The Dawn Chorus: Listening To Earth Music On VLF
Congratulations to [Mikey] who was chosen randomly from the correct responses and receives a Hackaday Podcast shirt
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Tiny Tesla Valves Etched In Glass
Fake: A Laser Display Board Of Your Very Own
A Collection Of Linux Tools On Steroids
dmenu
autojump: A cd command that learns – easily navigate directories from the command line
Linux-Fu
Blowing A 5000 A Fuse Takes Some Doing
Raspberry Pi Hat Adds SDR With High Speed Memory Access
Raspberry Pi Secondary Memory Interface (SMI) – Lean2
Running Way More LED Strips On A Raspberry Pi With DMA
19 Coils Make Charging Wireless
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
DOOM Comes To The NRF5340
Putting the flex on flexures
Rock-A-Bye Baby, On The Mechatronic Crib Shaker
Using Heaters To Display Time
Mike’s Picks
Human Google: Ruth Freitag, Isaac Asimov, And Bibliographies
Compact M&M Sorter Goes Anywhere
Steady Hand Brings GBA Cart B
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Teardown:
Franz Crystal Metronome
How Graphene May Enable The Next Generations Of High-Density Hard Drives
Mistaken Identity — Piezo Actuators Not Test Pads | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359597",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-06-25T21:38:55",
"content": "Don’t apologize for the faker guy. He has other fake videos and the website sells fake electronics education with the videos – it’s a part of a bigger scam.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,373,040.468663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/25/game-boy-color-gets-a-rechargeable-battery/ | Game Boy Color Gets A Rechargeable Battery | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"game boy",
"nintendo"
] | Nintendo’s classic Game Boy has long been the darling queen of the handheld scene. However, with many fans modifying their handhelds with power-sucking features like modern backlit LCDs, running on AA batteries can become a frustrating exercise as they rapidly run out.
[esotericsean] gets around that by modifying his Game Boys with a USB rechargeable battery setup.
(Video, embedded below.)
The hack is a simple one, but the execution is quite tidy. [esotericsean] starts by removing the original DC jack from the Game Boy motherboard, and hogs out the hole in the case to fit a micro USB port. The original battery housing is similarly carved out to suit a 2000 mAh lithium-polymer pouch cell. A single-cell charging board is used to manage the battery, with its original connector removed and replaced with a neater-looking panel mount micro USB port instead. The electronics is then wrapped up in Kapton tape and stuffed inside the shell as everything is put back together.
The result is a USB rechargeable Game Boy that lasts for ages. [esotericsean] reports playing the console for hours each day for a full week without running out of power. The hack could become popular with chiptuners who often knock AA cells out of their handhelds during the more enthusiastic parts of their sets.
We’ve seen similar hacks for other Game Boy models, too
. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359516",
"author": "Gareth",
"timestamp": "2021-06-25T16:00:35",
"content": "There’s a lot of my devices that could benefit from this!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6359517",
"author": "Nandru",
"timestamp": "2021-06-... | 1,760,373,040.531184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/25/this-week-in-security-schemeflood-modern-wardialing-and-more/ | This Week In Security: Schemeflood, Modern Wardialing, And More! | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"%p%s%s%s%s%n",
"My Book Live",
"This Week in Security",
"Windows 11"
] | There’s been yet another technique discovered to fingerprint users, and this one can even work in the Tor browser.
Scheme flooding
works by making calls to application URLs, something like
steam://browsemedia
. If your machine supports the requested custom URL, a pop-up is displayed, asking permission to launch the external application. That pop-up can be detected by JavaScript in the browser. Detect enough apps, and you can build a reasonable fingerprint of the system the test is run on. Unlike some previous fingerprinting techniques, this one isn’t browser dependent — it will theoretically give the same results for any browser. This means even the Tor browser, or any browser being used over the Tor network, can give your potentially unique set of installed programs away.
Now for the good news. The Chrome devs are already working on this issue, and in fact, Chrome on my Linux desktop didn’t respond to the probes in a useful way. Feel free to
check out the demo
, and see if the results are accurate. And as for Tor, you really should be running that on a dedicated system or in a VM if you really need to stay anonymous. And disable JavaScript if you don’t want the Internet to run code on your computer.
Samba Security Lost in Translation
Windows system security and Linux system security are quite different. OK, that’s probably both something of an understatement, and pretty obvious. In a project like Samba, which re-implements the Server Message Block protocol, those differences are a constant challenge. Sometimes, like in the case of
CVE-2021-20254
, the results are unusual.
This story really begins at Linköping University, where [Peter Eriksson] discovered that someone was able to delete a file on a Samba share, when that should not have been possible. He apparently tracked down the problem, which is in the Samba code that maps Windows SIDs to Unix Group IDs. Samba caches these lookups, and a possible cached result is that a match cannot be found. The bug is triggered when that cached response is fetched again, reading past the end of the buffer. There isn’t a known technique for triggering this bug intentionally, but that’s likely a failure of imagination, so make sure you get this one patched.
21st Century Finnish Wardialing
There are odd machines still connected to the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS). This thought was apparently keeping [Valtteri Lehtinen] up at night, because he built a system to call 56,874 different phone numbers, and then
documented what he found
. His testing rig is a bit odd, using
WarVOX
as the dialer. That program only supports IAX2, a VoIP protocol introduced by the Asterisk project that has been mostly forgotten in favor of SIP. His interface to the outside world was a SIP-to-GSM gateway and a cheap prepaid SIM card. To make WarVOX talk to the SIP gateway, he stood up an Asterisk instance to do the translation. His target was the “freephone” numbers, similar to a 1-800 number in the States — mostly businesses rather than individuals.
He spent 60 seconds per call, and recorded the results, running the experiment for 40 days. His results? About 2% of the numbers were interesting. He categorized those, and came up with 74 unique systems he had reached. For an example of what that means, seven of his calls reached dedicated fax lines. These were indistinguishable from each other, so only accounts for a single unique system. Eleven calls just played music, but several of those seemed to be playing the exact same music, making for seven unique systems.
There are a few really oddball recordings that [Valtteri] found. Two numbers contain a prompt about the zombie apocalypse, asking the caller if he wants to be rescued. These remind me very much of the various joke phone numbers, like the rejection hotline. He also found a couple numbers that sound very much like old mechanical phone switching hardware. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know exactly what hardware is on the other end of those calls? We can’t recommend taking up wardialing as a hobby, but there are certainly still some interesting endpoints out there. Want to look into the recordings for yourself? Check out his blog post, where many of the recordings are available to listen to.
Don’t Connect To That Wifi Network!
There’s a very odd problem with the iPhone that’s attracted a lot of attention this week. Connecting to a WiFi network with a name like
%p%s%s%s%s%n
made the phone’s WiFi subsystem crash, and prevented connection to any other networks. That string looks interesting, doesn’t it? Almost like a format string. For those not following, most programming languages have string formatting functions that take a series of inputs, combined with a format string like this one, and plug the inputs into the string. C’s
printf()
is one of the more familiar to many of us. The catch here is that when the inputs don’t match what the string calls for, you enter the realm of undefined behavior, AKA crashes and vulnerabilities.
After joining my personal WiFi with the SSID “%p%s%s%s%s%n”, my iPhone permanently disabled it’s WiFi functionality. Neither rebooting nor changing SSID fixes it :~)
pic.twitter.com/2eue90JFu3
— Carl Schou (@vm_call)
June 18, 2021
[CodeColorist]
took a deeper look at the problem
, and confirmed that it is indeed a format string issue. When the device attempts to connect to a new WiFi network, a message is written to the system log: “Attempting Apple80211AssociateAsync to ” and then the network name, using a format string method. The process of writing the string to the log invokes another such method, but this time the SSID is now part of the format string. The inputs no longer match, leading to a crash of the WiFi process. While it’s certainly an annoying bug, it doesn’t appear to be one that can lead to RCE.
Rate Limiting Bypass and Bounty Dispute
Password reset systems have always been something of a weak point of security schemes. Of particular note are the schemes that use a four- or six-digit reset code to protect the account. Have you ever wondered what stops an attacker from triggering a reset, and then simply trying all one million possible codes, assuming a six-digit number? The usual answer is a combination of expiring codes and rate limiting on guesses. This story is about Apple accounts, but the background is that [Laxman Muthiyah] first
found a way to exploit the password reset function of Instagram
.
Here’s the setup. When you start the password reset process on Instagram, a six-digit code is emailed to the email address on file. If you have access to that email, you type in the code within ten minutes, proving that you’re the account owner. After ten minutes, the code expires. If you’re an attacker, you can start the password reset process, and then guess that six-digit code — again, one million possible values. Try to brute force the code, and about 200 attempts go through before the rate-limiting kicks in. That gives you a 1-in-5,000 chance in breaking into the account.
What if there was a way to get around the rate-limiting? Hint: There was. You see, trying to send more than 200 guesses from a single IP was easily detected and rate-limited. But what if you had two different IPs? Send 200 guesses from each, at the same time, and they all get processed with no rate limiting. So to take over an Instagram account, all it takes is 5,000 IPs that you can send traffic from for a few seconds. Now how would you get 5,000 IPs to use? Three options come to mind. The cloud, a botnet, or IPv6 addresses. He used a cloud to demonstrate the attack, covering 20% of the possible key space in a single go. He netted a cool $30,000 from turning in the findings to Facebook.
Would other providers have the same weakness? [Muthiyah] took a look at Apple’s account recovery process, and
found a way to pull off the same attack
, but with some major limitations. Rather than 200 guesses from each IP, he could send six. That isn’t enough for a viable attack — but the target URL endpoint exists on six different IPs. That gives an attacker 36 guesses from each IP he controls. That’s on the edge of being exploitable, with only 28,000 IPs needed. That’s a *small* botnet. Apple agreed, asking him to keep the attack under his hat until they could push out fixes.
The story gets weird from here. First, what should have been a relatively simple fix took about ten months to roll out. [Laxman] asked for an update, and was told that his attack only worked against accounts not tied to a hardware device. Accounts tied to a device use a bit different password reset method, where a hashing function is used to prove that the user knows the reset code. That URL endpoint is now very well protected against his parallel brute-force attack, but he was only able to test it after the flaw was fixed.
For his trouble, Apple offered him $18,000. Sounds great, right? Hold up. A vulnerability that leads to an Apple account takeover should be worth $100,000; and if that leads to data extraction from a device, it goes up to $250,000. [Laxman] openly speculates that his attack probably worked on all accounts before it was patched, and suspects Apple of pulling a fast one. He walked away from the offered bounty, and posted the entire story for everyone to see. This isn’t the first time we’ve covered disputes over bug bounties, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
Dell Bios Vulnerabilities
Eclypsium found a handful of problems with Dell’s firmware update process
. BIOSConnect is a firmware update process that runs entirely from the system BIOS. From what I can tell, this means that a Dell machine could be vulnerable even if it isn’t running Dell’s SupportAssist, or even Windows at all. The BIOS makes an HTTPS request to
downloads.dell.com
, but fails to properly validate the TLS certificate. It seems that any wildcard certificate for any domain will be accepted. You could fool it as easily as using a Let’s Encrypt certificate for
*.myuniquedomain.com
, and telling an HTTPS server to use that cert for
dell.com
.
The saving grace here is that an attacker needs to be on the same network as the victim machine, in order to MItM the connection to the update server. Either way, if you have Dell hardware, go check for this issue and update if it’s there, or at least turn off BIOSConnect.
Unplug Your MyBooks
There’s been a rash of ransomware attacks against consumer NAS devices, and it looks like
Western Digital’s My Book Live might be the next device to be hit
. Multiple users discovered their drives wiped on the 23rd, and a log note that a factory restore had been triggered. WD has released a statement, acknowledging the issue, and recommending that anyone with a My Book Live unplug it from the network right away, and leave it offline until they can get to the bottom of the issue.
The latest official news is a reference to a 2018 CVE
, a
pre-auth network RCE
. What immediately comes to mind is that a particularly obnoxious ransomware program could include this attack as part of an effort to destroy backups. The odd part is that none of the affected users have reported a ransomware note.
Windows 11
Microsoft announced Windows 11, and while there was the normal marketing hype and keynotes, there were a couple interesting security-related tidbits, mostly in
the updated system requirements
. First up is the Trusted Platform Module 2.0 requirement. Most modern motherboards ship with a firmware TPM, but often disabled by default. If you try running the upgrade check, and were told that your nearly-new system can’t run Windows 11, that’s probably why. But why would Microsoft require a TPM for everyone? Credit to
Robert Graham for this one:
TPM is a requirement for BitLocker, the high quality whole disk encryption software built into Windows. This would indicate that BitLocker is going to be on for everyone, rather than a feature you have to manually enable.
The other somewhat surprising change is that Microsoft is doing away with support for 32-bit processors, and going to 64-bit Windows only. There are sure to be some issues for people still running 16-bit code, which won’t execute at all under 64-bit Windows. There are, however, quite a few
security features that only run on 64-bit windows
, like ASLR, signed drivers, the NX bit for Data Execution Protection, and PatchGuard. While the reduced engineering burden of dropping 32-bit Windows was likely the major driver in this decision, the Windows platform will be significantly more secure as a result. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359496",
"author": "GrizzlyAdams",
"timestamp": "2021-06-25T14:45:15",
"content": "Even better for TOR, run three machines. Your normal daily driver which never touches TOR, your TOR entrance node which only allows TOR traffic to the outside world (and is situated on a DMZ, outside... | 1,760,373,041.069433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/25/3d-printed-mecanum-wheels-for-hoverboard-motors/ | 3D Printed Mecanum Wheels For Hoverboard Motors | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"hoverboard",
"hoverboard motor",
"mecanum wheels",
"rover"
] | At this point, somebody taking the motors out of a cheap “hoverboard” and using them to power a scooter or remote controlled vehicle isn’t exactly a new idea. But in the case of the FPV rover [Proto G] has been working on, his choice of motors is only part of the story. The real interesting bit is the
3D printed omnidirectional Mecanum wheels he’s designed to fit the motors
, which he thinks could have far reaching applications beyond his own project.
Now, that isn’t to say that the rover itself isn’t impressive. All of the laser cutting and sheet metal bending was done personally by [Proto G], and we love the elevated GoPro “turret” in the front that lets him look around while remotely driving the vehicle. Powered by a pair of Makita cordless tool batteries and utilizing hobby-grade RC parts, the rover looks like it would be a fantastic robotic platform to base further development on.
The Mecanum wheels themselves are two pieces, and make use of rollers pulled from far smaller commercially available wheels. This is perhaps not the most cost effective approach, but compared to the alternative of trying to print all the rollers, we see the advantage of using something off-the-shelf. If you’re not sure how to make these weird wheels work for you, [Proto G] has also released a video explaining
how he mixes the RC channels to get the desired omnidirectional movement
from the vehicle.
If you’re content with more traditional wheeled locomotion, we’ve previously seen how quickly
a couple of second-hand hoverboards
can be
turned into a impressively powerful mobile platform
for whatever diabolical plans you may have. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359479",
"author": "john",
"timestamp": "2021-06-25T12:55:49",
"content": "Got me wondering where I can get some of those motors to try to make a small windmill.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6359484",
"author": "Va... | 1,760,373,040.688035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/25/simulating-the-game-boy-printers-actual-paper-output/ | Simulating The Game Boy Printer’s Actual Paper Output | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nook Hacks"
] | [] | Sometimes, we appreciate electronic devices not for their outright performance and crystal clear output, but precisely because they kind of suck in a unique and charming way. The Game Boy Camera, and its companion the Game Boy Printer, are much loved for precisely this reason.
[Raphael BOICHOT] decided that he wanted to simulate the analog reality of the latter printer’s output in code, and set about the hefty coding task.
The result is the Game Boy Printer Paper Simulation, and it does a great job of reproducing the grainy, somewhat noisy output of the original thermal printer. The simulation was coded with the assistance of multiple high-resolution scans of the original printer’s output, which allowed [Raphael] to create a mathematical model of how the original digital pixelized image came out when hot thermal print head was put to paper.
What started with a single dot became a fully-fledged simulation package that can be run in MATLAB and Octave. It allows the end user to generate legitimate-looking images of Game Boy Printer output without actually having to own the printer and a roll of thermal paper.
We’ve seen Nintendo’s much-beloved printer before,
such as this hack that turns it into an 8-bit photo gun.
If you’re meddling with thermal printers yourself,
be sure to let us know! | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359444",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-25T08:10:16",
"content": "Funny. The Japanese says, “Boobs!” With a poop in the middle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6359447",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,373,040.57629 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/review-and-teardown-of-economical-programmable-dc-power-supply/ | Review And Teardown Of Economical Programmable DC Power Supply | Donald Papp | [
"Reviews",
"Teardown"
] | [
"power supply",
"programmable power supply",
"review",
"teardown"
] | [Kerry Wong] isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, and is always more than willing to open things up and see what makes them tick. This time,
he reviews and tears down the Topshak LW-3010EC programmable DC power supply
, first putting the unit through its paces, then opens it up to see how it looks on the inside.
The Topshak LW-3010EC is in a family of reasonably economical power supplies made by a wide variety of manufacturers, which all share many of the same internals and basic construction. This one is both programmable as well as nice and compact, and [Kerry] compares and contrasts it with other power supplies in the same range as he tests the functions and checks over the internals.
Overall, [Kerry] seems pleased with the unit. You can watch him put the device through its paces in the video embedded below, which ends with him opening it up and explaining what’s inside. If you’ve ever been curious about what’s inside one of these power supplies and how they can be expected to perform, be sure to fire up the video below the page break.
Speaking of power supplies, most of us have ready access to ATX power supplies. They are awfully capable pieces of hardware, and hackable in their own way. Our own Jenny List will tell you
everything you need to know about the ATX power supply, and how to put it to new uses
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359438",
"author": "rewolff",
"timestamp": "2021-06-25T06:48:43",
"content": "The maximum of “200mA” measured is wrong. First 2V / 100 Ohm is about 20mA not 200mA.Second the 2V is wrong: His scope clipped the signal at the edge of the screen, so AFTER capture, you cannot bring stuf... | 1,760,373,040.895134 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/rocky-linux-is-ready-for-prime-time/ | Rocky Linux Is Ready For Prime Time! | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"Linux Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"CentOS",
"linux",
"Rocky Linux"
] | For some small percentage of the Hackaday crowd, our world got turned upside down at the end of last year, when Red Hat announced changes to CentOS. That distro is the official repackage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, providing a free, de-branded version of RHEL. The big problem was that CentOS 8 support has been cut way short, ending at the end of 2021 instead of the expected 2029. This caused no shortage of consternation in the community, and a few people and companies stepped forward to provide their own CentOS alternative, with AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux being the two most promising. AlmaLinux minted their first release in March, but the Rocky project made the decision to take things a bit slower. The wait is over, and
the Rocky Linux 8.4 release is ready
.
Not only are there ISOs for new installs, there is also
a script to convert a CentOS 8 install to Rocky
. Now before you run out and convert all your CentOS machines, there are a few caveats. First, the upgrade script is still being tested and fixed as problems are found. The big outstanding issue is that Secure Boot isn’t working yet. The process of spinning up a new Secure Boot shim and getting it properly signed is non-trivial, and takes time. The plan is to do an 8.4 re-release when the shim is ready, so keep an eye out for that, if you need Secure Boot support.
The future looks bright for enterprise Linux, with options such as Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and even CentOS Stream. It’s worth noting that Rocky has a newly formed company behind it,
CIQ
, offering support if you want it. The Rocky crew is planning a launch party online on June 25th, so tune in if that’s your thing. Regardless of which Linux OS you run, it’s good to have Rocky in the game. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359412",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2021-06-25T02:10:30",
"content": "*Quietly hums the “Rocky” theme music.*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhlPAj38rHc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6359413",
"author... | 1,760,373,040.637921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/hacked-ac-window-unit-split-in-half-to-cool-the-garage/ | Hacked AC Window Unit Split In Half To Cool The Garage | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"air conditioner",
"cooling",
"garage",
"garage door"
] | It’s getting into the hot summer months for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and for many Hackaday readers, that means its time to get the old window air conditioner out of storage and lug it back into position. But what if you’re trying to cool a space that doesn’t have a convenient window? In that case, this clever conversion that
[Infrared] came up with to keep his garage cool
might be of interest.
Basically, he’s taken the classic window AC and turned it into an impromptu ductless unit. By rotating the evaporator coils into a vertical position and lengthening the compressor wires, he was able to make the center of the AC thin enough that he could close his garage door over it. The back of the unit looks largely untouched, but the front side has a real
Mad Max
vibe going on; with sheet metal, exposed wiring, and a couple of fans thrown in for good measure. Fine for the garage or workspace, but probably not a great choice for the kid’s room.
[Infrared] says the hacked up AC can get his garage 18 degrees cooler than the outside air temperature in its current form, but he hopes the addition of some high CFM computer fans will not only improve performance, but let him make the new front panel look a bit neater. Though even in its current form,
this is far from the most ridiculous DIY AC project we’ve seen in recent memory
. | 34 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359381",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T23:25:50",
"content": "It would be even better if he converted the unit into a water chiller, and then the water/glycol cooling loop would be easy to diy into almost any configuration, including multiple fan coils from a single co... | 1,760,373,040.839389 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/fat-tire-bike-turned-hubless/ | Fat Tire Bike Turned Hubless | Danie Conradie | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"the q",
"tron"
] | Bicycle wheels have looked pretty much the same for over a century, and for very good reason: It works. [The Q] decided to ignore reason for a bit and focus on looks, so he built a
fat tire bike without any hubs or spokes
.
To make this work, he fabricated two sets of ring shaped “hubs” about the size of the rims, with a series of ball bearings around the circumference for the rims to roll around. The original forks were cut short and welded to a set of brackets that bolt to new hubs. This further complicates the back end as there’s nowhere to attach the sprocket cassette. The original rear hub, cassette and disc brake was moved to the inside of the frame. This drives the rear wheel using a second chain attached to a large ring sprocket mounted directly on the rim. The front brake was simply eliminated.
While this new design won’t be taking on existing bicycles, we doubt practicality was a priority in the build. It’s definitely a head turner, and we can’t help but see an opportunity to go even further and build a TRON bicycle.
Just recently, [The Q] turned another fat tire bike into an
all-wheel-drive extreme off-roader
. For another pedal-powered head turner, check out the
strandbeest bicycle
. | 45 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359315",
"author": "Morofry",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T20:15:15",
"content": "Since when has practicality ever been the sole basis for desire?I want one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6359333",
"author": "Foldi-One"... | 1,760,373,041.158499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/active-ball-joint-uses-spherical-gear/ | Active Ball Joint Uses Spherical Gear | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ABENICS",
"ball joint",
"cross spherical gear",
"spherical gear"
] | A common CAD operation is to take a 2D shape and extrude it into a 3D shape. But what happens if you take a gear and replicate it along a sphere and then rotate it and do it again? As you can see in the video below, you wind up with a porcupine-like ball that you can transfer power to at nearly any angle. There’s
a paper describing this spherical gear
as part of an active ball joint mechanism and even if you aren’t mechanically inclined, it is something to see.
The spherical gear — technically a cross spherical gear — is made from PEEK and doesn’t look like it would be that difficult to fabricate. There’s also a simpler version known as a monopole gear in the drive system that provides three degrees of freedom.
This looks like just the thing for your next robot arm project. The paper covers the kinematic equations you’d need, but doesn’t offer 3D printed models. However, it does mention that the parts were SLA printed, so it is possible to create the system with 3D printed gears.
With the recent trend to merge
robot arms with 3D printers
, this could be timely. The last time we saw
balls used in a robot arm
, it wasn’t quite for the same reason. | 41 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359281",
"author": "Jim",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T18:43:58",
"content": "Medical hip replacement merit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6359282",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T18:47:36",
... | 1,760,373,040.770303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/iss-gets-roll-out-solar-panels-in-post-shuttle-fix/ | ISS Gets Roll-Out Solar Panels In Post-Shuttle Fix | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"international space station",
"iss",
"nasa",
"solar array",
"solar power",
"Space Shuttle"
] | Astronauts are currently installing the first of six new solar arrays on the International Space Station (ISS), in a bid to bolster the reduced power generation capability of the original panels which have now been in space for over twenty years. But without the Space Shuttle to haul them into orbit, developing direct replacements for the Stations iconic 34 meter (112 foot) solar “wings” simply wasn’t an option. So NASA has turned to next-generation solar arrays that roll out like a tape measure and are light and compact enough for the SpaceX Dragon to carry them into orbit.
Space Shuttle
Atlantis
carrying part of the ISS truss.
Considering how integral the Space Shuttle was to its assembly, it’s hardly a surprise that no major modules have been added to the ISS since the fleet of winged spacecraft was retired in 2011. The few small elements that have been installed, such as the new International Docking Adapters and the Nanoracks “Bishop” airlock, have had to fit into the rear unpressurized compartment of the Dragon capsule. While a considerable limitation, NASA had planned for this eventuality, with principle construction of the ISS always intended to conclude upon the retirement of the Shuttle.
But the International Space Station was never supposed to last as long as it has, and some components are starting to show their age. The original solar panels are now more than five years beyond their fifteen year service life, and while they’re still producing sufficient power to keep the Station running in its current configuration, their operational efficiency has dropped considerably with age. So in January
NASA announced an ambitious timeline for performing upgrades
the space agency believes are necessary to keep up with the ever-increasing energy demands of the orbiting laboratory.
Made in the Shade
Replacing the Station’s original “Solar Array Wings”, or SAWs, with new ones isn’t really an option. For one thing, they’re far too large. Even in their retracted position, each SAW is more than 4.5 m (15 ft) long, considerably larger than what can be fit into the Dragon’s trunk. SpaceX likely could have come up with some Dragon variant capable of carrying expanded payloads, as
they’ve already been contracted to do as part of the Artemis lunar program
, but the time and cost involved would have been prohibitive.
But more importantly, removing the SAWs would be a massive undertaking that would undoubtedly be plagued with unexpected problems. The first step would be retracting them, but as
pulling just one of the arrays in turned out to be a six hour nightmare
when ground controllers last attempted it in 2006, the chances of getting all eight of them collapsed into a more manageable configuration would seem pretty poor. Plus the procedure would need to be done without disrupting normal operations aboard the Station, and afterwards, the old panels would need to be safely disposed of in some way.
Approximate size of new panels compared to original SAW.
Instead, NASA decided to take the easy way out: rather than actually replacing the old panels, they would simply install smaller panels directly on top of them. By not altering the original SAWs, the installation procedure would be far safer for the Station, and it would also allow the new panels to take advantage of the existing sun-tracking mounts. Naturally this means a sizable portion of the original SAWs would be in permanent shade, but given the higher efficiency of the new panels, it still ends up being a net positive in terms of energy production.
But that only solves half of the problem. These new solar arrays would still need to be compressed into a form small and light enough to fit into the back of the Dragon.
Rolling Out ROSA
The solution, developed through a collaboration between the Air Force Research Laboratory and Deployable Space Systems, is the Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA). Without the rigid strictures and hinges used in traditional deployable solar arrays, the ROSA can be stowed as a tight cylinder and unrolled once moved into its final position. The integrated booms on either side of the solar panels are made of a composite material, and are able to unfurl the array using nothing more than the potential energy stored when they were coiled up on the ground. This capability makes them highly reliable, and holds particular promise for future applications where human intervention may not be possible.
A prototype ROSA being tested on the ISS in 2017.
The first two ROSAs arrived at the Station earlier this month as part of the SpaceX CRS-22 mission, with the other four expected to be delivered before the end of the year. Installation of each ROSA requires two spacewalks, one to install a modification kit to the existing SAW structure, and the other to mount and unfurl the panel. NASA says that when deployed, each of the 18 m (60 ft) ROSAs will produce approximately 20 kilowatts; roughly equivalent to what each degraded SAW is currently delivering.
Astronauts prepare the first ROSA for installation.
Technically there’s no reason ROSAs couldn’t be installed over all eight of the original SAWs, but at least for the time being, NASA believes the additional 120 kilowatts the ISS will receive with six upgraded arrays will be enough to meet current and future power demands. It’s also likely that, in classic NASA fashion, they want to keep one pair of SAWs in their original configuration on the off chance that there is a problem with the modified arrays.
But the International Space Station is just the beginning. Assuming they work as expected in low Earth orbit,
NASA plans on installing similar roll out arrays on the Gateway lunar outpost
. This small space station will serve as a rallying point for astronauts travelling to and from the Moon’s surface, as well as a proving ground for the next-generation technology that could eventually take humans to Mars and beyond. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359286",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T19:04:13",
"content": "their operational efficiency has dropped considerably with age.How much?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6359288",
"author": "Photovolt... | 1,760,373,041.216185 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/mechanically-multiplexed-flip-dot/ | Mechanically Multiplexed Flip-Dot | Danie Conradie | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"flip dot display",
"james bruton",
"multiplexer",
"servos"
] | Flip dots displays are timeless classics, but driving the large ones can quickly turn into a major challenge. The electromagnets require a lot of current to operate, and the driver circuits can get quite expensive. [James Bruton] wanted to build his own, but followed a bit of a different route, building a
mechanically multiplexed flip dot (ball?) display
.
Each of the dots on [James]’ 5×3 proof of concept is a bistable mechanical mechanism that can either show or hide a ping pong ball sized half sphere. Instead of using electromagnets, the dots are flipped by a row of micro servos mounted on a moving carriage behind the display. The mechanism is derived from one of [James]’ previous projects, a
mechanical multiplexer
. Each dot mechanism has a hook at the back of the mechanism for a servo to push or pull to flip the dot. A major disadvantage of this design is the fact that the servo horn must match the state of the dot before moving through the hook, otherwise it can crash and break something, which also reduces the speed at which the carriage can move.
This build was just to get a feel for the concept, and [James] already has several ideas for changes and improvements. The hook design can certainly change, and a belt drive would really speed things up. We think this mechanical display is a very interesting design challenge, and we are interested to hear how our readers would tackle it? Let us know in the comments below.
Recently we covered a
3D printed flip dot display
for the first time. It’s still small and [Larry Builds] is working out the kinks, but we would love to see it eventually match the mesmerising effect of
Breakfast’s large installations
. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359239",
"author": "nooby",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T15:45:25",
"content": "Cool! In 1983 they made a color versionhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-gCBh6rk3M&t=11s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6359252",
"author": ... | 1,760,373,041.630711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/silicon-jumpers-make-this-wire-free-breadboard-programmable/ | Silicon Jumpers Make This Wire-Free Breadboard Programmable | Dan Maloney | [
"The Hackaday Prize",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"analog switch",
"breadboard",
"cmos",
"crosspoint",
"jumper",
"solderless"
] | There’s no doubting the utility of the trusty solderless breadboard, but you have to admit they’re less than perfect. They’re not ideal for certain types of circuits, of course, but that’s less of a problem than those jumper wires. The careless will end up with their components hopeless tangled in a rat’s nest of jumpers, while the fastidious will spend far more time making the jumpers neat and tidy than actually prototyping the circuit itself. What to do?
