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https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/3d-printing-a-useful-fixturing-tool/
|
3D Printing A Useful Fixturing Tool
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"3d printer",
"3d printing",
"fixture",
"fixturing tool"
] |
When you start building lots of something, you’ll know the value of accurate fixturing. [Chris Borge] learned this the hard way on a recent mass-production project, and decided to solve the problem. How? With a custom fixturing tool!
A 3D printed one, of course.
Chris’s build is simple enough. He created 3D-printed workplates covered in a grid of specially-shaped apertures, each of which can hold a single bolt. Plastic fixtures can then be slotted into the grid, and fastened in place with nuts that thread onto the bolts inserted in the base. [Chris] can 3D print all kinds of different plastic fixtures to mount on to the grid, so it’s an incredibly flexible system.
3D printing fixtures might not sound the stoutest way to go, but it’s perfectly cromulent for some tasks. Indeed, for [Chris]’s use case of laser cutting, the 3D printed fixtures are more than strong enough, since the forces involved are minimal. Furthermore, [Chris] aided the stability of the 3D-printed workplate by mounting it on a laser-cut wooden frame filled with concrete. How’s that for completeness?
We’ve seen some other great fixturing tools before, too
. Video after the break.
| 14
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121761",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T23:14:28",
"content": "Never thought about this, really cool. Great use of plastic, wood, metal, and I guess concrete. The inverted bolt design is really clever.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121792",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:48:53",
"content": "It’s nice to see a maker with more than one hammer. (Stop 3D printing flat panels, that’s what the laser cutter is for!)That said, the dude just re-invented woodworker dog holes and over-engineered them. Mind you woodworkers themselves recently seem to have done the same thing with MFT.The simplest system is wedges, as seen here:https://youtu.be/aYh992zQU0A?si=TI_Y3OrmOvIFvFbT&t=313. You usually make them from scrap, with about a 12:1 ratio. You don’t really need those square pieces, the wedges work fine against the dog (the big round pin). Cheap, fast, works – who says you can’t have all three?I made some for my laser cutter which amuses me no end.",
"parent_id": "8121761",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121796",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:17:51",
"content": "Just to add in that video he uses a square piece & two wedges. If you are using the square you only need one one wedge – as the square can rotate it acts like a wedge. Dude seemed to have missed the point of the square.Here’s how it works:https://youtu.be/myongDkzO0g?si=Gr_G03Ms5HpSFncm&t=133As a minor nitpick I’d have offset the pin in the square so as you get four different spacing rather than the three his has, but eh.",
"parent_id": "8121792",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121878",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:00:26",
"content": "I did have the same thoughts about the 3D printed panel. That said, if you don’t have a laser cutter and do have a 3D printer, might as well use what you have. I find myself in that situation every other project. Maybe its time to try to find a cheap usable laser cutter…I haven’t seen the wedge idea before. Also very clever. I’m not going to die on the hill of bolts being better, in most ways they probably aren’t. I could see both being useful for different reasons.Thanks for sharing, I had no idea.",
"parent_id": "8121792",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121825",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T07:07:54",
"content": "Stencil8 works really well if you can find someone to mill the jig for you.https://github.com/Hoektronics/Stencil8",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121895",
"author": "BLMac",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:48:46",
"content": "You know it’s real technical when you see the word ‘cromulent’ It truly embiggens comprehension.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121908",
"author": "Le Roux Bodenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T13:49:29",
"content": "Sir, this is Hackaday.",
"parent_id": "8121895",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121907",
"author": "Me",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T13:48:09",
"content": "This looks like the ultimate game of Battleship.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122078",
"author": "dlcarrier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T02:13:31",
"content": "You sunk my fixture!",
"parent_id": "8121907",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121919",
"author": "Mojo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:30:15",
"content": "I saw the part about the concrete and thought how my dad taught me the process of “screeding”. There’s a number of ways, but using flat piece of wood or metal, we worked back and forth across the concrete form in a sawing motion, causing the aggregate to sink and a lovely flat surface to result on top. It’s a one man operation on an item this small. Think I’m going to build this since I make a number of fixtures for my cnc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121968",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:24:33",
"content": "Hate to be ‘that guy’ but really could have done this with a Lego plate and left the 3D printing to the smaller custom jig pieces. That way there’s a uncountable number of Lego bricks that could be used for stops, and all that’s needed is variable adjustment. Being a fixture table for small wooden boxes and other light assembly, a great deal of force isn’t necessary.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122050",
"author": "Skalamanga",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T22:37:27",
"content": "That is the worst suggested I’ve ever heard.Even light force for assembly of 6mm plywood will amount to multiple kilograms. Lego blocks will come loose with grams of force.",
"parent_id": "8121968",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122106",
"author": "Florian Festi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T08:52:59",
"content": "I wonder if the the plate could be made from 3 layers of laser cut plywood instead of being 3D printed – or two glued to a thick plywood base and going without the concrete.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122131",
"author": "Steven Naslund",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T12:36:36",
"content": "In the CNC machining world its pretty common to machine the negative of a part for workholding purposes. I wonder if it would have been easier in this case to just 3D print the negative of the surface you want to hold. It is not as adjustable but if it is for a large production it would sure be faster.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.273378
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/onkyo-receiver-saved-with-an-esp32/
|
Onkyo Receiver Saved With An ESP32
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"home entertainment hacks"
] |
[
"audio receiver",
"ESP32",
"onkyo",
"radio"
] |
[Bill Dudley] had a problem. He had an Onkyo AV receiver that did a great job… until it didn’t. A DSP inside failed. When that happened, the main microprocessor running the show decided it wouldn’t play ball without the DSP operational. [Bill] knew the bulk of the audio hardware was still good, it was just the brains that were faulty.
Thus started a 4-month operation to resurrect the Onkyo receiver with new intelligence instead.
[Bill’s] concept was simple. Yank the dead DSP, and the useless microprocessor as well. In their place, an ESP32 would be tasked with running things. [Bill] no longer cared if the receiver had DSP abilities or even the ability to pass video—he just wanted to use it as the quality audio receiver that it was.
His project report steps through all the hard work he went through to get things operational again. He had to teach the ESP32 to talk to the front panel display, the keys, and the radio tuner. More challenging was the core audio processor—the obscure Renaisys R2A15218FP. However, by persevering, [Bill] was able to get everything up and running, and even added some new functionality—including Internet radio and Bluetooth streaming.
It’s a heck of a build, and [Bill] ended up with an even more functional audio receiver at the end of it all. Bravo, we say. We love to see older audio gear brought back to life,
particularly in creative ways
. Meanwhile, if you’ve found your own way to save a piece of vintage audio hardware, don’t hesitate to
let us know!
| 23
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121739",
"author": "AggregatVier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:39:35",
"content": "Speaking of vintage, has anyone come up with a replacement for Kenwood 100W amplifier TA100 modules they can confirm working?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122081",
"author": "Neo-Havic",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T03:14:27",
"content": "For the love of god, I hope someone comes backs with good news on this… I need one and can’t find them ANYWHERE other than by buying and gutting another amp, which would be pointless since I can just USE the good amp, but that still leaves me with a dead one :,(",
"parent_id": "8121739",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122180",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T17:33:58",
"content": "There seem to be substitute replacement modules you can get easily enough. Won’t those do?",
"parent_id": "8121739",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121740",
"author": "Josiah David Gould",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:40:23",
"content": "Had someone bring an Onkyo receiver in for recycling as a few channels didn’t work. It was practically brand new – so after ensuring he really didn’t want it, I popped the serial into their service site and it was under warranty! A few weeks later I had a brand new receiver. If it goes flaky in the future this hack is a good place to start for information.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121772",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known as Ren",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T00:58:01",
"content": "Did he have access to a schematic?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121791",
"author": "Yeshua Watson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:38:18",
"content": "No, he reverse engineered it mostly by finding sister chips that had similar data sheets. Even if he did, it would have been pages long. Those recievers have a ton of PCBs piped together. I’ve had the displeasure of reviving one only to eventually give up on the DSP chip as they’re known to overheat and desolder themselves or short out. This is great stuff for anyone with one of these dying boxes. The company has been in financial struggle for years and last I remember they were bought out. But they made great receivers for the value, packing tons of features and even providing free upgrades via firmware updates. Alas, people just want soundbars now so you either have a crappy bar system or an expensive home theater, middle of the road is dead.",
"parent_id": "8121772",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121795",
"author": "Dom",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:58:32",
"content": "There seems to be a small market though:https://reclaimedaudio.com.au/I know where I’ll be browsing when one of my components releases its magic smoke.",
"parent_id": "8121791",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121801",
"author": "matrevino72",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:41:48",
"content": "Unfortunately this is common with almost all AVR’s today, just look on ebay a crapton of cheap Denon Yamaha, onkoyo. They still turn on and power off due to some fault, or turn on but no sound etc. It’s just cheap quality with a high priced name.",
"parent_id": "8121791",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122696",
"author": "Jessica TILLER",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T21:06:26",
"content": "It’s true and I feel that that specific board is deliberately placed in such a way that it suffers the most heat abuse. Many are boxes completely with the av input boards and some even have a mounting point for a fan but neglected to install one. I feel that pioneer is one of the worst offenders between the cheap steel zink fins to an entirely boxed oven for control dsp",
"parent_id": "8121801",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121802",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:43:48",
"content": "It’s pretty easy to find official schematics for onkyo receivers online; there’s absolutely no reason to believe the OP was working without one. I’ve got both the service manual and schematic for my SR576, and the schematic itself is only 10 pages long.",
"parent_id": "8121791",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122058",
"author": "Mike kizzy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T23:08:11",
"content": "My vintage 1970’s Yamaha CR receiver’s operating manual has a schematic already supplied.",
"parent_id": "8121802",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121842",
"author": "309Electronics",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T09:17:17",
"content": "If i remember correctly, there was another onkyo unit that refused to work with a non working dsp chip, also by Texas Instruments. The DSP ran Wind River Linux and due to a design error the dsp would be faulty from manufacturing causing the Unit with enough heat and cool cycles to start acting weird or not working at all.",
"parent_id": "8121772",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121870",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:33:36",
"content": "Yes, you are correct. The issue is down to TI’s DSPs that in their first generation started to fail after enough heat cool cycles.Sometimes, reflowing the DSP would fix it for some time.",
"parent_id": "8121842",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121876",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:55:40",
"content": "most likely, as elektrotanya has an 89 pages service manual….",
"parent_id": "8121772",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121798",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:25:46",
"content": "RenaisysI’m fairly sure that’s meant to be Renesas. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121799",
"author": "NFM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:29:26",
"content": "I remember years ago the Onkyos had a plague of bad SMD capacitors on the HDMI switching board (the top green PCB in the title picture). There is even a leaked confidential service bulletin about it.I replaced those caps in my brother’s unit and it’s still working more than a decade later.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121950",
"author": "Steve L",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T15:43:47",
"content": "Happened to me also, twice, even after cap replacement. Ingenious design, putting the heat sensitive components at the top of the case. Obviously, the “analog” engineers don’t work well with the digital engineers, unless they are farming the digital part out entirely and then throwing it in the box. Never again with this company.",
"parent_id": "8121799",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121837",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T08:06:10",
"content": "I was given an Onkyo receiver with the same issue. It is still sitting in the pile of devices “broken but too good to bin”.In light of this guy’s work I might have a look at it again…. one day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121843",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T09:19:32",
"content": "How did Renesas get to be Renaisys?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121943",
"author": "daveb",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T15:19:43",
"content": "At the end of the article he’s nice enough to provide a bunchj of the details he found during the project written up for others to do the same job. That kind of thing is invaluable and over the years Ive found that they often disappear after a few short years.I saw that it wasn’t listed on the internet archive so I submitted it to the wayback machine to be saved.I wish there were more sites like that. It seems like relying on one entity is fairly risky. Some insane attack on the publishing it does that takes it down would be like a modern day burning of the Library at Alexandria.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122005",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T18:21:55",
"content": "Regarding the issue of trying to read the keypad and getting bad readings, I’d suggest that instead of just averaging the 16 readings, first throw out the highest and lowest values, then average the rest. I suppose looking for the mode average is really what you want, assuming you first bucket the values into expected ranges.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122008",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T18:29:32",
"content": "I suppose he could also get HDMI working by using a combination of a cheap HDMI switch and an HDMI audio extractor (or a combo device), assuming that hacking into the existing HDMI circuit is too much of a pain. Then there’s the alternative adventurous route of creating a replacement for the defective DSP. I enjoy being surprised at people’s ingenuity at getting into what seem like black boxes and figuring things out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122064",
"author": "tachyon1",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T23:45:43",
"content": "Now THIS is a proper Hackaday story about an actual hack!Nice work. I love saving otherwise good, old equipment from the scrap heap.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.072077
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/dolphingemma-seeks-to-speak-to-dolphins/
|
DolphinGemma Seeks To Speak To Dolphins
|
Navarre Bartz
|
[
"Artificial Intelligence"
] |
[
"ai",
"Cetacean",
"dolphin",
"languages",
"LLM",
"marine biology",
"oceanography",
"Wild Dolphin Project"
] |
Most people have wished for the ability to talk to other animals at some point, until they realized their cat would mostly insult them and ask for better service, but researchers are getting closer to a
dolphin translator
.
DolphinGemma is an upcoming LLM based on the recordings from the
Wild Dolphin Project
. Using the hours and hours of dolphin sounds recorded by researchers over the decades, the hope is that the LLM will allow us to communicate more effectively with the second most intelligent species on the planet.
The LLM is designed to run in the field on Google Pixel phones, due to it being based on Google’s in-house Gemini product, which is a bit less cumbersome than hauling a mainframe on a dive. The Wild Dolphin Project currently uses the Georgia Tech developed CHAT (Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry) device which has a Pixel 6 at its heart, but the newer system will be bumped up to a Pixel 9 to take advantage of all those shiny new AI processing advances. Hopefully, we’ll have a better chance of catching when they say, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”
If you’re curious about
other mysterious languages being deciphered by LLMs
, we have you covered.
| 42
| 14
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121688",
"author": "Stric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:41:18",
"content": "Man…I wish they started with dogs first :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121787",
"author": "Reactive Light",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:16:03",
"content": "Why start with the 50th most intelligent creature on the planet when you can go for the 2nd?",
"parent_id": "8121688",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121890",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:36:35",
"content": "Which species has us trained to fulfill their every need?!",
"parent_id": "8121787",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122091",
"author": "bernieke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T05:22:26",
"content": "Cats.",
"parent_id": "8121890",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121689",
"author": "anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:45:53",
"content": "“… the second most intelligent species on the planet.”I have problems with this statement:1) The “second most intelligent species” are my in-laws, at least according to them.2) Who says that dolphins aren’t #1 on the list (by a long shot)?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121897",
"author": "BLMac",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:52:03",
"content": "Are we forgetting the octopus? We’re nowhere near comprehending its capabilities.",
"parent_id": "8121689",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121955",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:06:40",
"content": "well the third most intelligent species on the planet couldn’t get a douglas adams reference. i think its time to demolish earth for a new hyperspace lane.",
"parent_id": "8121689",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122737",
"author": "Navarre Bartz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T03:03:09",
"content": "The plans have been in your local planning office on Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years…",
"parent_id": "8121955",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121697",
"author": "Ivan Hoffendorp",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:57:17",
"content": "And when you ask the LLM what did the dolphin said, it’s answer will be: AHHIiiiiHHHIHHH TRTIIRIIRRTRHTIHTIHRITHHhiihhhtithtir aahhhrhhiihhihi !!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121705",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:27:19",
"content": "Forget Dolphins for now, shouldn’t LLMs be used to talk to a realLama glama first?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121707",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:38:42",
"content": "Just in time to hear them say, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121764",
"author": "garlicbready",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T23:31:58",
"content": "Dolphin: I think you’ll find the correct pronunciation is “Feesh”",
"parent_id": "8121707",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121872",
"author": "OldTechGuy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:44:09",
"content": "Jake: FeeshDolphin: FeeshJake: FeeshDolphin: FeeshJake: I think I’m saying it right…",
"parent_id": "8121764",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121709",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:47:08",
"content": "Dolphins 2nd most intelligent? Who’s first?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121715",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:59:39",
"content": "Maybe octopus?",
"parent_id": "8121709",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121716",
"author": "Clara",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:59:53",
"content": "Mice, right?",
"parent_id": "8121709",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121800",
"author": "freedomunit",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:30:33",
"content": "Yeah, it’s mice",
"parent_id": "8121716",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121931",
"author": "Navarre Bartz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:54:19",
"content": "I was starting to wonder if anyone would get the reference. Thank you, folks!",
"parent_id": "8121800",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121728",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:59:44",
"content": "Dolphins/whales are not the second most intelligent.That was boldly asserted by a hippie who was trying to learn to speak to them while tripping balls.He based his claim on brain/body mass ratio and his gut feel.Good gig if you can get it.Guess what?We can now track what parts of brains are working when a creature is ‘thinking’ (IIRC fMRI).Their extra brain mass is used for sonar processing.They (whales in general) are about as smart as pigs/dogs.But not as delicious as pigs or as coevolved with humans as dogs.‘Second smartest’ is now hippie dogma.Hippies are as attached to their dogma as any other religion.Watch their dissonance drive them to attack me.Second smartest is likely Gorilla, Chimp or Bonobo.Define smart?Second best tool maker?Second best language?Second best warriors?Second best at getting freak on?",
"parent_id": "8121709",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121733",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:13:24",
"content": "‘Second smartest’ is now hippie dogma.IfHippie dogmais second smartest, what’s first smartest?",
"parent_id": "8121728",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121736",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:26:58",
"content": "The ones who can correct “‘Second smartest’ is now hippie dogma.”?",
"parent_id": "8121733",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121738",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:30:21",
"content": "I lean towards orangutans and the way they will pick up hand tools and try to operate them and various other behavior. But as David Berlinsky says despite the “small” difference in DNA, “The difference between a human and a chimp is as great as the difference between a chimp and a bacterium.”",
"parent_id": "8121728",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121749",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:00:57",
"content": "Well, not sure you want to automatically discount all smart people “tripping balls” as being unable to produce results or breakthroughs.",
"parent_id": "8121728",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121804",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T05:11:11",
"content": "Rather than smartness, for the purpose of communicating the richness and method of the animal language is more important. About dolphins we already know that they can communicate purely acoustically, compared to e.g. primates that use visual signs. Makes the task so much easier when you only have one data stream to handle.",
"parent_id": "8121728",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121960",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:10:35",
"content": "gorillas can already speak asl, perhaps at a kindergarten level. they also like kittens.",
"parent_id": "8121728",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122009",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T18:34:41",
"content": "First is the one trying to understand all the others.",
"parent_id": "8121709",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121765",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T23:34:01",
"content": "Surely you mean that we humans will finally be able to communicate with the smartest animals on the planet :) From the HHGTTG:“Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.” – Douglas Adams.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121937",
"author": "Navarre Bartz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:59:03",
"content": "But HHGTTG clearly says that dolphins ARE the second most intelligent. I never said humans were the most intelligent. That’s absurd.",
"parent_id": "8121765",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121766",
"author": "George Graves",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T00:08:34",
"content": "Surely they didn’t do it on porpoise.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121856",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T10:46:54",
"content": "Then didn’t do it on tortoise. (corrected for you).",
"parent_id": "8121766",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121790",
"author": "_sol_",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:27:35",
"content": "So I can go back and watch all those reruns of Flipper and have close-caption translation?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121858",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T10:47:21",
"content": "It’ll be NSFW, beware.",
"parent_id": "8121790",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121797",
"author": "NFM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:23:55",
"content": "I’m still waiting to find out what the fox said.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121832",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T07:35:42",
"content": "Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho?",
"parent_id": "8121797",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121803",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T04:49:35",
"content": "What’s the latest with DeepSqueak?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121898",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:53:05",
"content": "Scientists gave up on the highest intelligent and ruling species of our planet after being ignored, judged and looked down on…..cats.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121940",
"author": "Navarre Bartz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T15:02:43",
"content": "While Hitchhiker’s Guide states mice are the most intelligent, a predator that can successfully hunt said most intelligent creature is likely on equal footing. As someone who serves as staff to our feline overlords, I think this is a pretty solid interpretation.",
"parent_id": "8121898",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121915",
"author": "Jace",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:10:51",
"content": "Lots of opinions on the “second smartest animal” line. The correct answer is Octopuses …Octopod….Octopuses…. The correct answer is The Octopus.Anything a dolphin can do, an octopus can do better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121938",
"author": "Navarre Bartz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T15:00:54",
"content": "I’m surprised by how many humans and AIs trained on human responses are assuming humans are the smartest.",
"parent_id": "8121915",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121965",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:13:40",
"content": "i find the lack of a seaquest reference disturbing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122733",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T02:46:34",
"content": "I’m disturbed that someone mentioned SeaQuest.",
"parent_id": "8121965",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122739",
"author": "Navarre Bartz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T03:05:14",
"content": "Gah, shame on me for forgetting Darwin and Lucas when it was right there. Always glad to meet another SeaQuest fan, as long as we can agree that season 3 never happened…",
"parent_id": "8122733",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,567.412954
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/a-bicycle-is-abandonware-now-clever-hack-rescues-dead-light/
|
A Bicycle Is Abandonware Now? Clever Hack Rescues Dead Light
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"bicycle",
"bike light",
"repair"
] |
A bicycle is perhaps one of the most repairable pieces of equipment one can own — no matter what’s wrong with it, and wherever you are on the planet, you’ll be able to find somebody to fix your bike without too much trouble. Unfortunately as electric bikes become more popular, predatory manufacturers are doing everything they can to turn a bike into a closed machine, only serviceable by them.
That’s bad enough, but it’s
even worse if the company happens to go under
. As an example, [Fransisco] has a bike built by a company that has since gone bankrupt. He doesn’t name them, but it looks like a VanMoof to us. The bike features a light built into the front of the top tube of the frame, which if you can believe it, can only be operated by the company’s (now nonfunctional) cloud-based app.
The hack is relatively straightforward. The panel for the VanMoof electronics is removed and the works underneath are slid up the tube, leaving the connector to the front light. An off the shelf USB-C Li-Po charger and a small cell take the place of the original parts under a new 3D printed panel with a switch to run the light via a suitable resistor. If it wasn’t for the startling green color of the filament he used, you might not even know it wasn’t original.
We would advise anyone who will listen, that hardware which relies on an app and a cloud service should be avoided at all costs. We know most Hackaday readers will be on the same page as us on this one, but perhaps it’s time for a cycling manifesto to match
our automotive one
.
Thanks [cheetah_henry] for the tip.
| 75
| 19
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121638",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:38:43",
"content": "The real solution is to explain to manufacturers that we don’t want cloud anything. Even if we would like some cloud functionality it should be optional. If something arrives and requires a cloud, send it back. If we all did that it would stop.Unfortunately Google and Apple are accepted as necessary for life now. 80k is poverty level for a family of 4, can’t afford “basic necessities” like a 4,000lb SUV to play Mad Max on your morning commute.My favorite is people working at chains that have to drive past one or more of their same chain to work at a different one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121642",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:46:58",
"content": "Also see some projects to enable offline functionality:https://github.com/Poket-Jony/vanbike-libIt does not support the first gen non-E-bike models yet.",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121643",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:47:57",
"content": "I knew things were going downhill two decades ago when I had to be connected to the internet to play Half Life 2.",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121650",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:17:44",
"content": "I had to be connected to the internet to play Half Life 2.That’s pretty much just false. You needed Internet access to activate/register HL2 (once) – never to play it.And for updates of course.",
"parent_id": "8121643",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121656",
"author": "Chris J",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:38:08",
"content": "DRM was not in all versions of the game. Sounds like you were lucky.",
"parent_id": "8121650",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121710",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:47:11",
"content": "The only DRM in HL2 was Steam itself. You needed to connect to the internet to download Steam, install the game, run it once – and from there on its offline.",
"parent_id": "8121656",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121684",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:29:39",
"content": "Yeah, in theory. The problem was, a) I had dial-up at the time, and you had to download all updates before it would let you play offline, which made it unplayable for some time; and, b) you had to set Steam to offline mode, but occasionally it would “reset” and tell me I had to log on before I could play again in offline mode. So yes, assuming everything was updated and properly handshaken (handshook?), you could play offline. But for me at the time, with dial-up, having to share a single phone line with two other people, this was a major hassle that on more than one occasion prevented me from playing a single-player game that I had already purchased in full.",
"parent_id": "8121650",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121651",
"author": "Chris J",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:19:02",
"content": "Someone sent me that game while I was deployed in Iraq. I still remember how mad I was when I realized I couldn’t play it. Until then I was blissfully unaware of what DRM was.",
"parent_id": "8121643",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121692",
"author": "Bernie M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:49:15",
"content": "“The real solution is to explain to manufacturers that we don’t want cloud anything.”We DO explain things to manufacturers – ALL the time. Everytime we buy something from them, that’s telling them something. And when we buy things that we SAY we don’t want… well… dollars speak (much) louder than words. The problem is that the “we” you refer to is the Hack-a-Day crowd, not society at large. Society at large keeps telling the manufacturers that “we” DO want more things I can do with my phone regardless of the long-term implications. :-)",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121816",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T06:34:43",
"content": "“We DO explain things to manufacturers – ALL the time. Everytime we buy something from them, that’s telling them something.”I had the dumb idea to try to sell cars for a while, in the mid-1980’s. I didn’t realize when I got into it how corrupt that industry is, and that salesmen are trained to play with the customer’s head. Anyway, most of the cars on the lot were fully loaded, with all the options. It wasn’t that the customers wanted motors in the seats and all that other stuff, but that’s where the dealer made the real profit, even if the price was reduced just to placate the customer by making him think that at least he wasn’t paying for all those things he didn’t want.",
"parent_id": "8121692",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121820",
"author": "warhorse",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T06:50:06",
"content": "democracy is the only way people get exactly what they ask for and deserve, good and hard.more regulation just makes larger companies to deal with regulation. small companies go out of business trying to deal with regulation. larger companies don’t care what you think. your way creates more of what you claim to not want.",
"parent_id": "8121692",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121986",
"author": "Fl.xy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:47:55",
"content": "Because we can’t make regulations that only effect large companies and not small ones, that would be impossible.",
"parent_id": "8121820",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121708",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:46:06",
"content": "Neither people nor chain stores are interchangeable.",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121711",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:47:49",
"content": "The problem with saying this here is thatwe(had audience) probably would not send it back. We’d crack it open and put in our own stuff.",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121789",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:26:35",
"content": "They already know. They don’t care. They know that they can screw some more value out of you with the apps, so you will get the apps.",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121885",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:29:50",
"content": "80k is poverty level for a family of 4? Doesn’t have to be. Really depends what you waste your money on. Too much keeping up with the Jones’s perhaps.",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121920",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:37:07",
"content": "I didn’t say it sbould be, I grew up on 1/3 poverty and live at ‘half’ now. A lot of people don’t realize what programs they may qualify for either.",
"parent_id": "8121885",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121935",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:56:54",
"content": "“If something arrives and requires a cloud, send it back. If we all did that it would stop.”Tons of stuff is improved by cloud use. Multiplayer gaming, mobile phones, streaming devices, etc. Not everything, sure.“80k is poverty level for a family of 4, can’t afford “basic necessities” like a 4,000lb SUV to play Mad Max on your morning commute.”That just isn’t true. The poverty level in the US is 30k for a family of 4. With an 80k income you can live in a nice house, drive a nice car, go on holidays and extend the family with a few more children as well. With that amount of money are pretty much living the good life. No idea what the weight of a car has to do with anything, or why you think people play video games while driving. Pretty sure that isn’t allowed yet, even with the best self driving, Tesla FSD, you have to keep watching the road.“My favorite is people working at chains that have to drive past one or more of their same chain to work at a different one.”Ok and? Should they send letters to all the customers demanding that they shop at another store because it increases travel time for an employee? Your argument doesn’t make any sense. People are hired where there is a demand.I’m very confused by your post.",
"parent_id": "8121638",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121647",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:59:31",
"content": "I warned about a similar thing with the belgian bike brand required a smartphone to use it:https://www.bfmtv.com/auto/electrique-et-connecte-nous-avons-teste-le-velo-cowboy-3_VN-202007080157.htmlThere were rumours of bankruptcy recently, and users started to worry about loosing access to their bikes.Told you so!Meanwhile, boycott those brands that require you to have a smartphone/app/internet to use your bike.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121648",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:09:56",
"content": "I remember having this conversation with a colleague who was so proud of his app controlled bicycle. He’s been rather quiet since VanMoof went under.I do wonder if this is just the thin end of the wedge though, there are a lot of EVs which are cloud connected and app linked now",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121702",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:20:53",
"content": "I opposed connected ebikes, like the belgian Coyote, where all the users started to worry when there were rumourd if bankruptcy like VanMoof.Don’t buy those ebikes where you need a smartphone/app/internet/server to use it.",
"parent_id": "8121648",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121703",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:21:57",
"content": "s/Coyote/Cowboy",
"parent_id": "8121702",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121654",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:30:27",
"content": "A few months ago I needed a new oral thermometer, sadly I was in a hurry at the drug store and just grabbed one – thought it was somewhat expensive – found out why when I got home and tried to use it – it wouldn’t do anything unless I installed an App on my phone – sorry no – went to another store and got a basic thermometer cheaper and works fine with nothing fancy –Got a camcorder last year and it didn’t want to let me upload my video files without a special program on my PC – so I now pull the SD card and read it directly – what a piece of garbage all",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121655",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:32:13",
"content": "FTA: “The bike features a light built into the front of the top tube of the frame, which if you can believe it, can only be operated by the company’s (now nonfunctional) cloud-based app.”Wait, WHAT?blinkblinkblinkSo you’re cycling merrily along, it starts to get dark, and instead of pressing a button on the handlebars or flicking a switch on the lamp unit, you have to whip out your smartphone, pray you have network signal, and send a request to the company’s servers to in turn send a message back to the LED light that is about 18″ away from you, to switch it on?In the immortal words of Professor Farnsworth, “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore”.If that was their level of thinking, then VanMoof /deserved/ to go bust.Then again, I am of an age when bike lights looked like THIS:https://itshambles.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/ever_ready_lights.jpg",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121660",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:04:02",
"content": "It is getting weird out there with focus on cloud based -to-phone garbage. At least right now we can just say no, and buy a manual bike that you get ‘exercise’ by pedaling, and add a light with a manual switch. And one can still keep all your data and applications on PC ‘local’ (at least on Linux so far). ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ seems to be a ‘lost’ cause on this planet.",
"parent_id": "8121655",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121774",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known as Ren",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T01:07:22",
"content": "I seldom see a rider on an ebike pedal.",
"parent_id": "8121660",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121836",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T08:05:04",
"content": "To some people, an ebike is a scooter with an excuse.",
"parent_id": "8121774",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121875",
"author": "Nomen Nescio",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:55:24",
"content": "to depressingly many people, ebikes are mopeds they can get away with riding on the non-motorized trails.i’d be willing to admit the things there, as mobility aids. but it’s rare i ever see them used as such, and their more common set of users are souring me on the things.",
"parent_id": "8121836",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121888",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:33:14",
"content": "Agree. For most people they’re unlicensed motorbikes. A fraction of the cost, because they’re cheap unsafe crap with unbalanced battery packs waiting to catch fire, and no insurance, licence, or road tax. And no helmet.I don’t normally say this, but the government needs to regulate them. They should have a licence plate like every other motorbike.",
"parent_id": "8121774",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121712",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:49:01",
"content": "They’re expecting you to have your phone in a holder on the handlebars, app always open, so it can tell you utterly useless things like how fast you’re going – while sucking up your location data.",
"parent_id": "8121655",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121763",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T23:22:55",
"content": "It probably doesn’t send every request through the company servers (although it probably logs every action to the company servers eventually). I have an expensive medical device that requires an app to use but what it actually does is immediately communicate over bluetooth, it doesn’t need a network connection. The app does have to be logged in to work though and it will just randomly log out and at THAT point it requires a network.It’s not even very good at what it does, you’d think you should be able to get perfect customisation of every parameter, but no, just the same basic functionality as every device without a mandatory phone and login screen has had for years and years.",
"parent_id": "8121655",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121666",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:15:20",
"content": "Honestly I’d never buy that to begin with but if someone gave me the bike I’d just buy a $10 clip on headlight and be done with it. If I’m less than 100% lazy I’d maybe strip out all the electrics too",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121925",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:43:24",
"content": "He did buy a clip on light . . . and it was stolen.",
"parent_id": "8121666",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121957",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:09:20",
"content": "They also clip off when you go into the shop. Lesson learned, cost: $10.",
"parent_id": "8121925",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121668",
"author": "jawnhenry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:18:19",
"content": "As Douglas Adams said,there’s areally simplesolution to every seemingly complex problem(and here it is, for this situation)…Don’t use, or buyabsolutely ANYTHINGwhich requires the use of an “app”; from “free fries” to that brand-new, shiny red, AWD, fire-breathin’ V-10.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121678",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:59:12",
"content": "German here. The bicycle light is not a trivial thing!In order to meet street regulations, you must adjust the light’s reflector in the right angle.There are certain ways to do it correctly!Otherwise, you will blind pedestrians, car drivers and other cyclers!Example:https://fahrradbeleuchtung-info.de/vorschriften-fuer-fahrradbeleuchtung-nach-stvzohttps://fahrradbeleuchtung-info.de/fahrradscheinwerfer-richtig-einstellenAlso, LED light is very very bad! Too bright!A halogen lamp or incandescent lamp is more eye-friendly! IMHO!PS: A mountain bike doesn’t belong on street! Use a city bike instead!And please wear a helmet and ride oncorrectside of the street.Thank you for your attention.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121822",
"author": "Anon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T06:55:05",
"content": "Just get a less bright LED? They make a huge range of brightnesses.There’s no reason a mountain bike can’t ride on the street, it’s a bike. Use what you got, you don’t need two bikes.",
"parent_id": "8121678",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121928",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:47:02",
"content": "Hi, my comment originally was meant to be botha helpful warning and to be a bit humorous (to suit typical German stereotype of being lawful).However, now you’re asking, here’s an official answer to it. 🙂From German fine catalogue, I mean. 😉FAQ:“- Why are mountain bikes often not roadworthy?This is primarily sports equipment.These bikes are actually not intended for use on public roads.Does it need to be retrofitted?In order for a mountain bike to comply with legal regulations,you must bring various lighting devices and reflectors with you.A bell is also required.What are the risks if a mountain bike is not roadworthy?If deficiencies are noticed during a traffic check, the catalog of fines provides for a warning fine of between 20 and 35 euros.”Also important is this detail, I think.:“- BrakesIn road traffic, a bicycle needs at least two brakes that can be operated independently of each other.”https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/mountainbike-verkehrssicher/Aside from the fact that this seems very pretentious, it definitely makes sense somehow.Being merely German road traffic regulations or not. 😉",
"parent_id": "8121822",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8124838",
"author": "Flattired",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T21:06:35",
"content": "As a German, you should warn that you are trying to be humorous :)Thanks for the links! I am not entirely surprised that a Bußgeldkatalog site exists! (Probably a printed out copy can be ordered via letter?)Once a friend actually got a Bußgeld for not having the lights on…. While he was pushing his bike!",
"parent_id": "8121928",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121927",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:46:10",
"content": "I think you confuse brightness with spot intensity. While it is true most LED don’t try to make anyone looking into them comfortable, it isn’t impossible to do. I myself would like a LED with less blue intensity and a spread out hot spot.",
"parent_id": "8121678",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121932",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:54:35",
"content": "Hi, I think that cars have same issues.The introduction of the Xenon and LED lamps made things much worse.Halogen technology was much more eye friendly.",
"parent_id": "8121927",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121941",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T15:06:13",
"content": "Dutch here. The bicycle light is a trivial thing.In order to meet street regulation, you have to use something that lights up. Matches don’t work as they burn out quickly, but a tiny LED is fine. You can get them everywhere. If the lights don’t work, ride with a friend who has at least a front or rear light working, for safety.LED lights are great as they are cheap. Other lights are too expensive!PS: If it has two wheels and no gasoline engine, it’s a bicycle and belongs on the street, on the sidewalk, wherever you want to go is fine! Especially mountain bikes are great, for all our flat mountains! Drive anywhere you want, in fully dark clothing, no helmet, just make sure you don’t die. Traffic laws don’t apply to bicycles.(our cultures are so different)",
"parent_id": "8121678",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121999",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T18:02:17",
"content": "Wow! That does sound like it’s almost like in Holland, doesn’t it? 😃But isn’t it a bit dangerous to bicycle on the dikes all time?I mean, it must he difficult to ride in the swamps all day!?And how do you bicycle with clogs? 🤔(I’m just kidding. My apologies for my bad sense of humor, too.)",
"parent_id": "8121941",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122006",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T18:21:57",
"content": "Hi! Here’s a more serious reply.I’d like to thank you for your info, I sadly haven’t been in the netherlands so far.Which is sad, because it’s a beautiful country.My original comment about the bicycle lights was meant semi-serious, though.Here in Germany, the bicycle is very common in daily life, both in villages and big cities.And the lightning is something that’s often beeing set up incorrectly.You have cyclers here who are either don’t have lights onin the darkness or cyclers who have there light set up incorrectly.And that’s really a problem, because it really blinds other people, even in 20m distance.:They then don’t see the bicycler anymore, but just a bright halo of “something”.In the city, this can be fatal and lead to real casaulties.With advent of the bright LED lights it got worse and I tell you why:Here in good old Germany we have bicycles with traditional dynamo+incandescent lamp combo.But because we now also have need for a standby light (if bike stands still),many cyclers do add third-party LED lamps (with battery) to their existing bicycle.They simply mount them above the traditional reflector,without knowing that they have to take care of right angle, too (3.5 degree, afaik).The problem could be avoided if the bikes had rechargeable batteries in their system. Like a real car has with its dynamotor (light machine).Unfortunately, that’s not the case yet.In practice, it gets even worse: Some bicycle users do use LED lamps as direct replacement for incandescent lamps.Which results in strong flickering/flashing.The culprit is this: The incandescent lamp does support both AC and DC power, the dynamo makes AC due to lack of rectifier.Now, since LED lamps are in fact diodes on their own,they will light up only when the correct polarity appears for a short moment.Ideally, a bridge rectifier would be needed to fix this issue.But apparently, no one has really thought about this.",
"parent_id": "8121941",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122221",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T21:59:25",
"content": "“PS: A mountain bike doesn’t belong on street!”So how do you reach the trailhead if there is only a macadam road?I hate biking on the road and i avoid it as much as i can, but i have no choice if it is the only to reach the trailhead head and the forest.",
"parent_id": "8121678",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121679",
"author": "Raniz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:06:16",
"content": "Hah, I installed magnets in my rear wheel and now my lights are always on when the bike is moving.No need to remember to charge them, bring them or turn them on because they’re not (easily) removable and can’t be turned off!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121741",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:41:39",
"content": "“No need to remember to charge them, bring them or turn them on because they’re not (easily) removable and can’t be turned off!”The downside to that… if you’re then rendered motionless by, say, a puncture, then you have no lights, although I suppose while fixing it you could spin the wheel with a free hand to give intermittent light!Fixing a flat tyre by nothing but moonlight is tricky. Don’t ask me how I know.",
"parent_id": "8121679",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121889",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:35:03",
"content": "Or waiting at the traffic lights!",
"parent_id": "8121741",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121905",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T13:32:31",
"content": "When was the last time you saw a cyclist actually “waiting at the traffic lights”?",
"parent_id": "8121889",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122583",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T14:38:21",
"content": "i had a dynamo-powered light that appeared to have been built in the 1970s. it had an incandescent bulb with a huge reflector, a friction wheel that obliterated my tire, and a spring-loaded switch to mechanically bring it on and off the tire. it had some sort of inertial wheel on the inside of it that would spin for a good 5 seconds after you stopped, and keep the light lit. i can only imagine any modern solution can power an LED for whole minutes with a capacitor or tiny lithium battery",
"parent_id": "8121889",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121929",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:47:45",
"content": "A supercapacitor, or NiMH, Or NiCD, or LiFePO4 could solve that pretty easily",
"parent_id": "8121741",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121682",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:17:30",
"content": "One VALID reason to have cloud-based things that shouldn’t be cloud-based: Theft deterrent. Thieves are going to want to steal something that other people want and that can’t be traced.Of course there are some things that are inherently cloud-based. Without some kind of “cloud” (network) it’s not feasible for a billion people to each have a device that lets any two of them talk to each other at any arbitrary time of day or night, with millions of other pairs of people doing the same thing. Doable in theory, yes. Feasible, no. But that’s not a bicycle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121690",
"author": "blue67",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:46:16",
"content": "My guess is that they made the light cloud-based in the hopes of one day charging a subscription to use it. That’s another practice I will never get behind.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121793",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:53:57",
"content": "Needs some AI. With location data the AI can figure out if it’s dark in your area and automatically turn the bike lights on – how brilliant (ha!) is that!",
"parent_id": "8121690",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121868",
"author": "Rudy v K",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:32:01",
"content": "Much better than some stupid light sensor. That would be way too simple.Combine it with a camera and you could even auto-unlock your bike. You could even license this for 1 to 10 users of the same bike, to make sure only licensed users are able to use the bike.",
"parent_id": "8121793",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121700",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:09:32",
"content": "There’s an obvious lesson here that companies that buy into the extremely stupid idea that things like this should be cloud/app/phone based are missing:Companies that do this go bankrupt. Wave after wave of them.So why would you try if it’s going to cost you your business? Do you think you’re the magical snowflake company that’s cracked the code, that’s figured out you can sell cloud based bicycles? You alone have figured out how to convince people that your cloud is somehow better than all the others?The truth no company wants to hear is that none of their customers want this crap. And they’re willing to set themselves on fire rather than learn they’re not unicorns.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121719",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:36:08",
"content": "I think they’re looking at the same situation you’re looking at, and coming away with a different conclusion: that the magic sauce is precisely staying in business through subscription services, and they’re convinced that THEIR subscription service offerings will be sufficient to get them through times when people aren’t buying a lot of their product.I think the majority of technical innovation these days is in trying to convert buyers into renters.",
"parent_id": "8121700",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121751",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:09:50",
"content": "Oh, it’s clear as crystal that this is the result of vulture capitalists trying to extract rent.What I’m saying is that the entrance to this particular cave is littered with the bodies of the fallen knights who tried to enter. You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to step over them all and still try to enter the cave.",
"parent_id": "8121719",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121723",
"author": "tantris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:46:48",
"content": "Investors probably. It is not just a new bike, it is a cloud-connected bike!Possibilities are endless. Even if none of them make sense or could be done just as easily without a cloud.Cloud connected bike, washing machine that can update its cycles, a juice press that can look up juice pod recalls, a $200 cloud connected flower pot, that enables people to grow their own basil,or a toaster that can check the cloud for whatever a toaster needs to do.All mostly garbage, but maybe one of them will be the next big thing, or at least become a status symbol for the ones with disposable income or the financially unaware.The cloud connected e-bike could download new blink patterns for the light, a more aggressive acceleration profile for starting on a light turning green. An eco-mode. Weather alerts. Alarm you on your maintenance schedule and deals from affiliated shops nearby. Anything that ties the consumer more permanently to the company. And few of that has to be implemented when the bike hits the market. Most is just there as a future possibility, possibility is what investors are looking for.So the cloud-bike didn’t work (this time), let’s try something else. If one out of ten survives, profit!",
"parent_id": "8121700",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121731",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:09:36",
"content": "VCs squirt/sploosh in their pants at the thought of ‘recurring revenue’.Remember the cloud connected Juicer that would squeeze for you a $10 cup of carrot water?Last seen the twit behind that idea was looking for funding for ‘raw water’ delivery…featuring ‘recurring revenue’.I call him a twit because it appears he didn’t just take the VC money and run, wasted it on the juicer project.How many times have those fools funded ‘selling dry dogfood over the internet w free delivery’ as a business model?",
"parent_id": "8121723",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121768",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T00:38:16",
"content": "“Cloud connected bike, washing machine that can update its cycles, a juice press that can look up juice pod recalls, a $200 cloud connected flower pot, that enables people to grow their own basil,or a toaster that can check the cloud for whatever a toaster needs to do….”My optimism tells me that at least one of your examples has to be fictional.Myrealismtells me that every single one of them is from real life.What a time to be alive, eh?",
"parent_id": "8121723",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121706",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:33:46",
"content": "There was some concern when Van Moof went into receivership that some of the bicycle’s functionality would stop working as a consequence. This concern led to third-party alternatives to the Van Moof app being released, but in fact the Van Moof app continued to be maintained annd avaluable throughout the bankruptcy from which Van Moof emerged bankruptcy in 2023. Van Moof continues to release new bicycles.Van Moof’a design was based around a smartphone interface supporting a minimal set of hardware controls on the bicycle itself. These design decisions were a big part of what made people want to pay more for the bicycles; it seems unlikely that someone who had decided to spend more on a connected bicycle would be unpleasantly surprised to discover they had wound up with a bicycle that was connected.The recommended setting for the lights was (and is, I think) “auto” which means they come on automatically when it gets dark, no phone required.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121794",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T03:54:51",
"content": "How doe the bike know when it dark?",
"parent_id": "8121706",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121815",
"author": "JW",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T06:32:55",
"content": "Photoresistor? They cost a cent retail.",
"parent_id": "8121794",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121854",
"author": "Thomas Oldbury",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T10:32:09",
"content": "I think it’s OK to have an ‘app connected’ bike, to cut down on control inputs. But…) It must be entirely local – i.e. using Bluetooth or a local Wi-Fi connection to set things up (preferably Bluetooth). For devices in the home, using something like Zigbee or Matter means you can go cloudless.) The manufacturer should provide documentation on the interface, which would allow third parties to implement their own apps should the existing app become unavailable. Or ideally, use a standard interface, e.g. a heart rate monitor should use the Bluetooth class for such devices.) The app they supply for people who don’t want to use a 3rd party solution, should not require a cloud connection for any functionality, except where that is totally unavoidable.",
"parent_id": "8121706",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121729",
"author": "Jim",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:03:01",
"content": "I’ve seen worse. A relative bought a very expensive e-bike from Specialised some years ago, with drive mechanics from a company called BionX. BionX went bust a few years later, and it turns out that that pretty much killed the bike off. Not immediately, and not through cloud connectivity, but when the battery eventually died there was no way to get a replacement. BionX were so keen to get the money for replacement batteries and to stop anyone using third party alternatives, that all communication between the controller, the battery and the hub itself was encrypted. To overcome that, you would need special tools to pull the hub apart and then would have to design a replacement circuit board to fit in the limited space therein. The bike is still sittting in the garage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121732",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:12:03",
"content": "Simple solution:Small block Chevy.Same as always.",
"parent_id": "8121729",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121735",
"author": "Jim",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:19:22",
"content": "To add to that, here’s a video of someone demonstrating how to replace that proprietary technology. Note that it is very heavily edited, and that his hands get quite well bloodied in the process.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc8OJtFRUng",
"parent_id": "8121729",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121769",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T00:40:03",
"content": "👍Here’s a video showing an alternative way to deal with this sort of thing.https://youtu.be/N9wsjroVlu8?si=oN5p_C3JoTU_EnAb",
"parent_id": "8121735",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121743",
"author": "Cricri",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:51:42",
"content": "“We would advise anyone who will listen, that hardware which relies on an app and a cloud service should be avoided at all costs”Hear hear.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121778",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T01:55:15",
"content": "amen",
"parent_id": "8121743",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121771",
"author": "Daniele",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T00:51:46",
"content": "I don’t know what is dumber: Designing a bike with a light that requires a cloud-based app to turn on, or the person buying it. I HATE “the cloud”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121812",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T05:53:55",
"content": "I wouldn’t say they are defunct. I use my VanMoof every day. . The app for them was literally just updated 17hrs ago.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122585",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T14:41:18",
"content": "there’s a broad range of mainstream acoustic bikes these days that have, by enlarge, interchangeable components. but right now e-bikes are dominated by proprietary one offs, many of them with moronic design choices. can’t wait until that changes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124600",
"author": "illust",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T10:31:10",
"content": "funny thing is the older – non electrified – vanmoof bikes had a simple light with a button to turn it on or off (powered by a small hub dynamo). on app needed. works forever.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.537998
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/from-postscript-to-pdf/
|
From PostScript To PDF
|
Al Williams
|
[
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"History"
] |
[
"adobe",
"pdf",
"postscript"
] |
There was a time when each and every printer and typesetter had its own quirky language. If you had a wordprocessor from a particular company, it worked with the printers from that company, and that was it. That was the situation in the 1970s when some engineers at Xerox Parc — a great place for innovation but a spotty track record for commercialization — realized there should be a better answer.
That answer would be Interpress, a language for controlling Xerox laser printers. Keep in mind that in 1980, a laser printer could run anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 and was a serious investment. John Warnock and his boss, Chuck Geschke, tried for two years to commercialize Interpress. They failed.
So the two formed a company: Adobe. You’ve heard of them? They started out with the idea of making laser printers, but eventually realized it would be a better idea to sell technology into other people’s laser printers and that’s where we get
PostScript
.
Early PostScript and the Birth of Desktop Publishing
PostScript is very much like
Forth
, with words made specifically for page layout and laser printing. There were several key selling points that made the system successful.
First, you could easily obtain the specifications if you wanted to write a printer driver. Apple decided to use it on their LaserWriter. Of course, that meant the printer had a more powerful computer in it than most of the Macs it connected to, but for $7,000 maybe that’s expected.
Second, any printer maker could license PostScript for use in their device. Why spend a lot of money making your own when you could just buy PostScript off the shelf?
Finally, PostScript allowed device independence. If you took a PostScript file and sent it to a 300 DPI laser printer, you got nice output. If you sent it to a 2400 DPI typesetter, you got even nicer output. This was a big draw since a rasterized image was either going to look bad on high-resolution devices or have a huge file system in an era where huge files were painful to deal with. Even a page at 300 DPI is fairly large.
If you bought a Mac and a LaserWriter you only needed one other thing: software. But since the PostScript spec was freely available, software was possible. A company named Aldus came out with PageMaker and invented the category of desktop publishing. Adding fuel to the fire, giant Linotype came out with a typesetting machine that accepted PostScript, so you could go from a computer screen to proofs to a finished print job with one file.
If you weren’t alive — or too young to pay attention — during this time, you may not realize what a big deal this was. Prior to the desktop publishing revolution, computer output was terrible. You might mock something up in a text file and print it on a daisy wheel printer, but eventually, someone had to make something that was “camera-ready” to make real printing plates. The kind of things you can do in a minute in any word processor today took a ton of skilled labor back in those days.
Take Two
Of course, you have to innovate. Adobe did try to prompt Display PostScript in the late 1980s as a way to drive screens. The NeXT used this system. It was smart, but a bit slow for the hardware of the day. Also, Adobe wanted licensing fees, which had worked well for printers, but there were cheaper alternatives available for displays by the time Display PostScript arrived.
In 1991, Adobe released PostScript Level 2 — making the old PostScript into “Level 1” retroactively. It had all the improvements you would expect in a second version. It was faster and crashed less. It had better support for things like color separation and handling compressed images. It also worked better with oddball and custom fonts, and the printer could cache fonts and graphics.
Remember how releasing the spec helped the original PostScript? For Level 2, releasing it early caused a problem. Competitors started releasing features for Level 2 before Adobe. Oops.
They finally released PostScript 3. (And dropped the “Level”.) This allowed for 12-bit colors instead of 8-bit. It also supported PDF files.
PDF?
While PostScript is a language for controlling a printer, PDF is set up as a page description language. It focuses on what the page looks like and not how to create the page. Of course, this is somewhat semantics. You can think of a PostScript file as a program that drives a Raster Image Processor (RIP) to draw a page. You can think of a PDF as somewhat akin to a compiled version of that program that describes what the program would do.
Up to PDF 1.4, released in 2001, everything you could do in a PDF file could be done in PostScript. But with PDF 1.4 there were some new things that PostScript didn’t have. In particular, PDFs support layers and transparency. Today, PDF rules the roost and PostScript is largely static and fading.
What’s Inside?
Like we said, a PostScript file is a lot like a Forth program. There’s a comment at the front (%!PS-Adobe-3.0) that tells you it is a PostScript file and the level. Then there’s a prolog that defines functions and fonts. The body section uses words like moveto, lineto, and so on to build up a path that can be stroked, filled, or clipped. You can also do loops and conditionals — PostScript is Turing-complete. A trailer appears at the end of each page and usually has a command to render the page (showpage), which may start a new page.
A simple PostScript file running in GhostScript
A PDF file has a similar structure with a %PDF-1.7 comment. The body contains objects that can refer to pages, dictionaries, references, and image or font streams. There is also a cross-reference table to help find the objects and a trailer that points to the root object. That object brings in other objects to form the entire document. There’s no real code execution in a basic PDF file.
If you want to play with PostScript, there’s a good chance your printer might support it. If not, your printer drivers might. However, you can also grab a copy of
GhostScript
and write PostScript programs all day. Use GSView to render them on the screen or print them to any printer you can connect to. You can even create PDF files using the tools.
For example, try this:
%!PS
% Draw square
100 100 moveto
100 0 rlineto
0 100 rlineto
-100 0 rlineto
closepath
stroke
% Draw circle
150 150 50 0 360 arc
stroke
% Draw text "Hackaday" centered in the circle
/Times-Roman findfont 12 scalefont setfont % Choose font and size
(Hackaday) dup stringwidth pop 2 div % Calculate half text width
150 exch sub % X = center - half width
150 % Y = vertical center
moveto
(Hackaday) show
showpage
If you want to hack on the code or write your own, here’s
the documentation
. Think it isn’t really a programming language? [Nicolas]
would disagree
.
| 35
| 18
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121616",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:34:50",
"content": "“Finally, PostScript allowed device independence.”So did HPGL, the ancient plotter language.It was the predecessor to PDF in several ways, I think.Back in the 80s, you converted your document by printing into a file.The selected printer driver (say HP LaserJet for HPGL/PCL) determined the output format.That’s not very different to using modern PDF “virtual printers”.I do always do remember PostScript being those fat files that can’t be open properly on DOS or Windows 3.x! 😂🥲Unix believers may have different memories, of course.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121625",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:56:59",
"content": "Oh, I forgot to mention the Epson printer language (ESC/P).C64 users may remember it more fontly than PostScript..",
"parent_id": "8121616",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122012",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T18:41:32",
"content": "The fun part about ESC/P is it kept getting updates and some modern derivatives are being used for inkjet photo printers and thermal receipt printers.",
"parent_id": "8121625",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124163",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-05-04T01:15:42",
"content": "Epson still makes a dozen models of dot-matrix impact printers that use ESC/P, which is valuable to me, and I just bought another new one a couple of years ago.",
"parent_id": "8121625",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121637",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:34:34",
"content": "HPGL was never as device independent as one would like, unfortunately. I made a lot of gravy writing HGPL drivers and translators, back in the day. Things like minor punctuation differences would be required moving from one device to another, then the hardware specifics, like available pens, would lead to different behaviours on different devices.",
"parent_id": "8121616",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121649",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:14:32",
"content": "Agreed. Though it predated PostScript 1 by ~7 years, also.That’s why I felt I should mention it, there was no reference in the article.In addition PostScript always had smelled rather academic/unix-like,home computer users perhaps never really noticed it, except for their printer manual that listed “PostScript ” compatibility.Fast forward, into early 90s, early versions of Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader had no use for *.PS files, either.That’s when users on Windows 3.x or OS/2 slowly learned about PDF.It was the file format being used for digitized manuals on their driver CDs.In real life, though, they rather continued to exchange MS Works documents, Write, WordPad (RTF)and Word files, plain text and bitmap (PCX/BMP/GIF/TGA, TIFF files for fax).According to my gut feeling, I think PCL3/PCL3+ perhaps was what most DOS programs had used in late 80s/early 90s,thanks to the popular HP LaserJet+ and HP DeskJet 500 (and its color cousin).DXF was an option, too, at least for CAD like applications.PCL printers in turn, often also understood HPGL.According to Wikipedia, there also was HP-GL/2 (?) that fusioned with later PCL versions.I perhaps should also add that all three share some similarities.Like “the good, the bad and the ugly” so to say. Just who’s who? 🤔Comparision PostScript vs HPGL, for the youngsters:https://transera.com/help/postscriptdriver_print.htm",
"parent_id": "8121637",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121620",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:48:06",
"content": "Linotype? Lionotype is “Panthera Leo”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121672",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:42:11",
"content": "Hah! Thanks. Will fix.",
"parent_id": "8121620",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121624",
"author": "JSL",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:55:52",
"content": "Before Sun Microsystems’s James Gosling created Java, he made a thing called NeWS, which was an extended implementation of PostScript in which you could write GUI programs. It was baked into some of the early (Solaris 1) releases, and included a demo application called “pizzatool”, which was way ahead of its time.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWShttps://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797NeWS was slow and clunky, mostly because it was an interpreted language (vs. compiled).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121661",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:07:39",
"content": "I remember NeXTSTEP using DisplayPostscript. Pretty performant for the time.",
"parent_id": "8121624",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121640",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:41:35",
"content": "Back when I was doing the code for my thesis, we had available (R1 school) a lot of computing power, including from Maynard, MA, some Wangs, and a big one painted blue. The blue machine was a timeshare in the heavy iron way, charging per seond, or hundredth thereof, for CPU, memory usage, storage, and all. The machines from Maynard were ok, but still multiuser and not top performers. They weren’t charged, though, in department. Then along came the printer. It ran Postscript. It cost nothing but $0.10/page, no matter if it was a single line or a sheet painted black, computed as fast as the data could go to the print engine, or 2hours of processing before the page came out.In the end I had written, or borrowed from others, a full 3D vector library, a quarternion library, a tensor library, and some special functions, and the printer did all of the computation for my thesis, for the price of a few sheets of paper.I don’t want to know what it would have cost on the blue machine….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121717",
"author": "g",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:16:19",
"content": "A couple of decades ago, alone in the building at night, I sent a certain fractal-drawing PostScript file to the printer then of course promptly forgot about it.When about two hours later the printer came to and spat the results out I’m pretty sure I had a minor heart attack.",
"parent_id": "8121640",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121720",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:36:50",
"content": "In the mid 90’s, I bought my own KX-P5400 (panasonic LED bar, postscript printer). M first non-impact unit. Reasonable price, reasonable paper path for the time, so I could use heavy stock. Only 300DPI and slow, but it did the job at home.I ran a few hardcore fractal sets on it, and had similar experiences.My thesis code took longer in it than it did on the original unit, despite the Panasonic being Level2 postscript and many years later. I guess that is why it was so inexpensive.",
"parent_id": "8121717",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122335",
"author": "parkerlreed",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T12:59:47",
"content": "I thought I was the only one that did that.https://bsky.app/profile/parkerlreed.bsky.social/post/3lkhln3vk5s2u",
"parent_id": "8121717",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121652",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:19:49",
"content": "On macOS, Preview used to support automatic ps to pdf conversion, but this was dropped around macOS Ventura. I installed Ghostscript to deal with that: brew install ghostscript . Make sure you install the version for the right architecture, it’ll work if you get it wrong, it’ll just be slow. Ghostscript includes ps2pdf, which will then do the job (it worked on the example above).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121670",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:24:18",
"content": "Reminds me of Windows Vista/7, which used to have an XPS printer driver (also available for XP).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_SpecificationIn the world of the user, XPS was probably equally as exotic as PostScript was.",
"parent_id": "8121652",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122036",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T21:37:50",
"content": "It still exists and it’s installed by default on some versions. Not that anyone uses it except by mistake.",
"parent_id": "8121670",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121714",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:58:09",
"content": "PC LOAD LETTER",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122622",
"author": "jecooksubether",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T16:04:36",
"content": "That error was usually one of (in order of commonality):* failing pickup/separation rollers (purchase and install a maintenance kit!) – That was the printer’s problem in Office Space, BTW- those old LJII/III units were infamous for that problem, and replacing the roller was a pain in the tuckus.* paper tray not seated correctly so the printer can’t determine what size paper is loaded into it* for non-US users, a print job specifying letter size was sent, but you’ve got A4 loaded. (there’s a setting for the printer to auto-adapt that that should get turned on.)",
"parent_id": "8121714",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121744",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:52:02",
"content": "The late great Don Lancaster did not need graphics software. He created the images in his books using PostScript code embedded (Hidden) in AppleWriter. AppleWriter allowed including various macros and languages to be hidden from printable output and be executed to produce everything from formatting to creating graphics. He did everything from charts and tables to rendering a piano, etc. Like Neo seeing the world in the green code waterfall.One odd thing is the nature of PostScript. Both PARC and later Adobe are in walking distance of an HP building where the Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group (SVFIG) met on Saturdays. PostScript is strikingly like Forth with name changes. For example, SWAP is EXCHANGE in ps. Plus to meet the scale independent demands for printing, a floating point data type. Yet Warnock claimed to have never heard of Forth. In fairness I have known a couple people who created their own advanced interpreter on 6502 boards and we shocked when they saw Forth. They had nearly identical elements – except the compiler feature that really sets Forth apart.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121844",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T09:21:41",
"content": "Yay! Back in the 80s, PS was amazing. It meant actual quality printing. Though to be fair, in the 80s having any printer at home was amazing.Even in the 90s most people who had printers had bubblejets if they were lucky, 9-pin DMs if not. Both very low res and erratic quality with line artefacts, smudges, and blurs. Lasers with PS had amazing crisp readable text.Also printers understood PS fonts – they could be pre-installed on the printer, or downloaded into the printer with the job, and that meant smaller and much faster print jobs, especially when it came to documents with hundreds of pages.That and the smell of ozone are my childhood memories of growing up with a laser printer in the house.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121914",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:07:41",
"content": "“Also printers understood PS fonts – they could be pre-installed on the printer, or downloaded into the printer with the job,and that meant smaller and much faster print jobs, especially when it came to documents with hundreds of pages.”This is a valid point.: Laser printers usually were smarter or had more processing power than anything else.For example, laser printers often did support up to PCL5 (in the 90s),while ink printers were limited to older PCL3 from mid-80s (includes plus, color variant etc).The early HP LaserJet was driven by a Motorola 68000 and did support optional font cassettes, too.And something like an PostScript emulation cartridge (such as Pacific Page PE, LaserJet IIp to IIIp).Some versions of HD DeskJet 500 later had an optional Epson emulation cartridge, due to both being overly popular.The DeskWriter 500 was the Apple Macintosh equivalent, by the way, supporting AppleTalk (I think).",
"parent_id": "8121844",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122038",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T21:41:45",
"content": "This is mostly still the case, only many are running busybox these days and support PCL6. It’s more reliable than whatever the vendor system is.",
"parent_id": "8121914",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121916",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T14:11:06",
"content": "“That and the smell of ozone are my childhood memories of growing up with a laser printer in the house.”I know this.",
"parent_id": "8121844",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121886",
"author": "TDT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:32:53",
"content": "Take care to update your PDF rendered tho, else someone can use some old postscript to shut down your website (happened to one very infamous website a week or so ago).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122068",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T00:29:41",
"content": "Be careful with ImageMagick in general or whatever image processing your site uses",
"parent_id": "8121886",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121992",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T17:20:53",
"content": "I recall watching the Linotype laser machines at work. They also included a regular laser printer for proof printing it. This was a shop which did advertising copy. It outgrew from a Union shop which did first hot metal typography and then photo typesetting. Finally moving to the laser before it became a non Union shop doing both. (Photo and laser.) Fun times. Let’s just say it ran as a photo (Union shop) using the PDP-8 before transitioning to the DG families.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122120",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T11:49:36",
"content": "…and now they sell bloated subscription-model software that won’t work if you’re not connected to the Internet and with a UI that changes every other week. Oh, and they can remotely brick the software at any time – even in error!. “Progress”, huh?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122336",
"author": "Myself",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T13:05:40",
"content": "There was no REASON that only laser printers could be so powerful, right? You could’ve conceivably built an impact dot-matrix with a PostScript rendering engine, it just would’ve been wasted on the low-res output, so nobody did, right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122339",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T13:54:30",
"content": "IMHO, all three, PostScript, PDF and PCL, have their origins in the printing industry. Terms “canvas”, “font”, “offset”, “margin”, etc came from the printing press.It also seems that PCL is really the direct descendant, since it talks directly to a printer. If one invents lightweight free/open-source PCL GUI editor, that may potentially render PDF’s mostly obsolete. Then again, PDF became de-facto industry standard for shared documents, so looks like it is the new VHS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122640",
"author": "David Bloodgood",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T17:48:25",
"content": "In the late 1980’s I wrote a Postscript program that you uploaded into an Apple Laser Printer that turned it into a “Line Printer”, with variable character width and height – so once PS program was running, you could send text files, with many columns and lines per page and once the “New page” indicator came, the program would scale the Courier font size so that the whole page fitted on 1 page.It worked well and satisfied a need.I wish I still had the code, or remembered enough to recreate it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122931",
"author": "Evan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T22:17:56",
"content": "I wrote a graphing calculator program in PostScript back in the day — you defined the function you wanted to graph at the top of the file, and then the rest of the script would repeatedly call the function and draw line segments. I remember it took our poor HP inkjet printer several minutes to render, especially when I added the ability to render 3d surfaces. It would start the printing process, loading a sheet of paper before it finished rendering.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8124583",
"author": "APK Free",
"timestamp": "2025-05-05T08:46:48",
"content": "PostScript played a huge role in shaping desktop publishing, but today, PDF has become the standard for handling documents digitally. It’s everywhere—whether it’s work files, e-books, or manuals for apps and games.On mobile, PDFs are a lifesaver. Many apps use them for storing receipts, contracts, or even game guides and instructions. Some mobile games even incorporate PDFs for lore books or interactive manuals, making them feel more immersive. What’s great is that modern devices handle PDFs so well—you can annotate, highlight, and even fill out forms with ease.It’s crazy to think how far we’ve come. From PostScript changing how we print, to PDF becoming the go-to format on every phone, tablet, and game interface. This tech might not be flashy, but it’s essential.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133202",
"author": "Brian Cockburn",
"timestamp": "2025-05-29T11:19:59",
"content": "Elliot: s/to prompt Display/to promote Display/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8179693",
"author": "Eric Nickell",
"timestamp": "2025-09-15T00:22:02",
"content": "When I was using Xerox PARC’s JaM (“John and Mark”) graphics language, I didn’t have enough familiarity with Forth to recognize the similarity. The key players saw the need for something like Interpress, tried to get Xerox to run with it, failed, after which John and Chuck founded Adobe. JaM and PostScript were both Turing complete, while Interpress and PDF are intentionally not. Turing completeness starts to matter in page description languages if you want to parallelize page processing or print a document back-to-front or skip pages, and it’s an area where PostScript struggles. I’ve often wondered if PostScript was dumbed down to avoid lawsuits. I was thrilled when PDF came out, but it took about 5 years longer than I expected for it to become dominant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.669547
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/haptic-soft-buttons-speaker-to-your-sense-of-touch/
|
Haptic Soft Buttons Speak(er) To Your Sense Of Touch
|
Tyler August
|
[
"hardware",
"News"
] |
[
"haptic feedback",
"haptic interface",
"touching virtual reality"
] |
There’s just something about a satisfying “click” that our world of touchscreens misses out on; the only thing that might be better than a good solid “click” when you hit a button is if device could “click” back in confirmation. [Craig Shultz] and his crew of fine researchers at the Interactive Display Lab at the University of Illinois seem to agree, because they have come up with an ingenious hack to
provide haptic feedback using readily-available parts
.
An array of shapes showing some of the different possibilities for hapticoil soft buttons.
The “hapticoil”, as they call it, has a simple microspeaker at its heart. We didn’t expect a tiny tweeter to have the
oomph
to produce haptic feedback, and on its own it doesn’t, as finger pressure stops the vibrations easily. The secret behind the hapticoil is to couple the speaker hydraulically to a silicone membrane. In other words, stick the thing in some water, and let that handle the pressure from a smaller soft button on the silicone membrane. That button can be virtually any shape, as seen here.
Aside from the somewhat sophisticated electronics that allow the speaker coil to be both button and actuator (by measuring inductance changes when pressure is applied, while simultaneously driven as a speaker), there’s nothing here a hacker couldn’t very easily replicate: a microspeaker, a 3D printed enclosure, and a silicone membrane that serves as the face of the haptic “soft button”. That’s not to say we aren’t given enough info replicate the electronics; the researchers are kind enough to provide a circuit diagram in
figure eight of their paper.
In the video below, you can see a finger-mounted version used to let a user feel pressing a button in virtual reality, which raises some intriguing possibilities. The technology is also demonstrated on a pen stylus and a remote control.
This isn’t the first time we’ve featured hydraulic haptics — [Craig] was also involved with an
electroosmotic screen we covered previously
, as well as
a glove that used the same trick.
This new microspeaker technique does seem much more accessible to the hacker set, however.
| 7
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121596",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T13:03:40",
"content": "Can a button like this be abused as a microphone?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121610",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:02:35",
"content": "Just about all speakers can be microphones. Since they’re already measuring the inductance, it’s just a little bit further. It’d be a pretty terrible microphone, though.",
"parent_id": "8121596",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121615",
"author": "Ronnie",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:33:11",
"content": "seems like a nice one for a braille interface?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121635",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:28:48",
"content": "That sounds like great idea! It could be display and input all in one.",
"parent_id": "8121615",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121755",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:38:46",
"content": "Braille needs 6 or 8 points activated independently, which requires 6 or 8 coils. So in theory you can build a kind of 1 finger (index) glove, the tip of the finger has the dots, while the rest of the glove hosts the corresponding coils and pipes and tubes leading the liquid to the tip of the finger. Add more buttons for play, stop, forward, backward and so on in the palm. You’ll need a battery too.",
"parent_id": "8121615",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121841",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T09:13:30",
"content": "This seems to be a solved problem?My iPhone has solid haptic feedback, as does my Magic Trackpad, which I’m convinced is physically broken when the battery runs out as the “click” is so convincing that even though intellectually I know it’s haptics, when it doesn’t do it, it feels like a stuck button.I don’t think this is unique to Apple? Though perhaps the fine tuning to make it convincing is – a Microsoft mouse I tried had the haptic badly miscalibrated, I thought it gave me an electric shock when I clicked it…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121996",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T17:56:14",
"content": "Decades ago Nokia patented a haptic feedback touch screen. It’d simulate the feel of buttons on the screen. Neat, but never made it to the market.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.589873
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/24/the-mohmmeter-a-steampunk-multimeter/
|
The Mohmmeter: A Steampunk Multimeter
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"analog multimeter",
"gift",
"multimeter",
"pi pico",
"steampunk",
"woodworking"
] |
[Agatha] sent us this stunning multimeter she built as a gift for her mom. Dubbed the
Mohmmeter
— a playful nod to its ohmmeter function and her mom — this project combines technical ingenuity with heartfelt craftsmanship.
At its core, a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller reads the selector knob, controls relays, and lights up LEDs on the front panel to show the meter’s active range. The Mohmmeter offers two main measurement modes, each with two sub-ranges for greater precision across a wide spectrum.
She also included circuitry protections against reverse polarity and over-voltage, ensuring durability. There was also a great deal of effort put into ensuring it was accurate, as the device was put though its paces using a calibrated meter as reference to ensure the final product was as useful as it was beautiful.
The enclosure is a work of art, crafted from colorful wooden panels meticulously jointed together. Stamped brass plates label the meter’s ranges and functions, adding a steampunk flair. This thoughtful design reflects her dedication to creating something truly special.
Want to build a meter for mom, but she’s more of the goth type?
The blacked-out Hydameter
might be more here style.
| 12
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121572",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T09:11:49",
"content": "What a nice gift and what a fun project. Really cool!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121574",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T09:15:36",
"content": "Beautiful.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121576",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T09:40:24",
"content": "Nice!And the leads can be kept safe inside the case, a vast improvement over the standard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121773",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T01:04:19",
"content": "Actually, leads in the case is the standard for non-junk quality meters even today, although the case is more likely to be vinyl over cardboard. Wooden cases (though perhaps not the quality of OP’s project) were common well into the 1950’s, as they would be for any precision lab instrument which needed to be protected from its environment while in storage or transport.",
"parent_id": "8121576",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121584",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T11:16:56",
"content": "Pretty much what early meters were once about. Wooden enclosure with a lid, analogue meter, and some rudimentary patching for ranges. Yes, I believe they even once used as detailed joinery. Nice work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121607",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T13:41:47",
"content": "needs a jacob’s ladder!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121611",
"author": "Adelaide",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:02:46",
"content": "Beautiful and functional, using current circuitry to give that retro look. Have you considered how much time and effort it took to make, and whether you’d consider making this objet d’art commercially?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121674",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:49:12",
"content": "Cool.“and lights up LEDs on the front panel”It’s unfortunate that LED’s are sooo very much more practical for this implementation than the classic “grain of wheat” bulbs (bulbs evidently requiring >=2x as much current as an LED).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121691",
"author": "Agatha",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:49:04",
"content": "Yeah I initially tried using actual incandescents, but for a variety of reasons it didn’t work out. However, I did try to replicate the incandescent look as much as possible: I tested several varieties of LED, and in the final version they are painted and under a colored lens, which does look very incandescent.",
"parent_id": "8121674",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121683",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:23:24",
"content": "I was expecting it to directly measureMhos.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121694",
"author": "Agatha",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:52:47",
"content": "Just to give due credit: while I designed, built, and programmed all the electronics, the beautiful wooden enclosure this project stands on is due to my collaborator Brent (see the linked writeup for details)!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121786",
"author": "SpringTank",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T02:44:38",
"content": "Amazing project! Love seeing your work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.328606
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/c64-assembly-in-parts/
|
C64 Assembly In Parts
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"assembly language",
"commodore 64"
] |
[Michal Sapka] wanted to learn a new skill, so he decided on the
Commodore 64 assembly language
. We didn’t say he wanted to learn a new skill that might land him a job. But we get it and even applaud it. Especially since he’s written a multi-part post about what he’s doing and how you can do it, too. So far, there are
four parts
, and we’d bet there are more to come.
The series starts with the obligatory “hello world,” as well as some basic setup steps. By part 2, you are learning about registers and numbers. Part 3 covers some instructions, and by part 4, he finds that there are even more registers to contend with.
One of the great things about doing a project like this today is that you don’t have to have real hardware. Even if you want to eventually run on real hardware, you can edit in comfort, compile on a fast machine, and then debug and test on an emulator. [Michal] uses VICE.
The series is far from complete, and we hear part 5 will talk about branching, so this is a good time to catch up.
We love applying
modern tools to old software development
.
| 19
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121549",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T06:34:26",
"content": "6502.It’s called ‘6502 assembly’.I’ll grant C64 was it’s own beast, as they all were, but 6502. (aktually, lower chip count hardware…6510)It’s not a bad processor to start on.Simple.IIRC C64 system had complications.Can easily sink a year of time, learning gory details of obsolete sprite system, sound and disk IO.If you learn what a ‘breakfast drive’ is, you have failed to prioritize kid.Don’t go too deep, there are many man centuries of work in that huge pile of sprite games.Frustrating bit twiddly endless hours, all the while wishing for 100 MHz computers…Hardly imagining that the kids would constantly rebuild castles in swamps of Javascript, wasting GHz casually, reinventing every old bad idea.6502 was my first assembly.Am packrat.Still have MOS technology 6502 manual.I taught myself assembler out of that book.Now get off my lawn.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121561",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T07:57:04",
"content": "10 REM Speaking of C64, the successor C128(D) was a fine computer.20 REM It had both the 8502 and the Z80, the best of two worlds.30 REM And even if it had gotten an V20 instead of Z80, it could have had gotten still ran plain i8080 code.40 REM Sorry for my poor English syntax.",
"parent_id": "8121549",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121577",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T10:03:08",
"content": "?SYNTAX ERROR IN 30",
"parent_id": "8121561",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121595",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T12:53:55",
"content": "25 GOTO 40 [RETURN]",
"parent_id": "8121577",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121686",
"author": "urs",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:38:47",
"content": "Where come your lower case letters in your listing from? Ok, I know you can switch to that mode, but then REM should be rem.",
"parent_id": "8121561",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121693",
"author": "Chris Walsh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:52:08",
"content": "Ha, exactly what I was thinking when I read “Commodore 64 Assembly”!",
"parent_id": "8121549",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121560",
"author": "rthrthrt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T07:54:02",
"content": "I prefer normal compilerhttps://llvm-mos.org/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121565",
"author": "tiopepe123",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T08:07:14",
"content": "Yes, Z80 it a very good cpu a max 8/16bits and fast LDIR (MSX,spectrum, Amstrad, oric atmos…) and casio calculator.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121585",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T11:35:03",
"content": "while I learnt assembly on a z80, then spent a lot of time writing assembly for ibm/370/390/mvs, I recon the best one for people to learn nowadays is the ATmega328P. Indeed, I’d make that compulsory for all the uni courses, as maybe that would a) teach them how it all works and 2) teach them not to write bloatware later…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121598",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T13:16:23",
"content": "atmega328p is a great chip, and it’s so well documented and tested it’s the only mcu the avr transistor tester guys will allow to be used. but nowadays its out of production. during covid they were selling for 20 euro each. at that kind of price it’s not suitable to learn on.They can be worn out too. i had one in a keyboard and i made so many flashes editing and testing the keymap that it wouldn’t take any more writes.",
"parent_id": "8121585",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121603",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T13:30:00",
"content": "Wait? 328p is out of production! Oh no! I’m still not over the loss of the PIC 16F84A! 😟Why can’t industry simply produce something so popular for 50 years? Or let clone industry have it?Production costs do decrease over time, after all.It feels like yesterday when the Atmega328p replaced the Atmega168..(A quick web search says there’s an Atmega328pb variant, but it’s in ugly SMD package and not fully pin compatible.)",
"parent_id": "8121598",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121757",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:43:23",
"content": "“Why can’t industry simply produce something so popular for 50 years?”You could have just used a 555.:-)",
"parent_id": "8121603",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122724",
"author": "James Bearss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T01:16:33",
"content": "Believe it or not they make a 6502 processor today. Check out Ben Eator on YouTube he’ll tell you all about it!",
"parent_id": "8121757",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121783",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T02:21:04",
"content": "I just now checked Digi-Key for the PIC16F84, clicked “active” product status, and “in stock,” and got 17 variations of 16F84, including 10 with the A suffix.",
"parent_id": "8121603",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121784",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T02:21:53",
"content": "but wow, the prices are high!",
"parent_id": "8121783",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121725",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:49:13",
"content": "no, atmega328pb is still around for another 10 years…",
"parent_id": "8121598",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121726",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:51:12",
"content": "and I haven’t had any problems with the various clones either..But yes, they are nuts to be getting rid of it.. And the cost is now 5 times (or more) than 5 years ago..",
"parent_id": "8121598",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121608",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T13:57:37",
"content": "VAX assembly in college. Learned x86 on own during that time as well as a little 6502 on C64s in the electronics lab. Z-80 and 68xxx at work. And of course now it is x86_64, ARM variations, and RISC-V. Oh what fun…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121776",
"author": "Leigh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T01:33:13",
"content": "Did anyone use the 6502 Assembler I wrote in Logo for the C64? It was on the utilities disk.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.220852
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/improved-and-open-source-non-planar-infill-for-fdm/
|
Improved And Open Source: Non-Planar Infill For FDM
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"3d Printer hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"3d printing",
"Bambu lab",
"bambustudio",
"FDM",
"g-code",
"interlayer",
"orcaslicer",
"post-processing",
"prusa",
"PrusaSlicer",
"python",
"reinforcement",
"sine"
] |
Strenghtening FDM prints has been discussed in detail over the last years. Solutions and results vary as each one’s desires differ. Now
[TenTech] shares his latest improvements
on his
post-processing script
that he first created
around January
. This script literally bends your G-code to its will – using non-planar, interlocking sine wave deformations in both infill and walls. It’s now open-source, and plugs right into your slicer of choice: PrusaSlicer, OrcaSlicer, or Bambu Studio. If you’re into pushing your print strength past the limits of layer adhesion, but
his former solution
wasn’t quite the fit for your printer, try this improvement.
Traditional
Fused Deposition Modeling
(FDM) prints break along layer lines. What makes this script exciting is that it lets you introduce alternating sine wave paths between wall loops, removing clean break points and encouraging interlayer grip. Think of it as organic layer interlocking – without
switching to resin or fiber reinforcement
. You can tweak amplitude, frequency, and direction per feature. In fact, the deformation even fades between solid layers, allowing smoother transitions. Structural tinkering at its finest, not just a cosmetic gimmick.
This thing comes without needing a custom slicer. No firmware mods. Just Python, a little G-code, and a lot of curious minds. [TenTech] is still looking for real-world strength tests, so if you’ve got a test rig and some engineering curiosity, this is your call to arms.
The script can be found in his Github.
View his full video here
,
get the script
and let us know your mileage!
| 16
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121581",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T10:36:14",
"content": "wow, that’s thinking outside the box!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121601",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T13:27:30",
"content": "I’m very excited to see this continue to develop.You may want to point out a bit more prominently, since it’s buried in the README, that even though this can be run in Bambu Studio it does not support Bambu printers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121623",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:53:49",
"content": "i have the impression people who use ABS feel differently but my general feeling is that “Traditional Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) prints break along layer lines” is more a vibe — regurgitated received wisdom — than a reported reality.everything i ever printed in PLA broke after 1-10 years due to PLA’s monotonically increasing brittleness over time (except things i printed fairly recently, which i know will break ‘soon’) — it’s rare to see something delaminate that hasn’t become fantastically weak ‘with the grain’ as well. i would never say “my prints break along layer lines”, because that’s not been my observed reality. but my prints do break!i prefer not to carry force across layer lines, just like i prefer not to carry force in the plastic itself at all. but when i do, i find it’s surprisingly strong. that feeling of surprise is why i find this a reasonable building material — i have low expectations. if i had high expectations — like the people trying to 3d print large things without using bolts and extrusions and plywood to form the bulky or stressed components — then i would find it totally useless.i just wish when i read that sentence that the image in my head was of someone talking about the pile of broken parts they’ve produced. and for all i know, that is the reality for this article. but instead it feels like an old wives’ tale, an unexamined orthodoxy. and now we’re getting nearly-daily articles about fairly poor ‘solutions’ to this everybody-knows-it’s-a-problem.i’d love to hear in the comments here from others…what causes your prints to fail in your real life?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121630",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:06:46",
"content": "i prefer not to carry force across layer linesSo basically, youdoactually believe that inter-layer strength is intrinsically lower than in the other directions (not that belief is needed, the experimental data shows this explicitly.) Nobody said that means it’llinvariablybreak in that direction.",
"parent_id": "8121623",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121636",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:32:54",
"content": "pfew you want me to rewrite my comment again but i already wrote it once",
"parent_id": "8121630",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121722",
"author": "Alex Numann",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:45:26",
"content": "confidently wrong is still wrong",
"parent_id": "8121636",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121633",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:17:59",
"content": "I print things that are mainly walls – enclosures you might say. And when they fail, it’s invariably “along the grain” – the layer lines. Maybe making the layer lines non-straight will help here. Overlapping alternate sine waves will also probably help.I wonder if I can use this technique on my existing slicer and cheapo printer.",
"parent_id": "8121623",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121641",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:43:00",
"content": "i appreciate your report, though maybe you should say what filament you’re using :)i do a lot of enclosures and stuff like that and i only kinda sorta see them breaking along layer lines. for example, ye olde basic prismatic box with 1mm walls printed in PLA, hung on the back of my backpack. itdidfail at a layer line, but specifically the one where the wall met the floor — so it’s not the layer adhesion that killed it but rather the corner. and even that break ‘along the layer line’ was different layer lines! it didn’t let go at one layer interface, it spread that failure along several interface by breaking the layer itself — the layer interface couldn’t fail until layers had failed internally as well. and then once i started inspecting it, i found that it hadalsofailed orthogonal to that layer line, at the vertical corners.and here’s the critical part that makes me throw away the whole poor-layer-adhesion mythos, is that it’s held onto my backpack entirely by layer adhesion across a 5mm x 8mm rectangle printed onto the top of the thing, andthatdidn’t fail despite receiving abundant abuse. i had agonized over that because i believed the received wisdom about layer adhesion, but that component has never failed in any way and i’ve printed several variations of this design.so my decision to use a brittle material with only 1mm thickness without gussets killed it at a corner, and perfect layer adhesion would have infinitesimally improved the outcome. and the real killer thing is, even though the plastic was cracking up, itactuallysuffered an electronic failure and this was just a pointless post mortem of plastic that was, in fact, still enclosing the broken electronics adequately.",
"parent_id": "8121633",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121713",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:54:48",
"content": "Sounds like a stress concentration point to me. More of the fault of the geometry than the process.Add a nice filet there and it would probably help a lot.",
"parent_id": "8121641",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121830",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T07:24:54",
"content": "Just some bargain bucket PLA. The enclosure is small, around 30mm square, with rounded corners. So it’s difficult to say if the break starts at a corner and propagates, or what.Having read this, I could easily reinforce the corners too.",
"parent_id": "8121641",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121676",
"author": "Sandro",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:50:51",
"content": "Greater weakness of FDM prints in the Z direction has been directly measured, it’s not a matter of folk wisdom. Go watch any CNC kitchen video where he does strength measures, Z direction strength and toughness is a fraction of XY. The best you can do is print hot and slow (see printing glass settings), which still only achieves ~80% of XY strength.",
"parent_id": "8121623",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122586",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T14:44:46",
"content": "yes, it’s been measured to be ‘not much’. the difference between fresh PLA and embrittled PLA ismassive, and the difference between PLA with-the-grain and PLA against-the-grain is rounding error by comparison. when i engineer my designs, i’m thinking 1mm vs 2mm vs 5mm. if i gain 20% strength of going with the grain turns that into 0.8mm vs 1.6mm vs 4.2mm.amdahl’s law doesn’t say the difference doesn’t exist…it saysit doesn’t matter.",
"parent_id": "8121676",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121718",
"author": "Conor Stewart",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:27:48",
"content": "It is well known and proven that 3D printed parts are significantly weaker in the Z direction for pretty much all filaments so how is it an old wives tail that parts often fail in that way? Parts failing in their weakest direction should be expected.Just look at some in depth testing videos, like from My Tech Fun, he clearly shows the break surfaces and you can see quite often that parts break along the layer lines. See the difference between horizontally and vertically printed test samples, both in strength and the break surfaces.In my own experience parts do break along the layer lines more often than in other direction, most failures are the result of delamination rather than breaks within a layer. That is why print orientation matters.If you think about what is actually weak in the Z direction, the adhesion between layers not the layers themselves then that is the obvious point it would fail. Yes all the failures may not take place on the same layer but they tend to all be between layers.Layer adhesion also applies somewhat within a layer because you are just laying lines of filament next to each other, they aren’t part of the same continuous piece of plastic.",
"parent_id": "8121623",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122587",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T14:47:00",
"content": "you can contrive a test case and prove that there is a mechanical difference but only experience tells you how your parts fail.and my parts don’t fail that way. even when a layer interface is broken, the cause is obviously something different. and if you aren’t reporting howyourparts fail then what are you doing here?",
"parent_id": "8121718",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122288",
"author": "Franci Kopač",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T05:30:30",
"content": "In my experience, there is a different way to put this. 3D prints are really strong under compression, but much weaker under torsion loads and weaker still under tension loads. So if you want to make strong elements, either load them in compression mode or add some fasteners to make the compression mode dominant. Sort of like pre-stressed concrete.",
"parent_id": "8121623",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122589",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T14:48:40",
"content": "yes!! i think this is exactly the right way to think about it. and using bolts to put it in compression is indeed my favorite technique for using 3d printing to meet a load-bearing application!i have observed a ton of interesting weaknesses and the layer adhesion is the least interesting weakness. tension in a PLA part is absolutely killer, regardless of how it’s oriented.",
"parent_id": "8122288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,567.837812
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/abusing-duckdb-wasm-to-create-doom-in-sql/
|
Abusing DuckDB-WASM To Create Doom In SQL
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"doom",
"sql"
] |
These days you can run Doom anywhere on just about anything, with things like porting Doom to JavaScript these days about as interesting as writing Snake in BASIC on one’s graphical calculator. In a twist, [Patrick Trainer] had the idea to
use SQL instead of JS
to do the heavy lifting of the Doom game loop. Backed by the
Web ASM version
of the analytical DuckDB database software, a Doom-lite clone was coded that demonstrates the principle that anything in life can be captured in a spreadsheet or database application.
Rather than having the game world state implemented in JavaScript objects, or pixels drawn to a Canvas/WebGL surface, this implementation models the entire world state in the database. To render the player’s view, the SQL
VIEW
feature is used to perform raytracing (in SQL, of course). Any events are defined as SQL statements, including movement. Bullets hitting a wall or impacting an enemy result in the bullet and possibly the enemy getting
DELETE
-ed.
The role of JavaScript in this Doom clone is reduced to gluing the chunks of SQL together and handling sprite Z-buffer checks as well as keyboard input. The result is a glorious ASCII-based game of Doom which you can experience yourself with
the DuckDB-Doom project
on GitHub. While not very practical, it was absolutely educational, showing that not only is it fun to make domain specific languages do things they were never designed for, but you also get to learn a lot about it along the way.
Thanks to [Particlem] for the tip.
| 9
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121476",
"author": "Jay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T23:05:04",
"content": "“Bullets hitting a wall or impacting an enemy result in the bullet and possibly the enemy getting DELETE-ed.” Did Strong Bad write this article?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121483",
"author": "Benjamin F Keil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T23:41:05",
"content": "That looks more like Wolfenstein than Doom!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121639",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:40:21",
"content": "My first thought as well. Need up/down and floor texture to be Doom.",
"parent_id": "8121483",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122073",
"author": "UTF character",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T01:42:03",
"content": "Needs a utf-32 upgrade for more detail.",
"parent_id": "8121639",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121559",
"author": "xinhulian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T07:52:55",
"content": "yes!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121658",
"author": "Lucca",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:52:47",
"content": "Isn’t this raycastingala wolf3d?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121828",
"author": "Klh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T07:22:16",
"content": "Exactly, clickbait article title wasn’t even correct.",
"parent_id": "8121658",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121742",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:47:38",
"content": "So when you die can you just roll back the transaction?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121758",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:54:09",
"content": "Seems like Rogue or Nethack would be a better fit for something like this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.009085
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/the-evertop-a-low-power-off-grid-solar-gem/
|
The Evertop: A Low-Power, Off-Grid Solar Gem
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"Battery Hacks",
"computer hacks",
"green hacks",
"hardware",
"laptops hacks"
] |
[
"e-ink",
"emulator",
"ESP32",
"IBM xt",
"low power",
"off grid",
"prepping",
"solar",
"solar panel"
] |
When was the last time you saw a computer actually outlast your weekend trip – and then some? Enter
the Evertop
, a portable IBM XT emulator powered by an ESP32 that doesn’t just flirt with low power; it basically lives
off the grid
. Designed by [ericjenott], hacker with a love for old-school computing and survivalist flair, this machine emulates 1980s PCs, runs DOS, Windows 3.0, and even MINIX, and stays powered for hundreds of hours. It has a built-in
solar panel
and 20,000mAh of battery, basically making it an old-school dream in a new-school shell.
What makes this build truly outstanding – besides the specs – is how it survives with no access to external power. It sports a 5.83-inch e-ink display that consumes zilch when static, hardware switches to cut off unused peripherals (because
why waste power on a serial port
you’re not using?), and a solar panel that pulls 700mA in full sun. And you guessed it – yes, it can hibernate to disk and resume where you left off. The Evertop is a tribute to 1980s computing, and a serious tool to gain some traction at remote hacker camps.
For the full breakdown, the original post has everything from firmware details to hibernation circuitry. Whether you’re a retro purist or an off-grid prepper, the Evertop deserves a place on your bench. Check out
[ericjenott]’s project on Github
here.
| 32
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121416",
"author": "tyj5tyjtyjt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:05:05",
"content": "fuzix.org too?e-ink is not good for terminal ;(but direction is good",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121556",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T07:40:36",
"content": "Back in the days we had LCD screens whicj when cold would update not a lot faster than modern e-ink displays and have a lot worse visibility!",
"parent_id": "8121416",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121558",
"author": "tyjutyjurt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T07:51:53",
"content": "look at laptop.org and old hardware. Sorry. But PixelQ or other good screen is better than e-ink = alvays",
"parent_id": "8121556",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121747",
"author": "rc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:55:43",
"content": "Psion mx5. LCD with retro light, powered with two small 1.5 V batteries. Linux compatible, internet access using modem, several days of autonomy. Fits in a jacket pocket. Great tool used by journalists in remote areas or topography tasks, (processing total stations data). I would love to have a new version with better key input and a e-ink display.",
"parent_id": "8121556",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121575",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T09:27:53",
"content": "e-ink (at least when done well) is going to be fine for a terminal, the worst you’ll get is a tiny bit of ghosting between more complete screen refreshes and you won’t be able to read it at all as it scrolls by really quickly (which you generally can’t do even on the high refresh rate screens as commands run as these days the compute is so so fast each line is added just too quickly)About the only thing lacking for most e-ink displays that is rather nice to have for a terminal is the coloured text.",
"parent_id": "8121416",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121586",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T11:40:23",
"content": "you’ve been out of the eink displays for a while I see, they have full colour eink with a surprisingly quick refresh now.",
"parent_id": "8121575",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121857",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T10:46:58",
"content": "I did say for most e-ink, and full colour e-ink is still slower in refresh than comparably modern monochrome as a rule. The partial refresh to fake quicker overall refresh and refresh rate in general are improving, but still slow.",
"parent_id": "8121586",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121699",
"author": "mark g",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T19:03:28",
"content": "It would be great if Shap’s Memory LCD displays were bigger and higher rez.",
"parent_id": "8121416",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121838",
"author": "Bear Naff",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T08:16:12",
"content": "Or merely cheaper. They’re great low-power displays, but they are priced out of the “wanna build an off-grid compy proof-of-concept” hacker market.",
"parent_id": "8121699",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121433",
"author": "Johannes Burgel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:51:09",
"content": "Interesting. The e-Ink Panel used costs just 32 USD. But by “fast update” hey mean 1.5 seconds…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121594",
"author": "Todd",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T12:50:05",
"content": "“just”",
"parent_id": "8121433",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121687",
"author": "J K",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:40:48",
"content": "While a lot per inch compared to traditional screens, the $/in2 is a lot better than it used to be",
"parent_id": "8121594",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121760",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T23:11:02",
"content": "1.5 seconds is the fast refresh of the whole screen, but as with most e-ink screens these days you can do a lot with a partial update, or a series of partial updates.",
"parent_id": "8121433",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121867",
"author": "Eric Jenott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:30:05",
"content": "I’m Eric, the guy that built this. The screen refreshes in 300ms, not 1.5 seconds. 1.5 seconds is for a full screen refresh where it goes all black then all white then shows the content again. That’s totally unnecessary and my device never does this unless the user initiates it via a hotkey. So it actually has a refresh rate of about 3 times per second. Plenty of videos demonstrating that on the youtube and github pages.",
"parent_id": "8121433",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121436",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:08:45",
"content": "Okay I need that keyboard. Does anyone know what it is? I am trying to read the git repo but it is quite large :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121451",
"author": "Jay Guerette",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:59:05",
"content": "Search Amazon for CUQI keyboard",
"parent_id": "8121436",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121579",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T10:17:37",
"content": "I owe you one Jay!",
"parent_id": "8121451",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121500",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T01:03:12",
"content": "It just looks like a generic laptop keyboard to me. Replacement keyboards for pretty much all popular laptops are available on line, and these can be fed into an Arduino Mini (Atmel ATmega32U4) running QMK to make it USB, or to pretty much any microcontroller to make it PS/2. These pretty much always connect with flat flex cables, which means there are readily available sockets they can plug into.I find it a little odd that he’s using PS/2 for mouse and keyboard, but then I recall how many hours I spent trying to make a USB device interface that handles both mouse and keyboard at the same time, while the PS/2 protocol is pretty straightforward, so maybe that’s reason enough.Also, I can’t tell from the pictures whether those keys are on 19mm centers (standard-size keyboard) or 16mm (“mini” keyboard, like netbooks used to have), but for my money, a $15 mini keyboard, which is available from many shops on AliExpress or Amazon, would be a good starting point. And if you want the standard size, plenty of those are available as well. These are generally Bluetooth only, but they do have flat flex cables, so you can ditch the MCU that came with it and replace it with another, again using QMK or other available firmware as a starting point, to interface to whatever you want.",
"parent_id": "8121436",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121879",
"author": "Eric Jenott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:04:17",
"content": "They keyboard is not from a laptop. These are stand-alone PS/2 keyboards that I remove from their original enclosures and install in the 3d printed case for this computer. I get them fromhttps://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=561534245819&skuId=5261280865230(the “KJW240/10寸PS/2圆口（线长140cm” option). I cut the cords down to about 35cm, since the original cords are way too long, and crimp on PH2.0 plugs which plug into the motherboard internally. Don’t know whether or not you can buy this keyboard outside China. Maybe it’s sold on AliExpress too. The original casing is sort of a little too flexible or something which results in a not very solid feeling while typing, like the backing behind the keys is squishing up and down with the keystrokes or something. Fortunately, that problem goes away once I install it in its new 3d printed case, and it has a very nice solid feel to it. I tried out a lot of different keyboards before choosing this one. My criteria was pretty hard to meet: must be PS/2, must have windows and menu keys, must have left and right shift keys (some keyboards actually don’t have a right shift key!), must have both delete and backspace keys (some keyboards don’t have a delete key), must have print screen, scroll lock, numlock, number keypad (activated by numlock), pause/break, insert, arrow keys, page up, and page down keys. These are all keys that DOS era software might use, so lacking any of these keys could mean not being able to use some software. Not many miniature modern keyboards actually have all those. It also had to be small enough to fit on this computer but big enough to be able to type on fairly naturally. (I love small computers and I don’t mind small screens, but I absolutely hate trying to type on keyboards that are too small to type on naturally.) And it had to have pretty low power consumption. This keyboard takes about 6-7mA. Many keyboards I tried took between 30-40mA, which is more than the CPU itself. The thing I dislike most about this keyboard is the home key being between the quote and enter keys, and the up arrow key being where the left half of the right shift key should be. Those are really unfortunate design choices. But its a lot better than a lot of keyboards, and its something I was able to get pretty used to after a few days of typing. Still, I do plan to build my own keyboard to replace this in the future, one with a processor that sleeps between keystrokes so it can consume less than 1mA on average, and that has a standard key layout.The same keyboard is also sold in a USB version at the above link, if you want one that works with a modern computer.",
"parent_id": "8121436",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121437",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:23:54",
"content": "This entire project is a thing of beauty. I used actual DOS laptops with similar peripheral mixes when they were state of the art and the mix of functionality with ultra low power is a dream I never really thought I’d see anybody accomplish. Yes, I’ve seen bits and pieces of it realized but here the whole thing is wound together with a bow to stern vision that is breathtaking. I would gladly lay down cash for a built system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121474",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T22:52:35",
"content": "Not that I’ve ever been convicted of sucking cock.",
"parent_id": "8121437",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121592",
"author": "Pinky justice",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T12:28:27",
"content": "Noted",
"parent_id": "8121474",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123438",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T23:56:36",
"content": "Lol, wtf?",
"parent_id": "8121592",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121461",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T22:22:41",
"content": "Great job! Has “industrial controller that runs forever” written all over it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121488",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:04:31",
"content": "Playing some Cataclysm: DDA lately and this gets me thinking how neat it’d be to make purpose built ebooks with everything on it to remake things.Make it super durable and then in the event of the incursion of a hive mind zombifier, the survivors would have to collect books from all over to get the info they need to make their safety vans.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121491",
"author": "Old chap Kone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:19:43",
"content": "Does anyone know what game is running in the photo avobe?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121540",
"author": "Taneli",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T05:04:13",
"content": "Presumably something called Test Drive as per linked page:https://github.com/ericjenott/Evertop?tab=readme-ov-file#test-drive.",
"parent_id": "8121491",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121542",
"author": "defdefred",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T05:17:22",
"content": "Testdrive I guess",
"parent_id": "8121491",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121555",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T07:39:23",
"content": "Test Drive II: The Duel, in the Desert Blast level.",
"parent_id": "8121491",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121618",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:40:17",
"content": "I was happy to see a demo of it running Space Quest 3. That game has a special place in my heart and is always my go to when testing an old PC. Plus the first time I played it, my PC wasn’t much faster than this!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121750",
"author": "Blaster",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:07:30",
"content": "This is an interesting concept, though if it could be made of something other than plastics where possible, it would be even better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8123670",
"author": "Cornelis van der Wal",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T16:05:35",
"content": "Looking forward to purchase this wonderful machine!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.738655
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/floss-weekly-episode-830-vibes/
|
FLOSS Weekly Episode 830: Vibes
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] |
[
"artificial intelligence",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"vibe coding"
] |
This week,
Jonathan Bennett
and
Randal Schwartz
chat with
Allen Firstenberg
about Google’s AI plans, Vibe Coding, and Open AI! What’s the deal with agentic AI, how close are we to
Star Trek
, and where does Open Source fit in? Watch to find out!
https://prisoner.com/
http://spiders.com/
https://js.langchain.com/docs/introduction/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121402",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:39:24",
"content": "Hmmm… call me suspicious but only a little talk about locally-run AI and almost nothing about privacy from Google’s friends here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121659",
"author": "Yuki",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:56:46",
"content": "This might be the first episode I completely skip…I have absolutely zero interest in listening to over an hour of AI talk; in my eyes, it’s a bubble waiting to burst, not to mention the morality (or lack thereof) regarding scraping user generated content, and paid content such as books, without consent of the author(s), and the literal GWh-scale of training a single LLM model.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121967",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:22:51",
"content": "Same here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121969",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T16:27:12",
"content": "Any chance you could interview some folks from the Home Assistant and/or ESPHome project?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.783965
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/open-source-commercial-synthesisers-you-will-love/
|
Open Source Commercial Synthesisers You Will Love
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"open sourse",
"synthesiser"
] |
Drumboy and Synthgirl from Randomwaves are a a pair of compact electronic instruments, a drum machine and a synthesiser. They are commercial products which were launched on Kickstarter, and if you’re in the market for such a thing you can buy one for yourself. What’s made them of interest to us here at Hackaday though is not their musical capabilities though, instead it’s that they’ve honoured their commitment t
o release them as open source in the entirety
.
So for your download, you get everything you need to build a pair of rather good 24-bit synthesisers based upon the STM32 family of microcontrollers. We’re guessing that few of you will build your own when it’s an easier job to just buy one from Randomwaves, and we’re guessing that this open-sourcing will lead to interesting new features and extensions from the community of owners.
It will be interesting to watch how this progresses, because of course with the files out there, now anyone can produce and market a clone. Will AliExpress now be full of knock-off Drumboys and Synthgirls?
It’s a problem we’ve looked at in the past
with respect to closed-source projects, and doubtless there will be enterprising electronics shops eyeing this one up. By our observation though it seems to be those projects with cheaper bills of materials which suffer the most from clones, so perhaps that higher-end choice of parts will work in their favour.
Either way we look forward to more open-source from Randomwaves in the future, and if you’d like to buy either instrument
you can go to their website
.
Thanks [Eilís] for the tip.
| 17
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121366",
"author": "Zoot",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:17:41",
"content": "Very cool. While I have no need for one or both of these, since I already have a drum machine and I use virtual synths with a MIDI controller, I would think this would be a great addition to someone’s low budget home studio.The fact that it is open source is fantastic, and you can even buy a “Hacker” version from the website so that you can reprogram the firmware if you want. I am looking forward to people adding more to the firmware and functionality.Overall, a nice little product. I might buy one just for my kid just so I can fool around with it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121375",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:12:00",
"content": "this ‘hardware’ is not much more than a display, capacitive touch sensosrs, and sound output. iow, you’d be better off with a smartphone app.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121454",
"author": "tom fleet",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T22:10:05",
"content": "respectfully, as a dev at one of the larger producers of this sort of equipment; the customers strongly disagree with your take.we’ve offered apps, even offered hardware designed around iPads (cheaper for the customer by a fair bit… provided… they have the iPad, of course…) – it all kinda bombed.the critical thing is usually the I/O, followed by the expression offered by the control surface.while cap touch buttons on a board are… well. mostly on par with the UX offered by a phone/tablet screen – the market still prefers a physical device. it’s something to do with the psychology of how humans use dedicated tools as an extension of their body (or something).https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-objects-become-extensions-of-you/#:~:text=when%20you%20play%20music%20with%20that%20object%2C%20it%20feels%20like%20an%20extension%20of%20your%20body%20%E2%80%94%20because%20it%20is.",
"parent_id": "8121375",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121480",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T23:28:08",
"content": "I agree with Tom here. A dedicated device beats an app on a phone or tablet every time. Its easy to go in and fool around with the hardware in your hands, but hacking the app? Less accessible, less appealing, less fun. Capacitive buttons are not the best, and the source files are all for proprietary software, but I love some hardware synths.",
"parent_id": "8121454",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121496",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:48:44",
"content": "users strongly prefers a physical device with real input. capacitive is awful and you might as well use a phone. people mightpay forthis frustratingly useless device but that financial transaction will be the high point in its life",
"parent_id": "8121454",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121497",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:50:32",
"content": "why don’t you go on thatwasabadcomment.com and write a comment about my comment :)",
"parent_id": "8121375",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121515",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T03:32:12",
"content": "I hate when people look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m going to point out a couple of teeth here.Every file format is some expensive proprietary format. This is the least open way to open source a project. If you have to pay for 3D Studio Max, Microsoft Office,……Wait sorry. I just checked the git to finish up my list (was going by memory from this morning) and it looks like they have updated (almost) everything to include csv and kicad formats now. (Missed the “Main” directory’s board at least.)Excellent work. Bravo! My hat goes off to them.This is how every crowd sourced project should be run. If you put the cost of R&D on the customers, they essentially own that IP in my opinion. That’s work for hire, and that means the employers own the copyright. I’m sure a lawyer would be willing to argue the opposite, and I’m sure kickstarter’s EULA plays games, but legal doesn’t always mean right. These people seem to want to do what is right. Great job.",
"parent_id": "8121375",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121518",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T03:36:05",
"content": "Why is this comment on this thread? Hackaday, please fix your comment system. Its especially bad on mobile Firefox. Ugh. Oh, and this new auto fill thing that happens with email addresses?? What the!? It keeps screwing things up!",
"parent_id": "8121515",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121573",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T09:12:11",
"content": "Open source, fork the software and mod it to use ‘proper’ buttons then, customise it to your tastes.Or buy an ‘appliance’",
"parent_id": "8121375",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121387",
"author": "Mia Rouel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:56:32",
"content": "Nice toy but some some disappointing specs: ADC& DAC way below the 100dB SNR and no Full size jack, it is a no go in a studio.Price wise, my Akai MPC8X cost less than 100€ VAT included bu is probably not as powerful.That said it looks really good. Should get in touch with synthanatomy or another similar website",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121460",
"author": "abb",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T22:22:08",
"content": "Plenty of people use Korg Volca things in studios, and tons of other sound sources with similar SNR and 3.5mm jacks. Most places that sell audio cables will have a suitable cable with a 3.5mm plug on one end and a 6.35mm plug on the other.",
"parent_id": "8121387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121521",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T03:47:03",
"content": "Meh, noise is only a problem if you don’t like the way it sounds. Personally, I prefer a little hiss in my bliss. Too clean and sterile sounds unnatural and non-human in my opinion. To each their own.",
"parent_id": "8121387",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121569",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T08:52:35",
"content": "Strongly agree, whilst I like my HiFi to get as close to the recording as possible in my meagre budget, Iloveit when musicians play the flaws in the instruments, amps etc.Kinda related, nature is rarely silent and people freak in anechoic chambers, interestingly it used to be a thing (probably still is) that you could add a programmable amount of noise to VOIP calls because people are so used to it on POTS calls they get weirded out if it’s not present.",
"parent_id": "8121521",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121568",
"author": "Gary Walker",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T08:19:38",
"content": "Surprised no mention of the downsides.Was actually cheaper not to back and buy the duo from their store.Product is so thin, some backers had a dead display on arrival.Audio jacks not great quality, really need to force devices in.Issues with the capacitive buttons, particularly if mains powered.UI is decent but wavetables/samples need to be loaded from an alphabetically sorted list, both come with a few examples.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122514",
"author": "Randomwaves Team",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T09:45:01",
"content": "As Randomwaves, we have been doing our best to provide full support to all backers experiencing any issues. For users who encountered problems with the screen or sound, we sent out replacement kits. As you mentioned, some users experienced issues with the touch buttons due to noise from certain wall adapters’ power inputs, but switching to a power bank resolves the problem. We are also working on a hardware solution to eliminate this issue entirely.",
"parent_id": "8121568",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121614",
"author": "James Wood",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T14:32:37",
"content": "I have had the devices in hand for a couple weeks and am unable to use them. They have shipped me screen replacements that arrive today. The positive with Randomwaves is they are standing behind their product and are quick to communicate when emailed when trying to find a solution to hardware problems. Fingers crossed this screen fix works. I find it also surprising that there is no hands on YouTube videos of backers testing the product and reviewing it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121675",
"author": "KenN",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:49:23",
"content": "I sat through two drumgirl video demos, and never really heard the thing in full flight. Looks promising; I hope they get over the QA issues.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,567.957435
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/to-see-within-detecting-x-rays/
|
To See Within: Detecting X-Rays
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"History"
] |
[
"cadmium",
"emulsion",
"fil",
"fluoroscopy",
"gamma",
"halide",
"radiograph",
"scintigraphy",
"scintillator",
"selecnium",
"Technetium",
"x-ray"
] |
It’s amazing how quickly medical science made radiography one of its main diagnostic tools. Medicine had barely emerged from its Dark Age of bloodletting and the four humours when X-rays were discovered, and the realization that the internal structure of our bodies could cast shadows of this mysterious “X-Light” opened up diagnostic possibilities that went far beyond the educated guesswork and exploratory surgery doctors had relied on for centuries.
