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https://hackaday.com/2023/08/06/noisy-keyboards-sink-ships/ | Noisy Keyboards Sink Ships | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"eavesdropping",
"keyboard hack",
"side channel attack"
] | Many of us like a keyboard with a positive click noise when we type. You might want to rethink that, though, in light of a new paper from the UK that shows how researchers trained an AI to
decode keystrokes from noise on conference calls
.
The researchers point out that people don’t expect sound-based exploits. The paper reads, “For example, when typing a password, people will regularly hide their screen but will do little to obfuscate their keyboard’s sound.”
The technique uses the same kind of attention network that makes models like ChatGPT so powerful. It seems to work well, as the paper claims a 97% peak accuracy over both a telephone or Zoom. In addition, where the model was wrong, it tended to be close, identifying an adjacent keystroke instead of the correct one. This would be easy to correct for in software, or even in your brain as infrequent as it is. If you see the sentence “Paris im the s[ring,” you can probably figure out what was really typed.
We’ve seen this done before, but this technique raises the bar. As sophisticated as
keyboard listening was back in the 1970s
, you can only imagine what the three-letter agencies can do these days.
In the meantime, the mitigation for this particular threat seems obvious — just start screaming whenever you type in your password. | 40 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670301",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T14:14:29",
"content": "Wouldn’t those mics that focus on the speaker and minimize the background cut down on this?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6670313",
"aut... | 1,760,372,210.569138 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/06/got-fireflies-try-talking-to-them-with-a-green-led/ | Got Fireflies? Try Talking To Them With A Green LED | Donald Papp | [
"LED Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"blinking",
"fireflies",
"firefly",
"flashing",
"led",
"patterns",
"weekend project"
] | [ChrisMentrek] shares a design for a simple green LED signal light
intended for experiments in “talking” to fireflies
. The device uses simple components like PVC piping and connectors to make something that resembles a signal flashlight with a momentary switch — a device simple enough to make in time for a little weekend experimenting.
Observe and repeat flashing patterns, and see if any fireflies get curious enough to investigate.
Did you know that fireflies, a type of beetle whose lower abdomen can light up thanks to a chemical reaction, flash in patterns? Many creatures, fireflies included, are quite curious under the right circumstances. The idea is to observe some fireflies and attempt to flash the same patterns (or different ones!) with a green LED to see if any come and investigate.
[ChrisMentrek] recommends using a green LED that outputs 565 nm, because that is very close to the colors emitted by most fireflies in North America. There’s also a handy link about firefly flashing patterns from the
Massachusetts Audubon society’s Firefly Watch program
, which is a great resource for budding scientists.
If staying up and learning more about nocturnal nightlife is your thing, then in between trying to talk to fireflies we recommend
listening for bats
as another fun activity, although it requires a bit more than just a green LED. Intrigued? Good news, because we can tell you
all about the different kinds of bat detectors
and what you can expect from them. | 25 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670267",
"author": "tiopepe123",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T11:10:21",
"content": "more ESP32 CAM IR +Filter green",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6670294",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T13:42:40",
... | 1,760,372,210.266109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/06/tensioning-3d-prints-for-lightweight-strong-parts/ | Tensioning 3D Prints For Lightweight, Strong Parts | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"kevlar",
"lamp",
"lightweight",
"pretensioned",
"tensioning",
"thread",
"truss"
] | Desktop 3D printers have come a long way over the past decade. They’re now affordable for almost anyone, capable of printing in many diverse materials, and offer a level of rapid prototyping and development not feasible with other methods. That said, the fact that they are largely limited to printing different formulations of plastic means there are inherent physical limitations to what the machines are capable of, largely because they print almost exclusively in plastic. But augmenting prints with other building techniques, like
this method for adding tensioning systems to 3D printed trusses
can save weight and make otherwise unremarkable prints incredibly strong.