One way to crack this nut is to make
the solderless breadboard jumperless
, too. That’s the idea behind “breadWare” a work-in-progress undertaken by [Kevin Santo Cappuccio]. The idea is to adapt a standard breadboard so that connections between arbitrary pairs of common contact strips — plus the power rails — can be made in software. The trick behind this is a matrix of analog CMOS switch chips, specifically the MT8816AP. Each chip’s 128 crosspoint switches can handle up ± 12 volts, so there are plenty of circuits that can use these programmable silicon jumpers.
[Kevin] is currently on version 0.2, which is sized to fit under a solderless breadboard and make a compact package. He shared details on how he’s connecting to the breadboard contacts, and it looks like a painful process: pull out the contact, cut a small tab at the gutter-end, and bend it down so it forms a lead for a through-hole in the PCB. It seems like a lot of work, and there must be a better way; [Kevin] is clearly open to suggestions.
While we’ve seen
crosspoint switching used to augment solderless breadboarding
before, we find this project pleasing in its simplicity. The thought of tossing out all those jumpers is certainly tempting.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358977",
"author": "Green",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T18:46:42",
"content": "That’s a really cool project. A neat addition would be small screens on each side that diagram what connections are currently made.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,041.4131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/pipewire-the-newest-audio-kid-on-the-linux-block/ | PipeWire, The Newest Audio Kid On The Linux Block | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"digital audio hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"jack",
"linux",
"Pipewire",
"pro audio",
"pulseaudio"
] | Raise your hand if you remember when
PulseAudio
was famous for breaking audio on Linux for everyone. For quite a few years, the standard answer for any audio problem on Linux was to uninstall PulseAudio, and just use
ALSA
. It’s probably the case that a number of distros switched to Pulse before it was quite ready. My experience was that after a couple years of fixing bugs, the experience got to be quite stable and useful. PulseAudio brought some really nice features to Linux, like moving sound streams between devices and dynamically resampling streams as needed.
The other side of the Linux audio coin is JACK. If you’ve used Ardour, or done much with Firewire audio interfaces, you’re probably familiar with the JACK Audio Connection Kit — recursive acronyms are fun. JACK lets you almost arbitrarily route audio streams, and is very much intended for a professional audio audience.
You may wonder if there is any way to use PulseAudio and JACK together. Yes, but it’s just a bit of a pain, to get the PulseAudio plugin to work with JACK. For example, all of the Pulse streams get mixed together, and show up as a single device on the JACK graph, so you can’t route them around or treat them seapartely.
It’s the conundrum faced by Linux users for years now. PulseAudio isn’t usable for pro audio, and JACK is too complicated for everything else. I’m loathe to suggest that yet another audio system could solve the world’s audio problems, but it would be nice to have the best of both worlds. To let the cat out of the bag, PipeWire is that new system, and it has the potential to be the solution for nearly everyone.
The
Audio
Video Chosen One
The story told is that [Wim Taymans] was contemplating applications distributed as Flatpaks, and realized that this would be problematic for video input and output. He had been working on making PulseAudio play nicely with containerized applications, and started thinking about how to solve the problem for video streams, too. While doing the initial protocol design, it became apparent that AV synchronization would be a devilish problem if audio and video were routed over separate systems, so it was decided that PipeWire would include audio handling as well. Once that decision was made, it became obvious that PipeWire could replace PulseAudio altogether. To make this a seamless transition, PipeWire was built to be fully compatible with the PulseAudio server. In other words, any application that can talk to PulseAudio automatically has PipeWire support.
If PulseAudio was going to be rebuilt from the ground up, then it might as well address pro audio. If PipeWire could satisfy the needs of pro audio users, it could feasibly replace JACK as the go-to audio backend for digital audio workstations like
Ardour
. Convincing every project to add support for yet another Linux audio server was going to be an uphill battle, so they cheated. PipeWire would just implement the JACK API. That may sound like a whole lot of feature creep, starting from a simple video transport system, and ending up re-implementing both JACK and PulseAudio.
Let’s make that point again. PipeWire is a drop-in replacement for Pulseaudio and JACK at the same time. Any application that supports Pulse now supports PipeWire, and at the same time it can pull all the clever tricks that JACK can. So far I’ve found two killer hacks that PipeWire makes possible, that we’ll get to in a moment. Pretty much all of the major distros now support running PipeWire as the primary audio server, and Fedora 34 made it the default solution. There were a few bugs to work out in the first couple weeks of using it, but PipeWire now seems to be playing nicely with all the apps I’ve thrown at it.
The Latency Question
JACK gets used for all sorts of hijinks, and one of its killer features is that it can achieve latencies low enough to be imperceptible. Playing audio back with a noticeable delay can throw music or talkers off badly. The effect is so strong,
researchers have built a speech jammer
that uses the principle to silence speakers from afar. Let’s just say that you really don’t want that effect on your conference call. A 200 ms delay shuts down speech, but even lower latencies can be distracting, especially for musicians.
For PipeWire to really replace JACK, how low do we need the latency to go? The
Ardour guide suggests five milliseconds to really be imperceptible
, but it depends on what exactly you’re doing. With just a bit of work, on a modern machine, I’ve gotten my latency down to just under 18 ms, over a USB audio device. To put that another way, that’s about the delay you get from standing 18 feet away from an audio source. It’s just enough for your brain to notice, particularly if you’re trying to play music, but not a deal breaker. Need to go lower? You’re probably going to need a real-time kernel.
To get started tuning your latency, copy
alsa-monitor.conf
and
jack.conf
into their places in
/etc/pipewire
.
There are a few tweaks here
, but the main knobs to turn are
api.alsa.period-size
and
node.latency
in
jack.conf
. To really get low latencies, there are
a series of system tweaks that can help
, essentially the same tweaks needed for low latency on JACK.
Oh The Fun We Can Have
Now on to those tricks. While JACK can handle multiple streams coming from a single soundcard,
it doesn’t handle multiple external sources or sinks easily
. You have a pair of USB mics and want to record both of them? Sorry, no can do with JACK or ALSA. Get a bigger, more expensive audio interface.
PipeWire doesn’t have this limitation. It sees all of your audio devices, and can mix and match channels even into Ardour. It’s now trivial to make a three-track recording with multiple soundcards.
OK, I hear you saying now, “I’m not an audio engineer, I don’t need to do multi-track recording. What can Pipewire do for me?” Let’s look at a couple other tools, and I suspect you will see the possibilities. First is
Calf Studio Gear
, an audio plugin collection. Among the plugins are a compressor, parametric EQ, and a limiter. These three make for a decent mastering toolkit, where “mastering” here refers to the last step an album goes through to put the final polish on the sound. That step is sorely lacking on some of the YouTube videos we consume. Inconsistent audio levels is the one that drive me crazy the most often.
A second tool,
qjackctl
, helps put Calf to use. Not only does it allow you to see and manipulate the graph of signal flow, it has the ability to design simple rules to route audio automatically. Those rules use Perl regex matching, and it’s easy enough to set them up to automatically direct audio streams from Chrome into the Calf compressor, and from there to your speakers. Add Calf and
qjackctl
to your desktop’s autorun list, and you have an automated solution for bad YouTube mastering. Why stop there? Going to be on a Zoom call? Route your mic through Calf, and do a bit of EQ, or add a gate to cut down on background noise. Since you’re at it, record your audio and the call audio to Ardour.
Work Left To Do
PipeWire was originally intended to shuffle video around. That part works too. Browsers have added PipeWire support for video capture, and if you happen to be running Wayland, desktop capture is a PipeWire affair now, too. OBS has added support for PipeWire video inputs, but output to PipeWire is still unimplemented. And on that topic, while the JACK tools work great for audio, the video control and plugin selection is noticeably lacking.
There is one thing that JACK supports that PipeWire currently can’t touch. JACK supports the FFADO drivers to talk to FireWire audio interfaces, and PipeWire can’t support them at all. (OK, yes, ALSA has a FireWire stack, but it’s not in great shape, and only supports a handful of devices.) USB3 has certainly replaced FireWire as the preferred connection for new devices, but there are plenty of quality interfaces still at work that are FireWire only. Very recently, a new TODO item has appeared
on the official list
: FireWire backend based on FFADO or fix up ALSA drivers.
So where does that leave us? PipeWire has already changed what I can do with Linux audio. If the video ecosystem develops, it has the potential to make some new things possible, or at least easier, there too. The future is bright for multimedia on Linux. | 65 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358947",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T17:17:30",
"content": "Damn that is cool, I’ve hated pulse ever since I first started trying to get it to behave. It has got better since, but its still a tremendous pain for many many things compared to without it… But it do... | 1,760,373,041.350058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/big-spinning-disk-makes-a-small-color-video-display/ | Big Spinning Disk Makes A Small Color Video Display | Donald Papp | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"nipkov disk",
"nipkow disk",
"persistence of vision",
"POV",
"spinning disk"
] | Believe it or not, the Mickey Mouse clip used for this demonstration is actually in the public domain.
The earliest televisions used a spinning disk technology called the Nipkow disk, which is exactly what [Science ‘n’ Stuff] recreated with their
Arduino-based mechanical color television
(video link, also embedded below.) The device reads video and audio from an SD card, and displays the video using a precisely-timed RGB LED visible through a perforated spinning disk. The persistence of vision effect results in a video that is small, relative to the size of the disk, but perfectly watchable. A twist is that the video is in color!
A Nipkow disk is a fairly simple and electromechanical device that relies on timing; something a modern microcontroller and RGB LED is perfectly capable of delivering. In this device, the holes in the disk create 32 vertical scanlines with 96 “pixels” making up each of those lines. Spinning disk technology was always limited to being monochromatic, but in this implementation, each “pixel” is given its own unique color by adjusting the RGB LED accordingly.
The
first video
shows off the device and demonstrates it working; note that it may look like there are multiple little screens, but the center one can be thought of as the “true” display with the others essentially being artifacts due to light leakage. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of exactly how a Nipkow disk works, then
the second video
is what you’ll be more interested in, because it goes through all the details of exactly how everything functions.
Another neat thing about Nipkow disks is that
image acquisition is really not much more complex than image display
.
[via
Arduino Blog] | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358929",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T15:54:35",
"content": ">Believe it or notI don’t have to, because it isn’t. The copyright for “Steamboat Willie” expires in 2024 and this is a color clip, so it must be later production which is STILL under copyright for far longe... | 1,760,373,041.680399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/how-graphene-may-enable-the-next-generations-of-high-density-hard-drives/ | How Graphene May Enable The Next Generations Of High-Density Hard Drives | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"carbon",
"coc",
"graphene",
"hamr",
"hdd",
"magnetic storage"
] | After decades of improvements to hard disk drive (HDD) technology, manufacturers are now close to taking the next big leap that will boost storage density to new levels. Using laser-assisted writes, manufacturers like
Seagate are projecting
50+ TB HDDs by 2026 and 120+ TB HDDs after 2030. One part of the secret recipe is heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).
One of the hurdles with implementing HAMR is finding a protective coating for the magnetic media that can handle this frequent heating while also being thinner than current coatings, so that the head can move even closer to the surface. According to
a recent paper
by N. Dwivedi et al. published in Nature Communications, this new protective coating may have been found in the form of sheets of graphene.
The Need for a Protective Coating
Schematic view of hard disk media structures (a) Schematic cross-section of a hard disk drive with magnetic medium, disk overcoat, lubricant, fly height, head overcoat, head. (b) Bare CoCrPt-Oxide platter. (Credit: N. Dwivedi et al.)
Perhaps the irony in calling HDDs ‘spinning rust’ is that the process of corrosion is one of the major enemies to the long-term operation of these devices. The thin magnetic layer on top of a platter’s base material would readily corrode if left exposed to an atmosphere. Cobalt, the
Co
in the CoCrPt alloys, is especially susceptible to this process. Once corroded, that part of the platter would then be far less effective at retaining a magnetic orientation. One of the primary purposes of this coating, or overcoat, is to prevent this from happening.
The other use of the overcoat is as a protective measure against mechanical damage. Despite all the fright about ‘head crashes’, mechanical contact with the platter is fairly common, and one of the uses of the overcoat is to provide protection against this, as well as reduce friction. The latter usually involves the use of lubricants, which adds another layer on top of the overcoat. Together with the overcoat, the lubricant layer forms a significant part of the head-media spacing (HMS), and thus how close the head can get to the recording media.
In order for the areal density (AD) of hard drives to keep increasing, it’s necessary for this HMS to decrease even further, which means a thinner overcoat. Today these are carbon-based overcoats (COCs), generally between 2.5-3 nm thick. For upcoming high-density magnetic media that is compatible with HAMR, this means that the COC has to fulfill the following requirements:
Provide all features with a <1 nm coating
Full corrosion protection
Anti-friction equivalent to current COCs
Wear resistance and stretch resistance (elasticity, i.e. Young’s Modulus)
Lubricant compatibility (e.g. PFPE).
In-plane TEM image of CoCrPt-SiO
2
layer. (Credit: I. Kaitsu et al.)
Of note here is that the magnetic recording material itself is also likely to change during the transition from PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) to HAMR. This is similar to what happened during the transition from linear magnetic recording (LMR) to PMR as detailed in
this paper by I. Kaitsu et al.
from 2005.
With LMR, platters had used a coating of CoCrPt for the magnetic media, but for PMR this coating had to be more granular. The solution here was found in adding SiO2, as its grain boundaries neatly subdivide the CoCrPt into magnetic grains which work well with a PMR read/write head.
For HAMR magnetic media, the platter stack is changing again, this time to use FePt for the recording media, as this alloy is generally stable with the use of heat-based recording. This adds another two requirements to the coating for FePt-based platters:
Thermally stable with HAMR cycles.
Compatible with not only CoCrPt, but also FePt.
An ongoing issue with HAMR-based drives is that the application of local heat rapidly degrades the COC. Finding a new, more thermally stable overcoat material is paramount in their further commercialization.
Eventually, films of FePt will likely give way to bit-patterned media (
BPM
), in which magnetic islands are patterned into the magnetic recording layer. This would be similar to the CoCrPt-SiO
2
magnetic grains, only on an even smaller scale. Ideally, the same <1 nm COC that works with FePt will also work with such new and upcoming technologies.
The Many Faces of Carbon
The various allotropes of carbon. Graphene is allotrope (b).
As the name of COC indicates, it too is based on carbon atoms, just like graphene. So what’s the difference between current COCs and new, graphene-based COCs? The main difference is in the way that the carbon atoms are linked together, also known as the
allotropes
of carbon. In
graphene
, the carbon atoms are linked together in a regular hexagonal lattice.
This regular lattice is part of the reason why graphene is so stable, but producing it has been a major challenge for a long time. It wasn’t fully isolated and characterized until 2004, when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester used the world-famous ‘Scotch tape’ technique to pull graphene layers from graphite.
Since that time, the search for commercial applications of graphene has been ongoing, with the use in HDD COCs one of the more recent ones. As a two-dimensional material that is thermally and otherwise stable, it seems rather ideal for any situation where full coverage of a surface is required. Even if said surface is regularly being blasted by a laser as in the case of HAMR-based hard disk drives.
Science Checks Out
Comparison of measured coefficients of friction. (Credit: N. Dwivedi et al.)
After N. Dwivedi et al. used chemical vapor deposition (CVD) to coat the bare media with 1-4 layers of graphene (1-4LG) using a wet transfer process. They then subjected these graphene COCs along with existing commercial COCs to various tests, including mechanical (friction and wear), laser-based heating and corrosion protection.
Although even a single layer of graphene (1LG) managed to significantly reduce corrosion and show good mechanical, friction, and thermal stability properties, it was found that >2LG-based coatings would likely provide the greatest benefit. Not just with existing CoCrPt-SiO2 media, but also with FePt with HAMR, and HAMR plus BPM. What this essentially means is that a >2LG COC should be suitable for hard drives today and well into the future.
Another interesting finding was that graphene-based COCs do not require lubrication as do current commercial COCs. The benefit of this is that commercially used PFPE lubrication in hard disk drives is not thermally stable when used with HAMR, and thus being able to omit it in favor of just the heating-resistant graphene means that two problems are solved simply by using >2LG instead of non-graphene COCs.
It’s the Little Things
The most interesting thing about this paper is an insight in how the development of new technologies is often held up by what seems like small details. Even though a suitable magnetic recording media was found in FePt already, and even though integrating semiconductor lasers in read/write heads was already a more or less solved problem, the lack of a suitable overcoat material could have derailed all of that effort, or at least postponed it for years.
We can’t celebrate and put in orders for HAMR HDDs just yet, of course. The fun part with materials science comes after a concept has been demonstrated in the laboratory and it has to be scaled up to mass-production. There’s a massive difference between the CVD of graphene in laboratory settings to produce a few platters for a test and producing thousands upon thousands of them in an automated factory setting.
There are a dizzying amount of ways to
produce graphene
at this point, which is both good and bad news. Not all methods create the same quality graphene, and not all methods lend themselves to mass-production, or the integration into the hard drive manufacturing process. Figuring out the best way to take the results from this recent paper and make it work in a factory setting will be the next step, which can take many more years.
But as with all things in science, good things come to those who are patient.
(
Heading image:
visualization of single sheet of graphene. Credit: AlexanderAlUS, CCA-SA 3.0) | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358934",
"author": "Gareth",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T16:01:54",
"content": "Spinning disks. How… quaint.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358993",
"author": "Eric Chapin",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T19:37:26",
... | 1,760,373,041.753304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/test-your-blue-pill-board-for-a-genuine-stm32f103c8-mcu/ | Test Your ‘Blue Pill’ Board For A Genuine STM32F103C8 MCU | Maya Posch | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"blue pill",
"stm32"
] | With the market for STM32F103C8-based ‘Blue Pill’ boards slowly being overrun with boards that contain either a cloned, fake or outright broken chip, [Terry Porter] really wanted to have an easy, automated way to quickly detect whether a new board contains genuine STM32 silicon, or some fake that tries to look the part. After more than a year of work, the
Blue Pill Diagnostics project
is now ready for prime time.
We
have covered
those clone MCUs previously. It’s clear that some of those ‘Blue Pill’ boards obviously do not have a genuine STM32 MCU on them, as they do not have the STM32 markings on them, while others fake those markings on the package and identifying can be hard to impossible. Often only testing the MCU’s actual functionality can give clarity on whether it’s a real STM32 MCU.
These diagnostics allow one to test not only the 64 kB of Flash, but also the 64 kB of ‘hidden’ Flash that’s often found on these MCUs (rebadged 128 kB STM32F103 cores). It further checks the manufacturer JDEC code and uses a silicon bug in genuine STM32F1xx MCUs where the BGMCU_IDCODE cannot be read without either SWD or JTAG connected.
Another interesting feature of Blue Pill Diagnostics is using Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth as its foundation, which allows for easy access to a Forth shell via this firmware as well, not unlike MicroPython and Lua, only in a fraction of the Flash required by those. We have previously written about
using Mecrisp-Stellaris
in your projects. | 39 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358883",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T12:00:26",
"content": "The real question is if this will result in better boards or better fakes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358886",
"author": "helge",
... | 1,760,373,041.582964 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/the-compromises-of-raspberry-pi-hardware-documentation/ | The Compromises Of Raspberry Pi Hardware Documentation | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"open hardware",
"open source software",
"raspberry pi"
] | [Rowan Patterson] informed us about a recent ticket he opened over at the Raspberry Pi Documentation GitHub repository. He asked about the
the lack of updates
to the Raspberry Pi 4’s USB-C power schematics for this board. You may recall that the USB-C power issue was
covered by us
back in July of 2019, yet the current official
Raspberry Pi 4 schematics
still show the flawed implementation, with the shorted CC pins, nearly two years later.
[Alasdair Allan], responsible for the Raspberry Pi documentation, mentioned that they’re in the process of moving their documentation from
Markdown to AsciiDoc
, and said that they wouldn’t have time for new changes until that was done. But then [James Hughes], Principal Software Engineer at Raspberry Pi, mentioned that the schematics may not be updated even after this change due to a of lack of manpower.
As [James] emphasized, their hardware will probably never be open, due to NDAs signed with Broadcom. The compromise solution has always been to publish limited peripheral schematics. Yet now even those limited schematics may not keep up with board revisions.
An easy fix for the Raspberry Pi 4’s schematics would be for someone in the community to reverse-engineer the exact changes made to the Raspberry Pi 4 board layout and mark these up in a revised schematic. This should be little more than the addition of a second 5.1 kΩ resistor, so that CC1 and CC2 each are connected to ground via their own resistor, instead of being shorted together.
Still, you might wish that Raspberry Pi would update the schematics for you, especially since they
have
updated versions internally. But the NDAs force them to duplicate their efforts, and at least right now that means that their public schematics do not reflect the reality of their hardware. | 86 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358828",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T08:47:01",
"content": "In my opinion, the raspberry pi foundation is unconcerned with anything beyond getting a product out the door. Their advertising is not true in all markets, and they refuse to address false advertising. Avoi... | 1,760,373,041.872031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/modifying-a-snes-rom-to-be-widescreen/ | Modifying A SNES Rom To Be Widescreen | Matthew Carlson | [
"Games",
"home entertainment hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"emulator",
"nintendo",
"ROM hack",
"snes",
"super mario world",
"widescreen"
] | Turning a game like
Super Mario World for SNES into a widescreen game
is not a small task, but [Vitor Vilela] accomplished just that. [Vitor] has a long list of incredible patches such as optimizing code for better frame rates and adding code to take advantage of the
SA-1 accelerator chip
, so out of anyone he has the know-how to pull a widescreen mod off. This patch represents a true labor of love as many levels were designed with a specific screen width in mind. [Vitor] went through each of these single-screen width levels and expanded them by writing the extra assembly needed.
On a technical level, this hack was achieved by using the panning feature built into the game. The left and right shoulder buttons allowed a player to pan the camera to the left and right. The viewport is considered to be two times the screen resolution and so items will be rendered within the widescreen resolution. By taking away the panning feature and render a larger section of the viewport to the screen, you get a widescreen view. However, to save cycles, enemies and items don’t start moving until they get close to the screen edge. So how do you make a game widescreen without ruining the timing of every enemy that spawns? Suddenly the hours of muscle memory that fans have drilled in over the years is a disadvantage rather than a strength. The answer is a significant time investment and an eye for detail.
All the code is available on GitHub. A video of a playthrough of the mod is after the break. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358818",
"author": "Laserbeak43",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T07:05:30",
"content": "I’ve always daydreamed of doing something like this for the nes. Thanks!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6358823",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk"... | 1,760,373,041.917997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/you-cant-put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube-but-it-used-to-be-easier/ | You Can’t Put The Toothpaste Back In The Tube, But It Used To Be Easier | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"History",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"aluminium",
"aluminum",
"get the lead out",
"glass jar",
"lead",
"toothpaste",
"toothpaste tubes"
] | After five years of research,
Colgate-Palmolive recently revealed Australia’s first recyclable toothpaste tube
. Why is this exciting? They are eager to share the design with the rest of the toothpaste manufacturers and other tube-related industries in an effort to reduce the volume of plastic that ends up in landfills. It may not be as life-saving as seat belts or the Polio vaccine, but the move does bring Volvo and
OG mega open-sourcer Jonas Salk
to mind.
Today, toothpaste tubes are mostly plastic, but they contain a layer of aluminum that helps it stay flattened and/or rolled up. So far, multi-layer packaging like this isn’t accepted for recycling at most places, at least as far as Australia and the US are concerned. In the US, Tom’s of Maine was making their tubes entirely out of aluminum for better access to recycling,
but they have since stopped due to customer backlash
.
Although Colgate’s new tubes are still multi-layered, they are 100% HDPE, which makes them recyclable. The new tubes are made up of different thicknesses and grades of HDPE so they can be easily squeezed and rolled up.
Toothpaste Before Tubes
Has toothpaste always come in tubes? No it has not. It also didn’t start life as a paste. Toothpaste has been around since 5000 BC when the Egyptians made tooth powders from the ashes of ox hooves and mixed them with myrrh and a few abrasives like powdered eggshells and pumice. We’re not sure what they kept it in — maybe handmade pottery with a lid, or a satchel made from an animal’s pelt or stomach.
The ancient Chinese used ginseng, salt, and added herbal mints for flavoring. The Greeks and Romans tried crushed bones, oyster shells, tree bark, and charcoal, which happens to be back in vogue. There is evidence from the late 1700s showing that people once brushed with burnt breadcrumbs.
A jar of Zonweiss dentifrice. Zonweiss would later come in a metal tube. Image via
Kilmer House
Get the Lead Out
In the 1800s, people were still using various types of tooth powders in the least sanitary way imaginable — you wet your toothbrush and dip it into this little glass jar over and over again. Gross, eh?
In 1824, a dentist named Dr. Peabody added soap — literally washing your mouth out as you brushed. This was later replaced by laurel sulfate, which made it more like paste and less like powder. In 1873, Colgate began mass-producing a smooth, minty paste in tiny glass jars. In 1886, Johnson & Johnson came out with Zonweiss tooth cream, which came with a tiny spoon for scooping it out and onto the brush. Zonweiss later came in tubes and is often credited as the first toothpaste in a tube, but
that honor allegedly belongs to one Dr. Sheffield
.
In case you’re wondering, other stuff was in tubes at this point, but no one had though to use them for toothpaste. That was until Dr. Sheffield’s son, who was studying dental surgery in Paris, saw a painter squeezing out paint from tubes onto a palette and suggested tubes to his father. In 1881, the first collapsible toothpaste tube hit the market, and it was made with tin and lead just like the paint tubes. Tin and lead, what does that remind you of? Yep, people used to take their empties and use them for solder. In World War II,
toothpaste tubes were rounded up to make bullets
.
Collapsible Colgate. Image via
Smithsonian Magazine
Pump It Up
Some people like to squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, which is admirable but can be difficult. We assume that this is why the toothpaste pump was born sometime in the 1980s — to make you feel like you’re getting it all out of there, or at least getting most of it out in a more sophisticated way. All these companies really need is
a clever, collapsible design
like this one. As long as it’s recyclable, of course.
Maybe we just need to change our behavior, making the tube more recyclable while adding in something reusable to satisfy consumer’s need to roll it up from the bottom. The 3D printing community
has already solved this one
in a number of
different ways
. | 60 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359222",
"author": "doobie",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T14:11:18",
"content": "Sure you can put toothpaste back in a tube. I have one I bought years ago that you can refill for camping trips. It has two caps. One in the front where you put out your toothpaste into your brush. And ... | 1,760,373,042.163131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/a-pi-usb-webcam-that-was-born-to-boot-quick/ | A Pi USB Webcam That Was Born To Boot Quick | Sonya Vasquez | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [] | In the age of business Zoom rooms, having a crisp webcam is key for introducing fellow executives to your pet cat. Unfortunately, quality webcams are out of stock and building your own is out of the question. Or is it? [Dave Hunt] thought otherwise and cooked up the idea of using the Raspberry Pi’s USB on-the-go mode to stream video camera data over USB. [Huan Trong] then took it one step further, reimagining the project as a bootable system image. The result is
showmewebcam
, a Raspberry Pi image that transforms your Pi with an attached HQ camera module into a quality usb camera that boots in under 5 seconds.
Some of the project offerings on showmewebcam are truly stunning. Not only does the setup boot quickly, the current version requires a mere 64MB micro SD card for operations. What’s more, the project exposes camera settings like brightness, contrast, etc. via UVC, a standard USB protocol such that they can be controlled via typical software applications.
What’s truly exciting about this project is to see it take shape as different people tackle the same concept whilst referencing the prior milestone. [Dave Hunt] landed early to the scene with
a blog post that established that the Pi could indeed be used as a USB webcam
. [Huang Truong] built on that starting point, maturing it into an uploadable system image with
notes to follow
. Now, with showmewebcam on Github, it has seen contributions from over a dozen folks. Its performance specs are gradually improving. And it has a detailed wiki complete with
suggested lenses
and
user-contributed cases
to make your first webcam building experience a success.
And that’s not to say that others aren’t tackling this project from their own perspective either! For an alternate encapsulated solution, have a look at [Jeff Geerling’s]
take on Pi-based USB webcams
. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359176",
"author": "Pax",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T11:26:34",
"content": "<1sec and <128kb should be possible with bare metal bootcode.bin.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6359242",
"author": "Adam",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,041.969331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/24/breaking-down-the-usb-keyboard-interface-with-old-fashioned-pen-and-paper/ | Breaking Down The USB Keyboard Interface With Old-Fashioned Pen And Paper | Stephen Ogier | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"HID usb",
"keyboard",
"reverse engineering",
"usb",
"usb hid",
"usb keyboard"
] | What is better for gaming, old PS/2 style keyboards, or modern USB devices? [Ben Eater] sets out to answer this question, but along the way
he ends up breaking down the entire USB keyboard interface.
It turns out that PS/2 and USB are very, very different. A PS/2 keyboard sends your keystroke every time you press a key, as long as it has power. A USB keyboard is more polite, it won’t send your keystrokes to the PC until it asks for them.
To help us make sense of USB’s more complicated transactions, [Ben] prints out the oscilloscope trace of a USB exchange between a PC and keyboard and deciphers it using just a pen and the USB specification. We were surprised to see that USB D+ and D- lines are not just a differential pair but also have more complicated signaling behavior. To investigate how USB handles multi-key rollover, [Ben] even borrowed a fancy oscilloscope that automatically decodes the USB data packets.
It turns out that newer isn’t always better—the cheap low-speed USB keyboard [Ben] tested is much slower than his trusty PS/2 model, and even a much nicer keyboard that uses the faster full-speed USB protocol is still only just about as fast as PS/2.
If you’d like to delve deeper into keyboard protocols, check out
[Ben]’s guide to the PS/2 keyboard interface
, complete with a breadboarded hardware decoder. If these keyboards have too many keys for your taste, you might consider this
USB Morse code keyboard
. Thanks to Peter Martin for the Tip! | 37 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359131",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T08:12:34",
"content": "> even a much nicer keyboard that uses the faster full-speed USB protocol is still only just about as fast as PS/2.Humans are only so fast, so it doesn’t make sense to make keyboards faster. The USB HID p... | 1,760,373,042.055618 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/gorgeous-specimen-is-the-final-word-in-word-clocks/ | Gorgeous Specimen Is The Final Word In Word Clocks | Tom Nardi | [
"clock hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"python",
"RGB LED",
"word clock",
"ws2812"
] | At this point, it’s safe to say that word clocks aren’t quite as exciting as they once were. We’ve seen versions that boil the concept down to what amounts to a parts bin build, which for better or for worse, takes a lot of the magic out of it. You just get an array of LEDs, put some letters in front of it, write some code, and you’re done.
But then [Mark Sidell] sent in his build
, and we remembered why we collectively fell in love with these clocks in the first place. It wasn’t the end result that captivated us, although the final clock is indeed gorgeous, but the story of its painstaking design and construction. The documentation created for this project is unquestionably some of the best we’ve seen in a very long time, and whether or not you have any desire to build a word clock of your own, you won’t regret sitting down and reading through it.
If you can somehow come away from reading through that build log and not be impressed, surely the clock’s feature set will put you over the edge. The ability to show time in just five minute increments makes this one of the most practical word clocks we’ve seen, and the quality of life features such as automatic brightness control based on ambient light level, and a smartphone-controlled web interface for configuring the clock are just a few of its standout features.
