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https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/serene-snowdecahedrons/ | Serene Snowdecahedrons | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed toys",
"Dodecahedrons",
"polyhedrons",
"snow",
"snowball",
"snowballs"
] | It’s no secret that many parts of the United States saw quite a bit of snow that past few weeks. Even snowed in, hackers and engineers continue to do what they do and invent crazy wonderful things. Spurred on by a grand vision of complex polyhedron snowballs, [Jacob] created a
clever 3D printed mold
that can create
Rhombic Dodecahedrons
. It has some rather unusual properties as it can be stacked perfectly (no gaps in between the snowdechedrons) and all opposing sides are parallel so it can be held easily in a mitten or glove. Additionally, since the faces are parallel, it unmolds easily and without marring the beautiful snow you just crafted.
Premade STL’s of three different sizes are provided under creative commons with some helpful instructions on how best to print them. Perhaps next time your area gets some good snow, you can be prepared to show off with
your high-performance ski-sled
as your fly by throwing molded snowballs. That is until you get roped into a friendly debate about whether your snowdechedrons are in fact snow “balls”.
Thanks [Jacob] for sending this one in! | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328388",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T21:21:54",
"content": "I wanted to print the duckie snow mold, but my 3D printer was acting up.https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3947153I see now there’s also one for Baby Yoda.https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4056475",
"p... | 1,760,373,166.101897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/were-cloning-animals-from-the-frozen-zoo-like-a-seed-bank-but-for-animals/ | We’re Cloning Animals From The “Frozen Zoo”; Like A Seed Bank But For Animals | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"clone",
"cloning",
"frozen zoo",
"seed bank",
"zoo",
"zoology"
] | Seed banks are facilities of great value to biodiversity and agriculture around the world. These facilities are used to house stocks of seeds of a wide variety, helping to maintain genetic diversity and avoid the permanent loss of various plant species. While there are some challenges, the basic requirements to run a simple seed bank are to keep a selection of seeds at low temperature and humidity to maximise their viable lifespan.
When it comes to animals, things become more difficult — one can’t simply plant an old seed in the ground and grow a fresh new meerkat, for example. Preservation of animal genetic material poses its own unique set of challenges — ones that the San Diego “Frozen Zoo” don’t shy away from. They’ve recently shown the viability of the program with the healthy birth of a ferret cloned from an animal that died in 1988.
Long-Term Storage
There are less than a dozen frozen zoos around the world,
with the first being established at San Diego Zoo by Kurt Benirschke in 1972
. While the available biological technology was limited at the time, it was hoped that by cryopreserving samples of animal tissues and reproductive material, they might later be used for research or reproduction purposes. The idea has since spread, with a smattering of other facilities opening up around the world. Such facilities necessarily store a wide variety of material, depending on the species in question. Obviously, viable gametes, or reproductive cells, are of high priority. Eggs and sperm cells from sexually mature animals can readily be secured from both live and deceased specimens, and used to produce embryos for implantation.
Alternatively, fluids such as blood or milk may be saved, as well as muscle tissue, bone, hair or skin samples.
With cloning techniques pioneered in the 1990s
, DNA extracted from these non-reproductive cells can be inserted into an egg with its nucleus removed. This egg can then be implanted in a surrogate mother like any other embryo, and the pregnancy carried to term. With in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques in their infancy in the 1970s and cloning a distant blip on the horizon, Dr. Benirschke’s decision to establish the first frozen zoo at the time shows considerable foresight.
Elizabeth Ann was born in late 2020 – the first clone of a US endangered species. This is a screenshot from
a video from the US Fish and Wildlife Service
.
With decades of advancements in genetic sequencing and techniques like in vitro fertilization now available, these libraries of genetic material are starting to bear fruit. Although other species have already been successfully cloned, this is
the first clone of a US endangered species
— a black-footed ferret by the name of Elizabeth Ann. Born to a domestic ferret serving as a foster mother on December 10th of last year, her genes are a duplicate of a ferret named Willa who passed away in 1988 and was frozen at the San Diego facility.
The black-footed ferret has long been a focus of conservationists, who have been working to re-establish the species since it was thought to be extinct in the mid-20th century. When a dead specimen was found on a ranch in the 1980s, breeding work began in earnest, with thousands of ferrets reintroduced into the wild. As for Elizabeth Ann and any potential future clones, however, there aren’t yet plans to release them from captivity.
The Challenge of Genetic Diversity
Both breeding programs and cloning experiments highlight a limitation of this work, however. Genetic diversity is key to maintaining a thriving population over many generations, but the ferrets bred as part of the program all trace their lineage to just 7 individuals. Similarly, a cloning program can produce theoretically unlimited offspring from a single DNA sample,
but inbreeding depression will make such a cohort unlikely to thrive in the long term.
Thus, any frozen zoo aiming to serve as a potential backup against possible extinctions needs to collect as broad a spectrum of genetic samples as possible.
Kurt is the world’s first Przewalski’s horse clone, born to a domestic horse surrogate mother. It’s hoped that Kurt will grow up to breed with others of his species, increasing the genetic diversity of the herd.
The San Diego facility has had other success stories, too. In partnership with Viagen,
a company perhaps best known for offering cloning services for domestic pets
, scientists were able to clone Kurt, a Przewalski’s Horse,
from forty-year old frozen skin samples.
Similarly to the methods used to create Elizabeth Ann, Kurt’s genetic material was used to fertilise an egg which was then implanted into a domestic horse serving as a surrogate mother. Sequencing revealed the donor tissue featured many unique genes not found in the currently-alive population, all of which come from lines of just 12 former individuals. It’s hoped that when Kurt comes of age, breeding with others will significantly increase the genetic diversity of the endangered species.
The need for similar species to carry pregnancies means that it’s unlikely we’ll see frozen zoos churning out wooly mammoths or Tasmanian tigers for some time yet. Having the genetic material alone isn’t enough; a suitably close living relation is key, along with the aforementioned need for genetic diversity if repopulation is the goal. However, the technologies and techniques that have been developed will be crucial to maintaining biodiversity of existing species well into the future, especially given that habitat destruction and other existential threats remain around the world. And, as science continues to progress, it’s likely that frozen zoos will be the first to invite you to see their new dodo exhibit in the future! | 30 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328421",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T23:09:49",
"content": "Whew! Just in time: “Falling sperm counts ‘threaten human survival’, expert warns.”[1]References:1.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/falling-sperm-counts-human-survival",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,373,166.175913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/can-plants-bend-light-to-their-self-preserving-will/ | Can Plants Bend Light To Their Self-Preserving Will? | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"hardware rng",
"indoor plants",
"PEAR study",
"raspberry pi",
"rng",
"self-preservation"
] | It does sound a bit silly — the idea that given enough time, a plant could influence the order of hardware-generated random numbers in order to get enough light to survive. But not so silly that [DeckerM] couldn’t wait to try it out after seeing a short clip about an unpublished study done at Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab that came to this very conclusion. The actual verbatim conclusion from the clip: “It’s as though life itself – even life or consciousness in something as simple as a house plant, bends probability in the physical world in the direction of what it needs, in the direction of its growth and evolution.”
The idea is this: a plant is made to suffer by languishing in the corner of a windowless room. The room has exactly one light in the middle of the ceiling — a repositionable spotlight of sorts that can only shine into any of the four corners and is controlled by a random number generator. A set of dividers ensure that none of the light leaks out of the quadrant and into any of the others.
[DeckerM]’s recreation of this experiment is much more practical
. It’s essentially a little plywood cabinet with four open partitions and a ceiling. Each quadrant has a grow light strip planted in the corner, and all the wires are run through the top, where each has been stripped of its pesky power-governing controller and rewired to go straight into a smart plug. [DeckerM] is using a hardware RNG hosted on a Raspberry Pi, which is running a Python script that takes numbers from the RNG that corresponds to one of the quadrants, and then lights that quadrant.
And the results? They don’t really support the PEAR study’s bold conclusion unless viewed in small sample sizes, but [DeckerM] isn’t giving up that easily. Since the paper is unpublished, there are a lot of unanswered questions and juicy variables to play with, like the type, number, and age of the plants used. We’re excited to see if [DeckerM] can shed some light on plant psychokinesis.
Interested in portable plant propagation? A sunny location is usually ideal, but
this all-in-one solution can take care of the rest
. | 34 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328279",
"author": "spiritplumber",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T16:45:06",
"content": "This sort of thing is exactly what theology departments in universities should be doing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328288",
"a... | 1,760,373,166.334997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/arduboy-fx-mod-chip-now-youre-playing-with-power/ | Arduboy FX Mod-Chip: Now You’re Playing With Power | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Games",
"Hackaday Columns",
"handhelds hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Slider"
] | [
"Arduboy",
"attiny85",
"bootloader",
"flash cart",
"flash storage",
"modchip",
"spi",
"W25Q128"
] | Traditionally, a forum full of technical users trying integrate their own hardware into a game system for the purposes of gaining unfettered access to its entire software library was the kind of thing that would keep engineers at Sony and Nintendo up at night. The development and proliferation of so called “mod chips” were an existential threat to companies that made their money selling video games, and as such, sniffing out these console hackers and keeping their findings from going public for as long as possible was a top priority.
But the Arduboy is no traditional game system. Its games are distributed for free, so a chip that allows users to cram hundreds of them onto the handheld at once isn’t some shady attempt to pull a fast one on the developers, it’s a substantial usability improvement over the stock hardware. So when Arduboy creator Kevin Bates found out about the grassroots effort to expand the system’s internal storage on the official forums, he didn’t try to put a stop to it. Instead, he asked how he could help make it a reality for as many Arduboy owners as possible.
Now, a little less than three years after forum member Mr.Blinky posted his initial concept for hanging an external SPI flash chip on the system’s test pads,
the official Arduboy FX Mod-Chip has arrived
. Whether you go the DIY route and build your own version or buy the ready-to-go module, one thing is for sure: it’s a must-have upgrade for the Arduboy that will completely change how you use the diminutive handheld.
Freedom of Choice
Originally I was going to roll my own upgrade, which involves dead-bug soldering a SPI flash chip such as the W25Q128 to the Arduboy’s PCB with some thin wires and flashing the system’s ATmega32U4 microcontroller with a new bootloader using an ICSP like the USBasp. While it’s hardly a user-friendly operation, the procedure is well within the capabilities of the average Hackaday reader and potentially even something you can do with parts bin finds.
But in the end I decided to go with the pre-programmed FX Mod-Chip directly from Kevin. I’d been curious about the official upgrade
since writing about it last year
, and wanted to see what the top-of-the-line experience would be like. With a flexible PCB and an onboard ATtiny85 that can flash the system’s bootloader automatically, it’s a considerably more streamlined experience. Plus at just $15 USD, it’s hardly breaking the bank. Though if you want to save a few bucks, you can buy the blank version for $9 and load on your own games onto it.
In either event, the end result is the same. Rather than being stuck with a single game and having to connect your handheld up to the Arduino IDE each time you want to try out a new title, you’ll now have enough flash to store essentially the entire library of completed Arduboy games at once. You can quickly and easily navigate through them by genre using a very slick visual menu, and by holding the Up and Down keys simultaneously, you can even back out of the currently running game and select something else to play without having to power off the system.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/arduboymod_menus.mp4
As far as the Arduboy goes, this update is nothing short of revolutionary. Frankly, the fact that the device could only hold one game at a time always made it far more of a hassle to use than it should have been. But now that you can quickly skip around and try out all the games without being tethered to a computer, the Arduboy is far more practical for quick gaming sessions.
Installation
As mentioned before, the official upgrade kit has been designed with ease of installation in mind. If you know which way the pointy end of the soldering iron goes, you should be fine. For anyone who needs a little more guidance, there’s
a written step-by-step installation guide and even a video
you can watch.
Don’t blame me for that speaker wire.
With the back cover removed, you just need to slip the flex PCB under the battery and tack down the eight points that line up with the test pads on the board. You can remove the piezo speaker temporarily to make the installation a bit easier, but it’s not strictly necessary.
Once the flex PCB is securely attached, you need to turn the Arduboy back on and then short the GND and RST pads for approximately five seconds (a pair of tweezers works well for this). This will trigger the ATtiny85 to begin the bootloader flashing process, and pretty soon you should see the new Arduboy FX startup screen. Once you’ve confirmed the bootloader has been replaced, you can button the system back up.
Library Management
If you buy the pre-programmed FX Mod-Chip, you’ll immediately have access to 233 different Arduboy games and applications which take up roughly 5 MB of the 16 MB available on the W25Q128 chip. While this doesn’t represent
all
of the software ever written for the platform, it’s a fairly comprehensive collection. Making this sort of prediction is usually a good way to make yourself look like a fool in the future, but in this case, it’s probably safe to say that 16 MB ought to be enough for anybody.
But what about adding future titles? After all, the Arduboy enjoys an active developer scene, and there’s always something new to check out. Well, this is where things get a
little
tricky. As of this writing, the
official tools to actually build a new image for the chip
are still in their infancy. The current method relies on a handful of Python scripts and a manually curated CSV file that links nested directories of categories to individual game binaries and banner images. It’s not exactly difficult, but it’s just as unpleasant as it sounds.
There are some promising projects in the works though, such as
ArduManFX by Justin Davis
. This multi-platform tool allows the user to search for, download, and ultimately install Arduboy software. As of right now it can only flash single binaries to the system, but the next release is set to include the ability to create chip images from within its drag-and-drop GUI interface.
For now, the flash builder interface is grayed out and can’t be selected.
This is the Way
It’s honestly difficult to overstate just how much this upgrade improves the Arduboy experience, and it’s no surprise that
expanded flash storage is slated to be a standard feature going forward
. For me personally, the ability to quickly select from between hundreds of games has given new life to a device that was starting to get a bit dustier than I’d like to admit. It’s now a gadget I’ll make sure to toss in my bag before going on a trip, once there’s somewhere to go on a trip to, anyway.
But perhaps more importantly, the Arduboy FX Mod-Chip is a shining example of what can happen when a company doesn’t treat its customers like they’re the enemy. Not only was Kevin Bates
supportive of users attempting to modify the hardware they purchased
, but he had the forethought to turn their experiments into an official product and even roll the improvements into the next generation of Arduboy. The tech world would be a whole lot nicer if this sort of community collaboration could become the norm and not the exception. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328276",
"author": "Alex Rossie",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T16:40:31",
"content": "Arduboy is a very nice platform, but I wish there were more in the way of story driven games. I love time killers like flappybird clones or the lasers game from the video.But its the easy-on-easy-off ... | 1,760,373,166.723191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/volumetric-oled-display-shows-bladerunner-vibe-curious-screen-tech/ | Volumetric OLED Display Shows Bladerunner Vibe, Curious Screen Tech | Mike Szczys | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"oled",
"transparent oled",
"volumetric display"
] | [Sean Hodgins] is out with his latest video and it’s a piece of art in itself. Beyond a traditional project show and tell, he’s spun together
a cyberpunk vibe to premiere the volumetric display he built from an OLED stackup
. Update: He’s also
documented the build
.
The trick of a volumetric display is the ability to add a third dimension for positioning pixels. Here [Sean] delivered that ability with a stack up of ten screens to add a depth element. This is not such an easy trick. These small OLED displays are all over the place but they share a common element: a dark background over which the pixels appear. [Sean] has gotten his hands on some transparent OLED panels and with some Duck-Duck-Go-Fu we think it’s probably
a Crystalfontz 128×56 display
. Why is it we don’t see more of these? Anyone know if it’s possible to remove the backing from other OLED displays to get here. (Let us know in the comments.)
The rest of the built is fairly straight-forward with a Feather M4 board driving the ten screens via SPI, and an MPU-6050 IMU for motion input. The form factor lends an aesthetic of an augmented reality device and the production approach for the video puts this in a
Bladerunner
or
Johnny Mnemonic
universe. Kudos for expanding the awesome of the build with an implied backstory!
If you can’t find your own transparent displays, spinning things are a popular trend in this area. We just saw one last week that
spun an LED matrix to form cylindrical display
. Another favorite of ours is
a volumetric display that spins a helix-shaped projection screen
. | 39 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328177",
"author": "Anton Fosselius",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T12:10:06",
"content": "that video was awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328179",
"author": "carl",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T12:24:26",
... | 1,760,373,166.060786 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/23-scale-vt100-is-a-perfect-pairing-for-pdp-8-i-replica/ | 2:3 Scale VT100 Is A Perfect Pairing For PDP-8/I Replica | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"replica",
"serial terminal",
"vintage computing"
] | When he went shopping for a vintage serial terminal to go along with his reproduction PDP-8/I computer, [Michael Gardi] came down with a bad case of sticker shock. But rather than be discouraged, he reasoned that if his “retro” computer could stand to have modern components at its heart, so could the terminal he used to talk to it. Leaning on his considerable experience in designing 3D printed replica hardware,
he’s built an absolutely gorgeous scaled down DEC VT100 terminal
that any classic computer aficionado would be happy to have on their desk.
Now to be clear, [Michael] hasn’t created a
true
serial terminal. Since the faux PDP-8/I is running on a Raspberry Pi, all he needed to do was come up with something that could connect to its HDMI and USB ports. Put simply, he’s essentially just made a 3D printed enclosure for the Pi’s monitor and keyboard. Oh, but what a gorgeous enclosure it is.
Recreating the VT100 in CAD was made more difficult by the fact that [Michael] couldn’t get his hands on the authentic hardware. But of course,
that’s never stopped him before
. It turns out DEC provided some very detailed dimensions for the terminal in their original documentation, and while comparing them to photographs of the actual terminal did uncover a few key differences, the overall look is spot on. Once the design was done, he reports it took two rolls of filament and more than 200 hours to print out all the parts for the enclosure.
To help sell the authentic look [Michael] tracked down a 4:3 LCD of the appropriate size, and the use of an off-the-shelf portable mechanical keyboard should make text entry a pleasure. For a little fun, he even came up with a themed arcade controller for the VT100 that can be used with RetroPie. The printed logo plate is an especially nice touch, and we’re more than willing to forgive the fact that he had to print it at a larger scale than the rest of the terminal to get all the detail in with his printer’s 0.4 mm nozzle.
On a technical level, this is perhaps the most straightforward replica we’ve ever seen from [Michael]. But even on a relatively simple project like this, his
signature attention to detail and craftsmanship is on full display
. It’s always a good day when he’s got a new build to show off with, and we’re eager to see what he comes up with next. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328234",
"author": "joelfinkle",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T14:40:34",
"content": "The VT100 set the standard for 80-character terminals, I did a lot of work on those, and they beat the snot out of the older VT-52. But the VT-220 was the crown jewel of its age: amber or green text (... | 1,760,373,166.226579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/retrotechtacular-philips-factory-tour-circa-1930s/ | Retrotechtacular: Philips Factory Tour, Circa 1930s | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"1930s",
"assembly line",
"Bakelite",
"factory",
"philips",
"radio",
"retrotechtacular",
"vacuum tube"
] | If you’ve got a half-hour or so to spare, you could do worse than
this video trip through a Philips factory in the 1930s
.
The film is presented without narration, but from the Dutch title cards and the fact that it’s Philips, we gather that this factory of gigantic proportions was somewhere in the Netherlands. In any case, it looks like something right out of [Fritz Lang]’s
Metropolis
and turned the rawest of materials into finished consumer products.
Much of the film focuses on the making of vacuum tubes; the sheer physicality of the job is what really stands out here. The upper body strength that the glassblowers had to have boggles the mind. Check out the chops — and the soon-to-be very unfashionable mustache — on the glassblower at the 12:00 mark. And it wasn’t just the gents who had mad skills — the fine motor control needed for the delicate assembly of the innards of the tubes, which seems to be mostly staffed by women, is just as impressive. We were also surprised by the amount these manual crafts were assisted by automated systems.
Especially interesting is the section where they build the
luidspreker
. Without narration or captions, it’s a little hard to tell what’s going on, but it appears that they used an enormous press to form chips of Bakelite into sleek covers for the speakers, which themselves are super-chunky affairs made from scratch in the factory. We’re also treated to assembly of the radios, packaging of finished products, and a group of dockworkers who clearly didn’t read the “Fragile” labels pasted on the boxes.
One can’t help but wonder if these people had the slightest inkling of what was about to sweep over them and the rest of the world. And if they did, would they even begin to comprehend how much the very products that they were making would contribute to both the slaughter of the coming war as well as to the sparing of so many lives? Likely not, but the film is still an interesting glimpse into the creation of an industry, one that relied very much on craftsmanship to get it started.
[via
SWLing.com
] | 34 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328111",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T06:07:28",
"content": "That glassblower on the thumbnail pic has the Dizzy Gillespie thing going on with one cheek, and it’s just great.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,373,166.404992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/fueling-with-ammonia/ | Fueling With Ammonia | Al Williams | [
"chemistry hacks",
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ammonia",
"carbon emissions",
"carbon footprint",
"fuel",
"green energy",
"maritime"
] | There’s a major push now to find energy sources with smaller carbon footprints. The maritime shipping industry, according to IEEE Spectrum, is going towards
ammonia
. Burning ammonia produces no CO
2
and it isn’t hard to make. It doesn’t require special storage techniques as hydrogen does and it has ten times the energy density of a modern lithium-ion battery.
You can burn ammonia for internal combustion or use it in a fuel cell. However, there are two problems. First, no ships are currently using the fuel and second most ammonia today is made using a very carbon-intensive process. However it is possible to create “green” ammonia, and projects in Finland, Germany, and Norway are on schedule to start using ammonia-powered ships over the next couple of years.
Switching over, though, will be an infrastructure challenge. Ships consume about 300 million tons of fuel each year, and most of that is diesel which has twice the energy density of ammonia. Ports will need storage and filling equipment to make the switch practical.
To make ammonia takes hydrogen and nitrogen. Most commercial hydrogen is made by reacting methane which releases carbon as a byproduct. However, hydrogen can be split from water using green energy, too, and that will be another key factor in making ammonia fuel work for companies trying to reduce carbon emissions.
You might think this is a new idea, but Germany used ammonia in 1942 to fuel public buses in occupied Belgium. The buses used an internal combustion engine that ran on
a combination of ammonia and coal gas
. The X-15 aircraft also used ammonia as one component in the fuel that powered its rocket engines.
Storing ammonia is easy, but there are some easy ways
to store hydrogen
, too. We’ve seen some
fuel cell drones
, but nothing running on ammonia. At least, not yet. | 68 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328066",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T03:05:46",
"content": "Potent leaks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6328074",
"author": "Tom Hargrave",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T03:19:03",
"con... | 1,760,373,166.828511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/generator-runs-on-natural-gas-with-field-expedient-tip/ | Generator Runs On Natural Gas With Field Expedient Tip | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"conversion",
"engine",
"generator",
"natural gas",
"propane"
] | Many small gasoline engines can be safely modified to run on natural gas or propane with a kit that replaces the carburetor and adds a regulator, providing a reliable alternative fuel source in the event that gasoline is difficult to obtain in an emergency situation.
This seat of the pants hack by [HowToLou] is definitively
not
the safe way to run your generator on natural gas
, but if you ever find yourself in a situation where getting the power back on might be a literal matter of life or death, it’s a tip worth keeping in mind.
The basic idea here is that you feed natural gas (though propane should also work) directly into the engine’s intake by way of a hose attached to the air filter box. While cranking the engine, a valve on the gas line is used to manually adjust the air–fuel mixture until it fires up. It’s an extremely simple hack that, in a pinch, you can pull off with the parts on hand. But as you might expect, that simplicity comes at a cost.
There are a few big problems with this approach, but certainly the major one is that there’s nothing to cut off the flow of gas when the engine stops running. So if the generator stalls or you just forget to close the valve after you shut it down, there’s the potential for a very dangerous situation. Additionally, the manual gas valve will be at odds with a generator that automatically throttles up and down based on load. Though to be fair, there are certainly generators out there that simply run the engine flat-out the whole time.
Much like his DIY generator interlock plate that we covered last month
, we imagine this project may rub some folks in the wrong way. Admittedly, this isn’t a modification that you should take lightly and certainly not something you’d want to rely on for long-term use.
But as the recent situation in Texas has reminded us
, drastic times can occasionally call for drastic measures. | 111 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6328022",
"author": "wanderer_",
"timestamp": "2021-03-04T00:23:00",
"content": "I’m not well versed in this, but if you feed natural gas in through the air intake, does that mean that you need to open up the gas tank to make it the new air intake?",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,373,166.666446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/a-sympathetic-nail-violin/ | A Sympathetic Nail Violin | Matthew Carlson | [
"Art",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"Musical",
"musical instrument",
"nail",
"violin"
] | As a hacker community, we are no strangers to beautiful and unique musical instruments.
A sympathetic nail violin
built by [Nicolas Bras] is a welcome addition to the eclectic family. Working up from the simple idea of a nail in a piece of wood and adjusting the pitch by hammering the nail farther into the wood, [Nicolas] expanded the idea. With careful planning and tuning, the nails can have sympathetic properties. These properties mean that when one nail is played via a bow, it causes other nails to sound, creating harmonies and sustains.
With a bit of careful woodworking and a scant touch of metalwork, an instrument was crafted. It offers vast flexibility as it can be played by bow, by plucking with your finger, or by strumming. There are several levels of nails, each level having a paired sympathetic nail. This allows for a diverse and versatile instrument.
Here at Hackaday, we seem to have a thing for tiny violins, whether
physical
or
virtual
. While the nail violin may not look like your traditional violin, we can certainly appreciate the wonderful music it creates. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327996",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T21:59:21",
"content": "Amazing! I have a couple of questions though. First, could it be played like a hammered dulcimer (hammering the nails with little hammers). Secondly, could the nails be replaced with “filed” screws (scr... | 1,760,373,166.266914 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/complicated-and-useless-cancel-each-other-out/ | Complicated And Useless Cancel Each Other Out | Brian McEvoy | [
"Games",
"hardware"
] | [
"mechanical useless machine",
"microcontroller",
"rube goldberg",
"rube goldberg machine",
"toggle switch",
"useless",
"useless box",
"woodworking"
] | We all know what it means to procrastinate, but what about actively spending time building a useless machine? You have undoubtedly seen the ornamental boxes with a tempting little toggle switch on the top. When you inevitably flip the switch, an actuator pops out from one half of the enclosure with the sole purpose of undoing its own power switch. [Paz Hameiri] took it a step further by
adding some [Rube Goldberg] flavor
, and with the help of a microcontroller, his levers take their sweet time powering themselves down. (Video after the break.)
We didn’t find any code or diagrams for the project, but if you know the useless machine’s internals, it shouldn’t be any trouble to recreate one for your desk. The most significant design factor is that the switches. Their contacts must be wired in parallel so that the controller has power as long as one is active. How would you spice up the useless machine?
Even though these are called
useless machines
, they serve the purpose of decoration, conversation-starting, or a way to show off your woodworking and
programming skills
. | 11 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327956",
"author": "Bigfoot T",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T19:57:36",
"content": "I like this concept, congratulations to the maker! The movements were rather elegant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6327970",
"author": "rnja... | 1,760,373,166.878978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/what-uses-more-power-than-argentina-but-doesnt-dance-the-tango/ | What Uses More Power Than Argentina But Doesn’t Dance The Tango? | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"bitcoin",
"blockchain",
"co2",
"cryptocurrency",
"global warming"
] | There’s been a constant over the last few weeks’ news, thanks to Elon Musk we’re in another Bitcoin hype cycle. The cryptocurrency soared after the billionaire endorsed it, at one point coming close to $60k, before falling back to its current position at time of writing of around $47k. The usual tide of cryptocurrency enthusiasts high on their Kool-Aid hailed the dawn of their new tomorrow, while a fresh cesspool of cryptocurrency scam emails and social media posts lapped around the recesses of the Internet.
This Time It’s Different!
The worst phrase that anyone can normally say about a financial bubble is the dreaded phrase “
This time it’s different
“, but there is something different about this Bitcoin hype cycle. It’s usual to hear criticism of Bitcoin for its volatility or its sometime association with shady deals, but what’s different this time is that the primary criticism is of its environmental credentials. The Bitcoin network, we are told, uses more electricity than the Netherlands, more than Argentina, and in an age where global warming has started to exert an uncomfortable influence over our lives, we can’t afford such extravagance and the emissions associated with them.
Here at Hackaday we are more concerned with figures than arguments over the future of currency, so the angle we take away from it all lies with those power stats. How much energy
does
Argentina use, and is the claim about Bitcoin credible?
The now decommissioned Eggborough power station, Yorkshire, UK. Bitcoin requires eight of these 2GW coal-fired power stations to operate. Deut (
Public domain
).
We have as good an estimate as possible of the power used by Bitcoin miners, in the form of the Cambridge University Centre for Alternative Finance’s
Bitcoin network power tracker
. At the time of writing it has an estimate of the network’s annual power consumption at 129.1 TWh. It’s easy enough to find
global power consumption data
and find that Argentina uses 125 TWh in 2019, so on those metrics the assertion that Bitcoin uses more power than Argentina holds water. A quick back-of-envelope calculation shows the figure to be equivalent to a nearly 15 GW power station running flat-out all year round,and
looking up some figures for CO2 emissions per megawatt hour
for a further calculations that represents about 130 million tonnes of CO2 from coal-fired power stations.
That’s
10 million tonnes more than the entire UK transport sector emitted in 2019
. Arguments that some cryptocurrency may be mined from renewables do not apply, because while those coal fired power stations still exist they are supplying energy which could be supplied by renewable sources that are instead being taken up by the miners. Lest we forget that the Bitcoin algorithm is designed to become more difficult to compute as the blockchain progresses. Cryptocurrency farmers are not unaware of the electricity bills, perpetually seeking out the most efficient mining equipment. This makes for a hazy future, can hardware improvements keep up with increasingly elusive hashes or will the network’s electricity consumption continue to grow?
It’s inevitable that for the time being while our economies are in the transition away from fossil fuels there will continue to be CO2 emissions generated, so if that is the case then those emissions must provide a useful return. If we burn a tonne of fuel oil to move a shipload of freight containers then at least the emissions have done something for us, so is the same true for a cryptocurrency? Does a tonne of CO2 emitted by the miners do anything for us?
It’s reasonable to turn these same question around on traditional currency trading markets. The aggregate electricity usage of traditional stock markets not easily measured, but we know traders go to great lengths to find advantage like
building data centers near trading centers for low-latency microwave link access to information
. It’s worth considering that traditional trading uses a non-zero amount of energy and keep it in mind when flogging the cryptocurrency networks as unworthy of these resources. The problem is that Bitcoin just uses so much,
present Bitcoin transaction levels are estimated to be equivalent to one half of the energy used by all data centers globally
.
What Makes A Currency a Currency?
A German banknote from the period of hyperinflation. Stadt Plauen,
Public domain
.
For a currency to be effective it must serve both as a convenient and usable method of conducting transactions, as well as a safe and reliable storage medium for wealth. I can take a pound down to my local Tesco superstore and buy a loaf of bread, or inflation notwithstanding I can put it in my bank account and go to Tesco with it in a year’s time and buy a loaf of bread then.
Putting it in the bank or handing it over at the checkout are both transactions that don’t cost me any extra money and are completed in an instant. That pound (or dollar, or whatever) isn’t just a shiny disc of metal, it’s a tiny statement of confidence in a country’s economy, and jokes about politicians aside, if that country continues to have trade and factories and consumers, it’s a pretty safe bet. A fiat currency such as the pound can lose that effectiveness when the economy goes into crisis,
as happened in Germany
in the years following the First World War, or
in Zimbabwe
following the collapse of the country’s agriculture sector after a disastrous land reform programme. When citizens of Germany began needing a literal wheelbarrow full of Marks to pay for break, and a year in the bank saw a Mark reduced to a tiny fraction of its previous value, the Mark had lost its effectiveness as a currency.