The build from [Jón Schone] of
Proper Printing
consists of printed modular sections of truss which can be connected together to make structural components of arbitrary length. To add strength to them without weight, a series of Kevlar threads are strung from one end of the truss to the other on the interior, and then tensioned by twisting the threads at one end. Similar to building with
prestressed concrete
, this method allows for stronger parts, longer spans, less building material, and lighter weight components. The latter of which is especially important here, because this method is planned for use to eventually build a 3D printer where the components need to be light and strong. In this build it’s being used to make a desk lamp with a hinged joint.
For other innovative 3D printer builds, [Jón] has plenty of interesting designs ranging from
this dual extrusion system
to this
3D printed wheel
for a full-size passenger vehicle. There’s all kinds of interesting stuff going on at that channel and we’ll be on the edge of our seats waiting to see the 3D printer he builds using this tensioned truss system. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670268",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T11:16:07",
"content": "Pre-stressing doesn’t change the Young’s modulus of the material, so the beams become more bendy as you remove material. The compression doesn’t help with stiffness in any direction – the Young’s modulus of ... | 1,760,372,210.390809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/browser-based-robot-dog-simulator-in-800-lines-of-code/ | Browser-Based Robot Dog Simulator In ~800 Lines Of Code | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"physics",
"rapier",
"robodog",
"simulator",
"unitree"
] | [Sergii] has been learning about robot simulation and wrote up
a basic simulator for a robodog platform
: the Unitree A1. It only took about 800 lines of code to do so, which probably makes it a good place to start if one is headed in a similar direction.
Right now, [Sergii]’s simulator is an interactive physics model than runs in the browser. Software-wise, once the model of the robot exists the
Rapier JavaScript physics engine
takes care of the physics simulation. The robot’s physical layout comes from
the manufacturer’s repository
, so it doesn’t need to be created from scratch.
To make the tool useful, the application has two models of the robot, side by side. The one on the left is the control model, and has interactive sliders for limb positions. All movements on the control model are transmitted to the model on the right, which is the simulation model, setting the pose. The simulation model is the one that actually models the physics and gravity of all the desired motions and positions. [Sergii]’s next step is to use the simulator to design and implement a simple walking gait controller, and we look forward to how that turns out.
If Unitree sounds familiar to you, it might be because we recently covered how an unofficial SDK was able to
open up some otherwise-unavailable features
on the robodogs, so check that out if you want to get a little more out of what you paid for. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670220",
"author": "No Way Jose",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T05:12:22",
"content": "So it’s Browser Bowser?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6670315",
"author": "Garth Bock",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T15:15:05",
... | 1,760,372,210.199779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/jailbreaking-tesla-infotainment-systems/ | Jailbreaking Tesla Infotainment Systems | Navarre Bartz | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"automotive as a service",
"car net",
"features on demand",
"functions on demand",
"infotainment",
"paywall",
"subscription",
"subscription fee",
"subscription service",
"tesla",
"Tesla Motors"
] | With newer cars being computers on wheels, some manufacturers are using software to put features behind a paywall or thwarting DIY repairs. Industrious
hackers
security researchers have taken it upon themselves to set these features free by
hacking a Tesla infotainment system
. (via
Electrek
)
The researchers from TU Berlin found that by using a voltage fault injection attack against the AMD Secure Processor (ASP) at the heart of current Tesla models, they could run arbitrary code on the infotainment system. The hack opens up the double-edged sword of an attacker gaining access to encrypted PII or a shadetree mechanic “extracting a TPM-protected attestation key Tesla uses to authenticate the car. This enables migrating a car’s identity to another car computer without Tesla’s help whatsoever, easing certain repairing efforts.” We can see this being handy for certain other
unsanctioned hacks
as well.
The attack is purported as being “unpatchable” and giving root access that survives reboots and updates of the system. Since AMD is a vendor to multiple vehicle companies, the question arises as to how widely applicable this hack is to other vehicles suffering from
AaaS (Automotive as a Service)
.