Incidentally the glow behind the clock, provided by a dedicated array of WS2812 RGB LEDs, isn’t just for ambiance. It indicates the position of the sun in the sky as calculated by the Python
astral
package, as well as mimicking the colors of the sunrise and sunset. There’s even a compass onboard to make sure the LEDs are properly aligned with their astronautical counterpart.
[Mark] actually made several of these clocks, most of which were given away as gifts. Some of the lucky recipients lived far enough away that the clock had to be shipped, so he designed a custom shipping case to hold everything securely during the trip. It also meant he had to come up with a way of remotely maintaining the code on these clocks without user intervention, so he created a firmware update and telemetry gathering backend with Amazon Web Services that they check into periodically. Honestly, the attention to detail put into every element of this project is just staggering.
If you’re interested in seeing what all the fuss is about with these word clocks, but aren’t quite at [Mark]’s level, don’t worry. As we said earlier, you can build a small version with
little more than an LED array and a microcontroller
. Just don’t blame us if it ends up turning into an obsession. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359119",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2021-06-24T06:53:21",
"content": "I really like how much thought has gone into the backlight of this. The backlight feels like a project in its own right, even without the word clock itself.The fact that it doesn’t just illuminate a segmen... | 1,760,373,042.220001 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/spectrum-display-uses-tiny-cpu-and-many-leds/ | Spectrum Display Uses Tiny CPU And Many LEDs | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"ATtiny Hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"fft",
"led matrix",
"shift register",
"spectrum analyzier",
"TPIC6B595"
] | You would think the hard part about creating a
spectrum analyzer
using a pint-sized ATTiny85 would be the software. But for [tuenhidiy], we suspect the hard part was fabricating an array of 320 LEDs that the little processor can drive. The design does work though, as you can see in the video below.
The key is to use a TPIC6B595N which is an 8-bit shift register made to drive non-logic outputs. With all outputs on, the driving FETs can supply 150 mA per channel and the device can handle 500 mA per channel peak. At room temperature, the part can go over 1W of total power dissipation, although that goes down with temperature, of course. If you need higher power, there’s a DW-variant of the part that can handle a few hundred milliwatts more.
A
fixed-point FFT library
does the actual work. The program simply reads samples, processes the FFT, and drives the LEDs through the shift registers.
The construction technique is also a bit interesting as much of the wiring is left over LED leads. We admire the neat work, but we think we’d have had better luck with PCB traces.
Although billed as a spectrum analyzer, a device like this is really more of a music visualizer. If you want a real spectrum analyzer,
they have become reasonably cheap
. As impractical as the LED grid is for practical output, it beats
ping pong balls
.
400 | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6360156",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2021-06-28T12:43:32",
"content": "This is amazing. On an ATTiny85!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,042.407422 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/john-mcafees-wild-ride-is-over/ | John McAfee’s Wild Ride Is Over | Dan Maloney | [
"News"
] | [
"antivirus",
"McAfee",
"news",
"obituary",
"suicide"
] | John McAfee, the founder of McAfee Associates and pioneer in the antivirus field,
was found dead today, June 23, 2021, of an apparent suicide
in a Barcelona prison cell.
Born in 1945, the term “colorful” doesn’t begin to describe the life of McAfee. His entree into the nascent computer industry began with a degree in mathematics, followed by choice assignments at places like Xerox PARC, NASA, Univac, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Lockheed. He built up an impressive resume of programming skills until serendipity struck, in the form of one of the earliest computer viruses:
the Brain virus
. First found in the mid-1980s, Brain infected the boot sector of floppy disks and was originally intended as a somewhat heavy-handed form of copy protection by its authors. The virus rubbed McAfee the wrong way, and he threw himself into writing software to protect PCs from such infections. These were the roots of McAfee Associates, which opened its doors in 1987.
McAfee was done with his namesake company by 1994 and embarked on a series of business ventures with varying degrees of success, and a lifestyle that raised eyebrows as it departed more and more from the image of a tech entrepreneur. The Caribbean nation of Belize became a sort of base of operations for him, although he also claimed residency in places like Portland, Oregon, and Tennesee over the years. He was a person of interest in the 2012 death of his neighbor in Belize, but fled the country before he could be questioned by police there. He was captured in Guatemala when EXIF data in a picture taken by a reporter showed up online.
In custody in Guatemala, McAfee faked a series of heart attacks to avoid extradition back to Belize, and instead was deported to the United States. The state of Tennesee took an interest in him for DUI and weapons charges; eventually, the federal government added tax evasion charges — McAfee claimed that income taxes were illegal, and bragged openly about not paying federal taxes between 2014 and 2018, despite earning millions from consulting, speaking engagements, and selling his life story for a documentary. He used his resources to disappear for a while, but he was eventually arrested in Spain in October of 2020, after which US federal authorities tacked on cryptocurrency fraud charges and arranged for extradition back to the States.
McAfee, who
famously Tweeted in October
(apparently from his prison cell?) that he had no intention of killing himself, was found hanging in his prison cell today. Details are sketchy at this point, and there’s sure to be a lot of speculation about what happened, as well as discussion of the legacy of this larger-than-life pioneer of technology. We recently got a tip from someone who worked with McAfee, and who created
a YouTube series
detailing his dealings with him. We haven’t watched the whole series, so take it for what it’s worth, but it sure appears to be a first-hand account of one of the many people who shared John McAfee’s wild ride through life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ4xPBIiXpQ
Image credits:
Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images, Fred DuFour/AFP via Getty Images | 53 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359048",
"author": "Johan",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T23:39:25",
"content": "The man was a legend, and an example (sometimes a bad one) to many. I for one will miss his antics. Btw, in October of 2020 he announced that if he was ever found dead in his cell it was involuntary.",
... | 1,760,373,042.36875 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/piezo-pickup-makes-wax-records-easy-to-digitize/ | Piezo Pickup Makes Wax Records Easy To Digitize | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"acoustic",
"audacity",
"edison",
"phonograph",
"piezo",
"shunt",
"wax"
] | Sound recording and playback have come a long way in the last century or so, but it’s fair to say there’s still a lot of interesting stuff locked away on old recordings. Not having a way to play it back is partly to blame; finding an antique phonograph that plays old-timey cylinder recordings is pretty hard. But even then, how do you digitize the output of these fragile, scratchy old recordings?
As it happens, [Jan Derogee] is in
a position to answer these questions
, with an antique phonograph and a bunch of Edison-style wax cylinders with voices and music from a bygone era locked away on them. It would be easy enough to just use
the “reproducer”
he previously built and set up a microphone to record the sound directly from the phonograph’s trumpet, but [Jan] decided to engineer a better solution. By adding the piezo element from an electronic greeting card to his reproducer, potted with liberal quantities of epoxy and padded with cotton, the piezo pickup was attached to the phonograph arm in place of the original stylus and trumpet. The signal from the piezo element was strong enough to require a shunt resistor, allowing it to be plugged directly into the audio input jack on a computer. From there it’s just an Audacity exercise, plus dealing with the occasional skipped groove.
We appreciate [Jan]’s effort to preserve these recordings, as well as the chance to hear some voices from the past. We’re actually surprised the recording sound as good as they do after all this time — they must have been well cared for. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6359016",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T20:44:31",
"content": "This is awesome ! I have in my DJ library a collection of wax cylinder recordings. They were obviously made with the microphone in the horn method. There is so much history that can be saved by convert... | 1,760,373,042.284418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/steady-hand-brings-gba-cart-back-from-the-grave/ | Steady Hand Brings GBA Cart Back From The Grave | Tom Nardi | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"game boy advance",
"gba",
"PCB repair",
"repair"
] | The flash chips used in Game Boy Advance (GBA) cartridges were intended to be more reliable and less bulky than the battery-backed SRAM used to save player progress on earlier systems. But with some GBA titles now hitting their 20th anniversary, it’s not unheard of for older carts to have trouble loading saves or creating new ones. Perhaps that’s why the previous owner tried to reflow the flash chip on their copy of
Golden Sun
,
but as [Taylor Burley] found after he opened up the case
, they only ended up making the situation worse.
A previous repair attempt left the PCB badly damaged.
When presented with so many damaged traces on the PCB, the most reasonable course of action would have been to get a donor cartridge and swap the save chips. But a quick check on eBay shows that copies of
Golden Sun
don’t exactly come cheap. So [Taylor] decided to flex his soldering muscles and repair each trace with a carefully bent piece of 30 gauge wire. If you need your daily dose of Zen, just watch his methodical process in the video below.
While it certainly doesn’t detract from [Taylor]’s impressive soldering work, it should be said that the design of the cartridge PCB did help out a bit, as many of the damaged traces had nearby vias which gave him convenient spots to attach his new wires. It also appears the PCB was designed to accept flash chips of varying physical dimensions, which provided some extra breathing room for the repairs.
Seeing his handiwork, it probably won’t surprise you to find that this isn’t the first time [Taylor] has performed some life-saving microsurgery. Just last year he was able to
repair the PCB of an XBox controller than had literally been snapped in half
. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358615",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T11:30:28",
"content": "I’ve repaired a number of pc engines that have been previously reworked. They’re not too bad, but this process can always take more time than it’s really worth.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,373,042.529518 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/good-enough-for-the-spruce-goose-good-enough-for-satellites/ | Good Enough For The Spruce Goose, Good Enough For Satellites | Al Williams | [
"Space"
] | [
"ESA",
"WISA",
"wood",
"wooden",
"wooden satellite",
"woodsat"
] | Wood products have a long history in aviation even though modern materials have eclipsed them in many areas. But lately we’ve noticed several plywood satellites, including
this one the ESA plans to launch
. The WISA Woodsat is a test of WISA plywood, a particular brand made in Finland to show how it can withstand the orbital environment.
Why not? Plywood is cheap and easy to form. You probably don’t want to make a pressure vessel with it, but most satellites don’t need that anyway.
Oddly enough, the project is the brainchild of broadcaster [Jari Mäkinen] who is known for making models of things including cubesats. From wooden model to actual satellite seemed a logical connection.
The wood has some challenges, including weakness after forming, radiation and impact damage, and the tendency of wood to be stronger in one direction than others. In addition, the wood requires treatment to remove moisture and a thin aluminum oxide coating to prevent outgassing. Sensors onboard include two cameras and a very sensitive balance to detect contamination. There’s also a 3D printed electrical system inside the 100 millimeter cube.
The satellite should launch towards the end of the year, beating out the
Japanese wooden satellite
we saw earlier. Maybe this will make cubesats
even more affordable
. We’ve been watching this project in
Sunday’s Links column
too, so check it out. | 31 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358581",
"author": "Glen Searle (@GenesisMachines)",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T08:10:14",
"content": "One of the requirements for a cubesat launch is that you can’t be a contamination risk to your neighbours in the cubesat launch bay. One man’s minor out-gassing is another’s fogged ... | 1,760,373,042.904029 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/see-acorn-archimedes-get-repaired-and-refurbished-in-glorious-detail/ | See Acorn Archimedes Get Repaired And Refurbished, In Glorious Detail | Donald Papp | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"1990s",
"acorn archimedes",
"refurbish",
"retrocomputing",
"vintage"
] | Want to see a 90s-era Acorn Archimedes A3020 home computer get opened up, refurbished, and taken for a test drive?
Don’t miss [drygol]’s great writeup on Retrohax
, because it’s got all that, and more!
A modern upgrade allowing the use of a CF card in place of an internal hard drive, via a CF2IDE adapter and 3D-printed fixture.
The
Archimedes was a line of ARM-based personal computers by Acorn Computers
, released in the late 80s and discontinued in the 90s as Macintosh and IBM PC-compatible machines ultimately dominated. They were capable machines for their time, and [drygol] refurbished an original back into working order while installing a few upgrades at the same time.
The first order of business was to open the machine up and inspect the internals. Visible corrosion gets cleaned up with oxalic acid, old electrolytic capacitors are replaced as a matter of course, and any corroded traces get careful repair. Removing corrosion from sockets requires desoldering the part for cleaning then re-soldering, so this whole process can be a lot of work. Fortunately, vintage hardware was often designed with hand-assembly in mind, so parts tend to be accessible for servicing with decent visibility in the process. The keyboard was entirely disassembled and de-yellowed, yielding an eye-poppingly attractive result.
Once the computer itself was working properly, it was time for a few modern upgrades. One was to give the machine an adapter to use a CF card in place of an internal IDE hard drive, and [drygol] did a great job of using a 3D-printed piece to make the CF2IDE adapter look like a factory offering. The internal floppy drive was also replaced with a GOTEK floppy emulator (also with a 3D-printed adapter) for another modern upgrade.
The fully refurbished and upgraded machine looks slick, so watch the Acorn Archimedes A3020 show off what it can do in the video (embedded below), and maybe feel a bit of nostalgia.
The process of repairing vintage hardware takes extra care and attention, and there’s a bit of a cottage industry serving the special needs of this niche. For example, we’ve seen
a smart PSU adapter
make power issues less of a worry when firing up old hardware in uncertain condition. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358594",
"author": "Jonah",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T09:28:57",
"content": "Very cool! I love to see these kind of posts on Hackaday. Really cool to see this retro tech being updated and refurbished.:)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,373,042.834094 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/a-collection-of-linux-tools-on-steroids/ | A Collection Of Linux Tools On Steroids | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"cli",
"command line",
"linux"
] | Sometimes we do things because “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” Screws, for example, had slotted heads in the 1500s and slotted heads are notoriously bad, but despite Robertson in 1907 and Phillips in the 1930s, it took decades for slotted screw heads to become uncommon and they still lurk in a few areas. Many Linux tools we use every day are direct descendants from Unix tools that have been around for almost half a century. We’ve looked at a few more modern alternatives before, and [ibraheemdev] has a
GitHub collection of many such tools
that’s worth checking out.
Of course, modern doesn’t always mean better. However, the tools in the list do have great features including things that were uncommon in the old days such as the use of color, text-based graphics, and things like git integration.
Some of the commands replace very common commands. For example,
bat
is like
cat
with syntax coloring and git integration. The
exa
and
lsd
commands are like
ls
, and
lsd
is even compatible with
ls
. There’s
delta
for replacing
diff
, and
duf
or
dust
to replace
du
. Instead of
cd
, you can use
zoxide
to get some advanced capabilities that are native so some shells.
Many of the commands offer less power to make common tasks easier. For example, you can use
sed
to search and replace text, but
sd
is easier. You can use
cut
to pull parts of a file or stream out, but
choose
makes it easier. Sometimes the
man
command gives you too much detailed information. The
tldr
and
tealdeer
commands give you just the common options for commands and
cheat
offers interactive cheat sheets.
Rounding out the list are commands that offer dedicated network help where you might use
telnet
,
wget
, or
curl
. Programs like
xh
,
curlie
, and
httpie
, for example, offer easier ways to do various network requests.
You might not use every command on this list, and finger memory is very powerful (although you can always create an alias if you are brave enough). However, you’ll probably find one or two interesting commands that become part of your workflow if they aren’t already.
We’ve talked about some of these tools
in previous Linux Fu posts
, but having these in one collection is handy and — we presume — the list will update from time to time, so it is worth watching the project on GitHub.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen
a list like this
, although each seems to have some things the other ones don’t. If you find yourself often composing difficult command lines, check out
Marker
, which can help.
Banner image:
“penguin group small”
by
Antarctica Bound
.
CC BY-ND 2.0 | 75 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358543",
"author": "Reg",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T02:45:23",
"content": "As an old Unix guy who absolutely hates colored text. I can only laugh. It’s the first thing I disable if the system does that. I use bold black on white.Why? Because the focal distance for the human eye ... | 1,760,373,042.787352 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/vga-from-scratch-on-a-homebrew-8-bit-computer/ | VGA From Scratch On A Homebrew 8-bit Computer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"8 bit",
"homebrew",
"latch",
"retro",
"scratch",
"ttl",
"vga",
"video"
] | [James Sharman] has built an impressive 8-bit homebrew computer. Based on TTL logic chips, it has a pipelined design which makes it capable of Commodore-level computing, but [James] hasn’t quite finished everything yet. While it is currently built on its own custom PCB, it has a limiting LCD display which isn’t up to the standards of the rest of the build. To resolve this issue,
he decided to implement VGA from scratch.
This isn’t a bit-bang VGA implementation, either. He plans for full resolution (640×480) which will push the limits of his hardware. He also sets goals of a 24-bit DAC which will allow for millions of colors, the ability to use sprites, and hardware scrolling. Since he’s doing all of this from scratch, the plan is to keep it as simple as possible and make gradual improvements to the build as he goes. To that end, the first iteration uses a single latching chip with some other passive components. After adding some code to the CPU to support the new video style, [James] is able to display an image on his monitor.
While the image of the parrot he’s displaying isn’t exactly perfect yet, it’s a great start for his build and he does plan to make improvements to it in future videos. We’d say he’s well on his way to reproducing a full 8-bit retrocomputer. Although VGA is long outdated for modern computers, the standard is straightforward to implement and limited versions
can even be done with very small microcontrollers
.
Thanks to [BaldPower] for the tip! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358536",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T02:05:27",
"content": "Excellent project ! Reminiscent of probably how early computer started out…. in a basement or garage. (I love all the blinken lights…. er I mean status lights).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,373,042.676805 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/forget-smart-watch-build-a-smart-hat/ | Forget Smart Watch; Build A Smart Hat | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"hat",
"wearable"
] | Smart watches are pretty common today, but how many people do you know with a smart hat? [Oliver] built
Wilson
which he bills as “the IoT hat.” We wonder if the name was inspired by the Home Improvement character of the same name who only appeared as a hat above the fence line. You can see a video of the project, below.
The project is pretty straightforward for hardware. An LED strip, an Arduino, and a Bluetooth module. Oh. And a hat. The software, as you might expect, is a bit more complex. It allows you to display SMS messages to your hat.
As wearables go, your happiness with this project will depend on what’s important to you. If you want to read your text messages, you might like to stick with a watch since it is hard to see a hat while it is on your head. But if you want to show the world what’s on your mind — and your phone — this might be just the ticket.
Regardless of practicality, we thought it was a fun project and now that in person meetups are coming back, a great thing to wear at the next Supercon. It sure looks nicer than the
heads up baseball cap
, although you can read that one yourself. Oddly enough, most of the hat hacks we see involve
baseball caps
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358514",
"author": "Richard collins",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T21:42:04",
"content": "Nice work. Here is mine I built some time ago based on the Adafruit project. I wrote my own app. Sorry video is short. My hat is flat so needs recharging. :Dhttps://youtu.be/GCGQUNvn4CQhttps://you... | 1,760,373,042.943926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/a-laser-display-board-of-your-very-own/ | Fake: A Laser Display Board Of Your Very Own | Jenny List | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"laser display",
"real or fake",
"vector display"
] | Update 6/23/21:
Many people have called this out as fake. When viewed at 1/4 speed, you can see the logos in the YouTube video are always full-off or full-on and never caught mid way through a scanned frame. The images may be projected from off-camera to the left, rather than by the diode behind the screen. It’s a neat idea, but on closer review the demo provided smells a bit fishy so we’ve added a “
Real or Fake
” tag and updated the title.
Update #2:
[Kanti Sharma] wrote into the tipsline apologizing for the faked video, saying that he tried to get it to work but couldn’t and then “used a phone and a lens to fake the laser”. Thanks for fessing up to this one.
There are some times when an awesome project comes into your feed, but a language barrier intervenes as you try to follow its creator’s description.
[Kanti Sharma]’s laser display
appears to be a fantastic piece of work, but YouTube’s automatic translations in the video below make so little sense as to leave us Anglophones none the wiser as to what he’s saying. The principle comes across without need for translation though: he’s taken a laser diode module and is using it to create a vector scan by mounting it in the middle of a set of coils driven through beefy FETs by an Arduino. It’s an electromagnetic take on the same principle used in a CRT vector displays such as the famous Vectrex console, with the beam of electrons replaced with laser light.
It’s a technique not unlike what’s been used for years in the lighting industry, in which much larger laser displays are created with mirrors mounted on galvanometers. There must be a physical limit at which the weight of the laser slows down the movement, but if the video is to be believed it’s certainly capable of displaying graphics on a screen.
People have done a lot of things with lasers on these pages, but there have been surprisingly few vector displays using them.
Here’s one from nearly a decade ago
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyTGXrL5Vas | 64 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358443",
"author": "jose7380",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T18:44:12",
"content": "Why don´t you use the spining pentagonal mirror, like barcode readers do???",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358450",
"author": "jonmayo",... | 1,760,373,043.26938 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/arduino-nano-memory-upgrade-with-no-soldering/ | Arduino Nano Memory Upgrade With No Soldering | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"optiboot"
] | Ok, we’ll come clean. [Design Build Destroy] didn’t really add any memory to his Arduino Nano. But he did get about 1.5K more program space when compared to the stock setup. The trick? On some Nano boards and clones, the bootloader is set to use a large block of reserved memory, but Optiboot only requires a fraction of that reserved memory. By
reprogramming the bootloader and changing the configuration fuses
, you can reclaim that unused memory.
Of course, you can’t easily overwrite the bootloader and fuses over the serial port to prevent you from bricking your device. The video below shows how to connect another Arduino to do the programming. You could also use any dedicated AVR programmer you happen to have. Oddly, the Uno already uses Optiboot with the same processors, and is set correctly and the video shows the differences in the configuration between the two in their default state.
Of course, depending on where you get your Nano devices and their age, you may already have this set up at which point you won’t gain anything, but you should be able to easily tell if you need to go through the steps or not. The same trick will probably work with any older Arduino boards you have laying around if Optiboot supports them. What can you do with the extra memory? Maybe
speech recognition
? | 20 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358257",
"author": "Ted Themistokleous",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T02:37:21",
"content": "Neat! More memory is always better!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358375",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-06-... | 1,760,373,043.001902 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/hackaday-links-june-20-2021/ | Hackaday Links: June 20, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | The hits just keep coming for Elon Musk, as this week
Starlink users reported their new satellite dishes apparently can’t take the heat
. Granted, the places these reports are coming from are really, really hot, like Topock, Arizona, where one Starlink beta tester is located and where the air temperature is expected to hit 123°F (50°C) on Saturday. One user contacted Starlink customer service and was told that Dishy McFlatface is programmed to shut down if the surface temperature exceeds 50°C, which even in non-Arizona locations would be easily exceeded on a rooftop or in an urban heat island. Users experiencing thermal shutdown are taking extreme measures to get back online in the heat of the day, like by setting up sprinklers to water-cool their dishes. Others are building solar shades, and one die-hard is even considering putting the dish on an antenna tower, to get it up into the relatively cooler air above the ground. But these are just workarounds, and
according to the engineer
who did
the Starlink teardown we featured a while back
, the permanent fix may just be to redesign the thermal management. In other words, this isn’t likely to be another one of those problems that gets fixed with an OTA software push. Which is probably to be expected for something that’s still in the
“Better than Nothing Beta”
release.
We’ve all heard that AI and robots are going to replace pretty much every job at some point, but if
one customer’s experience with an AI drive-through window
is any gauge, it might take quite a while to get there. In
a video posted on TikTok
(we know, we know), a customer at a Chicago-area McDonald’s showed that the fast-food giant put exactly zero effort into making the experience anything but engaging. The synthesized voice is creepy, and evokes all the wrong kinds of feelings, like the ones you get when you’re forced to use a voice-response system to get through “voice mail jail”. At least in those cases, the voice at least sounds semi-apologetic when it can’t understand what you’ve said. After listening to it once, we’d much rather have a real human, even if it is a surly teen. This seems like a missed opportunity by McDonald’s, which probably has the resources to put a little humanity into their AI.
A while back, we dropped a link about satellites made largely of wood. At the time it seemed interesting if a bit self-serving, since the effort was largely backed by a large Finnish plywood company. And while that aspect of the project hasn’t changed, we’ve now got a better idea of how
the WISA Woodsat
is put together, and what it will do once it flies later this year. To be clear, the 1U CubeSat is not 100% wood, which of course would make including any electronics problematic. Instead, the side and top panels of the satellite are made from plywood, which are attached to aluminum rails that integrate with the launcher on the mothership. There’s also a metal pantograph-style selfie-stick, because pics or it didn’t happen. The interesting bit is the pre-treatment of the birch plywood, which is dried in a thermal vacuum chamber to prevent outgassing in space. Additionally, the exterior surface of the wood panels was covered with a thin layer of aluminum oxide, to give the surface a chance against highly reactive atomic oxygen. There will be sensors inside the satellite to see if any outgassing occurs, so we could actually get some valuable data about using wood in satellites out of what otherwise could have been just a publicity stunt.
As our long global nightmare appears to be playing out its endgame, and as the world begins to reopen itself to normal pursuits, it’s nice to see that some cons and meetups are actually returning to meatspace.
One such event will be BornHack 2021
, that week-long campout in a Danish forest with hundreds of like-minded hackers, tinkerers, and artists. The Call for Participation deadline has been extended to July 1, which gives you just a little more time to consider giving a presentation. We’ve heard Jenny List speak glowingly of BornHack, and it actually looks like a lot of fun.
And finally, it’s said that one can never include too many comments when writing code. Not everyone feels that way, of course; I once had a co-worker complain that I commented my code too much, which of course meant that I redoubled my efforts to make sure I had as many comments as possible. That meant I often ran out of ideas for pithy, pertinent, and gratuitous comments to sprinkle into my code. It’s a shame
What The Commit
didn’t exist back then. Just click the link and you’ll get a fresh, auto-generated comment ready to copy into your commits or embed in your code. Have fun! | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358232",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T23:30:29",
"content": "50C!? Screw the dish, I don’t operate in that temperature! So what about putting some big ass copper cooling fins on it? (Until the copper thieves steal it.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,043.055059 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/raspberry-pi-hat-adds-sdr-with-high-speed-memory-access/ | Raspberry Pi Hat Adds SDR With High Speed Memory Access | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"caribou",
"cariboulite",
"raspberry pi",
"sdr",
"Secondary Memory Interface",
"SMI",
"software-defined radio"
] | An SDR add-on for the Raspberry Pi isn’t a new idea, but the open source
cariboulite project looks like a great entry into the field
. Even if you aren’t interested in radio, you might find the project’s use of a special high-bandwidth memory interface to the Pi interesting.
The interface in question is the poorly-documented SMI or Secondary Memory Interface. [Caribou Labs] helpfully provides links to
others that did the work to figure out the interface
along with
code
and a
white paper
. The result? Depending on the Pi, the SDR can exchange data at up to 500 Mbps with the processor. The SDR actually uses less than that, at about 128 Mbps. Still, it would be hard to ship that much data across using conventional means.
On the radio side, the SDR covers 389.5 to 510 MHz and 779 to 1,020 MHz. There’s also a wide tuning channel from 30 MHz to 6 GHz, with some exclusions. The board can transmit at about 14 dBm, depending on frequency and the receive noise figure is under 4.5 dB for the lower bands and less than 8 dB above 3,500 MHz. Of course, some Pis already have a
radio
, but not with this kind of capability. We’ve also seen SMI used to drive
many LEDs
. | 57 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358207",
"author": "julian martinez",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T20:09:36",
"content": "the links for smi explanation and github repo are broken…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358209",
"author": "julian martinez",
... | 1,760,373,043.166852 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/tiny-tesla-valves-etched-in-glass/ | Tiny Tesla Valves Etched In Glass | Bryan Cockfield | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"acid",
"etch",
"glass",
"huygens optics",
"laser",
"small",
"Tesla valve"
] | While it’s in vogue right now to name fancy new technology after Tesla, the actual inventor had plenty of his own creations that would come to bear his namesake, including Tesla coils, Tesla oscillators, Tesla turbines and even the infamous Tesla tower. One of the lesser known inventions of his is the Tesla valve, a check valve that allows flow in one direction without any moving parts, and [Huygens Optics] shows us a
method of etching tiny versions of these valves into glass
.
The build starts out with a fairly lengthy warning, which is standard practice when working with hydroflouric acid. The acid is needed to actually perform the etching, but it’s much more complicated than a typical etch due to the small size of the Tesla valves. He starts by mixing a buffered oxide etch, a mix of the hydroflouric acid, ammonia, and hydrochloric acid, which gives a much more even etching than any single acid alone. Similar to etching PCBs, a protective mask is needed to ensure that the etch only occurs where it’s needed. For that there are several options, each with their own benefits and downsides, but in the end [Huygens Optics] ends up with one of the smallest Tesla valves ever produced.
In fact, the valves are so small that they can only be seen with the aid of a microscope. While viewing them under the microscope he was able to test with a small drop of water to confirm that they do work as intended. And, while the valves that he is creating in this build are designed to work on liquids, [Huygens Optics] notes that the reason for making them this small was to
make tiny optical components which they are known for
.
Thanks to [coneloco] for the tip! | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358183",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T17:52:02",
"content": "I could see this as part of a lab-on-a-chip.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358211",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T... | 1,760,373,043.315583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/19-coils-make-charging-wireless/ | 19 Coils Make Charging Wireless | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"wireless charger",
"wireless charging",
"xiaomi"
] | Wireless charging is conceptually simple. Two coils form an
ad hoc
transformer with the primary in the charger and the secondary in the charging device. However, if you’ve ever had a wireless charging device, you know that reality can be a bit more challenging since the device must be positioned just so on the charger. Xiaomi has a multi-coil charger that can charge multiple devices and is tolerant of their positioning on the charger. How does it work? [Charger Lab] tears one apart and finds
19 coils and a lot of heat management
crammed into the device.
The first part of the post is a terse consumer review of the device, looking at its dimensions and features. But the second part is when the cover comes off. The graphite heat shield looks decidedly like an accidental spill of something, but we’re sure that’s just how it appears. The coils are packed in tight in three layers. We have to wonder about their mutual interactions, and we assume that only some of them are active at any given time. The teardown shows a lot of the components and even pulls datasheets on many components, but doesn’t really go into the theory of operation.
Still, this is an unusual device to see from the inside. It is impressive to see so much power and thermal management in such a tiny package. We wonder that we don’t see more wireless charging in do-it-yourself projects. We do see
some
, of course. Not to mention
grafting a charging receiver to an existing cell phone
. | 57 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358136",
"author": "socksbot",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T14:19:38",
"content": "Even the product name on the box is “Multi-coil wireless fast charging board”.It’s a pretty complex design and the PCB inspection is thorough enough to give you an idea of its capabilities, but I can’t b... | 1,760,373,043.565856 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/compact-mm-sorter-goes-anywhere/ | Compact M&M Sorter Goes Anywhere | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"CdS cell",
"light dependent resistor",
"M&M sorter",
"photocell",
"RGB LED",
"servo",
"stepper motor"
] | Let’s face it — eating different colored candy like M&Ms or Skittles is just a little more fun if you sort your pile by color first. The not-fun part is having to do it by hand. [Jackofalltrades_] decided to tackle this time-worn problem for engineering class because it’s awesome and it satisfies the project’s requirement for sensing, actuation, and autonomous sequencing.
We’d venture to guess that it satisfies [Jackofalltrades_]’ need for chocolate, too
.