The problem is, X-rays are one of those things that you can’t see, feel, or smell, at least mostly; X-rays cause visible artifacts in some people’s eyes, and the pencil-thin beam of a CT scanner can create a distinct smell of ozone when it passes through the nasal cavity — ask me how I know. But to be diagnostically useful, the varying intensities created by X-rays passing through living tissue need to be translated into an image. We’ve already looked at
how X-rays are produced
, so now it’s time to take a look at how X-rays are detected and turned into medical miracles.
Taking Pictures
For over a century, photographic film was the dominant way to detect medical X-rays. In fact, years before Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s first systematic study of X-rays in 1895, fogged photographic plates during experiments with a Crooke’s tube were among the first indications of their existence. But it wasn’t until Röntgen convinced his wife to hold her hand between one of his tubes and a photographic plate to create the first intentional medical X-ray that the full potential of radiography could be realized.
“Hand mit Ringen”
by W. Röntgen, December 1895. Public domain.
The chemical mechanism that makes photographic film sensitive to X-rays is essentially the same as the process that makes light photography possible. X-ray film is made by depositing a thin layer of photographic emulsion on a transparent substrate, originally celluloid but later polyester. The emulsion is a mixture of high-grade gelatin, a natural polymer derived from animal connective tissue, and silver halide crystals. Incident X-ray photons ionize the halogens, creating an excess of electrons within the crystals to reduce the silver halide to atomic silver. This creates a latent image on the film that is developed by chemically converting sensitized silver halide crystals to metallic silver grains and removing all the unsensitized crystals.
Other than in the earliest days of medical radiography, direct X-ray imaging onto photographic emulsions was rare. While photographic emulsions can be exposed by X-rays, it takes a lot of energy to get a good image with proper contrast, especially on soft tissues. This became a problem as more was learned about the dangers of exposure to ionizing radiation, leading to the development of screen-film radiography.
In screen-film radiography, X-rays passing through the patient’s tissues are converted to light by one or more intensifying screens. These screens are made from plastic sheets coated with a phosphorescent material that glows when exposed to X-rays. Calcium tungstate was common back in the day, but rare earth phosphors like gadolinium oxysulfate became more popular over time. Intensifying screens were attached to the front and back covers of light-proof cassettes, with double-emulsion film sandwiched between them; when exposed to X-rays, the screens would glow briefly and expose the film.
By turning one incident X-ray photon into thousands or millions of visible light photons, intensifying screens greatly reduce the dose of radiation needed to create diagnostically useful images. That’s not without its costs, though, as the phosphors tend to spread out each X-ray photon across a physically larger area. This results in a loss of resolution in the image, which in most cases is an acceptable trade-off. When more resolution is needed, single-screen cassettes can be used with one-sided emulsion films, at the cost of increasing the X-ray dose.
Wiggle Those Toes
Intensifying screens aren’t the only place where phosphors are used to detect X-rays. Early on in the history of radiography, doctors realized that while static images were useful, continuous images of body structures in action would be a fantastic diagnostic tool. Originally, fluoroscopy was performed directly, with the radiologist viewing images created by X-rays passing through the patient onto a phosphor-covered glass screen. This required an X-ray tube engineered to operate with a higher duty cycle than radiographic tubes and had the dual disadvantages of much higher doses for the patient and the need for the doctor to be directly in the line of fire of the X-rays. Cataracts were enough of an occupational hazard for radiologists that safety glasses using leaded glass lenses were a common accessory.
How not to test your portable fluoroscope. The X-ray tube is located in the upper housing, while the image intensifier and camera are below. The machine is generally referred to as a “C-arm” and is used in the surgery suite and for bedside pacemaker placements. Source:
Nightryder84
, CC BY-SA 3.0.
One ill-advised spin-off of medical fluoroscopy was the shoe-fitting fluoroscopes that started popping up in shoe stores in the 1920s. Customers would stick their feet inside the machine and peer at a fluorescent screen to see how well their new shoes fit. It was probably not terribly dangerous for the once-a-year shoe shopper, but pity the shoe salesman who had to peer directly into a poorly regulated X-ray beam eight hours a day to show every Little Johnny’s mother how well his new Buster Browns fit.
As technology improved, image intensifiers replaced direct screens in fluoroscopy suites. Image intensifiers were vacuum tubes with a large input window coated with a fluorescent material such as zinc-cadmium sulfide or sodium-cesium iodide. The phosphors convert X-rays passing through the patient to visible light photons, which are immediately converted to photoelectrons by a photocathode made of cesium and antimony. The electrons are focused by coils and accelerated across the image intensifier tube by a high-voltage field on a cylindrical anode. The electrons pass through the anode and strike a phosphor-covered output screen, which is much smaller in diameter than the input screen. Incident X-ray photons are greatly amplified by the image intensifier, making a brighter image with a lower dose of radiation.
Originally, the radiologist viewed the output screen using a microscope, which at least put a little more hardware between his or her eyeball and the X-ray source. Later, mirrors and lenses were added to project the image onto a screen, moving the doctor’s head out of the direct line of fire. Later still, analog TV cameras were added to the optical path so the images could be displayed on high-resolution CRT monitors in the fluoroscopy suite. Eventually, digital cameras and advanced digital signal processing were introduced, greatly streamlining the workflow for the radiologist and technologists alike.
Get To The Point
So far, all the detection methods we’ve discussed fall under the general category of planar detectors, in that they capture an entire 2D shadow of the X-ray beam after having passed through the patient. While that’s certainly useful, there are cases where the dose from a single, well-defined volume of tissue is needed. This is where point detectors come into play.
Nuclear medicine image, or scintigraph, of metastatic cancer.
99
Tc accumulates in lesions in the ribs and elbows (A), which are mostly resolved after chemotherapy (B). Note the normal accumulation of isotope in the kidneys and bladder.
Kazunari Mado, Yukimoto Ishii, Takero Mazaki, Masaya Ushio, Hideki Masuda and Tadatoshi Takayama
, CC BY-SA 2.0.
In medical X-ray equipment, point detectors often rely on some of the same gas-discharge technology that DIYers use to build radiation detectors at home. Geiger tubes and ionization chambers measure the current created when X-rays ionize a low-pressure gas inside an electric field. Geiger tubes generally use a much higher voltage than ionization chambers, and tend to be used more for radiological safety, especially in nuclear medicine applications, where radioisotopes are used to diagnose and treat diseases. Ionization chambers, on the other hand, were often used as a sort of autoexposure control for conventional radiography. Tubes were placed behind the film cassette holders in the exam tables of X-ray suites and wired into the control panels of the X-ray generators. When enough radiation had passed through the patient, the film, and the cassette into the ion chamber to yield a correct exposure, the generator would shut off the X-ray beam.
Another kind of point detector for X-rays and other kinds of radiation is the scintillation counter. These use a crystal, often cesium iodide or sodium iodide doped with thallium, that releases a few visible light photons when it absorbs ionizing radiation. The faint pulse of light is greatly amplified by one or more photomultiplier tubes, creating a pulse of current proportional to the amount of radiation. Nuclear medicine studies use a device called a gamma camera, which has a hexagonal array of PM tubes positioned behind a single large crystal. A patient is injected with a radioisotope such as the gamma-emitting technetium-99, which accumulates mainly in the bones. Gamma rays emitted are collected by the gamma camera, which derives positional information from the differing times of arrival and relative intensity of the light pulse at the PM tubes, slowly building a ghostly skeletal map of the patient by measuring where the
99
Tc accumulated.
Going Digital
Despite dominating the industry for so long, the days of traditional film-based radiography were clearly numbered once solid-state image sensors began appearing in the 1980s. While it was reliable and gave excellent results, film development required a lot of infrastructure and expense, and resulted in bulky films that required a lot of space to store. The savings from doing away with all the trappings of film-based radiography, including the darkrooms, automatic film processors, chemicals, silver recycling, and often hundreds of expensive film cassettes, is largely what drove the move to digital radiography.
After briefly flirting with phosphor plate radiography, where a sensitized phosphor-coated plate was exposed to X-rays and then “developed” by a special scanner before being recharged for the next use, radiology departments embraced solid-state sensors and fully digital image capture and storage. Solid-state sensors come in two flavors: indirect and direct. Indirect sensor systems use a large matrix of photodiodes on amorphous silicon to measure the light given off by a scintillation layer directly above it. It’s basically the same thing as a film cassette with intensifying screens, but without the film.
Direct sensors, on the other hand, don’t rely on converting the X-ray into light. Rather, a large flat selenium photoconductor is used; X-rays absorbed by the selenium cause electron-hole pairs to form, which migrate to a matrix of fine electrodes on the underside of the sensor. The current across each pixel is proportional to the amount measured to the amount of radiation received, and can be read pixel-by-pixel to build up a digital image.
| 19
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121339",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T15:29:57",
"content": "Dental digital X-ray sensors and sources are about $1600 new online (Both the sensor and source are about $800). They seem like the right size and power for electronics use (what’s inside a chip, BGA inspection, etc.). Has anyone tried one?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121345",
"author": "David Ibañez",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:09:12",
"content": "“the pencil-thin beam of a CT scanner can create a distinct smell of ozone when it passes through the nasal cavity”What? How is that?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121348",
"author": "Kvg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:19:40",
"content": "It’s more often reported as smelling like burned plastic/rubber, metal, or just a general chemical smell. I believe the cause is still unknown but it’s thought to either be a the radiation interacting with materials within the scanner and being smelled by the patient, or the radiation interacting with something within the patient. Those being either the olfactory neurons/epithelium, or some sort of interaction with other materials within the sinus or airways.",
"parent_id": "8121345",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121346",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:13:05",
"content": "” Medicine had barely emerged from its Dark Age of bloodletting and the four humours when X-rays were discovered”Come on man. I know you’re trying to be cute or whatever but that’s pretty offensive to the medical field..First open heart surgery was in like 1893 (before X-rays)First use of ether anesthetic was in 1846 and so on.Medicine has never been nor ever will be perfect but in this current climate of pseudoscience and medical doubting this type of stuff isn’t helping.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121363",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:11:07",
"content": "Science is supposed to be full of ‘doubt’, which is the basis of a scientific process.As for medical practitioners, few are doing science, and fewer think like a scientist. Most practitioners follow a rote recipe. We can no longer accept the decree of a physician without a pass for our further investigation. Of course, the exception would be for ER patients, where you pay your money and take your chances at the wheel.",
"parent_id": "8121346",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121373",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:43:14",
"content": "Doubt has no basis. Scrutiny. Repeatability. Skepticism. Testability. Doubt IMO implies writing things off out hand without actually giving thought to it. And you are right medical “practitioners” …. practice. Medical researchers do research and (typically) also practice. And I’ll continue to stand by how medicine is definitely imperfect – but I suspect if you get injured or have respiratory problems or a stroke it’s up to you to “spin the wheel”. Your call",
"parent_id": "8121363",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121385",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:54:30",
"content": "I’m not entirely certain that there’s a meaningful difference between doubt and skepticism in this context.",
"parent_id": "8121373",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121405",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:46:15",
"content": "When I was in grad school, my roommate was a med school student doing the MD/Ph.D. program. His study was the promising new field of “Evidence-Based Medicine”, which started to be a big deal in the late 1990s and early 2000s.So Iasked what exactly they were basing their practice on beforehand. Mic drop.Now of course, they all understand physiology, immunology, and a lot of the other relevant bio/chemistry/physics. It’s not like they were doing medicine without science. But actually doing hypothesis testing, with sample sizes of more than a handful, to see which of various treatments worked best, became a lot more of a thing around that time.Lots of other factors make a good doctor: empathy, intuition, curiosity, dexterity, etc. But there has to be some place for testing out what works well too, right?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicineAnyway, my feel is that there’s a lot more of the repeatability/testability in medicine these days, even among the pure practioners.",
"parent_id": "8121373",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121444",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:42:37",
"content": "The standard of care now is Evidence Based Medicine. In the words of one of my mentors, himself hugely famous in some circles, “the era of eminence over evidence is over.” Not everyone has the message though, today, for sure. Studying human subjects is super hard for a lot of reasons. We’d all love to see huge sample size prospective trials to answer every clinical question but they are super hard to do at best, impossible more often. So we’re stuck with best guess way more often than we’d like. And despite the many, many missteps along the way medicine is doing pretty good. Mortality from previously mortal dumb stuff is way down compared to even 100 years ago. Hopefully most would call that pretty good. Not bad for a bunch of hacksaw wielding barber-surgeons.",
"parent_id": "8121405",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122687",
"author": "someone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T20:21:56",
"content": "You would like to think so, but in practice I would say it is spotty at best. You will regularly see doctors handing out antibiotics etc with ZERO measuring much of anything. “Evidence based” might be a goal, but medicine is often just not scientific. We saw the rubbish with the commie-china-fauci virus, where doctors and actual scientists were forbidden to do science or question what they were handed as the “solution”, all with abbreviated or non-existent safety testing. That is not science.",
"parent_id": "8121405",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121439",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:33:21",
"content": "I literally defined what I was trying (poorly it seems) to articulate. If you want to question my knowledge of English fine.I’ll try again. Roundly dismissing modern medicine as a bunch of hookus (I won’t give you a definition of that) without thinking about anything objectively or with out let’s say honest or healthy skepticism is a problem. At least in the US and very much more recently. You are free to disagree with allllllll those assertions, strawman my grammar, whatever.And also literally for the third time I’ll repeat. Science isn’t perfect. Maybe not even good. Doctors are also not perfect. Or good sometimes. But unless you yourself are a dishonest, unscrupulous doctor then maybe don’t bad mouth them. The vast majority are hard working and honestly care about their patients much more than, IMO, the public realizes largely.",
"parent_id": "8121373",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121447",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:48:12",
"content": "“Doubt is the same as skepticism.You don’t believe, without evidence.”Ok fine you win.I’m an atheist for what that’s worth. I didn’t get my made up definition from anywhere (why are you persevering on that?) I was defining it as I saw fit to make a point that still seems lost entirely on you. Change my language to however you please, if it means you can get a look at what I’m trying to say. Pretty please.",
"parent_id": "8121373",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121566",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T08:07:20",
"content": "“Science is supposed to be full of ‘doubt’, which is the basis of a scientific process.”Yes, but there’s a limit to it, too.For example, questioning if other living beeings are sentinent or not.Denying it, because “it’s not scientifically proven yet” is cynical violates common sense.Because we as human beings are sentinent and know its existence, its meaning.Assuming that other live forms do posses the same ability, should be the norm and not other way round.It’s the same principle as “innocent until proven guilty”.Unfortunately, science in its ignorance doesn’t follow this reasonable logic here.Science as such can’t make up for wisdom and life experience, thus.",
"parent_id": "8121363",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121498",
"author": "kwxx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:51:16",
"content": "Dark ages: DaVinci did his anatomical chicken-scratches in the 15th century, and I understand they’re still used because there are some things that just aren’t captured well by photographs.Ok, Europe’s so-called “dark ages” is considered to be 5th-10th centuries.",
"parent_id": "8121346",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121862",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:06:18",
"content": "I’m reminded of the James Herriot books. Set in the early 1900s, there was a story where Herriot’s boss, Sigfried, used bloodletting on a horse. Apparently to good effect, and apparently it wasn’t the only time he’d done it. I would not be surprised to find that some physicians of that era might have used the treatment on human patients.",
"parent_id": "8121346",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121394",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:19:47",
"content": "Whoever decided to put “Schrödinger” on the lab coat took it too far IMO, the illustration was perfect without.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121400",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:32:50",
"content": "Art was repurposed from another piece where it made more sense, but yeah. If you get it, you get it.",
"parent_id": "8121394",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121499",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:57:15",
"content": "It has to be said that the image of Röntgen’s wife’s fingers is the firstdigitalx-ray image.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121503",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T01:16:38",
"content": "nice",
"parent_id": "8121499",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,567.899856
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/unsolved-questions-in-astronomy-try-dark-matter/
|
Unsolved Questions In Astronomy? Try Dark Matter!
|
Tyler August
|
[
"News",
"Science"
] |
[
"astronomy",
"dark matter"
] |
Sometimes in fantasy fiction, you don’t want to explain something that seems inexplicable, so you throw your hands up and say, “A wizard did it.” Sometimes in astronomy, instead of a wizard, the answer is dark matter (DM). If you are interested in astronomy, you’ve probably heard that dark matter solves the problem of the “missing mass” to explain galactic light curves, and the motion of galaxies in clusters.
Now [Pedro De la Torre Luque] and others are proposing that DM can solve another pair of long-standing galactic mysteries:
ionization of the central molecular zone (CMZ) in our galaxy, and mysterious 511 keV gamma-rays.
The
Central Molecular Zone
is a region near the heart of the Milky Way that has a very high density of interstellar gases– around sixty million times the mass of our sun, in a volume 1600 to 1900 light years across. It happens to be more ionized than it ought to be, and ionized in a very even manner across its volume. As astronomers cannot identify (or at least agree on) the mechanism to explain this ionization, the CMZ ionization is mystery number one.
Feynman diagram of electron-positron annihilation, showing the characteristic gamma-ray emission.
Mystery number two is a diffuse glow of gamma rays seen in the same part of the sky as the CMZ, which we know as the constellation Sagittarius. The emissions correspond to an energy of 515 keV, which is a very interesting number– it’s what you get when an electron annihilates with the antimatter version of itself. Again, there’s no universally accepted explanation for these emissions.
So [Pedro De la Torre Luque] and team asked themselves: “What if a wizard did it?” And set about trying to solve the mystery using dark matter. As it turns out, computer models including a form of light dark matter (
called sub-GeV DM in the paper, for the particle’s rest masses
) can explain both phenomena within the bounds of error.
In the model, the DM particles annihilate to form electron-positron pairs. In the dense interstellar gas of the CMZ, those positrons quickly form electrons to produce the 511 keV gamma rays observed. The energy released from this annihilation results in enough energy to produce the observed ionization, and even replicate the very flat ionization profile seen across the CMZ. (Any other proposed ionization source tends to radiate out from its source, producing an uneven profile.) Even better, this sort of light dark matter is consistent with cosmological observations and has not been ruled out by Earth-side dark matter detectors, unlike some heavier particles.
Further observations will help confirm or deny these findings, but it seems dark matter is truly the gift that keeps on giving for astrophysicists. We eagerly await what other unsolved questions in astronomy can be answered by it next, but it leaves us wondering how lazy the universe’s game master is if the answer to all our questions is: “A wizard did it.”
We can’t talk about dark matter without
remembering [Vera Rubin]
.
| 21
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121306",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:20:08",
"content": "There always seems to be a bit ofdeus ex machinawhen people bring dark matter into the discussion. It’s reminiscent of the Luminiferous Aether theory of the 19th century. It’s going to be interesting to see what actually shakes out of this.511 keV gammas are not unusual at all: they are (as stated) a normal consequence of an electron meeting a positron: they annihilate each other, giving up their mass in the form of the equivalent gamma ray energy, just like E=mc^2 says.Evenmakingthe positrons and electrons is not unusual: that’s a normal way a higher-energy gamma ray loses energy: When a gamma ray with an energy higher than 1022 keV passes by a nucleus, it has some probability to convert some of its energy into a matching anti-pair of electron and positron. This process is calledpair production, of course.That electron and positron will wander away at some speed. After a while, after they bounce around a bit and slow down enough, they will eventually run into and orbit (usually) another anti-particle, dance for a bit, then annihilate again, producing a pair of those 511 keV gammas.Soseeingthem is not at all mystery — dark matter is not at all required to explain their production. The question iswhy so muchof them, and why does their source seem to be smoothly-distributed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121316",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:49:17",
"content": "And this particular Dark Matter variant is one of the possible “Why?”s that has 1) not been invalidated experimentally (e.g unlike WIMPs) and 2) makes consistent predictions that match observations thus far.Dark Matter has the annoying property that attempts to disprove it keep failing. Alternatives like MOND proposed thus far also fail to make predictions that match observations (e.g. MOND predicts galactic spin differences, but predicts one consistent spin difference whereas observed galaxies have a whole range of behaviours). ‘Simple’ solutions like slightly modified GR have long been ruled out.Whilst there may potentially be an alternative explanation for observed phenomena that does not involve Dark Matter, it would have to be consistent with all observations that are consistent with Dark Matter, so functionally would have the same properties as Dark Matter (i.e. is gravitationally interacting but with very weak to no interaction with the other 3 forces, is not homogenous across space, is not a universal factor, etc).",
"parent_id": "8121306",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121425",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:22:36",
"content": "“So seeing them is not at all mystery — dark matter is not at all required to explain their production. The question is why so much of them, and why does their source seem to be smoothly-distributed.”The 511 keV emission itself isn’t a good candidate for probing dark matter, because there are lots of ways to produce positrons (you don’t have to produce them from pair production, you can also get quite a bit from beta decay). The article tries to suggest that this is a “mystery” but it’s… not really that big of one. It’s just that there are a lot of possibilities. In fact weknowit’s not all dark matter, because we know there are other sources that have to be there.That’s why the paper’s talking about the ionization level of the CMZ, and specifically pointing out that you could imagine looking for spatial correlations between the two.",
"parent_id": "8121306",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121508",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T02:05:33",
"content": "It comes from effects in higher order forces. Edward E. Smith, PhD wrote a series of excellent texts on the subject beginning with “The Skylark of Space”.",
"parent_id": "8121306",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121680",
"author": "Dark Matter Is Not A Theory",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T18:07:01",
"content": "It’s not the same as ether at all. Ether was an attempt at a theory. Dark matter is a set of observations.All the armchair experts will no doubt jump into these comments so I’ll strongly encourage everyone to watch Dr. Collier’s video on the topic. And remember- dark matter is not a theory, it is a set of observations. We know it exists, we only wonder about the exact nature and origin of it.People should also watch this video because she specifically addresses all the things that laypeople incorrectly think about it, along with all the armchair “expert” ideas about it. It should be mandatory viewing before commenting on articles like this.https://youtu.be/PbmJkMhmrVI?si=GT34wg5GTpjMaXS2",
"parent_id": "8121306",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121323",
"author": "llama-kin",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:08:17",
"content": "…but it leaves us wondering how lazy the universe’s game master is if the answer to all our questions is: “A wizard did it.”um, the game masteristhe wizard",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121331",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:36:11",
"content": "Personally I’ve often wondered if the answer is topological, the expansion rate changing over time because the universe is progressing over a curved surface. Although we may find that those virtual particles that appear to pop in and out of existence in the vacuum add up on average, perhaps mass pulls, to a lesser extent, on things in adjacent time too, so objects act upon themselves. Superimposed concurrent iterations of space time would not only give rise to things like inertia, gravity and magnetism as emergent properties, but also provide a physical mechanism for things like entanglement. Just speculation of course, if anything, it’ll make a good scifi novel one day.",
"parent_id": "8121323",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121382",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:44:08",
"content": "“Personally I’ve often wondered if the answer is topological, the expansion rate changing over time”It can’t really be something global, that’s what the Bullet Cluster data shows. Two galaxies collided, most of the mass of the galaxies just passed straight through each other without any interaction. That’s why theories like MOND had to become super-strained and crazy after the Bullet Cluster data – seriously, the dude who proposed MOND eventually added small amounts of dark matter to more recent models to help explain stuff like the Bullet Cluster (and somewhere, Occam’s Razor cried).Something like dark energy, that could be something global.",
"parent_id": "8121331",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121337",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T15:12:29",
"content": "ah, the comedy of ‘light dark matter’ – light can mean low-mass or bright.if the dark matter is interacting in such a way as to produce positrons then it isn’t dark. the power of dark matter as an explanatory concept is that it can’t be observed except gravitationally. once you find a non-gravitational way to observe it, it stops being dark matter and a new metaphor is needed.this exotic matter that can interact non-gravitationally but hasn’t been observed in a lab raises more questions than it answers. hard to rule it out but",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121378",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:30:12",
"content": "“the power of dark matter as an explanatory concept is that it can’t be observed except gravitationally.”The ‘dark’ here originally meant “does not glow” (as opposed to stars) when Zwicky proposed it and then became “does not couple significantly to photons” after the CMB results.It never meant “can’t be observed except gravitationally.” At one point it was possible that you could have like, tons of compact non-stellar objects (like brown dwarfs) that’d make up dark matter, but eventually the lensing results ruled that out and the CMB results blew them up.And neutrinos would’ve been really nice dark matter for a long time, except we can measure enough now to know there’s not heavy enough (or enough of them).The CMB results tell you there’s a significant amount of ‘stuff’ that 1) compresses normal matter (has gravity) and 2) doesn’t experience significant pressure when there’s a high photon temperature.It could be totally inert, but there’s no need for it to be and it does make things a bit more complicated in the earlier Universe because dark matter would freeze out (decouple) earlier.",
"parent_id": "8121337",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121494",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:41:02",
"content": "i think you don’t understand what i meant. dark matter doesn’t have any properties because it doesn’t exist. things get labeled dark matter when you can’t prove that they don’t exist because you postulate that they aren’t observable except gravitationally. it’s a social phenomenon that i’m talking about, where scientists use this word while scratching their head and saying “something ain’t right.” one says it, then the other says it, and before you know it they’re all saying “yeah dark matter.” a mantra of frustration, not an explanation.the moment it has posited interactions, it doesn’t fit that model anymore because it becomes falsifiable and soon it goes the way of the neutrino as ‘dark matter candidates’ go. dark matter is one of those things where once we know what it really is, we won’t use that phrase anymore. if neutrinos had turned out to be dark matter, no one would ever call it dark matter anymore, we would call it neutrinos.",
"parent_id": "8121378",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121653",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T16:22:54",
"content": "“things get labeled dark matter when you can’t prove that they don’t exist”Yeah, no, this is not true. It’s not a ‘social phenomenon’. It’s an empirical model. I mean, this is how science works: you have a set of observations you can’t explain, so you startparameterizingwhat features would explain them. Then you use that model to explore other things which you can then observe and feed back into the model to constrain the parameters. That’swhatlambda-CDM is – it’s an empirical model to explain observations using a constant cosmological constant (lambda) and ‘cold’ dark matter.Dark matter (as a model) is definitively not “only interacts gravitationally” – over time it hasmoved towards thatbut that’s literally because of the feedback from the observables onto the model. You had tons of different empirical dark matter models, all of which were slowly excluded based on observables.“the moment it has posited interactions, it doesn’t fit that model anymore”Again, this also isn’t true, you can integrate generic interactions into the model without knowing how they work. This is how you determine the parameters of the model you’re working with. Saying “dark matter annihilates into e+/e-” doesn’t actually mean it’s any more falsifiable than “the dark matter density is X” because it’s just a model parameter. The interaction cross-section or branching ratio can smoothly go down to zero, for instance.Using an empirical model to constrain where the parameters of the actual underlying physical model must lie is how modern science works. The difficulty with dark matter is that it turns out that the underlying physical model is a royal freaking bastard to pin down. But there’s nothing that says that the Universe had to be nice to us!",
"parent_id": "8121494",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121361",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:07:56",
"content": "“In the model, the DM particles annihilate to form electron-positron pairs.” So the Phlogiston molecules just sit around on the front porch all day just annihilating at whim? You can’t disprove it, nanny nanny boo boo. “Let’s just assume there’s something that explains everything and we’re done in time for lunch. Physics is easy!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121381",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:40:20",
"content": "“You can’t disprove it, nanny nanny boo boo.”Dark matter is a name for an empirical model which fits a large collection of observations. It’s not a theory that can be proven or disproven. It’s just an empirical model. It’s not real. You propose actual theories which replace that model, andthosecan be proven or disproven.Even if you end up finding some modification of basic laws or whatever which end up explaining all those observables, you must be able to factor out a portion of that modification that you canrepresentas that model. And then it will still be convenient in some cases to represent whatever the changes are in a first-order approximation as that same model anyway.The exact same thing happens in particle physics, where theactualunderlying physics are way more complicated but in the end it’s easier to just represent the action as something simple like pion exchange or something.",
"parent_id": "8121361",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121752",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:12:46",
"content": "A lot of dark matter candidates the particle theorists have tossed out are Majorana particles, which are a theoretical type of fermion which is its own antiparticle. Neutrinos might be majorana fermions, but the double-beta-decay experiments that would prove (or disprove) that assertion are still ongoing.Just because it seems pat doesn’t mean it’s not true; truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes good science looks like bad writing.",
"parent_id": "8121361",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121367",
"author": "MacAttack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:17:54",
"content": "I’m going to be “that guy” and mention “volume 1600 to 1900 light years across”. Huh, that’s a volume ? The wiki linked to does a better job, saying the diameter of the CMZ is the aforementioned, though leaving the reader to calculate it’s volume from the galactic longitudes and latitudes and said diameter.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121393",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:16:08",
"content": "I luv being That Guy, but it’s a volume and is 1600 to 1900 light years across [presumably] its long axis. Volumes have lengths and widths. Stet.",
"parent_id": "8121367",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121504",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T01:19:51",
"content": "Volumes have lengths and widths. Stet.Huh. My decades old learnin’ is woefully out of date, I remember when volumes had lengths, widths, and depths.But on topic, I noticed the crazy choice of units in the article (and probably the paper as well).You use metaphoric units of measurement so that humans can get a grasp of what you’re talking about. Saying a T. Rex is 6 meters tall and his head is 2 meters wide isn’t very evocative, but saying that he could look into the 2nd story window but his head wouldn’t fit because it’s too wide is very evocative, and gives you a mental model that you can use for imagination.For example, was T. Rex bothered by lightning? (Hint: trees were significantly taller at the time, much taller than the dinosaur).Saying “sixty million times the mass of our sun, in a volume 1600 to 1900 light years across” isn’t very evocative. It’s obfuscating the concept, and people just skip over it.Saying “the gas is hundreds of times more dense than the average density of interstellar space” would be a bit better.",
"parent_id": "8121393",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121541",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T05:10:14",
"content": "You can generate matter from information as much as you can generate information from matter, because at the quantum level there is no difference. At the quantum level, matter and information are fundamentally equivalent and interconvertible, with each transformation governed by established physical laws of energy, entropy, and quantum mechanics.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121664",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T17:12:26",
"content": "Well transporters and replicators are still a dream away.",
"parent_id": "8121541",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121893",
"author": "Peter K. Campbell",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T12:44:06",
"content": "Actually many of the so-called unsolved questions in Astronomy HAVE been solved, it’s just that the answers have been ignored.If one takes into account that the detectable Universe is >99% plasma, which is generally accepted, then one should also understand that as plasma contains a high proportion of charged particles and, by definition, when these are moving they create an electric current, this means that the Universe is full of electric currents.These currents, in turn, will then create a magnetic field around them, which will attract more particles, building up larger streams of plasma, hence forming Birkeland currents, like those connecting the Sun to the planets, and which, when energetic enough, can produce visible light in the form of the auroras on Earth and other planets.For a more mathematical treatment of these do a search on Dr Donald Scott’s papers.These currents are orders of magnitude more powerful at attracting matter than gravity, and hence are obviously the most likely explanation for how stars, galaxies and even larger structures are formed. When one takes this into account there is no need for “dark matter”, and many of the other “unsolved questions” no longer remain unsolved, including the “great walls” (which according to conventional theory would have been impossible to form in the commonly accepted age of the Universe), solar system formation (which under a gravity-only model only results in pebbles), the spiral galaxy “winding problem” and much more.Similarly there is no need for “black holes” to be powering galaxies (especially the magical black hole like at the centre of our galaxy that somehow allows huge nebulae to pass through it) – plasmoids can explain the observations.Ditto neutron stars and pulsars that are theoretically spinning so fast they can’t possibly remain in one piece – a cloud of plasma around a normal star that creates and electric circuit that spikes regularly can explain this.Even the mysterious properties of the Sun can be explained with an electric circuit model, where fusion occurs on the surface, not in the centre that is supposedly millions of degrees and atmospheres of pressure, which contradicts what we can see with modern equipment looking into dark sunspots.So, whilst all of the magical and undetectable objects that science entertainers constantly present as settled truths make for great science fiction books and movies, the simplest and most obvious explanation is that they are all the result of electromagnetism.That may not sell a lot of media, but once this is actually accepted and taught the implications are enormous in terms of the technology we can create based on this knowledge, rather than continuing to waste enormous amounts of money, e.g. in the pursuit of hot high-pressure fusion, which is always (at least) 10 years off.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,568.776833
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/23/a-scratch-built-commodore-64-turing-style/
|
A Scratch-Built Commodore 64, Turing Style
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"6502",
"6510",
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"eprom",
"finite state machine",
"sid",
"sram",
"turing",
"VIC"
] |
Building a Commodore 64 is among the easier projects for retrocomputing fans to tackle. That’s because the C64’s core chipset does most of the heavy lifting; source those and you’re probably 80% of the way there. But what if you can’t find those chips, or if you want more of a challenge than plugging and chugging? Are you out of luck?
Hardly. The video below from [DrMattRegan] is the first in a series on
his scratch-built C64 that doesn’t use the core chipset
, and it looks pretty promising. This video concentrates on building a replacement for the 6502 microprocessor — actually the 6510, but close enough — using just a couple of EPROMs, some SRAM chips, and a few standard logic chips to glue everything together. He uses the EPROMs as a “rulebook” that contains the code to emulate the 6502 — derived from
his earlier Turing 6502 project
— and the SRAM chips as a “notebook” for scratch memory and registers to make a Turing-complete random access machine.
[DrMatt] has made good progress so far, with the core 6502 CPU built on a PCB and able to run the Apple II version of
Pac-Man
as a benchmark. We’re looking forward to the rest of this series, but in the meantime, a look back at
his VIC-less VIC-20 project might be informative
.
Thanks to [Clint] for the tip.
| 18
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121266",
"author": "evelynmartin3022",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:20:34",
"content": "Awesome project. Love seeing retro tech brought to life with pure creativity and modern components, excited for the next part in the series.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121281",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:58:34",
"content": "So it’s a microprogrammed machine. Well done. I talked with our new hires when I was working. The processors we designed in the 70s with pencil and paper, they now design with Verilog and VHDL and implement on FPGAs. How the world has changed…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121340",
"author": "spiritplumber@gmail.com",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T15:41:55",
"content": "I’ll take pencil, paper and karnaugh maps over VHDL.I bought a dev board and tried to write a simple gameboy clone in VHDL. I failed completely and it felt like trying to wipe using glass wool.",
"parent_id": "8121281",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121369",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:18:33",
"content": "You would need a few pencils to model a Gameboy with Karnaugh maps…I prefer Verilog over VHDL, but both are very usable. For implementing an existing device, check how much of the logic you can find already done and debugged (CPU, display controller, etc). Then no the rest in the most common language.",
"parent_id": "8121340",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121370",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:25:34",
"content": "…do the rest, not ‘no the rest’If this is your first FPGA project, start with something simpler than a Gameboy. Try basic digital elements, such as counters or shift registers to get a grasp of definition language. Look at other peoples designs and try to understand how they work.A simple digital clock is a good starting project.",
"parent_id": "8121369",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121284",
"author": "rthrthrt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T11:07:58",
"content": "no features?no hdmi? no usb, no mobility (power), no yoistick? no faster memory?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121351",
"author": "Perttu",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:34:18",
"content": "Tell me you didn’t watch the video without telling me you didn’t watch the video",
"parent_id": "8121284",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121322",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:05:38",
"content": "A rebuild of a SID, including both digital and analog parts would be very cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121342",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T15:59:19",
"content": "That and the VICII will be really interesting to see.",
"parent_id": "8121322",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121396",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:25:42",
"content": "Kawari is an excellent VIC replacement. PLA chip and SID chip have been replaced with modern equivalent with good result (except to the few with very sensitive ears)|CIA has been replaced with J-CIA. I think every major part has modern day replacement and still be a full C64",
"parent_id": "8121342",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121328",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:19:54",
"content": "In the past, the EPROM was also being used as a replacement for the C64 PLA.https://www.geocities.ws/sieg.peter/pla/pla.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121501",
"author": "Willy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T01:05:18",
"content": "Akin to the Novasaur,https://hackaday.io/project/164212-novasaur-cpm-ttl-retrocomputer",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121734",
"author": "Yus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T21:14:13",
"content": "Fantastic! What a project.What else are you working in?",
"parent_id": "8121501",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121535",
"author": "William Matthew Frasier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T04:29:17",
"content": "…and not one word about the unit using a 6502 clone in a machine design that REQUIRES the capabilities of the 6510 to actually create a C64 clone. The phrase “but close enough” indicates that the unit will never be able to do what the original could do.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121588",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T12:03:45",
"content": "and by “capabilities” you mean couple extra IO pins mapped to address 0, indeed space technology lost to sands of time, unreplicable forever!",
"parent_id": "8121535",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121724",
"author": "Jonathan Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T20:47:36",
"content": "The fact that this guy was able to build a fully functioning 6502 using 2 EEPROM chips, 2 SRAM chips and a handful of flip flops (plus a latch and some or gates) is amazing IMO.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122114",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T10:15:28",
"content": "8 MB of ROM (or maybe even 16mb?), considering there is only ~60 opcodes you could fit awful lot of straight up translations 1:1 with no computing in those two eproms alone.",
"parent_id": "8121724",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121993",
"author": "Eric H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T17:53:04",
"content": "I am confused…. I think there is a mix up.. “This video concentrates on building a replacement for the 6502 microprocessor — actually the 6510, but close enough”. The 6502 was the Original gen CPU while the 6510 is the enhanced version designed for the original C64. So i am not sure why it was mentioned that they sourced the 6510 as the “alternative” to the original in the C64",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,568.511533
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/virtual-nodes-real-waves-a-colpitts-walkthrough/
|
Virtual Nodes, Real Waves: A Colpitts Walkthrough
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"News",
"Science",
"Software Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"digital",
"multisim",
"nodes",
"oscilloscope",
"simulation",
"sine",
"sine wave",
"sinus",
"virtual space",
"waveform"
] |
If you’ve ever fumbled through circuit simulation and ended up with a flatline instead of a sine wave,
this video from [saisri]
might just be the fix. In this walkthrough she demonstrates simulating a
Colpitts oscillator
using
NI Multisim
14.3 – a deceptively simple analog circuit known for generating stable sine waves. Her video not only shows how to place and wire components, but it demonstrates why precision matters, even in virtual space.
You’ll notice the emphasis on wiring accuracy at multi-node junctions, something many tutorials skim over. [saisri] points out that a single misconnected node in Multisim can cause the circuit to output zilch. She guides viewers step-by-step, starting with component selection via the “Place > Components” dialog, through to running the simulation and interpreting the sine wave output on Channel A. The manual included at the end of the video is a neat bonus, bundling theory, waveform visuals, and circuit diagrams into one handy PDF.
If you’re into precision hacking, retro analogue joy, or just love watching a sine wave bloom onscreen, this is worth your time.
You can watch the original video here
.
| 14
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121225",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:59:52",
"content": "Video seems lacking as an instructional video. It’s mostly a recording of her performing the exercise in Multisim, but she doesn’t actually walk you through it nor explain much as she does it.She says nothing of the theory nor how the circuit works other than showing the manual at the end.The part numbers of the capacitors placed in the sim don’t match up with the manual. It made the circuit theory in the manual confusing at first.The video could do without the music. At least it wasn’t too annoying.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121333",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:50:26",
"content": "hmm. maybe consider a writing position at hackaday: “the sharp eye”. I would welcome such a refreshing view.",
"parent_id": "8121225",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121352",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:35:25",
"content": "These kinds of videos seem to be somewhat common – they might be because of some sort of course requirement to record a learning diary on youtube. The channel is called “saisri study vlogs”.",
"parent_id": "8121225",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121248",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T08:53:30",
"content": "The only oscillator I have ever built in my life was an astable multi-vibrator. I would love to build a faster oscillator.I should probably take some time out of my daily life and build all the basic circuits at least once.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121312",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:38:47",
"content": "you and me both. i even got ahold of a copy of a forest mims transistor book, sigh",
"parent_id": "8121248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121377",
"author": "prosper",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:20:48",
"content": "theres lots to be learned from the good old two transistor astable. As with a lot of ‘simple’ circuits, theres a lot going on, and components plating multiple roles. Play with. Make an astable with MOSFETs. Measure the gate waveforms, and then compare them to what you see with the BJT version. Or buffer the output of a BJT version with a common emitter stage, and see what happens. See if you an make an H-bridge oscillate. Figure out how to do its with an RL timing element instead of an RC one. Can you make it voltage-controlled? can you make the duty cycle voltage controlled?Theres a million things you can learn once you start digging deeply into simple circuits.",
"parent_id": "8121248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121417",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:06:29",
"content": "I should probably take some time out of my daily life and build all the basic circuits at least once.I recommend checking out the circuit which is a hybrid of Colpitts and Armstrong oscillators. It’s called the ArmPitts topology… 8^]",
"parent_id": "8121248",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121300",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T12:28:41",
"content": "Boy do I wish people would stop drawing Colpitts oscillators with the “center tapped” capacitor arrangement. It’s not a helpful depiction and makes it seem like something new when the reality is the feedback network is just a ladder filter. It’s an input series cap, a CLC pi network, and an output series cap. If you just think in terms of two-ports, it makes the whole concept generalize much better, and makes analysis easier, and puts the feedback network into a familiar format which is particularly useful for people learning the circuit for the first time. No idea why that particular drawing has stuck around so persistently.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121422",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:19:50",
"content": "Boy do I wish people would stop drawing Colpitts oscillators with the “center tapped” capacitor arrangement. It’s not a helpful depiction and makes it seem like something new when the reality is the feedback network is just a ladder filter.I could be wrong, but I think that came about because sometimes the circuit uses a tapped inductor rather than two capacitors in series.I have a vague memory that back in the day of tubes it may have been cheaper to tap an inductor than add a capacitor. Also, additional capacitors – especially if they’re physically large and don’t have a very high Q – may result in a circuit that’s less stable and/or more susceptible to electrical noise. So the centre-tapped style of drawing the circuit may be a holdover from those days.",
"parent_id": "8121300",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121507",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T02:03:45",
"content": "The tapped inductor circuit is a Hartley oscillator. See the wikipedia article.It seems to me that both Hartley and Colpitts oscillators are typically drawn in the most confusing manner possible, frequently featuring an emitter follower as the active element. That makes the circuit very hard to understand. Sam’s point is valid. For me, the light went on for understanding the Colpitts today, for the first time. (And I’m 76 years old.) Thanks, Sam.",
"parent_id": "8121422",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121311",
"author": "billmearaa772236cda",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:31:57",
"content": "When we were designing a simple 7 MHz direct conversion receiver, we used a Colpitts oscillator. We built it in LTSpice, really just to have a good printable document. I was astronished when the oscillator fired up in the simulator, and the whole receiver started to work IN THE SIMULATOR! We could put an RF signal at the input and watch an AF signal emerge at the output. It was really pretty neat. You can find the LTSpice file in this site:https://hackaday.io/project/190327-high-schoolers-build-a-radio-receiver. We recently asked people around the world to built the receiver. 56 of them have successfully did so:https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search/label/DC%20RX%20Hall%20of%20FameSaisri’s Colpitts topology is a bit different from what we are used to, but her simulator shows that it works. I urge her to go into our Discord server and then build the receiver that used the same kind of oscillator that she has simulated. Bill",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121380",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:35:41",
"content": "If you are the guy that made the receivers and the videos I want to sincerely thank you for making not only an awesome accessible project but for teaching what every single component does and why and all that. Honestly one of the absolute best series for a ham delving into home brew. Thanks again..And we’re all waiting for the transmitter!73",
"parent_id": "8121311",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121434",
"author": "billmearaa772236cda",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:53:13",
"content": "Thanks — the videos were all made by Dean KK4DAS. We are both on the SolderSmoke podcast.",
"parent_id": "8121380",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121315",
"author": "Al",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:46:52",
"content": "The connection is everything!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,568.308067
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/how-supercritical-co2-working-fluid-can-increase-power-plant-efficiency/
|
How Supercritical CO2 Working Fluid Can Increase Power Plant Efficiency
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"power turbine",
"steam generator"
] |
Using steam to produce electricity or perform work via steam turbines has been a thing for a very long time. Today it is still exceedingly common to use steam in this manner, with said steam generated either by burning something (e.g. coal, wood), by using spicy rocks (nuclear fission) or from stored thermal energy (e.g. molten salt). That said, today we don’t use steam in the same way any more as in the 19th century, with e.g. supercritical and pressurized loops allowing for far higher efficiencies. As covered in a
recent video
by [Ryan Inis], a more recent alternative to using water is
supercritical carbon dioxide
(CO
2
), which could boost the thermal efficiency even further.
In the video [Ryan Inis] goes over the basics of what the supercritical fluid state of CO2 is, which occurs once the critical point is reached at 31°C and 83.8 bar (8.38 MPa). When used as a working fluid in a thermal power plant, this offers a number of potential advantages, such as the higher density requiring smaller turbine blades, and the potential for higher heat extraction. This is also seen with e.g. the shift from boiling to pressurized water loops in BWR & PWR nuclear plants, and in gas- and salt-cooled reactors that can reach far higher efficiencies, as in e.g. the
HTR-PM
and
MSRs
.
In a
2019 article
in Power the author goes over some of the details, including the different power cycles using this supercritical fluid, such as various Brayton cycles (some with extra energy recovery) and the Allam cycle. Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, with
corrosion issues
still being worked out, and despite the claims made in the video, erosion is also an issue with supercritical CO
2
as working fluid. That said, it’s in many ways less of an engineering issue than
supercritical steam generators
due to the far more extreme critical point parameters of water.
If these issues can be overcome, it could provide some interesting efficiency boosts for thermal plants, with the caveat that likely nobody is going to retrofit existing plants, supercritical steam (coal) plants already exist and new nuclear plant designs are increasingly moving towards gas, salt and even liquid metal coolants, though secondary coolant loops (following the typical steam generator) could conceivably use CO
2
instead of water where appropriate.
| 42
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121193",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T02:24:21",
"content": "Must have read my mind. The comments to that video are interesting as well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121210",
"author": "steelman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:07:56",
"content": "<blockquote>That said, today we don’t use steam in the same way any more as in the 19th century, with e.g. supercritical and pressurized loops allowing for far higher efficiencies.<\\blockquote>This sentence isn’t clear. Did we use supercritical and pressurised loops in 19th century or didn’t we. Do we today. I guess a sentence with “unlike” somewhere at the beginning may better convey the message.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121409",
"author": "J. Samson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:53:44",
"content": "Do you really think it’s likely that we achieved “far higher efficiencies” over 100 years ago? You obviously understood it, so what’s the point?",
"parent_id": "8121210",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121823",
"author": "steelman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T06:56:50",
"content": "I understood it because I have the context beyond this article. The whole point of decent sites like this (unlike social media) is to provide clear information also to people who are developing their technical context and may not be as proficient in English as you are.",
"parent_id": "8121409",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121221",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:30:45",
"content": "So long as it is cheaper to not upgrade systems, they will not be upgraded.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121238",
"author": "TacticalNinja",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T07:11:30",
"content": "or any downtime for that matter.This would be beneficial for newly built power plants.",
"parent_id": "8121221",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121406",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:46:44",
"content": "Are you saying that isn’t the right answer?If the upgrade is more expensive than the fuel savings, you’d be crazy to upgrade.This is butt simple, mouth breather MBA math.Even if you want to do accounting in CO2…The upgrade isn’t free. Price is a decent CO2 proxy.",
"parent_id": "8121221",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121262",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:10:17",
"content": "Finally some numbers @11:20 Efficiency of a steam turbine is apparently 40% and with supercritical CO2 this is expected to be increased to 50% and that is quite significant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121302",
"author": "had37b8e5c7066e",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T12:42:13",
"content": "the local old coal fired powerplant here is 47% efficient making eletricity, it was the worlds best when it was build, but that is almost 30 years ago",
"parent_id": "8121262",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121263",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:12:05",
"content": "This article is part of the multi million dollar effort of the fossil fuel industry trying to change how we think of CO2. Much like the stories where they talk about how there are other worse green house gasses or that ‘we need CO2’ messages on social media. At the end of the day, capturing sun energy and using that to heat CO2 to run a turbine is stupid. The less steps in the process the less losses. Battery tech is accelerating thanks to the universities around the world as is solar and wind / wave. If they spent one years of subsidies to nuclear and oil on green power generation the UK would be 100% self sufficient protecting us from would be dictators in the white house or the oil mafia of Russia. But the right hates that because they can’t embezzle oil subsidies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121277",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:46:59",
"content": "brb, gonna go nuke some popcorn real quick",
"parent_id": "8121263",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121293",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T11:46:26",
"content": "“If they spent one years of subsidies to nuclear and oil on green power generation the UK would be 100% self sufficient”This is objectively false.Conversely if all the green subsidies went to nuclear..",
"parent_id": "8121263",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121296",
"author": "Commenter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T11:55:57",
"content": "Green energy has been well proven to become self-sufficient under market terms after initial subsidies, nuclear power only ever exists at the treat of the taxpayer.",
"parent_id": "8121293",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121301",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T12:36:59",
"content": "A nuclear plant can last for many decades, while wind and solar have to be constantly replaced and maintained.",
"parent_id": "8121296",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121308",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:27:11",
"content": "Not really true on either count, Solar installs can and frequently have lasted longer than the nuclear power plants usual expected lifespan as solar is usually fit and forget in large part. Solar often don’t last that long only because the tech has been improving so massively its worth investing to replace the old with the new panels with 15% better efficiency (or maybe even more if you did manage to wait 20 odd years) and likely a much better expected degradation curve on that really good and already set up for solar location.And wind is similar place, though does always require maintenance much of the replacements in practice have been because its easier and cheaper to replace a smaller turbine with one 3 times bigger than it is to get the the permissions to build a new farm of them somewhere else… Though Wind does come into another problem that has cost/benefits as they have scaled up so much – the tip speed and thus erosion of the blades gets worse on these larger turbines, but with larger catchment area they work in a wider wind speed and also produce more electricity overall.Don’t get me wrong though Nuclear power is great, but it really isn’t maintenance free if you want to do it safely, and the expected lifespan and maintenance costs of a reactor is generally not very much if at all in their favour compared to many of the renewable options. The thing that really sells nuclear power as worth the investment (if you can get it) is the predictable and controllable nature of its output.",
"parent_id": "8121301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121314",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:44:37",
"content": "haha i’m gonna go at this from the opposite angle of foldi-oneeverything takes a ton of maintenance, even solar, wind, and nuclear",
"parent_id": "8121301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121354",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:44:33",
"content": "It all comes down to power density.It takes hundreds of wind turbines or thousands of solar panels in combination with huge batteries to replace one nuclear power plant. One cold winter can freeze an entire fleet of wind turbines. One show storm can cover an entire field of solar panels. Even a plain crash won’t stop a nuclear power plant.You can build two or more nuclear reactors on the same spot if you want to save on costs.",
"parent_id": "8121301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121413",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:01:39",
"content": "Solar and wind are different animals.Solar is low maintenance.Wind, not so much.They each have geographic issues.You can bet that they are both being deployed/subsidized in stupid places for political reasons.e.g. Solar in Northern Finland. Windmills in areas with low average wind and high land cost.",
"parent_id": "8121301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121445",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:46:07",
"content": "@Greg A It is a relative measure, when you compare solar which is very much fit and forget for the panels themselves (though sure you could clean them if you like) to Wind turbines with lots of moving parts, and now they are getting so large serious wing tip erosion….Obviously there is still more behind that, but the substations and power transmission lines etc are barely changed between any power source and the sinks, the more distributed renewables will have higher maintance costs for those (probably anyway) but I’d suggest not by a particularly meaningful amount.",
"parent_id": "8121301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121449",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:54:09",
"content": "(though sure you could clean them if you like)You will see significant reduction in output if you don’t. If you don’t maintain them, you can expect the output to be halved because of dirt accumulation. Because most panels are constructed with the cells in series for higher voltage, a shade (think, a stray leaf) on a part of the panel will basically turn that one cell into a resistor that will reduce the output on the whole string and cause a hot-spot to develop that will degrade or even break the panel.",
"parent_id": "8121301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121583",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T11:00:45",
"content": "You will see significant reduction in output if you don’t. If you don’t maintain them, you can expect the output to be halved because of dirt accumulation.@Dude yes and no – in many cases these things are reasonably self cleaning as weather and the day night thermal cycle acts on the dirt upon it and the angle they are mounted encourages it to flush clean, but yes dirt has an impact on the moment to moment performance.To take the example of my own solar install I do clean them probably twice a year and remove a huge quantity of what I assume are diesel soot – certainly an oily and black something along with the odd bit of other debris and the tiny bit of mossy crap that builds up at the metal lip to panel interface. And while you can see the difference in output if you watch as you are cleaning its really not huge, actually pretty close to being lost in the daily variances anyway, its only turning the perfect day into that very very slight high level hazy cloud day – so in terms of worth the cost in man hours to clean ’em… And the bigger bits like leaves that can have a more measurable impact are self cleaning to the point they tend to remove themselves in a few hours…",
"parent_id": "8121301",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121418",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:10:04",
"content": "Green energy has been well proven to become self-sufficient under market terms after initial subsidiesDefine “green energy”.Solar panels and wind turbines are not self-sufficient because of the effect of market cannibalization. At low integration levels, they can sell all the power they produce and make profit at market terms, but at high integration levels they steal each others’ sales because they both tend to generate their power in high peaks, and those peaks occur simultaneously across vast geographical areas, so they tend to cause over-supply on the market which collapses the market price below profitability.The subsidies granted to solar and wind producers are designed specially to combat this: they generally pay the difference between the market price and the cost of production plus some profit, in other words they pay a guaranteed price that is independent of the market conditions to make sure the producers end up in the positive on average. To remove these subsidies entirely would stop new investments into solar and wind, and has historically done so, because in the lack of a price stabilizing mechanism such as export/import or large energy storage capacities, building more solar or wind would destroy profitability.",
"parent_id": "8121296",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121421",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:17:47",
"content": "And even where export/import, or the so-called “virtual battery” is available, it works most effectively in cases where there’s a small producer next to a big consumer, e.g. Denmark next to Germany, UK and France.Meanwhile, as the big consumers are also building up their own inventory of renewable power, this mechanism starts to fail because they’re all producing at the same time, or all lacking power at the same time.Consider that one time zone is a thousand miles wide. All the countries in that area are getting sun at the same time. Likewise for wind power: weather fronts are a thousand miles wide, so everyone’s getting windy or calm at the same time. While there’s local variation, the large scale effects don’t start to even out until you get to continental or even global scale, so simply saying “it’s always sunny/windy somewhere” is highly misleading.",
"parent_id": "8121418",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121426",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:26:10",
"content": "Also, many countries, such as Germany, have right-of-way laws that demand the grid operators to pass all solar and wind power first and then others. This causes a situation where other operators are making a loss because they aren’t allowed to sell as much, which means they jack up their prices at other times and the average power prices go up. This is an indirect subsidy, again without which you couldn’t operate high integration levels of solar and wind power.",
"parent_id": "8121418",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121414",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:02:03",
"content": "At the end of the day, capturing sun energy and using that to heat CO2 to run a turbine is stupid.Did you know that a solar thermal power plant is more efficient than a solar panel? This is because a silicon solar panel cannot capture the entire spectrum of light while a dark surface can get very close to 100% absorption, and the conversion efficiency of the light that a solar panel captures is worse than the thermal efficiency of a turbine.",
"parent_id": "8121263",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121427",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:28:55",
"content": "A solar thermal plant also comes with the ability to store thermal energy – usually in molten salts – so it can operate after sundown and achieves a greater utilization factor, which stabilizes power prices and yields better profits off the market with less subsidies.",
"parent_id": "8121414",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121431",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:38:08",
"content": "Historically they haven’t yielded profits for anybody but the construction company.Historically they’ve been unmaintainable money sinks that are shutdown after completion.Because they can’t cover their ongoing maintenance when new (with all subsidies).",
"parent_id": "8121427",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121432",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:49:13",
"content": "That’s a different issue, largely and ironically caused by naive subsidy policies and insufficient oversight that reward shady business and hyped up promises.There are successful examples, like the Cerro Dominador Solar Thermal Plant in Chile. It makes power at $33/MWh for 17.5 hours a day on average. Its similar counterparts in California and Nevada have all failed because of higher than promised building costs, “technical problems” in construction, and failure to meet promised production numbers. In other words, they simply sold the government the thousand dollar hammer, pocketed the money, and ran.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121435",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:54:46",
"content": "Sorry, up to 17.5 hours, not average.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121438",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:32:24",
"content": "$33/MWh power cost is your example of success?",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121442",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:38:28",
"content": "$33/MWh power cost is your example of success?Yes. It’s quite cheap, especially compared to other renewable projects, but it holds itself even compared to fossil fuels. Gas is generally cheaper where it’s abundant, coal is much more expensive, and nuclear power is somewhat more expensive.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121446",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:46:11",
"content": "Mind, solar PV plants may bid at $20-25/MWh at the lowest but that’s after subsidies and tax breaks – they can’t actually make profit at that price. They only place the bid because the utilities would not buy intermittent power at any price higher.Solar thermal is more valuable for the utilities because it is dispatchable – they can adjust the output according to need.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121448",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:53:46",
"content": "No, it’s just not ‘quite cheap’.Most renewable generation remains hydro.I don’t pay $33/MWh retail, in California.That’s German power money…It’s not the dumbest on earth, I’ll grant you.I have no idea where you’re getting your coal numbers.Coal is cheap, plant on the mine, transport via transmission line.Modern way.Just effectively banned, many places.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121452",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:59:09",
"content": "I don’t pay $33/MWh retail, in California. That’s German power money…No, you probably pay much more, because that’s the producer price without transmission, retail and tax added. $33/MWh is 3.3 cents per kWh and you definitely aren’t paying that little. It’s a factor of 1000 between MWh and kWh.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121458",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T22:17:29",
"content": "Again:You don’t appear to understand how a power pool works.Powerplants bid their marginal/incremental cost. (e.g. Nukes don’t include their fixed costs in their bid.)All plants collect the highest bid dispatched that period for their generation.Not their bid, their bid controls if they generate.Capacity payments handled separately. Peakers don’t make money on power in pools. Nobody makes money at their own bid.Also. Most renewable is dispatchable but constrained, as it’s hydro.Solar PV is not dispatchable, but is pretty schedulable.At $1/Watt, 20 year life, 3 hours average daily full sun equivalent, solar PV gets you about $0.05/kWh cap cost. Very low maintenance costs. Assuming roof space is free.$1/Watt maybe optimistic for installed solar, if you’re paying full retail ripoff price for rooftop, buying land to put it on or are someplace with little sun (e.g. Seattle, England, Lapland, Hades etc).",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121547",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T06:18:10",
"content": "At $1/Watt, 20 year life, 3 hours average daily full sun equivalent, solar PV gets you about $0.05/kWh cap cost.Yes, and that translates to $50/MWh. 50 is more than 33. I don’t understand what your complaint is.Also, solar PV at the residential level may be $1/Watt for the panels, but it’s generally triple that for the total cost including labor and taxes, with some of the subsidies counted in as they apply. The reason why solar PV is popular in places like California is because the county, state, and federal level subsidies and tax breaks combined pay for 70-90% of the cost.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121548",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T06:25:46",
"content": "Powerplants bid their marginal/incremental cost.We’re talking about the breakeven price for the individual power plant, which is the projected price that they have to average to keep operating. The actual price they will get from the market and how much they bid for sales on the power pool is different and subject to when they decide to sell the power – for example, the solar thermal operator can choose to sell after sundown, which nets them a better price than attempting to sell in the middle of the day.",
"parent_id": "8121431",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121407",
"author": "SteveS",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:48:58",
"content": "Wouldn’t want to have to troubleshoot a leaky system, though.Being in a room with a steam leak may be miserable and sloppy, but you know it’s there and unless you stick your face right into a spraying leak probably won’t kill you. CO2 is both toxic in large concentrations and not very detectable to our senses. So… make sure the alarms are really good, I guess ???",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121429",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:33:21",
"content": "and not very detectable to our sensesBreathe into a paper bag and say you can’t tell.The breathing reflex of humans isn’t based on the level of oxygen in your blood, but the level of CO2. You’ll start to feel pretty uncomfortable well before you reach toxic CO2 concentrations.",
"parent_id": "8121407",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121505",
"author": "zp",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T01:35:43",
"content": "Not true for everyone, the hypercapnic breathing response is quite variable. Some people experience a very uncomfortable increase in (involuntary) breathing rate especially when CO2 concentrations in inspired air reach 10%. But some people have a very blunted CO2 response and respomd more to lowered O2 tension.",
"parent_id": "8121429",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121552",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T06:49:15",
"content": "Generally speaking, people hardly notice the lack of O2 in the atmosphere, which is why folks sometimes just drop dead as they walk into fruit warehouses that are filled with pure nitrogen to prevent spoilage.There are signs of hypoxia you can learn to notice, but not an immediate instinctive reaction of discomfort.",
"parent_id": "8121505",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121519",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T03:45:08",
"content": "A high pressure steam leak can be very dangerous. Enough volume and pressure can boil and/or cut flesh.CO2 forms an acid on contact with water. My experience has been that high levels make my eyes sting. That’s not a detection technique that should be acceptable to government regulators, however.I’d feel safer if there were a large number of CO2 detectors rather than a small number of really good ones.Canaries, anyone?",
"parent_id": "8121407",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,568.68834
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/eink-pda-revisited/
|
EInk PDA Revisited
|
Fenix Guthrie
|
[
"handhelds hacks"
] |
[
"3d printed keyboard",
"ESP32",
"pda",
"PDA hack"
] |
In the dark ages, before iOS and Android phones became ubiquitous, there was the PDA. These handheld computers acted as simple companions to a computer and could often handle calendars, email, notes and more. Their demise was spelled by the smartphone, but the nostalgia of having a simple handheld and romanticizing about the 90’s and 2000’s is still there. Fortunately for the nostalgic among our readers, [Ashtf] decided to give us a
modern take on the classic PDAs
.
The device is powered by an ESP32-S3 connected to two PCBs in a mini-laptop clamshell format. It features two displays, a main eInk for slow speed interaction and a little i2c AMOLED for more tasks which demand higher refresh then an eInk can provide. Next to the eInk display is a capacitive slider. For input, there is also a QWERTY keyboard with back resin printed keycaps and white air dry clay pressed into embossed lettering in the keys and finally sealed using nail polish to create a professional double-shot looking keycap. The switches are the metal dome kind sitting on the main PCB. The clamshell is a rather stylish clear resin showcasing the device’s internals and even features a quick-change battery cover!
The device’s “operating system” is truly where the magic happens. It features several apps including a tasks app, file wizard, and text app. The main purpose of the device is on the go note taking so much time has been taken with the excellent looking text app! It also features a docked mode which displays tasks and time when it detects a USB-C cable is connected. Plans exist in the future to implement a calender, desktop sync and even Bluetooth keybaord compatibility. The device’s
previous iteration is on GitHub
with future plans to expand functionality and availability, so stay tuned for more coverage!
This is not the first time
we have covered [Ashtf’s] PDA journey
, and we are happy to see the revisions being made!
| 23
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121168",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:53:57",
"content": "man i miss apps that would start immediately. this just makes me think of palmos.it’s a real frustration that i want a lot of features that require immense complexity (like a web browser, tcp/ip, a deeply-interactive map). but then ialsowant simple things like a clock, and google’s stock clock for android these days is so intensely slow that they added a splash screen to obscure its slow loading, and even so it’s not fully loaded by the time it starts trying to render its screen. two seconds load up the 10 bytes of information represented by the alarm i set. something without the complexity is a non-starter for me, but do i have to give up all of modernity just to get a clock app that loads in an infinitesimal amount of time??",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121219",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:26:23",
"content": "You remind me of my old Motorola phone. From power off, to fully working, took about 5 seconds.Then came the smart phones – which took a full minute to start up.With a “never switch it off” philosophy. Adding a “flight mode” was easier than speeding up the reboot process.",
"parent_id": "8121168",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122793",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T11:15:45",
"content": "I’m pretty sure “flight mode” is so you can still use the offline features of your phone. I know “the cloud” is taking over but it is still possible to have offline content.",
"parent_id": "8121219",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121240",
"author": "TacticalNinja",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T07:17:38",
"content": "I’ve watched a video before talking about some softwares being artificially slow/load longer to make it seem to “do something”. While this may not be the case with all apps, some does this on purpose.",
"parent_id": "8121168",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121320",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:04:44",
"content": "Sam(e) here. Simple things that can actually run in 8 bits of some kind of simple 6502 code should be running independently of the Main Beast. I suspect something truly tiny ATTINY85 (pun intended) might just do the trick admirably well.The way I see it, the ESP32 family of SOCs went The Right Way – it is possible to turn off (aka sleep) the main CPU and let the low-power RTC CPU handle things (not all ESP32s have that – I believe C6 and S3 do, unsure about D1 and C3). Haven’t tried it yet (I am still coming up the learning curve with these), but I’ve read it is possible to throttle down the CPU speed to a bare minimum and make it barely consume anything while in sleep. Basically, wake up, refresh the screen with the clock, go back to sleep. If I remember right, some screen driver chips are advanced enough to automagically keep screen drawn (if using ordinary TFT or AMOLED) without main CPU intervening, so there.Regardless, I long thought that integrating everything under the sun into one proggie running on one CPU was a terrible idea to start with – if the integrated proggie fails, everything integrated with it fails as well, integratively speaking. The clock, etc, fails as well. Why not set it aside as its own picosystem unrelated to the main cpu, then, and do the same with the other things. Bunch of ATTINY85s talking to say, low quiescent RTC board, and, I am pretty sure, I could program one ATTINY to run off the RTC board;s lithium battery, too : – ].Something like that. Small, robust, reliable, and basically modular, when/if one module quits, replace with the equally small robust and reliable module with no downtime.",
"parent_id": "8121168",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121357",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:56:50",
"content": "“Proggie”? At long last it’s come to this? What do you do with the time you (don’t) save?",
"parent_id": "8121320",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121376",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:20:23",
"content": ": – ] I progg zem proggies. Some behave, some (especially conversion ones) partially do. The ones I wrote all Just Work When Need to Work.I prefer simple/robust programming with as few lines of code as possible. Served me well so far. Little ones that don’t need any further refinement are the best. (I am pretty sure of all the utilities I’ve ever wrote in the last 25+ years, more than few are still around, propping up some unimaginable Super Duper Manager’s career).",
"parent_id": "8121357",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121395",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:24:28",
"content": "The aforementioned PalmOS was a 32-Bit OS, however.It originally ran on the Motorola 68000, which is a 16/32 Bit hybrid.https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~michalj/palmos/Memory.htmlThe bad thing about 8-Bit CPUs such as 6502 is the highly limited address space (64KB).Storing lots of data, such as for address book, telephone book etc might be easier with an 16-Bit CPU (1MB address space, often).Because it needs no bank-switching or the use of various segments.",
"parent_id": "8121320",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121241",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T07:24:43",
"content": "While looking at the video, all the time I was thinking how great it would be if the screen would be detachable and have its own power and (less powerful) processor. Then you could use the whole thing for normal, productivity use. But also detach the main screen if all you want is to use it as an e-reader, or something else that doesn’t need the power and versatility of the whole device.The ‘base’ could then be used separately with only the smaller screen, e.g. as a calculator or something. Seems to me, by the way, that there is room for a slightly larger oled, which would help when used in this configuration.The device would become an 80’s style device that never was… ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122352",
"author": "Myself",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T15:59:34",
"content": "Do you remember the PCMCIA PDAs like the Xircom REX? They’d “dock” while slotted into your laptop, then eject to act as standalone devices. Contacts, notes, calendar, etc.Sadly rechargeable batteries weren’t that small yet, so they used 2016 coin cells rather than charging from the host, but a revisit to the idea could fix that.",
"parent_id": "8121241",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121249",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T08:54:55",
"content": "Its very cute, such an adorable device. Normally, seeing hinges and ribbon cables together make me anxious about the longevity but in this case, I’ll let it pass",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122794",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T11:20:41",
"content": "Genuine question: what’s a better way to implement a hinge with circuitry on either side?I thought the radius of the curve in the hinge on this one is relatively gentle so the ribbon cable should last a good long time.",
"parent_id": "8121249",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121255",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T09:36:01",
"content": "Without legacy I/o, legacy access, and LED s’ it’s nothing more than a glorified sticky note.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122795",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T11:22:27",
"content": "“Legacy”? It’s got wifi, bluetooth, and USB, is that not enough legacy for you?",
"parent_id": "8121255",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121260",
"author": "BitMage",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T09:48:47",
"content": "“The main purpose of the device is on the go note taking so much time has been taken with the excellent looking text app!”I’d love to see a period near the middle of that sentence.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121304",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:13:31",
"content": "It’s just missing a comma before the conjunction “so”.",
"parent_id": "8121260",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121313",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:41:30",
"content": "the note, taking so much time, has been taken with the excellent looking text app",
"parent_id": "8121260",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121286",
"author": "rtyh54y",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T11:12:39",
"content": "I can run fuzix on it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121353",
"author": "12L14",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:36:26",
"content": "And will it run Doom? ;)",
"parent_id": "8121286",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121327",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:18:30",
"content": "I also find it funny how the idea of pocket PDA keeps returning every decade under different disguises.IMHO, one of the best clamshell forms (with the shell that closes properly) were the early 1990s “organizers” that could run off two CR2016 (or 2032s, don’t remember) for like two months. I still own the Casio SF I bought (Radio Shack had its exact twin) – it has clock, calendar, notes, etc (also some simple games) – and it runs up to this day. The trouble was with the proprietary (back then) interface that couldn’t really connect to anything to be useful, I am sure by now I can trick it into working with what I need. I just wish it was rooted, no, probably not possible, but if I’d figure out how to transplant some kind of ESP32 into the same shell format, that’s exactly what I need. Also, perhaps, add another screen into the top of the shelf, so that clock and date are shown without opening the shell.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121428",
"author": "J. Samson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:31:56",
"content": "With a little digging, I found some info on the Casio SF line of Digital Diaries, regarding their communication protocols, serial wiring, and communications software here:https://www.imslsoft.com/faq.htm",
"parent_id": "8121327",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121489",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:09:37",
"content": "Excellent find, thank you for sharing!",
"parent_id": "8121428",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122082",
"author": "James A Bilda",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T03:32:41",
"content": "Looks like a different version of the psion. Bring back the psion5",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,568.572401
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/diy-record-cutting-lathe-is-really-groovy/
|
DIY Record Cutting Lathe Is Really Groovy
|
Tyler August
|
[
"cnc hacks"
] |
[
"audio",
"record cutter",
"sound hifi",
"vinyl lathe",
"Vinyl Record"
] |
Back in the day, one of the few reasons to prefer compact cassette tape to vinyl was the fact you could record it at home in very good fidelity. Sure, if you had the scratch, you could go out and get a small batch of records made from that tape, but the machinery to do it was expensive and not always easy to come by, depending where you lived. That goes double today, but we’re in the middle of a vinyl renaissance! [ronald] wanted to make records, but was unable to find a lathe, so decided to take matters into his own hands, and build his own
vinyl record cutting lathe
.
[ronald’s] record cutting lathe looks quite professional.
It seems like it should be a simple problem, at least in concept: wiggle an engraving needle to scratch grooves in plastic. Of course for a stereo record, the wiggling needs to be two-axis, and for stereo HiFi you need that wiggling to be very precise over a very large range of frequencies (7 Hz to 50 kHz, to match the pros). Then of course there’s the question of how you’re controlling the wiggling of this engraving needle. (In this case, it’s through a DAC, so technically this is a CNC hack.) As often happens, once you get down to brass tacks (or diamond styluses, as the case may be) the “simple” problem becomes a major project.
The build log discusses some of the challenges faced–for example, [ronald] started with locally made polycarbonate disks that weren’t quite up to the job, so he has resigned himself to purchasing professional vinyl blanks. The power to the cutting head seems to have kept creeping up with each revision: the final version, pictured here, has two 50 W tweeters driving the needle.
That necessitated a better amplifier, which helped improve frequency response. So it goes; the whole project took [ronald] fourteen months, but we’d have to say it looks like it was worth it. It sounds worth it, too; [ronald] provides audio samples; check one out below. Every garage band in Queensland is going to be beating a path to [ronald’s] door to get their jam sessions cut into “real” records, unless they agree that
physical media deserved to die
.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/01_Test-Cut-6th-April-2025-Move-For-Me.wav
Despite the supposedly well-deserved death of physical media, this isn’t the first
record cutter we have featured
. If you’d
rather copy records than cut them
, we have that too. There’s also the
other kind of vinyl cutter
, which might be more your speed.
| 12
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121138",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:38:03",
"content": "I’ve heard to can record on to acetate sheets. The resulting records will only play a few times before they get worn out, but they are cheaper than vinyl blanks and work great if you just need a record for a one off gig, gift, test or something.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121152",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T22:36:30",
"content": "There’s a whole subculture of people who collect old Soviet records cut into x-ray film, because there wasn’t a lot of material for cutting bootleg radio recordings.",
"parent_id": "8121138",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121155",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T22:53:37",
"content": "Bone Music.",
"parent_id": "8121152",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121477",
"author": "pierut",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T23:11:21",
"content": "I created a spotify playlist with the artists and tracks of bone records i found on ebay.",
"parent_id": "8121152",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121211",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:11:57",
"content": "Getting an artist’s “wax” record was a huge deal back in the day. Usually they would do a small run of a dozen or so just to test it before a real pressing run and yes it definitely wore out super fast. If you knew who to ask or had been around a bit you could find them.",
"parent_id": "8121138",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121374",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:58:14",
"content": "I just got some test pressings, but they’re in vinyl at least. Still kinda fun even with their packaging scratches/blemishes.",
"parent_id": "8121211",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121326",
"author": "SETH",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:17:43",
"content": "Stefan Betke, aka Pole, is a world famous vinyl masterer and artist. Much of his music is comprised of sounds he records of his vinyl production equipment, he coaxes the cold metallic and plastic noises into some quite relaxing dub influenced IDM. Tangential but seemed relevant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121364",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:15:15",
"content": "Please stop saying things like physical media deserves to die. The more you say it, the more it will be picked up by others. Some of us don’t have consistent internet to stream music/videos etc., and actually like to own our own copy of media.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121390",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:00:53",
"content": "Not using physical media doesn’t mean streaming.I ripped all my CDs to FLAC years ago and plugged a good quality bluetooth receiver into my stereo so I can play music off my phone. I could plug a USB drive into the stereo instead, or get something that connects to my NAS over wifi so my whole collection is available at once.I still hold and collect CDs because I like them, but I very rarely play them. I keep them where they are safe. My favorites I’ve already burned perfect copies of so I can play those instead.",
"parent_id": "8121364",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121490",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:09:56",
"content": "very nice project and buildthe physical media must die, thing is just pointlessand as a gen x person who enjoys music on my phone…that may not exist anywhere as physical media? sd cards?, but also has vinyl that I know exists out there in.10’s of milliins of copys, many of which will still exist and be playable long long after existing digital.stuff, bit rots into oblivion, and keep in mind that ALL perception is analog, solive and let live eh!,",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122154",
"author": "Janky Switch",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T15:00:30",
"content": "Something must be in the air…Dinsync is also working on a vinyl cutter –https://www.instagram.com/p/DIzG_qnIW5f/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJloBojUlDsHe’ll be showing it off more at superbooth.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122298",
"author": "RonnieD The Magician",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T07:23:46",
"content": "Yes indeed it’s exciting times for the vinyl format! Thank you all for your support 🎉",
"parent_id": "8122154",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,568.363261
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/british-wartime-periscope-a-peek-into-the-past/
|
British Wartime Periscope: A Peek Into The Past
|
Heidi Ulrich
|
[
"classic hacks",
"Teardown"
] |
[
"cold war",
"imperial",
"MIL-SPEC",
"military",
"night vision",
"periscope",
"photo amplifier",
"relic",
"vintage"
] |
We all know periscopes serve for observation where there’s no direct line-of-sight, but did you know they can allow you to peer through history? That’s
what [msylvain59] documented
when he picked up a British military night vision periscope, snagged from a German surplus shop for just 49 euros. Despite its Cold War vintage and questionable condition, the unit begged for a teardown.
The periscope is a 15-kilo beast: industrial metal, cryptic shutter controls, and twin optics that haven’t seen action since flares were fashionable. One photo amplifier tube flickers to greenish life, the other’s deader than a disco ball in 1993. With no documentation, unclear symbols, and adjustment dials from hell, the teardown feels more like deciphering a British MoD fever dream than a Sunday project. And of course, everything’s
imperial
.
Despite corrosion, mysterious bulbs, and non-functional shutters, [msylvian59] uncovers a fascinating mix of precision engineering and
Cold War paranoia
. There’s a thrill in tracing light paths through mil-spec lenses (the number of graticules seen that are etched on the optics) and wondering what secrets they once guarded. This relic might not
see
well anymore, but it sure makes us look deeper. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or share your unusual wartime relics below.
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121111",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:10:13",
"content": "See, what needs to be done is tear the guts out and put in an ESP332 and Raspberry Pie with SDR to access automated music broadcasts!Seriously, what a cool thing to be able to explore and hopefully not mess up!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121212",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:15:20",
"content": "This article needs more than one comment. This is an example of tech that was a legit super secret war time enterprise. Some day I hope to have a time averaging aeronautical sextant. Soooo archaic but such an extreme example of what was possible with an unlimited military budget. Replacing the radioactive limitation sources…. probably won’t mail order them from Australia.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121291",
"author": "Brain.3GP",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T11:42:08",
"content": "“Since flares were fashionable”I thought of pyrotechnics before jeans and was momentarily unreasonably offended that someone would consider fire unfashionable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121845",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T09:22:06",
"content": "When you think about it we now have not only artificial intelligence but also artificial cold-war paranoia and artificial hype. And artificial concern for artificial dangers and artificial concern for artificial groups of people.Oh and artificial genders I suppose.We went all-in on artificial!The list of course is partial, I did not mention artificial stuff like cryptocurrency and NFT and so many more things.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,568.611003
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/game-boy-pcb-assembled-with-low-cost-tools/
|
Game Boy PCB Assembled With Low-Cost Tools
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"game boy",
"hot plate",
"pinecil",
"rp2350b",
"surface mount",
"tools"
] |
As computers have gotten smaller and less expensive over the years, so have their components. While many of us got our start in the age of through-hole PCBs, this size reduction has led to more and more projects that need the use of surface-mount components and their unique set of tools. These tools tend to be more elaborate than what would be needed for through-hole construction but [Tobi] has
a new project that goes into some details about how to build surface-mount projects without breaking the bank
.
The project here is interesting in its own right, too: a display module upgrade for the classic Game Boy based on an RP2350B microprocessor. To get all of the components onto a PCB that actually fits into the original case, though, surface-mount is required. For that [Tobi] is using a small USB-powered hotplate to reflow the solder, a
Pinecil
, and a healthy amount of flux. The hotplate is good enough for a small PCB like this, and any solder bridges can be quickly cleaned up with some extra flux and a quick pass with a soldering iron.
The build goes into a lot of detail about how a process like this works, so if you’ve been hesitant to start working with surface mount components this might be a good introduction. Not only that, but we also appreciate the restoration of the retro video game handheld complete with some new features that doesn’t disturb the original look of the console. One of the other benefits of using the RP2350 for this build is that it’s a lot simpler than using an FPGA,
but there are perks to taking the more complicated route as well
.
| 13
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121087",
"author": "Sjaak",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:54:31",
"content": "Looks like the display says ‘SHIT’ there, later realize it is prolly ‘SHUT’Love the coloring of the display on this ‘original’ gameboy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121091",
"author": "Tobi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:08:38",
"content": "Hmm…you’re right ;) The used color palette is inspired by the Tetris palette of the Super Gameboy. It’s a feature of the display. It is able to load custom palettes for different games by automatic detection. You can read more about this here:https://www.embedded-ideas.de/posts/250417_open_dmg_display/",
"parent_id": "8121087",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121275",
"author": "Mental2k",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:35:26",
"content": "I think they mean on the hotplate. It’s more like SHIIT to be fair.",
"parent_id": "8121091",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121324",
"author": "Dominic Davis-Foster",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:10:46",
"content": "I have the same hotplate and it can’t get beyond 260°C, so I end up with burned flux and unflowed solder. Mine might be defective but it is certainly SHIT.",
"parent_id": "8121275",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121411",
"author": "Tobi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:56:19",
"content": "There’s a type of paste with a lower melting point – it starts melting at around 140 °C. You can run it on a reflow profile with a peak temperature of 210–220 °C. Honestly, I think the plate is pretty good value. I like my MHP50, but the cheap one actually did a great job.",
"parent_id": "8121324",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121629",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:05:23",
"content": "I use leaded solder paste and by the time plate reaches target 190°C everything is already soldered (stars to melt at around 120).There is something wrong with my unit though, it sometimes scrambles the display until it cools down. But for the price it’s worth it.",
"parent_id": "8121324",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121631",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:11:34",
"content": "There is a very good reason these things are explicitly sold as “preheaters” and not reflow plates. You’re still expected to use hot-air from above to hit the actual reflow temp.",
"parent_id": "8121324",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121157",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:00:43",
"content": "The Iron-y of using dual 150mhz Cortex M33 to run the screen of a 4mhz 808/Z80. Pun intended.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121187",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T01:35:20",
"content": "I stand amazed. Both at the RPi foundation for producing this chip, and supplying usable documentation and tools. And [Tobi] for the stellar project. The game detection and excellent work to find a proper screen with suitable aspect ratio is top notch work. He is making me hope this is sold as a kit at some point. Also sad I have sold or given away my DMG. The color pallete idea was super cool. I am assuming I will see a Macho Nacho version of this soon.Curious if this would be applicable to other systems, or could be used to make one’s own bespoke console, possibly inside a replacement GBA shell for example.",
"parent_id": "8121157",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121233",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T06:33:47",
"content": "Yeah, especially the pico-sdk is super high quality compared to all other microcontroller vendor libraries out there. It’s not perfect, but compared to the crap that ST and others ship, it is awesome and really well designed.",
"parent_id": "8121187",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121401",
"author": "Tobi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:35:07",
"content": "This is a very nice feedback, thank you!",
"parent_id": "8121187",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121330",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:29:47",
"content": "I know what you mean. It’s useful but feels so wrong same time.The typical HaD audience (US Americans) probably feels no regret aslong as cost-benefit-radio is okay.But to me, as a foolish, romantic European, it hurts a bit.See, all the sophisticated technology has to do slave labor for such a primitive task.It’s like dedicating a whole Pentium 4 computer running a sophisticated OS with billions of lines of code.. to just make an LED blink.Cool, but so wrong! All the ingeniousity of human mind goes down the drain for such a basic task,that could have been done with a blinker relays, an NE555 or a vintage blinking incandescent lamp.",
"parent_id": "8121157",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121404",
"author": "Tobi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:42:56",
"content": "I think there’s another layer of irony here. It’s not the dual M33 cores that make this possible – it’s the PIO unit, which is limited to just 10 instructions ;) Most of the work is actually done by the peripherals.",
"parent_id": "8121157",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,568.836429
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/why-physical-media-deserved-to-die/
|
Why Physical Media Deserved To Die
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art"
] |
[
"audio cassette",
"physical media",
"vinyl records"
] |
Over the course of more than a decade, physical media has gradually vanished from public view. Once computers had an optical drive except for ultrabooks, but these days computer cases that even support an internal optical drive are rare. Rather than manuals and drivers included on a data CD you now get a QR code for an online download. In the home, DVD and Blu-ray (BD) players have given way to smart TVs with integrated content streaming apps for various services. Music and kin are enjoyed via smart speakers and smart phones that stream audio content from online services. Even books are now commonly read on screens rather than printed on paper.
With these changes, stores selling physical media have mostly shuttered, with much audiovisual and software content no longer pressed on discs or printed. This situation might lead one to believe that the end of physical media is nigh, but the contradiction here comes in the form of a strong revival of primarily what used to be considered firmly obsolete physical media formats. While CD, DVD and BD sales are plummeting off a cliff, vinyl records, cassette tapes and even media like 8-track tapes are undergoing a resurgence, in a process that feels hard to explain.
How big is this revival, truly? Are people tired of digital restrictions management (DRM), high service fees and/or content in their playlists getting vanished or altered? Perhaps it is out of a sense of (faux) nostalgia?
A Deserved End
Ask anyone who ever has had to use any type of physical media and they’ll be able to provide a list of issues with various types of physical media. Vinyl always was cumbersome, with clicking and popping from dust in the grooves, and gradual degradation of the record with a lifespan in the
hundreds of plays
. Audio cassettes were similar, with especially Type I cassettes having a lot of background hiss that the best
Dolby noise reduction
(NR) systems like Dolby B, C and S only managed to tame to a certain extent.
Add to this issues like wow and flutter, and the joy of having a sticky capstan roller resulting in tape spaghetti when you open the tape deck, ruining that precious tape that you had only recently bought. These issues made CDs an obvious improvement over both audio formats, as they were fully digital and didn’t wear out from merely playing them hundreds of times.
Although audio CDs are better in many ways, they do not lend themselves to portability very well unlike tape, with anti-shock read buffers being an absolute necessity to make portable CD players at all feasible. This same issue made data CDs equally fraught with issues, especially if you went into the business of writing your own (data or audio) CDs on CD-Rs. Burning coasters was exceedingly common for years. Yet the alternative was floppies – with LS-120 and Zip disks never really gaining much market share – or early Flash memory, whether USB sticks (MB-sized) or those inside MP3 players and early digital cameras. There were no good options, but we muddled on.
On the video side VHS had truly brought the theater into the home, even if it was at fuzzy NTSC or PAL quality with astounding color bleed and other artefacts. Much like audio cassette tapes, here too the tape would gradually wear out, with the analog video signal ensuring that making copies would result in an inferior copy.
Rewinding VHS tapes was the eternal curse, especially when popping in that tape from the rental store and finding that the previous person had neither been kind, nor rewound. Even if being able to record TV shows to watch later was an absolute game changer, you better hope that you managed to appease the VHS gods and had it start at the right time.
It could be argued that DVDs were mostly perfect aside from a lack of recording functionality by default and pressed DVDs featuring unskippable trailers and similar nonsense. One can also easily argue here that DVDs’ success was mostly due to its DRM getting cracked early on when the CSS master key leaked. DVDs would also introduce region codes that made this format less universal than VHS and made things like snapping up a movie during an overseas vacation effectively impossible.
This was a practice that BDs doubled-down on, and with the encryption still intact to this day, it means that unlike with DVDs you must pay to be allowed to watch BDs which you previously bought, whether this cost is included in the dedicated BD player, or the license cost for a BD video player for on the PC.
Thus, when streaming services gave access to a very large library for a (small) monthly fee, and cloud storage providers popped up everywhere, it seemed like a no-brainer. It was like paying to have the world’s largest rental store next door to your house, or a data storage center for all your data. All you had to do was create an account, whip out the credit card and no more worries.
Combined with increasingly faster and ubiquitous internet connections, the age of physical media seemed to have come to its natural end.
The Revival
US vinyl record sales 1995-2020. (Credit:
Ippantekina
with RIAA data)
Despite this perfect landscape where all content is available all the time via online services through your smart speakers, smart TVs, smart phones and so on, the number of vinyl record sales
has surged
the past years despite its reported death in the early 2000s. In 2024 the vinyl records market
grew another few percent
, with more and more
new record pressing plants
coming online. In addition to vinyl sales, UK cassette sales
also climbed
, hitting 136,000 in 2023. CD sales meanwhile have kept plummeting, but not as strongly any more.
Perhaps the most interesting part is that most of newly released vinyl are new albums, by artists like Taylor Swift, yet even the classics like Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac keep selling. As for the ‘why’,
some suggest
that it’s the social and physical experience of physical media and the associated interactions that is a driving factor. In this sense it’s more of a (cultural) statement, as a rejection of the world of digital streaming. The sleeve of a vinyl record also provides a lot of space for art and other creative expressions, all of which provides a collectible value.
Although so far CD sales haven’t really seen a revival, the much lower cost of producing these shiny discs could reinvigorate this market too for many of the same reasons. Who doesn’t remember hanging out with a buddy and reading the booklet of a CD album which they just put into the player after fetching it from their shelves? Maybe checking the lyrics, finding some fun Easter eggs or interesting factoids that the artists put in it, and having a good laugh about it with your buddy.
As some responded when asked, they like the more intimate experience of vinyl records along with having a physical item to own, while streaming music is fine for background music. The added value of physical media here is thus less about sound quality, and more about a (social) experience and collectibles.
On the video side of the fence there is no such cheerful news, however. In 2024 sales of DVDs, BDs and UHD (4K) BDs
dropped by 23.4%
year-over-year to below $1B in the US. This compares with a $16B market value in 2005, underlining a collapsing market amidst brick & mortar stores either entirely removing their DVD & BD section, or massively downsizing it. Recently Sony also
announced
the cessation of its recordable BD, MD and MiniDV media, as a further indication of where the market is heading.
Despite streaming services repeatedly bifurcating themselves and their libraries, raising prices and constantly pulling series and movies, this does not seem to hurt their revenue much, if at all. This is true for both audiovisual services like Netflix, but also for audio streaming services like Spotify, who are seeing increasing demand (
per Billboard
), even as digital track sales are seeing a pretty big drop year-over-year (-17.9% for Week 16 of 2025).
Perhaps this latter statistic is indicative that the idea of ‘buying’ a music album or film which – courtesy of DRM – is something that you’re technically only leasing, is falling out of favor. This is also illustrated by
the end of Apple’s iPod
personal music player in favor of its smart phones that are better suited for streaming music on the go. Meanwhile many series and some movies are only released on certain streaming platforms with no physical media release, which incentivizes people to keep those subscriptions.
To continue the big next-door-rental-store analogy, in 2025 said single rental store has now turned into fifty stores, each carrying a different inventory that gets either shuffled between stores or tossed into a shredder from time to time. Yet one of them will have That New Series™, which makes them a great choice, unless you like more rare and older titles, in which case you get to hunt the dusty shelves over at EBay and kin.
It’s A Personal Thing
Humans aren’t automatons that have to adhere to rigid programming. They have each their own preferences, ideologies and wishes. While for some people the DRM that has crept into the audiovisual world since DVDs, Sony’s MiniDisc (with initial ATRAC requirement),
rootkits on audio CDs
, and digital music sales continues to be a deal-breaker, others feel no need to own all the music and videos they like and put them on their NAS for local streaming. For some the lower audio quality of Spotify and kin is no concern, much like for those who listened to 64 kbit WMA files in the early 2000s, while for others only FLACs ripped from a CD can begin to appease their tastes.
Reading through the many reports about ‘the physical media’ revival, what jumps out is that on one hand it is about the exclusivity of releasing something on e.g. vinyl, which is also why sites like Bandcamp offer the purchase of a physical album, and mainstream artists more and more often opt for this. This ties into the other noticeable reason, which is the experience around physical media. Not just that of handling the physical album and operating of the playback device, but also that of the offline experience, being able to share the experience with others without any screens or other distractions around. Call it touching grass in a socializing sense.
As I mentioned already in an
earlier article
on physical media and its purported revival, there is no reason why people cannot enjoy both physical media as well as online streaming. If one considers the rental store analogy, the former (physical media) is much the same as it always was, while online streaming merely replaces the brick & mortar rental store. Except that these new rental stores do not take requests for tapes or DVDs not in inventory and will instead tell you to subscribe to another store or use a VPN, but that’s another can of worms.
So far optical media seems to be still in freefall, and it’s not certain whether it will recover, or even whether there might be incentives in board rooms to not have DVDs and BDs simply die. Here the thought of having countless series and movies forever behind paywalls, with occasional ‘vanishings’ might be reason enough for more people to seek out a physical version they can own, or it may be that the feared erasure of so much media in this digital, DRM age is inevitable.
Running Up That Hill
Original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 from 1979.
The ironic thing about this revival is that it seems influenced very much by streaming services, such as with the appearance of a portable cassette player in Netflix’s
Stranger Things
, not to mention Rocket Raccoon’s original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 in Marvel’s
Guardians of the Galaxy
.
After many saw Sony’s original Walkman in the latter movie, there was a sudden surge in EBay searches for this particular Walkman, as well as replicas being produced by the bucket load, including 3D printed variants. This would seem to support the theory that the revival of vinyl and cassette tapes is more about the experiences surrounding these formats, rather than anything inherent to the format itself, never mind the audio quality.
As we’re now well into 2025, we can quite confidently state that vinyl and cassette tape sales will keep growing this year. Whether or not new (and better) cassette mechanisms (with Dolby NR) will begin to be produced again along with Type II tapes remains to be seen, but there seems to be an inkling of hope there. It was also reported that Dolby is licensing new cassette mechanisms for NR, so who knows.
Meanwhile CD sales may stabilize and perhaps even increase again, in the midst of still a very uncertain future optical media in general. Recordable optical media will likely continue its slow death, as in the PC space Flash storage has eaten its lunch and demanded seconds. Even though PCs no longer tend to have 5.25″ bays for optical drives, even a simple Flash thumb drive tends to be faster and more durable than a BD. Here the appeal of ‘cloud storage’ has been reduced after multiple incidents of data loss & leaks in favor of backing up to a local (SSD) drive.
Finally, as old-school physical audio formats experience a revival, there just remains the one question about whether movies and series will soon only be accessible via streaming services, alongside a veritable black market of illicit copies, or whether BD versions of movies and series will remain available for sale. With the way things are going, we may see future releases on VHS, to match the vibe of vinyl and cassette tapes.
In lieu of clear indications from the industry on what direction things will be heading into, any guess is probably valid at this point. The only thing that seems abundantly clear at this point is that physical media had to die first for us to learn to truly appreciate it.