Longing for a modern drivetrain with the simplicity of yesteryear? Read our
Minimal Motoring Manifesto
. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670183",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T02:39:19",
"content": "Hey all I wanted to do was turn off the continuous logging that killed the NAND flash. But as long as its a jailbroken Ryzen, can I run SteamOS? (HoloISO)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,372,210.32467 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/making-a-kid-scale-apollo-11-lunar-lander/ | Making A Kid-Scale Apollo 11 Lunar Lander | Donald Papp | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"apollo 11",
"lunar lander",
"model",
"prop"
] | If you’d like to see what goes into making a 1/3-scale Apollo 11 Lunar Module,
[Plasanator]’s photos and build details
will show off how he constructed one for a kid’s event that was a hit!
The photo gallery gives plenty of ideas about how one would approach a project like this, and readers will surely appreciate the use of an old frying pan as a concrete mold to create the lander’s “feet”. Later, a little paint makes the frying pan become a pseudo-antenna mounted on the lander’s exterior.
Inside, the lander has a control panel with a lot of arcade-style buttons and LED lighting. It’s pretty simple stuff, but livens things up a lot. Bright red lighting for the engine combined with a couple of slow strobe lights really makes it come alive in the dark. The gold foil? Emergency thermal blankets wrapped around the frame.
We happen to have the perfect chaser for this kid-scale lunar module:
the Apollo 11 moon landing, recreated with animatronics and LEGO
. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670136",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T23:16:07",
"content": "Oh that’s cool, but you just know somebody is going to say it was faked.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6670231",
"author": "foxpup",
... | 1,760,372,210.065409 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/07/review-beepy-a-palm-sized-linux-hacking-playground/ | Review: Beepy, A Palm-sized Linux Hacking Playground | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"handhelds hacks",
"Reviews",
"Slider"
] | [
"Beepy. BeepBerry",
"blackberry",
"open hardware",
"Sharp Memory LCD",
"SQFMI"
] | In the long ago times, when phones still flipped and modems sang proudly the songs of their people, I sent away for a set of Slackware CDs and embarked on a most remarkable journey. Back then, running Linux (especially on the desktop) was not a task to be taken lightly. The kernel itself was still in considerable flux — instead of changing some obscure subsystem or adding support for a niche gadget you don’t even own, new releases were unlocking critical capabilities and whole categories of peripherals. I still remember deciding if I wanted to play it safe and stick with my current kernel, or take a chance on compiling the latest version to check out this new “USB Mass Storage” thing everyone on the forums was talking about…
But modern desktop Linux has reached an incredible level of majority, and is now a viable choice for a great number of computer users. In fact, if you add Android and Chrome OS into the mix, there are millions and millions of people who are using Linux on daily basis and don’t even realize it. These days, the only way to experience that sense of adventure and wonderment that once came pre-loaded with a Linux box is to go out and seek it.
Which is precisely how it feels using
using the Beepy from SQFMI
. The handheld device, which was
formerly known as the Beepberry
before its creators received an all-too-predicable formal complaint, is unabashedly designed for Linux nerds. Over the last couple of weeks playing with this first-run hardware, I’ve been compiling kernel drivers, writing custom scripts, and trying (though not always successfully) to get new software installed on it. If you’re into hacking around on Linux, it’s an absolute blast.
There’s a good chance that you already know if the Beepy is for you or not, but if you’re still on the fence, hopefully this in-depth look at the hardware and current state of the overall project can help you decide before SQFMI officially starts taking new orders for the $79 gadget.
Hardware
To be clear, the Beepy itself is not a computer. It’s simply a board that combines a BlackBerry keyboard, a 400 x 200 Sharp Memory LCD, and a rechargeable battery. You’ll still need to bring your own Raspberry Pi Zero to complete the device, although SQFMI does plan on offering the Beepy with a Pi Zero 2 pre-installed as an option. Its design is covered by the CERN Open Hardware Licence v1.2, with the schematics and KiCad files already released by SQFMI.