Here’s how it works: one by one, M&Ms are selected, pulled into a dark chamber for color inspection, and then dispensed into the proper cubby based on the result. [Jackofalltrades_] lived up to their handle and built a color-detecting setup out of an RGB LED and light-dependent resistor. The RGB LED shines red, then, green, then blue at full brightness, and takes a voltage reading from the photocell to figure out the candy’s color. At the beginning, the machine needs one of each color to read in and store as references. Then it can sort the whole bag, comparing each M&M to the reference values and updating them with each new M&M to create a sort of rolling average.
We love the beautiful and compact design of this machine, which was built to maximize the 3D printer as one of the few available tools. The mechanical design is particularly elegant. It cleverly uses stepper-driven rotation and only needs one part to do most of the entire process of isolating each one, passing it into the darkness chamber for color inspection, and then dispensing it into the right section of the jar below. Be sure to check out the demo after the break.
Need a next-level sorter? Here’s one that locates and separates the holy grail of candy-coated chocolate —
peanut M&Ms that didn’t get a peanut
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358110",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T11:14:55",
"content": "Reminds me of the famous “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)” clause on Van Halen’s contract.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358135... | 1,760,373,043.756861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/a-mini-usb-display-for-your-pc-desktop/ | A Mini USB Display For Your PC Desktop | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"display",
"lcd",
"usb display"
] | By now it’s likely that most Hackaday readers will be used to USB display adapters, in their most common form channeling DisplayPort over the ubiquitous serial interface. Connecting to projectors and other screens with a laptop becomes a breeze, and gone are the days of “Will my laptop work in the venue” stress for people delivering presentations. [Avra Mitra]’s
STM32 tiny monitor
may not ascend to these giddy heights, but it does at least live up to the promise of reproducing a desktop onto a small colour LCD hooked up through a USB port.
Not through any DisplayPort wizardry though, instead it relies on a Python script that takes successive screen grabs and streams them through USB to the microcontroller, which in tun puts them on the display. It’s claimed to achieve 6 to 7 frames per second as you can see in the video below, with an admission that there remains a huge scope for improvement.
Notwithstanding its limited utility at the moment, we can see that maybe this idea could have its uses in a very basic display after a few improvements. Meanwhile, more conventional monitors take the established route of
pairing a dedicated controller board with an LCD panel
.
Thanks [Pyrofer] for the tip. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358098",
"author": "CampGareth",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T08:27:05",
"content": "Transferring screenshots over USB is a sort of homebrew version of DisplayLink. I’d look at that for any potential improvements.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,043.450296 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-chinese-typewriter/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Chinese Typewriter | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"cables",
"KBD news",
"Kinesis",
"Kinesis Advantage",
"Lois Lew",
"macro pad",
"ZAP! cables"
] | As much as I’d like to devote an article to each and every bit of keyboard-related what-have-you that I come across in my travels through the intertubes, there just aren’t enough hours. And after all, this isn’t Clack-a-Day. To that end, I gained editorial approval to bring you a periodic round-up of news and other tidbits on the keyboard and keyboard accessories front, and here we are. So let’s get to it!
I wish this were mine. Maybe I’ll make an offer!
A Macro Pad for
Stonks
Life
You don’t have to look far to find awesome keebs and macro pads made by the community. Over on Hackaday.io, [
Maciej Witkowiak
] is
hacking a little Thomson-Reuters macro pad meant for trading
.
All the trading keebs we’ve seen thus far have been
battleship rectangles
— 104+ key ‘boards that have several extra buttons for macros and stuff, like the old IBM Model F. Sometimes the trading keebs even have a little built-in screen.
The teardown revealed an STM32 CPU. After sniffing the keypad’s output, [Maciej] is able to employ AutoHotKey scripts to use it as a macro pad without needing the proprietary drivers. Here’s hoping they end up using YOURS/MINE as GitHub accept and reject buttons, because we can’t think of anything more apt.
Sustainable Clackin’
I made this for
the ErgoDox
, and there’s a matching USB cable.
[John] at Zap! recently popped into Discord to let @everyone know about their new cable recycling program called ZCORP —
Zap Cables Official Recycling Program
. Did you make or order a custom cable that you didn’t end up liking or using? Don’t let it languish on a shelf, put it up on consignment for cash! Zap will take your “old, unused, or slightly damaged custom cables, clean them up, and find them a new home.”
Whether you have anything to put on the table or not, it sounds like a good place to get a great deal on a really cool cable to grace your desktop. They are accepting cables via Google Forms, where they encourage you to share the story behind the cable. This is an all-around great idea, and I can’t wait to see what interesting custom cables people put up for sale.
Take My Money
Word on the street is that
Kinesis have re-imagined the 30-year-old Advantage monoblock split keyboard into a streamlined and sexy full split
. You can bet that I dropped everything and filled out their beta tester survey and interest form. With a little luck, I’ll be reviewing one of these beauties for you all, whether I have to pay for it myself or not.
I found it interesting that the survey starts by asking where +/=, Escape, and Caps Lock should be. I think I would rather have Escape on a layer rather than +/=, but ideally they could just put Escape next to A and put Caps Lock on a layer. I’ll just be over here laying on my Shift pedal anyway. Is there a more iconic duo than capital letters and stomping?
Hopefully, the cable that joins the two halves will be a little longer than that.
Why is this exciting news? Well, because if the Advantage has one disadvantage, it’s the fixed split distance. On the one hand this is a good thing, because those two-piece keebs can slip and slide all over the place. But everyone’s shoulders are different, and I think it’s ultimately better if you can set the split distance to suit yourself. Kinesis have managed to make the Advantage 360 even cooler/weirder looking than the uni-body constructed type, and I hope it makes an appearance in a future
Men In Black
installment.
Speaking of Eye Candy
Have you heard about
the Keyboard Builder’s Digest?
It’s essentially a weekly update featuring the best of
r/mk
combined with keyboard news from around the world, and it’s presented in this totally slick web magazine format. There’s even a cool keyboard sightings section like the back pages of 2600 (but with keyboards). If you aren’t that much into keyboards, you might change your mind after perusing the Digest. Go for the eye candy, stay for the info, history lessons, and back issues, because they’re about 30 issues into this thing already.
Historical Clackers: Lois Lew
And she worked that thing in constricting 1940s business attire.
Have you ever seen the massive Kanji keyboard? Before that came the somewhat more practical Chinese typewriter made by IBM in the 1940s. Inside was a large rotating drum with 5400 of the most common Chinese characters. The keyboard was just four banks of numbers — one 0-5, and three 0-9 — and each character was assigned a four-digit code that had to be chorded, or mashed simultaneously like a piano chord.
A lot of people memorize things for their job, whether it’s phone numbers, PLUs, or the NATO phonetic alphabet. Lois Lew worked as a typist for IBM in Rochester, New York and was chosen to help sell the typewriter by demonstrating it on a world tour.
This rock star typist holed up in a hotel room on the opposite coast and memorized her first 100 characters inside of a week, mostly because her job depended on it and they really needed her to succeed.
Now in her 90s, Lois fondly recalls her time in the limelight during an interview with a professor of Chinese history
. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358423",
"author": "dovenyi",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T17:23:05",
"content": "Thanks for featuring the Digest!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6358424",
"author": "Ken",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T17:34:24",
"content"... | 1,760,373,044.283344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/microscopy-hack-chat-with-zachary-tong/ | Microscopy Hack Chat With Zachary Tong | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"atomic force",
"confocal",
"electron microscope",
"Hack Chat",
"micron",
"microscope",
"microscopy"
] | Join us on Wednesday, June 23 at noon Pacific for the
Microscopy Hack Chat
with
Zachary Tong
!
There was a time when electronics was very much a hobby that existed in the macroscopic world. Vacuum tubes, wire-wound resistors, and big capacitors were all mounted on terminal strips and mounted in a heavy chassis or enclosure, and interfacing with everything from components to tools was more an exercise in gross motor skills than fine. Even as we started to shrink components down to silicon chips, the packages we put them in were still large enough to handle and see easily. It’s only comparatively recently that everything has started to push the ludicrous end of the scale, with components and processes suitable only for microscopic manipulation, but that’s pretty much where we are now, and things are only likely to get smaller as time goes on.
The microscopic world is a fascinating one, and the tools and techniques to explore it are often complex. That doesn’t mean microscopy is out of the wheelhouse of the average hacker, though. Zachary Tong, proprietor of the delightfully eclectic
Breaking Taps
channel on YouTube, has been working in the microscopic realm a lot lately. We’ve featured
his laser scanning confocal microscope
recently, as well as his latest foray into
atomic force microscopy
. In the past he has also made
DIY acrylic lenses
, and he has even tried his hand at
micromachining glass with lasers
.
Zach is pretty comfortable working in and around the microscopic realm, and he’ll stop by the Hack Chat to share what he’s been up to down there. We’ll talk about all the cool stuff going on in Zach’s lab, and see what else he has in store for us.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, June 23 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,043.601593 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/raspberry-pi-floppy-driver-uncovers-fishy-secrets/ | Raspberry Pi Floppy Driver Uncovers Fishy Secrets | Chris Lott | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"fdc",
"file systems",
"floppy disk",
"floppy disk controller",
"floppy formats",
"raspberry pi"
] | A forum post by New Zealand electronics enthusiast [zl2wrw]
about retreiving waypoints from a mysterious floppy disk caught our eye. The navigation system on his friend’s fishing boat had died and was replaced. But the old waypoints were stored on a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk that was unreadable on a normal PC. Not to be deterred, [zl2wrw] then looked for another solution — apparently a list of hot NZ fishing spots is worth quite the effort.
The tool he discovered, and the main point of this story, is the
bbc-fdc
by [Jasper Renow-Clarke] aka [picosonic]. [Jasper] made this project to read 5-1/4 inch Acorn DFS floppies from his BBC Micro. But bbc-fdc can be used to read a variety of floppy disk formats, such as DOS, C64, Apple II, and others It can also just capture raw magnetic flux transitions on the disk, blissfully unaware of any logical structure to the data. We recently wrote about
another Raspberry Pi Floppy Drive Controller project
by [Scott Baker]. What sets [picosonic]’s project apart is that he’s not using an FDC controller chip here. The only interface electronics is a couple of open-collector 7406 ICs. Data is read using the SPI peripheral. If you need to archive old floppy disks or do a forensic analysis of unknown disks like [zl2wrw], then one of these two projects will almost certainly do the trick.
Meanwhile back in New Zealand, [zl2wrw] discovered that the floppy format was standard (Modified Frequency Modulation, MFM) by examining the raw flux dump. However, the filesystem was a mystery — it didn’t quite match any of the usual suspects. So [zl2wrw] dug into the hex dump of the data and figured out enough of the structure to manually recover the waypoints. Subsequently, a user on the forum found a document describing the file system used by Furuno GPS units, which proved to be a close match albeit after the fact. Alas, [zl2wrw] hasn’t publish the coordinates of those good fishing spots.
Have you had any successes (or failures) when it comes to reading data from old disks? Or have you encountered peculiar disk formats and/or file systems, where having a tool like this could have been helpful? Let us know in the comments below. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358387",
"author": "Jerry",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T15:05:17",
"content": "Sweet. Bookmarked..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6358421",
"author": "k-ww",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T17:14:25",
"content": "I worked ab... | 1,760,373,043.803707 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/review-inkplate-6plus/ | Review: Inkplate 6PLUS | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"Kindle hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"development board",
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"e-reader",
"e-waste recycling",
"electronic paper",
"ESP32",
"kindle"
] | While the price of electronic paper has dropped considerably over the last few years, it’s still relatively expensive when compared to more traditional display technology. Accordingly, we’ve seen a lot of interest in recovering the e-paper displays used in electronic shelf labels and consumer e-readers from the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Unfortunately, while these devices can usually be purchased cheaply on the second hand market, liberating their displays is often too complex a task for the average tinkerer.
Enter the Inkplate. With their open hardware ESP32 development board that plugs into the e-paper displays salvaged from old e-readers, the team at e-radionica is able to turn what was essentially electronic waste into a WiFi-enabled multipurpose display that can be easily programmed using either the Arduino IDE or MicroPython. The $99 Inkplate 6 clearly struck a chord with the maker community, rocketing to 926% of its funding goal on Crowd Supply back in 2020. A year later e-radionica released the larger and more refined Inkplate 10, which managed to break 1,000% of its goal.
For 2021, the team is back with the Inkplate 6PLUS. This updated version of the original Inkplate incorporates the design additions from the Inkplate 10, such as the Real-Time-Clock, expanded GPIO, and USB-C port, and uses a display recycled from newer readers such as the Kindle Paperwhite. These e-paper panels are not only sharper and faster than their predecessors, but also feature touch support and LED front lighting; capabilities which e-radionica has taken full advantage of in the latest version of their software library.
With its Crowd Supply campaign recently crossing over the 100% mark
, we got a chance to go hands-on with a prototype of the Inkplate 6PLUS to see how e-radionica’s latest hacker friendly e-paper development platform holds up.
Room to Grow
The average Hackaday reader is well aware of the capabilities the ESP32 brings to the table: right out of the box you’ve got an impressively powerful processor, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and some of the best power saving features available on a hobby microcontroller. It’s a perfect candidate for the sort of tasks most folks would want to do with an electronic paper display, and e-radionica were smart to make it the centerpiece of their product. They even sprung for the ESP32-WROVER version, with an expanded 8 MB of RAM.
Of course, if all you wanted was an ESP32 plugged into an e-paper display, you could get a module from somebody like Waveshare and be done with it. Which is why e-radionica included so many extra features on the Inkplate 6PLUS. You don’t need to wire in an external SD reader, because one’s already there. Need an RTC? All you have to do is slot in a battery. They even included a lithium ion charge controller and a connector for a battery pack, should you want to roll your very own e-reader.
Hungry for more? As you’d expect, the ESP32’s I2C interface can be used to connect up various sensors or even secondary displays should you need them for your project. But if you’re worried about the notoriously limited GPIO on the ESP32, don’t be. Since the Bill of Materials for the board already included a sixteen channel MCP23017 IO expander that the microcontroller needed to interface with the e-paper display, e-radionica decided to add another one in for good measure.
All of the pins for the secondary MCP23017 are broken out along the edge of the Inkplate 6PLUS, giving you plenty of breathing room for future expansions. The standard width pin header even includes ground and 3.3 V lines, which should make it easy to put together daughterboards which plug right into the back of the display.
Legendary Performance
Even though it’s arguably the star of the show, I won’t spend much time talking about the 1024 x 758 e-paper display on the Inkplate 6PLUS. That’s because anyone who’s used a first or second generation Kindle Paperwhite has already seen it. While it might be a couple revisions behind the screen used in the current generation Kindle, it’s still a fantastic display. This isn’t some hokey panel from a nameless eBay seller, it’s literally the same screen that once graced the world’s most popular e-reader.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/inkplate6p_video.mp4
Images and text are crisp, and the lightning-fast partial refreshes really complement its touch capabilities. While full screen refreshes still take a beat or two, the panel is more than up to the challenge of displaying dynamic data and interactive menus.
Hit the Ground Running
Between e-radionica’s thoughtful board design and industry standard display technology, there’s no denying that the hardware here is excellent. But in this community, that’s only half the battle. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to have competent open source libraries, plenty of example code, and documentation that’s clear enough for absolute beginners to understand but still deep enough to satisfy the hardcore hackers.
On all those fronts, I’m happy to say e-radionica has delivered. Getting the display running with the Arduino IDE is about as quick and easy as humanly possible: just add the URL for the board definitions, install the Inkplate library through the browser, and flash one of the examples. Depending on your operating system you might have to install drivers for the board’s CH340 USB-to-serial converter, but that’s it. At the time of this writing the MicroPython module for the 6PLUS was not available, but looking at the process for getting it up and running on the previous Inkplates, it looks like it won’t be much more difficult to get going.
Browsing through the official documentation
uncovers a wealth of resources, such as a complete API reference for the Arduino and MicroPython environments, and tools like the
web-based GUI designer
or
image converter
can really help jump start your project. Even if you’ve never worked with an e-paper display or touch screen before, the team has made sure you have everything you need to bring your idea to life.
A Worthy Investment
While overall I found the Inkplate 6PLUS hardware and software to be extremely impressive, I did notice a few odd quirks. The board would often fail to reboot itself after having new code flashed, and on several occasions went into a sort of rapid boot loop. The screen is also inverted in the current version of the library, requiring you to add
display.setRotation(2)
at the top of each program to get it into the proper orientation. But these are really very minor quibbles, and considering this is still prototype hardware, it’s entirely possible these issues will be resolved before it starts shipping to backers.
If there’s any real fault with the Inkplate 6PLUS for most people, it’s going to be the price. At $159 it’s a tough sell for those just looking to dip their toes in the water, but in truth, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If all you want to do is add a little e-paper weather display to your desk, this probably isn’t the product for you. Just grab a cheap 2.13 module from eBay and plug it into the header on a Pi Zero,
there’s plenty of prior art to get you started
.
But if you want a serious electronic paper development platform that’s fully open source and scalable to whatever project you could come up with down the line, you’d be hard pressed to find a better option than the Inkplate 6PLUS at any price. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358381",
"author": "dings",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T14:36:11",
"content": "Could be interesting if it was available without the Display.(Kindles with broken USB port are quite cheap)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358395",... | 1,760,373,043.865258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/rf-burns-and-exploding-pc-speakers-sophos-looks-at-the-evidence/ | RF Burns And Exploding PC Speakers: Sophos Looks At The Evidence | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"computer hacks"
] | [
"kernel driver",
"LKML",
"PC speaker"
] | Every year in the month of June, someone by the unlikely name of [R.F. Burns] posts a question to the Linux Kernel Mailing List asking whether a Linux kernel module is possible that would blow the PC speaker. It’s fairly obviously a joke, which is why the UK-based anti-virus company Sophos
have devoted a light-hearted blog post to it
.
The post is an interesting diversion into early PC sounds, when the only hardware guaranteed to be present was a small speaker hooked up to a bit on an output port. The bit could be cycled for square wave beeps, or with a lot of clever manipulation could put out a low-bitrate PWM that delivered almost intelligible sounds including music and voice. They conclude that since the speaker would have been designed to be at the full amplitude of the 5-volt output bit all the time it should be impossible to blow it from software, and we’d be inclined to agree. There’s a remote possibility that some speakers might have a resonant frequency that could be found in software, but we’re not entirely convinced.
Your Hackaday scribe might have spent a while in a university computer lab back in the day trying and failing to write C code that would produce a usable PWM on an XT speaker, but those with long memories might recall
the PC speaker driver for Windows 3.1
. If you’re a fan of chiptune music there are even
entire albums written for this most basic of instruments
.
Header image: MKFI,
Public domain
. | 24 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358344",
"author": "Markus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T11:31:02",
"content": "I once blew a speaker literally using a MiniCrescendo (elektor reading folks know what that was – Japanese Mosfets hardly to be obtained) with 40 Vpp and a looot of Amps floating on a 50Hz hum (fuses are f... | 1,760,373,044.043086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/even-with-ac-hazmat-suit-isnt-really-cool/ | Even With AC, Hazmat Suit Isn’t Really Cool | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"air conditioning",
"cooling suit",
"hazmat",
"suit"
] | We’ll admit that the coolness factor of an air conditioned faux spacesuit made out of a hazmat suit will largely depend on where you wear it. At your next chess club meeting, maybe a hit. On a blind date, probably not. [Saveitforparts] apparently doesn’t mind and the combination of very warm weather and the donation of an expired hazmat suit,
spurred his imagination as you can see in the video below
.
A battery pack, a blower, and a box full of frozen water bottles completes the ensemble. Wireless temperature sensors show the outside temperature as well as temperature inside different parts of the suit. Does it work? We guess it must, but the roar of the fan is deafening and we have doubts about the frozen water cooling system. On the other hand, if you’re shooting a low budget science fiction thriller, this might be just the thing.
Even [Saveitforparts] admits this isn’t really practical and, as we suspected, he decided to get out of it as the condensing water started to run down his legs. Turns out astronauts and tank drivers use an undergarment made with small tubes of flowing water to stay cool.
This project reminded us of the
positive pressure suit
we saw a bit ago. Not to mention the one that
went full body
. | 30 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358301",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T08:21:50",
"content": "Peltier pls",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358377",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T14:20:29",
"c... | 1,760,373,043.982705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/20/rock-a-bye-baby-on-the-mechatronic-crib-shaker/ | Rock-A-Bye Baby, On The Mechatronic Crib Shaker | Dan Maloney | [
"Lifehacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bed",
"Child",
"crib",
"infant",
"lead screw",
"mechatronics",
"parent",
"recirculating ball",
"sleep",
"stepper",
"toddler"
] | While an engineering mindset is a valuable tool most of the time, there are some situations where it just seems to be a bad fit. Solving problems within the family unit would seem to be one such area, but then again,
this self-rocking mechatronic crib
seems to be just the cure for sleepytime woes.
From the look of [Peter]’s creation, this has less of a rocking motion and more of a gentle back-and-forth swaying. Its purpose is plainly evident to anyone who has ever had to rock a child to sleep: putting a little gentle motion into the mix can help settle down a restless infant pretty quickly. Keeping the right rhythm can be a problem, though, as can endurance when a particularly truculent toddler is fighting the urge to sleep. [Peter]’s solution is a frame of aluminum extrusion with some nice linear bearings oriented across the short axis of the crib, which sits atop the whole thing.
A
recirculating ball lead screw
— nothing but the best for [Junior] — and a stepper drive the crib back and forth. [Peter] took care to mechanically isolate the drivetrain from the bed, and with the selection of the drive electronics and power supply, to make sure that noise would be minimal. Although thinking about it, we’ve been lulled to sleep by the whining steppers of our 3D printer more than once. Or perhaps it was the fumes.
Hats off to [Peter] for a setup that’s sure to win back a little of the new parent’s most precious and elusive commodity: sleep. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358271",
"author": "Mac",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T05:32:52",
"content": "I think mine was easier…. :/)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6358294",
"author": "Dad of self swinging babies",
"timestamp": "2021-06-21T07:35:2... | 1,760,373,043.920022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/print-your-own-flexures/ | Print Your Own Flexures | Chris Lott | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"flexures",
"living hinge"
] | Game developer and eternal learner [David Tucker] just
posted a project
where he’s making linear flexures on a 3D printer. Tinkerer [Tucker] wanted something that would be rigid in five of the six degrees of freedom, but would provide linear motion along one axis. In this case, it is for a pen or knife on a CNC flatbed device. [David]’s design combines the properties of a 1-dimensional flexure and a spring to give a constant downward force. Not only is this an interesting build in and of itself, but he gives a good explanation and examples of more traditional flexible constructs. He also points out
this site by MIT Precision Compliant Systems Lab engineer [Marcel Thomas]
which provides a wealth of information on flexures.
Shown in the relaxed state
Shown in the fully compressed state
[David]’s experiments showed that leaf-spring-like segments with a thickness of 0.4 mm provided the desired amount of force. We’re not sure how many iterations were required to arrive at this number — perhaps those mechanically inclined readers can offer up equations to predict the spring force ahead of time for a particular geometry. Even though printing springs of a precise force may be trial and error, at least 3D printers are good at making precise and repeatable thin-walled structures. Also note that since the spring force only needs to act in one direction, pushing into the paper or other working material, the spring design is asymmetric.
This approach is basically a living hinge of sorts, so there could be some longevity issues. On the other hand, yours truly has a small Tupperware pocket stamp container that’s well over 20 years old whose living hinge has yet to fail, so maybe they aren’t such a bad thing if done right. We wrote about
3D printing of living springs
before. Our writeup last year on
the Martian helicopter Ingenuity
has a good picture of flexures, metal not plastic, which are integrated into its landing gear / legs. Do you have any project which have used flexures like this? | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358791",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T03:07:32",
"content": "One of my favorite constant force compliant mechanisms:https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4624094If you want to dive deep into compliant mechanisms checkout “The FACTs of Mechanical Design” youtube channel:ht... | 1,760,373,044.178313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/flexible-prototyping-for-e-textiles-that-doesnt-cost-an-arm-and-a-leg/ | Flexible Prototyping For E-Textiles That Doesn’t Cost An Arm And A Leg | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"conductive thread",
"magnets",
"prototyping",
"velcro"
] | Let’s face it: pretty much everything about e-textiles is fiddly. If wearables were easy, more people would probably work in that space. But whereas most circuit prototyping is done in two dimensions, the prototyping of wearables requires thinking and planning in 3D. On top of that, you have to figure out how much conductive thread you need, and that stuff’s not cheap.
[alch_emist] has a method for arranging circuits in 3D space that addresses the harsh realities of trying to prototype wearables
. There’s that whole gravity thing to deal with, and then of course there are no straight lines anywhere on the human body. So here’s how it works: [alch_emist] made a bunch of reusable tie points designed to work with an adhesive substrate such as felt. They laser-cut a set of acrylic squares and drilled a hole in each one to accommodate a neodymium magnet. On the back of each square is a small piece of the hook side of hook-and-loop tape, which makes the tie points stay put on the felt, but rearrange easily.
We love the idea of prototyping with felt because it’s such a cheap and versatile fabric, and because you can easily wrap it around your arm or leg and see how the circuit will move when you do.
Not quite to this planning stage of your next wearable project?
Magnets and conductive thread play just as well together in 2D
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358808",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-23T06:20:58",
"content": "Those are some good ideas! I also really like the idea of using magnets to hold the conductive thread to the IO on the Lilypad. I’m going to have to pull out my Lilypad and try that out. Thanks for the tips!... | 1,760,373,044.22151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/doom-comes-to-the-nrf5340/ | DOOM Comes To The NRF5340 | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"doom",
"nordic",
"nrf",
"nRF5340"
] | If you’re looking for a reminder of how powerful the tiny microcontrollers that run our everyday gadgets have become, check out the work impressive work
[Audun Wilhelmsen] has done to get DOOM running on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340
. This is the sort of Bluetooth SoC you’d expect to find in a headset or wireless keyboard, and yet it’s packing a 128 MHz processor that can go head to head with the Intel 486 that the iconic first person shooter recommended you have in your old beige box PC.
That said, porting the open source shooter over to the nRF5340 wasn’t exactly easy. The challenge was getting the game, which recommended your PC have 8 MB back in 1993, to run on a microcontroller with a paltry 512 KB of memory. Luckily, a lot of the data the game loads into RAM is static. While that might have been necessary when the game was running from a pokey IDE hard drive, the nearly instantaneous access times of solid state storage and the nRF5340’s execute in place (XIP) capability meant [Audun] could move all of that over to an SPI-connected 8 MB flash chip with some tweaks to the code.
nRF53 Development board with I2S DAC
In general, [Audun] explains that many of the design decisions made for the original DOOM engine were made with the assumption that the limiting factor would be CPU power rather than RAM. So that lead to things often getting pre-calculated and stored in memory for instant access. But with the extra horsepower of the nRF5340, it was often helpful to flip this dynamic over and reverse the optimizations made by the original developers.
On the hardware side, things are relatively straightforward. The 4.3″ 800×480 LCD display is connected over SPI, and an I2S DAC handles the sound. Bluetooth would have been the logical choice for the controls, but to keep things simple, [Audun] ended up using a BBC micro:bit that could communicate with the nRF5340 via Nordic’s own proprietary protocol. Though he does note that Bluetooth mouse and keyboard support is something he’d like to implement eventually.
If some of the software tricks employed by this hack sounded familiar, it’s because a very
similar technique was used to get DOOM running on an IKEA TRÅDFRI light bulb a week or so back
. Unfortunately it must have ruffled some feathers, as it was pulled from the Internet in short order. It sounds like [Audun] got the OK from his bosses at Nordic Semiconductor to go public with this project, so hopefully this one will stick around for awhile. | 14 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358737",
"author": "dmitry Grinberg",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T20:55:23",
"content": "Article lost me at this nonsense: <>C-M33 is Little endian. stopped reading there",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358739",
"author... | 1,760,373,045.309177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/pi-pico-powered-atx-motherboard/ | Pi Pico-Powered ATX Motherboard | Chris Lott | [
"Retrocomputing",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"Micro-ATX",
"Paspberry Pi Pico",
"retro computer",
"rp2040"
] | For a couple of years, embedded developer and Rust addict [Jonathan Pallant] aka [theJPster] has been working on a
simple computer which he calls the Neotron
. The idea is to
make a computer that is not only easy to use but easy to understand
as well. He describes it as a CP/M- or DOS-like operating system for small ARM microcontrollers. His most recent project is powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 Pico and built in the format of a microATX motherboard. This board packs a lot of features for a Pico-based design, including 12-bit color VGA and seven expansion slots. See
his GitHub repository
for a full list of specifications, and all the files needed to build your own — it is an Open Source project after all.
Besides the Neotron Pico itself, a couple of gems caught our eye in this well-documented project. [theJPster] was running out of I/O pins on the Pico, and didn’t have enough left over for all the peripherals’ chip selects. Check out how he uses an MCP23S17 SPI-bus I/O expander and a tri-state buffer to solve the problem.
On a more meta level, we are intrigued by his use of GitHub Actions. Per the standard concept of repositories, they shouldn’t contain the results of a build, be that an executable binary or Gerber files. Distribution of the build products is typically handled outside of GitHub, using something like GitHub’s Large File Storage service, or just ignoring convention altogether and putting them in the repo anyway. [theJPster] uses another method, employing GitHub Actions to generate the files needed for PCB fabrication, for example.
The Neotron Pico is the latest in a series of boards made to run Neotron OS. Previous boards include:
Neotron 9x — Microchip SAM9X
Neotron 1000 — STM32H7 + Lattice Semi iCE40 FPGA
Neotron 600 — Teensy 4.1
Neotron 340ST — ST 32F746G-DISCOVERY
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358710",
"author": "retger",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T19:02:12",
"content": "Why only one cpu?why not 3 or 7? please 2 fpga, 2 smal signal cpu and meybe 2 differe archetecture",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6358742",
... | 1,760,373,047.071558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/human-google-ruth-freitag-issac-asimov-and-bibliographies/ | Human Google: Ruth Freitag, Isaac Asimov, And Bibliographies | Al Williams | [
"Biography",
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"bibliography",
"librarian",
"library of congress",
"profiles in science",
"reference librarian",
"ruth freitag"
] | You don’t often turn on a light and think, “That power company is sure on the ball!” You generally only think of them when the lights go out without warning. I think the same is true of search. You don’t use Google or DuckDuckGo or any of the other search engines and think “Wow! How awesome it is to have this much information at your fingertips.” Well. Maybe a little, but it is hard to remember just how hard it was to get at information in the pre-search-engine age.
I were thinking about this the other day when I read that Ruth Freitag had died last year. Ruth had the unglamorous but very important title of reference librarian. But she wasn’t just an ordinary librarian. She worked for the Library of Congress and was famous in certain circles, counting among her admirers Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan.
Ruth Freitag in 1985
You might wonder why a reference librarian would have fans. Turns out, high-powered librarians do more than just find books on the shelves for you. They produced bibliographies. If you wanted to know about, say, Halley’s comet today, you’d just do a Google search. Even if you wanted to find physical books, there are plenty of places to search: Google Books, online bookstores, and so on. But in the 1970s your options were much more limited.