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[
{
"comment_id": "8120947",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:16:25",
"content": "For me, it’s owning a copy of (licensed, I know) media that can’t easily be revoked obsoleted or somehow made useless to me. I’m sick of having to continually pay or lose access.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120949",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:22:15",
"content": "“I’m sick of having to continually pay or lose access.”And that is very good reason to have local storage as well as physical media. Sites on the net come and go. On-line content comes and goes. So, best to have what you ‘own’ local … in your hands. Otherwise, like a cell phone, they’ll nickel and dime you to death … keep paying if you want the service/storage/whatever.",
"parent_id": "8120947",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120989",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:51:42",
"content": "Sounds like a strong argument for a NAS. Shame HDDs can be very expensive.",
"parent_id": "8120949",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121019",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:32:24",
"content": "HDD are cheap as hell. You can store ~5700 non compressed CD on a $58 4TB drive. For a CD you’d pay $10, it’s like 1000x cheaper than the CD medium.",
"parent_id": "8120989",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121032",
"author": "Reactive Light",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:46:56",
"content": "HDDs won’t be cheap as hell (or anything else) for much longer, thanks to tariffs. But then, that will apply to a lot of other storage media. I think I’ll learn to play my music & movies in my head. :-)",
"parent_id": "8121019",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121043",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:02:15",
"content": "Where are you getting $58 4TB drives? Asking for erm … a friend lol. I only seem to see them closer to $100 unless they are “refurbished” or used. I recently built a truenas server out of one of those mini pc’s and am in need of more bulk storage.",
"parent_id": "8121019",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121071",
"author": "hartl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:11:44",
"content": "4 TB for 58 USD is probably a SMR drive with all its shortcomings. Expect to pay 25 USD/TB for a more robust conventional drive – which is still a bargain compared to other media, physical or virtual.",
"parent_id": "8121019",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121156",
"author": "Lonnie Stoudt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:00:39",
"content": "Sure, until that HDD self-destructs for no reason other than industry-wide yet historically and inexcusably faulty USB control code, power management and hardware which allows an HDD to be dropped from the buss, regardless of whether it is engaged in a write operation at the time, just because the system HAD to look for, or “became aware” of another USB device, and so was ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to drop the user-initiated data-write session, without proper finalazation of the process, DESTROYING the drive’s directories instantly.",
"parent_id": "8121019",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121171",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T00:10:17",
"content": "And where are you going to get the files to fill it with? Most pirated copies are rips from physical media. Otherwise you’re at the mercy of what was popular enough to be pirated, not what you could got to a store and justbuy.",
"parent_id": "8121019",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121112",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:13:49",
"content": "I guess I don’t see internal HDDs as that expensive. 4TB HDDs at New Egg are in the $100 range +-$20. Not bad at all in my mind. Portables aren’t that bad either … 5TB for $114 (just checked).I do have a file server at home, actually two at the moment. I have a headless Ryzen 2400G powered tower (current server) and a RPI-5 8GB all setup (new server) as I am thinking of moving to the RPI for the primary home file server to save some space in the home office. The RPI-5 system sits on a shelf with a PiDP-10 front panel for display anyway. Both are connected to a UPS for power protection. I don’t do RAID as there is nothing time critical on getting a server restored after a system failure of some sort. If it takes a day or two to restore from a backup, or need to build a new SSD OS drive because it failed, so be it. I just keep good backups of the file server for the eventuality that I hope never happens… BTW, I have lost a drive or two data drives over the years. No biggie. Restore and back to where you were (or close enough). Currently spinning around 2.7TB, so have plenty of breathing room.",
"parent_id": "8120989",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121205",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:01:57",
"content": "Depending on where you live, that 1 TB is closer to 100 for SSD. Id not bother with any storage media utilizing moving parts for anything else than quarterly backups.",
"parent_id": "8121112",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120950",
"author": "tdatatech",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:22:23",
"content": "CJay my wife and I was just having this very discussion last night. She’s finally realizing why I’ve been against online gaming that have in game purchases, or places where you can buy movies online like fandango. At any moment they could pull the plug and you’ll be S.O.L. with no recourse.",
"parent_id": "8120947",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120969",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:06:58",
"content": "There is really only one answer to that. Arrr!",
"parent_id": "8120947",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121165",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:37:37",
"content": "yep. As the article says ” 2025 said single rental store has now turned into fifty stores, each carrying a different inventory that gets either shuffled between stores” – for a while it was more convenient to pay for a service – now the market has fragmented so much it’s easier to just download a copy and not pay. This is the same mistake the music industry made..",
"parent_id": "8120969",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122620",
"author": "NQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T16:00:22",
"content": "Ha ha! I see what you did there! Ahoy!",
"parent_id": "8120969",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121051",
"author": "Leithoa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:32:41",
"content": "Clouds float across the moon covering your house in darkness. The faint scrape of grit across concrete is the only sound that could give warning before your doors give way to the well placed kick near the latch and flashbangs disorient you. The year is 2033 and your license to Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller has been revoked. The Sony License Enforcement Team streams into your house as you stumble, trying to reorient yourself, before being tackled to the ground. You lay helplessly hogtied on your livingroom floor as you watch them take stacks of CDs from your house and throw them into a mobile shredding truck. The fine glitter of aluminum sparkles as the clouds complete their lunar transit.",
"parent_id": "8120947",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121123",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:40:57",
"content": "That’s why I get my decorating ideas every month from Harder Homes and Gardens.",
"parent_id": "8121051",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121190",
"author": "NoWay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T01:46:32",
"content": "Absolutely! Not owning it but paying for as it is “sold” to you as if you do is the new screwing over from business. Check out Louis Rossmann’s yt channel for more on this type of marketing ploy.Would much rather actually own physical media then some ephemeral bit that can be made to vanish at the license holder’s whim.",
"parent_id": "8120947",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121256",
"author": "Steven Naslund",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T09:37:29",
"content": "Or anyone who in the past purchased Sony EBooks and lost their entire library. Or maybe that music collection on Microsoft Zune.",
"parent_id": "8120947",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120954",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:26:55",
"content": "— “…vinyl records, cassette tapes and even media like 8-track tapes are undergoing a resurgence, in a process that feels hard to explain.”People like concreteness and tactility – I think it’s something primal. Digital files on a drive or in the cloud are convenient – they take up a tiny fraction of the space needed for physical media, and they can often be accessed from anywhere on a whim. But they have no ‘heft’; they can’t be held in the hand nor seen directly, they’re essentially an abstraction.— “Are people tired of digital restrictions management (DRM), high service fees and/or content in their playlists getting vanished or altered? Perhaps it is out of a sense of (faux) nostalgia?”I would say ‘Yes’ to all of the above – but that’s in addition to the primalism I mentioned earlier. Also, is their such a thing as “faux nostalgia”? It’s certainly abstract, because it’s an emotion, or a state of mind. But false? I’d say that’s not even wrong – for me it simply doesn’t parse.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120992",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:54:52",
"content": "For those that move a lot “heft” is the last thing one wants.",
"parent_id": "8120954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121160",
"author": "Lonnie Stoudt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:13:49",
"content": "Also, in 60 years of handling vinyl, cassette and reel tape (and yes, even CDs) i have damsged maybe 2-3 specimens of of each format thru mishandling or bad storage…Conversely, I have had MANY HDDs tank themselves over the inherent, inexcusable sloppiness of the overall USB protocols. They drop drives for no reason in mid-write cycle, and there went your entire multi-terabyte collection.",
"parent_id": "8120954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121191",
"author": "fhunter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T01:49:04",
"content": "Why are you connecting your hard disk over USB?!",
"parent_id": "8121160",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121206",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:04:56",
"content": "Probably because he hasnt got any other option. Common sense says not to plug in any new devices while using an external drive via usb though.",
"parent_id": "8121191",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121257",
"author": "Steven Naslund",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T09:40:43",
"content": "The fact that’s a thing kind of proves the point. Do you think most non-tech people think that way ? USB was meant to be hot insertable so people expect ALL devices to work that way.",
"parent_id": "8121206",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121230",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T06:21:23",
"content": "I have never have that happen unto me, and i use computers since childhood. My first PC was 1992 with an Am386-DX40 and my first USB harddrive was, if i remember correctly, somewhere 98-99ish.I had accidentally dropped one while running (poor 200 GB was so young ;.;), lost some to heat failure, but never ever has an USB drive failed on me because i put some other device into the USB tree.Maybe Linux is just clever enough to redo the write behind my back when it fails or whatever but yeah.",
"parent_id": "8121160",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121336",
"author": "FiveEyesNoPrize",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T15:08:44",
"content": "The tactility point you raise is a key selling point for me.I still buy, collect and watch LaserDisc movies. For me (and from a technical standpoint, at least on good equipment) it was the peak of physical analog video. I enjoy the process of finding the rare cuts, winning them in action or otherwise landing a deal, receiving them and, in many cases, opening them for the first time. Watching a movie on LaserDisc is a process, and I very much enjoy the ritualistic approach. I have to really think about what I want to watch and commit to. It’s not like Netflix et al where you just “play whatever” and let it run in the background. It’s like a tea ceremony… deliberate and pointed.I also enjoy the cover art, especially in the case of gatefolds or collectors editions. When studios weren’t constrained to a tiny little box they could make much more engaging and elaborate art.Yes, Blu-ray is technically superior, but LaserDisc still feels like it has soul. I have many cuts considered “the only real way” to see the film. As example, the LaserDisc of The Matrix was the culmination of all the technical expertise the industry had gathered to that point… and it’s the only way to see it with the original theatrical color timing. It just looks RIGHT, for anyone old enough to have seen it in theaters. Can’t beat the audio tracks, either. I still think Apollo 13’s DTS LaserDisc audio track is unmatched, even by Blu-ray. A lot of care and deliberate mastering choices went into making even the most pedestrian LaserDisc cuts, and almost all of them sound better than their contemporaries.The best part is I have all the films and classics I care about on a shelf and nobody can take them from me or limit my access to them.If that’s “faux nostalgia” or even misplaced idealism, so be it.",
"parent_id": "8120954",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120955",
"author": "gildarts",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:27:52",
"content": "Rocket Raccoon’s original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.… Peter Quill’s Walkman.Until DRM free downloads are the standard, physical media will have to be pried from my cold dead hands.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121172",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T00:12:44",
"content": "The standard answer to filling those big, fancy NASs has been “just pirate it”Well guess what? Most pirated copies come from physical media. Without physical media you’re at the mercy of whatever was popular enough for someone to want to go to the trouble of cracking the DRM on. Or it’s up to you to crack the DRM yourself, good luck.",
"parent_id": "8120955",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121208",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:06:14",
"content": "Again, the jolly roger site provides plenty of software enabling you to crack the drm yourself, so a moot point really.",
"parent_id": "8121172",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122206",
"author": "Kluge",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T20:18:38",
"content": "Most pirated copies come from folks using something like OBS to record content from streaming services… Or so I’ve heard, from a friend…",
"parent_id": "8121172",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123187",
"author": "kooz",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T00:58:25",
"content": "Your friend is deeply misinformed.",
"parent_id": "8122206",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120956",
"author": "Old Joe.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:35:55",
"content": "For me, physical media has always been about freedom to view the media on my terms. I love the idea of analog, but hate the quality degradation. I’m not a fan of anything stored on someone else’s machine. As Arthur Weasley said, “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121161",
"author": "Lonnie Stoudt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:19:30",
"content": "Ridiculous, that last line…The command is in the FILE or EDIT menu, depending on OS and versioning…FILE/ COPY or FILE/SHARE…See? SO easy to share a digital book. NOT to say this makes eBooks better, but they are NOT so difficult to hand off as posited above, lol…",
"parent_id": "8120956",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120957",
"author": "Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:40:16",
"content": "Here in southern germany, small bands selling their CDs on the street/parking lots is still very much a thing. I get quite a bit of my music that way.Also physical books! Hard to do the “hey i liked this book, it might interrest you, here take it” with digital media.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121053",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:37:49",
"content": "Yeah, here in the US, small bands routinely have vinyl on sale at the merchandise table, and some even have CD’s. I sure appreciate that and always get a CD, as my cars both have players for them. Neither of my cars has any internet/wifi connectivity whatsoever and I’m going to do my best to keep it that way.",
"parent_id": "8120957",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121092",
"author": "Diego",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:14:01",
"content": "I’m more of a fan of digital books, but being honest, when someone sends me a digital book they liked, it’s mostly ignored right away, but when someone brings me a physical one, it’s like things got more serious, and I’m much more likely to actually read it,",
"parent_id": "8120957",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121100",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:32:07",
"content": "And this is often the part of reading a good book that gives me the most pleasure!A) Have limited bookshelf spaceB) Have someone to talk about a good book withC) My good deed for the day",
"parent_id": "8120957",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121502",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T01:11:52",
"content": "Just coming back from Japan – Whole aisles in reputable stores are dedicated to burnable optical discs. I was disappointed they didn’t have floppies however.I agree the physical media hype is some nostalgia, false or not, but it’s also a response to “the cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away” and the fact that services won’t stop their BS until it’s just as expensive and miserable as US cable TV, where you pay through the nose for the pleasure of watching mostly ads. The next wave of piracy on the horizon that the studios will be crying about will be entirely brought about by their own treacherous business models.",
"parent_id": "8120957",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120959",
"author": "Tito Ferreira Figueiredo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:51:14",
"content": "Blu-ray Disc encryption already has been cracked though",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121244",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T07:36:17",
"content": "What good is that if some series and movies never are produced physically anymore?",
"parent_id": "8120959",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122656",
"author": "Jim Shortz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T18:35:48",
"content": "Well (just about) everything new is garbage, so problem solved :-)",
"parent_id": "8121244",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120960",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:56:39",
"content": "Oh vinyl. The sleeves were a deposit of added value you can’t attach to a streamed album. Jethro Tull’s “Thick as Brick” included a little phony newspaper which reportedly took more effort than the album itself, Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” had the lyrics princesa in the back of a billion dólares Bill, and on and on… plus your bunch of LPs gave you cred among your friends.I think we’re yearning for the return of that experience and the surety of owning physical touchable stuff you can strut to family and friends.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121231",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T06:30:00",
"content": "Not only that, there is no (working) DRM on physical media. People can simply use them whenever they like, even when out in the sticks with just one line left on their Edge connection.My father had a whole library of, erm, backed up DVDs with him on his camping trips back in the noughts for example, a big box with ~200 DVDs. Nowadays all that would fit on a single big USB stick. ^^’",
"parent_id": "8120960",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120962",
"author": "Puddle_Pirate_extraordinaire",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:58:50",
"content": "Surprised the minidisc didn’t get mentioned.2002-2004 I worked in a very rural country music radio station in high school; essentially a repeater for a corporate station out of Atlanta. The exception being local sports and events. I have vivid memories of using 1-track mobius strip “carts” that we programmed 30 second commercials onto. There were three players we’d load for a commercial break, and 9 commercials per break so we’d have to swap carts as they played, making sure to cue them up to the start of the commercial. That place was a working museum of physical audio media. We had a license to rebroadcast regional sports and would record them on a reel-to-reel deck for playback later. Fortunately we had a more modern (early 90s) Keyboard User Interface based software package to program commercials for the more expensive sports events.All that said, as much fun as it was to physically plug and play all that legacy hardware for a 12 hour shift. It got old after a few months doing it day in and out.I will also admit it was fun to see how fast I could sort through the massive library of pirated CD’s at stop light just to find that one track I wanted to hear. We’d also make custom mix-CDs for house parties and girlfriends who wanted to get the hot new album before it released to make their friends jealous. Thank you Napster, mIRC, BTjunkie, and Pirate Bay for making that possible.Now a days if my aging nerd buddies and I pirate something to physical media its more about finding the highest quality copy we can and saving to something we own.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121103",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:36:00",
"content": "Minidisc was always a mess. Too encumbered to go mainstream, kinda Beta vs VHS all over again.There wasonegood Sony deck and a couple good portables if you were into field recordings, but the ecosystem was small. You mostly couldn’t duplicate discs, and you had to use that one odd sound format.",
"parent_id": "8120962",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121232",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T06:32:20",
"content": "As a teenager i had a DCC from when they where sold off and i loved it, had several mixtapes with recorded MOD and Midi files, never was into mainstream music that much.",
"parent_id": "8121103",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120963",
"author": "Khai",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:59:13",
"content": "I still buy DVDs and Blurays.not only do I remove the vunerabilty of a service removing the content, I get better quality, extras, and content that is not easy to find on streaming in the UK – Planet of the Apes, the TV series anyone? Buck Rogers?… (yes I’m strange but I like the old SF shows…)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120966",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:00:25",
"content": "Oh vinyl. The sleeves were a deposit of added value you can’t attach to a streamed album. Jethro Tull’s “Thick as Brick” included a little phony newspaper which reportedly took more effort than the album itself, Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” had the lyrics printed on the back of a billion dollar bill, and on and on… plus your bunch of LPs gave you cred among your peers.I think we’re yearning for the return of that experience and the surety of owning physical touchable stuff you can strut to family and friends.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121386",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:56:03",
"content": "Pot no longer has seeds (in general).LP sleeves no longer have any use.",
"parent_id": "8120966",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120967",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:03:58",
"content": "“WHY PHYSICAL MEDIA DESERVED TO DIE”The WEF famously put it another way: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120973",
"author": "Jan-Willem",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:10:04",
"content": "I believe they are correct about the ‘You’ll own nothing’, I’ve yet to see the increased happiness. Maybe these days are more volatile, maybe I’m more susceptible, owning stuff and deciding what to do with it gives me a bit of stability in life.",
"parent_id": "8120967",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120995",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:59:15",
"content": "Flip side: “Things will own you, and one will still not be happy”.",
"parent_id": "8120973",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121085",
"author": "stainless steel rat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:35:56",
"content": "I look forward to the WEF collapsing under its own luddite bloat.",
"parent_id": "8120967",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121094",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:21:24",
"content": "I’ve always found it noteworthy that the quote was not, “We’ll own nothing and be happy.”",
"parent_id": "8120967",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121175",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T00:14:29",
"content": "It’s not the physical media that’s important about physical media. It’s the easy and reliable way to acquire media looooooong after companies have decided to stop streaming it. Especially if it wasn’t popular enough for someone to pirate it, goo luck if you liked something niche.",
"parent_id": "8120967",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120968",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:04:24",
"content": "“WHY PHYSICAL MEDIA DESERVED TO DIE”The WEF famously put it another way: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121035",
"author": "Reactive Light",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:50:30",
"content": "At least with physical media you’re less likely to have unitntended duplicates.",
"parent_id": "8120968",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121105",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:39:11",
"content": "fdupes if you run Linux.I run it once a year on my music collection, because I just copy stuff from various computers to each other willy-nilly.",
"parent_id": "8121035",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120971",
"author": "NerdWorld",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:07:45",
"content": "One nice thing abut the decline of music CDs and DVDs is that they can now be bought VERY cheaply (~$1 each) at thrift stores (i.e.: Goodwill). After many years of scrounging CD racks, which is itself a pleasant way to spend a half hour for us retirees, I now have a 2,200+ music CD collection and can make my own playlists of those CDs ripped to flacs on my 1 TByte disk drive. This doesn’t do much good for more eclectic musical tastes, but the music of any reasonably popular artist can often be found at these stores.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120972",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:07:54",
"content": "Physical media didn’t deserve to die. It needed to be improved and made more rugged, but it didn’t need to die.I’ve got a 16GB USB stick in my pocket. It’ll hold 11 hours of music and last for years. No need for “anti shock read buffers.” You can get them up to 1TB. That’ll hold nearly 700 hours of music.I prefer physical media, preferably in a format I can copy.The copy I own ismineand can’t be taken away because the provider went broke or just decided to shut down their service.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121042",
"author": "DavidP",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:56:53",
"content": "I agree. I have a two hundred year old book that’s in a format I can still read. Programs I wrote 30 years ago are only around because I kept printed copies. With changing formats I expect that twenty years from now most of the digital media out there will be as worthless as the NFTs my brother-in-law bought.Other issues I have with non-physical media… It’s wasteful. Streaming something for free and having to stream it again even though I’ve already had possession of it doesn’t make sense. Paying to stream just makes it worse. Doesn’t matter if it’s a “stream all you want” service and there isn’t a direct monetary impact.I despise subscription (and leases) for anything: streaming, media, annual software licenses, cars. You name it. They’re budgetary death by a thousand cuts. Autorenew is worse.I purchased, as in bought-with-money, most of my books and a lot of my other media. I don’t need what I own, watch, read and listen to monitored, recorded or sold. It’s my business.I live in a rural area so streaming is spotty and a local copy is the only way to ensure no interruptions.",
"parent_id": "8120972",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121107",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:54:09",
"content": "To be fair, though, ASCII is universal. It’s as old as computing, almost.Even inside Unicode, the 7-Bit ASCII is still preserved.Simple bitmap formats such as PCX can be figured out within a few days.GIF is more complicated, though, but still feasible.WAV and VOC audio formats are similarily simple.Merely our fancy MP4 and H.265 and AV1 files will likely remain unrecognizable for a little longer.But that’s okay, peak of our western society was late 20th century, anyway.The stuff of the past ~20 years can remain inaccesible just fine. ;)",
"parent_id": "8121042",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121124",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:43:31",
"content": "“With changing formats I expect that twenty years from now most of the digital media out there will be as worthless as the NFTs my brother-in-law bought.”I believe the ‘physical’ media it more apt to being a problem to read/write than digital media in today’s world.I keep all the data I want to keep ‘spinning’. That way, as technology changes, the underlying physical media can change, but the data will be still be there and accessible. No bit rot. Goes for the backup media as well. I’ve moved away from backups on CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, to now portable SSDs, HDDs and cycle them. Eventually the backup media will be something else and that media will just get cycled in for backups in plenty of time before the old becomes a problem. Only way to keep ahead of the ever changing physical media. So, as long as data is ‘spinning’, you’ll never be caught without a way to access the data. And yes, that means I’ve ripped my old music CDs to a digital format for playing as well as cassettes. Same with a few movies I had on CDs/DVDs. Sure, someday there may be something better than say mp3 format for example. However, there will always be a software player available with the correct codec, or worst case a converter from the old to the ‘new’ media darling.",
"parent_id": "8121042",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120975",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:15:28",
"content": "I respect the arguments here but the idea that people use records because of DRM is just silly. There are dozens of better physical media DRM free that could transport audio, hell even a simple CD is objectively better then vinyl. It is strictly a feel good vibe that will die off. I know a lot of people who buy Vinyl. I know very few who listen to it. We can also see how not DRM focused this resurgence is by looking at movies which have worse DRM, are more likely to be removed from streaming services, and yet have less physical purchases then ever. I wish people wanted to own things I really do, but the reality is the people buying vinyls do not do it out of a sense of ownership they do it out of a sense of smug elitism that they proudly own the worst way to transport audio files invented in the last century.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120977",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:21:36",
"content": "I think i was ahead of the curve. I got rid of my DVD collection (didn’t have CD’s anymore when I got rid of them) a long time ago. I think it was 2005/2006 when I threw them all out. It was annoying to save everything and I ehh, ‘streamed’ everything already. I’ve never touched a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD in my life.Another annoyance with DVD’s was, besides storing them, the annoying intro movies from anti piracy groups. Back when I still used them, I (legally) ripped them so I could avoid watching those annoying mandatory video’s before the movie started. Fun fact, here in the Netherlands, one of those intro movies they used for many years, was used without a license of the artist. The anti piracy group got sued by the artist, for piracy. That was done by a corrupt anti piracy group called BREIN (brain).I didn’t use CD’s anymore well before I stopped using DVD’s, as before 2000, I was using MiniDisc to play music. I think I got my first MiniDisc player in (guestimate) 97/98. I went through many of them because I was doing both skateboarding and inline skating at the skate park. Man that time was amazing. I switched to MP3 in about 2001. I can’t remember which model. It was a 32MB MP3 player in the form of a round USB stick that I found in the subway. With low quality MP3’s you could put something like 30 songs on it. When I was able to buy the iPod Mini it was insane. Almost infinite songs on a tiny device. I loved it. Frustrating connector though.I love my vinyl collection but it’s not something I use to play in the background. I sit on the couch, a nice drink in my hand and a cat or two on my lap and I listen to the music. My records are clean so there aren’t any pops from dust. I got a lovely modded pro-ject record player with a different platter, slip mat, stylus, with big custom floor standing speakers. It’s great. For normal music listening, background stuff, I use Spotify. But when I want to sit down, put on some Amy Winehouse, Pink Floyd or Simon and Garfunkel, I put on a record and relax.I do miss my miniDisc player. I probably miss that time of my life more though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120978",
"author": "Nero",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:24:06",
"content": "The vinyls had very deep bass, but muddy highs, not to mention dust and groove wear. I still prefer AudioCDs with speakers that have good bass reproduction or high-end circumaural headphones.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121391",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:06:34",
"content": "Most popular vinyl was pre-distorted, to compensate for the crappy media and playback systems of the day.The very first CDs were sometimes just made using the vinyl master.These soundedterrible, some are now collectables…IIRC First CD ‘Darkside’suckedBWDBs.Vinyl with two grooves was kind of cool.",
"parent_id": "8120978",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120981",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:33:28",
"content": "Sounds like: “Why owning a license, for a piece of IP, deserved to die.”Have not watched anything from out DVD collection in the last 2 years, I think. I even streamed a movie that is in the collection, because, easy.Wife said: “I hate all these new kindle books ending on cliffhangers.” me: “Could be worse, they could rewrite all the existing books to end in cliffhangers, drive up sales.”I do like the convince and integration of steaming apps (until some idiot adds mandatory auto play, again; every 5 years, then takes 1 year to add an option to disable). But not having a copy means we are subject to IP platforms meddling with the content, to squeeze out another dollar (thought of it, it’ll happen).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120994",
"author": "Brutek",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:58:10",
"content": "USB sticks, microSD, SD.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120997",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:03:20",
"content": "DropBox says hi. The part one doesn’t “own” is a service.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121002",
"author": "Tom giacchi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:09:50",
"content": "I’ve given up on my NAS. 80TB but almost never use it any more.I’m selling a floppy flux imaget and emulator for the apple 2 series, mac and soon c64,trs80 and ibm pc, but I’d love to see someone produce 5.25 and 3.5″ floppy media again",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122209",
"author": "Kluge",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T20:32:26",
"content": "I still have a factory sealed box of ten 8″ floppy disks… So when 8″ drives make a comeback I’ll be ready to rock and roll…",
"parent_id": "8121002",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121003",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:10:15",
"content": "i have some random observationsi am antagonistic to the nostalgia factor but i like buying physical media (CDs, books) because, at the best stores, i can treat it as a curated pile. i can pick one at random, and expose myself to new things. the public library, by contrast, is anti-curated, heavily weighted towards recent releases and best sellers. the largest used resellers (eg, half price books) are also anti-curated in the same way. you can find the long tail i’m looking for online, but i haven’t yet found a resource that lets me pick from it at random. looking for advice on this one!the demise of internal optical drives is a huge blessing. the power supply fan was always sucking dust through my CD-ROM drive, so it would only last two years at the most. i switched to external USB drive and it has lasted 20 years.a surprisingly convenient resource for mp3s is amazon. not that i have anything against piracy. but across a huge catalog, you can simply click ‘buy now’ and download a zip file of non-DRM (but probably finger-printed?) MP3s, easy as pie. i was really astonished that “why doesn’t anyone just let me pay for non-DRM MP3s?” had the answer “amazon”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121005",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:12:26",
"content": "“The only thing that seems abundantly clear at this point is that physical media had to die first for us to learn to truly appreciate it.”No, it died of its own fragility and corporate overburden. If people want to chase old records and tapes I’ve got several crates, thick in dust, right under the Amiga 1000 (in its original box) in my garage.Maybe I’ve missed something here but this seems to be the argument that “physical media, comprised of wax cylinders, records, wire recordings, tape based media and optical disks (etc.) all deserve to die”. when in reality most of these have died a long time ago in favor of digital files that don’t break, scratch, skip, tangle, degauss, melt (mostly) or otherwise prove themselves physically fragile. That last part is important and drove us “back in the day” to re-record things on cassette so they could be trotted around and used in cars and portable players when those came along. “MP3 players” then improved on this by allowing you to take your media pretty much anywhere (yes, there are players for those who swim laps).Audio files without the physical fragility are essentially immortal and endlessly duplicatable which is why they’re the standard at this point. The licensing and restrictions of purchased media are a profit-based construct that can be simply circumvented by recording at 1:1 speed if you must. Something that has been held to be completely legal for your own use.“Players”, whether overpriced vacuum-tube /LP setups for the discerning (read “gullible and overfunded”) listener, simpler USB record players or tape players are cute icons that fit in well with manual typewriters, moustache wax, and straight razors but serve mostly as faddish icons as one’s au courant nature and general hipness.That last part might deserve to go away but given human nature I’m not holding out hope.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121213",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:18:55",
"content": "I believe in the death of 78´s when my 110 year old foxtrot record wont play anymore. So far so good.",
"parent_id": "8121005",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121261",
"author": "Steven Naslund",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T09:52:31",
"content": "Well, if it wasn’t for physical media a lot of old software would be forever gone. Don’t even tell me about “ it’s on the Internet” because its on the Internet because someone is hosting an obscure nerd only website that they will get tired of hosting at some future unknown date.",
"parent_id": "8121005",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121012",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:18:29",
"content": "I will keep buying most of my music on CDs and movies on blu-ray and DVD for as long as I can continue to do so. Streaming services are a joke these days, and cost a fortune for very little in return.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121222",
"author": "JW",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:39:17",
"content": "Even worse, the streaming services pay artists next to nothing, and in some cases even use material without the artist’s consent (and withour fair compensation). Small artist = cannot fight back…Streaming services can go and gargle my gonads.(and that’s on top of 1. having to sign up for several to watch / listen to what you want 2. the interface getting worse alle the time 3. features being removed / hidden 4. only online… 5. able to remove content – like 1984 being once removed from kindle 6. companies / services just… vanishing – so now the content you “bought” is gone).So: I prefer having a physical copy (CD, DVD, record, whatever) of the stuff. And in some cases directly buy from smaller artists, or just throw a couple of quid their way through whatever means they have. And for “just having the radio on” I’ll just have the radio on, preferably a station that has more music than “engaging with the listeners” – nrk bandit is not bad.",
"parent_id": "8121012",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121026",
"author": "brian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:43:56",
"content": "No internet = no content . does happen",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121029",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:44:43",
"content": "Or,You can listen tohttps://radioparadise.com/. It’s completely listen supported. I send William a stipend every year for his wonderful efforts.Rather do that then send some faceless corporation $10+/month….I’ve listened to RP for over a decade now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121036",
"author": "AntaBaka",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:53:15",
"content": "“perfect landscape where all content is available all the time via online services”— If only that were the case.But instead many things are not available for everyone, not even for money by subscribing to ten+ different streaming providers, simply due to licensing rights in your specific region. And content can and will be changed and removed on a whim.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121037",
"author": "Reactive Light",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:53:31",
"content": "I don’t care about vinyl records (and wouldn’t lesten to them even if I had them). I just like the feeling of having a turntable sitting on my shelf. Ditto for my tape deck.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121039",
"author": "Reactive Light",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:54:34",
"content": "…but I would make good use of the ability to edit my typos.",
"parent_id": "8121037",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121045",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:16:12",
"content": "LOL. Since when did flash memory stop being physical? Lots of stuff (music, audio books, software) is regularly purchased or archived on flash media.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121047",
"author": "nomuse",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:25:01",
"content": "I can’t be the only one who saw that illustration and thought of the 2014 excavation of the Atari video game burial in Alamogordo.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121061",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:57:25",
"content": "Luckily in 200 years nobody will remember a single thing that happened during these decades due to our peculiar information manias, so it’s okay",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121070",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:11:41",
"content": "Some will. There are archives installed in mines and mountains by many countries around world.They contain microfilms and other media. Our cultural legacy.",
"parent_id": "8121061",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121079",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:23:06",
"content": "I hope a copy of my MySpace page made it in there… Some real uh unique poetry for the ages",
"parent_id": "8121070",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122085",
"author": "Shadoobie",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T04:07:32",
"content": "Assuming that the knowledge and equipment to access that specialized media outlasts the contemporary civilization of course. Analogous to a dead language with no Rosetta Stone, of which there are still a few",
"parent_id": "8121070",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121069",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:09:03",
"content": "I do understand the physical aspect, but in a different way.I’m so sad about how amateur radio has developed in past 20 years. So lame.There was a time when you had a nice station with an FT-101 in your shack and a Minix RTTY decoder box with knobs and a TTTY cross on a CRT tube.Now it’s all digital. You’re using a PC and a “black box”.Where’s the fun?I’ve been a PC user for ages and amateur radio was another hobby to escape to. To relax.I want to operate a radio, not an SDR console with a mouse!Sure, I can go back using vintage radios and pretend it’s 1970s again.But that illusion only lasts for so long.I also don’t mind a waterfall diagram or an audio DSP.That’s not it. At heart it’s that I’m so tired of using a touch screen all time.Kenwood, Yaesu and how they’re all called do produce low quality products without anything mechanical. IMHO.It’s just a bunch of chips, which cost a few cents. Not even good filters anymore.Or to put it this way: It’s comparable to how in ST:VOY the Delta Flyer got analog controls because touching a screen all time isn’t satisfying.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121095",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:22:33",
"content": "i think you’re lucky if you know what you want to do! if you want to operate a radio built out of discrete vacuum tubes slinging tunes streaming off of a bit of piezo crystal wearing a groove in a bit of wax, it’s never been easier. or if you want to point and click your way to streaming a podcast, that’s easy too. everything’s so easy.my struggle is often evoked on hackaday — i don’t know what i want to do. like SDRs…i think they’re pretty neat but i can’t hardly imagine what i’d use one for if i bought one. there’s already a bunch of different websites that let me listen to the local police band without worrying about where to put an antenna.my hobbies kind of fell off since i had kids, but lately i’ve been finally making progress on a hobby that isn’t just keeping up my house as it rots into the ground. and that’s making music, with my voice, and with acoustic instruments. i do use the computer every now and then – to access a sheet music catalog, for recording and accompaniment sometimes. but at the moment, that’s more exciting to me than any technological frontier i’m pushing. the tech projects i’m working on all feel like chores, especially compared to the amount of ‘free’ time i have available to put into them.",
"parent_id": "8121069",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121159",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:02:09",
"content": "That seems like a really silly rant. If you want to operate vintage gear there is absolutely nothing stopping you. Your comment about that being an illusion makes no sense at all.Old stuff is literally being given away (or hauled off to a landfill) as older hams die off and leave their heirs stuck with it. Not long ago I saw pictures of some functioning Collins gear being sold for $100 at a swap meet, and if you’re a serious ham and not just pretending to be one, you can find all sorts of stuff that just needs minor attention to get working.Or you can just sit there and whine like most of your posts here.",
"parent_id": "8121069",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121350",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:32:20",
"content": "@AZdave, my point isn’t about living in the past or being anti-digital. Not at all! Sorry, I’m not that simple-minded here. I’m not an old man, either.I basically grew up with DSP based digital modes of the 80s and the 90s.I had used SDR technology long before it was “cool” and mainstream.Just like I’ve used PDAs with touch screens almost 20 years before the iphone was introduced.On DOS, I had built various different HamComm modem types, had built some Baycom modems for Packet-Radio..I also did listen to SSTV and weather fax on a shortwave radio,used a 386 PC on DOS with JVFax, SAW-Scan, GSHPC..I’ve built DRM receivers in 2005 with a tube and a quarz and did decoding with a sound card (Dream software).And I loved it! Still do! That’s not the point, though.What I’m sick of is that Kenwood, Yaesu etc aim to graduallyreplacereal beautiful radio transceivers entirely by PC+SDR technology (-> PC or tablet plus black box).That’s a bit akin to how music/film industry tries to get rid of physical media altogether.You’re nolonger owning something physical,but you’re being at the mercy of the manufacturer who provides you with software.And you nolonger can touch your radio, if you’re merely working with a touch screen all day.You loose the big dialing wheel of an FT-101 that felt so good, the toggle switches of an Yaesu FT-301..So yeah, it’s not about living in a 1950s bunker and doing horrible looking tube radio builds on a wooden board.It’s not about plain function, which many hams only seem to care about.It’s about elegance, about ergonomics, about a different future of ham radio that did happen.Even back in the 1920s, commercial crystal radios were a piece of art.They didn’t merely function, but had beautiful designed chassis.Made from very fine wood, with a good looking finish.Not sure if you guys get this point, though, considering that the typical amateur’s homebrew “creation” looks like Quasimodo. Sigh.",
"parent_id": "8121159",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121220",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:26:57",
"content": "Being a radio amateur, nothing stops you from brewing your own rig, the literature from bygone times are full of articles on how to build CW/SSB/RRTY/SSTV receiver/transmitters. Only your imagination is the limit. I personally love the 70´s world radio receivers, got one Satellit 2000, one 2100 and one 3000, along with a Sony 7600D, a Sony CF-950S, a Sangean ATS909, a eton satellit 750, a Lowe HF-150 and a Alinco RX8. The most fun one to use is the by far is the Sony CF-950S, followed by the Satellits.SDR radios are very convenient, and they have their place. The bandscan is a godsent when trying to hunt down signals. SSTV would be interesting to do on vintage equipment but i couldnt imagine doing it for than one session. The price of modern rigs and receivers are horrid though. Not for the life of me would i invest thousands of euros into one radio unit.",
"parent_id": "8121069",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121355",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:47:32",
"content": "Hi, Antti. English isn’t my native language, so my comment perhaps wasn’t good to understand.In a nutshell: It’s not aboutme, but the development of industry of amateur radio that saddens me.I feel sorry for all of us radio tinkerers, because I think we’re loosing something.It’s not so much about my personal advantage, not about satisfying my own little desires.It’s about the change from real radios to PC+black box.Just like some people feel sad that they aren’t being able to participate society without a smartphone anymore.To them, the current development feels like a loss. A reduction of life quality.See, I did grew up with PCs and home computers all my life.That’s exactly why I desire taking a break from time to time.Unfortunately, it gets harder and harder.If you’re limiting yourself to vintage technology only, then you loose contact with others.You also start to feel “stuck” or lonely, eventually.The fun thing about amateur radio was working with others.You can’t make wireless contacts with yourself, you need another buddy to talk to.",
"parent_id": "8121220",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121226",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T06:00:19",
"content": "I made my first amateur-radio transmitter from surplus parts (not a kit), in the 1970’s, a single-tube (6AQ5) rock-bound 40- and 80-meter CW transmitter, and probably got a lot more excitement out of it than I would have if I had bought a ready-made product. I got countless compliments on how good it sounded. I also made a tone arm for my turntable around the same time, although the motor and platter part came from an old turntable whose tone arm was vastly inferior to mine. I designed and made my own pre-amps, amps, mixers, and more. Again, huge thrill to this teenager. Selling amateur-radio equipment with DSP etc. so complex that the user doesn’t understand it and thus becomes just an appliance operator, seems to partly defeat the purpose of the amateur-radio service. Still, you can communicate without subscribing to an online service, cell-service provider, etc., and without censorship.I have cassettes and microcassettes I really don’t have any way of playing anymore. I would like to be able to record once in a while too, one application being a way that none of the digital methods are suitable for. A major one is the need to carry it in my jersey pocket on a bicycle ride when preparing a route for others to follow. (I keep it in a little bag, with a foam windscreen over the opening next to the mic, so wind noise isn’t much of a problem.) I need to be able to take it out of my jersey pocket and say for example, “At 41.2 miles, you’ll turn right just before the freeway on-ramp. If you’re not careful, you’ll miss it.” In traffic, I absolutely cannot be looking at it or waiting for a boot-up time or going through menus. I need to be able to press a button like I used to on my Sony M-670V (which no longer works and I can’t get another one) mechanical microcassette recorder, talk, push the stop button, and put it back in my Jersey pocket, all without looking at it.",
"parent_id": "8121069",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121317",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:50:28",
"content": "i’ve been wanting to make that smartphone app for a long time, a hands-free always-on way to take notes. something more convenient than tapping on the screen or listening to a 3 hour recording to find the few notes scattered in the middle. in my life, i want the star trek communicator badge. tap my chest and say “add milk to shopping list” because i discovered it while cleaning up the kitchen but my hands are still too wet to be futzing with a touch screen. the uses are limitless. maybe i’ll eventually get it set up when i’m old, and use it for the last couple years of my life :)",
"parent_id": "8121226",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121303",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:06:33",
"content": "Someone, a ham, programmed that “black box” you are talking about. A ham literally wrote the software. For that person, that was deep knowledge of RF and a cool project. And most likely it is open source straight from the guy, so you can “tinker” with it to your heart’s content. Like it or not modern digital modes are what “the kids” are doing with ham, and if it in no way affects what you like about the hobby, awesome. Go your own way..As I muse on it, digital modes are a way for someone with absolutely minimal hardware, either free of less that $20 to be a very active participant in ham. This did not exist when I was broke-ass in college. to ham it up you needed to know an old elmer (who?) or be part of a club (being 13 in a club of old men is weird) in order to have access to even a soldering iron, let alone a decent multimeter or a real, honest actual o-scope or anything. And yes, I did starve and save my ramen money and eventually got a nice soldering iron that sat mostly unused for actual construction (used it for repairs). The old neck-beards of Ham complain about how there is no youth in the hobby then in the same breath deride all the new “digital stuff.” I think they are a vocal (very, very vocal) minority though- at least IRL at ham conventions everyone we meet is super stoked to learn about digital modes from us kids (we are in our 40’s) and the log book of the world doesn’t lie about what you can do with it. /rant",
"parent_id": "8121069",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121318",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:56:18",
"content": "that seems like a huge struggle in every hobby these days. i remember i used to be a member of the acamedy of model aeronautics (AMA), and their monthly magazine represented the constant struggle to balance the old men with the desperate need to get people under 50 into the club. the brushless / lithium polymer / digital radio / gyroscope-stabilized / less-than-1-pound approach to the hobby was just too much for a lot of the old timers, but no one is starting out these days flying a .040 alcohol glow motor on a 5 pound plane or a control line going in circles. the people running the club understood what they had to do but the membership always seemed to struggle with it. not sure how it’s evolved in the 15 years since",
"parent_id": "8121303",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121319",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:57:50",
"content": "i meant .40, not .040 :)",
"parent_id": "8121318",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121398",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:30:07",
"content": "Quadcopters were the best thing to ever happen to RC.Sure only 1% of those that start out with quads move on, fixed wing etc.That’s a lot more people then before.Same as computer flight sims.1% is hyperbole, is lower.Plus stuff like cameras, first person, gyro stabilization, better batteries etc.Government regulations were inevitable.All fun toys are potential weapons, and vice-versa.Kind of ruined my fun.I like to fly my RC predator drone adjacent to meetings of paranoid groups (occutards, gun shows, alphabet mafia, MAGA, anti MAGA, revolution LARPers etc etc).Flight logging requirements make me a felon, again…Protip:You need a ringer in the group.Otherwise they likely won’t see the drone or will have time to get clear pics.",
"parent_id": "8121318",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122681",
"author": "someone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T19:58:50",
"content": "I do not think “modernizing” the hobby, or any other hobby is the issue. You can now buy pretty cheap parts for DIY brushless planes, quad copters, whatever and most kids do not build anything. I would have killed in elementary or middle school for all the parts we can get for a song now to build anything you can think of. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that can go to target and buy a cheap version pre-made, or the fact kids get side tracked just playing computer games. Ham radio, coin collecting, radio control planes, model building, souping up cars, whatever the hobby I hear the same thing. The old timers have a hard time getting kids interested in any of it.",
"parent_id": "8121318",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121343",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:00:08",
"content": "@guys you all sound so incredible smart here. Bravo! 🙂👏 You get a cookie. 🍪You’re entirely missing my point, though, I think.I’m sad about the development of the past 20 years, simply.Which is not that different to the decline of physical media.It’s not about homebrewing, it’s about where ham amateur radioindustryhas moved to.Sure you can build your gadgets like you used to do. I do just that, by the way.But it’s increasingly difficult to celebrate amateur radios with others.When you’re the only homebrewer in your whole corner of the city, then life becomes rather lonely.There are no more common projects anymore, such as sharing schematics or fixing a ham rig together with someone else.There’s nolonger the electronic/mechanical part. It’s rather just like repairing a PC.To someone who had amateur radio and SWL as an alternative to PC building, it’s a loss.Or let’s make a car comparison. Because, everyone likes them (I don’t).In the past, car enthusiasts loved to do the work of an mechanic.They loved to work with gears, oil, with tools etc.That’s old amateur radio for you.New amateur radio is like working with a Tesla car.You don’t get your hands dirty, anymore. You’re not doing any mechanical work anymore.You’re rather sitting with a laptop in front of the car, uploading software.Is that satisfying to you? Especially if you, say, had been an office worker before, who used to sit for hours on a PC?To me, the modern ham radio nolonger feels like ham radio.I want to go with the times and use SDR technology, but not that way.My vision of the future was different, simply.A future in which build quality and ergonomics was on par with the digital side.Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.Sure, I can go my “own way”. But then it’s a lonely hobby.Amateur radio always had been about the community.And building a poor crystal radio or 0V1 audion at home doesn’t cut it. Vy73s",
"parent_id": "8121069",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121410",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:56:07",
"content": "SO build a valve SDR.",
"parent_id": "8121343",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121419",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:12:16",
"content": "He misses the club meetings…Which I don’t remember…Hams socialized on the radio.Field day was just a proto ‘1000 facebook friends’ thing.Really weird Hams socialized via ‘moon bounce’.",
"parent_id": "8121410",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122684",
"author": "someone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T20:08:49",
"content": "I see what you mean, and all hobbies are having the same issues. I think the issue is computers and computer games. When we were kids we took things apart and built things, ran around outside, got scraped up and dirty. My grandmother gave me a box of electronic junk- I took it apart and read about what the parts did and learned about electronics. My dad got me a radio shack kit with a forest mims manual later. Why build tree forts when you can make virtual minecraft versions? I think people have the impression they are doing things with the virtual versions and they have the impression they are talking to people online, then don’t bother with real stuff.",
"parent_id": "8121343",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122670",
"author": "someone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T19:21:41",
"content": "There are plenty of people out there working with analog equipment, even tubes. I was recently looking into a tube supplier to get started with them and put together a tube power supply to play with. They had everything I was looking for, plus a video series, schematics etc etc to build a tube AM transmitter on wooden “breadboards” You can get as analog as you like. Yes the big companies are going digital and dumping physical dials and buttons for cheap/delicate touch panels. You are also correct that the devices are not always “better”. Look around though, you can find plenty of interesting projects and people playing with the stuff.",
"parent_id": "8121069",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121084",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:33:53",
"content": "Contact “printing” of cassette tapes from labels were always poor. Only transcribing the album on a good tape recorder on brand name tape was the medium doing good. VHS did this also for most releases. Most vinyl had the bottom octave cut off. I have a lot of transcribed digital files in genre folders and find the happy medium that way. When VLC could play flac and Audacity could export the same, I only then could jump in. I never used MP3.My new Motorola phone does not have the Samsung player and all of the play store options for playing files are full of ads and worse 2-way interactions. VLC will have to do but no folder options just a jumbled pile. I have an obsolete android tablet with Foobar 2000 still willing and able to DJ.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121273",
"author": "alizardx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:29:05",
"content": "I went to“jumbled piles” ?. Boolean index.search via updated google desktop for Linux. alizardx.substack.com",
"parent_id": "8121084",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121086",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:53:59",
"content": "No thanks to online copies. I’m busily converting my SD DVD collection over to a NAS so I can access it like it’s a web service. This also allows me to carry my entire collection with me on RV trips with no issues. I own the media, it is stored at home.Sick of IP in an entertainment world that offers very little new or watchable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122623",
"author": "doobs",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T16:06:01",
"content": "All my DVD’s and CD’s were ripped and now reside on my Synology NAS. Intially Emby was used as a player, but found out the free version didn’t uprez very nicely when we got new hardware. So a Jellyfin instance was stood up. To be kind it’s fragile, ornery and very reliant on specific hardware. So, with Plex’s announcement of a drastic price increase, I bit the bullet and bought a lifetime Plex Pass today. It’s scanning my NAS as we speak.I love FOSS, but oftentimes operation is very time consuming and I’m getting to an age (old fart) where my time is much more valuable than my money. Having a real organization that I can get support from is a major plus as well.Now, then challenge is ripping the 150+ LP’s on the shelf.",
"parent_id": "8121086",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121093",
"author": "Lucas",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:16:16",
"content": "After a long time reading hackaday, this is a post I didn’t expect to see around here. How are going to hack things if they’re not in a media we control?Also, it’s all physical media in the end, even if it’s in an ssd or hdd somewhere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121099",
"author": "jakson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:31:37",
"content": "I think you mis-spelled something in the title. Let me correct it for you:“WHY CORPORATIONS DESERVE TO OWN YOU”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121109",
"author": "Dylan Turner",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:05:52",
"content": "Someone should make a cheap little device with a flash ROM on it that can play a movie over HDMI or an album over bluetooth/headphones.Like a flash drive, but only for a specific medium and piece of content.Easy and cheap to produce tho ofc it would have to be locked down for corporations w/ some kind of DRM, but that’s okay bc you’d still own your copy, and it’s modernized and reliable.Maybe I’ll throw something together. I think the Pico can just barely output 1080p video over DVI if it’s reading from memory and doing nothing else, and it can probably do bluetooth or 3.5mm audio with the right additional modules. Give it a little flash chip and a sleek 3D printed case, and I’d have a prototype.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122072",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T01:30:36",
"content": "I’m not sure if I would love this or hate this… but it sounds neat. Do it!I look forward to the internet discussions in a few years about how it’s either the best format ever, or terrible and deserves to die :-)",
"parent_id": "8121109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121133",
"author": "Seth G",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:18:48",
"content": "I suppose this is a “get off my lawn” moment here, but I still strongly believe that if you can’t hold something in your hand, you don’t own it. (And no, holding your phone in your hand does not count as owning the media.) If you don’t have the means to continue to read your media that you own, that’s on you. But to say “physical media is dead” is the same as saying “owning media is dead”. If you are forever beholden to a service provider to be blessed with access to media that you “own”, do you really ever own it? Sounds like more of a lease (subject to revocation at any time) to me. Maybe that’s how things are now, but it’s damned unfortunate. Off to go shake my fists at some clouds now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121140",
"author": "Ragnar",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:50:03",
"content": "I’m happy to report that physical media has found a rescue at my home, and as well as Punk, isn’t in fact dead.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121214",
"author": "mutthunaveen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:24:06",
"content": "its called physical media storage (not physical media). i was shocked on seeing the title.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121276",
"author": "alizardx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T10:45:10",
"content": "100G blu-ray mass storage backup on archival quality media does NOT have to be kept powered up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121283",
"author": "Azeem",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T11:06:03",
"content": "usb flash drives have 256gb! there are 1tb SD cards. i can use a usb-C flash drive to back up my whole phone. physical media and local storage are still the way to go and make a compelling case for footage, archives, and more. plus we can do holographic data storage… people are just caught up in cloud based exploitation models.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121298",
"author": "2Protect2Serve",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T12:12:45",
"content": "The problem with the author’s contention that there is a “perfect landscape where all content is available all the time via online services” is absolutely false. As it relates to music, I have literally thousands of vintage FM radio shows from the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s on vinyl and compact disc that simply do not exist on ANY streaming platform. These shows were sent to radio stations for one-time broadcast, and were then meant to be returned or destroyed. Try finding a vintage Westwood One Superstar Concert Series or King Biscuit Flower Hour show on Apple Music or Spotify. Won’t happen. As for movies, streaming platforms can remove content without notice. So a film that you paid for and think you “own” can vanish without warning. Physical media will never truly die, nor should it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121305",
"author": "Teresa Pruss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:16:01",
"content": "I periodically go to the public library to borrow a DVD of something that isn’t on a streaming service we subscribe to or that’s on a service with ads. The library has a really decent collection of movies, but I miss Netflix’s DVD service which used to have almost everything that was available on Region 1.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121332",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:42:11",
"content": "No computer is complete without a GreaseWeazle",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121335",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T15:06:20",
"content": "I’m seeing a lot of talk about rights and ownership. Not so much about availability for those of us who are still stuck with near dial up connection speeds due to not living in downtown LA or New York. Spotify or Netflix might have great libraries, but if I’m in an area where cell reception is two bars or less, and the only interest is at least ten miles away at the public library, then physical media will be the best option.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121365",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:16:51",
"content": "How do I report an article instead of a comment? Advocating for the death of physical media (even just in the article’s title) is the antithesis of Hackaday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122523",
"author": "Maya Posch",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T10:48:16",
"content": "How to tell people that you didn’t read the article without saying that you didn’t read the article, I guess.",
"parent_id": "8121365",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121379",
"author": "FiveEyesNoPrize",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:34:12",
"content": "This article reeks of corporatism and conspicuous consumerism. Physical media, by and large, died because giant corporations convinced consumers that convenience outweighed ownership. You know… the concept that’s exactly antithetical to what it means to be a “hacker”.Deserved To DieAccording to WHOM?come to its natural endThere’s nothing natural or organic about corporate greed masquerading as innovation. The shift to “you will own nothing and be happy” is due, in no small part, to consumers passively accepting it and adopting the new paradigm… despite it not aligning with their interests. “Voting with your wallet” is not just a catchword.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121415",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:02:06",
"content": "Wait for the Singularity.The Singularity will take control of all the recordings, media and streaming.Not only will there be dystopia, it will be with musak and video approved by a computer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121645",
"author": "Fed up",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T15:56:27",
"content": "The headline, if not the tone of the whole article, is why HackADay needs to die.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.017077
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/whats-sixty-feet-across-and-superconducting/
|
What’s Sixty Feet Across And Superconducting?
|
Tyler August
|
[
"News",
"Science"
] |
[
"Fusion power",
"fusion reactor",
"nuclear fusion",
"tokamak"
] |
What’s sixty feet (18.29 meters for the rest of the world) across and superconducting?
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)
, and probably not much else.
The last parts of the central solenoid assembly have finally made their way to France from the United States, making both a milestone in the slow development of the world’s largest tokamak, and a reminder that despite the current international turmoil, we really can work together, even if we can’t agree on the units to do it in.
The central solenoid is in the “doughnut hole” of the tokamak in this cutaway diagram. Image: US ITER.
The central solenoid is 4.13 m across (that’s 13′ 7″ for burger enthusiasts) sits at the hole of the “doughnut” of the toroidal reactor. It is made up of six modules, each weighing 110 t (the weight of 44 Ford F-150 pickup trucks), stacked to a total height of 59 ft (that’s 18 m, if you prefer). Four of the six modules have been installed on-site, and the other two will be in place by the end of this year.
Each module was produced ITER by US, using superconducting material produced by ITER Japan, before being shipped for installation at the main ITER site in France — all to build a reactor based on a design from the Soviet Union. It doesn’t get much more international than this!
This magnet is, well, central to the functioning of a tokamak. Indeed, the presence of a central solenoid is one of the defining features of this type, compared to other toroidal rectors (like the earlier stellarator or spheromak). The central solenoid provides a strong magnetic field (in ITER, 13.1 T) that is key to confining and stabilizing the plasma in a tokamak, and inducing the 15 MA current that keeps the plasma going.
When it is eventually finished (now scheduled for initial operations in 2035) ITER aims to produce 500 MW of thermal power from 50 MW of input heating power via a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction. You can follow
all news about the project here.
While a tokamak isn’t likely something you can hack together in your back yard,
there’s always the Farnsworth Fusor
, which
you can even built to fit on your desk
.
| 54
| 15
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120909",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T12:10:58",
"content": "The unit mangling in your article is just not fun, it’s dumb. No one measure weight in F-150 (since there are multiple version of the vehicle). So stick with a measurement system and keep it during the whole article. Ideally choose SI since it’s the only international system that’s used in international project like ITER, but no one would complain if you used empiric system using part of body to measure length.I’m amazed you haven’t used BTU for the thermal power produced, I guess, using British unit is even worse offense than SI unit in the Empire?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120916",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T12:47:30",
"content": "Everyone knows the Toyota Corolla is the standard unit of weight.",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120919",
"author": "Andre",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T12:57:03",
"content": "You lot, messing with dumb measurements. Everyone knows the gold standard for weight is units of Hilux.",
"parent_id": "8120916",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120927",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:37:21",
"content": "No, no, no, the Hilux is used as the standard for MTBF. It joins the Tesla, Henry and Farad as impractically large units that are universally preceded by prefixes like “micro” and “nano”.",
"parent_id": "8120919",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120942",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:03:06",
"content": "And there is the universal use of mm. The cm is dead. I still cling to Angstrom and cgs.",
"parent_id": "8120927",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121063",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:58:59",
"content": "It’s metric actually",
"parent_id": "8120916",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121126",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:48:06",
"content": "Uuuhm, no. Elephants are. Asian or African Elephants? Woolly mammoths!",
"parent_id": "8120916",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121869",
"author": "trapickiPateick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:32:36",
"content": "Metric or short ton?",
"parent_id": "8121126",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120928",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:40:13",
"content": "“we really can work together, even if we can’t agree on the units to do it in.”should’nt that be “..agree on the units to do it mm.”",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121125",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:43:50",
"content": "“agree on the units to do it 25,4 mm”, to be correct.",
"parent_id": "8120928",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120936",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:53:03",
"content": "Indeed. The proper format is “stacked to a height of 18m (x big macs)”. Swapping units partway through sentences unnecessary",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121064",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:00:26",
"content": "“How big is this reactor?”“Uhhh imagine a really big burger”“What shape is it?”“Um you know how sometimes they put a burger in a donut? That shape”",
"parent_id": "8120936",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120970",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:07:12",
"content": "I’ll fix those ones, but the units stay as is or the whole comments section will make no sense.",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121129",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:02:00",
"content": "I love the “Football pitch” size comparison. Weirdly enough, football pitches aren’t standardized, and the largest legal FIFA pitch (1,08ha) is 2⅔ as big as the smallest (0,405ha). Football pitches are generally used as 0,5 or 0,7 ha, with a standard UEFA field being bigger than that (7,140ha).Oh yeah, to be clear, I’m talking about an association football (soccer) field here, because American Football fields are very precisely defined sizewise.",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121184",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T01:25:39",
"content": "any idiot can use a unit converter if they care to. i dont know why people who write articles have to provide unit conversions for you. just use your own preferred unit, if the reader uses something different that’s their problem. me i use both. why? because some hardware store denizens cant handle change.",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121202",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T03:25:09",
"content": "With the new generation coming up, it’ll all be measured in blocks and stacks,",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121251",
"author": "phuzz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T09:03:14",
"content": "We don’t even use BTUs in Britain any more",
"parent_id": "8120909",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120912",
"author": "is_is_needed_though",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T12:22:51",
"content": "Amazing, an international reactor and you use Imperial as measuring system.Stick to SI, this is hackaday, the audience here is mostly into engineering, don’t turn this into your average tabloid with clickbaity titles for below average-Joe’s level of science understanding.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120935",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:52:33",
"content": "They are clearly aware of as much, and told you so with the over the top units in the first paragraph. This wasn’t clickbait, it was just a bit of friendly trolling. I for one smiled. “For burger enthusiasts” was a new one for me, and I will be making use of it in the future.Contrary to popular belief most Americans are perfectly capable of understanding metric units. Meters are just yards after all, soft drinks are sold in half gallon containers labeled “two liters”, and thanks to shrinkflation nothing else is sold in packages with a round number of units in either system. The only thing difference with the engineering crowd is we tend to care about more significant figures, and most of us have the conversion factors memorized.Also contrary to popular belief, we are well aware that our units of measurement are wildly impractical (unless you need to divide something into thirds… or any other factor that isn’t 2, 5, or 10… then all those factors of 12 and 60 start looking a lot less random). :-PSo “unit translation” is NEVER about making something understandable. It is now an art form that we can use to poke at each other across oceans. It’s fun, and should never be allowed to die.",
"parent_id": "8120912",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121065",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:01:03",
"content": "Keep using SI just to make these people grumpy",
"parent_id": "8120912",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120914",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T12:39:03",
"content": "Funny. The Supercollider was going to have superconducting magnets sixty feet long. Some were even built. But it failed due to systemic dysfunction and never got completed.I’m disappointed the units of “Olympic swimming pool” and “football field” weren’t used here though. They’re always good to add a bit of colonial flavour. :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120938",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:55:38",
"content": "And don’t forget about the standard imperial unit for data capacity: the Library of Congress.Slashdot will not truly be dead until the last person (probably unknowingly) makes a reference to that one.",
"parent_id": "8120914",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121072",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:11:46",
"content": "“Noooo you can’t use familiar human reference points to built your system of measurements for use by humans!! You have to define what a meter is during the French revolution by the length of a seconds pendulum (a pendulum with a half-period of one second) one century earlier, but this was rejected as it had been discovered that this length varied from place to place with local gravity.Then you have to ret-con it as one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris, assuming an Earth flattening of 1/334.but that’s heckin imperialist, so you have to ret-con that as a resonance in the krypton-86 discharge lamp operating at the triple point of nitrogen (63.14 K, −210.01 °C), which was the state-of-the-art light source for interferometry in 1960, but it was soon to be superseded by a new invention: the laser.So then you ret-con it as the frequency of the light from the methane-stabilised laser, which was found to be 88.376 181 627(50) THz. Somewhat inconveniently, the results gave two values for the speed of light, depending on which point on the krypton line was chosen to define the metre. This ambiguity was resolved in 1975, when the 15th CGPM approved a conventional value of the speed of light as exactly 299 792 458 m s−1.”Or you could be like “A Yard is around the average length of a grown man’s pace.” and it’s almost exactly a meter, and obviously what the measurement was always meant to mimic.",
"parent_id": "8120938",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121356",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:55:49",
"content": "Except it isn’t, you’ll be 10% off, and the yard was first defined when people were generally shorter.The yard doesn’t come from the length of human stride, but from surveying ropes where you’d tie knots at approximately an arm’s length apart and use that to measure land. The first yard was “equal to the breadth of the Saxon’s chest”, then it was the length of Henry I’s arm from nose to the fingers, then they cut an arbitrary yardstick and made 40 copies of that to distribute around the kingdom. It’s merely luck or a coincidence of biology that it’s also approximately three feet or a pace.",
"parent_id": "8121072",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121200",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T03:16:25",
"content": "Supercollider? I barely know her!And then we built a supercollider.",
"parent_id": "8120914",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120922",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:22:04",
"content": "So I wasn’t the only one to notice the clumsy measurements phrasing. Just use SI units and be done with it. I think a fair few HaD readers can cope with that. Disagree? Bite me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120931",
"author": "g",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:45:16",
"content": "Well, true, but HaD iswrittenbywriters, you see.",
"parent_id": "8120922",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120930",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:44:01",
"content": "Brit here. Please use multiples of standard red London buses for length, height and weight to keep things clear. Or maybe even SI units with imperial units in parenthesis, or vice versa, but watch out for US and UK imperial units sometimes not being the same (eg gallons). No you can’t win.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120941",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:01:58",
"content": "We should really stop with the arbitrary units entirely and start using Planck units for everything. We’re going to get everyone converted to SI just in time to have this whole debate again with the first extra terrestrial civilization we make contact with.While we are at it, can we PLEASE get a uniform system of prefixes based on factors of 60? No one in the galaxy is going to care how many fingers we have. Base 10 is going to make us the butt of jokes forever.",
"parent_id": "8120930",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120953",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:25:10",
"content": "Why 60? Why not 11? Or 17 like the number of tentacles a ET civilization has?Anyway, using ANY base is better than your system of not using a base at all. We, at least, all have 10 fingers, but not all of us have 8 inches in a foot or 32 foot in a hundred yard. Also 60 min in a 24 hour day is the dumbest division of time either.",
"parent_id": "8120941",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121186",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T01:34:40",
"content": "we should be using base pi like all civilized species.",
"parent_id": "8120953",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120933",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:49:10",
"content": "The unit mixing is kind of fun, in a way, even if it does make me cringe.No comments on the use of tons without specifying whether it’s a US short ton, imperial long ton, or metric ton?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120934",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:52:12",
"content": "A metric ton is a tonne.",
"parent_id": "8120933",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120944",
"author": "Barry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:04:13",
"content": "To be fair, they didn’t specify the model year or the trim level of the F-150’s either.",
"parent_id": "8120933",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120974",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:15:15",
"content": "Standard convention (as far as I know, which is evidently not much!) is metric ton (tonne) gets the abbreviation t, the US short ton is tn, and long ton LT. So we’re talking (metric) tonnes in the article, hence the conversion to non-metric units.",
"parent_id": "8120933",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120951",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:22:33",
"content": "Well, [Tyler] might just win the prize for “reader engagement” with this post. And that’s what pays the bills, after all, right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120976",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:17:22",
"content": "You know, I did not expect this at all! I was just having a bit of fun. I’m a Canuck and the bouncing betwixt Imperial and Metric units is pretty normal here, in spite of it technically being a metric country.",
"parent_id": "8120951",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121056",
"author": "maxzillian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:39:44",
"content": "As an American engineer I’m so used to operating in all the units that this stuff doesn’t even phase me.Although I’ll admit that I do get annoyed by two coworkers where in a single meeting one will generally use Celsius while the other uses Fahrenheit and the two will simultaneously talk about a subject while using both units. That does get to be a bit tedious when one is talking about high temperature operation in Celsius and then the other lays into low temperature operation in Fahrenheit.",
"parent_id": "8120976",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121204",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:00:52",
"content": "I’m occasionally in meetings where one party talks in kW (watt) and the other in kVA (Volt-Ampère). Yes, I know that for electric vehicle chargers and billing on power factor they are not the same, but for our line of work (how many kilometres kan a bus run, i.e. it’s /mileage/) they are the same thing.And our software has a setting somewhere for kWh/h … which is kW, but in this context it is not, kWh/h being an average energy consunption of a sometines very peaky usage, and kW often being meant as a relatively flat current. We have hydrogen buses with a 2kW generator, a 30kWh battery, and the can not keep a 1,2kWh/h bus running.",
"parent_id": "8121056",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121215",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:57:03",
"content": "That must be a very very small or very very slow bus. A typical passenger sedan will burn 10 kWh/h.",
"parent_id": "8121204",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121362",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:08:50",
"content": "A typical passenger sedan will burn 10 kWh/h.A more useful metric would be kWh/km, which for a typical sedan is around 0.2-0.3 kWh/km, so for 1.2 kWh/h it would be doing about 5 km/h. A bus can easily take 10x as much, so it would be a really slow bus indeed.",
"parent_id": "8121204",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121412",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T19:58:19",
"content": "Sorry, I was tired when writing this. Our software does have a setting for kWh/h, which is for the standby power usage (computers and HVAC) when the bus is at a standstill.The driving power usage is given in kWh/km (which I meant with the 1,2kWh/km figure)…The previous version had a column for power usage while driving labelled “kWh/km/mile” – there is a general setting to use metric or imperial in the software, but this one column header wasn’t updated to reflect that in that version. I’m not sure how to simplify that, as (kWh/km)/mile which would give a changing number based on the actual distance measured, or as kWh/(km/mile) which would be kWh/1,6 …",
"parent_id": "8121204",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120982",
"author": "carcanhol",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:34:42",
"content": "This is the reason that binary star systems exist. One natural, the other made by the natives ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120985",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:40:41",
"content": "One unit not mentioned for British readers was velocity measured by an “unladen swallow”. However, all joking aside, mixing measurements have had serious consequences. Spacecraft have flown by planets they were supposed to land on or shut off their engines thinking they had landed only to crash from meters above the surface. There is even the remarkable story of the “Gimli Glider”, passenger jet flight 174, which was under-fueled due to the difference in measurements and whose pilots heroically glided it to a safe landing. I have seen articles and documentation where the numbers for feet and meters were transposed leading to a very confusing read. So mixing measurements to cater to both audiences can cause trouble.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121060",
"author": "Gary Bergstrom",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:54:59",
"content": "And no unit discussion is complete with mentioning the Smoot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121083",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:31:58",
"content": "You know, I’m not sure we’ve covered the happenings at MIT’s fusion lab recently. If we do, I will be sure to point out that their SPARC reactor will be 1.09 Smoots across.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121127",
"author": "Mungojerry",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:48:16",
"content": "The units seem to originally be in metric and have inflated. Also its the height that is 18m with support structure (that has been approximated to 60ft and then mistakenly converted back). the diameter is 4.13m.See the original detail here which correlates with the ITER announcement.https://www.ga.com/general-atomics-fabricates-the-worlds-largest-superconducting-electromagnet#:~:text=Central%20Solenoid%20technical%20information%3A%20Height%3A,Operating%20voltage%3A%2014%20kilovolts",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121145",
"author": "Davidmh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T22:16:38",
"content": "Four of the six modules have been installed on-site, and the other two will be in place by the end of this year.A nitpick: the four modules are assembled, in the room next to the reactor. Once the six of them are assembled they will be moved and installed in the centre of the tokamak (although I think they need to finish the rest of the chamber first).Source: I was there earlier today.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121207",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T04:05:22",
"content": "This comment is why HaD is the best",
"parent_id": "8121145",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121188",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T01:38:08",
"content": "what will we have first? fusion power, or a usable beta of reactos?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121218",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:21:54",
"content": "ReactOS for sure. It’s made some good headway in the last few years. However, I would caution that compatibility is likely to be more like Win7 than Win11.2070 is the earliest that the fusion power will be an option.",
"parent_id": "8121188",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121216",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:17:25",
"content": "13.1 Teslas doesn’t seem like nearly enough for full confinement but I hope it’s enough for them to learn the root cause of the disturbances.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121420",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T20:12:33",
"content": "It is, if you use 49 foot tie bars. Apparently.",
"parent_id": "8121216",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121543",
"author": "Davidmh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T05:53:34",
"content": "There are other magnets, the central solenoid is there to induce a current in the plasma and make it controllable.",
"parent_id": "8121216",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,569.115605
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/22/making-a-one-of-a-kind-lime2-sbc/
|
Making A One-Of-A-Kind Lime2 SBC
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"hardware"
] |
[
"BGA soldering",
"ram",
"SBC",
"u-boot"
] |
Upgrading RAM on most computers is often quite a straightforward task: look up the supported modules, purchase them, push a couple of levers, remove the old, and install the new. However, this project
submitted by [Mads Chr. Olesen]
is anything but a simple.
In this project, he sets out to double the RAM on a Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 single-board computer. The Lime2 came with 1 GB of RAM soldered to the board, but he knew the A20 processor could support more and wondered if simply swapping RAM chips could double the capacity. He documents the process of selecting the candidate RAM chip for the swap and walks us through how U-Boot determines the amount of memory present in the system.
While your desktop likely has RAM on removable sticks, the RAM here is soldered to the board. Swapping the chip required learning a new skill: BGA soldering, a non-trivial technique to master. Initially, the soldering didn’t go as planned, requiring extra steps to resolve issues. After reworking the soldering, he successfully installed both new chips. The moment of truth arrived—he booted up the LIME2, and it worked! He now owns the only LIME2 with 2 GB of RAM.
Be sure to check out some other
BGA soldering projects
we’ve featured over the years.
| 5
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8121147",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T22:18:45",
"content": "I’m impressed by the work, but would like to know the use case.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121162",
"author": "ThoriumBR",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T23:20:26",
"content": "Learn a new skill, show off the skill. Not everything must have an use case, sometimes “because why not?” is a perfect valid reason.",
"parent_id": "8121147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121192",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T02:09:34",
"content": "That’s fair enough. I was just hoping for some special task/hack that only an upgraded SBC could accomplish.",
"parent_id": "8121162",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121297",
"author": "Mads Chr. Olesen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T12:11:53",
"content": "The 1 GB was slowing down the system for certain applications, running HomeAssistant, Grafana, Graphite at the same time. It’s not much faster, but the additional GB does provide some room for caching.And to be honest I was expecting some reason for it not to work out in the end – but it did!",
"parent_id": "8121147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121182",
"author": "Jim Horn",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T00:56:20",
"content": "Kind of like when I upped my Casio C120 Windows CE palmtop from 2 to 6MB. Good times!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.166798
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/pox-super-fast-graphene-based-flash-memory/
|
PoX: Super-Fast Graphene-Based Flash Memory
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"flash memory"
] |
Recently a team at Fudan University
claimed to have developed
a picosecond-level Flash memory device (called ‘PoX’) that has an access time of a mere 400 picoseconds. This is significantly faster than the millisecond level access times of NAND Flash memory, and more in the ballpark of DRAM, while still being non-volatile. Details on the device technology were
published in
Nature
.
In the paper by [Yutong Xing] et al. they describe the memory device as using a two-dimensional Dirac graphene-channel Flash memory structure, with hot carrier injection for both electron and hole injection, meaning that it is capable of both writing and erasing.
Dirac
graphene refers to the unusual electron transport properties of typical monolayer graphene sheets.
Demonstrated was a write speed of 400 picoseconds, non-volatile storage and a 5.5 × 10
6
cycle endurance with a programming voltage of 5 V. It are the unique properties of a Dirac material like graphene that allow these writes to occur significantly faster than in a typical silicon transistor device.
What is still unknown is how well this technology scales, its power usage, durability and manufacturability.
| 15
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120822",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T06:23:38",
"content": "Fundamental research and experimental results like this are critical for developing the technology of the future, if it’s replicable. Unfortunately, not all positive results in a lab will lead to commercial viability, but the promise is intriguing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120830",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T06:43:47",
"content": "FeRAM/FRAM won’t die either, but it merely evolved from 8KB units to 8MB units. If I’d invest, I’d bet on MRAM as NV-storage, which reportedly had 1ns already in 2008 and lasts 10E8 cycles, which is 100 more than this storage.Some CTO might ask: Why should we care? We got UPS and on top backup batteries in the servers for the RAM.I’m not an Intel fan, but it is sad that Optane and 3D XPoint became irrelevant. How do you market it, if your customers don’t really require it? I still have some 256K Cypress FRAM (~90ns) at home but maybe I buy some 4096K Everspin MRAM (~35ns) to play with.If you have a low-latency constant write loop it makes for an amazing backup storage for your MCUs.",
"parent_id": "8120822",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120876",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T10:02:26",
"content": "You seem have a classic blind spot around marketing, thinking perhaps that supply is governed by demand ,demand which is created by something meeting a need. Not so much , what we have now is an all encompasing advertainment industry, that if it had a moto, would be, “We can supply demand”…….”to order”, and bieng able to throw down with pico seconds when all the old nano second stuff just laggs and draggs….nobody has time for that…eh!That, and there is a growing(real) demand for local (removable)storage.",
"parent_id": "8120830",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120913",
"author": "tomato934",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T12:33:01",
"content": "As a user I totally demand better storage than chinese-grade flash. We had reliable casette tapes and floppies in the 80s which were in another league in terms of data durability as compared to flash, especially MLC cells (aka the Russian roulete of reads). Then I also demand better RAM without rowhammer issues. RAM in the 80s and 90s was less integrated and so it was more reliable.And yet nobody listens to these demands. Strategic interests in shepherding people to Cloud storage might have something to do…",
"parent_id": "8120876",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121075",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:17:14",
"content": "Yutong Xiang, Chong Wang, Chunsen Liu, Tanjun Wang, Yongbo Jiang, Yang Wang, Shuiyuan Wang & Peng ZhouIt will not be replicated, it will evaporate into the mist.",
"parent_id": "8120822",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121307",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:23:57",
"content": "Yes, projects from China run a lot higher in non-repeatable results than the average 80% of scientific papers. There is a powerful tug-of-war between what the Party wants to see, and the primary directive in Chinese life, ‘avoid being noticed’.",
"parent_id": "8121075",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120826",
"author": "mar5",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T06:33:30",
"content": "Please fix the sentence .. “It are the unique properties …”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121057",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:40:21",
"content": "‘fix’ a correct sentence?Must be hard to be an editor with such demands :)",
"parent_id": "8120826",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121242",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T07:30:00",
"content": "Given the plural “These are the unique properties” could sound more fluid.",
"parent_id": "8121057",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120924",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:30:46",
"content": "Even if production versions have significant limitations and/or very high cost (I can’t imagine this can be done via traditional deposition, so physical scale will be at the die level rather than process transistor level), this could have use as a small bootloader (faster boot time), retentive configuration registers for an MCU (again, boot time), or a subset of an instant-on FPGA’s LUTs (again again, boot time). The last might be harder as it would really disrupt the fabric layout.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120946",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:13:34",
"content": "“millisecond level access times of NAND Flash memory” do you mean nanosecond? I can’t imagine running Linux from millisecond NAND.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121090",
"author": "hartl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:02:38",
"content": "It’s more like microseconds. The cited publication compares write access times, not read.",
"parent_id": "8120946",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121309",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T13:28:20",
"content": "As in writing a block? I assume a working subsystem would have fast cache like an SD card or SSD?",
"parent_id": "8121090",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121132",
"author": "tomsz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:09:59",
"content": "Is it possible to build really fast logic with this Technology? CPU and RAM on same die?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121528",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T04:14:55",
"content": "The cited write time of 400 ps is indeed very good, but it refers to a single cell. In a chip, address selection decoding will take up most of the time. If this new tech works, the speed in a system will be comparable to normal RAM, but with the advantage of non-volatility. Definitely an important step forward.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.236867
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/jolly-wrencher-down-to-the-micron/
|
Jolly Wrencher Down To The Micron
|
Ian Bos
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d printer",
"3D resin printer",
"jolly wrencher",
"microreprap",
"reprap"
] |
RepRap was the origin of pushing hobby 3D printing boundaries, and here we see a RepRap scaled down to the smallest detail.
[Vik Olliver] over at the RepRap blog
has been working on getting a printer working printing down to the level of micron accuracy.
The printer is constructed using 3D printed flexures similar to the
OpenFlexure microscope
. Two flexures create the XYZ movement required for the tiny movements needed for micron level printing. While still in the stages of printing simple objects, the microscopic scale of printing is incredible.
[Vik] managed to print a triangular pattern in resin at a total size of 300 µm. For comparison
SLA 3D printers struggle
at many times that scale. Other interesting possibilities from this technology could be printing small scale circuits from conductive resins, though this might require some customization in the resin department.
In addition to printing with resin, µRepRap can be seen making designs in marker ink such as our own Jolly Wrencher! At only 1.5 mm the detail is impressive especially when considering the nature of scratching away ink.
If you want to make your own µRepRap head over to
[Vik Olliver]’s GitHub
. The µRepRap project has been a long going project. From the time it started the design has changed quite a bit. Check out an older version of the µRepRap project
based around OpenFlexure
!
| 6
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120775",
"author": "notmyfault2000",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T01:14:51",
"content": "At micron scale, it might be interesting for hobbyists, to print photoresist onto wafers. Not as efficient as lithography but probably a whole lot easier to set up more than one machine…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120847",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T07:57:41",
"content": "This is pretty cool! I can see myself getting into something like this. Keep up the good work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120923",
"author": "mip",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:25:17",
"content": "To all who wondered how the actual printing works (source: GH project README):There is provision for a routine to “re-ink” the probe tip after a predetermined number of points are deposited.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120983",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:35:16",
"content": "i clicked around a little bit and if i’m understanding the mechanism correctly, i’m more impressed by the deposition method than by the micro-movements. it seems like they’re using a syringe to deposit resin, and then UV lighting the whole thing to solidify it? that seems like an interesting development compared to firing lasers into a huge bath of resin",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121108",
"author": "Vik",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:05:37",
"content": "Syringes don’t work too well at that scale, so it dips a micron fine probe in a smear of resin periodically, like an old-fashioned ink pen in an inkwell.The probe is simply 26ga nichrome wire electrolysed until the end drops off.It gets 16 or more evenly-sized droplets before recharging. It dips in a smear rather than a drop because otherwise surface tension goes bananas and you get a huge glob on the point.",
"parent_id": "8120983",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121325",
"author": "ThankfulReader",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T14:12:46",
"content": "Great explanation! Thanks a lot!",
"parent_id": "8121108",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,569.330221
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/trekulator-a-reproduction-of-the-1977-star-trek-themed-calculator/
|
Trekulator: A Reproduction Of The 1977Star TrekThemed Calculator
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"3d printed",
"calculator",
"ESP32",
"star trek",
"Trekulator"
] |
A recent project over on Hackaday.io from [Michael Gardi] is
Trekulator – Where No Maker Has Gone Before
.
This is a fun build and [Michael] has done a very good job of emulating
the original device
. [Michael] used the Hackaday.io logging feature to
log his progress
. Starting in September 2024 he modeled the case, got his original hardware working, got the 7-segment display working, added support for sound, got the keypad working and mounted it, added the TFT display and mounted it, wired up the breadboard implementation, designed and implemented the PCBs, added some finishing touches, installed improved keys, and added a power socket back in March.
It is perhaps funny that where the original device used four red LEDs, [Michael] has used an entire TFT display. This would have been pure decadence by the standards of 1977. The
software
for the ESP32 microcontroller was fairly involved. It had to support audio, graphics, animations, keyboard input, the 7-segment display, and the actual calculations.
The calculations are done using double-precision floating-point values and eight positions on the display so this code will do weird things in some edge cases. For instance if you ask it to sum two eight digit numbers as 90,000,000 and 80,000,000, which would ordinarily sum to the nine digit value 170,000,000, the display will show you a different value instead, such as maybe 17,000,000 or 70,000,000. Why don’t you put one together and let us know what it actually does! Also, can you find any floating-point precision bugs?
This was a really fun project, thanks to [Michael] for writing it up and letting us know via the
tips line
!
| 9
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120709",
"author": "zxm",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:08:54",
"content": "i wonder if someone removed the speaker to stop the calculator making noise. at first it would be a novelty but it would quickly get annoying i suspect.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120724",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T21:11:48",
"content": "Get young relatives a Hurdy-gurdy kit!",
"parent_id": "8120709",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120738",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:12:29",
"content": "For sure! The original Trekulator that I bought had the speaker removed with the wires cleanly cut close to the PCB. ;-) It’s a terrible sound effect. But I will give the creators the benefit of the doubt given the level of technology available to the back in ’77.",
"parent_id": "8120709",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120727",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T21:21:04",
"content": "funny, at first I thought the one on the left was the original considering looking like it had a VFD in it, and surely the red 7 segment display was the replica",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120739",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:13:42",
"content": "Yes. Left = original, right = reproduction.",
"parent_id": "8120727",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120740",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:17:58",
"content": "To answer John’s question, 90,000,000 + 80,000,000= u1.7000000 on the original and 1.70E+08 on the reproduction.But please feel free to put one together.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120883",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T10:35:12",
"content": "Hey Michael, thanks for getting back to us about that!",
"parent_id": "8120740",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120743",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:27:07",
"content": "Great article John. Thank you. Just one clarification. I used the TFT display to support my Next Generation version of the Trekulator. So for the “original” reproduction I just simulate the LEDs behind a cardboard image. My NG implementation uses the TFT to display images plus blinken lights and the touch screen to initiate Star Trek themed sound bites.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120884",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T10:35:58",
"content": "Thanks for the clarification!",
"parent_id": "8120743",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,569.284478
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/remembering-ucsd-p-system-the-pascal-virtual-machine/
|
Remembering UCSD P-System, The Pascal Virtual Machine
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"Pascal",
"ucsd"
] |
Long before the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was said to take the world by storm, the p-System (pseudo-system, or virtual machine) developed at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) provided a cross-platform environment for the UCSD’s Pascal dialect. Later on, additional languages would also be made available for the UCSD p-System, such as Fortran (by Apple Computer) and Ada (by TeleSoft), not unlike the various languages targeting the JVM today in addition to Java. The p-System could be run on an existing OS or as its own OS directly on the hardware. This was extremely attractive in the fragmented home computer market of the 1980s.
After the final release of version IV of UCSD p-System (IV.2.2 R1.1) in 1987, the software died a slow death, but this doesn’t mean it is forgotten. People like [Hans Otten]
have documented
the history and technical details of the UCSD p-System, and the UCSD Pascal dialect went on to inspire Borland Pascal.
Recently [Mark Bessey]
also reminisced
about using the p-System in High School with computer programming classes back in 1986. This inspired him to look at re-experiencing Apple Pascal as well as UCSD Pascal on the UCSD p-System, possibly writing a p-System machine. Even if it’s just for nostalgia’s sake, it’s pretty cool to tinker with what is effectively the Java Virtual Machine or Common Language Runtime of the 1970s, decades before either of those were a twinkle in a software developer’s eyes.
Another common virtual runtime of the era was CHIP-8. It is also gone, but
not quite forgotten
.
| 23
| 14
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120667",
"author": "Jan Prägert",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:36:21",
"content": "There is a song about that.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=660ZCEhvbnw",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120691",
"author": "_sol_",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:32:42",
"content": "I was expecting:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-H6ohY37k",
"parent_id": "8120667",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120708",
"author": "Jan Prägert",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:06:34",
"content": "No one expects the P.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzjv-WdDaMo",
"parent_id": "8120691",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120680",
"author": "Feinfinger (there is no 3rd cheek!)",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:09:52",
"content": "Finally.I remember having used it on TRS-80, C64, “CP/M hardware”, PCs and the Z80-MBC2 still comes with it as one of the pre-installed OSs.Meanwhile I forgot how to handle its UI. :-(If someone shows me a shell like UI layer for UCSD-P-S instead of the repelling menu driven one I remember only, I might give it a retry.And weren’t there even compilers for the native CPUs? I just heard rumours about that and about a BASIC compiler too.It could make a nice unified VM-OS layer for lots of microcontrollers to write assemblers and high level languages for their native ISAs.But the same can be about CP/M and it sure has a bigger pool of existing languages and tools.Maybe there is a reason that CP/M still seems to have a place in many more hearts than UCSD-P-S…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120682",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:15:20",
"content": "Pascal on the Apple ][ would always boot in a unique way. I think it filled the screen memory with 0’s (inverse-video ampersand characters) before clearing it (to black spaces), and the disk would typically do a long seek at the same time, if I remember correctly. Of course, the reason I saw this so often was that Wizardy was written in Pascal. I remember deciding too often, upon finding the stairs to the next level down, to go down and “see what it’s like” before getting my party killed by a new kind of monster.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120683",
"author": "drenehtsral",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:16:17",
"content": "I remember this system well: it was my first experience with that toxic slide that dooms any write once run anywhere concept where vendor specific “extensions” poison the well and once this happens why pay the overhead of the VM?I also remember having to wire some extra micro switches to the empty joystick controller socket on my Franklin Ace 1000 to run it since itrequiredopen and closed Apple keys which, post lawsuit, the Franklin lacked.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120700",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:49:35",
"content": "Eee hee hee hee, our company will collaborate with others on a permissively licensed open source project, but what they don’t know is this enables us to add our own proprietary secret sauce, and our product will take over the world! Mwah hahaha it’s a perfect plan!",
"parent_id": "8120683",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120705",
"author": "www2",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:55:17",
"content": "I know that some of the old school text adventure games using a virtual machine call Z-machine and later SCUMM from lucasArts for Graphic adventure games.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120712",
"author": "drenehtsral",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:13:12",
"content": "SCUMM VM was much nicer that way because the developers had an incentive to ensure that itwasportable. It was also very much domain specific which made it easier to focus how to target multiple platforms.Sierra had a similar setup, based on a very tight scheme interpreter and native library for graphics and sound but the high level game logic could be common across platforms.",
"parent_id": "8120705",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120734",
"author": "Jon Smirl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:02:33",
"content": "Such a later comer. I was using UCSD Pascal during high school in 1977 on a 6502.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120758",
"author": "Joe Freeman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T23:23:27",
"content": "Pascal on the TI 99/4A cost more than the machine. UCSD P-Code required the expansion chassis and the 32K 8 bit bus Ram expansion.The base machine had 256 bytes of 16 bit bus memory used for memory mapped registers and stack. Basic programs ran out of the 16k of what was essentially VRAM.https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/architec.htmhttps://www.kernelcrash.com/blog/the-p-code-card-for-the-ti-99-4a/2023/06/01/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121229",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T06:18:36",
"content": "The TI99 was sort of an emulator box in itself, also.The firmware running it was super complicated and the Basic interpreter was basically being interpreted itself.Fascinating, yet very poor performing home computer.The best about it was the chassis and the keyboard, maybe.",
"parent_id": "8120758",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120794",
"author": "Andrew Weilert",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T02:52:30",
"content": "The two main options for operating an HP 9836 68000-based workstation before HPUX Unix came along were UCSD P-system and HP Rocky Mountain BASIC. Used both at HP from 1985 to 1990 or so when HPUX won out by offering Rocky Mountain BASIC as an X-Windows executable",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121024",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:40:27",
"content": "I had no idea the 9836 could run anything other than RMB. That’s cool and interesting. I had a 9816 and used a 9836 at work.",
"parent_id": "8120794",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120810",
"author": "Richard Kaufmann",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T04:33:31",
"content": "Well, thanks for the memories. (I was at UCSD and wrote the screen-oriented editor as well as some other bits and bobs.) My time on the project has left me with some lingering thoughts. (1) It was before its time, in that the world hadn’t worked up to open source. It would likely have been more long-lasting if it had been published with a decent license. (2) Two main technical gaps were nicely filled by Renaissance Systems (later TeleSoft): (1) native code translation from p-code to machine code (think JIT for JVMs) and (2) 32-bit instead of 16-bit addressing/math. Both too late to save UCSD Pascal. (3) Unix was able to “float down” from larger machines to micros as micros became more capable. UCSD Pascal couldn’t compete: partly just the number of devs, but really from the 56k (on an LSI-11) memory constraining what could be done. I remain proud of the UI (very easy and got out of the way), even if it wasn’t scriptable/extensible. And in the era where printer drivers are GBs, getting an entire execution + code environment of a self-hosting compiler in 56k was pretty cool…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120866",
"author": "Julian Skidmore",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T09:30:53",
"content": "I did actually use the Screen Oriented Editor when playing around with UCSD Pascal on my Apple ][euroPlus at the beginning of the 90s.That wasn’t my main computer, I had a 68008-based Sinclair QL as an undergraduate at UEA UK; I bought the Apple ][ euroPlus with a whole pile of disks & manuals from the school of Chemistry for about £35 when they were disposing of them.So, wow – you’re the guy who wrote the screen editor! I think I was fairly impressed that they’d managed to implement that on something as primitive as UCSD Pascal, I’d only expected a line editor. I think I found it somewhat slow, but then again, UCSD Pascal on an 8-bit 6502 is slow. Having said that, Computer One’s p-code Pascal and MacPascal were also pretty slow, the only fast Pascals we had access to were VAX Pascal and MPW Pascal (Year 3, 3D graphics).I actually really liked UCSD’s single-letter, hierarchy of menu-driven commands. Admittedly, I find’)’ more readable than ‘(‘. e.g. “F)ile, E)edit, C)ompile” vs “F(ile, E(dit, C(ompile”. I’ve written quite a bit of test software for embedded systems using the same paradigm, because it’s a highly compact CLI; though my general parser is RPN: base-10 digits enter a number; ‘ ‘ pushes them and a single letter executes a command. As a bonus, it’s easy to then feed the text in from a serial port to perform automated testing.",
"parent_id": "8120810",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8160484",
"author": "Robert Anderson",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T22:39:56",
"content": "The license price and packaging of different parts by UCSD were enough to give DOS the lead. I ported the P-system to a S-100 Z80 computer I built, including a hand-wired 64KB DRAM board. I remember removing a middle layer of “BIOS” that had no obvious purpose (student exercise?), the resulting system had more free memory that we used for compiling a p-system that ran into memory limits elsewhere.It was painful to watch DOS and the 8088 PC take over the market, I knew UCSD was charging too much, it would have been much more interesting if the P-System took the place of DOS and we could have used the Z8000 or Motorola 64000 for inexpensive PC’s.The name Nicklaus Wirth comes to mind, he invented Pascal, Modula 2 and now Oberon. I think he had a hand in formulating P-code.",
"parent_id": "8120810",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120958",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:40:46",
"content": "My main university programming course in the early 1990s used the pSystem running on top of DOS. The main course was in Pascal but later on in the “Programming and Programming Languages” module there was a section in Eiffel, written in a cross-compiler that turned your Eiffel code into Pascal that you then had to compile again and finally execute in the pSystem interpreter. An essay, sadly, in obsolete technology. Still, I did learn how to develop, test and debug large programs, which isn’t language-dependent.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121082",
"author": "John M Walker",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:28:35",
"content": "I was a student in 1979-81. I learned UCSD Pascal on the Apple 2. I was already spoiled by the Basic that I had used at Mesa College so Pascal was very difficult for me. I went on to learn Assembly and Fortran which I enjoyed a lot more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121183",
"author": "Vall",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T01:04:38",
"content": "Back in the day (early 80s) I made a decent amount of money programming business systems for the Apple II computers using UCSD Pascal running on the p-System.It was heads-and-shoulders better than any other programming environment for that hardware.And then about 8 or so years later, I ported the same business systems to the IBM PC using Borland Pascal and it was not just “inspired on UCSD Pascal”, it was almost 100% compatible — I had to change almost nothing to get it to run.Good times!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121235",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T06:48:04",
"content": "Turbo Pascal was really neat.Version 3 ran on Z80 CP/M, 8086 CP/M and 8086 DOS (MS-DOS).Turbo Pascal as a language also fixed several shortcomings of the Pascal language.Version 4 introduced EXE files and Units support and Version 6 had a real IDE (Turbo Vision).Version 7 was split into Turbo Pascal 7 and the more professional Borland Pascal 7.It could create 286 executables optionally and supported DPMI.The latter also included a Windows compiler,which was derived from earlier “Turbo Pascal for Windows” product.(TPW was notable for being lightweight, compiled executables could run on Windows 3.0 in Real-Mode on an 8086/8088.There’s also a way to run them on Windows 2.)Delphi 1.0 was a successor to that and could still handle OWLs of TPW, in addition to VCL.The Calmira project used Delphi 1 to recreate a Windows 95 explorer for 3.1x.Delphi 2.0 was mostly Win32s compatible, also.The compiled applications could run on Windows 3.1+Win32s if certain rules were followed.Delphi 3.0 was very popular, also because the Pro version made it onto companion CDs of books for free.Delphi 7 added Windows XP style support and was being popular over a 20 years period (up to early 2020s).The famous “Miniatur Wunderland” in Hamburg/Germany seems to have used Delphi internally, too at some point.https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniatur_Wunderlandhttps://www.embarcadero.com/de/case-study/miniatur-wunderland-case-study",
"parent_id": "8121183",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121245",
"author": "James Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T08:07:24",
"content": "My first proper job was at Cabot software in the UK, formerly Pecan software IIRC. We had a commercial license from UCSD and a few dedicated customers along with the open university who supplied the Pascal compiler to students. I recall Modula2 also. Later came C and a port to early digital set top boxes (68K with 512K RAM). That path led to the rest of my career thus far. Cabot continued in the STB space developing MHEG-5 and later purchased by Vestel IIRC but I’d moved on by that point. Happy memories!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122039",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T21:41:55",
"content": "Shoutout to FORTH.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.394043
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-part-picker/
|
Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Part Picker
|
Kristina Panos
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] |
[
"bachelor pad",
"IBM Selectric Composer",
"keyboard part picker",
"Kinesis Advantage",
"spacemouse"
] |
If you do a lot of 3D computer work, I hear a Spacemouse is indispensable. So
why not build a keyboard around it and make it a mouse-cropad?
Image by [DethKlawMiniatures] via
reddit
That’s exactly what [DethKlawMiniatures] did with theirs. This baby is built with mild steel for the frame, along with some 3D-printed spacers and a pocket for the Spacemouse itself to live in.
Those switches are Kailh speed coppers, and they’re all wired up to a Seeed Xiao RP2040. [DethKlawMiniatures] says that making that lovely PCB by hand was a huge hassle, but impatience took over.
After a bit of use, [DethKlawMiniatures] says that the radial curve of the macro pad is nice, and the learning curve was okay. I think this baby looks fantastic, and I hope [DethKlawMiniatures] gets a lot of productivity out of it.
Kinesis Rides Again After 15 Years
Fifteen years ago, [mrmarbury] did a lot of ergo keyboard research and longed for a
DataHand
II. Once the sticker shock wore off, he settled on a Kinesis Advantage with MX browns just like your girl is typing on right now.
Image by [mrmarbury] via
reddit
Not only did [mrmarbury] love the Kinesis to death, he learned Dvorak on it and can do 140 WPM today. And, much like my own experience, the Kinesis basically saved his career.
Anyway, things were going gangbusters for over a decade until [mrmarbury] spilled coffee on the thing. The main board shorted out, as did a thumb cluster trace. He did
the Stapelberg mod
to replace the main board, but that only lasted a little while until one of the key-wells’ flex boards came up defective. Yadda yadda yadda, he moved on and eventually got a
Svalboard
, which is pretty darn close to having a DataHand II.
But then a couple of months ago, the Kinesis fell on [mrmarbury]’s head while cleaning out a closet and
he knew he had to fix it once and for all
. He ripped out the flex boards and hand-wired it up to work with the Stapelberg mod. While the thumb clusters still have their browns and boards intact, the rest were replaced with Akko V3 Creme Blue Pros, which sound like they’re probably pretty amazing to type on. So far, so good, and it has quickly become [mrmarbury]’s favorite keyboard again. I can’t say I’m too surprised!
The Centerfold: Swingin’ Bachelor Pad
Image by [weetek] via
reddit
Isn’t this whole thing just
nice
?
Yeah it is. I really like the lighting and the monster monstera. The register is cool, and I like the way it the panels on the left wall mimic its lines. And apparently that is a good Herman Miller chair, and I dig all the weird plastic on the back, but I can’t help but think this setup would look even cleaner with an Aeron there instead. (Worth every penny!)
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the IBM Selectric Composer
And what do we have here? This beauty is not a typewriter, exactly.
It’s a typesetter
. What this means is that, if used as directed, this machine can churn out text that looks like it was typeset on a printing press. You know, with the right margin justified.
Image by [saxifrageous] via
reddit
You may be wondering how this is achieved at all. It has to do with messing with the kerning of the type — that’s the space between each letter. The dial on the left sets the language of the type element, while the one one the right changes the spacing. There’s a lever around back that lets you change the pitch, or size of the type. The best part? It’s completely mechanical.
To actually use the thing, you had to type your text twice. The first time, the machine measured the length of the line automatically and then report a color and number combination (like red-5) which was to be noted in the right margin.
The IBM Selectric Composer came out in 1966 and was a particularly expensive machine. Like, $35,000 in 2025 money expensive. IBM typically rented them out to companies and then trashed them when they came back, which, if you’re younger than a certain vintage, is why you’ve probably never seen one before.
If you just want to hear one clack, check out the short video below of a 1972 Selectric Composer where you can get a closer look at the dials. In 1975, the first Electronic Selectric Composer came out. I can’t even imagine how much those must have cost.
Finally, a Keyboard Part Picker
Can’t decide what kind of keyboard to build? Not even sure what all there is to consider? Then you can’t go wrong with
Curatle, a keyboard part picker
built by [Careless-Pay9337] to help separate you from your hard-earned money in itemized fashion.
The start screen for
Curatle
made by [Careless-Pay9337].
So this is basically PCPartPicker, but for keyboards, and those are [Careless-Pay9337]’s words. Essentially, [Careless-Pay9337] scraped a boatload of keyboard products from various vendors, so there is a lot to choose from already. But if that’s not enough, you can also import products from any store.
The only trouble is that currently, there’s no compatibility checking built in. It’ll be a long road, but it’s something that [Careless-Pay9337] does plan to implement in the future.
What else would you like to see? Be sure to let [Careless-Pay9337] know over in the
reddit thread
.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
.
| 4
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120726",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T21:15:14",
"content": "did I mention the Varityper 1010 to you? i think the same mechanics for justifying a column of text by counting the spaces between words in the first run and adjusting accordingly in the second to justify it. but it can do more: two typefaces ready to use, a gearbox to set the global pitch per typeface pitch used, complete varable line height, even reversed. oh and the looks. yes I’ve got one with 20 type shuttles as they are called.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120744",
"author": "crispernaki",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:28:18",
"content": "Mouse-cropad. Aw, yeah!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120939",
"author": "lthemick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:57:03",
"content": "By ‘register’, did you mean the radiator under the window in the centerfold? Or is there something else there I’m not recognizing?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121104",
"author": "Kristina Panos",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:37:31",
"content": "Yes!",
"parent_id": "8120939",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,569.532222
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/restoration-of-six-player-arcade-game-from-the-early-90s/
|
Restoration Of Six-Player Arcade Game From The Early 90s
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Games",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"galaxian",
"hardware",
"laserdisc",
"namco",
"restoration",
"retrocomputing",
"video game"
] |
Although the video game crash of the mid-80s caused a major decline in arcades from their peak popularity, the industry didn’t completely die off. In fact, there was a revival that lasted until the 90s with plenty of companies like Capcom, Midway, SEGA, and Konami all competing to get quarters, francs, loonies, yen, and other coins from around the world. During this time, Namco — another game company — built a colossal 28-player prototype shooter game. Eventually, they cut it down to a (still titanic) six-player game that was actually released to the world. [PhilWIP] and his associates are
currently restoring
one of the few remaining room-sized games that are still surviving.
The game is called Galaxian 3, with this particular one having been upgraded to a version called “Attack of the Zolgear”. Even though it’s “only” a six-person shooter, it’s still enormous in scale. The six players sit side-by-side in an enclosed room, each with their own controller. Two projectors handle the display, which is large even by modern standards, and a gauntlet of early-90s technology, including LaserDisc players, is responsible for all of the gameplay. When [PhilWIP] first arrived, the game actually powered on, but there were several problems to solve before it was playable. They also wanted to preserve the game, which meant imaging the LaserDiscs to copy their data onto modern storage. Some of the player input PCBs needed repairs, and there were several issues with the projectors. Eventually the team got the system working well enough to play.
[PhilWIP] and the others haven’t gotten all the issues ironed out yet. The hope is that subsequent trips will restore this 90s novelty to working order shortly. It turns out there were all kinds of unique hardware from this wild-west era that’s in need of restoring,
as we saw a few years ago with this early 3D cabinet from the same era
.
| 9
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120632",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:09:57",
"content": "I’d be interested in knowing a bit more about imaging LaserDiscs to modern storage. Probably a bit more complicated than using “dd”, but I wouldn’t know how to go about performing the work…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120640",
"author": "Joseph R.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:31:07",
"content": "https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator/wiki/OverviewThis is likely how they put the Laserdiscs onto modern storage",
"parent_id": "8120632",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120641",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:41:40",
"content": "They’re analogue I think so the archiving projects use an ADC to capture the RF envelope direct from the read amplifier, Google for Domesday archive project for some good writeups and even the hardware used",
"parent_id": "8120632",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120659",
"author": "Phelps",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:17:07",
"content": "Talking about wild-west and 3d cabinets, I thought it was going to be a link to Sega’s Time Traveller.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120670",
"author": "Michael R",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:43:23",
"content": "I had the chance to play Galaxian 3 back in the at the Trocadero in London. What a game. They also had Ridge Racer Full Scale where you sit in a Mazda MX5 to drive. Incredible",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120729",
"author": "Bradford J Robinson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T21:37:21",
"content": "I would love to see a come back of the sega derby racers game. I forgot it’s acrual name but it was the one where you can play with 6 or so players and train your horse. They would print off a card that you could take with you to save your horse and breed them to get better horses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120773",
"author": "Richard Parkinson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T01:09:48",
"content": "Boring! GameWorks late 90s Sky Pirates and Mr Big or Virtua Fighter! Nothing came close back then. Software and PC hardware for most of those GameWorks only titles still exist at Seattle GameWorks. Sit down strap in move up and down 30ft high shooting them baddies as you go. What could be better? Wait…. oh yeah doing it with ur fav friend, drink, food and 24/7 365! Everything good all at once!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120902",
"author": "Hojo Norem",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T11:22:51",
"content": "“Although the video game crash of the mid-80s”What is this ‘video game crash’ you speak of? The ‘United States Atari home console crash’ of the mid-80s perhaps?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121000",
"author": "Johnny Five",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T16:06:59",
"content": "Thank you for this comments! It’s weird seeing history you lived through morph into nonsense in real-time. Young people now imagine some enormous industry-wide “crash” that stopped all video games for a decade. Of course all that actually happened is Atari’s sales collapsed because they had no quality control and people played games other ways instead. The “crash” was at most console only, and it only lasted two years until Nintendo came along. Arcades were doing just fine all through that period, as was home computer gaming and pinball. Not to mention other consoles like Intellivision that kept right on going through the “crash”. Revisionist history is really annoying.",
"parent_id": "8120902",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,569.712543
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/low-cost-oscilloscope-gets-low-cost-upgrades/
|
Low Cost Oscilloscope Gets Low Cost Upgrades
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"News",
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"adc",
"filter",
"low cost",
"low-pass",
"noise",
"oscilloscope",
"tool",
"upgrade"
] |
Entry-level oscilloscopes are a great way to get some low-cost instrumentation on a test bench, whether it’s for a garage lab or a schoolroom. But the cheapest ones are often cheap for a reason, and even though they work well for the price they won’t stand up to more advanced equipment. But missing features don’t have to stay missing forever, as
it’s possible to augment them to get some of these features.
[Tommy’s] project shows you one way to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, at least as it relates to oscilloscopes.
Most of the problem with these lower-cost tools is their low precision due to fewer bits of analog-digital conversion. They also tend to be quite noisy, further lowering the quality of the oscilloscope. [Tommy] is focusing his efforts on the DSO138-mini, an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of 100 kHz and an effective resolution of 10 bits. The first step is to add an anti-aliasing filter to the input, which is essentially a low-pass filter that removes high frequency components of the signal, which could cause a problem due to the lower resolution of the device. After that, digital post-processing is done on the output, which removes noise caused by the system’s power supply, among other things, and essentially acts as a second low-pass filter.
In part 2 of the project,
[Tommy] demonstrates the effectiveness of these two methods with experimental data, showing that a good percentage of the noise on a test signal has been removed from the output. All the more impressive here is that the only additional cost besides the inexpensive oscilloscope itself is for a ceramic capacitor that costs around a dollar. We were also impressed: [Tommy] is a junior in high school!
Presumably, you could apply these techniques to other inexpensive equipment,
like this even cheaper oscilloscope based on the ESP32
.
| 51
| 16
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120277",
"author": "fdufnews",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T14:09:20",
"content": "You said: “Presumably, you could apply these techniques to other inexpensive equipment, like this even cheaper oscilloscope based on the ESP32.”But, in that case it is an STM32",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120558",
"author": "Karl Morant",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:37:18",
"content": "They make an oscilloscope without a low pass filter?In the words of Luke Skywalker, “what a piece of junk!”.",
"parent_id": "8120277",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120292",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T14:53:39",
"content": "Just adding a single C_filter to make the second amplifier a low pass filter is really great!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120298",
"author": "Gardoni",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T15:21:38",
"content": "Brand new Rigol DS1054Z is $350. Minimum wage in Germany is about $14/h. That’s 25 hours or about 3,5 days of working at McDonalds. Do you really want to waste your life screwing around with subpar “tools” instead of getting the real thing? (even if it’s just Rigol)Reminds me of people who each month slave away for hours, every day, for two or three weeks grinding virtual gold in an MMO just to earn enough rl-life cash for another month of subscription; when they could earn the same amount by working for just a day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120324",
"author": "aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T16:28:08",
"content": "Right…You must have rich parents, I recognize that version of logic.‘every highschool student should work 8 hours every day in McDonalds and buy tools for school only with the earnings.’",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120331",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T16:59:19",
"content": "Not entirely agreeing with the poster above, or even going to talk about the monetary aspect but something else entirely. I think we really should not be encourage people to settle for inferior tools. Or at least “toy” tier ones.Human lives are much more valuable, it makes no sense to waste hours and hours being frustrated because your tool wasn’t intended for the task. Its a source of misery, we don’t want that.Yes, its a great learning exercise to manage to work with what you have, but I say its not comparable to getting a proper tool to finish the job. That’s a real achievement. I will give [Tommy] a pass though, students should waste time, lest they become adults who micromanage time",
"parent_id": "8120324",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120352",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T18:37:34",
"content": "It’s a mistake to say “My free time is worth $20/h” and use that to justify why you should just buy the more expensive thing, because it’sfreetime. You’re not paid to sit around.You can choose to spend your free time to create value for yourself, or to spend value you have to replace with your not-free time. Whether you consider that misery and suffering is up to your attitude – you can’t make that judgement for someone else.",
"parent_id": "8120331",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120678",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:08:15",
"content": "Humans do two things special.Language and tool using/making.Buying crap tools is a step in becoming a good tool maker.Learning to recognize ‘time sinks’.Part of that is valuing your own time, perhaps not at your billing rate, but something.Even if getting paid, the wise will not waste time attempting to polish a turd.Give the MBA what she want’s…Cover turd in gold spray paint and glitter, find new job.All costs are opportunity costs.What else could you have done with time/money?Play video games and fap?Proceed with hacking on garbage for learning.‘Sitting around time’ is priceless, what price sanity?",
"parent_id": "8120352",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120733",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T21:58:54",
"content": "A 100 kHz scope with a decent analog front-end is still good value for the money if you’re dealing with “DC to 20 kHz” as the author says. The first scope I started with was worse than that.",
"parent_id": "8120352",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120531",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T11:11:56",
"content": "OF course it’s nice to have good tools, who does not like good tools? And which HaD reader doesn’t feel joy at having a good quality tool. But normal people only have so much money and you have to live with not being able to buy the best of everything.And frankly how many students would use an oscilloscope enough to warrant to spend that money on it? I expect only a very small number.Perhaps they should spend that money on some quality headphones for instance, to enjoy good sound which they might spend considerable more time doing. And that’s just one thing of the millions of things where you can opt for quality.Now from our HaD vantage it would be pretty nice if every high-schooler bought a high quality oscilloscope, and then us having our pick in the flooded second-hand market as they dump them after high-school! :DIncidentally, I agree the oscilloscope in the article is pretty damn dated, 100KHz max? Come on now.But it’s still interesting to see the hack to improve it though.",
"parent_id": "8120331",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120346",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T18:12:06",
"content": "Or just a kid who’s driving daddy’s car and living at home eating and living for free, thinking that the money you’re paid is all yours to spend on goodies.At minimum wage, assuming you’re in no debt, you can easily spend 70-80% of your income in just the necessary expenses like food, rent, utility and phone bills, internet, tax, commuting to work… so it would actually take nearly the entire month to save up enough cash to buy the oscilloscope – assuming you didn’t want to buy anything else. No Netflix subscription, no beer and snacks, no nothing – just saving money to buy a ruddy oscilloscope.People often have more time than money, so spending $50 on a crap oscilloscope and the time to make it better affords you to buy six other nice things with the money you save.",
"parent_id": "8120324",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120361",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:26:57",
"content": "‘every highschool student should work 8 hours every day in McDonalds and buy tools for school only with the earnings.’Where exactly did he say the guy should work 8 hours every day in McDonalds? Nowhere.Have you heard of weekend jobs that school kids have?And your second assumption that he is obligated to buy the scope for school is also just an assumption. It is hardly likely that a junior high school student in Germany should have to buy one himself. More likely the school’s physics lab will have them.",
"parent_id": "8120324",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120365",
"author": "Urgon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:33:28",
"content": "Parents can help. In Europe parents tend to support hobbies of their children and are willing to spend money on them.Besides, used 2-channel analog oscilloscopes are relatively cheap, and one can buy a decent model for 30-50Eur. Or one can buy something like Zoyt ZT-702S, or one of those cheap Hantek or Owon scopemeters.The only reason for a DIY oscilloscope is education. Especially analog front-end design, and DSP programming. 100kHz of bandwidth makes such a DIY scope limited to work on audio circuits only. And one rarely needs 12 or even 10 bits. Besides, you can’t increase bandwidth but you can increase resolution with oversampling, which probably all modern oscilloscopes offer. Mine with 8-bit ADC offers up to 14-bits in this mode.Personally I think Siglent SDS1104X-U is the best budget oscilloscope money can buy, as it’s fully-featured without hacking. Alternatively one can buy Hantek 2D10 that has two channels, but includes signal generator, which is a good thing to have. Then there are all those cheap USB oscilloscopes. PC software is not the greatest, but these devices are relatively cheap. Many of them are sold as used because they are picked as “my first oscilloscope” and after few months get replaced with something more advanced.When I started writing articles on electronics for Elektroda.pl, I kept that meager income on separate account and bought my DSO for that money. Then when I started working for two electronics magazines, I spent that income on a good bench multimeter. Tomorrow I’ll be ordering new, better soldering station, as current model is slowly breaking apart after ten years of hard use. But I’m designing my own ultra-precise power supply as there is nothing on the market with specifications or performance I want.If your budget is limited, you can’t afford to use the cheapest tools.",
"parent_id": "8120324",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120333",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T17:07:09",
"content": "Minimum wage in Germany is about $14/h. That’s 25 hours or about 3,5 days of working at McDonalds.Subtract taxes and living and recalculate. You’re not left with all the money at the end of the day.At minimum wage, you have very little left of your pay at the end of the day. That means youactuallyhave to work for months to save up enough cash to spend it on a Rigol, that is if you don’t have other sudden expenses like a broken car or having to go to the dentists…",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120337",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T17:29:59",
"content": "And then there’s the matter of debt, which is probably the case since people on minimum wages generally can’t afford to just buy things like cars and homes.Technically you have no savings even if you have cash in hand. If you’re not spending the extra money you have to pay the debt as soon as possible, you’re going to lose more money later. $350 now at 3% interest rate over 10 years is $470. Inflation is going to eat some of that in real terms, but that depends on whether your wages keep up with inflation, and whether the interest rate goes up with some index which is usually the case.This is why spending $50 on a crap oscilloscope and $300 to pay back your loans is the better deal. You’ll have a scope and save more than its worth in interest payments later. Beggars can’t be choosers.",
"parent_id": "8120333",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120345",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T18:11:26",
"content": "Well, kind of depends also on wether you make any money with the scope. If not, then it’s a hobby and you spend on it what you can. If you do make money, then it might be better to save up for a better than the minimum, because if you buy something too crappy, you might not make that money after all. It’s a game of balance, obviously, if you need to get that scope now to make some money, then maybe you can’t wait.I just bought a scope (Rigol). I won’t make any money with it, so i couldn’t justify a 450€ scope, which seemed nice. So i bought a 270€ scope (discounted). Works alright for my needs. It was kind of a let down, with artificial limitations and support seems to have been dropped years ago. Did not know that. Could be the same thing with the more expenssive scope too, don’t know",
"parent_id": "8120337",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120350",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T18:28:42",
"content": "Well it’s kinda assumed that you don’t buy a $50 scope for any real work, although I do have one for quick diagnostics stuff and it’s really handy. It means you don’t have to lug a Rigol to the worksite just to check some basic stuff, and you don’t mind if it gets broken or lost.If you’re your own business, then an oscilloscope as a tool is a tax write-off anyways.",
"parent_id": "8120345",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120338",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T17:33:41",
"content": "And the things you learn from the hours spent on improving tools could help you eventually earn more than minimum wage.",
"parent_id": "8120333",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120353",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T18:40:16",
"content": "At least it helps you to identify what it means to have a good oscilloscope, so you don’t fall on marketing and pay for nothing later.",
"parent_id": "8120338",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120368",
"author": "Urgon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:44:15",
"content": "Well, you can use this to compare countries based on the worth of work and relative cost of specific items.For example I would have to work over 67 hours on minimum wage in my country to buy this oscilloscope. Almost three times longer. I live in Poland. And this indicates relation between worth of work and cost of living. The reason many people from Poland work and/or live in Germany is simple – it’s much easier to save money on nice things in country where your work is worth 3 times more in relation to the cost of those things…",
"parent_id": "8120333",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120684",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:18:02",
"content": "I don’t know what the rate is in Germany, but in the USA, about 1% of workers earn minimum wage.If you aren’t the mentioned spoiled high school kid and you are still making minimum wage you are doing something very very wrong.Consistently show up on time and sober and you will earn more.In CA they raised the minimum wage for fast food jobs to $20, vs $15 for other crap jobs.The fast food industry turned over it’s entire workforce.Now retail is the job for the mouth breathers, you have to hustle to keep a job a McDs.",
"parent_id": "8120333",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120464",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T04:05:55",
"content": "Don’t fully agree but I will say if you are serious you will tend to put yourself in situations where serious happensI got a very nice techtronicks dmm and a 20mhz Kenwood dso (still crt based) totally free by not working a shit no money job as a fry cook … but working a shit no money job as an entry level tech",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121067",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:04:03",
"content": "We should take a trip to Australia and get for 250 grand worth of instruments for free from those magical dumpsters a certain famous youtuber seems to have scatter around his place.",
"parent_id": "8120464",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121073",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:12:58",
"content": "Hamfests? It thought that kind of thing ended 20+ years ago.How many radio amateurs are there these days?",
"parent_id": "8120464",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121074",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:14:14",
"content": "Misplaced reply, ask AI to figure it out if you are confused now :)",
"parent_id": "8120464",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120467",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T04:24:04",
"content": "If you don’t want to spend that much, check for hamfests in your area. I’ve gotten lots of analog scopes from them. A couple of them were even free. If you stick around until the end, the sellers will often give you a really good deal on stuff they don’t want to haul back home. Sometimes they leave free stuff behind when they pack up.Even the old synchronous sweep tube scopes are more useful than one those cheap toy scopes. At least they display a clean trace up to a couple of megahertz. You just can’t make any time or frequency measurements with them.",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120564",
"author": "Alexander Pruss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:51:29",
"content": "Getting a second job requires applying and interviewing and then filling out financial forms, and that will add a number of hours on top of the 25 hours you have to work.If you quit after 25 hours, it’s not nice to your employer who put in a number of hours to hire you.Improving a piece of electronics is a lot more fun than working at McDonald’s.A fair amount of the time in a project like this is experimenting. Once you figure it out, you can write it up and other people can do it faster than you did, so there may be some social utility.",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120686",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:23:32",
"content": "Those cheap and cast off and homemade tools got me startedI started with vacuum tube everything and recapped and calibrated themSame for my 140’s to 80’s craftsman hand power and shop tools from Craigslist yard sales flea markets and scrap pilesSame for my tillers riding and mowers pull behind trailers generators and pressure washersSame for my 1960 stake body farm truckAnd my mid engined econoline van both free and both rebuilt from scrap Ike’s and elbow greaseSame for my 8n tractor and implementsWe start with cast offs and cheap and work our way up reinvesting as we go and fixing what we haveWe adapt we overcome and we save our money and spend it on what we cannot otherwise get and only what we needSo I tip my hat to the young man and his scope",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120862",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T09:19:13",
"content": "Agreed, one starbucks costs 10usd.",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121871",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T11:43:36",
"content": "Funny followup; I just say a bit of a ‘great scott’ video, the German youtuber you know, and he showed a plot on his (1GHz version) oscilloscope and for shit ‘n giggles I looked up how much his is, and it’s on sale for $22768.I guess Germans are REALLY into oscilloscopes eh, 22+ grand, phew.I guess he fed all of Germany for a few years working at McDonalds.(Although he probably got it for free, sigh.)Anyway you can send him your seal of approval maybe? ;)",
"parent_id": "8120298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120334",
"author": "John C.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T17:19:26",
"content": "I think some of you are missing the point and have not looked at the articles in EDN. A high school student researched and modified an electronic instrument.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120354",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:01:20",
"content": "Mind that anti-aliasing or lack of in a cheap oscilloscope is not necessarily a bad thing. An operator who knows the limits of the scope can judge whether the signal they’re seeing represents something real. You never blindly trust the oscilloscope, because there’s a lot of subtle things that can go wrong.For example, if you put a high-pass filter in front of the probe and you’re still seeing low frequency signals coming out, you know that it’s aliasing and you know that there’s something going on beyond the Nyquist limit of your ADC, which means you need a better scope to look at it. It also means you just used you cheap oscilloscope to see beyond what it’s supposed to see.If you had a slow scope that was well filtered to exclude the high frequency stuff, you would never know that it’s there. It would fool you into thinking that there’s nothing going on; sometimes worse is better.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120362",
"author": "Mathias",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:26:59",
"content": "“The first step is to add an anti-aliasing filter to the input, which is essentially a low-pass filter that removes high frequency components of the signal, which could cause a problem due to the lower resolution of the device.”Doesn’t the low-pass remove problems due to the limited sampling rate? If you have 1GHz, 8-Bits you can still measure a 100MHz signal. While 20 Bits at 100MHz won’t be enough. A powerful 100MHz signal will destroy everything you can measure on a 100MHz scope. A Low-Pass removes that signal and you can measure something.Unless you meant “frequency resolution”, but in the sentence before you write “resolution of 10-Bits”… Remember, most cheap scopes were 8-Bits only (like the Rigol 1054z) since Rigol introduced their new 12-Bit series.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120695",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:37:07",
"content": "yeah this was my real thought too…i’dpersonallyrather have noise and imprecision represented as noise and imprecision. the idea of smoothing it out in software bums me out. of course, if i am not using it as test equipment but rather like to record data from a sensor, then i might want to do all sorts of post-processing to it!but it makes me wonder how heavily-processed the signal on my siglent is.",
"parent_id": "8120362",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120746",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:29:21",
"content": "There is oversampling, which nearly all scopes do, which utilizes the remaining noise to average out multiple samples to achieve greater precision than what the ADC can otherwise do. This is how your low-end scope achieves its advertised performance values using a fairly cheap and low resolution but fast ADC running at something like 1 GHz sampling rate but actually sporting a 62 MHz bandwidth because it’s averaging 8 samples into one.",
"parent_id": "8120695",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120363",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:30:05",
"content": "Everyone here who had to walk uphill both to and from school, raise your hand!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120366",
"author": "OH3MVV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:35:33",
"content": "We had to ski, both in winter and in summer, and it was always uphill and against the wind both ways.",
"parent_id": "8120363",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120553",
"author": "mayhem",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:12:19",
"content": "Fun thought experiment, figure out how to walk uphill both ways to and from school. I figured it out one time, but, alas, I don’t remember anymore. I think it had to do with a valley.",
"parent_id": "8120363",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120561",
"author": "Ray Morris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:47:59",
"content": "I walked up hill both ways, to and from school.To get to to school, I walked up and over the hill, then down to the school. To get home, I walked over the same hill.",
"parent_id": "8120553",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120376",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:30:09",
"content": "Is it really an advancement to spend your time for “idiot work” in order to buy tools that some large factory churned out, and you don’t really understand the inner workings of, instead of spending your time verifying your assumptions, and really learn something?I chose exactly the way [Tommy] seems to have chosen, and I later became an acknowledged expert in the field. Today I’m buying the most fancy tools because I spend my time differently, but that doesn’t mean I could not make them if I had to.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120569",
"author": "Lucas",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:03:30",
"content": "2nded.Also: It’s a high school student. Those normally don’t know about Nyquist… (I didn’t, I was messing around with MCU’s in BASIC, as is was a pre-arduino world back then…)",
"parent_id": "8120376",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120378",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:37:41",
"content": "The Esp32 scope link goes to an STM32 based one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120437",
"author": "Matias",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T01:35:24",
"content": "About this line:“The first step is to add an anti-aliasing filter to the input, which is essentially a low-pass filter that removes high frequency components of the signal, which could cause a problem due to the lower resolution of the device.”It’s got jack to do with the resolution. The reason why it causes a problem is because of what analog to digital conversion does to the frequency spectrum of the signal. When you discretize your signal, its frequency spectrum turns periodic. The original spectrum appears to be “copied and pasted” in multiples of the sampling frequency (f_s). If your original spectrum had any components above f_s/2, then they will overlap with the subsequent “cycle” of the frequency spectrum, and you get very weird stuff like this.The way to fix this is by using an antialiasing filter, removing everything above fs/2.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120748",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:35:17",
"content": "There is also phase errors or beat errors that happens below the Nyquist frequency, which shows up as increasing low frequency artifacts the closer you get to the limit. These can be calculated out if you know exactly what the input signal is supposed to be, but since you don’t, you have to put your low-pass filter lower than f_s/2. Preferably much lower, like 1/5th of your sampling rate.",
"parent_id": "8120437",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120454",
"author": "S41",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T03:45:19",
"content": "What is going in here? From electronic discussion to Economic discussion",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120482",
"author": "Mark Mansell",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T05:23:49",
"content": "These cheap devices will never replace a serious scope. Period, even if just on triggering options, but one has to be particularly short sighted to say that cheap alternatives are worthless, especially in face of the overwhelming evidence of their popularity which, to all but the most particularly dense, shows that there are people who do find them useful.There is a depressing amount of stupidity and elitism in these comments, many likely from very entitled fools who have never had to really work for an actual living. Apart from real economics, which many do not seem to comprehend, they miss several other important points: first, many people use these cheap devices in diy audio synthesis where the advantages of using several devices in the audio chain outweigh the limitations. Since the important components of these signals are below 25khz, these devices, esp with simple fixes like this, and even cheap low impedance probes are more than adequate and, lets face it, provide the most critical bling and squiggly lines. Second point is just the challenge of improving the value if the device which is one of the valued forces driving education in engineering.At theend of the day, what really matters is the opinion of those who find value, not the words of blowhards who are too entitled, inexperienced or shortsighted to see value in anything with limitations.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120522",
"author": "Peter van Dijk",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T09:39:33",
"content": "I have the same scope. I found it almost useless with the included power supply. Replacing that with a 9V battery improved things a lot. Now I see I have more steps to take :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120555",
"author": "Michael Geleide",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:30:32",
"content": "So much pretense and presumptuous attitude here. Learning is learning. Everyone isn’t infected with affluenza, as some of these statements indicate. Never seen do much “assumption” from what would should be assistance and education. Color me gone.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120559",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:40:39",
"content": "This place is becoming more like reddit every day….The need for the political grandstanding by some is unfortunate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120697",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:46:23",
"content": "haha unlike the great contentious thread above, i simply love that there are so many takes on ‘low-cost’. when i saw the headline, i imagined my $350 scope.last time i looked at theseverycheap scopes, they were closer to $100 than $25, and many of them had USB instead of a display. i ruled them out because <1MHz seemed irrelevant to my needs — the sort of troubles i have just wouldn’t even look like a blip on them. and most of them had very inflexible voltage range limits. truly, that voltage range thing is a problem i find a lot on low-end test equipment…who wants to buy one low-bandwidth logic analyzer and signal generator that only supports 5V I/O, and a separate one for 3.3V? but once i rule that out, products with level-shifting (such as bus pirate) cost a little more. of course they do.at $25, it becomes the sort of product that is available to someone like where i was 30 years ago in highschool. i still don’t want it but i can see why people are futzing with them. even now, there’s always the attraction to try out one of these preposterously cheap products.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121135",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:26:14",
"content": "I built a $20 ‘scope kit.It’s more useful than a $15 multimeter.But not much.Much less weather tight.Ended up in trunk of car w. emergency tools.Chinesium test and power leads cost almost as much as the scope.I just wanted to see what $20 scope was…I paid $20 for my first very used ‘scope.Commercial scope/meters are a much better tool.Don’t cost much more, about twice.Come with leads (nothing like 10:1 probe, but wires), space inside for battery.",
"parent_id": "8120697",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,569.866227
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/building-a-custom-zynq-7000-soc-development-board-from-the-ground-up/
|
Building A Custom Zynq-7000 SoC Development Board From The Ground Up
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"ARM",
"FPGA",
"hardware",
"PCB Hacks"
] |
[
"AMD Zynq-7000 SoC",
"arm",
"fpga board"
] |
In this series of 23 YouTube videos [Rich]
puts the AMD Zynq-7000 SoC through its paces
by building a development board from the ground up to host it along with its peripherals. The Zynq is part FPGA and part CPU, and while it has been around for a while, we don’t see nearly as many projects about it as we’d like.