The Raspberry Pi connects to the Beepy via a clever arrangement of flexible pins, which are held into place by the act of screwing it down into the metal standoffs. This means you don’t need to solder anything, and in theory, makes it easy to swap the Pi in and out. In practice though, I found the interface to be a bit finicky. It took several attempts before all of the pins clicked into place, and once it finally got lined up, I didn’t dare move it.
Luckily, you shouldn’t have to. SQFMI have broken out the Pi’s GPIO pins to standard headers on either side of the display. This makes it easy to add your own hardware, and prevents you from having to touch the header on the Pi itself. Thanks to the physical arrangement of the Pi when mated to the Beepy, you’ll also have access to its micro USB port (remember, only one of the Zero’s two ports can be used for data) and the HDMI port — though we’ll get back to the latter in a minute.
Keyboard
As previously mentioned, the keyboard is a genuine BlackBerry board. If you ever used one of these devices back in the day, I don’t have to tell you how good it feels. Sure it’s small, but the tactile response is great and they did an excellent job of making sure all the necessary symbols and punctuation marks were just an ALT key away.
After using the keyboard on the Beepy for awhile, going back to the touchscreen on my Google Pixel is a miserable experience, and I remember all over again how disappointing it was to see the mobile industry move away from physical keyboards.
The electronics that interface the BlackBerry keyboard with the Raspberry Pi are based on the
BBQ20KBD from Solder Party
. This includes the use of the RP2040, which on the Beepy also controls an RGB LED at the top left corner of the device. Source code for the RP2040’s firmware is
provided under the MIT license
, and it can be updated even without a Pi installed by holding down the “End Call” key as you plug in the USB-C cable, just like with the original BBQ20KBD.
Display
Arguably the most unique feature of the Beepy is its Sharp Memory LCD, which is
reportedly the same model used in the Playdate
. This technology is sometimes compared to eink, in that it uses very little power while offering high contrast and exceptional daylight readability. Like eink, it also doesn’t produce any light, so unfortunately you won’t be using Beepy in the dark. On the plus side its refresh rate is closer to that of a traditional LCD, so even when text is scrolling quickly, there’s no obvious ghosting.
Should you ever accidentally find yourself outside, you’ll have no trouble seeing the Beepy’s Sharp Memory LCD.
The display has a resolution of 400 x 240, and the documentation recommends you use a terminal font of 8×8 pixels to maximize how much information you can pack onto it at one time. Thanks to the excellent contrast of the Memory LCD the tiny text is more readable than I feared, but it’s still hardly ideal. Going forward, the viability of the Beepy will likely depend on how many programs can be adapted for this limited resolution.
Text on the Beepy is small, but very sharp.
Currently, there’s no official support for graphics on the Beepy’s display, but there is a
very promising DirectFB2 port
that you can install via an automated script. But be careful — not only does the script add a few hundred megabytes worth of packages to your system, it also has to compile several libraries from source. On the Pi Zero 2 this probably isn’t that big of a deal, but on the original Zero, it took quite a long time to complete the process.
Battery Life
The Beepy comes with a 2,000 mAh LiPo pouch battery that takes up most of the available space on the back of the board. With my multimeter sitting between the battery and the Beepy, I measured an idle current of approximately 250 mA with the Raspberry Pi Zero (expect this is to be higher with a Zero 2), which would result in a respectable run time of approximately eight hours.
Of course, you’ll probably want to do something more exciting with your Beepy than watch the terminal cursor blink. So I connected a USB audio adapter (the Beepy has no onboard audio hardware) and started streaming
SomaFM
. The added hardware and the bump in CPU utilization increased the current draw to 280 mA, which equates to roughly seven hours of runtime.