The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that it is not a fiat currency backed by a nation state or a real-world asset such as a pile of gold in Fort Knox. A cryptocurrency that is stable and easy to use would be a very effective currency, in that holding it is not risky and it can be taken to a merchant and exchanged for a loaf of bread without problem. Our next question is therefore whether Bitcoin satisfies those criteria and can be considered a useful currency.
The Cost of Bitcoin Transactions
A Bitcoin transaction carries a fee to the miners, it’s a variable rate that at the time of writing is somewhere around $25. There is also a wait for transactions to complete, until they have been placed in the blockchain by the actions of the miners. Therefore Bitcoin is not a convenient currency for transactions; while both of these drawbacks are nothing when buying a Tesla it makes the currency useless as a means to buy a loaf of bread. The
Lightning network
is an attempt to mitigate this by abstracting micropayments to a peer-to-peer network of participants who conceal their micropayments within a larger paid-for transaction on the main blockchain, but it is not without problems of its own and does not seem to have gained widespread understanding.
The 10000 Bitcoin pizza is famous in the Bitcoin community, but this isn’t it. Perhaps that neither it or Laszlo Hanyecz get more than a passing mention on the whole of Wikipedia should serve as a reminder that the world doesn’t revolve around Bitcoin. Valerio Capello,
CC BY-SA 3.0
.
So Bitcoin has at least the potential to remain a useful currency for transactions, but does it stack up as a store for wealth? We hear about Elon Musk and institutional investors buying into the cryptocurrency, but what those stories fail to make clear is that those investments are only a small percentage of their much larger portfolios. What about those of us who aren’t multi-billionaires with huge diversified investment portfolios, and who stand to lose our shirts if our one investment goes south? A pile of pounds or dollars in a bank is a safe place to keep our life savings even if it’s not a particularly clever one in an era of low interest rates, so if Bitcoin is a currency we have to evaluate how its safety matches to that of a traditional currency. It’s tempting at this point to cite Bitcoin’s performance over the last decade as evidence of its safety as a store of wealth, and it’s true that had I put even a small percentage of my savings in the currency back when Laszlo Hanyecz
bought his famous 10000 BTC pizza
I would now be fabulously wealthy instead of a relatively penniless itinerant scribe (I remember reading that news back in 2010 and thinking “That’s cool but it’ll never catch on”, oh well).
But performance and safety of an investment are not the same metrics, so any appraisal of its wealth storage potential should look at it in the here and now: would you advise your grandmother to put her life savings into it? Even the most ardent Bitcoin enthusiast should admit that it is a volatile asset that is prone to sudden falls as well as the occasional stratospheric rise, so it’s difficult to make a case for it as anything other than a speculative investment vehicle and certainly not a safe place for Granny’s hard-earned.
Have We Backed The Wrong Horse?
The above is almost certainly not what most Bitcoin enthusiasts want to hear, that their currency may have the potential to be usable for everyday transactions but elusively remains a volatile wealth store that’s destroying the planet. But they’re awkward questions that have to be asked, otherwise having so far dodged Government financial regulation, the cryptocurrency may succumb instead to Government environmental regulation.
Cryptocurrencies and the blockchains that underpin them are an extremely cool idea, even though the blockchain is not the universal answer to all computing problems that some of its proponents appeared to present it as during the peak of its hype. It’s inevitable that in some form they will be a part of our futures, but perhaps it’s time to ask: In Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies which follow a similar model, have we backed the wrong horse? | 180 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327888",
"author": "Jadon B",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T18:17:24",
"content": "The energy consumption of bitcoin will always be the sum total power draw of all profitable miners, if a limited run of vastly power efficient miners is released that dilutes the profitability of all othe... | 1,760,373,167.111508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/liquid-lite-brite-robot/ | Liquid Lite Brite Robot | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Art"
] | [
"art",
"CMYK",
"color",
"image",
"liquid",
"lite-brite",
"medical",
"pump"
] | Liquid handling workstations are commonly used in drug development, and look like small CNC machines with droppers on the ends which can dispense liquid into any container in a grid array. They are also extraordinarily expensive, as is most specialty medical research equipment. This liquid handling workstation doesn’t create novel drugs, though,
it creates art
, and performs similar functions to its professional counterparts at a much lower cost in exchange for a lot of calibration and math.
The art is created by pumping a small amount of CMYK-colored liquids into a 24×16 grid, with each space in the grid able to hold a small amount of the colored liquid. The result looks similar to a Lite-Brite using liquids instead of small pieces of plastic. The creator [Zach Frew] created the robot essentially from scratch using an array of 3D printers, waterjets, and CNC machines. He was able to use less expensive parts, compared to medical-grade equipment, by using servo-controlled valves and peristaltic pumps, but makes up for their inaccuracies with some detailed math and calibration.
The results of the project are striking, especially when considering that a lot of hurdles needed to be cleared to get this kind of quality, including some physical limitations on the way that the liquids behave in the first place. It’s worth checking out not just for the art but for the amount of detail involved as well. And, for those still looking to scratch the 90s nostalgia itch, there are plenty of
other projects using the Lite Brite as inspiration
.
Thanks to [Thane Hunt] for the tip! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327896",
"author": "rok",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T18:26:41",
"content": "Just another microfuildics robot, but cheaper :)Could be even cheaper and way faster by re-purposing an inkjet printer",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,373,167.351218 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/using-phase-change-materials-for-energy-storage/ | Using Phase Change Materials For Energy Storage | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"energy storage",
"phase change",
"phase change materials"
] | Renewable energy sources are becoming increasingly popular. However, such energy can be wasted if an excess is available when it’s not yet needed. A particularly relevant example is solar power; solar panels provide most of their output during the day, while often a household’s greatest energy use is at night.
One way to get around this problem is by storing excess energy so that it can be used later. The most common way this is done is with large batteries, however, it’s not the only game in town. Phase change materials are proving to be a useful tool to store excess energy and recover it later – storing energy not as electricity, but as heat. Let’s take a look at how the technology works, and some of its most useful applications.
It’s All About Heat
The heating curve of water. Note the flat lines on the curve where the latent heat must be overcome to change phase.
Unlike batteries or capacitors, phase change materials don’t store energy as electricity, but heat. This is done by using the unique physical properties of phase changes – in the case of a material transitioning between solid and liquid phases, or liquid and gas. When heat energy is applied to a material, such as water, the temperature increases. However, when the liquid water reaches temperatures close to boiling point, something strange happens.
As more energy is put in, the temperature begins to flatline. This is because enough energy must be put in to overcome what is called the
latent heat of vaporization
– the energy required to turn the liquid into a gas. Eventually, once enough heat is put in, the water turns to steam and the temperature is again free to rise. This latent heat can store a significant amount of energy in a material over a relatively small temperature change. This latent heat exists in solid-to-liquid phase changes as well, where it’s known as the latent heat of fusion. By taking advantage of latent heat, large amounts of energy can be stored in a relatively small change in actual temperature, and accessed by manipulating the phase change of a material.
Perhaps the most common form of phase change heat storage on the market is the sodium-acetate handwarmer. These handwarmers contain a sodium-acetate gel in a plastic pouch. When the gel is given a nucleation point by tweaking a metal disk in the gel, it quickly changes phase from a super-saturated liquid to a solid. Suddenly freezing like this releases the latent heat the material was holding in its liquid form, and warms the user’s hands nicely. The material can later be recharged by heating the handwarmer up to melt the sodium acetate once more, before allowing it to gently cool back down to room temperature. The latent heat will then be trapped in the liquid until it is once more disturbed, causing it to freeze again.
A wide variety of materials have been studied for heat storage through the phase change effect
. Paraffin wax is perhaps one of the most commonly studied, thanks to its phase change occuring in a useful temperature range. However, its low thermal conductivity limits the rate at which energy can be exchanged, hampering performance. Hydrated salts have been another material of significant interest, though face problems of their own. Often, such materials will undergo subcooling. As heat is extracted from the liquid material, its temperature declines below freezing point without the material actually becoming solid. Without undergoing a change in phase, the latent heat remains trapped in the liquid, and can’t be extracted. Additionally, like many battery chemistries, repeated cycling can cause problems. The phase change material must retain its properties over many cycles, without chemicals falling out of solution or corrosion harming the material or its enclosure over time. Much research into phase change energy storage is centered around refining solutions and using additives and other techniques to engineer around these basic challenges. Often, the specifics of such materials remains a commercial secret as companies attempt to recoup research costs through sales.
Sunamp’s early phase change cells for home heating – note the input and output fluid ports that feed into the internal heat exchanger.
The phase change effect can be used in a variety of ways to functionally store and save energy. Heat can be applied to a phase-change material, melting it and thus storing energy within it as latent heat. Excess electrical energy, such as from renewable sources, can readily be stored in such phase change materials, as it’s possible to turn electrical energy into heat quite efficiently. The reverse is not so easy, however.
Instead, such phase change devices are often instead used to output heat more directly – either by
being used as hot water heaters
or to
supply heat energy to refrigeration processes
. This is achieved often by simply passing working fluid, like water or refrigerant, through a heat exchanger in contact with the phase change material. The former has plenty of applicability to households, cutting down on costs for residential heating and hot water. The latter is of more relevance to large commercial and industrial facilities. Particularly in industries such as winemaking and cold storage, refrigeration can be a major bottom-line expense that is essential to operations. Even small percentage gains in efficiency or reduced energy use can have huge payoffs over time.
Different phase change materials freeze at different temperatures, making them suitable for different applications. Lower-temperature materials are useful for refrigeration applications such as in this project by the University of South Australia.
Another interesting use of phase-change materials is as
a passive heat management solution for buildings
. The idea is to use a phase change material with a melting point around a comfortable room temperature – such as 20-25 degrees Celsius. The material is encapsulated in plastic matting, and can be installed in a building in walls and ceilings along with insulation. The material then acts as a sort of thermal buffer. Heat energy building up in a room can be absorbed by the phase change material, keeping temperatures lower. As the building then cools, the material can release its heat, acting to stabilize temperatures. It can be a lightweight way to increase the thermal mass of a building, and can reduce the reliance on active cooling or heating from HVAC systems.
BioPCM brand phase-change material installed in a ceiling. This is used as a lightweight way to add thermal mass to a building, helping maintain stable comfortable temperatures without the need for continuous heating and cooling.
Looking to the future, it may be that phase change energy storage remains of limited use in the residential space. While it can have benefits, its limited heating-only application makes it less attractive than battery storage that can run an entire home. However, for industrial processes, such as refrigeration and process heating, there’s plenty of scope for phase change technologies to be used as a cheap and effective store of energy. With research ongoing in the field, it’s likely we’ll see greater uptake of this technology in future as energy conservation increases in relevance in future years. | 35 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327821",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T15:04:00",
"content": "We just need to find some of that special water they had in “Steam Boy” (Allowing super high pressure steam to be stored for a long time)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,167.581484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/attack-of-the-flying-18650s/ | Attack Of The Flying 18650s | Tom Nardi | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"18650",
"3d printed",
"FPV",
"minimalist",
"quadcopter"
] | When somebody builds a quadcopter with the express purpose of flying it as fast and aggressively as possible, it’s not exactly a surprise when they eventually run it into an immovable object hard enough to break something. In fact, it’s more like a rite of passage. Which is why many serious fliers will have a 3D printer at home to rapidly run off replacement parts.
Avid first person view (FPV) flier [David Cledon] has taken this concept to its ultimate extreme by designing a
3D printable quadcopter that’s little more than an 18650 cell with some motors attached
. Since the two-piece frame can be produced on a standard desktop 3D printer in a little over two hours with less than $1 USD of filament, crashes promise to be far less stressful. Spend a few hours during the week printing out frames, and you’ll have plenty to destroy for the weekend.
While [David] says the overall performance of this diminutive quadcopter isn’t exactly stellar, we think the 10 minutes of flight time he’s reporting on a single 18650 battery is more than respectable. While there’s still considerable expense in the radio and video gear, this design looks like it could be an exceptionally affordable way to get into FPV flying.
Of course, the argument could be made that such a wispy quadcopter is more likely to be obliterated on impact than something larger and commercially produced. There’s also a decent amount of close-quarters soldering involved given the cramped nature of the frame. So while the total cost of building one of these birds might be appealing to the newbie, it’s probably a project best left to those who’ve clocked a few hours in on the sticks.
We’ve seen quite a few
3D printed quadcopter frames over the years
, but certainly none as elegant as what [David] has created here. It’s an experiment in minimalism that really embraces the possibilities afforded by low-cost desktop 3D printing, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it become the standard by which future designs are measured. | 31 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327766",
"author": "Jenny",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T12:17:43",
"content": "Finally someone thought about this, scale the copter to a common cell, not the other way around!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6327814",
"a... | 1,760,373,167.867035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/03/free-to-good-home-fpga-supercharged-audio-video-synthesizer/ | Free To Good Home: FPGA Supercharged Audio/Video Synthesizer | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"8 layer",
"audio",
"design",
"pcb",
"synthesizer",
"testing",
"video",
"xilinx zynq"
] | Audio and video synthesizers have been around for decades, and are pretty much only limited by one’s willingness to spend money on them. That is, unless you can
develop your own FPGA-supercharged synthesizer
to really get a leg up on the consumer-grade components. Of course, as [Julian] found out in this four-year project, you tend to pay for it anyway in time spent working on your projects.
[Julian] has actually decided to stop working on the project and open-source it to anyone who wants to continue on. He has already finished the PCB layout on a gargantuan 8-layer print, done all of the routing and parts selection, and really only needed to finish testing it to complete the project. It’s powered by the Xilinx Zynq and is packed with features too: HDMI, DDR3 ram, USB, a handful of sensors, and an Arduino Uno-style header to make interfacing and programming a breeze.
While we’re sympathetic with setting aside a project that we’ve worked so hard on, with most of the work done on this one it should be pretty easy to pick up and adapt for anyone interested in carrying the torch. If you were hoping to wet your whistle with something with fewer PCB layers, though, we’ve seen
some interesting (but slightly simpler) video synthesizers
made out of other unique hardware as well. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327737",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T09:45:21",
"content": ">> with most of the work done on this one it should be pretty easy to pick up and adaptI’ve fallen for that a few times..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,373,167.444464 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/the-70s-are-calling-to-shed-some-light/ | The 70s Are Calling To Shed Some Light | Kristina Panos | [
"green hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"desk lamp",
"phone",
"upcycling"
] | Remember when phones didn’t all look the same? We had a good thing going in the early cell phone days, which seemed like a brief holdover from the Western Electric (et. al) era where you could get a phone that suited your inner minimalist or princess, and choose the color to boot.
[Dubchinsky] found a beautiful phone from this bygone era and saved it from one of two likely fates — the landfill, or else a life languishing as a piece of vintage technology that’s just sitting around for looks.
Instead, this phone found a second calling as a lovely desk lamp with secret goose neck flexibility
. The lamp itself is an inexpensive LED module from ebay that’s wired up to mains power through a push button switch in the phone’s base.
We absolutely love that [Dubchinsky] wrapped the curly cord around the goose neck, but were a bit disappointed that he didn’t use the hook switch to turn the lamp on and off. In the comments, he says that the plastic felt like it was too brittle to stand up to repeated actuation of such a heavy switch. That’s understandable. [Dubchinsky] also thought about using the rotary dial as a dimmer, and we think that’s a bright idea.
Between the guide, the pictures, and the build process video after the break, this is pretty much a complete how-to. We think that is commendable given that [Dubchinsky] is selling these lamps on etsy.
Do ya miss spinning the rotary dial and long for somewhat simpler days?
Hook your finger into this rotary cell phone
. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327711",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T06:41:24",
"content": "[homer simpson wearing leather jacket with tweed elbow patches].. Correction Marge, I ruined TWO perfectly good jackets! [/homer simpson wearing leather jacket with tweed elbow patches]",
"pa... | 1,760,373,167.506642 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/circuit-impedance-calculations-without-cumbersome-simulations/ | Circuit Impedance Calculations Without Cumbersome Simulations | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"calculation",
"circuit",
"impedance",
"model",
"passive",
"python",
"RLC",
"simulation",
"software",
"SPICE"
] | Using circuit simulating software like SPICE can be a powerful tool for modeling the behavior of a circuit in the real world. On the other hand, it’s not always necessary to have all of the features of SPICE available all the time, and these programs tend to be quite expensive as well. To that end, [Wes Hileman] noticed an opportunity for a
specific, quick method for performing impedance calculations using python
without bulky, expensive software and came up with a program which he calls fastZ.
The software works on any network of passive components (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) and the user can specify parallel and series connections using special operators. Not only can the program calculate the combined impedance but it can perform frequency analysis at a specified frequency or graph the frequency response over a wide range of frequencies. It’s also running in python which makes it as simple as importing any other python package, and is also easy to implement in any other python program compared to building a simulation and hoping for the best.
If you find yourself regularly drawing Bode plots or trying to cobble together a circuit simulation to work with your python code, this sort of solution is a great way to save a lot of headache. It is possible to get the a piece of software like SPICE to to work together with other python programs though,
often with some pretty interesting results
. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327696",
"author": "Matthew",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T03:51:39",
"content": "Readers might also be interested in lcapy, a more mature project along the same lines.https://github.com/mph-/lcapy",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6... | 1,760,373,167.400576 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/cycling-cadence-display-with-esp32/ | Cycling Cadence Display With ESP32 | Danie Conradie | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"bluetooth low energy",
"cadence",
"cycling",
"ESP32",
"micropython"
] | Terry Pratchett once said “Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.” This is as true with technical skills as it is with the rest of life, and you won’t truly understand a specific topic unless you’ve struggled with it a bit. [publidave] wanted a simple
wireless display for a bluetooth cycling cadence sensor
, and soon found himself deep down the rabbit hole of Micropython and Bluetooth Low Energy on the ESP32.
[publidave] had converted his bicycle for indoor training during lockdown and winter, and realized he can’t use the guided training app and view his cadence simultaneously, so he needed a dedicated cadence display. Since [publidave] was comfortable with Python, he decided to give
Micropython on the ESP32
ago. Bluetooth Low Energy can be rather confusing if you haven’t implemented it before, especially if good examples are hard to come by. In short, the ESP32 needs to find the sensor, connect to it, select the right service, and listen for the notifications containing the data. The data is then converted to RPM and displayed on a small OLED display. [publidave] does an excellent job of describing what exactly he did, highlighting the problems he encountered, and how he solved them.
In the end, he had a functional display, a good idea of what he would do differently next time, and a lot of additional knowledge and understanding. In our book that’s a successful project.
Since so much of the health related devices work with
Bluetooth Low Energy
, it could be handy to know the technology and how to interface with it. It would allow you to do things like
unbrick a $2000 exercise bike
, | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327697",
"author": "bill",
"timestamp": "2021-03-03T04:13:38",
"content": "wisdom comes from making mistakes, assuming you learned from said mistake",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6327731",
"author": "Jorge Pinto",
"ti... | 1,760,373,167.917862 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/3d-printed-macro-pad-ditches-the-pcb-with-slick-wiring-guides/ | 3D-Printed Macro Pad Ditches The PCB With Slick Wiring Guides | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3d printed",
"cherry mx",
"custom keyboard",
"macro keypad",
"macro pad",
"pcb",
"pico",
"programmable",
"raspberry pi",
"soldering"
] | Reddit user [duzitbetter] showed off their design for a
3D-printed programmable macro keyboard
that offers a different take on what can be thought of as a sort of 3D-printed PCB. The design is called the
Bloko 9
and uses the
Raspberry Pi PICO
and some Cherry MX-style switches, which are popular in DIY keyboards.
The enclosure and keycaps are all 3D printed, and what’s interesting is the way that the enclosure both holds the components in place as well as providing a kind of wire guide for all the electrical connections. The result is such that bare copper wire can be routed and soldered between leads in a layout that closely resembles the way a PCB would be routed. The pictures say it all, so take a look.
Bloko 9
is available as a paid model
, and while
going PCB-free thanks to 3D printing is a technique others have played with
, it is very well demonstrated here and shows there is still plenty of room to innovate on the concept. DIY keyboard and macro pad design is also fertile ground for hackers; we have even seen that
it’s possible to 3D print one right down to the switches themselves
. | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327625",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T21:43:50",
"content": "Looking at the picture, there is a separate object that just olds the “slick wiring” which I would argue is really just a PCB made the hard way.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,167.742847 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/wireless-low-power-e-ink-weather-gadget/ | Wireless, Low Power E-Ink Weather Gadget | Donald Papp | [
"home hacks",
"how-to",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"developer board",
"e-ink",
"ESP32",
"Lilygo",
"weather"
] | Not that long ago, making a low-power and wireless weather display complete with an e-ink screen would have required a lot of work and almost certainly would have been larger than the device [Dmitry] created.
(1) Weather alert indicator, (2) Current temperature, (3) Humidity and wind, (4) 24-hour temperature graph, (5) 24-hour precipitation probably graph
His
low power e-ink weather gadget
takes advantage of one of the niftier developer boards out there to create a useful and slim device that does exactly what he needs and not a lick more. It’s fast to look up weather online, but not as fast as glancing at a display in a convenient location.
The board [Dmitry] selected is a LilyGO TTGO T5s, an ESP32-based board that integrates an e-ink display, which requires no power unless being updated. It has been loaded with just enough smarts to fetch weather information using the
OpenWeather API
, and update the display accordingly.
Powering up the WiFi to fetch an easily-parsed JSON file and update the display only once per hour means that a battery can provide months of runtime. As a bonus, the LilyGO board even includes the ability to charge the battery, making things awfully convenient.
The bill of materials is here
and code for the device, including setup directions, is on the project’s
GitHub repository
. And if your tastes happen to run more towards the artistic than utilitarian,
we have just the weather display for you
. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327585",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T19:30:42",
"content": "–;— not any real life power consumption data or runtime length data.— not partial update featureWho needs another “I bought a board, downloaded something and was able to upload it.” piece? Sorry.Long... | 1,760,373,167.799173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/rube-goldbergs-least-complicated-invention-was-his-cartooning-career/ | Rube Goldberg’s Least Complicated Invention Was His Cartooning Career | Kristina Panos | [
"Biography",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"cartoons",
"engineering",
"mouse trap",
"profiles in science",
"rube goldberg",
"rube goldberg machine"
] | The name Rube Goldberg has long been synonymous with any overly-built contraption played for laughs that solves a simple problem through complicated means.
But it might surprise you to learn that the man himself was not an engineer or inventor by trade
— at least, not for long. Rube’s father was adamant that he become an engineer and so he got himself an engineering degree and a job with the city. Rube lasted six months engineering San Francisco’s sewer systems before quitting to pursue his true passion: cartooning.
Rube’s most famous cartoons — the contraptions that quickly became his legacy — were a tongue-in-cheek critique meant to satirize the tendency of technology to complicate our lives in its quest to simplify them. Interestingly, a few other countries have their own version of Rube Goldberg. In the UK it’s
Heath Robinson
, and in Denmark it’s Robert Storm Petersen, aka
Storm P
.
Rube Goldberg was a living legend who loved to poke fun at everything happening in the world around him. He became a household name early in his cartooning career, and was soon famous enough to endorse everything from cough drops to cigarettes. By 1931, Rube’s name was in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, his legacy forever cemented as the inventor of complicated machinery designed to perform simple tasks. As one historian put it, Rube’s influence on culture is hard to overstate.
Rube’s alma mater Berkeley calls him an engineer’s engineer. Image via
Berkeley Engineering
Engineer of His Own Future
Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg was born July 4th, 1883 to Max and Hannah Goldberg in San Francisco, California. He started tracing cartoons in the newspaper at the age of four and kept drawing throughout his childhood. Rube never had any formal drawing lessons, though he did take a few lessons from a sign painter around age 11.
When Rube announced his intent to become a famous cartoonist, his family was horrified. Rube’s father, a policeman and fire commissioner, had worked hard to to provide a good life for his family after emigrating from Germany. He equated artists with beggars, and wanted Rube to be an engineer.
Though Rube still dreamed of becoming a famous cartoonist, he got a mining engineering degree from UC Berkeley in 1904. He then took a job with the city of San Francisco as a water and sewers engineer. Rube hated the job so much that he quit after six months, and took a job at the
San Francisco Chronicle
for one third the pay. Rube started out at the bottom, emptying wastebaskets, sweeping the floors, and filing photographs. But he still drew every chance he got, and was eventually hired by the
San Francisco Bulletin
to be their sports cartoonist.
Crazy Contraptions with Explanatory Captions
In 1906, a powerful and deadly earthquake shook San Francisco. Faced with his own mortality, Rube realized that if he wanted to be nationally famous, he’d have to go where the action was — New York City. The following year, Rube moved across the country by train in the hopes of getting hired by a nationally-syndicated newspaper. Just when he was ready to sell his father’s diamond ring for a train ticket back home, he was hired by the
New York Evening Mail
.
As we all know, Rube Goldberg is most famous for his contraption cartoons that employ ridiculous chain reactions to solve every day problems. These intricate machines were all inventions of Rube’s alter ego Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, who was loosely based on one of Rube’s engineering professors at Berkeley. He drew the first one of these around 1912 and shot to fame and fortune soon after. Rube spent many hours perfecting his cartoons and would spend upwards of 60 hours drawing a single cartoon.
Image via
The Science Academy
Image via
Screwball Comics
Rube drew all kinds of cartoons about sports, politics, and current events. Soon after getting hired at the
New York Evening Mail
, Rube started his first nationally-syndicated cartoon called “Foolish Questions”. These single-panel cartoons depicted one person asking another a question where the answer is painfully obvious. But as the saying goes, ask a foolish question, and you’ll get a foolish answer — the retort is usually an oddly-specific oddball answer.
Between 1905 and 1938, Rube drew more than 60 different cartoon series including “Foolish Questions”, “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts”, and “Mike and Ike (They Look Alike)”, which likely spawned the candy of the same name.
Rube drew so many different strips and panels throughout his career that historians have a hard time cataloguing it all. In 1930, Rube’s inventions came to life on the silver screen in the movie
Soup to Nuts
, which introduced the world to the slapstick comedy of the Three Stooges.
Image via
Wikimedia Commons
Still Relevant, Still a Household Name
Rube Goldberg had an amazing 72-year career as a cartoonist. Throughout his career, he drew an estimated 50,000 cartoons, both political and otherwise.
Rube won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for a single-frame political cartoon called “Peace Today” that depicts a nuclear family balanced on a precipice dividing world domination from total destruction of same. He never stopped making art and became a sculptor at age 80. He died in 1970 at the age of 87.
Although Rube may never have built any of his own creations, his imagination continues to inspire people to invent their own wild ways of solving problems and make them come to life. All across America, schools hold contraption-building competitions every year in his honor, often with a required minimum number of actions.
We’ve seen plenty of Rube Goldberg-inspired builds over the years.
Here’s one that systematically opens a bottle of beer
, and
another that uses a CNC router to scrape the stuf out of Oreos
. Have you ever built a Rube Goldberg machine? Let us know in the comments! | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327554",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T18:13:54",
"content": "In Spain we had “The inventions of Prf. Franz of Copenhaguen”, also known as “The great inventions of the TBO”, clearly “inspired” in the comics from Rube Goldberg.https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_gra... | 1,760,373,167.996834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/new-contest-data-loggin/ | New Contest: Data Loggin’ | Mike Szczys | [
"contests"
] | [
"contest",
"data logger",
"data logging"
] | What are we gonna’ do with all this data? Let’s make it something fun!
That’s the point of the just-launched Data Loggin’ contest
. Do something clever to automatically log a data set and display it in an interesting way. Three winners will each receive a $100 Tindie gift certificate for showing off an awesome project.
One year of baby sleep patterns
encoded by @Lagomorpho
in a knitted blanket.
Data logging is often an afterthought when working on a project, but the way you collect and store data can have a big effect on the end project.
Just ask Tesla
who are looking at a multi-thousand-dollar repair process for failing eMMC from too much logging. Oops. Should you log to an SD card? Internet? Stone tablets? (Yes please, we actually really want to see that for this contest.) Make sure to share those details so your project can be a template for others to learn from in the future.
Next, consider Schrodinger’s dataset: if the data is never used does it actually exist? Grab some attention with how you use this data. That automatic donut slicer you built can be used to slice up a tasty pie-chart of the minutes you spent on the elliptical this week. Your energy consumption can be plotted if you connect that
OpenCV meter reader
up to
your favorite cloud service
to visualize the data or a
NodeRED dashboard
if you’d rather keep things local. You could also make some of that data permanent, like
this blanket that encoded baby’s sleep patterns in the colors
.
You probably already have something harvesting data. Here’s the excuse you need to do something silly (or serious) with that data. Tells us about it by publishing a project page on Hackaday.io and don’t forget to use that “Submit Project To” menu to add it to the Data Loggin’ contest. | 24 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327540",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T17:16:57",
"content": "Damn, guess I better crib up on micropython for scraping .io for contest submissions and log and chart data on that. :-D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,373,168.06999 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/fixing-the-only-thing-thats-slow-about-grand-theft-auto-v/ | Fixing The Only Thing That’s Slow About Grand Theft Auto V | Jenny List | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"GTA V",
"json parser",
"software",
"software bug"
] | The driving, crime, and general mayhem game
Grand Theft Auto V
is something of a phenomenon that has lasted for the last seven or more years. Whether following the in-game missions, driving around like a hooligan for fun or performing crazy stunts, the depth of detail in its landscapes and the continual improvements to gameplay that have arrived over the years have assured it a massive following across multiple platforms. The game is not without its problems though, one of which is an unreasonably long loading time for its online version.
This annoyed [T0st]
to the extent that it was worth the effort of looking under the hood to find out where the problem lay.
It was evident that for PC users the effect varied depending on the hardware present. Furthermore AMD processors seemed worse-hit than Intel ones, and indeed they found an entire core maxed out by a couple of processes during the wait. Some diagnostics and disassembly led the trail to some string processing code which was identified as a JSON parser. This was not simply parsing the JSON but also performing a check for token uniqueness in an extremely inefficient manner, causing the whole process to be extremely slow. Sone nifty patching in a DLL containing a much more efficient function with a cache for unique values saved the day, and delivered an impressive 70% speed-up. It’s to be hoped that the game’s developers will take note, and a future
GTA V
update will deliver a fix.
Driving a car from a third-person viewpoint in a game like
GTA V
is a hoot.
In real life though, not so much
.
Thanks [Thanatos Erberus] for the tip. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327532",
"author": "yaniv382",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T16:48:02",
"content": "Rockstar, please fix.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6327565",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T18:44:52",
"content": "> So... | 1,760,373,168.120158 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/an-homage-to-daft-punk-in-fan-made-helmets-through-the-years/ | An Homage To Daft Punk In Fan-Made Helmets Through The Years. | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"LED Hacks",
"Musical Hacks",
"Roundup",
"Slider",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"cosplay",
"daft punk",
"daft punk helmet"
] | It’s with sadness that we note the end to an end. The French dance music duo Daft Punk have split up, announced in
a video that’s has already clocked 22 million views
.The band have inspired hardware geeks across the world not just with their music but the way they present themselves. A perennial project has been to replicate in some way their iconic robot helmets.
Harrison Krix’s 2009 take on Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s helmet.