Turns out, Ruth had an interest and expertise in astronomy, but she also had a keen knowledge of science and technology in general. By assembling
comprehensive annotated bibliographies
she could point people like Asimov and Sagan to the books they needed just like we would use Google, today.
Author Mark Littman wrote
Planets Beyond: Discovering the Outer Solar System
. The book contains an article and picture of an automatic asteroid finder from 1873, and Littman writes:
When in this book you find the names of people never fully identified anywhere else, when you find the phrasing precise, you know you have encountered the touch of Ruth S. Freitag of the Library of Congress. She has at her fingertips the most amazing information. It was she who contributed the vignette on the automatic asteroid finder. Her encyclopedic knowledge and unfailing good spirits make me very fortunate indeed to have her as a friend and mentor.
Automatic Asteroid Finder illustration from an 1873 work translated by Freitag
She was fluent in several languages, including German and Italian. She even contributed to the computer-age with her work with computer programmer Henriette Avram on
MARC
, an electronic library format. She didn’t just bibliograph astronomy, either.
The Battle of the Centuries
, for example, covers debates on when a century starts and ends. So was the 20th century 1900-1999? Or 1901-2000? You can see a bit of Ruth’s personality in the bibliography which starts with a song from a 1900 issue of P
unch
called
Song for the Year 1900
.
Ruth was known for helping Carl Sagan while writing
Comet
and dined with the likes of Isaac Asimov. She was an unusual woman for her time — spending 1945 to 1947 in China as part of the Army and working in London and Hong Kong at the American Embassy for six years. She graduated with a master’s in library science in 1959 and was recruited by the Library of Congress, where she remained until she retired in 2006.
As a young engineer, I remember seeking out the older engineers at work for advice. Now, nine times out of ten, people will turn to the Internet instead. I wonder if Ruth felt the loss of that the same way we do? | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358676",
"author": "Mark S.",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T17:05:04",
"content": "pssttt… Asimov’s first name is Isaac and not Issac. You might want to give Google a try some time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6358678",
"aut... | 1,760,373,047.191312 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/heatsink-makes-vr-even-cooler/ | Heatsink Makes VR Even Cooler | Al Williams | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"virtual reality",
"vr",
"vr headset"
] | Our first thought was that having big fins coming out of your VR goggles might not look very cool. But then we realized if you are wearing VR goggles, that’s probably not your biggest concern. (Ba-doom, tss.) Seriously, though, high-intensity graphics can cause your phone or device to get pretty toasty up there pressed against your face, so [arfish] set out to make a
heatsink
.
The build isn’t very hard. Some 0.8 mm aluminum sheet is easy to shape and cut. Thermal pads from the PC world help with heat transfer.
Thicker metal would make a better heat sink. So would ribbing to increase surface area. But both of those things would be a lot harder to work with. You do have to work with the sheet to make cut outs for the camera and maybe some other items, depending on your exact situation.
We wondered, though, if this would lend itself to competition like you see in PC cooling. After all, it wouldn’t be hard to mount a few fans and a battery — maybe the battery could go on the head strap or clip to your belt. Then water cooling can’t be far behind. We aren’t ready to lug a Dewar flask around with our VR gear, though, so there is a limit.
You may laugh at the idea, but we’ve
freezing Arduino overclocks
. Not to mention the
water-cooled flashlight
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358660",
"author": "voidnill",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T16:00:17",
"content": "I love it when some projects solve a problem in a very simple way. It doesn’t look so bad that it would interfere with the design of the VR goggles.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,373,046.959699 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/22/teardown-franz-crystal-metronome/ | Teardown: Franz Crystal Metronome | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Musical Hacks",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"4-bit",
"metronome",
"microcontroller",
"oscillator",
"vintage hardware"
] | I wish I could tell you that there’s some complex decision tree at play when I select a piece of hardware to take apart for this series, but ultimately it boils down two just two factors: either the gadget was something I was personally interested in, or it was cheap. An ideal candidate would check both boxes, but that’s not always the case. This time around however, I can confidently say our subject doesn’t fall into either category.
Now don’t get me wrong, at first glance I found the Franz Crystal Metronome to be intriguing in its own way. With that vintage look, how could you not? But I’m about as far from a musician as one can get, so you’d hardly find a metronome on my wish list. As for the cost, a check on eBay seems to show there’s something of a following for these old school Franz models, with ones in good condition going for $50 to $80. Admittedly not breaking the bank, but still more than I’d like to pay for something that usually ends up as a pile of parts.
That being the case, why are you currently reading about it on Hackaday? Because it exploits something of a loophole in the selection process: it doesn’t work, and somebody gave it to me to try and figure out why. So without further ado let’s find out what
literally
makes a Franz Crystal Metronome tick, and see if we can’t get it doing so gain.
For a More Civilized Age
Thanks at least in part to the selection criteria I outlined earlier, the build quality of most of the devices we’ve looked at in this series thus far has been questionable at best. With few exceptions, injection molded plastic and hot glue have been the artisan’s tools of choice. But this? This is something very different. For the first time, we have on the bench a piece of consumer electronics nestled into an solid wood enclosure that’s held together with actual nails. Nails!
Never thought I’d be pulling nails with this thing.
I understand this might not be quite as exciting for some of the more temporally experienced hardware hackers out there, but for those of us who had to read about the Moon landing in the history books, it’s pretty wild. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I actually like the idea, after all, prying all the nails out without scratching or denting the thing took considerable effort. But I can certainly see the appeal.
Put simply, the Franz Crystal Metronome is gorgeous. Its heft combined with the resounding clicks and snaps of the dials and switches on the front panel gives the impression of quality, and it genuinely feels like something you’d be proud to own and display in your home. Whatever this gadget cost originally was money well spent, and compared to the cheapo digital metronomes on the market today, I can absolutely see why some people are willing to pay a premium for one on eBay. All the more reason to get it back in working order.
Dead Trees and ICs
Getting the PCB out of the Franz Crystal Metronome requires you to take the device completely apart, which means pulling out all the nails on the front and back as well as uncovering the three screws hidden under the felt feet on the bottom. When all the fasteners are out, the case slides apart like some kind of puzzle box. It’s clever, but not exactly convenient.
I expected to see some kind of oddball vintage components inside, but the board is actually quite simple. Beyond a handful of passives, the star of the show is a National Semiconductor COPL421, a low-power entry into the COP400 family of 4-bit microcontrollers. Introduced in 1978, these chips were fairly common in early 80s electronic devices, and there’s a fair bit of information online about dumping the firmware from them should you be so inclined.
It’s interesting to note that, according to the COPL421 datasheet, one of the improvements of the low-power version is a wider operating voltage — 4.5 V to 9.5 V — compared to the standard COP400. That explains why there’s no obvious power regulation on the board, just a 100 Ω resistor between the chip and the 9 V battery that powers the metronome. Sure enough, with a fresh battery installed, the VCC pin reads roughly 8.9 V.
You sit on a throne of lies.
Now if you’re like me, you may be asking yourself where the crystal is. After all, the thing is called a “Crystal Metronome” right? Well I can only assume the name refers to the yellow CSB 455 down at the bottom of the board, a 455 kHz oscillator being used as the clock source for the COPL421. But while this component is critically important to the timing of the metronome itself, it’s actually a ceramic resonator and not a quartz crystal as we were promised.
It feels good to bring the vicious lies of the Franz corporation to the public after all these years. Though to be fair, “Franz Ceramic Resonator Metronome” doesn’t have nearly the same ring to it.
The Beat Goes On
At the top of this teardown, I said that the metronome was given to me in hopes that I could get it working again. After a quick once over confirmed the device was dead, a close inspection revealed the culprit in short order. Unfortunately, the fix is not nearly as exciting as you’re probably hoping.
It turns out that after a few decades of service, the 9 V battery contacts had badly corroded. With a trip to the parts bin and a few taps of the soldering iron, a new connector was in place and the device fired right up.
I considered replacing the capacitors
since
they’re often suspect after so many years of service
, but thanks to the relatively light duty these have seen, there were no obvious signs of failure. That said, should it start acting up again, the capacitors will be the prime suspect.
So at least for the time being, I’m happy to report that the Franz Crystal Metronome is in working condition and back with its original owner. Doing, you know…whatever the hell a metronome does. | 16 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358642",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2021-06-22T14:28:32",
"content": "Good to see that another one of these is kept ticking along",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6358644",
"author": "Ryan B Erickson",
"time... | 1,760,373,047.016746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/is-it-a-plasma-tweeter-or-a-singing-tesla-coil/ | Is It A Plasma Tweeter Or A Singing Tesla Coil? | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"plasma tweeter",
"tesla coil",
"tweeter"
] | When our ears resolve spatial information, we do so at the higher treble frequencies rather than the bass. Thus when setting up your home cinema you can put the subwoofer almost anywhere, but the main speakers have to project a good image. The theoretical perfect tweeter for spatial audio is a zero mass point source, something that a traditional speaker doesn’t quite achieve, but to which audio engineers have come much closer with the plasma tweeter. This produces sound by modulating a small ball of plasma produced through high-voltage discharge, and it’s this effect that [mircemk] has recreated with
his HF plasma tweeter
.
A look at the circuit diagram and construction will probably elicit the response from most of you that it looks a lot like a Tesla coil, and in fact that’s exactly what it is without the usual large capacitor “hat” on top. This arrangement has been used for commercial plasma tweeters using both tubes and semiconductors, and differs somewhat from the singing Tesla coils you may have seen giving live performances in that it’s designed to maintain a consistent small volume of discharge rather than a spectacular lightning show to thrill an audience.
You can see it in operation in the video below the break, and it’s obvious that this is more of a benchtop demonstration than a final product with RF shielding, It’s not the most efficient of devices either, but given that audiophiles will stop at nothing in their pursuit of listening quality, we’d guess that’s a small price to pay. Efficiency can be improved with
a flyback design
, but for the ultimate in showing off how about
a ring magnet to create the illusion of a plasma sheet
? | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357911",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T09:44:23",
"content": "One of the many problems with plasma tweeters is that the flame produces a continuous noise that gets mixed with the music. It’s hard to tell in this video because it seems like there’s a fan running in ... | 1,760,373,047.305978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/a-model-of-dry-humor/ | A Model Of Dry Humor | Brian McEvoy | [
"home hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"brown and sticky",
"craft",
"DK",
"donkey kong",
"fun",
"game",
"humor",
"model",
"n64",
"scale",
"treehouse"
] | If you want to see a glorious combination of model bananas in a treehouse mixed with a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor, you will appreciate
[Studson]’s build video
. Video also after the break. He is making an homage to Donkey Kong 64 from 1999, which may be a long time ago for some folks’ memory (Expansion Pak). Grab a piece of your favorite banana-flavored fruit and sit tight for joke delivery as dry as his batch of baked bark.
The treehouse uses a mixture of found material and crafting supplies. In a colorful twist, all the brown bark-wielding sticks are
green
, while the decorative greenery came from a modeling store shelf. It all starts with a forked branch pruned from the backyard and a smooth-sided container lid that might make you look twice the next time you nuts are buying a bin of assorted kernels. If you thought coffee stirrers couldn’t be used outside their intended purpose, prepare to have your eyes opened, but remember to wear eye protection as some of the wood clippings look like they could achieve escape velocity. The key to making this look like an ape abode, and not a birdhouse, is the color choices and finishing techniques. Judging by the outcome and compared to the steps, making a model of this caliber is the sign of an expert.
If you wish to binge on
wooden Donkey Kong
, we can grant your desire, but if you prefer your treehouses life-sized, this may
launch your imagination
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357893",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T06:44:15",
"content": "cool build, funny vid, interesting tips and the end result looks awesome!Thanks for posting",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6357905",
"author": "then... | 1,760,373,046.858659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/3d-printing-food-university-style/ | 3D Printing Food University Style | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"3d printing food",
"paste",
"paste extruder",
"syringe"
] | While refitting a 3D printer for food printing isn’t really a new idea, we liked the detailed summary that appeared from a team from the University of Birmingham which converted an i3 clone printer to use
a syringe extruder
.
The syringe in question was meant for veterinarian use and is made of metal. The paper suggests that the metal is a better thermal conductor, but it was’t clear to us if they included a heating element for the syringe. In the pictures, though, it does appear to have some insulation around it. In any case, we imagine a metal syringe is easier to keep clean, which is important if you are depositing something edible.
In addition to the syringe mount which they did in Tinkercad, the paper includes notes about software configuration. In particular, they modified Marlin and detailed the exact changes they made which might be useful if you were to embark on a similar project.
We are never sure about printing something you actually eat, but a syringe extruder like this could also dispense solder paste or other similar substances. Naturally, if you used solder paste in it, you’d probably never use it for food ever again.
We suppose pushing
cake frosting
out is no worse than other ways to do it, especially if you made sure you had a clean food-safe bed. Another common paste to extrude is
clay
which you can fire into ceramics. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357877",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T04:04:27",
"content": "Considering the mass production that’s food this will remain kind of a niche item where it’s strengths apply.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "635788... | 1,760,373,047.623974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/check-soil-moisture-at-a-glance-with-this-useful-display/ | Check Soil Moisture At A Glance With This Useful Display | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"moisture",
"soil",
"soil moisture sensor"
] | Keeping soil moist is key to keeping most plants happy. It can be a pain having to dip one’s fingers into dirty soil on the regular, so it’s desirable to have a tool to do the job instead.
[Andrew Lamchenko] built a capable soil moisture monitor, and equipped it with an E-ink display for easy readings at a glance.
The device is built around the NRF52810 or other related NRF52 microcontrollers, which run the show. Rather than using an off-the-shelf sensor to determine soil conditions, an LMC555CMX timer chip is used, a variant of the classic 555 timer designed for low power consumption. Combined with the right PCB design, this can act as a moisture sensor by detecting capacitance changes in the soil. The sensor is also able to send data using
the MySensor protocol
, allowing it to be used as a part of a home automation system.
The soil is tested periodically with the moisture sensor, and displayed on the attached e-ink screen. Since the e-ink display requires no electricity except when rewriting the display, this allows the sensor to operate for long periods without using a lot of battery power. The soil can be checked, the display updated, and then the entire system can be put to sleep, using tiny amounts of power until it’s time to test the soil again.
It’s a great example of design for low power applications, where component selection really is everything. We’ve featured [Andrew]’s projects before;
he’s long been a fan of using e-ink displays to create long-lasting, low power budget sensor platforms.
Video after the break. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357890",
"author": "sllw",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T06:35:50",
"content": "this is that big! why this is not integrate with water container ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6357899",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,373,046.910639 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/just-how-water-resistant-is-the-casio-f91w/ | Just How Water Resistant Is The Casio F91W? | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"casio",
"Casio F91W",
"F91W"
] | Water resistance is an important feature of a modern watch. It makes wearing the watch far more practical in this modern world of sudden rainstorms and urban water balloon ambushes. The Casio F91W, one of the company’s most popular watches, is claimed to be water resistant to “30 meters”, which in ISO parlance, means it is suitable for splashes and rain resistance only. [Rostislav Persion] wanted to get a better idea of what this really meant,
so set about investigating for himself.
The first step was to simply immerse the watch under 5.5″ of cold tap water while pressing the buttons and observing for any signs of water ingress. Already, the watch proved it is far more than just rain resistant, so [Rotislav] decided to disassemble the watch and learn how it achieved this.
Disassembly revealed that the watch’s case was entirely sealed, except for three buttons. The buttons, however, are specially designed in order to seal with the plastic case of the watch. Each button consists of a stainless steel pin, machined to be larger on the outside-facing side than the inside. The buttons also have a rubber O-ring seal to allow them to move in the case without allowing water to leak inside. [Rotislav] then compares the simple design to buttons used on watches with higher water resistance ratings, which boast multiple O-ring seals and more complex designs.
Given [Rotislav’s] results, we’d be far more confident getting our affordable Casio watches a little wet. Obviously, we wouldn’t expect to make a warranty claim if damage occurred from use outside the specs, but it’s clear the watch is far more capable than standards might suggest. If that’s not enough though,
you can always set about modifying the watch to improve its water resistance even further. | 25 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357833",
"author": "Just how water resistant?",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T20:13:46",
"content": "But the question still remains. How water resistant is the casio F91w. Down to 10metrs? 15meters? 30meters? 50meters? I need answers now that you have asked the question!",
"parent_i... | 1,760,373,047.586199 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/formula-1-tv-broadcasting-in-187-scale/ | Formula 1 TV Broadcasting In 1:87 Scale | Chris Lott | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"miniatures",
"model car",
"modeling",
"race car",
"video"
] | [Gerrit Braun], co-founder of the [Miniatur Wunderland] model railway and miniature airport attraction in Hamburg, takes his model building seriously. For more than five years, he and his team have been meticulously planning, testing, and building a 1:87 scale of Formula 1’s Monaco Grand Prix. Models at the
Wunderland
are crafted to the Nth detail and all reasonable efforts, and some unreasonable ones, are taken to achieve true-to-life results. In
the video down below
, part of Gerrit’s diary of the project, he discusses the issues and solutions to simulating realistic television broadcasts (the video is in German, but it has English language subtitles).
The goal is to model the large billboard-sized monitor screens set up at viewing stands. In real life, these displays are fed with images coming in from cameras located all over the circuit, the majority of which are operated by a cameraman. The miniaturization of cameras has come a long way in recent years — the ESP32-CAM module or the Raspberry Pi cameras, for example. But miniaturizing the pan-and-tilt actions of a cameraman, while perhaps possible, would not be reliable over the long time (these exhibits at Wunderland are permanent and operate almost daily). Instead, the team is able to use software to extract a cropped window from high-resolution video, and moving the position of this cropped window simulates the pointing of the camera. More details are in the video.
The skill and creativity of [Gerrit] and his team is incredible. Other videos on this project cover topics like the sound system, PCB techniques used for the roads, and the eye-popping use of an electric standing desk to lift an entire city block so workers can gain access to the area. Fair warning — these are addictive, and the video below is #76 of an unfinished series. We wrote about Wunderland back in 2016 when [Gerrit] and his twin brother [Frank] teamed with
Google Maps to make a street view of their replica cities
. Thanks to [Conductiveinsulation] who sent us the tip, saying that the discussion about
interconnected triangular PCB tiles
on this week’s
Podcast #122
reminded him of this for some reason. Have any of our readers visited Miniatur Wunderland before? Let us know in the comments below. | 11 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357818",
"author": "schlagbohrer",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T18:47:13",
"content": "The Miniatur Wunderland is amazing. I’ve been there multiple times and everytime you will find new stuff even on the “old” sections. Those dairy videos show the endless effort they put into the displ... | 1,760,373,047.120925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/do-you-spaceapi/ | Do You SpaceAPI? | Jenny List | [
"Hackerspaces",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"community",
"hackerspaces",
"spaceapi"
] | Here at Hackaday we’re privileged to be part of a global community of hackers, makers, technology enthusiasts and creative people whose collective works make our daily news feeds such a fascinating read. We encounter you all directly in the physical world rather the virtual one at the many events across the community, or at the various hackerspaces we visit on our travels. But how can we keep track of the world of hackerspaces when there are so many? Maybe
SpaceAPI
might hold the answer.
Many of the Hackaday staff are intimately involved with hackerspaces, whether as members, directors, or even founders. It’s something I’ve said numerous times as I’ve shown prospective members around Oxford Hackspace or MK Makerspace, that decent sized towns and cities worldwide have hackerspaces, so within reason anywhere you are likely to step out of an airport there will be a bunch of us in a room full of tools and parts somewhere within range.
There’s a Whole World Out There, If Only You Can Find It
The hackerspaces.org map of the world. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
With so many hackerspaces in the world, it can be difficult to keep up with them all. It must certainly be a headache for the maintainers of
hackerspace directories
, with new arrivals as well as spaces sadly closing meaning that a directory can only be as current as its last update. For those of us who follow the world of hackerspaces professionally it’s a struggle to keep on top of them all, and we know there will always be that amazing project posted on a hackerspace website that will pass us by.
An easy way to spot a space that’s active is to look at its website or social media feeds. It’s a pretty decent bet that since
my space in Milton Keynes
has a recent blog post, it’s an active space and that (pandemic rules permitting) you’ll be able to turn up on an open night and see the place (If you’re visiting MK please do, and take in
the National Museum of Computing
while you’re here!). But what about a space whose last activity was a year, or 18 months ago? Have they closed, or are they simply more concerned with running a space than updating their web site?
How SpaceAPI Can Help, And Why You Need It In Your Space
The RevSpace space state switch. Holly Hudson (
CC BY 2.0
).
Here’s where SpaceAPI can help: by providing
a standard JSON interface
to the space properties. This holds not only all the static details such as location and contact details, but also the address of the space’s project repository, and most interestingly an indication of whether or not the space is open. The JSON can be a static file, but in many spaces it’s generated by the space itself depending on whether or not there is someone in it.
The first hackerspace to have a SpaceAPI endpoint was
RevSpace
in the Hague, Netherlands, and if you visit their website you’ll see the current status as a banner on their logo. This and the status reported in
their SpaceAPI endpoint
is generated by a button in the space that operates their automation systems and turns everything on, the idea being that opening the space up and shutting it down is a single button press. I’ve stood in RevSpace and watched this happen, it’s one of those living-in-the-future moments that I’m sad to admit leaves us behind a little back home in MK. Those of you who read Hackaday regularly may remember our reporting on
the badge they created to mark their tenth birthday
, it uses SpaceAPI data to great effect in mapping the spaces in the Netherlands as an array of LEDs.
The SpaceAPI maintainers also publish
a directory
, from which
a variety of visualizations and other projects
draw their data. As this is being written there are 179 hackerspaces on the list, mostly from Europe but with a few from further afield. If your space isn’t on the list yet, I’d like to ask you to consider creating a SpaceAPI endpoint, and submitting it to the directory. Why should you do this? Discoverability is a key to success for a hackerspace, it means more potential members can find you and those with an interest in hackerspaces such as Hackaday scribes can as well. Finding a space exists and that it is active makes our day, and we think it can yours too.
Header image: RevSpace’s Decennium badge, which uses SpaceAPI data for its visualization. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357854",
"author": "ROB",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T22:47:27",
"content": "Oh look! There’s a hacker space only 4500 km from me lol.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357863",
"author": "Anita Space",
"timestamp... | 1,760,373,047.405644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/apollo-shift-register-is-discrete/ | Apollo Shift Register Is Discrete | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"apollo",
"DTL",
"ken shirriff",
"nasa",
"shift register",
"space"
] | We’re unabashed fans of [Ken Shirriff] here at Hackaday, and his latest post about an
Apollo-era transistorized shift register
doesn’t disappoint. Of course, nowadays a 16-bit shift register is nothing special. But in 1965, this piece of Apollo test hardware weighed five pounds and likely cost at least one engineer’s salary in the day, if not more.
The incredible complexity of the the Apollo spacecraft required NASA to develop a sophisticated digital system that would allow remote operators to execute tests and examine results from control rooms miles away from the launch pad.
This “Computer Buffer Unit” was used to hold commands for the main computer since a remote operator could not use the DSKY to enter commands directly. Externally the box looks like a piece of military hardware, and on the inside has six circuit boards stacked like the pages of a book. To combat Florida’s notoriously damp conditions, the enclosure included a desiccant bag and a way to fill the device with nitrogen. A humidity indicator warned when it was time to change the bag.
There is a lot more in the post, so if you are interested in unusual construction techniques that were probably the precursor to integrated circuits, diode transistor logic, or just think old space hardware is cool, you’ll enjoy a peek inside this unusual piece of gear. Be sure to check out some of [Ken]’s previous examinations, from
tiny circuits
to
big computers
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358073",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T05:12:51",
"content": "“Engineer salary per day”?More likely per month for such specialized test equipment manufactured individually in very small quantities.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,047.481365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/turning-gamecube-n64-pads-into-midi-controllers/ | Turning GameCube & N64 Pads Into MIDI Controllers | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino pro micro",
"gamecube",
"midi",
"n64",
"nintendo",
"nintendo 64",
"nintendo gamecube"
] | It’s fair to say that the Nintendo 64 and GameCube both had the most unique controllers of their respective console generations. The latter’s gamepads are still in high demand today as the
Smash Bros.
community continues to favor its traditional control scheme. However, both controllers can easily be repurposed for musical means, thanks to work by [po8aster].
The project comes in two forms –
the GC MIDI Controller
and
the N64 MIDI Controller
, respectively. Each uses an Arduino Pro Micro to run the show, a logic level converter, and
[NicoHood’s] Nintendo library
to communicate with the controllers. From there, controller inputs are mapped to MIDI signals, and pumped out over traditional or USB MIDI.
Both versions come complete with a synth mode and drum mode, in order to allow the user to effectively play melodies or percussion. There’s also a special mapping for playing drums using the Donkey Konga Bongo controller with the GameCube version. For those eager to buy a working unit rather than building their own,
they’re available for purchase on [po8aster’s] website.
It’s a fun repurposing of video game hardware to musical ends, and we’re sure there’s a few chiptune bands out there that would love to perform with such a setup. We’ve seen other great MIDI hacks on Nintendo hardware before, from
the circuit-bent SNES visualizer
to
the MIDI synthesizer Game Boy Advance.
Video after the break.
If you wanna be a cool nerd who uses video game controllers to play music, I’m doing a birthday sale, 20% off all the things! 🎮🎶
Code/Link👇 RTs appreciated 🙏
pic.twitter.com/GqBpGUFWLe
— Po8aster (@Po8aster)
April 30, 2021
[Thanks to Chris D for the tip!] | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6358145",
"author": "Yeshua Watson",
"timestamp": "2021-06-20T14:57:11",
"content": "I’ve done the drum thing with all the Rock Band sets that are staying to pile up in dumpsters due to new console incompatibilities. Although, I implemented the midi interface in software simply conv... | 1,760,373,047.524298 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/ipod-hifi-gains-new-high-notes/ | IPod HiFi Gains New High Notes | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"crossover",
"ipod",
"ipod hifi",
"speaker",
"tweeter"
] | The iPod HiFi was a stereo speaker add-on produced by Apple in the mid-2000s for their iPod range, a $300-plus speaker cabinet with twin drivers per channel, an iPod dock, aux, and TOSLINK interfaces. It’s caught the eye of [Jake], in particular one posted on Reddit that had an extra set of tweeters to improve the HiFi’s lackluster treble. The question was that it might have been an Apple prototype, but lacking his own
[Jake] set out to replicate it
.
The job he’s done is to a high quality. The baffle has first 3D scanned, and then recesses were milled out of it so the tweeters could be press-fit in. He’s driving them through a simple LC crossover circuit taken from the speaker drive, and reports himself happy with the result.
Unfortunately, we still don’t know whether or not
the Reddit original
was an Apple prototype or not. We’d be inclined to say it isn’t and praise the skills of the modder who put the tweeters in, but in case it might be we’d point to something that could deliver some clues. The iPod HiFi didn’t use a passive crossover, instead it had a DSP and active crossover, driving four class D amplifiers. If you find one with tweeters and they’re driven from the DSP through an extra pair of amplifiers then put it on eBay as a “RARE BARN FIND APPLE PROTOTYPE!” and make a fortune, otherwise simply sit back and enjoy the extra treble a previous owner gave it.
Of course, some people baulked at the price tag of the Apple speaker, and
made their own
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6486002",
"author": "edba",
"timestamp": "2022-06-22T08:59:24",
"content": "Hi, the Github images are not available. Could you please re-upload?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,047.66834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/1700-regulatory-approvals-revoked-in-south-korea/ | 1700 Regulatory Approvals Revoked In South Korea | Chris Lott | [
"News"
] | [
"international",
"legal",
"regulatory compliance",
"south korea",
"telecommunications"
] | For the first time since its inception, the Korea Communications Commission this week
revoked the regulatory approvals
of 1,696 telecommunications devices from 378 companies, both foreign and domestic. Those companies must recall unsold inventory from the shelves, and prove conformity of existing products already sold. In addition, the companies may not submit new applications for these items for one year. It’s not clear what would happen to already-sold equipment if the manufacturer is unable to prove conformity as requested — perhaps a recall? Caught up in this are CCTV products, networking equipment, Bluetooth speakers, and drones from companies like Huawei, DJI, and even Samsung.
The heart of the issue are what’s known as
Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs)
between countries to officially recognize of each other’s certification testing laboratories (or Conformity Assessment Bodies, CAB, in the lingo of the industry). Currently ten countries (USA, Canada, Mexico, UK, Israel, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, and Australia), the 27 member states of the EU, Taiwan and Hong Kong all have MRAs with each other. Based on these MRAs, a Korean manufacturer could have a product tested by a laboratory in Israel, for example, and all would be kosher with the KCC.
At the center of attention is the
Bay Area Compliance Laboratories (BACL)
, established in 1996 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. BACL has laboratories all over the world (USA, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and mainland China). Except for those in mainland China, all BACL laboratories are acceptable per the MRAs. The KCC
received a tip last year
that some compliance test reports for some products might be defective.
A six-month investigation in cooperation with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) resulted in the announcement this week. Korean companies, 378 of them to be exact, had submitted test reports from BACL Sunnyvale which appeared to be appropriate. But on further investigation, it was learned that the actual testing was done by BACL laboratories in mainland China and only the reports were prepared in Sunnyvale.
It’s not clear whether these companies were knowingly playing fast and loose with the rules, whether BACL was complicit, if it was just a misunderstanding of the intricacies of the regulations and MRAs, or a combination of all three. Regardless, the KCC said that intent doesn’t matter according the their rules. It also has not been suggested that the products themselves are problematic, nor has anyone suggested that BACL’s Chinese laboratories performed slipshod work — rather, the KCC says it has no choice but to proceed with the revocation based on the applicable laws. | 40 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357986",
"author": "Justin",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T20:26:52",
"content": "“Boss, our EMC testing failed.” “Well, just send it to China to get tested. They’ll pass anything.” Problem solved. I know a lot of bosses that would be ok with this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth... | 1,760,373,047.748054 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/vacuum-tube-magic-comes-to-the-741/ | Vacuum Tube Magic Comes To The 741 | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"741",
"op-amp",
"tube"
] | Some of you may remember a recent project that featured on these pages, a 555 timer reproduced using vacuum tubes. Its creator [Usagi Electric] was left at loose ends while waiting for a fresh PCB revision of the 555 to be delivered, so set about creating a new vacuum tube model of a popular chip,
this time the ubiquitous 741 op-amp
. (Video, embedded below.)
The circuit is fairly straightforward, using six small pentodes. The first two are a long-tailed pair as might be expected, followed by two gain stages, then a final gain stage feeding a cathode follower with feedback. It’s neatly built on a PCB with IC-style “pins” made from more PCB material, then put in a huge replication of an IC socket on a wooden baseboard.
The result is an op-amp, but not necessarily a good one. He looks at the AC performance instead of the DC even though it’s a fully DC-coupled circuit, and finds that while it performs as expected in a classic op-amp circuit it still differs from the ideal at higher gain. The frequency response is poor too, something he rectifies by replacing the feedback capacitor with a smaller value. Sadly he doesn’t look at its common mode performance, though we’d expect that without close matching of the tubes it might leave something to be desired.
It’s obvious that this project would never be selected as an op-amp given the quality of even the cheapest silicon op-amp in comparison. But its value is in a novelty, a talking point, and maybe a chance to learn about op-amps. For that, we like it.