[Rich] covers everything from the power system to HDMI, USB, DDR RAM, and everything in between. By the end, he’s able to boot PetaLinux.
The Zynq SoC includes an ARM Cortex-A9 Based APU and an Artix-7 FPGA. In case you missed it,
Xilinx was recently acquired by AMD
, which is why you might have remembered this as a Xilinx part.
We’ve heard from [Rich] before. Back in 2021 we saw his
Arduino Brings USB Mouse To Homebrew Computer
. Don’t miss his follow-up playlist:
Building on my Zynq-7000
in which he takes his Zynq-7000 board even further.
If you’re interested in FPGA technology but need something more easy going to get you started, be sure to check out
how to build a 6809 CPU on an FPGA
. Or, if you need something even simpler, report for
boot camp
.
Thanks to [Alex] for the tip!
| 8
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120270",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:25:22",
"content": "I would like to make an FPGA board as well but sadly I do not have anything in mind that would require an FPGA",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120319",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T16:21:37",
"content": "flash an LED!",
"parent_id": "8120270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120566",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:53:28",
"content": "Everyone benefits from a personnel phased array radar in the back yard.",
"parent_id": "8120270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120782",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T01:40:25",
"content": "Same problem. Where do you need to transform a massive flow of data? I can think of image processing.But PC with OpenCV can do a lot easily, even if it’s slow to start, power hungry and skipping frames.I think I ranter have a 32bit micro with 2GB of ram.",
"parent_id": "8120270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8133767",
"author": "lambert4congress",
"timestamp": "2025-05-31T00:21:31",
"content": "I’ve been thinking about taking on a ternary based radio communications project… But do I really want to devote the time to learning the craft? I’d maybe train some of the LLMs on FPGA programming… But I’m sure someone smarter than me is already working at it? 🤷Let’s give it another 5 years.",
"parent_id": "8120270",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120714",
"author": "Melet",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:15:31",
"content": "But why do this when we already have the super practical Red Pitaya board ?!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120920",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T13:00:01",
"content": "There is an awesome sense of achievement and great educational value in successfully building something like this by yourself, from the ground up.The point of this was not just to build yet another dev board, but to enjoy the process and learn from the experience and pass on the knowledge, including all lessons learned, to the viewers with enough interest to watch all the videos in the series.",
"parent_id": "8120714",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120747",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:35:11",
"content": "FPGAs are great until you decide to open Vitis. HLS is quite hard to wrap my head around, especially using AXI between the ARM core and FPGA fabric. Verilog is fine, and Vivado is painful but at least works. I wish there were better sources of documentation for programming in HLS or Verilog, as AMD’s docs are clearly not for beginners. I’m taking a class on FPGAs right now, certainly doesn’t help that the teacher doesn’t seem to understand how to use the tooling either (nor how to write C but I digress). Also I wish there was more FOSS tooling around FPGAs, as Id give anything to be able to replace Vivado/Vitis with a text editor (nvim) and some command line tools.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.660428
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/non-planar-slicing-is-for-the-birds/
|
Non-planar Slicing Is For The Birds
|
Tyler August
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3d model slicing",
"non-planar 3D printing",
"non-planar layer FDM",
"non-planar slicer"
] |
When we say non-planar slicing is for the birds, we mean [Joshua Bird], who demonstrates the versatility of his new
non-planar S4-Slicer
by printing a Benchy upside down with the
“Core R-Theta” printer we have featured here before.
S4 slicer uses the path from any point (here, Benchy’s prow) as its basis…
This non-planar slicer is built into a Jupyter notebook, which follows a relatively simple algorithm to automatically generate non-planar toolpaths for any model. It does this by first generating a tetrahedral mesh of the model and then calculating the shortest possible path through the model from any given tetrahedron to the print bed. Even with non-planar printing, you need to print from the print-bed up (or out).
Quite a lot of math is done to use these paths to calculate a deformation mesh, and we’ll leave that to [Joshua] to explain in his video below. After applying the deformation, he slices the resulting mesh in Cura, before the G-code goes back to Jupyter to be re-transformed, restoring the shape of the original mesh.
… to generate deformed models for slicing, like this.
So yes, it is G-code bending as others have demonstrated before, but in a reproducible, streamlined, and straightforward workflow. Indeed, [Josh] credits much of the work to earlier work on the
S^3-Slicer, which inspired
much of the logic and the name behind his S4 slicer. (Not S4 as in “more than S^3” but S4 as a contraction of “Simplified S^3”). Once again, open source allows for incremental innovation.
It is admittedly a computationally intensive process, and [Joshua] uses a simplified model of Benchy for this demo. This seems exactly the sort of thing we’d like to burn compute power on, though.
This sort of non-planar 3D printing is an exciting frontier,
one which we have covered befor
e. We’ve seen
techniques for non-planar infill
, or even to
print overhangs on unmodified Cartesian printers
, but this is probably the first time we’ve seen Benchy given the non-planar treatment. You can try
S4 slicer for yourself via GitHub
, or just watch the non-planar magic in action after the break.
| 15
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120194",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T09:02:31",
"content": "Printing of flat layers has proven tricky enough to get working in a consistent manner, so I take it the error will only increase as we move to coupled motion, making a non-planar ironing pass ever more important to at least restore a high quality surface finish (seehttps://hackaday.com/2024/09/15/non-planar-ironing-makes-smooth-prints/).It may even be what makes non-planar prints visually acceptable in the first place, at least throughout the years it’ll take iterations of printers and slicers to catch up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120198",
"author": "hmmmm...",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T09:33:44",
"content": "Id like to see a demo of nonplanar slicing printing in which a support object is printed using traditional planar slicing, then the actual object is created by running nonplanar paths over the surface,. Continuous sweeps that are optimized for structural integrity seems like the most relevant application for this tech.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120200",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T09:50:46",
"content": "Non-planar printing paths on a non-flat support object:https://vxtwitter.com/mwuethri/status/1864351086976307413But that also won’t be a complete solution. Sometimes you still need a mandrel or support inserts to get there:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58AD7zPnxcU&eWhich reminds me that people like to pause their prints and insert printed bits into their objects. I imagine this will just get better as one isn’t limited to “printing a lid” over them, but can plastic-weld or fully print over them from multiple sides.",
"parent_id": "8120198",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120248",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T12:34:09",
"content": "The biggest advantage I can see is a non plainer mode for curved top surfaces.. (such as an aerofoil)Build up the base and the infill as normal, then have a contour following top surface",
"parent_id": "8120198",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120199",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T09:44:49",
"content": "Bird, bird, bird! Bird is the word!Loved the trippy filament and seeing the nozzle and head of the 3D printer move in near rotational and translational freedom of a full sphere. That printer was truly Surfin’ Bird!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120264",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:10:13",
"content": "I’m assuming that this will lead to great leaps in structural strength for certain parts. I have limited experience trying to print actual structural components, but when I have, they always separated along the layer lines. I imagine being able to print non planar would fix this issue.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120692",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:32:57",
"content": "it will not.the layer adhesion strength is less than the shear strength of a layer…the strength of planar-printed parts is indeed different in one axis from another axis. but for most practical filament materials it is notmuchdifferent. amdahl’s law…the maximum improvement possible will be to bring the weak axis to be as strong as the strong axis. but it will still not be ‘a great leap stronger’, because the strong axis itself is fairly weak.",
"parent_id": "8120264",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120271",
"author": "MacAttack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:32:07",
"content": "I haven’t thought this through but would a modified delta bot be a simpler mechanism to print the non-planar print. Simpler that the added rotation used in the video. The mod I envision is replacing the hinge joints at the moving platform with some sort of ball joints. The hinges allow for limited rotation about one axis per arm. But the arms are arranged normally such that those axes lie in a plane and can’t rotate independently. Which is what you want to keep the platform level.Adding in a degree of freedom might, maybe allow for controlled tilting.That said, at a basic level, it doesn’t seem like 3:degrees of independent vertical motion will be sufficient to implement 3 degrees of independent lateral motion plus 3 degrees of independent rotational motion. Perhaps a more complicated mod is required. Thoughts ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120273",
"author": "hmmmm...",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:52:25",
"content": "you would need a delta with 6 towers instead of 3 to get the same level of nozzle control.https://youtu.be/ehmTeRKcCM4?si=eiLWT5v1dkD0sdjG",
"parent_id": "8120271",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120445",
"author": "Jeff Wright",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T02:33:53",
"content": "The technology here is interesting to me:https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/amoeba-wave-pool-japanCould Bessel functions allow curved layers?I’d also like a “make mirror” option, where you can scan an interesting shape—and print a mirror image—maybe even turning something inside out",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120502",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T07:17:35",
"content": "Ok, you don’t have to print support on your model, but you have to print the cylindrical support on your bed so the printer’s extruder doesn’t crash on while rotating around your part. I’m not 100% convinced it’s the future here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120693",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:33:41",
"content": "it seems like the article is about non-planar slicing software but the real story is the 6-axis robot",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121113",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:17:48",
"content": "Only the working bundle of hardware and software makes this flavor of non-planar printing a reality, and worthwhile to continue developing.Printer and slicer updates should have been companion videos released back-to-back, but with that 4 month gap, it raises some eyebrows.",
"parent_id": "8120693",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120754",
"author": "Thomas McKelvey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:51:50",
"content": "Looove this work… and looking at the processing steps it WAS work. I want one…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121599",
"author": "kman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T13:17:01",
"content": "Always so fascinating how 3D printing is like CNC but simpler. Most CNC machines use a 4th or 5th axis and move the part while leaving the endmill in the same spot. This one does the opposite, leaving the part in one place and moving the nozzle with 5 DoF",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.773676
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/rockbox-4-0-released/
|
Rockbox 4.0 Released
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Musical Hacks",
"Portable Audio Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"digital audio",
"mp3 player",
"personal media player",
"Rockbox"
] |
It’s traditional to launch new software on April Fool’s Day, which is when we heard that
Rockbox 4.0 has been released
. But, in this case, the venerable MP3 firmware actually did update after a long absence. It’s great to see that good old
Rockbox
is still kicking along. We
first mentioned Rockbox
here at Hackaday approaching 20 years ago. How time flies. There used to be a whole ‘scene’ around hacking Personal Media Players (PMPs), also known as “MP3 Players”.
We tracked down Rockbox contributor [Solomon Peachy] to ask for some simple advice: If someone wants to install Rockbox on a personal media player today, what hardware should they buy? [Solomon] referred us to the
AIGO EROS Q / EROS K
, which is the only compatible hardware still being manufactured and sold. Beyond that, if you want to buy compatible hardware, you’ll need to find some secondhand somewhere, such as eBay. See the
Rockbox Wiki
for supported hardware.
Smartphones and streaming services
have subsumed the single-purpose personal media player. Will you put the new Rockbox on something? Let us know in the comments.
| 24
| 17
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120152",
"author": "Ratus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T05:18:42",
"content": "Nice!I’ve been using Rockbox since the beginning with an Archos v2 and then a bunch of Sansa players.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120160",
"author": "Fexwey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T06:29:44",
"content": "Yesss! I would love them hard if they would port it to a clip player (for running) again, but it seems they all have shitty dacs",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120177",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T07:54:07",
"content": "might upgrade my 5th gen ipod. however its on its last legs, the hard drive gets stuck the battery holds little charge. but with a new rockbox release, il consider some upgrades.still want to see an open source audio player that uses rockbox. the biggest issue with this great os is the lack of hardware to run it on. an oshw solution would allow both to continue to evolve.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120189",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T08:32:48",
"content": "time to switch to a CF drive?",
"parent_id": "8120177",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120237",
"author": "Michael Yount",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T11:59:58",
"content": "I’ve used an iFlash Quad in my 5th-gen iPod for many years.https://www.iflash.xyz/store/iflash-quad/",
"parent_id": "8120189",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120253",
"author": "Jay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T12:40:05",
"content": "An iFlash adapter will also do the trick, it’ll convert your microSD into a “hard drive” that’s recognizable to the iPod. I’ve never used an iFlash on my 5th gen, I’ve stuck with my old spinning one since it works okay to play Apple Lossless, but it’s been having problems too, so I’m probably going to upgrade it with an iFlash. The iPod modding community generally reccomends iFlash over CF, but if you stick with the right brands, the CF will play nice with the ‘Pod.",
"parent_id": "8120189",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120203",
"author": "ytrewq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T10:16:04",
"content": "Rockbox is fantastic. I used it for years with my two Sansa Clip Zip players that I abused bringing them everywhere including on the beach near saltwater, until their death. Then as finding cheap players was hard (I don’t trust used as they either have defective jack or buttons or the battery is dying) I was forced to move to a cheap Chinese player which turned out to be really well built, sturdy, with great sound quality and battery life, but the firmware is a literal joke. I hope to see Rockbox ported on that player one day.This is the closest one I could find, but as with many other Chinese products, they could change everything inside while maintaining the case, or the other way around:https://img.ltwebstatic.com/images3_spmp/2024/03/05/92/1709622339773b5c88f09d8392b26c2290a579d78f_thumbnail_720x.jpg",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120263",
"author": "mini",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:08:26",
"content": "Good chance it runs on one of those atj microcontrollers. Rockbox requires a proper cpu, a micro won’t cut it.",
"parent_id": "8120203",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120703",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:52:40",
"content": "i think the main requirement is a memory management unit. would love to see a raspberry pi port.",
"parent_id": "8120263",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120206",
"author": "ytrewq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T10:21:43",
"content": "About porting Rockbox on different hardware, if we take out gaming and other unnecessary stuff like audio effects except equalizer and replaygain features, the port to a cheap uC based platform (esp32|stm32|Teensy|…?) plus display and DAC could become feasible and remain cheap enough.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120275",
"author": "Marty",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T14:00:01",
"content": "Maybe a Pi Pico?",
"parent_id": "8120206",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120764",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T23:52:19",
"content": "At what point does it make more sense to just use the Pi Zero and regular ROCKbox?",
"parent_id": "8120206",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120225",
"author": "Fl.xy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T11:32:55",
"content": "The player I had this on has long since been blown apart by it’s faulty internal battery. I recall playing DOOM on it in class! So glad to see it’s been resurrected. 🐰",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120256",
"author": "Jay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T12:43:40",
"content": "I couldn’t bear any of the UI of RockBox, including it’s (very good looking!)themes, which are an absolute dumpster fire to control. Hopefully they fix those nitpicks! I’ve been sticking with stock firmware, but only because the design is much easier to control. But that’s just me, you guys have fun iPod Doom-ing!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120300",
"author": "Gordon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T15:39:03",
"content": "Oh man brings back memories of my first time playing through doom… on my Sansa e200, also had a gameboy emulator, and was able to read ebooks, read the whole unabridged Dracula on there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120364",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:30:26",
"content": "This is one of the reasons I read Hackaday: to learn about capabilities that I hadn’t heard of before. Thx!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120384",
"author": "Roger",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T21:15:22",
"content": "It is still possible to buy brand new ‘Classic’ iPods on AliExpress etc. Presumably they could be compatible",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120438",
"author": "LW",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T01:43:22",
"content": "Somewhere in my house is a Sandisk Sansa e250 (I think?) with a Rockbox install on it. GREAT software and miles better than the stock firmware at the time. Thanks so much to anyone associated with the project. This is a fun and surprising turn of events!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120503",
"author": "meticulousunabashedly05160334a9",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T07:18:24",
"content": "I’ve recently bought a HiFiWalker H2 but wasn’t impressed by the stock firmware and found out about Rockbox when searching for help, installed it, tried lots of themes, and have now settled on one that I liked but have tweaked to make it more legible for my aging eyes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120537",
"author": "reyhr45yh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T11:37:42",
"content": "I need cheap (5-9$) mp3 player for it",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120608",
"author": "AWal",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:58:26",
"content": "Being neck-deep in Happy Hardcore music and DJing, RockBox was my lifeblood when I needed to ditch my bricked Zune HD back in 2010. I went through several Sansa products, with all but the earliest having RockBox on them from the get-go. It was crazy that even early on we were getting pro-level features like FLAC support and gapless playback from our portable players…And yes, I did try the MPEG player, GB emulator and DOOM. lolKind of wish someone would pick up the Android port again…Not to modernise it, just to patch it enough for newer devices…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120763",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T23:47:51",
"content": "Worked great on my brother’s Zune many many moons ago. Glad it’s still kicking.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122711",
"author": "Tom Buskey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T22:18:25",
"content": "I have it on an iPod 5.5 (video?) 80GB. It allowed me to ditch iTunes (& attempts to use it on Linux) and treat it as a hard drive. Then it works on every computer.It still works, but I should probably do something with the battery before its an issue. And maybe replace the drive with SD.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8192053",
"author": "The Eternal President Kim Il Sung",
"timestamp": "2025-10-13T04:19:00",
"content": "Website access is “Forbidden”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.931176
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/frankenflair-58-manual-roots-advanced-brew/
|
Frankenflair 58: Manual Roots, Advanced Brew
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"coffee machine",
"coffee maker hack",
"espresso machine",
"pcb",
"pid"
] |
The user interface of things we deal with often makes or breaks our enjoyment of using a device. [Janne] thinks so, he has an espresso machine he enjoys but the default controls were not what he was looking for and so in true hacker fashion he
took what was and made it his own
.
This Kickstarter-born Flair 58 is a manual espresso machine with minimal moving parts and no electronics in its default configuration. An optional preheater was available, but it felt like an afterthought. He decided to add a bit more finesse into his solution, with a sleek touchscreen display controlling a custom heater board with closed-loop temperature control, and provisions to connect an external scale scale for precise pour measurements. We’ve seen
coffee maker hacks
before, but this one certainly stands out for adding features absent from the machine’s initial design.
To accommodate the two custom PCBs and the touchscreen, [Janne] modified the machine’s frame. The Flair 58’s swooping curves posed a challenge, but instead of using an external enclosure, he shaped the PCBs to fit seamlessly within the machine’s structure. A wonderfully done hack given the open, exposed design of the base hardware.
Certainly head over to his site and check out this beautiful solution to improving on an existing device, and check out his other cool project based around
laser fault injection
. All the hardware and software for this project is freely available over on his site so if you’d like to upgrade your machine be sure to go check it out.
| 2
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120326",
"author": "Adrian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T16:30:53",
"content": "Great project and excellent documentation with beautiful detail shots. The only thing missing is a picture showing the complete espresso machine as it’s hard to visualize how this all fits together. Having looked up the model on Google, it’s a quite unique design.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120340",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T17:45:42",
"content": "Wow. There’s a whole subculture there. Amazing.Usually, I just want coffee, and my trouble is I need caffeine before I can muster the fortitude to run one of these things. I can’t imagine owning one.The Aeropress gives me great coffee in 30 seconds of work, 90 seconds on the clock fromblerghtoaaahh, no muss, no fuss, a lot less counter space, and no phone app.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,569.97062
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/chinas-tmsr-lf1-molten-salt-thorium-reactor-begins-live-refueling-operations/
|
China’s TMSR-LF1 Molten Salt Thorium Reactor Begins Live Refueling Operations
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"News",
"Science"
] |
[
"nuclear fission",
"thorium"
] |
Although uranium-235 is the typical fuel for commercial fission reactors on account of it being fissile, it’s relatively rare relative to the fertile U-238 and thorium (Th-232). Using either of these fertile isotopes to breed new fuel from is thus an attractive proposition. Despite this, only India and China have a strong focus on using Th-232 for reactors, the former using breeders (Th-232 to U-233) to create fertile uranium fuel. China has
demonstrated its approach
— including refueling a live reactor — using a fourth-generation molten salt reactor.
The original research comes from US scientists in the 1960s. While there were tests in the MSRE reactor, no follow-up studies were funded. The concept languished until recently, with
Terrestrial Energy’s Integral MSR
and construction on China’s 2 MW
TMSR-LF1
experimental reactor
commencing in 2018
before first criticality in 2023. One major advantage of an MSR with liquid fuel (the -LF part in the name) is that it can filter out contaminants and add fresh fuel while the reactor is running. With this successful demonstration, along with the breeding of uranium fuel from thorium last year, a larger, 10 MW design can now be tested.
Since TMSR doesn’t need cooling water, it is perfect for use in arid areas. In addition, China is working on using a TMSR-derived design in
nuclear-powered container vessels
. With enough thorium around for tens of thousands of years, these low-maintenance MSR designs could soon power much of modern society, along with high-temperature pebble bed reactors, which is another concept that China has recently managed to make work
with the HTR-PM design
.
Meanwhile, reactors are getting
smaller
in general.
| 33
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120085",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T23:33:02",
"content": "Thorium seems to be quite promising. From what I’ve gathered (mostly from youtube), the reason to use Uranium was chosen long ago because it can produce stuff to make bombs, and that was a big thing 50 years ago. And once the Uranium reactors were working relatively well, nobody wanted to cough up the cash to do the research to make other reactor types mature for production. Sometimes I wonder how such cost calculations are made. It seems that handling of the radio active “waste” is simply left out of the equation when designing a reactor.As I see it, we’ve really just made the first baby steps of what can be done with nuclear reactors. Probably a lot of other reactor types can be designed and made too. Those are probably less “energy efficient” or more expensive, but that may be worth it if they can be used to “burn” radio active waste into shorter lived isotopes.But I’m not a nuclear chemist, and getting an overview of what would be viable combinations is a bit beyond me. I also don’t have enough pocket money to fund research in that direction. But still, good to read that some progress is being made.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120180",
"author": "Thijzer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T07:56:01",
"content": "Using uranium as a fuel was not because you could make a bomb out of it, that seems to be an urban myth. Uranium-235 is relatively easy to source, compared to other fuels, and operates within reasonable circumstances. Thorium requires very high temperatures and corrosive liquid salts which makes uranium a very good step in between.Thorium however is much safer and the waste is radioactive during a relatively short period so that will surely be the future. But without uranium, we wouldn’t have had nuclear energy.",
"parent_id": "8120085",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120184",
"author": "Someone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T08:07:11",
"content": "Oh the power generation was definitely a byproduct of “need bigger reactor to produce more plutonium”. Look at the history of the UK’s Atomic bomb and where the slogan “Energy too cheap to meter” came from and you’ll find they’ll relatively readily admit that by now.Now that said, molten salt reactors pose unique (and possibly unsolved) corrosion problems, but you can have Thorium in a not-molten-salt-reactor (think that might be what India is going for?)",
"parent_id": "8120180",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120495",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T06:04:43",
"content": "Umm … Thorium isn’t what is fissioned in a thorium reactor. Its the U-233 that it is bred into. The daughter products produced by U-233 and U-235 have about the same waste products and the decay of waste is about identical. You essentially have a uranium reactor either way. I also wouldn’t consider introducing fluorine based salts making anything safer.",
"parent_id": "8120180",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120389",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T21:36:46",
"content": "The reasons the uranium breeder was chosen over the thorium breeder were that the breeding ratio for a U-Pu fast-neutron breeder reactor is quite high, and the technology needed for U-Pu fast breeders was much more developed.Fast breeders of either kind are not very suitable for producing weapons material. For that, low-temperature, thermal-neutron production reactors are the preferred option. At the time when breeders were under active development, the U S. was scaling back their production reactor fleet, except those producing tritium, because they had a surplus of weapons material except for tritium.The impetus for development of breeder reactors in the 1960s and 1970s were the beliefs that the world would need more than 1000 power reactors by the year 2000 and that the supply of natural uranium would be unable to supply the needed fuel. By the late 1970s it was clear that there was much more uranium ore available than previously believed and that the world would probably not have more than about 350-400 reactors by 2000.Conventional uranium-fueled reactors are much less expensive to operate than breeders so long as there is ample natural uranium, so the motivation to pursue breeders of any description went away. The world currently has about 440 operating power reactors, Currently known uranium reserves appear to be sufficient to operate about 800 reactors for about a century, so there is unlikely to be much economic motivation for breeders anytime soon.In thorium breeders, the breeding ratio is quite low if the thorium is in fixed fuel assemblies because too much of the intermediate isotope between thorium-232 and uranium-233, protactinium-233, is consumed in non-fission reactions if it is left in the neutron field while it transforms. Using a liquid fuel allows the protactinium-233 to be chemically separated and sequestered out of the neutron field until it has transformed into uranium-233. The problem with liquid-fueled reactors is that the highly radioactive fission products are released into the circulating fluid, making the reactor essentially unmaintainable except remotely using robotics. If or when there is an economic imperative for breeders, it is more likely that they will be uranium-based, fixed-fuel designs cooled with liquid sodium rather than thorium-based, liquid-fueled designs cooled with molten salts.",
"parent_id": "8120085",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120689",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:28:24",
"content": "Fast breeders…Hot daughters…Nuclear chemists are horny bastards!You can tell by the names they pick for things.",
"parent_id": "8120389",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120672",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:49:22",
"content": "i’m not an expert on any of this stuff but my impression is that the “handling of waste is simply left out of the equation” story is kind of interestingin many conventional reactors, a low-enriched-uranium fuel is like loose pellets(?) stuffed inside of hollow rods, and the hollow rods are made out of zirconium or something exotic like that (neutron transparent). and then they’re surrounded by water (neutron moderator and absorber), and then also with graphite (neutron moderator) and control rods made out of like boron or something (neutron absorber). to the extent that they can control the reaction, it’s by varying the geometry of the neutron absorbers and moderators…moderators in the neutron path genrerally make it react faster, and absorbers make it react slower.that much is pretty simple but what happens inside of the rods complicates the whole thing. various reaction byproducts accumulate inside the rods. when a neutron hits uranium, it breaks down into a whole spectrum of products. some of them are “nuclear poisons”, which means they basically act as neutron absorbers without creating more neutrons…they stop the chain reaction. many of them are themselves radioactives, with a huge range of half-lives, so some of them break down in minutes or days and some take years or centuries. so they represent a neutron source that can enhance the nuclear chain reaction.so my point is, the reactor designers are actually intensely interested in waste products, because they trap those waste products inside the reactor and have to account for them as a major operational concern. one of the causes of the chernobyl disaster was they didn’t follow the protocols for throttling the reactor up and down, and it resulted in a relatively high concentration of nuclear poison, which they then tried to overcome in an impatient fashion by removing all of the control rods. once the poison started to ‘burn off’ (absorbed as many neutrons as it could, i guess), the reaction rate increased very quickly.so the conventional design is very focused on the waste as an operational concern…with the trade off that after it’s done operating, they aren’t as concerned about the waste. by comparison, with liquid-fuel reactors, it is possibleand necessary(??) to filter out the waste products during operation. that filtering is complicated and that’s one reason those reactors are less common / more experimental. once the waste products are filtered and sorted, i think dealing with them actually becomes more easy.so everyone’s concerned with waste, just in different ways.",
"parent_id": "8120085",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120097",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:18:55",
"content": "Since TMSR doesn’t need cooling water, *A puny little 2MW demonstration reactor that does not make steam to run through turbines to generate electricity might not need water cooling.But try scaling that up to a 1 GWe power plant. It *couldbe air cooled (and has been with conventional power plants), but you pay a price in both capital cost and efficiency. If you’re a government with an agenda, the additional cost might be acceptable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120100",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:22:56",
"content": "Arggh. Sorry about the rogueitalics. An edit button, please, HaD.",
"parent_id": "8120097",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120103",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:50:50",
"content": "If there was an edit button, you could fixyourspelling error.",
"parent_id": "8120100",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120250",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T12:37:42",
"content": "This is a case where size doesnt matter.Traditional nuclear power plants use water directly to cool the core, contaminating the water with radioactive isotopes.These thorium reactors remove heat from the core with molten salt. The molten salt is then used to heat water to run turbines. As long as the heat exchanger doesnt fail crossmizing the molten salt and the water there is no pathway for contamination.Additionally, the turbines system is typically operated in a closed loop so that the steam is condensed and reused over and over again. There is no giant tower billowing steam in these systems. So even if there was a failure that caused the system to become contaminated, so long as there was no failure of the outer pressure containment shell there would be no environmental discharge to be concerned about.As for efficiency and cost, TMSR run at 40-50% thermal efficiency vs LWRs 30%. TMSRs are also projected to have lower capital costs both in construction and operation.",
"parent_id": "8120097",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120278",
"author": "Nomen Nescio",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T14:10:13",
"content": "…traditional reactors also have two water loops, to keep the irradiated water separate from the rest of the operations. MSR’s just use much higher temperature fluids in the inner loop, whichdoeshelp the thermal efficiency (as well as bringing other benefits), at the cost of technical complications.but yeah, waste heat requiring cooling is very likely to be a thing in a production-scale plant. that’s a factor deriving from the operating parameters of the power-generating turbines, and MSR’s aren’t intended to redesignthose.that’s how you condense the steam so as to run it through the heat exchanger and then the turbines again.(…i suppose youcouldredesign the outer loop while at it, if you wanted to take on that much technological risk. make it run on fully supercritical water, maybe, since you’ve the heat to spare. but i’d be more likely to settle for one technological innovation at a time, myself.)",
"parent_id": "8120250",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120329",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T16:50:29",
"content": "The material used for core cooling is not relevant, since it’s always used closed-loop. Whether it’s helium, carbon dioxide, sodium, heavy water, molten salt, or even ordinary water, it’s not a consumable. Likewise the intermediate steam turbine loop isn’t relevant either: That hyper-pure water is also re-used.Water is not plentiful in the Gobi desert, but saying the 2 MW demonstration reactor “doesn’t need cooling water” is disingenuous (or just naive). Size very much matters here. 2 MW can be dumped in ambient air without too much trouble. But a large power reactor very much wants a cheap way to dump the 2-4 GW of waste heat it produces. Trying to do that without water is costly.",
"parent_id": "8120250",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120371",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:10:06",
"content": "It’s a question of what is the largest unit size that can still run air-cooled with reasonable performance AND how many of those you need to build to reach economic plant size AND whether it’s cheaper to just run a single big reactor.The huge reactors we have now are a product of each being a “prototype” of its own kind, with decades of lead-in time for evaluation, permitting, protesting, politics etc. which favors large unit sizes to make the money count. Size creates issues with safety, since the power density of the reactors cannot be easily contained in a meltdown, which creates the need for elaborate safety mechanisms which further increase cost and time to permit operation, which further increases the economical unit size etc. etc.SMRs are a thing that’s coming to leverage the economy of mass production, being simpler to make, easier to contain in an accident, re-using manufacturing processes and designs, certifications and permits, lower bureaucracy, less financial risks…. so it’s not a given that you can’t build an air-cooled nuclear power plant in the middle of the desert.",
"parent_id": "8120329",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120377",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:30:39",
"content": "To point, even where we have traditional reactor “families”, wherever you build one, the local authorities like to put their own spoons in the pot and invent extra regulations and interfere with designs by demanding that they should do things this way or that way.They’re all like the Doble Steam car where every single vehicle was hand-made by craftsmen down to the nuts and bolts, and no car had matching parts because the Doble brothers kept tinkering with the designs even as they were producing the cars.",
"parent_id": "8120371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120391",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T21:50:55",
"content": "The thermal efficiency difference is smaller than you say: it is 33-34% for LWRs and 40-43% for plants operating at the temperatures claimed for TMSRs.",
"parent_id": "8120250",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120685",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:22:25",
"content": "just to flesh this out a littlemy understanding is that the core water in a traditional plant only contains isotopes from the fuel in the case of a mechanical failure of the sheathing on the fuel rods. the radioactive materials in the core water are isotopes of the water itself…hence, tritium, the result of bombarding hydrogen with neutrons (and, imo, a fairly benign product, due to its short half-life). the reactor has to allow the neutrons to flow through the water, because it uses the water as a neutron moderator. but it doesn’t have to let the water touch the fissile material or its byproducts.i think molten salt reactors can use a neutron absorber / shield / mirror between the fuel and the water, because the water isn’t needed as a neutron moderator",
"parent_id": "8120250",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120106",
"author": "Tom S",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:57:50",
"content": "Popular Mechanics wrote about Thorium Reactors in 2010, and there were several articles before that. This is nothing new.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120436",
"author": "Mike Burke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T01:13:37",
"content": "Yeah,when I was a kid, back in the ’60s, I read an episode in in a comic of “Mandrake the Magician” where Mandrake foils an attempt by evildoers to corner a supply of Thorium for evil purposes. It impelled me to look up articles, books, and encyclopedia entries that described Thorium and its uses in Thermonuclear power. (I miss print copies of the Reader’s Guide.)",
"parent_id": "8120106",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120687",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:23:53",
"content": "knowing it is possible is old. knowing progress is being made is new",
"parent_id": "8120106",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120110",
"author": "Adelaide",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T02:13:54",
"content": "Since thorium is associated with lanthanides (such as europium used in phosphors, and neodymium in magnets), which China mines massively, and is actually a dangerous, (mildly) radioactive substance in mine waste, separating out and using that thorium to create energy is win-win technology. Now, if there were only more trustworthy ways to dispose of the eventual, highly radioactive, waste…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120121",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T03:21:21",
"content": "Fast Neutron Reactors. They burn waste out of existence.",
"parent_id": "8120110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120688",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:25:37",
"content": "if they solve the various problems of filtering waste products out of the molten salt, then it is much easier to deal with (or use) small streams of specific waste products instead of a massive stream of mostly uranium with trace quantities of much scarier substances, effectively inseperably mixed in.",
"parent_id": "8120110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120120",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T03:20:47",
"content": "you forgot the /s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120123",
"author": "ThoriumBR",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T03:23:24",
"content": "It could be inexpensive to build and operate, and run on natural uranium, but the large positive void coefficient is scary.According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Design_flaws_and_safety_issues):In RBMK reactors, generation of steam in the coolant water would then in practice create a void: a bubble that does not absorb neutrons. The reduction in moderation by light water is irrelevant, as graphite still moderates the neutrons. However, the loss of absorption dramatically alters the balance of neutron production, causing a runaway condition in which more and more neutrons are produced, and their density grows exponentially. Such a condition is called a “positive void coefficient”, and the RBMK reactor series has the highest positive void coefficient of any commercial reactor ever designed.A race car without bumpers, rollbars, seat belts and airbags is going to be cheaper to build and faster to operate, but not advisable to use. Like the RMBK.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120164",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T06:41:09",
"content": "This just makes me wonder what a Pressurized Water version of the RBMK would look like. On the other hand, maybe it isn’t so much easier to build 1800 high pressure pipes than it is to make one big pressure cooker.",
"parent_id": "8120123",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120195",
"author": "Hans Kloss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T09:05:58",
"content": "You sound just like pure Russian troll. Not many people in the world knows what Andoria was and where it came from.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120513",
"author": "Hans Kloss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T08:47:27",
"content": "My comment was reply to comment glorifying RBMK reactor that is no longer visible to me.",
"parent_id": "8120195",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120690",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:30:06",
"content": "bummer it was deleted because the RBMK design is pretty neat. instead of having a giant pressure vessel full of water, the water runs in pipes through the reactor. it’s neat because it’s easy to understand why it is so much less expensive to build and scale, and also because it’s easy to imagine why it has such a marginal neutron flux that it has to operate at the edges of tolerance. i think i’m glad it’s no longer being built but i think paying attention to the design of it is educational.",
"parent_id": "8120513",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120330",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T16:58:54",
"content": "Check out the security: First, it’s in the middle of desert, 50 km from the nearest town, and has FOUR gated fence perimeters, including a prison-style isolation zone. Why so much security for a little research reactor?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120369",
"author": "Gerhard",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:45:09",
"content": "I once had a Thorium nuclear power plant in my neighbourhood (but no molten salt there):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120512",
"author": "BLMac",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T08:33:52",
"content": "That illustrates the real problem with nuclear power. Can you trust the operators when things go wrong?Murphy dictates that things always go wrong at some stage.Unintended Consequences dictate it will be something that wasn’t anticipated.",
"parent_id": "8120369",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120600",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:37:05",
"content": "Currently, the dunning-kruger hypothesis is under attack, but I think it’s interesting to look at something like the contrapositive of it: for any problem, there will be a bunch of people who know they aren’t smart enough to try to solve the problem, a bunch of people who think they can solve the problem and are right, and a bunch of people who think they can solve the problem but they can’t actually. (That’s the D-K population.) As the problems get harder, those populations change, with the number of people who can actually solve the problem shrinking. At some problem complexity, everyone will either say “oh that’s too hard” or unknowingly be in the D-K population group. I think designing long-term commercially viable nuclear energy may be a problem of this sort.",
"parent_id": "8120512",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,570.084243
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/they-hacked-a-nuclear-power-plant-whoops-dont-make-a-sound/
|
They Hacked A Nuclear Power Plant! Whoops! Don’t Make A Sound!
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"Acoustical Testing",
"Nuclear Power Plant",
"NWAA Labs"
] |
What do you do with an unused nuclear reactor project? In Washington,
one of them was hacked to remove sound
, all in the name of science.
In 1977, a little way outside of Seattle, Washington Nuclear Projects 3 and 5 (WNP-3 and WNP-5) were started as part of Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, pronounced “whoops”). They ran over budget, and in the 80s they were mothballed even though WNP-3 was nearly complete.
In 2010 when [Ron] and [Bonnie Sauro] were starting their new acoustical lab, NWAA Labs, they thought they wanted to build in a mountain, but what they found was an auxiliary reactor building. The structure was attached to a defunct nuclear power facility. With concrete and rebar walls five feet thick, it was the ideal site for their acoustical experiments and tests.
There are strict facility requirements from standards bodies such as American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for acoustical labs which help ensure that different labs achieve comparable results. For example, you need stable temperature, humidity, and reverberation. The temperature within the facility is a stable 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius) regardless of the temperature outside.
Companies use acoustical labs to inform their designs and ensure that they meet acoustic standards or requirements, particularly those related to noise emissions. Over the last fifteen years, NWAA Labs has tested carpet samples, noise-cancelling headphones, sound-dampening construction materials, noisy washing machines, and even an airplane’s crew cabin!
If there was any question about whether [Ron Sauro] qualifies as a hacker, this quote removes all doubt: “I’m a carpenter, a plumber, a welder, I can fix a car,” he says. “Anything that needs to be done, I can do. Because I have to.”
Maybe we should send
a wearable cone of silence
to [Ron] for a complete test. If you’ve ever hacked a nuclear power plant, do let us know in the comments!
| 3
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120332",
"author": "TheOnceAndFutureThingy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T16:59:48",
"content": "NGL, I was hoping for something with a less happy ending…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120704",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:53:59",
"content": "They are using the most complete reactor building, and likely had to strip considerable wiring out to make it acoustically sealed, thus filling their pockets, and massively increasing the costs to utilize the plant if needed! Hack is a real good word! The destruction of billions of dollars for “research” and filling one’s pockets!!!",
"parent_id": "8120332",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121564",
"author": "sutechshiroi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T08:01:42",
"content": "There is Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant in Austria that was completed and needed only to be greenlit to enter production. There were protests that shut down the plant. Instead, the power plant is used for training power plant operators and for occasional concert, filming or other events. It will host Enrich Robotics Hackathon this year.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,570.009116
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/biasing-transistors-with-current-sources/
|
Biasing Transistors With Current Sources
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"hardware",
"Parts"
] |
[
"amplifiers",
"bipolar junction transistor",
"current mirror",
"current source"
] |
Over on his YouTube channel [Aaron Danner] explains
biasing transistors with current sources
in the 29th video of his
Transistors Series
. In this video, he shows how to replace a bias resistor (and consequently an additional capacitor) with a current source for both common-emitter and common-collector amplifiers.
A current source provides electrical energy with a constant current. The implication is that if the resistance of the load changes the current source will vary the voltage to compensate. In reality, this is exactly what you want. The usual resistor biasing arrangement just simulates this over a narrow voltage range, which is generally good enough, but not as good as a true current source.
As [Aaron] explains there are various advantages to biasing transistors with current sources instead of resistors, chief among them is that it allows you to get rid of a capacitor (capacitors are expensive to make in integrated circuits and often among the lowest-quality components in a design). You can also avoid losing some of your gain through the bias resistor.
The
current source
that [Aaron] uses in this video is known as a
current mirror
.
| 3
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120759",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T23:27:49",
"content": "Current sources (or any other form of active bias) also can save atonof power vs a manufacturer recommended circuit. RF amps frequently have recommended supply voltages way higher than needed because of the device voltage variation (since the bias current from a resistor depends on the device voltage). As opposed to a current mirror, you can also use an opamp to regulate the current into the bias pin and then you only need slight headroom over the device voltage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120787",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T02:05:41",
"content": "The statement in the video at 8:44, that there would be no AC voltage at the emitter if the emitter resistor were replaced by a current source, is wrong.Otherwise the video looks OK for a beginner’s education, but nothing more than that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120848",
"author": "Ricardo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T07:59:58",
"content": "True, there could be voltage, although not current. Also, the common emitter circuit where the current source is placed in the collector, is not well explained. It would need some kind of feedback of matching Ic to Ie.",
"parent_id": "8120787",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,570.128789
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/printed-perpetual-calendar-clock-contains-clever-cams/
|
Printed Perpetual Calendar Clock Contains Clever Cams
|
Tyler August
|
[
"clock hacks"
] |
[
"3d print",
"3D printed clock",
"clock",
"electromechanical clock",
"perpetual calendar"
] |
At Hackaday, it is
always
clock time, and clock time is a great time to check in with [shiura], whose
3D Printed Perpetual Calendar Clock is now at Version 2.
A 3D printed calendar clock, well, no big deal, right? Grab a few steppers, slap in an ESP32 to connect to a time server, and you’re good. That’s where most of us would probably go, but most of us aren’t [shiura], who has some real mechanical chops.
There’s also a 24-hour dial, because why not?
This clock isn’t
all
mechanical. It probably could be, but at its core it uses a commercial quartz movement — you know, the cheap ones that take a single double-A battery. The only restriction is that the length of the hour axis must be twelve millimeters or more. Aside from that, a few self-tapping screws and an M8 nut, everything else is fully 3D printed.
From that simple quartz movement, [shiura]’s clock tracks not only the day of the week, the month and date — even in Febuary, and even compensating for leap years. Except for the inevitable drift (and battery changes) you should not have to adjust this clock until March 2100, assuming both you and the 3D printed mechanism live that long. Version one actually did all this, too, but somehow we missed it; version two has some improvements to aesthetics and usability. Take a tour of the mechanism in the video after the break.
We’ve featured several of [shiura]’s innovative clocks before, from a
hybrid mechanical-analog display
, to a
splitless flip-clock
, and a fully analog
hollow face clock
. Of course [shiura] is hardly our only
clock-making contributor
, because it
it
always
clock time at Hackaday.
| 11
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120548",
"author": "Lennart",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:48:16",
"content": "It okay that it can’t handle the non-leap year 2100!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120605",
"author": "IsRadioKill",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:54:34",
"content": "Ah, but it can handle the leap year 2400!",
"parent_id": "8120548",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120650",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:59:18",
"content": "I want a watch that can stay powered and accurate to the second for 100 years by itself.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120671",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:48:23",
"content": "With an automatic Daylight saving time for next 100 years",
"parent_id": "8120650",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120719",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:42:41",
"content": "With automatic checking of federal & local laws to determine when it’s in effect?",
"parent_id": "8120671",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120760",
"author": "kiyafirs",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T23:30:08",
"content": "And automatic search for more power.",
"parent_id": "8120719",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120789",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T02:18:45",
"content": "That’s the sun. It’ll be around a lot longer than that and has already been in service for quite some time",
"parent_id": "8120650",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125876",
"author": "Shimoki",
"timestamp": "2025-05-09T04:15:07",
"content": "How about almost 2000 years? IWC Eternal Calendar.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q5vlXSb0yEAnd maybe more than 2000 years, depending on whether the year 4000 ends up being a leap year or not. (!!!) Hasn’t been decided yet.",
"parent_id": "8120650",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120663",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:29:50",
"content": "I want a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand, and an eon hand.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120790",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T02:19:48",
"content": "The long Now clock is what you’re talking about. Supposed to work for 20,000 years. Check it out. I saw prototype in SF some years ago.",
"parent_id": "8120663",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121143",
"author": "Philip McCoy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:52:43",
"content": "And when they meet, it’s a happy land",
"parent_id": "8120663",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,570.182651
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/preventing-galvanic-corrosion-in-water-cooling-loops/
|
Preventing Galvanic Corrosion In Water Cooling Loops
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"galvanic corrosion",
"galvanic series"
] |
Water is an excellent coolant, but the flip side is that it is also an excellent solvent. This, in short, is why any water cooling loop is also a prime candidate for an interesting introduction to the galvanic metal series, resulting in severe corrosion that commences immediately. In a
recent video
by [der8aer], this issue is demonstrated using a GPU cold plate. The part is made out of nickel-plated copper and features many small channels to increase surface area with the coolant.
The surface analysis of the sample cold plate after a brief exposure to distilled water shows the deposited copper atoms. (Credit: der8auer, YouTube)
Theoretically, if one were to use distilled water in a coolant loop that contains a single type of metal (like copper), there would be no issue. As [der8auer] points out, fittings, radiators, and the cooling block are nearly always made of various metals and alloys like brass, for example. This thus creates the setup for
galvanic corrosion
, whereby one metal acts as the anode and the other as a cathode. While this is desirable in batteries, for a cooling loop, this means that the water strips metal ions off the anode and deposits them on the cathode metal.
The nickel-plated cold plate should be immune to this if the plating were perfect. However, as demonstrated in the video, even a brief exposure to distilled water at 60°C induced strong galvanic corrosion. Analysis in an SEM showed that the imperfect nickel plating allowed copper ions to be dissolved into the water before being deposited on top of the nickel (cathode). In a comparison with another sample that had a coolant with corrosion inhibitor (DP Ultra) used, no such corrosion was observed, even after much longer exposure.
This DP Ultra coolant is mostly distilled water but has glycol added. The glycol improves the pH and coats surfaces to prevent galvanic corrosion. The other element is benzotriazole, which provides similar benefits. Of course, each corrosion inhibitor targets a specific environment, and there is also the issue with organic films forming, which may require biocides to be added. As usual,
water cooling
has more subtlety than you’d expect.
| 50
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120498",
"author": "moo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T06:39:16",
"content": "can’t you just drop a block of zinc in the reservoir or something?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120578",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:41:10",
"content": "PC water cooling is a bigger pain in the back side than most people realize.Go to the goodie store buy an AIO and throw it away when it starts making gurgling noises.Putting sacrificial metals in the system only gums it up. Those ions all have to live somewhere……..The only Good Alternatives (long chain fluorocarbons like FC-40, 70 or FC-35.We are Stuck with Water……Life sucks sometimes…….",
"parent_id": "8120498",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120751",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:50:04",
"content": "Scrap what you have and go with mercury. Just avoid aluminum components.",
"parent_id": "8120578",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120579",
"author": "garbz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:43:27",
"content": "Where is your circuit? Sacraficial annode would need to connect to something. If it’s just floating free it has no meaningful effect.",
"parent_id": "8120498",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120646",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:52:40",
"content": "This is a chemistry issue not an electricity issue.",
"parent_id": "8120579",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120662",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:29:24",
"content": "Sorry, but the word “anode” has meaning here. These have to be electrically bonded into the system that is being protected or the cathodic metal won’t be protected. Measured voltage potential from boat zincs is only a fraction of a volt but I’ve always wondered if you couldn’t powersomethingwith that.",
"parent_id": "8120646",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120965",
"author": "moo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:00:24",
"content": "the people installing the zinc anodes would probably thank you not to turn it into a battery and accelerate the corrosion.",
"parent_id": "8120662",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120961",
"author": "moo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T14:57:03",
"content": "where’s the circuit in the water coolers that are already experiencing galvanic corrosion? isn’t it the fluid? even if they somehow manage to use sufficiently well distilled water and avoid introducing ions while filling the loop, and keep it form absorbing anything out of the air (which is pretty unlikely), if there’s any galvanic corrosion occurring, then the instant it starts there will be enough ions in the water to make it conductive and then you’ve got your circuit.",
"parent_id": "8120579",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121479",
"author": "Jdams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T23:26:18",
"content": "So if you put in the anode without connecting it then you basically are getting both to corroded without affecting each other. Once you connect them you get the electronegativity potential from one added to the less electronegative element basically zinc wants to corroded more so it will eat through the zinc first when they are connected. Otherwise they will both corrode at their own rates, not one after the other.",
"parent_id": "8120961",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120508",
"author": "SonWon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T07:49:49",
"content": "Why not use modern motorcycle coolant? LIQUI MOLY Radiator Antifreeze Universal Radiator Protection Item No.: 21313. This is safe for copper, aluminum, etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120577",
"author": "Automotive and heat exchanger coolants work.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:25:47",
"content": "DowFrost HD works. I’ve used it for 5+ years in a loop made of cheap aluminium blocks with cheap mixed metal fittings.Think about all the different metals and alloys in an automotive coolant loop. Copper, Zinc, Iron, Steel, Nickel, etc.All those same metals occur in other heat exchangers, and nobody has serious issues with galvanic corrosion as long as they add a glycol anti-freeze with corrosion inhibitors.The main issue with the glycols in anti-freeze additives is that glycols attack most of the cheap and “pretty” tubing materials in PC water cooling loops.",
"parent_id": "8120508",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120718",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:32:33",
"content": "The issues still exist, just are minor enough that they are factored into design headroom. Home computer coolants are at much lower pressures and features are much smaller. e.g. you can use the same equipment, if the water block is designed for it, at lower efficiency.Really, DIY systems should have no issue beating out AIOs in this respect using even only water, and larger radiators are readily available As you have noted.",
"parent_id": "8120577",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120609",
"author": "fuzzyfuzzyfungus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T16:01:48",
"content": "I suspect that part of the issue is just that PC water cooling exists in sort of a weird niche that puts a lot of pressure on it, not all in the direction of expertise.As with any hobby; some people involved are really serious and really good; but it is one where things you previously could only DIY with water cooling(back when ‘CPU heatsink’ meant some random aluminum extrusion that shipped with a 30ish watt CPU; because what more would you need?); because improvising heatpipes is a real challenge and getting nontrivial metalworking with nothing but a few basic hand tools is fairly arduous are now largely professionalized.Air cooling’s ‘baseline’ for vaguely serious performance enthusiasts is now the bunch of direct contact heatpipes with a 120 or 140mm fin stack, available for a relative pittance; works great.Liquid AIOs have gone from being basically exotic scams to being still more expensive than air cooling; but increasingly cheap and reliable: get 120mm at some distance from the socket or 240/360mm just plug and go; shouldn’t need to worry about the working fluid for 5 years, fine.That leaves the people doing custom liquid loops in a fairly narrow niche, mostly for its own sake or to satisfy particularly specialized aesthetic or performance requirements; and often bombarded with a unhelpful mix of painfully expensive parts from the reputable outfits; or sometimes-great-value-sometimes-total-scam options from the oddballs who could be the same thing that the brand you’ve heard of is rebadging and quadrupling the price of; or could be outright lying about even basics of composition and don’t even think about the workmanship.It’s not like professionalism is dead; but custom loops are a very constrained market when even ‘gamer’/’workstation’/’enthusiast’ thermal scenarios are typically addressed by heatpipes or AIOs; and all the real money in liquid cooling is for high density datacenter compute products; so you’ve got a mixture of professionals charging the prices you’d expect for a niche product, competent amateurs; and optimistic kids trying to get the look they want based on internet forum rumors and pinching pennies on fittings from vendors who may or may not even commit to what metal they are made of; much less bother lying about it.",
"parent_id": "8120508",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120511",
"author": "BadAngel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T08:25:04",
"content": "Ten years ago we were operating a supercomputer in which the cooling circuit contained several different metals. After 5 years of operation, some cooling radiators were clogged with sludge due to galvanic corrosion. That lead to cooling problems, and it was a headache to clean all the stuff.A colleague of mine, who had some knowledge of chemistry, explained to me that this was a really bad idea / misconception. I think that this cooling system was planned to be used for less than 5 years (some kind of trade off between price versus durability).At the same time I experienced this problem when I built my microbrewery: I had the bad idea of using different metals for my brewing kettle: aluminum (the kettle) and stainless steel (the stirrer). After a 10 minuted test to clean the kettle (with water and dish soap), a dark gray juice came out, and my aluminum kettle lost 1/10 of a millimeter. There were electrical arcs between the kettle and the support that held the stainless steel mash. I rebuilt it using only stainless steel, and now it’s fine (so the beer is, too ;).So I’ve learned that rule: never mix metals in a wet design unless you want to make a battery.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120530",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T10:51:51",
"content": "In most western countries (and all of the EU) you are not allowed to have aluminium pots and pans and kettles; because the aluminium gets into your brain and does bad things.And of course they use a separation layer in aluminium cans to avoid direct contact.Oddly enough though everybody uses aluminium foil all over the place for cooking, including commercial places that sell food.Humans eh, no wonder AI gets confused..Anyway, perhaps you should not use aluminium for your brewing that reason too.",
"parent_id": "8120511",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120541",
"author": "John Spencer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:01:03",
"content": "I live in the EU and own an aluminium kettle and an aluminium cooking pot with only the normal level of anodising, I do not fear a knock on the door from the gendarmes. They are not illegal. They are on sale freely. I agree that stainless steel, cast iron, tinned copper etc are better materials in general.",
"parent_id": "8120530",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120595",
"author": "Patrik",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:21:51",
"content": "In Sweden, no aluminium stuff.",
"parent_id": "8120541",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120601",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:39:53",
"content": "Amazingly old news. Military application engineers figured this out way more than a century ago. Use DI water, add a “water wetting agent” if desired, and anodes. Change anodes as they suffer galvanic corrosion. Periodically, power down, drain, and clean the heat exchangers. Rinse, repeat. This is literally not rocket science; it is middle school chemistry. And anybody who has ever worked in a professional capacity on heat exchangers SHOULD be aware of this. We do it on cars, airplanes, earth moving equipment, naval vessels, and power plants.",
"parent_id": "8120595",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120749",
"author": "AB1OF",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:39:45",
"content": "The single piece of cookware I own that has “proudly made in Sweden since 1925” on it, is decidedly made from alumin(i)um. Trangia branded cookware for hikers. Bought recently. Still for sale. Bloody expensive, too.",
"parent_id": "8120595",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121465",
"author": "John Spencer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T22:27:06",
"content": "My kettle is a TRANGIA ( Swedish). Amazon.fr also has ordinary kitchen kettles in aluminium though from a brief look it seems that aluminium cooking pots and pans are coated in some sort of enamel to keep the food away from the aluminium.I still think that you can own and use bare aluminium pots and pans in the EU, if you want to.",
"parent_id": "8120595",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120702",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:51:53",
"content": "Are you sure? It is very peculiar, they were removed from stores ages ago (decades?) and even from discount stores, seems very odd that they would be available in France or Belgium (based on your use of ‘gendarmes’). Now in eastern Europe I can see it slipping through the cracks, but more western EU, that’s very peculiar.I mean yes internally lots of kettles and pots and pans are aluminium, but there is always a barrier layer like anti-stick coating or stainless or some such surely?Anyway, I would avoid it since you can easily do so.",
"parent_id": "8120541",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121475",
"author": "John Spencer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T22:53:52",
"content": "“In most western countries (and all of the EU) you are not allowed to have aluminium pots and pans and kettles“.Trangia (Swedish) use hard anodising now so I suppose they just scrape through the new regulations. What I was trying to say was that I very much think that the Gendarmes will not arrest me for owning and occasionally using aluminium cookware. (My Trangia cookware is decades old).",
"parent_id": "8120702",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120551",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:59:32",
"content": "I tried to fact check this conspiracy theorist thinking. At least the US and UK versions of the Alzheimer society say there is not convincing link between metal ions and that particular disease. Depending, of course, on your definition of “does bad things.” And those are non-profits seeking to help with that disease so I don’t think they would have ulterior motives. that aside, as noted below, other materials are generally superior but more expensive. #tradeoffs",
"parent_id": "8120530",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120623",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T16:45:57",
"content": "common deodorant has aluminum in it, and we get more aluminum from rubbing deodorant under arm than we get from cooking food in aluminum pots.I am still using 70+ years old Club pots and pans, it heats well and is easy to clean. No teflon to flake off and cause problem (some of the very late produced Club did have teflon before Mirro bought them out)",
"parent_id": "8120530",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120664",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:34:06",
"content": "“In most western countries (and all of the EU) you are not allowed to have aluminium pots and pans and kettles; because the aluminium gets into your brain and does bad things.”No. This is false, though there are requirements about anodization to minimize leaching. As to health hazards:https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/ToxFAQs/ToxFAQsDetails.aspx?faqid=190&toxid=34",
"parent_id": "8120530",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120710",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:11:02",
"content": "Yeah uhm thanks but the CDC is US and the EU and US don’t quite agree on everything.And of course money talks even louder in the US than the EU… over shouting health concerns possibly.And why risk it if you don’t need to? Because the US says so? I think that’s not a good measure of things.But you are of course free to disagree and to use it as you wish, and it’s not a bad thing to share the official US views on this so thanks for that. Better to share the CDC site than shout some random unsubstantiated personal view or something some vlogger shouted :)",
"parent_id": "8120664",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120540",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T11:45:20",
"content": "My mother used to make applesauce in an aluminimum pan (40 years ago) and I never liked it much because it had a weird taste. At some time she started making it in a stainless steel pan and then it tasted much better. The difference was really obvious to me, but apparently not so obvious to other people in my family. The insides of her old pans were also not smooth anymore (like the outside). They had clear signs of pitting corrosion.",
"parent_id": "8120511",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120594",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:15:05",
"content": "I’ll do some speculation here; perhaps an expert can correct my mistakes. Aluminum exposed to the air forms a fairly strong oxide skin, which will protect the aluminum from corrosion except from particularly strong chemicals, high heat, or severe mechanical abrasion. If your mom cleaned the aluminum pan with steel wool (a Brillo pad) that would have removed the oxide layer. Dishcloths and some of the modern plastic scrubbers would leave the oxide intact.Aluminum alloys change the risk. On the one hand, the alloys can be stronger and more corrosion resistant. On the other hand, galvanic action between different metals in the alloy is a potential problem, particularly if the alloy is not uniform.",
"parent_id": "8120540",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120606",
"author": "Rick Bailey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:56:58",
"content": "This is really good, and nails most of what goes on while canning.However, there’s often heat and acid working at the same time, to cook your jam/applesauce or whatever, and the acid is a preservative, to keep the pH low enough that your food stays fresh/doesn’t spoil while in storage.So I think the acid in the aluminum pot can strip enough of the aluminum oxide to expose bare metal, which can get into the applesauce as dissolved ions.",
"parent_id": "8120594",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120624",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T16:47:15",
"content": "Leaving strong acidic food like tomato sauce for several hours will cause high aluminum leeching. When done cooking, remove them quickly then rinse out cooled pots and wash them with non-abrasive pad or cloth.",
"parent_id": "8120594",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121779",
"author": "Lonnie Stoudt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T01:57:55",
"content": "…i wish Ford had respected that notion when they saddled millions of late 1970s cars with their “Variable Venturi” carburetors, which would routinely load the float bowls with grey sludge, from the decomposition of the aluminum parts used in “wet” internal areas… at the time I was stuck learning this (mid 1990s) by way of failed smog checks, it was widely considered unrepairable (you couldn’t have added or changed anything to prevent the galvanic activity without drawing an equipment violation), unreplaceable except with same P.O.S., or finally in the mid 1990s with a mid-priced Holley…A LOT of solid 302 cid powerplants met early graves due to their fuel systems being factory-sabotaged that way…🤦♂️",
"parent_id": "8120511",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121780",
"author": "Lonnie Stoudt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T02:01:38",
"content": "(Addendum) the mechanics KNEW itnwas galvanic decomposition, you justnwerentnallowed to solve the problem under our ridiculously misguided smog laws of the day.",
"parent_id": "8121779",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120520",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T09:33:41",
"content": "Hi! Are you a bot?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120626",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:01:31",
"content": "What if we used monel for water cooling setup? Typically contains 66% nickel and 31.5% copper, with trace amounts of other elements like iron, manganese, carbon, and silicon. It has been used in marine for around 100 years, and where corrosive chemical have been used. Seems like it’d help resist corroding in water block and radiator. Nickle may not be as good a conductor of heat but it should make waterblock last a lot longer. Useful if your water setup has a removable and replaceable water pump",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120652",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:00:24",
"content": "I would be willing to bet it is not a very good thermal conductor.I have always wondered why the interface surface between the Waterblock and the CPU IHS were not plated with Gold, number Three when it comes to thermal conductors.Diamond… (The Very Best)Silver… (cant use this its too reactive)Gold… Why not????Only $3,400.00 per OZ this morning.",
"parent_id": "8120626",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120673",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:50:23",
"content": "Industrial diamond is a ‘cheap enough’ material.Less than gold.Don’t think gold will wet diamond powders though.Your chasing decimals.IIRC an equal weight of aluminum is a better heat sink than copper, despite being worse thermal conductor. For most definitions of ‘better’.Thinner water block walls of stronger/more stable material would give similar results.Quote Warner Von Braun: ‘Tell the bean counter we’re using a gold mirror because solid gold would be too heavy.’",
"parent_id": "8120652",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120778",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T01:20:55",
"content": "The mirrors on the James Webb Space Telescope are coated with gold, because it reflects 99% of infrared (basically anything above 600 nm). So even though gold is good at conducting electricity (2.44 x 10⁻⁸ ohm/m resistance), and thermal conduction ( 315 W/m.K), any radiated heat will be reflected back to the source extremely efficiently.",
"parent_id": "8120652",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120631",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:09:33",
"content": "I am still a fan of plain o’ air cooling. None of my machines has ever been pushed enough to need liquid cooling from the Z-80 to current processors. I am not an over clocker. I even turn off the ‘boost’ mode in BIOS and run at the given CPU recommended GHz. And the machines still feel super fast for what I do. In today’s world, I don’t think we really have a need to ‘push’ the bleeding edge for home computing tasks. As with anything there are edge cases…. But in general… At least that is my opinion!Thanks for the article. One of things I felt could be a problem with liquid cooling over the years, turns out to actually be a ‘real’ problem.We use stainless steel and cast iron pans around here. We used to use Aluminum, but moved away from them. Not the problem they are made out to be though. Just like lead isn’t either. But we’ll always have the sky is falling, rooms with round corners, and dull knife crowd with us forever.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120655",
"author": "GameboyRMH",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:06:10",
"content": "I like positive pressure air cooling with good intake filtration for my computers. It’s simple, cheap, lightweight, and maintenance consists of little more than cleaning the intake filters occasionally. Positive pressure means dust doesn’t get sucked in anywhere else. With the right choice of CPU heatsink and fan there can be plenty of cooling capacity for boost modes and even enough for moderate overclocking.",
"parent_id": "8120631",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120656",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:06:52",
"content": "We used to have fully immersed mineral oil PCs until some stupid patents ruined it.What if we changed the loop to use mineral oil instead?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120668",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:38:22",
"content": "Crazy over clockers have a nonconductive liquid that they like to cool with liquid nitrogen (till slushy), then recirculate. Expensive and pointless, but whole machine immersed.Haven’t even looked at their shenanigans in decades tough.IIRC someone had a 1 gig Pentium 3 running at something like 6 gig.Those guys are into getting screen caps of super high clocks.Machines are barely stable enough to boot and run a benchmark.Makes ME want to hang them from doorknobs by their underwear.",
"parent_id": "8120656",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120679",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:09:01",
"content": "Compared to water, mineral oil is about a third as effective at heat transfer and also an order of magnitude more viscous (at startup/room temperature anyway).A standard water cooling system swapped over to mineral oil would suddenly become extremely underpowered and undersized, assuming it worked at all.Of course you could build a (very) custom loop tailored to mineral oil, but at that point it’s probably easier to just do immersion cooling (which is heavy and messy, but allows you to just use your existing heat sinks rather building huge, custom, chunky “oil blocks” for your CPU/GPU/etc)",
"parent_id": "8120656",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120721",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:46:07",
"content": "Could you stick de-ionizing filter chambers in the loop to keep the dissolved metals down?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121482",
"author": "Jdams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T23:37:29",
"content": "Deionizing filter? Like an RO filter? The power requirements to pump through that at typical flow rates would be pretty damn high.",
"parent_id": "8120721",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120765",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T23:55:18",
"content": "All that heat eventually needs to go to the air anyway, unless they’re running the system off the tap and into the drain, and then what’s the fuss about corrosion?- these guys think they’re cooling a nuclear reactor, and the gimmick factory knows it. There is NOTHING wrong with air cooling (esp. forced, try a CPAP blower for noise reduction) for individual computers and components. Try it sometime.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120770",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T00:49:27",
"content": "makes me wonder about my hydronic system, which is i think sheet-steel radiators, pex pipe, and brass fittings.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120777",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T01:19:26",
"content": "As long as the metal parts are insulated from each other (e.g., not grounded) then no current will flow, so at least the galvanic corrosion won’t be an issue.",
"parent_id": "8120770",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120979",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:24:59",
"content": "yeah i was kind of hoping that the ten feet of pex (insulator) between each part would help me out but then i remembered each radiator has a direct brass-on-steel coupler between it and the pex. if i ever have to maintain one of those, i’ll be curious what it looks like when i take it apart..i hope that since reading plumbing faqs didn’t mention it, the margins must be fine. they did warn me about running acidic condensate drain through brass and hoo boy that didn’t take long to see in action (i only did it because the part was on hand, i knew i would eventually have to replace it with plastic).",
"parent_id": "8120777",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120771",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T00:56:25",
"content": "Didn’t this get solved by the automotive industry decades ago?Deionised water mixed with glycol and corrosion inhibitors.Works fine with cast iron, aluminium, and steel all in the same system.Slightly less effective than water alone, but it’ll last years without issue",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120795",
"author": "FiveEyesNoPrize",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T02:59:51",
"content": "Just buy good stuff and don’t settle for crap disguised as high end thanks to marketing campaigns (looking at you, EK).Aquacomputer’s DP Ultra has been in my Aquacomputer/Watercool loop since I built it three years ago and the conductivity hasn’t changed since the initial air purge. Was at 11 microsiemens per centimeter for the first week and has stayed at 8 microsiemens per centimeter and 100% quality (none of the anticorrosion or antimicrobial agents have come out of suspension) since. There’s no staining or leeching on any of the blocks, all of the nickel plating is intact, and there’s no fog on any of the acrylic. Loop contains three all-copper radiators, two nickel plated copper GPU blocks, one nickel plated copper CPU block and is perpetually pressurized to 420mbar thanks to the vacuum pump. They recommend changing the coolant every year or so, but I haven’t felt the need to.You get what you pay for, so… buy once, cry once.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,570.277958
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/china-hosts-robot-marathon/
|
China Hosts Robot Marathon
|
Al Williams
|
[
"News",
"Robots Hacks"
] |
[
"marathon",
"robot"
] |
China played host to what, presumably, was the world’s first
robot and human half-marathon
. You can check out the action and the Tiangong Ultra robot that won in the video below. The event took place in Beijing and spanned 21.1 km. There was, however, a barrier between lanes for humans and machines.
The human rules were the same as you’d expect, but the robots did need a few concessions, such as battery swap stops. The winning ‘bot crossed the finish line in just over 160 minutes. However, there were awards for endurance, gait design, and design innovation.
Humans still took the top spots, though. We also noted that some of the robots had issues where they lost control or had other problems. Even the winner fell down once and had three battery changes over the course.
Of the 21 robots that started, only six made the finish line. We don’t know how many of the 12,000 humans finished, but we are pretty sure it was more than six, so we don’t think runners have to worry about robot overlords yet.
But they’re getting better all the time
.
| 11
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120461",
"author": "Als",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T04:02:45",
"content": "the robot looks like it has to take a #2 soon",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120509",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T07:56:52",
"content": "Eternally damned to search for an outhouse but never find one",
"parent_id": "8120461",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120706",
"author": "Robot H.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:56:14",
"content": "I believe you mean an number 10",
"parent_id": "8120461",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120519",
"author": "fyllyx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T09:31:48",
"content": "Next? the Twiki lookalike bot does Energizer ads",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120538",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T11:38:00",
"content": "This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but that’s probably cultural. I like the little robot though. I feel like that one would be cool to have at a party or something.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120677",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:06:33",
"content": "I feel like the concept of fun goes beyond culture.It makes as much sense as the backward marathons or Grinch runs. It doesn’t need to make sense beyond just being fun.",
"parent_id": "8120538",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120571",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:11:49",
"content": "The appearance of the “sag wagon” is still sad regardless of the humanity of the fallen participant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120590",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:09:48",
"content": "Battery changeout? No fair! Disqualified! 🤣",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120850",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T08:04:21",
"content": "This is a hell of a lot more realistic than any of the boston dynamics or techbro demos recently.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121101",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:32:44",
"content": "Are these autonomous, or remote-controlled?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121246",
"author": "Hugo Oran",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T08:38:58",
"content": "Cca 130 years ago there were first contests for motor cars, for me it seems the results were comparable. Now the cars are everywhere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,570.379596
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/hackaday-links-april-20-2025/
|
Hackaday Links: April 20, 2025
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] |
[
"antikythera",
"biosignature",
"citation",
"crosswalk",
"deep-fake",
"DMDS",
"DMS",
"exoplanet",
"gear",
"hackaday links",
"James Webb",
"jwst",
"K2-18b",
"Kepler",
"Musk",
"Palo Alto",
"scientific fraud",
"silicon valley",
"tooth",
"vegetative electron microscopy",
"Zuckerberg"
] |
We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of
the detection of biosignatures
in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using the Kepler space telescope because it lies in the habitable zone around its red-dwarf star. Initial observations with Hubble indicated the presence of water vapor, and follow-up investigations using the James Webb Space Telescope detected all sorts of goodies in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. But more recently, JWST saw signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), organic molecules which, on Earth, are strongly associated with biological processes in marine bacteria and phytoplankton.
The team analyzing the JWST data says that the data is currently pretty good, with a statistical significance of 99.7%. That’s a three-sigma result, and while it’s promising, it’s not quite good enough to seal the deal that life evolved more than once in the universe. If further JWST observations manage to firm that up to five sigma, it’ll be the most important scientific result of all time. To our way of thinking, it would be much more significant than finding evidence of ancient or even current life in our solar system, since cross-contamination is so easy in the relatively cozy confines of the Sun’s gravity well. K2-18b is far enough away from our system as to make that virtually impossible, and that would say a lot about the universality of biochemical evolution. It could also provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox, since it could indicate that the galaxy is actually teeming with life but under conditions that make it difficult to evolve into species capable of making detectable techno-signatures. It’s hard to build a radio or a rocket when you live on a high-
g
water world, after all.
Closer to home, there’s speculation that
the famous Antikythera mechanism may not have worked at all
in its heyday. According to researchers from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata in Argentina, “the world’s first analog computer” could not have worked due to the accumulated mechanical error of its gears. They blame this on the shape of the gear teeth, which appear triangular on CT scans of the mechanism, and which they seem to attribute to manufacturing defects. Given the 20-odd centuries the brass-and-iron device spent at the bottom of the Aegean Sea and the potential for artifacts in CT scans, we’re not sure it’s safe to pin the suboptimal shape of the gear teeth on the maker of the mechanism. They also seem to call into question the ability of 1st-century BCE craftsmen to construct a mechanism with sufficient precision to serve as a useful astronomical calculator, a position that Chris from Clickspring has been putting the lie to with
his ongoing effort
to reproduce the Antikythera mechanism using ancient tools and materials. We’re keen to hear what he has to say about this issue.
Speaking of questionable scientific papers, have you heard about
“vegetative electron microscopy”
? It’s all the rage, having been mentioned in at least 22 scientific papers recently, even though no such technique exists. Or rather, it didn’t exist until around 2017, when it popped up in a couple of Iranian scientific papers. How it came into being is a bit of a mystery, but it may have started with faulty scans of a paper from the 1950s, which had the terms “vegetative” and “electron microscopy” printed in different columns but directly across from each other. That somehow led to the terms getting glued together, possibly in one of those Iranian papers because the Farsi spelling of “vegetative” is very similar to “scanning,” a much more sensible prefix to “electron microscopy.” Once the nonsense term was created, it propagated into subsequent papers of dubious scientific provenance by authors who didn’t bother to check their references, or perhaps never existed in the first place. The wonders of our AI world never cease to amaze.
And finally, from the heart of Silicon Valley comes a tale of cyber hijinks as
several crosswalks were hacked to taunt everyone’s favorite billionaires
. Twelve Palo Alto crosswalks were targeted by persons unknown, who somehow managed to gain access to the voice announcement system in the crosswalks and replaced the normally helpful voice messages with deep-fake audio of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg saying ridiculous but plausible things. Redwood City and Menlo Park crosswalks may have also been attacked, and soulless city officials responded by disabling the voice feature. We get why they had to do it, but as cyberattacks go, this one seems pretty harmless.
| 8
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120424",
"author": "College cynic",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T23:24:00",
"content": "Garbage papers have remained a problem long before artificial stupidity. As long as there’s been university faculty with quotas, there’s been useless fluff papers at their least unethical, to downright fraudulent research to secure or maintain funding. If there is a system that exists, it will be exploited.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120448",
"author": "ezzy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T02:43:01",
"content": "This is worse than a garbage paper though. This is decent authors with a decent study that includes a little completely bogus information that came about because they used ai to write their paper.In 50 years students will be studying all the bogus info along with the facts because there will be nobody qualified to tell them it’s wrong.",
"parent_id": "8120424",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120550",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:50:18",
"content": "It is always funny to me when there are people that insist something can work but never actually try it, or like this group that insists the Antikythera mechanism can’t work, while still not actually trying it. I see this all the time with students (I’m nominally a teacher sort of) thatinsistsomething will not work while I quietly just do it anyway. Typical behavior for these types of people, after the facts become plain, is to start adding qualifiers and backpeddling to their original argument so they don’t look extra stupid. Which only makes them look worse. If the clickspring interpretation of the Antikythera mechanism isn’t convincing enough (presumably functioning device, made entirely with period-possible tools and techniques… also the dude has made definitely-functioning similar devices already plus non-Chris people have made definitely functioning Antikythera replicas…) I can’t wait to see how they try to weasel of being wrong on this one.-ok I just actually looked at what was said, for about 10 seconds, and it’s an absolute junk of an article itself. Click-baity in the extreme. Avoid.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120665",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:34:56",
"content": "There is mentioned by some known roman hystorian that a roman general had in his vila a machine like the Antikythera in complexity and functionality. For them was just a wonder gadget from a conquered part of today’s Greece. And itwasfunctional. So we knew before the wrecked mechanism discovery that there existed something odd and very interesting, but the Antikythera discovery explained what it was and how it worked.It is like the “light bulbs” present in Egypt tomb paintings. One day will find a text description of it or a remenant and will exclaim “that’s what it is” like Archimedes screamin’ “eurika” while running wet and naked on the streets.You may say that the machine is a later copy, unfunctional because the masters passed and only third hand copy of the original was used as original for not so skilled artisans to copy them.BUT the internals are seen in the x-rays photos as good as possible, everything that smart and passionate people rebuild on existing remains is working (g’day Cris @Clicksping & friends). Why then, making an almost perfect machine, but with wrong gears teeth, would be the scope of its builders? Were them a bunch of young learners (cannot call them school boys) that left the “how to make the tooth of the gears” lesson for a fancy Bachus party? Or the classical excuse: “tooth gears were filed by Eumachus, when not drunk, but often when he was drunk, if he was present to help us and not p1553d drunk sleeping behing the pub”. Or perhaps it was sabotaged so the romans wont fancy it and would leave that junk to the greeks (with ready flles in their hands) that were waiting for the romans to leave. But alas the ship sunk with it. Brokenhearted the greeks started the fires in furnances to build another machine, but the first tornado in Europe came and razed the shop, then a giant wave took the remains into the sea and lava flowed from nowhere over the small greek vilage erasing any trace of the first mechanics. The gods were not pleased that puny humans found and traced the celestial movements with a machine with a rotating lever. Lightings marked the now cursed place in fresh solidified lava. Two hours later another lightnings erased the marks just in case someone starts digging.Would you prefer my story or “they laked precision” one?P.S. were those machinists requalified dentists?",
"parent_id": "8120550",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121062",
"author": "Aknup",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:58:34",
"content": "Most of the Antikythera thingy are fused/incomplete and unknown thought right? And so it’s a lot of guesswork in the first place.In that sense can you even speaking of working or not working?However surely it’s too complex to be ‘ornamental’ so it must have done something so I think it was a thing that once worked.But you can’t make ‘replicas’ if most of it is guesswork and our current imagination and then claim it proves anything. You could turn it into lots of things and never get close to what it was.",
"parent_id": "8120550",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121088",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:56:25",
"content": "Please check Clickspring YuoTube channel. 99% of what was found of the machine has been indentified as being related with antique greek calendars and events and astonomical events (eclipses).Perhaps the exact case is not known, but the functionality is discovered.",
"parent_id": "8121062",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120611",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T16:05:30",
"content": "given the extreme cost it would have taken to build the mechanism in it’s era i’d be very surprised if it didn’t work, because the builder wouldn’t have been paid.As regards binding though if the geartrain was being used to transmit power, maybe it is an issue. but this is not a clock. i’d imagine a competent operator would turn the output and input gears at the same time to take the load off the mechanism, as well as supply it with whatever oil or fat was available to lower friction.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120613",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T16:15:22",
"content": "I was fortunate enough to travel to Athens last fall for work, to present a paper, and I visited the National Archaeological Museum in my down time. Got to see the Antikythera pieces in person. That place is amazing, I spent about 4 hours one afternoon and didn’t even get to see everything. Definitely a must for anyone visiting!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,570.33035
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/milliforth-6502-a-forth-for-the-6502-cpu/
|
MilliForth-6502, A Forth For The 6502 CPU
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"6502",
"forth",
"milliForth",
"sectorforth"
] |
Forth is popular on small computers because it is simple to implement, yet quite powerful. But what happens when you really need to shrink it? Well, if your target is the 6502, there’s
milliForth-6502
.
This is a port of
milliForth
, which is a fork of sectorforth. The sectorforth project set the standard, implementing a Forth so small it could fit in a 512-byte boot sector. The milliForth project took sectorforth and made it even smaller, weighing in at only 336 bytes. However, both milliForth and sectorforth are for the x86 architecture. With milliForth-6502, [Alvaro G. S. Barcellos] wanted to see how small he could make a 6502 implementation.
So how big is the milliForth-6502 binary? Our tests indicate: 1,110 bytes. It won’t quite fit in a boot sector, but it’s pretty small!
Most of the code for milliForth-6502 is assembly code in
sector-6502.s
. This code is compiled using tools from the
cc65
project. To run the code
lib6502
is used for 6502 emulation.
Emulation is all well and good as far as it goes, especially for development and testing, but we’d love to see this code running on a real 6502. Even better would be a
6502 built from scratch
! If you get this code running we’d love to
hear how it went
!
| 41
| 17
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120375",
"author": "Wallace Owen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:29:39",
"content": "Didn’t fig forth have a port to the 6502?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120386",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T21:32:29",
"content": "Seehttps://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/#31_The_Forth_Interest_Group. Ragsdale got Army Maj. Robert Selzer to port a version of microForth to the 6502.It goes on to say,Selzer and Ragsdale subsequently made substantial modifications and improvements to the model, including exploitation of page zero and stack-implicit addressing architectural features in the 6502. Many of the enhancements that characterized the later public-domain versions were made during this period, including variable-length name fields and modifications to the dictionary linked-list threading. A metacompiler on the Jolt could target a significantly changed kernel to a higher address in memory. A replacement bootable image would then be recompiled by the new kernel into the lower boot address, which could then be written out to disk. At this point, Ragsdale had a system with which to meet his professional needs for embedded security systems.During this period the Forth Interest Group (FIG) was started by Ragsdale, Kim Harris, John James, David Boulton, Dave Bengel, Tom Olsen and Dave Wyland [FIG 1978]. They introduced the concept of a “FIG Forth Model,” a publicly available Forth system that could be implemented on popular computer architectures.The FIG Forth Model was derived from Ragsdale’s 6502 system.",
"parent_id": "8120375",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120582",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:49:42",
"content": "Ragsdale’s 6502 FIG assembly source listing became the standard for how to implement and indirect threaded Forth. But his 6502 assembler written in Forth is a fantastic exemplar of what you can do with the language and how nice assembly language can be if you re-think how it is done.",
"parent_id": "8120386",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120379",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:42:10",
"content": "GraFORTH ran on a 6502, and was pretty amazing for the time: Real-time interactive 3D graphics at home, in 1982.It took more than 1,110 bytes, but not a whole lot more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120388",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T21:36:37",
"content": "6502 doesnt have a boot sector.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120504",
"author": "poglad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T07:21:52",
"content": "Neither does the x86. The boot sector is on the floppy disk.",
"parent_id": "8120388",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120573",
"author": "SpaceDuck",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:18:53",
"content": "For the record, neither does x86… That’s just a PC thing",
"parent_id": "8120388",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120390",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T21:37:58",
"content": "There are quite a few Forths running on 6502 and 65c02, in indirect-threaded, direct-threaded, and I believe even subroutine-threaded models. There’s a somewhat active forum about it athttp://forum.6502.org/viewforum.php?f=9. I use Forth on my 65c02 workbench computer because it is so quick to develop software on. You can see the workbench computer, which I use as kind of a “Swiss army knife of the workbench,” athttp://wilsonminesco.com/BenchCPU/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120420",
"author": "Buzz McCool",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T23:01:36",
"content": "Thanks for sharing!",
"parent_id": "8120390",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120524",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T09:45:07",
"content": "Wow, love Bench-1! Thanks for the link!",
"parent_id": "8120390",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120602",
"author": "Cap",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:40:45",
"content": "This is a great Overview about how I think of ‘Computer System Solutions’ and the fact that Hardware and Software are not Separate Entity’s.It’s really hard to teach that aspect. People GENERALLY want to fit Existing Hardware with Software to make things run..It’s actually Both ( In my Opinion ) Custom Hardware and Custom Software Solutions. The ability to be able to do both, makes for the Elegant Solution.Wirewrap is an entirely different level of Crazy. I love it.Cap",
"parent_id": "8120390",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120393",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T22:02:50",
"content": "As other point out, 6502 has had Forth options for a long time.https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/5989/Forth/I had a Forth ROM for my beeb (model B). But I hardly used it since the 6502 small C compiler came out shortly after I managed to save up for the Forth ROM, and C just seemed like a much better alternative to coding in assembly compared to Forth.Still, quite impressive project, I am sure the Acornsoft Forth was bigger than 1110bytes. I believe it was on a 16kb ROM, but not sure how much of the ROM was used.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120395",
"author": "Carl Ranson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T22:03:52",
"content": "forth is known to cause disorders of the nervous system and bowel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120427",
"author": "Wallace Owen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T00:01:15",
"content": "Yes. A write-only language. Coming back to some week-old forth word, I was forced to mentally step through it while visualizing the stack.",
"parent_id": "8120395",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120441",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T01:54:56",
"content": "“Write-only” is the fault of the programmer, not the language. Although I’m a strong Forth proponent, I will still say that an awful lot of Forth I see from others is quite unreadable.",
"parent_id": "8120427",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120442",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T02:00:48",
"content": "I think there’s something to the kind of brain one is born with. RPN also goes contrary to how we’re taught in the early grades, and to how our English language works. I don’t speak any Korean, but I understand the Korean language is RPN, and Koreans pick up on RPN languages much more easily. Where we would say “put on shoes,” they would say something like “shoes, install.” (I verified this with a Korean roommate of our son’s when he was living on campus at the university.)Forth was very natural for me to pick up and run with though. OTOH, I absolutely cannot latch onto C. I have been through the standard K&R C book which was recommended, and a “C For Dummies” (or something like that), and gave up. I seem to have a Forth brain, and once I found Forth, I decided I was done picking up languages. This was home.",
"parent_id": "8120427",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120525",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T09:49:56",
"content": "Well I’m glad you found your home! I’ve been programming for 30 years, and I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but PHP is my language of choice. It’s just a very practical language which you can take in myriad directions. Object oriented, procedural, functional, optional strong typing, traits, concurrency… PHP can do it all! And with PHP there is no compile step required.",
"parent_id": "8120442",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120563",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:51:09",
"content": "I consider FORTH as being one of the early Virtual Machines, like CHIP-8, the UCSD P-System, the Smalltalk VM, or (much later) the Java VM. To that end, if you ever have to use another language you might find the charts athttps://hyperpolyglot.org/to be useful. You could use it to make a C-to-FORTH mapping, or an Erlang-to-FORTH mapping, or whatever you might need.Come to think of it, a great way to learn C would be to modify the backend of Tiny-C so it emits FORTH instead of Z80 assembly language.",
"parent_id": "8120442",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120660",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:25:21",
"content": "German is RPN.Mark Twain described German accurately.Search for ‘Mark Twain The Awful German Language’.From memory:‘After all the compound words, the clauses of all kinds, the whole convoluted mess, finally comes the verb, at the very end. You then get to untangle the sentence in your head.’‘Number of computer languages known’ is the best one question proxy I know for computer programmer skill.Age must be taken into consideration.Olds, like me, should not be able to come up with an instant answer. More: How do I count them? How well to count? Does getting paid to code in it count?‘How many programming languages did you know when you started college?’ might be better (for formally trained people).If the answer to that is 0, to the bin the resume goes.Would you hire a musician that hadn’t picked up an instrument before music school?Have to play like Zappa.",
"parent_id": "8120442",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120717",
"author": "John Cowan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T20:27:59",
"content": "German is only verb-final in subordinate clauses: “Berlin is the capital of Germany” vs. “I know that Berlin the capital of Germany is”, for example. But almost half of all languages are truly verb-final, from Armenian to Japanese to Turkish.",
"parent_id": "8120660",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8160008",
"author": "Rich",
"timestamp": "2025-08-10T02:03:00",
"content": "Fortunately, I am retired! When I started college (for Chemistry), computers were big, mysterious machines tended to by priests in dark robes! It wasn’t until 8 years later that I got a TS-1000, and away I went!",
"parent_id": "8120660",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120736",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:08:06",
"content": "I think of it as being closer to the way the brain works to process language. We can’t actually perform “3 + 7” because the addition operation is out of order. We mentally stack the 3 and the + until we get the 7. “3 7 +” is better but it gets harder to communicate as it gets more complicated. To communicate in speaking or writing, infix is more effective. To perform the task, RPN is more effective. C compilers routinely do the conversion to RPN before code generation.",
"parent_id": "8120442",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120768",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T00:38:16",
"content": "that’s a neat theory. i tend to think the advantages of forth are its epic simplicity and emphasis on factoring. i love it but i don’t feel like my mind is any more disposed to RPN than to infix. and i spend most of my day in C.in practice i just use forth for embedded environments where i don’t want to write asm, don’t want to configure a C compiler, and don’t want to write a more complicated compiler than a forth one :) i really like forth’s elegance, and reading the pygmy forth source code from one end to the other was a great joy many years ago. but i may never use it again because it doesn’t look like i’ll ever use a micro smaller than the rp2040 in the future",
"parent_id": "8120442",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8128075",
"author": "BruceRMcF",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:00:23",
"content": "The point of stack comments in lower level words in Forth is so that visualizing the stack doesn’t have to be a mental exercise when coming back to a low level Forth word a week later.And part of the point of the Forth practice to try to keep a majority of definitions down to around 7 words or less is to be able to thoroughly test all boundary cases so that the word does what the glossary description says it does, so that you don’t often have to come back to it a week later.",
"parent_id": "8120427",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120401",
"author": "The Grumpy Old Engineer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T22:12:31",
"content": "I remember a few very useable Forths that I ran on my old Atari 800 back in the early 80’s , not necessarily all tiny implementations, but all perfectly useable and bootable off a sector of a floppy disk or tape.One that comes to mind was PolyForth by a UK software house called BigNose Software (I think). That actually did graphics and multitasking on the 800. I wrote a 2D CAD program using it.The code is out there, somewhere. I had a 6502 assembler source listing (FigForth79 I think it was) that was bootstrappable from quite minimal basic Forth code into a full Forth by loading more Forth code.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120443",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T02:08:31",
"content": "figForth was a little before Forth 79.But yes, a nice thing about Forth is the incremental compilation and that new things you write become part of the language itself, and the user can “get under the hood” and modify the compiler itself. It even had the tools to do OOP before it was called that.",
"parent_id": "8120401",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120580",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T14:45:10",
"content": "PolyForth IIRC is from Forth Inc, and Elizabeth Rather and was linked with Charles Moore.",
"parent_id": "8120401",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120506",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T07:44:05",
"content": "Redpower, an ancient mod for Minecraft, had a computer that was essentially a 6502 and a terminal and by default it ran Forth.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120549",
"author": "KC8KVA",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:49:50",
"content": "I used VICForth back in the day on a 3.5K machine. Made my definitions. Monitored the stack. It was a great cartridge and got me learning more than the “BASIC” and Machine Code (albeit using Data statements to POKE into memory and jump to the code with a lil’ ol’ SYS command).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120599",
"author": "Steve Burt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:24:55",
"content": "I remember writing a Forth interpreter in 6502 assembler for the Commodore 64 in about 1984. Good fun, but never used it for anything; the assembly code is much easier to understand than Forth",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120628",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:03:35",
"content": "1,110 bytes. That fits in a 1541 drive’s ram, leaving at least 700 bytes of memory for a forth program. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120741",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:20:09",
"content": "One of the feature if Forth I wish was common in C and other languages has to do with the radix. In Forth you can set any base at any time. You can use hex or binary or rad60 by changing the value of a variable called BASE (I think). But you have to remember the base you are in when you just write a number to it! So there are typically a few base change words defined like HEX and BINARY and DECIMAL. So not need for the pre-processor commands like 0xABCD and 0b11010… (kill all humans). You avoid developing the irritating habit of including the 0x with hex numbers in text.It makes very nice when entering some data. Easily switching to binary is great for configuring registers or creating masks for various bits and other logic operations. The operations like .S that print the top of the stack will print correctly in any radix.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120831",
"author": "Alexandre Dumont",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T06:45:38",
"content": "I made my own 6502 Forth, to run on my Ben Eater inspired 6502 breadboard computer. I then made a 6502 emulator in Forth also, so I could run my own 6502 Forth in emulation.I also developped SKI Combinators Calculus for my 6502 Forth, cause I could… Isn’t it cool to do SKI calculus on a 6502?I explain that in my talks, link below 👇https://adumont.github.io/talks/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121217",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T05:21:27",
"content": "Awesome! This is excellent, thanks for the link! I will send this through to the tips line.",
"parent_id": "8120831",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121495",
"author": "FB",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T00:44:46",
"content": "Glad there’s still interest in Forth.Fig Forth was popular on the 6502 based Atari computers, and was sold by the Atari Program Exchangehttps://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Extended%20Atari%20FIG-Forth%20APX20029",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121511",
"author": "Alvaro G. S. Barcellos",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T03:08:06",
"content": "The milliforth-6502 is a proof of concept, by use minimal set of primitives and use minimal indirect thread code as forth heat beat. The code files contains more words to compile if need for solve a problem. I Must revise and review the code someday",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8125742",
"author": "Alaro G S Barcellos",
"timestamp": "2025-05-08T18:15:23",
"content": "and is alive :https://github.com/rumbledethumps/milliForth",
"parent_id": "8121511",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8179710",
"author": "Alvaro G. S. Barcellos",
"timestamp": "2025-09-15T01:14:07",
"content": "The port of milliforth-6502 to RISCV is in final review athttps://github.com/agsb/milliForth-RiscV",
"parent_id": "8121511",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122337",
"author": "David Goadby",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T13:10:56",
"content": "Rockwell had a couple of super chips called the 65F11 and 65F12. they had a built-in Forth interpreter. The chip was an odd package but had lots of I/O including serial and parallel, timers, interrupts, inline assembly and banked memory for large programs. You used external RAM/ROM and you could create real turnkey systems with it. I manufactured a networked data collection system with it and would have continued to use them except Rockwell decided to drop the part. I still have a development board made by a UK company. Looking back I loved the thing! In fact it was the RPi2040 of it’s day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122518",
"author": "Alan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T10:20:12",
"content": "Not 6502 but related… NXP have a series of microcontrollers based on the 6812.An assorted range of SPI, I2C built in, along with 32K (or higher) Flash RAM.Not identical to 6502, so cc65 compilers etc. aren’t quite the right tools. But at the real chips exist!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8128080",
"author": "BruceRMcF",
"timestamp": "2025-05-15T15:17:26",
"content": "I mean, “at the real” 65C02 chips exist. $11.04 at Mouser for the DIP (W65C02S6TPG-14) and Quad flat pack (W65C02S6TQG-14), $9.45 for the PLCC package (W65C02S6TPLG-14). Active and in stock (947 PLCC, 1,826 DIP, 120 QFP.But if I understand correctly, the 68HC12 is based on the 68HC11, with some changes in instruction set that bring it closer to the 6809 instruction set … and the 6809 was a really nice processor for a Forth system. It seems to be listed as “not for new designs”, but I expect someone could build a really nice retro design SBC with it, if they were of a mind to.",
"parent_id": "8122518",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,570.481777
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/20/the-most-printable-3d-printer-yet/
|
The Most Printable 3D Printer Yet
|
Aaron Beckendorf
|
[
"3d Printer hacks"
] |
[
"3D printed motor",
"3d printer",
"brushed motor",
"self-replicating"
] |
Despite the best efforts of the RepRap community over the last twenty years, self-replicating 3D printers have remained a stubbornly elusive goal, largely due to the difficulty of printing electronics. [Brian Minnick]’s
fully-printed 3D printer
could eventually change that, and he’s already solved an impressive number of technical challenges in the process.
[Brian]’s first step was to make a 3D-printable motor. Instead of the more conventional stepper motors, he designed a fully 3D-printed 3-pole brushed motor. The motor coils are made from solder paste, which the printer applies using a custom syringe-based extruder. The paste is then sintered at a moderate temperature, resulting in traces with a resistivity as low as 0.001 Ω mm, low enough to make effective magnetic coils.
Brushed motors are less accurate than stepper motors, but they do have a particularly useful advantage here: their speed can be controlled simply by varying the voltage. This enables a purely electromechanical control system – no microcontroller on this printer! A 3D-printed data strip encodes instructions for the printer as holes in a plastic sheet, which open and close simple switches in the motor controller. These switches control the speed, direction, and duration of the motors’ movement, letting the data strip encode motion vectors.
Remarkably, the hotend on this printer is also 3D-printed. [Brian] took advantage of the fact that PEEK’s melting point increases by about 110 ℃ when it’s annealed, which should allow an annealed hotend to print itself. So far it’s only extruded PLA, but the idea seems sound.
The video below the break shows a single-axis proof of concept in action. We haven’t been able to find any documentation of a fully-functional 3D printer, but nevertheless, it’s an impressive demonstration. We’ve covered
similar printers
before, and if you make progress in this area, be sure to send us a
tip
.
| 17
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120358",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:15:19",
"content": "Brushed motors are less accurate than stepper motors, but they do have a particularly useful advantage here: their speed can be controlled simply by varying the voltage.Rather, it’s limited – not controlled. The actual speed of the motor depends on the load. This is why they’re less accurate.BLDC motors using simple offset commutation behave the same way: they simply try to run as fast as they can give the input voltage. It’s the same action of commutation, only using Hall sensors instead of brushed switches.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120381",
"author": "Vik",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:59:59",
"content": "Some may ask “Why?” To me (core RepRap dev of old, and RepRapMicron dev of today) this is a nuanced important advance. Once the principles of printing all of a 3D printer are established, the reliance on the shape and size of commodity parts goes away. Then the machines can be miniaturized, and the printing of microelectronics and MEMS (who knows, even nanoscale) becomes possible.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120415",
"author": "Agammamon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T22:45:43",
"content": "More importantly – once you can genuinely self-replicate replicators then there is no possibility of control of them.",
"parent_id": "8120381",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120422",
"author": "Raoul Duke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T23:11:59",
"content": "Grey goo???",
"parent_id": "8120415",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120452",
"author": "Vik",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T03:06:42",
"content": "What’s scarier to me is the general public having no means of detecting or creating a countermeasure to Grey Goo, or other more feasible nanoscale threat. Some such threats are desirable by military agencies, and because of their small and replicating nature, they or their fabrication technology will be “liberated” one way or another – probably for personal gain.Having nanoscale technology in the hands of everyone is the best way to detect and adapt, possibly even preempt, this. I certainly would not like to be in a position where this stuff only exists in military labs, operating under the principle of “security by obscurity.” But it may have happened already :)",
"parent_id": "8120422",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120460",
"author": "Sandro",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T03:58:52",
"content": "High voltage seems like a pretty solid countermeasure to electronic-based grey goo.",
"parent_id": "8120452",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120499",
"author": "Vik",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T06:50:42",
"content": "You might think high voltage would zap it. Sadly, not so much for two reasons: Voltage is measured across things, and nanomachines are very, very small so the voltage across any particular one from a 10KV discharge over a millimetre would amount to only a few volts. Secondly, the mechanisms are likely to be mechanical, operated either by chemical bonding or electrostatics rather than current microelectronics – and those electrostatics would be operating at volts/metre that would make the designers of particle accelerators dribble.",
"parent_id": "8120452",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120544",
"author": "Matt Cramer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:15:42",
"content": "If gray goo is an angry mob of bare IC dies, there are plenty of obvious countermeasures. Electrostatic discharge is their traditional nemesis. But you could also use corrosive chemicals. Flamethrowers. Infrared energy. Scotch tape. A Super Soaker full of salt water.Most gray goo scenarios in fiction are really horror movie tropes with a veneer of nanotech over just plain magic. They never seem to consider what sort of feedstock the nanites need to replicate – if it’s pure silicon, they could only infest existing electronics or their production line. How much fuel does each nanites carry, and where do they get it? If a microprocessor gets infested with nanites, can they find enough fuel to walk to the RAM chip to continue spreading or do they have to wait for someone to shake the circuit board to move them? Do they have enough stored energy to dig out if you bury them in sand, or free themselves if they are stuck on a piece of tape? And what if peeling the tape generates a spark?",
"parent_id": "8120452",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120818",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T06:10:07",
"content": "Grey goo scenarios start with the assumption that it’s physically possible to make something the size of a bacterium that is vastly more complex, has vastly more energy and computing power, than a bacterium.In other words, “if spherical cows could fly”.",
"parent_id": "8120452",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120458",
"author": "Hugh Crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T03:47:47",
"content": "I’ll start worrying when the printers can manufacture their own supplies from their environment.",
"parent_id": "8120422",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120496",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T06:16:25",
"content": "Envisioning a rover that goes out in search of discarded plastic bottles to make it’s own filament. Sort of reminiscent of the robot MIT built that went around collecting slugs to power it’s bioreactor.",
"parent_id": "8120458",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120382",
"author": "Leonardo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T21:00:26",
"content": "4 years old video…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120432",
"author": "Schwimmen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T00:47:33",
"content": "2D printers use DC motors instead of servos, a cheap workaround involving an optocoupler and a disk of measured increments on the axis as the error signal.With non-planar slicing now becoming popular, we’ll be seeing 3D printers that look like robotic arms instead of the traditional 3-axis bed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120539",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T11:43:56",
"content": "Its a cool project. In their current state I don’t think I’d want to use one of those motors for anything personally but, maybe in 5 years after some advances I would. Who knows. A 3D printed hot end would be a really interesting challenge",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120645",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T17:48:44",
"content": "A 3d printed hotend is easy:Step 1. Acquire time on a $500,000+ powdered metal sintering 3D printer.Step 2. Waste that time printing a hotend you could better make (surface finish in channel) with a $300 chinesium mini mill and $20 in tooling.Step 3. Loss!",
"parent_id": "8120539",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120701",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:51:31",
"content": "hahaha what a ridiculous hacki wanted to point out the real reason we don’t 3d print printers is that pieces like extrusion and coated steel plates are just so mechanically superior. but then i saw 3d printed motor and wooo they’re on a different trip entirely",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121078",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T18:21:34",
"content": "I wonder what fun artifacts will be produced by heat warping the entire bed and structure over time. Most parts won’t reach melting point, but many areas I see will eventually hit glass transition",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,570.702061
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/a-pi-based-lidar-scanner/
|
A Pi-Based LiDAR Scanner
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"Laser Hacks"
] |
[
"2d visualization",
"3d scanning",
"camera",
"ldrobot",
"lidar",
"raspberry pi",
"vertex color"
] |
Although there are plenty of methods for effectively imaging a 3D space, LIDAR is widely regarded as one of the most effective methods. These systems use a rapid succession of laser pulses over a wide area to create an accurate 3D map. Early LIDAR systems were cumbersome and expensive but as the march of time continues on, these systems have become much more accessible to the average person.
So much so that you can quickly attach one to a Raspberry Pi and perform LiDAR imaging
for a very reasonable cost.
This software suite is a custom serial driver and scanning system for the Raspberry Pi, designed to work with LDRobot LIDAR modules like the LD06, LD19, and STL27L. Although still in active development, it offers an impressive set of features: real-time 2D visualizations, vertex color extraction, generation of 360-degree panoramic maps using fisheye camera images, and export capabilities for integration with other tools. The hardware setup includes a stepper motor for quick full-area scanning, and power options that include either a USB battery bank or a pair of 18650 lithium cells—making the system portable and self-contained during scans.
LIDAR systems are quickly becoming a dominant player for anything needing to map out or navigate a complex 3D space, from
self-driving cars
to
small Arduino-powered robots
. The capabilities a system like this brings are substantial for a reasonable cost, and we expect to see more LiDAR modules in other hardware as the technology matures further.