The artists themselves have been reticent about the exact technology that powers their headgear, but while this is a source of endless mystery and speculation to the music press it’s safe to assume from our perspective that their designers have the same parts at their disposal as we have. Microcontrollers, EL wire, and LEDs are universal, so the challenge lies in artistic expression with the helmet design rather than in making the effects themselves. We’ve reached into the archives for a bit of Daft Punk helmet nostalgia, so stick on
Harder Better Faster
and lets take a look at them, er, one more time.
One of the earliest Daft Punk helmets
we featured came from
Ben Heck
Harrison Krix
, a very high quality sculpted Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo model replicated as a resin shell by means of a flexible silicone mould, and given a vacuum-formed visor.
Harison Krix as Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo
Harison Krix again, this time with a Thomas Bangalter headpiece
Harrison used very similar techniques to make the helmet itself, but knocked it out of the park with the LED lighting effects to bring the life the closest helmet you could have to a real one without being in the band itself. Not content with just one,
he returned a year later
with his version of Thomas Bangalter’s headgear.
Advancing Tech Just Makes Them Better And Better
Mike Michelena gave his helmet MIDI control.
In 2014 Adafruit
published a design for a 3D printed Guy-Manuel helmet
, which would have paired nicely with Marc’s Thomas helmet whose shell was
printed in polycarbonate on a high-quality industrial printer
. This one featured iPhone control, and marked a trend of the helmets increasing in technical capabilities as the decade progressed and better components became available.
Mike Michelena’s Guy-Manuel helmet
from 2016 reached a new height both in physical and technical sophistication with a huge array of features including MIDI control.
Each of the helmets presents its own design challenges, and the Thomas helmet in particular requires an LED array to an exacting specification in a curved plane. This is no easy task to get right and requires some fine soldering skills with a huge pile of discrete LEDs.
Nathaniel Stepp showed us how it should be done in the fall of 2018
with some particularly fine workmanship. For mere mortals the job could be done with LED strips, as ElectroNoobs’s much simpler build showed us.
As it has with so many things, the pandemic seems to have claimed everybody’s attention and last year must have pushed partying away from the limelight. Estefannie’s Guy-Manuel helmet
was the subject of a talk at the 2019 Superconference
, and since then the scene has been quiet. But that’s not quite the end of the story though, because there’s a parallel stream of other helmets that aren’t replicas but maybe owe some inspiration to the French duo. Mocymo’s
Smile helmet
for example uses an Android tablet for its display and electronics,and ingeniously has a built-in periscope to see past it.
Daft Punk themselves may have disbanded, but that doesn’t mean the story should be over in our community. It’s likely that the time period following the eventual all-clear from this virus will be marked by an outpouring of excess from the party-starved and newly-vaccinated masses, so if you’re a fan then perhaps now is the time to start building. | 32 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327508",
"author": "Hari Wiguna",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T15:48:37",
"content": "Eleven years ago… long before 3D printers… “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” inspired me to build Daft Punk Pandas!Great memories. Thank you Daft Punk!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQuQ93SBeRg&ab_c... | 1,760,373,168.199455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/dont-tase-me-keeb/ | Don’t Tase Me, Keeb! | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"particle",
"particle argon",
"shock gum",
"typing trainer"
] | Okay, so this doesn’t really use a taser — that’s just click bait and we apologize. An actual taser would be a terrible way to train yourself to be a better typist, because depending on where you choose to deliver the shock, you could damage your typing nerves pretty quickly with a few milliamps at 50,000 volts.
Instead of a taser, [nobody6502] got a pack of prank gum off of Amazon that delivers a much more doable shock that is
painful enough to get the user to type more carefully
. [nobody6502] set up a simple no-pain, no-train
website
that presents random English words one at a time and checks for typos against
an open-source list of nearly half a million entries
. Misspell a word, and a get a relay-driven shock from the gum circuit.
The main brain of this pain trainer is a Particle Argon board which has I/O pins that can be controlled from the web. When the website detects a typo, it sends a signal to the Argon, which turns on a relay that activates the shock mechanism. What’s most impressive is that [nobody6502] doesn’t have a full-blown computer and programmed everything on an iPad. Check out the build video after the break.
Are you a hunt and peck typist?
There’s a negative reinforcement keyboard for that
.
Thanks to [Heladera Dragon] and [Alvarito050506] for tipping us off. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327461",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T12:48:05",
"content": "“Okay, so this doesn’t really use a taser — that’s just click bait and we apologize. An actual taser would be a terrible way to train yourself to be a better typist, because depending on where you choose... | 1,760,373,168.399792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/02/a-flir-one-pro-sees-again-thanks-to-some-nifty-soldering/ | A FLIR One Pro Sees Again, Thanks To Some Nifty Soldering | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"flir",
"flir one",
"USB C"
] | The Flir One Pro is a thermal camera that attaches to a mobile phone with a USB-C plug. [Gigawatts] has one, and unfortunately managed to drop it, breaking the USB-C plug and rendering the device useless. The plug is separate from the main PCB, an assembly of its own with a flexible cable, but FLIR are not interested in supplying spares. What was the answer?
Wire data lines into the device’s charging port, of course
!
The One Pro has its own battery, and to avoid draining the phone it is charged through another USB connection, this time a socket. The data lines aren’t connected, which necessitated some very careful soldering of wire-wrap wire to an SMD package to fix. When completed and secured with glue the resulting camera works with a USB-C cable, and there are plans to mount a tripod thread receptacle in the space left by the USB-C plug.
It’s disappointing that Flir choose not to supply replacements for the USB-C plug assembly, seemingly they see the device as a throwaway piece of consumer electronics rather than the expensive instrument that it is. This modification should at lease allow some unfortunate One Pro owners to revive their dead cameras.
If you’re curious about the Flir One series of cameras,
perhaps you’d like to read our review
. | 29 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327429",
"author": "Drew",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T09:43:53",
"content": "I have a flir one (not pro). The *sensor* is amazing. The rest of it, absolute trash. I always assumed the built in battery was for noise reasons? But in any case it’s dead every time I go to use the thing... | 1,760,373,168.706564 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/lowering-the-electricity-bill-by-mining-cryptocurrency/ | Lowering The Electricity Bill By Mining Cryptocurrency | Danie Conradie | [
"computer hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"crypto mining",
"cryptocurrency",
"Heat pump",
"heating"
] | Wherever you are in the world, the chances are that a large portion of your utility bill is for heating. This was certainly the case for [Christian Haschek], who realized he can use a
cryptocurrency mining rig to offset some of his heating costs
.
[Christian]’s central ventilation and water heating is handled by a heat pump, which uses a lot of electricity, especially in the Austrian winter. When it draws in cool air, it first needs to heat it to the thermostat temperature before venting it to the house. Cryptocurrency mining rigs are also heavy electricity users, but they also produce a lot of heat, which can be used to preheat the air going to the heat pump. [Christian] had four older AMD R9 390 GPUs (equivalent to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970) lying around, so he mounted them in a server case and piped the heat pump’s air intake through the case.
At the time he did the tests, earnings from mining were enough to cover half of his heating bill, even after paying for the mining rig’s electricity. That is not taking into account the electricity savings from the preheated air. He only shows the results of one evening, where it dropped his electricity usage from around 500Wh to below 250Wh. We would like to see the long-term results, and it would be an interesting challenge to build a model to calculate the true costs or savings, taking into account all the factors. For instance, it could be possible to save costs even if the mining rig itself is running at a slight loss.
Of course, this is not a new idea. A quick internet search yields several similar projects and even some commercial crypto mining space heaters. We do like the fact that [Christian] reused some hardware he already had and integrated it into his central heating rather than using it as a mobile unit.
When [Christian] isn’t building crypto heaters, he can be found
flooding phishing scams with fake data
, or
tracking down corporate spies
. | 119 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327369",
"author": "Tom Hargrave",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T06:20:06",
"content": "‘ where it dropped his electricity usage from around 500Wh to below 250Wh’Not possible. A heat pump saves energy because it’s cheaper to move heat with electricity than to convert electricity directl... | 1,760,373,168.646171 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/open-source-cam-software-in-the-browser/ | Open Source CAM Software In The Browser | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"3d printing",
"cam",
"CNC milling",
"Laser cutting",
"slicer"
] | 3D printers, desktop CNC mills/routers, and laser cutters have made a massive difference in the level of projects the average hacker can tackle. Of course, these machines would never have seen this level of adoption if you had to manually write G-code, so CAM software had a big part to play. Recently we found out about an open-source browser-based CAM pack created by [Stewert Allen] named
Kiri:Moto
, which can generate G-code for all your desktop CNC platforms.
To get it out of the way, Kiri:Moto does not run in the cloud. Everything happens client-side, in your browser. There are performance trade-offs with this approach, but it does have the inherent advantages of being cross-platform and not requiring any installation. You can click the link above and start generating tool paths within seconds, which is great for trying it out. In the machine setup section you can choose CNC mill, laser cutter, FDM printer, or SLA printer. The features for CNC should be perfect for 90% of your desktop CNC needs. The interface is intuitive, even if you don’t have any previous CAM experience. See the video after the break for a complete breakdown of the features, complete with timestamp for the different sections.
All the required features for laser cutting are present, and it supports a drag knife. If you want to build an assembly from layers of laser-cut parts, Kiri:Moto can automatically slice the 3D model and nest the 2D parts on the platform. The slicer for 3D printing is functional, but probably won’t be replacing our regular slicer soon. It places heavy emphasis on manually adding supports, and
belt printers
like the Ender CR30 are already supported.
Kiri:Moto is being actively improved, and it looks as though [Stewart] is very responsive to community inputs. The complete source code is available on
GitHub
, and you can run an instance on your local machine if you prefer to do so.
We like what we’re seeing with Kiri:Moto, and honestly surprised we didn’t find out about it sooner. After
Autodesk neutered the free version of Fusion 360
, some CAM users might still be looking for alternatives. We think this is a good option, and you might want to consider the Path workbench in
FreeCAD
as well.
Thanks for the tip [Bruce]! | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327345",
"author": "Jon Smirl",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T04:03:01",
"content": "Onshape… it is free for open source projects.https://www.onshape.com/en/products/free",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6327348",
"author":... | 1,760,373,168.499009 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/machining-a-honing-jig-will-keep-skills-sharp/ | Machining A Honing Jig Will Keep Skills Sharp | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"chisel",
"honing",
"machining",
"metalworking",
"plane",
"sharpening"
] | [Amy Makes Stuff] has long used a pair of diamond honing blocks to freehand sharpen planes, chisels, and all the other dull things around the shop. Although this method works fairly well, the results are often inconsistent without
some kind of jig to hold the blade securely as it’s being sharpened
. These types of devices are abundant and cheap to buy, but as [Amy] says in the video after the break, then she doesn’t get to machine anything. Boy, do we know that feeling.
[Amy] was able to make this completely out of stuff she had lying around, starting with a block of scrap aluminium that eventually gets cut into the two halves of the jig. The video is full of tips and tricks and it’s really interesting to see [Amy]’s processes up close. Our favorite part has to be that grippy knob that expands and contracts the jig. [Amy] made it by drilling a bunch of holes close to the outside edge of a circle, and then milled away the edge until she had a fully fluted knob. Once she had the jig finished, she upgraded her honing blocks by milling a new home for them out of milky-white high-density polyethylene.
Mills are fantastic tools to have, but they’re a bit on the pricey side.
If you’re just getting started, why not convert a drill press into a mill?
Wouldn’t that be more fun that just buying one? | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327355",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T05:01:36",
"content": "This is really cool. I made something similar but just use a single screw clamp to hold the tool to the jig, so I have to square it up. This design is way better and I wish I’d thought of it. Tim... | 1,760,373,168.441118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/shredding-the-ice-with-powered-skates/ | Shredding The Ice With Powered Skates | Danie Conradie | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"brushless motor",
"ice skating",
"micro-mobility"
] | The availability of small and powerful brushless motors has been instrumental in the development of so-called micro-mobility vehicles. But if your commute involves crossing a frozen lake, you might find the options a bit lacking. Fortunately [Simon] from [RCLifeOn] now has a solution for you in the form of
motorized ice skates
.
[Simon] used 3D printed brackets to mount outrunner brushless motors to the back of a pair of ice-skates. The spinning outer housing of the motor is used as the wheel, with a bunch of studs threaded in it to dig into the ice and provide traction. At first [Simon] tried to use a pair of RC car springs to keep the motor in contact with the ice, but spring force was insufficient for the task, so he ended up rigidly mounting the motors. Getting proper traction on the ice from a standstill was still tricky, so he ended up leaning back to push the motor down, which also had the effect of putting him off balance, limiting the practical acceleration. The most obvious solution for the tracking problem seems to be stronger springs, but we assume he didn’t have any on hand. The batteries are held in a backpack, with cables running down to the skates, and a wireless electric skateboard controller is used for throttle control.
The obvious risk of these skates is of the studded motors inadvertently becoming meat grinders if you fall. It still looks like a fun project, and we wouldn’t mind having a go on those skates.
[Simon] likes messing around with brushless motors, and has done everything from a
jet-powered surfboard
to a
gyro-stabilized RC “motorbike”
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327247",
"author": "Jan Helebrant (@jhelebrant)",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T21:34:06",
"content": "Apetor, from Normay uses a chainsaw hack :-Dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5-Bbipc7fo&t=161sjust for fun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,373,168.840211 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/street-legalize-your-ebike-with-a-magnet/ | Street-Legalize Your Ebike With A Magnet | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"controller",
"ebike",
"hall effect",
"limit",
"magnet",
"microcontroller",
"programmable",
"speed",
"street legal"
] | Getting into e-biking is a great hobby. It can get people on bikes who might otherwise not be physically able to ride, it can speed up commute times, and it can even make hauling lots of stuff possible and easy, not to mention it’s also fun and rewarding. That being said, there are a wide array of conflicting laws around what your e-bike can and can’t do on the road and if you don’t want to run afoul of the rules you may need a
programmable device that ensures your e-bike is restricted in the appropriate way
.
This build is specifically for Bafang mid drives, which can be up to 1000 W and easily power a bike beyond the speed limit where [Tomblarom] lives. A small microcontroller is housed in a waterproof box on the bike and wired between the motor’s display and controller. A small hall effect sensor and magnet sit by this microcontroller, and if the magnet is removed then the microcontroller reprograms the bike’s controller to limit the speed and also to disable the throttle, another feature that is illegal in some jurisdictions but not others. As an added bonus, the microcontroller also handles brake lights, turn signals, and automatic headlights for the bike as well.
While the
project page
mentions removing the magnet while getting pulled over to avoid fines and other punishments, that’s on you. We imagine this could still be useful for someone who wants to
comply with local laws when riding on the road
, but still wants to remove the restrictions when riding on private property or off-road where the wattage and speed restrictions might not apply. | 98 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327198",
"author": "Feinfinger",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T20:11:22",
"content": "Aaaaaaaah!I get it now: Like a diesel-cheat-device for a bike!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6327356",
"author": "geemy",
"ti... | 1,760,373,169.06519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/worlds-first-evtol-airport-will-land-this-november/ | World’s First EVTOL Airport Will Land This November | Kristina Panos | [
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"air taxi",
"eVTOL",
"eVTOL hub",
"flying cars"
] | We have to admit that flying cars still sound pretty cool. But if we’re ever going to get this idea off the ground, there’s a truckload of harsh realities that must be faced head-on. The most obvious and pressing issue might seem to be the lack of flying cars, but that’s not really a problem. Air taxis are already in the works from companies like
Airbus
,
Rolls-Royce
, and Cadillac,
who premiered theirs at CES this year
.
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. But we do need infrastructure to support this growing category of air traffic that includes shipping drones that are already in flight. Say no more, because by November 2021,
the first airport built especially for flying cars is slated to be operational in England
.
Image via
Hyundai
British startup Urban Air Port is building their flagship eVTOL hub smack dab in the center of Coventry, UK, a city once known as Britain’s Detroit due to the dozens of automobile makers who have called it home. They’re calling this grounded flying saucer-looking thing Air One, and
they are building it in partnership with Hyundai
thanks to a £1.2 million ($1.65M) grant from the British government. Hyundai are developing their own eVTOL which they are planning to release in 2028.
Starting in November 2021, this temporary, pop-up eVTOL hub will used to give live demonstrations that show the viability of these electric air vehicles for transporting both passengers and goods on a regular basis, as well as in heightened response to natural disasters. The hubs themselves will be small — 60% smaller than a heliport, which is their closest living cousin. They require no runway, and can be powered completely off-grid if necessary. Urban Air Port expects to be able to stand up one of these facilities in a matter of days, which makes them ideal for getting supplies into disaster-stricken areas of the world.
Even though the overall footprint will be smaller, these hubs will still need parking lots, bus stops, and other support for ground transportation. Fortunately, this is a whole-future endeavor and the hub is designed to be harmonious with other sustainable modes of electric transport. We’re picturing an EV charger in every parking space, all of which are shaded beneath a roof covered with responsive solar panels. Oh, and there’s a really nice bus stop.
If You Build It, They Will Come
On the one hand, it totally makes sense to start building these hubs. Again, you have to start somewhere, and I know I would feel a lot better about getting into an air taxi after a bit of front-row education. Like Urban Air Port founder Ricky Sandhu says in the video below, cars need roads, trains need rails, and planes need airports. And they all need places for parking, embarking, and disembarking. Air taxis and shipping drones need places for people and goods to load in and load out of them. From the looks of it, these hubs are more than just storage and a launch pad; they’re more akin to, well, small urban airports or helipads with amenities like couches and restrooms and maybe a vending with masks and sanitizer.
On the other hand, we still have a global pandemic going on that has changed the way we work, shop, and do just about everything. There’s barely anyone using regular airplanes these days. We have to wonder how much use these near-future air taxis would get, what with way fewer people actually going to a job, and no drive-through coffee options in the sky as of yet.
Urban-Air is planning to build 200 of these hubs across the UK and abroad within the next five years. We’re excited to see where project this goes — how many hubs end up getting built, and where. NASA thinks the Urban Air Mobility market could be worth a lot in the States, but
cites the current lack of infrastructure as a major barrier
. Don’t tell that to Archer Aviation,
a California start-up that plans to launch a fleet of air taxis as early as 2024
. | 51 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327173",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T18:20:39",
"content": "…but can you fit a mobile office inside?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6327176",
"author": "Tom Brusehaver",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T18:35:17... | 1,760,373,168.932647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/putting-lasers-to-work-hack-chat/ | Putting Lasers To Work Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"acrylic",
"business",
"entrepreneur",
"Hack Chat",
"laser",
"laser cutter",
"laser engraving",
"wood"
] | Join us on Wednesday, March 3 at noon Pacific for the
Putting Lasers to Work Hack Chat
with
Jonathan Schwartz
!
Laser cutting equipment runs the gamut in terms of cost, with low-end, almost disposable units that can be had for a song to high-power fiber lasers that only big businesses can afford. But the market has changed dramatically over the years, and there’s now a sweet-spot of affordable laser cutters that can really do some work. And while plenty of hobbyists have taken the plunge and added such a laser cutter to their shops, still others have looked at these versatile tools and realized that a business can be built around them.
For the next Hack Chat, we’ll be sitting down with Jonathan Schwartz. He started with laser cutters at his maker space, and quickly became the “laser guy” everyone turned to for answers. With about 10 years of experience, Jon set up
American Laser Cutter
in Los Angeles, to provide bespoke laser engraving and cutting services. He has built a business around mid-range laser cutters, and he’s ready to share what he’s learned. Join us as we talk about the machines, the materials, and the services that are part of a laser cutting business, and find out some of the tricks of the laser-jockey’s trade.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 3 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. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327156",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T17:41:45",
"content": "Materials thicker than say ~1.5 mm, ~1/16″ are a “solved problem” for me, I’ve got saws, lots of saws, and 2 routers. What would interest me in a laser cutter is cheap obtanium parts, only for cuttin... | 1,760,373,169.157902 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/theres-only-one-way-to-play-a-star-wars-game/ | There’s Only One Way To Play A Star Wars Game | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"game controller",
"light saber",
"light sabre",
"motion sensing",
"star wars"
] | Most computer and console games have a variety of different control schemes depending on the controller peripheral the player has to hand. For Star Wars games the fight scenes may be playable with a gamepad, but perhaps that leaves a little to desired in the realism department. In that case, [
Leonardo Moreno
] has the solution, in the form of
a motion sensing light sabre for gaming via gesture control
.
The first part of any light sabre project is the sabre itself, and for this he uses soft transparent PVC tubing. This might seem an insubstantial choice, but makes sense when the possibility of hitting an expensive television or gamers monitor with it is considered. Up the pipe goes a piece of LED strip, and onto it a hilt containing an Arduino and an MPU6050 gyroscope sensor. The physical controls come courtesy of a small analogue joystick and a trigger fashioned from a wooden clothes pin. The result may be a little rough and ready, but it’s undeniably a light sabre. Full instructions and software can be found at the link.
Light sabres have been a perennial build, but few have captured the original better than
this laser based one
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327148",
"author": "unipagrupo",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T17:19:33",
"content": "Cool!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6327294",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-03-02T00:03:37",
"content": "That photo looks l... | 1,760,373,169.10775 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/wind-turbines-and-ice-how-theyre-tailored-for-specific-climates/ | Wind Turbines And Ice: How They’re Tailored For Specific Climates | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"deice",
"ice",
"power outage",
"Texas",
"Wind turbine"
] | Wind turbines are incredible pieces of technology, able to harvest wind energy and deliver it to the power grid without carbon emissions. Their constant development since the first one came online in 1939 mean that the number of megawatts produced per turbine continues to rise as price per megawatt-hour of wind energy continues to fall. Additionally, they can operate
in almost any climate to reliably generate energy almost anywhere in the world
from Canada to the North Atlantic to parts beyond. While the cold snap that plowed through the American South recently might seem to contradict this fact, in reality the loss of wind power during this weather event is partially a result of tradeoffs made during the design of these specific wind farms (and, of course, the specifics of how Texas operates its power grid, but that’s outside the scope of this article) rather than a failure of the technology itself.
First, building wind turbines on the scale of megawatts isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Purchasing a large turbine from a company like GE, Siemens, or Vestas is a lot like buying a car. A make and model are selected first, and then options are selected for these base models. For example, low but consistent wind speeds demand a larger blade that will rotate at a lower speed whereas areas with higher average wind speeds may be able to get by with smaller and less expensive blades for the same amount of energy production. Another common option for turbines is cold weather packages, which include things like heaters for the control systems, hydraulics, and power electronics, additional insulation in certain areas, and de-icing solutions especially for the turbine blades.
In a location like Texas that rarely sees cold temperatures for very long, it’s understandable that the cold weather packages might be omitted to save money during construction (although some smaller heaters are often included in critical areas to reduce condensation or humidity) but also to save on maintenance as well: every part in a wind turbine has to be maintained. Continuing the car analogy, it’s comparable to someone purchasing a vehicle in a cold climate that didn’t come equipped with air conditioning to save money up front, but also to avoid repair costs when the air conditioning eventually breaks. However, there are other side effects beyond cost to be considered when installing equipment that’s designed to improve a turbine’s operation in cold weather.
Let’s dig into the specifics of how wind turbine equipment is selected for a given wind farm.
Good Design Involves Tradeoffs
Improving a turbine’s ability to operate in cold weather may actually decrease its ability to operate in hot weather, which Texas at least is guaranteed to see during large portions of the year. Everything in a turbine generates heat when operating, from the blade pitching equipment to the gearbox and generator to the power electronics which tie them electrically to the grid. Expelling the waste heat in summer is much more important in these places than preparing them for a few days of cold weather that might not even happen in any given year. Typically this waste heat is expelled by means of radiators and cooling fans, whether they are installed on the gearbox, generator, power converter, or other heat-sensitive equipment, and the settings at which the cooling systems activate (if they exist at all) may not be easy or possible to change.
This brings up another consideration with wind energy in Texas specifically. Wind is plentiful in Texas, so it was among the first places in the US to adopt early versions of grid-scale wind turbines, some of which are still in operation. These turbines are much less configurable than modern versions, and it may not be easy or possible to change the various temperature settings in a turbine. That means that in some cases, cooling fans are active all the time, or the turbines are otherwise permanently configured in a way that makes them ideal for use in hot climates but quickly trip offline in cold weather. Even modern turbines will go offline if the internal temperatures reach a set point well below freezing (typically -30 °C/-22 °F) in order to prevent damage (note that if grid operators are aware of the weather they’ll be able to predict the loss of generation and plan for it), but if cooling systems aren’t configured for the cold, vents are still open, or insulation is lacking, these turbines will not be immune to the effects of the cold either.
Fighiting Ice: Electric Heat and Special Paint; But Not Helicopters
Other aspects of wind turbines that impact their abilities to operate in extreme cold is how they deal with ice, specifically on the turbine blades. Carbon-based electrical heaters on the blades are common way to control ice buildup. 2014 images of the
helicopter deicing tests in Sweden shown in the video below
went viral during the Texas outage, but this technique is not used in Texas and doesn’t seem to have seen much adoption anywhere due to the expenses involved. (Also considering the need to have a pilot and at least two other workers on-site during icy conditions.) Installing blade heaters caries its own cost and, at least for the time being, may only make economic sense in areas that are expected to deal with cold during a significant portion of the year.
Other options include using thermal cameras to sense ice buildup and shut the turbine down if the ice becomes severe. While all of these methods so far require energy inputs in order to de-ice blades, an innovative product from a wind turbine company called Gamesa is
producing paint that naturally prevents ice formation
, eliminating the need for expensive energy-intensive deicing solutions.
Another example of a company using paint to try to prevent ice buildup on blades is at a wind farm in Canada where the site has
painted some blades black
in order to increase the amount of UV light absorbed from the sun, hoping to naturally increase the temperature of the blades without any novel technology or energy-intensive solutions. While this method is not as widespread as other methods, it demonstrates an example of a tradeoff between hot and cold climates: painting blades black in Texas, while there is
some evidence that it may reduce bird fatalities
, presumably would have major downsides when the long summers rolled around and the blades heated up beyond design tolerances.
Human Resources in Cold Weather
While all of these technological solutions to extreme climates are the subject of any news cycle focused on the downsides of wind energy, one of the most important things about the operation of wind turbines is often glossed over when considering operation outside of their intended climate: the people who maintain them have to also be prepared to live and work in that climate as well. If a turbine trips offline for a routine reason during a snow or ice event, most wind technicians at sites in places like Texas don’t have access to snowplows, snowblowers, or snowmobiles to access the turbines like they might if they were working in northern Quebec. They may not live in areas that regularly plow or salt the roads, making it difficult or unsafe to get to the site or turbines at all. Even if the technicians are doing something simple to improve the turbine’s performance in cold weather, like shutting hatch vents or adding insulation, they still need to get to the turbines.
Ice buildup on turbine blades can be thrown or fall on people and equipment if left unchecked. Via
windpowerengineering.com
Further, there are some safety issues with ice buildup on turbines as well, namely that it has to go somewhere when it falls off of the turbines. For that reason, most technicians have strict rules on approaching turbines during ice events to prevent any ice from shedding off of the turbine and onto them or their vehicles. In a cold climate that has de-icing systems, however, this issue can be more controlled and predictable, but in a place like Texas this means that an otherwise fixable turbine might be left offline for a much longer time while technicians wait for safer conditions.
In conclusion, we’d like to note that the recent disaster in Texas was not related to any fundamentals of wind energy itself, but rather to other issues with their
isolated power grid
and the
trend of American infrastructure to be in a general state of disrepair
. Wind turbines are perfectly capable of producing energy in some of the most extreme cold environments on the planet, provided they (and their operators) are designed and equipped to handle the climate. In fact, since air density is inversely proportional to temperature, turbines in cold climates can produce more energy for a given wind speed than those in hot climates. We should also give Texas a pat on the back for investing so heavily in wind energy. As of 2019 the state had just shy of 25 GW of wind power capacity, the most by far of any other state, and installed capacity continues to rise rapidly. They have
an incredible amount of wind energy available
and they have not let it go to waste. But winterizing turbines in hot climates, especially older turbines that aren’t as configurable, is often infeasible both from an economic point-of-view and also because the process of designing any product, whether it’s a small toy or a giant wind farm, requires tradeoffs. | 75 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327114",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T15:44:47",
"content": "Like I said elsewhere: the manufacturer asked if they wanted cold weather equipment, the Texans asked how much did it cost and the rest is history",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,373,169.26691 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/electroplating-3d-printed-parts-for-great-strength/ | Electroplating 3D Printed Parts For Great Strength | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"copper",
"electroplating",
"metal",
"nickel",
"resin",
"stiffness",
"strength"
] | Resin 3D printers have a significant advantage over filament printers in that they are able to print smaller parts with more fine detail. The main downside is that the resin parts aren’t typically as strong or durable as their filament counterparts. For this reason they’re often used more for small models than for working parts, but [Breaking Taps] wanted to try and improve on the strength of these builds buy
adding metal to them through electroplating
.
Both copper and nickel coatings are used for these test setups, each with different effects to the resin prints. The nickel adds a dramatic amount of stiffness and the copper seems to increase the amount of strain that the resin part can tolerate — although [Breaking Taps] discusses some issues with this result.
While the results of electroplating resin are encouraging, he notes that it is a cumbersome process. It’s a multi-step ordeal to paint the resin with a special paint which helps the metal to adhere, and then electroplate it. It’s also difficult to ensure an even coating of metal on more complex prints than on the simpler samples he uses in this video.
After everything is said and done, however, if a working part needs to be smaller than a filament printer can produce or needs finer detail, this is a pretty handy way of adding more strength or stiffness to these parts. There’s still some investigating to be done, though, as electroplated filament prints are difficult to test with his setup, but it does show promise. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to print with this amount of precision
using metal directly
rather than coating plastic with it.
Thanks to [smellsofbikes] for the tip! | 33 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327067",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T12:08:16",
"content": "Now, THIS, this is a hack. You win.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6327069",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2021-... | 1,760,373,169.331262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/01/svg-to-gerber-without-the-pain/ | SVG To Gerber, Without The Pain | Jenny List | [
"hardware"
] | [
"gerber",
"pcb",
"svg"
] | We’ve all marveled at the high quality PCB artwork used within the #BadgeLife and other communities to produce eye-catching designs, but those of you who have dipped your toes in the PCB artwork water will know that it’s hardly an easy process. [Jaseg] may have an answer though with
gerbolyze
, his software for processing SVG files into Gerber layers or KiCAD footprints.
His impetus for building it came from disappointing experience with other scripts that simply tried to rasterise any SVG they were given, or didn’t fully support the complete SVG spec. It’s designed for minimal preprocessing, allowing for as streamlined a process as possible. It includes a bitmap vectoriser to handle everything that can be thrown at it, and the GitHub repository has full instructions including examples of the output for different settings.
This is the latest in a long progression of enhancements to the PCB art process, but it’s not
by any means
the first time we’ve ventured down this path. In particular [Brian Benchoff] did
a lot of work
on the production of multi-colour PCBs. | 10 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6327017",
"author": "Thomas",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T09:38:13",
"content": "Niiice!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6327051",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T11:25:08",
"content": "Or you can just use... | 1,760,373,169.375375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/tim-hunkin-rides-again-with-the-secret-life-of-components/ | Tim Hunkin Rides Again With The Secret Life Of Components | Jenny List | [
"News"
] | [
"Novelty Automation",
"Secret Life Of Components",
"Tim Hunkin"
] | Long-time readers may remember one of the occasional
Engineering Heroes
series that focused on the British engineer, inventor and sometime TV presenter Tim Hunkin, known for his intricate creations, unusual arcade machines, and
Secret Life Of Machines
TV series’ from the years around 1990. It seems we’re now in for a fresh treat as he’s returning to our screens via YouTube with a new series.