We covered the vacuum tube 555 when details of it emerged
, but if op-amps are your bag
we’ve looked at a simple one very closely indeed
.
Thanks [Emily] for the tip. | 41 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357948",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T17:27:13",
"content": "Well, the 6dj8 tubes he’s using are used with an anode voltage of 24V, and they were designed to work with a typical voltage of 90V. If he increases the voltage, the tubes should work better.",
"parent_i... | 1,760,373,048.083432 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/growing-up-with-computers/ | Growing Up With Computers | Elliot Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"children",
"computers",
"education",
"newsletter",
"retrocomputing"
] | My son is growing up with computers. He’s in first grade, and had to list all of the things that he knows how to do with them. The list included things like mousing around, drawing ghosts with the paint program, and — sign of the times — muting and unmuting the microphone when he’s in teleconferences. Oh yeah, and typing emojis. He loves emojis.
When I was just about his age, I was also getting into computers. But home computers back then were in their early years as well. And if I look back, I’ve been getting more sophisticated about computers at just about the same pace that they’ve been getting more sophisticated themselves. I was grade school during the prime of the BASIC computers — the age of the Apple II and the C64. I was in high school for the dawn of the first Macs and the Amiga. By college, the Pentiums’ insane computational abilities just started to match my needs for them to solve numerical differential equations. And in grad school, the rise of the overclockable multi-cores and GPUs powered me right on through a simulation-heavy dissertation.
We were both so much younger then.
When I was a kid, they were playthings, and as a grownup, they’re powerful tools. Because of this, computers have never been intimidating. I grew up
with
computers.
But back to my son. I don’t know if it’s desirable, or even possible, to pretend that computers aren’t immensely complex for the sake of a first grader — he’d see right through the lie anyway. But when is the right age to teach kids about voice recognition and artificial neural networks? It’s a given that we’ll have to teach him some kind of “social media competence” but that’s not really about computers any more than learning how to use Word was about computers back in my day. Consuming versus creating, tweeting versus hacking. Y’know?
Of course every generation has its own path. Hackers older than me were already in high-school or college when it became possible to build your own computer, and they did. Younger hackers grew up with the Internet, which obviously has its advantages. Those older than me
made
the computers, and those younger have always lived in a world where the computer is mature and taken for granted. But folks about my age, we grew up
with
computers.
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
! | 78 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357940",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T16:44:34",
"content": "Z80 Assembly language is a tasteful snack for the eager mind of a teenager. Those were good times!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357942",
... | 1,760,373,048.304791 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/tell-time-the-cistercian-way/ | Tell Time The Cistercian Way | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"Cistercian",
"cistercian clock",
"led matrix"
] | It’s rare for the fields of the engineer and the mediaevalist to coincide, but
there’s a clock project bringing the two fields together
. The Cistercian monastic order used an intriguing number system from the 13th century onwards that could represent any four-digit number as a series of radicals expressed in the four corners of a single composite symbol, and it’s this number system that’s used by the clock to render the full range of 24 hour time on a large 5×7 LED matrix mounted on a wooden base.
Behind the scenes is an Arduino and a
DS3231
real-time clock, and
all the code can be found in a handy GitHub repository
. There’s even
a PCB from everyone’s favourite vendor of purple PCBs
, The result is certainly an interesting clock that makes the break from the usual binary and Nixie timepieces with some style. It also provides an introduction to this fascinating but obscure numerical system, in the event that any of us might have missed
the one other such clock that has made it to these pages
. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357916",
"author": "Val",
"timestamp": "2021-06-19T11:04:17",
"content": "Is this a prank clock for colour blind people?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357962",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2021-... | 1,760,373,047.932722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/hackaday-podcast-123-radioactive-rhinos-wile-e-coyote-jetpack-radio-hacks-3-ways-and-battery-welders-on-the-spot/ | Hackaday Podcast 123: Radioactive Rhinos, Wile E. Coyote Jetpack, Radio Hacks 3-Ways, And Battery Welders On The Spot | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday’s Mike Szczys is taking a bit of vacation this week, so Elliot is joined by Staff Writer Dan Maloney to talk about all the cool hacks and great articles that turned up this week. Things were busy, so there was plenty to choose from, but how would we not pick one that centers around strapping a jet engine to your back to rollerskate without all that pesky exercise? And what about a light bulb that plays Doom – with a little help, of course. We’ll check out decals you can make yourself and why the custom keyboard crowd might want to learn that skill, learn about the other “first computer”, and learn how a little radiation might be just what it takes to save an endangered species.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(55 MB or so.)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 123 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
Tell us your answer for this week’s “What’s that sound?”
. Next week on the show we’ll randomly draw one name from the correct answers to win a limited-edition Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. (How limited? So far, limited to four. But I’m sure we’ll make another in a couple weeks.)
New This Week:
Mike’s on vacation
The Mystery of Betelgeuse’s Great Dimming Has Officially Been Solved!
Carl Sagan: We are starstuff
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Waterslide Decals For Wingding Keycaps
Roller Skating, Wile E. Coyote-Style
Review: Battery Spot Welders, Why You Should Buy A Proper Spot Welder
A Battery-Tab Welder With Real Control Issues
Not Just Your Average DIY Spot Welder
Fit Your LCDs With Lenses For That Vintage CRT Look
Milling Dies And Injection Moulding Some Acrylic Lenses
Telescope Building with John Dobson – YouTube
2:3 Scale VT100 Terminal Gets Closer To Its Roots
2:3 Scale VT100 Terminal Reproduction
A Smart Light Bulb Running Doom Is A Pretty Bright Idea
Ice40 Runs DOOM
PrBoom – Project Homepage
Quick Hacks:
Dan’s Picks
Ham Radio Traffic Logger Using A Bug In Baofeng Electronics
APRS Implemented At Low Cost And Small Size
Balloon Antenna Doesn’t Need A Tower
Elliot’s Picks:
Alexa, Bring Me A Beer!
Digital X-Ray Scanner Teardown Yields Bounty Of Engineering Goodies
Recore Hacks The Hidden Microcontroller For 3D Printing
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Other First Computer: Konrad Zuse And The Z3
Rhisotope: Addressing Poaching By Making Rhinoceros Horns Radioactive | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,048.717892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/led-matrix-glasses-built-with-the-help-of-graph-paper/ | LED Matrix Glasses Built With The Help Of Graph Paper | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"led glasses",
"led matrix"
] | These days, there’s all manner of addressable LEDs out there that can be easily used to produce blinky, flashy projects. However, there’s nothing stopping makers from doing things the old fashioned way, and hacking together an matrix out of raw LEDs.
[Deepak Khatri] did just that with his own custom build.
Rather than rely on a PCB or other substrate to hold the matrix together, [Deepak] elected to freeform the design instead. A matrix of holes was cut in a cardboard template with the aid of graph paper. LEDs were then inserted into the holes in the requisite pattern, and their own leads soldered together to create the frame for the glasses. Additional wires that were needed were then installed, doubling as a bridge to allow the glasses to rest comfortably on the nose. Black epoxy was then used on the back side to block the light from blinding the wearer. The matrix is controlled by a pair of shift registers addressed by a microcontroller, and the display animates impressively smoothly.
it’s a fun build, and one that we suspect looks particularly impressive at night. They’d also make it easy for your friends to spot you in a dark club.
We’ve seen some impressively stylish LED glasses over the years, too,
dating all the way back to [macetech]’s
pair from 2012
. Video after the break. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357774",
"author": "seand",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T15:51:19",
"content": "Finally, I can have meme laser eyes IRL.Neat project but I wonder how much you can see when those things are on!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357... | 1,760,373,048.00734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/this-week-in-security-updates-leaks-hacking-old-hardware-and-making-new/ | This Week In Security: Updates, Leaks, Hacking Old Hardware, And Making New | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"android",
"ios",
"This Week in Security",
"wrt54gl"
] | First off, Apple has issued
an update for some very old devices
. Well, vintage 2013, but that’s a long time in cell-phone years. Fixed are a trio of vulnerabilities, two of which
are reported to be exploited in the wild
. CVE-2021-30761 and CVE-2021-30762 are both flaws in Webkit, allowing for arbitrary code execution upon visiting a malicious website.
The third bug fixed is a very interesting one, CVE-2021-30737, memory corruption in the ASN.1 decoder. ASN.1 is a serialization format, used in a bunch of different crypto and telecom protocols, like the PKCS key exchange protocols. This bug was reported by [xerub], who showed off an attack against locked iPhone immediately after boot. Need to break into an old iPhone? Looks like there’s an exploit for that now.
pic.twitter.com/zf1lZMbcUU
— ~ (@xerub)
May 28, 2021
Samsung’s Pre-installed Apps
Or if we were feeling less charitable, we’d call them bloatware. Either way, researchers at Oversecured took a look… and
found some problems
. First up is Samsung’s Knox Core app, part of their enterprise security system. This core framework file can install other apps, triggered by a world-writable URI. So first problem, anything that can load a file and call a URI can trigger an arbitrary app install. There is a second problem: part of that install process copies the app-to-be-installed to a world-readable location. This means that with a bit of work, any other app can abuse this to read any file this system app can read, and that’s all of them.
Up next is the managed provisioning app. This too allows installing apps, but has a built-in verification system, as it was based on Managed Provisioning from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Samsung added features, one of which is a flag to disable the verification. Oh, and this one installs apps as system. “Please install my rootkit, Samsung.” “OK”
And the last problem we’ll look at is the TelephonyUI app. It exposes a receiver, PhotoringReceiver, which takes two arguments: the URL to download, and the file location to write it to. This function does check that the remote server reports the file to be an image or video, but this is trivial for an attacker to spoof. The result is that an attacker can send an intent, download an arbitrary file, and write it anywhere on the phone as UID 1001, one of the system users.
Volkswagen Data Leaks
Volkswagen has just confirmed that
someone got access to a database
of their potential and actual customers. Their letter states that a “vendor left electronic data unsecured.” Based on previous breaches, this is probably something like an Elsticsearch instance exposed to the Internet. So there’s good and bad news here. The good, if you only made it into their database as a prospective customer, only your name, physical and email addresses, and a phone number are exposed. The bad? If you were an actual customer, that could include driver’s license number, date of birth, and SSN. Watch out for targeted fishing using the information, though the more likely scenario is something like unemployment fraud committed using the information.
EA Code Stolen
Though when it comes to source code, it’s not really theft, just unauthorized copying. Regardless,
an unnamed group claims to be in possession of 780 GB
of internal data and source code from EA, and is offering access for a mere $28 million. It’s unclear how the breach happened, but known bugs have been suggested, like the high-profile Microsoft Exchange bug from a few months back. Regardless, the dump includes the full source to FIFA 21 and FrostBite, EA’s engine. The really bad part is the collection of API keys and other secrets that were inevitably a part of the grabbed source.
The Data of Three Million Machines
Researchers from NordLocker discovered
a really big database of data
, which appear to have been collected by a network of trojans. How did that malware wind up on real machines? Mostly through cracked software, it seems. An illegal Photoshop download, a Windows crack, and a handful of games. So think long and hard before you’re tempted to fire up you favorite torrent client, you might just be inviting malware in.
The malware did quite a bit while it was active, too. It took a screenshot, as well as a webcam capture. Uploaded files from the user’s folders, captured and sent along passwords and cookies, and more. The whole trove of data seems to be 1.2 terabytes worth. Yikes.
Apple vs The EU?
If you haven’t noticed, a growing collection of people, companies, and now nations are taking issue with Apple’s walled garden approach to smartphone software. The ongoing litigation from Epic over the Fortnight game and the app store has perhaps the highest profile. But the European Union, thanks to their proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA), might soon enter the fray. This legislation aims to limit the power a digital gatekeeper can exercise over a market.
Tim Cook recently gave his thoughts on the idea
— not entirely positive. The biggest issue? The DMA would force Apple to allow app sideloading. The official response is that sideloading would “destroy the security of the iPhone.”
Now let’s chat about that for a moment. Is it a bit iffy to install apps on your device that haven’t been vetted through the official app store? Sure. If you aren’t careful, you’re likely to install apps with malware, and not have a Google or Apple working to detect and automatically remove the malicious app. On the other hand, it seems just a bit over-the-top to say that this would destroy the iPhone’s security. There have been plenty of vulnerabilities found in the last couple years that can compromise the device from a simple page visit. Not to mention malicious apps that have made it into the store.
Allowing you to install any application you wanted would break Apple’s stranglehold on the iOS app store. What this would mean, is that Apple would out on a whole lot of revenue from apps like Fortnight, who would be willing to build their own app store. So what do you think? Is this really the big security problem that Apple says it is, or are they just being protective of their walled garden and the benefits thereof?
Hacking a Router
Sometimes, exploits aren’t notable for how serious they are, but for how educational the write-up is. Firmly in that category is
this story of getting a remote shell on an ancient Linksys WRT54GL
. Quick note, the “L” there stands for Linux, and this particular router exists because the WRT54G was the grand-daddy of custom router firmware. A request for GPL code for the original router led a few hackers to put together their own firmware images, and DD-WRT and OpenWRT were both born out of the efforts. Router revisions happen rapidly, and soon the WRT54G had switched to VxWorks, and cut the flash in half, making support just about impossible for the custom firmwares. Enough customers complained, that Linksys re-released the older version as the WRT54GL.
History aside, [Elon Gliksberg] had one of the old routers, and decided to try to break in. Scan the ports with
nmap
, nothing interesting. The web interface? There is a diagnostic page that can send pings, so it probably runs a linux commands on the backend, so it’s worth trying something like
ping 192.168.1.1; echo hello;
That endpoint was sufficiently sanitized that it wasn’t a viable attack. A bit of decompiling did lead to one call of
system()
that could be abused, though. That call was in the post-upgrade logic, to restore the user-interface language. Set the language to some shellcode, and you get execution. From there, it was just the task of getting the reverse shell compiled for that specific device, and using the built-in
wget
to fetch it.
So here’s the irony: this vulnerability is launched as part of uploading firmware, and this device is just about the most widely supported target for custom firmware in the world. You can install your own Linux image on it with the same access this hack requires. Irony aside, the value here is waking through the process, which is well written out, and full of tips for trying to find your own exploit.
The WiFi Wart!
A couple weeks ago, we covered a nifty new project,
the WiFi Wart
. Well [Walker] is still at it, and
has an update on his progress
. There’s good news, like finishing the design of the first prototype boards, sourcing the components, and actually assembling a trio of the test boards. Then there was some bad news, like discovering the hard way that the Low Dropout Regulator (LDO) he ordered was a 3.3 V component, instead of the needed 2.5 V. That’s one board with dead components, and time spent waiting on the replacement parts. Such is the way of things, when building new hardware. We’ll keep you up to date with this promising project, as updates are available. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357801",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T19:34:28",
"content": "The right answer for what apple should be doing here is obvious. Have a physical “switch” which must be moved to enable such sideloading. A waleld garden is not a morally acceptable software ecosystem, but t... | 1,760,373,048.128473 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/mistaken-identity-piezo-actuators-not-test-pads/ | Mistaken Identity — Piezo Actuators Not Test Pads | Chris Lott | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"hard disk",
"hard drive read head",
"micro-actuators",
"milli-actuators",
"piezoresistive transducer"
] | One hard disk recently failed in the EEVBlog laboratory’s NAS. Keeping true to his catch phrase, [Dave “Tear it Apart” Jones] opened it up and
gave us an inside tour
of a modern hard disk drive. There are so many technological wonders to behold in modern HDDs these days — the mechanical design, electronics and magnetics, and the signal processing itself which is basically an advanced RF receiver — that we can forgive [Dave] for glossing over a system of piezo actuators thinking they were manufacturing test points. Even knowing they are actuators, you have to stare at them and think for a bit before your brain accepts it.
Later realizing the mistake, he made a follow-up video (down below) focusing on just the disk head actuator arms and this micro-actuation system (or perhaps they are milli-actuators). The basic concept is a pair of piezoelectric transducers mounted on either side of the short arm holding the read head. Presumably they are driven out of phase to flex the arm left or right, but the motion is imperceptible to the eye — even under magnification, [Dave] was not able to discern any motion when he pulsed the transducers. When you consider that these micro-actuators are mounted on the main actuator arm, which itself is also in motion, the nested control loop arrangement to maintain nanometers of accuracy is truly amazing. Check out
this 45 second explanatory video
by Western Digital which has a good animation of the concept.
If you want to see your HDD in operation without taking it apart, check out
the transparent drive
we wrote about last month. And to read more about esoteric actuators, check out
this article from 2015
which contains one of the longest words to appear in our pages —
magnetorheological
. If you’ve experience a hard disk failure, which thankfully is becoming rarer these days, do you chunk it or tear it apart? | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357727",
"author": "Slacker",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T11:31:04",
"content": "This is a sad video.Take a look at this guy’s channel takes them apart and repairs themhttps://youtube.com/c/hddrecoveryservices",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,373,048.361336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/18/blowing-a-5000a-fuse-takes-some-doing/ | Blowing A 5000 A Fuse Takes Some Doing | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"5000a fuse",
"fuse",
"photonicinduction"
] | Fuses are generally there to stop excessive electrical currents from damaging equipment or people’s soft, fleshy bodies when faults occur. However, some people like to blow them just for fun, and [Photonicinduction] is just one of those people. He recently decided to push the boat out,
setting his mind to the task of popping a 5000 A fuse in his own back yard.
(Video, embedded below.)
The fuse looks quite haggard after the event
It’s not a job for the faint-hearted. The fuse is rated at 5,000 A — that’s the nominal rating for the currents at which it is
intended
to operate. Based on the datasheet, the part in question is capable of withstanding 30,000 A for up to five full seconds. To pop the fuse instantly takes something in the realm of 200,000 A.
To achieve this mighty current, a capacitor bank was built to dump a huge amount of energy through the fuse. Built out of ten individual capacitor units wired up in parallel, the total bank comes in at 10,000 μF, and is capable of delivering 200,000 A at 3000 V. (Just not for very long.) The bank was switched into circuit with the fuse via a pneumatic switch rated at just 12,000 A.
The results are ferocious, with both the fuse and switch contacts blasting out hot metal and flashes of light when the power is dumped. It’s a heck of a display. We’ve featured big capacitor banks before too,
though they pale in comparison to what we’ve seen here today.
[Thanks to B1tbang3r for the tip!] | 37 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357687",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T08:13:54",
"content": "Insanely insane insanity here!I love it :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6357697",
"author": "Leander",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T08:45:29",
... | 1,760,373,048.436323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/scratch-built-tracked-robot-reporting-for-duty/ | Scratch Built Tracked Robot Reporting For Duty | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"night vision",
"node-red",
"remote controlled",
"rover",
"tank tread",
"tracked robot"
] | Inspired by battle-hardened military robots, [Engineering Juice] wanted to build his own remote controlled rover that could deliver live video from the front lines. But rather than use an off-the-shelf tracked robot chassis,
he decided to design and 3D print the whole thing from scratch
. While the final product might not be bullet proof, it certainly doesn’t seem to have any trouble traveling through sand and other rough terrain.
Certainly the most impressive aspect of this project is the roller chain track and suspension system, which consists of more than 200 individual printed parts, fasteners, bearings, and linkages. Initially, [Engineering Juice] came up with a less complex suspension system for the robot, but unfortunately it had a tendency to bind up during testing. However the new and improved design, which uses four articulated wheels on each side, provides an impressive balance between speed and off-road capability.
Internally there’s a Raspberry Pi 4 paired with an L298 dual H-bridge controller board to drive the heavy duty gear motors. While the Pi is running off of a standard USB power bank, the drive motors are supplied by a custom 18650 battery pack utilizing a 3D printed frame to protect and secure the cells. A commercial night vision camera solution that connects to the Pi’s CSI header is mounted in the front, with live video being broadcast back to the operator over WiFi.
To actually control the bot, [Engineering Juice] has come up with a Node-RED GUI that’s well suited to a smartphone’s touch screen. Of course with all the power and flexibility of the Raspberry Pi,
you could come up with whatever sort of control scheme you wanted
. Or perhaps even
go all in and make it autonomous
. It looks like there’s still plenty of space inside the robot for additional hardware and sensors, so we’re interested to see where things go from here.
Got a rover project in mind that doesn’t need the all-terrain capability offered by tracks?
A couple of used “hoverboards” can easily be commandeered to create a surprisingly powerful wheeled platform
to use as a base. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357678",
"author": "ExploWare",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T07:00:01",
"content": "that picture is not showing a Raspberry Pi 4 though",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357688",
"author": "three_d_dave",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,048.676801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/the-regulatory-side-of-rolling-your-own-moderate-solar-farm/ | The Regulatory Side Of Rolling Your Own Moderate Solar Farm | Donald Papp | [
"green hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"inspections",
"NEC",
"power company",
"power grid",
"regulatory compliance",
"solar",
"solar farm"
] | [Russell Graves] lives in Idaho and recently connected his solar installation to the grid, which meant adhering to regulatory requirements for both the National Electric Code (NEC) as well as complying with the local power company’s own regulations.
His blog post is an interesting look at the whole regulatory process and experience
, and is of interest to anyone curious about running their own solar farm, whether they have plans to connect it to the grid or not.
A circuit breaker that met NEC code, but not the power company’s requirements.
The power company has a very different set of priorities from the NEC, and part of [Russell]’s experience was in having to meet requirements that weren’t documented in the expected places, so study of the materials didn’t cut it. In particular, the power company needed the system to have disconnects with conductors that visually move out of position when disconnected. [Russell] was using NEC-compliant circuit breakers that met NEC code, but they didn’t meet the power company requirement for conductors that can be visually confirmed as being physically disconnected. Facing a deadline, [Russell] managed to finesse a compliant system that was approved, and everything got signed off just as winter hit.
How well does his solar farm work out? Sometimes the panels produce a lot of power, sometimes nearly nothing, but it has been up and running for all of winter and into spring. Over the winter, [Russell] pulled a total of 3.1 MWh from the grid, mainly because his home is heated with electric power. But once spring hit, he started pushing considerably more into the grid than he was pulling; on some days his setup produces around 95 kWh, of which about 70 kWh gets exported.
[Russell] didn’t go straight to setting up his own modest solar farm;
we saw how he began by making his own ideal of a perfect off-grid office shed
that ran on solar power, but it has certainly evolved since then and we’re delighted to see that
he’s been documenting every bit of the journey
. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357668",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T04:35:32",
"content": "A good friend of mine went through the visible disconnect when he plumbed is generator up to his house, even though the generator had an approved transfer switch. In the end the power company allowed him to ... | 1,760,373,048.612375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/review-battery-spot-welders-why-you-should-buy-a-proper-spot-welder/ | Review: Battery Spot Welders, Why You Should Buy A Proper Spot Welder | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Reviews",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"battery pack",
"battery spot welder",
"review",
"spot welder"
] | Making battery packs is a common pursuit in our community, involving spot-welding nickel strips to the terminals on individual cells. Many a pack has been made in this way, using reclaimed 18650 cells taken from discarded laptops. Commercial battery spot welders do a good job but have a huge inrush current and aren’t cheap, so it’s not uncommon to see improvised solutions such as rewound transformers taken out of microwave ovens. There’s another possibility though, in the form of cheap modules that promise the same results using a battery pack as a power supply.
With a love of putting the cheaper end of the global electronic marketplace through its paces for the entertainment of Hackaday readers I couldn’t resist, so I parted with £15 (about $20), for a “Mini Spot Welder”, and sat down to wait for the mailman to bring me the usual anonymous grey package.
This Welder Promises much…
The mini spot welder set up to use, with electrodes held in a vice.
What arrived seemed promising, a “Portable Transistor Mini Spot Welder” along with a pair of battery cables and some cables terminated with spot welding electrodes.
The module itself is a sandwich of PCBs on metal standoffs, with a main board holding power electronics and a daughterboard with part-number-sanded microcontroller and small OLED display. There are some control buttons and a power switch on the board along with a socket for a foot pedal, and the main board has screw terminals, a row of hefty MOSFETs, and a large electrolytic capacitor.
Along with the unit was a set of leads, the welding leads being terminated in a set of insulated except for their tip copper probes and the battery leads being unterminated. I fitted a pair of crimp eye connectors to fit my battery terminals. Also in the box was a piece of paper advising on the type of batteries suitable for the task, which boil down to something close to a car battery. I had a suitable sealed lead-acid battery to hand as well as a few dubious 18650 cells of the extremely lightweight obvious fake variety, so taking a short piece of nickel strip I set out to weld cell and strip together.
The tips of the electrodes, with a bit of discharge damage visible.
Powering up the device and experimenting with the buttons, it became apparent that there were two modes: an Auto mode that would operate it when it detected something to weld, and a manual mode for operating it via a foot switch. I happen to have a foot switch from another piece of equipment, so opted for that.
Otherwise there’s a power setting calibrated in “E”, with no explanation as to what an “E” is. In fact it’s a measure of energy in terms of the length of the power pulse pulse delivered by the device, and on power-up it’s set to the low end of the range at 5E.
I first tried to hold the two probes in one hand and apply them to strip and cell with the other, but found I lacked the dexterity to pull this off. Reaching for a small bench vice, I was able to position them both such that I could hold cell and strip together against their tips and operate the welder via the foot switch.
… But Delivers Little
This was the best the device could do to my test subjects.
Starting at 5E and setting out to find the point at which the device would do a successful spot weld, I increased the power in steps of 5E and tried a weld at each level. The lower levels made the two stick together but only to the point that I could easily pull them apart, so I continued. Sadly I never found the level at which it worked , because at 25E one of those MOSFETs failed to a short circuit with the usual magic smoke smell, and I was unable to continue.
The process of reviewing very cheap electronics of this type is something like playing a one-armed bandit. Sometimes you win the jackpot, but at other times the device turns out to be no diamond in the rough. It’s usual though
for it to at least do the job albeit in an entertainingly bad way
, so this case of it failing to destruction before I had even managed to get it to perform is particularly disappointing.
It’s evident that
there is something in the idea of a battery MOSFET spot welder
, but these cheap devices seem not to deliver. If you need to weld battery terminals find a more traditional spot welder, meanwhile as regards these battery ones: I bought one so you don’t have to. | 64 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357228",
"author": "gebi",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T14:06:03",
"content": "i’ve no idea how you came to the conclusion that battery spot welders “don’t deliver” in general…kweld (the one you linked to as MOSFET based spot welder) works great and reliable since years.Started using i... | 1,760,373,048.869131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/modular-box-design-eases-silicone-mold-making/ | Modular Box Design Eases Silicone Mold-Making | Donald Papp | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"adjustable",
"casting",
"magnets",
"mold making",
"resin",
"silicone"
] | Resin casting is a fantastic way to produce highly detailed parts in a wide variety of colors and properties, and while the process isn’t complicated, it does require a certain amount of care and setup. Most molds are made by putting a part into a custom-made disposable box and pouring silicone over it, but [Foaly] was finding the process of making and re-making those boxes a bit less optimized than it could be. That led to
this design for a re-usable, modular, adjustable mold box
that makes the workflow for small parts considerably more efficient.
The walls of the adjustable box are four identical 3D-printed parts with captive magnets, and the base of the box is a piece of laser-cut steel sheet upon which the magnetic walls attach. The positioning and polarity of the magnets are such that the box can be assembled in a variety of sizes, and multiple walls can be stacked to make a taller mold. To aid cleanup and help prevent contamination that might interfere with curing, the inner surfaces of each piece are coated in Kapton tape.
The result is a modular box that can be used and re-used, and doesn’t slow down the process of creating and iterating on mold designs. The system as designed is intended for small parts, but [Foaly] feels there is (probably) no reason it can’t be scaled up to some degree. Interested? The
design files are available from the project’s GitHub repository,
and if you need to brush up a bit on how resin casting works,
you can read all about it here
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357219",
"author": "stupid",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T12:54:13",
"content": "Legos and a plastic bag is the correct answer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357233",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,373,048.923663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/an-automatic-shop-vac-dust-extractor/ | An Automatic Shop Vac Dust Extractor | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"chop saw",
"dust extraction",
"shop vac"
] | Finding cheap or even free tools in the second-hand adverts is probably a common pursuit among Hackaday readers. Thus many of you will like [DuctTape Mechanic], have a row of old woodworking bench tools. The experience we share with him is a lack of dust extraction, which makes
his adaption of a second-hand shop vac
as an automatic dust extractor for his chop saw worth a watch. Take a look, we’ve put the video below the break!
The system hooks up a relay coil to the saw’s on/off switch, which controls the vacuum’s power. It’s thus not the most novel of hacks, but there are a few things to be aware of along the way and who among us doesn’t like watching a bit of gentle progress on a workshop project? The 120V current taken by both vacuum and saw sound excessive to those of us used to countries with 230V electricity, but the relay is chosen to easily serve that load. What’s nice about the automatic system is that being at the bench is not accompanied by the constant deafening noise of the shop vac, and save for when the saw is in use the bench is both dust-free and mercifully quiet.
If you happen to have a solid state relay in your parts bin,
here’s another way to achieve a similar result
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357181",
"author": "DL",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T08:31:40",
"content": "It’s “adaptation”, instead of “adaption. Third line.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357201",
"author": "Stu",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16... | 1,760,373,048.763329 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/aprs-implemented-at-low-cost-and-small-size/ | APRS Implemented At Low Cost And Small Size | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"APRS",
"digital",
"ESP32",
"inexpensive",
"modem",
"small",
"voice"
] | Before smartphones and Internet of Things devices were widely distributed, the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) was the way to send digital information out wirelessly from remote locations. In use since the 80s, it now has an almost hipster “wireless data before it was cool” vibe, complete with plenty of people who use it because it’s interesting, and plenty of others who still need the unique functionality it offers even when compared to more modern wireless data transmission methods. One of those is [Tyler] who shows us
how to build an APRS system for a minimum of cost and size
.
[Tyler]’s build is called Arrow and operates on the popular 2 metre ham radio band. It’s a Terminal Node Controller (TNC), a sort of ham radio modem, built around an ESP32. The ESP32 handles both the signal processing for the data and also uses its Bluetooth capability to pair to an Android app called APRSDroid. The entire module is only slightly larger than the 18650 battery that powers it, and it can be paired with a computer to send and receive any digital data that you wish using this module as a plug-and-play transceiver.
While the build is still has a few limitations that [Tyler] notes, he hopes that the project will be a way to modernize the APRS protocol using methods for radio transmission that have been improved upon since APRS was first implemented. It should be able to interface easily into any existing ham radio setup, although even
small balloon-lofted radio stations can make excellent use of APRS
without any extra equipment. Don’t forget that you need a license to operate these in most places, though! | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357173",
"author": "Lou",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T06:12:50",
"content": "…. he hopes that the project will be a way to modernize the APRS protocol….Why? There’s nothing wrong with APRS as it stands.The biggest problem is that almost no one has ever used the system as it was envisi... | 1,760,373,048.979324 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/art-with-technology-hack-chat/ | Art With Technology Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"animation",
"art",
"blender",
"gaming",
"Hack Chat",
"motion capture",
"stop motion",
"technology"
] | Join us on Wednesday, June 16 at noon Pacific for the
Art with Technology Hack Chat
with
Cory Collins
!