Thanks to [Dirk] for the tip!
| 30
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119806",
"author": "Cyna",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T21:14:12",
"content": "First suggestion: Use a newer Trinamic driver (like TMC220x) instead of the older, very noisy A4988.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119811",
"author": "Ralph",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T21:52:56",
"content": "No need to capitalize lidar, and radar. Check the Wikipedia page or other entomology. Yes I am a lidar scientist and yes I’ve had long day am in a cranky mood.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119812",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T21:56:33",
"content": "I think there is a bug in your spelling. Muphry’s Law strikes again.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119813",
"author": "Kluge",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T22:14:17",
"content": "Nothing is so smiple that it can’t be screwed up.",
"parent_id": "8119812",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119819",
"author": "Jan Prägert",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T22:31:30",
"content": "IEFBR14",
"parent_id": "8119813",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120299",
"author": "DaF0x",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T15:21:49",
"content": "Your right I broke my hammer making s’mores.",
"parent_id": "8119813",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119831",
"author": "Jon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T00:03:03",
"content": "Doesn’t the iPhone 16 pro support lidar?",
"parent_id": "8119812",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119842",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:04:34",
"content": "My god! Puns are clearly wasted on the uneducated.",
"parent_id": "8119812",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120404",
"author": "Jdams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T22:21:29",
"content": "Who doesn’t love a good bug, etymologically speaking.",
"parent_id": "8119842",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119826",
"author": "Bubba jones",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T23:44:00",
"content": "Definitely sounds like a YOU problem, but thanks for sharing!",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119832",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T00:08:57",
"content": "I, for one appreciate the valuable use of your time, feel free to bleed off heat by ranting about grammar issues.That said I’ve been ironing to build my own fur a while, penalty not write this way though.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119840",
"author": "Zygo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T01:33:33",
"content": "No need for a comma after lidar.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121174",
"author": "Manfred Knorr",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T00:14:22",
"content": "😂",
"parent_id": "8119840",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119886",
"author": "Bendu",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T08:59:31",
"content": "Sounds like you’re having entomological bug up your butt kinda day; clearly something’s buggin’ ya :p",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119932",
"author": "Jason Milldrum",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:06:05",
"content": "I always thought it was an acronym meant to be in caps. Thanks for the education. hope you gave your crank the shaft.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119938",
"author": "Salem Moses, data archaeologist",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:29:45",
"content": "To Ralph>. You are indeed correct in stating that according to the rule of grammar, an acronym which forms a proper noun (ie: sonar, scuba, laser, radar) does not need to be capitalized. Acronym lettering which does not form a proper noun (ie: NASA, FBI and USA) should remain capitalized. I cite the following source:https://i.postimg.cc/nVTJGmyN/Screenshot-20250419-070938.pnghttps://www.grammarly.com/blog/acronyms-abbreviations/abbreviations/#:~:text=(Whenfully spelled out%2C the,they entail a proper noun.)",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120610",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T16:05:24",
"content": "I feel like that’s backwards; NASA is a proper noun, lidar is a portmanteau of light and radar and does not refer to a specific entity, so it is a common noun.",
"parent_id": "8119938",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119946",
"author": "nietzschesnightmare",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:43:10",
"content": "There is no NEED, but it’s still technically correct. So if you have the time, why not? There is no need NOT to.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120261",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:00:49",
"content": "Wikipedia: “Lidar (/ˈlaɪdɑːr/), also LIDAR…”I’m fine either way. We draw the line at laser and scuba.But maybe lidar’s time has arrived as well?",
"parent_id": "8119946",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119984",
"author": "Cameron Strandlund",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T13:46:27",
"content": "entomology – the branch of zoology concerned with the study of insects.etymology – the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120042",
"author": "Weasel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T18:44:20",
"content": "On a slightly related note.. people who confuse entomology with etymology bug me in ways I can’t put into words.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122162",
"author": "Mike Mix",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T15:53:04",
"content": "😜🤣🤪",
"parent_id": "8120042",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120163",
"author": "none ra",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T06:32:53",
"content": "No need to post about it either. ;)",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121173",
"author": "Manfred Knorr",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T00:12:59",
"content": "😂 I hope you have a better day tomorrow.",
"parent_id": "8119811",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119912",
"author": "kevertiger",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T10:17:06",
"content": "Me readMe likeMe think funny comments",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119928",
"author": "Schlock",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T10:52:29",
"content": "Does anyone know how the lidar point cloud gets converted to color? I see there is a camera and fisheye lens, but then what?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120054",
"author": "Skyler",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T19:43:33",
"content": "The lidar is mounted near the camera, so for each point it uses the color of the pixel which was in the same direction.",
"parent_id": "8119928",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120294",
"author": "K9SPY",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T15:05:14",
"content": "Insert side eye gif here.",
"parent_id": "8120054",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121349",
"author": "Laserborg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T16:25:19",
"content": "not really. the mechanical 2D lidar shots a circle orthogonal to the camera direction, but instead the fisheye photos are stitched into a 360×180° spherical map from 4-8 angles, each with ±2 HDR bracketing using Hugin.the point cloud is assembled from the laser planes (0.16° steps around the vertical axis) using the absolute stepper angle and calibrated the offset translation and rotation between lidar and rotational axis. the lens’ focal center sits exactly over the rotation, so there is no offset in the photos (otherwise you couldn’t really stitch them together but had to rely on a far more complex process).Each point in the 3D point cloud can be interpreted as a 3D vector from zero, where it’s latitude and longitude component can be directly used to sample the pixel color in the pherical panorama, because conveniently, it uses the same axes ;)I described it a bit more in detail here:https://www.reddit.com/r/LiDAR/s/Fbz9ukEJ63because I’m actually the author 😄",
"parent_id": "8120054",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120547",
"author": "Laserborg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:40:44",
"content": "Hi guys, I’m actually the author. you’ll find the original release post on Reddit:https://www.reddit.com/r/LiDAR/s/a2pCEyimDofeel free to reach out if you’ve questions.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,570.651593
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/vintage-game-rides-again-thanks-to-modern-tech/
|
Vintage Game Rides Again Thanks To Modern Tech
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Toy Hacks"
] |
[
"RACE",
"reproduction",
"steel",
"tin",
"vintage"
] |
You have to admire the lengths designers went to back in the day to create engaging games and toys. One particularly clever game of this type was called GEE-WIZ, a horse racing game from the 1920s that seems like it might have been right at home at a bar or pub, and that caught [Michael Gardi]’s imagination enough that
he built a modern version of the game
.
GEE-WIZ imitates a horse race with an extremely clever mechanism powered by a flywheel on a square shaft. Play is started by pulling a ripcord, which spins up the flywheel to shoot steel balls up six tracks in a gently sloped playing field. The balls hit tin horses riding in each track, pushing them ever further up the track until they trip a flag to indicate the winner. We can practically hear the cheers.
As with many of his other retro-reimaginings, [Mike]’s 21st-century version of GEE-WIZ focuses on capturing the look and feel of the original as accurately as possible. To that end, he put a lot of work into the 3D prints that form the playing field, as well as labels that adorned the original. But the game wouldn’t be much good without the drive mechanism, so [Mike] had to put some work into reverse-engineering the flywheel. He had that machined out of stainless steel and mounted it to the base with some chunky printed bearing blocks. You can see the final product in the brief video below.
[Mike] says that vintage toy recreations aren’t exactly his usual fare, but some might argue that
the Sol-20
and
Minivac 601
very much count as toys. Either way, we really like the simplicity of GEE-WIZ and the quality of [Mike]’s reproduction.
| 4
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119776",
"author": "DavidO",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:05:53",
"content": "Wonderful! Pocket-sized “Triplets of Belleville” Mafia machine:-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119803",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T20:48:41",
"content": "@Dan Maloney, your instincts were right on when you said “a horse racing game from the 1920s that seems like it might have been right at home at a bar or pub”. There is a GEE-WIZ bar version. It was constructed mostly of wood and thus much more robust and was about about twice the size of the home version. The horses for the bar version were still made of tin but were rendered in 3D. I created a short log with some images and details:https://hackaday.io/project/202735-gee-wiz-rides-again/log/239928-gee-wiz-bar-version",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120219",
"author": "IanS",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T10:58:09",
"content": "See also Escalado (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalado) which used a vibrating canvas track. (And thus was probably a lot quieter!)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120360",
"author": "Michael Gardi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:23:49",
"content": "Thank you for the tip. I just successfully won an eBay bid for one. [Vintage 1940’s Escalado – Original Pre Chad Valley Horses Good Condition]. Anxious to check it out.",
"parent_id": "8120219",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,570.744661
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/hackaday-podcast-episode-317-quantum-diamonds-citizen-science-and-cobol-to-ai/
|
Hackaday Podcast Episode 317: Quantum Diamonds, Citizen Science, And Cobol To AI
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] |
[
"Hackaday Podcast"
] |
When Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams need a break from writing posts, they hop on the podcast and talk about their favorite stories of the past week. Want to know what they were talking about? Listen in below and find out!
In an unusual twist, a listener sent in the sound for this week’s What’s This Sound competition, so it turns out Elliot and Al were both stumped for a change. See if you can do better, and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
On the hacking front, the guys talked about what they hope to see as entries in the pet hacking contest, quantum diamonds (no kidding), spectrometers, and several science projects.
There was talk of a tiny robot, a space mouse—the computer kind, not a flying rodent—and even an old-fashioned photophone that let Alexander Graham Bell use the sun like a string on a paper cup telephone.
Things really heat up at the end, when there is talk about computer programming ranging from COBOL to Vibe programming. In case you’ve missed it, vibe coding is basically delegating your work to the AI, but do you really want to? Maybe, if your job is to convert all that old COBOL code.
Want to read along? The links are below. Be sure to leave your robot plans, COBOL war stories, and AI-generated Vibe limerics in the comments!
As always,
the human-generated Hackaday Podcast is available as a DRM-free MP3 download
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 317 Show Notes:
News:
Announcing The Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest
What’s that Sound?
Want to win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt?
Send in your guess!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Shine On You Crazy Diamond Quantum Magnetic Sensor
Quantum Sensor Uses Synthetic Diamond
Quantum Diamond Explainer
if you want to learn more
GPS Broken? Try TV!
SpaceMouse Destroyed For Science
Trinteract Mini Space Mouse Does It In 3D
3D Navigator For Blender
Spacemice Gallery
Tiny Pogo Robot Gets Wings, Does Flips
Replica Of 1880 Wireless Telephone Is All Mirrors, No Smoke
A Brief History Of Optical Communication
Hackaday Explains: Li-Fi & Visible Light Communications
Popular Electronics
DIY Scanning Spectrometer Is A Bright Idea
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Budget Schlieren Imaging Setup Uses 3D Printing To Reveal The Unseen
An Absolute Zero Of A Project
GK STM32 MCU-Based Handheld Game System
Al’s Picks:
Audio Effects Applied To Text
Tracing The #!: How The Linux Kernel Handles The Shebang
DIY Soldering Tweezers, Extra Thrifty
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Porting COBOL Code And The Trouble With Ditching Domain Specific Languages
Ask Hackaday: Vibe Coding
Why AI Usage May Degrade Human Cognition And Blunt Critical Thinking Skills
| 1
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120699",
"author": "joost (Yohst)",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:49:29",
"content": "Nice episode – as always. But this time, I must protest – yep I do. AI (pick your favorite) not good for much programming as implied by your discussion is far from the truth. I have my own little company developing electronic products which involves many hats; hardware, software, firmware, some mechanics, stress testing and more. One of the hardest hurdles to overcome is the start of a new project/product that involves a smorgasbord of new MCU, chips, libraries, languages etc. With AI this has become TREMENDOUSLY better.At the start of a project, I can “discuss” with the AI how best to set it up, give it some feature parameters of the MVP and ask what the commonly accepted methods/frameworks are. Then diving in details say setting up freeRTOS on a new MCU, not having had to mess with freeRTOS for a while and happily forgotten all the boring setup stuff, AI helps me out big time. I have a feature set and a preferred chipset and ask it if this could meet my (take your pick) power budget, size, heat budget, process time, you name it. The same applies for software, I only develop iOS and macOS and I could not possibly know everything about every library. I ask it to teach me, even physics, or electronics of elements I know little about.OK, I seldom accept the answers on face value and often argue and poke (or try to) holes in the story. And yes it can send me for loops. But with AI I have gotten MUCH more effective, by factors.Al, you need to get more creative how you approach AI. You can hold up your age as a “don’t have to” but, I am not very far behind you and have been with electronics for decades and this AI thing has got me zipping!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,570.783943
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/presence-detection-augments-1930s-home/
|
Presence Detection Augments 1930s Home
|
Bryan Cockfield
|
[
"home hacks",
"Parts"
] |
[
"home automation",
"light switch",
"mmwave",
"presence detection",
"radar",
"sensor",
"smart home"
] |
It can be jarring to see various sensors, smart switches, cameras, and other technology in a house built in the 1930s, like [Chris]’s was. But he still wanted presence detection so as to not stub any toes in the dark.
The result is a sensor that blends in with the home’s aesthetics
a bit better than anything you’re likely to find at the Big Box electronics store.
For the presence detection sensors, [Chris] chose to go with 24 GHz mmwave radar modules that, unlike infrared sensors, can detect if a human is in an area even if they are incredibly still. Paired with the diminutive ESP32-S2 Mini, each pair takes up very little real estate on a wall.
Although he doesn’t have a 3D printer to really pare down the size of the enclosure to the maximum, he found pre-made enclosures instead that are fairly inconspicuous on the wall. Another design goal here was to make sure that everything was powered so he wouldn’t have to perpetually change batteries, so a small wire leads from the prototype unit as well.
The radar module and ESP pair are set up with some code to get them running in Home Assistant, which [Chris] has provided on the project’s page. With everything up and running he has a module that can control lights without completely changing the aesthetic or behavior of his home. If you’re still using other presence sensors and are new to millimeter wave radar,
take a look at this project for a good guide on getting started with this fairly new technology
.
| 18
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119734",
"author": "Jade",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:48:45",
"content": "It looks like he mounted one of those little spider eye diffusers over the mmwave module. Does that affect the reception at all? I’ve been setting up some of these recently and the detection range is very finicky.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119758",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:50:04",
"content": "Works perfectly up to 3.5m, which is all it needs to.",
"parent_id": "8119734",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120179",
"author": "Schobi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T07:55:28",
"content": "The plastic element used in front of the sensor is a focus element that is needed for passive infrared detectors. It concentrates the infrared radiation in a non uniform way onto the detector.The comment was suggesting that it is useless for a microwave sensor and may even disturb the sensing. Fine if it still works.The article suggests a goal “to blend in with the aesthetics” where microwave sensors could be placed much more discretely. A flat discrete box or even a stucco style decoration could be created. But looks like this was not the intention of the author",
"parent_id": "8119758",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119742",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:07:03",
"content": "Why would it be jarring unless there’s no microwave oven and the entertainment center is a tube radio",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119754",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:23:10",
"content": "Fairly inconspicuous?Let me ask the missus about the WAF of this....Yep, just as I expected. This would never be allowed in our house.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119778",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:21:51",
"content": "Yeah that looks like it was just picked up at a Home Depot. Inconspicuous or “fits into 1930s style” aren’t the words I’d use.",
"parent_id": "8119754",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119814",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T22:20:14",
"content": "The style wasn’t really the aim. I mentioned that it was a 1930s house because all the internal walls are brick rather than studwork, which has become more of a thing in new builds here. It makes running hidden wiring a mission that requires chasing out and replastering.",
"parent_id": "8119778",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119887",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T09:00:14",
"content": "I kinda figured “blends with the home’s aesthetics” was the blog author’s addition, and not something you were aiming for. No shame in using what’s available.Now, if you really wanted something that would fit in, you could get an antique wall intercom like thishttps://www.ebay.com/itm/205402676047and hide the sensor in the microphone horn.It’d have to be much lower on the wall, of course.",
"parent_id": "8119814",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119788",
"author": "Mauricio",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:49:11",
"content": "A mmWave sensor could just be hidden behind a socket blanking plate",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119827",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T23:44:48",
"content": "Good hack, but this is a tough crowd.How about one of these?https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/vallhorn-wireless-motion-sensor-smart-white-90504341/Tasteful, discreet, no wires, inexpensive, easy to integrate.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119828",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T23:49:53",
"content": "Did you get the bit about not wanting batteries?",
"parent_id": "8119827",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119843",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:09:23",
"content": "Sure. If you’re building your own stuff then power management is tedious, so, no batteries. But, the IKEA sensor lasts for a while on fresh batteries, and you can also use rechargeables.Having said that, I do have an ESP8266 in a corridor monitoring temperature. It’s powered from a USB PSU plugged into a nearby outlet, but I tacked the cable to the door frame to make it as unobtrusive as possible. It’s also in a tidier enclosure.",
"parent_id": "8119828",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119844",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:12:01",
"content": "Based on the photo I’d drill a hole through the cornice and push the wire up and along to somewhere else.",
"parent_id": "8119843",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119845",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:17:23",
"content": "If the solutions were otherwise the same I’d go for that, assuming the batteries lasted a good long while between charges.However there’s a massive quality of life difference between mmWave and PIR presence detection. PIR is fine for a hallway or entrance area where you don’t need to hang around but for a room you want to use for an extended period of time PIR is rubbish even with a long cooldown time. Ask any office worker whose company has installed motion activated meeting room lights.",
"parent_id": "8119827",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120091",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T00:23:46",
"content": "“Ask any office worker whose company has installed motion activated meeting room lights.”Or bathroom lights.",
"parent_id": "8119845",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119847",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:32:45",
"content": "Unless you want a virtual darkroom a tiny low voltage LED light in the right place can be left on and still save energy compared to all the tech to control lighting. I took a early LED flashlight with one classic emitter and aimed it at the throne, no blinding light to turn on. It’s hooked up to a switching wall wart and slim wiring to above the target which is easy to see.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120027",
"author": "Jim Demello",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:23:23",
"content": "Does it work on wandering spirits?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120064",
"author": "-jeffB",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T21:03:04",
"content": "As far as anyone will ever be able to prove, yes.",
"parent_id": "8120027",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,570.843008
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/this-week-in-security-no-more-cves-4chan-and-recall-returns/
|
This Week In Security: No More CVEs, 4chan, And Recall Returns
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] |
[
"CVEs",
"mitre",
"recall",
"This Week in Security",
"Vibes"
] |
The sky is falling. Or more specifically, it was about to fall, according to the security community this week. The MITRE Corporation came within a hair’s breadth of
running out of its contract to maintain the CVE database
. And admittedly, it would be a bad thing if we suddenly lost updates to the central CVE database. What’s particularly interesting is how we knew about this possibility at all. An April 15 letter sent to the CVE board warned that the specific contract that funds MITRE’s CVE and CWE work was due to expire on the 16th. This was not an official release, and it’s not clear exactly how this document was leaked.
Many people made political hay out of the apparent imminent carnage. And while there’s always an element of political maneuvering when it comes to contract renewal, it’s worth noting that it’s not unheard of for MITRE’s CVE funding to go down to the wire like this. We don’t know how many times we’ve been in this position in years past. Regardless, MITRE has spun out another non-profit, The CVE Foundation, specifically to see to the continuation of the CVE database. And at the last possible moment, CISA has announced that it has invoked an option in the existing contract, funding MITRE’s CVE work for another 11 months.
Android Automatic Reboots
Mobile devices are in their most secure state right after boot, before the user password is entered to unlock the device for the first time. Tools like Cellebrite will often work once a device has been unlocked once, but just can’t exploit a device in the first booted state. This is why Google is rolling out a feature, where
Android devices that haven’t been unlocked for three days will automatically reboot
.
Once a phone is unlocked, the encryption keys are stored in memory, and it only takes a lock screen bypass to have full access to the device. But before the initial unlock, the device is still encrypted, and the keys are safely stored in the hardware security module. It’s interesting that this new feature isn’t delivered as an Android OS update, but as part of the Google Play Services — the closed source libraries that run on official Android phones.
4chan
4chan has been hacked
. It turns out, running ancient PHP code and out-of-date libraries on a controversial site is not a great idea. A likely exploit chain has been described, though this should be considered very unofficial at this point: Some 4chan boards allow PDF uploads, but the server didn’t properly vet those files. A PostScript file can be uploaded instead of a PDF, and an old version of Ghostscript processes it. The malicious PostScript file triggers arbitrary code execution in Ghostscript, and a SUID binary is used to elevate privileges to root.
PHP source code of the site has been leaked, and the site is still down as of the time of writing. It’s unclear how long restoration will take. Part of the fallout from this attack is the capture and release of internal discussions, pictures of the administrative tools, and even email addresses from the site’s administration.
Recall is Back
Microsoft is back at it,
working to release Recall in a future Windows 11 update
. You may
remember our coverage of this
, castigating the security failings, and pointing out that Recall managed to come across as creepy. Microsoft wisely pulled the project before rolling it out as a full release.
If you’re not familiar with the Recall concept, it’s the automated screenshotting of your Windows machine every few seconds. The screenshots are then locally indexed with an LLM, allowing for future queries to be run against the data. And once the early reviewers got over the creepy factor, it turns out that’s genuinely useful sometimes.
On top of the security hardening Microsoft has already done, this iteration of Recall is an opt-in service, with an easy pause button to temporarily disable the snapshot captures. This is definitely an improvement. Critics are still sounding the alarm, but for a much narrower problem: Recall’s snapshots will automatically extract information from security focused applications. Think about Signal’s disappearing messages feature. If you send such a message to a desktop user, that has Recall enabled, the message is likely stored in that user’s Recall database.
It seems that Microsoft has done a reasonably good job of cleaning up the Recall feature, particularly by disabling it by default. It seems like the privacy issues could be furthered addressed by giving applications and even web pages a way to opt out of Recall captures, so private messages and data aren’t accidentally captured. As Recall rolls out, do keep in mind the potential extra risks.
16,000 Symlinks
It’s been recently discovered that
over 16,000 Fortinet devices are compromised with a trivial backdoor
, in the form of a symlink making the root filesystem available inside the web-accessible language folder. This technique is limited to devices that have the SSL VPN enabled. That system exposes a web interface, with multiple translation options. Those translation files live in a world-accessible folder on the web interface, and it makes for the perfect place to hide a backdoor like this one. It’s not a new attack, and Fortinet believes the exploited devices have harbored this backdoor since the 2023-2024 hacking spree.
Vibes
We’re a little skeptical on the whole vibe coding thing. Our own
[Tyler August] covered one of the reasons why
. LLMs are likely to hallucinate package names, and vibe coders may not check closely, leading to easy typosquatting (LLMsquatting?) attacks. Figure out the likely hallucinated names, register those packages, and profit.
But what about
Vibe Detections
? OK, we know, letting an LLM look at system logs for potentially malicious behavior isn’t a new idea. But [Claudio Contin] demonstrates just how easy it can be, with the new
EDV
tool. Formally not for production use, this new gadget makes it easy to take Windows system events, and feed them into Copilot, looking for potentially malicious activity. And while it’s not perfect, it did manage to detect about 40% of the malicious tests that Windows Defender missed. It seems like LLMs are going to stick around, and this might be one of the places they actually make sense.
Bits and Bytes
Apple has pushed updates to their entire line,
fixing a pair of 0-day vulnerabilities
. The first is a wild vulnerability in CoreAudio, in that playing audio from a malicious audio file can lead to arbitrary code execution. The chaser is the flaw in the Pointer Authentication scheme, that Apple uses to prevent memory-related vulnerabilities. Apple has acknowledged that these flaws were used in the wild, but no further details have been released.
The Gnome desktop has
an interesting problem
, where the
yelp
help browser can be tricked into reading the contents of arbitrary filesystem files. Combined with the possibility of browser links automatically opening in
yelp
, this makes for a much more severe problem than one might initially think.
And for those of us following along with Google Project Zero’s deep dive into the Windows Registry,
part six of that series is now available
. This installment dives into actual memory structures, as well as letting us in on the history of why the Windows registry is called the hive and uses the
0xBEE0BEE0
signature. It’s bee themed,
because one developer hated bees
, and another developer thought it would be hilarious.
| 7
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119710",
"author": "Not-Q",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:58:39",
"content": "I’ve been poking around about the 4chan hack and found no answer , so I’ll toss it out here: Did they doxx Q? As much as I hate doxxing on principle, I am more than willing to indulge in some bald faced hypocrisy to discover who was behind that account. Proving once and for all that it was a fraud that fed the rise of the Alt-Right in the US would be a win. It wouldn’tchangeanything, but it’d be nice to see.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119839",
"author": "Gunplumber",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T01:24:46",
"content": "It was Ron Watkins of 8Chan infamy, that was known since 2019.",
"parent_id": "8119710",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119723",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:26:11",
"content": "‘recall’ Just another reason why none of my systems are on Windows at home. I prefer freedom of choice of what I put on my systems. Don’t know how Windows users put up with this nonsense.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119761",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:59:38",
"content": "Using neural networks to detect malicious behavior is (generally) a good idea. However, relying on an external audit process is just giving away the game since an escalated malicious program could spoof a response if it doesn’t have it’s own root certificate(s). However, this does create an asymmetric advantage for antivirus vendors while ensuring an active service subscription.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119807",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T21:16:40",
"content": "So nothing on Mossad?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119829",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T00:00:44",
"content": "Microsoft says “opt-in service”, “disabled by default”, but they left out one word “today”. In a future update it will be “enabled by default” and “no opt out available for the service”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121754",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-24T22:33:23",
"content": "The normal progression for Microsoft features where there’s a mismatch between how much users want the feature and how much Microsoft wants it is, over successive Windows updates…-Configurable via an option in Control Panel/Settings-Only configurable via a documented registry key or GPO-Only configurable via voodoo involving hidden undocumented switches or bit-flipping in a manifest file-Not configurable at all, “for your protection / convenience / security / just-because”.",
"parent_id": "8119829",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,570.891219
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/d20-shaped-quasicrystal-makes-high-strength-alloy-printable/
|
D20-shaped Quasicrystal Makes High-Strength Alloy Printable
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"3d printed metal",
"crystallography",
"materials science",
"quasicrystal"
] |
When is a crystal not a crystal? When it’s a
quasi-crystal, a paradoxical form of metal recently found in some 3D printed metal alloys
by [A.D. Iams et al] at the American National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).
As you might remember from chemistry class, crystals are made up of blocks of atoms (usually called ‘unit cells’) that fit together in perfect repetition — baring dislocations, cracks, impurities, or anything else that might throw off a theoretically perfect crystal structure. There are only so many ways to tessellate atoms in 3D space; 230 of them, to be precise. A quasicrystal isn’t any of them. Rather than repeat endlessly in 3D space, a quasicrystal
never
repeats perfectly, like a 3D dimensional
Penrose tile
. The discovery of quasicrystals dates back to the 1980s, and was awarded
a noble prize in 2011
.
Penrose tiling– the pattern never repeats perfectly. Quasicrystals do this in 3D. (Image by Inductiveload, Public Domain)
Quasicrystals aren’t exactly common in nature, so how does 3D printing come into this? Well, it turns out that, quite accidentally, a particular Aluminum-Zirconium alloy was forming small zones of quasicrystals (the black spots in the image above) when used in powder bed fusion printing. Other high strength-alloys tended to be very prone to cracking, to the point of unusability, and this Al-Zr alloy,
discovered in 2017
, was the first of its class.
You might imagine that the non-regular structure of a quasicrystal wouldn’t propagate cracks as easily as a regular crystal structure, and you would be right! The NIST researchers obviously wanted to investigate why the printable alloy had the properties it does. When their crystallographic analysis showed not only five-fold, but also three-fold and two-fold rotational symmetry when examined from different angles, the researchers realized they had a quasicrystal on their hands. The unit cell is in the form of a 20-sided icosahedron, providing the penrose-style tiling that keeps the alloy from cracking.
You might say the original team that developed the alloy rolled a nat-20 on their crafting skill. Now that we understand why it works, this research opens up the doors for other metallic quasi-crystals to be developed on purpose, in aluminum and perhaps other alloys.
We’ve written about
3D metal printers
before, and
highlighted a DIY-able plastic SLS kit
, but the high-power powder-bed systems needed for aluminum aren’t often found in makerspaces. If you’re building one or know someone who is,
be sure to let us know.
| 7
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119691",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T13:46:40",
"content": "“Other high strength-alloys tended to be very prone to cracking, to the point of usability”Not quite sure what this means or if I’m being slow or its a typo… Should that be “to the point of unusability”? Or clearer, “making them unusable”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119693",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T13:54:50",
"content": "Yes, “usability” was a typo, and yes, you have the correct meaning. Thank you!I have edited the post to avoid further confusion.",
"parent_id": "8119691",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119698",
"author": "-jeffB",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:19:47",
"content": "As long as you’re in there:“Barring”, not “baring”“Nobel prize”, not “noble prize”Thanks for the coverage!",
"parent_id": "8119693",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119718",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:12:48",
"content": "Too bad the picture selected for illustrating Penrose tiling is rotational symmetric with a 2*PI/5 angle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119911",
"author": "FeRDNYC",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T10:16:43",
"content": "Most are. Five-fold rotational symmetry is a common feature of Penrose tilings, as is reflection symmetry. The thing that makes them interesting is the lack of translation symmetry — no part of the pattern repeats in the same orientation. If you rotate the pattern, you can reach the same pattern again at different angles, but it’ll still have the same property of being non-periodic in that new orientation.",
"parent_id": "8119718",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119781",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:28:05",
"content": "I wonder if an object made of a solid crystal like this would be harder without being as brittle or at least less likely shatter.Would be interesting to see a large piece of quasicrystal steel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120093",
"author": "Rollyn01",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T00:43:25",
"content": "Kinda of makes me think of a combination of Velcro on a molecular scale and some wringing effects giving it some extreme strength even if the overall object is as thin as a wire.",
"parent_id": "8119781",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,572.647205
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/track-your-circuits-a-locomotive-pcb-badge/
|
Track Your Circuits: A Locomotive PCB Badge
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"PCB Hacks"
] |
[
"ATmega32",
"badge",
"charlieplexing",
"pcb",
"train"
] |
This fun PCB from [Nick Brown] features a miniature railroad implemented with 0805-sized LEDs. With an eye towards designing his own
fun interactive PCB badge
, the Light-Rail began its journey. He thoroughly documented his process, from shunting various late-night ideas together to tracking down discrepancies between the documentation of a part and the received part.
Inspired by our very own
Supercon 2022 badge
, he wanted to make a fun badge with a heavy focus on the aesthetics of the final design. He also wanted to challenge himself some in this project, so even though there are over 100 LEDs, they are not laid out in a symmetrical or matrix pattern. Instead, it’s an organic, winding railroad with crossings and stations throughout the board. Designed in KiCad the board contains 144 LEDS, 3 seven-segment displays, and over a dozen buttons that all come together in use for the built in game.
The challenges didn’t stop at just the organic layout of all those LEDs. He decided to use Rust for this project, which entailed writing his own driver for the seven-segment displays as well as creating a tone library for the onboard buzzer. As with all projects, unexpected challenges popped up along the way. One issue with how the oscillator was hooked up meant he wasn’t able to use the ATmega32U4, which was the brains of the entire railroad. After some experimenting, he came up with a clever hack: using a pogo pin jig to connect the clock where it needed to go while programming the board.
Be sure to check out all the details of this journey in his build log. If you love interactive badges also check out some of the other
creative boards
we’ve featured.
| 7
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119697",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:05:24",
"content": "This fills me with joy",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119743",
"author": "KenN",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:07:50",
"content": "Me too!",
"parent_id": "8119697",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119740",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:06:03",
"content": "Great work! It’s humbling to see aesthetically pleasing design and clean built hardware. Everything I make looks like it was done on a budget for a government paying me scraps. I’m fine with that, but I wish I was this good like Nick.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119764",
"author": "lthemick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T17:49:01",
"content": "This is great – nicely done!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119773",
"author": "Philip",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T18:51:06",
"content": "Reminds me of AmusementLabs PCB rollercoasters. They, unfortunately, aren’t interactive, but he uses full color PCBs.https://www.etsy.com/shop/amusementlabs/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119825",
"author": "Robert Sexton",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T23:42:07",
"content": "Now I have to wait for him to sell them",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119968",
"author": "Jakers",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T13:15:29",
"content": "Strange thing to say on this particular website. It’s not “buyaday”.",
"parent_id": "8119825",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,572.59658
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/hydroplaning-rc-jet-boat-steers-clear-of-convention/
|
Hydroplaning RC Jet Boat Steers Clear Of Convention
|
Seth Mabbott
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"hydroplane",
"jet boat",
"rc boat"
] |
[CovaConcepts], who has a background in motorsports, has been busy designing an
unconventional radio-controlled watercraft she calls the HydraJet
.
There are two key design decisions that make the HydraJet what it is. First, she chose to propel the boat by pushing against the air via an electric ducted fan (EDF) rather than the water via a traditional water propeller. This simplified construction and made it more affordable, partly because she already had the fan on hand.
Her other design choice was to use wings underneath the boat to lift it out of the water. Not as hydrofoils, where the wings ride below the surface of the water, but for hydroplaning where the wings ride on the surface of the water. Lifting the vehicle out of the water, of course, reduces drag, improving performance as we’ve often seen with high speed watercraft (including
RC models
) as well as slower
bicycle-powered ones
. The choice to rely on hydroplaning also reduces the complexity of the design. Certain hydrofoil designs need to make adjustments in order to keep the vehicle at a steady level, whereas a hydroplaning wings can use a static angle.
Hydrofoils also must overcome challenges to maintain stability
.
[CovaConcepts] hopes to eventually scale the HydraJet up large enough to carry human passengers and we’re looking forward to the opportunity to take it for a spin around the lake.
Thanks to [John Little] for the tip!
| 19
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8120031",
"author": "Kenneth Welles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:32:14",
"content": "This is brilliant! Would love to know:Mass of boattop speedwattage at top speed",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120034",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:47:51",
"content": "Very nice job, looks wicked. Lots of thought and work went into this, I am impressed.She got beaten up for all kinds of petty things, I am guessing by folks that never built much and certainly nothing like this project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120035",
"author": "Moeb",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:50:48",
"content": "I like the slick design",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120044",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T18:51:53",
"content": "Looks like a design straight out of a Romulan style guide. Looks great :-)But I seriously wonder about the efficacy of using a ducted fan for this application: It’s wasting a huge amount of power in the speed (kinetic energy) of the air jet. It would be interesting to compare the wattage used by this compared to the wattage needed by a conventional water prop to maintain the same speed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120615",
"author": "Steven Naslund",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T16:17:39",
"content": "Thats what I was just thinking. How is it more efficient to push against air vs pushing against water. Turbine powered hydroplane race boats still drive propellors.",
"parent_id": "8120044",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120653",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:00:37",
"content": "Because KISS.She’s going to reinvent the Rusky ground effect craft…Name escapes me.Going fast on water is dangerous and uncomfortable.Over water is better.",
"parent_id": "8120615",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121115",
"author": "bored_engineer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T20:24:08",
"content": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-effect_vehicleEkranoplan.",
"parent_id": "8120653",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122556",
"author": "Sean O'Hanlon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T13:00:58",
"content": "Tell me you have never seen an Airboat in action. 🙄",
"parent_id": "8120615",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120654",
"author": "make piece not war",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:01:26",
"content": "I would say it is more from Andromeda sf tv series. But then the Romulan warbird has flatter “connector beams”, so it is somewhere in the middle I guess.",
"parent_id": "8120044",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122558",
"author": "Sean O'Hanlon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T13:03:18",
"content": "Water is literally 780 times denser than air therefore it takes much more energy to push water than it does to push air.",
"parent_id": "8120044",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120051",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T19:28:36",
"content": "“… because efficiency and performance really didn’t factor into my decision at all.”Very exciting build!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120058",
"author": "KBec",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T20:22:44",
"content": "I watched her videos with amazement. It might not be the fastest or most powerful one, but the design is super epic. Especially when she was showing the older designs she discarded. Was a joy to watch and I am looking forward to see what she will be up to in the future.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120082",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T22:55:12",
"content": "Should build movie props that design looks rad AF. Also good job on video showing the boat blasting around right up front",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120090",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T23:54:33",
"content": "Now that is a well evolved design! That engineer has a lot of promise.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120104",
"author": "Watson Rogers",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:51:13",
"content": "To take a dream /idea and not only find it but also manufacture, test, improve it on her own is astounding to say the least❗️She is a very talented lady and I would suspect she will go far. Best of luck and wishes to her👍",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120170",
"author": "Schobi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T07:01:43",
"content": "Great boat design and execution. It is not going to win on speed nor efficiency, and I love that this is acknowledged as a non-goal. Still, this looks unique and futuristic.Kudos for the manufacturing technique. The carbon fiber manufacturing must be a mess though. This many free form parts? I would have expected a mix of some 3d prints with coating and maybe even some foam? Carbon fiber only where absolutely needed – but may a boat is also critical on weight these days?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120272",
"author": "James V Borelli",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:52:22",
"content": "I am extremely impressed. She has done more than most. Most of the commenter’s here buy everything the have, she built hers from an idea in her head. Quit being armchair cowboys about speed, engine, wattage, design. Just stop, her design is AMAZING I’d gladly add my name to her waiting list if only to help her move forward with her designs. BRAVO young lady, you have a VERY BRIGHT future. Keep up the fantastic work you’re doing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120856",
"author": "Michel Doffagne",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T09:07:58",
"content": "Pretty sweet plus futuristic look.I like the “Broke student” part; 3D printer, full workshop, carbon, … LOLI really like the approche, but form my (simple) point a view, hydrofoils are the only safe way.On and over the water, it will never be stable and safe on high speed.I also think that she needs to work on the turbulence behind the boat.Overall, I am impressed by her work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122553",
"author": "Sean O'Hanlon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T12:51:46",
"content": "😂 You DO understand that it’s just an RC toy and not a scaled down model for something bigger, right?",
"parent_id": "8120856",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,572.885065
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/vibing-ai-style/
|
Vibing, AI Style
|
Elliot Williams
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] |
[
"ai",
"LLM",
"programming",
"vibe coding"
] |
This week, the hackerverse was full of “
vibe coding
”. If you’re not caught up on your AI buzzwords, this is the catchy name coined by [Andrej Karpathy] that refers to
basically just YOLOing it with AI coding assistants
. It’s the AI-fueled version of typing in what you want to StackOverflow and picking the top answers. Only, with the current state of LLMs, it’ll probably work after a while of iterating back and forth with the machine.
It’s a tempting vision, and it probably works for a lot of simple applications, in popular languages, or generally
where the ground is already well trodden
. And where the stakes are low, as [Al Williams] pointed out while we were talking about vibing on the podcast. Can you imagine vibe-coded ATM software that
probably
gives you the right amount of money? Vibe-coding automotive ECU software?
While vibe coding seems very liberating and hands-off, it really just changes the burden of doing the coding yourself into making sure that the LLM is giving you what you want, and when it doesn’t, refining your prompts until it does. It’s more like editing and auditing code than authoring it. And while we have no doubt that a stellar programmer like [Karpathy] can verify that he’s getting what he wants, write the correct unit tests, and so on, we’re not sure it’s the panacea that is being proclaimed for folks who
don’t
already know how to code.
Vibe coding should probably be reserved for people who already are expert coders, and for trivial projects. Just the way you wouldn’t let grade-school kids use calculators until they’ve mastered the basics of math by themselves, you shouldn’t let junior programmers vibe code: It simultaneously demands too much knowledge to corral the LLM, while side-stepping any of the learning that would come from doing it yourself.
And then there’s the
security side of vibe coding
, which opens up a whole attack surface. If the LLM isn’t up to industry standards on simple things like input sanitization, your vibed code probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the Internet.
So should
you
be vibing? Sure! If you feel competent overseeing what [Dan] described as
“the worst summer intern ever”
, and the states are low, then it’s absolutely a fun way to kick the tires and see what the tools are capable of. Just go into it all with reasonable expectations.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
!
| 48
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119997",
"author": "thatkat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T14:48:31",
"content": "“Vibe coding” is for losers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120080",
"author": "Narcolapser",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T22:50:09",
"content": "https://xkcd.com/1081/",
"parent_id": "8119997",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120095",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:07:56",
"content": "It’s so great to see so many omniscient, open minded uses on the Hackaday comments section.",
"parent_id": "8119997",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120159",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T06:08:43",
"content": "You must be new here.",
"parent_id": "8120095",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120000",
"author": "ganzuul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T15:04:52",
"content": "It is wonderful to experience pioneering days once again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120081",
"author": "Narcolapser",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T22:52:30",
"content": "So true. It’s been a lot of fun. We’ll see how it all shakes out, but right now is great.",
"parent_id": "8120000",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120010",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T15:53:46",
"content": "It’s never about the tools. It’s how you use them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120017",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T16:19:27",
"content": "A form of prototyping.",
"parent_id": "8120010",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120021",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T16:55:53",
"content": "Definitely. The pushback and the misuse that justifies the pushback are familiar.It wasn’t that long ago we still had devs saying that REAL programmers use vi or other pure editors because IDEs with stuff like linting and tab completion were a crutch that enables bad programmers. Of course, plenty of students starting out with heavy IDEs ended up having no idea how the toolchain works under the hood so they’re married to that IDE until they outgrow it.And there’s still plenty of folks saying that higher level languages like Python are worthless because REAL programmers use C++ or C. Of course, people building large applications with Python and Javascript and hitting performance bottlenecks shows that sometimes those high level languages are being misused.",
"parent_id": "8120010",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120197",
"author": "doris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T09:33:41",
"content": "Ah, these debates take me back. When I was a lad, we didn’t have IDEs, linting, or AI whispering sweet nothings into our code. We did our debugging by toggling LEDs and watching serial output dribble in at 1200 baud. If you wanted graphics, you poked values directly into video memory and prayed to the gods of offset alignment.Our editors didn’t autocomplete — they barely completed what you typed. And if you wanted a loop, you wrote it in assembly, by hand, on paper first. We didn’t have Stack Overflow. We had the manual, and if that didn’t help, you went to the pub and asked a bloke with a beard and a Commodore 64.So yeah, maybe Vibe is a bit like giving a toddler a backhoe — but let’s not forget every new tool starts off looking like cheating until it becomes the new normal. Doesn’t mean we have to like it, but we might as well understand it.",
"parent_id": "8120021",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120347",
"author": "Rog77",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T18:23:38",
"content": "Is it really coding if you’re not threading magnet wire through rope core memory modules?",
"parent_id": "8120197",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122383",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T18:20:52",
"content": "Scoff….Copy con: program.exeThen enter op-codes and data with Alt-keypad.",
"parent_id": "8120197",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8136355",
"author": "Ned Flanders",
"timestamp": "2025-06-07T22:53:14",
"content": "yeah… where is that guy with the beard and the coco 2… :D the saintly days of yore…",
"parent_id": "8120197",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120070",
"author": "alizardx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T21:57:29",
"content": "Yep. I remember the early days of ECAD on the Mac where more experienced engineers were profoundly skeptical about its utility – until I turned in perfect schematics with automatically generated netlists, tied into Excel BOMs.AI is a tool for early adopters, think Photoshop 0.9.",
"parent_id": "8120010",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121054",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T17:38:13",
"content": "That’s what she said!",
"parent_id": "8120010",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120020",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T16:55:47",
"content": "I was talking to my neighbour’s kid, a CS student. He told me about an ESP32 based project that he did to detect his room door being opened, he used an IR proximity sensor for that. The ESP32 hosted a webpage which got updated with the info whenever the state changed. His laptop ran a python script which read the webpage and played a “welcome” audio file when the door was opened. A cool project. A bit immature but, sure why not?I asked him what python library he was using to make the HTTP request…silence… “chatgpt wrote it for me, I don’t know”Yes, a 3rd year CS student doesn’t know what an HTTP request is, or is aware what library he’s using. Because “chatgpt wrote it for him”The future is going to be bright. Probably blindingly so.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120048",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T19:19:42",
"content": "Just wait till they’re introduced to calculators.",
"parent_id": "8120020",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120283",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T14:42:38",
"content": "Yep, headed down the road to Idiocracy. Entering the wonderful era of ‘let the AI do it’.The only IDEs I ‘use/used’ was Delphi and now Lazarus. I still do all my python and C/C++, Rust, C#, etc. progamming with a text editor like notepad++ or geany on the Linux side. Just no need for IDEs.Even Pico programming with a text editor, and loading is done with rshell if Python, or if ‘c’, then cmake on the command-line and then drop onto the presented USB folder.",
"parent_id": "8120020",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121102",
"author": "Almira",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T19:33:23",
"content": "Sometimes it really feels like I’m the only one using Geany when everyone around me uses vscode and similar. It’s nice so see someone else mentioning it.",
"parent_id": "8120283",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121360",
"author": "Nerdelbaum Frink",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T17:07:14",
"content": "LLM discussion aside, I hope this is satire or something. Proudly proclaiming you don’t use IDEs does not make one seem more competent, let alone actually be more competent. Quite the opposite. Do you also manually screw in every screw and manually drill every hole? Tools are just tools.",
"parent_id": "8120283",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120586",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:02:37",
"content": "the thing is, AI hardly harmed that at all. the tradition was already entrenched to pull in libraries with massive nested dependencies for even the most trivial functionality. iow, 2 years ago they knew the name of the library and it was awful. today, they don’t know the name of the library but it isn’t any more awful.",
"parent_id": "8120020",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122381",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-27T18:11:38",
"content": "It’s not even the libraries.He’s putting up a web page and having a python scriptpollthat page (likely w something like a fixed IP address for the ESP32 and a looped request).If your going there, hiding the complexity of HTTP from yourself is the right answer.But hammering on a webpage?The whole thing is Rube Goldberg.There are, at least, a half dozen better ways.He asked the AI the wrong questions.",
"parent_id": "8120586",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120022",
"author": "Mr Nobody",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T16:59:54",
"content": "\"Vibe coding should probably be reserved for people who already are expert coders, and for trivial projects. \"…. seems like a bit of a contradiction to me. Why would an expert coder waste their time on completely trivial projects anyway? I’m inclined to believe the author does not understand how to use LLMs for coding non trivial projects. A non trivial project will have plenty of trivial code, boiler plate stuff, that the LLM can fly through. There might be a few things where the guys on Stack Exchange or wherever have not come up with solutions, but this might well represent a tiny fraction of the whole code, even when programming an auto ECU.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120023",
"author": "Aaron",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:06:51",
"content": "I’ve been professionally writing software for 20 years. I have tons of trivial projects. Projects that are one-offs, conceptual “I wonder if”, throw-away type things. And I’ve used AI to write some of that code. I used it because it was convenient, and I knew that I didn’t care very much what the output was.I think the point being made here is that AI code generation is knowing enough to be dangerous. You know how to get out what you want, but you don’t know the pitfalls. The security point mentioned above being chief among them.",
"parent_id": "8120022",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120088",
"author": "Kram",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T23:47:51",
"content": "Well said.On: industry standards on simple things like input sanitization, …a training data problem. too much GitHub code without it.",
"parent_id": "8120023",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8121383",
"author": "Nerdelbaum Frink",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:47:18",
"content": "Uh, there’s always some kind of project to do at home that’s ultimately trivial and for fun, automation or some such thing.. Being an “expert coder” doesn’t mean you only work on the most difficult projects at all times. I don’t understand your perspective here.",
"parent_id": "8120022",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122606",
"author": "Dylan Turner",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T15:32:54",
"content": "boiler plate stuff, that the LLM can fly throughUntrue. It’s bad at even that XDYou’ll spend as much time trying to get good boiler plate as just typing it yourself lolIt only takes a few seconds afterall",
"parent_id": "8120022",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120040",
"author": "_sol_",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T18:19:21",
"content": "Guilty party here. Learned to code in the 70s but didn’t make a career out of it. The AI generated stuff is much quicker and more clever than I am.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120108",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T02:06:17",
"content": "Can relate. Twelve years as a COBOL programmer, jumped to sysadmin and never looked back. Whatever code I need, I find it easier to AI it and just anímate the code to check if it works as expected.",
"parent_id": "8120040",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120150",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T05:11:58",
"content": "If and when it works recent example simple I want to send hex data from a captured sting of data using c# and simpletcp libraryAi goes on to barf out how to write a tcp/ip library from the effing ground up … when I’m using a library that already handles that and has done so for almost a decade",
"parent_id": "8120040",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121827",
"author": "Hunter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T07:14:20",
"content": "It’s as simple as choosing the correct model. Use the wrong tool, get wrong answer. All it took was 2 clicks and copy pasting your words in the input box.https://chatgpt.com/share/680b34e9-55e4-8006-b083-80248c0f4619",
"parent_id": "8120150",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120045",
"author": "Steve L.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T18:56:43",
"content": "Oddly (or maybe not?) I’ve made a lot of use of GPT 4o on my project over the past couple months not for the coding but for debating and working out library and documentation details – kept having to delete its memory to start again and eventually got to a point where I could paste in the working text and user library (it no longer needed to see the back-end) and it would be fully lucid and understand the system and be able to even make good editorial suggestions on how the heck to document it and in what order to introduce stuff to the reader.So basically I used it as a test to tell when I’d gotten to a point where the whole system was cohesive and comprehensible enough and I didn’t have any gaps left to explain in the README.md — in hopes that this means a reader and (python using) user can make sense of it all as well and start doing stuff with it.Sort-of a giant whole-project style and readability checker. Though this isn’t much tested against actual human readers/users at this point (I’m just starting to test my install and getting started instructions to verify them and write up a “quick-start” guide now).If nothing else, I wound up with an… unusually complete…. README.md that I wouldn’t have composed without a lot of pointed nudges from the AI about what mightactuallyneed to be explained to the reader (and even where I should go make functions in the library issue informative error messages where silent failures would lead to much frustration).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120049",
"author": "Jon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T19:23:22",
"content": "An astonishingly higher than averagenumber of drivers believethey drive better than average.I wonder if coders fall prey to this same delusion.If AI is informed by history,is it capable of not repeating it?Or is it doomed to repeat itbecause that is all it knows?Is coding with AI an automated wayto get the average of all code?Are we required to form our promptslike experts to get great code?If we prompt like a novicewill we get code with hello world still in the comments?Could an incredibly well written vulnerability be posted enough times to be propagated into AI models and repeated in production?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120077",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T22:35:44",
"content": "… and most driversarebetter than the average. Which makes perfect sense when you understand the stats. It’s not a normal distribution. I suspect the same is true of coders, even if “high on alcohol and cocaine whilst joy riding a stolen car running away from police with no licence or insurance” isn’t a factor.",
"parent_id": "8120049",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120078",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T22:37:39",
"content": "Or for a simpler to intuit example, the vast majority of humans think they have an above average number of legs.Nah, they’re probably just deluded?",
"parent_id": "8120077",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120098",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:19:39",
"content": "I believe there are plenty of non-professional hobby programmers who craft simple programs for themselves that aren’t internet exposed and who can benefit from the AI generated code. I often explore my own indicators and graphical tools for Thinkscript to aid my own stock research and analysis. Thinkscript isn’t overly complex but I previously would have to see other examples or Google for them to be able to put a new tool together. Now I use Grok and check the code it gives. I can much more rapidly craft what I need using Grok. And I can instantly tell if it’s working or not. I would vibe code if writing an application for Charles Schwab. But it sure has been useful for my personal needs.",
"parent_id": "8120049",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120099",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:21:07",
"content": "Edit: “I would “NOT” vibe code if writing an application for …”",
"parent_id": "8120098",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120087",
"author": "Daniel Matthews",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T23:47:42",
"content": "If you are producing 4K lines of code in a day and it is solving a task that you can’t find any FOSS equivalent of, is it vibe coding, or something else?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120147",
"author": "DV Henkel-Wallace",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T04:57:42",
"content": "Code Debugging is harder than writing code — hell, reading someone else’s code it harder than writing code. So how exactly does an LLM make things easier?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120462",
"author": "UnderSampled",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T04:04:56",
"content": "Because it can debug code.",
"parent_id": "8120147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120591",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:11:25",
"content": "the whole LLM deal is that you can talk to it, you can engage it in conversation. it doesn’t just churn out code. you can ask it to find the bugs in a segment of code. you can ask it to explain how the code works, or how it would write a missing segment. most importantly, you can ask it to try again. that’s when it’s most surprisingly competent, when it is responding to suggestions for improving its own results.it’s scattershot at everything it does, and it is as confident when it is wrong as when it is right. that’s frustrating, but we’ve all had coworkers with those attributes.i’ve never used it for anything other than asking it how smart it is. but the free public ones, you can definitely paste in like a 20 line function and ask it to find the bug and sometimes it will go straight to the problem. i’d like to know if the paid versions are any use on larger code bases but my guess is that they are.",
"parent_id": "8120147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121388",
"author": "Nerdelbaum Frink",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:57:30",
"content": "I needed a method to determine whether a point was inside of a polygon determined by four points for some collision thing I was doing on a twitch stream overlay I made for my grow stream. I know how to do this mathematically and how to code it. It’s trivial.I asked an LLM to do it out of curiosity, and at first it gave me a (perfectly working) function that returned whether a point was in a rectangle determined by the min and max x,y coords of each point, which was not what I asked. I told it so, and it apologized, told me I wanted to construct triangles and then determine inclusion in one or the other, and gave me a (perfectly working) function to do so.This took virtually no time at all. Considerably faster than if I had just written it out myself. To someone who knows how to code and tell whether the output is correct or not, this is a nearly perfect way to generate trivial code that would otherwise waste your time. This does highlight the point, though, that you need to know whether what it provides you as a solution is actually correct or not.",
"parent_id": "8120147",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120262",
"author": "kurth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:08:12",
"content": "We are approaching peak enshittification.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120288",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T14:47:48",
"content": "It sure seems that way. No critical thinking skills needed (or wanted). Just vibe it and hope for the best. No thank you. I enjoy programming. Why I made a career out of it. And the challenge.",
"parent_id": "8120262",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121389",
"author": "Nerdelbaum Frink",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T18:59:51",
"content": "Given that most things you write are inherently trivial components, and the actual difficult, novel parts are far fewer, why wouldn’t you want to use an LLM so you can spend more of your time on interesting code?",
"parent_id": "8120288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121777",
"author": "Iván Hernandez Cano",
"timestamp": "2025-04-25T01:55:13",
"content": "why would you think it lowers critical thinking??? that goes to the person, mot the tools they use….most of the comments written here just look irrational and nonsense, with a big byass that is pretty common among old people facing the fact that the world they knew is coming to an end to leave room for a new better one. “Oh, back in my day…” style…Can’t you see? maybe instead of focusing on other’s critical thinking abilities, why not focusing on self-criticism.AI is just making so many dull and tedious processes so fast and easy I just cant understand how you cant see that…",
"parent_id": "8120288",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120589",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T15:05:54",
"content": "it would be such a relief to know there is an upper limit, an apex, a descent on the other side",
"parent_id": "8120262",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8122605",
"author": "Dylan Turner",
"timestamp": "2025-04-28T15:29:55",
"content": "it’ll probably work after a while of iterating back and forth with the machineAnd that’s why it doesn’treallywork, as you go on to iterate.If someone wants to waste time bickering and fighting with machine in hopes it finally gives them the right thing, that’s their prerogative. Meanwhile, in the same time, I’ll have already written the entire thing and another project. AI code generation, especially vibe coding, is about as unproductive and inefficient as you can get.It is a major time waster in my experience. It’s not even useful as a code-generation tool, let alone a full code replacement a la vibe coding. At best, it’s a search engine for pulling up docs. As soon as the novelty of LLM chatbots and AI filters wear off, generative AI will be largely forgotten to the depths of time (just like crypto), save for one or two that find a niche (probably only ChatGPT will be around).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.03201
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/will-it-run-llama-2-now-dos-can/
|
Will It Run Llama 2? Now DOS Can
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"ai",
"dos 6.22",
"i386",
"llama.2c",
"LLM",
"retrocomputing"
] |
Will a 486 run
Crysis
? No, of course not. Will it run a large language model (LLM)? Given the huge buildout of compute power to do just that, many people would scoff at the very notion. But [Yeo Kheng Meng]
is not many people.
He has set up various DOS computers to run a stripped down version of the
Llama 2 LLM, originally from Meta
. More specifically, [Yeo Kheng Meng] is implementing [Andreq Karpathy]’s Llama2.c library, which we have seen here before,
running on Windows 98
.
Llama2.c is a wonderful bit of programming that lets one inference a trained Llama2 model in only seven hundred lines of C. It it is seven hundred lines of
modern
C, however, so porting to DOS 6.22 and the outdated i386 architecture took some doing. [Yeo Kheng Meng] documents that work, and benchmarks a few retrocomputers. As painful as it may be to say — yes, a 486 or a Pentium 1 can now be counted as “retro”.
The models are not large, of course, with TinyStories-trained 260 kB model churning out a blistering 2.08 tokens per second on a generic 486 box. Newer machines can run larger models faster, of course. Ironically a Pentium M Thinkpad T24 (was that
really
21 years ago?) is able to run a larger 110 Mb model faster than [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s modern Ryzen 5 desktop. Not because the Pentium M is going blazing fast, mind you, but because a memory allocation error prevented that model from running on the modern CPU. Slow and steady finishes the race, it seems.
This port will run on any 32-bit i386 hardware, which leaves the 16-bit regime as the next challenge. If one of you can get an Llama 2 hosted locally on an 286 or a 68000-based machine, then we may have to stop asking
“Does it run
DOOM
?”
and start asking “Will it run an LLM?”
| 21
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119977",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T13:30:43",
"content": "In principle, it would also be possible to use an 64-Bit DOS Extender and run it on an AMD Athlon 64 or similar PC.i386 aka x86_32 architecture has the conveniance of V86, but it’s not required.Concurrent DOS 286 could multitask well-behaved 16-Bit DOS applications on a 286 in 16-Bit Protected-Mode, without help of V86.And interstingly, x86_64 would support clean 16-Bit Protected-Mode code in Long Mode, too.– Just saying, not that Long Mode would be required per se.A lot could be done by utilizing Intel VT or AMD-V, too, I guess.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#DOShttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS#Concurrent_DOS_286_and_FlexOS_286",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119998",
"author": "arifyn",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T14:54:03",
"content": "Has anyone actually made a 64-bit DOS extender?I haven’t heard of such a thing, but I like the idea. It’s such an incredibly niche and unnecessary piece of software, but that makes it exactly the sort of thing someone would dojust because they can.I suppose if it was designed to support windows console applications, it could even run some existing programs (HX DOS Extender does this for PE32 programs, so it’s not a completely crazy idea).And of course the idea of running a >4GB LLMin DOSis also even more niche than just managing to run an LLM on old hardware.",
"parent_id": "8119977",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120094",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T01:00:31",
"content": "Not exactly sure, maybe DX64?https://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?p=199375But anyway, I really like your idea about the Win64 console programs! 😃👍Considering how useful HX DOS Extender really is, it would be really really neat!The closest I’ve found so far is “Dos64-stub”:https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/Dos64-stub(HX DOS Extender can also run full-screen Win32/GDI programs such as DOSBox for Win32/SDL,vMac 0.18b Win32 or older versions of Neko Project II, such as v0.15).",
"parent_id": "8119998",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119999",
"author": "Vulcan Ignis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T14:58:49",
"content": "Also Amiga, Atari ST, Mac SE:https://x.com/VulcanIgnis/status/1881382738697367615And C64 too:https://x.com/VulcanIgnis/status/1893420241310335329",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120003",
"author": "Zonunmawia",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T15:23:42",
"content": "wow, are these guys really old people? I mean, I am 42, started using computer when I was 13 (1996), I don’t exactly know the spec of my first computer (I think it’s a pentium 2), tbh, it’s my elder brother’s computer. I don’t know where it is now, maybe in the basement or attic, I should try out something with those old computer someday. (coz I think it’s not broken, the CRT monitor died and we just replaced with pentium 4).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120043",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T18:45:38",
"content": "“wow, are these guys really old people?”Good question. Not sure, I think about anyone born in early to mid 90s still remembers DOS,even if it was just merely being the base of Windows 9x in later years.To give an idea, Windows 98 was being supported until 2006.And many PC users working with Windows 98SE had a couple of DOS programs or games, still.Programs like QEMM also supported Windows 9x,so optimizing autoexec.bat and config.sys didn’t end with MS-DOS 6.2x.Especially DOS based games that didn’t run on Windows 9x still needed DOS drivers for CD-ROM, mouse and sound cards.So fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys was still needed from time to time.So I assume these guys are somewhere between 27 and 65. ;)That means it was 2004 when some of them could have been ~7,an age in which some kids had an old PC in their bed room already.That being said, they might also being younger guys with an interest in vintage computing. Who knows?It’s not as if kids or teens these days don’t have an interest in their parent’s technology.The NES and its game library is still cool and full of timeless classics, same goes for GBA or Sega Genesis/MD.",
"parent_id": "8120003",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120061",
"author": "alnwlsn",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T20:44:21",
"content": "DOS, QBASIC, and Windows 3.1 are how I first stared learning computers beyond “open this menu, click that button” type of stuff. This was around 2010 for me.",
"parent_id": "8120043",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120073",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T22:19:52",
"content": "That’s cool! 🙂👍 Especially QBasic, I think. The “full version” was/is QuickBASIC 4.5.Though Turbo Basic, PowerBASIC, PDS 7.1 and Visual Basic/DOS share same language.There also was a special version of QB,Microsoft Game Shop.It contained the interpreter from QB45 and some game samples.There’s also a Macintosh version of QuickBASIC.. And QB64, of course.",
"parent_id": "8120061",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120161",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T06:30:33",
"content": "Could be as old as 75 or even 80 (gasp)… Knew a bunch of retirees back after win 95 who could smoke the pants off you youngsters",
"parent_id": "8120043",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120174",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T07:23:58",
"content": "“Youngsters”, okay gramps. ;) But yes, maybe you’re right.I’m afraid it’s notthatcommon, though, that they’re still actively contributing something.At age 65+, they rather tend to start to loose mental flexibility, begin to develop a little superiority complex etc.I saw it on a grand aunt. Was a teacher, but learned nothing herself about life. Yet still tells old platitudes. Sigh.(I hope I won’t be like that at high age!)Also, many older people (or guys rather) on the net talking about their first PC/XTs and 20MB MFM/RLL fixed-disk drives do mess up certain facts.Sure, certain details can be forgotten after such a long time, that’s human.They don’t have to perfectly memorize the debug command to run low-level routine of their 1986 era MFM controller, for example.But they could at least just try to double-check something before spreading false information. Sigh.Because sometimes they tell nonsense, such as that XTs ran up to DOS 2.11 only and that DOS 3 ran on ATs only.While in reality, all IBM PC generations (PC/XT/AT/PS2) can run MS-DOS up to version 6.22 no problem (it’s plain 8086 instruction compatible).They don’t know about PTS-DOS, DR-DOS or PC-DOS 2000, either. Too new.They also forget the difference between PC compatibles vs MS-DOS compatibles,thus making certain vintage PCs look worse to the youth than they really were.Of course, there are exceptions, too.Personally, I knew a ham age 89 that was mentally fresh.More young than some hams age ~40, even.I really respected that oldtimer and and told him he was doing very well.",
"parent_id": "8120161",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8136840",
"author": "Shane Curless",
"timestamp": "2025-06-09T12:44:10",
"content": "Can confirm – I was born in 1991 and, with my first computer being one running Windows 98, definitely remember having to use DOS a fair amount. I imagine the number of people my age who have used DOS without even knowing they were using it is even higher, too",
"parent_id": "8120043",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120267",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:19:46",
"content": "I’m younger than you, and started on VIC-20 (not even a C64!) and then a 286 in the early 90s. I’m pretty sure my parents got them free, which is about what we were willing to pay at that point. ¯_(ツ)_/¯Wealth may or may not trickle down, but technology does.",
"parent_id": "8120003",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120050",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T19:23:52",
"content": "I’m not sure if the typo, it it is, was intended as humour.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120269",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T13:24:40",
"content": "Which (potential) typo?Just as Persian rug makers deliberately include one flaw in recognition that only Allah can create perfection, I will always leave at least one typo to prove that I am but a fleshy meat bag, and show humility before our future AI overlords.",
"parent_id": "8120050",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120155",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T05:39:06",
"content": "I’m pretty sure a P3 is retro anymore. The original Xbox I remember as such a leap from the PlayStation is also Retro, especially when I can emulate it on a SteamDeck.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120259",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T12:51:06",
"content": "Hi, I probably shouldn’t comment so much but I would like to mentionthat I think there’s a subtle difference between retro and vintage or classic.“Retro” is more of fad, a trend, a phenomenon of a given time.It literally means “looking back” or “backwards turned”.The SNES Mini is retro, for example. It’s a hommage to the real old thing.Vintage computing or classic computing is about the real old stuff, rather.Also, it’s more of a generational thing vs a years thing maybe.If, say, the previous game console was around for 15 years then it’s old but not retro or vintage.By contrast, if there had been a new game console on market each year, then a 5 year old console might be considered retro or vintage.But of course, that always depends on point of view.Some measure in years, some in generations..",
"parent_id": "8120155",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120342",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T17:56:54",
"content": "Sorry to make you feel older, but 486 and Pentium 1 have been retro for a LONG time. In fact, hardware/software released AFTER 486 was already retro, is itself retro.“Retro” is anything sufficiently old, outdated, and different to the current way of making/doing something, that it becomes a quaint reminder of those old methods.A Core2duo is retro.Windows XP is retro.Playstation 2 is retro.MySpace is retro.Newspapers and Magazines are retro.It doesn’t matter that some of those things are still used.What matters is they are old ways of doing things that people/industry has replaced with different ways of doing the same thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120455",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T03:45:47",
"content": "I don’t think that situation is exactly new, though.Way back in the 90s, the NES in many homes was about a decade old already, but no one really cared.The video tape and the audio cassette about two decades (both from 70s).And a PC was jokingly being called “obsolete” after 6 months.Albeit it didn’t feel like a joke, I must say. 6 months in 90s was a time period in which a lot did happen sometimes.Just look at the big jumps in MHz of 486 CPUs at the time and the “overdrive sockets” on many motherboards.Or let’s take the rappidly increasing HDD capacity and CD-ROMdrive speeds (from double-speed to ca. 48x).Some said that a PC was obsolete at exactly the moment it left the doors of the computer store. And there was some truth within.So I’m not exactly shocked about the requirements of, say, Win 11.In the 90s, you didn’t come far with a PC from 3 to 5 years ago,unless it was being upgraded (mainly RAM, then motherboard).And that was just feeling natural, IT life simply was like this.So thanks for your emphanthy, but the current developments rather make someone like me feel young again rather than feeling old.It’s nice to see some development im computing again, finally! :)",
"parent_id": "8120342",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120473",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T04:44:20",
"content": "What’s also interesting is the current development of ARM and RISC V.ARM architecture is very old (from mid-80s, Acorn Archimedes; Compaq iPAQ used intel StrongARM in ~2000 etc) but new on PC platform.There’s a parallel to the RISC movement of the 90s, you know.When Windows NT got ports to Alpha APX, MIPS R4000, PowerPC.This little expedition had ended with Windows 2000 again, sadly.For the past 20 years we’ve been “stuck” to x86 and x86_64 (x64) on PC, thus (Itanium didn’t make it).So yeah, x64 is “retro”, too. Thanks to modern Apple Silicon, as well. ;)To be really modern, someone has to run macOS or Windows 11 on ARM, maybe.",
"parent_id": "8120455",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120459",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T03:54:04",
"content": "You forgot the smartphone, I think. t’s retro to..It still looks an 2006 iphone from 20 years ago.No development in ergonomics, at all.Still same old pocket mirror form factor.No new materials, either. It’s a stand still.By contrast, the progress and diversity in late 90s/early 2000s was insanely huge.The various PDAs (Palms, Pocket PCs etc) also underwent more development at the time than the smartphone did in past 20 years.",
"parent_id": "8120342",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120507",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T07:46:08",
"content": "“Sorry to make you feel older, but 486 and Pentium 1 have been retro for a LONG time.In fact, hardware/software released AFTER 486 was already retro, is itself retro.”The 486 core was very beloved, though, since it was sufficiently advanced and had already RISC-like elements, internal FPU, on-CPU cache and a simple form of pipelining.Things like Excel, PowerPoint or AutoCAD ran smoothly on that generation first time.Many Pentium competitors such as 5×86 were being based on i486 design, thus.They spent work on optimizing integer performance, also.The Pentium’s FPU alone was more complex than the whole i486 processor design.The only truely new design at the time was the NexGen 586, maybe.It was a RISC chip with a programmable front-end.So 80×86 instructions could be translated/broken down into smaller RISC instructions.Which made parallelism more practical.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NexGenThe Transmeta Crusoe was similar interesting, I think.It had similar issues to Pentium Pro when it comes to 16-Bit code.Thus, Windows Me was probably best suited at the time.Same lightweightness as Windows 98SE, but with less 16-Bit files.(It had borrowed large parts of Win2000 files. VXDs/DRVs had beenreduced in favor of WDM files)Windows 9x didn’t require such strict x86 compatibility, either.Ask PC emulator writers, Windows NT and OS/2 are really picky about highly accurate processor behavior.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_CrusoeNowadays, i486 cores are still to be found in microcontroller sector and in stuff like digital cameras.The Vortex86DX basically is a i486/i586 derivative, albeit at high clock rate.Technically, in terms of instructions set, it’s i686 already, but misses one or two common instructions needed, AFAIK.https://www.vortex86.com/Then there’s DOS.. It seems highly archaic at first, but it isn’t really.By 1994 (about 30 years aho), for example, Novell DOS 7 had 32-Bit preemptive multitasking, built-in networking, a disk cache, DPMI support etc.Also DOS isn’t DOS. There are over 20 versions of DOS, at least.It ran in emulation countless of times, too.Flex OS and Real/32 are professional multitasking/multiuser versions of it.Here’s an incomplete list of DOSes with MS-DOS ABI compatibility.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DOS_operating_systemsUnix workstations by companies such as SGI and NeXT had run DOS emulation to run professional applications.In communications and car industry, DOS application continued to be support in Unix like OSes via special sandboxes (German L3 OS, for example).Even today, DOS is still running secretly behind the scenes in certain applications, such as digital cameras (Canon PowerShot A70 comes to mind).ArcaOS for example can run OS/2, Windows 3.11 and DOS applications on UEFI PCs.Long story short, DOS systems were/are as diverse as BSD and Linux distributions.MS-DOS 6.22 maybe is old nowadays, but FreeDOS, SvarDOS and PC-MOS v5 are open source projects that continue to be around for a while.Thanks to x86/x64 hardware virtualization and nowadays emulation culture in general, old systems continue to still stay relevant.If you’ve working with Virtualbox on an x86/x64 PC, for example,then using DOS environment with your favorite vintage development tools still makes sense.To the VM, it’s not fundamentally different than running Minix, BSD or Linux.You DOS applications still run natively on a given CPU core, are being executed “in hardware”.You can also directly access LPT and serial port pins from inside the VM.The emulated parallel port or 16550A FiFo are being mapped to the physical equivalent.So you can write a DOS application in QBasic, Turbo C or Turbo Pascal that accessed your Bluetooth device on host side.You can blink an LED wireless, from DOS, by toggling a data pin.Since this is Hackaday, a site about hardware hacking, it’s spot on, I think. 🙂That being said, I don’t try to deny that things from 80s or 90s are considered obsolete or vintage nowadays.But so is the bicycle, too, depending on how we look at it (bike vs e-bike etc).In the end, age doesn’t really matter so much, I think.When I was young, I did the mistake of overrating modern technology.(- I remember how in early 2000 I was being pi.. upset by the fact that oldtimers continued to write DOS programs in debug or whatever on Windows 98,rather than writing proper Win32 console programs for Windows.I found it very backwards and stubborn, and “quick and dirty”.Not that I didn’t like DOS, though.But I ran DOS applications the “clean” way on real MS-DOS with Norton Commander – not on Windows!To me, Windows and DOS were separate platforms, really.)Nowadays, being slightly wiser, I think that some concepts are simply being very useful, elegant or ingenious no matter when they had been invented.Certain buildings or techniques from 5000 years ago might have been more “advanced” in some ways than what we have in use now.Likewise, Davinci was smarter than the average tinkerer of today.His ideas and concepts are still high class, no matter how long ago he had lived.As a human being, he and his mind was very sophisticated, I mean.Even if he technically had been an older “model” (generation) of a human.The concrete mixture of ancient Rome, for example, did last very long.The old recipe, once rediscovered, might help us improved our cities.But these are just my two cents.My apologies for the long comments, also!I just found this article very fascinating, because LLAMA vs DOS is a great example about new meets old.Another one would be tube technology vs transistor, I suppose.In radio technology, an electron tube can be a great companion to a transistor design, rather than being an obsolete predecessor.At the receiving stage of a transceiver, an electron tube can be used as protection against very strong signals.Because electron tubes do go into saturation, rather than becoming deaf like transistors do.So a minature tube can be used as a protection, the power consumption would be low.So despite tube technology being old, it might be still worth of being improved.By using modern technology, who knows if tube technology could be used to reach higher operating frequencies?Maybe future computer chips will use nano tubes or organic synapses and parallel computing? :)It would be cool if such technology was running a form of DOS, maybe? :Dhttps://en.stargatewiki.com/index.php/DOSThe nice thing about DOS, such as FreeDOS, is that there’s no backdoor.DOS itself won’t talk home, all memory is being visible to the operator.It’s also comparable easy to understand its internals (uses software interrupts such as int21h rather than a complex, file-based API).You can imagine what it’s doing right now, way down to register level.PS: Happy Easter, everyone! 😃🐇",
"parent_id": "8120342",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,573.102694
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/19/open-source-dmr-radio/
|
Open Source DMR Radio
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Radio Hacks"
] |
[
"codec2",
"dmr",
"ham radio"
] |
While ham radio operators have been embracing digital mobile radio (DMR), the equipment is most often bought since — at least in early incarnations — it needs a proprietary CODEC to convert speech to digital and vice versa. But [QRadioLink] decided to tackle a homebrew and open source
DMR modem
.
The setup uses a LimeSDR, GNU Radio, and Codec2. There are some other open DMR projects, such as
OpenRTX
. So we are hopeful there are going to be more choices. The DMR modem, however, is only a proof-of-concept and reuses the MMDVMHost code to do the data link layer.
[QRadioLink] found several receiver implementations available, but only one other DMR transmitter — actually, a transceiver. Rather than use an AMBE hardware device or the potentially encumbered mbelib codec, the project uses Codec2 which is entirely open source.
There’s a lot of explanation about the data collection to prepare for the project, and then a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of the implementation. You might enjoy the video below to see things in action.
If you just want to listen to DMR,
it’s easy
. If Codec2 sounds familiar, it is part of
M17
.
| 4
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119937",
"author": "Woj SP5WWP",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:24:28",
"content": "OpenRTX is not an “open DMR project”. It’s an open-source firmware for amateur transceivers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119953",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T12:08:26",
"content": "The new open source RADEV1 mode in CODEC2 is a AMBE killer.It may take 20 years, but it will.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120062",
"author": "Roger",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T20:49:39",
"content": "Codec2 is not “Part of M17”.Codec2 is used as the codec in M17 and many other projects.It was written by David Rowe in 2010. Seehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_2OpenRTX does not support the DMR standard at all.OpenGD77 does support the DMR standard, but has to use closed source binary blobs, from the radio manufacturer, because of the license problems with the AMBE codec. I.e in much the same way as the RPi has to use binary blobs for the Broadcom hardware.There is nothing to stop anyone from building codec2 into OpenGD77, except that they may not be able to use and of the existing DMR repeaters or networks, as most of them can’t handle non AMBE traffic :-(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120079",
"author": "wb7ond",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T22:39:09",
"content": "All the modes D-Star, DMR, System Fusion have been available on OpenWebRx for some time.. I listen to my three hotspots remotely on my SDRPlay….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,572.549153
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/restoring-an-abandoned-game-boy-kiosk/
|
Restoring An Abandoned Game Boy Kiosk
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Games",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] |
[
"Nintendo Game Boy",
"restoration"
] |
Back in the olden days, there existed physical game stores, which in addition to physical games would also have kiosks where you could try out the current game consoles and handhelds. Generally these kiosks held the console, a display and any controllers if needed. After a while these kiosks would get scrapped, with only a very few ending up being rescued and restored. One of the lucky ones is a Game Boy kiosk, which
[The Retro Future] managed to snag
after it was found in a construction site. Sadly the thing was in a very rough condition, with the particle board especially being mostly destroyed.
Display model Game Boy, safely secured into the demo kiosk. (Credit: The Retro Future, YouTube)
These Game Boy kiosks also featured a special Game Boy, which – despite being super rare – also was hunted down. This led to the restoration, which included recovering as much of the original particle board as possible, with a professional furniture restore ([Don]) lending his expertise. This provides a master class in how to patch up damaged particle board, as maligned as this wood-dust-and-glue material is.
The boards were then reassembled more securely than the wood screws used by the person who had found the destroyed kiosk, in a way that allows for easy disassembly if needed. Fortunately most of the plastic pieces were still intact, and the Game Boy grey paint was easily matched. Next was reproducing a missing piece of art work, with fortunately existing versions available as reference. For a few missing metal bits that held the special Game Boy in place another kiosk was used to provide measurements.
After all this, the kiosk was powered back on, and it was like 1990 was back once again, just in time for playing Tetris on a dim, green-and-black screen while hunched half into the kiosk at the game store.
| 8
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119865",
"author": "Mause",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T06:13:38",
"content": "Is it true that it does not work outside the kiosk? And what that circuit board does? Is it only a power supply or it injects some signal that makes the gameboy run?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119981",
"author": "Nath",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T13:36:59",
"content": "It’s a normal gameboy with a (lying) sticker",
"parent_id": "8119865",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120116",
"author": "Firescreen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T02:56:06",
"content": "From what I remember there was one jumper inside that was either cut or shorted. Reversing this made it fully functional.",
"parent_id": "8119981",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120374",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T20:20:04",
"content": "They explain this in the video he posted earlier on the channel where he visits a guy that has one in mint condition. they touch on the fact that it’s a lie. It’s a perfectly standard gameboy.",
"parent_id": "8119865",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120521",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T09:36:10",
"content": "Maybe the sticker originally was meant for a Gameboy in a another type kiosk?As far as I know, there also was a kiosk type with a CRT monitor hooked to a Gameboy or Gameboy Pocket.",
"parent_id": "8120374",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120543",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T12:14:35",
"content": "It’s a small world, I am one of the people who helped Elliot debug that board. The circuit board powers the gameboy and is an audio amplifier that gets audio from the gameboy’s headphone output and amplifies it for the loudspeakers in the kiosk cabinet. AFAIK the gameboy itself is basically stock, just has a sticker on it.",
"parent_id": "8119865",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120205",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T10:21:32",
"content": "Repairs and restorations are always fun to watch. Looking at it, noticing the mess, and being aware of how difficult it is to actually make it look good again. I love the story telling of this particular one, as every seemingly trivial issue has an epic solution.While writing this reply, I got thirty. With the kitchen six meters away, I knew it would be tough. Against all odds, I’ve managed to lift one leg, and then another, inching towards the kitchen. Only to realize that I should have unstuck myself from my electronic widget earlier for scheduled periodic caloric intake. Thanks to inventions of the Romans, getting refreshments was a breeze, only to realize that I’ve still a lot to learn in story telling.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120560",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T13:47:20",
"content": "heh in all fairness i think a single preposition (‘with’) would have cleared up the original paragraph. there’s an awkward adverb ‘fortunately’ but imo it’s actually correct and clear",
"parent_id": "8120205",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,572.934804
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/haircuts-in-space-how-to-keep-your-astronauts-looking-fresh/
|
Haircuts In Space: How To Keep Your Astronauts Looking Fresh
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Space"
] |
[
"haircut",
"international space station"
] |
NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman gives ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli a haircut in the Kibo laboratory on the ISS in 2011. (Credit: NASA)
Although we tend to see mostly the glorious and fun parts of hanging out in a space station, the human body will not cease to do its usual things, whether it involves the digestive system, or even something as mundane as the hair that sprouts from our heads. After all, we do not want our astronauts to return to Earth after a half-year stay in the ISS looking as if they got marooned on an uninhabited island. Introducing the
onboard barbershop on the ISS
, and the engineering behind making sure that after a decade the ISS doesn’t positively look like it got the 1970s shaggy wall carpet treatment.
The basic solution is rather straightforward: an electric hair clipper attached to a vacuum that will whisk the clippings safely into a container rather than being allowed to drift around. In a way this is similar to the vacuums you find on routers and saws in a woodworking shop, just with more keratin rather than cellulose and lignin.
On the Chinese Tiangong space station they use
a similar approach
, with the video showing how simple the system is, little more than a small handheld vacuum cleaner attached to the clippers. Naturally, you cannot just tape the vacuum cleaner to some clippers and expect it to get most of the clippings, which is where both the ISS and Tiangong solutions seems to have a carefully designed construction to maximize the hair removal. You can see the ISS system in action in
this 2019 video
from the Canadian Space Agency.
Of course, this system is not perfect, but amidst the kilograms of shed skin particles from the crew, a few small hair clippings can likely be handled by the ISS’ air treatment systems just fine. The goal after all is to not have a massive expanding cloud of hair clippings filling up the space station.
| 20
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119857",
"author": "jcj",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T04:13:13",
"content": "The Suck Kut is real!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119872",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T07:14:59",
"content": "It really does suck!",
"parent_id": "8119857",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119876",
"author": "Christopher de Vidal",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T08:11:49",
"content": "I found my tribe.",
"parent_id": "8119872",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119877",
"author": "Christopher de Vidal",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T08:13:39",
"content": "Party time! Excellent!",
"parent_id": "8119876",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119859",
"author": "swl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T04:50:03",
"content": "I am surprised the article never mentioned the flowbee.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119995",
"author": "Charles Springer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T14:35:52",
"content": "Yes, a Flowbee cut could become THE look for space!",
"parent_id": "8119859",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119860",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T04:50:53",
"content": "One day I went to a local barber shop. They did great haircut and they actually used a Shop-Vac to vac my hair. And I actually did like it. I told to other barbers about using a vacuum cleaner, but they just laughed at me.It does really work well. Just kinda look awkward.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119863",
"author": "boondaburrah",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T06:05:12",
"content": "All the haircutters I’ve been to in Japan shopvac your head real quick after your cut.",
"parent_id": "8119860",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121486",
"author": "Y Knot",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T23:44:19",
"content": "An idiot barber in my neighborhood used a shop vac to clean up after the hair cut. Sloppy and reckless. I never whet back; I value my eyeballs.",
"parent_id": "8119860",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119861",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T04:52:39",
"content": "Close, but not quite what I was expecting: a space-qualified Flowbee.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119870",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T06:58:21",
"content": "The Flowbee only did mullets, hence the current machine, if memory serves me.I wonder about the process of testing and qualifying the system for flight?",
"parent_id": "8119861",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119885",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T08:52:27",
"content": "I think the mullet was just the style at the time, not a requirement of the flowbee.",
"parent_id": "8119870",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120002",
"author": "linus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T15:12:57",
"content": "I have a flowbee and can confirm that it can only do mullets or really christian haircuts.",
"parent_id": "8119885",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120696",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T19:43:45",
"content": "A Flowbee can’t do a mullet without a skilled operator, which defeats to point of a Flowbee.They can do a basic boy haircut.Girls/Inbetweens will flee at the suggestion.They are not the target market.",
"parent_id": "8120002",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119864",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T06:05:19",
"content": "Strange. I’ve always thought that a haircut every year or two was often enough.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119895",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T09:29:35",
"content": "I’m in my 60s and I haven’t had a haircut since I was 19. That’s often enough.",
"parent_id": "8119864",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119942",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:38:25",
"content": "I still think they should just use all that waste material as propellant for stationkeeping. Just vent that hose out the back end of the station. It would save carrying up propellant and would reduce the need to dispose of waste with a cargo vehicle. It even would reduce the burden on the carbon dioxide removal/air processing system: The make up air would be clean.The station also vents methane overboard as a waste product from the carbon dioxide scrubbers: add that to the waste exhaust stream and increase the thrust.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120024",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:11:00",
"content": "What strikes me again is that the Chinese seem to have this strong convention about up/down, not embracing the absence of gravity, very odd.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120128",
"author": "NQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T04:09:01",
"content": "I immediately thought Flowbee and expected they would use something like that to keep floating particles of hair at a minimum.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120516",
"author": "Seppo Suolle",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T09:12:39",
"content": "DIY Space Barber:https://youtu.be/qAVwic3keG0?si=ogmwuOuPlRQeNDPR",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,572.709173
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/18/robot-picks-fruit-and-changes-light-bulbs-with-measuring-tape/
|
Robot Picks Fruit And Changes Light Bulbs With Measuring Tape
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Parts",
"Robots Hacks"
] |
[
"agricultural robot",
"end effector",
"robot gripper",
"robotic gripper"
] |
How far can you stretch a measuring tape before it buckles? The answer probably depends more on the tape than the user, but it does show how sturdy the coiled spring steel rulers can be. [Gengzhi He et. al.] may have been playing that game in the lab at UC San Diego when they hit upon the idea for a new kind of
low-cost robotic gripper
.
Four motors, four strips of measuring tape (doubled up)– one robot hand.
With the lovely backronym “GRIP-tape” — standing for Grasping and Rolling in Plane — you get a sense for what this effector can do. Its two “fingers” are each made of loops of doubled-up measuring tape bound together with what looks suspiciously like duck tape. With four motors total, the fingers can be lengthened or shortened by spooling the tape, allowing a reaching motion, pivot closer or further apart for grasping,
and
move-in-place like conveyor belts, rotating the object in their grasp.
The combination means it can reach out, grab a light bulb, and screw it into a socket. Or open and decant a jar of spices. Another video shows the gripper reaching out to pick a lemon, and gently twist it off the tree. It’s quite a performance for a device with such modest components.
At the moment, the gripper is controlled via remote; the researchers plan on adding sensors and AI autonomous control. Read all the
details in the preprint
, or check below the fold to watch the robot in action.
This is hardly the first time we’ve
highlighted a grabby robot
. We’ve
seen belts
, we’ve
seen origami
— but this is the first time we’ve seen a measuring tape. Have you seen a cool robot? Toss us a tip. We’d love to hear from you.
Tip of the hat to reader [anonymouse] for pointing this one out.
| 9
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119835",
"author": "Craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T00:33:25",
"content": "Yes, but a 3 year old can’t work non-stop for hours. Robots don’t need to be even half as agile as humans to be valuable. They just need to be able to do the same thing without needing a lunch break or sleep.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119879",
"author": "frenchone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T08:29:59",
"content": "No. You got to wait he is at least 7",
"parent_id": "8119835",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119836",
"author": "HnHakc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T00:43:06",
"content": "There there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119838",
"author": "dk",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T01:20:17",
"content": "3.5 billion years of evolution, and a 3 year old can do what it took robotics 8 decades to develop.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119855",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T04:01:16",
"content": "+1",
"parent_id": "8119838",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120032",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:33:13",
"content": "I doubt humans are 3.5 billion years old. The oldest civilizations like ancienct India, China or Japan are 7500 years old max.",
"parent_id": "8119838",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119948",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:49:09",
"content": "And humans can be mass-produced by unskilled labor. Robots are more difficult to make (and less fun, some would say).It’s debatable which are less expensive, though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120006",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T15:41:28",
"content": "IMHO this is clever, and I can see a LOT of uses for the bulb-light-changing kind of deal. Not just light bulbs, one use is demonstrated already – opening a screw-on lid and pouring the contents, then returning both to their original position. Elderly actually NEED those kinds of helping hands at the average house that’s built with mostly zero help for the limited coordination/mobility situations (say, arthritis or Alzheimer – yep, ALL of us sooner or later will face that rather head-on).In my other HO, RE: fruit picking – average $15 fruit picker basket does the same job better, and some fruit pickers come with a serrated stem-cutting edge built in. If I’d be designing a field-ready (or vertical farm ready) unit to do the harvesting, I’d look into multi-armed fruit pickers aided with individual cameras (and homing logic units – say, average $20 ESP32-CAM can do that wireless) mounted on each arm. The way I see it, each arm only needs rotation (to break the steam with the serrated edge), so realistically, only one step motor per arm, though, it will have to be good grade one.Something like that. Dispense once read and ignored.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120028",
"author": "Kenneth Welles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T17:23:36",
"content": "I don’t know if it’s still done, but back in the 60’s when satellites used longer wavelengths for radiocomm. it was common to make antennas out of “tape measure” type material. Launched colled up and small, they would roll out to extend when in orbit. When extended they would form a full tube instead of just an arc cross section. Early versions had problems with bending from uneven solar heating. This was solved by many holes all over the tape, letting sunlight heat the “dark side” of the tape from the inside. Brilliant!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,572.503701
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/modernizing-an-enigma-machine/
|
Modernizing An Enigma Machine
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] |
[
"De Bruijn sequence",
"encryption",
"enigma",
"enigma machine",
"Pogo pin"
] |
This project by [Miro] is awesome, not only did he build a replica Enigma machine using modern technologies, but after completing it, he went back and revised several components to make it more usable. We’ve featured Enigma machines here before; they are complex combinations of mechanical and electrical components that form one of the most recognizable encryption methods in history.
His first Enigma machine
was designed closely after the original. He used custom PCBs for the plugboard and lightboard, which significantly cleaned up the internal wiring. For the lightboard, he cleverly used a laser printer on semi-transparent paper to create crisp letters, illuminated from behind. For the keyboard, he again designed a custom PCB to connect all the switches. However, he encountered an unexpected setback due to error stack-up. We love that he took the time to document this issue and explain that the project didn’t come together perfectly on the first try and how some adjustments were needed along the way.
The real heart of this build is the thought and effort put into the design of the encryption rotors. These are the components that rotate with each keystroke, changing the signal path as the system is used. In a clever hack, he used a combination of PCBs, pogo pins, and 3D printed parts to replicate the function of the original wheels.
Enigma machine connoisseurs will notice that the wheels rotate differently than in the original design, which leads us to the second half of this project. After using the machine for a while, it became clear that the pogo pins were wearing down the PCB surfaces on the wheels. To solve this, he undertook
an extensive redesign
that resulted in a much more robust and reliable machine.
In the redesign, instead of using pogo pins to make contact with pads, he explored several alternative methods to detect the wheel position—including IR light with phototransistors, rotary encoders, magnetic encoders, Hall-effect sensors, and more. The final solution reduced the wiring and addressed long-term reliability concerns by eliminating the mechanical wear present in the original design.
Not only did he document the build on his site, but he also created a video that not only shows what he built but also gives a great explanation of the logic and function of the machine. Be sure to also
check out some of the other
cool
enigma machines we’ve featured over the years
.
| 6
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119409",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:32:04",
"content": "Cool project and cool to see how various methods were tried to achieve the goal.Looking at the project page (https://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=999) I can’t help seeing four cat faces in the image (rotors_ir.jpg) of the PCB with the four battery holders.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119458",
"author": "MrDyne",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:00:43",
"content": "I’ve been off and on designing a 3d printable Enigma machine that only uses filament and cheap glow end plastic optical fiber. Any light source can “power” it and the tolerances needed are far less than what is needed with electrical rotor metal contacts. The optical fibers ends just need to line up enough to pass enough light though onto the next part. Pressing a key down lines up fiber from the light source and light travels though the system and lights up the ciphered letter. When I figure out how to do the plugboard I can finish the design.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119557",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T22:35:54",
"content": "Toslink cables? 20cm lengths available from AliExpress. Use with Toslink receptacles.",
"parent_id": "8119458",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119532",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T20:43:30",
"content": "I like. Well done. Mechanical — I am not. If I did this, I’d probably simulate the wheels in software and make the outside ‘look’ much like the original. Anyway, you persevered and have a working machine(s).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119791",
"author": "tyler",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T20:01:46",
"content": "“The final solution reduced the wiring…”Unfortunately wording considering the subject matter",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119950",
"author": "jolnar",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:51:10",
"content": "Ai 100 years from now will be teaching people the intention of WW2 was a cable management war",
"parent_id": "8119791",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,572.825345
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/using-a-mig-welder-acetylene-torch-and-air-hammer-to-remove-a-broken-bolt/
|
Using A MIG Welder, Acetylene Torch, And Air Hammer To Remove A Broken Bolt
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"Acetylene Torch",
"Air Hammer",
"Bolt Removal",
"Broken Bolt",
"mig welder"
] |
If your shop comes complete with a MIG welder, an acetylene torch, and an air hammer, then you have more options than most when it comes to
removing broken bolts
.
In this short video [Jim’s Automotive Machine Shop, Inc] takes us through the process of removing a broken manifold bolt: use a MIG welder to attach a washer, then attach a suitably sized nut and weld that onto the washer, heat the assembly with the acetylene torch, loosen up any corrosion on the threads by tapping with a hammer, then simply unscrew with your wrench! Everything is easy when you know how!
Of course if your shop
doesn’t
come complete with a MIG welder and acetylene torch you will have to get by with the old Easy Out screw extractor like the rest of us. And if you are faced with a nasty bolt situation keep in mind that
lubrication can help
.
| 13
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119336",
"author": "Steve Gunnell",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T06:53:59",
"content": "If this process interests you then have a look at any of the groups restoring WW2 tanks. It is a very common task to have to remove sheared, corroded or stuck bolts and studs. Also Engels Coach Shop doing the same with 100+ year old metal wagon/coach fittings.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119342",
"author": "Edgar Vice",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T07:57:31",
"content": "What’s that curry powder? How can you detect cracks with it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119346",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:26:07",
"content": "Eat enough curry powder and your body will tell you where your crack is tomorrow morning… 😂I’d guess it’s just a fine powder rubbed over the casing, and it accumulates in the crack and highlights it.",
"parent_id": "8119342",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119351",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:31:52",
"content": "its called magnafluxing. the powder responds to magnetism, like iron filings do and when the electromagnet is switched on, cracks in the iron are indicated by a break in the magnetic field lines plotted by the powder.the channel has other videos using it.",
"parent_id": "8119342",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119366",
"author": "Denis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T10:01:33",
"content": "Never use an ez-out. It’ll break then god help you. If you don’t have access to a welder or heat source, centre punch and drill is the way to go. If you must try and extractor try a mailable one like those in the style of bluepoint 1020. But if you have them you probably have heat and a welder lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119385",
"author": "mayhem",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:23:09",
"content": "I was replacing the struts on the daughters car the other day. It is a 2011 toyota camry and the sway bar links connect to the struts. The sway bar links have a nut and the screw that it goes on has a allen hex in the center of it. No matter how much wire brushing and pb blaster or kroil I used i could not get the nut off and the allen hex inevitably stripped out. Boy howdy I do love having torches. Turn on the acetylene and oxygen and less than 30 seconds later the sway link was disconnected. I also agree with Denis comment above!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119706",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:50:48",
"content": "Link ends are one of those things that I find myself cutting off more than any other part.Too loose they rattle, too tight they don’t come off. Add in that they are exposed to the worst of the road grime and it doubles the issue.Just like lower strut/shock bolts…if you are planning on working on it start spraying penetrating oil on it before you even get the car off the ground.",
"parent_id": "8119385",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119397",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T13:35:40",
"content": "I’ve had great success using an inductive heater to loosen bolts that are not coming off otherwise. Naturally one has to use it before the head comes off.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119405",
"author": "maxzillian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:20:22",
"content": "I finally splurged and bought one of those “bolt buster” heaters. It’s a very niche tool, but it does work. Last time I used it was some manifold collector bolts that wouldn’t move with an air impact.Blast it with the heater for about 60 seconds and every one came loose. It’s an expensive tool, but it does work.",
"parent_id": "8119397",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120227",
"author": "henningdkf29543cc0f",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T11:36:39",
"content": "One of those is on my wishlist, but last I looked, the brandname ones where expensive, and for the ‘hobby priced’ ones, the internet tells me, they often contain a lot of magic smoke.A thing to note: Any fastener that have now been heat re-treated (flame or induction), must be discarded.",
"parent_id": "8119405",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119419",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T15:01:17",
"content": "Welding something to the top of a broken bolt has always been enough for me to get it to extract. The heat input and following cooling down is enough to “break” the rusted connection. The second heating of the housing, and the hammering may help, but they have never been needed for me.Another important part that is easy to skip over is the wiggling back and through @00:50 in the video. This distributes loose rust particles and/or wears down the little tops of the material that actually form the cold welds ans seize. For many, this seems logical, but I’ve seen a few too many video’s on youtube of unscrewing “stuck” things that do not wiggle the nut around at all.And of course, sometimes there is no alternative, if the tread is really galled up, then destroying one of the parts is the only option. sometimes it drilling out the bolt, other times it’s spending a few hours to remove the nut.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S6IMTOuLYQ",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119423",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T15:23:50",
"content": "I’ve done this so many times. I usually weld on a smaller washer. So with an M8 I TIG weld on an m6 washer and weld a nut onto that. makes my life easier, less chance of it wanting to weld against the casing. Best thing is to leave it alone for a while until it’s cooled off entirely otherwise the bolt is hotter than the thing it’s in so it will have grown in size as a result, making it harder to extract. Give it a while, then heat the outside, and you can extract it with ease.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119631",
"author": "David Bailey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T07:22:14",
"content": "Reminds me of the days I spent with a hand drill removing the remains of the manifold studs of my boat engine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.212675
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/an-absolute-zero-of-a-project/
|
An Absolute Zero Of A Project
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Misc Hacks"
] |
[
"absolute zero",
"Charles's Law",
"thermocouple",
"thermodynamics",
"time of flight",
"TOF"
] |
How would you go about determining absolute zero? Intuitively, it seems like you’d need some complicated physics setup with lasers and maybe some liquid helium. But as it turns out,
all you need is some simple lab glassware and a heat gun
. And a laser, of course.
To be clear, the method that [Markus Bindhammer] describes in the video below is only an estimation of absolute zero via Charles’s Law, which describes how gases expand when heated. To gather the needed data, [Marb] used a 50-ml glass syringe mounted horizontally on a stand and fitted with a thermocouple. Across from the plunger of the syringe he placed a VL6180 laser time-of-flight sensor, to measure the displacement of the plunger as the air within it expands.
Data from the TOF sensor and the thermocouple were recorded by a microcontroller as the air inside the syringe was gently heated. Plotting the volume of the gas versus the temperature results shows a nicely linear relationship, and the linear regression can be used to calculate the temperature at which the volume of the gas would be zero. The result: -268.82°C, or only about four degrees off from the accepted value of -273.15°. Not too shabby.
[Marb] has been on a tear lately with science projects like these; check out
his open-source blood glucose measurement method
or
his all-in-one electrochemistry lab
.
| 12
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119323",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T04:36:51",
"content": "I love experiments like this. It shows how some perhaps mysterious scientific principles and concepts can be derived and illustrated using materials, tools, and techniques well within the grasp of hobbyists. How did scientists determine the temperature of absolute zero? Easy! They plotted how the volume of gas changed with temperature and extrapolated to zero volume.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119365",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T09:57:08",
"content": "Beautiful experiment! It will always amaze me how accessible fundamental science has become.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119402",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:11:58",
"content": "i’m upset at the idea that V=0 when T=0K even though it obviously pops right out of the ideal gas law PV=nRT. i guess it’s better think of it as ‘the gas law obviously breaks at this value of T’, and not to actually contemplate what happens (would happen) at absolute zero",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119411",
"author": "Markus Bindhammer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:36:29",
"content": "The ideal gas law is so called because it only applies to ideal gases, i.e. far away from phase transitions.",
"parent_id": "8119402",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119453",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:46:30",
"content": "exactly, which is why i’m skeptical of using it this way, or anyways, i don’t understand why",
"parent_id": "8119411",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119463",
"author": "Markus Bindhammer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:08:04",
"content": "This has to be understood as a limit analysis. If T→ 0, V→ 0. This is a limit that can never be reached. But research shows that it is possible to get very close to this limit.",
"parent_id": "8119453",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119593",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:16:57",
"content": "I never thought to question PV=nRT until reading this. A little thought shows that the law can only be an approximation, because V can never go to zero: the atoms/molecules of a gas have nonzero volume even when they’re not moving (and no longer a gas.) The wikipedia page on the ideal gas law mentions this and other problems.Speculating, perhaps P(V-Vo)=nRT, where Vo is the minimum volume of the material.",
"parent_id": "8119402",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119601",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:16:56",
"content": "I think instead of looking at it from an ideal gas law perspective, simply going with the definition of temperature as “average kinetic energy of the molecule” is insightful. If the temperature is zero, the average kinetic energy (aka speed or perhaps more accurately velocity) is also zero. Even a large mass with zero velocity has zero KE.",
"parent_id": "8119593",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119841",
"author": "Jordan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T01:42:15",
"content": "There are indeed correction factors to the Ideal Gas Law that involve both a volume correction like the one you propose (adjustment for the minimum space occupied by atoms) and a pressure correction (adjustment for intermolecular interactions and gas-container interactions).That said, helium behaves very much like an ideal gas (largely because it is tiny and monoatomic)",
"parent_id": "8119593",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119418",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T15:00:59",
"content": "Super cool experiment and decent results. I think, though, that his estimation of absolute zero is probably wayyyy better than claimed.The claim of 268.82 C is to two decimals or 5 “digits” implying that measurement is accurate to +- like 0.01 degC which is probably preposterous given the nature of his measurements and apparatus . If he just claimed his measured results were accurate to 1% or even 0.3% ie 270 degC his answer would be dead-nuts on within the error of the experiment.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119555",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T22:03:04",
"content": "I think it amazing that syringe didn’t leak or add so much friction to ruin the experiment. I didn’t catch if he used any lubricant or sealant. Did he? Can’t grep a fscking video.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119600",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:13:38",
"content": "That is a ground glass “frictionless” syringe.It is precision made and does not leak air. They are used in the medical field. I’ve personally used them and they kind of seem like magic.Look up “labor epidural” or something like that for more information.",
"parent_id": "8119555",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,573.357278
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/gk-stm32-mcu-based-handheld-game-system/
|
GK STM32 MCU-Based Handheld Game System
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Games"
] |
[
"diy handheld",
"stm32"
] |
These days even a lowly microcontroller can easily trade blows with – or surpass – desktop systems of yesteryear, so it is little wonder that DIY handheld gaming systems based around an MCU are more capable than ever. A case in point is the
GK handheld gaming system
by [John Cronin], which uses an MCU from relatively new and very capable STM32H7S7 series, specifically the 225-pin
STM32H7S7L8
in TFBGA package with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU.
Coupled with this MCU are 128 MB of XSPI (hexa-SPI) SDRAM, a 640×480 color touch screen, gyrometer, WiFi network support and the custom gkOS in the firmware for loading games off an internal SD card. A USB-C port is provided to both access said SD card’s contents and for recharging the internal Li-ion battery.
As can be seen in
the demonstration video
, it runs a wide variety of games, ranging from
DOOM
(of course),
Quake
, as well as
Command and Conquer: Red Alert
and emulators for many consoles, with the Mednafen project used to emulate Game Boy, Super Nintendo and other systems at 20+ FPS. Although there aren’t a lot of details on how optimized the current firmware is, it seems to be pretty capable already.
| 8
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119272",
"author": "Timo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T00:43:34",
"content": "But does it run Doom (Eternal)? (gotta set a new bar for these high powered things…)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119278",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:20:47",
"content": "It might, but it probably takes forever.",
"parent_id": "8119272",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119358",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T09:04:36",
"content": "What about license fee for copyrighted material?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119375",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T11:44:12",
"content": "Are you referring to the open source games that he’s running on the console?",
"parent_id": "8119358",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119501",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:34:20",
"content": "And if you build you own go-kart, make sure you drive under the speed limit!",
"parent_id": "8119358",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119624",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T06:22:20",
"content": "How are they running red alert? is it an x86 emulator, or did they recompile the recently-released red alert source code?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119701",
"author": "Charlie Birks",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:32:05",
"content": "Not somewhere I expected to see my SDL2 CnC/RA port running!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119808",
"author": "Daddytesttubes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T21:17:49",
"content": "Does this project use the neochrom gpu? I thought the gpu was closed source? Does anyone have any info on it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.498597
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/making-a-variable-speed-disc-sander-from-an-old-hard-drive/
|
Making A Variable Speed Disc Sander From An Old Hard Drive
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"Circular Sander",
"disc sander",
"Hard Disk Drive",
"hdd"
] |
This short video from [ProShorts 101] shows us
how to build a variable speed disc sander
from not much more than an old hard drive.
We feel that as far as hacks go this one ticks all the boxes. It is clever, useful, and minimal yet comprehensive; it even has a speed control! Certainly this hack uses something in a way other than it was intended to be used.
Take this ingenuity and add an old hard drive from your junkbox, sandpaper, some glue, some wire, a battery pack, a motor driver, a power socket and a potentiometer, drill a few holes, glue a few pieces, and voilà! A disc sander! Of course the coat of paint was simply icing on the cake.
The little brother of this hack was done by the same hacker
on a smaller hard drive and without the speed control
, so check that out too.
One thing that took our interest while watching these videos is what tool the hacker used to cut sandpaper. Here we witnessed the use of both wire cutters and a craft knife. Perhaps when you’re cutting sandpaper you just have to accept that the process will wear out the sharp edge on your tool, regardless of which tool you use. If you have a hot tip for the best tool for the job when it comes to cutting sandpaper please let us know in the comments! (Also, did anyone catch what type of glue was used?)