The Secret Life Of Components
will be his attempt to pass on the accumulated knowledge of a long career that most of us would have given our eyeteeth for.
There will be eight videos in the series which launches on the 4th of March, and judging by the snippets in the preview video below the break he’ll be covering a wide range including springs, adhesives, chains, belts, switches, and much more. His entertaining style and beautifully built working models are guaranteed to make for some very good content while giving a unique view into the workshop of a true master of the craft.
As an appetiser it’s worth reading
our profile of Tim Hunkin
. It features a visit to his
Novelty Automation
arcade in London’s Holborn, which should be an essential stop for any travelling Hackaday reader finding themselves in that city.
Thanks [Jeff Del Papa] and others for the tip. | 33 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326992",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T06:47:26",
"content": "I think the new theme music is an inversion of the original Dave Brubeck – Take Five",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6327061",
"author": "bbp",
... | 1,760,373,169.503688 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/reliable-frequency-reference-from-gps/ | Reliable Frequency Reference From GPS | Bryan Cockfield | [
"gps hacks"
] | [
"blue pill",
"diy",
"frequency",
"gps",
"oscillator",
"reference",
"stm32",
"time"
] | GPS technology is a marvel of the modern world. Not only can we reliably locate positions on the planet with remarkable accuracy and relatively inexpensive hardware, but plenty of non-location-based features of the technology are available for other uses as well. GPS can be used for things like time servers, since the satellites require precise timing in order to triangulate a position, and as a result they can also be used for things like
this incredibly accurate frequency reference
.
This project is what’s known as a GPSDO, or GPS-disciplined oscillator. Typically they use a normal oscillator, like a crystal, and improve its accuracy by pairing it with the timing signal from a GPS satellite. This one is a standalone model built by [Szabolcs Szigeti] who based the build around an STM32 board. The goal of the project was purely educational, as GPSDOs of various types are widely available, but [Szabolcs] was able to build exactly what he wanted into this one including a custom power supply, simple standalone UI, and no distribution amplifier.
The build goes into a good bit of detail on the design and operation of the device, and all of the PCB schematics and source code are available on the projects
GitHub page
if you want to build your own. There are plenty of other projects out there that make use of GPS-based time for its high accuracy, too, like this one which
ties a GPS time standard directly to a Raspberry Pi
. | 35 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326976",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T05:09:05",
"content": "I was expecting he built a GPSDO. The 2nd paragraph implied that it is built around the STM32, it is not. The GPSDO is already built and he uses TruePosition board and put an enclosure on it.",
"pare... | 1,760,373,169.439293 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/hackaday-links-february-28-2021/ | Hackaday Links: February 28, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"Artemis",
"hackaday links",
"Human Landing System",
"logic",
"mandelbrot",
"moon",
"nasa",
"psychology",
"solidworks",
"ttl"
] | In an announcement that came as a surprise to few,
NASA now says that landing humans on the Moon by 2024 is no longer likely
. Acting administrator Steve Jurczyk lays the blame at the feet of Congress, for failing to provide the funds needed for Human Landing Systems development, a critical step needed to meet the aggressive overall timeline. The announcement doesn’t mark the end of the Artemis program; in fact, NASA is continuing to work on a realistic timeline for getting boots back on the lunar surface, and a decision on which of the three submitted proposals for a lunar lander will be further developed should be coming in the next few months. As far as we can see, this is simply an adjustment to the original timeline for a landing, but given the stunning recent success of Perseverance showing just what robots can do, we’d expect pushback from some quarters on the need for human exploration.
The entry-level 3D design market was thrown into considerable turmoil last year when Autodesk changed the licensing terms for its flagship Fusion 360 package. Hobbyists who had been enjoying relatively unfettered access to the powerful suite chafed at the new restrictions, leaving many to threaten to jump ship, apparently without much thought given to the dearth of alternative products. That may be changing now that Dassault Systèmes has announced
two new versions of SolidWorks aimed at the maker and student segments
. The Makers offer is intended for hobbyists who want to design for benchtop manufacturing methods like 3D-printing. The Students offer is aimed at engineering and design students looking to gain experience with the tools they’ll be expected to have mastered by the time they enter the job market. It looks like the Makers offer will be at least partly contingent on the interest expressed by the community, so you might want to
make your feeling know on the subject
. If the Makers edition comes to pass in the second half of this year, it will likely target a $99/year price point.
We stumbled upon an interesting YouTube series the other day that stirred the creative juices. We all probably remember the first time we learned about the Mandelbrot set, the fractal number set that looks something like a lumpy kidney bean and continues to do so no matter how far you zoom into it. The image may be complex but the math behind it is simple enough to implement in software that it’s often done as an exercise for CS students and other unfortunates. But implementing a Mandelbrot set generator in logic is possible too, which WildEngineering did in
this video series
. Rather than implement this as discrete logic gates, he used a neat logic simulator called
Digital
, which looks like a handy tool to learn all by itself. The Mandelbrot generator concepts are really instructive too, and it sure seems like the next logical step would be to gather the needed 74xx-series chips and start breadboarding. We’d love to give it a whirl ourselves, but won’t be heartbroken if someone beats us to it.
If it sometimes appears that we at Hackaday get a little frustrated with the comments section of the articles we write, rest assured that we know that we have the best readers on the planet, hands down. Where the toxicity of other corners of the Internet is often unbearable, our readers truly do make this a fabulously collaborative environment, on the whole.
In fact, some commenters even go so far as to basically write their own articles in response to one of ours, and when that happens we like to point it out. The article that spawned the effort was Kristina Panos’ excellent
“What If I Never Make Version Two?”
, a recent piece that dips a toe into the psychology of hacking. Peter Walsh picks up on the theme with his Hackaday.io page entitled
“The Psychology of Version Two”
, which we really enjoyed. After a brief look at the neurochemistry of happiness, Peter dives into some “brain hacks” to assess the need for a version 2. There are some great tips, and we really enjoyed both the original article and Peter’s response. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326937",
"author": "Rumble_in_the_Jungle",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T00:25:08",
"content": "“Where the >toxicitydifferent opinion< wrong.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326958",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp... | 1,760,373,169.699143 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/bga-soldering-and-inspection/ | BGA Soldering And Inspection | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"ball grid array",
"bga",
"smd",
"soldering",
"surface mount"
] | If you want to build cool things these days, you’ve probably had to master surface mount electronics. However, for many people, ball grid array (BGA) is still intimidating. Have a look at [VoltLog’s] video about his techniques for
soldering BGA
and inspecting that you managed to do it right.
He’s got quite a few tips about things like surface finish and flux selection. It looks easy when he does it. Of course, having a good PCB with good registration markings will help too.
You can’t get a soldering iron under the part, of course. A hot plate provides heat from underneath. A gentle push from a hot air gun will push the solder balls over the melting edge. Even taking the part off the hotplate requires a special technique.
Without seeing the result, how can you know if it was successful? Pros can use an X-ray machine, but you probably don’t have one of those sitting in your shop. [VoltLog] uses a DVM and tests the internal protection diodes that the chip almost certainly has on its pins. However, to do that, you need to put the chip on a bare board. If you were repairing an existing board, the technique wouldn’t be useful since other components on the board would throw the measurements off.
We’ve seen the very patient
hand solder wires to BGAs
. You can also find
more detailed videos
and compare other techniques if you want to try them yourself. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326918",
"author": "Jlbrian7",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T21:21:49",
"content": "I appreciate that he talked about the trouble he has had with proper alignment. I have trouble with QFN, which at least I can inspect and rework. BGA is going to be a new challenge.",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,373,169.752115 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/hidden-tv-out-on-the-nintendo-ds-lite/ | Hidden TV-Out On The Nintendo DS Lite | Danie Conradie | [
"Nintendo DS Hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"nintendo DS lite",
"tv output",
"video out"
] | The DS Lite was one of Nintendo’s most popular handheld gaming consoles, but unbeknownst to all, it has a hidden feature that could have made it even more popular. Digging through the hardware and firmware, the [Lost Nintendo History] team discovered the System-on-Chip (SoC) in the
DS Lite can output a composite video signal
.
The SoC can output a 10-bit digital output running at 16.7 MHz, but it is disabled by the stock firmware early in the boot process, so custom firmware was required. It still needs to be converted to an analog signal, so a small adaptor board with a DAC (digital-analog converter) and op-amp is attached to the flex cable of the upper screen. A set of buttons on the board allow you to select which screen is displayed on the TV. The adaptor board is open source, and the
Gerbers and schematics are available on GitHub
.
The current version of the adaptor board disables the upper screen, but the [Lost Nintendo History] team is considering designing a pass-through board to eliminate this disadvantage. The TV-out mod can also be combined with the popular
Macro mod
, in which the upper screen is removed to turn it into a Game Boy Advance. The Nintendo DS is a popular hacking subject, and we’ve been covering them for
well over a decade
. | 34 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326880",
"author": "FlaxWombat",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T19:02:23",
"content": ">gameboy DS liteSuddenly flashbacks to when I was a wee one and that’s what my parents said I was grounded from.“No more gameboy DS”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,373,169.936339 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/fail-of-the-week-how-not-to-build-a-filament-extruder/ | Fail Of The Week: How Not To Build A Filament Extruder | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"auger",
"extrusion",
"filament extruder"
] | It would be great if you could create your own filament. On the face of it, it seems easy to do, but as [Thomas Sanladerer] found out when he was a student,
there are a lot of details
that can bedevil your design. His extruder sort of works, but he wouldn’t suggest duplicating his effort. In fact, he hopes you can learn what not to do if you try to do it yourself.
In all fairness, [Thomas] was a low-budget student and was trying to economize. For example, he tried using a drill to drive the auger. Why not? It looks like a drill bit. But he found out that wasn’t satisfactory and moved to a pair of wiper motors with their built-in gear train.
The wiper motors allowed him to get some ABS filament, but the machine had more troubles. Other lessons learned were to keep the water cooling tank closed so water doesn’t splash out onto electronics, and that it is hard to look at filament with a CCD sensor.
The controller is a simple Arduino. There are three heat zones before the plastic reaches the die. As you might expect, there’s a PID controller to regulate the machine.
[Thomas] says the flow rate was too high, so slowing down the production might have helped. A smaller auger is also on his list of things he’d do differently in hindsight. The melting area needed a heatbreak much like a 3D printer’s hotend to keep hot plastic from creeping towards the cooler part of the tube and clogging.
With his current experience and a bigger budget, we have no doubt he could end up with a workable extruder. As it is, we always enjoy learning from other people’s suboptimal builds. It is a little humbling to show you failed projects on the Internet, but it is a valuable service, indeed.
We want an extruder that can
recycle our junk parts
. We’ve seen some
really cheap builds
, but we don’t really know how well they work. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326960",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2021-03-01T03:21:16",
"content": "The real wtf is the trade name for the ABS resin pellets. “Polylac”, really?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326987",
"author": "Mr Name Re... | 1,760,373,169.642751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/nissans-office-pod-concept-is-a-productivity-paradise-on-wheels/ | Nissan’s Office Pod Concept Is A Productivity Paradise On Wheels | Kristina Panos | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"Herman Miller",
"mobile office",
"nissan",
"Nissan Caravan NV350",
"office",
"productivity"
] | All this working from home is pretty great, but we have to admit that we miss packing up the Hackaday office and heading for the local coffeehouse once in a while to spend a few hours writing against the buzzing background. One thing we don’t miss about the experience is that you’re never guaranteed a place to sit and spread out. And unless you trust a friendly stranger to keep an eye on your stuff while you’re in the bathroom, you have to take it with you at the risk of losing your table.
If only we could afford one of Nissan’s mobile office pod concept vehicles
. We’ve always wanted to pretend we’re doing surveillance and would probably have the thing wrapped with graphics for a fake flower shop or something. That would certainly make it easier to park somewhere and borrow someone’s open Wi-Fi network — maybe even from the coffeehouse parking lot after we hit the drive-thru.
As you’ll see in the extended tour video below, Nissan seem to have thought of everything except restroom facilities. The cab-over-engine design and all-terrain tires would make it easier to drive out into nature and really get away from it all. Once you’ve found the perfect spot, you can open the lift gate for some fresh air, or get some sun while you work by pulling out the motorized unibody-constructed cubicle which includes a built-in Herman Miller Cosm chair. (Evidently the Aeron is old and busted now; we disagree). For some reason, the cubicle is edge-lit, and not in a way that would help you work at the desk. According to the video, it’s based on the Caravan NV350,
which looks far more comfortable but not as cool when outfitted as an alternate mobility concept
.
The office pod has some nice amenities like a DC-AC converter so you can run your Keurig or Nespresso, and there’s even a UV-disinfecting lamp in the glove box. The larger windows behind the cab can be electronically shaded so you don’t bake in the sun. Here’s where things get a bit ridiculous: the floor is made of clear polycarbonate in case you want to park lengthwise over a small stream and watch the surviving fish go by underneath your feet. And if you really want to take a break, climb up to the roof deck and stretch out in the chaise lounge beneath the deck umbrella.
If we lived anywhere but America,
we might forego the flower shop graphics wrap and dress it up to look like a TV detector van instead
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vngwMVP90Vk | 40 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326812",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T12:10:57",
"content": "You can’t move the chair, only rotate. Awful!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326872",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T1... | 1,760,373,170.066304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/28/onshape-to-robot-models-made-easier/ | OnShape To Robot Models Made Easier | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"gazebo",
"OnShape",
"pybullet",
"robot",
"SDF",
"URDF"
] | We live in a time where our phones have computing power that would have been the envy of NASA a few decades ago. So, in theory, we should be able to simulate just about anything. Thanks to [rhoban], robots you design in OnShape — a popular CAD tool — are now
easier to simulate using several common simulation tools
.
Electronic circuits are pretty easy to simulate, because we typically draw schematics and circuit simulators can capture those schematics readily. But simulating physics for robotic designs is a bit trickier. Gazebo and Pybullet both can use SDF files or URDF. However, building those files is often a separate process from actual physical design even though you probably did the design using a CAD tool. Even if you don’t use OnShape, you can probably import your preferred format and then bridge to the simulation file format without having to manually recreate your design. You can see the author walk through the process in the video below.
The program does use the OnShape API, so you’ll need a key for that. The example quadruped looks like a cool design. Once you have the design in the right format, you can use multiple tools to work with it from a simulation perspective.
We’ve seen
URDF exports for SolidWorks
before. If you want a chance to play with Pybullet, try
Boston Dynamic’s Spot robot
. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326815",
"author": "rthjtju",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T12:19:02",
"content": "where is my home robot, why i cant buy it for 500$?simple robot for bring my stuff, turn on my coffe, tea or increase haizung",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,373,169.983449 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/how-to-monitor-blood-pressure-without-raising-it/ | How To Monitor Blood Pressure Without Raising It | Kristina Panos | [
"Medical Hacks",
"News",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"biowearables",
"blood pressure",
"diabetes",
"glucose",
"interstitial fluid",
"ultrasound"
] | Does anyone actually enjoy the sensation of being squeezed by a blood pressure cuff? Well, as Mom used to say, it takes all kinds. For those who find the feeling nearly faint-inducing, take heart: researchers at UC San Diego have created
a non-invasive medical wearable with a suite of sensors that can measure blood pressure and monitor multiple biochemicals at the same time
.
The device is a small, flexible patch that adheres to the skin. So how does it manage to measure blood pressure without causing discomfort? The blood pressure sensor consists of eight customized piezoelectric transducers that bounce ultrasonic waves off the near and far walls of the artery. Then the sensor calculates the time of flight of the resulting echoes to gauge arterial dilation and contraction, which amounts to a blood pressure reading.
This patch also has a chemical sensor that uses a drug called pilocarpine to induce the skin to sweat, and then measures the levels of lactate, caffeine, and alcohol found within. To monitor glucose levels, a mild current stimulates the release of interstitial fluid — the stuff surrounding our cells that’s rife with glucose, salt, fatty acids, and a few minerals. This is how
continuous glucose monitoring
for
diabetes patients
works today. You can check out
the team’s research paper
for more details on the patch and its sensors.
In the future, the engineers are hoping to add even more sensors and develop a wireless version that doesn’t require external power. Either way, it looks much more comfortable and convenient than current methods. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326798",
"author": "Onetruegod",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T09:34:04",
"content": "Interesting article Kristina. Is the photo at the top the actual device? If so, what is attached to it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326899"... | 1,760,373,170.11903 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/a-pcb-out-of-a-quarter/ | A PCB For A Quarter? | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"metal pcb",
"pcb",
"quarter"
] | As time has gone by and PCB assembly companies have reached further into the space of affordability for our community, the available types of board have multiplied. No longer are we limited to FR4 with a green solder mask, we can have all colours of the rainbow and a variety of substrates. The folks at BotFactory have taken things a step further with their PCB printer though,
by printing a fully-functional PCB on a quarter
.
As a base layer the printed five passes of insulation on the coin, before printing the traces. Holes are left in the insulation to create a form of via that connects to the coin. On the board is an ATtiny2313 microcontroller that flashes an LED, and on the reverse side of the coin is a CR2032 cell that’s secured with a set of bolts and washers. You can see it taking shape in the video below the break.
It’s true that an LED flasher isn’t exciting, and that this is a marketing stunt for BotFactory’s printer. But it’s an inventive one, and reminds us that with a bit of ingenuity anything can become a board. We’ve had our share over the years, and instantly springing to mind is
this stretchable PCB
. | 19 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326774",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T05:35:55",
"content": "@Jenny List said: “As a base layer the printed five passes of insulation on the coin, before printing the traces.”So… they just printed a capacitor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,373,170.277181 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/pool-noodle-robot-shines-a-light-on-the-pros-and-cons-of-soft-robots/ | Pool Noodle Robot Shines A Light On The Pros And Cons Of Soft Robots | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"james bruton",
"pneumatic",
"pool noodle",
"soft robotics"
] | [James Bruton]’s impressive portfolio of robots has always used conventional rigid components, so he decided to take a bit of a detour and try his hand at a soft robot. Using a couple of few inflatable pool noodles for quick prototyping, his experiments quickly showed some of the
strengths and weaknesses of soft robots
.
Most of the
soft robots
we see require an external air source to inflate cells in the robot and make the limbs actuate. Taking inspiration from a recent
Stanford research project
, [James] decided to take an alternative approach, using partially inflated tubes and squeezing them in one section to make the other sections more rigid. He bought a couple of cheap pool noodles and experimented with different methods of turning them into actuators. The approach he settled on was a pair of noodles tied together side by side, and then folded in half by an elastic cord. As one end is squeezed by a servo bellows, the internal pressure overcomes the tension from the elastic cord, and the “elbow” straightens out.
[James] tested various arrangements of these limbs to build a working hexapod robot but to no avail. The simple actuating mechanism was simply too heavy, and could just lift itself slightly. This highlighted a common theme in almost all the soft pneumatic robots we’ve seen: they carry very little weight and are always tethered to an external air supply. The combination of stretchy materials and relatively low pressure compressed air can only handle small loads, at least in Earth gravity and above water.
However, it wasn’t all failure. [James] had success with a gripper design, which is the one area we have seen
practical
and
commercial
success with other soft robots. They do work well for gripping delicate and irregularly shaped objects. If you would like to experiment with [James]’s bellow design, it is open source and available on
GitHub
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326750",
"author": "ConsultingJoe",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T01:53:23",
"content": "Man, I wish I had that kind of time to play with pool noodles. lol-ConsultingJoe",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6326754",
"author": "mreho... | 1,760,373,170.172551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/circle-full-of-leds-becomes-a-clock/ | Circle Full Of LEDs Becomes A Clock | Rich Hawkes | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"analog clock",
"clock",
"led",
"led ring",
"led ring clock",
"ntp"
] | Building a clock of some sorts seems to be a time honored tradition for hackers and LED clocks seem one of the most popular. You can build anything from a seven-segment display to a binary clock or something even more fancy. [Clueless] found a circle of LED rings online and with made an
LED version of an analog clock
.
The rings aren’t wired together, and it seems like these are designed to be separated, but it’s pretty easy to wire them together in order to have a circle of individually accessible RGB LEDs. Each hand of the clock is a different color and is antialiased to give a smoother look, since the LEDs don’t line up. [Clueless] wanted the second hand to rotate smoothly, so it is updated using the milliseconds as an offset to the second. An ESP8266 runs the code and controls the LEDs getting the time from an NTP server. Occasionally, [Clueless] has the clock display a quick effect, such as a Pac-man or a radar scan animation.
All the files are
up on the Github page
, including the Blender models for the case, available to build your own and a simple search for “241 LED ring” turns up the LED hardware used. There are plenty of clock projects on the site, like this
multicolor LED ring clock
and we’re sure that you can find
something
interesting
.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/LayoutVideo.mp4 | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326782",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2021-02-28T06:26:25",
"content": "Interesting. I did not know about these LED disks; I need to sniff around on AliExpress more often. Here’s a randomly chosen example like the disk used by [Clueless] – 241 RGB WS812B 5VDC LEDs on a white 17... | 1,760,373,170.220126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/exploring-the-open-source-that-really-goes-into-a-risc-v-chip/ | Exploring The Open Source That Really Goes Into A RISC-V Chip | Jenny List | [
"Parts"
] | [
"esp32-C3",
"open source ISA",
"RISC-V"
] | It’s an exciting time in the world of microprocessors, as the long-held promise of devices with open-source RISC-V cores is coming to fruition. Finally we might be about to see open-source from the silicon to the user interface, or so goes the optimistic promise. In fact the real story is considerably more complex than that, and
it’s a topic [Andreas Speiss] explores in a video
that looks at the issue with a wide lens.
He starts with the basics, looking at the various layers of a computer from the user level down to the instruction set architecture. It’s a watchable primer even for those familiar with the topic, and gives a full background to the emergence of RISC-V. He then takes Espressif’s ESP32-C3 as an example, and breaks down its open-source credentials. The ISA of the processor core is RISC-V with some extensions, but he makes the point that the core hardware itself can still be closed source even though it implements an open-source instruction set. His conclusion is that while a truly open-source RISC-V chip is entirely possible (as demonstrated with a cameo
Superconference badge
appearance), the importance of the RISC-V ISA is in its likely emergence as a heavyweight counterbalance to ARM’s dominance in the sector. Whether or not he is right can only be proved by time, but we can’t disagree that some competition is healthy.
Take a closer look at the ESP32-C3,
with our hands-on review
. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326663",
"author": "some guy",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T18:53:47",
"content": "s/Speiss/Spiess/g",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326681",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T20:06:51",
"content"... | 1,760,373,171.881749 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/printing-yoda-heads-re-makers-riffing/ | Printing Yoda Heads: Re-Makers Riffing! | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants"
] | [
"inspiration",
"making",
"newsletter",
"originality"
] | We had a comment recently from a nasty little troll (gasp! on the Internet!). The claim was that most makers are really just “copiers” because they’re not doing original work, whatever that would mean, but instead just re-making projects that other people have already done. People who print other peoples’ 3D models, or use other peoples’ hardware or software modules are necessarily not being creative. Debunking a cheap troll isn’t enough because, on deeper reflection, I’m guilty of the same generic sentiment; that feeling that copying other people’s work isn’t as worthy as making your own. And I think that’s wrong!
In the 3D printing world in particular, I’m guilty of dismissively classifying projects as “Yoda Heads”. About ten years ago, [chylld] uploaded a clean, high-res
model of Yoda
to Thingiverse, and everyone printed it out. Heck, my wife still has hers on her desk; and alone this is proof that straight-up copying has worth, because it made a sweet little gift. After a while, Yoda gave way to Baby Groots, and strangely enough we’re back to Yoda again, but
it’s Baby Yoda now
.
Does filling the world with more Yoda Heads, vomiting toothpaste or not, further creativity? I’d argue it does. It’s actually a moderately difficult print — those spindly little ears present an overhang challenge that’ll definitely help you calibrate your cooling, or force you to learn something about supports. Pushing your limits in 3D printing teaches you about the tool and what possibilities it presents.
Mastering a tool
is an important step toward using it creatively. And then there’s “riffing”.
Jazz musicians don’t just get up and play improvisational solos that come magically into their heads. They’ve spent hours in the shed, copying the ways that other players have interpreted the classics. Which is to say, they become creative through copying. Transcendental, inspirational, original moments come about through hours and hours of filtering other peoples’ work through your fingers, ears, and lips until it becomes a part of you and eventually bubbles up through your musical sensibility.
The same goes for any “derivative” project. We just covered
a tuning-fork-based clock
that was a remake of a
previous incarnation
, but in the process of re-making, it morphed a little bit into something more aesthetically post-apocalyptic. We’ve seen possibly a million word clock builds, but [t0mg]’s version this one is
beautifully laser-etched into paint
on the back side of glass, and made me think that you could do the same with the coating on the back side of a mirror. Riffing. I could go on for hours.
So maybe it’s not as sexy to re-make someone else’s project, but it can be tremendously valuable. It’s how we learn tools, how we increase our creative vocabulary, and it gives us a chance to explore something cool that someone else has done from the inside out. Copying should be seen as essential skill-building, despite our cultural prejudices against it. Go out and print yourself some Yoda Heads (metaphorically) without shame!
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.
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! | 50 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326602",
"author": "soundman98",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T15:17:52",
"content": "If the only way to be creative is to be the only one with the idea, we’d likely still have square wheels because round wheels are a derivative work.To the troll, I say this:If you are unhappy about the... | 1,760,373,172.719987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/a-very-modern-tube-headphone-amplifier/ | A Very Modern Tube Headphone Amplifier | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"EF95",
"tube",
"tube amp"
] | Once a discarded relic, over the years the humble vacuum tube has been rehabilitated in the arena of specialist audio. There are plenty of tube amplifiers now being manufactured, with a popular choice being headphone amplifiers that use a tube as a gain stage followed by an op-amp as a buffer with a low impedance output. This forms the basis of
[
Ratti3
]’s amplifier
, but with the added interest of a battery supply and a Bluetooth connection.
The tube circuit is a very conventional anode follower using an EF95 pentode. This provides plenty of gain and of course that “valve sound” beloved of audio enthusiasts, but suffers from an output impedance too high to drive a set of headphones. An NE5532 steps in for the op-amp buffer role, making for a very simple circuit. Power comes from a set of four 18650 Lithium-Ion cells with associated charger and balance boards, while a little switching boost converter provides the 100 volt HT for the tubes.
We’ve visited this type of amplifier before with
a similar but much more rough-around-the-edges Chinese version
. That had some astonishingly cheap Chinese tubes, but if we’re seeking better components it’s interesting to know
just who makes tubes these days
. | 34 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326589",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T13:50:51",
"content": "The guaranteed output short-circuit current of a 5532 opamp is 10 milliamps. If you have some magical 1000 ohm headphones it could be OK. The 5532 is not intended as a headphone driver and is not suitable f... | 1,760,373,172.062204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/morph-led-ball-is-a-there-is-no-spoon-reality-bending-art-installation/ | “MORPH” LED Ball Is A There-Is-No-Spoon, Reality-Bending Art Installation | Mike Szczys | [
"Art",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"art installation",
"bipolar stepper motor",
"LED ball",
"morph"
] | Marvelously conceived and exquisitely executed, this huge ball made up of hexagon tiles combines the best of blinky LEDs and animatronics into one amorphic ball.
The creation of [Nicholas Perillo] of Augmentl along with [
MindBuffer
],
full details of the “morph v2” project have not yet been published
. However,
some tantilizing build progress is documented on [Nicholas’] Insta
— most especially through
the snapshots in the story thread
spanning the last seven months. The scope of the project is brought into focus with time lapse video of hundreds of heat-set inserts, bundles of twisted wire, a pile of 1500 sliding rails, cases full of custom-order stepper motors, and thick cuts of copper bus bars to feed power up the shaft and out to the panels.
The demo video after the break is mesmerizing, shot by [nburdy] during a demo at MotionLab Berlin where it was built. Each hex tile is backed by numerous LEDs and a stepper motor assembly that lets it move in and out from the center of the ball. Somehow it manages to look as though it’s flowing, as they eye doesn’t pick up spaces opening between tiles as they are extended.
The Twitter thread
fills in some of the juicy details: “486 stepper motors, 86,000 LEDs and a 5 channel granular synth engine (written by @_hobson_ no less, in @rustlang of course).” The build also includes speakers mounted in the core of the ball, hidden behind the moving LED hexes. The result is an artistic assault on reality, as the highly coordinated combinations of light, sound, and motion make this feel alive, otherwordly, or simply a glitch in the matrix. Watching the renders of what animations will look like, then seeing it on the real thing drives home the point that practical effects can still snap us out of our 21st-century computer-generated graphics trance.
It’s relatively easy to throw thousands of LEDs into a project these days, as PCBA just applies robots to the manufacturing problem. But motion remains a huge challenge beyond a handful of moving parts. But
the Times Square billboard from a few years ago
and the Morph ball both show it’s worth it.
As you’ve guessed from the name, this is the second Morph ball the team has collaborated on. Check out details of v1,
a beach ball sized moving LED ball
.
486 stepper motors, 86,000 LEDs and a 5 channel granular synth engine (written by
@_hobson_
no less, in
@rustlang
of course).
pic.twitter.com/Sn2fp5tuXc
— nburdy🐣🏳️🌈 (@nburdy)
February 12, 2021 | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326168",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T00:20:25",
"content": "Perfect for when you want to gaslight someone by making them think they’re looking at CGI in the real world.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "632... | 1,760,373,171.946013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/electric-airboat-for-getting-you-across-thin-ice/ | Electric Airboat For Getting You Across Thin Ice | Danie Conradie | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"airboat",
"boat",
"electric power",
"ice"
] | Even with all the technological progress civilization has made, weather and seasons still have a major impact on our lives. [John de Hosson] owns a cabin on an island in a Swedish lake, and reaching it involves crossing 500 m of water. In summer this is done with a conventional boat, and in winter they can simply walk across the thick ice, but neither of these is an option on thin ice in the spring or fall. To solve this [John] built an
electric airboat
, and it looks like a ton of fun in the video after the break
The construction is simple but functional. A 3.3 m flat-bottomed aluminum boat has used a base, and an aluminum frame was bolted on for the motor and propeller. The motor is an 18 kW brushless motor, with a 160 cm/63-inch carbon fiber propeller. Power comes via a 1000 A ESC from a 100V 3.7 kWh Lipo pack mounted in a plastic box. Steering is very similar to a normal airboat, with a pair of air rudders behind the propeller, controlled by a steering lever next to the driver’s seat. The throttle is an RC controller with the receiver wired to the ESC.
Performance is excellent, and it accelerates well on ice and slush, even with two people on board. [John] still plans to make several improvements, with a full safety cage around the propeller being at the top of the list. He is also concerned that it will capsize on the water with the narrow hull, so a wider hull is planned. [John] has already bought a large steering servo to allow full remote control for moving cargo, with the addition of an FPV system. We would also add an emergency kill switch and waterproofing for the electronics to the list of upgrades. It looks as though the battery box is already removable, which is perfect for getting it out of the cold when not in use.
Even the small scale are boats are a fun RC project which can be built from only
junk bin parts
, or you can go to the other extreme and add
full autonomous navigation
.
Thanks for the tip [Måns Almered]! | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326128",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T22:03:57",
"content": "Yeah, we do it a little different in Canada…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCu6evrKqsI",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326218",
"author... | 1,760,373,172.460944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/demonstrating-the-mars-rover-pendulum-problem-with-a-drone-on-earth/ | Demonstrating The Mars Rover Pendulum Problem With A Drone On Earth | Danie Conradie | [
"drone hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"drone",
"flight controller dRehmFlight",
"flight dynamics",
"Perseverance",
"quadcopter",
"sky crane"
] | The sky crane system used on the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers is a challenging control system problem that piqued [Nicholas Rehm]’s curiosity. Constrained to Earth, he decided to investigate the problem using a
drone and a rock
.