As hackers, we naturally see the beauty of technology. We often talk in terms of the aesthetics of a particular hack, or the elegance of one solution over another, and we can marvel at the craftsmanship involved in everything from a well-designed PCB to a particularly clever reverse-engineering effort. Actually using technology to create art is something that’s often harder for us to appreciate, though, and looking at technological art from the artist’s side can be pretty instructive.
Cory Collins
is an animator and artist with a long history of not only putting tech to work to create art, but also using it as the subject of his pieces. Cory’s work has brought life to video games, movies, and TV shows for years; more recently, he has turned his animation skills to developing interactive educational material for medical training. He has worked in just about every physical and digital medium imaginable, and the characters and scenes he has created are sometimes whimsical, sometimes terrifying, but always engaging.
Cory will stop by the Hack Chat to talk about what he has learned about technology from the artist’s perspective. Join us as we dive into the creative process, look at how art influences technology and vice versa, and learn how artistic considerations can help us address the technical problems every project eventually faces.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, June 16 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,049.504588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/cheap-expandable-floor-piano-plays-with-heart-and-soul/ | Cheap, Expandable Floor Piano Plays With Heart And Soul | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino mega",
"floor piano",
"leds",
"MPR121"
] | Ever since we saw the movie
Big,
we’ve wanted a floor piano. Still do, actually. We sometimes wonder how many floor pianos that movie has sold. It’s definitely launched some builds, too, but perhaps none as robust as
this acrylic and wooden beauty by [FredTSL]
. If you want more technical detail,
check out the project on IO
.
The best part is that this piano is modular and easily expands from 1 to 8 octaves. Each octave runs on an Arduino Mega, with the first octave set up as a primary and the others as secondaries. When [FredTSL] turns it on, the primary octave sends a message to find out how many octaves are out there, and then it assigns each one a number. Whenever a note is played via conductive fabric and sensor, the program fetches the key number and octave number and sends the message back to the primary Mega, which plays the note through a MIDI music shield.
We think this looks fantastic and super fun to dance around on. Be sure to check out
the build log in photos
, and stick around after the break, because you’d better believe they busted out some Heart and Soul on this baby. After all, it’s pretty much mandatory at this point.
Wish you could build a floor piano but don’t have the space or woodworking skills?
Here’s a smaller, wireless version that was built in 24 hours
. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357169",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T05:11:24",
"content": "I would like to see an isotonic layout, less reach more pads redundancy. With all the pads the same size, you could move to different types. Bayon or the other, or any layout.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,049.024228 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/developing-a-power-over-ethernet-stack-light/ | Developing A Power Over Ethernet Stack Light | Tom Nardi | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"dmx",
"ESP32",
"ethernet",
"PoE",
"power over ethernet",
"stack light"
] | A common sight on factory floors, stack lights are used to indicate the status of machinery to anyone within visual range. But hackers have found out you can pick them up fairly cheap online, so we’ve started to see them used as indicators in slightly more mundane situations than they were originally intended for.
[Tyler Ward] recently decided he wanted his build own network controlled stack light
, and thought it would double as a great opportunity to dive into the world of Power Over Ethernet (PoE).
Now the easy way to do this would be to take the Raspberry Pi, attach the official PoE Hat to it, and toss it into a nice enclosure. Write some code that toggles the GPIO pins attached to the LEDs in the stack light, and call it a day. Would be done in an afternoon and you could be showing it off on Reddit by dinner time. But that’s not
exactly
what [Tyler] had in mind.
An early Arduino-based prototype.
He decided to take the scenic route and designed his own custom PCB that combines an Ethernet interface, PoE hardware, and the ESP32 into one compact unit. It’s no great secret that it
only takes a few extra components to plug the ESP32 into the network
rather than relying on WiFi, but it’s still not something we see done very often by hobbyists. Rarer still is seeing somebody roll their own PoE solution,
but thanks to the in-depth documentation [Tyler] has provided for his circuit
, that may change in the future.
On the software side [Tyler] has developed a firmware for the ESP32 that supports both Art-Net and RDM protocols, which are subsets of the larger DMX protocol. That means the controller should be compatible with existing software designed for controlling theatrical lighting systems. If you’d rather take a more direct approach, the firmware also sports a web interface and simple HTTP API to provide some additional flexibility.
While it’s exceptionally impressive, not everyone will need such a robust solution. If you just want a quick and easy way to fire up your stack light,
a USB controlled relay and some Python can get you where you need to go
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357116",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T22:08:07",
"content": "Fairly cheap! That’s tens of dollars, at least!If you’ve got a 3D printer and a parts bin of LEDs there’s a model up on Thingiverse to DIY the whole build.https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4268994",
"... | 1,760,373,049.882342 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/cloned-memory-module-fixes-broken-scopemeter/ | Cloned Memory Module Fixes Broken Scopemeter | Dan Maloney | [
"News",
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"flash",
"fluke",
"memory",
"ram",
"reverse engineering",
"scopemeter"
] | Finding broken test gear and fixing it up to work again is a time-honored tradition among hackers. If you’re lucky, that eBay buy will end up being DOA because of a popped fuse or a few bad capacitors, and a little work with snips and a soldering iron will earn you a nice piece of test gear and bragging rights to boot.
Some repairs, though, are in a class by themselves, like
this memory module transplant for a digital scopemeter
. The story began some time ago when [FeedbackLoop] picked up a small lot of broken Fluke 199C scopemeters from eBay. They were listed as “parts only”, which is never a good sign, and indeed the meters were in various states of disassembly and incompleteness.
The subject of the video below was missing several important bits, like a battery and a power connector, but most critically, its memory module. Luckily, the other meter had a good module, making reverse engineering possible. That effort started with liberating the two RAM chips and two flash chips, all of which were in BGA packages, from the PCB. From there each chip went into a memory programmer to read its image, which was then written to new chips. The chip-free board was duplicated — a non-trivial task for a six-layer PCB — and new ones ordered. After soldering on the programmed chips and a few passives, the module was plugged in, making the meter as good as new.
While we love them all, it’s clear that there are many camps of test gear collectors. You’ve got your
Fluke fans
, your
H-P aficionados
,
the deep-pocketed Keithley crowd
— but
everyone loves Tektronix
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357405",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T09:10:51",
"content": "Wow, that’s amazing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6357422",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T11:06:34",
"content": "That memo... | 1,760,373,049.929873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/retrotechtacular-discovering-aerodynamics-with-the-chrysler-airflow/ | Retrotechtacular: Discovering Aerodynamics With The Chrysler Airflow | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"aerodynamics",
"automotive",
"car",
"design",
"retrotechtacular",
"streamlining",
"wind tunnel"
] | When you think about it, for most of human history we’ve been a pretty slow bunch. At any time before about 150 years ago, if you were moving faster than a horse can run, you were probably falling to your death. And so the need to take aerodynamics into consideration is a pretty new thing.
The relative novelty of aerodynamic design struck us pretty hard when we stumbled across
this mid-1930s film about getting better performance from cars
. It was produced for the Chrysler Sales Corporation and featured the innovative design of the 1934 Chrysler Airflow. The film’s narration makes it clear why the carmaker would go through the trouble of completely rethinking how cars are made; despite doubling average engine horsepower over the preceding decade, cars had added only about 15% to their top speed. And while to our 21st-century eyes, the Chrysler Airflow might look like a bulked-up Volkswagen Beetle, compared to the standard automotive designs of the day, it was a huge aerodynamic leap forward. This makes sense with what else was going on in the technology world at the time — air travel — the innovations of which, such as wind tunnel testing of models, were spilling over into other areas of design. There’s also the influence of [Orville Wright], who was called in to consult on the Airflow design.
While the Airflow wasn’t exactly a huge hit with the motoring public — not that many were built, and very few remain today;
[Jay Leno] is one of the few owners
, because of course he is — it set standards that would influence automotive designs for the next 80 years. It’s fascinating too that something seemingly as simple as moving the engine forward and streamlining the body a bit took so long to hit upon, and yet yielded so much bang for the buck. | 31 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357364",
"author": "Chris L Snyder",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T03:40:06",
"content": "looks like a lot of the products that came out of Europe in the 30’s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357379",
"author": "Mwil",
... | 1,760,373,049.391068 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/wood-and-brass-drink-temperature-monitor-looks-good-has-class/ | Wood And Brass Drink Temperature Monitor Looks Good, Has Class | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"9V battery",
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"IR temperature sensor",
"leds",
"lever switch",
"limit switch"
] | We’ve all been there. Your current project has hit a wall, or the next step will take days to complete, and you need something to do in the meantime. So you start a project that you envision will fit nicely in the gap, and then, inevitably, it doesn’t. Maybe it even takes so long that the original project gets finished first. So what? There’s nothing wrong with that, especially when the filler project turns out as well as
this drink temperature monitor disguised as a circuit sculpture
(video, embedded below). Just put your mug on the coaster, and the weight of it activates a hidden switch, which causes the sculpture to display its secret LEDs.
[MakeFunStuff] wanted to make something that looked less like a circuit and more like art, while building a tool that could determine the relative hotness of a beverage. Such a a useful circuit sculpture sounds like a tall order to us, but [MakeFunStuff] pulled it off with finesse and style.
The circuit is based around this Sputnik-looking standalone IR temperature sensor which, as [MakeFunStuff] aptly describes, is “a single-pixel infrared camera that picks up everything in a 90° cone starting at the sensor.”
[MakeFunStuff] paired this easy-to-use sensor with an Arduino Nano and five LEDs that show how hot a beverage is on a scale from 1 to 5. The sensor is hidden in plain sight, suspended from the top of the brass rod sculpture and blending in perfectly. We love that the LEDs are hidden behind a thin layer of carefully-drilled wood and agree that a drill press would have been much easier.
The code is set up for just about every temperature scale from Celsius to
Rømer
, so that solves that argument. [MakeFunStuff] went with the Kelvin scale because science. Our favorite thing about this video is that [MakeFunStuff] shared their failures and fixes as they built their way toward answering the questions of how to suspend the sensor over the drink, and how best to display the heat level while hiding the electronics. Go grab a hot cup of something and check it out after the break while you let it cool off the normie way.
We admit that we would likely zone out while waiting for the LEDs to disappear.
Here’s a smart coaster that uses an ESP8266 to send a message to Discord when your beverage has reached the perfect drinking temperature
.
Thanks for the hot tip, [Perry]! | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357341",
"author": "rpavlik",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T23:49:40",
"content": "What a lovely result, looking forward to watching the video. Circuit sculpture always looks so cool when well done, and this looks closer to my level (I struggle to make perf board look tidy…)",
"pare... | 1,760,373,049.467792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/repairing-a-300w-co2-laser-one-toasted-part-at-a-time/ | Repairing A 300W CO2 Laser, One Toasted Part At A Time | Tom Nardi | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"diy inductor",
"inductor",
"laser",
"power supply"
] | A couple months back, [macona] got his hands on a 300 watt Rofin CO2 laser in an unknown condition. Unfortunately, its condition became all too known once he
took a peek inside the case of the power supply and was confronted with some very toasty components
. It was clear that the Magic Smoke had been released with a considerable bit of fury, the trick now was figuring out how to put it back in.
The most obvious casualty was an incinerated output inductor. His theory is that cracks in the ferrite toroid changed its magnetic properties, ultimately causing it to heat up during high frequency switching. With no active cooling, the insulation cooked off the wires and things started to really go south. Maybe. In any event, replacing it was a logical first step.
If you look closely, you may see the failed component.
Unfortunately, Rofin is out of business and replacement parts weren’t available, so [macona] had to wind it himself with a self-sourced ferrite and magnet wire. Luckily, the power supply still had one good inductor that he could compare against. After replacing the coil and a few damaged ancillary wires and connectors, it seemed like the power supply was working again. But with the laser and necessary cooling lines connected, nothing happened.
A close look at the PCB in the laser head revealed that a LM2576HVT switching regulator had exploded rather violently. Replacing it wasn’t a problem, but why did it fail to begin with? A close examination showed the output trace was shorted to ground, and further investigation uncovered a blown SMBJ13A TVS diode. Installing the new components got the startup process to proceed a bit farther, but the laser still refused to fire. Resigned to hunting for bad parts with the aid of a microscope, he was able to determine a LM2574HVN voltage regulator in the RF supply had given up the ghost. [macona] replaced it, only for it to quickly heat up and fail.
This one is slightly less obvious.
Now this was getting ridiculous. He replaced the regulator again, and this time pointed his thermal camera at the board to try and see what else was getting hot. The culprit ended up being an obsolete DS8922AM dual differential line transceiver that he had to source from an overseas seller on eBay.
After the replacement IC arrived from the other side of the planet, [macona] installed it and was
finally
able to punch some flaming holes with his monster laser. Surely the only thing more satisfying than burning something with a laser is burning something with a laser you spent months laboriously repairing.
We love repairs at Hackaday, and judging by the analytics, so do you. One of this month’s most viewed posts is about a
homeowner repairing their nearly new Husqvarna riding mower instead of sending it into get serviced under the warranty
. Clearly there’s something about experiencing the troubleshooting and repair process vicariously, with our one’s own hardware safely tucked away at home, that resonates with the technical crowd. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357305",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T20:41:05",
"content": "LMLM2576HVT ? I think this one got an LM too much ;D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357306",
"author": "Cree",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,373,049.573489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/sunlight-based-life-clock-predicts-your-darkest-hour/ | Sunlight-Based Life Clock Predicts Your Darkest Hour | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"clock hacks",
"Solar Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino pro mini",
"e-paper",
"e-paper display",
"life expectancy",
"the hackaday prize"
] | The past year has been quite a ride for everyone on Earth. But you never know which day is going to be your last, so you might as well live a little, eh?
This clock doesn’t actually know when you’ll kick off, either
. But just for fun, it predicts the number of years remaining until you go to that hackerspace in the sky by hazarding a guess that’s based on your current age and the latest life expectancy tables. Don’t like the outcome? It’s completely randomized, so just push the button and get a set of numbers: the age you might die, and the percentage of life elapsed and remaining.
We love the design of this calculated doom clock, and it’s quite simple inside — an Arduino Pro Mini outputs the graph on an 2.9″ e-paper display, and both are powered with a 5.5 V solar panel. Just suction cup that puppy to the window and you’ll get automatic updates about your impending demise on sunny days, and none on cloudy days.
Want a more realistic picture of your mortality?
Here’s a clock that counts down to your 80th birthday
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357288",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T18:51:37",
"content": "The last bit will be like watching a big download complete on a 56k modem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6357291",
"author": "John Q. Public",
... | 1,760,373,049.624783 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/the-other-first-computer-konrad-zuse-and-the-z3/ | The Other First Computer: Konrad Zuse And The Z3 | Chris Lott | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"computer history",
"Inventor",
"Konrad Zuse"
] | Bavarian Alps, Dec. 1945:
Since 1935, Berlin engineer Konrad Zuse has spent his entire career developing a series of automatic calculators, the first of their kind in the world: the Z1, Z2, Z3, S1, S2, and Z4. He accomplished this with a motley group of engineers, technicians, and mathematicians who were operating against all odds. With all the hardships and shortages of war and the indifference of their peers, the fact that they succeeded at all is a testament to their dedication and resourcefulness. And with the end of the war, more hardships have been piling on.
Two years ago, during the Battle of Berlin, bombers completely destroyed the Zuse family home and adjacent workshops on the Methfesselstraße, where they performed research and fabrication. All of the calculators, engineering drawings, and notes were lost in the rubble, save for the new Z4 nearing completion across the canal in another workshop on Oranienstraße. In the midst of all this, Zuse married in January of this year, but was immediately plunged into another crisis when the largest Allied air raid of the war destroyed the Oranienstraße workshop in February. They managed to rescue the Z4 from the basement, and miraculously arranged for it to be shipped out of the Berlin. Zuse, his family, and colleagues followed soon thereafter. Here and there along the escape route, they managed to complete the final assembly and testing of the Z4 — even giving a demonstration to the Aerodynamics Research Institute in Göttingen.
On arrival here in the Bavarian Alps, Zuse found a ragtag collection of refugees, including Dr Werner Von Braun and a team of 100 rocket scientists from Peenemünde. While everyone here is struggling just to stay alive and find food and shelter, Zuse is further worried with keeping his invention safe from prying eyes. Tensions have risen further upon circulation of a rumor that an SS leader, after three bottles of Cognac, let slip that his troops aren’t here to protect the scientists but to kill them all if the Americans or French approach.
In the midst of all this madness, Zuse and his wife Gisela welcomed a baby boy, and have taken up residence in a Hinterstein farmhouse. Zuse spends his time working on something called a
Plankalkül
, explaining that it is a mathematical language to allow people to communicate with these new machines. His other hobby is making woodblocks of the local scenery, and he plans to start a company to sell his devices once the economy recovers. There is no doubt that Konrad Zuse will soon be famous and known around the world as the father of automatic computers.
Meanwhile, Back in 2021
It was 80 years ago that
Konrad Zuse
demonstrated his model Z3, an appropriate occasion to look back at his life and accomplishments. But despite the musings of our imaginary correspondent above, most people outside of computer history buffs have never heard of Konrad Zuse. How is it that someone created and built the world’s first programmable computer and yet is only a footnote in history?
Konrad Zuse had trouble finding his niche in life. As a young teen he seemed destined to become an engineer based on his interests and skills, always tinkering with erector sets and inventing gadgets. But he was also a talented sketch artist, photographer, and enjoyed acting in skits and plays. During his time at the
Technical University of Berlin
, he changed majors twice. Initially put off by the rigid conformity of mechanical engineering, he switched to architecture, only to find it equally boring. He finally settled on civil engineering, which struck the right balance between engineer and artist.
Zuse in 1935
After completing his studies in 1935, his first job was at the Henschel Airplane Works just outside of Berlin. But he quit after only a few months, turning his attention to something he had been pondering for some time — could he build a machine to automate those boring and repetitious engineering calculations?
How Should It Work?
Zuse was working in almost complete isolation from others in the nascent field of computing. And initially, at least, he wasn’t so much focused on a general purpose computer as we think of it today. His goal was to make an automated mechanical adding machine of sorts, to handle the tedious calculations such as those required in static stress analyses. Early on, he made a key decision to use binary rather than decimal. He rightly saw that this would greatly simplify the building of such a machine, no matter what the implementation.
You might think that the choice of binary numbers would immediately make relays the most obvious choice. And while he did experiments with relays, they were ruled too unreliable. Today we take for granted the reliability and quality of relays, but Zuse was living in 1930s Germany and operating on a shoestring budget supported by his family and friends. Relays were expensive, and they were designed to switch infrequently, not run continuously at many Hertz. The relays that he could obtain were more often than not discards his friends rescued from the trash at the local telephone exchange. Along with his friend Helmut Schreyer, they also experimented with using of vacuum tubes, but realized that technology would be significantly delayed due to wartime shortages.
Zuse’s Mechanical XNOR Gate
So how did he implement a computer without relays or vacuum tubes? It was all mechanical. Zuse devised a clever arrangement of plates, flat bars, and steel pins to make a digital memory store and a floating point binary arithmetic logic unit (ALU).
Print Your Own Z1 Mechanical Logic Gate
This
video
explains the basic operation of the mechanical adder (don’t let the fact that it’s in German discourage you from watching it).
If you want to dig into how Zuse implemented memory and an ALU mechanically, check out
[fjkraan]’s project explaining the basics
and OpenSCAD 3D printer examples you can make yourself:
Memory Cell Demo
Logic Gate Demo
Z1 Specs
The memory consisted of 64 each 22-bit words ( 14-bits of mantissa and 8-bits of exponent and sign). The ALU could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The program instructions were provided on punched tapes, and consisted of only eight operations:
Lu
input a decimal number
Ld
output a decimal number
Pr z
read from address
z
into register
r
Ps z
store from register
r
into address
z
Ls1
add two floating point numbers, R1 = R1 + R2
Ls2
subtract two floating point numbers, R1 = R1 – R2
Lm1
multiply two floating point numbers, R1 = R1 * R2
Li1
divide two floating point numbers, R1 = R1 / R2
The computer’s clock was equivalent to a four-phase CPU clock of modern times. But it was mechanical rather than electrical, and could be driven by either a hand crank or an electric motor. Each clock phase was one of four planar motions — imagine pushing a square plate a few centimeters North, then West, then South, then East back to the starting point. Each phase performed a basic operation, and fortunately no basic operation took more than three of these cycles.
As hinted to by the instruction set, Zuse also built converters to permit the use of human-friendly decimal numbers for input and output. Paper tape was too rare a commodity at the time, so another solution was needed. They found that blank 35 mm movie film worked just fine, and wrote their programs using a hand-held hole punch.
New Models Abound
The Z1 was finished in 1938, but was never very reliable. But it wasn’t meant to be a finished product, only a proof-of-concept prototype. Work next began on the Z2, which was planned to test whether relays could would be suitable. Zuse kept the mechanical memory for the Z2, but replaced the ALU with a relay version, but only operating on fixed-point numbers. It was completed and successfully demonstrated in 1938, whereupon Zuse received partial funding to build a successor model.
The Z3 was designed entirely with relays. It was basically an improvement on the Z1, was faster and more reliable. It was delivered and demonstrated on 12 May 1941, and then Zuse began construction of yet another computer, the Z4 mentioned in the introduction. The Z4 expanded on the Z3, adding new features like square root, punch tape output, multiple tape input units, and a conditional branch instruction. Zuse continued to use relays in the ALU, but returned to the mechanical memory because of its greater density. The Z4 was eventually put into full time service and operated from 1950 until 1959.
Analog to Digital Converter to Measure Wing Curvatures
As the Z3 project was underway, a request came from Henschel for help in the production of guided missile wings. Zuse built what are probably the first process control computers, the S1 and S2, and invented an analog to digital converter. These single-purpose computers followed the contour of newly-manufactured wings as a hundred analog-to-digital-equipped rollers measured their curvatures.
The machines would then automatically calculate the required trim for the tail surfaces and ailerons from this data, a task that previously been done by a dozen computers (people, not machines). After performing their jobs around the clock for two years, the factory was destroyed by bombing in 1944, and the S1 and S2 were either destroyed or possibly captured by the Soviets.
If you want to learn more about each model, check out this
extensive website
describing all the computers and much more. It was made by Konrad Zuse’s son who was born in the introduction above,
Prof Horst Zuse
, who became an electrical engineer, a software engineer, and an expert on computer history.
Logic and Math
Zuse and his team were able to switch back and forth between mechanical, relay, and even vacuum tube realizations of the computer components because of Zuse’s grasp on the underlying equations at work. He developed his own system of rules and notation, until his former math teacher told him he had reinvented propositional calculus, or Boolean algebra as is more commonly used today. By reducing the computer operations into equations, the design concepts were separated from the physical construction, making it easier to jump back and forth between implementations.
Zuse realized that with the framework, what we would call a computer language today, the computer could do so much more than just solve equations. He had been thinking of such a language since 1939, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, he spent much of his time formalizing what he called
Plankalkül
, the first high-level programming language for a computer — in English, it translates as
a formal system for planning
. Despite Zuse’s high hopes, Plankalkül never took off, although some say that elements of it can be found in Algol 58, albeit uncredited.
Patent Problems and Growth
Zuse made patent applications for many of his inventions, and a number of patents were issued. His patent for the computer itself, would be frustrated. He filed a patent application on 16 Jun 1941. It wasn’t until after the war in 1952 that the German Patent Office
published his claims
. No company in the whole industry objected, except for one — the
Triumph calculator company
filed opposition to the patent, later revealed to be backed by IBM. The court case lingered for years, only to ultimately be rejected in 1967 on the grounds that the invention was not worthy of a patent.
The innovation and progressiveness of the object concerned in the main application are not doubted. Yet a patent cannot be granted due to insufficient inventive merit.
In the meantime, Zuse had begun commercializing his own line of computers. There was a false start with IBM, who wanted the patents but wouldn’t let Zuse continue development.
Remington Rand
became an important early client, followed closely by the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
(ETH) in Zürich who took delivery of the Z4 in 1950. Business grew over the next 15 years, with a series of computers and even a plotter,
the Graphomat 64.
But by the mid 1960s the company was having financial troubles, and it was acquired by Siemens in 1967.
Replicas
As with many historical computers that have been destroyed or sold for scrap, there have been several recreations of Zuse’s computers built over the years.
Replica of the Z1 Computer
With support from Siemens, Zuse began a project in 1984 to reconstruct the Z1. It was completed in 1989 and is
now on display
at the
German Museum of Technology
in Berlin. Prof Raúl Rojas of the Free University of Berlin has written an
excellent, in-depth paper
on how the Z1 and its reconstruction work. Regarding this project, Zuse once remarked:
Back then, it didn’t function very well, and in that regard, this replica is very reliable — it also doesn’t work well.
Z3 Replica by Zuse in 1961
The relay-based Z3 has been reconstructed three times. First, in 1961, Zuse himself built a replica that is still on display in the
Deutsches Museum
in Munich. Again in 1997, Profs Raúl Rojas and Horst Zuse built a recreation that is now on display
Konrad Zuse Museum
in Hünfeld, Germany. And most recently, Prof Horst Zuse built an original size reconstruction which was installed at the Konrad Zuse museum in 2010.
Zuse as a LEGO Brick Man
And speaking of replicas, this is a replica of Konrad Zuse himself, in the form of a LEGO brick man, holding a relay storage unit from the Z3 computer.
Lack of Recognition
This month, the German Patent Office
wrote about Zuse
and had this to say:
Zuse had the misfortune to have made his most important invention in times of war. Otherwise, the practical, entrepreneurial Zuse might be known today not only as a technology pioneer, but also as the founder of a global technology corporation of the stature of Bill Gates.
It does make you wonder why Konrad Zuse isn’t well known and why his groundbreaking inventions and computers are often ignored. Whether or not he made the first programmable computer, his contributions were undeniably significant, well ahead of their time, and deserve better recognition. Konrad Zuse’s accomplishments are best summarized by Eric Weiss, who wrote
Zuse’s obituary
for the IEEE in 1996 :
Zuse was a man of many talents. He was a persistent, innovative, and extraordinarily creative engineering designer and builder, a mathematical logician, the founder of several successful computing manufacturing businesses, and an impressive artist. His countrymen and the computing world will remember him chiefly for the concepts of the first Z machines but also for his entrepreneurial companies, successfully created and operated, almost without outside help under the most trying conditions.
Below the break is a 1958 television broadcast with Zuse (English subtitles are available) and some additional resources about Konrad Zuse.
To Learn More
Konrad Zuse Internet Archive
Prof Horst Zuse’s website about Konrad Zuse
The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse
Zuse obituary IEEE
A Computer Pioneer Rediscovered, 50 Years On
The Computer, My Life
by Konrad Zuse, ISBN 978-3-642-08151-4 | 43 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357276",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T17:19:55",
"content": "2nd paragraph:“Two years ago, during the Battle of Berlin, ”Did you mean “Two years earlier”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357278",
"author... | 1,760,373,049.760802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/16/printable-hot-swap-sockets-make-keyboard-building-even-cooler/ | Printable Hot-Swap Sockets Make Keyboard Building Even Cooler | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"hot swap",
"hot swap sockets",
"mechanical keyboard"
] | Okay, so you want to build a keyboard — something crazy-curvy like the dactyl or dactyl manuform. The kind of keyboard that has to be hand-wired, because key wells and rigid PCBs do not play well together. You want to build this keyboard, but all that hand-wiring would mean that you can’t easily swap switches later. And it will means hours and hours of fiddly soldering. What do you do? You could buy or design your own switch PCBs, but again, those are rigid and space is limited inside of most of these designs.
If you’re [stingray127], you trade those hours of soldering for a week of designing and printing some
sweet little hot-swap sockets with wire guides
. This is version four, which is easier to print than earlier versions. They are designed to use through-hole diodes and 24 AWG solid-core wire and give a tight fit. Can’t figure out how to use them? [stingray127] has
a wiring guide with plenty of pictures
.
We really like this idea, and it makes the end result feel more like a totally hand-wired keyboard than individual switch PCBs would As you can see, it involves little solder. The only downside is that you can only swap a few switches at a time, otherwise the matrix might fall apart. But that’s hardly even a downside.
Just want to make a macropad?
You can easily print your way out of using a PCB for those, too
.
Via
KBD
and
r/mk | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357320",
"author": "Curlyknob",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T21:34:45",
"content": "Keyboardaday",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357333",
"author": "bbp",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T22:49:57",
"content": "C... | 1,760,373,049.668214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/using-heaters-to-display-time/ | Using Heaters To Display Time | Bryan Cockfield | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"display",
"ESP8266",
"heat",
"ntp",
"pcb",
"resistor",
"smd",
"thermochromic"
] | We’re always fans of interesting clock builds around here, whether it’s a word clock, marble clock, or in this case a clock using a unique display method. Of course, since this is a build by Hackaday’s own [Moritz v. Sivers] the display that was chosen for this build was a custom thermochromic display. These displays use heat-sensitive material to change color, and his latest build leverages that into
one of the more colorful clock builds we’ve seen
.
The clock’s display is built around a piece of thermochromic film encased in clear acrylic. The way the film operates is based on an LCD display, but using heat to display the segments. For this build,
as opposed to his previous builds using larger displays
, he needed to refine the method he used for generating the heat required for the color change. For that he swapped out the Peltier devices for surface mount resistors and completely redesigned the drivers and the PCBs around this new method.
Of course, the actual clock mechanism is worth a mention as well. The device uses an ESP8266 board to handle the operation of the clock, and it is able to use its wireless capabilities to get the current time via NTP. All of the files needed to recreate this are available on the project page as well, including code, CAD files, and PCB layouts. It’s always good to have an interesting clock around your home, but if you’re not a fan of electronic clocks like this
we can recommend any number of mechanical clocks as well
. | 9 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357626",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T23:24:30",
"content": "Nice clock!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6357627",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T23:25:37",
"content": "A very long time... | 1,760,373,050.299816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/upgrading-the-powerbook-100-with-a-fresh-new-battery/ | Upgrading The PowerBook 100 With A Fresh New Battery | Lewin Day | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"laptop",
"laptop battery",
"macintosh",
"Powerbook",
"powerbook 100"
] | The PowerBook 100 was one of the earliest Apple laptops released, coming not long after the breakout Macintosh Portable. Unlike modern hardware, it relied on sealed lead acid batteries. [360alaska] has such a laptop whose original battery is long dead,
so they set about building a replacement battery with lithium cells instead.
The battery and its associated support circuitry is a mite unconventional in its design, but it gets the job done. The build uses two lithium polymer pouch cells in place of the original four cell sealed-lead acid battery, to replicate the roughly 7.2V nominal voltage. Because of this, unfortunately the stock PowerBook charger can’t provide enough voltage to fully charge the LiPo cells up to their full 8.4 volts.
The workaround selected is that when the batteries fall below 80% state of charge, relays disconnect the cells from their series configuration powering the laptop, and instead connect each cell to its own single-cell charger board. Once charging is complete, the relays switch back out of charging mode so the batteries power the laptop once more. The only major drawback is that withdrawing the power adapter while the batteries are on charge will cut all power to the laptop.