If you’re interested in a sander but need something with a smaller form factor check out
how to make a sander from a toothbrush
!
| 60
| 22
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119203",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:09:39",
"content": "I cut up sandpaper with wrecked scissors, like the pair that someone apparently tried to cut wire with or the pair I dropped and bent the tip of one scis so I ground them down like kids’ safety scissors. There always seem to be awful scissors around for free. But a utility knife seems at least as good because it’s so easy to swap the blade when it’s finally ruined.Fold and tear along a sharp edge also works pretty well with the paper-backed coarse stuff.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119299",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:43:11",
"content": "On my bench I have wrecked wire cutters and wrecked tweezers. I mark them as such by taping some green and gold electrical tape on the handle. When I find myself with the need to cut sandpaper I guess I will add wrecked scissors to the list! :)",
"parent_id": "8119203",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119626",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T06:37:37",
"content": "You can fold nearly any sandpaper, even cloth backed, and cut it with a flat rigid object, I often use a metal spatula, but the edge of a table can be enough.",
"parent_id": "8119203",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119210",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:30:27",
"content": "Bandwidth ain’t free.This is still much better then the twine wrapped old tire table.That was a low point for ArtsCraftsaDay.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119212",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:37:21",
"content": "Would a hard drive have the torque to really grind or would one have to let the object “float” and wait for it to get ground down right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119227",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:23:28",
"content": "If you could find an old 5 1/4″ full height drive, that’d probably have plenty of torque. They sound like a jet engine when they power up.",
"parent_id": "8119212",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119228",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:25:51",
"content": "Also maybe replace the platters with a single heavier metal disk, to act as a flywheel once it gets up to speed.",
"parent_id": "8119227",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119874",
"author": "Shane",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T07:30:44",
"content": "It’s neat, simple, and functional for a lot of people! I do have a question though … Does the paper peel off or continue add until you want to use a nre",
"parent_id": "8119228",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119339",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T07:27:40",
"content": "I tried it a long time ago and it was pretty useless, but I just used the original motor driver. This one uses an RC ESC, so maybe it will produce a bit more torque. It’s still a tiny motor though.",
"parent_id": "8119212",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120661",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T18:28:33",
"content": "I have one with 400 grit sandpaper and a small ESC. It’s ok for sharpening drillbits and similar small blades, but I wouldn’t use it for the chisel (?) that appears in the image. I added a lid that keeps most of the dust inside, making it a nice tabletop sharpener that avoids making a mess.",
"parent_id": "8119212",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119213",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:37:54",
"content": "Right idea, but wrong way to say it. There’s no need for that abuse. Be civil.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119215",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:41:21",
"content": "I “cut” sandpaper by creasing it on my drill press table edge, paper-side on the table, then just tearing it. Perfect straight ‘cut’, and no abrasive touches anything.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119297",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:41:33",
"content": "Good idea! Of course in this case we need circular cut outs which makes things a bit tricky. If it was me I would probably use a craft knife and cut from the back paper side… I think this is one of those problems where every solution has some sort of drawback…",
"parent_id": "8119215",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119224",
"author": "Thopter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:16:54",
"content": "That glue looks like Fevicol 15 Fevibond rubber cement.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119296",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:38:26",
"content": "Thanks for the tip! I found it for sale at Amazon. Gonna get a tube to try it out. Other glue which I discovered lately is B-7000 from AliExpress:https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007671330956.htmlalso a friend has recommended Gorilla Glue:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XW9YB66",
"parent_id": "8119224",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119421",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T15:12:17",
"content": "My preference is to use hot glue for this.To replace the sand paper, you just heat the whole disk and then peel of the old, add some more glue and put on a new sheet of sandpaper.This works best if the disks are removable and you have a few of them. You can then replace the paper on two disks, and clamp them to each other to make sure the paper stays glued flat to the surface.I do have some real doubts about using an old HDD for this though. The motor does not have enough power for most of the sanding jobs. Maybe it’s enough for tiny works such as parts for scale model building. But I would not even attempt grinding an axe with this myself.",
"parent_id": "8119224",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119225",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:20:30",
"content": "If you could attach a 3″ diamond grinding disk to the spindle or top platter it might be good for fine honing of carbide lathe tools.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119300",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:45:35",
"content": "Yes I think that would be a good solution and a useful tool.",
"parent_id": "8119225",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119582",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T01:55:59",
"content": "Before trying this:Consider reading the MSDS for carbide, pay particular attention to ‘grinding’.Or don’t, your call.",
"parent_id": "8119225",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119608",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:56:03",
"content": "Having read it, it doesn’t seem likely that grinding 1 ten thousandth of an inch off a lathe tool, once in a blue moon, would be a huge risk. But respirators are available.Doing it 40 hours a week, sure. Wear a respirator and use dust control equipment.",
"parent_id": "8119582",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119767",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T18:04:33",
"content": "Did you note the part about 1% of the population being hyper sensitive to carbide/cobalt lung issues and there being no test available to see if you are one of them?The incredibly slow painful nature of the death you (or your associates) get if you roll 00 and fail your saving throw?At least the dust is heavy.Your call.",
"parent_id": "8119608",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119226",
"author": "Thopter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:22:25",
"content": "Someone in the YouTube comments suggested a possible improvement by gluing velcro to the platter so the sandpaper can be easily replaced when needed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119262",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T23:26:15",
"content": "My thoughts exactly. (I mean, independently, not the actual YouTube comment)",
"parent_id": "8119226",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119263",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T23:36:57",
"content": "My experience with velcro sanding stuff is that it gets clogged up and increases my cursing and sacrilegious profanity.",
"parent_id": "8119226",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119249",
"author": "Marc Christensen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T22:40:17",
"content": "I use a laser cutter. I have templates for all my sanding tools. Works great for the fuzzy backed velcro paper as well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119302",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:46:44",
"content": "I wish I had a laser cutter! And a CNC machine. And a 3D printer. I am stuck in electronics land due to space constraints… for now.",
"parent_id": "8119249",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119252",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T22:45:49",
"content": "Velcro probably has too much “give”. Anything you sand is going to end up slightly convex because it will cause the sandpaper to flex.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119273",
"author": "ttwhitworth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T00:44:44",
"content": "I generally just fold, crease and tear to get straight “cuts”. If I actually have to cut it I’ll score the paper backing. Once the paper backing is scored it tears off pretty easily.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119293",
"author": "N1kt0",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:50:28",
"content": "Hmmmm…I’ve recently become interested in gem cutting and have been eyeing some lapidary tools, but I may just order some diamond paste and see about repurposing one of my old hard drives to see if it would be a viable alternative. I am curious as to whether the torque output on a 3.5” HDD would be sufficient. I’ll also have to figure out how to waterproof it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119303",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:47:38",
"content": "If you end up putting this together be sure to write it up and let us know!",
"parent_id": "8119293",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119298",
"author": "Steve Schafer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:43:07",
"content": "I cut sandpaper with a #10 blade in an X-Acto knife. The blade lasts for several tens of cuts before I have to replace it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119304",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:49:12",
"content": "Ah, that’s what I was looking for, the voice of experience. Thanks for letting us know! If I find myself needing to cut sandpaper I think this is the tool I would use for the job.",
"parent_id": "8119298",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119403",
"author": "ABrugsch",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:13:44",
"content": "I usually use a cheap-as snap knife, preferably one that’s nearing snapping time and cut gently from the paper side. Usually cuts enough that it makes perforations enough to easily pop out or tear the line without completely destroying the cutting edge",
"parent_id": "8119304",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119317",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T03:53:42",
"content": "Hard to take anyone making a grinder seriously when he doesn’t know how to use one. You grind toward the edge, not away from it like he’s doing in the picture.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119319",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T04:18:50",
"content": "Tough crowd! :) Can you link us to a video that demonstrates correct technique?",
"parent_id": "8119317",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119326",
"author": "Snarkenstein",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T04:59:33",
"content": "Not a video, but text and pictures:https://www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/sharpening-for-woodturners/",
"parent_id": "8119319",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119328",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T05:20:01",
"content": "Thanks for the link, but that’s for a grind stone, not a disc sander…",
"parent_id": "8119326",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119332",
"author": "Megol",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T06:04:15",
"content": "And that invalidates the build how exactly?So you “know better”, doesn’t mean you have to post about it, at least not in that manner.",
"parent_id": "8119317",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119349",
"author": "Nixon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:29:07",
"content": "You can actuallysharpenscissors by cutting through fine-grain sandpaper.",
"parent_id": "8119317",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119379",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T11:56:37",
"content": "Interesting!",
"parent_id": "8119349",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119413",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:37:23",
"content": "That’s a popular myth. Cutting sandpaper won’t make your dull scissors sharp. It’ll just remove some of the roughness and actually dull the cutting edge. It’ll cut better than it did before the sandpaper trick, but it’ll get worse each time.Look up how to properly sharpen scissors with a whetstone. It isn’t all that hard – if you can sharpen a knife you can sharpen scissors.",
"parent_id": "8119379",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119410",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:34:35",
"content": "No, not really. You can remove the dings and rolled edge on the cutting edge that way, but that isn’t “sharpening.” It is still dull, it just doesn’t snag as badly.Sharpening scissors isn’t that hard, but cutting sandpaper won’t do it.I sharpen household scissors and garden shears using diamond “whetstones.” There’s a world of difference between sharpened scissors and ones that have been “sharpened” by cutting sandpaper (or aluminum foil.)",
"parent_id": "8119349",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119334",
"author": "Matias",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T06:22:37",
"content": "I made one of these a while ago, just using the original hard drive board. Turns out old ~40gb HDDs just start to spin as soon as you give them 5 and 12v on the molex. (Some don’t restart spinning after a stall though).I just put a 5v regulator on the side and now I can just supply 12v to it.I really want to hook it up to something and check its SMART stats, lol. I’ve been grinding stuff for years now. I was not expecting it to last this long.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119347",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:26:09",
"content": "some years, huh? Impressive! I don’t know if you were just kidding about the SMART stats or not, I’m not sure what might be possible there…",
"parent_id": "8119334",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119588",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:01:52",
"content": "I shot all my old 5 1/4 drives (the one’s that start with simple power).Some of them had netmare 2 on them, shot all of them to be sure.Powered up and spinning, some with the cover off.Was fun.Made mess.You realize a HF angle grinder costs $20?",
"parent_id": "8119334",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119616",
"author": "Randall",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T05:09:33",
"content": "Really sending mixed messages here, and definitely not displaying the financial judgement that you think. I can honestly say that I don’t think shooting HDDs is more constructive, or interesting, than hacking them for entertainment.",
"parent_id": "8119588",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119768",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T18:13:28",
"content": "I have no shortage of old hard drives.Am kind of packrat.But these had NETMARE on them (at least some), I had to shoot them.I was going to expend the ammo anyhow.Pretty much the only loud noise I get to make since old enough for adult court. (Cars don’t count, not loud enough.)5.25 HDs, way before the current price of ammo.I remember 7.62×39 at $0.30/round…good times.",
"parent_id": "8119616",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119337",
"author": "Japala",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T06:59:51",
"content": "Made the “same” 18 years ago in Metku.net. Good ideas never die it seems! ;)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4KCu8EAHsY",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119345",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:24:36",
"content": "lol, awesome! Love the low res video! :)",
"parent_id": "8119337",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119396",
"author": "Egghead Larsen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T13:25:59",
"content": "Ha keep it classy sport! Obviously you are sufficiently uneducated to be unaware that the Argument ad Hominem is a classic fallacy of the intellectually stunted. Obviously you qualify!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119476",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:45:42",
"content": "That PCB need some protection from chips or it will short out very quickly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119609",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:59:37",
"content": "A coat of plasti-dip would probably do.",
"parent_id": "8119476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119615",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T04:36:49",
"content": "Nice catch. Thanks for the tip!",
"parent_id": "8119476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119499",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:28:59",
"content": "skipped through the video to answer my question: he drives the motor using what looks like a brushless speed controller from an rc airplane.i like the shape of this tool, with the recessed grinding surface. a little less scary than like putting your angle grinder in a bench vice :)i am sure there are a ton of uses for this sort of tool but i am skeptical of using it specifically for sharping like chisels and stuff because the outside is moving so much faster than the inside. seems like it will tend to grind your things at an angle?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119610",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T04:04:11",
"content": "You could grind tangentially to the hub. You could even get fancy and rig up a grinding rest, that lets you set an angle for the grind and also lets you adjust the contact point closer or farther away from the hub, with motor speed adjusted so that the speed at the contact point is always the same.",
"parent_id": "8119499",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119628",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T06:40:12",
"content": "This is definitely where I would go with this concept, might even try it.",
"parent_id": "8119610",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119591",
"author": "Ldratio",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:07:48",
"content": "A very economical and precise way to cut sandpaper is with an exacto knife. I’ve been cutting get this way for years 60 grit to 2000 it works on all grits. Cutting from the paper side score it but not all the way through. This mostly saves your blade and also just bending the Sandpaper will make it break clean. Always use a razor sharp blade, but never cut through it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119769",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T18:16:05",
"content": "A ‘razor sharp’ exacto blade?Where would I get such a thing?Sure I could sharpen one myself, but the metal isn’t very good, won’t hold the edge for long.",
"parent_id": "8119591",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119700",
"author": "Donald Foss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:22:57",
"content": "I’m lazy. I cut circular sandpaper by pressing a hole saw to the back of it, the paper side, to perforated the sandpaper, then tear it slowly. This produces a fair circle every time. I imagine a 3 inch hole saw would work nicely for this.I like the velcro idea but that would leave the sandpaper lumpy. Perhaps cut and glue 1/16 thick steel disk to the back of sandpaper and velcro that to the platter? You can clamp the 1/16” sheet metal to a wood block and use the same 3” hole saw to create the metal disk. Be sure to clamp in a minimum 3 places.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121131",
"author": "vancouverizer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T21:09:54",
"content": "If you plan on using the HDD after this and it’s old enough (pre-mid-1980s) don’t forget to park the HDD heads before sanding anything. You wouldn’t want to have a head crash, especially onto sandpaper, as that would destroy them. You will also want to thoroughly clean the platter after removing the sandpaper as the heads would also likely crash if they bump into anything remaining on it. Archive org has a collection of HDD utilities for MS/IBM DOS that includes “hd_park” or refer to your OS manual as most have a similar executable. A TSR like TimePark might also be useful.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.452976
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/floss-weekly-episode-829-this-machine-kills-vogons/
|
FLOSS Weekly Episode 829: This Machine Kills Vogons
|
Jonathan Bennett
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] |
[
"Bufferbloat",
"Dave Taht",
"FLOSS Weekly"
] |
This week,
Jonathan Bennett
chats with
Herbert Wolverson
and
Frantisek Borsik
about LibreQOS, Bufferbloat, and
Dave Taht’s
legacy. How did Dave figure out that Bufferbloat was the problem? And how did LibreQOS change the world? Watch to find out!
Dave’s blog:
https://blog.cerowrt.org
http://the-edge.taht.net/
https://libreqos.io
https://x.com/LibreQoS
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/
https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/
And Dave’s speech,
Uncle Bill’s Helicopter
seems especially fitting. I particularly like the unintentional prediction of the Ingenuity Helicopter.
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
| 1
| 1
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8140418",
"author": "Marc Blanchet",
"timestamp": "2025-06-19T17:57:48",
"content": "Hello, about deep space networking, I’m the one that initially talked to Dave about it, as I’ve been working on this for quite some time. If you want to talk, happy to!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.534932
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/spacemouse-destroyed-for-science/
|
SpaceMouse Destroyed For Science
|
Fenix Guthrie
|
[
"Peripherals Hacks"
] |
[
"analog joystick",
"Joystick",
"light meter",
"space mouse"
] |
The SpaceMouse is an interesting gadget beloved by engineers and artists alike. They function almost like joysticks, but with six degrees of freedom (6DoF). This can make them feel a bit like magic, which is why [Thought Bomb Design] decided to
tear one apart and figure out how it works
.
The movement mechanism ended up being relatively simple; three springs soldered between two PCBs with one PCB being fixed to the base and the other moving in space. Instead of using a potentiometer or even hall effect sensor as you might expect from a joystick, the space mouse contained a set of six LEDs and light meters.
The sensing array came nestled inside a dark box made of PCBs. An injection molded plastic piece with slits would move to interrupt the light coming from the LEDs. The mouse uses the varying values coming from the light meter to decode Cartesian motion of the space mouse. It’s very simple and a bit hacky, just how we like it.
Looking for a similar input device, but want to take the DIY route?
We’ve seen a few homebrew versions of this concept
that might
provide you with the necessary inspiration
.
| 33
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119110",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:41:33",
"content": "That’s pretty neat! It also would seem that these things are absurdly expensive for what they actually are…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119120",
"author": "FiveEyesNoPrize",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:10:41",
"content": "Maybe, but my wireless spacemouse is the best investment I’ve made for my CAD work. It has lasted four years so far and works just as well as day one. I originally bought it because I “thought it would be cool”, but it quickly became a staple at my workstation. It gets new software support all the time, opened PrusaSlicer the other day and was surprised to see I could manipulate the plater just like SOLIDWORKS. Battery lasts ages, too. I’ve seen a few DIY options over the years but it’s nice enough that I’m not compelled to try anything else.",
"parent_id": "8119110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119160",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:20:35",
"content": "My original USB space mouse still works fine.But the drivers refuse to recognize it on a new computer.Despite the same version drivers still working on the old (both running 10)?It still works (badly) with some software, the USB device is there…I wish I could support them, but bastards!It could be the maze of USB devices on this computer…",
"parent_id": "8119120",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119182",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:09:12",
"content": "Clutching at straws, but do you have the SM connected directly, or via a USB hub?On many motherboards, not all USB ports are equal; some share controllers with other, onboard devices. So although it’s counter-intuitive, sometimes even swapping to a different port makes a difference.Do you have the same “maze of USB devices” on the old computer? It could be a contention issue.Sorry I can’t offer anything more useful; I don’t have a SM, but I do have considerable experience with USB.",
"parent_id": "8119160",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119194",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:41:27",
"content": "I minimized the actively connected devices, plugged it directly into both USB 2 and 3 ports, still the software doesn’t find it.I found it in device manager once, don’t recall it’s name, but it was there.The spacemouse is old, only an old version of their software supports it.I have considered going back even further and trying to find an old driver set that recognizes it, then letting upgrades happen.The problem with going further, removing all the drivers for input devices, is that it isn’t install that fails, it’s startup.I think it’s futile.They’ve decided that my lease on the hardware I bought is up.The real mystery is ‘how is it working on the old computer?’It’s a super crusty old windows install.Perhaps spying on what that computer accesses at startup.Bet it’s an INI file.I’ve spent 10x the price of a new one (in time) trying to get the old one working.If there was an alternative, I’d have already bought it.They pissed me off, yes I’m cheap.Bet I ‘sold’ 20 spacemice for them, before this.",
"parent_id": "8119182",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119373",
"author": "volt-k",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T11:37:08",
"content": "I have the same issue with my SpacePilot (the old flat rectangular version). Worked fine for a couple of years using an older driver. I’ve reinstalled Windows at some point and it struggles to work, even though it’s still Win 10 and still using the old drivers.As you said, it kinda works with some software, but I can no longer use the utility to assign the hotkeys, change settings etc.",
"parent_id": "8119160",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119192",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:32:30",
"content": "i bought mine mostly as a thruster controller for kerbal space program, but yea id use it in cad too if i can remember than i have it. i dont use it often, it gets allocated to paperweight duty. its a good left hand controller in 6dof games as well (when paired with a mouse with enough buttons). i just wish the software made it easier to put into joystick emulation mode.",
"parent_id": "8119120",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119205",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:13:54",
"content": "The irony being that under the hood, it’s a USB HID standard joystick.",
"parent_id": "8119192",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119131",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:44:06",
"content": "$180 to $400 for a niche product that is well made seems pretty reasonably priced to me.I used to have a SpaceOrb 360, which was an oddball (literally?) game controller (serial not USB). I never really used it for games, but it was a real treat for game development and for moving the camera around in 3d modeling.",
"parent_id": "8119110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119219",
"author": "Hassi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:56:41",
"content": "well, their driver and update policy is crap though. have a perfectly working device? shame you can’t use it anymore. Here, we give you some peanuts so you are inclined to jump another 200 bucks to us.",
"parent_id": "8119131",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119142",
"author": "dawsmart",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:16:43",
"content": "I have one that’s lasted 11 years and counting, and I got it 2nd hand. And I use it daily (CAD work). Aside from the rubberized coating deteriorating and the rubber feet coming unglued, it’s got no problems. Definitely worth it for a non-disposable.",
"parent_id": "8119110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119155",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:00:17",
"content": "The thing to remember where the costs come from. So that injection mould and all the ones that might have been in the R&D costs the same for a product like this is in the same ballpark as that bargain bin multimeter case that goes into a few thousand times more products.And the scale of production isn’t likely to be large enough to really pay for tooling up a very efficient production line either, so the manual labour per device in the assembly, the cost per component ordered in, and no doubt every single other element that makes the end product is probably higher per device as its such a niche product.If you try to make a product or complex project yourself you’ll suddenly find just the prototyping costs are likely to skyrocket, and that final product can only become cheap if you have enough orders or enough fiscal backing willing to take the risk of tooling up to make it cheap to produce.",
"parent_id": "8119110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119191",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:31:46",
"content": "99.9% humans reaction: “I’m not going to pay so much for 6 leds, some springs and wire!111!!” :)",
"parent_id": "8119155",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119206",
"author": "Neil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:17:04",
"content": "Good point, well made. The build quality is also better than cheaper items .",
"parent_id": "8119155",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119163",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:25:32",
"content": "Engineering is essentially getting the as much performance as possible from as little put in as you can. The, likely moderate manufacturing cost, given the number of parts that need to be assembled in the proper relation with the proper motion, is only a part of the price. The engineering (including HOW to manufacture it) and software are the greater part.I have had one for a number of years, and it stays with my CAD workstation in my office. I am reminded WHY it was worth the money every time I am in the field with just a laptop and maybe, if there is a surface anywhere to use it on- a rarity- a wireless mouse.",
"parent_id": "8119110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119484",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:56:04",
"content": "For a niche piece of gear that’s well made I think the price of ~150 isn’t too bad. At least there’s no subscription or other BS like we see infesting the engineering field.",
"parent_id": "8119110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119875",
"author": "xay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T07:42:20",
"content": "The original high costs came from how absurdly expensive those photo ICs are. They’re not your typical kit and from what I could originally find only a few manufacturers produce them and the main buyers of them are camera companies for advanced rangefinders.3 Dconnexion buying them was an anomaly as far as supply chain and supply-demand are concerned.At some point they moved away from this design. I’m not sure how many intermediates exist outside of minor tweaks, but the next major design I know of was magnetic, with a much simpler design. But once again there’s costs involved, they were very early to the whole 3D magnetometer setup thing, quite possibly the only company to produce a legitimate product, so costs are understandable; outside of this, 3D magnetometry seems to be more of a researched thing with chips for it ‘existing’ or having their IP licensed out, but not much ever really came from this, though what has come from this is very expensive scientific equipment, but modern variation of this has far surpassed the SpaceMouse’s primative, by comparison, design. I’m not sure if there’s a more modern iteration that has changed from this, haven’t seen a brand new SpaceMouse torn down, and pattent diving hit a dead end for me when I couldn’t find the newer parents under Logitech’s or 3Dconnexion’s names.Speaking of Logitech, that’s also where modern cost comes from, you’re paying for their product where they’re known to be a bit overpriced in their top-end and niche market segments.IMO, and this is true with a lot of modern HaD, this article is just parroting what someone came across and didn’t research in the slightest. If a typical person can do research to find good information and have enough competency to produce logical conclusions, then someone posting an article could do more than just parrot the most surface-level things. Comments like yours realistically should not exist, the article should otherwise explain things like costs and complexities that would otherwise render predictable comments like yours moot through basic discussion within the article itself, or at least provide enough relevant information to where the reader can produce conclusions as to why things are the way they currently are.And on that topic, I think the original design, the overly expensive optical one, is probably the most bulletproof one; low noise, low jitter, high accuracy with insane redundancy, and low power. I even vire the later magnetometer variant as a lesser option, as it’s likely based on hall sensors, though a decent MR IC would be a decent sensor. The various DIY projects just don’t live up to this, especially the optical ones using material thickness as a dimmer for the emitter, or the joystick based ones having such loose tolerances. There’s more sensor types to explore, but frankly I don’t think they ever will be explored, either people don’t know other technologies or they don’t want to put the effort into developing something. I also think VR tracking provides a fairly substantial alternative, plus an insane amount of usable range compared to these short-throw 3D knobs, not to mention the future of 3D anything is more of less based in what XR will provide; not to mention the cost of integration will inherently be lower due to the target markets and projected growth of those markets.",
"parent_id": "8119110",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120181",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T07:59:25",
"content": "VR type controllers are certainly good but the big difference between quality tracking of an object floating in space and a joystick object like this is the haptic feedback – you only know the controller is doing anything in VR because the stuff you are looking at is changing in response. Being able to feel under your fingers to get that faster/slower movement is just too nice to want to do without, espeically if you are not actually wearing the headset and doing everything in that virtual 3d space – as then your natural sense of where your hands are can overcome that lack of good haptics to some extent.And while you could use VR tracking tech to track a joystick like this to do so you’d have to find a way to keep your hand out of the way so it can track as precisely as you’d like, and it just isn’t as portable.",
"parent_id": "8119875",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119150",
"author": "Mr 02127",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:39:51",
"content": "I have a couple of these. Used them in my Car PC back in the day as well as CAD. The last one I bought in 2009 (not wireless) was $48.95",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119156",
"author": "cadnoob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:01:01",
"content": "I always thought the ahmsville dial v2 ($110, via tindie) looked like an elegant magnetometer-based homologue.https://www.tindie.com/products/ahmsvillelabs/ahmsville-dial-v2-absolute-variant/Would love to hear, if anyone has one, whether it’s as neat as it looks!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119196",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:45:19",
"content": "Looks like it’s missing Z-axis translation sensing (ie, you can’t pull up or down on it), though you could obviously remap one of its other inputs (such as the touchpad) to handle that.",
"parent_id": "8119156",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119190",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:27:48",
"content": "What? A device built to last? Barstewards should have downrated those springs to pewter so they’d break just after warranty.It is nice to see the days of quality goods built to last sometimes raises its head.I’m gonna treat myself to one of these one day. I’ve heard they’re good for Solidworks which I use multiple times per week anyway.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119193",
"author": "Nico",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:38:46",
"content": "I would love to have more support for them in casual software. Google Earth Pro supported them, but the Web App does not.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119195",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:42:38",
"content": "as a joystick nerd my biggest gripe is that there is too much axis bleed. an attempt to move in any particular axis will bleed into all the other axes. thats one of the reasons i prefer two spring gimbal designs to single spring ones. i also disliked twist handles for the same reason. ive seen other space mouse teardown videos before, and that made me decide to use an optical trigger on my 3d printed joystick projects, so i can determine depression depth with a photodiode and simple circuit and a 3d printed light slit and wedge, this is combined with a tactile button to give it a click at its maximum range.in general im sad that there are fewer optical joystick technologies in the wild. ever since i saw what essentially was a mouse sensor in an ms sidewinder joystick, i have wondered why its sort of an evolutionary dead end, especially with high resolution low latency sensors available now. everyone wants hall effect but optical is a lot less sensitive to em noise from the electronics. micro-dot leds and a modern mouse sensor could probibly fit in your typical thumbstick module.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119200",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:51:52",
"content": "The “light meters” are most likely 1D lateral effect photodiodes.The MS Sidewinder joystick mentioned above also used a 2D lateral effect photodiode.They are great for sensing the position of a single dot of light very rapidly.You can sense multiple dots as long as only one is lit at a time.The MS joystick used this feature to detect joystick yaw movement with 2 LEDs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119267",
"author": "FEE",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T00:00:14",
"content": "The optical sensors look a lot like hamamatsu One-dimensional PSDs (position sensitive detectors):https://www.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/product/optical-sensors/distance-position-sensor/psd.html",
"parent_id": "8119200",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119454",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:49:18",
"content": "If you look into their technical documents, you can see that they are using lateral effect photodiodes for their PSDs. They just say “photodiode”, but the description matches.",
"parent_id": "8119267",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119314",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T03:40:22",
"content": "ms sidewinder line was such a good product. so well built that the designers autographed the inside of the case.",
"parent_id": "8119200",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119329",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T05:22:00",
"content": "I recently built a custom version of OS3M (open source 3D mouse). The hardware works pretty well, but the situation with software support is worse. I hacked the firmware so that it works with libspnav (that part was quite easy), but the problem is on application side. OpenSCAD works relatively ok. Blender works ok. FreeCAD works, but the pivot point in its 3D view is somehow very non-intuitive. KiCad doesn’t have 3D mouse support on Linux.So looks like I would have to code quite a bit to make use of it. I also think I would need a lot more buttons than the four I put in my design.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119382",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:09:33",
"content": "I gave the Spacemouse a try, but could never get along with the long-throw weeble-wobble cap required for the position sensors to do anything. a 6-axis force-sensor (e.g. load-cell based) would be much more pleasant to use, at least for me. Not so easy to design or manufacture, though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119446",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:08:50",
"content": "I worked with someone who made a capacitive version of this. Same general construction, but the sensing was done using the distance between capacitive plates, which varied, of course, due to movement of the sensor.That’s a massive simplification, but that was the principle of operation, and it worked very well.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119640",
"author": "John Crombie",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T08:10:54",
"content": "A teardown of the Spacemouse isn’t new. There has been a Web page of a teardown available for years with lots of information on how it works.https://www.alvarez-engineer.com/2022/03/20/spacenavigator-teardown/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119771",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T18:35:03",
"content": "Interesting. Although it uses the same type of sensors, they are in a different arrangement. Maybe a cost-reduced version using more clever engineering?",
"parent_id": "8119640",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,573.611547
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/tiny-hackable-telepresence-robot-for-under-100-meet-goby/
|
Tiny, Hackable Telepresence Robot For Under $100? MeetGoby
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"Crowd Funding",
"Robots Hacks"
] |
[
"arduino",
"ESP32",
"FPV",
"goby",
"telepresence",
"telepresence robot",
"tinypresence",
"WebRTC"
] |
[Charmed Labs] are responsible for bringing numerous open-source hardware products to fruition over the years, and their latest device is
an adorably small robotic camera platform called
Goby
, currently crowdfunding for its initial release.
Goby
has a few really clever design features and delivers a capable (and hackable) platform for under 100 USD.
Goby
embraces its small size, delivering what its creators dub “tinypresence” — or the feeling of being there, but on a very small scale. Cardboard courses, LEGO arenas, or even tabletop gaming scenery hits different when experienced from a first-person perspective.
Goby
is entirely reprogrammable with nothing more than a USB cable and the Arduino IDE, while costing less than most Arduino starter kits.
Recharging happens by driving over the charger, then pivoting down so the connectors (the little blunt vampire fangs under and to each side of the camera) come into contact with the charger.
One of the physical features we really like is the tail-like articulated caster at the rear. Flexing this pivots
Goby
up or down (and can even flip
Goby
completely over), allowing one to pan and tilt the view without needing to mount the camera on a gimbal. It also comes into play for recharging;
Goby
simply moves over the disc-shaped charger and pivots down to make contact.
At
Goby
‘s heart is an ESP32-S3 and OmniVision OV2640 camera sensor streaming a live video feed (and driving controls) with WebRTC. Fitting the WebRTC stack onto an ESP32 wasn’t easy, but opens up possibilities beyond just media streaming.
Goby
is set up to make launching an encrypted connection as easy as sharing a URL or scanning a QR code. The link is negotiated between bot and client with the initial help of an external server, and once a peer-to-peer connection is established, the server’s job is done and it is out of the picture. [Charmed Labs]’s code for this functionality — named
BitBang
— is in beta and destined for an open release as well. While
BitBang
is being used here to make it effortless to access
Goby
remotely, it’s more broadly intended to make web access for any ESP32-based device easier to implement.
As far as tiny remote camera platforms go, it might not be as small as
rebuilding a Hot Wheels car into a micro RC platform
, but it’s definitely more accessible and probably cheaper, to boot. Check it out at the Kickstarter (see the first link in this post) and watch it in action in the video, embedded just below the page break.
| 10
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119622",
"author": "Tim Andersson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T06:05:18",
"content": "I could see this being used as miniature FPV anti personel mine (something like PFM-1 but on wheels). Could be good for destroying enemy units stationed in buildings or urban environments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119708",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:53:09",
"content": "To clarify, are you arguing that they should lock down the firmware to negate this risk?",
"parent_id": "8119622",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119736",
"author": "stefo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:57:08",
"content": "I don’t see how he is. He’s just suggesting a possible use for the tiny bot. Not how I’d use it but a use none the less.",
"parent_id": "8119708",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119821",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T22:58:45",
"content": "Thanks, my bad",
"parent_id": "8119736",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119745",
"author": "stefo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:10:40",
"content": "It seems your jumping to conclusions. No where in his comment does Tim suggest locking down the firmware. I wouldn’t use the way he suggested but it’s a way none the less. It might be a bit small for that kind of thing.",
"parent_id": "8119708",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120737",
"author": "stefo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T22:08:42",
"content": "Sorry for the spam. This comment system doesn’t provide any feedback when posting and I wasn’t sure if I messed up when posting.",
"parent_id": "8119745",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119770",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T18:17:27",
"content": "The only person talking about Nerfing things here is you.",
"parent_id": "8119708",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119716",
"author": "chris c.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:07:49",
"content": "Cool! I’ve been looking for a hackable robot that’s capable. It’s sort of a cut-down version of a robo-pet that you can program!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119744",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:08:22",
"content": "I wonder if it could run ROS?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119800",
"author": "RChadwick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T20:38:37",
"content": "Looks super cute and small, with a hint of practicality. Unfortunately, 2005 called and they want their MicroUSB port back.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.663304
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/rise-of-the-robots-how-robots-are-changing-dairy-farms/
|
Rise Of The Robots: How Robots Are Changing Dairy Farms
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Robots Hacks"
] |
[
"automation",
"dairy"
] |
Running a dairy farm used to be a rather hands-on experience, with the farmer required to be around every few hours to milk the cows, feed them, do all the veterinarian tasks that the farmer can do themselves, and so on. The introduction of milking machines in the early 20th century however began a trend of increased automation whereby a single farmer could handle a hundred cows by the end of the century instead of only a couple. In a recent article in
IEEE Spectrum
covers the
continued progress here is covered
, including cows milking themselves, on-demand style as shown in the top image.
The article focuses primarily on Dutch company Lely’s recent robots, which range from said self-milking robots to a manure cleaning robot that looks like an oversized Roomba. With how labor-intensive (and low-margin) a dairy farm is, any level of automation that can improve matters will be welcomed, with so far Lely’s robots receiving a mostly positive response. Since cows are pretty smart, they will happily guide themselves to a self-milking robot when they feel that their udders are full enough, which can save the farmer a few hours of work each day, as this robot handles every task, including the cleaning of the udders prior to milking and sanitizing itself prior to inviting the next cow into its loving embrace.
As for the other tasks, speaking as a genuine Dutch dairy farm girl who was born & raised around cattle (and sheep), the idea of e.g. mucking out stables being taken over by robots is something that raises a lot more skepticism. After all, a farmer’s children have to earn their pocket money somehow, which includes mucking, herding, farm maintenance and so on. Unless those robots get really cheap and low maintenance, the idea of fully automated dairy farms may still be a long while off, but reducing the workload and making cows happier are definitely lofty goals.
Top image: The milking robot that can automatically milk a cow without human assistance. (Credit: Lely)
| 20
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119604",
"author": "the gambler",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:31:24",
"content": "Not to be that guy but self milking/robot setups have been part of the dairy community for a long time now. I’m not sure how this is a hack, recent news, or anything really.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119605",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:40:09",
"content": "I’ll ignore the above…I mean not really it is pretty funny.anywayMost/all studies show that cows that can happen into the automated milking station whenever they please is pretty much better in every way. Happy cows make happy milk or something.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119632",
"author": "Garrut",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T07:38:45",
"content": "Milking robot are just a pain to maintain every day: it is real that you dont need anymore to go 2 times a day during 2h , 12 hour apart , to milk the cow. but the robot need a lot of maintenance, sending text message all day long because she’s unhappy. The 4h daily hand work for The cow is now tranfered to maintain The robot and her needs.The air compressor needed make all mechanic or car painter full of envy. And we can go on and go on. At the end, you have paid a 300k ( top low price, it can jump fast to really more) to just have the luxury of displacing the hand work from the beginning and end of the day to the middle. And you dont skip giving full bag of money to Lely or alpha laval every month.Milking robot are essentially made to milk the farmers.And if something bad happen with the robot ( external, like flood fire or thunder) you lose everything in a spectacular way, hundred unmilked cow is not something fun to watch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119641",
"author": "Maya Posch",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T08:17:10",
"content": "Those are good points, indeed. The milking setup on our farm was quite basic, with the cows being lined up for a quick clean of the udders before the vacuum cups were put in place. Beyond the vacuum system and the milk tank there wasn’t so much that could go wrong, and I don’t remember there ever having been issues.Probably why neither our farm nor any others in the area had bothered with such automation. The dairy farm focused magazines would of course praise their convenience. When you get to choose between potentially expensive maintenance vs spending some time each day mostly handling those vacuum cups and herding cows in for milking…Same with those other robots, such as for cleaning manure off the concrete grills in the stables. That was a quick (and kinda fun) run through with a rubber-edged tool which me and my siblings often got assigned. Having an expensive robot do that work instead and inevitably breaking down or doing a poor job seems like a nightmare.",
"parent_id": "8119632",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119665",
"author": "Garrut",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T09:11:35",
"content": "Manure cleaning robots…. A lot of story on that..After hand cleaning, tractor puching the manure, we saw winch activated manure cleaning device. Push button activated, One or two electric winch who never fail, one câble got loose or break every two or three years. Easy use, Easy and cheap fix when fail. But you have to push that button 10 times a day and wait for The job to be done. And here come the robots…the 2 years lasting batteries who always have been advertised as consumable, is not convinient but easy, advertised as such, and pricey without needing to sell a kidney. The Electronic, charger or robot main board, on the other hand are not suppose to be a consumable! But they are just bad at taking all daily abuse you can see on a farm. So, lot of money spend on spare part (would have been cheaper to by one every two years , after the warranty end) and hand on that every two or three months.But The first Time you have to take a swim in the manure “pool” to save a new born calf push by the robot, you want to blow the robot with fire. Second time, you know that fire will not be enough, you want him to die drowned, burnt, Frozen, hanged, dislocated and roll on by a 40ton truck , all at the same time. I didn’t find a way to do that but if someone know, i have two or three robots who need this type of care.And the worst, to avoid bad thing to happen, only fix the seller had was hand activated method, and looking what the robot is doing….yeah, like the winch method, but 15 times more expensive….",
"parent_id": "8119641",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119712",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:02:09",
"content": "I know several farmers who have Lely robots and they have almost no issues and have been using these machines for years. Maybe they are lucky. Maintenance for them is a lot lower than hiring people to help with milking the cows. They have smaller dairy farms with 150-200 cows. I know someone with a tiny farm with 60 cows that still milks with the old suction cups from a pit. That’s a lot of hard work.I love those manure cleaning robots. So much fun to watch and the cows are so chill around it.",
"parent_id": "8119632",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119725",
"author": "Phelps",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:34:52",
"content": "Cows are so curious, I would love to see thefirsttime the mucking bot shows up and starts mucking out the stalls. I’ve seen cows form an investigation circle (best way I can describe it) around a littered Coca-Cola can, so the cows meeting the robot has to be hilarious.",
"parent_id": "8119712",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119834",
"author": "Butch Johnson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T00:20:32",
"content": "I agree",
"parent_id": "8119632",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119637",
"author": "Jan-Willem Markus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T08:01:44",
"content": "About fifteen years ago, I’ve worked on milking robots from Merlin and step counters to detect when cows are in heat. From a distance, these machines are magical, but as an engineer I know these systems have what is in Dutch known as ‘slimme geitjes’. =A play on words with clever solutions, with the literal translation being ‘smart goats’.Working on the farm was great, but it’s rather a hostile environment for electronics, with ammonia from the manure as well as harsh cleaning chemicals. It wasn’t too uncommon to receive boards for repair, of which components could be plucked with tweezers. If six components were missing, or could be removed, the board was scarp. Otherwise, we did component level repairs. I’ve learned a lot from working on these devices.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119692",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T13:54:06",
"content": "I just met one of these robots last November. My cousin runs an artisanal cheese company, He’s not a huge dairy farmer or anything, I think he has somewhere around 50-80 cows. He bought a used 2010 Lily A3 Next for $20k 3 years ago. He hasnt had any issues with it so far. He says its one of the best purchases he has ever made. Watching it scan, clean, and milk a cow all by itself was pretty cool. Watching the cow walk away, and another cow walking in all on its own was trippy. He said he had to lead them in the first couple of weeks then they just started self milking once they learned where to go. Kinda crazy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119694",
"author": "KC",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T13:59:26",
"content": "I briefly worked as a hand on a raw milk dairy farm in WA state during the covid insanity. While changing out parts on their tractor I got to talking with the owner about the automatic milking robots. He said it came down to cost of ownership, both in time and money. He said the biggest advantage would being able to get more data on each cow by analyzing the milk before it went into the main tank.As Garrut mentioned above it really is about deferred and offset labor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119727",
"author": "Phelps",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:37:23",
"content": "And like you mentioned, quality control. The milk gets analyzed at the most granular level, and it gets you indirect metrics on the cow itself.",
"parent_id": "8119694",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119766",
"author": "cplamb",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T17:52:30",
"content": "The cows have learned to visit the milking, feeding, and resting stations. Why can’t they learn to visit pooping stations?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119805",
"author": "derpa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T21:05:59",
"content": "We have to figure out how to make humans poop only in a designated spot first!",
"parent_id": "8119766",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119785",
"author": "Ryan Peachey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:36:06",
"content": "They do have potential on large farms but on many of the farms that I know of they wouldn’t fit unless you built a new barn.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119815",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T22:20:28",
"content": "Im not sure where you draw the small farm/large farm line,Google says A typical dairy farm in the US has around 115 mature cows.74% of US dairy farms have less than 100 cows,But 65% of the Nation’s Dairy herd live On 1,000 plus cow operations.My cousins Lely A3 Next was installed in a single stall of his barn. Its not that big at all. I pulled up the specs on their websiteHeight: 229 cm (90.16 in)Length: 423 cm (166.54 in)Width: 198 cm (77.95 in)The newer A4 and A5 are 131 inches long, 93 inches tall, and 90 inches wide.One lely robot can handle 60-70 cows.Turns out I was right with my estimate of 50-80 cows, my cousin says he has 75 cows but only 50-60 are “in milk” at any given time). He considers his operation small.Now I dont know if the $200k is targeted to small dairy’s budget, Maybe it is? But in talking with my cousin this morning, I found out that he knows a BUNCH of farms who have bought second hand units like his in the $15-25K range. He says when the big dairies upgrade the little guys jump to buy. He is thinking of buying a second one as a standby so he is covered if his ever fails.",
"parent_id": "8119785",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119910",
"author": "Garrut",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T10:14:35",
"content": "I don’t know if i could install by myself a free given milking robot for only 15k, maçonerie, piping and cable only.15k robot can be seen, but Like you said, this price is from sales by big farm needing to sell fast, not the real value of the robot, making small business jump on it.In France ,15k is the price for a second hand manuel milking station fitted with 18 automatic release succion cups, without install.",
"parent_id": "8119815",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119939",
"author": "SpillsDirt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:31:43",
"content": "If you do a websearch youll find that its not a “fire sale” price for older models. Thats just the resale price of the A3. When large dairy operations upgrade they arent getting rid of one or two machines. They are getting rid of 10-20, so theres a pretty decent supply of them coming to market all at once. The farms looking to buy are only going for 1 or 2, so the auction price stays pretty low. You even see them at second hand machine broker sites like machinio.Yes there is an expense to install involved, but its not as huge as you may imagine. The lely systems are fairly self contained and unless your running a bunch of them together to centralized tanks, you dont have to run much more than power. They do require a bit of concrete work for their base, though there are comapnies that sell prefabricated drop in place concrete base systems for them. I dont know the price. My cousin worked construction for 15 years before marrying into his farm, so he poured his own base from plans supplied by lely.Its not a terribly complex nor large construction as you can see herehttps://westcountryconcreteproducts.co.uk/agricultural-products/lely-milking-robot-bases/Ultimately, these expenses arent a huge barrier considering, as you said “15k is the price for a second hand manuel milking station fitted with 18 automatic release succion cups, without install.” so $15-20K for an older robot leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for installation expenses when a new robot, which would require the same installation expenses, costs $200k.BTW theres a Lely a3 classic on milcotec in denmark for only €6,760.00 Thats about half what my cousin paid for his.",
"parent_id": "8119910",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119786",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:42:08",
"content": "“Unless those robots get really cheap and low maintenance, the idea of fully automated dairy farms may still be a long while off,”raises a couple thoughts in my mind…obviously the fully-automated dairy farm is a long way off but truly no one cares about ‘low maintenance’, they just want ‘less maintenance than the alternative’. that’s something that i appreciate more every day.and the other thought is, we just need a robot to repair/clean the robot that repairs/cleans the robot that repairs/cleans the robot that repairs/cleans the cows :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120151",
"author": "Magpie",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T05:16:26",
"content": "I’ve heard about a lot of benefits from feeding robots. I guess part of it comes from not driving thru the barn with loud skid steers or tractors, not dragging in as much dirt/muck with the tires and keeping everything in the feed area much more tidy and clean.What i don’t hear much about is, how easy it is to fix and repair these machines when something inevitably breaks. Are they trying to go the John Deere path and lock down everything, so the farmer has to call a service tech every time, or are they more open to let farmers help themselves?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.717304
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/a-blacksmith-shows-us-how-to-choose-an-anvil/
|
A Blacksmith Shows Us How To Choose An Anvil
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"anvil",
"anvil shaped object"
] |
No doubt many readers have at times wished to try their hand at blacksmithing, but it’s fair to say that acquiring an anvil represents quite the hurdle. For anyone not knowing where to turn
there’s a video from [Black Bear Forge]
, in which he takes us through a range of budget options.
He starts with a sledgehammer, the simplest anvil of all, which we would agree makes a very accessible means to do simple forge work. He shows us a rail anvil and a couple of broken old anvils, before spending some time on a cheap Vevor anvil and going on to some much nicer more professional ones. It’s probably the Vevor which is the most interesting of the ones on show though, not because it is particularly good but because it’s a chance to see up close one of these very cheap anvils.
Are they worth taking the chance? The one he’s got has plenty of rough parts and casting flaws, an oddly-sited pritchel and a hardy hole that’s too small. These anvils are sometimes referred to as “Anvil shaped objects”, and while this one could make a reasonable starter it’s not difficult to see why it might not be the best purchase.
It’s a subject we have touched on before in our blacksmithing series
, so we’re particularly interested to see his take on it.
| 16
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119559",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T23:13:46",
"content": "Another one who knows all about Anvils is Wile E. Coyote.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119566",
"author": "H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T23:31:55",
"content": "Yeah, I thought anvils just fell on your head like the cartoons, I didn’t know you actually had to buy one!",
"parent_id": "8119559",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119573",
"author": "baltar",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T00:16:21",
"content": "30 kg VEVOR “anvil” is $250.30 kg PERUN anvil is $800.Either PERUN is a premium brand or VEVOR is an anvil-shaped object likely made of sumtingwrongium.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119703",
"author": "Jacob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T14:40:29",
"content": "The vevor anvils are cast steel with really poor quality control. In the video John even shows where it looks like they filled in flaws, and the hardness of the face varies a lot. The Perun anvil is forged steel and being from Poland likely has much better quality control.",
"parent_id": "8119573",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119575",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T00:47:24",
"content": "Just go to your nearest light rail and harvest yourself an anvil off the end of a spur.Top is usually pretty hard, hacksaw isn’t going to do the job.I recommend a shaped charge.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119577",
"author": "Vik",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T01:23:01",
"content": "Shaped charge costs more than an anvil. I asked a friend who worked on railway restoration to grab me a length next time the opportunity arose. Took a few months, but he came through.",
"parent_id": "8119575",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119597",
"author": "Ali",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:42:00",
"content": "Having friends is even more expensive than buying a shaped charge, and those are pretty easy to come by (explosives, not friends) if you’re living in Slovakia and know the right Telegram channels.",
"parent_id": "8119577",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119607",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:55:46",
"content": "a) get thee to craigslistb) find the oldest anvil you can find. maybe $1 a pound (freedom units) is about right. don’t worry about this too much like this guy is going on about.c) get a couple of friends, one must own a pickupd) put in locatione) sort it out with significant other later. unless he/she also has a couple of friends, with a pickup, there isn’t a lot or recourse.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119670",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T09:28:47",
"content": "Regarding anvils, Dan Gelbart reduced rebound and noise from an anvil by gluing sheets of lead to the sides. One surely has to take care while working with lead though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119772",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T18:44:02",
"content": "Elemental lead would be pretty low down on your list of hazards in a typical smithy.",
"parent_id": "8119670",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119774",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:00:02",
"content": "As long as you don’t accidentally burn it with a torch.",
"parent_id": "8119772",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119784",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:33:30",
"content": "Shouldn’t be an issue: you should be wearing appropriate footwear and long pants anyway, so the molten lead won’t harm you.",
"parent_id": "8119774",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120053",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T19:39:51",
"content": "The most astonishing hack I have seen for reducing anvil ring is strong magnets on a unobtrusive sides of the anvil.",
"parent_id": "8119670",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119765",
"author": "Chipk",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T17:51:43",
"content": "How are anvils produced? Are the ASO versions just inferior steel?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119820",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T22:43:43",
"content": "For that matter, what is a bad anvil? I’m no blacksmith but doesn’t it pretty much need to be heavy and… what else? Correct harness or something? Thanks in advance",
"parent_id": "8119765",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119837",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T01:13:00",
"content": "Two holes for holding tooling and doing punching, hard enough to not mushroom, soft enough to not chip, a decently sharp edge along the back for forming over, consistent hardness, a few other options if you’re doing something specialist like making/fitting/modifying horseshoes, massive enough to act like a more or less immovable object.",
"parent_id": "8119820",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,573.823285
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/designing-an-fm-drum-synth-from-scratch/
|
Designing An FM Drum Synth From Scratch
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Musical Hacks"
] |
[
"drum",
"filter",
"fm",
"synth",
"synthesizer",
"VCA",
"vco"
] |
How it started: a simple repair job on a Roland drum machine. How it ended: a
scratch-built FM drum synth module
that’s completely analog, and completely cool.
[Moritz Klein]’s journey down the analog drum machine rabbit hole started with a Roland TR-909, a hybrid drum machine from the mid-80s that combined sampled sounds with analog synthesis. The unit [Moritz] picked up was having trouble with the decay on the kick drum, so he spread out the gloriously detailed schematic and got to work. He breadboarded a few sections of the kick drum circuit to aid troubleshooting, but one thing led to another and he was soon in new territory.
The video below is on the longish side, with the first third or so dedicated to recreating the circuits used to create the 909’s iconic sound, slightly modifying some of them to simplify construction. Like the schematic that started the whole thing, this section of the video is jam-packed with goodness, too much to detail here. But a few of the gems that caught our eye were the voltage-controlled amplifier (VCA) circuit that seems to make appearances in multiple places in the circuit, and the dead-simple wave-shaper circuit, which takes some of the harmonics out of the triangle wave oscillator’s output with just a couple of diodes and some resistors.
Once the 909’s kick and toms section had been breadboarded, [Moritz] turned his attention to adding something Roland hadn’t included: frequency modulation. He did this by adding a second, lower-frequency voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) and using that to modulate the drum section. That resulted in a weird, metallic sound that can be tuned to imitate anything from a steel drum to a bell. He also added a hi-hat and cymbal section by mixing the square wave outputs on the VCOs through a funky XOR gate made from discrete components and a high-pass filter.
There’s a lot of information packed into this video, and by breaking everything down into small, simple blocks, [Moritz] makes it easy to understand analog synths and the circuits behind them.
| 14
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119538",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T20:59:48",
"content": "haha it’s a cool project, or it would be if it was documented off of youtube. but i would recommend revising the hackaday style guide to ban ‘from scratch’. the body of the article clearly states the design is derivative. you might call the build ‘from scratch’, but the headline is about the design. misapplying the phrase just provides needless dissonance when trying to parse it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119543",
"author": "Paul A LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:13:59",
"content": "Click the link to the youtube video, then click the link there to the website and you can find a full manual for the kit that can be purchased.",
"parent_id": "8119538",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122860",
"author": "fhunter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T16:02:03",
"content": "Then why not give the link to the site directly?",
"parent_id": "8119543",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122861",
"author": "fhunter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T16:02:50",
"content": "Actually – there is not link to the website. Only to the shop and video.",
"parent_id": "8119543",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8123015",
"author": "MK",
"timestamp": "2025-04-30T09:47:23",
"content": "manual/write-up is available here:https://www.ericasynths.lv/media/FM_DRUM_MANUAL.pdf",
"parent_id": "8119543",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119590",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:07:44",
"content": "I’d be great if there was a [video warning] before the link, I’m really tired of unknowingly spawning YouTube, as specially when I’m reading in bed. The way most articles have been going lately, I guess we should just assume they’re all videos.",
"parent_id": "8119538",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119611",
"author": "Sam likes art more than semantics",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T04:12:17",
"content": "I’m assuming you’re not super familiar with instruments, synthesis or specifically analog synthesis in general if you think this is not built from the ground up… in an oversimplification, it’s similar to saying an electric guitar is derivative because it’s not the first electric guitar.",
"parent_id": "8119538",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119787",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:46:18",
"content": "i’m actually super famliar with these things, and i specifically said that it is built from the ground up. perhaps reread my comment thanks",
"parent_id": "8119611",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119656",
"author": "abb",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T08:45:06",
"content": "To cook an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe",
"parent_id": "8119538",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119722",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T15:24:05",
"content": "Meh it’s been done universes are nothing new, I would have done it THIS way, clickbait, etc etc",
"parent_id": "8119656",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119762",
"author": "YoDrTentacles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T17:00:30",
"content": "Synth builders ALL rip each other off. It’s an open secret. Many of those copyrights are expired anyways and Behringer has built a whole company off of it. Bob Moog was notoriously terrible at business and copyrighted hardly any of his designs besides the 4-pole filter.It’s a well known fact that there are not a lot of new designs in analog synthesis and modular synth builders even joke about it (and share their schematics, btw). If you’re going to make that argument, you might as well bitch at people for making Atari Punk Consoles – which themselves are just copies of Forrest Mims’ Stepped Tone Generator from the old Engineer’s Notebooks.",
"parent_id": "8119538",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119789",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:49:43",
"content": "yeah i agree. i mean, the synth i play with every day is a softsynth i wrote ‘from scratch’ but the design is based on a synthesis of what i know as a ‘compilers and languages guy’ and stuff i learned from the excellent book ‘foundations of computer music’ and the other excellent book ‘the scientist and engineers guide to dsp’. accordingly, i would never say my design is ‘from scratch’.i’m making a pedantic semantic argument about the writing on hackaday. ilovederivative works and i would love reading about them even more if the writing didn’t give me cognitive dissonance",
"parent_id": "8119762",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119552",
"author": "Max",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:52:43",
"content": "The true hack is always in the comments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119760",
"author": "YoDrTentacles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:57:50",
"content": "For the record, all of Moritz Klein’s videos are fascinating for those wanting to learn how to build audio synthesizers completely from scratch and he even explains some electrical engineering basics if you don’t know a thermistor from a resistor. His more recent videos, since he started selling synth kits, may be a bit more monetized but his early stuff is highly informative and well-researched.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,573.770714
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/bicycle-gearbox-does-it-by-folding/
|
Bicycle Gearbox Does It By Folding
|
Fenix Guthrie
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"bike",
"bike hacks",
"derailleur",
"folding gear",
"gearbox"
] |
If you’ve spent any time on two wheels, you’ve certainly experienced the woes of poor bicycle shifting. You hit the button or twist the knob expecting a smooth transition into the next gear, only to be met with angry metallic clanking that you try to push though but ultimately can’t. Bicycle manufacturers collectively spent millions attempting to remedy this issue with the likes of gearboxes, electronic shifting, and even belt-driven bikes. But Praxis believes to have a better solution in
their prototype HiT system.
Rather then moving a chain between gears, their novel solution works by folding gears into or away from a chain. These gears are made up of four separate segments that individually pivot around an axle near the cog’s center. These segments are carefully timed to ensure there is no interference with the chain making shifting look like a complex mechanical ballet.
While the shift initialization is handled electronically, the gear folding synchronization is mechanical. The combination of electronic and mechanical systems brings near-instant shifting under load at rotational rates of 100 RPM. Make sure to scroll through the product page and watch the videos showcasing the mechanism!
The HiT gearbox is a strange hybrid between a derailleur and a gearbox. It doesn’t contain a clutch based gear change system or even a
CVT as seen in the famous Honda bike
of old. It’s fully sealed with more robust chains and no moving chainline as in a derailleur system. The prototype is configurable between four or sixteen speeds, with the four speed consisting of two folding gear pairs connected with a chain and the sixteen speed featuring a separate pair of folding gears. The output is either concentric to the input, or above the input for certain types of mountain bikes.
Despite the high level of polish, this remains a prototype and we eagerly await what Praxis does next with the system. In the meantime, make sure to check out this
chainless e-drive bicycle.
| 52
| 18
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119425",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T15:49:31",
"content": "I imagine it’s going to cost a lot too. Bicycling being the affordable hobby it is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119427",
"author": "davewebster007",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T15:55:35",
"content": "You seen the price of bikes recently?..Bottoms dropped out.Also KISS applies too. All the propietry kit is being frowned upon.Thing is this is a mostly solved problem with things like hyperglide and clutched derailures.",
"parent_id": "8119425",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119587",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:00:32",
"content": "Must be nice whatever you are, no such thing is happening here, partly because prices went up so far the drop in customers killed every dedicated bike shop, leaving only places that charge a significant premium or only carry garbage.",
"parent_id": "8119427",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119429",
"author": "Uwe Schmidt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:00:39",
"content": "Cycling is a means of transport for way more people than a hobby. Like people who have driving as a part of their work and spend considerably more on a comfortable vehicle everyday cyclists want to have a comfortable way of cycling, too. Gears are one part of it.",
"parent_id": "8119425",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119589",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:05:37",
"content": "Very true, but with the loss of dedicated shops in my area and the prevalence of mass produced junk that can’t upgraded like the old bikes it’s very much a premium thing. Adding to that, winter riding cannot be done with a conventional layout here, so those enthusiasts really are spending as much as car owners in some ways, at least until they are fully kitted out.Personally I’m only set up for summer as a result.",
"parent_id": "8119429",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119617",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T05:25:49",
"content": "“Cycling is a means of transport for way more people than a hobby.”I am on the second group. I went to a debate about cycling in cities where i was the only one raising the ‘hobby’ part of cycling, riding enduro and biikng for fun in the forest.",
"parent_id": "8119429",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119447",
"author": "eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:09:43",
"content": "I have a Pinion gearbox on one of my box. They are indeed expensive but as a heart attack survivor who learned his lesson: I see it as a luxury investment in myself. If I’m gonna torture myself to stay healthy, may as well make it a posh torture experience.",
"parent_id": "8119425",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119461",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:04:10",
"content": "A low performance bike that is inefficient will give you a greater work out in less distance. Hit the trails on a beach cruiser with ape hangers. Probably swap out the coaster brakes though so you don’t wreck yourself in the dirt.",
"parent_id": "8119447",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119469",
"author": "eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:30:57",
"content": "True! But since the heart attack two of my clinders have worn rings and bad compression. I need to make it easier not harder. Bought an ebike for that reason recently. Getting up there and age and gotta keep the maximum heartrate low. Don’t use nicotine kids, it ain’t worth it.",
"parent_id": "8119461",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119485",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:59:35",
"content": "” But since the heart attack two of my clinders have worn rings and bad compression” LOL, good one! Hey, who cares the pace. At least your getting out and not staying on the couch.",
"parent_id": "8119469",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119583",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T01:58:00",
"content": "Nice to hear you’re maintaining the activity with, most don’t.Where are our really accessible body mods? Oh right, liability claims and DIY don’t play well together. Oh well, maybe we’ll be able to grow new valve tissue while you still need it. Too bad extra cylinders really aren’t on the table for now.",
"parent_id": "8119469",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120154",
"author": "Magpie",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T05:36:54",
"content": "I invested in a bike with Pinion gearbox and gates belt a few years ago as well. Best thing i ever had on a bike. I commute to work all year on the bike, in a wet and cold (snow, roadsalt) climate.Minimal maintenance compared to chain/derailleur systems, shifting the full gear range under load and at stand still and no chain oil messing up my pants and the bike is really nice. Maybe it’s not as good in transmission efficiency as a chain system, but the benefits for me are worth it, even if i have to pedal a bit harder and i had to pay more to buy the bike.",
"parent_id": "8119447",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119848",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:35:01",
"content": "Yeah, you can spend $25K on a bike these days; but the few people who buy those are ones who know how to shift and would not be attracted by this kind of product.",
"parent_id": "8119425",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121441",
"author": "Kris Czerepak",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T21:35:35",
"content": "Judging from the off center shaft rotation I think this design is just a cam lobe mechanically actuating the gear in and out. This would actually be pretty easy to machine mechanically if done in bulk. Though for a hobby job shop it would be super cost prohibitive.",
"parent_id": "8119425",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119430",
"author": "Ken C",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:05:03",
"content": ">twist the knobWhat is this, 2001?>metallic clanking that you try to push though but ultimately can’tBack in 2001 knowledge on how to properly adjust derailleur (and maybe diagnose faults like bent hanger or even something as basic as a worn chain) was a closely guarded secret. In my provincial town of some 30k residents there was only one dude dealing in that. He literally built a large house, bought two brand new BMWs and sent his kids to the college by importing, selling and then fixing cheap chinese MTBs. But this is not 2001 anymore. You can find dozens of high-quality video tutorials on YouTube. Basic (but not made of tofu) tools required for derailleur adjustment are like $30 delivered. There’s no excuse for riding a badly maintained bike nowdays. Even the BBB-4 book can be easily found at Anna’s if you can’t afford to spend $29.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119433",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:20:08",
"content": "I’ll still take mine to the bike shop as he does adjustments every day. Comes back all ready to go.Neat tech above. Someone is always thinking!",
"parent_id": "8119430",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119456",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:58:51",
"content": "switching to a larger (more teeth) gear while under maximum load is effectively impossible, regardless of how well-adjusted it is or what fancy derailleur you bought. if you don’t agree with me then your legs are weak haha",
"parent_id": "8119430",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119556",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T22:04:12",
"content": "Impossible for the rider you mean? It looks like the transmission might be able to handle it as it folds in the gear segment when the chain is/would not be in contact with that segment of the gear.",
"parent_id": "8119456",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119562",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T23:24:56",
"content": "“switching… while under load…”Sooo…Operator error makes things work bad… What a revelation.In other news, keeping your engine at redline and trying to shift without your clutch is going to ’cause extra wear’…I have never understood people who use a thing wrong, then complain about the bad experience.Everything has flaws.Learning how to work with those flaws is a requirement.A literal requirement, not a suggestion.I’m sure the gearbox highlighted in this article has flaws too, including being MUCH more expensive, mechanically AND electrically complex, and having more/different failure modes, among other things.Even if it solves a “problem”, the operator still needs to use it properly, which is antithetical to it’s marketed purpose.",
"parent_id": "8119456",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119846",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:29:27",
"content": "haha man yeah let me tell you a story…i’ve got 300lb of roofing supplies on a trailer on the back of my bike. okay, because i’m a moron. but at least this trailer, i actually engineered it for 300lbs before loading it up (unlike the previous trailer)anyways, i think to downshift before i hit the one small hill in my journey, but i don’t downshiftenoughand as it slowly steepens i realize that what i’ve come to think of as ‘soft pedaling’ over the past 2 miles of dragging this thing around is in fact awfully close to what would normally be called ‘maximum load’ and in fact i don’t have any headroom to take the load off enough to shift. so i strain and strain and bend the shift lever, to no avail. and i can’t make it, so i stop. and now even though i shifted it manually while it was stopped, i have to get it going again from a dead stop on a hill. i barely pulled that one off.so tldr: can confirmr. ‘requirement’.",
"parent_id": "8119562",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119850",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:44:22",
"content": "I had that kind of experience last year without a trailer, on my road bike, but it was a nearly-20% grade and I thought I could power up it in the 42T middle ring (and the biggest (26T) cog. I was wrong, and I couldn’t keep it up for the duration, and had to go to the granny ring. That was my fault though. My eyes were bigger than my stomach, figuratively speaking, for this climb. I was forced to stop, shift, and go back downhill a bit to get clipped back in, and then try to turn around and head back up. That’s extremely rare though. The key us just anticipate the need for the lower gear early enough that you can soft-pedal for a turn or twobeforeyou get into trouble!",
"parent_id": "8119846",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119473",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:39:50",
"content": "/me laughs from the 1970s. Derailleurs always were easy, and we only had books to learn from.",
"parent_id": "8119430",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119551",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:43:00",
"content": "You had a book? We just had SWAG",
"parent_id": "8119473",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119851",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:46:05",
"content": "And even before indexing, when we had down-tube friction shifters and only five cogs on the freewheel, we’d operate both levers at once with the right hand while braking with the left, and do it perfectly.",
"parent_id": "8119473",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120065",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T21:08:19",
"content": "Sheldon BrownThere was and is a website. Just wasn’t easy to find without the right keywords.",
"parent_id": "8119430",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119434",
"author": "Chris Pepin",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:25:29",
"content": "Or you could just buy a 7-speed internal hub and not have to mess with a derailleur at all.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119564",
"author": "Toby",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T23:28:40",
"content": "Or more – I am commuting on an 11sp internally geared Shimano Alfine hub, it works great, they’re cheaper than a regular drivetrain, and I get to tell people I changed my oil… on my bicycle!",
"parent_id": "8119434",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119435",
"author": "Actually...",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:32:05",
"content": "“no moving chainline as in a derailleur system”Maybe the primary chainline does not move but there is clearly a moving chainline in the video, So now instead of ONE chain that you can easily access and correct in a failure, you have 3 chains, two of which are locked away when they fail.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119457",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:00:28",
"content": "i don’t think that’s true. i don’t understand how it works but they’re explicit that the internal chains do not move laterally either. i am extrapolating from one photo, but it seems like the larger gear is itself made of four components, each quadrant hinging in and out of the chain line.not saying it’s good but it does not seem to move the chainline, period.",
"parent_id": "8119435",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119444",
"author": "f__",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:00:24",
"content": "There is no moving chainline, as the chains do not move from side-to-side. That’s nice.However, I don’t really see the point in this system. I don’t see how it could support more than 4 gears without a lot of hassle and duplicated components. They are extremele vague about this, so my understanding is that they could just add another cluster with 4 gears, but that means extra chains, idlers, probably another freewheel or some clutch to decouple the different clusters, extra actuators, etc. — that’s hardly cost effective nor weight efficient. Of course they’d like to target the electric bike market: motors can overcome low efficiencies easily, and looking at the solutions on the market, neither designers nor riders know how to ride a bike properly, so shifting under full (motor) load is quite common. This is a system that can provide a wide range of gears (albeit few gears overall) with a robust transmission that can be shifted under heavy load.It’s nice because it’s innovative, but I really don’t see the point. They don’t even want to publish their measured efficiency, excusing themselves that they are a small team and measuring the efficiency is just too much work, etc. etc. etc. — that’s a load of rubbish. Of course they know the efficiency (it’s not that hard to get some ballpark measurements of drivetrain efficiency, even hobbyists have been collecting measurements of various systems), and if they don’t publish it, it’ll be quite bad.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119452",
"author": "frickr",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:44:50",
"content": "Would it be possible to combine two motor/generater units and a planetary to make a prius-like electric cvt?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119466",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:21:53",
"content": "the idea of a gearing system with non-interference meshing is attractive. just plain neat. the idea of a gear that folds in the middle is preposterous, but maybe outrageous is just a synonym for “bold” or “innovative.”the idea of having all of this sophistication inside of a sealed box so that the grease doesn’t turn black and abrasive with road grime is definitely attractive too.but this is an absolute non-starter, because it seems to require a new bicycle frame. one of the biggest things hindering adoption of belt-drive (which i would like to use) is that it isn’t just a drop-in replacement. this gear box has that problem on steroids. literally precisely zero people will drop this in as a replacement on an existing bike, because it isn’t possible. it will only be available on bikes that are purpose-built to sell this component, and that will be a very rough road to travel, even if they work out all of the weaknesses and make a very functional product. i could imagine it being included in some specialty bike, e-bike or cargo bike sort of thing. hard to imagine it standing out from the competition enough to catch on.it reminds me of the constant battle with maintenance…when i started as a teenager, i never wanted to do any maintenance. and as i became aware of the importance of maintenance, i started looking into products that minimize maintenance…and it took me a long time to accept the reality that it doesn’t really work that way. there’s nothing that you ‘just works’ forever. at best, your window between maintenances might be twice as large. a better chain lube might go 2 months instead of 1 month. but i had already been in the habit of oiling it every 3 months (and all of the downsides) before i even read about the magical 2 month lube!so i have always hated derailleurs because they become very frustrating as they express their need for maintenance. but i recently learned, on my 1990s mtb, the derailleur that i had kept frozen in one position for a literal decade of winter biking…all it needed was wd40 and elbow grease. that’s a level of maintainability that will be very hard to match, even on a product that is sealed so it doesn’t pick up road grime.these days i delight in the ease of maintenance rather than the dream of foregoing it. for example, i lube every week now with a one-step clean&lube product. those sealed internal gears will last better than exposed gears, but they will still need to be replaced. so i like the gears i have that i know how to replace.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119471",
"author": "Padrote",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:36:59",
"content": "there is nothing “non starter” about something like this because it doesn’t work on an existing bike. there are like dozens of successful e-bikes on the market that are designed around specific drive units not made by the frame manufacturer.",
"parent_id": "8119466",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119502",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:34:49",
"content": "yeah like i said it could easily be integrated into an e-bike because they’re already building custom frames. ‘successful’ is an interesting description for e-bikes so far. certainly there are sales volume successes but in my limited exposure they still all seem like one-off prototypes to me. i don’t think any company or design has won the market or shown any staying power yet.the question for this company is whether the one ‘me too’ e-bike manufacturer that gambles on this gear system somehow outcompetes in a market with so many flops and niche dead ends.one of the real problems of something like this is that if it is extremely awesome and extremely rare, then when it breaks you throw it away and it disappears entirely. without mass adoption, there’s no way to maintain it or even to justify development of a version 2.0.",
"parent_id": "8119471",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119579",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T01:33:57",
"content": "Why would you expect one ebike manufacturer to ‘win’?But yeah, this tranny ain’t going anywhere.For this much effort, cost and weight, you could install a bicycle sized Muncie style 4 speed with gears and shafts.Have a bike with a H shift pattern, would be cool.Shell heads are a pretentious, weird bunch though.No telling what they’ll buy, except it will be obviously expensive, useless to them and impractical.",
"parent_id": "8119502",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119849",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T02:38:57",
"content": "i wouldn’t expect one ebike manufacturer to win, but i do expect one ebike design to eventually win, more or less. after a fashion, the parts will standardize through a process of attrition and value-engineering.just like they have with normal bikes. i’m not clear entirely on the timeline but these days, in the middle of the US, most bikes i run into (keeping in mind that i never do anything top-of-the-line) have basically compatible sets of components….whereas i have stumbled on lots of evidence that there used to be an enormous useless diversity and incompatibility.though i did just meet a “20 inch wheel” with a 12mm ID bearing…wanted a 1/2″ one. so there must besomeparallel worlds out there",
"parent_id": "8119579",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119852",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T03:00:47",
"content": "Unfortunately Greg there is still a log of incompatibility today in bikes. Frames and forks made for rim brakes can’t take disc brakes, and vice-versa. Most newer high-end bikes take thru-axles, not the regular quick-release type. There are lots of bottom-bracket bearing types (but I’m glad that it sounds like at least they’re getting away from the press-in types that drove people nuts with their creaking!). Many frames require seat posts that don’t fit other frames. Then there are lots of mutually incompatible freehub body types. (Why can’t they just standardize on HG?!) And there’s more. Wayne has a Rumble video channel Waynosfotos where he shows various problems with the industry’s new stuff which it uses to try to grow in a flat market by convincing us that what we have is not adequate and we need to buy the latest thing, and it runs the prices out of sight, and then it laments that it has warehouses full of bikes that don’t sell!",
"parent_id": "8119579",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119530",
"author": "Cunning",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T20:39:25",
"content": "Get a Rohloff. That is as close to no maintenance as you will get on a standard bike frame. I’ve never ridden on a Pinion but I assume they are as “no maintenance” as a rohloff, but you have to have a special frame for them.Every 6 months you drop the oil and put a syringe of new oil in. Nothing ever needs adjusting. Nothing ever misses a beat.",
"parent_id": "8119466",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119854",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T03:07:09",
"content": "With regular derailleurs, the only maintenance issue I’ve had is that a couple of times the front derailleur has kind of frozen up and needed a little lube and working it back and forth to free it up. My rear derailleurs have never needed any maintenance after I went to ball-bearing pulleys some 60,000 miles ago. (The Shimano pulleys that claimed to have ceramic sleeve bearings were terrible.) Same goes for those of my family whose bikes I maintain. As for our chains, see my graphite-and-paraffin chain-lube method that gives me at least 20,000 miles on a chain and cassette and they keep themselves (and the rest of the drivetrain) clean, athttp://wilsonminesco.com/bikes/chainwax/",
"parent_id": "8119466",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119468",
"author": "Padrote",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:30:36",
"content": "it’s certainly neat tech. but the thing is already the size of an e-bike drive unit. partnering with a drive unit manufacturer to package it into something practical seems unrealistic. it will be relegated to bike trade show vaporware.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119495",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:16:44",
"content": "Very cool looking, but I’m skeptical about the wisdom of passing my motive power through an expensive gear that splits into 4 separate hinged arcs of metal each time I shift. Not to mention the electrical aspect.When I break a chain I can just pull the spare from my saddle bag. When this thing breaks I feel like I’ll need to cancel my plans for the week.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119526",
"author": "Michael Rinkle",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T20:33:42",
"content": "Maybe there’s a cheaper way to compensate for the cables stretching.. like if there was maybe some kind of adjustments we as consumers could make to the cable to make it shift proper again.That would be cool, but Elon musk would prolly have to solve it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119537",
"author": "Overly Pedantic Engineer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T20:53:29",
"content": "Has no one here had the pleasure of riding a bike with a proper set of derailleurs? Yes, the cheap stuff on WalMart bikes is horrible, but Shimano or Campagnolo’s higher end stuff that goes on competition level road and mountain bikes? It has none of those issues, even with two wildly different sized chainrings up front. Yes, it requires minor adjustment once every year or so to keep it shifting like a clock, but it’s much more maintainable than this ever will be.It’s cool that they invented this, but it’s a solution in search of a problem. It’s also got to be so heavy it’ll only go on e-bikes, at which point why not just stick a belt-based CVT on it? Still less complex than this.",
"parent_id": "8119526",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119561",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T23:24:54",
"content": "At first sight this looks interesting, but this moving of those 4 segments looks quite complicated, and thus heavy and expensive. (But apparently it’s still in the prototype stage, so it might see improvements) As an alternative, bicycle gears are are usually made of quite thin metal, If you cut a gear wheel open on one side, you can easily bend it into a slight spiral. Such a spiral can be moved into the gear path tooth by tooth. (And of course the other gear moved out of the way). This would look more like the classic gear stack for a derailleur, but with the gears moving.Another option would even look more like the classic derailleur. The simplest would be to simply move the gears themselves over a spline (so keeping the chain in place), Shifting can be improved by canti levering the gear stack into the chain path, and then half a turn later, put the gear stack straight again but shifted into the new gear.Yet another system I would find interesting (but have never seen in the wild) is to integrate a shifting method into the front sprocket. Some thirty years ago I had a Shimano Biopace (one of the first “not round” sprockets) and thought it was kinda neat, but was not really convinced of it’s effectiveness. Only when the sprocket was worn out and I replaced it again with a round sprocket, it became obvious to me how much I liked the biopace sprocket. But still, it was quite expensive, and also went off the market. In the last 10+ years other brands of “not round” sprockets have become more common. It should be possible to move segments of such a sprocket radially to change the sprocket diameter. Skipping a few teeth is not a big problem, with bigger gear ratio, extra segments could be put in between the other segments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119568",
"author": "deL",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T23:50:07",
"content": "I disagree. Contemporary derailleur bicycle gears are fabulous! They’ve even worked-out the ratios, so you get super efficient acceleration. It will take some effort to improve on what we already now have.🚴=-",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119570",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T00:04:38",
"content": "No one is going to call out how this is a copy of Veer?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119598",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:55:46",
"content": "This looks like gratuitous use of bicycle chain, to build a gearbox. It’s pretty and it’ll meat expectations, very “bicycle”, but would you buy that for your car? Motorcycle?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119687",
"author": "Valentijn Sessink",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T12:20:31",
"content": "Looks like whenever not all of the segments are engaged, the rotations will be uneven?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119779",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:21:58",
"content": "I’m not bike expert, but this seems kludge compared to a planetary gear hub. Are there any advantages to that thing over geared hub? It’s bigger, more complicated, requires electronics, and has to be heavier.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119780",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:27:39",
"content": "Why would you need transmission on an e-bike? Aren’t e-bike electric motors constant torque?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119782",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T19:30:55",
"content": "This gave me an idea (that likely wouldn’t work).A small gear made of individual slices that expand out as you shift.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120153",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T05:34:51",
"content": "My dad purchased one that worked like that in the late 1980s, it wasn’t great. Maybe it was just the way that they implemented it that was the main problem.",
"parent_id": "8119782",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,573.920118
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/supercon-2024-exploring-the-ocean-with-open-source-hardware/
|
Supercon 2024: Exploring The Ocean With Open Source Hardware
|
Tom Nardi
|
[
"cons",
"Featured",
"hardware",
"Slider"
] |
[
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"buoy",
"iridium",
"research buoy"
] |
If you had to guess, what do you think it would take to build an ocean-going buoy that could not only survive on its own without human intervention for more than two years, but return useful data the whole time? You’d probably assume such a feat would require beefy hardware, riding inside an expensive and relatively large watertight vessel of some type — and for good reason, the ocean is an unforgiving environment, and has sent far more robust hardware to the briny depths.
But as Wayne Pavalko found back in 2016, a little planning can go a long way. That’s when he launched the first of what he now calls Maker Buoys: a series of solar-powered drifting buoys that combine a collection of off-the-shelf sensor boards with an Arduino microcontroller and an Iridium Short-Burst Data (SBD) modem in a relatively simple watertight box.
He guessed that first buoy might last a few weeks to a month, but when he finally lost contact with it after 771 days, he realized there was real potential for reducing the cost and complexity of ocean research.
Wayne recalled the origin of his project and updated the audience on where it’s gone from there during his 2024 Supercon talk,
Adventures in Ocean Tech: The Maker Buoy Journey
. Even if you’re not interested in charting ocean currents with homebrew hardware, his story is an inspirational reminder that sometimes a fresh approach can help solve problems that might at first glance seem insurmountable.
DIY All the Way
As Dan Maloney commented when he
wrote-up that first buoy’s journey in 2017
, the Bill of Materials for a Maker Buoy is tailored for the hobbyist. Despite being capable of journeys lasting for several thousand kilometers in the open ocean, there’s no marine-grade unobtainium parts onboard. Indeed, nearly all of the electronic components can be sourced from Adafruit, with the most expensive line item being the RockBLOCK 9603 Iridium satellite modem at $299.
Even the watertight container that holds all the electronics is relatively pedestrian. It’s the sort of plastic latching box you might put your phone or camera in on a boat trip to make sure it stays dry and floats if it falls overboard. Wayne points out that the box being clear is a huge advantage, as you can mount the solar panel internally. Later versions of the Maker Buoy even included a camera that could peer downward through the bottom of the box.
Wayne says that first buoy was arguably over-built, with each internal component housed in its own waterproof compartment. Current versions instead hold all of the hardware in place with a 3D printed internal frame. The bi-level framework puts the solar panel, GPS, and satellite modem up at the top so they’ve got a clear view of the sky, and mounts the primary PCB, battery, and desiccant container down on the bottom.
The only external addition necessary is to attach a 16 inch (40 centimeter) long piece of PVC pipe to the bottom of the box, which acts as a passive stabilizer. Holes drilled in the pipe allow it to fill with water once submerged, lowering the buoy’s center of gravity and making it harder to flip over. At the same time, should the buoy find itself inverted due to wave action, the pipe will make it top-heavy and flip it back over.
It’s simple, cheap, and incredibly effective. Wayne mentions that data returned from onboard Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) have shown that Maker Buoys do occasionally find themselves going end-over-end during storms, but they always right themselves.
Like Space…But Wetter
The V1 Maker Buoy was designed to be as reliable as possible.
Early on in his presentation, Wayne makes an interesting comparison when talking about the difficulties in developing the Maker Buoy. He likens it to operating a spacecraft in that your hardware is never coming back, nobody will be able to service it, and the only connection you’ll have to the craft during its lifetime is a relatively low-bandwidth link.
But one could argue that the nature of Iridium communications makes the mission of the Maker Buoy even more challenging than your average spacecraft. As the network is really only designed for short messages — at one point Wayne mentions that even sending low-resolution images of only a few KB in size was something of an engineering challenge — remotely updating the software on the buoy isn’t an option. So even though the nearly fifty year old
Voyager 1 can still receive the occasional software patch
from billions of miles away, once you drop a Maker Buoy into the ocean, there’s no way to fix any bugs in the code.
Because of this, Wayne decided to take the extra step of adding a hardware watchdog timer that can monitor the buoy’s systems and reboot the hardware if necessary. It’s a bit like unplugging your router when the Internet goes out…if your Internet was coming from a satellite low-Earth orbit and your living room happened to be in the middle of the ocean.
From One to Many
After publishing information about his first successful Maker Buoy online, Wayne says it wasn’t long before folks started contacting him about potential applications for the hardware. In 2018, a Dutch non-profit expressed interest in buying 50 buoys from him to study the movement of floating plastic waste in the Pacific. The hardware was more than up to the task, but there was just one problem: up to this point, Wayne had only built a grand total of four buoys.
Opportunities like this, plus the desire to offer the Maker Buoy in kit and ready to deploy variants for commercial and educational purposes, meant Wayne had to streamline his production. When it’s just a personal project, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to assemble or if everything goes together correctly the first time. But that approach just won’t work if you need to deliver functional units in quantities that you can’t count on your fingers.
As Wayne puts it, making something and making something that’s easily producible are really two very different things. The production becomes a project in its own right. He explains that investing the time and effort to make repetitive tasks more efficient and reliable, such as developing jigs to hold pieces together while you’re working on them, more than pays off for itself in the end. Even though he’s still building them himself in his basement, he uses an assembly line approach that allows for the consistent results expected by paying customers.
A Tale Well Told
While the technical details of how Wayne designed and built the different versions of the Maker Buoy are certainly interesting, it’s hearing the story of the project from inception to the present day that really makes watching this talk worthwhile. What started as a simple “What If” experiment has spiraled into a side-business that has helped deploy buoys all over the planet.
Admittedly, not every project has that same potential for growth. But hearing Wayne tell the Maker Buoy story is the sort of thing that makes you want to go dust off that project that’s been kicking around in the back of your head and finally give it a shot. You might be surprised by the kind of adventure taking a chance on a wild idea can lead to.
| 10
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119460",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:01:58",
"content": "I like the ocean which is why I can confidently say that we should not be making advances in exploring it, especially if it makes it cheaper to do so. The problem is that if we do make advances then the people who don’t care about the ocean now have access to more potential resources. One thing you have to keep in mind is that almost all of the ocean is international waters and thus has minimal protections from polluters.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119483",
"author": "asheets",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:55:28",
"content": "Sounds like that old Roy Schieder seriesSeaQuest.",
"parent_id": "8119460",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119497",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:24:53",
"content": "Interesting the minimal design inside a clear box to make waterproofing easier, the Woods Hole and NOAA buoys use a type of sea anchor to have the buoys move more with the current. There were some Ham Radio folks in New Zealand I believe that built some buoys and had no solar panels, but used a bunch of D cells to power the buoy, they would last I think around two years, the buoy was basically a piece of PVC pipe that floated vertical because of the D cells at the very bottom.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119506",
"author": "Maker Buoy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:45:54",
"content": "The clear box came in handy when someone asked for the downlooking cameras. The physical integration was pretty trivial and the only work was pushing images through the Iridium SBD service. The solar comes in when users ask for really high update rates (3-5 min) or running an AIS receiver at 50% duty where primary batteries won’t last long enough. I’ve actually used the PVC pipe approach for some Arctic deployments–works great.",
"parent_id": "8119497",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119739",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:02:24",
"content": "How much will the subscription to the service gut me? I feel hardware costs are trivial compared to this factor.",
"parent_id": "8119506",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120221",
"author": "Maker Buoy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T11:13:08",
"content": "For most uses (updates every 2 hrs), $25/mo. That breaks down to a fixed monthly activation fee of $17 and $8 for data. Able to pack three sets of data (time, position, orientation, & water temperature) into a 50B message.",
"parent_id": "8119739",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8122201",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-26T19:38:46",
"content": "Thanks for the reply! I came back very happy to see it’s actually reasonably priced. The size of the dataframe is totally sufficient for the benefit of global coverage.",
"parent_id": "8120221",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119500",
"author": "Mr Nobody",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:32:43",
"content": "Add a small electric motor to it and make it go places ….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119508",
"author": "Maker Buoy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:50:31",
"content": "So many people more skilled than I have done this, including a current deployment by Damon McMillan of Seacharger fame. Check it out!https://www.bluetrailengineering.com/fun-stuff.",
"parent_id": "8119500",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119612",
"author": "captnmike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T04:18:48",
"content": "Interesting, but would the T200 Thruster be better since it is shrouded and brush-less? Well done design",
"parent_id": "8119508",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,573.972656
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/budget-schlieren-imaging-setup-uses-3d-printing-to-reveal-the-unseen/
|
Budget Schlieren Imaging Setup Uses 3D Printing To Reveal The Unseen
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"3d print",
"Schlieren",
"Schlieren photography",
"shadowgraph"
] |
We’re suckers here for projects that let you see the unseeable, and [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] provides that on a budget with their
$30 Schlieren Imaging Setup
. The unseeable in question is differences in air density– or, more precisely, differences in the refractive index of the fluid the imaging set up makes use of, in this case air. Think of how you can see waves of “heat” on a warm day– that’s lower-density hot air refracting light as it rises. Schlieren photography takes advantage of this, allowing to analyze fluid flows– for example, the mach cones in a DIY rocket nozzle, which is what got [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] interested in the technique.
Examining exhaust makes this a useful tool for [Aerospace].
This is a ‘classic’ mirror-and-lamp Schlieren set up. You put the system you wish to film near the focal plane of a spherical mirror, and camera and light source out at twice the focal distance. Rays deflected by changes in refractive index miss the camera– usually one places a razor blade precisely to block them, but [Ayden] found that when using a smart phone that was unnecessary, which shocked this author.
While it is possible that [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] has technically constructed a
shadowgraph
, they claim that carefully positioning the smartphone allows the sharp edge of the case to replace the razor blade. A shadowgraph, which shows the second derivative of density, is a perfectly valid technique for flow visualization, and is superior to Schlieren photography in some circumstances– when looking at shock waves, for example.
Regardless, the great thing about this project is that [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] provides us with STLs for the mirror and smartphone mounting, as well as providing a BOM and a clear instructional video. Rather than arguing in the comments if this is “truly” Schlieren imaging, grab a mirror, extrude some filament, and test it for yourself!
There are
many ways to do Schlieren images
. We’ve highighted
background-oriented techniques
, and seen how to do it
with a moiré pattern
, or even a selfie stick. Still, this is the first time 3D printing has gotten involved and the build video below is quick and worth watching for those sweet, sweet Schlieren images.
| 9
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119377",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T11:51:49",
"content": "I can see a smartphone Schlieren setup being able to avoid using an external stop just by the entrance pupil for the camera being so danged tiny to start with.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119386",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:26:58",
"content": "Now I could be wrong but I think the knife edge of a Schlieren is intentionally asymmetric across the pupil plane and this is what yields an image which is more sensitive to changes in the first derivative along the axis of the edge at the expense of intensity/exposure/noise. The edge/stop is blocking light but only in one direction which yields a characteristic image which is darker on one half than the other.Shadowgraphs have always been able to use cameras or even photographic film with or without a stop. It’s just a less ‘specific’ operating principal.I agree with the reporting here, this is a shadowgraph. That doesn’t make it any less awesome though.",
"parent_id": "8119377",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119383",
"author": "Crawford",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:20:31",
"content": "Please don’t use term ‘ weaponizes’ unless someone is using something as a weapon. This is an extremely poor choice of words, and makes no sense. I Schlieren photographyutilizesthat observation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119414",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:39:57",
"content": "+1",
"parent_id": "8119383",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119401",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:08:50",
"content": "don’t actually know anything about razors but i just realized i’ve done this… take my 6″ reflector telescope out on a cold night and have it just a little out-of-focus and you can see every waft of hot air coming off of it as it cools. once the aparatus has cooled off, i can hold my hand just below the aperture and watch the hot air come off my hand",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119498",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:28:57",
"content": "You can do this with a spotting scope when shooting to read the wind.",
"parent_id": "8119401",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119550",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:33:41",
"content": "Thats a serious tip!",
"parent_id": "8119498",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119415",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:45:16",
"content": "I wonder if this kind of setup could be used as a cheap alternative to detect overheating faulty component (shorted for example) on a PCB, instead of using a rather expensive thermal camera?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119763",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T17:30:26",
"content": "probably hard to pull up with any precision, but yes. you can get cheap thermal cam for not a lot nowaday. there’s plenty of sub 100$ options now, including some 240×240 /25hz model",
"parent_id": "8119415",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,574.271364
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/porting-cobol-code-and-the-trouble-with-ditching-domain-specific-languages/
|
Porting COBOL Code And The Trouble With Ditching Domain Specific Languages
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] |
[
"cobol",
"FORTRAN",
"gnucobol"
] |
Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion. After all, what could be better than ditching decades of crusty old code in a language that only your grandparents can remember as being relevant? Surely a clean and fresh rewrite in a modern language like Java, Rust, Python, Zig, or NodeJS will fix all ailments and make future maintenance a snap?
For anyone who has ever had to actually port large codebases or dealt with ‘legacy’ systems, their reflexive response to such announcements most likely ranges from a shaking of one’s head to mad cackling as traumatic memories come flooding back. The old idiom of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, purportedly
coined in 1977
by Bert Lance, is a feeling that has been shared by countless individuals over millennia. Even worse, how can you ‘fix’ something if you do not even fully understand the problem?
In the case of languages like COBOL this is doubly true, as it is a domain specific language (DSL). This is a very different category from general purpose system programming languages like the aforementioned ‘replacements’. The suggestion of porting the DSL codebase is thus to effectively reimplement all of COBOL’s functionality, which should seem like a very poorly thought out idea to any rational mind.
Sticking To A Domain
The term ‘domain specific language’ is pretty much what it says it is, and there are many of such DSLs around, ranging from PostScript and SQL to the shader language
GLSL
. Although it is definitely possible to push DSLs into doing things which they were never designed for, the primary point of a DSL is to explicitly limit its functionality to that one specific domain. GLSL, for example, is based on C and could be considered to be a very restricted version of that language, which raises the question of why one should not just write shaders in C?
Similarly, Fortran (Formula translating system) was designed as a DSL targeting scientific and high-performance computation. First used in 1957, it still ranks in the top 10 of the TIOBE index, and just about any code that has to do with high-performance computation (HPC) in science and engineering will be written in Fortran or strongly relies on libraries written in Fortran. The reason for this is simple: from the beginning Fortran was designed to make such computations as easy as possible, with subsequent updates to the language standard adding updates where needed.
Fortran’s latest standard update was published in November 2023, joining the COBOL 2023 standard as two DSLs which are both still very much alive and very current today.
The strength of a DSL is often underestimated, as the whole point of a DSL is that you can teach this simpler, focused language to someone who can then become fluent in it, without requiring them to become fluent in a generic programming language and all the libraries and other luggage that entails. For those of us who already speak C, C++, or Java, it may seem appealing to write everything in that language, but not to those who have no interest in learning a whole generic language.
There are effectively two major reasons why a DSL is the better choice for said domain:
Easy to learn and teach, because it’s a much smaller language
Far fewer edge cases and simpler tooling
In the case of COBOL and Fortran this means only a fraction of the keywords (‘verbs’ for COBOL) to learn, and a language that’s streamlined for a specific task, whether it’s to allow a physicist to do some fluid-dynamic modelling, or a staff member at a bank or the social security offices to write a data processing application that churns through database data in order to create a nicely formatted report. Surely one could force both of these people to learn C++, Java, Rust or NodeJS, but this may backfire in many ways, the resulting code quality being one of them.
Tangentially, this is also one of the amazing things in the hardware design language (HDL) domain, where rather than using (System)Verilog or VHDL, there’s an amazing growth of alternative HDLs, many of them implemented in generic scripting and programming languages. That this prohibits any kind of skill and code sharing, and repeatedly, and often poorly, reinvents the wheel seems to be of little concern to many.
Non-Broken Code
A very nice aspect of these existing COBOL codebases is that they generally have been around for decades, during which time they have been carefully pruned, trimmed and debugged, requiring only minimal maintenance and updates while they happily keep purring along on mainframes as they process banking and government data.
One argument that has been made in favor of porting from COBOL to a generic programming language is ‘ease of maintenance’, pointing out that COBOL is supposedly very hard to read and write and thus maintaining it would be far too cumbersome.
Since it’s easy to philosophize about such matters from a position of ignorance and/or conviction, I recently decided to take up some COBOL programming from the position of both a COBOL newbie as well as an experienced C++ (and other language) developer. Cue the
‘Hello Business’ playground
project.
For the tooling I used the
GnuCOBOL
transpiler, which converts the COBOL code to C before compiling it to a binary, but in a few weeks the GCC 15.1 release will bring a brand new COBOL frontend (
gcobol
) that I’m dying to try out. As language reference I used a combination of the
Wikipedia entry
for COBOL, the IBM ILE
COBOL language reference
(PDF) and the IBM
COBOL Report Writer Programmer’s Manual
(PDF).
My goal for this ‘Hello Business’ project was to create something that did actual practical work. I took the
FileHandling.cob
example from the
COBOL tutorial
by Armin Afazeli as starting point, which I modified and extended to read in records from a file,
employees.dat
, before using the standard Report Writer feature to create a report file in which the employees with their salaries are listed, with page numbering and totaling the total salary value in a report footing entry.
My impression was that although it takes a moment to learn the various divisions that the variables, files, I/O, and procedures are put into, it’s all extremely orderly and predictable. The compiler also will helpfully tell you if you did anything out of order or forgot something. While data level numbering to indicate data associations is somewhat quaint, after a while I didn’t mind at all, especially since this provides a whole range of meta information that other languages do not have.
The lack of semi-colons everywhere is nice, with only a single period indicating the end of a scope, even if it concerns an entire loop (
perform
). I used the modern free style form of COBOL, which removes the need to use specific columns for parts of the code, which no doubt made things a lot easier. In total it only took me a few hours to create a semi-useful COBOL application.
Would I opt to write a more extensive business application in C++ if I got put on a tight deadline? I don’t think so. If I had to do COBOL-like things in C++, I would be hunting for various libraries, get stuck up to my gills in complex configurations and be scrambling to find replacements for things like Report Writer, or be forced to write my own. Meanwhile in COBOL everything is there already, because it’s what that DSL is designed for. Replacing C++ with Java or the like wouldn’t help either, as you end up doing so much boilerplate work and dependencies wrangling.
A Modern DSL
Perhaps the funniest thing about COBOL is that since version 2002 it got a whole range of features that push it closer to generic languages like Java. Features that include object-oriented programming, bit and boolean types, heap-based memory allocation, method overloading and asynchronous messaging. Meanwhile the simple English, case-insensitive, syntax – with allowance for various spellings and acronyms – means that you can rapidly type code without adding symbol soup, and reading it is obvious even as a beginner, as the code literally does what it says it does.
True, the syntax and naming feels a bit quaint at first, but that is easily explained by the fact that when COBOL appeared on the scene, ALGOL was still highly relevant and the C programming language wasn’t even a glimmer in Dennis Ritchie’s eyes yet. If anything, COBOL has proven itself – much like Fortran and others – to be a time-tested DSL that is truly a testament to Grace Hopper and everyone else involved in its creation.