The setup and the tests are simple, but clearly illustrate the problem faced by NASA engineers. [Nicholas] attached a winch mechanism to the bottom of a racing-type quadcopter, and tied a mass to the end of the winch line. At first, he built a foam model of the rover, but it proved to be unstable in the wake of the quadcopter’s propellers, so he used a rock instead. The tests start with the quadcopter taking off with the rock completely retracted, which is then slowly lowered in flight until it reaches the end of the line and drops free. As soon as the rock was lowered, it started swinging like a pendulum, which only got worse as the line got longer. [Nicholas] attempted to reduce the oscillations with manual control inputs, but this only made it worse. The quadcopter is also running [Nicholas]’s own
dRehmFlight
flight controller that handles stabilization, but it does not account for the swinging mass.
[Nicholas] goes into detail on the dynamics of this system, which is basically a two-body pendulum. The challenges of accurately controlling a two-body pendulum are one of the main reasons the sky crane concept was
shelved when first proposed in 1999
. Any horizontal movement of either the drone or the rock exerts a force on the other body and will cause a pendulum motion to start, which the control system will not be able to recover from if it does not account for it. The real sky crane probably has some sort of angle sensing on the tether which can be used to compensate for any motion of the suspended rover.
We’re hoping that [Nicholas] will follow up on this experiment with a demonstration of using his
dRehmFlight
flight controller to solve this problem. The customizability of dRehmflight should make it the perfect tool for the job
Be sure to check out [Dan Maloney]’s deep dive on the “
Seven minutes of terror
” of the Perseverance landing procedure, and of course the
incredible video of the successful landing
. | 39 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326067",
"author": "louloulou",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T19:37:57",
"content": "Sort of of topic, but did you film that in Maryland? I swear your back yard looks familiar.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6326076",
"author":... | 1,760,373,172.21253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/3d-printering-makerbot-prints-stainless-you-do-half-the-work/ | 3D Printering: To Print Stainless, You Do Half The Work | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d printing",
"metal printing",
"sintering",
"stainless"
] | Everyone wants to print using metal. It is possible, but the machines to do the work are usually quite expensive. So it caught our eye when MakerBot announced a printer — armed with an experimental extruder — that can
print stainless steel parts
. Then we read a bit more and realized that it can only sort of do the job. It needs a lot of help. And with some reasonable, if not trivial, modifications, your printer can probably print metal as well.
The key part of the system is BASF Ultrafuse 316L Stainless Steel filament, something that’s been around for a few years. This is a polymer with metal incorporated into it. This explains the special extruder, since metal-bearing filament is hell on typical 3D printer nozzles. However, what comes out isn’t really steel — not yet. For that, you have to send the part to a post-processing facility where it is baked at 1380 °C in a pure hydrogen atmosphere using special equipment. This debinding and sintering produces a part that the company claims can be up to 96% pure metal.
It sounds as though there may be more than one post-processing facility possible, but for now everything is available from
MatterHackers
. However, metal printing still doesn’t come cheap. A roll of filament — it looks like a 1 kg roll — costs $465. That comes with a “ticket” for postprocessing one batch of parts that weigh up to 1 kg. Additional tickets are $50. They also suggest you use a special pen to attain bed adhesion, which costs only $18, but is out of stock as we write this.
On the other hand, if you need a part in stainless steel, this isn’t that expensive.
According to Matterhackers
, you can run this filament through most 3D printers, although we are betting you will want a pretty stout extruder and nozzle. You’ll also need a heated bed that can make at least 100 °C. A lot of beds can’t get that high, or have coatings that won’t tolerate that high a temperature. MakerBot’s METHOD X printer can do this, but you could probably upgrade your printer to do it as well.
So how is this better than just having someone do a metal print for you? We can print PLA models to get the design right and then send out to a service provider with a big-money metal printer. It sounds like you might get a faster turnaround by doing it yourself, but it isn’t clear to us why that has to be the case. We took a 40 mm x 40 mm x 4 mm bracket design and asked a service company for a price. In 316L steel, the part would cost $70 shipped. You could get it in aluminum for the same price, or titanium for $112. Gold was also an option, but at $6,400, we’ll pass. The same part in PLA was about $10, and at that price, we’d say it makes sense to print at home. But for metal, we’re comparing a $50 ticket and other material and wear costs with $70, delivered.
The video below shows some design tips, some of which are common sense to designers used to 3D printing. However, some appear to have to do with the sintering process and we wondered how much the part’s dimensions might change after the sintering process. The video claims you should scale your parts 120% in the X and Y dimensions and 126% in height. The video mentions a 100 cubic millimeter limit on parts, but if you read up, you’ll see they really mean a cube 100 mm on each side, which is 1,000,000 cubic millimeters, and significantly bigger.
So will you try this out? Unless you have a pretty robust machine, you’ll need some upgrades first. Then you still have to wait for your metal part to come back in the mail. As cool as it would be to print in stainless, we’ll wait until we can produce the metal part with no outside help.
If we were going to try it, we might think about
a ruby nozzle
. Maybe we’ll wait for the
$400,000 printers
to show up on the surplus market. | 37 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326041",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T18:46:19",
"content": "Ok, how do you print ceramic ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326059",
"author": "Max Allan",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T19:17:24... | 1,760,373,172.139677 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/frys-electronics-has-fizzled-out-completely/ | Fry’s Electronics Has Fizzled Out Completely | Kristina Panos | [
"News"
] | [
"Fry's",
"Fry's Electronics",
"pour one out"
] | 2020 and all its ills have claimed another stalwart among PC builders and electronics hobbyists:
Fry’s announced yesterday that they have closed up shop for good
after nearly 36 years in business both as a brick-and-mortar wonderland and an online mecca for all things electronic.
According to
Fry’s website
(
PDF copy for posterity
), all 31 stores across nine states were suddenly and permanently shuttered on Wednesday the 24th, citing changes in the retail industry and the widespread difficulties wrought by the pandemic. Signs of the retailer’s growing challenges were seen back in 2019 when
the company began shifting toward a consignment model
in an attempt to cut overhead and liability.
Burbank Fry’s electronics [Image source:
Bryce Edwards
CC-BY 2.0]
Sadly, I never set foot inside of a Fry’s though I hear it was an experience beginning with the themed entrances found at many of the locations. Now it seems I never will. Where I live, Microcenter is king, and it has been truly awesome to watch the hobby electronics section expand from a single four-foot panel in a dark corner to the multi-aisle marketplace it is today. I keep imagining that Microcenter suddenly went out of business instead, and it makes me want to cry.
So where can a person go to pick up some quick components now that
Radio Shack
and Fry’s are no more? Of course there’s the previously mentioned Microcenter, but you should also look for old-school supply stores in your area. They may not have an Adafruit section and they’re probably not open after 5:00PM or on the weekends, but these stores are still kicking and they need us now more than ever. We’ve previously reported on
gems like Tanner’s Electronics
which sadly
closed its doors almost a year ago
. Help spread the word about your favorites that are still open in the comments below.
Thank you [Ryan], [John], and [Jack] for tipping us off.
[Main image source:
San Jose Fry’s
by Bryce Edwards; CC-BY 2.0] | 119 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325980",
"author": "spiritplumber",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T16:40:48",
"content": "I’d like to recommend Electronic Plus in San Rafael. They’re everything a Radio Shack should have been. And they’re open Saturdays.https://electronicplus.com/Very pricey but they know their stuff.Le... | 1,760,373,172.625422 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/may-no-longer-contain-hackers-mch-2021-has-been-cancelled/ | May (No Longer) Contain Hackers: MCH 2021 Has Been Cancelled | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"Covid-19",
"hacker camps",
"MCH",
"MCH2021"
] | In a sad but unsurprising turn of events, MCH, this summer’s large hacker camp in the Netherlands,
has been cancelled
. Organising a large event in a pandemic would inevitably carry some risk, and despite optimism that the European vaccine strategy might have delivered a safe environment by the summer that risk was evidently too high for the event organisers
IFCAT
to take on. Our community’s events come from within the community itself rather than from commercial promoters, and the financial liability of committing to hire the site and infrastructure would have been too high to bear had the event succumbed to the pandemic. Tickets already purchased will be refunded, and they leave us with a crumb of solace by promising that alternatives will be considered. We understand their decision, and thank them for trying.
As with all such events the behind-the-scenes work for MCH has already started.
The badge has been revealed in prototype form
, the call for participation has been completed, and the various other event team planning will no doubt be well under way. This work is unlikely to be wasted, and we hope that it will bear fruit at the next Dutch event whenever that may be.
It would have been nice to think that by now we could be seeing the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, but despite the sterling work of scientists, healthcare workers, and epidemiologists, it seems we still have a a way to go before we’ll once more be hanging out together drinking Club-Mate in the company of thousands of others. If the pandemic is weighing upon you,
take care of yourselves
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325975",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T16:25:44",
"content": "Interesting even though the actual event looked like it was much later in the year. Time enough for the vaccine trend to become much better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,171.986521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/what-if-i-never-make-version-two/ | What If I Never Make Version Two? | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"backpack",
"hacking and philosophy",
"prototype"
] | When you make something, what does version one look like? What I mean is, how much thought do you put into the design? Do you try to make it look nice as you go along, or do you just build something that functions and say screw the presentation? Do you try to solve for everything upfront, or just plow through it and promise to fix your mistakes in version two? What if you never make version two?
No matter what you like to make, there’s a first time for everything. And it doesn’t seem to matter if you need the thing you’re making or just want to have it around: it’s a given that version one will probably be a bit rough around the edges. That’s just how it goes. Even if you’re well-versed in a skill, when you try a new type of project or a new pattern, it will be a new experience. For example, I’ve sewn a dozen different purses, but when I took on a new challenge I found I was only somewhat prepared to make my first backpack.
Great is the enemy of good, and perfection is the enemy of progress. Shooting for a pristine prototype on the first go steep and rocky path that never leads to finishing the build. So our goal here is to decide what makes rev1 good enough that we still love it, even if rev2 never happens.
Want vs. Need
Of course, the answers to all of the opening questions greatly depend on want versus need. When I’m making something for fun, I’m happiest while I’m still inside the project. I want it to be over so I can see the finished product, but I also don’t want the process of making it to end, because that’s the fun part. It’s like reading a really good book. With sewing projects, I’m always really excited to see how they come together. It seems like no matter how I manipulate fabric beforehand and try to visualize how something will turn out, the end result is always a little bit of a surprise.
If I need the thing I’m making, I’m more likely to work quickly and cut corners to get the thing into use. The trouble with that is if I don’t spend enough time in the design phase, I’ll probably end up annoyed at the very least, or back to square one without a viable solution. In either case, I’ll admit that I have a pretty serious case of perfectionism. It affects everything I do. I love and hate this part of myself in equal amounts, because I’ve made some things I feel fairly proud of. But I’m usually too hard on myself along the way. If I were any harder on myself, I would probably never start or finish anything. Try to reign that in by setting expectations in the design phase, with plenty of thought spent on how you’ll achieve each needed feature.
Case in Point: The Practice Backpack
At the beginning of this year, I decided to make a backpack and
document the process
. I had made exactly one backpack before this one, but the designs differ enough that I decided to make a practice backpack first out of fabric I already have. This way, I can go through
the pattern
once and work out the kinks before buying fancy, expensive fabric — something I didn’t do with the first backpack and somewhat regret.
In dressmaking, this is called making a muslin
. It’s somewhat akin to a circuit made on stripboard: a functional prototype that’s more permanent than a breadboarded circuit. It may not be pretty, but it works. Ideally.
It’s not that I needed a backpack, I just wanted to practice bag-making, because I learn something from every new pattern I try. Even so, I knew I didn’t want to make any old thing. This is where my personal design conundrum begins. Yes, this is something I want to do rather than something I need to do. But I still have to consider how much time and money I’ll be investing in making the thing. I didn’t keep a clock running this time, but I would estimate that it took at least ten to fifteen solid hours of my free time. Shouldn’t I make it as pretty as possible?
Another thing to consider is that the end product will be a backpack, a real, functional backpack. This is not a breadboarded version of a backpack full of safety pins and/or hot glue. I will be using real fabric, working zippers, and actual webbing for the handles and straps. It doesn’t have to be perfect, sure. But shouldn’t it lean toward making me proud rather than embarrassed? I say yes. Because I might want to use it, or even sell it to someone else if it turns out well enough. So this practice backpack required plenty of decisions up front, from the fabric to the zippers to the hardware.
Decisions, Decisions
First and foremost was choosing the fabrics. Fabric is expensive in general, so instead of buying new fabric, I took a long, hard look at my stash — my parts bin if you will. The more bag-making I do, the more that everything looks like usable fabric to me, especially big things like table cloths and decorative shower curtains. A few years ago, I bought an off-white canvas drop cloth to use as a photography backdrop. It has since been wadded up and forgotten, so I threw it in the wash, thrilled with the idea of sewing a bunch of bags with what feels like free fabric.
This project is a lined backpack, so it calls for an exterior fabric and an interior fabric. The first pastry-pocked backpack I made, the tiny purse-sized one, uses the same fabric inside and out — a thin quilting cotton like standard bed sheet material. In order to make it suitable for a bag, it all had to be interfaced.
Interfacing is a material that’s applied as a backing to any fabric that needs more body. I’m exaggerating a little, but you can make anything out of anything if you have the right interfacing. Think of it like a veneered cabinet door: the fabric you want to show is the veneer, and the interfacing is what lies underneath, giving it the strength and structure it needs to pass as a cabinet door. In the case of the doughnuts backpack, the exterior pieces have two types of interfacing — woven first, and then foam. The backpack is empty in the pictures above; it’s the foam interfacing that gives it all that shape.
For the lining, I turned back to the fabric stash. I have several yards of a geometric-patterned quilting cotton in a southwestern/earth-toned color palette that I think looks really good next to the drop cloth canvas. At some point early on in the project, I decided to use lining fabric for the exterior side pockets to add visual interest.
Generally speaking, the heavier a fabric is, the less interfacing you need to strengthen it. The drop cloth I used is made of a lightweight canvas, so it has enough body that I didn’t have to interface it all. (Avoiding the use of interfacing is my new favorite thing, because that stuff is stupidly expensive.) On the other hand, the lining material I used is like bed sheets — too floppy to use by itself without interfacing, even in the lining.
Zippers vs. Zipper Tape
For both backpacks, the first step is making the zippered cargo pocket on the front, so I knew I had to make my zipper decisions early on.
This backpack has four zippers total: one 24″ zipper with two kissing zipper pulls for the main opening, an 11″ zipper for the front patch pocket, and two 8″ zippers, one for the exterior pocket above the patch pocket, and one for the interior pocket.
Here’s the thing about zippers: buying single, pre-made zippers gets expensive fast. Although it’s certainly not easier to do it this way, it is much more economical to buy a few yards of zipper tape and some pulls and make them myself. Plus, now I have some extra black zipper tape and pulls in my stash for the next bag.
Webbing, Handles, and Hardware
This pattern calls for ladder lock buckles, which are your standard backpack strap adjuster thingies. Standard as they may be, I didn’t have a single one on hand — only metal hardware. Much like the zippers, they are cheaper in bulk, so now I have 48 more ladder lock buckles to use in 24 more backpacks.
It’s the same with the polypropylene webbing that makes up the handles and the adjustable part of the straps. The backpack would probably look better if I found some in a fun color that matches the interior fabric, but this is version one. It’s cheaper and far more practical to buy several yards of black webbing, because black goes with almost everything. I did already have some webbing, but it’s the wrong size for the pattern. Now I have it in two sizes.
Enter the Project Conundrum
Bag-making is just like anything else — it takes materials, tools, time, and effort. I tell myself it’s cheaper in the long run to buy hardware and other things in bulk, because I’ll have them around to make more bags. I used to think that I wanted to make my own clothes, but bag-making is much more fun and practical, especially when it comes to selling them.
The problem is I now have a fully functional backpack that I merely like and don’t love because of my material decisions. I’ll be honest — I don’t know if I’ll ever make version two of this backpack. I probably will if I come across the right fabric because I don’t have any other square backpacks. I’m glad I put thought and effort into version one, but there are some things I would do differently, like adding foam padding for the laptop-sized pocket. Now that I know how it goes together, I would probably add more pockets, or maybe even
hack the pattern and change the size
.
So, if I had made those different decisions from the start, would I be strapping on my beloved backpack as my daily driver, or would I never have gotten the thing off the ground in the first place? That’s a tough line to walk.
And You?
So, how about you? How much effort do you put into version one of any given project? Does it really matter, as long as you finish it and move on? That question is probably worth a think piece of its own. | 62 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325957",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T15:25:05",
"content": "This is a good article and a good topic to raise for discussion.Ultimately this is once again, all about trade-offs. But here are some thoughts.I was doing some work yesterday on the lathe and... | 1,760,373,172.313698 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/27/sounding-the-humble-led/ | Sounding The Humble LED | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"Art",
"hardware"
] | [
"bjt",
"candle flicker",
"current amplifier",
"flickering led",
"led",
"synthesizer"
] | Here at Hackaday we’re no strangers to the colorful glow of LEDs. But what if there was more to appreciate beneath the surface? Back in 2011 [Windell] over at Evil Mad Scientist dug into a certain variety of
LED and discovered they had a song to sing
.
Over the last couple decades, you’ve likely encountered the flickering “candle flame” variety of LED. Often found embedded in small plastic candle simulacra they are shaped like typical through hole “gumdrop” style LEDs, but pack some extra magic which causes them to flicker erratically. Coupled with a warm white color temperature the effect isn’t entirely dissimilar to the flickering of a candle flame.
To the Hackaday reader (and [Windell]) the cause of the flickering may be fairly clear, there is an IC embedded in the lens of the LED. See photo at top for an example of how this might look, helpfully magnified by the lens of the LED itself. Looking through the lens the captive die is visible, as well as the bond wires connecting it to the legs and light emitting diode itself. [Windell]’s observation is that together this assembly makes for a somewhat strange electrical component; from the perspective of the circuit it appears to randomly vary the current flowing through the LED.
He includes two interesting demos. One is that by attaching the flickering LED to a BJT he can turn it into a current amplifier and successfully drive a much more powerful 1W LED with the same effect. The other is that with the power of the amplifier the same flickering LED can drive a buzzer as well. The effect is surprisingly pleasant, though we’d hesitate to call it musical.
For a more recent example of a similar phenomenon with a very different sound, check out out [Emily Velasco]’s playback of a similarly constructed RGB color changing LED, embedded below. We’ve seen
optical tools used to decode LED
flickers into data streams, but not for audio playback! We have also covered some
LED flicker reverse engineering
that spills more of the mystery sealed up in these specialized diodes.
Did you ever wonder what a color-changing RGB LED sounds like?
I stuck one in the synthesizer to find out.
pic.twitter.com/mjyrQIs7kk
— Emily Velasco (@MLE_Online)
February 24, 2021 | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326571",
"author": "Jef",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T10:23:28",
"content": "Sometimes the chip is not in the LED and they use music chips such as in birthday cards.https://www.instructables.com/Listen-to-a-led-tea-light/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,172.786866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/bottle-filler-perfectly-tops-your-cup/ | Bottle Filler Perfectly Tops Your Cup | Mike Szczys | [
"home hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bottle filler",
"valve",
"water filter"
] | You know those bottle fillers at schools and airports? What if you had one of those at home?
We know what you’re going to say: “My fridge has one of those!” Well ours doesn’t, and even though [Chris Courses’] fridge did, his bottle of choice didn’t fit in the vertically-challenged water and ice hutch, nor did it fill autonomously. The solution was to build a dubiously placed, but nonetheless
awesome custom bottle filler in his kitchen
.
The plumbing for the project couldn’t be more straight-forward: a 5-year undersink water filter, electronically actuated valve, some tubing, and a T to splice into the existing water line going to the fridge. Where the rubber hits the road is making this look nice. [Chris] spends a lot of time printing face plates, pouring resin as a diffuser, and post processing. After failing on one formulation of resin, the second achieves a nice look, and the unit is heavily sanded, filled, painted, prayed over, and given the green light for installation.
For the electronics [Chris] went for a Raspberry Pi to monitor four buttons and dispense a precise allotment tailored to each of his favorite drinking vessels. While the dispenser is at work, three rows of LEDs play an animated pattern. Where we begin to scratch our heads is the demo below which shows there is no drain or drip tray below the dispenser — seems like an accident waiting to happen.
Our remaining questions are about automating the top-off process. At first blush you might wonder why a sensor wasn’t included to shut off the filler automatically. But how would that work? The dispenser needs to establish the height of the bottle and that’s a non-trivial task, perhaps best accomplished with computer vision
or a CCD line sensor
. How would you do it?
I built an automatic water dispenser to fill my water bottles to their exact dimensions
from
r/somethingimade | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326547",
"author": "Delgir",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T06:20:14",
"content": "I would train an AI to recognize the distinctive sounds of water filling a bottle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326615",
"author": "Delg... | 1,760,373,172.896065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/the-famous-basic-computer-games-book-gets-a-2021-update/ | The Famous Basic Computer Games Book Gets A 2021 Update | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"basic",
"david ahl",
"games",
"retrocomputing"
] | If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 101 BASIC Computer Games. The book, published in 1973 by [David Ahl] was a staple in its day and the first computer book to sell over one million copies. Of course, if you want to run Super Star Trek or Hamurabi, you better fire up an old retrocomputer or a simulator because BASIC in 1973 doesn’t look like what we have today. Or, you can head to
GitHub
where [coding-horror] is inviting people to help update the programs using modern languages.
One of our favorites, Bagels, is there with directories for C#, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and VB.net. It doesn’t appear that all of the games are in all the languages, though. There’s also a .Net solution file that apparently has a few entries in it. We were also happy to see Super Star Trek represented, along with a link to an article about
a C++ language port
. The original games were tweaked to run on
VintageBasic
.
By today’s standards, these games are pretty crude, but they are still engaging and, if you remember them, always nostalgic. There is one thing missing, though. In 1973, you had no choice but to type the programs in yourself. You couldn’t help but learn something about programming in the process. Besides, you then had to debug the program to find your typing mistakes and that was definitely educational. It might seem like these games are ultra-simple, but hexapawn does machine learning and the lunar lander game is a simple physics simulation.
Regardless of language, if I were using these with a student, I might be tempted to make them type the programs in by hand. They’d probably revolt against the idea, but it might be good training. Think of “wax on, wax off” from the Karate Kid.
Seeing some of these old gems is like unexpectedly running into an old friend. If you want to help out, there’s a
discussion board available
. You’d think BASIC would be gone by now, but it still
hangs in there
. If your program is short enough, you might even
run it on Twitter
. | 53 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326507",
"author": "JWhitten",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T03:05:44",
"content": "Oh yeah, I remember those. Our Basic on the HP-3000 wasn’t quite the same dialect (not that it mattered, since I didn’t know either one– nor did I have a manual) But I did use it to puzzle it out and had... | 1,760,373,173.168394 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/3d-printed-printing-press-turns-you-into-gutenberg/ | 3D Printed Printing Press Turns You Into Gutenberg | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"Gutenberg",
"moveable type",
"printing",
"printing press"
] | A few machines have truly changed the world, such as the wheel, steam engines, or the printing press. Maybe 3D printers will be on that list one day too. But for today, you can use your 3D printer to produce a working printing press by following
plans from [Ian Mackay]
. The machine,
Hi-Bred
, allows you to place printed blocks in a chase — that’s the technical term — run a brayer laden with ink over the type blocks and hand press a piece of paper with the platen.
The idea is more or less like a giant rubber stamp. As [Ian] points out, one way to think about it is that white pixels are 0mm high and black pixels are 3mm high. He suggests looking at old woodcuts for inspiration.
This might be just the thing for doing something fancy like custom invitations. Seems like it would be pretty hard to do a booklet or magazine, although anything is possible if you are patient. Real type was made with lead and we doubt the plastic type will be quite as durable.
Of course, if you just want the old school feel, you could try a
mimeograph or hectograph
. In the old days, typesetter put type in from big cases that often wind up now as shadowboxes. But then came the
Linotype
. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326490",
"author": "Jonathan Bennett",
"timestamp": "2021-02-27T00:29:09",
"content": "I think the internet will be the overarching world-shaking technology remembered from this era. It’s what’s made 3d printers possible.It’s appropriate to see plans for a 3d printed printing press... | 1,760,373,172.950141 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/spectrogram-drawing-for-fun-and-coding/ | Spectrogram Drawing For Fun And Coding | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"sdr",
"spectragram",
"waterfall"
] | It probably can’t have taken long after the first spectrum waterfall display was created, before somebody had a go at creating a waveform that would create an image in the waterfall. We don’t know who that pioneer was, but it’s over 20 years since Aphex Twin famously used the technique in their music, so it’s nothing new. If you fancy a go for yourself,
[Gokberk Yaltirakli] has the project for you
, creating waterfall images with an SDR from image files, using a bit of Python code.
The value here isn’t necessarily in creating the waterfall of Bitcoin logos that can be seen in the video he’s put on the page, instead it’s in the simple explanation of creating I and Q values for an SDR. The code is a bit slow so writes its values to a file which is output by a HackRF, but it could just as easily be used by any other capable output device such as GNU Radio and a soundcard if you too want an Aphex Twin moment.
The hardware for displaying a spectrum waterfall doesn’t even have to be very complex
.
Thanks [Leo] for the tip. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326452",
"author": "josephsleary",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T21:29:34",
"content": "Nice. Reminds me of the osc music:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnL40CbuodU",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6326455",
"author": "RW ver 0.... | 1,760,373,173.00693 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/this-week-in-security-mysterious-mac-malware-an-elegant-vmware-rce-and-a-json-mess/ | This Week In Security: Mysterious Mac Malware, An Elegant VMware RCE, And A JSON Mess | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"apt",
"Jian",
"json",
"SimpliSafe",
"This Week in Security"
] | There’s a new malware strain targeting MacOS,
Silver Sparrow
, and it’s unusual for a couple reasons. First, it’s one of the few pieces of malware that targets the new M1 ARM64 processors. Just a reminder, that is Apple’s new in-house silicon design. It’s unusual for a second reason — it’s not doing anything. More precisely, while researchers have been watching, the command and control infrastructure didn’t provide a payload. Silver Sparrow has been positively found on nearly 30,000 machines.
The malware also has an intentional kill switch, where the presence of a particular file triggers a complete removal of the malware package. Researchers at Red Canary point out that this package behaves very much like a legitimate program, difficult to pick out as malware.
Ars Technica got an off-the-record statement from Apple
, indicating that they are tracking the situation, and have revoked the developer’s certificate used to sign the malware. It’s not entirely clear whether this prevents the malware running on already compromised machines, or just stops new infections.
So who’s behind Silver Sparrow? The observed stealth mode and other complexities suggest that this is more than a simple adware or ransomware campaign. Since it was discovered before the payload was delivered, we may never know what the purpose is. It may have been a government created campaign, targeting something specific.
VMware RCE
The
details of a VMware vulnerability
were published this week, and the attack struck me as rather elegant. CVE-2021-21972 is a combination of two problems. The first is that the VMware web interface exposes an HTTP endpoint that doesn’t enforce user authentication. One of the functions of this endpoint is to allow the upload of an archive file, and extract this in the
/tmp
directory. The second problem is that the extraction function didn’t properly sanitize the names of the extracted files. Hence, it was possible to create an archive with a path transversal attack.
Here we have two very simple flaws, and when put together, allow a completely unauthenticated actor to easily get arbitrary code execution on the machine running VMware. The attack works on Linux and Windows servers, with expected implementation variations.
Inside a Wireless Security System
Ever wonder just how secure a residential security system is? [Nick Miles] and [Chris Lyne], a pair of researchers from Tenable, wondered the same thing, and decided to
tear apart a SimpliSafe system, wringing out all of its secrets
. They started with logic analyzers, and went as far as paying for functional decapping of the chips, to recover the firmware.
The step-by-step process is worth reading, but the conclusion is that the system is relatively well put together. Each device has an immutable AES key, and that represents an attack surface that wouldn’t be present with a more robust key exchange.
For the curious, [Nick] did
a detailed analysis of a Ring system just a few months back
.
Proper Exploit Attribution, The Story of Jian
I’ve been known to be a bit skeptical when an attack or exploit is attributed to a foreign nation, but no real evidence is presented. A story caught my eye this week, because it’s a wonderful example of what proper attribution looks like, not to mention a great example of unraveling a malware mystery.
Check Point Research looked deep into an exploit
used by APT31, believed to be a part of the Chinese government.
There are way too many details to dive into here, go read the post for the particulars, but we’ll cover the high points. Remember
the Shadow Brokers leak
, back in 2017? That was a collection of impressive 0-days that is universally recognized as produced by the Equation Group, part of the NSA. One of the tools exposed in that lead was “EpMe”, which leveraged CVE-2017-0005. Jian, an exploit produced by APT31 also targeted this CVE, and was probably created in 2014.
The kicker here is that Checkpoint makes a very convincing case that it was no accident that both exploits targeted the same CVE, but that the Chinese exploit was based on a captured sample of the NSA-produced tool. Essentially, they reverse-engineered the exploit and used it in their own operations, even before the tool was exposed by the Shadow Brokers.
Firefox State Partitioning
Mozilla has released a new privacy feature,
State Partitioning
, a way to authoritatively stop cookie-based tracking online. The concept is deceptively simple. Every domain you visit has its own “cookie jar”. Many websites have Facebook iframes or embedded images. State partitioning would isolate the cookies created by each of those iframes, meaning your browser is anonymous to Facebook on each of those sites.
Hand-in-hand is a new API that allows a website to request cross-site cookie access. This is important for the handful of uses where access is needed for legitimate uses, like Single Sign-On services. For now, partitioning is off by default, and can be turned on via the Enhanced Tracking Protection strict setting.
JSON Undefined Behavior
[Jake Miller] of
Bishop Fox Labs wrote a great intro
to a subject I’ve never considered: odd JSON constructions, and how different implementations handle them. An example will help.
obj = {"test": 1, "test": 2}
So what’s the value of
obj["test"]
? It’s complicated. Some JSON parsers will choose the first definition of a key, while others choose the last. Still others will throw an error in response. What makes this a particularly serious problem is that the same data may be parsed by different implementations in a single transaction. The example given in the post is of an online store, where the payment processing is handled by a third party.
The attack works by manipulating the JSON object sent by the browser, injecting a second value definition for the quantity of items purchased. The store itself sees the higher value, which determines the actual items shipped. The payment backend uses a different JSON parser, which sees the smaller value. The backend actually handles payment processing, so the amount charged is that of the smaller quantity.
The article goes on to describe issues with invalid unicode embedded in JSON and valid keypairs that have been
/*commented out*/
, and what happens when you re-serialize this quirky data. Another interesting edge case is the handling of very large numbers, where some parsers return 0, others return a null, and some an approximation in scientific notation.