It may not be perfect, but [360alaska] has succeeded in building a drop-in battery solution for the PowerBook 100 that can be used with the stock charger. Laptop batteries can be a fraught thing to deal with; often there are safeguards or DRM-type issues to navigate to get them to work around.
Sometimes open-source designs are the best solution out there. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357587",
"author": "Esot.eric",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T20:40:58",
"content": "Back when laptops could run off AC AND charge at the same time!I love seeing folk go to such efforts to keep machines like this alive. Emulation is fun and all, but nothing like the real thing, and some... | 1,760,373,050.046184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/a-tidy-octave-mod-for-the-casio-sk-1/ | A Tidy Octave Mod For The Casio SK-1 | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"casio",
"Casio SK-1",
"keyboard",
"sampler",
"sampling keyboard"
] | 1985 saw the release of the Casio SK-1, a compact sampling keyboard that brought the technology to a lower price point than ever before. However, one drawback of this was that it comes stock with only a 2.5 octave keyboard. [Jonas Karlsson] wanted a little more range out of the instrument,
so set about hacking in his own octave mod.
The build consists of fiddling with the SK-1’s microprocessor clock to change the pitch of the notes generated by the instrument. The original clock is generated by a simple LC circuit, which in this mod is fed to an inverter, and then a pair of flip-flops to divide the clock by four. The original clock and the divided version are then both sent to a mux chip. With the flick of the switch, either the original or downshifted clock can be sent to the microprocessor.
With the slower clock feeding the microprocessor, all the notes are downshifted an octave. The resulting sound,
which you can listen to on Soundcloud
, is similar to what you get when chopping down sample rates. It bears noting, however, that as this mod changes the master clock, other features such as rhythms are also effected.
It’s a great mod which gives the instrument a gloomier, grittier sound on demand. The Casio SK-1 has long been prized for its hackability;
we’ve seen them completely worked over in previous mods.
If you’ve got your own twisted audio experiments cooking up in the workshop,
be sure to drop us a line
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357812",
"author": "mjrippe",
"timestamp": "2021-06-18T18:29:19",
"content": "As the oscillator is an LC type, I wonder if it would not be easier to change the values of those two components via a multi-pole switch?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,050.091007 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/how-to-get-into-cars-land-speed-racing/ | How To Get Into Cars: Land Speed Racing | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"car hacks",
"cars",
"how to get into cars",
"land speed racing",
"Land speed record"
] | Land speed racing is one of the oldest forms of motorsport, and quite literally consists of going very, very fast in (ideally) a straight line. The higher the speed your car can attain, the better! It’s about the pure pursuit of top speed above all else, and building a car to compete is a calling for a dedicated few. If you’d like to join them, here’s how to go about it.
Faster, Faster, Faster!
A great example of the “36HP” Volkswagen class, which challenges competitors to set land speed records using only classic VW engines, with categories for various levels of modification. Note the aero wheels and raked stance. Credit:
Utah Salt Flats Racing Association
While taking the outright land speed record typically requires a jet-engined sled of singular design, there is plenty of land speed competition to be had in various classes for competitors fielding their own entries. There are vintage classes for older technology engines, still popular from the dawn of hotrodding, like Ford Flathead V8s and other contemporary motors.
There are also classes split by engine displacement, number of cylinders, aerodynamic modifications, or the type of fuel used.
Racers often pick a record or set of records they wish to beat – for example, wanting to set the the fastest speed for a gasoline-powered, naturally-aspirated four cylinder – and build their car to that end. Alternatively, a racer might build a car with a large V8 engine, for example, to compete in one class, and then disable several cylinders on a later run to try and snatch records in lower classes as well.
Events are often run on salt flats that have suitable space for cars to reach their top speed and still have a suitable runoff area, such as Bonneville’s famous Speed Week event. Tracks are usually on the order of five to eight miles long, with several miles used for slowing down at the end of a run. Competitors
are usually timed over several mile-long sections
to determine the speed figure for record purposes. Alternatively, smaller events are run on long runways or stretches of road, like the
Texas Mile.
In these events, competitors aim to maximise their top speed at the end of a mile from a standing start, with a suitable runoff area in which to slow down afterwards.
The Engine
It goes without saying that if you want to increase your top speed, more power is a great way to go about it. As with any build, the options available are endless, constrained only by your budget and the class rules within which you wish to compete.
If you’re looking to go the naturally aspirated route,
you’ll likely start with intake and exhaust mods. From there, cams and heads are the natural progression, before you get into the realms of a fully built engine with high-compression internals and a rev limit as high as the moon. If you want to add bulk power without so much hassle, however,
you might find that forced induction is more your speed.
A supercharger is typically a much easier install, but turbos can be cheaper and easier if you’re aiming for big gains.
Land speed racing has also long been a hot bed for wilder ideas around performance. Without concerns about long-term reliability, cornering prowess, excess weight, or quick acceleration, all manner of oddball concepts that are impractical in other motorsports suddenly have some merit. Nitrous oxide is par for the course, being a cheap way to add serious power to a motor. But the sky is the limit –
multiple-engine designs are common, and all manner of weird fuels are too.
If you can build it, and have it hang together for a few miles of continuous wide-open-throttle, there’s likely a class for you to compete in.
Aero
The famous Roadkill Camaro built for land speed racing. Note the rake, front bumper design and engine cowling – all done to reduce drag on the vehicle. Source:
Hot Rod
Aerodynamics is key to success in land speed racing. However, unlike track disciplines, which focus heavily on downforce, land speed racing is concerned most of all with drag. After all, assuming a vehicle is not limited by gearing, top speed is reached when the propulsive force generated by the engine is equal to the forces trying to slow the car down – like rolling resistance and of course, aerodynamic drag.
At highway speeds and above, aerodynamic drag dominates these forces. Thus, reducing aerodynamic drag increases top speed, and often significantly. The power needed to overcome drag is proportional to the cube of speed, so for double the speed, eight times as much power is needed. Thus, small reductions in drag can have major benefits.
At the mild level for competitors with street cars, taping up panel gaps and blocking out parts of a car’s radiator can help reduce drag by a few percent – useful if you’re close to breaking a record but haven’t quite got there yet. Other simple mods involve changing ride height to reduce the car’s profile, and adding rake – a slope front-to-rear – can help and also add stability at higher speeds. Pulling off extraneous protrusions like side mirrors and indicators can help, too.
One of the more famous belly tankers ever built, this one constructed by Bill Burke from a drop tank originally designed for the P-38 fighter. Source:
Silodrome
Further modifications involve custom bodywork, often homebrewed in wood, fiberglass, or metal, to smooth the car’s lines and reduce that drag coefficient ever lower to make the most out of every available horsepower on tap. Custom bonnets, cowlings and boattails can all make a difference and help clinch a record. Even if such additions are heavy and cumbersome, weight only really matters for acceleration, not final speed. For land speed courses that are many miles long, slower acceleration isn’t a problem – so the gains to top speed are all that matters.
At the extreme end, the pursuit of lower drag ends up with custom built streamliners. Some of the most well known are
the belly-tank racers,
built out of ex-military drop tanks from World War II aircraft in the mid-20th century. These had the benefit of already being designed for minimum drag, and were cut up and fitted with engines and drivetrains to compete out on the salt. However, many different designs exist, with their constructions spanning everything from home-built tube framed racers to heavily-sponsored all-composite designs. In these builds, drivers often lay supine or prone to minimise frontal area, while streamlined bodywork helps minimise the coefficient of drag as well. Building one of these machines is no mean feat, but a challenge relished by the dedicated competitors of the land speed set.
Other Considerations
The top gear you need at speed might stall out your motor if you’re starting from a dead stop. Thus many competitors at the higher levels also bring a pickup truck outfitted with tyres or rubber bumpers on the front.
This is known as a
push truck
,
and they’re used to literally push the land speed vehicle up to speed at the start of a run to get them going. It’s unlikely you’ll need one when you’re starting out, but it’s something to consider down the road if you’re undertaking an advanced streamliner build with exceptionally long gears.
Push trucks don’t have to be anything special, but play an important role out on the salt. Source: Hot Rod
It goes without saying, but safety is a big deal in land speed racing, as it is in all motorsports. However, land speed events pose unique challenges. Often run in far-flung locations, medical facilities can be a long ride away, and the high speeds involved mean that even a minor mechanical failure can turn to disaster in the blink of an eye. Thus, the organisations that run such events take safety very seriously.
Lower-tier street car classes may only require minor levels of personal protective gear, such as race suits and helmets, depending on the venue and organisation. However, those competing at higher speeds may require a more advanced setup like HANS devices, harnesses, and roll cages. Active safety gear, such as fire extinguishers or even automatic suppression systems, are common requirements. Parachutes may even be required, to help slow cars safely rather than relying solely on brakes. It pays to follow the safety regulations to the letter, both so one can live on to contest future events, and to avoid the disappointment of not competing due to failing scrutineering. The volunteers who run these safety checks are to be respected – they’re looking out for everyone at the end of the day!
Land speed racing is one of the purest motorsport pursuits out there, focusing on maximising just one number above all others. Diehard adherents have an almost religious fervor, heading out to the hallowed salt to worship at the altar of speed. It’s worth making a trip as a spectator just to see what all the fuss is about – and you may just find yourself with a new addiction! | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357561",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T18:35:44",
"content": "I remember seeing on TV (must’ve been late 1990’s) a “race” on a salt flat between a Dodge Viper or so and something that I remember as the Thrust SSC but might’ve been another car. The Viper just split whil... | 1,760,373,050.212772 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/the-ridiculous-gamecube-keyboard-controller-gets-modded/ | The Ridiculous GameCube Keyboard Controller Gets Modded | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"gamecube",
"gamecube keyboard",
"keyboard",
"nintendo",
"nintendo gamecube"
] | Believe it or not, there was a keyboard peripheral sold for the original GameCube, and it was built into the middle of a controller. Designed for the Phantasy Star Online games, it allowed players to easily communicate with others via chat. [peachewire] got their hands on one,
and set about modifying it in the way only a true keyboard fanatic could.
The result is a gloriously colorful keyboard and controller set up to work with a PC. The stock membrane keyboard was removed entirely, which is possible without interfering with the gamepad hardware inside the controller shell. It was replaced with a Preonic keyboard PCB, fitted with
Lubed Glorious Panda switches
and those wonderful pastel
DSA Vilebloom keycaps
. The keyboard also features a Durock screw-in stabilizer to make sure the space key has a nice smooth action. The controller itself received a set of colored buttons to match the theme, setting off the aesthetic. It’s still fully functional, and can be used with an adapter to play games on the attached PC.
Overall, it’s a tidy controller casemod and one hell of a conversation starter when the crew are scoping out your battlestation. The added weight might make it a little straining for long gaming sessions in controller mode, but it looks so pretty we’re sure we wouldn’t notice.
We’ve seen keyboards and Nintendo mashed up before;
this Smash Bros. controller makes excellent use of high quality keyswitches
. Video after the break. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357616",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T22:36:50",
"content": "It still completely baffles me that this product existed at all, cool mod though!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357650",
"author": "Steven... | 1,760,373,050.256092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/where-are-all-the-cheap-x86-single-board-pcs/ | Where Are All The Cheap X86 Single Board PCs? | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"amd",
"CPU architecture",
"intel",
"raspberry pi",
"single board computer",
"x86"
] | If we were to think of a retrocomputer, the chances are we might have something from the classic 8-bit days or maybe a game console spring to mind. It’s almost a shock to see mundane desktop PCs of the DOS and Pentium era join them, but those machines now form an important way to play DOS and Windows 95 games which are unsuited to more modern operating systems. For those who wish to play the games on appropriate hardware without a grubby beige mini-tower and a huge CRT monitor, there’s even the option to buy one of these machines new: in the form of a much more svelte Pentium-based PC104 industrial PC.
In A World Of Cheap Chips, Why No Intel?
Intel’s Galileo and Edison boards hardly set the world of embedded computing on fire. Regi51,
CC0
.
Having a small diversion into the world of PC104 boards after a recent Hackaday piece it was first fascinating to see what 486 and Pentium-class processors and systems-on-chip are still being manufactured, but also surprising to find just how expensive the boards containing them can be. When an unexceptional Linux-capable ARM-based SBC can be had for under $10 it poses a question: why are there very few corresponding x86 boards with SoCs giving us the commoditised PC hardware we’re used to running our mainstream distributions on? The answer lies as much in the story of what ARM got right as it does in whether x86 processors had it in them for such boards to have happened.
Imagine for a minute an alternative timeline for the last three decades. It’s our timeline so the network never canned
Firefly,
but more importantly, the timeline of microprocessor evolution took a different turn as ARM was never spun out from Acorn and its architecture languished as an interesting niche processor found only in Acorn’s Archimedes line. In this late 1990s parallel universe without ARM, what happened next?
Imagine the chain of events started by this early ARM chip never happened. Peter Howkins,
CC BY-SA 3.0
.
When Intel’s Pentium was the dominant processor it seemed that a bewildering array of companies were fighting to provide alternatives. You’ll be familiar with Intel, AMD, and Cyrix, and you’ll maybe know Transmeta as the one-time employer of Linus Torvalds but we wouldn’t be surprised if x86 offerings from the likes of Rise Technologies, NexGen, IDT, or National Semiconductor have passed you by.
This was a time during which RISC cores were generally regarded as the Next Big Thing, so some of these companies’ designs were much more efficient hybrid RISC/CISC cores that debuted the type of architectures you’ll find in a modern desktop x86 chip. We know that as the 1990s turned into the 2000s most of these companies faded away into corporate acquisition so by now the choice for a desktop is limited to AMD and Intel. But had ARM not filled the niche of a powerful low-power and low-cost processor core, would those also-ran processors have stepped up to the plate?
It’s quite likely that they would have in some form, and perhaps your Raspberry Pi might have a chip from VIA or IDT instead of its Broadcom part. All those “Will it run Windows?” questions on the Raspberry Pi forums would be answered, and almost any PC Linux distro could be installed and run without problems. So given that all this didn’t happen it’s time to duck back into the
real
timeline. What did ARM get right, and what are the obstacles to an x86 Raspberry Pi or similar?
Sell IP, Win The Day
If you know one thing about ARM, it’s that they aren’t a semiconductor company as such. Instead they’re a semiconductor IP company; you can’t buy an ARM chip but instead you can buy chips from a host of other companies that contain an ARM core. By contrast the world of x86 has lacked a player prepared to so freely licence their cores, and thus the sheer diversity of the ARM market has not been replicated. With a fraction of the numbers of x86 SoC vendors compared to ones sporting ARM there simply isn’t the cheap enough competition for those ten dollar boards.
Somewhere underneath all that heatsink is an x86 SBC.
Then there is the question of power. There is a tale of the very first ARM chip delivered to Acorn powering itself parasitically from the logic 1 signals on its bus when its power was disconnected, and whether true or not it remains that ARM processors have historically sipped power compared to even the most power-efficient of their x86 counterparts. Those x86 chips that do reach comparable power consumption are few and far between. Thus those small x86 boards that do exist will often have extravagant heatsink needs and power consumption figures compared to their ARM equivalents.
Bringing these two together, it creates a picture of a technology that’s extremely possible to build but which brings with it an expensive chipset and support circuitry alongside a voracious appetite for power, factors which render it uncompetitive alongside its low-power and inexpensive ARM competition. If there’s one thing about the world of technology though it’s that it defies expectations, so could the chances of a accessible x86 platform ever increase? Probably not if it were left to AMD and Intel, but who’s to say that
an x86 softcore
couldn’t tip the balance. Only time will tell.
Header: Oligopolism,
CC0
. | 154 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357470",
"author": "Tom Brusehaver",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T14:18:25",
"content": "There is a component missing in the hypothesis stated above.What if Linux had never come along?Would there be a place for any cup that doesn’t run windows? Arm, risc or otherwise.",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,373,050.891601 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/17/is-that-an-emp-generator-in-your-pocket-or-is-my-calculator-just-broken/ | Is That An EMP Generator In Your Pocket Or Is My Calculator Just Broken? | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"electromagnetic pulse",
"emp",
"high voltage",
"hv",
"RF",
"scrambler",
"spark gap"
] | Ah, what fond memories we have of our misspent youth, walking around with
a 9,000-volt electromagnetic pulse generator
in our Levi’s 501s and zapping all the electronic devices nobody yet carried with them everywhere they went. Crazy days indeed.
We’re sure that’s not at all what [Rostislav Persion] had in mind when designing his portable EMP generator; given the different topologies and the careful measurement of results, we suspect his interest is strictly academic. There are three different designs presented, all centering around a battery-powered high-voltage power module, the Amazon listing of which optimistically lists as capable of a 400,000- to 700,000-volt output. Sadly, [Rostislav]’s unit was capable of a mere 9,000 volts, which luckily was enough to get some results.
Coupled to a spark gap, one of seven different coils — from one to 40 turns — and plus or minus some high-voltage capacitors in series or parallel, he tested each configuration’s ability to interfere with a simple pocket calculator. The best range for a reset and scramble of the calculator was only about 3″ (7.6 cm), although an LED hooked to a second coil could detect the EMP up to 16″ (41 cm) away. [Rostislav]’s finished EMP generators were housed in a number of different enclosures, one of which totally doesn’t resemble a pipe bomb and whose “RF Hazard” labels are sure not to arouse suspicions when brandished in public.
We suppose these experiments lay to rest
the Hollywood hype about EMP generators
, but then again, their range is pretty limited. You might want to rethink your bank heist plans if they center around one of these designs.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/EMP-TEST-002.mp4 | 42 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357426",
"author": "Kilian Demmel",
"timestamp": "2021-06-17T11:15:38",
"content": "Has anyone ever used one of these against an electronic door lock? I wonder what would happen…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6357430",
... | 1,760,373,050.378629 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/23-scale-vt100-terminal-gets-closer-to-its-roots/ | 2:3 Scale VT100 Terminal Gets Closer To Its Roots | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"DEC VT100",
"emulator",
"serial terminal",
"simulator",
"Terminal emulator",
"vt100"
] | When
[Michael Gardi] finished his scaled down DEC VT100 replica a few months ago
, he made it very clear that the project was only meant to look like a vintage terminal on the outside. A peek into the case revealed nothing more exotic than a Raspberry Pi running its default operating system, making the terminal just as well suited to emulating classic games as it was dialing into a remote system. But as any hacker knows, some projects end up developing a life of their own.
It started simply enough. The addition of an RS-232 Serial HAT to the Raspberry Pi meant that the 3D printed VT100 could actually operate as a serial terminal using software such as
minicom
.
Then [Lars Brinkhoff] got involved
. He loved the look of the printed VT100, and thought it deserved better than a generic terminal emulator. So he went ahead and started developing a custom terminal
simulator
for it to run.
Reliving those CRT glory days.
The idea here is that an an 8080 emulator actually runs an original VT100 firmware ROM, warts and all. It makes all the beeps and chirps you’d expect from the real hardware, and there’s even some OpenGL trickery used to mimic an old CRT display, complete with scan lines and a soft glow around characters.
Naturally the visual effects consume a fair amount of processing power, so [Lars] cautions that anything lower than the Pi 4 will likely experience slowdowns. Of course, nothing is stopping you from running the simulator on your desktop machine if you’re looking for that classic terminal experience.
Did this gorgeous recreation of the VT100 need to have a true serial interface or a simulator that recreates the unique menu system of the original? Not at all. Even without those additions,
it blew us away when [Michael] first sent it in
. But are we happy that these guys have put in the time to perfect this already stellar project? We think you already know the answer. | 44 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357078",
"author": "Erik",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T18:36:56",
"content": "You’re missing a lot of the vt100 experience if you don’t make it 2/3 as heavy as the original. For this size, that would be 28 lbs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,051.14528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/alice-ball-steamrolled-leprosy/ | Alice Ball Steamrolled Leprosy | Kristina Panos | [
"Biography",
"chemistry hacks",
"Featured",
"Medical Hacks",
"Original Art"
] | [
"chaulmoogra",
"chaulmoogra oil",
"ester compound",
"leprosy",
"the Ball Method"
] | Leprosy is a bacterial disease that affects the skin, nerves, eyes, and mucosal surfaces of the upper respiratory tract. It is transmitted via droplets and causes skin lesions and loss of sensation in these regions. Also known as Hansen’s disease after the 19th century scientist who discovered its bacterial origin, leprosy has been around since ancient times, and those afflicted have been stigmatized and outcast for just as long. For years, people were sent to live the rest of their days in leper colonies to avoid infecting others.
The common result of injecting chaulmoogra oil. Image via
Stanford University
Until Alice Ball came along, the only thing that could be done for leprosy — injecting oil from the seeds of an Eastern evergreen tree — didn’t really do all that much to help. Eastern medicine has been using oil from
the chaulmoogra tree
since the 1300s to treat various maladies, including leprosy.
The problem is that although it somewhat effective, chaulmoogra oil is difficult to get it into the body. Ingesting it makes most people vomit. The stuff is too sticky to be applied topically to the skin, and injecting it causes the oil to clump in abscesses that make the patients’ skin look like bubble wrap.
In 1866, the Hawaiian government passed a law to quarantine people living with leprosy on
the tiny island of Moloka’i
. Every so often, a ferry left for the island and delivered these people to their eventual death. Most patients don’t die of leprosy, but from secondary infection or disease. By 1915, there were 1,100 people living on Moloka’i from all over the United States, and they were running out of room. Something had to be done.
Professor Alice Ball hacked the chemistry of chaulmoogra oil and made it less viscous so it could be easily injected. As a result, it was much more effective and remained the ideal treatment until the 1940s when sulfate antibiotics were discovered. So why haven’t you heard of Alice before?
She died before she could publish her work, and then it was stolen by the president of her university
. Now, over a century later, Alice is starting to get the recognition she deserves.
Alice at one of her graduations. Public Domain via
Wikipedia
Surrounded By Chemistry
Alice August Ball was born July 24th, 1892 in Seattle, Washington. She was one of four children, with two older brothers and a younger sister. Alice’s family was middle class — her father was a newspaper editor, lawyer, and photographer. Her mother was a photographer. And her grandfather, James Presley Ball, was a famous photographer who was among the first Black Americans to use the daguerreotype method — printing photographs on metal plates instead of paper. This was the first publicly-available printing process and it involved iodine-sensitized silver plates and mercury vapors, so Alice was surrounded by chemistry from a young age.
When Alice was still a child, the family moved to Hawaii in an attempt to soothe Grandpa Ball’s arthritis with heat. He died soon after they arrived, and the family moved back to Seattle about a year later. Alice attended Seattle High School until 1910, earning high grades in all the sciences. Then she earned two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Washington by 1914 — one in pharmaceutical chemistry, and the other in the science of pharmacy.
Alice was offered several scholarships for graduate school and settled on the University of Hawaii. She received a master’s of chemistry and stayed on as a professor. Part of her master’s thesis included a study of the Kava plant species and its chemical properties. Her work drew the attention of Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, who recruited Alice to study chaulmoogra oil and to assist him in treating leprosy patients at Kalihi Hospital when she wasn’t teaching.
The Ball Method
Alice and Dr. Hollmann had been heating the chaulmoogra oil, but she realized that was the wrong approach and tried freezing the extract instead after exposing the fatty acids in the oil to alcohol. In doing this, Alice came up with a method to isolate the ester compounds from the oil and modified them to produce a substance that could be better absorbed by the body while keeping the medicinal value intact.
Fruit of the chaulmoogra tree from which the seeds are extracted. Image via
Madame Botanic
The Ball Method worked quite well. Within a few years, nearly 100 people who had received the intravenous chaulmoogra oil treatment had no more lesions and were allowed to return home to their families. It was so successful that for a few years, no new patients were exiled to Moloka’i. Chaulmoogra oil continued to be used until the 1940s when sulfonamide antibiotics were invented.
Unfortunately, Alice died December 31st, 1916 before she had a chance to publish her work. Though her death certificate lists ‘tuberculosis’, the cause is arguably unknown. It was reported that she was accidentally exposed to chlorine gas while giving a demonstration about proper gas mask usage.
The college’s president, Arthur Dean, picked up where Alice left off and then co-authored a paper in 1920 claiming it as his own without any credit to Alice. Dr. Hollmann published his own paper two years later giving Alice the credit she deserved, and admonishing Dean for having the audacity to add absolutely nothing to Alice’s work and then pass it off as his own.
In the 1930s, the King of Siam (now Thailand) sent a chaulmoogra tree to the University of Hawaii as a thank you gift. A plaque was affixed there on February 29th, 2000 in a ceremony that was attended by several former inhabitants of Moloka’i. That day, the lieutenant governor of Hawaii declared it would be henceforth known as Alice Ball Day and be celebrated every four years. Historians have worked since the 1970s to restore Alice Ball’s legacy, and we think it’s an important one worth immortalizing. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357060",
"author": "spiritplumber",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T17:15:11",
"content": "Yep, this sort of thing keeps happening. Also see Antonio Meucci because he was an immigrant.“If you become an inventor, you can make someone else very, very rich!” doesn’t sound very motivational w... | 1,760,373,050.525836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/printed-catamaran/ | Printed Catamaran | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"boat",
"catamaran",
"lake",
"ocean",
"river",
"watercraft"
] | If you want to send some instruments out on the lake or the ocean, you’ll want something that floats. Sure, if you need to be underwater, or if you can fly over the water there are other options, but sometimes you want to be on the surface. For stability, it is hard to beat a catamaran — a boat with two hulls that each support one side of a deck. If that sounds like the ocean sensor platform of your dreams, try
printing the one
from [electrosync].
The boat looks super stable and has a brushless motor propulsion system. The design purpose is to carry environmental and water quality monitoring gear. It can hold over 5 kg of payload in the hull and there’s an optional deck system, although the plans for that are not yet included in the STL files.
It is hard to get the scale from the pictures, but this is a meter long, so this isn’t going to fit in most people’s bathtubs. You can see the beast in the videos below. The videos are about a year old, but the STLs were only published this month.
We always enjoy seeing really large things that people 3D print on ordinary 3D printers. We also love seeing
practical prints
. Of course, we’ve seen
bigger boats
, but not with a consumer-grade printer. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357170",
"author": "William Joseph Gallant",
"timestamp": "2021-06-16T05:38:56",
"content": "Yes it’s an RC boat but how long till the boating industry begins printing full sized vessels?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "63572... | 1,760,373,050.676201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/15/your-1958-punch-card-machine-tested-tubes/ | Your 1958 Punch Card Machine Tested Tubes | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"hickok",
"punch cards",
"punched cards",
"tube",
"tube tester"
] | We think of punched cards as old-fashioned, but still squarely part of the computer age. Turns out, cards were in use way before they got conscripted by computers. Jacquard looms are one famous example. The U.S. Census famously used punched cards for tabulating the census without anything we’d consider a computer. But in the 1950s, you might have had a punched card machine on your electronics workbench. The Hickok Cardmatic was a tube tester with a difference.
About Tube Testers
While you, as a Hackaday reader, might tear into a busted TV at your house and try to fix it, most people today will either scrap a bad set or pay someone to fix it. That’s fine today. TVs are cheap and rarely break, anyway. But this hasn’t always been the case.
In the “good old days” your expensive TV broke down all the time. Most of the parts were reliable, but the tubes would wear out. If you were the kind of person who would change your own oil, you’d probably look to see if you could spot a burned out tube and try replacing it. If you couldn’t spot it, you’d pull all the tubes out. If you were lucky, there was a diagram glued inside the cover that showed where they all went back. Then you took them to the drugstore.
You might wonder why you’d take them to the drugstore. They were one of the places that would have a tube tester in a large cabinet. You’d look up your tube and it would tell you how to set the various dials on the machine. For example, you might have to plug the tube into socket #5, turn switch 1 to position 4, switch 2 to position B, and then switch C to position 9. You’d push a button and a big meter would show you if the tube was good or bad. If the tube was bad, you’d open the cabinet, pull out a replacement tube, and pay for it at the register. (Imagine having to do this with any given transistor in your cell phone.)
Tube Testing at the Shop
[Joe Haupt]
CC-BY-SA 2.0
Of course, if you had a TV repair shop or you just had a well-stocked electronics bench, you probably had a tube tester yourself. You might not have had the big cabinet of spares, but then again your tester was probably at least somewhat portable by the standards of the day.
For example, the Knight tube tester was more or less the drugstore model with a smaller meter and a handle. The controls were a little more technically labeled than the consumer models, too. But you still had to look up a table, twist knobs, and throw switches. You really wanted to be sure to read the table correctly, too. Being off one row or getting data from two rows could possibly kill your tube under test.
Enter Punch Cards
My friend [Tom] had a different kind of tube tester for sale at a recent hamfest. Compare this Hickok tube tester to the Knight one up above. There is a conspicuous absence of switches. Of course, there are a number of sockets because you can’t force a tube into a different socket. The meter is sort of the same, too. But instead of a table, there’s a bin of around 300 punch cards and a card reader you can see near the bottom left corner of the machine.
Tube tester with cards
Better view of the cards
The card reader doesn’t have a computer — at least, we don’t think it did. It was simply a set of contacts you’d normally find behind switches on a conventional tube tester. When you slid the card in, it would move between a set of contacts. When the card hit a stop, the plunger-like switch near the card reader would pop up, engaging the contacts through the card’s holes and fixing the card. Pushing down on the plunger released the card.
You can see a better picture of a few of the cards in the other picture. Note that one of the cards was for a 17D4 tube. It tells you to use socket F and since it says, “card 1 of 1” it follows that some of the tubes needed multiple cards and tests.
The Price of Convenience
The Cardmatic shows up in ads in the late 1950s. The “new low price” for the model 121 was $250, so that implies that maybe it cost more at some point. Or perhaps it was relative to the more expenisve model 123. Sure, $250 doesn’t sound like much but adjusted that’s around $2,300 today. You had to be testing a lot of tubes to justify that kind of expenditure. For the average worker at the time, that was about a month’s take-home pay! And the 123A cost $470, even more!
Of course, according to the ad you can see here, it would test the tube in only eight seconds. Well, eight seconds after the tube warmed up. They claim the device was 300% more accurate than an ordinary tube tester, but we have no idea how’d you’d prove or disprove that.
Thanks to [bandersentv], you can actually watch a video (below) of the machine in operation. That particular model is a 121, but they are very similar. There was also a military version, the AN/USM-118B.
The operation wasn’t totally automatic. While the tube warms up, you are supposed to observe meter scale 1 which should be near zero. Then you press button 2 and verify the meter is in the green portion of scale 2. Finally — you probably guessed it — you press button 3 and make sure the meter’s needle is in the green zone on scale 3.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Despite common misconception, most processing of punched cards didn’t happen with actual computers, even for
computer punched cards
. Life sure is simpler now. You can get a
general-purpose component tester
for almost nothing. Of course, it won’t test tubes — we don’t think — but if you build a tube adapter for it, please tell us so we can cover it.
Thanks to [Tom, N3LLL] for the photos of this great old piece of test gear. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6357021",
"author": "Ken",
"timestamp": "2021-06-15T14:07:27",
"content": "“If you were the kind of person who would change your own oil, you’d probably look to see if you could spot a burned out tube and try replacing it. If you couldn’t spot it, you’d pull all the tubes out. If yo... | 1,760,373,050.618362 |
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