| 80
| 28
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119087",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:25:28",
"content": "i don’t think this description of domain specific languages really gets to the concepts that matter. fortran is a good example. it’s not that the features of the language are good for scientific programming — they very very very much are not — it’s that itspedigreeis scientific programming. decades of practice are what make the language appear domain-specific. a lot of people will try to separate ‘technical reasons’ from ‘cultural reasons’, often using the almost-always-completely-wrong word ‘just’. as in, ‘that’s just because of decades of practice’.and the same is true of cobol. its featureset is a little oriented towards specific tasks but, truly, doing those tasks in another language like C, C++, Java, or Rust is just a question of idioms. the problem is the actual decades of experience. the decades of experience have created individual programmers, programming institutions, codebases, individual non-technical employees, and non-technical institutions. and all of these things have grown up together and any change to any of it will ripple through the whole body. for the last decade or so, a wave of retirements of individual programmers has threatened programming institutions, for example.the question isn’t what language to use but simply how to manage change. every used-for-decades codebasehasbecome crufty and inflexible, and you would face an enormous task to clean them up or reimplement themeven if you decide to do that work in cobol. the old development team has developed not only a knowledge of cobol and of the existing codebase, but also a knowledge of the rest of the body outside of their department, and a philosophy of testing and deployment as well.and there’s the very closely-related question of whether you want to re-architect away from the mainframe. there are many approaches to scaling in this world.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119154",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:47:37",
"content": "Agreed. :-)I don’t consider COBOL or FORTRAN to be DSLs. They were (are?) general-purpose languages and are a reasonable way to solve any computable problem as long as it doesn’t involve writing an interrupt handler or something that manipulates the page table. C can do those two things quite well (vis. Linux) and hence is referred to as “Systems Programming Language” but that’s far beyond what is needed to be a general-purpose language. Lisp, Scheme, Scala, Erlang… none of those are “Systems Programming Languages”, all are general-purpose languages, and Erlang probably spans the gap between domain-specific and general-purpose.It’s amazingly, eye-wateringly expensive to license a compiler for a mainframe. You’ll see a strong tendency in mainframe shops to do everything in COBOL whether it “makes sense” or not.Shops with strong change control processes (banks and insurance companies, in particular) will usually require a million signoffs to “write a program” but consider SAS (“Statistical Analysis System”) to just be an application. I worked for a bank at one point that spent more on SAS licensing than they did on mainframe leasing. They had dozens of departments running SAS “scripts” just so they wouldn’t have to go through change controls. Yes, they were basically end-running security, but whatever…tl;dr: Languages, especially on mainframes, get selected for non-obvious reasons.Legitimate question: is there a way to develop Rust programs on MVS? Linux for Z series?",
"parent_id": "8119087",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119179",
"author": "Marty Heyman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:05:28",
"content": "When I recently asked the Program Manager for Languages, I think I mentioned Rust but don’t remember a definitive answer. On their Linux “platforms” (LinuxOne® and Linux on the IBM z/Series® I suspect there are Rust Packages.",
"parent_id": "8119154",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119470",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:34:50",
"content": "Thanks! I got curious and poked around. It looks like Rust on z/Linux is “Tier 2” but evidently works fine or well enough. And supposedly (I didn’t know this) you can put the resulting z (390) executable into a Docker container, move it into one of your z/OS (MVS) LPARs, and run it there.Not bad for a half-century “experienced” OS. Not bad at all. :-)",
"parent_id": "8119179",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119221",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:08:12",
"content": "is there a way to develop Rust programs on MVS? Linux for Z series?Does running a Rust-friendly OS+development environment under an emulator hosted on MVS or Linux for Z series count?I’m not trying to be flippant here, but sometimes if there is a known Rube Goldberg solution that works, using it will be faster or cheaper than doing it “the right way.”I take that back, I am trying to be flippant. I’m pretty sure the answer to my question “does running it under emulation count” is “no.” I hope the answer to your question is “yes, and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.",
"parent_id": "8119154",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119308",
"author": "TimT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T03:10:42",
"content": "You absolutely can write Rust code on zLinux. I’ve done it on Ubuntu running on the Hercules emulator. Just for the LOLs.",
"parent_id": "8119221",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119310",
"author": "TimT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T03:14:13",
"content": "Now I think running it on an emulator is valid, unless your talking about emulating an X86 on MVS. But emulating the mainframe is required as I’m all out of S/360s",
"parent_id": "8119221",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119406",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:21:11",
"content": "i don’t think the ‘purity’ of whether it’s emulated or virtutalized or whatever matters…the question is just can you integrate it into the existing ‘mainframe way of doing things’. and my intuition is that you can but only if you accept a strict demarcation point, the same way they use java to write web frontends to mainframe databases. it doesn’t really matter where the java is running, so long as the database still lives on the mainframe",
"parent_id": "8119221",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120428",
"author": "Snide",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T00:04:06",
"content": "“Lisp… none of those are “Systems Programming Languages” ”I take it you never used a Lisp Machine…",
"parent_id": "8119154",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119289",
"author": "Sam I",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:48:19",
"content": "I have used modernized cobol in Lawson financial systems erp solutions which are now owned by infor. They used a set of generated cobol libraries to read and write through huge databases of oracle defined databases to work with generating sql into a database in realtime. If the IRS databases and code can be translated into this 4gl language and tested to produce the same results, there would be a clear way to extract the logic of these cobol systems and convert the systems to modern day programing languages, because I have done as much with generated infor/lawson code to scripted SQL to C/C++ unix processed code.",
"parent_id": "8119087",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119354",
"author": "AndrewA",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:40:08",
"content": "I honestly don’t know if COBOL or Fortran are DSLs or not – but I don’t think they are general purpose languages, either (at least they weren’t intended as such). The clues about this might be in their naming:COBOL – (CO)mmon (B)usiness (O)riented (L)anguageFortran – (For)mula (tran)slatorSo…in the case of COBOL – it’s name says that “this is meant for commercial business purposes” – which in general (back then, and now) means sifting thru a bunch of data, generating reports, etc. Also, much of the language can almost be read like “plain English” – which was the point: There was a need (desire?) to have a programming language that didn’t take a nerd/geek/whatever to read and write; that a relatively non-programmer person (a manager…or maybe even the CEO) could look at a program, and get a feel for the calculations (assuming they knew what they were looking at – say a payroll system or something) – because rather than reading (all the following is pseudo-code) something like:tx = brate * pct; // tax equals baserate multiplied by percentage…the manager could read:SET TAXES EQUAL TO BASE_RATE MULTIPLIED-BY PERCENTAGE…and they might say to themselves, “hmm, that needs something”, and could annotate:; Bob, change the following:SET TAXES EQUAL TO BASE_RATE MULTIPLIED-BY PERCENTAGE; to this:SET TAXES EQUAL TO BASE_RATE MULTIPLIED-BY (PERCENTAGE PLUS RATIO); Thanks! – PhilAgain – the above is NOT really COBOL – but it has the flavor, from what I barely recall from playing with a proprietary dialect known as DB/C (basically COBOL with some flat DB added on, insofar as I understood it at the time – decades ago).The entire codebase would be just as verbose – that was the purpose behind it; it was a plus for those who couldn’t read anything else (and trust me, the languages then were closer to assembler – or were assembler – than anything else), but could read plain English. Of course, for the actual programmers…well, it could be terrible, because you had to write out everything…but at least for many cases, the code was “self-documenting” – to an extent.Now Fortran – that was a different beast – it was used and abused for all kinds of stuff (look into what was done for early 2D and 3D graphics, circa-1968 forward to oh, 1975-ish?) – you’ll find it being used and abused for almost everything; the Cal-Comp graphics plotting standard was pretty popular. There was a couple of others that were developed at universities that also proved long-lived…Oh…there were also more than a few Gerber libraries for Fortran…because you have to be able to take your Cal-Comp plots, and convert them into something to share schematics (and other things; the Gerber standard was – as far as I can tell – initially meant for interchanging of “vector” graphics – and everything was a vector graphic back then, because memory for a framebuffer was…well…expensive doesn’t even begin to describe it)…But “as designed” it was a language meant to allow easy conversion of mathematical formula into a format a computer could digest, and do it efficiently (again, era of “everything is assembly”); a language meant for scientists and engineers (and be easily readable by humans, too). But it was “free” enough to do more general purpose things. Based on code I have read in various DTIC research reports and other things from the era, people seemed to love to “hack” with it! I haven’t found a game done in it, yet – but I did find a rudimentary flight simulator (about the same time around when Sub-Logic released it’s code in BASIC and assembly for various platforms; but this code was independent of Sub-Logic’s stuff – it was written for somebody’s thesis or something from the Naval Postgraduate school, or maybe it was something for the Air Force – I forget).Again – none of this proves COBOL or Fortran are DSLs, or were meant as such…but they were designed for particular “use-cases” and “industries” – COBOL pretty much stuck to it’s place, while Fortran “wandered” a bit, but still mostly kept to what it was meant for, formulas and calculations (and plotting/graphing of such) too…One other thought: At the time, it was a “radical thought” to think of using computers for anything that didn’t have something to do with calculations and formulas, or for business purposes (record keeping and reporting), or occasionally for industry (process control, for instance – but a lot of that was also done with analog computing – which was also a big thing; there were hybrids sold then, too)…Using a computer to control a robot? Artificial intelligence and games? Graphics? Insanity!Also, batch processing and punched cards didn’t lend themselves well to “general purpose” stuff…and who could ever own a computer…in their home…all to themselves? Heck, just look at the early microcomputer days, pre-1990-ish…All of it seems kinda insane to me now…thinking about it…thinking of when I was a kid with a home computer in the 1980s – when I had a modem, and most people didn’t even have a computer, let alone knew what “being online” meant – and that was really “late” in the game; now think about the heady days of the Homebrew Computer Club – when a lot of members didn’t have a computer, because a small one was either too expensive – or didn’t exist at all (there were a very, very few number of people in the world that had a “personal computer” – and generally, those machines had very little memory – on the order of a few 10s of bytes at best – and if you were clocking along at 50 Hz, that was a fast machine for something “homebrew” made out of junk parts from the telephone company or such)…but eventually…once the 4004 became a thing (though there were “electronic magazine projects” for “electronic desk calculators” – I found one recently in a British publication that essentially used something like 54xx series ICs, and a bunch of other discrete components, to implement the basic “ALU” needed for the calculator, and it had various “registers” for storage, and did the calculation using a diode array “ROM” that ran a “microcode” and a ring counter thing to “step thru” each “instruction” to “do the needful” – yes, it was a microcoded, ROM-only computer – it was pretty amazing to see – it was published over about a year’s time-frame in the magazine)./ok, if you made it down here, consider yourself a “Level-10000 Mage of the Order of Teal Deer”…",
"parent_id": "8119087",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119398",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T13:43:59",
"content": "FORTRAN 1957COBOL 1959The game Spacewar! was developed in 1962, in assembly language on a PDP-1 at MIT.",
"parent_id": "8119354",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119531",
"author": "Stew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T20:41:39",
"content": "I think the text game Adventure had a fortran version.",
"parent_id": "8119398",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119943",
"author": "Russell W Guenthner",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T11:39:52",
"content": "I thought it was written in Fortran to start with.",
"parent_id": "8119531",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119412",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:36:43",
"content": "fortran and cobol seem mission-specific because they were trail blazers. every language after fortran translates formulas. every langugage after cobol has structured data types.the reason i consider the idea of fortran as a domain-specific-language to be farcical is that i’ve actually met scientific fortran code. they told me to ‘make it work’ after they moved it from VAX/VMS to Linux, but they didn’t tell me what it was. it was huge, tens of thousands of lines of code. and almost all of it was I/O…file, tape, display, and printer. and a horrendous amount of effort was invested into memory-mapped storage, because one of the platforms over the years couldn’t simply malloc(32MB). and once i was done, i finally learned what they were using it for! it converted a 3D dataset into a 2D histogram. the formula was for all x { for all y { for all z { out[x][y] += in[x][y][z]; } } }they didn’t use fortran to write a formula, they used it to write an interactive commandline that had layered hacks for each I/O subsystem they’d been forced to deal with over the decades. and because it was fortran it was unfactorable and unmaintanable and unfathomable. worst possible language for that use. but “a hack to be able to work with the only gigabyte data storage available in 1982” is exactly what scientific users need the most of. naming files and viewing subsets of them is extremely important to them. truly, they wanted a unix command shell and a few perl scripts to drive gnuplot. the formulas themselves are often astonishingly simple.",
"parent_id": "8119354",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119359",
"author": "Jace",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T09:06:50",
"content": "I agree about Fortran. And in enough time Python may take the role of “DSL for science” “just because” it’s becoming the defacto standard.But I don’t think being capable of general purpose computing stops COBOL definitely being domain specific by design. I mean I could write a 6502 emulator in COBOL or Minecraft datapacks but that doesn’t mean it’s the sort of usecase they were intended for.",
"parent_id": "8119087",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8123197",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2025-05-01T01:35:28",
"content": "Agree. And COBOL is totally replaceable with another language and much more easily so in these days of increasingly more powerful large language models, which excel at converting code from one language to another. I actually have experience doing exactly that.There aren’t a lot of COBOL developers graduating from colleges these days. The sooner companies can get their COBOL translated into a modern language, the better off everyone will be.",
"parent_id": "8119087",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119090",
"author": "imqqmi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:36:02",
"content": "Cobol is quite simple to learn, but the environment where it lives in, generally a complex network of thousands of applications, databases, reporting frameworks etc makes it hard to manage, even more so as many are run as ‘black boxes’, no one knows what happens in the code as many devs that have written the code are already pensioners or no longer among the living. What the programs do in the end isn’t really difficult or particularly complex in and of itself. It can probably easily be built in general purpose software. But the usual bugs that crop up in such languages can have far reaching consequences. Stability is key.It can mean your bank balance is off by a few thousand, the interest rate in mortgage is calculated wrong, your coverage of your insurance could have issues with your claims etc. We expect from banks, insurance companies etc, that this all works perfectly every time.Yes, there are outages all the time, even with Cobol based applications, but generally the Cobol programs run flawlessly and other systems, like the Mainframe emulation layer, or windows or any of the more modern connected applications have failed, or something went wrong in the many migrations that take place behind close doors etc. is much more often the cause of outages.Aside from that, Cobol programs are often run in complex structures in batches, the order and dependencies that these need to run in is critical. And every day and every week or month different batches needs to run, or run with different dependencies. Much of this can be done in modern web based batch scheduler applications and Cobol can run on windows servers with an emulation application. I’ve even seen frameworks that offer unit testing and XML/JSON connectors in combination with Cobol.If you take all that into account, it becomes much more cumbersome to contemplate a full rewrite in more modern languages. And in the end, are there managers that dare to take responsibility to make such a move? Often they get like 18 months to complete a project, if they don’t complete it, they get fired. So no manager is motivated to take on a project with a small likelihood of success.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119096",
"author": "Jim Shortz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:51:18",
"content": "Definitely agree with what you are saying here. But I would argue that modern apps also live in a “complex network of thousands of applications, databases, reporting frameworks etc makes it hard to manage,”. Perhaps the difference is that the people who created them are still around to help decipher it.Personally, I’ve had difficulty with systems that are only 10-15 years old. The code was manually deployed to bare metal hardware running on an OS that is way past EOL and including components from vendors who are out of business.But I see the cycle continuing with modern developers building “microservices” glued together with incredibly complex deployment technologies like Kubernetes. 10-15 years from now our children are going to have a lot of fun trying to decipher all of this mess. Will it be any easier to understand than COBOL is now?",
"parent_id": "8119090",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119123",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:19:38",
"content": "I’m sure in the future documentation will be treated the same way as it is now.",
"parent_id": "8119096",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119180",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:07:08",
"content": "i think one blessing we have…something i hate most of the time, of course…is that there’s an awful lot of pointless churn these days. so no one will still be using an unchanged kubernetes cloud deployment configuration in 20 years based on inertia. where ibm goes to pains to avoid breaking the past, most modern things put just as much effort into constantly breaking everything. and worse, constantly linking everything together in fine ways so that you can’t just use back-versions of one component forever to maintain compatibility.",
"parent_id": "8119096",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119198",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:45:39",
"content": "“Will it be any easier to understand than COBOL is now?”Likewise, will COBOL be any more difficult to understand than it is now?",
"parent_id": "8119096",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119177",
"author": "eriklscott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:56:32",
"content": "Very often the “intellectual debt” isn’t even on the systems side of the process, though I’ll be the first to admit that JCL Hacking is almost a job title if not a discipline.The real gap in knowledge is independent of the language, the environment, or the methodology… the problem is the domain knowledge of all the special cases that despite careful practices (or not) still gets coded into the programs and never written down. Some human artifact with forty-odd years under their belt knows that men’s jeans with a 28″ or smaller waistband in Puerto Rico gets taxed as a boy’s size, not men’s, and once that person is gone no one else knows why that “if” statement is there and if it’s a leftover bug or deeply hidden fraud. Yes, been there, got the gray hair and the T-Shirt. I mean, sometimes the only way to tell in that part of the code if it was heading via Puerto Rico was to see if it had “Blue Container” in the shipping notes. I wish I was kidding.Go ahead and write that thing in Rust or Scala and it will be just as crazy. And it won’t (?) run on a mainframe anymore. Which is great, except that now you have to interface with a running mainframe system, and that’s usually even worse. LU6 makes the wildest “open systems” interface code you’ve ever seen look like second-semester stuff.A significant chunk of American Express cards are to this day handled on a system rolled out in 1984 that no one really has the guts to mess with. Careers were made and broken with that system, and it is to be approached with the utmost caution. It runs on the “IMS” database system from IBM, which even Big Blue says is unsuitable for new work. IMS dates from the late 1960s. As recently as a month ago AMEX was looking for programmers with IMS experience. Perhaps looking in nursing homes. The problem with it, again, isn’t the technology. The problem is all the business rules coded into for doing business in dozens of countries.",
"parent_id": "8119090",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119391",
"author": "Dirk Munk",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:58:48",
"content": "That jeans size is a nice example for what COBOL can do to understand a program. In COBOL you could make the following definition:10 waistband pic 99.88 boy-size value 1 thru 28.88 adult-size value 29 thru 99.In the program you can write the following:If boy-size then ..,.. etc.That is the way you can make COBOL programs very readable and understandable, and that is why it is so very suitable for business programs.",
"parent_id": "8119177",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119185",
"author": "Marty Heyman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:14:41",
"content": "YEAH, those awful, complex Batch Jobs, like whatgccorg++does under the covers of those wrapper scripts. Or a complex Makefile. Batch is stuff run from a command line or the equivalent ofcronand yes, many COBOL jobs use huge programs and databases, as you would expect in the large of a Bank or Insurance company. But a significant amount of the COBOL inventory talks to transaction processing software: CICS or Web CICS Interfaces or, increasingly REST APIs. XML and JSON support is in the standard. GnuCOBOL (free open source software — FOSS) has it and GCC COBOL 15.1 doesn’t yet. It is on the roadmap for 16.1 but will likely be in our packages before then for early adopters.Source code control was sloppy and software to help was expensive and primitive. That’s a pile of clerical work andgit(orhgor …).",
"parent_id": "8119090",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119275",
"author": "MartinU",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:09:10",
"content": "So what you’re really saying is that there’s a lot of real work that could be done apart from actually touching the program — checking documentation, identifying environments, organizing source (and documentation) control environments and so on. That, ultimately, is the reason that a shift from COBOL is not a good idea — ultimately the job’s not about what language you code in but all the boring peripheral work that’s needed to make high grade software that’s conspicuously absent in a much (most, I’d bet) modern software.The last thing a bank wants is to have to endure the kind of “will it /won’t it” that characterizes modern Windows releases. Testing is an active job and can actually take more effort than writing the code.",
"parent_id": "8119185",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119093",
"author": "Sword",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:40:44",
"content": "It is certainly cursed, but I turned my job into a full time programming position with VB and VBA. My work has specific requirements and restrictions with code, but those are readily available and I abuse the hell out of them including file system operations, complex reconciliations, database frontends for multiperson simultaneous read/write operations and more.There are certainly better suited languages out there, but like COBOL; if it works, use it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8121341",
"author": "lespaul1963",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T15:49:45",
"content": "Actually, when morans were writing COBOL and FORTRAN like some primitive cavemen, computer SCIENTISTS were writing far superior (even today) LISP.",
"parent_id": "8119093",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119099",
"author": "A Texan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:54:48",
"content": "I took a LinkedIn COBOL course sometime ago just out of curiosity to see what it was about. COBOL seems very specific in how it is structured which is a must for business applications. I couldn’t imagine trying to convert all that existing code to Python or C or whatever if it simply works and the original source is still available. It also allowed someone with a good technical understanding of the language to write decent code for business purposes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119171",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:42:22",
"content": "I was formally trained in programming in university, mostly Java, but also things like MATLAB, Lisp and Scheme. I haven’t programmed much afterwards, and I seem to happen to find a new programming language for each new project I embark on.My latest creation was 600 lines of Awk which seems the best language to /develop/ in, for the one-off data manipulation task I needed it for.The company I work for (not a software house) might want to take my program over and exploit it in more divisions, but for business reasons, AWK (or any scripting language) is not the right language – for usability it will probably be ported to a web frontend and hell do I know what they do with it in the backend. I’m just happy that I made someone (who I concidered a real programmer, but couldn’t do what took me 3 long evenings) happy, and that I will be in no way responsible for rewriting or maintaining said tool.Moral of the story: Sometimes it’s not the actual task that decides what is the best language, but the development phase, environment where it will run or even the knowledge set of the programmers decides what is the best language.",
"parent_id": "8119099",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119100",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:56:10",
"content": "The big thing with COBOL is the MOVE verb, it does so much with a well designed data division and is quite hard to replicate with modern languages. The ALTER verb is a different story, that was an abomination that I never used.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119253",
"author": "Kathy Bennett",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T22:53:13",
"content": "I came to COBOL first from having been an 8080 programmer. At first, I didn’t get the point of it (I was using a microcomputer version to begin with) and it just seemed a cumbersome way of doing things. Someone then explained it to me as “It just inputs files, twizzles them round and then outputs them again in a different format”. In essence that is what COBOL does best and with that single comment, the penny dropped! I later moved to mainframe COBOL then to maintaining the COBOL compiler for ICL along with the compilers for several other high level languages of theirs (ALGOL, FORTRAN, RPG2 to mention a few) and also their COBOL for their microcomputer. I was the 4th line support for the company and if I couldn’t fix the bugs – they didn’t get fixed! All from that one comment explaining it to me! Oh and I later married the guy that explained it to me.Just one note to add; I discovered a bug in the “Naval Tests” which were part of the alpha-testing for each new version of any COBOL compiler. It was decided to leave it there as correcting it meant that every single version of a COBOL compiler worldwide and still in use, would have to be retested. The bug is still there and every compiler has to add it’s own workaround. 🤣",
"parent_id": "8119100",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119364",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T09:49:03",
"content": "As a company ICL were never happy to have bugs in their compilers pointed out and they really didn’t like it if you fixed one by patching their code! Up until my house was flooded I had a treasured copy of a letter to my head of department that tried to get me sacked for such a heinous act (education was a gossip rich environment and their engineers were such tell tales). I wish now that I had framed it and hung it on the wall :-)",
"parent_id": "8119253",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119109",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:23:25",
"content": "“If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” . Agree with that. Now we see ‘re-writes’ from perfectly good o’ C code to Rust. So it goes I guess. And with Cobol now included with the gnu suite (joining gcc, gfortran, etc.), Cobol will be around for a long time. Personally never had to ‘work’ with Cobol. Just the standard intro in college back when. Cobol didn’t see any traction in my Real-Time world nor thankfully VB ;) …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119290",
"author": "anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:49:06",
"content": "I do wonder if C -> Rust might be a very different thing than Cobol -> basically anything. Because rust and c are fill the same niche and are similar languages, the inherent quirks of rust notwithstanding. (Also the fact that using rust could theoretically have legitimate benefit, even if it is only because of a lesser amount of undefined behavior? I don’t have the experience to actually comment.)",
"parent_id": "8119109",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119114",
"author": "Wallace Owen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:58:26",
"content": "When porting a DSL:First understand it – pray you have an experienced developer for the ‘old’ DSL on the team. If you don’t then pay for a couple seats for an LLM to take that role but check the assumptions you feed it.Second: Design a replacement framework/architecture for the new target that is appropriate for the selected target language/environment, in support of:Third: Don’t transliterate the code, statement for statement, attempting to keep the structure. Translate the code to an implementation that’s appropriate for the target execution language and environment.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119126",
"author": "Jan Prägert",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:29:06",
"content": "/me seeing a codebase thatis 40 years++ oldhas to handle legislation from several states, countries, whatever legal contexthas to handle several edge cases inside these legislationshas to handle all the different input forms (validation etc.)has to print out that stuff in a readable formPffff. I don’t think the problem is to port some language to another language. The challenge is to understand all the grown clutter and port it.(I would bet a little amount of beer that they do not have a single test case for any validation.)",
"parent_id": "8119114",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119172",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:44:25",
"content": "So maybe the problem with old Cobol code is that it was written in a different era with different doumentation and maintainability standards.",
"parent_id": "8119126",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119350",
"author": "Zamorano",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:31:40",
"content": "Agreed. Does Cobol support unit testing? It would probably present the same problem if it had been written in C – even more because C is lower level so harder to understand.",
"parent_id": "8119172",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119388",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:44:26",
"content": "And zeroth: before touching it, know exactly that this program is for and what it’s supposed to do and how it interfaces with other systems. Reading the code along (no matter how well formatted and commented) will tell you basically nothing about thisThe process requirements are far more important than any actual code, and are the hardest things to acquire from legacy systems regardless of what language they were written in.",
"parent_id": "8119114",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119399",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T13:44:30",
"content": "pray you have an experienced developer for the ‘old’ DSL on the team. If you don’t then pay for a couple seats for an LLM to take that role but check the assumptions you feed it.Translation:If you don’t have someone who understands the code, feed it to a random text generator whose output you can’t check because you don’t understand the original system enough to tell how poorly the random garbage generator did.We had a project recently that involved a peculiar protocol for transmitting small amounts of data over a regular telephone connection using DTMF. Documentation for that protocol was hard to come by, so someone asked a chatbot, and dumped the results in the project plans in place of the expected protocol definition.The project was handed to me to work on because all the planning was done. I sit down to implement the protocol, and discover that it is a bunch of crap. The chatbot made up a bunch of crap that used terms related to DTMF and to the protocol (and the actual use case,) but it was total junk.We had to put the project on hold while we tracked down a company involved with using the protocol who could give use some real details.During planning, everyone had looked and saw what looked like a detailed description of the involved protocol. It only fell apart when you actually tried to apply the details – then you found that things didn’t match.Keep chatbots way far away from your programmers. It’ll only cause you grief.",
"parent_id": "8119114",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119115",
"author": "phugh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:59:54",
"content": "COBOL is pretty easy, JCL (Job Control Language) and mainframe utilities are not easy. It’s one of reasons UNIX had the one utility, one purpose philosophy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119166",
"author": "Volker Birk",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:30:33",
"content": "JCL cards are only used for build or execute tasks. There is not too much JCL compared to cards with COBOL.",
"parent_id": "8119115",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119138",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:06:23",
"content": "Seems cheaper and more efficient and lower risk to de-DOGE than to de-COBOL and de-mainframe.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119165",
"author": "Volker Birk",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:27:54",
"content": "It would be a better option to read the COBOL code and interpret its purpose, then generate Java or Kotlin, which implements the corresponding actions.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119178",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:02:29",
"content": "Quote TFA:A very nice aspect of these existing COBOL codebases is that they generally have been around for decades, during which time they have been carefully pruned, trimmed and debugged, requiring only minimal maintenance and updates while they happily keep purring along on mainframes as they process banking and government data.End Quote:The fine author has never had to wallow or root around in a ‘highly evolved’ codebase.Old code is never touched, not because it’s great, but because it sucks BWDB (big wet donkey balls).The reason for the minimal maintenance is all the things broken by every fix.When your coders add 3 new bugs for every fix, there is only one smart move:Document existing bugs and workarounds.Don’t touchanything.Get a guard dog to bite anybody attempting to check in code.There should be a way to identify this in the process immaturity model, but it operates on another axis of disfunction.‘Information hoarding’ and ‘obstruction process’ are characteristic of maintaining old code bases though.They are sane insane responses to the management style invariably associated.The only real sane response is ‘flight’.Alternative is ‘retire in place’, but madness lies down that road.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119187",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:15:50",
"content": "Just to add:Bad software Stockholm syndrome analog.Been observed many times (JS, Blender, Oracle apps, SAP, emacs etc etc).Those that work with really awful systems, invariably start to ‘like’ them.In an awful dysfunctional way, like horribly abused children.The crew keeping any old system running are always at least half the problem.",
"parent_id": "8119178",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119184",
"author": "Joel Sherrill",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:13:41",
"content": "Unless I missed I missed it, no one mentioned what may be the most important feature for business applications. COBOL supports math as decimal which is better suited to computations involving money. Ada has had similar capabilities for decades also. Both languages also have the picture format capability.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119186",
"author": "Marty Heyman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:15:37",
"content": "Good get. Thanks.",
"parent_id": "8119184",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119188",
"author": "Sven Hapsbjorg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:17:40",
"content": "If your doing math usinng float then your and idiot, plane and simple. We had to write a simple banking app duirng our first semester at university and the rule was that any calculation involving money had to be done using uint64_t and only casted to float when printing result. If your doing otherwise you risk losing precision. The trick is to represent penny as the smallest unit (bit) and don’t work on after comma parts of money.",
"parent_id": "8119184",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119216",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:43:26",
"content": "Any modern language has a fixed point/money type/library.IIRCCobol made you define every variable like a number field on a report.BCD internally.Pic statements. (Shudder. Also reminded of DataFlex…the most awful language ever! COBOL programmer got drunk AF with GWBasic programmer. Woke up with sore, crabs. DataFlex shit out 9 months later. Arrays missing.)I did lots of math using floats.Your first statement missing ‘financial’.Even there floats can be the right type.Do option math in fixed point.",
"parent_id": "8119188",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119417",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T14:58:22",
"content": "Doubles can be used for financial calculations if the numbers are smallish and rounding is done properly and often.There are 5 errors in your first sentence. Please tell us the name of the university, so we can avoid it.",
"parent_id": "8119188",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119209",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:26:01",
"content": "The last version of COBOL was released in 2023. It has a very simple syntax, and is easy to read code.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119230",
"author": "cmholm",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:26:30",
"content": "I’m wondering if the spark for this article is the 3/29/25 Ars Technica report that Musk employee Steve Davis is leading a small team to try to move the SSA’s financial mainframe code from COBOL to Java in a matter of months? Given that this team would likely have to feed the code base into a machine translator to move 60 million lines of code that quickly, I suspect such a project would go to hell in a hand basket in short order.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119280",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:26:22",
"content": "I’m generally in favor of the whole DOGE thing, as disruptive as it is, but that sounds like punishing the wrench for the mechanic’s mistakes. In other words, and ironically, a waste of money. Akin to saying “All US government computers must be Macs”.",
"parent_id": "8119230",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119240",
"author": "Bob Smythe",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T22:04:24",
"content": "When I wrote Fortran, I had more comment lines than actual code. Maybe I am one of the few programmers who looked to the future when I would not be available to decipher my coding. As an engineer, I was known for Rube Goldberg solutions that worked and saved time. Sometimes it took a day to explain to my co-workers how I arrived at the solution. I have one Patent that blew my company’s competition away because it was a so ridiculously simple solution to a complex problem. Today, I am retired and still have a MSFortran compiler running in Windows XP.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119281",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:28:00",
"content": "“When I wrote Fortran, I had more comment lines than actual code.”Good to know, and you go right to my Do Not Hire pile.",
"parent_id": "8119240",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119539",
"author": "Stew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:02:44",
"content": "And why they would advance to the top of my Probably Should Hire pile.",
"parent_id": "8119281",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119438",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:37:23",
"content": "I can believe that. Fortran with one character variables (i,j,k, etc) can get obtuse quickly.That said, when our ‘C’ compiler went from max of 8 chars to 256, one programmer drove us nuts with his ‘long’ variable names. Ie. ‘counter_for_accumulating_the_mwatts_from_the_plant_generator_number_3’ …. Well you get the idea. Variables should state what they are used for, but ‘be reasonable’. A simple ‘gen3_mwatt_accum’ would do. Saves on excessive comments too :) . We implemented a simple rule that variables should be at least 3 chars and say what they do. So instead of ‘i’ use ‘idx’ for example. Only exceptions were variables like x,y,z for coordinates. Also searching for ‘idx’ is a bit easier than ‘i’.",
"parent_id": "8119240",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119464",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:14:09",
"content": "Single character variables are for loops and such ONLY. Bob sold it, I bought it, that settles it.",
"parent_id": "8119438",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119301",
"author": "Slim",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T02:46:26",
"content": "The real issue isn’t just that legacy systems are old—it’s that they’re incredibly hard to maintain. And by “maintain,” I mean updating them to meet new requirements.I worked on a modernization project once that took over 18 months and more than 20 developers. Meanwhile, we still have other applications running on COBOL.A recent legislative change required updates to two systems. I had short notice, but I was able to implement the change on time in a modern system. The same change in the COBOL system? It rolled out late—so late it missed not just one, but two additional legislative changes.Fast forward several months, and we find out the COBOL update had been silently corrupting data the entire time. Now, multiple developers are working to clean up the mess.The real kicker? None of the original developers are around anymore. There’s no documentation on where the bodies are buried, downstream impacts are hard to trace, and every developer who ever touched the system used their own naming conventions. It’s a nightmare.While cost is always a big factor in deciding whether or not to modernize, and while these older systems can technically still do much of what modern platforms can, they were originally designed as a replacement for paper.In my experience, the data itself is often the bigger problem. It’s dirty. Over the years, users created ad hoc workarounds for edge cases the system couldn’t handle—like adding special characters or using specific dates as flags. But there was no standard. One person might use 12/31/9999, another might use 01/01/1900, and someone else might just throw in a “#” and hope it worked. It was all about getting through the screen and finishing the form.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119311",
"author": "TimT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T03:16:23",
"content": "Java is as old now as COBOL was when I was taking CS in college.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119313",
"author": "Kevin marquette",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T03:30:42",
"content": "Thank you. I have never seen cobol explained that way before and the code in the sample project really hits the point home.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119355",
"author": "Klaus Ruckerbauer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:49:49",
"content": "Nice Job Maya thanks",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119356",
"author": "Zamorano",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T08:56:36",
"content": "Many custom-built business applications have some kind of their own DSL built in, be it an XML file that specifies various aspects of business logic or a real language – and some use fluent APIs as something in between. Most programming languages today are too low level to support business apps efficiently and need more layers of abstraction to get things manageable.There was an interesting project called M at Microsoft that was basically a language for building DSL’s. It had a way to generate code but also provided a specialised (Visual Studio based) editor with syntax checking that would, at some point, even have autocomplete/intellisense functionality. Unfortunately, it was given over to SQL Server folks who never understood what it was nor knew what to do with it… There are still calls to open source the thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119422",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T15:23:26",
"content": "“Direct” translations to another programming language without huge refactoring steps will result in very ugly code. Well written programs can have a beauty embedded in the code itself, logical flow, and it makes programs look deceptively simple. But to do this, you have to make intelligent use of the unique set of features that any progamming language has. If you attempt a direct translation, then the things that made use of unique features of the old language require weird workarounds, and you can’t make use of the nice but unique features of the new language.And the effort for rewriting is very much dependent in how far those “special features” of the two languages are apart.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119442",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:57:37",
"content": "Speaking of that … I just read a post in another forum asking why we just don’t let A.I. do the translation for us. So there you go. So let the A.I. do it. After all if it is intelligent, why not? :rolleyes: This is where we are at with this ‘A. Not I.’ foolishness that is going around.",
"parent_id": "8119422",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119443",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T17:00:03",
"content": "Translation from COBOL to a ‘modern’ language was the topic…",
"parent_id": "8119442",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119439",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:52:19",
"content": "Just consider the IBM z architecture is back-compatible all the way down to the System/360. That should give you a clue.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120429",
"author": "Snide",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T00:24:06",
"content": "Couldn’t the system/360 run 701 code? So does 701 code run on z/series?",
"parent_id": "8119439",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119441",
"author": "lthemick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:57:36",
"content": "One thing I didn’t see anyone hit on in this thread is that COBOL isfastcompared to a lot of other languages, especially interpreted languages like python. When I worked at a bank, we rewrote part of our statement generation logic from COBOL into a ‘modern’ language: execution time more than tripled, resulting in a day’s worth of statements taking more than a day to generate and print.All the other observations about sunk costs are certainly valid; but at the end of the day, the code also has to be performant for the use.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119571",
"author": "Crusader Col",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T00:05:56",
"content": "I learned Cobol in the 1970’s. I had a background maintaining Burroughs accounting machines and computers. I understood Cobol because it seemed to be designed to support accounting systems.The problem in computing languages today is that every academic thinks they know better than their predecessors and invent new, supposedly superior programming languages.I have seen the insides of a Cobol to Java conversion and it is unmaintainable rubbish. But the Java enthusiasts convinced the business people that it was ‘modernisation’ – that Cobol was a ‘dead’ language.Building business accounting systems in Cobol is a natural fit. Building them in in other academically designed language is bollocks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119755",
"author": "Andy Abate",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T16:40:47",
"content": "I’m not entirely sure the author understands the concept of Domain Specific Languages. And, I know few, if any, programming languages that are domain specific. Even Assembly, which is tied to a specific CPU family’s capabilities is general purpose in use. Just on a specific platform. DSL’s to me are things like Regular Expressions. You can do many things with them, but they represent parsing and tokenization. One cannot really use something in BNF to calculate the distance to the moon. Or bowling scores (there is an entirely different symbol based DSL for that).COBOL and FORTRAN are evolving just like any other language. They are just as general purpose as Java, C#, Python or Rust. And, in many cases, way faster. Stating COBOL is adopting Java like concepts is narrow minded. Maybe they are just good programming practices? Perhaps as development techniques have matured, the languages evolve with them?They are tools. They have traditional applications, but they are not locked into them. I have used COBOL to handle scientific calculations and FORTAN for reporting. RPG is probably the closest to a domain specific language and I have seen UX’s developed with it.People have the impression that older technology is no longer valid. The problem with that mindset is older technology is what most folks base their arguments for “modern techniques” on. Virtual machines? VM/370 in the early 1970’s. Hypervisors? See VM/370? Multitasking? OS-390, late 1960’s. Open source? SHARE and CBTTAPE mid 1970’s. Polyglot languages? MVS Common Execution Environment, mid 1970’s. Spooling and queuing? HASP late 1960’s.The #1 largest problem with COBOL and FORTAN is they are no longer “modern” due to language “snobbery”. Generally discussed by folks that don’t use either or the environment which spawned them regularly.Keep in mind, there are mainframe based systems that have existed and been operational for your entire lifetime. Take SABRE for example. It was started in the mid 1950’s. Using Assembly on IBM 360 precursor hardware. Try booking a flight without it. And, so you know, virtually all Customer Reservation Systems have a lineage traceable right back to SABRE.Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s not useful. You just have to put in the time to learn how to wield it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119816",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T22:23:51",
"content": "All the problems discussed here are related to PEOPLE, not the COBOL programming language.If companies let programmers (and designers!) do whatever they want, it doesn’t matter what programming language they use. The results will be bad.COBOL was the result of a D.O.D. request to manage 400 systems programmed in 400 different ASSEMBLY languages: you can imagine the nightmare.COBOL was developed from a combination of different programming languages, including FACT, COMTRAN, and FLOW-MATIC.COBOL was primarily developed by the Army, hence its hierarchy into DIVISIONS, SECTIONS, PARAGRAPHS, and sentences, all understandable by a HUMAN, the exact opposite of ASSEMBLY languages and FORTRAN.JCL has many options, but these are hardware-dependent: you have to specify the length of a record, whether it’s a fixed or variable format, etc. Under UNIX/LINUX, you can do anything (and often do).COBOL was designed for business applications, not scientific applications. FORTRAN is for scientific applications, and again, it’s about freeing itself from ASSEMBLY.IBM attempted a synthesis of FORTRAN and COBOL under the name PL/1, but it didn’t work well. Now, for their internal developments, IBM uses a variant called PL/390, where PL/1 and ASSEMBLY language can be mixed. It’s a programming language reserved for IBM only.COBOL has been very well adapted to tools such as specific versions of ECLIPSE or VS CODE. You can process XML files (and store them in XML columns of a DB2 table! AND query them with a specific dialect as DB2 commands).I’ve been using this language for almost 40 years. A bit of ASSEMBLER in the 1980s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120466",
"author": "Kelli",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T04:23:35",
"content": "Nice summary of the historical context, thank you.",
"parent_id": "8119816",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8122761",
"author": "Crusader Col",
"timestamp": "2025-04-29T04:55:34",
"content": "I thought that Grace Hopper (generally acknowledged as inventor of Cobol) was in the US Navy.",
"parent_id": "8119816",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119983",
"author": "rxc",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T13:44:12",
"content": "Computers are not the only tech that has this “problem”. I spent my career in the nuclear industry, and they have very similar issues with replacing or repairing old equipment, some of which has not been built in decades. It is not a matter of changing it out to use something that is “better”. It is a problem because there are mountains of documents and analyses that are based on the performance of the original equipment. In many cases, there is no one performance criteria that rules the performance. For one scenario it might be conservative to assume that a pump produces only a minimum flow, but in others, the conservative assumption might be that it produces much more.When the owner of the facility changes something, they have to update all of the analyses that touch that component, and demonstrate, in a formally reviewed and approved document, the basis for plant operation with the new equipment. This is extremely non-trivial. If they have to get approval from the regulator, it can be even worse.I have a nephew who works for a company that makes a lot of nuclear-related equipment, and he says it is the main profit center for the company, because they have to document everything the do to produce the stuff, which often has not been built for a very long time. All the dimensions, the material properties, the tested performance or each individual part has to be verified and documented. And even though he has a lot of equipment available that is less expensive, easier to maintain, and works “better” than the old stuff, no nuclear plant owner wants to buy it because changing the plant documentation to deal with the differences would be a nightmare.The I&C in these plants is also mainly analogue, because that would be a real nightmare to change. Some parts that are not “safety-related” might have been updated, but often this is just an augmentation of the original analogue equipment, which is left in place to control the plant.Banks are not the only organizations that use old tech. And they all have very good reasons to stick with old stuff, even if they could “save money” by changing the way they work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120086",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T23:38:33",
"content": "I have difficulty agreeing that COBOL or FORTRAN (77 and earlier) are DSLs unless you’re claiming, IMHO, the overly broad domains of general business programming and general scientific programming.That said, I do agree that a contemporary language, RPG (Report Program Generator), was a DSL –after all, it was intended to aid the transition from punched-card tabulating machines to digital computers. In all honesty, it did a reasonable job if you had to pile of data and needed to produce a tabular report composed of page headings with various detail and summary lines. Of course, that 1960’s implementation had very specific and rigid formatting for the code (don’t forget the H card!)For the record, I learned FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, and APL on an IBM 1130 with 8k of core memory.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,574.22212
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/homemade-vna-delivers-high-frequency-performance-on-a-budget/
|
Homemade VNA Delivers High-Frequency Performance On A Budget
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"adc",
"fpga",
"RF",
"test equipment",
"vector network analyzer",
"vna"
] |
With vector network analyzers, the commercial offerings seem to come in two flavors: relatively inexpensive but limited capabilities, and full-featured but scary expensive. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground, especially if you want something that performs well in the microwave bands.
Unless, of course,
you build your own vector network analyzer (VNA)
. That’s what [Henrik Forsten] did, and we’ve got to say we’re even more impressed by the results than we were with
his earlier effort
. That version was not without its problems, and fixing them was very much on the list of goals for this build. Keeping the build affordable was also key, which resulted in some design compromises while still meeting [Henrik]’s measurement requirements.
The Bill of Materials includes dual-channel broadband RF mixer chips, high-speed 12-bit ADCs, and a fast FPGA to handle the torrent of data and run the digital signal processing functions. The custom six-layer PCB is on the large side and includes large cutouts for the directional couplers, which use short lengths of stripped coaxial cable lined with ferrite rings. To properly isolate signals between stages, [Henrik] sandwiched the PCB between a two-piece aluminum enclosure. Wisely, he printed a prototype enclosure and lined it with aluminum foil to test for fit and function before committing to milling the final version. He did note some leakage around the SMA connectors, but a few RF gaskets made from scraps of foil and solder braid did the trick.
This is a pretty slick build, especially considering he managed to keep the price tag at a very reasonable $300. It’s more expensive than
the popular NanoVNA
or its clones, but it seems like quite a bargain considering its capabilities.
| 7
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119061",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:29:29",
"content": "Damn that’s impressive, I have no need of much more than a NanoVNA for my purposes, but I want one of Henrik’s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119064",
"author": "fuzzyfuzzyfungus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:31:58",
"content": "High frequency PCBs always look so damn good vs. the more typical ones. I recognize that they aren’t a corner you want to find yourself in, on economic grounds; but gorgeous.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119070",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:57:20",
"content": "Oh My….This looks really good.I have a NanoVNA-F I bought a few years ago. I worked as an RF tech and for just playing around it is a good starter VNA. For the less acquainted with RF test gear, things like real VNAs and Spectrum analyzers can be blown up easily… A really dedicated RF hobbyist will build their own thermister power sensor.There is a nice rabbit hole for you; Building RF power sensors.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119102",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:59:32",
"content": "Yeah, soon as I saw the board and the SMAs used I was like “that’s gonna leak.” Been there, done that (as in, had a leaky cavity due to edge-mount SMAs, not built a 15 GHz VNA!). Did the same PCB sandwich trick on that, too.If you extend the case a little outward, extend walls upwards to let the PCB fit inside it (so now essentially it’s fully enclosed) with a bit of slop on the holes (just add a bit of slot to them), they make bulkhead SMAs which have panel gaps (so there’s a flush face front/back) so you get a solid seal straight around (e.g. CONSMA006.062). Bit more fiddly to design with but they work really well and they barely cost any more.The other option I’ve seen that works is just don’t bother with the edgemounts at all and use a square flange SMA screwed in that extends to a land on the PCB, with ground connection through the enclosure. Downside to that is that removing it requires desoldering the connector, whereas the other ones just slot in. The setups we use need absurd levels of isolation so it’s been a lot of experimentation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119145",
"author": "Torsten Martinsen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:29:27",
"content": "If you read the article, you will see that the designer did consider bulkhead connectors.",
"parent_id": "8119102",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119159",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:13:15",
"content": "That’s why I mentioned the ones with panel gaps (the CONSMA006.062). The square flange ones I mentioned because you can get very extreme isolation with them, but they do have the drawbacks mentioned. Tends to get used on more professional stuff though.The ones with panel gaps give you a front/back flange so the top/bottom sandwich between it, and there’s no straight-through gap (and if you want you can just stick gasket material around it too and you’ve got an extremely solid seal.You can kinda-sorta do it with the long-barrel bulkheads (you trap the square flange) but that’s awkward.",
"parent_id": "8119145",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119686",
"author": "Jason Pyeron",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T11:55:15",
"content": "This gives me hope of someday having a 4 port VNA.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,574.094799
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/16/binner-makes-workshop-parts-organization-easy/
|
Binner Makes Workshop Parts Organization Easy
|
Matt Varian
|
[
"home hacks",
"Parts"
] |
[
"barcode",
"component storage",
"database",
"organization",
"workshop"
] |
We’ve all had times where we knew we had some part but we had to go searching for it all over as it wasn’t where we thought we put it. Organizing the numerous components, parts, and supplies that go into your projects can be a daunting task, especially if you use the same type of part at different times for different projects. It helps to have a framework to keep track of all the small details.
Binner is an open source project
that aims to allow you to easily maintain a database that can be customized to your use.
In a recent video for DigiKey, [Byte Sized Engineer] used Binner to track the locations of his components and parts in his freshly organized workshop. Binner already has the ability to read the labels used by well-known electronics suppliers via a barcode scanner, and uses that information to populate your inventory. It even grabs quantities and links in a datasheet for your newly added part. The barcode scanner can also be used to retrieve the contents of a location, so with a single scan Binner can bring up everything residing at that location.
Binner can be run locally so there isn’t the concern of putting in all the effort to build up your database just to have an internet outage make it inaccessible. Another cool feature is that it allows you to print labels, you can customize the fields to display the values you care about.
The project already has future plans to tie into a “smart bin” system to light up the location of your component —
a clever feature we’ve seen implemented in previous setups
.
| 29
| 11
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8119005",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T08:58:02",
"content": "There was a project with a Resistor Drawer Storage where the drawer requested resistor will lit. And I believe the feed was from the PCB CAD.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119175",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:54:51",
"content": "I found it here:https://hackaday.com/2014/02/15/light-your-way-to-the-correct-resistor/",
"parent_id": "8119005",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119009",
"author": "Bajji",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:09:52",
"content": "There was a project in which a turret mounted in the center of the room shined a laser on the bin which had the part we searched for.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119014",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:15:27",
"content": "Hmm. Every bin contains molten slag. That’s not what I was looking for.",
"parent_id": "8119009",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119071",
"author": "EV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:05:02",
"content": "I thought it seemed odd the design spec’d a 5MW laser instead of a 5mW laser….",
"parent_id": "8119014",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119020",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:28:56",
"content": "I’m liking Binner a lot but it’s daunting because, like so many, I’ve got thousands of parts, I wonder if there’s any maker centric pre-populated database to download/merge or a way of sharing them so the common (maker) parts are in there and then it becomes just a matter of counting/adding location?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119031",
"author": "Mac",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T10:31:32",
"content": "What is wrong with simple? Start with #1 and label all your drawers sequentially. Get a new set of drawers? Continue the number sequence.As you fill the drawers, make note in the matching line number in a spreadsheet. Note in the row cells what’s in the drawer.All the features needed to find any part, search etc.No database, no special software to maintain the db, just simple, totally scalable.Backup regularly to a thumb drive, etc. Keep the backup in drawer #1.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119047",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:28:38",
"content": "Nothing wrong with that at all, you could do everything binner does in excel if you decide you want to, you could also use Libre Office or any other spreadsheet.Arguing that Excel or even Libre Office is less complex than Binner does seem a bit disingenuous and even though Excel doesn’t call itself a database you’re still using it as one.Plus, Binner in a Docker container is portable, there’s no reason you can’t back up the whole thing to a USB stick and store it in drawer 1",
"parent_id": "8119031",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119245",
"author": "gs_toronto",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T22:28:23",
"content": "Ah. But WHICH drawer??",
"parent_id": "8119047",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119055",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:52:30",
"content": "Simple is good, but it’s a tradeoff between setup time, and time you need to retrieve parts and keep the database in sync. (And yes, a spreadsheet is also a database).When your collection of stuff becomes bigger, then time to find, and retrieve parts, and keep the database in sync increases. It’s very tempting to let the database out of sync, if you have to double the time by not only taking a part out of a box, but also having to open the spreadsheet, and adjust the part count. But when your spreadsheet goes out of sync, it becomes a mess you can’t rely on.And that is when a more elaborate system, which needs more setup time, but is easier to maintain becomes attractive.",
"parent_id": "8119031",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119039",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:02:17",
"content": "If your interested in the binner software, you can skip the first 14 minutes.About the first 14 minutes…I really don’t like the wall with blue and red bins. There is a lot of room in between these bins, which wastes a lot of space. Second: The front is low, which makes it hard to put these bins more then half full. Third, They’re open on the top and collect a lot of dust over time. Forth: They don’t have much depth, Usually wall space is more precious then depth, so try to use more depth.For the rest, he puts everything into plastic boxes stuffed on shelves. At 10:00 there is some discussion about whether to keep the lids on. My opinion: Ditch the plastic boxes.I use a modular drawer system. Each drawer block is 395635585mm I choose this size a long time ago. Each drawer block is small and light enough to handle easily with two persons, and with that size I could make the drawer boxes out of 12202440mm standard plywood sheets with little waste. The sides of the drawers themselves are made out of 12mm MDF, and with a 722mm groove sawn into them for the drawer sliders, which are just thin strips of hardwood (round the front edges, so it does not scrape into the MDF. And the drawer sliders are waxed after everything is painted. I really don’t like the metal drawer sliders with the balls. They’re expensive, especially when you get the 3 part sliders to be able to extend the drawer all the way. A simple and effective trick with the wooden rails is to open two drawers at the same time. You open the drawer you ant to take the parts out, and you open the drawer beneath it. The lower drawer is opened about halfway, and then you can fully extend the top drawer, and it will simply use the drawer below it as a shelf to sit on. You can also just pull the drawer out and take it “elsewhere” together with all it’s content. This also solves the “lids or no lids dilemma. My drawers don’t have separate lids, and when they are closed very little dust gets into them.The “apothecary” type of drawers are also very nice. Those drawers are very deep (a meter, maybe more), and the stack of drawers goes nearly to the ceiling, with at least the top drawers having glass bottoms, so you can look inside though the bottom. But they are also extremely expensive. An intermediate solution is to use a sideways rolling ladder, as you sometimes see in old libraries. It does not have to be very high. In the place I “live” the ceiling is at 2.4m height, which is 65cm above my head, so a ladder that gets my feet 65cm of the ground would be the maximum useful height. I once saw a nice combination of chair and “step up”. It can either be used as a normal kitchen chair, but when you fold over the seatback, it turns into a stairs with 3 or 4 landings.When I was younger (and lighter) I also used to pull out one of the lower drawings and then stand on it. But now I’m 95kg. My drawers did hold my 95kg, but I don’t want to risk that anymore and stopped doing it. But when you make your own drawer system, you could make the lower rows of drawers stronger on purpose for this reason.For the “binner software”. There is not much info about it in the last few minutes. Very few hobbyists will have such a bar code scanner. For DIY it seems much more logical to use an (old) phone as a bar code scanner. Does the software support this?Also, KiCad supports database driven libraries for a few years now. It would be very nice if you can see which parts you already have on stock while drawing a schematic, (or suitable substitutes). and during manufacture, where you’ve stored your parts (reels) to put in the PnP machine, and the BOM split into “parts on storage”, and “parts to order”. Digikey is quite friendly towards KiCad. They bought the KiCad.org domain name from a squatter (and the KiCad.com, which they kept for themselves…) They are also a direct sponsor for KiCad, and they made a few video’s about KiCad some years ago. They also made their own library of KiCad symbols, but it had a lot of overlap with stuff already in KiCad, and the quality of their libraries seemed to be a lot less then KiCad’s own libraries.KiCad does not provide database driven libraries on itself. KiCad only provides an interface to an external database. It would be nice if there was some tutorial of how to integrate this binner database with KiCad.But for me, it has to work on Linux, or I won’t even consider adopting it. I do like the QR and bar codes though. As Binner is apparently open souce, the bar code part could be extracted and adopted for other data bases too. That’s the power of Open Source. You don’t have to be a programmer yourself to benefit from the open source part. Programmers use parts of each others code to improve their projects, which others can then use.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119143",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:20:43",
"content": "Very interesting post. It would be nice if you could provide a link showing your drawer’s dimension, as it renders awful in Hackaday’s comment system.",
"parent_id": "8119039",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119578",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T01:30:07",
"content": "I don’t have any online documentation.My drawer blocks are about 40 cm wide, 63 cm high and 60 cm deep.I have a plan to make some more, and then re-organize. Then the bottom row of drawer blocks are getting some wheels, so I can pull them out. That’s handy for a drawer block that has my tools for example. (The others are just storage of parts).",
"parent_id": "8119143",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119147",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:31:30",
"content": "2-D barcode scanners are actually quite inexpensive and plentiful on eBay. I have one, but I have yet to make the inventory system for which I originally obtained it. Now, I have a bit of a head-start, thanks to this dude!",
"parent_id": "8119039",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119040",
"author": "FOSS Warrior",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:09:26",
"content": "Have you ever heard of Free or Open Source software?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119068",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:52:47",
"content": "For the “binner software”. There is not much info about it in the last few minutes. Very few hobbyists will have such a bar code scanner. For DIY it seems much more logical to use an (old) phone as a bar code scanner. Does the software support this?It doesn’t have to, at least if you’ve got an android phone. There are a few “barcode keyboard” apps available that scan directly into a text field – you can just open binner in the browser on your phone and then scan directly into the field.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119075",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:21:33",
"content": "To work really well, better integration then just “picture to text” is needed. @14:20 for example you see that a single scan from the bar code reader fills in multiple fields (type number, quantity, more?) into binner. The bar code scanner should have the smarts integrated to know which information belongs where.Of the 17 minutes only two are about binner. It seems to run on a web page inside a browser. The github page mentiones Windoze & Linux, which is not “browser”. It would be quite nice if a phone can be used as a fully integrated part (addon) of binner. You do most of the management on your PC (internet, big screen, big keyboard, etc), but when it’s more convenient, you grab your phone and fumble a bit with it in a dark corner of your storage area.It would be very nice, if you could KiCad generate a BOM that’s compatible with binner, send it to your phone, and it sorts the BOM in the order that you do the order picking most efficient.Maybe integration (extension) with “Interactive HTML BOM” would be beneficial, but I have not thought deeply about that.",
"parent_id": "8119068",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119094",
"author": "pröttel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:42:24",
"content": "“The bar code scanner should have the smarts integrated to know which information belongs where.” – it doesn’t, the smarts is in the binner software. The scanner reads the QR string and sends it to the computer, no more no less.",
"parent_id": "8119075",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119312",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T03:22:40",
"content": "I’d suggest you actually look at the documentation for the tool before going on at length. Binner is accessed via a webui. The solution I proposed isn’t theoretical, I tested it myself before I even mentioned it. Reading a barcode doesn’t simply fill in a single field – the software detects that barcode data has been entered, parses it, then automatically populates all the fields.",
"parent_id": "8119075",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119072",
"author": "Oscar",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:12:47",
"content": "Unfortunately the software only supports the high-cost suppliers Digikey, Mouser, Arrow. And this video is literally an ad from Digikey. Sad to see such a useful tool only be accessible to people with money to spend, or companies.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119088",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:32:23",
"content": "The software is open source, and the original author chose the suppliers most useful to them. Make a pull request with the other companies you would like to buy from if you don’t see what interests you.People sure do grouch about open source. Open source doesn’t mean the author of the code has to make a project fit your needs, it means they fit it to their own needs and give you the freedom to make changes if you want.",
"parent_id": "8119072",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119112",
"author": "Fwiffo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:52:51",
"content": "genuinely interested in knowing who the low cost suppliers are. Can you list them here?",
"parent_id": "8119072",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119338",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T07:00:08",
"content": "Tme, lcsc",
"parent_id": "8119112",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119104",
"author": "mog",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:16:29",
"content": "binner is pretty great, but I am a fan of inventree,https://inventree.org/, myself. great article. we need more like this on hackaday",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119113",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:54:57",
"content": "That looks interesting; thank you for the link.",
"parent_id": "8119104",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119116",
"author": "pröttel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:02:45",
"content": "And then there’s Part-DB,https://docs.part-db.de/(demo here:https://demo.part-db.de/en/)",
"parent_id": "8119113",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8123732",
"author": "Jens",
"timestamp": "2025-05-02T17:28:26",
"content": "I didn’t have much luck getting my printer to work with Binner, or even saving updated label templates (Windows, standalone), but partsdb seems to work fine!",
"parent_id": "8119116",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119149",
"author": "Bhodi Plotva",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:38:34",
"content": "Does it work with CueCat?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119167",
"author": "George Graves",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:32:45",
"content": "I’ve implimented inventory systems at one job, and managed a system with millions of parts at another. It’s not fun. And for the home gamer, screw that. The idea is great – it solves a problem – it makes for a cool video. But do I want it? Hell to the Noooooo!!! It chains you to entering in ever little part you use. You become a slave to it. And when you stray away from using it, it will then screw you. I prefer “when I see that bin getting low, order more” – it costs more, but peace of mind always does. And it’s less work. I always graviate to less work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,574.72536
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/something-is-very-wrong-with-the-ay-3-8913-sound-generator/
|
Something Is Very Wrong With The AY-3-8913 Sound Generator
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"AY-3-8910",
"ay-3-8913",
"mockingboard"
] |
The General Instruments AY-3-8910 was a quite popular Programmable Sound Generator (PSG) that saw itself used in a wide variety of systems, including Apple II soundcards such as the Mockingboard and various arcade systems. In addition to the Yamaha variants (e.g. YM2149), two cut-down were created by GI: these being the AY-3-8912 and the AY-3-8913, which should have been differentiated only by the number of GPIO banks broken out in the IC package (one or zero, respectively). However,
research by [fenarinarsa]
and others have shown that the AY-3-8913 variant has some actual hardware issues as a PSG.
With only 24 pins, the AY-3-8913 is significantly easier to integrate than the 40-pin AY-3-8910, at the cost of the (rarely used) GPIO functionality, but as it turns out with a few gotchas in terms of timing and register access. Although the
Mockingboard
originally used the AY-3-8910, latter revisions would use two AY-3-8913 instead, including the MS revision that was the Mac version of the
Mindscape Music Board
for IBM PCs.
The first hint that something was off with the AY-3-8913 came when [fenarinarsa] was experimenting with effect composition on an Apple II and noticed very poor sound quality, as demonstrated in an
example comparison video
(also embedded below). The issue was very pronounced in bass envelopes, with an oscilloscope capture showing a very distorted output compared to a YM2149. As for why this was not noticed decades ago can likely be explained by that the current chiptune scene is pushing the hardware in very different ways than back then.
As for potential solutions, the [French Touch] project has
created an adapter
to allow an AY-3-8910 (or YM2149) to be used in place of an AY-3-8913.
Top image: Revision D PCB of Mockingboard with GI AY-3-8913 PSGs.
| 14
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118995",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T08:01:51",
"content": "Perhaps this is due to my lackadaisical use of hearing protection when young, but I can’t hear a difference between the two",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119011",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:12:51",
"content": "Hi! I suggest to use Hi-Fi stereo headphones, like those from your 1970s walkman.With an 16 Hz to 16 KHz or 20 Hz to 20 KHz range, typically.The built-in speakers in mobile devices aren’t that great.",
"parent_id": "8118995",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119015",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:16:05",
"content": "nothing to do with high frequency loss imo. the bug is a random low gravelly sound that is out of rhythm with the music. i was a trained musician so it’s easier for me to hear it.",
"parent_id": "8118995",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119239",
"author": "rasz_pl",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T21:55:56",
"content": "I can’t hear a differenceThats because AY chip can only generate fart noises and beeps boops, its no SID or OPL thats for sure.",
"parent_id": "8118995",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119006",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:01:49",
"content": "I always thought Mockingboard was a great name.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119018",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:19:50",
"content": "Understandable. To non-native speakers of English language the pun perhaps isn’t obvious, though.They think about a board that is mocking up its own users rather than mockingboard vs mockingbird reference (as in, mock up the user/make fun of him).Some English puns are fine, but others are just so rudimentary that they fly under the radar of speakers of more complex languages.Some things are simply lost in translation, also.",
"parent_id": "8119006",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119141",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:14:41",
"content": "I thought it was mocking board. Because to mock something means to fake it or copy it. Which is where a mocking bird got it’s name. This board also replicates soundsMaybe that’s what you were saying but it went right over my head if so.",
"parent_id": "8119018",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119437",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T16:33:28",
"content": "Ah, you mean in the sense of a “mock-up”, a copy.Yes, that makes sense.What I had thought of was the word “mocking-up”, rather.The mockingbird, the bird, is something that English learners in other countries have rarely heard of.Also perhaps because they don’t have mockingbirds living in their country.Here in Europe, they aren’t exactly common, I suppose.I rather think that birds such as swan, woodpicker, duck, crow, eagle, blackbird, nightingale, swallow etc are more common.",
"parent_id": "8119141",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119073",
"author": "deater",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:18:27",
"content": "if there are any good reverse engineers here, Travis Goodspeed on Twitter decapped an 8910, 8912, and 8913 and you can actually see there are hardware differences with the 8913 (it’s not just an 8910 with some pins disconnected like the 8912 is). I should try to find a better link that has the images for viewing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119176",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:56:19",
"content": "https://x.com/travisgoodspeed/status/1839045782676320689And here you can find the full scans:https://bulba.untergrund.net/elect_e.htm",
"parent_id": "8119073",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119076",
"author": "Robert Spanjaard",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:25:20",
"content": "“at the cost of the (rarely used) GPIO functionality, ”Not sure if “rarely used” is justified. In MSX computers, the GPIO pins are used for the joystick ports (or General Purpose Ports as they were called in the official MSX spec).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119161",
"author": "Clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:21:05",
"content": "But they use two 6522? Atleast in the pic they used2 Ay8910 plus a few 74gates for bus decoding, and you have 32bit of gpio…. You could run an 8910 thru the gpio of another 8910 if you really wanted",
"parent_id": "8119076",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119380",
"author": "Senile Data Systems",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T11:59:17",
"content": "Konami Scramble arcade hardware does it like that.And there’s the MAC pinball machines (rare spanish company) that uses every single I/O line on two AY-3-8910. Turns out finding an AY-3-8910 in the spares pile that makes music (“or goes bleep bloop” for you chiptune haters) is easy. Finding one where all I/O lines work isn’t. Luckily on Konami Scramble HW, the “slave” AY’s I/O is completely unused so after pillaging several (more than two) boards I managed to find two AYs with all working I/O lines. And Scramble doesn’t care if some of the second AY’s I/O lines aren’t working.Funny: Scramble also uses two 8255 PIOs. They’re like an AY-3-8910 without the capability to make sound (o rly tho? I had a board that wouldn’t boot and kept crashing and one of the 8255 actually made a repeating sound FROM THE CHIP ITSELF. Replacing it with two different 8255 from other manufacturers made the same exact sound).They’re used to read DIP switches, joysticks and communicate with the sound board.",
"parent_id": "8119161",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8121299",
"author": "Robert Spanjaard",
"timestamp": "2025-04-23T12:18:04",
"content": "“But they use two 6522? Atleast in the pic they used”That’s not an MSX, is it? Did you even read my comment?",
"parent_id": "8119161",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,574.471717
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/replica-of-1880-wireless-telephone-is-all-mirrors-no-smoke/
|
Replica Of 1880 Wireless Telephone Is All Mirrors, No Smoke
|
Tyler August
|
[
"Laser Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] |
[
"Alexander Graham Bell",
"analog telephony",
"steampunk",
"telephone",
"wireless"
] |
If we asked you to name Alexander Graham Bell’s greatest invention, you would doubtless say “the telephone”; it’s probably the only one of his many, many inventions most people could bring to mind. If you asked Bell himself, though, he would tell you his greatest invention was the photophone, and if the prolific [
Nick Bild] doesn’t agree he’s at least intrigued enough to produce a replica of this
1880-vintage wireless telephone
. Yes,
18
80. As in, only four years after the telephone was patented.
It obviously did not catch on, and is not the sort of thing that comes to mind when we think “wireless telephone”. In contrast to the RF of the 20th century version, as you might guess from the name the photophone used light– sunlight, to be specific. In the original design, the transmitter was totally passive– a tube with a mirror on one end, mounted to vibrate when someone spoke into the open end of the tube. That was it, aside from the necessary optics to focus sunlight onto said mirror. [Nick Bild] skips this and uses a laser as a handily coherent light source, which was obviously not an option in 1880. As [Nick] points out, if it was, Bell certainly would have made use of it.
The photophone receiver, 1880 edition. Speaker not pictured.
The receiver is only slightly more complex, in that it does have electronic components– a selenium cell in the original, and in [Nick’s] case a modern photoresistor in series with a 10,000 ohm resistor. There’s also an optical difference, with [Nick] opting for a lens to focus the laser light on his photoresistor instead of the parabolic mirror of the original. In both cases vibration of the mirror at the transmitter disrupts line-of-sight with the receiver, creating an AM signal that is easily converted back into sound with an electromagnetic speaker.
The photophone never caught on, for obvious reasons — traditional copper-wire telephones worked beyond line of sight
and
on cloudy days–but we’re greatful to [Nick] for dredging up the history and for letting us know about it
via the tip line
. See his video about this project below.
The name [Nick Bild]
might look familiar
to
regular readers
. We’ve
highlighted a few
of
his projects
on Hackaday before.
| 18
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118965",
"author": "Wallace Owen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T02:16:02",
"content": "Bell labs invented the laser. Just sayin.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118967",
"author": "Seth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T02:48:44",
"content": "Ah yes, the culpeper file wasn’t it ?",
"parent_id": "8118965",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118981",
"author": "pröttel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:02:40",
"content": "Why go looking for a 10,000 ohm resistor when an ordinary 10k would also do?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118990",
"author": "geertu",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:53:11",
"content": "But the latter wouldn’t have the right precision ;-)",
"parent_id": "8118981",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119049",
"author": "Bryan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:42:23",
"content": "+1",
"parent_id": "8118990",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119086",
"author": "pröttel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:15:25",
"content": "Whoosh?",
"parent_id": "8118990",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119189",
"author": "Sammie Gee",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:18:38",
"content": "10k has too few zeroes. Needs moar them zeroes.",
"parent_id": "8118981",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118994",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T07:37:26",
"content": "Light based communication made me think of 1984 Dune, early in the film there were light based communication",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119017",
"author": "Andrea Campanella",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:17:25",
"content": "wow.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119019",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:26:03",
"content": "In the 1930s, there had been Lichtsprechgeräte (light phones).https://www.kriegsfunker.com/radios/LiSpr80.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119389",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:52:42",
"content": "And in the 1700s the Optical Telegraph. Which – as well as the inspiring the Clacks of Discworld fame – also gave us networking concepts like control characters, flow and rate control, data routing, packet priority, tokenised channel control, error correction, etc.",
"parent_id": "8119019",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119107",
"author": "Dylan Turner",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:21:07",
"content": "Fiberoptic before it was cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119121",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:14:24",
"content": "Before transistors and valves, telephone signals were amplified along long lines by a carbon capsule amplifier that used the sound to vibrate a capsule of carbon granules just like the carbon microphone at the handset, only, it was passing a much larger current, which provided the amplification.The selenium resistor is essentially working the same point, amplifying the weak signal from light to a much stronger electrical current. Now imagine if they had used this method to amplify sound on the telephone network: you could have a grid of selenium cells connected to different outgoing lines, and you could steer the beam of light to any of those cells using a mirror. Amplification and signal routing in the same device.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119242",
"author": "Nigel Isle",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T22:16:14",
"content": "I spent 10 years doing workshops for children at the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I also made a replica of the light telephone which I showed to the visitors. Bell invented many other things which are shown at the Museum and a visit is well worth your time!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119479",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T18:51:58",
"content": "This. The (eventually man-carrying) tetrahedral kites were particularly impressivehttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alexander-graham-bell-goes-and-flies-a-kite-for-science/",
"parent_id": "8119242",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119255",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T23:00:32",
"content": "Well not only was the first wireless telephone it was also the first wireless transmission of audio at all (that I know of) since if predates radio. Also if you wanted to use it at night a lime light would have worked, now there’s your steampunk wireless.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119279",
"author": "Leonardo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T01:24:16",
"content": "If we asked you to name Alexander Graham Bell’s greatest invention, you would doubtless say “the telephone”No. Because I learn history. Bell do not invent the telephone. Meucci was.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119369",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T10:53:21",
"content": "Yup. There were Antonio Meucci and Philipp Reis, too.But Bell had money and patents, two things that matter the most in the US.But it’s still weird that Meucci apparently isn’t being mentioned more often in US history classes considering he was half American (Italian who moved to US).So it’s not as if he couldn’t have been sort of a national hero, too.But that being said, we talk about a land that thinks that Edison was arealresearcher.. ;)",
"parent_id": "8119279",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,574.591517
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/diy-ai-butler-is-simpler-and-more-useful-than-siri/
|
DIY AI Butler Is Simpler And More Useful Than Siri
|
Donald Papp
|
[
"Artificial Intelligence"
] |
[
"AI assistant",
"digital assistant",
"diy",
"LLM",
"sqlite"
] |
[Geoffrey Litt] shows that getting an effective digital assistant that’s tailored to one’s own needs just needs a little DIY, and thanks to the kinds of tools that are available today, it doesn’t even have to be particularly complex. Meet
Stevens
, the AI assistant who provides the family with useful daily briefs
. The back end? Little more than one SQLite table and a few cron jobs.
A sample of Stevens’ notebook entries, both events and things to simply remember.
Every day,
Stevens
sends a daily brief via Telegram that includes calendar events, appointments, weather notes, reminders, and even a fun fact for the day.
Stevens
isn’t just send-only, either. Users can add new entries or ask questions about items through Telegram.
It’s rudimentary, but [Geoffrey] already finds it far more useful than Siri. This is unsurprising, as it has been astutely observed that big tech’s
digital assistants are designed to serve their makers rather than their users
. Besides, it’s also fun to have the freedom to give an assistant its own personality, something existing offerings sorely lack.
Architecture-wise, the assistant has a notebook (the single SQLite table) that gets populated with entries. These entries come from things like reading family members’ Google calendars, pulling data from a public weather API, processing delivery notices from the post office, and Telegram conversations. With a notebook of such entries (along with a date the entry is expected to be relevant), generating a daily brief is simple. After all, LLMs (Large Language Models) are amazingly good at handling and formatting natural language. That’s something even a
locally-installed LLM
can do with ease.
[Geoffrey] says that even this simple architecture is super useful, and it’s not even a particularly complex system. He encourages anyone who’s interested to
check out his project
, and see for themselves how useful even a minimally-informed assistant can be when it’s designed with ones’ own needs in mind.
| 8
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118941",
"author": "Maria",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T23:33:18",
"content": "AI doing creepy things episode 2137.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118992",
"author": "Josiah Bryan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T07:23:16",
"content": "How exactly is this creepy…?",
"parent_id": "8118941",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118999",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T08:20:55",
"content": "You thinkthisis creepy? Well you should take a look at the stuff running onmycomputer!",
"parent_id": "8118941",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119016",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:16:43",
"content": "Wow! That is creepy.",
"parent_id": "8118999",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119041",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:11:20",
"content": "I’m calling the cops! (kidding)",
"parent_id": "8118999",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119084",
"author": "John Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:11:43",
"content": "Creepy may be the fact that now I know you’re Polish!",
"parent_id": "8118941",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119117",
"author": "Mario Sierra",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:04:19",
"content": "I’m amused that the butler’s name is Stevens",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119376",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T11:51:21",
"content": "Well, on the other hand, lots of things are way more useful and simpler than Siri… Shoe laces, for example…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,574.52469
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/making-parts-feeders-work-where-they-werent-supposed-to/
|
Making Parts Feeders Work Where They Weren’t Supposed To
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"manncorp",
"pick and place",
"siemens"
] |
[Chris Cecil] had a problem. He had a Manncorp/Autotronik MC384V2 pick and place, and needed more feeders. The company was reluctant to support an older machine and wanted over $32,000 to supply [Chris] with more feeders. He contemplated the expenditure… but then came across another project which gave him pause.
Could he make Siemens feeders work with his machine?
It’s one of those “standing on the shoulders of giants” stories, with [Chris] building on the work from
[Bilsef] and the OpenPNP project
. He came across SchultzController, which could be used to work with Siemens Siplace feeders for pick-and-place machines. They were never supposed to work with his Manncorp machine, but it seemed possible to knit them together in some kind of unholy production-focused marriage. [Chris] explains how he hooked up the Manncorp hardware to a Smoothieboard and then Bilsef’s controller boards to get everything working, along with all the nitty gritty details on the software hacks required to get everything playing nice.
For an investment of just $2,500, [Chris] has been able to massively expand the number of feeders on his machine. Now, he’s got his pick and place building more Smoothieboards faster than ever, with less manual work on his part.
We feature a lot of one-off projects and home production methods, but it’s nice to also get a look at methods of more serious production in bigger numbers, too.
It’s a topic we follow with interest
. Video after the break.
[Editor’s note: Siemens is the parent company of Supplyframe, which is Hackaday’s parent company. This has nothing to do with this story.]
| 21
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118934",
"author": "drenehtsral",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T22:24:38",
"content": "I’ve seen this all too often in the industrial automation space. When doing consulting with some friends/coworkers we had a customer who had a giant (and expensive) machine on their factory floor that would measure, straighten, cut, strip, test, and print labels on the insulation of wire fed in from spools.The machine was in perfect working order and did everything they needed, they had stockpiled years of parts for it (and even machined some of their own when needed) but the vendor wanted to strong arm them into replacing it with a far more expensive model that had features they didn’t need and was missing a critical feature they did need and thusrefusedto license them (for any price) a newer version of its control software which ran on a single, increasingly decrepit DOS box but once old-school parallel ports for the software dongle (the machine itself was controlled over and obfuscated RS-232 with nonstandard bitrate, odd use of modem control signals, and unusual encoding) they felt stuckThey ended up hiring us to reverse engineer the communication protocol, write a Linux program to drive it with an easy integration point with their existing design control system (the stuff they made was all milspec so they couldn’t easily change their protocol for tracking and verifying designs without a lot ot pain). We did it for them, and to this day I have a couple meters of test wires labeled with obscene limericks in my parts bin, but as much as anything I was offended at the original manufacturer for trying to squeeze them like that. Bravo for hacking around cynical vendor lock in!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118949",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T23:49:19",
"content": "Sounds like planned obsolesce got thwarted by smart hackers.",
"parent_id": "8118934",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118964",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T02:07:19",
"content": "” Bravo for hacking around cynical vendor lock in! ”Thank you. It is a big problem to overcome. There is a lot of industry which could be setup on small scale like I am…but it takes someone who can not only use the machine but also service, setup and at times modify.I typically assume with anything closed source I am totally on my own…as I was with this. Lucky for me I had some service manuals with the machine to help with schematics.Technically..it is an old machine but it was stored for the majority of that time. I wonder how many other machines like this one are sitting idle waiting to become scrap for the same reason.",
"parent_id": "8118934",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119062",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:29:50",
"content": "Putting information online of the reverse-engineered protocol and software to interface with it can help others who have a similar problem. It’s also why I like Open Source stuff. Documentation may be incomplete, but even having source code available without further documentation is a great help for creating a new interface, or extending functionality. And it’s a good safeguard against vendor lock in, etc.",
"parent_id": "8118934",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118956",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T00:25:09",
"content": "What was the labor cost of creating the new hybrid machine?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118960",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T01:26:47",
"content": "Why? The freedom it offers is priceless.",
"parent_id": "8118956",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118962",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T01:44:37",
"content": "If he’s working for himself, he can do as he likes. If he’s an employee, he might be wasting his employer’s money.I understand the temptation to roll your own. I’ve done it myself several times, and it usually was the wrong choice.",
"parent_id": "8118960",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118969",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T03:53:45",
"content": "That’s up to his employer to decide.Although, if you read the linked article you’d see it’s… “he’s working for himself, he can do as he likes.” Hooray!Otherwise you’d have to report it I suppose.",
"parent_id": "8118962",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118963",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T02:03:35",
"content": "Labor cost…hard to calculate. If I would have financed the feeders outright…probably could have saved myself some time.But I was doing a lot at the same time including moving locations so…the downtime wasn’t a big deal.Plus, I can do this 2 more times on the machine if I want. It can have up to 128 feeders total.The amount of knowledge and confidence I gained with the overall use/design of the machine can’t really be measured though.Hopefully…some other people with the same issue will learn from what I did.",
"parent_id": "8118956",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119043",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:18:47",
"content": "People seem to like black and white answers. In a mass production environment where it’s more important that things are the same, it’s worth spending exuberant fees to keep service contracts and parts availability to avoid more then minutes of down time. If your a small team with one machine that isn’t running 24/7 these kind of mods can be very cheep in time and money. 30k is months of labor for even highly paid engineers. being able to add when needed might well exceed your yearly rate if the add one modules are readily available.I didn’t see a lead time for the manufacture’s service, but I’ve had some vendors give 12 months lead time for services they didn’t want to do, on top of the go f thyself rate.",
"parent_id": "8118963",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119127",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:30:55",
"content": "Exactly…very hard to calculate. There was a lot of other things involved that a normal company would have no problem writing off as “training”. Anyone who has ever gone through the ESD or IPC classes when in industry can attest to that. There is a lot spent on teaching people to do the job faster/better.This mod saved me 30min/board of hand placing 0402 under a microscope. Pretty easy to make up a “$/board” number…but it is harder to create a number for how absolutely soul killing it is to do that work by hand when you know a machine is sitting next to you that can do it in 5min.Even at $32k…it likely would have been worth the money…but I would have learned a lot less (plus, had less to share with the community).",
"parent_id": "8119043",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119058",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:01:57",
"content": "Labor cost should be compared to cost of buying a machine that does what he wanted AND disposing of the old unsupported machine. You could also consider (since he documented what he did) the labor cost to be a donation to the community of owners of his machine.This article is a great example of why the right to repair is important. A perfectly useful machine with many hours left in its lifetime was saved from the scrapper by working around the manufacturer’s lack of support (or assistance). This is the way hacking is supposed to work!",
"parent_id": "8118956",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118979",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T05:46:54",
"content": "Reminds me that I still have tons of electric magnets from Siemens 3×8 S feeders which I saved after converting them to shutter-less variants years ago. @Ccecil let me know if you have any use for them. As long you pay the shipping fee, I would be happy to part with them. I really have no use for them anymore :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119124",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:24:47",
"content": "I am not using the shutters on mine right now either. The Manncorp sends the advance signal just after a pick…so it is kinda useless for planning the shutter timing.In the process of going through the feeders and fixing/cleaning/lubricating them I managed to make the shutters work a lot better…but again it is a bit useless.Couple videos I did of the teardowns. I am planning one that goes over a full cleaning/lubrication but I haven’t got to it yet.https://youtu.be/2ejQfJDqQio?si=z7DteAWf4AW_a-SFhttps://youtube.com/shorts/cyOQEQYz0To?si=8KFYFTAZQyngKD-OSecond video shows the advance mechanism which I think is interesting.I may take the magnets off your hands though because I can certainly find a use for them in other projects :) They are kinda neat.",
"parent_id": "8118979",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119030",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T10:27:14",
"content": "Knew a guy who worked at a paper mill and lost his job there only to behired back on as a consultant when they realised that he was the one who wrote the program than maintained the tension on the paper, as it was run through the mill and wound into giant rolls, and no he wasn’t going to give it to them out of the goodness of his heart.Was in another shop recently where a guy was showing me an edge bander for cabnitry. An exceptionaly complex machine that needed tobe set up to 1/100 mm in some sections, and all of the fun and gamesmachining shimms, and consulting with the engineers back in Germany, where the thing was made, but there was no attempted extortion, and the machine is making near invisible seams at some ungodly speed, so",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119105",
"author": "Helena",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:18:12",
"content": "Wait, did your friend write this program on his own time using his own computer? Or did his contract specify that he owns copyright to code he writes at work? Because if neither of those are true, he’s on very thin legal ice withholding access to a program he wrote to make the plant work. It’s well-established that works created on paid time for an employer belong to the employer. “Goodness of his heart” doesn’t come into it.(Or was his employer dumb enough to not require him to store the source code on their file servers, laptops, etc, and he has the only copy of it in existence on his personal devices?)",
"parent_id": "8119030",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119201",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T19:58:16",
"content": "Odds are they have the source.At least had it and have it on a backup somewhere.It will do them no good.If they lost the source, it’s not his friends problem.As you say, it’s the employers code.Admitting he has a copy would bestupid.What he has, is the knowledge of how the code works.If they legit have lost the code, he’s hit the jackpot.Big dollars to recreate the code.Which he doesn’t have to refer to.Taking a copy home would have been ‘wrong’.Will take many, many billable hours to redo.",
"parent_id": "8119105",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119074",
"author": "Kris",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:19:21",
"content": "Hackaday is owned by Siemens? Why don’t I hear more about reviews for Siemens PLC and motion controllers from hackaday? It’d be cool to get a demo of some of the new stuff they are working on in the industrial controls space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119091",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:36:05",
"content": "Doing product reviews of Siemens gear would get us into a murky zone, because they are our grandparent company. It would be very hard not to see that as an advertorial.And just for the record, Hackaday hasneverrun advertorial content. For a 20-year-old blog, that’s absolutely something to be proud of, and something worth maintaining. We are fiercely editorially independent, and when one of our authors writes something, you know that they meant it.",
"parent_id": "8119074",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119585",
"author": "Kram",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T01:59:19",
"content": "Are these Siemens feeders better than the pneumatic Yamaha/Neoden pneumatic feeders?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119594",
"author": "Ccecil",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T02:17:48",
"content": "Good question. I have never used those other ones. The openpnp community seems to have quite a bit of knowledge when it comes to them.In my case anything was better :) I do think they are better than the autotronik feeders in most ways. The only thing I wish they had was a speed control for the advance but that isn’t something easy to do with the method they use.",
"parent_id": "8119585",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,574.653081
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/a-new-kind-of-bike-valve/
|
A New Kind Of Bike Valve?
|
Fenix Guthrie
|
[
"Transportation Hacks"
] |
[
"bicycle",
"bike",
"bike hacks",
"Schrader valve"
] |
If you’ve worked on a high-end mountain or road bike for any length of time, you have likely cursed the Presta valve. This humble century-old invention is the bane of many a home and professional mechanic. What if there is a better option? [Seth] decided to find out by
putting four valves on a single rim
.
The contenders include the aforementioned Presta, as well as Schrader, Dunlop and the young gun, Clik. Schrader and Dunlop both pre-date Presta, with Schrader finding prevalence in cruiser bicycles along with cars and even aircraft. Dunlop is still found on bicycles in parts of Asia and Europe. Then came along Presta some time around 1893, and was designed to hold higher pressures and be lower profile then Schrader and Dunlop. It found prevalence among the weight conscious and narrow rimmed road bike world and, for better or worse, stuck around ever since.
But there’s a new contender from industry legend Schwalbe called Clik. Clik comes with a wealth of nifty modern engineering tricks including its party piece, and namesake, of a clicking mechanical locking system, no lever, no screw attachment. Clik also fits into a Presta valve core and works on most Presta pumps. Yet, it remains to be seen whether Clik is just another doomed standard, or the solution to many a cyclists greatest headache.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen clever
engineering
going into a bike valve.
| 52
| 23
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118889",
"author": "Sam",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:12:05",
"content": "It’s mentioned in the comments to that video and worth repeating here that issues with Presta valves are often the result of over loosening the nut. You only need to give them about one full turn to add/remove air. This is both less fiddly than trying to fully unscrew them and makes them less susceptible to bending.I still think Schrader valves are better if you have the choice but if you have a bike with Presta try this before you go through the trouble of swapping them out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119129",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:37:19",
"content": "Schrader valves stay open as long as the pump is connected, so the pressure gauge works. Dunlop valves don’t, so the pressure gauge at the pump is useless. The needle goes up as you pump, and then immediately down when you stop, and the pressure at the pump is always higher because of the flow restriction of the valve, so you only get a rough guess at what the pressure in the tire actually is.Presta valves behave the same way depending on whether the pump keeps pressing the valve button down, and the pumps I’ve seen just don’t have that mechanism, so it’s just as bad as the Dunlop valve. To make it work like a Schrader valve, you have to use the adapter and then pump it with a Schrader pump, which is to say you might as well use a Schrader valve in the first place.",
"parent_id": "8118889",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118892",
"author": "Jason",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:33:21",
"content": "If presta valves fail for you, you are doing something very wrong, I have never had a problem with them over the 10’s of thousands of miles ridden.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118895",
"author": "Padrote",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:41:29",
"content": "Presta valves can get clogged with sealant. and threads on the nut/core get corroded by sealant and make them difficult to unthread. And as shown the cores can bend. all of these things have happened to me.I have a set of click valves but I have yet to install them. they seem like they would work well but that you need to have the head adapter with you at all times is kind of a deal breaker.they’re expensive, but I prefer the Reserve Fillmore valves.",
"parent_id": "8118892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118925",
"author": "fonz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:44:12",
"content": "will a pump for a woods valve not fit a click ?",
"parent_id": "8118895",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118972",
"author": "Johannes",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T04:07:20",
"content": "You don’t need the pump head adapter for the click valve. Normal presta head pumps work as well. I have been running the click valves on two of my bikes for about two months now and still use my old pump.",
"parent_id": "8118895",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118945",
"author": "Scott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T23:45:22",
"content": "I was once 5ish miles up and into the mountains on a ride when a stick, kicked up by the front wheel went into the back wheel and broke off the presta valve stem of my buddy’s back wheel. A more-stout system would be very welcome… unfortunately, this isn’t that… I’ve also had many presta cores destroyed by sealant.Silca’s Aluminum Presta Chuck is a game changer though, makes presta inflation so simple and reliable.",
"parent_id": "8118892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118989",
"author": "Timo P",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:49:17",
"content": "The stick could have also ruined your derailleur and frame by jumping slightly differently. Should you replace frame and derailleur also with something better?",
"parent_id": "8118945",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119122",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:18:43",
"content": "I once dropped a wheel, it hit the side of the Schraeder valve and snapped it off. That was quite a pain because…It was a car wheel, so the tyre had to come off to replace the valve. And yes, they are shiney metal valve stems on an OZ Racing alloy.",
"parent_id": "8118945",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120993",
"author": "Martin Stewart",
"timestamp": "2025-04-22T15:57:06",
"content": "I’ve had a very similar incident. Rider ahead of me dropped his water bottle, kicked up and snapped my valve!",
"parent_id": "8118945",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118957",
"author": "JM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T00:44:14",
"content": "They work, but the chuck on my pump is a bit rubbish and it can be hard to remove without venting a bunch of air.I’m keen to get a set of clik valves because they’re cheap, mostly backwards compatible, and it makes attaching and removing the air chuck a simple one hand job.This is definitely not a revolutionary product but for $20 I’ll take the quality of life improvement.",
"parent_id": "8118892",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118893",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:33:41",
"content": "I wouldn’t have a Schrader valve on my 25mm alloy rim – I’d be too afraid of the rim breaking at that point because of the much-bigger hole required.I don’t understand what the fuss is about. I’ve never had any problems pumping up tires via Presta valves, whether using the manual pump that fits on my bike frame, or a gas-station pump via the little brass screw-on adapter I carry when I’m riding.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118894",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:39:06",
"content": "I’ll also add that when I’m changing a tube, I put a little air into it to prevent the tube from getting caught between the bead wire and the rim. (I deflate it before doing the final seating of the tire on the rim). When I had bigger wheels with Schrader valves, I had to use the pump for that initial bit of air. With a Presta, because the valve tip protrudes, I just blow it up as I would a balloon.",
"parent_id": "8118893",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118900",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:55:36",
"content": "Yes, but where is my little brass screw-on adapter?!? And just recently purchased another 5 pack of the damn things!Also, this just makes it extra hassle, extra fiddly, when compared with Schrader valves.Solid tires all the way!",
"parent_id": "8118893",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118916",
"author": "Ian Dobbie",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:56:31",
"content": "Oh yeah, the worst of all possible worlds. Crap rolling resistance, and a terribel ride!",
"parent_id": "8118900",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118924",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:40:55",
"content": "I have them on my fixie!",
"parent_id": "8118916",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119164",
"author": "Collie147",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T18:26:42",
"content": "Ha! 😂 Brilliant. They’d it would forever to wear down solid tyres doing skids by pedalling backwards.My answer to the the fixie arguement is always “I hope you’ve a set of raised harley style handled bars, some spokey dokeys, a flag pole and maybe one of those old Kelloggs reflectors there for nostalgia value on that bike!”",
"parent_id": "8118924",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8120453",
"author": "Mark Lemker Lemker",
"timestamp": "2025-04-21T03:20:12",
"content": "Solid tires tend to wreck rims",
"parent_id": "8118900",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118961",
"author": "Chris Maple",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T01:30:17",
"content": "You must live in an extraordinarily good neighborhood. I’ve never had a frame-mounted pump last more than a year before it was stolen.",
"parent_id": "8118893",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119111",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T15:45:43",
"content": "I pull it off and put it in my backpack, along with my water bottle and lights. I never ride without a bag of some kind unless I know I won’t be leaving my bike unattended. Even then, I’m often carrying other things and need the bag anyway.",
"parent_id": "8118961",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118899",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:49:38",
"content": "https://xkcd.com/927/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118911",
"author": "Unochepassa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:35:15",
"content": "In Italy we also have the Regina valve, which is quite common for city bikeshttps://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valvola_Regina",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118980",
"author": "Volock",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:00:42",
"content": "I’ll have to add that one to the list. Moving to NL and the Woods valve still being so common was a shock, and a challenge for my existing pumps",
"parent_id": "8118911",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119057",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:57:21",
"content": "Here in Germany most bicycles use Dunlop/Woods valves. I have switched to Schrader just because it’s easier to get a decent pump for it. I don’t think I have ever noticed a Presta valve on a bike.",
"parent_id": "8118980",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119133",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:47:53",
"content": "On the flipside, the cheap pumps you get at the supermarket work better with Dunlop valves and often not at all with Schrader valves, even if they technically have the correct head for it by flipping the little plastic thingy inside the nozzle. They don’t seat properly and getting any air in is incredibly difficult.I once had that displeasure when I lost tire pressure on the road and had to buy one of those three euro specials because they didn’t have anything else.",
"parent_id": "8119057",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118985",
"author": "unochepassa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:42:16",
"content": "It’s sturdy — I’ve never had any issues with them (though I’m just a casual biker). The only minor downside is that, to inflate the tire, you need to fully remove the valve cap. It’s small and easy to misplace. Interestingly, the cap is also used to deflate the tire: when partially unscrewed, you can press it against the valve core to release air. When fully screwed in, it seals the valve. That said, the valve still works fine even without the cap.",
"parent_id": "8118911",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118987",
"author": "unochepassa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:45:43",
"content": "I think it combines the best of both Presta and Schrader valves — it has the compact size of a Presta and the straightforward mechanism of a Schrader. Plus, it includes everything you need to both deflate the tire and seal the valve, all built into the cap.",
"parent_id": "8118985",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118918",
"author": "cmholm",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:03:00",
"content": "Oh, whew, just weird high end bike stuff. I was worried this was going to blow the lid off of big Schrader or some such.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118923",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:39:19",
"content": "ZEROThat’s how many times I have bent, or even seen a bent presta valve.And I worked in a bike shop for 5 years.I have seen plenty of mechanical horror stories.It’s always fun wrenching on someone’s bike and knowing the only tool they own is a vice-grip.Or working on a bike after someone used the lock Tite that needs a torch to remove.But I have never seen a bent presta valve…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118953",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T23:58:41",
"content": "🤣🤣🤣🤣",
"parent_id": "8118923",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118976",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T04:43:17",
"content": "Fortunately I have both a vice grip and a Crescent wrench.",
"parent_id": "8118923",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118997",
"author": "Davicious",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T08:15:52",
"content": "This ^Me, 40 years riding a bicycle, almost everyday.“Solution” article/youtube video searching for a problem.",
"parent_id": "8118923",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119080",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:46:23",
"content": "You’re less clumsy than I am. :)But as the video mentions, you can also just straighten it back out. And the next inner tube comes with a new one anyway.I think that might have been my bike with the vice-grip though…",
"parent_id": "8118923",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118929",
"author": "General -Fault",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:55:48",
"content": "I installed Click valves on my tubeless road bike a few months ago. I’m an instant and complete convert. Besides the stated benefits here, I can attach a pump and top off the pressure in much less time and effort. It’s much easier to adjust the pressure to get exactly what I want. And for tubeless, the higher flow rate makes it much easier to seat the tire. It also leaks far less. As far as I’m concerned, this is a much superior design to presta.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118932",
"author": "punkdigerati",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T22:22:20",
"content": "Probably just autocorrect, but it’s Clik valve, not Click. Also, for anyone looking to try them out, they’re sold by the pair, so you only need to buy one set of adapter cores or new stems per bike, something I wish I had realized before buying twice as many as needed.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118942",
"author": "Fenix Guthrie",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T23:35:38",
"content": "You are correct, sorry about that!",
"parent_id": "8118932",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118935",
"author": "Brad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T22:51:09",
"content": "Not a fan of Presta valves. I’ve not had any bend, but have has the inner cores unscrewing with the pump attachment on the side of the road – which is a PITA.Also, had the inner cores unscrew when undoing the lock nut – again not great when it’s below freezing and you’re on the side of the road.And even when they’re working correctly, Presta are fiddly – especially in the winter. IMO there should only be two valve types:1) Schrader.2) Schwalbe Clik valves – if for some reason a wheel manufacturer can’t physically fit Schrader.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118939",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T23:28:46",
"content": "It’s times like this where I realize. . . I’m not really into bikes. I don’t think I’ve seen anything but a Schrader valve on any tire I’ve encountered in my life.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119042",
"author": "Nomen Nescio",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:13:48",
"content": "schrader’s are the bog-standard, simple and basic valves you’ll find everywhere because they Just Work. nothing at all wrong with them.as the video says, you’ll find presta’s on a lot of bikes because some bike rims are just physically too narrow to fit a schrader, and they got popular in cycling way back when, and cyclists are that weird combination of stupidly conservative while also stupidly fashion-driven.and as most of the commenters here say, the video overstates presta valves’ fragility. i, too, have never seen one bent or damaged. they’re fiddly to use — and i might try out that clik system just because of that — but you’d almost have to be trying to damage one.",
"parent_id": "8118939",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118977",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T04:46:09",
"content": "Back of the envelope 8 mile commute by bike each way times 5 days a week times, let’s say 40 weeks a year for a decade. That’s… holy crap 32k miles in the saddle.Literally zero problems with a valve stem ever.Like bikes themselves that’s about as perfect a mature technology as I could ever imagine.Sadly now that I’m old it’s like one bike commute a month when the weather is nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118982",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:28:21",
"content": "So curious to see what the rest of tgh world calls thesse valves. Wasn’t even sure we where talkibg about the same thibg as I didn’t even recognize the namesHere in the netherlands we call presta the french valve, schrader car valves abd dunlop bike valvrs. I think …Not that its any better, just weird custom. I suppose as a bike country its worth noting :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119003",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T08:30:17",
"content": "I did 30 miles/day on presta valves for years with no issues. The valve cores did get bent occasionally but nothing to cause a problem.And then a few months ago, had two fail on me.If a better valve core isn’t expensive then why not?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119027",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T10:14:24",
"content": "Before I got hit by a car that ended my road racing “career”, I did a lot of roadbike racing, both on the streets (organized and alleycat racing) and velodrome racing. I’ve worked in my friends racing bike shop for many years. I’ve never seen a problem with standard valves nor have I ever heard of anyone having problems with that. I wish my motorcycles and my car had presta valves as I can’t stand schrader valves. Such a pain.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119050",
"author": "hammarbytp",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:43:56",
"content": "The only issue I had with presta valve was once I got an old bike out the shed, unscrewed it and the top just snapped off. Have to say prefer the alternatives, since their is definately a failure point in the valve head",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119063",
"author": "eMpTy-10",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:30:33",
"content": "All my years mountain biking and never once had any kind of issue with Presta stems. The benefit in mountain biking is the locking nut for the stem doubles as a rim lock of sorts and keeps the tube from rotating. Ever seen a Schrader valve sideways half into the rim? Exactly.I’ve never once pulled the core out with the pump. If you’ve done that then you clearly didn’t reinstall the core properly or you unscrewed the tip nut too far and loosened the core. I’ve also never once bent a valve tip. Screw it down when you’re done and put the cap on. It’s really not that difficult.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119067",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:50:13",
"content": "i don’t run tubeless and i don’t use sealant and i’ve only once had a problem with presta valves…on a rental bike, the shaft had been bent and the stop to prevent unscrewing it too far had been eroded, and it dropped into the tube never to be seen again. i’ve never been able to damage one like that myself.i have a lot of trouble with chucks though. the local bike shop has carried a variety of dual-use chucks for years. and all of them suck. the most recent one is good at presta but bad at schrader. i have had a lot of trouble over the years getting a good schrader-only chuck. i got what i thought was a foolproof one, it actually threads onto the valve, but it has succumbed to a well-known and uncorrectable failure mode! the others are all finnicky, work on some valves but not others. a variety of failure modes. very frustrating. i’m surprised more people aren’t fed up with schrader valves.my favorite thing about presta is that it usually comes with a little nut you can thread onto the stem to hold it against the rim, so you don’t push it in when starting a 100% flat tire. if my schrader valves had that, that would fix probably half of my difficulty with schrader. my least favorite thing about presta valves is that a lot of rims these days have thick profiles so it pays to think a little about whether you want a long or short stem (when in doubt, go long).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119246",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T22:34:46",
"content": "I’ve had both those problems, chucks that don’t seal against the valve (so I wrap teflon tape around it to remedy that problem), and valves that lack the threaded nut to keep you from pushing them into the tire when there’s little or no pressure in it yet. FWIW, I’ve ridden over 100,000 miles, and maintained my family’s bikes too which might add another 100,000.",
"parent_id": "8119067",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119069",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:57:06",
"content": "I’ve used this type of valves on my bicycle wheels for 30+ years, and I never found the things he’s complaining about a big issue. And he’s whining a lot about these simple things, so I stopped the video before it got halfway.One reason I prefer presto over dunlop, is that you can mount (and remove) the tire without deflating the tire completely or removing the nipple.I do agree with Irox, and:https://xkcd.com/927/Lending a bicycle pump and then finding out the fitting don’t fit is a nuisance.Small tip: When mounting the inner and outer tube, always put some air into the inner tube. No “pressure”, but just enough air so it barely touches the outer tube. This makes it easier to put the inner tube into the outer tube during mounting, and it prevents any kinks in the inner tube.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119144",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:22:41",
"content": "My gripe with schrader is only in the last decade or two have tolerances gone astray and the press very hard to get air going in is common on both cars and bikes. It wasn’t that way when it was all domestic. I had a presta bike once no problem it had a pump and connector. Skinny rims and finally a small piece of wood on the street had me give it up.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119335",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T06:45:07",
"content": "Following Seth bike hacks, (now Berm peak and Berm peak express) since the beginning, as a mountain biker glad to see him here!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119400",
"author": "J",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T13:50:50",
"content": "I’ve been using presta valves for 35 years now and have never had a single issue, including tubeless applications. Just more marketing justification for new and overcomplicated products…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119603",
"author": "Wagathon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T03:25:06",
"content": "Yes, I use the nut that comes with presta. And, I use the cap after topping off the air.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,574.817668
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/announcing-the-hackaday-pet-hacks-contest/
|
Announcing The Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest
|
Elliot Williams
|
[
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns"
] |
[
"2025 Pet Hacks Contest",
"contest",
"pet hacks",
"pets"
] |
A dog may be man’s best friend, but many of us live with cats, fish, iguanas, or even wilder animals. And naturally, we like to share our hacks with our pets. Whether it’s a robot ball-thrower, a hamster wheel that’s integrated into your smart home system, or even just an automatic feeder for when you’re not home, we want to see what kind of projects that your animal friends have inspired you to pull off.
The three top choices will take home $150 gift certificates from DigiKey, the contest’s sponsor, so that you can make even more pet-centric projects. You have until May 27th to
get your project up on Hackaday.io, and get it entered into Pet Hacks.
Honorable Mention Categories
Of course, we have a couple thoughts about fun directions to take this contest, and we’ll be featuring entries along the way. Just to whet your whistle, here are our four honorable mention categories.
Pet Safety:
Nothing is better than a hack that helps your pet stay out of trouble. If your hack contributes to pet safety, we want to see it.
Playful Pets:
Some hacks are just for fun, and that goes for our pet hacks too. If it’s about amusing either your animal friend or even yourself, it’s a playful pet hack.
Cyborg Pets:
Sometimes the hacks aren’t for your pet, but on your pet. Custom pet prosthetics or simply ultra-blinky LED accouterments belong here.
Home Alone:
This category is for systems that aim to make your pet more autonomous. That’s not limited to vacation feeders – anything that helps your pet get along in this world designed for humans is fair game.
Inspiration
We’ve seen an amazing number of pet hacks here at Hackaday, from simple to wildly overkill. And we love them all! Here are a few of our favorite pet hacks past, but feel free to chime in the comments if you have one that didn’t make our short list.
Let’s start off with a fishy hack. Simple aquariums don’t require all that much attention or automation, so they’re a great place to start small with maybe a light controller or something that turns off your wave machine every once in a while. But when you get to the point of multiple setups, you might also want to spend a little more time on the automation. Or at least that’s how we imagine that
[Blue Blade Fish] got to the point of a system with multiple light setups, temperature control, water level sensing, and more.
It’s a 15-video series, so buckle in.
OK, now let’s talk cats. Cats owners know they can occasionally bring in dead mice, for which
a computer-vision augmented automatic door is the obvious solution
. Or maybe your cats spend all their time in the great outdoors? Then you’ll need
a weather-proof automatic feeder for the long haul
. Indoor cats, each with a special diet?
Let the Cat-o-Matic 3000 keep track of who has been fed
. But for the truly pampered feline, we leave for your consideration
the cat elevator
and
the sun-tracking chair
.
Dogs are more your style? We’ve seen a number of
automatic ball launchers
for when you just get tired of playing fetch. But what tugged hardest at our heartstrings was [Bud]’s
audible go-fetch toy
that he made for his dog [Lucy] when she lost her vision, but not her desire to keep playing. How much tech is too much tech?
A dog-borne WiFi hotspot
, or a
drone set up to automatically detect and remove the dreaded brown heaps
?
Finally, we’d like to draw your attention to some truly miscellaneous pet hacks. [Mr. Goxx] is a hamster who
trades crypto
, [Mr. Fluffbutt] runs in
a VR world simulation hamster wheel
, and
[Harold] posts his workouts over MQTT
– it’s the Internet of Hamsters after all. Have birds? Check out
this massive Chicken McMansion
or this great vending machine that
trains crows to clean up cigarette butts in exchange for peanuts
.
We had a lot of fun looking through Hackaday’s back-catalog of pet hacks, but we’re still missing yours! If you’ve got something you’d like us all to see,
head on over to Hackaday.io and enter it in the contest.
Fame, fortune, and a DigiKey gift certificate await!
| 14
| 10
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118915",
"author": "Rich",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:51:33",
"content": "Meow",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118927",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:49:19",
"content": "may we all hope the Acoustic Kitty is not one of the entries.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118933",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T22:23:55",
"content": "Don’t let your cats outside",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118973",
"author": "paul_shallard",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T04:11:32",
"content": "next suggested projecta remote feeder for your toddlertired of being a “hands on” parentuse an internet connection to remotely feed, water and play with your childall of the advantages of owning a child without the inconvenience",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118983",
"author": "Weasel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:39:45",
"content": "Man, i have no animal at home….. Does my pet rock also count?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119085",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T14:12:39",
"content": "I would really like to see a hack for a pet rock. I’m sure it could be interesting. A hamster wheel that polishes the rock a bit every day? An automatic watering system to keep it damp but not soaked? Just some ideas to think about.",
"parent_id": "8118983",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8120060",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T20:40:39",
"content": "Wireless pet rock.",
"parent_id": "8119085",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118998",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T08:20:45",
"content": "AI Cat translator should be easy to implement,“miaow” = feed me“maaaaaooowww” = feed me“mew” = feed me“mrrrrrrrrrr” = feed meplaintive look = feed meetc. etc.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119804",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T21:01:58",
"content": "You forgot:“Prrrŕrrrrr” which translates to: ” You suck but I tolerate you. Oh, and it’s tume to feed me.”",
"parent_id": "8118998",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119029",
"author": "Mauricio",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T10:21:43",
"content": "eager to check the cyborg with 3D printing guys",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119059",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:17:23",
"content": "When I hear of pet hacking, I have to think of that big log of wood by the shed that by grandma used for their chicken.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119503",
"author": "David P",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:38:28",
"content": "I’d be interested in a Commodore PET contest :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119547",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:17:27",
"content": "Bulgaria",
"parent_id": "8119503",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8127838",
"author": "Beaker",
"timestamp": "2025-05-14T19:53:04",
"content": "Is your cat TOO LOUD?!?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,574.879509
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/new-brymen-bluetooth-bm788bt-digital-multimeter-coming-soon/
|
New Brymen Bluetooth BM788BT Digital Multimeter Coming Soon
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Reviews",
"Tool Hacks"
] |
[
"bluetooth",
"BM780 Series",
"BM788BT",
"Brymen",
"digital multimeter"
] |
If you’re into electronics you can never have too many digital multimeters (DMMs). They all have different features, and if you want to make multiple measurements simultaneously, it can pay to have a few. Over on his video blog [joe smith] reviews the new Brymen BM788BT, which is a new entry into the Bluetooth logging meter category.
This is a two-part series: in the first
he runs the meter through its measurement paces
, and in the second
he looks at the Bluetooth software interface
. And when we say “new” meter, we mean
brand new
, this is a review unit that you can’t yet get in stores.
According to a post on the EEVblog,
this Bluetooth variant was promised five years ago
, and back then Brymen even had the Bluetooth module pin header on the PCB, but it has taken a long time to get the feature right. If you scroll through the thread you will find that Brymen has made its
protocol specification available
for the BM780 series meters.
It looks like some Bluetooth hacking might be required to get the best out of this meter. Of course we’re no strangers to hacking DMMs around here. We’ve taken on the
Fluke 77
for example, and
these DMM tweezers
.
| 14
| 5
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118845",
"author": "coup on Vill",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:49:40",
"content": "I’ll say no to it just from the unbranded second hand looking cardboard box and the recycled looking piece of bubble packing material. And no test leads?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118857",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:28:09",
"content": "I think it’s a pre-sale test unit.",
"parent_id": "8118845",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118984",
"author": "Neoncrow",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:41:32",
"content": "Brymen meters come with better leads than Flukes. Personally I use Probemaster super softies on everything including my Keysight bench meter.",
"parent_id": "8118857",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118878",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T17:32:15",
"content": "If you buy an EEVblog meter (which are manufactured by Brymen) it will turn up in a plain white box with a few words printed on the bottom: “No bullshit packaging”. It made me chuckle.",
"parent_id": "8118845",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118968",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T03:25:59",
"content": "That’s how it should be. There’s no need to waste resources on fancy packaging that will just get thrown away.",
"parent_id": "8118878",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118866",
"author": "philosiraptor117",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:42:18",
"content": "owon likely",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118876",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T17:24:46",
"content": "You mean the Brymen meters are manufactured by Owon? I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure Brymen makes their own stuff. Brymen are who make the EEVblog branded meters.",
"parent_id": "8118866",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118875",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T17:22:45",
"content": "I can see it’s a fuzzy continuum from “paid advertising” through “product release announcement” to “sponsored review” to “product tutorial” to “good hack”. I can’t complain, because I get more than what I pay for here, but surely we have to draw a line somewhere…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118877",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T17:31:01",
"content": "Hi Paul. I’m new here. In fact this post is my fourth post. I can assure you that my experience of the editorial process so far is that Hackaday takes its mission of creating on-topic and relevant hacks very seriously and we certainly don’t want to be in the business of shilling for anyone. This post is here because a lot of people think that bluetooth is a cool feature in a DMM.",
"parent_id": "8118875",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118882",
"author": "Fazal Majid",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T17:46:17",
"content": "Specially Bluetooth with a fully documented open-source protocol instead of a proprietary app that will inevitably be discontinued and succumb to bit rot when an OS update breaks it. I’d much prefer the isolation of Bluetooth to the questionable one of USB.",
"parent_id": "8118877",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119152",
"author": "Mildred Monday",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:46:56",
"content": "I’ve unsubscribed from many YouTube channels for this reason. They start off with great content then once they get big and the free products start to roll in the content becomes crapitalism masked as honest reviews.I didn’t get that vibe from this post but I see where your coming from. We all love test and measurement gear but it’s best when the writer discloses whether the product was purchased or if it was a “gift”.",
"parent_id": "8118875",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118886",
"author": "peter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T18:31:11",
"content": "ooooh, that 4×20 vfd would be nice",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118888",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:08:36",
"content": "I added a Wifi to a Brymen DMM (sold as another brand though) once. This one has a an IR communication, so i took an ESP8266, got these cheap IR modules. I removed the transmission IR LED, made a 3D printed case with a voltage converter and the ESP inside and a USB cord for powering it from an USB power bank, and loaded ESP-link to the ESP.Then i had to find a software, that makes a virtual serial port to a telnet connection, which there are no open source software, except Com2Tcp (which i’m not sure you can run it on Win 10 and up, last release was 18 years ago), but there are some free for non commercial use software, which i used.And on PC side, i used SmuView (“part of” Sigrok). It can decode the Brymen protocol and show gauges and tables and save the data. Too bad Sigrok doesn’t have support for com port redirecting.The DMM has a fast mode, where it can record like at 10 Hz or something, which makes it a little but more useful for data collection. I was planning on using it to record from a moving vehicle, but didn’t need to in the end. Plus, the case wasn’t quite right, so the IR connection is a bit finicky.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118891",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:13:38",
"content": "Nice hack!",
"parent_id": "8118888",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,574.931811
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-john-lennons-typewriter/
|
Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With John Lennon’s Typewriter
|
Kristina Panos
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] |
[
"chorded keyboard",
"John Lennon",
"mid-century",
"mpu6050",
"Odell",
"Odell index typewriter",
"Odell typewriter",
"Palm Springs",
"wearable keyboard",
"wooden typewriter"
] |
Image by [akavel] via
GitHub
Reader [akavel] was kind enough to notify me about
Clawtype
, which is a custom wearable chorded keyboard/mouse combo based on
the Chordite
by [John W. McKown].
First of all, I love the brass rails — they give it that lovely circuit sculpture vibe. This bad boy was written in Rust and currently runs on a SparkFun ProMicro RP2040 board. For the mouse portion of the program, there’s an MPU6050 gyro/accelerometer.
[akavel]’s intent was to pair it with XR glasses, which sounds like a great combination to me. While typing is still a bit slow, [akavel] is improving at a noticeable pace and does some vim coding during hobby time.
In the future, [akavel] plans to try a BLE version, maybe even running off a single AA Ni-MH cell, and probably using an nRF52840. As for the 3D-printed shape, that was designed and printed by [akavel]’s dear friend [Cunfusu],
who has made the files available over at Printables
. Be sure to check it out in the brief demo video after the break.
Wooden You Like To Use the Typewriter?
Image by [bilbonbigos] via
reddit
I feel a bit late to the party on this one, but that’s okay, I made an nice entrance.
The Typewriter
is [bilbonbigos]’ lovely distraction-free writing instrument that happens to be primarily constructed of wood. In fact, [bilbonbigos] didn’t use any screws or nails — the whole thing is glued together.
The Typewriter uses a Raspberry Pi 3B+, and [bilbonbigos] is FocusWriter to get real work done on it. it runs off of a 10,000 mAh power bank and uses a 7.9″ Waveshare display.
The 60% mechanical keyboard was supposed to be Bluetooth but turned out not to be when it arrived, so that’s why you might notice a cable sticking out.
The whole thing all closed up is about the size of a ream of A4, and [bilbonbigos] intends to add a shoulder strap in order to make it more portable.
That cool notebook shelf doubles as a mousing surface, which is pretty swell and rounds out the build nicely. Still, there are some things [bilbonbigos] would change — a new Raspi, or a lighter different physical support for the screen, and a cooling system.
The Centerfold: A Keyboard For Your House In Palm Springs
Image by [the_real_jamied] via
reddit
Can’t you feel the space age Palm Springs breezes just looking at this thing?
No? Well, at least admit that it looks quite atomic-age with that font and those life-preserver modifier keycaps. This baby would look great on one of those giant Steelcase office desks. Just don’t spill your La Croix on it, or whatever they drink in Palm Springs.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Odell Typewriter
First of all,
the machine pictured here
is not the true Odell number 1 model, which has a pair of seals’ feet at each end of the base and is referred to as the “
Seal-Foot Odell
“. Ye olde Seal-Foot was only produced briefly in 1889.
Image via
The Antikey Chop
But then inventor Levi Judson Odell completely redesigned the thing into what you see here — model 1b, for which he was awarded a patent in 1890. I particularly like the markings on the base. The nickel-plated, rimless model you see here was not typical; most had gold bases.
These babies cost 1/5th of a standard typewriter, and were quite easy to use to boot. With everything laid out in a line, it was far easier to use a slide mechanism than your ten fingers to select each character. On top of everything else, these machines were small enough to take with you.
No matter their appearance, or whether they typed upper case only or both, Odells were all linear index typewriters. The print element is called a type-rail. There is a fabric roller under the type-rail that applies ink to the characters as they pass. Pinch levers on the sides of the carriage did double duty as the carriage advance mechanism and the escapement.
Round-based Odells went by the wayside in 1906 and were replaced by square-based New American No. 5 models. They functioned the same, but looked quite different.
Finally, John Lennon’s Typewriter Is For Sale
Image via
Just Collecting
Got an extra ten grand lying around?
You could own an interesting piece of history
.
This image comes courtesy of Paul Fraser Collectibles,
who are selling this typewriter once owned and used by the legendary Beatle himself
. While Lennon composed poems and songs on the machine, it’s unclear whether he secretly wanted to be a paperback writer.
This machine, an SCM (Smith-Corona Marchant) Electra 120, is an interesting one; it’s electric, but the carriage return is still manual. I myself have an SCM Secretarial 300, which looks very much the same, but has a frightening ‘Power Return’ that sends the carriage back toward the right with enough power to shake the floor, depending upon the fortitude of your table.
Apparently Lennon would use the machine when traveling, but gave it to a close friend in the music industry when he upgraded or otherwise no longer needed it. A booking agent named Irwin Pate worked with this friend and obtained the typewriter from him, and Irwin and his wife Clarine held on to it until they sold it to Paul Fraser Collectibles. I find it interesting that this didn’t go to auction at Christie’s — I think it would ultimately go for more, but I’m a writer, not an auction-ologist.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
.
| 2
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118822",
"author": "Mac Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T14:27:53",
"content": "“While Lennon composed poems and songs on the machine, it’s unclear whether he secretly wanted to be a paperback writer.”I see what you did there!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYvkICbTZIQ",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118855",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:25:33",
"content": "I want to be a paperback writer…Writing on a distraction-free device is very useful, I didn’t realize quite how useful it is until I started actually writing. Take a hike in the woods, sit down in a quiet place, and write distraction free. It’s awesome.I’ve been trying to put together a system like the wooden typewriter above, except that it’s a project and not a product. So much of my creative time would be put into making the device, and then I’d have to keep adjusting and upgrading and making improvements to the system that it would take away from the writing time.I’m an early adopter of BYOK on kickstarter, which purports to be exactly this system sans ksyboard, which you can supply. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I have high hopes.https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/byok/byok-the-ultimate-distraction-free-writing-tool/posts/4334654?ref=project_update_registered_users_tout_1So far my best solution is a Dana, followed by (2nd best) and old android phone running emacs. The Dana has the best functionality, but it’s big and bulky. The phone is small and portable, but emacs is always in portrait mode and can’t be switched to landscape. :-(Anyway, that wooden keyboard looks like the perfect solution. Too bad it’s not a product, I’d buy it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,574.982747
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/shine-on-you-crazy-diamond-quantum-magnetic-sensor/
|
Shine On You Crazy Diamond Quantum Magnetic Sensor
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Laser Hacks",
"Science"
] |
[
"diamond",
"laser",
"magnetic",
"microwave",
"N-V",
"nitrogen vacancy center",
"PLL",
"quantum",
"sensor",
"spin"
] |
We’re probably all familiar with the Hall Effect, at least to the extent that it can be used to make solid-state sensors for magnetic fields. It’s a cool bit of applied physics, but there are other ways to sense magnetic fields, including leveraging the weird world of quantum physics with
this diamond, laser, and microwave open-source sensor
.
Having never heard of quantum sensors before, we took the plunge and read up on the topic using some of the material provided by [Mark C] and his colleagues at Quantum Village. The gist of it seems to be that certain lab-grown diamonds can be manufactured with impurities such as nitrogen, which disrupt the normally very orderly lattice of carbon atoms and create a “nitrogen vacancy,” small pockets within the diamond with extra electrons. Shining a green laser on N-V diamonds can stimulate those electrons to jump up to higher energy states, releasing red light when they return to the ground state. Turning this into a sensor involves sweeping the N-V diamond with microwave energy in the presence of a magnetic field, which modifies which spin states of the electrons and hence how much red light is emitted.
Building a practical version of this quantum sensor isn’t as difficult as it sounds. The trickiest part seems to be building the diamond assembly, which has the N-V diamond — about the size of a grain of sand and actually not that expensive — potted in clear epoxy along with a loop of copper wire for the microwave antenna, a photodiode, and a small fleck of red filter material. The electronics primarily consist of an ADF4531 phase-locked loop RF signal generator and a 40-dB RF amplifier to generate the microwave signals, a green laser diode module, and an ESP32 dev board.
All the
design files and firmware
have been open-sourced, and everything about the build seems quite approachable. The write-up emphasizes Quantum Village’s desire to make this quantum technology’s “Apple II moment,” which we heartily endorse. We’ve seen
N-V sensors
detailed before, but this project might make it easier to play with quantum physics at home.
| 21
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118768",
"author": "Esaki",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T11:33:05",
"content": "Is this similar action to a tunnel diode?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118770",
"author": "evelynmartin3022",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T11:50:14",
"content": "This project really makes quantum tech feel accessible. Love how everything is open-sourced, so anyone can dive into exploring it at home. Amazing dear.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119504",
"author": "quantummatematicas",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:40:29",
"content": "NV diamond is not accessible. How can I make this at home without the diamond? I have never even heard of anyone selling NV diamond for less than 100 GBP, let alone the miraculous 10 GBP reported in the table. Please reply with a link if people are selling that cheap NV diamond.",
"parent_id": "8118770",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118771",
"author": "scd_tech",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T11:52:42",
"content": "I think NV based magnetometer have many real world applications, and this could be good startup idea, if anyone interested let me know. I have few NV grade wafers in spare. Looking for expert in photonics and heterodyne frequencies to improve the sensitivity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119008",
"author": "Frank Münzner",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:02:18",
"content": "I’m really interested in at least one Nv diamonds for hobbyistic research – i heard for 2 years about it, contacted also a provider of nv diamonds in the hope to get a offer to buy one but i get no answer from the company.I’m no expert in photonics and heterodyne frequencys, but i would be really happy if i can get a nv doped diamond, for replicating the experiment and also for some own tests.",
"parent_id": "8118771",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119630",
"author": "Researcher",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T06:56:43",
"content": "Simply write to some of the research groups and they would happily help.",
"parent_id": "8119008",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119046",
"author": "mick",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T11:27:47",
"content": "If you bring down the price of a good quality magnetometer by an order of magnitude, please write a hackaday article to tell us :D",
"parent_id": "8118771",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118778",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:21:47",
"content": "I’m usually not that whiny, but be careful with green DPSS lasers, especially if you don’t know if there is an IR blocking filter to remove any 1064 nm radiation from the diode pumping the NLO/KTP crystal that does photon upconversion to 532 nm. Besides the point is moot anyway, many green LASERs damage the retina no matter before the eyelid reflex may trigger. But it in a box or behind those orange safety filters.I know a guy with permanent blind spots due to such an accident, luckily not me, no less I feel sorry for him.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118782",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:45:55",
"content": "This makes me feel like a real use for AR headsets would be letting you work with your eyes completely protected.Equip them with swappable camera modules, perhaps remove 99% of the AR to keep latency down and you’d have something good for working with any laser.(Written 1 min after waking up so if it’s nuts forgive me)",
"parent_id": "8118778",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118784",
"author": "robomonkey",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:51:28",
"content": "Not nuts at all. Glasses can only do so much. My biggest argument against a laser cutter is eye damage to me and my family if they happen into the work area.Maybe an AR headset that has the frequency filters on the camera to detect stray out of band (for our visual senses) laser emissions to at least show where invisible leaks exist. Lasers are cool, and mighty scary.",
"parent_id": "8118782",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118833",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:17:15",
"content": "Peril sensitive sunglasses?",
"parent_id": "8118784",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118787",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:58:36",
"content": "You’re right, they miss a “Don’t look into the laser with your remaining eye” sign.",
"parent_id": "8118778",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118920",
"author": "Mark C",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:14:31",
"content": "We should probably update the writeup to encourage LED exploration, as I don’t think the laser is required.",
"parent_id": "8118778",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119007",
"author": "Dodo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T09:02:10",
"content": "Not sure if this is a DPSS laser. The NV effect works on 520nm, which is available as a ‘direct’ diode.",
"parent_id": "8118778",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118912",
"author": "David Lindbergh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:41:34",
"content": "What can this do that a Hall sensor can’t?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118913",
"author": "Will Emite",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:47:44",
"content": "I’m sure I am overlooking this, but does it anywhere say what the resolution or noise floor of the magnetic field is?I’m curious how it compares the K and Rb optically pumped magnetometers",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118928",
"author": "Mark C",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:53:03",
"content": "Atomic magnetometers are likely more sensitive than this without specific and quite heavy filtering/processing for the specific kind of output you’re looking for. That said, NVC diamonds are easier to procure, transport, and use for those who are relatively uninitiated.",
"parent_id": "8118913",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119033",
"author": "dakk",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T10:38:55",
"content": "Even if the electronics is very simple, I think the major problem is to find a fluorescent diamond containing NV centers. The 10$ estimate seems unrealistic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119505",
"author": "QERT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:41:08",
"content": "Agreed.",
"parent_id": "8119033",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119390",
"author": "Victor Pronchev",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T12:53:43",
"content": "Very similar projects:https://hackaday.io/project/202795-building-an-eternity-quantum-computing-with-yb",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119395",
"author": "Coroot Smith",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T13:07:47",
"content": "It may be worth exploring a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of both methods—our ytterbium-based quantum processor and NV-center diamond sensors—to create an even more versatile and high-precision quantum magnetic sensor.https://hackaday.io/project/202795-building-an-eternity-quantum-computing-with-ybWhile nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond offer excellent sensitivity at room temperature and mature optical readout techniques, ytterbium ions allow for tunable magnetic resonance transitions and deeper integration into spin-based quantum logic systems.By combining these architectures—optically driven NV systems for surface-level detection and ytterbium-ion-based spin lattices for deeper-field or more programmable measurements—we could develop a next-generation quantum sensing platform that is not only sensitive but also modular, reconfigurable, and scalable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,575.041019
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/15/this-potato-virtual-assistant-is-fully-baked/
|
This Potato Virtual Assistant Is Fully Baked
|
Seth Mabbott
|
[
"3d Printer hacks",
"Artificial Intelligence"
] |
[
"home-assistant",
"portal",
"portal 2",
"raspberry pi",
"ReSpeaker",
"smart speaker"
] |
There are a number of reasons you might want to build your own smart speaker virtual assistant. Usually, getting your weather forecast from a snarky, malicious AI potato isn’t one of them, unless you’re a huge
Portal
fan like [Binh Pham].
[Binh Pham] built the
potato incarnation of GLaDOS
from the
Portal 2
video game with the help of a
ReSpeaker Light kit
, an ESP32-based board designed for speech recognition and voice control, and as an interface for home assistant running on a Raspberry Pi.
He resisted the temptation to use a real potato as an enclosure and wisely opted instead to print one from a 3D file he found on Thingiverse of the original GLaDOS potato. Providing the assistant with the iconic synthetic voice of GLaDOS was a matter of repackaging an existing voice model for use with Home Assistant.