All told, JSON deserialization is a mess. There’s sure to be many hard-to-spot bugs in web applications that use multiple parsers. The author makes a few recommendations at the end of the post. The most important is that parsers should produce a fatal error on particular quirky JSON input, rather than returning a guess at what data was intended. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326461",
"author": "wanderer_",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T22:15:52",
"content": "It never ceases to amaze me how much smarter than I am those people must be to find exploits like this one with JSON.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,373,173.068679 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/hackaday-podcast-107-ftdi-plays-music-led-dimming-aint-easy-measuring-poop-calories-and-sketchy-laser-cutters/ | Hackaday Podcast 107: FTDI Plays Music, LED Dimming Ain’t Easy, Measuring Poop Calories, And Sketchy Laser Cutters | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams gab about all of the geeky things. We had a delightful time watching NASA bring Perseverance down to the Red planet. In Kristina’s words, we pour one out for Fry’s Electronics. And then we jump into a parade of excellent hacks with a magnetic bearing for crooked ball screws, a science-based poop-burning experiment, and the music hack only microcontroller enthusiasts could love as an FTDI cable is plugged directly into a speaker. Smart circuit design is used to hack a dimmer into non-dimmable LED fixtures, and an octet of living clams are the early warning sensors for water pollution.
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
(~60 MB)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Google Podcasts
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
Episode 107 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Stunning Footage Of Perseverance Landing On Mars
Fry’s Electronics Has Fizzled Out Completely
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Internet Of Clams
Audio Out Over A UART With An FTDI USB-To-TRS Cable
Your USB Serial Adapter Just Became A SDR
Ben Krasnow Measures Human Calorie Consumption By Collecting The “Output”
Improving Cheap Ball Screws
HevORT Advanced DIY 3D Printer
Hacking A Non-Dimmable LED Fixture
Homebrew Doorknob Caps For High-Voltage Fun
No Doorknobs Needed For This Nitrogen Laser Build
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks
Beautiful And Bouncy RGB LED Skirt Reacts To Movement
Dynamic Macro Keyboard Controls All The Things
Vintage Calculator Design Shows Just How Much We Take For Granted Today
Elliot’s Picks:
Micro:bit Makes Cardboard Pinball More Legit
How Did The Nintendo Virtual Boy Work?
Pelton Turbine Development For An Air Powered Model Helicopter
Can’t-Miss Articles:
A Brief History Of Optical Communication
Hands On With The Ortur Laser Cutter
This Slimline Word Clock Uses Laser Etching To Keep Things Simple | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,172.830431 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/bad-week-for-boeing-reports-of-third-engine-failure-causes-emergency-landing-in-moscow/ | Bad Week For Boeing: Reports Of Third Engine Failure Causes Emergency Landing In Moscow | Mike Szczys | [
"News"
] | [
"777",
"777-200",
"777-300ER",
"boeing",
"emergency landing",
"engine failure",
"Pratt & Whitney"
] | Early Friday morning a Boeing 777 performed an emergency landing in Moscow, according to Russian media. The Interfax news agency cites
an anonymous source who claims the landing was caused by an engine failure
on a flight from Hong Kong to Madrid. According to the Hong Kong civil aviation department this was a cargo flight. So far no injuries have been reported.
Two damaged fan blades from UA328, a Boeing 777 that returned safely to DIA shortly after takeoff
Engine failures happen, pilots train for them, and our airport infrastructure is setup to accommodate emergency landings like this. However, the timing of this reported failure is notable. This is the second engine failure on a 777 within a week, and the third to occur in a Boeing aircraft.
Shortly after takeoff on Saturday, February 20th, a United Airlines flight bound for Hawaii
made an emergency landing after suffering a catastrophic failure of the right engine
. The event was widely shared on social media, you likely saw
the video from a passenger inside the Boeing 777-200
that shows the damaged engine on fire — if you haven’t you really should. There was also damage on the ground due to falling debris. This prompted Boeing to launch inspections of all 777-200s, and soon afterwards
the NTSB published photos of the damaged engine
. No injuries have been reported.
Two days later, on February 22nd, a Boeing 747-400 cargo plane operated by Longtail Aviation
suffered an engine failure over the Netherlands, dropping parts that reportedly injured two people
on the ground. This is a different model of aircraft but uses a Pratt & Whitney PW4000, in the same family as the Pratt & Whitney PW4070/4090
on the United 777-200
.
Reports of this morning’s emergency landing in Moscow will need to be verified and investigated, and we have not seen confirmation on what type of engine the Rossiya Airlines B777-300ER used. For comparison the
777-300ERs of the United fleet
and
the 777-300ERs operated by Emirates
both use General Electric engines rather than Pratt & Whitney models, so it is likely the Rossiya aircraft also had a GE engine.
The fact that the flights were all able to make safe landings is a testament to the redundant engineering of these aircraft.
CNET did a deep dive into last Saturday’s engine failure
and notes that it was an Extended-range Operations Performance Standards (
ETOPS
) aircraft capable of flying long distances on a single engine — necessary if an aircraft needed to make it half-way to Hawaii on one engine for an emergency landing. They also report on two other Pratt & Whitney PW-4000 engine failures in 2018 and
2000
2020, although as mentioned before, today’s incident likely didn’t involve an engine from this maker.
[Main image source:
B777-300
by Maarten Visser CC-BY-SA 2.0] | 34 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326383",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T17:20:06",
"content": "Does this have anything to do with hollow blades?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326392",
"author": "defcon.klaxon",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,173.297954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/modified-3d-printer-makes-a-great-microscope-too/ | Modified 3D Printer Makes A Great Microscope, Too | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"microscope",
"polarimetric camera"
] | A false-color polarimetric image of sugar crystals floating in water.
Look past the melty plastic bits, and your average 3D printer is just a handy 3-axis Cartesian motion platform. This makes them useful for all kinds of things, and as [E/S Pronk] shows us,
they can easily be modified into an automated polarimetric microscope!
The microscope build actually took two forms. One, a regular digital microscope any of us may be familiar with, using a C-mount microscope lens fitted to a Raspberry Pi HQ camera. The other, a polarimetric microscope, using an Allied Vision Mako G-508B POL polarimetric camera instead, with the same microscope lens. The polarimetric camera takes stunning false-color images, where the color values correspond to the polarization of the light bouncing off an object. It’s incredibly specialized hardware with a matching price tag, but [E/S Pronk] hopes to build a cheaper DIY version down the line, too.
3D printers make excellent microscopes, as they’re designed to make small precise movements and are easily controlled via G-Code. We’ve seen them used for other delicate purposes too –
such as this one modified to become a soldering robot
. Video after the break. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326365",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T16:45:35",
"content": "Well, a 3D printer doesn’t really make a good microscope. It makes a good microscope stand.I’m not even sure I would call it good. Good enough for some purposes. Versatile certainly, and com... | 1,760,373,173.509373 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/should-i-use-wheels-or-tracks/ | Should I Use Wheels Or Tracks? | Lewin Day | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"tank",
"tank track",
"Tank Tracks",
"tracked vehicle"
] | When it comes to dominating offroad performance, many people’s first thought is of tracked vehicles. Bulldozers, tanks and excavators all use treads, and manage to get around in difficult terrain without breaking a sweat. Today, we’re exploring just what makes tracked vehicles so capable, as well as their weaknesses.
It’s All About Ground Pressure
The various parts of a tank’s propulsion system.
Let’s first look at how tank tracks work. There are a huge variety of designs, with differences depending on application. Different trends have been followed over time, and designs for military use in combat differ from those used for low-speed construction machines, for example. But by looking at a basic tank track design, we can understand the basic theory. On tanks, the track or tread itself is usually made up of individual steel links that are connected together with hinges, though other machines may use rubber tracks instead. The tracks are wrapped around one or more drive wheels, often cogged, which directly pull on the track. On the bottom of the vehicle are the road wheels, which ride on top of the track where it lies on the ground. The weight of the vehicle is carried through the road wheels and passed on to the tread, spreading out the load across a broader area. Outside of this, the track system may also have one or more idler wheels used to keep the track taught, as well as return rollers to guide the track back around without touching the road wheels.
The low ground pressure of tracks, thanks to their large contact patch, means they’re perfect for driving in soft terrain like sand without sinking in.
Tank tracks, or continuous tracks as they’re more technically known, were developed initially for farm and logging applications, for heavy vehicles that needed to operate in soft terrain. Continuous treads had the advantage that they could support a vehicle’s weight over a much greater area than wheels. Spreading out the load meant that the ground pressure was lower, and thus the vehicle was less likely to sink into soft mud or sand. It also allowed a vehicle to put much more torque to the ground without slipping, thanks to the much larger contact patch compared to regular wheels. The party piece of the tank —
the ability to crush smaller road vehicles
— is as much a result of its huge weight as its tracks. However, the tracks are less likely to get tangled or damaged when driving over another vehicle, compared to a pneumatic tyre.
Awful Highway Mileage
When it comes to high speed travel on road surfaces, wheels are a far more efficient and comfortable solution.
However, tracks come with drawbacks that make them unsuitable for many applications. There’s a reason you don’t see tanks taking people to work on the New Jersey Turnpike; if you did you’d probably assume something political had gone very, very wrong. For many vehicular applications, the simple pneumatic tyre and wheel combination is more suitable. Pneumatic tyres do less damage to paved surfaces than tracks, and are better suited to higher speed operation. They’re also less noisy, and far easier to replace when damaged. Tracks are significantly more mechanically complicated, with the average tank having many more wheels and moving parts, as well as the tracks themselves. All of these add some loss to the driveline, making tracked transport far less fuel efficient, too. Steering on tracked vehicles can also be complicated for single-engine setups, requiring special gear mechanisms to allow the speed of each tread to be varied appropriately. Additionally, while tracks are great on soft surfaces, they don’t offer anything particularly special when it comes to ground clearance. In many cases, a properly designed wheeled vehicle may out perform a tracked one in a rock-crawling scenario.
Tracks as a Drive Train
For robots doing delicate work, tracks can be a good solution, providing the ability to turn on a coin and accurately manoeuvre in tight spaces.
Tracks are also used on smaller scale vehicles, from robots to radio controlled toys. Here, they maintain the benefits of lower ground pressure compared to wheels. However, the often lower weight of smaller scale vehicles means this isn’t as much of a benefit as it is for a main battle tank that must carry up to 60 tons of armour and weaponry into battle. Smaller scale vehicles that run on electricity can have the benefit of running one motor per track however, eliminating much of the steering complexity in single-engine vehicles. Much like larger vehicles, while tracks may offer better performance in soft surfaces, ground clearance is still important for dealing with obstacles like rocks.
Overall, it’s important to remember that tracks were designed to do one thing well, and that’s get vehicles through soft, boggy terrain like mud, snow and sand. If you’re having to deal with such conditions, the tank track might be just the engineering solution you’ve been looking for. If, however, high speed, efficiency, or comfort are more important – you’re probably best sticking with wheels! | 32 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326346",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T15:58:49",
"content": "Both! Like Johny Five.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6326357",
"author": "socksbot",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T16:29:29",
"content": ... | 1,760,373,173.369309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/diy-all-transistor-addressable-pixel/ | DIY All-Transistor Addressable Pixel | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable led",
"led",
"RTL"
] | By now most readers should be used to addressable LEDs, devices that when strung out in a connected chain can be individually lit or extinguished by a serial data stream. Should you peer at one under a microscope you’ll see alongside the LED dies an integrated circuit that handles all the address decoding. It’s likely to be quite a complex device, but how simply can its functions be replicated?
It’s a theme [Tim] has explored in the TransistorPixel
, and addressable LED board that achieves addressability with only 17 transistors.
It uses a surprisingly straightforward protocol, in which a pulse longer than 500ns enables the LED while a shorter one turns it off. Subsequent pulses in a train are passed on down the line to the next device. A 20µs absence of a pulse resets the string and sets it to wait for the next pulse train. Unlike the commercial addressable LEDS there is only a single colour and no suport for gradated brightness, but it’s still an impressive circuit.
Under the hood is some very old-school RTL logic, a monostable to detect the pulse and a selection of gates and a latch to capture the state and forward to the chain. It’s laid out on a PCB in order of circuit function, and while we can see that maybe it’s not a practical addresssable LED for 2021, it’s likely that it could be made into a much smaller PCB if desired.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the ready availability of addressable LEDs, we’ve not seen many home made ones.
This addressable 7-segment display may be the closest
. | 36 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326291",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T12:22:29",
"content": "Another GREAT project from Tim !Now I wonder if/how it could be implemented in CMOS :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6326296",
"author": "... | 1,760,373,173.641631 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/homebrew-metrology-the-cern-way/ | Homebrew Metrology The CERN Way | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"adc",
"cern",
"instrument",
"metrology",
"nosie",
"peltier",
"precision",
"Thermal",
"vapor phase reflow",
"voltmeter"
] | We won’t pretend to fully grok everything going on with
this open-source 8.5-digit voltmeter
that [Marco Reps] built. After all, the design came from the wizards at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, home to the Large Hadron Collider and other implements of Big Science. But we will admit to finding the level of this build quality absolutely gobsmacking, and totally worth watching the video for.
As [Marco] relates, an upcoming experiment at CERN will demand a large number of precision voltmeters, the expense of which led to a homebrew design that was released on
the Open Hardware Repository
. “Homebrew” perhaps undersells the build a bit, though. The design calls for a consistent thermal environment for the ADC, so there’s a mezzanine level on the board with an intricately designed Peltier thermal control system, including a custom-machined heat spreader blocker. There’s also a fascinatingly complex PCB dedicated solely to provide a solid ground between the analog input connector — itself a work of electromechanical art — and the chassis ground.
The real gem of this whole build, though, is the vapor-phase reflow soldering technique [Marco] used. Rather than a more-typical infrared process, vapor-phase reflow uses a perfluropolyether (PFPE) solution with a well-defined boiling point. PCBs suspended above a bath of heated PFPE get bathed in inert vapors at a specific temperature. [Marco]’s somewhat janky setup worked almost perfectly — just a few tombstones and bridges to fix. It’s a great technique to keep in mind for that special build.
The last [Marco Reps] video we featured was
a teardown of a powerful fiber laser
. It’s good to see a metrology build like this one, though, and we have a feeling we’ll be going over the details for a long time. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326281",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T11:15:45",
"content": "Accidentally producing hydrofluoric acid is not something that any sane person wants to deal with ever. If it does not kill you, it can still be bad.(before clicking on this link be aware that you may be di... | 1,760,373,173.567844 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/tired-of-popcorn-roast-coffee-instead/ | Tired Of Popcorn? Roast Coffee Instead | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"coffee",
"coffee roaster"
] | We’ve seen a lot of coffee roaster builds over the years. [Ben Eagan] started his with a
hot-air popcorn maker
. If you think it is as simple as putting beans in place of the popcorn, think again. You need to have good control of the heat, and that requires some temperature monitoring and a controller — in this case, an Arduino. [Ben’s] video below shows how it all goes together.
With the Arduino and the power supply strapped to the sides, it looks a bit like something out of a bad post-apocalypse movie. But it looks like it gets the job done.
In addition to the Arduino, a thermocouple measures the temperature and that takes a little circuitry in the form of a MAX31855. There’s also a relay to turn the heater on and off. There are other ways to control AC power, of course, and if a relay offends your sensibilities you can always opt for a solid state one.
The only other wrinkle was the addition of an extra power supply so the fan could operate without the heater. There might have been some other ways to manage that, but power supplies are cheap enough and at least the strapped on power supply counterbalances the strapped on Arduino on the other side of the popper.
We’ve seen
popcorn poppers used like this
before, of course. Thermocouples are a great way to measure high temperatures, but there are
lots of other ways to measure that particular quantity
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326315",
"author": "epitaxial",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T14:20:30",
"content": "I used a small variac to adjust the fan speed and a Omega temperature controller for the heating element. My Chinese solid state relay recently died and shorted closed. I knew it was an $8 fake and supp... | 1,760,373,173.68936 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/oddball-x86-instructions/ | Oddball X86 Instructions | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"assembler",
"assembly language",
"x86"
] | David Letterman made the top ten list famous. [Creel] has a top ten that should appeal to many Hackaday readers: the
top 10 craziest x86 assembly language instructions
. You have to admit that the percentage of assembly language programmers is decreasing every year, so this isn’t going to have mass appeal, but if you are interested in assembly or CPU architecture, this is a fun way to kill 15 minutes.
Some would say that all x86 instructions are crazy, especially if you are accustomed to reduced instruction set computers. The x86, like other non-RISC processors, has everything but the kitchen sink. Some of these instructions might help you get that last 10 nanoseconds shaved off a time-critical loop.
There are also interesting instructions like RDSEED, which generates a real random number. That can be useful but it takes many clock cycles to run, and like anything that purports to generate random numbers, is subject to a lot of controversies.
Our favorite, though, was PSHUFB. As soon as we saw “Mr. Mojo Risin’!” as the example input string, we knew where it was going. You could probably go a lifetime without using any of these instructions. But if you need them, now you’ll know.
If you really want to learn modern assembly language, there’s
plenty of help
. We occasionally write a little
Linux assembly
, just to keep in practice. | 66 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6326212",
"author": "Alexander Wikström",
"timestamp": "2021-02-26T03:41:38",
"content": "Some actually interesting instructions in here that seems to have just been created on a whim by someone who had something very specific to accelerate…Though, the string instruction on the end ... | 1,760,373,173.89287 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/real-time-os-basics-picking-the-right-rtos-when-you-need-one/ | Real-Time OS Basics: Picking The Right RTOS When You Need One | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"embedded",
"interrupt latency",
"RTOS"
] | When do you need to use a real-time operating system (RTOS) for an embedded project? What does it bring to the table, and what are the costs? Fortunately there are strict technical definitions, which can also help one figure out whether an RTOS is the right choice for a project.
The “real-time” part of the name namely covers the basic premise of an RTOS: the guarantee that certain types of operations will complete within a predefined, deterministic time span. Within “real time” we find distinct categories: hard, firm, and soft real-time, with increasingly less severe penalties for missing the deadline. As an example of a hard real-time scenario, imagine a system where the embedded controller has to respond to incoming sensor data within a specific timespan. If the consequence of missing such a deadline will break downstream components of the system, figuratively or literally, the deadline is hard.
In comparison soft real-time would be the kind of operation where it would be great if the controller responded within this timespan, but if it takes a bit longer, it would be totally fine, too. Some operating systems are capable of hard real-time, whereas others are not. This is mostly a factor of their fundamental design, especially the scheduler.
In this article we’ll take a look at a variety of operating systems, to see where they fit into these definitions, and when you’d want to use them in a project.
A Matter of Scale
Different embedded OSes address different types of systems, and have different feature sets. The most minimalistic of popular RTOSes is probably
FreeRTOS
, which provides a scheduler and with it multi-threading primitives including threads, mutexes, semaphores, and thread-safe heap allocation methods. Depending on the project’s needs, you can pick from a number of dynamic allocation methods, as well as only allow static allocation.
On the other end of the scale we find RTOSes such as VxWorks, QNX and Linux with real-time scheduler patches applied. These are generally POSIX-certified or compatible operating systems, which offer the convenience of developing for a platform that’s highly compatible with regular desktop platforms, while offering some degree of real-time performance guarantee, courtesy of their scheduling model.
Again, an RTOS is only and RTOS if the scheduler comes with a guarantee for a certain level of determinism when switching tasks.
Real-Time: Defining ‘Immediately’
Even outside the realm of operating systems, real-time performance of processors can differ significantly. This becomes especially apparent when looking at microcontrollers and the number of cycles required for an interrupt to be processed. For the popular Cortex-M MCUs, for example, the interrupt latency
is given
as ranging from 12 cycles (M3, M4, M7) to 23+ (M1), best case. Divide by the processor speed, and you’ve got a quarter microsecond or so.
In comparison, when we look at
Microchip’s 8051
range of MCUs, we can see in the ‘Atmel 8051 Microcontrollers Hardware Manual’ in section 2.16.3 (‘Response Time’) that depending on the interrupt-configuration, the interrupt latency can be anywhere from 3 to 8 cycles. On x86 platforms the story is more complicated again, due to the
somewhat convoluted nature
of x86 IRQs. Again, some fraction of a microsecond.
This latency places an absolute bound on the best real-time performance that an RTOS can accomplish, though due to the overhead from running a scheduler, an RTOS doesn’t come close to this bound. This is why, for absolute best-of-class real-time performance, a deterministic single polling loop approach with fast interrupt handler routines for incoming events is by far the most deterministic.
If the interrupt, or other context switch, costs cycles, running the underlying processor faster can also obviously reduce latency, but comes with other trade-offs, not the least of which is the higher power usage and increased cooling requirements.
Adding Some Cool Threads
As FreeRTOS demonstrates, the primary point of adding an OS is to add multi-tasking (and multi-threading) support. This means a scheduler module that can use some kind of scheduling mechanism to chop the processor time into ‘slices’ in which different tasks, or threads can be active. While the easiest multi-tasking scheduler is a
cooperative-style one
, where each thread voluntarily yields to let other threads do their thing, this has the distinct disadvantage of each thread having the power to ruin everything for other threads.
Most real-time OSes instead use a
preemptive
scheduler. This means that application threads have no control over when they get to run or for how long. Instead, an interrupt routine triggers the scheduler to choose the next thread for execution, taking care to differentiate between which tasks are preemptable and which are not. So-called kernel routines for example might be marked as non-preemptable, as interrupting them may cause system instability or corruption.
Although both Windows and Linux, in their usual configuration, use a preemptive scheduler, these schedulers are not considered suitable for real-time performance, as they are tuned to prioritize for foreground tasks. User-facing tasks, such as a graphical user interface, will keep operating smoothly even if background tasks may face a shortage of CPU cycles. This is what makes some real-time tasks on desktop OSes such a chore, requiring various workarounds.
A good demonstration of the difference with a real-time focused preemptive scheduler can be found in the x86 version of the
QNX
RTOS. While this runs fine on an x86 desktop system, the GUI will begin to hang and get sluggish when background tasks are performed, as the scheduler will not give the foreground tasks (the GUI) special treatment. The goal of the Linux kernel’s real-time patch also changes the default behavior of the scheduler to put the handling of interrupts first and foremost, while otherwise not distinguishing between individual tasks unless configured to do so by explicitly setting thread priorities.
RTOS or Not, That’s the Question
At this point it should be clear what is meant by “real-time” and you may have some idea of whether a project would benefit from an RTOS, a plain OS, or an interrupt-driven ‘superloop” approach. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here, but in general one seeks to strike a balance between the real-time performance required and the available time and budget. Or in the case of a hobby project in far how one can be bothered to optimize it.
The first thing to consider is whether there are any hard deadlines in the project. Imagine you have a few sensors attached to a board that need to be polled exactly at the same intervals and the result written to an SD card. If any kind of jitter in between readings of more than a few dozen cycles would render the results useless, you have a hard real-time requirement of that many cycles.
We know that the underlying hardware (MCU, SoC, etc.) has either a fixed or worst-case interrupt latency. This determines the best-case scenario. In the case of an interrupt-driven single loop approach, we can likely easily meet these requirements, as we can sum up the worst-case interrupt latency, the cycle cost of our interrupt routine (ISR) and the worst-case time it would take to process and write the data to the SD card. This would be highly deterministic.
In the case of our sensors-and-SD-card example, the RTOS version would likely add overhead compared to the single loop version, on account of the overhead from its scheduler. But then imagine that writing to the SD card took a lot of time, and that you wanted to handle infrequent user input as well.
With an RTOS, because the samples need to be taken as close together as possible, you’d want to make this task non-preemptable, and give it a hard scheduling deadline. The tasks of writing to the SD card and any user input, with a lower priority. If the user has typed a lot, the RTOS might swap back to handling the data collection in the middle of processing strings, for instance, to make a timing deadline. You, the programmer, don’t have to worry about it.
In short: an RTOS offers deterministic scheduling, while an interrupt-driven single loop eliminates the need for scheduling altogether, aside from making sure that your superloop turns around frequently enough.
Creature Comforts
When one pulls away the curtain, it’s obvious that to the processor hardware, concepts like ‘threads’ and thread-synchronization mechanisms such as mutexes and semaphores are merely software concepts that are implemented using hardware features. Deep inside we all know that a single-core MCU isn’t really running all tasks simultaneously when a scheduler performs its multi-tasking duty.
Yet an RTOS – even a minimalistic one like FreeRTOS – allows us to use those software concepts on a platform when we simultaneously need to stay as close to the hardware as possible for performance reasons. Here we strike the balance between performance and convenience, with FreeRTOS leaving us to our own devices when it comes to interacting with the rest of the system. Other RTOSes, like
NuttX
, QNX and VxWorks offer a full-blown
POSIX
-compatible environment that supports at least a subset of standard Linux code.
While it’s easy to think of FreeRTOS for example as an RTOS that one would stuff on an MCU, it runs just as well on large SoCs. Similarly,
ChibiOS/RT
happily runs on anything from an 8-bit AVR MCU to a beefy x86 system. Key here is finding the right balance between the project requirements and what one could call creature comforts that make developing for the target system easier.
For RTOSes that also add a hardware abstraction layer (e.g. ChibiOS, QNX, RT Linux, etc.), the HAL part makes porting between different target systems easier, which can also be considered an argument in its favor. In the end, however, whether to go single loop, simple RTOS, complicated RTOS or ‘just an OS’ is a decision that’s ultimately dependent on the context of the project. | 60 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325726",
"author": "Grant",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T18:44:16",
"content": "Not a bad write-up. There’s a few misc notes I have:* While the article hinted at this, it didn’t quite come out and say that you need a preemptive scheduled for something to be considered real-time.* One c... | 1,760,373,173.794585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/deleting-the-camshafts-from-a-miata-engine/ | Deleting The Camshafts From A Miata Engine | Danie Conradie | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"camless",
"engine",
"freevalve",
"mazda miata",
"piston engine",
"piston valve"
] | The idea of camless automotive engines has been around for a while but so far has been limited to prototypes and hypercars. [Wesley Kagan] has been working on a DIY version for a while, and successfully
converted a Mazda Miata to a camless valve system
. See the videos after the break.
There have been many R&D projects by car manufacturers to
eliminate camshafts
in order to achieve independent valve timing, but the technology has only seen commercial use on Koenigsegg hypercars. [Wesley] started this adventure on a cheap
single cylinder Harbor Freight engine
, and proved the basic concept, so he decided to move up to an actual car. He first sourced a junkyard engine head to convert, and use as a drop-in replacement for the head on the complete project car. An off-the-shelf double-acting pneumatic cylinder is mounted over each valve and connected to the valve stem with a custom adaptor. The double-acting cylinder allows the valve to be both opened and closed with air pressure, but [Wesley] still added the light-weight return spring to keep the valve closed if there is any problem with the pneumatic system.
The controller is an Arduino, and it receives a timing signal from a factory crankshaft and operates the pneumatic solenoid valves via MOSFETs. After mounting the new head and control box into the Miata, it took a couple of days of tuning to get the engine running smoothly. Initial tests were done using the compressor in his garage, but this was replaced with a small compressor and air tank mounted in the Miata’s boot for the driving tests.
Although the pneumatic system works well for short test drives, the compressor is quite noisy and adds a couple of points of failure. [Wesley] is also working on a solenoid actuated system, which would require a lot more current from the battery and alternator, but he believes it’s a better long-term solution compared to compressed air. However, he is still struggling to find solenoids with the required specifications.
[Wesley] will be open-sourcing all his designs and code, with the hope that others will be able to modify and improve the design. The results could be very interesting, so we’re hoping a community develops around these camless conversions. | 57 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325697",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T16:50:26",
"content": "Nice work. It also looks like he have another exciting project in the background!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6325699",
"author": "Alexander... | 1,760,373,173.981401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/increasing-the-resolution-of-the-electrical-grid/ | Increasing The Resolution Of The Electrical Grid | Matthew Carlson | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"batteries",
"grid",
"infrastructure",
"microgeneration",
"modernization",
"renewable",
"solar"
] | As a society in the USA and other parts of the world, we don’t give much thought to the twisting vines of civilization that entangle our skies and snake beneath our streets. The humming electrical lines on long poles that string our nations together are simply just there. Ever-present and immutable. We expect to flick the switch and power to come on. We only notice the electrical grid when something goes wrong and there is a seemingly myriad number of ways for things to go wrong. Lighting strikes, trees falling on lines, fires, or even
too many people trying to crank on the A/C
can all cause rolling blackouts. Or as we found out this month,
cold weather can take down generation systems that have not been weatherized
.
We often hear the electrical grid described as aging and strained. As we look to the future and at the ever-growing pressure on the infrastructure we take for granted, what does the future of the electrical grid look like? Can we move past blackouts and high voltage lines that criss-cross the country?
Our Current Grid
The power we use in our homes is generated by a complex and dynamic mechanism of peaker plants, distribution nodes, and high voltage lines. We’ve written a guide
on how power gets to the outlets in your home
as well as
a guide trying to demystify the grid as a whole
. But a quick recap never hurt anyone.
In our current grid, power starts from some sort of generation source. Usually, this is a large facility such as wind turbine time, a nuclear power plant, or a hydroelectric dam. The power output of the grid must match the load, so it is carefully monitored and controlled. At any one given time, different power sources will be connected to handle the demand, or in the case of Texas over the past week, parts of the grid are shut off so that demand falls to match a reduced capacity.
Some power plants are good at spinning up quickly to meet demand (known as peaker plants) while others are able to produce a steady stream of power. However, some power sources such a wind can’t be “started” if the wind simply isn’t blowing. This is something that
large-scale storage efforts like the Hornsdale Power Reserve
are seeking to address as they can store power to be used when needed, but grid-scale storage remains a rarity.
Power plants benefit from economies of scale and generate huge amounts of power in a localized area. The tricky part then is getting power to everyone who needs it. Transformers boost 10,000’s volts from the generators to 100,000’s of volts for long-distance transmission. Residential substations step back down to tens of thousands of volts and local transformers take this down to the standard 120/240 volts at a socket.
As cities have rapidly grown, they’ve patched and augmented the grid, with demand and population ballooning faster than construction or budgets allowed. Systems wear out and systems never designed to service that sort of load get expanded upon. It’s a difficult job and the wonderful humans that run and build our grid are working with limited resources.
“Smart” Grids
The future of electrical infrastructure is often declared to be smart grids, without much thought on what the phrase actually means. We’ve talked about
how smart the grid really is
before on Hackaday. Smart meters are already starting to be rolled out in certain areas, allowing for smarter load shedding and more accurate data. Grid-scale batteries and other storage systems are being installed to help smooth loads and reduce reliance on peaker plants. The industry currently doesn’t have any sort of standard to rally behind so
most providers are just experimenting by adding to their existing infrastructure
, much as we’ve always done. Adding a solar station here, a local large-scale battery there, and struggling to maintain the millions of miles of electrical lines.
Decentralization
As mentioned before, large-scale power plants have made sense by congregating all the power generation into one place, making it cost-effective to produce, manage, and distribute. However, over the last few decades, we’ve seen a relentless push down in cost due to technological advances and manufacturing scale. The price of solar and wind have plunged ever lower as efficiency has slowly crept up. Solar alone has dropped 70% in price over the last decade.
In fact, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)
released a dataset in June 2020
, suggesting that new solar and wind projects are undercutting the cheapest of existing coal-fired plants. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) in the US
released a projected LCOE
(levelized cost of energy, the price at which the produced electricity must be sold to break even) for 2025 for different power sources. In that data, solar, wind, and geothermal were the best performing in terms of dollars to megawatt-hours.
The EIA also noted that in the future, the share of power generated residentially will continue to grow. Already one-third of
solar energy produced is from residential rooftops
. So in a world of mini-powerplants scattered across rooftops, what does our grid look like? The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy within the Department of Energy (DOE)
suggests that a new model might be the way forward
. Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and
microgrids
can come together to form something new. Microgrids can be thought of as a way to further increase the grid size by creating smaller resilient grids within the larger macro grid.