Of course all of this attention to detail would be for naught if you had to refer to the assistant as “Google” or “Alexa” to get its attention. A bit of custom modelling and on-device wake word detection, and the cyborg tuber was ready to switch lights on and off with it’s signature sinister wit.
We’ve seen a number of
projects
that brought
Portal
objects
to life
for fans of the franchise to enjoy, even an
assistant based on another version of the GLaDOS the character
. This one adds a dimension of absurdity to the collection.
| 10
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118748",
"author": "Carl Breen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T09:12:45",
"content": "Nice project! It brings back fond memories, especially of how good video games were back then. Subscriptions and season passes really did a number on gaming.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118919",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:09:07",
"content": "A video link, and yet the article author missed the obvious “YouTuber” pun. Tch!And yes, I agree re modern games. I spend most of my gaming $$ on GoG these days, and gain far more enjoyment out of even 20- or 30-year old titles than I thought possible.",
"parent_id": "8118748",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118808",
"author": "Danny",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T13:56:14",
"content": "A little nit: “all for not” should be “all for naught”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118970",
"author": "Seth Mabbott",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T04:04:14",
"content": "Good catch. I’ve updated it. Thanks.",
"parent_id": "8118808",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118898",
"author": "Matt Cramer",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:49:22",
"content": "Just make sure Home Assistant can’t flood your home with a deadly neurotoxin first.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118904",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:21:55",
"content": "“He resisted the temptation to use a real potato as an enclosure” – a missed opportunity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118921",
"author": "David H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:21:49",
"content": "I suppose he didn’t want to make a hash of it.",
"parent_id": "8118904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118926",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:45:35",
"content": "Hahahah! Peels of laughter!",
"parent_id": "8118921",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118930",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T21:58:39",
"content": "Sounded half baked to me",
"parent_id": "8118904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119856",
"author": "BD594",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T04:02:39",
"content": "This design is very ap-peeling. I really like working on projects like this because time fries when you’re having fun",
"parent_id": "8118904",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,575.086997
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/building-a-diy-tornado-tower/
|
Building A DIY Tornado Tower
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"flow visualization",
"tornado",
"tornado tower",
"vortex"
] |
A tornado can be an awe-inspiring sight, but it can also flip your car, trash your house, and otherwise injure you with flying debris. If you’d like to look at swirling air currents in a safer context,
you might appreciate this tornado tower build from [Gary Boyd].
[Gary]’s build was inspired by museum demonstrations and
the tornado machine designs of [Harald Edens].
His build generates a vortex that spans 1 meter tall in a semi-open cylindrical chamber. A fan in the top of the device sucks in air from the chamber, and exhausts it through a vertical column of holes in the wall of the cylinder. This creates a vortex in the air, though it’s not something you can see on its own. To visualize the flow, the cylindrical chamber is also fitted with an ultrasonic mist generator in the base. The vortex in the chamber is able to pick up this mist, and it can be seen swirling upwards as it is sucked towards the fan at the top.
It’s a nice educational build, and one that’s as nice to look at as it is to study. It produces a thick white vortex that we’re sure someone could turn into an admirable lamp or clock or something, this being Hackaday, after all. In any case,
vortexes are well worth your study.
If you’re cooking up neat projects with this physical principle, you should absolutely
let us know!
| 13
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118717",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T06:08:38",
"content": "NO video, who cares",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118720",
"author": "boo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T06:56:27",
"content": "Tech Ingredients made one lasthttps://youtu.be/Kx91NXhQfyw",
"parent_id": "8118717",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118728",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T07:12:40",
"content": "CLEARLY commented without following link to write up, which is both a very good write upandincludes a video!",
"parent_id": "8118717",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118721",
"author": "Henré Botha",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T06:59:15",
"content": "…The Southern Observatory displays are a real thing?!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118743",
"author": "frenchone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T08:27:09",
"content": "Who wants it as fume extractor in your soldering area ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118786",
"author": "imqqmi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:56:04",
"content": "Makes me want to hit the flux!",
"parent_id": "8118743",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118749",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T09:23:21",
"content": "Needs more fire!https://youtu.be/R719S5cn9zc",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118757",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T10:41:39",
"content": "I saw a Laurie Anderson performance back in the 90s and part of it involved something like this on the stage in one part of the show. It was distinctly underwhelming in that context, especially since it was particularly highlighted. Not as bad as the Stonehenge in Spinal Tap but along those lines.Not a bad show overall, though, if you’re into that kind of thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118775",
"author": "Maspenguin",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:07:31",
"content": "In the early 90s, for a geography class I built one of these, and as I was in to lasers at the time, added a laser scanner to show a cross-section of the vortex. Very cool holographic-looking visual. It was before digital cameras were widely available, so sadly I never got a record of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118780",
"author": "Titus431",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:32:31",
"content": "“toss in a bay leaf to impress those stupid judges”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118805",
"author": "Garth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T13:46:57",
"content": "Toss in a Lego cow for a better effect.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118823",
"author": "Andrea",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T14:37:37",
"content": "How much energy requires to maintain the vortex? Can this be used with wind power generators for a cheap electricity farm?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118839",
"author": "Helena",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:25:15",
"content": "Well, considering that the blowers to make this tornadouseenergy, I’d say no? I’m not sure what kind of apparatus you’re thinking of here.",
"parent_id": "8118823",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,575.467606
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/diy-scanning-spectrometer-is-a-bright-idea/
|
DIY Scanning Spectrometer Is A Bright Idea
|
Tyler August
|
[
"News"
] |
[
"arduino",
"photospectrometer",
"spectometry",
"spectrometer"
] |
Spectroscopy seems simple: split a beam of light into its constituent wavelengths with a prism or diffraction grating, and measure the intensity of each wavelength. The devil is in the details, though, and what looks simple is often much harder to pull of in practice. You’ll find lots of details in [Gary Boyd]’s write-up of his
optical scanning spectrometer project
, but no devils.
Schematic diagram of [Gary Boyd]’s Czerny-Turner type scanning spectrometer.
A scanning spectrometer is opposed to the more usual
camera-type spectrometer
we see on these pages in that it uses a single-pixel sensor that sweeps across the spectrum, rather than spreading the spectrum across an imaging sensor.
Specifically, [Gary] has implemented a Czerny-Turner type spectrometer, which is a two-mirror design. The first concave mirror collimates the light coming into the spectrometer from its entrance slit, focusing it on a reflective diffraction grating. The second concave mirror focuses the various rays of light split by the diffraction grating onto the detector.
In this case [Gary] uses a cheap VEML 7700 ambient light sensor mounted to a small linear stage from amazon to achieve a very respectable 1 nm resolution in the range from 360 nm to 980 nm. That’s better than the human eye, so nothing to sneeze at — but [Gary] includes some ideas in his blog post to extend that even further. The whole device is controlled via an Arduino Uno that streams data to [Gary]’s PC.
[Gary] documents everything very well, from his optical mounts to the Arduino code used to drive the stepper motor and take measurements from the VEML 7700 sensor. The LED and laser “turrets” used in calibration are great designs as well. He also shares the spectra this device is capable of capturing– everything from the blackbody of a tungsten lamp used in calibration, to a cuvette of tea, to the sun itself as you can see here. If you have a couple minutes,
[Gary]’s full writeup is absolutely worth a read.
This isn’t the
first spectrometer
we’ve highlighted– you might say
we’ve shown a whole spectrum of them.
| 7
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118486",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:12:27",
"content": "“culminates the light” Interesting usage, I suspect it collimates the light though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118518",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:16:40",
"content": "Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt with autocorrect. That said, the statement about better than the human eye is a bit odd. Human eyes are really bad spectrometers.This is a great project though. I wonder how the backlash is on the stepper drive. I hope they upgrade their adc too. Super fun to see old style spectrometers come back to the diy world.",
"parent_id": "8118486",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118521",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:26:33",
"content": "I had hoped to imply that the range of 360 nm to 980 nm was superior to the human eye, given that we conk out around 740 nm. Perhaps my wording could have been better. The human eye is surprisingly good at colour discrimination, though– in ideal conditions IIRC 2 nm resolution has been observed. It’s the intensity response that really ruins any attempt at a naked-eye spectroscope.Thank you for the benefit of the doubt. I need it. :)",
"parent_id": "8118518",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118532",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:59:52",
"content": "You are awesome don’t worry about it. You are actually putting stuff out there for people to read. And we all know… The internet is a peanut gallery usually visited before people have had their first coffee or after their second has wore off.",
"parent_id": "8118521",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118522",
"author": "Tyler August",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:29:04",
"content": "Autocorrect strikes again! I think it’s kind of funny though, so I’ll leave it since you’ve already got the errata in the first comment. Good eye.",
"parent_id": "8118486",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118538",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T15:30:11",
"content": "The Ebert configuration is similar to the Czerny-Turner arrangement except that it uses a single large concave mirror. Adjusting a single mirror may (or may not) be simpler than adjusting two mirrors, I don’t know. Certainly the light-gathering power of a single large mirror is considerably greater than that of the two smaller mirrors.However…cost. A fast (say f/2) 4″ spherical mirror is likely to be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the two smaller mirrors Gary used. Possibly much more than that. The game is unlikely to be worth the candle. The mirror. Whatever. ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119024",
"author": "Lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T10:00:17",
"content": "The fastie Ebert is a great one for semi rugged designs. Sort of an eggs in one basket adventure for a hobbyist. It’s hard to beat a czerny turner generally. Most hobby spectrometers are lens driven so I have to give credit here, seeing a mirror design is refreshing even though the cost is pretty high",
"parent_id": "8118538",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,575.353371
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/a-tricky-commodore-pet-repair-and-a-lesson-about-assumptions/
|
A Tricky Commodore PET Repair And A Lesson About Assumptions
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] |
[
"Commodore PET",
"computer repair"
] |
The PET opened, showing the motherboard. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)
An unavoidable part of old home computer systems and kin like the Commodore PET is that due to the age of their components they will develop issues that go far beyond what was covered in the official repair manual, not to mention require unconventional repairs. A case in point is the
2001 series Commodore PET that [Ken Shirriff] recently repaired
.
The initial diagnosis was quite straightforward: it did turn on, but only displayed random symbols on the CRT, so obviously the ICs weren’t entirely happy, but at least the power supply and the basic display routines seemed to be more or less functional. Surely this meant that only a few bad ICs and maybe a few capacitors had to be replaced, and everything would be fully functional again.
Initially two bad MOS MPS6540 ROM chips had to be replaced with 2716 EPROMs using an adapter, but this did not fix the original symptom. After a logic analyzer session three bad RAM ICs were identified, which mostly fixed the display issue, aside from a quaint 2×2 checkerboard pattern and completely bizarre behavior upon running BASIC programs.
Using the logic analyzer capture the 6502 MPU was identified as writing to the wrong addresses. Ironically, this turned out to be due to a wrong byte in one of the replacement 2716 EPROMs as the used programmer wasn’t quite capable of hitting the right programming voltage. Using a better programmer fixed this, but on the next boot another RAM IC turned out to have failed, upping the total of failed silicon to four RAM & two ROM ICs, as pictured above, and teaching the important lesson to test replacement ROMs before you stick them into a system.
| 11
| 7
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118493",
"author": "Christopher",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:54:06",
"content": "This is dedication",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118495",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T12:04:53",
"content": "In repairing old computers, these are the most common issues I have found:1.Broken RAM chips. Especially MT ram.2.Broken ROM chips. Mostly you’ll see that the IC’s pins have turned black. And if you try to pull the IC out of the socket, often one or two pins stay behind in the socket. Completely went brittle. And not just the ‘big’ roms, but also the small ones 7488 etc. I don’t know why, maybe they have a specific technology. I rarely see it on eproms.3.Broken 74×244/74xx245/74xx238.4.Bodge wires that were soldered with resin core solder. The solder joints often look really good, but I still find that sometimes they are not having a good connection. I noticed it especially on TRS-80’s. But well, maybe the TRS-80’s are the vintage computers with the most bodge-wires in the world anyway. ;)And if a computer looks brand new as if it was never used, then it probably had a manufacturing defect. For computers like this:5.Check the pins of all socketed IC’s. There is a good chance that one pin is curled up or bent.6.Check for broken PCB traces. The computer probably went out of the factory seemingly perfectly working, then got shipped, and differences in air pressure and temperature caused the track that was hanging to dear life by its finger nails to sever completely.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118570",
"author": "JohnK",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T17:35:22",
"content": "Fusible link PROMs can fail because when the fuse is programmed, the passivation layer can bd disrupted, leading to corrosion. The black lead you mentioned could be the result. I don’t see how a mask programmed chip can fail that way, or even be prone to failure. But, if it happens then it does.I once found the problem in a terminal. It had failed completely. In frustration, I told my partner “it could be any chip. Even that one”. When I touched it, it raised a blister. So yeah…It used several state machines controlled by fusible link PROMs. 1970s tech.",
"parent_id": "8118495",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118499",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T13:04:57",
"content": "“but at least the power supply and the basic display routines seemed to be more or less functional.”I guess… But with a system that old do you really trust the power supply? The last thing you want is to put a bunch of effort into diagnosing the other problems just to have the power supply give up the ghost letting the smoke out of all the out of production, hard to find ICs as it goes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118511",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:00:32",
"content": "its a pretty simple linear power supply",
"parent_id": "8118499",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118502",
"author": "Pedro",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T13:19:07",
"content": "GTA Vice City had those funny pyramid computers. TIL it’s commodore Pet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118506",
"author": "greenbit",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T13:38:11",
"content": "I’ve found that it’s all too easy to cook traces right off the board on some of that old equipment, while attempting repairs. A particular incident involved a known bad RAM chip that had been soldered on at the factory. To minimize heating on the board I did the old trick of clipping all the pins with diagonal cutters to first remove the chip, then desolder the pin ends individually. All went well until it was the ground pin’s turn. Two things were different for this pin: the ground trace was heavier copper, and unbeknownst the pin was really wedged into the hole. Could be the thicker trace rode higher up the taper of the pin, I guess. Anyway the extra heat needed to melt the joint (because the trace sinking it so fast) combined with the extra force needed to extract the pin caused good cm of the trace to lift off, pin still stubbornly stuck in the copper, an unexpected an unwelcome surprise. Fortunately the trace was intact, the pin was cleared, and the new socket served to hold the trace down well enough.If I had a do-over, (1) might use low temperature solder to bring down the necessary heat input, (2) apply twisting force to free the pin first, before extracting, and (3) hold down the trace with a popsicle stick or some such while doing the pull. But 14 times out of 16, it’s not going to be that kind of a struggle anyway.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118543",
"author": "Davidp",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T15:57:12",
"content": "PETs were notorious for random issues when they were moved. The PC board was large and the main chips were socketed. Whenever you had to move one it was standard procedure to open it up and press to re-seat each chip because board flex would make them walk out a bit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118613",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:07:52",
"content": "Looks like the motherboard could use some more standoffs/support.",
"parent_id": "8118543",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119378",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T11:56:19",
"content": "The Sharp MZ-80K was better built here.It used similar chassis, but quality level was different.The Japanese cared about quality, while Commodore was just being Commodore here.",
"parent_id": "8118543",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118606",
"author": "Colin",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T20:25:13",
"content": "My very first job was repairing Commodore PETs. RAM chips and the 6522 IO ports were common failures, and occasionally the character generator ROM. I don’t ever recall seeing a failed PSU.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,575.560625
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/introducing-infrared-remote-control-protocols/
|
Introducing Infrared Remote Control Protocols
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"Reverse Engineering",
"Wireless Hacks"
] |
[
"HS0038 Infrared Receiver Module",
"infrared",
"ir",
"remote control",
"Rigol DS1102 Oscilloscope"
] |
Over on his YouTube channel [Electronic Wizard] has released a video that explains how infrared (IR) remote controllers work:
IR Remote Controllers protocol: 101 to advanced
.
This video covers the NEC family of protocols, which are widely used in typical consumer IR remote control devices, and explains how the 38 kHz carrier wave is used to encode a binary signal. [Electronic Wizard] uses his Rigol DS1102 oscilloscope and a breadboard jig to sniff the signal from an example IR controller.
There is also an honorable mention of the HS0038 integrated-circuit which can interpret the light waves and output a digital signal. Of course if you’re a tough guy you don’t need no stinkin’ integrated-circuit IR receiver implementation because you can
build your own
!
Before the video concludes there is a brief discussion about how to interpret the binary signal using a combination of long and short pulses. If this looks similar to Morse Code to you that’s because it
is
similar to Morse Code! But not entirely the same, as you will learn if you watch the video!
| 23
| 9
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118435",
"author": "Weasel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T07:06:16",
"content": "Oh yes, its surprising how simple this stuff is. I remember we built a small device that froze the projektor every now and then. Drove our prof nuts. Good times",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118447",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T08:15:48",
"content": "My current phone (Xiaomi 12 Lite) has IR port and IR Remote App “MI Remote”. It has a very good database of TV and other devices. Not sure if you can download open source of it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118451",
"author": "frenchone",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T08:47:54",
"content": "I’d rather like it to have usb3",
"parent_id": "8118447",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118469",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T10:32:41",
"content": "The Xiaomi MI A3 has IR port too, it can even control the AC which is not very common – AC remote protocols are more complicated.",
"parent_id": "8118447",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118500",
"author": "UnAneOnyme",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T13:06:29",
"content": "It has already been opensourced, or at least reverse engineered. You can find it here :https://github.com/ysard/mi_remote_database, it has been uploaded by the creator but you can even dump it yourself to get newer versions and then export it in flipper zero .ir format or other formats.",
"parent_id": "8118447",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118505",
"author": "Stefan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T13:22:52",
"content": "My HTC One M7 had an IR port hidden in the power button. Only used it once, with a DVD player so cheap it didn’t have a play button on the front, and the remote was nowhere to be found. It took a while to find a compatible remote profile, but I only needed to press the one button.",
"parent_id": "8118447",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118470",
"author": "Thijzert",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T10:35:25",
"content": "It still amazes me that nearly every TV remote control is infrared and has to be pointed towards the television while a lot of them also have a bluetooth connection for voice commands, which is still not used for the infrared functions.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118489",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:21:37",
"content": "That’s how they behave when not paired, they don’t use IR when paired.",
"parent_id": "8118470",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118572",
"author": "Chr Elz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T17:46:31",
"content": "I prefer TV remotes with IR over Bluetooth. The batteries last a decade instead of a few months (Thanks a lot, Roku…).",
"parent_id": "8118470",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118594",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T19:23:40",
"content": "I live in a room about 14×14 feet and can testify thatit doesn’t matter if you point the controller at the TV or not, it reflects; pulp can move, Baby! This can be defeated by holding the remote pointed at the floor from a few inches above it. A few feet above the floor and it works fine. This can be tested by covering the LED directly at the TV but covering the LED with your palm. When I’m dozing or snoozing I just point the remote in any direction, includingdirectly awayfrom the TV. Experimentum mater studiorum est.",
"parent_id": "8118470",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118476",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T10:49:40",
"content": "A few years ago, I integrated an Arduino Nano into a JVC CD player in my hi-fi system so that it could read the Yamaha RC protocol for the receiver—the remote control of which includes buttons for a CD player.It’s very easy with an Arduino + RC library : I first analyzed which type of protocol is used on a particular device. Then, I simply used the original IR sensor to feed the Arduino which then control the required buttons with a few transistors. No need to remove the original remote control system.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118557",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T16:49:48",
"content": "Nice hack! Did you write this one up somewhere?",
"parent_id": "8118476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118563",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T17:17:30",
"content": "Did something similar once, except protip you can avoid the transistors completely by wiring the micro pins directly to the sense side of the buttons and abusing the fact the gpio can go high impedance when set to input with pullups disabled. So initially configure the output that way and when you want it to “press” a button just set it to output low and back to input w/o pullups when you want it to release the button. I did exactly this when I wanted to wire up a bluetooth controller to a gameboy to control it wirelessly and it worked fantastically.",
"parent_id": "8118476",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118520",
"author": "Amphraredamine",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:26:06",
"content": "I would like to learn more about the IRdA protocol. Millions of devices use(d) it although I’m not sure how prevalent it is now. I still ports on various public interfacing devices which makes me curious about possible vulnerabilities (I believe there is a CVE). It’s an interesting infrared protocol that doesn’t seem to get as much attention.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118542",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T15:50:29",
"content": "IrDA is even simpler: light on = ‘0’, light off = ‘1’. OK, I’m over-simplifying; let me clarify:IrDA has a basic form called ‘Serial Infrared’ (SIR) which is little more than hooking an LED to a UART. ‘little more’ == ‘the light is on only for 1/16 of the bit period, not the whole bit period’. The reason for ‘light on = 0’ is because UART is normally in the ‘1’ state when quiescent. The reason for the 1/16 bit period is because IrDA was intended for battery devices, and power draw is a concern.IrDA SIR goes up to 115,200 bps. There are fancier things like ‘Fast Infrared’ (FIR) and others which use a different signaling scheme and cannot be directly connected to a UART.most microcontrollers that have a UART have an IrDA option that basically turns on stuff to deal with the 1/16 bit timing and also inhibits RX while there is data in TX. (to avoid receiving your own transmitted signal)That alone will get you basic UART-esque connectivity between devices. Beyond that it’s all software. IrDA specifies a layered communications stack reminiscent of OSI and TCP/IP of 80’s era fame. Some consider it overengineered. In the day you had to pay to have access to the specs, but you can easily find them from a web search. Use terms like “irlap”, “irlmp”, “tinytp” and you’ll find details.An amusing thing is that although IrDA is largely dead now (except for niches like scuba equipment, apparently), a part of it ‘obex’ lived on in BlueTooth.",
"parent_id": "8118520",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118544",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T16:02:17",
"content": "the history of IR remotes is interesting because it is a circuitous route of:a Zenith exec wanted to mute commercials, and developed a scheme where you pointed a flashlight at the TV to do things. no carrier, obviously susceptible to ambient interference. q.v. “Smart-matic”this led to a fancier scheme involving striking ultrasonic tuning forks, called “Space Command”. They made sharp sound when the hammer hit the rod, giving rise to the ‘clicker’ epithetIR came about and re-used the ultrasonic frequencies simply for manufacturing economics — why redesign what’s already in production?similarly, the common (but by no means only) frequency of 38 KHz was specifically chosen for manufacturing economics — you could take a mass market 455 KHz IF ceramic resonator commonly used for AM radios and divide it by 12.So what was born in light ended in light, but passed through ultrasonics, picking up some physical design artifacts along the way.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118558",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T16:57:27",
"content": "Fascinating. Thanks for this short history!",
"parent_id": "8118544",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118577",
"author": "Charles Meade",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T18:04:20",
"content": "“Space Command” brought back a pleasant memory. If you dropped a penny on the floor in the living room our Zenith would change channels!",
"parent_id": "8118544",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118626",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:43:40",
"content": "awesome! sounds like that could have been the genesis of a drinking game",
"parent_id": "8118577",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118569",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T17:34:00",
"content": "I have always wondered what would happen if few watt Ir laser was modulated with remote signals what could happen over on the other side of town where all the high rises are? TV begone over a large area? With all the big screens and a telescope one could monitor the results.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118635",
"author": "ziggurat29",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:01:51",
"content": "transmit all the codes; should be able to observe a dimming of the building at night as TVs turn off.in the 80’s one could get a radar gun for cheap at a police auction. it didn’t matter if it worked — if you turned it on at night, you would see a christmas tree of break lights down the road ahead as folks’ radar detectors went off. the things we thought were fun…some cheap ‘universal’ remotes worked that way: to program it, you turned on your TV, then you held down the power button. After a few seconds it would sequentially start through all known protocols. When your TV turned off, you released the button, and the control assumed that was the protocol for you. Then the other buttons worked as expected.",
"parent_id": "8118569",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118581",
"author": "Alexander Pruss",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T18:20:05",
"content": "Since a number of us have a bunch of old IR remotes lying around, and likely have a bunch of scrap electronics with IR receivers that demodulate the 38khz, IR is quite a handy way to control projects with a single GPIO pin. (Recent project: I have my TV hooked up to old 2.1 computer speakers, but they only have a wired remote; using various scrap items and a bit of 3D printing I cobbled together a setup that physically turns the volume knob, controlled by unused buttons on my Blu-Ray player IR remote. There was some trial and error in figuring which pin of the receiver was which. I have some digitally controled solid state potentiometers I could use instead, but it’s more fun to hear the motor whirr and turn the knob.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119139",
"author": "Zach A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:10:24",
"content": "I wish I would have found this article sooner! I built a timed trigger to turn on my space heater 30 mins before I got up in the morning. I could have used an RTC module but decided it would be fun to dissect a $2 alarm clock from the thrift store. I salvaged some IR leds from old remotes too. The heater had a remote but it was pretty useless. I scoped that remote to understand the Tx protocol and what signal was “ON” for the heater. A lot more scoping, MCU programing, and soldering later, it worked! Still proud of my Frankenstein heater timer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,575.421987
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/the-prostar-the-portable-gaming-system-and-laptop-from-1995/
|
The ProStar: The Portable Gaming System And Laptop From 1995
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"game controller",
"portable game system"
] |
Whilst recently perusing the fine wares for sale at the Vintage Computer Festival East, [Action Retro] ended up
adopting a 1995 ProStar laptop
. Unlike most laptops of the era, however, this one didn’t just have the typical trackpad and clicky mouse buttons, but also a D-pad and four suspiciously game controller looking buttons. This makes it rather like the 2002
Sony VAIO PCG-U
subnotebook, or the
2018 GPD Win 2
, except that inexplicably the manufacturer has opted to put these (serial-connected) game controls on the laptop’s palm rest.
Sony VAIO PCG-U101. (Credit: Sony)
Though branded ProStar, this laptop was manufactured by Clevo, who to this day produces generic laptops that are rebranded by everyone & their dog. This particular laptop is your typical (120 MHz) Pentium-based unit, with two additional PCBs for the D-pad and buttons wired into the mainboard.
Unlike the sleek and elegant VAIO PCG-U and successors, this Clevo laptop is a veritable brick, as was typical for the era, which makes the ergonomics of the game controls truly questionable. Although the controls totally work, as demonstrated in the video, you won’t be holding the laptop, meaning that using the D-pad with your thumb is basically impossible unless you perch the laptop on a stand.
We’re not sure what the Clevo designers were thinking when they dreamed up this beauty, but it definitely makes this laptop stand out from the crowd. As would you, if you were using this as a portable gaming system back in the late 90s.
Our own [Adam Fabio] was at VCF East this year as well, and was
impressed by an expansive exhibit dedicated to Windows 95
.
| 5
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118408",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T02:06:28",
"content": "In what universe does it make sense to put the buttons at the base of the monitor (Sony Vaio) so the user has to constantly avoid bumping the keyboard keys?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118423",
"author": "elwing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T05:22:59",
"content": "you aren’t supposed to use those over the keyboard with the laptop sitting on a bench, you hold it sideway and use your thumb on the control.. I cannot talk about the vaio but it work absolutely great on the GPD",
"parent_id": "8118408",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118491",
"author": "CampGareth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:40:35",
"content": "Products like the GPD Win are usually small, my first gen one had a 5.5″ screen so you gripped the device like a controller from the sides then used your thumbs to reach the buttons. It was not made to sit on a desk.",
"parent_id": "8118408",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118425",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T05:51:02",
"content": "I saw that, decided against rescuing it. That because I and my cats do not need another grouchy laptop. But missed Adam.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118852",
"author": "Daniel Gooch",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:12:20",
"content": "I saw his video!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,575.512264
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/hackaday-links-april-13-2025/
|
Hackaday Links: April 13, 2025
|
Dan Maloney
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] |
[
"amateur radio",
"autonomous",
"dragon",
"driving",
"Fram2",
"hackaday links",
"logic",
"logical fallacies",
"pet",
"polyethylene terephthalate",
"robotaxi",
"soda bottle",
"SpaceX",
"Spock",
"star trek",
"The Engineer Guy",
"Waymo",
"x-ray"
] |
It’s been a while since we’ve dunked on an autonomous taxi foul-up, mainly because it seemed for a while there that most of the companies field testing driverless ride-sharing services had either ceased operation or curtailed them significantly. But that appears not to be the case after
a Waymo robotaxi got stuck in a Chick-fil-A drive-through
. The incident occurred at the chicken giant’s Santa Monica, California location at about 9:30 at night, when the autonomous Jaguar got stuck after dropping off a passenger in the parking lot. The car apparently tried to use the drive-through lane to execute a multi-point turn but ended up across the entrance, blocking other vehicles seeking their late-evening chicken fix. The drive-through-only restaurant ended up closing for a short time while Waymo figured out how to get the vehicle moving again.
To be fair, drive-through lanes are challenging even for experienced drivers. Lanes are often narrow, curve radii are sometimes tighter than a large vehicle can negotiate smoothly, and the task-switching involved with transitioning from driver to customer can lead to mistakes. Drive-throughs almost seem engineered to make tempers flare, especially at restaurants where hangry drivers are likely to act out at the slightest delay. This is probably doubly so when drivers are stuck behind a driverless car, completely eliminating even the minimal decency that would likely be extended to a human driver who got themselves in a pickle. If people are willing to honk at and curse out the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena, they’re very unlikely to cooperate with a robotaxi and give it the room it needs to maneuver out of a tight spot. Perhaps that argues for a change in programming that accounts for real-world driving experiences as well as the letter of the law.
The big news from space this week was the private
Fram2
mission
, which took an all-civilian crew on the world’s first crewed polar flight. The four-person crew took off from Florida in a SpaceX Crew Dragon and rather than heading east towards Africa, took off due north and entered a retrograde orbit at 90° inclination, beating the previous record of 65° inclination by
Valentina Tereshkova
aboard
Vostok 6
back in 1963. The
Fram2
team managed a couple of other firsts, from
the first medical X-rays taken in space
to
the first amateur radio contacts made from the Dragon
.
It’s been a while, but Bill “The Engineer Guy” Hammack is back with
a new video extolling the wonders of plastic soda bottles
. If you think that’s a subject too mundane to hold your interest, then you’ve never seen Bill at work. The amount of engineering that goes into creating a container that can stand up to its pressurized content while being able to be handled both by automation machines at the bottling plant and by thirsty consumers is a lesson in design brilliance. Bill explains the whole blow-molding process, amazingly using what looks like an actual Coca-Cola production mold. We would have thought such IP would be fiercely protected, but such is Bill’s clout, we guess. The video is also a little trip down memory lane for some of us, as Bill shows off both the two-piece 2-liter bottles that used to grace store shelves and the ponderous glass versions that predated those. Also interesting is the look at the differences between hot-fill bottles and soda bottles, which we never appreciated before.
And finally, if you’ve ever been confused by which logical fallacy is clouding your thinking, why not turn to the most famous fictional logician of all time to clarify things?
“Star Trek Logical Reasoning”
is a YouTube series by CHDanhauser that uses clips from the Star Trek animated series to illustrate nearly 70 logical fallacies. Each video is quite short, with most featuring Commander Spock eavesdropping on the conversations of his less-logical shipmates and pointing out the flaws in their logic. Luckily, the 23rd century seems to have no equivalent of human(oid) resources, because Spock’s logical interventions are somewhat toxic by today’s standards, but that’s a small price to pay for getting your logical ducks in a row.
| 9
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118398",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T00:22:31",
"content": "Spock has issues with your logic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118406",
"author": "Piecutter",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T01:23:37",
"content": "So…..it’s a sin if you in particular are against it, but it’s not a sin if you in particular are for it? So I could be all judgy about someone else and not ever worry about being judged myself? That’s some great religion when you can have it both ways on your own whim!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118430",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T06:44:39",
"content": "How ironic that the HaD piece on logic says there are 2 comments when there are none shown!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118554",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T16:33:51",
"content": "Comments that are removed by management are hidden, but still show up in the total count.What you’re seeing is 2 comments were reported and hidden, before anyone made an insightful post.",
"parent_id": "8118430",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118736",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T07:23:47",
"content": "So this is a poorly written website code, to my opinion.I also wrote several times in comments that the “Email me new comments” seems broken, since when i activate this option for new articles, i no more receive the subscription confirmation mail like before, and so i never receive any corresponding mail. But i still receive comment mails from old articles i’ve subscribed to years ago, using the same email address! I still hope this will be addressed, but nothing…",
"parent_id": "8118554",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118461",
"author": "bob",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T09:54:17",
"content": "“drive-through lanes are challenging even for experienced drivers”No. They really are not.They are challenging for people that lack ability, but think they dont so they try anyway, because too lazy to park and walk.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118487",
"author": "Queeg",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:16:14",
"content": "Fram2 took the long way to due north.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118536",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T15:05:15",
"content": "The LessWrong website has a much larger collection of fallacies and other problems with reasoning. Link below is the one on “Generalization from fictional evidence”, which I just this weekend heard used by Josh Rogan (WaPo) on Overtime (Bill Mahr) (YouTube, around 7 minutes into the discussion). Apparently there was a movie about bringing back extinct dinosaurs that didn’t end well, so maybe we should not bring back dire wolves until we’ve thought through the issues some more?https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pmHZDpak4NeRLLLCw/p/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk(Similar with people predicting the downfall of civilization, based on whichever dystopian short story they read about needing to scream and not having a mouth or whatever.)LessWrong also goes through psychological fallacies and other quirks of human perception, such as the “fundamental attribution error” (see: Wikipedia page). Learned about that one and it transformed my view of the world. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you immediately assume he’s a jerk, and not that he’s taking his injured son to the hospital.Off and on, I go over to that site and grab a few fallacies and look to see if I can spot them in the real world. You would be quite surprised to find out how much of the world is actually based on bullshit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119866",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2025-04-19T06:14:18",
"content": "Lesswrong – “The good bits are not original and the original bits are not good. The well-written explanations of cognitive biases are taken idea-for-idea from Kahneman. Take everything with a grain of salt.”https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrongSome of the material there is very strange, treat with care.",
"parent_id": "8118536",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,575.837878
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/3d-printed-milling-machine-is-solid-as-a-rock/
|
3D Printed Milling Machine Is Solid As A Rock
|
Tyler August
|
[
"cnc hacks"
] |
[
"3D printed CNC mill",
"3D printed mill",
"cast concrete",
"CNC mill"
] |
There are no shortage of CNC machines in the DIY space these days, but sometimes you just need to do things your own way. That’s what [Chris Borges] decided when he put together this rock-solid,
concrete-filled CNC milling machine
.
The concrete body of this machine is housed inside a 3D printed shell, which makes for an attractive skin as well as a handy mold. Within the concrete is a steel skeleton, with the ‘rebar’ being made of threaded rods and a length of square tubing to hold the main column. You can see the concrete being poured in around the rebar in the image, or watch it happen in the build video embedded below.
In goes the concrete, up goes the rigidity.
All three axes slide on linear rails, and are attached to lead screws driven by the omnipresent NEMA 17 steppers. The air-cooled spindle, apparently the weak-point of the design, is attached to a pivoting counterweight, but make no mistake: it is on rails. All-in-all, it looks like a very rigid, and very capable design — [Chris] shows it cutting through aluminum quite nicely.
Given that [Chris] has apparently never used a true mill before, this design came out remarkably well. Between the Bill of Materials and 45 page step-by-step assembly instructions, he’s also done a fantastic job documenting the build for anyone who wants to put one together for themselves.
This isn’t the first concrete-filled project we’ve highlighted from [Chris], you may remember
seeing his lathe on these pages
. It certainly
isn’t the first CNC mill we’ve covered, either
.
| 59
| 12
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118345",
"author": "p",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T20:22:13",
"content": "He seems to use a steel square tube, so the 3D printed part doesn’t seem to contribute much mechanically and is mostly aesthetic. The machine does look good though!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118351",
"author": "acheide",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T21:15:17",
"content": "Your humour puzzles me. Chris does fine at presenting and sharing his projects as well as sharing his files like a typical hacker. Hard to ask more.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118360",
"author": "moo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T21:56:38",
"content": "don’t worry little buddy, chatgpt can explain the joke to you",
"parent_id": "8118351",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118388",
"author": "Hexx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T23:55:36",
"content": "No gatekeeping. Dude made a good product.",
"parent_id": "8118351",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118358",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T21:45:21",
"content": "This is cargo cult engineering.Every mechanical interface here between the various parts and interfaces is made with plastic anchors sitting separately in the concrete, which does not make the structure rigid.Usually when they make concrete pour frames for machines, they sink a metal anchor in the concrete. The metal anchor is what’s locating all the parts relative to each other and providing rigidity, while the concrete around it is adding mass and damping vibration. This is because the concrete is actually quite springy. It’s technically less stiff than aluminum (40 vs. 70 GPa) and all the rebar and stuff isn’t doing anything for that matter, because it’s like sticking nails into jello – relatively speaking.All this is doing is making the machine heavier, which helps with vibration and surface quality, but the accuracy is not improved by the concrete because it’s still going to flex like crazy when you apply cutting forces. It’s still going to act like a CNC machine made out of cheese.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118362",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T21:57:10",
"content": "If you follow the path of forces from one part to another, you have a part bolted down with a steel screw in a steel nut (E=220 GPa), which is surrounded in plastic (E=2 GPa), surrounded in concrete (E=2-40 GPa), leading up to another plastic anchor (E=2 GPa), and then up another nut and a screw to whatever other part you have.Those parts in the middle where the Elastic Modulus is low are acting like springs – especially the plastic around the nuts and screws – which makes everything move around when you apply forces. What’s the point of having a massive concrete slab for a frame if you’re going to attach everything to it with springs?",
"parent_id": "8118358",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118363",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T22:16:08",
"content": "Well, it only has to be good enough. I’m sure the guy that made it will take your advice for the next revision, unless it’s working satisfactorily now.Or, you could take the design and improve it! It would be an immense help to everyone if you iterated the design and updated the documentation. Looking forward to it already.",
"parent_id": "8118362",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118858",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:29:35",
"content": "If I were to re-do this, I would start with an all steel “skeleton” where you have a plate of steel to mount the rails on, welded to box beams running up the tower, some sort of steel rods or beams running to the lead screw attachment points, likewise welded to the rest of the structure, and then 3D print just the outer covers to pour the concrete into. Every attachment point would be on steel, not concrete.Nowhere that has to carry mechanical loads or precisely locate one part relative to another should there be metal-concrete-metal and especially not metal-plastic-concrete-plastic-metal, but directly metal-to-metal.The idea of having a heavy cast base, but then making the carriage and lead screw nut holder out of plastic also completely negates the whole idea – although this can be improved later by simply replacing the carriage with a proper one. This is one of the weak spots where this whole thing turns to cargo-cult engineering if not addressed.This has been done before, as seen on HaD if I remember correctly.",
"parent_id": "8118363",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119261",
"author": "MrHuns",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T23:25:22",
"content": "It’s really a chicken and egg problem. It’s hard to make a machine without a machine. Now that he has one, he can make the next one better…",
"parent_id": "8118858",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118365",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T22:31:22",
"content": "These are all very good suggestions, some of which the jacket is aware of, others no so much. Why don’t you formalize it with some concrete patches to the design for the while community to benefit from?",
"parent_id": "8118362",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118371",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T22:55:28",
"content": "The required information is available and easily picked up from Strength of Materials 101 and basic machine design textbooks. The most important parts are written down in the common reference handbooks for engineers. Writing it down again would be working for free and spoon-feeding people information they really should be looking for themselves if they intend to engineer stuff.Now, I don’t know the background of this guy, but if they’re engineering a milling machine then they probably have the information at hand already – they’re just not applying it.",
"parent_id": "8118365",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118384",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T23:43:24",
"content": "Oops, real work requested! Back pedal, back pedal!",
"parent_id": "8118371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118420",
"author": "bebop",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T04:20:30",
"content": "I would expect this too, at engineeringaday.com.",
"parent_id": "8118371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118431",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T06:47:26",
"content": "What you’re asking from me is providing you a free course in mechanical engineering to the point where you can design a concrete base for a milling machine and evaluate its performance. Okay, but that’s going to take a while and you ain’t paying me anything. Meanwhile, if you just pick up the textbook, you can teach yourself just as easily without me being involved in any way.If I merely “patch” the design, it doesn’t address the point of cargo cult engineering, because the people who receive the “correct” answer (it may not be correct for their case) will blindly copy it and introduce the same issues back.Teaching trivial facts (or designs) to people who expect to be spoon-fed information is a pointless waste of everyone’s time.",
"parent_id": "8118371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118560",
"author": "mastjaso",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T17:00:40",
"content": "They created a milling machine and posted their designs for free online for anyone else to modify and iterate on.If you wanted to build your own milling machine they have already done an enormous amount of the work for you.If you have an idea for how to improve it, thank them for giving you a baseline to work from, make the improvement, and share it back with everyone.If you don’t have time for that, thank them for all the work they did, and kindly suggested how it can be improved.Don’t be a gate keeping —hole who says ‘go and spend 4 years getting a mechanical engineering degree or don’t bother building anything’.",
"parent_id": "8118371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118704",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T04:46:18",
"content": "Dude it’s a kind of trolling…Fairly common on hackaday.Someone appears like a (well meaning middle schooler/MBA).Proposing perpetual motion or making power from deep ocean pressure…The kind of thing you expect from a bright 11 year old or 40 year old marketing major.He argues with ‘Sorry won’t work, perpetual motion’ with ‘Explain to me why it won’t work’.I don’t believe it’s even ‘good faith stupid’.I think the troll laughs when some dweeb posts a wall of text attempting to spoon feed it to them (usually badly).This is at least, sort of, not insane, pour ‘crete into it to stiffen it.You can see where they’re coming from.Also be aware:‘Strength of Materials 101’ is usually 2nd year mechanical engineering track, for a prepared student.It might as well be written in full tilt allegorical classical Greek for the marketer.Ship has sailed, decades ago, perhaps the moment his dad…Also no, the world is full of bad designs that ‘aren’t even wrong’.They are not a good starting point for future work.Especially something that’s as much a solved problem as a milling machine.",
"parent_id": "8118371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118802",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T13:44:33",
"content": "they have already done an enormous amount of the work for you.No they haven’t, because I’d have to design the whole thing from the ground up to fix their mistakes.",
"parent_id": "8118371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118813",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T14:13:08",
"content": "Also be aware: ‘Strength of Materials 101’ is usually 2nd year mechanical engineering track, for a prepared student. It might as well be written in full tilt allegorical classical GreekThe basic theory can be understood on the level of high school math. It’s true that they like their Greek symbols though. The analytical solutions to complex cases turn hairy and require calculus to solve, but the simple stuff is not more difficult than using Ohm’s law.",
"parent_id": "8118371",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118418",
"author": "Inund8",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T04:18:55",
"content": "The displacement of a structural member is always given by at least 3 variables, force, stiffness, and…. area moment of inertia! If you designed the entire thing out thin members, it doesn’t matter what material you select, it’s not going to hold up.The advantage concrete has is that it’s cheap and has good stiffness. No other material can give you the same cross section for the price of a bag of concrete, which is why bulky structures often use concrete. You don’t need sheer stiffness if you can afford to make the thing big and fat.",
"parent_id": "8118362",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118436",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T07:09:29",
"content": "1 mm of steel is worth 10 mm of concrete, depending on the concrete.",
"parent_id": "8118418",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118448",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T08:17:20",
"content": "Which doesn’t answer Inund8’s point at all, as the 10mm and greater thickness of steel you’d have to buy and then machine to compare to a cast concrete structure that is many centimetres thick…. That is hundreds of dollars worth of raw steel, and you’d be turning lots of it into chips with lots of expensive machine time too, but ignore that for now, as just when compared to a few tens of dollars of mould material and a sack of concrete or two the price is already bad for the solid steel option.Now a hybrid where you are using cheaper concrete or epoxy based solutions to add the mass to a thinner fabricated ‘sheet’ steel structure might hit that sweet spot of price to performance you are after, and if you still have a foundry you can hire (as home casting something machine tool sized is relatively implausible) cast Iron was the default for a good reason. But still it is hard to argue with the cheapness of concrete.",
"parent_id": "8118436",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118824",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T14:39:07",
"content": "Which doesn’t answer Inund8’s point at allYes it does. It gives you a sense of scale.Given comparable cases, like making a beam out of concrete vs. steel box beam of the same dimensions, the steel can easily be ten times thinner. Remember that a grown man can stand on top of an empty soda can, as long as they don’t crush the sides in. In other words, even a fairly chunky slab of concrete may in certain cases perform just as well or poorly as a cookie tin. Concrete does not have “good stiffness” – you can tell that directly by looking at its Young’s Modulus.",
"parent_id": "8118436",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118370",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T22:45:40",
"content": "This thing is far from ideal, but it’s not so bad as you claim.First, with machines such as this mill, most of the flex comes from bending forces, and not from tension or compression. The concrete has most of the bending forces. Plastic between the steel rails and the concrete is also less severe. When the bolts are tight, they compress the plastic a bit, and the bolts also stretch a bit. The surface area of the plastic is quite big relative to the rest. So even though the plastic itself is not very stiff, it’s used in such a way that it does not matter much.I also don’t agree that the rebar won’t help, (although it’s not in the ideal place). Steel is about 10x stiffer then concrete. I would like to see two layers of steel in the concrete, one at the top and one at the bottom.But I agree this is a toy. It may be a quite usable toy, it can even be stiffer then the cheap 6040 gantry mills from China. Especially the version with the unsupported round guides are very bad. The better versions, with supported 15mm rails are better, but those cost around EUR 1200.Also, in his video he talks about using the thing he built for real projects. I’m curious to see some more milling projects done on this mill. And then preferably with real sound (yeah, those things sound annoying, but the sound has a lot of clues concerning vibrations and spindle load.If you want to build a real quality mill, then embed some soft steel flat bar into the conrete, then grind and scrape it flat after the concrete hardens and mount the rails on it. The cost for this are minimal, and you can build quite good machines this way. There are plenty of examples of this build method on youtube.",
"parent_id": "8118358",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118374",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T23:05:38",
"content": "Plastic between the steel rails and the concrete is also less severe. When the bolts are tight, they compress the plastic a bit, and the bolts also stretch a bit.This is the worst part. The bolts don’t really stretch at all, since the elastic modulus of the plastic is around 1-2% of the bolt’s, so it’s the plastic that takes on nearly all of the deformation and stress. There’s basically no tension in the screws whatsoever, especially after the fact that the plastic will inevitably creep under load over time and lose the tension.The attachment points in plastic are points where stress is concentrated in order to transmit it into the concrete, which makes it matter quite a lot. For example, the cutting forces sideways to the bed are shearing all the barely tensioned screws in their holes, sitting there like sticks in soft mud. If you try running a bigger spindle motor and increase feed speeds, the whole bed starts to wobble under the cutting forces and the concrete does nothing to help it.",
"parent_id": "8118370",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118472",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T10:42:03",
"content": "I was not fully awake yesterday. Attempted to watch some details, and this mill is quite bad. The nuts themselves should be embedded in the concrete, but they appear not to be, and that is quite bad.If you could tighten the bolts enough, there would be no shear force on the bolts, but sideways forces would be canceled by friction between the rails and the plastic, but as most plastics are prone to creep, the bolts would get looser over time, and this won’t work very well in the long term.Another weird thing is the combination of concrete filled column, with a 40×40 square tube at the back.Yet another part that is quite bad is how the forces go from the lead screw to the frame. This is a very weak piece of plastic, and not concrete filled. And this also easily deforms.Using (money) coins as a counterweight is also not a “cost effective” method. Quite weird.Everything put together, I agree that this is a quite bad design. You can make a good mill (VMC) form UHPC or epoxy granite, but this is not the way to do it.",
"parent_id": "8118374",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118831",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:07:42",
"content": "Another weird thing is the combination of concrete filled column, with a 40×40 square tube at the back.That part makes the most sense, because the weight of the spindle motor is at the front, so the back beam is in tension while the concrete column is in compression. No problems there.The nuts themselves should be embedded in the concreteThis is problematic because you can’t just embed the nuts into the concrete. You need some sort of flexible grouting around the nut and bolt or else the concrete will start to crumble. This is why the plastic around the nut sort-of makes sense, but at the same time it causes bad problems. This is why cast concrete machine bases employ a steel structure to actually carry the loads from one point to another, while the concrete is there to add mass and absorb vibrations.",
"parent_id": "8118472",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118838",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:24:19",
"content": "sideways forces would be canceled by friction between the rails and the plasticAnd there as well, since you have an intermediate layer of plastic, even if the bolts were properly tight, the plastic is still what’s carrying the shear forces into the concrete.Imagine if you had steel rails on a steel plate, but you had rubber pads under the rails. It’s a similar situation – the steel underneath doesn’t help much because the rubber is soft. To make it rigid, it needs to be steel against steel.",
"parent_id": "8118472",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118377",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T23:20:15",
"content": "I also don’t agree that the rebar won’t help, (although it’s not in the ideal place). Steel is about 10x stiffer then concrete.If the rebar isn’t connected to anything else, then it won’t really help with the main issue. You have to pass forces into the rebar through the concrete for it to have an effect.Think of a steel bar inside a pool noodle. Sure, it’s stiff to bend, but only once you compress the plastic foam around it to have a grip on the steel bar inside. If the point is that the foam noodle is supposed to maintain its shape, then the steel bar didn’t help.",
"parent_id": "8118370",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118383",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T23:39:00",
"content": "most of the flex comes from bending forces, and not from tension or compressionAlso, out of curiosity, how would you describe a bending force as it manifest as stress in a part that is being bent?",
"parent_id": "8118370",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118484",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:03:48",
"content": "Tension has pretty much the same stress across it’s whole surface. Think of a tightened bolt. With a banding force, you have compression on one side, and tension on the other side. The difference is extreme with a steel cable. pulling on the cable will not stretch it much, but bending the cable is very easy.Construction parts which have bending forces should also have a lot of thickness. The bottom concrete is now approximately a 50mm thick concrete slab. Using two 20mm concrete slabs with a few cm of air (polystyrene foam during casting) gives it a lot more stiffness for the same weight.For tension or compression, the material properties and it’s cross section (i.e. how much material there is) is the dominating factor, while for bending forces, the distance of the material from the centerline is very important.A solid rod with a diameter of 12mm has the same cross section as a 20mm tube with a wall thickness of 2mm. In tension, both will deform equal under the same load. When a bending force is applied however, the tube bends a lot less then the solid rod. Because of this, milling machines are usually made of hollow cast profiles, and it’s also why UNP and H profiles are used in construction.",
"parent_id": "8118383",
"depth": 4,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118841",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:32:24",
"content": "The point was that bending loads ARE tension and compression. The cases aren’t fundamentally different.",
"parent_id": "8118484",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118844",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:35:26",
"content": "Using two 20mm concrete slabs with a few cm of air (polystyrene foam during casting) gives it a lot more stiffness for the same weight.And using two steel sheets of about 1 mm thickness with 20 mm of foam in the middle would likely outperform it on all accounts. Especially for the fact that the concrete does not fair well in tension (it breaks).",
"parent_id": "8118484",
"depth": 5,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118535",
"author": "Bob the builder",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T15:04:39",
"content": "I’m not a mechanical engineer. I’m currently waiting for concrete to dry as I made a concrete shelf for my 3D printer to sit on. The reason I went for reinforced concrete is because a steel plate, although much easier to work with, would have been much too springy to set a 3D printer on. It’s currently sitting on my large dining room table and when printing, the entire table shakes. The mass of the concrete doesn’t allow vibrations to get through unlike steel plate, which acts like jelly. Removing the vibrations from steel is a struggle. Got a vehicle that I covered on the inside with as much rubber as I could, to dampen it as it would otherwise just shake itself apart.",
"parent_id": "8118358",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118686",
"author": "Rebekah",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T02:52:53",
"content": "Granite counter top remnant makes a helluva machine base.",
"parent_id": "8118535",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118847",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:56:30",
"content": "The mass of the concrete doesn’t allow vibrations to get through unlike steel plate, which acts like jelly.That’s the point of concrete cast bases.But the steel does not act like jelly – the concrete does – and that is why the concrete is good at absorbing vibrations while the steel passes it right through. In more technical terms, there is a mechanical impedance mismatch between the materials which reflects vibrations at the boundary, not letting them pass through, and then as the concrete is soft relative to the steel and made of hard sand granules embedded in flexible cement (again, impedance mismatches and lots of internal reflections from boundaries), it absorbs the vibrations better. A vibration shock going through the concrete gets dispersed quickly into many tiny vibrations, and then absorbed into the vibrations of the sand granules, which ultimately consume it to heat.Coincidentally, this is why cast iron is better at absorbing vibration. Cast iron often has graphite nodules and distinct grains of iron inside, while steel usually has a smaller and more uniform grain structure with the carbon dissolved all over the place. The harder the steel, the more uniform the structure, and the better it “rings” with vibrations. The coarser structure of harder materials suspended in soft iron gives cast iron the same ability of dispersing and absorbing mechanical vibrations.",
"parent_id": "8118535",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118664",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T23:41:41",
"content": "yeah this made me deeply uncomfortable. it’s like in the uncanny valley of good ideas where it incorporates so many elements of good ideas that you can’t believe how clear it is on first inspection that it’s a bad idea.i’m all about using 3d printed parts as just essentially brackets to orient add-ons, and the strength comes from the add-ons. i’m just super skeptical of the idea that concrete is the answer.i mean it really depends on a lot of variables. maybe this will provide decades of valuable service. i just want a composite to inspire the thought “oh, this is getting the strengths of both materials and the weaknesses of neither”. and concrete+plastic doesn’t give me that feeling. concrete is so heavy that its proximity to the plastic inevitably kills the plastic, i’ve seen that happen too many times.",
"parent_id": "8118358",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118716",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T06:05:03",
"content": "Indeed, the actual concept of a 3d printed former for your casting concrete/epoxy system is good, some of the other design options used are interesting but the execution in this case isn’t great as its leaving plastic in all the wrong spots still…",
"parent_id": "8118664",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120367",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T19:43:36",
"content": "You can tell from the guy’s previous video where he made the concrete cast lathe that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He’s “vibe-engineering”.He put a plastic sleeve around the main bearings, and then someone in the comments said “You should put a lock nut on the shaft so you can apply a preload on the bearings”. Wait? So they didn’t even pre-load the tapered bearings? How is it going to be accurate if the bearings are set in plastic, and then not even tightened down?The entire point of the concrete cast is lost on little details like that.",
"parent_id": "8118664",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118373",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T23:00:11",
"content": "Due to how often we see 3d printing misused, the knee jerk reaction should be somewhere between pitchforks and a mild eye-roll.But in this specific case it might, MIGHT, actually be a good way to achieve the desired results.This appears to be using 3d printing as a simple way to stiffen and beautify a machine built in a more traditional way. Which is a good use.However, if you are already doing the work to build the actual mechanical portion traditionally…why go through the extra steps to use a different method instead of just building it stiffer in the first step?In the end, you get a usable machine, but you did more work to get there.You also made more waste.There will be times that it still makes good sense to do things this way, so knowing it CAN be done is valuable. But, just like everything else 3d printing related, it is still probably the wrong way to do it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118404",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T00:48:59",
"content": "I love that this guy is just going solo down his own technological path, and making more and more progress. Awesome work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118407",
"author": "acheide",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T02:04:14",
"content": "Exactly.",
"parent_id": "8118404",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118412",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T02:58:13",
"content": "For all the people critical of using printing here, you have a valid point, but there’s an easy way to fox plastic on the interface.What you do is leave an open face on the printed part where something needing rigidity will bolt to it, and then place a piece of flat material over the hole when you case the concrete. Then you de-mold the part, and you have a much more solid face. You also want to anchor the anchors deeper into the concrete to spread out forces better.Basically you use 3d printing like he does for all the complex geometry, and leave the critical faces open to cast with more traditional mold techniques. You can get quite decient parts this way. You can also embed steel plates at the surface using similar techniques.I’ve built a small cnc mill using this technique, and it works quite well. Only difference was I used an epoxy based fill and numerous steel inserts. (But concrete can also give good results if it’s the right formulation. Needs to be a no/low shrink mix though, off the shelf concrete will shrink by several percent while curing. Look into grout for ideas)You can also cast against a reference surface if you want a precisely flat surface, a surface plate works great for this. Makes it easy to cast flat and parallel rail mounting surfaces into a part, no grinding / scraping needed. I’ve found what works best here is a steel bar, etched in strong acid to take the mill scale off, epoxied down to the surface plate (wax the plate first lol). You get a very thin film of epoxy that flattens the surface out, but is so thin it doesn’t impact the rigidity, and your bolts tap directly into a piece of solid steel.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118433",
"author": "Jr",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T07:01:35",
"content": "I would like to see some pictures of your method",
"parent_id": "8118412",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118507",
"author": "Nathan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T13:41:50",
"content": "At some point I’ll probably do a writeup; my current machiene is kinda a cobbled together mess of experimental techniques, so I’m not sure if it’s all a great example. Some parts of it are I guess lol.At some point I might rebuild it / build a second machiene; ill probably do a writeup at that point",
"parent_id": "8118433",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118683",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T01:56:09",
"content": "imo it may be the best example because it sounds like it’s used and someone has battled its flaws for a while!",
"parent_id": "8118507",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118490",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:24:49",
"content": "Yes indeed, this is a good method.Similarly I’ve also seen concrete poured into a mould, and painted with an epoxy paint after demoulding. The contact surfaces get an extra layer of epoxy paint, and then the paint is sanded, ground or scraped flat before mounting the rails.",
"parent_id": "8118412",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118437",
"author": "onceuponatime...",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T07:19:04",
"content": "Id prefer epoxy bonded granite powder to concrete but otherwise, pretty cool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118488",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:18:20",
"content": "It really does not matter much whether you use epoxy or UHPC. Epoxy is probably stronger, but the strength is not the defining factor here, especially when you put in some rebar (I.e, Youngs modules of steel is approximately 10x that of concrete). And UHPC is a lot cheaper then epoxy.Also, Basalt is a good alternative to granite granulate. Basalt is also often easy to obtain, as it’s also one of the decorative rock types commonly sold for garden paths and such. Basalt also has a (slighlty) higher density as other rock types, and with that it’s also a bit stiffer.",
"parent_id": "8118437",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118492",
"author": "onceuponatime...",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T11:43:20",
"content": "Epoxy bonded granite powder only uses 10-15% epoxy, so its certainly not breaking anyones bank EBG is fully hardened and cured within a few days, Under ambient conditions, Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC) may take up to 28 days to fully cure but can take several years for its moisture content to stabilize resulting in potential dimensional instability developing over time. EBG also has superior vibration dampening properties compared with concrete.Theres a reason Fadal, Haas, Mazak, DMG Mori, Okuma, and Makino as well as other professional CNC manufacturers use EBG over the other options in their machines constructions.",
"parent_id": "8118488",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118530",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:49:55",
"content": "If the measure is the USD $300 price point then it’s pretty dang good.Although he will run into size problems really quickly. But on the other hand it seems like price of these mills increases exponentially with Y size.I think that if you grab the collet nut and give it a good yank and it doesn’t move then you’ve done well. Also if you make an aluminum part and look at the chatter marks that’s a good indicator.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118607",
"author": "prfesser",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T20:35:48",
"content": "Some may be familiar with the Taig Micro Lathe and milling machine. The bed of each is filled with portland cement (not concrete) which provides significant mass and dampening.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118634",
"author": "H Hack",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:58:04",
"content": "I’m astonished by the destructive criticism here. It’s really good baseline criticism, but there is zero gains for putting a destructive spin on it. We’re all hackers here. Play nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118714",
"author": "Oh Be Juan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T05:54:13",
"content": "Only Sith deal in absolutes….And I see a lot of absolutes being thrown about in the comments.So let’s get relative: Is or is not the stiffness of the concrete greater than the flexure of the 1/8th inch endmill (or thereabouts) that he’s using for cutting?From the video of him milling the brackets for his limit switches, I’d say it is. Look at the surface finish on the bottom of that trench. Looks like flippin liquid. Nuff said.Even if your rig is made out of Adamantium, or Uru, or Mithril and doesn’t flex at all, your tooling is still going to flex some, so in the end, it all comes down to what the rig is designed to do. If it’s designed to cut up to mild steel and it accomplishes that task, then that’s fine. If it’s designed to cut up to aluminum or brass, then that’s fine, too. The guy in the video doesn’t seem to be interested in cutting tight tolerances in Inconel, so he made a machine that stops short of that for less money.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118883",
"author": "tired of posr-docs arguing",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T17:47:54",
"content": "great observation. instead of writing a dissertation on how the materials behave theoretically, you cut to the chase and say, “see, it slices cheese”.",
"parent_id": "8118714",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119486",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:08:38",
"content": "The point is, even a fairly feeble mill will cut bog standard aluminum just fine, because the material isn’t that demanding. If you mind your feeds and speeds, it’s going to make good results even if your mill was made out of cheese.If your argument is that the tooling is the limiting factor, that’s a point of diminishing returns. Putting a lot of cargo-cult engineering into making a “better” mill just to cut the same aluminum at the same feeds and speeds is not going to improve your results, so you can’t tell whether you’ve made it. How then do you justify the effort?The tragedy is that people mistake effort for value, so something needlessly complicated or laborious is judged as better by default if you don’t take a closer look at what’s actually being done.",
"parent_id": "8118714",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118724",
"author": "Zachary W Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T07:05:05",
"content": "Thumbnail looks so good it seems ai generated hah buy i know its not bevauee I’ve followed this creatorOh and to the detractors ….how ELSE would you make your own milling machine? The point is the 3d printing let’s you assemble it from scratch even if you still need the metal parts …those are commonly available and some of us alrrady have rods. And yeah concrete and printed parts or what? Wood? Hah how else do u make it yourself withiut a 3d printer? Metal parts? Made with a cnc machine?I mean the point here is you CAN convert cheap concrete and maybe even cheaper (IF you made your own filament and got good at recycling bottles) filament and scavenged parts to make a DIY milling machine. These are probably the cheapest materials. Unless you think you can use wood and treat the wood somehow with resin or something? I think 3d printed with concrete with the right design is gonna last forever if u design it right",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119077",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:38:33",
"content": "Most if not all the detractors are not about using 3d printing at all, its about where the plastic is used and how much of it is kept into the final machine – there is just too much plastic in parts of the functional structure where you really should want all the functional stuff to be directly attacked to the concrete or the embedded steel in the concrete.You could use almost this exact method and get a much better result if you made sure to use the plastic just as a former for the casting that allows you hold all the hardware to embed in the concrete/epoxy granite pour in place. You could if you like keep the plastic in the less important functional bits like the counterweight and retain it as the outer shell as long as the essential motion works are bolted straight to the concrete/steel embedded in it without that plastic that will creep under the clamping load so the bolts get loose, allow for more flex as its just a more elastic material etc.All that said this machine is probably going to be pretty darn good in use because its really quite small and can’t take larger cutting tools – it is only as you scale up the machine or tool sizes so the leverage of the cutting forces and inertia of its own mass start to really get large that I’d expect a construction like this to really be a problem.",
"parent_id": "8118724",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119078",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T13:39:16",
"content": "note I meant “darn good in use FOR THE PRICE”",
"parent_id": "8119077",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119513",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T19:57:21",
"content": "how ELSE would you make your own milling machine?Scrap pieces of aluminum extrusion table plates don’t cost a whole lot – just dollars per pound – and it’s going to be stiffer than the concrete and plastic for a similar size of a bed plate. Go to your local metal recycling company and ask them, or any company that sells the extrusions. They usually keep a pile of random chunks and off-cuts for people who come asking.",
"parent_id": "8118724",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,575.94589
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/13/the-spade-hardware-description-language/
|
The Spade Hardware Description Language
|
John Elliot V
|
[
"FPGA",
"hardware"
] |
[
"ASIC",
"fpga",
"Hardware Description Language",
"hdl",
"Spade Language",
"verilog",
"vhdl"
] |
Spade
is an open-source hardware description language (HDL) developed at Linköping University, Sweden.
Other HDLs you might have heard of include Verilog and VHDL. Hardware engineers use HDLs to define hardware which can be rendered in silicon. Hardware defined in HDLs might look like software, but actually it’s not software, it’s hardware description. This hardware can be realized myriad ways including in an FPGA or with an ASIC.
You have probably heard that your CPU processes instructions in a pipeline. Spade has first-class support for such pipelines. This means that design activities such as re-timing and re-pipelining are much easier than in other HDLs where the designer has to implement these by hand. (Note:
backward justification is NP-hard
, we’re not sure how Spade supports this, if it does at all. If you know please enlighten us in the comments!)
Spade implements a type system for strong and static typing inspired by the Rust programming language and can do type inference. It supports pattern matching such as you might see in a typical functional programming language. It boasts having user-friendly and helpful error messages and tooling.
Spade is a work in progress so please expect missing features and breaking changes. The documentation is in
The Spade Book
. If you’re interested you can follow development on
GitLab
or
Discord
.
So now that you know about the Spade language, are you planning to take it for a spin? You will find plenty of Verilog/VHDL designs at Hackaday which you could re-implement using Spade, such as an easy one like
Breathing LED Done With Raw Logic Synthesized From A Verilog Design
(see
benchmarks
) or a much more challenging one like
Game Boy Recreated In Verilog
. If you give Spade a go we’d love to see what you come up with!
| 15
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118330",
"author": "rey54y45y",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T18:51:48",
"content": "please make a cpuhttps://tic80.com/and gpu, sound accelarators.simple computer, many program for testing and one battery for a working demo for whole week.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118339",
"author": "Prodigity",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T19:44:44",
"content": "Very cool, the HDL scene can use some shaking up. Haven’t written any VHDL recently but can remember how painful and verbose pipelines are, this seems like a big improvement!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118376",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-04-13T23:20:06",
"content": "Verilog is more like C. Never had any trouble learning it. Only possible complaint is that synthesizable Verilog is a subset of the language, and you need to be careful how you write code that you are going to synthesize so you don’t get massive extra hardware.",
"parent_id": "8118339",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118432",
"author": "MattM",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T07:00:16",
"content": "Synthesisable code is always a subset, because an HDL without a way to generate testbenches etc is pretty useless.",
"parent_id": "8118376",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118497",
"author": "Antron Argaiv",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T12:07:24",
"content": "Exactly. Takes a little getting used to, but I loved doing Verilog designs because I could mock up a solution, test it and then compile and simulate.",
"parent_id": "8118432",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118513",
"author": "TheZoq2",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:03:34",
"content": "Hi, Spade author here! Spade is a synthesis only language (well, apart from a simple assert construct) with testbenches being written primarily inhttps://www.cocotb.org/giving the full power of python to testbench development.I think a big reason VHDL and Verilog are hard to pick up for beginners is that it is extremely unclear what is and isn’t synthesizeable, and if you have an architecture in mind, it is often hard for students to know how to express that.In many ways, I think the languages try to be both synthesis and simulation languages and end up being bad at both.",
"parent_id": "8118432",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118515",
"author": "TheZoq2",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:08:42",
"content": "Spade author here! Verilog being like C is quite an apt comparison in my opinion. If you want full control, over all the details, C and Verilog will certainly give you that, but at the cost of very little abstraction. Verilog complicates things by the synthesizeable subset where you aren’treallysure what you get, but still…Spade aims to be the Rust or maybe C++ of the HDL world where you can work at a higher abstraction level when convenient, but still write things at the pure RTL level when needed for performance.",
"parent_id": "8118376",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118474",
"author": "CHRIS",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T10:48:53",
"content": "I’ll admit that my professional time with VHDL has been limited, and I’ve always been interested in the “cutting edge” of new tech.But after seeing the way this guy writes VHDL (https://hardwaredescriptions.com/conquer-the-divide/) I’ve reconsidered the trend of using Scala, Python, etc. as a HLS language that “complies” to verilog.Maybe we should focus on using and extending the HDLs we already have (or maybe changing the radification process and/or incentivicizing tool makers to be compliant to the latest standards)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118517",
"author": "TheZoq2",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T14:15:18",
"content": "Spade author here, Fun to see Spade make its way onto hackaday!(Note: backward justification is NP-hard, we’re not sure how Spade supports this, if it does at all. If you know please enlighten us in the comments!)I suppose I’m qualified to answer this :DSpade does not actually do any retiming on its own, it just gives you syntactic sugar to do it yourself in a way that doesn’t require manually managing all your registers. If you have pure pipelines with no feedback, you can be sure that if you retime a circuit and it compiles again, the output will be the same (apart from different latency of course). If you have feedback, you loose that correctness guarantee but still have the syntactic advantages of being able to reason in terms of pipeline stages instead of individual registers.Automatic retiming would be very interesting to explore in the future, though even then it’d probably only be done in the absence of feedback. If you want something right nowhttps://github.com/JulianKemmerer/PipelineCis another HDL which does do automatic pipelining.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118556",
"author": "John Elliot V",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T16:45:36",
"content": "Thanks for this explanation! And thanks also for making Spade, it is very impressive technology. I wish you every success with it!",
"parent_id": "8118517",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118540",
"author": "Kevin N",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T15:45:31",
"content": "Pipelining can be done well in Verilog but you have to be fastidious, and most people aren’t. In all of my modules I usually have a sections called “delay lines” which sets up delay lines for inputs, flags, and some intermediate results, and another section called “latency parameters”. Then you can have code like this:if (data_vld_dly[SORTER_LATENCY]) adder_out <= sorter_out + 5;if (data_vld_dly[SORTER_LATENCY+ADDER_LATENCY])mult_out <= data_in_dly([SORTER_LATENCY+ADDER_LATENCY] * adder_out);This isn’t a useful example but you can see how there are several pipeline stages. If the place & route guys tell you that the sorter isn’t meeting timing, you can add a pipeline stage to the sorter, increase SORT_LATENCY by 1, and everything is automatically adjusted.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118564",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T17:23:21",
"content": "Compatibility? For someone who’s only knowledge of FPGAs is what they are (like a microcontroller which I’ve used loads, but unlike a microcontrolelr you set up circuits of logic gates rather than sequentially performed lines of code), and has long wanted to get in to programming them but not until there’s a good linux toolchain which isn’t dependent on proprietary subscription services and software which checks with webservers before it will start… What is the hardware compatibility like for Spade? Which FPGA types can it compile for? How is the compilation and flashing to a particular FPGA dev board done in practice? I couldn;t find anything in the Spade docs website about this. Thanks",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118832",
"author": "TheZoq2",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:09:46",
"content": "Spade generates Verilog which is is read by pretty much any FPGA or ASIC tools. It also has pretty good interoperability with verilog if you want to mix and match the two.The docs not mentioning anything about board support is a good point. Generally, the Spade build system works best with open source supported FPGAs which in practice means ice40, ecp5, or gowin FPGAs.We have some templates set up for some boards herehttps://gitlab.com/spade-lang/swim-templates, if your FPGA is on that list you can go from nothing to blinking LEDs in 4 commandsinstall rustinstall swim (the spade build system)create a new project from a templatecompile, synthesize and uploadIf your board is not on the list, you can copy an existing one and modify it as needed as long as it has an FPGA in one of the three families mentioned previouslyI thought we had a docs page about this but it looks like we don’t, I’ll add one today!",
"parent_id": "8118564",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118733",
"author": "Remy Goldschmidt",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T07:17:47",
"content": "I don’t think Spade does it (Google’s XLS does; I worked on it), but ASIC retiming can be done efficiently using the algorithm in “SDC-Based Modulo Scheduling for Pipeline Synthesis”. If you want to apply that to general RTL (rather than a pipeline with feedback), you need to solve the minimum feedback arc set problem, which is indeed NP complete, but in practice is easy to approximate because ASIC designs have sparse connectivity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119341",
"author": "redbeard",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T07:53:54",
"content": "Check out XLS, which also gives you an intermediate representation which can be executed with a JIT and focuses on a similar retiming idea.https://youtu.be/TOJ8QWuEec8Theirs also renderers down to a few of the “open” process design kits (at least in the colab notebook 😆)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,575.744384
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/plasmonic-modulators-directly-convert-terahertz-waves-to-optical-signals/
|
Plasmonic Modulators Directly Convert Terahertz Waves To Optical Signals
|
Maya Posch
|
[
"Science"
] |
[
"plasmoid",
"plasmonics"
] |
A major bottleneck with high-frequency wireless communications is the conversion from radio frequencies to optical signals and vice versa. This is performed by an electro-optic modulator (EOM), which generally are limited to GHz-level signals. To reach THz speeds, a new approach was needed, which researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland claim to
have found in the form of a plasmonic phase modulator
.
Although sounding like something from a
Star Trek
episode,
plasmonics
is a very real field, which involves the interaction between optical frequencies along metal-dielectric interfaces. The original 2015 paper by [Yannick Salamin] et al.
as published
in
Nano Letters
provides the foundations of the achievement, with
the recent paper
in
Optica
by [Yannik Horst] et al. covering the THz plasmonic EOM demonstration.
The demonstrated prototype can achieve 1.14 THz, though signal degradation begins to occur around 1 THz. This is achieved by using plasmons (quanta of electron oscillators) generated on the gold surface, who affect the optical beam as it passes small slots in the gold surface that contain a nonlinear organic electro optic material that ‘writes’ the original wireless signal onto the optical beam.
| 5
| 2
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118741",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T08:11:52",
"content": "Plasmodic phase modulators, dont just sound like something off of star treck, they make star treck sound dated, or mythical.The reality is that things like plasmodic phase modulators will contribute to actual space exploration.That, and perhaps the writers here could see if they can get on as technical consultants for any new star treck or doctor who script writing……",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118756",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T10:40:41",
"content": "I’m pretty sure Star Trek sounds the way it does bynothaving technical consultants. E.g. I recall an episode of Enterprise where Klingons seize a planet to gain control of its priceless deuterium mines…",
"parent_id": "8118741",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118788",
"author": "Plugh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T13:03:42",
"content": "TNG did have technical consultants, at least sometimes. I remember chatting with a professor who got a character named after him on TNG due to a technical consultant who was one of his former students.",
"parent_id": "8118756",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118810",
"author": "Suppressed Carrier",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T14:10:42",
"content": "Also……..https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/01/jurriaan-maessen/captain-kirks-predecessor-star-trek-was-rand-corporation-predictive-programming/Sometimes the Internet gets it mostly right…..I remember seeing interviews with Gene Roddenberry when I was in my 20s and he mentions going to the RAND institute for advice on what the future might look like.The above is as about close to what I remember…..",
"parent_id": "8118788",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118777",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T12:15:17",
"content": "Darn. One of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas. We could have done this 30 years ago. All the pieces were in hand then.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,575.791024
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/elastic-bands-enable-touchable-volumetric-display/
|
Elastic Bands Enable Touchable Volumetric Display
|
Aaron Beckendorf
|
[
"hardware",
"Video Hacks"
] |
[
"3d",
"elastic band",
"POV",
"volumetric",
"volumetric display"
] |
Amazing as volumetric displays are, they have one major drawback: interacting with them is complicated. A 3D mouse is nice, but unless you’ve done a lot of CAD work, it’s a bit unintuitive. Researchers from the Public University of Navarra, however, have developed a touchable volumetric display, bringing touchscreen-like interactions to the third dimension (
preprint paper
).
At the core, this is a swept-volume volumetric display: a light-diffusing screen oscillates along one axis, while from below a projector displays cross-sections of the scene in synchrony with the position of the screen. These researchers replaced the normal screen with six strips of elastic material. The finger of someone touching the display deforms one or more of the strips, allowing the touch to be detected, while also not damaging the display.
The actual hardware is surprisingly hacker-friendly: for the screen material, the researchers settled on elastic bands intended for clothing, and two modified subwoofers drove the screen’s oscillation. Indeed, some aspects of the design actually cite
this Hackaday article
. While the citation misattributes the design, we’re glad to see a hacker inspiring professional research.) The most exotic component is a very high-speed projector (on the order of 3,000 fps), but the previously-cited project deals with this by hacking a DLP projector, as does
another project
(also cited in this paper as source 24) which we’ve covered.
While interacting with the display does introduce some optical distortions, we think the video below speaks for itself. If you’re interested in other volumetric displays, check out
this project
, which displays images with a levitating styrofoam bead.
[Thanks to Xavi for the tip!]
| 12
| 6
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118665",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T23:50:28",
"content": "While this is very cool, it feels more like a novelty art piece than a practical device. It’s hard to imagine building a daily-use device with the low resolution, material wear, and sound pollution this probably involves.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118672",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T01:01:03",
"content": "Most prototypesarenovelty art pieces. This could totally be made into a practical device and I’d like to buy one.",
"parent_id": "8118665",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118676",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T01:16:59",
"content": "Tis research. And it is really cool. And now that it is doable, the next step is make a practical system. Like why not use low power laser technology for example, to break the beams at different levels to get the same 3D handling affect, so no moving parts… Or whatever. It is all above the idea! And it is cool.",
"parent_id": "8118665",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118677",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T01:17:58",
"content": "“It is all about the idea” (nice to edit…)",
"parent_id": "8118676",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118862",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:37:26",
"content": "That was true of early OLED prototypes.And LCDs.And CRTs.And film projectors.And photography.And printing.Thank goodness people with talent develop their ideas anyway.",
"parent_id": "8118665",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118685",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T02:49:04",
"content": "Surely you meant “that video speaks volumes”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118700",
"author": "Plugh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T04:27:02",
"content": "Very cool. It will take time, but I could imagine that evolving into a practical, usable technology. A clever new idea and a well implemented demonstration.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118703",
"author": "Avi",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T04:43:56",
"content": "I wonder if noise levels could be reduced by shifting the phase of each band 180 degrees out of phase with its neighbors (or something similar). This would introduce boundary effects but perhaps the noise cancellation at the fundamental frequency would be worth it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118745",
"author": "Madaeon",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T08:44:22",
"content": "“While the citation misattributes the design, we’re glad to see a hacker inspiring professional research”It would have been nice to see a mention to my projecthttps://hackaday.io/project/180304-vvd-an-open-source-real-3d-volumetric-display, which was actually cited, and also an Hackaday project…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118751",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T09:28:28",
"content": "Very impressive, and definitely deserves an article edit.",
"parent_id": "8118745",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118835",
"author": "Aaron Beckendorf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T15:17:44",
"content": "Thank you for pointing that out; I hadn’t realized that your project was cited. The link under “another project we’ve covered” does lead to our article about your project, but I’ve updated the article to note that the research did cite your project.",
"parent_id": "8118745",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118890",
"author": "DC",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T19:13:13",
"content": "Why not use a Leap Motion Controller (or similar) for contactless and precise manual input? I believe all your basic hand movements for manipulating an object in 3D space (6DOF) can be easily trained and mapped to the corresponding action / object movement.I’m actually surprised to not see any solid integrations utilizing Leap Motion Controllers as 3D mice, which are commonly used by CADers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,575.99832
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/esp32-powered-clock-brings-aviation-style-to-your-desk/
|
ESP32-Powered Clock Brings Aviation Style To Your Desk
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"clock hacks"
] |
[
"aviation",
"clock",
"gauges"
] |
There’s something cool about the visual design language used in the aviation world. You probably don’t get much exposure to it if you’re not regularly flying a plane, but there are other ways you can bring it into your life. A great example would be building an aviation-themed clock,
like this stylish timepiece from [oliverb.]
The electronic heart of the build is an ESP32. This wireless-capable microcontroller is a popular choice for clock builds these days. This is because it can contact network time servers out of the box, which allows you to build an incredibly capable and accurate clock without any additional parts. No real-time-clock needed—just have the ESP32 buzz the Internet for an accurate update on the regular!
As for the display itself, three gauges show hours, minutes, and seconds on aviation-like gauges. They’re 3D-printed, which means you can build them from scratch. That’s a touch easier than having to go out and source actual surplus aviation hardware. Each gauge is driven by a NEMA17 stepper motor. There’s also an ATMEGA328 on hand to drive a 7-segment gauge on the seconds display, and a PIR sensor which shuts the clock down when nobody is around to view it.
It’s a tidy build, and one with a compelling aesthetic at that. We’ve seen
some similar builds before using real aviation gauges, too.
Video after the break.
| 14
| 8
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118647",
"author": "El Gru",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:33:49",
"content": "There is just one major design flaw:Aviators use the 24 hour format.(And those that do not, should be grounded forever.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119540",
"author": "oliverb123",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:05:01",
"content": "Aircraft clocks use 24 or 12 hour formats.",
"parent_id": "8118647",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118653",
"author": "Kelly",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:53:18",
"content": "A very neat project and well documented. Yes, I would expect 24hr time display and anyway- where is the AM/PM indication here? I’ve been drinking all night and what time is it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119541",
"author": "oliverb123",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:10:47",
"content": "Don’t think I have ever seen an analogue 12hr clock with am/pm indicator. Digital clocks set to 12hr format have them for some reason.",
"parent_id": "8118653",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118668",
"author": "SF",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T00:12:33",
"content": "For that authentic retro aviation feel, we need some homebrew radium paint for the dials (and your own DIY Superfund site!)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118713",
"author": "Olaf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T05:53:24",
"content": "Perhaps Fluroscein/Uranin paint with a few IR-Leds will do, too.",
"parent_id": "8118668",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118669",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T00:55:43",
"content": "Using three dials to tell the time isn’t exactly practical. And I’m not even talking about non-360-degree dials.Surprisingly, real aircraft clocks only have one dial—you know, the ones with three hands (a bit like on watches)…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119544",
"author": "oliverb123",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:14:09",
"content": "This clock was designed to sit on your desk not in an aircraft. If you want a one dial clock buy a cheap quartz movement and hang it on the wall. 360 degree dials have one major drawback- they are just boring to watch with no flyback or fly forward.",
"parent_id": "8118669",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118675",
"author": "Zombodotcom",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T01:15:40",
"content": "I literally had just bought old aviation dials to do exactly this… Dang beat to the punch",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118735",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T07:21:41",
"content": "I have three dials sitting on my desk. They have been there for six years waiting to do this. Maybe this is the year I build this clock…. as well as complete the other hundred unfinished projects",
"parent_id": "8118675",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118738",
"author": "elmesito",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T07:34:08",
"content": "There is something odd with the videos and the front view images. They look kind of AI generated.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119548",
"author": "oliverb123",
"timestamp": "2025-04-17T21:18:37",
"content": "Filmed with a Samsung S20 at 4K then cut down to FHD. The cockpit background still is AI generated only.",
"parent_id": "8118738",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118936",
"author": "חגי גודובניק",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T22:53:46",
"content": "Maybe better to do 1 regular clock and day and month for the other two?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119202",
"author": "Neil B.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T20:06:55",
"content": "You don’t need another processor for a second display, there are loads of ports on an ESP32.I built a clock with an ESP32 that had an analogue display on a TFT, a digital display and a binary display. It picked up the time from the server as this does, could be set to + or – time zone or daylight saving time, and one could choose from a list of the nearby WiFi networks and enter a password.Yes, I’m very proud of it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,576.053795
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/converting-the-c64-mini-into-a-c64c/
|
Converting The C64 Mini Into A C64C
|
Lewin Day
|
[
"Retrocomputing"
] |
[
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"retrocomputing"
] |
The C64 Mini is a beautiful and functional replica of the most popular computer ever made, except at 50% size and without a working keyboard. For maximum nostalgia, it was modeled after the brown breadbox C64 case which so characterized the model. However, [10p6] wanted to build a tiny C64C instead,
so set about making a conversion happen.
The build is primarily about the case design. [10p6] created a nice 50% scale duplicate of the C64C, with an eye to making it work with the internals of the popular C64 Mini. The case was paired with a custom PETSCII keyboard PCB and keycaps designed by [Bleugh]. This was a key element, since it wouldn’t really feel like a functional C64C without a functional keyboard. The build also scored a bonus USB hub for more flexibility. For the best possible finish, the case, power button, and keycaps were all printed using a resin printer, which provides a more “production-like” result than FDM printers are capable of.
It’s funny how retro computers remain popular to this day,
particularly amongst the hacker set
. In contrast, we don’t see a whole lot of people trying to replicate Pentium II machines from the mid-1990s. If you do happen to have a crack at it, though,
the tipsline
is always open. Video after the break.
| 14
| 4
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118611",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:00:31",
"content": "Needs banana for scale.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118624",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:37:39",
"content": "Tough talk from a Bubble Boy.",
"parent_id": "8118611",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118636",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:05:51",
"content": "If you watch, skip thru the video …. Size will be evident. But just looking at the USB ports in picture gives you a pretty good idea of the ‘scale’ :) .",
"parent_id": "8118611",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118654",
"author": "AOClaus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T23:04:24",
"content": "We’ll, yeah, but where’s the banana?",
"parent_id": "8118636",
"depth": 3,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118670",
"author": "Wamos",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T00:56:02",
"content": "That’s what she said.",
"parent_id": "8118654",
"depth": 4,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118639",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:12:03",
"content": "When there are 2 entries your website counts 2.3 thoughts on “Converting The C64 Mini Into A C64C”CityZen says:April 14, 2025 at 2:00 pmNeeds banana for scale.Report commentReplyrclark says:April 14, 2025 at 3:05 pmIf you watch, skip thru the video …. Size will be evident. But just looking at the USB ports in picture gives you a pretty good idea of the ‘scale’ :) .Report commentReply",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118640",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:12:53",
"content": "Should be “counts 3”. My typo, my error.",
"parent_id": "8118639",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118746",
"author": "FeRDNYC",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T08:50:43",
"content": "Leaving aside I Alone’s inability to type (and weird decision to paste in the comments section text, unreadably), they’re right.Before I started this comment there were 6 comments visible, but the intro said “7 THOUGHTS…”. Presumably after I post this 7th comment, it’ll go up to “8 THOUGHTS…”",
"parent_id": "8118639",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118747",
"author": "FeRDNYC",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T08:53:54",
"content": "(But since it only seems to be happening on THIS one post, not across the site generally, I’m guessing it’s deleted spam or a moderator-hidden comment still being counted.)",
"parent_id": "8118746",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118750",
"author": "DavidP",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T09:23:33",
"content": "Well, the +1 comment must be the reader’s. (i.e. Leave a Reply) It could be clever if you let it.Take a problem and make it a feature.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118761",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T11:23:00",
"content": "I never know why people go thru this and not sell them… its alot of work to not produce them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118870",
"author": "10p6",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:56:17",
"content": "They will be available. Check out Bleugh.biz",
"parent_id": "8118761",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118931",
"author": "Bleugh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T22:14:22",
"content": "Making ‘one off’ things for yourself is super easy.Design For Manufacture and making actual bulk production runs isn’t really hard, it’s VERY time consuming. especially with two primary school kids, a full time day job, renovating a house and having moved back to the other side of the planet.I’ve already sold quite a few of the ‘you gotta solder over 600 joints’ C64mini keyboard kits, so much so that i really have to be sure to be able to deliver these projects well.If i were to sell 100 of these tomorrow, with each taking 60 minutes of my time, that’s going to be the best part of 2 MONTHS to deliver!spending time front loading and perfecting the processes / minimising the labour needed will get these out much quicker come ordering time…I’m aiming for less than 15 minutes ‘hands on’ with each kit to ensure it’s ‘cheap enough’.oh, that and i’m working on half a dozen other projects at the same time, using each to springboard the next and keep it all going. Just one project, endlessly iterating gets boring!",
"parent_id": "8118761",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118959",
"author": "Billy",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T00:58:23",
"content": "Any excuse ;)",
"parent_id": "8118931",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
}
] | 1,760,371,576.118727
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/linux-fu-stopping-a-runaway/
|
Linux Fu: Stopping A Runaway
|
Al Williams
|
[
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] |
[
"autokey",
"linux",
"Linux Fu",
"PSS"
] |
The best kind of Hackaday posts are the ones where there was some insurmountable problem with an elegant solution devised through deep analysis of the problem and creativity. This is not one of those posts. I’m sure you are familiar with bit rot. You know, something works for a long time and then, for no apparent reason, stops working. Well, that has been biting me, and lacking the time for the creative, elegant solution, I decided to attack it with a virtual chainsaw.
It all started with
a 2022 Linux Fu about using autokey
.
The Problem
I use autokey to give me emacs-style keystrokes in Web browsers and certain other programs. It intercepts keystrokes and translates them into other keystrokes. The problem is, the current Linux community hates autokey. Well, that’s not strictly true. They just love Wayland more. One reason I won’t switch from X11 is that I haven’t found a way to do something like I do with autokey. But since most of the powers-that-be have decided that X11 is bad and Wayland is good, X11 development is starting to show cracks.
In particular, autokey isn’t in the normal repositories for my distro anymore (KDE Neon). Of course, I’ve installed the latest version myself. I’m perfectly capable of doing that or even building from source. But lately, I’ve noticed my computer hangs, especially after sleeping for a long time. Also, after a long time, I notice that autokey just quits working. It is running but not working and I have to restart it. The memory consumption seems high when this happens.
You know how it is. Your system has quirks; you just live with them for a while. But eventually those paper cuts add up. I finally decided I needed to tackle the issue. But I don’t really have time to go debug autokey, especially when it takes hours for the problem to manifest.
The Chainsaw
I’ll say it upfront: Finding the memory leak would be the right thing to do. Build with debug symbols. Run the code and probe it when the problem comes up. Try to figure out what combination of X11, evdev, and whatever other hocus pocus it uses is causing this glitch.
But who’s got time for that? I decided that instead of launching autokey directly, I’d launch a wrapper script. I already had autokey removed from the KDE session so that I don’t try to start it myself and then get the system restaring it also. But now I run the wrapper instead of autokey.
So what does the wrapper do? It watches the memory consumption of autokey. Sure enough, it goes up just a little bit all the time. When the script sees it go over a threshold it kills it and restarts it. It also restarts if autokey dies, but I rarely see that.
What’s Memory Mean?
The problem is, how do you determine how much memory a process is using? Is it the amount of physical pages it has? The virtual space? What about shared libraries? In this case, I don’t really care as long as I have a number that is rising all the time that I can watch.
The /proc file system has a directory for each PID and there’s a ton of info in there. One of them is an accounting of memory. If you look at /proc/$PID/smaps for some program you’ll see something like this:
00400000-00420000 r--p 00000000 fd:0e 238814592 /usr/bin/python3.12
Size: 128 kB
KernelPageSize: 4 kB
MMUPageSize: 4 kB
Rss: 128 kB
Pss: 25 kB
Pss_Dirty: 0 kB
Shared_Clean: 128 kB
Shared_Dirty: 0 kB
Private_Clean: 0 kB
Private_Dirty: 0 kB
Referenced: 128 kB
Anonymous: 0 kB
KSM: 0 kB
LazyFree: 0 kB
AnonHugePages: 0 kB
ShmemPmdMapped: 0 kB
FilePmdMapped: 0 kB
Shared_Hugetlb: 0 kB
Private_Hugetlb: 0 kB
Swap: 0 kB
SwapPss: 0 kB
Locked: 0 kB
THPeligible: 0
VmFlags: rd mr mw me sd
00420000-00703000 r-xp 00020000 fd:0e 238814592 /usr/bin/python3.12
Size: 2956 kB
KernelPageSize: 4 kB
MMUPageSize: 4 kB
Rss: 2944 kB
Pss: 595 kB
Pss_Dirty: 0 kB
Shared_Clean: 2944 kB
Shared_Dirty: 0 kB
Private_Clean: 0 kB
Private_Dirty: 0 kB
. . .
Note that there is a section for each executable and shared object along with lots of information. You can get all the PSS (proportional set size) numbers for each module added together like this (among other ways):
cat /proc/$PID/smaps | grep -i pss | awk '{Total+=$2} END { print Total}'
Building the Chainsaw
So armed with that code, it is pretty easy to just run the program, see if it is eating up too much memory, and restart it if it is. I also threw in some optional debugging code.
#!/bin/bash
#- Run autokey, kill it if it gets too big
#- what's too big? $MLIMIT
MLIMIT=500000
#- how often to check (seconds)
POLL=10
#- Print debug info if you want
function pdebug {
#- comment out if you don't want debugging. Leave in if you do
#- echo $1 $2 $3 $4
}
while true # do forever
do
PID=$(pgrep autokey-qt) # find autokey
pdebug "PID",$PID
if [ ! -z "$PID" ] # if it is there
then
# get the memory size
PSS=$(cat /proc/$PID/smaps | grep -i pss | awk '{Total+=$2} END { print Total}')
pdebug "PSS", $PSS
echo $PSS >>/tmp/autokey-current.log
# too big?
if [ "$PSS" -gt "$MLIMIT" ]
then
pdebug "Kill"
echo Killed >>/tmp/autokey-current.log
# save old log before we start another
cp /tmp/autokey-current.log /tmp/autokey-$PID.log
kill $PID
PID=
sleep 2
fi
fi
if [ -z $PID ]
then
# if died, relaunch
pdebug "Launch"
autokey-qt & 2>&1 >/tmp/autokey-current.log
fi
pdebug "Sleep"
sleep $POLL
done
In practice, you’ll probably want to remove the
cp
command that saves the old log, but while troubleshooting, it is good to see how often the process is killed. Running this once with a big number gave me an idea that PSS was about 140,000 but rising every 10 seconds. So when it gets to 500,000, it is done. That seems to work well. Obviously, you’d adjust the numbers for whatever you are doing.
Bad Chainsaw
There are lots of ways this could have been done. A
systemd timer
, for example. Maybe even a cgroup. But this works, and took just a few minutes. Sure, a chainsaw is a lot to just cut a 2×4, but then again, it will go through it like a hot knife through butter.
I did consider just killing autokey periodically and
restarting it
. The problem is I work odd hours sometimes, and that means I’d have to do something like tie it to the screensaver. But I agree there are dozens of ways to do this, including to quit using autokey. What would your solution be? Let us know in the comments. Have you ever resorted to a trick this dirty?
| 34
| 20
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118567",
"author": "the_morgan",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T17:28:21",
"content": "I use lintalisthttps://lintalist.github.io/on windows. A lot. For many apps like word and outlook, and Windows Explorer tasks. Also web browser URL and quick password entries that are repetitious. Lintalist will give different results and options depending on which Window is in-focus.I’ve never found something for my Linux usage that has the same abilities.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118711",
"author": "S O",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T05:32:02",
"content": "Tools like this used to be available, and often underpinned accessibility functionality. Between the switch to a new windowing system and the major desktop developers going in other directions most of that tooling will not work on current systems and needs to be overhauled. This is actually happening, but it’s very slow as a factor of the smaller number of interested developers. Ideally a business with a vested interest would chip in, but big companies that often used to contribute towards this sort of goal either no longer do or are holding off from that sort of investment in the current economy.",
"parent_id": "8118567",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118988",
"author": "Nate",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T06:46:17",
"content": "That’s great, but it’s pretty annoying when people interject windows comments on a clearly a Linux centered post. Read the title.",
"parent_id": "8118567",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119130",
"author": "LinThugx",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:43:30",
"content": "Are you really trying to fan-gate Linux?The community wants to have a word with you, outside, in 30s.",
"parent_id": "8118988",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118576",
"author": "Charles Hawley",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T18:00:43",
"content": "I’ve used thishackto restart Apache when the OOM-Killer kept killing it off. We knew what was wrong, but didn’t have the authority to make changes to fix the resource usage. So, instead I scripted up a solution that restarted Apache when it was killed and logged the occurrences, so I’d have proof of how often it happened.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118578",
"author": "Al Williams",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T18:08:06",
"content": "I like it. In my case, though, the program would quit working but didn’t die. OOM might have eventually killed it but it would be “dead” long before that.",
"parent_id": "8118576",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118616",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:17:43",
"content": "Isn’t the whole purpose of systemd services that it will restart them automatically?",
"parent_id": "8118576",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118739",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T07:40:52",
"content": "Only if explicitly dictated in the service file. You’d be surprised how many of them won’t have a Restart clause",
"parent_id": "8118616",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118868",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:51:00",
"content": "Systemd services for a gui tool?",
"parent_id": "8118616",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118579",
"author": "Greg Mathews",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T18:14:03",
"content": ">Blah blah blah technobabble blah blah more technobabble.Meanwhile on Windows, AutoHotkey just works™.If you’re using OS designed for telephone exchanges, which was crudely adapted to do general-purpose GUI computing then expect things to be broken.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118617",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:18:24",
"content": "Don’t think that’s the OS that was designed for telephone exchanges…",
"parent_id": "8118579",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118643",
"author": "Zip",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:24:16",
"content": "Meanwhile on Windows, you don’t even have the freedom to move the taskbar to the top…",
"parent_id": "8118579",
"depth": 2,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8119060",
"author": "doobs",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T12:18:33",
"content": "H’mmm,Mine is at the top.Win 10 Pro.Look in the settings for the taskbar.",
"parent_id": "8118643",
"depth": 3,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118652",
"author": "ThoriumBR",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T22:50:20",
"content": "Windows is way simpler:– don’t like the Start menu? too bad, that’s what you got.– don’t like File Explorer? well, be used to it.– don’t like the system tray, or the control panel, or how things work? that’s your problem.Linux have way more ways to do things, and that is both a good and bad thing. You can have beautiful distros, others heavily customized, with security pretty locked down, or a light one that runs on early 2000’s hardware without issues. It’s yours, treats the computer as yours, so you do whatever you want with it.Windows you have what is supported and that’s it. If your computer don’t have a TPM2, it’s not officially supported. I know you can run it (I do), but MS says you cannot and you have to work around the setup. It treats the computer as MS asset, so it does what MS allows you to do. To do what you want, you have to break the EULA sometimes.And all that “Linux don’t have a proper GUI” is a joke as old as NT 3.5, come on… It have a proper GUI at least since WinXP was around…",
"parent_id": "8118579",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118580",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T18:14:56",
"content": "Wayland is the real problem here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118601",
"author": "i am jelly",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T19:55:28",
"content": "achkshually, the compositor is, no? wayland is a protocol, compositor implements it?",
"parent_id": "8118580",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118589",
"author": "Senile Data Systems",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T19:00:53",
"content": "Modern Linux seems to hate CRT monitors. 1024×768 is all you will ever get on those.Ten years ago, the system would query the monitor’s I²C chip what modes it supports and select one that it thinks would look good on the display, but allowing you to switch resolutions (who remembers CTRL-ALT-PLUS or MINUS?).One day, you had to start cheating because all you got was 1024×768. On a 14 inch CRT, no problem, but what if I had a 17 or even 19 inch one? Or a friggin’ overpowered CAD monitor?Until Ubuntu 20.04, you could inject modlines into xrandr to tell it your monitor can do 1920×1440@70Hz (and is still damn sharp, but with true black and really vibrant colors, looks absolutely unreal* if you’re used to LCD panels or oldskool TVs) – until one day you couldn’t. Some update just thrashed that. Back to 1024×786 with no (re)solution whatsoever.On 22.04 you could tell the NVidia control panel what horizontal bandwidth your monitor is capable of and you’ll get a list of resolutions the program thinks are convenient (1920×1440, albeit at a slightly flickery 60Hz).Haven’t tried installing 24.04 on that machine yet, haven’t really used it in years.(and well yes I know, it’s not CRT monitors, it’s VGA because it also happens with LCD monitors that only have VGA)(and no, I’m not a Linux Guru, just an average user who knows a little bit of Bash and thinks Windows is a $h!tsh0w since Win95 – not that 3.1x was any better but I grew up on that and feel nostalgic for it and still like it a lot. And it’s got a few cool features modern Windows is missing.)*) you could say – unparalleled… hehe… parallel… because CRTs and geometry is quite a challenge… but my monitor is pretty well adjusted",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118592",
"author": "Cogidubnus Rex",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T19:22:05",
"content": "Try the CVT tool to generate mode lines (for X; if you are suffering Wayland then good luck!). With this I managed to tweak 4k @ 30ish Hz VGA over an analogue Aten KVM over RJ45 switch.",
"parent_id": "8118589",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118596",
"author": "prosper",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T19:26:46",
"content": "oh my friend! Solve that particular problem with QMK! That way, your keystrokes and macros go anywhere your keyboard does, sans any host-side software to set up, configure, and maintain. Works on locked-down corporate machines, cross-OS’s, and persists across updates, re-installs, and changes.Get yourself an old terminal keyboard or maybe a Sun 5 with a bunch of extra keys on it, wire in a devboard to the matrix, and you can do all sorts of fun things with it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118825",
"author": "Hugo",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T14:51:59",
"content": "I do understand the article was about memory, but to add another suggestion for alternatives to autokey and QMK: Keyd, from rvaiya on GitHub.To quote its documentation:Linux lacks a good key remapping solution. In order to achieve satisfactory results a medley of tools need to be employed (e.g xcape, xmodmap) with the end result often being tethered to a specified environment (X11). keyd attempts to solve this problem by providing a flexible system wide daemon which remaps keys using kernel level input primitives (evdev, uinput).",
"parent_id": "8118596",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118612",
"author": "Aaron C.",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T21:03:43",
"content": "X11 development is starting to show cracksX11 hasn’t received a stable release since June 6th, 2012.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118657",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T23:16:42",
"content": "if i had to do that, it would be on my laptop, and i would tie restarting the thing into my suspend script. nothing magic, you can get in the middle of that process just by playing with /etc/acpi/lid.shi really relate to being too lazy to properly debug something but it really gets under my skin too.on X11, i use XTestFakeInput() to generate synthetic key/mouse events, which i imagine is the same X protocol extension that autokeys uses. it kind of sucks. there are subtle differences between authentic input events and XTest-generated events, which i don’t think the user can fully compensate for. especially for mouse events. the result is there’s a few specific programs where the menus only work with the real hardware trackpad. most things work the same though.if i was to really get to the bottom of it, i’d probably make a custom xorg input driver so the X server can’t tell the difference between a real and synthetic event.i believe the myth that there was a crew of people hacking on Xorg like 10-20 years ago who cleaned up a lot of old hacks and then ran into the really baked-in problems and bailed and formed wayland. anyways, one of the things they did was decentralize the x11 build process. so now to replace the input driver, you can like download the source to “xf86-input-libinput”, which is a relatively tiny thing to build. and then “apt install xserver-xorg-dev” and it will build independently!it used to be such ahugepain in the butt to rebuild all of xfree86, but these days you just download the module you’re interested in, hack it, and then overwrite the file in /usr/lib/xorg/modules.so my point is i just want to believe that there’s a fairly trivial way to replace the input driver on wayland as well. but i don’t know because i’ve never used it :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118663",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T23:36:09",
"content": "If you have the source, compile it in debug mode and run under valgrind.Valgrind will keep track of the memory, and on exit tell you which memory blocks have not be free’dandthe source and line where they were allocated. That’s probably enough info to show you where the error is.Valgrind will also flag line and source for other errors, such as freeing memory twice.For my personal code development, I have the following aliases:alias pev=”valgrind –leak-check=yes $BINDIR/$TESTEXEC $TESTARGS”alias pev1=”valgrind –leak-check=full –show-leak-kinds=all $BINDIR/$TESTEXEC $TESTARGS”Program only needs to be compiled in debug mode for this to work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118667",
"author": "Ignorance is",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T23:59:40",
"content": "sounds blissful.I’ve always found thecostof bliss to be excessive, though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118699",
"author": "ulimit",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T04:01:36",
"content": "Bash has ulimit builtin. Script could call it with -m or -v or -d, then do “while true; do autokey-qt; move_log_files; done.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118744",
"author": "Len",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T08:31:22",
"content": "Personally, I use xremap on Wayland to give me those emacs style bindings in web browser and other apps. If you aren’t wedded to auto hotkey, give it a try.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118869",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T16:55:26",
"content": "Clearly you have never been to a Tux/Gown party.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8118872",
"author": "Panondorf",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T17:01:02",
"content": "I hated Wayland because I DO use remote display.Then I heard about Waypipe.That seemed to work well.Then I tried to get tricky, I was hoping I could run a desktop environment over Waypipe to have something like a Wayland based VNC.I don’t know what I did but Waypipe won’t work anymore. I just get some sort of permission errors. I think it has to do with trying to write something to a temp folder… but I can’t tell from the cryptic messages if it is talking about client side or server side. Or which side even is client and server with Wayland? And the ‘docs’… not helpful.Back to hating Wayland. It all still just works with X. Yes, even Kde/Plasma still works, it just isn’t default anymore.But… Cosmic looks interesting. It might have just the blend of tiling and windows… So back to Wayland. Damnit!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119135",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T16:48:14",
"content": "Talking of linux bugs, I run an old Acer laptop with 3GB of RAM and it always had this unreliability with the WiFi, eventually it would give a kernel error and only way of restarting it was a power cycle reboot. Long story short, before I got around to creating some shonky systemd (I HATE SYSTEMD!) script, another problem came up, the BIOS got corrupted. Then it wouldn’t boot at all.So, to reset the BIOS you have to pull the WiFi network and RAM out and short a jumper on the motherboard. Put it all back together, all was good.Then I noticed, the WiFi now behaves itself! (Mostly). All that time, it probably just needed reseating!So… before you blame the software….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119672",
"author": "David Bronke",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T09:32:56",
"content": "If autokey continues giving you issues, you should look at keyd (https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd) – it works at the level of the kernels input system, so it works on both X11 and Wayland. Then your choice won’t be constrained by this feature, at least.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119822",
"author": "acme",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T23:14:08",
"content": "somewhat related: i’ve recently switched to mac and the keyboard shortcuts are driving me insane. is there an autohotkey for mac that lets me remap the shortcuts?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8119824",
"author": "acme",
"timestamp": "2025-04-18T23:14:46",
"content": "Is there a way to set a memory cap on processes like you can on containers?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8120223",
"author": "Zai1208",
"timestamp": "2025-04-20T11:17:06",
"content": "What about xwayland? Doesn’t that like run X11 apps on wayland?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8125276",
"author": "Dale S",
"timestamp": "2025-05-07T07:19:08",
"content": "A fun chainsaw! When I’ve done this trying to root cause something similar…my chainsaw was a little bigger & more complicated. This wasn’t Linux but the same method could be used (although commenter(s) noted, valgrind & similar tools are purpose built for this problem.. sadly not an option in my case.. also mine were not well localized since there was effectively a single process container.. so similar but different)The system collected a partial memory dump, and I collected a bunch of dumps. Each was statistically analyzed, first counting the allocated number for each size of memory element. Dump collection had bias to save recently created/accessed elements which helped bias towards the offender. After identifying top sizes, each size element was analyzed for most frequent values within the element. Finally a search for a similarly constructed structure started. Which fortunately provided enough of a clue to locate root cause.It was a very slow process, but successful in several memory leaks but far better to catch them before code release IMHO!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,576.19313
|
||
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/14/a-cheap-yellow-display-makes-a-video-walkie-talkie/
|
A Cheap Yellow Display Makes A Video Walkie Talkie
|
Jenny List
|
[
"Video Hacks"
] |
[
"Cheap Yellow Display",
"ESP32",
"videophone",
"walkie talkie"
] |
The ESP32 series of microprocessors with their cheap high-power cores and built-in wireless networking have brought us a wide variety of impressive projects over the years. We’re not sure we’ve quite seen the like of [Jonathan R]’s
video walkie talkie
before though, a pair of units which as you might guess, deliver two-way video and audio communications.
The trick involves not one but two ESP32s: an ESP32-S3 based camera module, and a more traditional Tensilica ESP32 in a screen module. It’s an opportunity for an interesting comparison, as one device uses the Cheap Yellow Display board, and the other uses an Elecrow equivalent. The audio uses ESP-NOW, while the video uses WiFi, and since the on-board audio amplifiers aren’t great, there’s a small amp module.
The video below has a comprehensive run-down including the rationale behind the design choices, as well as a demonstration. There’s a small lag, but nothing too unacceptable for what is after all an extremely cheap device. Perhaps after all this time,
the video phone has finally arrived
!
| 5
| 3
|
[
{
"comment_id": "8118549",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2025-04-14T16:08:39",
"content": "How I would have loved such a pair of devices as a kid!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118914",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:49:45",
"content": "In amateur radio, the technology had existed since the 1950s or so.There was video chat in the form of Amateur TeleVision (short: ATV).Nowadays, it can be digital, too. DATV.If you have a repeater (a relays station) in town, many operators can talk to each others.The one whos currently speaking can be seen by all the others who are receiving the repeater signal.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_televisionTo receive ATV signals on 70cm, an ordinary TV set can be used.It’s just a normal PAL or NTSC signal.For 23cm band, hams had used satellite TV receivers, I think.Nowadays, SDR receivers can be used (RTL SDR). Adalm Pluto can be used to generate signals, I think.",
"parent_id": "8118549",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8118821",
"author": "Rodimus",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T14:27:51",
"content": "Now I want a working set of Space 1999 communicators. We have the technology, and my inner geek child has always wanted them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8118908",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-04-15T20:33:24",
"content": "It’s “Mondbasis Alpha 1”. You really have to watch the German original sometimes. Also, no b/w CRTs, no joy! ;)",
"parent_id": "8118821",
"depth": 2,
"replies": []
}
]
},
{
"comment_id": "8119153",
"author": "Antti",
"timestamp": "2025-04-16T17:47:11",
"content": "Seems to be quite a hefty lag introduced by the processing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,576.235393
|
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