Imagine your neighborhood as a microgrid. Right now, if there was a blackout everyone’s power would be out except for those with a backup generator, solar panels, or some other power solution. With a microgrid, your neighborhood can reconfigure itself and so that any generators or battery packs can power the neighborhood. Even when the macro grid is up and running, your microgrid can lend its power to help smooth power peaks. There’s even the potential of microgrids working together.
The idea seeks to shed the days of massive rolling blackouts when communities can be self-sufficient. By distributing the sources of power across an area rather than congregating them in small clusters, the number of long-distance high-voltage lines could potentially be reduced. Long-distance lines
are estimated to cost
around $1000 per mega-watt kilometer, so reducing the distance between generation and utilization would lead to significant cost savings for consumers and producers.
Of course, this interconnectivity and two-way coupling between the macro grid and the microgrids creates thousands of new states and edge cases. To help manage a system like this, IEEE has a
working proposal for a control scheme for microgrids
. While it does take more control out of the hands of large-scale electrical companies and more into the network itself, it provides important features such as prediction and coordination.
Storage
Storage and the intermittent nature are the persistent thorns in the sides of solar and wind power. The sun only shines for part of the day and the wind doesn’t always blow. Traditionally, we simply fire up a peaker plant to match the load as needed. With intermittent power, it needs to be stored and load-shedding algorithms and plans need to be in place.
Despite the up-front costs, storing power offers some unique advantages. Battery banks such as the Hornsdale Power Reserve are quite profitable since they can spin up faster than any gas-powered generator (generally around ten minutes for the gas and nearly instantly for the battery). This allows them to command a premium on the Frequency Control Auxiliary Services (FCAS) market compared to traditional peaker plants.
In addition, power storage can help with “black start” processes, which is the initial kick of power required to start up baseline power plants after an extended blackout. Currently, this is a carefully controlled process of gradually starting larger generators while matching load. Providers have been experimenting with adding storage systems to local areas. While scaling to megawatt scales still presents a challenge, there have been experiments with
compressed air
,
gravity storage
,
flow batteries
, hydro-pumped reservoirs, and dozens of other ideas. Some even suggest using excess power on sunny or windy days to synthesize hydrogen or natural gas, which can be used as storage.
DIY 20 kWh power wall
built from 18650 cells by [HBPOwerwall]
So far the trend for microgrids is positive. Every year, a great percentage of solar installs include storage systems instead of just pure solar. By and large, the most common storage solution for residential has been batteries. We’ve written up about
adding batteries in a modular way to your home.
New battery technologies are on the horizon but for now, most other methods of storing power just don’t make sense in a residential setting. A fun challenge to do with fellow engineers or co-workers is to try and design a power storage system that can be built into a house that doesn’t use batteries while still storing enough power for most of a day (10kWh for example).
As more and more homes and local areas have redundant storage, the microgrid becomes more self-sufficient and capable of withstanding peaks or troughs.
What’s Next
For now, the DoE has determined microgrids are a key part of infrastructure in the common decades. Research programs are ongoing across Europe, Japan, Korea, and Canada. In fact, the Office of Electricity
keeps a page of the current microgrid projects here in the USA
. While there is still quite a bit to flesh out and standardize, the future does look brighter. We can expect more reliable power with fewer blackouts. Despite all the investments and shifts in grid planning that will come over the next decades, not much will change for the average consumer (which is a good thing). The lights will come on, the fridge will stay cold, and the A/C will blow. Which is perhaps the greatest testament to the incredible system we’ve all built and all rely on. | 68 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325663",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T15:18:14",
"content": "Hopefully we’ll see a market glut of the current generation of Lithium batteries when solid state Lithium batteries and Lithium-sulfur batteries start being produced. If not, I’m hoping batteries that can... | 1,760,373,174.109303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/30-fps-flip-dot-display-uses-cool-capacitor-trick/ | 30 FPS Flip-Dot Display Uses Cool Capacitor Trick | Mike Szczys | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flip dot display",
"flip dots",
"Flip-disc display",
"flip-dot"
] | Most people find two problems when it comes to flip-dot displays: where to buy them and how to drive them. If you’re [Pierre Muth] you level up and add the challenge of driving them fast enough to rival non-mechanical displays like LCDs. It was a success, resulting in
a novel and fast way of controlling flip-dot displays
.
Gorgeous stackup of the completed display. [Pierre] says soldering the 2500 components kept him sane during lockdown.
If you’re lucky, you can get a used flip-dot panel decommissioned from an old bus destination panel, or perhaps the arrivals/departures board at a train station. But it
is
possible to buy brand new 1×7 pixel strips which is what [Pierre] has done. These come without any kind of driving hardware; just the magnetized dots with coils that can be energized to change the state.
The problem comes in needing to reverse the polarity of the coil to achieve both set and unset states. Here [Pierre] has a very interesting idea: instead of working out a way to change the connections of the coils between source and sink, he’s using a capacitor on one side that can be driven high or low to flip the dot.
Using this technique, charging the capacitor will give enough kick to flip the dot on the display. The same will happen when discharged (flipping the dot back), with the added benefit of not using additional power since the capacitor is already charged from setting the pixel. A circuit board was designed with CMOS to control each capacitor. A PCB is mounted to the back of a 7-pixel strip, creating modules that are formed into a larger display using SPI to cascade data from one to the next. The result, as you can see after the break, does a fantastic job of playing
Bad Apple
on the 24×14 matrix. If you have visions of one of these on your own desk,
the design files and source code are available
. Buying the pixels for a display this size is surprisingly affordable at about 100 €.
We’re a bit jealous of all the fun displays [Pierre] has been working on. He previously built
a 384 neon bulb display
that he was showing off last Autumn. | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325622",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T12:09:32",
"content": "I guess you have to turn the music up to hear over all the clacking.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6325745",
"author": "YGDES",
"time... | 1,760,373,174.199823 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/audio-out-over-a-uart-with-an-ftdi-usb-to-trs-cable/ | Audio Out Over A UART With An FTDI USB-To-TRS Cable | Maya Posch | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"usart",
"usb"
] | What is the easiest way to get audio from a WAV file into a line-level format, ready to be plugged into the amplifier of a HiFi audio set (or portable speaker)? As [Konrad Beckmann]
demonstrated on Twitter
, all you really need is a UART, a cable and a TRS phono plug. In this case a USB-TTL adapter based around the FTDI FT232R IC: the
TTL-232R-3V3-AJ
adapter with 12 Mbps USB on one end, and a 3 Mbps UART on the other end.
[Konrad] has made the C-based code
available on GitHub
. Essentially what happens underneath the hood is that it takes in a PCM-encoded file (e.g. WAV). As a demonstration project, it requires the input PCM files to be a specific sample rate, as listed in the README, which matches the samples to the baud rate of the UART. After this it’s a matter of encoding the audio file, and compiling the
uart-sound
binary.
The output file is the raw audio data, which is encoded in PDM, or
Pulse-Density Modulation
. Unlike Pulse-Code Modulation (
PCM
), this encoding method does not encode the absolute sample value, but uses binary pulses, the density of which corresponds to the signal level. By sending PDM data down the UART’s TX line, the other side will receive these bits. If said receiving device happens to be an audio receiver with an ADC, it will happily receive and play back the PDM signal as audio. As one can hear in the video embedded in the tweet, the end result is pretty good.
If we look at at the
datasheet
for the TTL-232R-3V3-AJ adapter cable, we can see how it is wired up:
When we compare this to the wiring of a
standard audio TRS
jack, we can see that the grounds match in both wirings, and TX (RX on the receiving device) would match up with the left channel, with the right channel unused. A note of caution here is also required: this is the 3.3V adapter version, and it lists its typical output high voltage as 2.8V, which is within tolerances for
line-level
inputs. Not all inputs will be equally tolerant of higher voltages, however.
Plugging random TRS-equipped devices into one’s HiFi set, phone or boombox is best done only after ascertaining that no damage is likely to result. Be safe, and enjoy the music. | 41 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325586",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T09:34:09",
"content": "Most of my music has an odd parity",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6325746",
"author": "josephsleary",
"timestamp": "2021-02... | 1,760,373,174.366223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/retro-dreamcast-rhythm-game-controller-built-from-scratch/ | Retro Dreamcast Rhythm Game Controller Built From Scratch | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"dreamcast",
"maple bus",
"pop",
"popn music"
] | Pop’n Music is a rhythm game which has had both arcade and home console releases over the years. [Charlie Cole] is a fan of the Dreamcast version,
and decided to build his own controller for the game using the new hotness, the Raspberry Pi Pico
.
The controller itself is built out of layers of lasercut MDF, along with an acrylic top and cork bottom to make it sit nicely on surfaces. Arcade buttons are installed to play the rhythm game, mimicking the design of the official cabinets seen in arcades. To run the controller, a Pico was pressed into service, with [Charlie] hoping to use the Pico’s PIO hardware to easily and effectively interface with the Dreamcast’s Maple bus. There were a few headaches along the way, and it didn’t quite live up to expectations, but with some clever use of dual cores, [Charlie] was able to get everything up and running.
Often, such vintage gaming hardware can be thin on the ground, so having the skills to build your own can come in handy. We’ve seen rhythm game hardware modded before too,
like this repurposed DJ Hero controller
. Video after the break. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325556",
"author": "iamevn",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T06:49:02",
"content": "Always love to see Pop’n! My first real attempt at DIY was for a USB Pop’n controller. Shame about the difficulties getting PIO to work though",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,174.262381 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/capstan-winch-central-to-this-all-band-adjustable-dipole-antenna/ | Capstan Winch Central To This All-Band Adjustable Dipole Antenna | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"adjustable",
"amateur radio",
"antenna",
"brushes",
"capstan",
"dipole",
"feedpoint",
"ham",
"stepper"
] | The perfect antenna is the holy grail of amateur radio. But antenna tuning is a game of inches, and since the optimum length of an antenna depends on the frequency it’s used on, the mere act of spinning the dial means that every antenna design is a compromise. Or perhaps not, if you build
this infinitely adjustable capstan-winch dipole antenna
.
Dipoles are generally built to resonate around the center frequency of one band, and with allocations ranging almost from “DC to daylight”, hams often end up with a forest of dipoles. [AD0MZ]’s adjustable dipole solves that problem, making the antenna usable from the 80-meter band down to 10 meters. To accomplish this feat it uses something familiar to any sailor: a capstan winch.
The feedpoint of the antenna contains a pair of 3D-printed drums, each wound with a loop of tinned 18-gauge antenna wire attached to some Dacron cord. These make up the adjustable-length elements of the antenna, which are strung through pulleys suspended in trees about 40 meters apart. Inside the feedpoint enclosure are brushes from an electric drill to connect the elements to a 1:1 balun and a stepper motor to run the winch. As the wire pays out of one spool, the Dacron cord is taken up by the other; the same thing happens on the other side of the antenna, resulting in a balanced configuration.
We think this is a really clever design that should make many a ham happy across the bands. We even see how this could be adapted to other antenna configurations, like
the end-fed halfwave
we recently featured in our “$50 Ham” series. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325531",
"author": "BobH",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T03:32:50",
"content": "I think that this is probably how the fancy “Step IR” antennas work also.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6325644",
"author": "Andy",
... | 1,760,373,174.635638 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/pelton-turbine-development-for-an-air-powered-model-helicopter/ | Pelton Turbine Development For An Air Powered Model Helicopter | Danie Conradie | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"compressed air engine",
"Pelton turbine",
"tom stanton"
] | [Tom Stanton] has been messing around with compressed air power for a few years now, and most of his work focused on piston engines. He likes using 2-liter soda bottles as lightweight tanks but their capacity is limited, so the nozzle can be a maximum of 1 mm in diameter if he wants to produce thrust for 30 seconds or longer using a turbine. Pelton turbines have been in use for a long time, especially for hydroelectric systems, and they use small diameter nozzles, so he decided to experiment with a
pneumatic Pelton turbine
. (Video, embedded below.)
Pelton wheels
are water wheels with specially designed buckets to efficiently extract energy from a high-velocity jet of water. [Tom] 3D printed several geared Pelton turbines and started doing bench tests with a propeller and a load cell to gather empirical data. With the help of high-speed video of the tests, he quickly realized that the turbine efficiency is highly dependent on the load. If the load is too small or too large, the moving air will not come to a complete standstill, and energy will be wasted. [Tom] also suspected that some moving air was escaping from the bucket, so he created a version that enclosed the buckets with a ring on the outer perimeter, which increased the peak thrust output by 65%. Compared to his
diaphragm air engine
design, the peak thrust is higher, but the overall efficiency is less. [Tom] believes there is still room for improvement, so he plans to continue working on the Pelton turbine concept, with the hopes of building an air-powered model helicopter that can lift off.
One comment that came up a few times with his piston engine designs is whether venting the air straight out the nozzle, without a turbine or engine in the way, would be a better option. [Tom] tested this in the bench, and the straight-through nozzle was four times less efficient than the turbine. The reason for this was addressed in the
comments
on our article on diaphragm air engine and discussed on the
Hackaday podcast
. It’s an impedance matching problem, and an engine or turbine converts the small volume of high-velocity air into a large volume of low-velocity air. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325291",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T09:47:38",
"content": "Pelton wheels can be tricky to design, but for a general rule of thumb, the peak efficiency is when your buckets are moving at half the speed of the fluid stream.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,174.533055 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/22/led-spectrum-visualizer-driven-by-raspberry-pi/ | LED Spectrum Visualizer Driven By Raspberry Pi | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"audio visualizer",
"LED music visualizer",
"visualizer"
] | Back in the 1980s, spectrum displays on audio equipment were absolutely
must have,
and the aesthetic came to define the era. This lingered on through the 1990s, and remains a cool look even to this day.
[Arduino Guy] decided to put together such a display using a Raspberry Pi and a large LED display.
The LED display in question is of the 64×64 RGB type, available from Aliexpress and other electronics suppliers online. To run the display, an Adafruit RGB Matrix Hat is used with the Raspberry Pi 3B, which makes driving the panel a cinch. The visual effect is run via a Python script, which plays a wave file and produces the spectrum graphics via a Fast Fourier Transform.
While the code isn’t able to act as a general-purpose equalizer display for any content played on the Raspberry Pi, creating such a script could be an entertaining exercise for the reader. Alternatively, the Pi could be hooked up to a microphone to run the display based on ambient room noise. In any case, we’ve seen great projects like this before,
such as this laser-based display
. Video after the break. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325257",
"author": "[skaarj]",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T06:29:50",
"content": "That’s too…. digital. Black corners at 90° scratch my eyes, right there in the middle of led display where some frequencies do mot get any corresponding reactions. It’s cool but the math is far from perf... | 1,760,373,174.582837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/22/3d-print-a-pcb-the-hard-way/ | 3D Print A PCB The Hard Way | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"CNC mill",
"mill",
"pc board",
"pcb",
"PCB mill"
] | There’s an old joke about the physics student tasked with finding the height of a building using a barometer. She dropped the barometer from the roof and timed how long it took to hit the ground. Maybe that was a similar inspiration to [Moe_fpv_team’s] response to the challenge: use a 3D printer to create a PC board. The answer in that case?
Print a CNC mill
.
[Moe] had some leftover 3D printer parts. A $40 ER11 spindle gets control from the 3D printer software as a fan. The X, Y, and Z axis is pretty standard. The machine can’t mill metal, but it does handy on plywood and fiber board and should be sufficient to mill out a PCB from some copper clad board.
It would probably be possible to beef up the design by using rods larger than 8mm. Of course, you could just attach a spindle or even a rotary tool to a 3D printer, but the fact that the machine uses leadscrews on all axes should make it better at forcing its way through the material even if it is a little slower.
If you need a
tutorial
on how the process works, we’ve got you covered. If your setup isn’t robust enough to cut through copper, maybe you can just
cut through the resist
and etch. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325225",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T03:35:40",
"content": "Oh, there were so many other good answers to that quiz. My favorite was “take the barometer to the superintendent and say, ‘I will trade you this shiny new barometer if you tell me the height of this buildin... | 1,760,373,174.68469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/22/how-to-design-a-custom-generator-interlock-plate/ | How To Design A Custom Generator Interlock Plate | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"cardboard template",
"circuit breaker",
"generator",
"interlock",
"template"
] | If you connect a generator to your home’s main electrical panel when the power goes out, you need to make sure the main breaker is shut off. Otherwise, when the power comes back on, you (or the linemen) are going to have a bad time. There are commercial interlock plates which physically prevent the generator and main breakers from being switched on at the same time, but since they tend to be expensive,
[HowToLou] decided to make one himself.
The hardest part of this project is designing the template. It needs to be carefully shaped so its resting position prevents the generator’s breaker from being switched on under normal circumstances, but once the main is turned off and out of the way, you should be able to lift it up and have the clearance to flip the lower breaker. Spending some quality time at the breaker box with tape and a few pieces of cardboard is going to be the easiest way of finding the proper shape.
Making a template with thin cardboard.
In the video after the break, [HowToLou] demonstrates the ideal shape for his particular application, which should help you get your mind wrapped around the idea. There are a lot of variables involved, not least of which the size and placement of the breakers, so taking the time to get the template right is critical.
Once you have the shape, you could really make the plate however you want. [HowToLou] cuts his by hand out of a piece of thin aluminum, but you could certainly 3D print it or even CNC it out of a thicker piece of metal. The important thing is that its stiff enough that somebody can’t just bend it out of the way if they’re fumbling around with it in the dark.
It probably goes without saying that a homemade interlock isn’t going to be up to code, but even if you don’t have any inspectors sniffing around your electrical panel, it’s a sensible precaution to have something like this installed. The middle of winter is a bad time to
realize you don’t have any way to safely power your home when the grid goes down
, so the key is getting something like this ready to go
before
you actually need it. | 85 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325166",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T00:13:48",
"content": "Inches? Nickels? Quarters? What are they?And that does not look like aluminium.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6325173",
"author": "lurker"... | 1,760,373,174.799372 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/22/stunning-footage-of-perseverance-landing-on-mars/ | Stunning Footage Of Perseverance Landing On Mars | Dan Maloney | [
"Current Events",
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"descent",
"EDL",
"entry",
"landing",
"Mars 2020",
"nasa",
"Perseverance",
"Seven minutes of terror"
] | The much-anticipated video
from the entry descent and landing (EDL) camera suite on the Perseverance rover has been downlinked to Earth, and it does not disappoint. Watch the video below and be amazed.
The video was played at the NASA press conference today, which is still ongoing as we write this. The brief video below has all the highlights, but the good stuff from an engineering perspective is in
the full press conference
. The level of detail captured by these cameras, and the bounty of engineering information revealed by these spectacular images, stands in somewhat stark contrast to the fact that they were included on the mission mainly as an afterthought. NASA isn’t often in the habit of adding “nice to have” features to a mission, what with the incredible cost-per-kilogram of delivering a package to Mars. But thankfully they did, using mainly off-the-shelf cameras.
The camera suite covered nearly everything that happened during the
“Seven Minutes of Terror”
EDL phase of the mission. An up-looking camera saw the sudden and violent deployment of the supersonic parachute — we’re told there’s an Easter egg encoded into the red-and-white gores of the parachute — while a down-looking camera on the rover watched the heat shield separate and fall away. Other cameras on the rover and the descent stage captured the skycrane maneuver in stunning detail, both looking up from the rover and down from the descent stage. We were surprised by the amount of dust kicked up by the descent engines, which fully obscured the images just at the moment of “tango delta” — touchdown of the rover on the surface. Our only complaint is not seeing the descent stage’s “controlled disassembly” 700 meters away from the landing, but one can’t have everything.
Honestly, these are images we could pore over for days. The level of detail is breathtaking, and the degree to which they make Mars a real place instead of an abstract concept can’t be overstated. Hats off to the EDL Imaging team for making all this possible. | 70 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325097",
"author": "David Given",
"timestamp": "2021-02-22T20:49:38",
"content": "A special shoutout to MRO’s Hirise imager too, which managed to manage to capture a stunning image, from orbit, of the backshell and parachute impacting the surface.",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,373,175.058385 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/22/pvc-pipes-play-popcorn-perfectly/ | PVC Pipes Play “Popcorn” Perfectly | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"popcorn",
"PVC",
"pvc instrument"
] | There are all sorts of fun ways to make music with empty jugs and other things that resonate with a popping sound when poked with a finger. Should you ever get stuck on that proverbial desert island, you can entertain yourself by making cheerful, staccato music with nothing but a fingertip and the inside of your cheek. At the very least, it will keep your spirits up until you can fashion an ocarina from a coconut.
[Nicolas Bras] loves to make homemade instruments. When he saw all the scrap pieces of perfectly finger-sized PVC tubing piling up around the workshop, he decided to
make an instrument specifically to play the effervescent synth tune “Popcorn”
. (Video, embedded below.) He plays it by plugging and quickly unplugging wood-capped pipes with his fingers, and using another PVC tube to blow across the tops of them to fill out the orchestration.
[Nicolas] started by making a two-octave chromatic scale with 25 pipes ranging from C4 to C6. He kept building on it from there in both directions, ultimately ending up with a poppin’ 68-note pipe organ that sounds fantastic. If you’re interested in getting the sound samples, [Nicolas] has those and the instrument plans available through Patreon.
Be sure to check out the build and demo video below — it’s a joy to see it come together, and the whole thing clocks in under six minutes. Take our word for it and don’t jump to the “Popcorn” cover, because the build-up is necessary for maximum enjoyment.
Hungry for more “Popcorn”?
Here’s a robotic glockenspiel busting out a striking cover
.
Thanks for the hot, buttered tip, [This Field Intentionally Left Blank]. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325080",
"author": "43monkeys",
"timestamp": "2021-02-22T20:04:42",
"content": "I’ve love to up vote this but there’s no Raspberry Pi, not even an Arduino, hell, there’s no 555.Oh, nor is there an up vote button.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,174.962323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/22/flapping-wings-and-the-science-of-how-bees-can-fly/ | Flapping Wings And The Science Of How Bees Can Fly | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"bees",
"bird",
"birds",
"flapping wing",
"flight",
"ornithopter"
] | Jerry Seinfeld launched his career with
Bee Movie,
an insect-themed animated feature that took the world by storm in 2007. It posed the quandary – that supposedly, according to all known laws of aviation, bees should not be able to fly. Despite this, the bee flies anyway, because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.
The quote isn’t easily attributed to anyone in particular, but is a cautionary tale about making the wrong assumptions in an engineering context. Yes, if you model a bee using the same maths as an airliner, of course you’ll find that it shouldn’t be able to fly. Its tiny wings can’t possibly generate enough lift to get its body off the ground. But that’s because the assumption is an erroneous one – because bees don’t fly in the same way planes do. Bees flap their wings. But that’s just the beginning. The truth is altogether more complex and interesting!
Flapping Wings and Dynamic Stall
Smoke visualization of a hawk moth. Peeling apart the mysteries of flapping wing flight has required intensely difficult work to visualise complex three-dimensional flow regimes around tiny, uncooperative insects. (
(Willmott, Ellington & Thomas, 1997)
Regular planes have fixed wings that are, for all intents and purposes, relatively rigid. There is some structural flexibility, but from an aerodynamic standpoint, it doesn’t have a significant effect. These wings generate lift when moving through the air at speed, thanks to their airfoil shape. Increase the angle of the wing relative to the airflow, for example, by pitching up the aircraft, and the wing will generate more lift. This angle is called the
angle of attack
.
Increase it too far, and the flow will separate from the wing, and it will stop producing lift entirely. This is called a
stall
. Without lift, planes fall out of the sky.
Bees, like birds, and many insects, don’t have fixed wings – instead, they flap their wings to generate both propulsion and lift. The wings are flapped in an incredibly complex motion, with the wing rotating throughout the downstroke and upstroke in order to maximise efficiency. The key to creating high lift with a flapping wing
is down to a variety of complex fluid mechanisms
.
The leading edge vortex, as visualised on a model of a hovering hawkmoth. Note how the leading edge vortex stays attached to the wing on the downstroke from (a) to (b). (
van den Berg, Ellington 1997
)
The first is the generation of a strong leading edge vortex through a phenomenon known as
dynamic stall,
or
absence of stall
. This is where the wing is at an incredibly high angle of attack on the downstroke and upstroke, which causes the airflow over the wing to seperate, generating a large vortex attached to the leading edge of the wing. This vortex remains attached to the wing, thanks to flow features generated along the span of the wing, in much the same way as delta wings work on aircraft. By keeping this vortex attached, the wing is able to generate high lift thanks to the pressure difference across the wing that would otherwise be absent if the vortex were allowed to dissipate.
The second is down to rotational effects. It’s possible to rotate the wing either before changing stroke direction, during change of stroke direction, or after changing stroke direction. When the wing rotates, this motion adds to the circulation in the existing vortexes around the wing. Doing this in advance of a stroke change, the added circulation in the air creates a boost to the lift generated by the wing; doing it after creates a negative lift force. Doing it symmetrically creates both positive and negative lift peaks throughout the full wingbeat. By varying the point of rotation, it’s possible to vary the lift generation on each flap of the wings.
A diagram showing the difference in aerodynamic performance of wings during advanced, symmetrical, and delayed rotation regimes. The black lines represent the wing, with the dot showing the leading edge. The red arrows show the magnitude and direction of the instantaneous forces on the wing. This data was collected with a robotic flapping wing model.
(Dickinson, Lehmann & Sane, 1999)
Other complex mechanisms have also been observed in various types of insects and birds, with many species displaying unique and varied flapping techniques. One technique observed in butterflies is that of wing-wake interaction. A wake is a flow regime seen in a fluid behind a moving object; most commonly observed by humans as the changing flow behind a boat travelling through water. This exists for wings in air as well. In wing-wake interaction, the motion of the wing during flapping creates an interaction between the wing’s flow and the wake shed by the previous flapping motion. As the wake in the air consists of fluid moving because of the flapping wings, interacting with this wake to generate more lift allows the insect to recapture some of the energy already expended to improve its efficiency.
Another commonly cited mechanism is the “clap and fling”, where the wings on either side of an insect are clapped together at the top of the upstroke, squeezing out air between them that helps generate thrust, before flinging apart to begin the downstroke. As the wings peel apart, they create a low-pressure zone between them that sucks in air and helps build circulation during the downstroke. However, this method is not used by all species, and only used in certain flight regimes, so is not a critical component of regular flapping wing flight.
Overall, the fluid mechanics behind flapping wing flight is incredibly complex. A basic understanding of fluid mechanics is required even to parse this very simple explainer, let alone truly dive into the topic. Flapping wing flight is still not completely understood, and is an area of ongoing research around the world. One of the reasons for this is the high level of difficulty involved in studying these phenomena.
Particularly with regard to insect flight, the flow regimes are tiny and difficult to visualise. This has led to techniques such as
building robotic analogues of insect wing systems at larger scales
and moving the wing surfaces through tanks of mineral oil to better see and understand the mechanisms at play.
This allows techniques such as dye visualization to be used
, giving insights into the complex three-dimensional flow regimes. Other work involves studying birds, which are larger and easier to observe, and running computer models. However, it’s always necessary to directly study the real thing to confirm any theory.
Regardless of the complexity, the old adage that “bees can’t fly” is provably false, and rooted more in making inappropriate engineering assumptions than any major physical paradox. As always, when running simulations, it pays to make sure you’re modelling the right thing at the get-go. | 70 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325032",
"author": "thatguy",
"timestamp": "2021-02-22T18:08:24",
"content": "Jerry Seinfeld launched his career. . . did I miss something?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6325081",
"author": "Newman",
"timest... | 1,760,373,174.910197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/dodowdiy-is-a-homebrew-sleep-aid/ | DodowDIY Is A Homebrew Sleep Aid | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"biofeedback",
"sleep",
"sleep aid"
] | The Dodow is a consumer device that aims to help users sleep, through biofeedback. The idea is to synchronise one’s breathing with the gentle rhythm of the device’s blue LEDs, which helps slow the heartrate and enables the user to more easily drift off to sleep. Noting that the device is essentially a breathing LED and little more,
[Daniel Shiffman] set about building his own from scratch.
An ATTiny85 runs the show; no high-powered microcontrollers are necessary here. It’s hooked up to three 5mm blue LEDs, which are slowly ramped up and down to create a smooth, attractive breathing animation. The LEDs are directed upward so that their glow can be seen on the ceiling, allowing the user to lay on their back when getting ready for sleep. It’s all wrapped up in a 3D printed enclosure that is easily modifiable to suit a variety of battery solutions; [Daniel] chose the DL123A for its convenient voltage and battery life in this case.
The design is available on Thingiverse for those looking to spin their own.
It’s a neat example of where DIY can really shine – reproducing a somewhat-expensive gadget that is overpriced for its fundamental simplicity. Now when it comes to waking up again,
consider building yourself a nifty smart alarm clock. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325505",
"author": "Darko Kulić",
"timestamp": "2021-02-24T00:11:15",
"content": "Blue led color is an unfortunate choice, because blue light wakes up. Some yellow LED may be a better choice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "632... | 1,760,373,175.368326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/ben-krasnow-measures-human-calorie-consumption-by-collecting-the-output/ | Ben Krasnow Measures Human Calorie Consumption By Collecting The “Output” | Mike Szczys | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"ben krasnow",
"bomb calorimetry",
"calories",
"poop",
"Soylent"
] | It’s a bit icky reading between the lines on this one… but it’s a fascinating experiment! In his latest Applied Science video,
[Ben Krasnow] tries to measure how efficient the human body is at getting energy from food
by accurately measuring what he put in and what comes out of his body.
The jumping off point for this experiment is the calorie count on the back of food packaging. [Ben] touches on “
bomb calorimetry
” — the process of burning foodstuff in an oxygen-rich environment and measuring the heat given off to establish how much energy was present in the sample. But our bodies are flameless… can we really extract similar amounts of energy as these highly controlled combustion chambers? His solution is to measure his body’s intake by eating nothing but Soylent for a week, then subjects his body’s waste to the bomb calorimetry treatment to calculate how much energy was not absorbed during digestion. (He burned his poop for science, and made fun of some YouTubers at the same time.)
The test apparatus is a cool build — a chunk of pipe with an acrylic/glass laminated window that has a bicycle tire value for pressurization, a pressure gauge, and electrodes to spark the combustion using nichrome wire and cotton string. It’s shown above, burning a Goldfish® cracker but it’s not actually measuring the energy output as this is just a test run. The actual measurements call for the combustion chamber to be submerged in an insulated water bath so that the temperature change can be measured.
Now to the dirty bits. [Ben] collected fecal matter and freeze-dried it to ready it for the calorimeter. His preparation for the experiment included eating nothing but Soylent (a powdered foodstuff) to achieve an input baseline. The problem is that he measures the fecal matter to have about 75% of the calories per gram compared to the Soylent. Thinking on it, that’s not surprising as we know that dung must have a high caloric level — it burns and has been used throughout history as a source of warmth among other things. But the numbers don’t lead to an obvious conclusion and [Ben] doesn’t have the answer on why the measurements came out this way. In the YouTube comments [Bitluni] asks the question that was on our minds: how do you correlate the volume of the input and output? Is comparing 1g of Soylent to 1g of fecal matter a correct equivalency? Let us know what you think the comments below.
The science of poop is one of those 8th-grade giggle topics, but still totally fascinating. Two other examples that po
o
p to mind are
our recent sewage maceration infrastructure article
and the science of
teaching robot vacuums to detect pet waste
. | 37 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325434",
"author": "aleksclark",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T21:13:54",
"content": "The reason is, I suspect, that his calorimetry is burning the dietary fiber and counting that as well, while the caloric value of the soylent doesn’t include it. There are many things we can’t digest, ... | 1,760,373,175.255625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/plasma-discharges-show-you-where-the-radiation-is/ | Plasma Discharges Show You Where The Radiation Is | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"alpha particle",
"americium-241",
"flyback",
"high voltage",
"plasma",
"smoke detector"
] | Depending on the context of the situation, the staccato clicks or chirps of a Geiger counter can be either comforting or alarming. But each pip is only an abstraction, an aural indication of when a particle or ray of ionizing radiation passed through a detector. Knowing
where
that happened might be important, too, under the right circumstances.
While
this plasma radiation detector
is designed more as a demonstration, it does a pretty good job at localizing where ionization events are happening. Designed and built by [Jay Bowles], the detector is actually pretty simple. Since [Jay] is the type of fellow with plenty of spare high-voltage power supplies lying around, he took a 6 kV flyback supply from an old build and used it here. The detector consists of a steel disk underneath a network of fine wires. Perched atop a frame of acrylic and powered by a 9 V battery, the circuit puts high-voltage across the plate and the wires. After a substantial amount of tweaking, [Jay] got it adjusted so that passing alpha particles from a sample of americium-241 left an ionization trail between the conductors, leading to a miniature lightning bolt.
In the video below, the detector sounds very similar to a Geiger counter, but with the added benefit of a built-in light show. We like the way it looks and works, although we’d perhaps advise a little more caution to anyone disassembling a smoke detector. Especially if you’re taking apart Soviet-era smoke alarms — you might get
more than you bargained for
. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325409",
"author": "rok",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T19:40:47",
"content": "The context of the situation probably likely depends of the setting of the setup.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6325420",
"author": "Markus",
"... | 1,760,373,175.179787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/paul-taylor-opened-the-lines-of-telecommunication-for-the-hearing-impaired/ | Paul Taylor Opened The Lines Of Telecommunication For The Hearing-Impaired | Kristina Panos | [
"Biography",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"profiles in science",
"tdd",
"telecommunication device for the deaf",
"telecommunications relay service",
"teletypewriter",
"tty"
] | These days, nearly everyone communicates through some kind of keyboard, whether they are texting, emailing, or posting on various internet discussion forums. Talking over the phone is almost outmoded at this point. But only a few decades ago, the telephone was king of real-time communication. It was and still is a great invention, but unfortunately the technology left the hearing and speaking-impaired communities on an island of silence.
Paul and an early TDD. Image via
Rochester Institute of Technology
Engineer and professor Paul Taylor was born deaf in 1939, long before cochlear implants or the existence of laws that called for testing and early identification of hearing impairment in infants. At the age of three, his mother sent him by train to St. Louis to live at a boarding school called the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID).
Here, he was outfitted with a primitive hearing aid and learned to read lips, speak, and use American sign language. At the time, this was the standard plan for deaf and hearing-impaired children — to attend such a school for a decade or so and graduate with the social and academic tools they needed to succeed in public high schools and universities.
After college, Paul became an engineer and in his free time, a champion for the deaf community. He was a pioneer of Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf, better known as TDD or TTY equipment in the US. Later in life, he helped write legislation that became part of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.
Paul was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2017 and died in January of 2021 at the age of 81
. He always believed that the more access a deaf person had to technology, the better their life would be, and spent much of his life trying to use technology to improve the deaf experience.
High school-aged Paul. Image via
YouTube
Learning to Speak Without Hearing
Soon after three-year-old Paul started school at CID, he met a little girl named Sally Hewlett who would one day become his wife. Along with their classmates, they spent the next several years learning to speak by holding their hands to the teacher’s face to feel the vibrations of speech, then touching their own faces while mimicking the movement and sound.
Paul’s father died while he was still in school. His mother moved to St. Louis to be with her son so he could still attend, but live at home. She took the opportunity to study at CID and she became an accredited teacher for deaf children. When it was time for high school, Paul and his mother moved to Houston, where she started a school for the deaf, and he enrolled in public school for the first time. Paul had no interpreter, no helper of any kind.
In a 2007 documentary made by the Taylors’ youngest daughter, Paul tells a story about an experience he had in high school. There was a nice looking girl in his class, and he wanted to know more about her, so he asked a different girl who she was. When that girl offered to give Paul the first girl’s telephone number, he stopped in his tracks, realizing at that moment how different he was because he couldn’t use the phone like all the other kids. The experience stuck with him and helped drive his life’s work.
AT&T’s Picturephone as it premiered at the 1964 World’s Fair. Image source: AT&T Archives and History Center via
LA Times
Phones for All
After high school, Paul completed his bachelor’s of chemical engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1962 and moved back to St. Louis to earn a master’s degree in operational research at Washington University. In the meantime, Sally, who had gone to high school in St. Louis, earned her bachelor’s degree in home economics and returned to CID to teach physical education, religion, and home economics. When Paul learned that Sally was living in town, he got in touch with her immediately. They started dating and were engaged six months later.
Paul took Sally to the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, New York for their first anniversary. They marveled at
AT&T’s Picturephone
and wished the future would arrive sooner so they could easily talk from anywhere by reading each other’s lips. By day, Paul was an engineer at McDonnell Douglas and later, Monsanto. He was a different kind of engineer at home, devising different ways to help raise their three hearing children. After their first child was born, Paul built a system that would blink the lights in the house to let them know the baby was crying.
Paul, Sally, and their son David along with one of the first teletypewriters that was repurposed as a telecommunication device for the deaf. Image via
Rochester Institute of Technology
He also did whatever he could to help the deaf community by volunteering his time. The phone problem still bothered him greatly. When he noticed an old Western Union teletype machine from WWII just sitting around collecting dust, he got the idea to turn it into a new kind of communication tool.
Around the same time, a deaf physicist named
Robert Weitbrecht
was developing an acoustic coupler that would transmit teletype signals over consumer phone lines. Paul got Weitbrecht to send him one and created one of the first telecommunication devices for the deaf (TDD). With one of these devices on each end of the phone line, anything typed on one would be printed out on the other. Paul worked with Western Union to get these old teletypewriters into the hands of hearing and speaking-impaired people, and convinced AT&T to create a relay service to use them as well.
Paul started a non-profit organization to distribute these early TDDs to other deaf St. Louisans. He asked a local telephone wake-up call service to help out, and
built one of the first telephone relay systems in the process
. Although both parties needed a TDD to be able to communicate, this was a big step in the right direction.
Paul also did a lot of work to keep the machines humming for the people who depended on them. Teletypewriter manuals were helpful, but were awfully dense reading material for the layman. Paul organized a week-long workshop to create
a picture-rich manual called Teletypewriters Made Easy
to help people repair and maintain three common models of teletypewriter. Paul discusses his personal history with TDD development in the video below.
A Loud Voice for the Deaf Community
In 1975, Paul was offered a position at the National Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, so the Taylor family moved to upstate New York. Paul became a computer technology professor and chairman of the Engineering Support team. He stayed there for the next 30 years before retiring.
A more modern TTY. Image via
YouTube
During this time, he advocated for a national, operator-assisted telephone relay service through which deaf and hearing impaired people could communicate with anyone, whether or not the other person had a TDD.
The idea was that the deaf person would use a TTY to call an operator, who would get the other person on the line and relay messages back and forth between the two parties by typing out what the voice caller said and reading aloud what the TDD user typed in response. Paul took a two-year leave of absence from teaching and worked directly with the FCC to write regulations that became part of the guidelines prescribed in the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (
ADA
).
Learning How to Hear
At the age of 65, Paul and Sally decided to get cochlear implants after a lifetime of silence. Their youngest daughter Irene made a documentary about their experience called
Hear and Now
, which is embedded below. It’s an interesting firsthand look into the process, which is not the instant cure that the internet may have led you to believe. The implant can’t be activated until the swelling from surgery goes down, which takes about a month. And it can take years for the brain to get used the new sensory information and begin to distinguish relevant sounds from background noise.
Although TTY/TDDs are falling out of use thanks to the videophone-enabled text messaging devices in most people’s pockets, their influence on communication lives on in shorthand now used in our everyday messages — OIC, PLS, and THX are older than you might think.
Thanks for the tip, [Zoobab]. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325392",
"author": "ameyring",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T18:25:33",
"content": "I have severe hearing loss and was very dependent on a loaner TDD (thanks to a non-profit) for talking to people with difficult voices in the 1990s. Helped me get through early job searches after finishi... | 1,760,373,175.318075 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/useful-build-tips-for-making-led-panel-frames/ | Useful Build Tips For Making LED Panel Frames | Donald Papp | [
"how-to",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"aluminum extrusion",
"bezel",
"enclosure",
"frame",
"LED panel",
"magnetic",
"raspberry pi"
] | [NotLikeALeafOnTheWind] has created many LED-based display projects, and
shares his method for making attractive LED panel frames and mounts
. At first glance it may look as though slapping a rectangle of aluminum extrusion around a display is all it takes, there is also the mounting and management of wiring, power supply, and possibly a Raspberry Pi to deal with. The process of building an attractive frame also has a few hidden gotchas that can be avoided with a bit of careful planning.
Magnetic feet on the LED panels makes mounting much easier and more flexible.
Here is one tip that will resonate with some readers: don’t rely on specified dimensions of parts; measure the actual parts yourself. There can be small differences between what a data sheet says to expect, and the dimensions of the actual part in one’s hands. It may not be much, but it can be the difference between an ideal fit, and something that looks like a bit of a hack job.
[NotLikeALeafOnTheWind] provides some basic frame layouts, and suggests using two- or three-channel extrusions to provide a flat bezel around the display edge if desired. Mounting the LED panel itself is done with magnetic feet and providing a length of steel bar to which the display can attach. This can provide a flush mount while avoiding the whole issue of screw-mounting the display panels themselves, or sliding them into channels. For mounting all the other hardware, a piece of DIN rail and some 3D-printed parts takes care of that.
The result looks slick and sturdy, and some of the tips are sure to be useful even if the whole process isn’t applied. We like the way the basic design scales and is flexible about the thickness and size of the LED panels themselves, making it a promising way to accommodate
perfectly functional oddball panels that end up in the trash
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325364",
"author": "Phil Barrett",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T17:14:19",
"content": "Those are nice looking frames. Though, I was hoping the article was about more than extrusion frames. I would also like to see something about regarding mitered corners which would really have to b... | 1,760,373,175.540516 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/hands-on-with-the-ortur-laser-cutter/ | Hands On With The Ortur Laser Cutter | Al Williams | [
"cnc hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"laser cutter",
"laser engraver",
"laser engraving",
"ortur"
] | I couldn’t write very much without a computer. Early in my career, I wrote with a typewriter. Unless you are pretty close to perfect — I’m not — it is very frustrating to make edits on typewritten stuff. The equivalent in the real world, for me, has been 3D printers and CNC machines. I can visualize a lot of things that I’m not careful enough to build with normal tools. Despite my 7th-grade shop teacher’s best efforts, everything I did turned out to be a toothpick or a number 7. But I can get my ideas into CAD and from there the machines do the rest. That’s why I was excited to get a laser cutter this past Christmas. You might wonder why I’d need a laser cutter if I have the other tools. Then again, if you read Hackaday, you probably don’t need me to explain why you need a new gadget. I’ve had my eye on a laser for a good long time, but recent developments made it more attractive. I thought I’d share with you some of what I’ve found getting started with the Ortur laser cutter. The cutter is easy to put together and costs somewhere in the $200-$400 range depending on what you get with it. I thought I’d take some time to share what I’ve learned about it.
Why a Laser?
If you haven’t had experience with a laser cutter or engraver before, you might think it is a very specific instrument. Sure, the Ortur is good at engraving some things (but not all things). It can cut some things, too, but not as many things as a big serious laser cutter. However, creative people find lots of ways to use cutting and engraving to produce things you might not expect.
For example, if you surf YouTube, you’ll find people who put spray paint on either a ceramic tile or a canvas and then burn some or all of the paint away to make really interesting artwork. Sometimes they’ll even use multiple layers of paint to create different colors by burning different depths into the artwork. Another multicolor technique is to cut what amounts to a custom stencil in masking tape that is already applied to the part. You can then spray paint, remove the tape, apply fresh tape, and cut a new stencil for another color. Some people etch the backs of mirrors. It is also surprisingly handy to be able to precision cut paper and cardboard. However, with some practice and technique, you can even cut some thicknesses of plywood.
I’m very interested in creating PC boards either directly or by cutting resist and then using conventional etching techniques. People are
doing that, too
. Depending on the power of your laser, you can cut quite a few things, although with a visible laser, you can’t cut things that are transparent. You can engrave more things, and even metal if you use some additional chemicals (like
mustard
). In addition to line art and text, you can do halftone images from pictures. If you have a powerful enough laser, you can even
make glass
, sort of.
Of course, in addition to all the artsy things, you can just cut material too, which is surprisingly handy. [Electronoobs] did a video last year experimenting with different materials with a 15W laser so that will give you some idea of what you can and can’t cut with this type of laser.
There are some things you shouldn’t cut because they emit noxious fumes like ABS or vinyl products. Leather engraves and cuts well but boy does it stink! I understand that you should be careful working with chrome tanned leather, too, because the tanning chemicals could emit bad fumes. Some materials are also too prone to bursting into flames like styrofoam.
About the Ortur
If you want a laser, your next problem is which one to buy. There are carbon dioxide lasers that are commonly available, but they are pretty pricey and are known to need a lot of effort — including a bucket of ice of water and ventilation — to use. Semiconductor lasers are cheap and much easier to use. These are generally visible which, as I mentioned, means you can’t use them to cut some things like clear acrylic. You can get some very inexpensive laser engravers, but many of them are probably not going to cut much.
Then again, power isn’t everything. Broadly speaking, you can trade time for power with a laser. That is, a cut that might take a 10 watt laser a few seconds in a single pass might take a 1 watt laser four or five 30-second passes. It isn’t always simple because as the laser chars material it creates a barrier that prevents you from getting as much energy underneath. Still, you can sometimes do the same job with lower power if you are willing to take longer per pass and repeat the pass.
The Ortur Laser Master 2 is reasonably priced and has three choices in laser power: 7W, 15W, and 20W. This is a little deceptive because the power is actually the input power to the module. The 15W unit, for example, produces less than 5W of output power, but that’s still able to do a lot more than you might think.
The device is made to work with a free piece of Windows software called LaserGRBL that talks to the onboard GRBL controller. In theory, anything that would send G-code could work. I use Linux, so I opted for LightBurn which is excellent and well worth the $40 you’ll pay for it. It runs on multiple platforms, too, but sadly not on the Raspberry Pi, so I’ve had to drag a laptop out to work with the Ortur. You might also check out
LaserWeb
.
There are other cheap laser engravers and cutters, but I was impressed with the Ortur’s size and capabilities. There’s also a lot of add on designs available for it and good support in software.
Assembly
The unit requires some assembly, although much of it is preassembled. You build a frame of aluminum extrusions and then slip the X carriage on. There’s a 32-bit controller board and some stepper motors. The 32-bit board is a big selling point. Some of the work you do with the laser requires PWM to modulate the beam’s power. Most 8-bit boards will allow you to step power from 0-255 so each step is about 0.4% of full strength. A 32-bit board will let you do around 1,000 divisions of full scale which gives you about 0.1% on each step.
The mechanism is like a plotter or a 3D printer with no Z-axis. Since the laser doesn’t touch anything, it doesn’t need the robustness of a CNC setup. Of course, you can also
mount a laser to a 3D printer
or a
CNC machine
if you already have one and that’s not necessarily a bad option, although most of those setups have some limitations (for example, no modulation of beam intensity).
The best way to see how to build the machine is to watch the company’s video instructions (see below). There are a few things unclear in the video and I made some
notes that might help you
. There are also plenty of 3rd party build videos on YouTube.
First Cuts
The urge to cut something is overwhelming when you get the unit complete. However, be sure you have eye protection and plenty of ventilation. You should probably have a spray bottle of water and a fire extinguisher, too (you can see one of my fire extinguishers in the video below). Things do catch on fire under a laser, so be prepared. If you do get a little flame, try the water first since the extinguisher will make a huge mess.
The glasses that come with the cutter seem to be adequate and some people have tested them by firing the laser through them. However, I opted for some better-quality glasses. Your eyes are worth more than a few bucks you can save with cheap glasses.
Be sure you have the latest firmware. My unit predated the January 2021 update and the fan did not run unless the laser was also running. I would guess this would shorten the laser diode’s life. With the updated firmware, there is smarter fan management along with some other fixes. The update is as simple as dragging and dropping a file, but for some reason, it only works under Windows. Linux sees the USB drive and will do the copy but it doesn’t stick. At least it didn’t brick the cutter.
Regardless of firmware, before you can cut, you’ll need to set the focus correctly. If you are like me, you are probably thinking: “Focus? You don’t focus a laser.” Well, turns out you do focus a cheap laser.
Focus is Everything
To get the required energy to the workpiece, the semiconductor laser passes through a lens that focuses the beam to — more or less — a point. That point is what does all the cutting or engraving. That means the piece you want to work with has to be at that focal point. After the lens, the beam will look like an hourglass and the further you are from the pinch in the hourglass, the less cutting you’ll do.
The Ortur’s laser doesn’t move up and down but the lens can either screw in and out a few millimeters or push in and out, depending on which one you have. Once you have something under the cutter, you can put some black construction paper over it and use that to visualize the focus. The software you are using will have a button to turn the laser on at low power. Using the glasses will help reduce the spillover and you’ll be able to see the main part of the beam easily on the black paper.
Some people use a USB microscope or other magnification to get the best focus. However, I didn’t like the stock method for focusing. The lens ring is hard to turn and even if you 3D print your own ring, it is awkward to spin the lens around. It also doesn’t afford you much range.
Luckily, there are many 3D printed solutions to create a moving laser head on the Ortur. I’ll show you the one I’m using next time. For now, assume you are going to focus the lens yourself. That limits the height of things you can cut or engrave, too, although some people put the machine on blocks to make more room underneath. A tight focus will let you cut or engrave quicker and make the cut line finer, too. However, even if you are a little off, you can usually get some result. It is a good idea to tape your work down or clamp it so if you need to you can do a second pass without moving anything.
There are different lenses you can get for the laser. The one the 15W machine comes with has a focal length of about 55 mm. However, there are other lenses — the G8 is popular — that have different focal lengths. Each lens has different characteristics as far as how tight they can focus and how many elements they have (more elements means less overall power).
The power delivered to your part is a combination of the beam power, the quality of the focus, and the time spent. Even the time it takes for the laser to change direction can cause a deeper burn or cut which is why most software offers an overscan function that keeps the laser off and away from the cut line when it changes direction.
If you are careful about focusing, you should be able to get a pretty good engraving on a piece of cardboard. Be sure to have something under it since you might cut through and leave a permanent mark. I mounted my cutter on a piece of plywood and I deliberately marked a grid on the board. I’ll tell you more about those additions next time.
Sometimes, you deliberately want to defocus a little to get wider lines. [Geordie_h] talks about
this trick, along with some other pro tips
that are aimed for a more commercial cutter, but still apply to the Ortur and other similar lasers.
Next Time
Speaking of next time, there’s a lot more to talk about. In addition to mounting the device and making the laser head move, I wanted to add air assist — something I’m still working on. This clear smoke from the cut as well as fine ash, allowing the laser to hit fresh material while cutting.
For some reason my machine will often stall on long cuts, and from reading the Internet, I’m not alone. Changing USB cables seemed to help. It may need a slightly beefier power supply or grounding on the frame. Then again, it could be power settings on my laptop. Time will tell. This has been particularly a problem when doing images that require a lot of time. You can see my picture of Rocky has a little misalignment at the top where I restarted after a failure like this and didn’t quite get it lined up right.
The Ortur reminds me of early 3D printers. It works, but it needs some work to get it to work well. But, for me at least, that’s the fun part anyway. | 63 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325342",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T15:35:38",
"content": "“Then again, if you read Hackaday, you probably don’t need me to explain why you need a new gadget.”Help support the economy? :-p",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"... | 1,760,373,175.640033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/23/lighted-raspberry-pico-stream-deck-is-easy-as-pi/ | Lighted Raspberry Pico Stream Deck Is Easy As Pi | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"macro keyboard",
"OBS",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"stream deck"
] | Whether it’s for work, school, fun, or profit, nearly everyone is a content-creating video producer these days. And while OBS has made it easier to run the show, commanding OBS itself takes some hotkey finesse. Fortunately, it just keeps getting easier to build macro keyboards that make presenting a breeze. That includes the newest player to the microcontroller game — the Raspberry Pi Pico, which [pete_codes] used to whip up
a nice looking OBS stream deck
.
Sometimes you just need something that works without a lot of fuss — you can always save the fuss for version two. [pete_codes]’ Pico Producer takes advantage of all those I/O pins on the Pico and doesn’t use a matrix, though that is subject to change in the future. [pete_codes] likes the simplicity of this design and we do, too. You can see it in action after the break.
In reply to the
Twitter thread
, someone mentions re-legendable keycaps instead of the current 3D-printed-with-stickers keycaps, but laments the lack of them online. All we can offer is that re-legendable Cherry MX-compatible keycaps are definitely out there. Maybe not in white, but they’re out there.
If [pete_codes] wants to go wild in version two and make this macro keeb control much more than just OBS, he may want to
leave the labeling to something dynamic, like an e-ink screen
.
It's alive! The Pico Producer (new name) is assembled! 12 buttons and LEDs hooked up to a
@Raspberry_Pi
#RaspberryPiPico
acting as a HID device using Circuit Python!
pic.twitter.com/CxNGmvFdh9
— Pete Gallagher – Azure #MVPBuzz (@pete_codes)
February 11, 2021 | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325333",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-02-23T15:09:13",
"content": "Lighted? Shouldn’t it be “lit,” “blacklit,” or use another word like “illuminated”? This feels like something you would here in the UK.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,175.69223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/turn-an-ender-3-into-a-belt-3d-printer-of-your-very-own/ | Turn An Ender 3 Into A Belt 3D Printer Of Your Very Own | Jenny List | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"belt printer",
"conveyor belt printer",
"ender 3",
"infinite bed"
] | Infinite-bed 3D printers have long been an object of desire in our community, but it has taken a long time for the promise to catch up with the reality in terms of relatively affordable models that live up to expectations. They’re still a little expensive compared to their fixed-bed cousins though, so if you hanker for a Creality CR30 but only have the cash for an Ender 3, [Michael Sgroi] may have the project for you. He’s created
the EnderLoop, a set of parts to perform the conversion from a stock Ender 3 to a fully-functional belt printer
.
It takes the Ender 3 gantry and tilts it sideways on a pair of 3D printed supports, and replaces the stock Y azis with a belt on rollers driven by a larger motor through a timing belt drive. He has a variety of suggestions for sourcing a belt, and in his case he’s chosen one from PowerBelt3D. As well as the GitHub repository already linked,
it can also be found on Thingiverse
.
It’s clear that hacking apart a reliable printer in this way is not for the faint-hearted, and that a cautious hacker might prefer to wait a while for a cheaper off-the-shelf model. But we can see that the reliability of the Ender 3 will mean that its parts are still of decent quality in the new configuration, and that it looks as though the base printer can be reassembled should a belt-based build be a failure. Infinite bed printers will inevitably have a major presence in our community, and it is designs such as this one which will lead the way as they evolve into reliable machines. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325925",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T12:56:39",
"content": "What’s the purpose of tilting the Z axis in belt-bed printers? Why don’t printers without a belt bed use a tilted Z axis?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,373,175.793235 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/25/diy-usb-c-touch-monitor-is-all-polished-brass/ | DIY USB-C Touch Monitor Is All Polished Brass | Danie Conradie | [
"laptops hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Portable Video Hacks"
] | [
"4k monitor",
"brass",
"diy perks",
"portable",
"USB C"
] | We’ve known for a while that you can buy interface boards to turn old laptop screens into standalone monitors, but complete sets with 4K panels and control boards are also now becoming widely available on sites like eBay and AliExpress, and prices are dropping. These sets are also available with low-profile connectors like micro HDMI and USB-C, which allow for some very compact builds.
[Matt] from [DIY Perks] used one of these sets to build a
slimline USB-C monitor with a brass enclosure
. Video after the break. The enclosure consists of brass sheets and U-channel pieces soldered and screwed together. There is quite a bit of residue and discoloration after soldering, but this was removed with a bit of sanding and polishing. A pair of adjustable legs were added to allow it to stand on its own, and an additional chamber on the back holds the control board, an old smartphone battery, and a battery protection circuit. [Matt] also added a pair of removable speakers, which are sealed speaker units covered in brass mesh and plate.
We’ve covered several
DIY monitor builds
over the years, and they are perfect as an
additional monitor for a laptop
, or for pairing with the Raspberry Pi 400 with its integrated keyboard. We really [Matt]’s builds, which include a
smartphone-based 4K projector
, and a very effective
cooling system for an expensive DSLR camera
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325896",
"author": "Albertstc01",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T09:28:15",
"content": "No mention of a touch panel used?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6325906",
"author": "z-nexx",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T10:26:... | 1,760,373,175.740553 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/microbit-makes-cardboard-pinball-more-legit/ | Micro:bit Makes Cardboard Pinball More Legit | Kristina Panos | [
"Games",
"how-to",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"cardboard",
"DIY pinball",
"homebrew switches",
"Micro:bit",
"pinball",
"pinbox 3000"
] | What have you been doing to ward off the winter blues? [TechnoChic] decided to lean in to winter and
make a really fun-looking game out of it
by combining the awesome PinBox 3000 cardboard pinball sandbox with a couple of Micro:bits to handle and display the player’s score. Check it out the build and gameplay in the video after the break.
The story of Planet Winter is a bittersweet tale: basically, a bunch of penguins got tired of climate change and left Earth en masse for a penguin paradise where it’s a winter wonderland all year round. There’s a party igloo with disco lights and everything.
[TechnoChic] used a Micro:bit plugged into a Brown Dog Gadgets board to keep track of scoring, control the servo that kicks the ball back out of the igloo, and run the blinkenlights. It sends score updates over Bluetooth to a second Micro:bit and a Pimoroni Scrollbit display that sit opposite the pinball launcher. She went through a few switch iterations before settling on conductive maker tape and isolating the ball so it only contacts the tape tracks.
There are two ways to score on Planet Winter — the blizzard at the end of the ball launcher path nets you ten points, and getting the ball in the party igloo is good for thirty. Be careful on the icy lake in the middle of the playfield, because if the ball falls through the ice, it’s gone for good, along with your points. It’s okay, though, because both the party igloo and the ice hole trigger an avalanche which releases another ball.
Seriously, these PinBox 3000 kits are probably the most fun you can have with cardboard, even fresh out of the box. They are super fun even if you only build the kit and make a bunch of temporary targets to test gameplay, but never settle on a theme (ask us how we know). Not convinced?
Hackaday Editor-in-Chief [Mike Szczys] explored them in depth at Maker Faire in 2018
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325911",
"author": "Bas van de Sande",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T10:49:17",
"content": "Absolutely love it…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6325940",
"author": "Yeshua A Watson",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T14:01:21",
"... | 1,760,373,175.831072 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/robotic-pool-cue-can-be-your-friend-or-your-foe/ | Robotic Pool Cue Can Be Your Friend Or Your Foe | Danie Conradie | [
"Games",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"computer vision",
"eight ball pool",
"Stewart platform",
"stuff made here"
] | In his everlasting quest to replace physical skill with technology, [Shane] of [Stuff Made Here] has taken aim at the game of eight-ball pool. Using a combination of computer vision and mechatronics, he created a
robotic pool system
that can allow a physical game of pool over the internet, or just beat human players. See the video after the break.
Making a good pool shot requires three discrete steps. First, you need to identify the best shot, then figure out how exactly to strike the balls to achieve the desired results, and finally physically execute the shot accurately. [Shane’s] goal was to automate all these steps. For the physical part, he built a pool cue with a robotic tip which only requires the user to place in approximately the right position, while a pneumatic piston mounted on a Stewart platform does the rest. A
Stewart platform
is a triangular plate mounted with six reciprocating rods, which gives it the required freedom of motion. The rods’ bases are attached to a set of cranks actuated by tension cables pulled by servos mounted at the rear-end of the cue. An adjustable air system allows the power of the shot to be adjusted as required.
A camera mounted is mounted over the table and connected to computer vision software to gather the required position information. Fiducials on the corners of the table and the cue tip allow the position of the pockets, balls, and cue to be accurately determined, and theoretically should allow the robot to take the perfect shot. Getting this to work in reality quickly turned into a very frustrating experience. After many hours of debugging, [Shane] tracked the error to a tiny forgotten test function that was introducing 5-10 mm of position error, and 2 of the six servos in the cue not performing up to spec. To determine the vertical positioning of the cue, an IMU and fixed height foot were added. [Shane] also added an overhead projector to overlay all required information directly on the table.
At this point [Shane] realized he had all the parts to allow someone to play a game of pool with him over the internet. He created a simple web-app to send a video feed to the remote player, who can then choose where [Shane] should position the pool cue, and then take the shot remotely. Although he didn’t have high hopes for this mode, it turned out to be a fun and engaging experience.
The final step was to make the computer choose the shots. First, it does a bit of pseudo ray tracing to compile a list of every possible shot and its effects across the table. It then selects the best shot based on a combination of distance, precision, and ball velocity.
This is probably [Shane]’s a most complex project to date, but only by a small margin. The fact that he can complete projects like the
CNC barber
,
robotic basketball hoop
, and
explosive baseball bat
quickly enough for a monthly upload schedule is nothing short of amazing. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325844",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T03:59:18",
"content": "great project, and yet again makes me envious of the price of machinery in the usa..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6325857",
"author": "Al... | 1,760,373,175.886033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/24/motor-driven-movement-modernizes-pov-toy/ | Motor-Driven Movement Modernizes POV Toy | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"bldc motor",
"persistence of vision",
"phenakistoscope",
"phenokistiscope",
"POV"
] | Just as we are driven today to watch gifs that get better with every loop, people 100+ years ago entertained themselves with various persistence of vision toys that used the power of optical illusions to make still images come to life.
[jollifactory] recently recreated one of the first POV devices
— the phenakistoscope — into a toy for our times.
The original phenakistoscopes were simple, but the effect they achieved was utterly amazing. Essentially a picture disk with a handle, the user would hold the handle with one hand and spin the disk with the other while looking in a mirror through slits in the disk. Unlike the phenakistoscopes of yore that could only be viewed by one person at a time, this one allows for group watching.
Here’s how it works: an Arduino Nano spins a BLDC motor from an old CD-ROM drive, and two strips of strobing LEDs provide the shutter effect needed to make the pictures look like a moving image.The motor speed is both variable and reversible so the animations can run in both directions.
To make the disks themselves, [jollifactory] printed some original phenakistiscopic artwork and adhered each one to a CD that conveniently snaps onto the motor spindle. Not all of the artwork looks good with a big hole in the middle, so [jollifactory] created a reusable base disk with an anti-slip mat on top to spin those.
If you just want to watch the thing in action, check out the first video below that is all demonstration. There be strobing lights ahead, so consider yourself warned. The second and third videos show [jollifactory] soldering up the custom PCB and building the acrylic stand.
There are plenty of modern ways to build old-fashioned POV toys, from
all-digital
to
all-printable
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6325945",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2021-02-25T14:44:15",
"content": "I imagine that back when the phenakistoscope was originally popular it provided something most people wouldn’t have ever seen before: motion pictures.This is a cool take on an old device. Well done! T... | 1,760,373,175.927933 |
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