Next, I
connected to Libera Chat
and spent some time gabbing in #linux. The Beepy was now pulling around 310 mA, bringing the estimated endurance to a still very reasonable six hours. Oh, what I would have given in my younger days for a handheld device that would let me stay on IRC for most of the night without needing a recharge…
Things really don’t start getting too bad until you connect some beefier external devices. Running Kismet with an Alfa AWUS036H WiFi adapter brought total consumption to 700 mA, reducing the runtime to just about three hours. Tuning in with an RTL-SDR (Nooelec NESDR Nano 2) had the Beepy gulping down between 770 and 800 mAh, which would be enough to drain the battery in under two and a half hours.
Power Management
I’d estimate that’s about the shortest runtime you’re likely to see on a fully charged Beepy (at least with the Pi Zero), as any device that consumed more power than the SDR caused the hardware to lose power once it was plugged in. Curious to see where the weak link was, I pulled the datasheet for the TPS61090 boost converter listed in the schematics and was surprised to see it was only good for 500 mA. Taking a close look at the board I noticed that the actual component is a TPS61030, which is rated for a more appropriate 1 A. It’s unclear if SQFMI actually intended on using the lower-spec converter originally and then had to bump it up later, or if it’s simply a case of using a convenient footprint in KiCad — as of this writing, there doesn’t seem to be a public Bill of Materials to cross reference.
Incidentally, you’ll want to avoid draining the Beepy’s battery too deeply if you can help it — according to the schematics (and confirmed on my actual hardware) SQFMI have used a 10K resistor on the “programming” pin of the TP4054 charging IC. That sets the chip’s charge rate to a measly 100 mA, which means a full recharge of the battery would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours. It’s hard to believe this was intentional, and may be addressed on a later hardware revision.
Note:
While I didn’t experience any issues personally, it’s worth mentioning that there are several reports among those who’ve already gotten their Beepys that the TPS61030 can fail without warning. The chip apparently shorts internally, which in turn causes the nearby inductor to get extremely hot. Functionally, the result is a completely dead device, as power from both the USB port and the battery are routed through the same chip.
There’s actually a report about this exact problem on the
Texas Instruments support forum
that dates all the way back to 2011. The official advice from TI even back then was to upgrade to a newer and more reliable component, so if the failure rate is as high as some users suspect, it’s possible this component will be swapped out in a new board revision.
Software
With the Beepy, SQFMI is basically just selling you the hardware. While they do provide a script that will automate installation of the necessary kernel drivers on a stock install of Raspberry Pi OS, there’s little else in the way of official software. Even core functions like blinking the notification LED to checking the battery level aren’t actually implemented. The documentation simply tells you which I2C addresses to poke, and leaves it to the community to figure out what to do with that information.
For hardware hackers and Linux graybeards, that’s no problem at all. Actually it’s kind of exciting, and sort of the point of buying a device like this. But anyone who thinks they can just buy the Beepy and start using it like a regular consumer gadget is going to be in for a rude awakening. To be clear, SQFMI is absolutely upfront about this fact, though I’m sure that won’t prevent people from complaining about it anyway.
The Beepy will run anything you throw at it…so long as you can run it in the terminal.
As for what’s provided by the setup script, namely the drivers for the keyboard and display, they seem to work perfectly fine. Like I mentioned previously, the default environment doesn’t support graphics on the Sharp Memory LCD, so you’re essentially limited to programs you can run in the terminal. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of those. Some need minor tweaks to work on the Beepy’s small display, but if you’ve gotten this far, that shouldn’t be an problem.
What you might not expect though is that the HDMI port, at least under the current software, doesn’t actually work. More specifically, when the Memory LCD driver is loaded, the console is moved over to a different framebuffer. So while you might think you can just plug the Beepy into your TV when you get tired of looking at its tiny screen, you’ll actually find it’s not outputting anything. There’s some talk of trying to set the HDMI port up as a secondary graphics-only output, but I haven’t seen anyone actually submit a patch for it yet. In a pinch you could of course reconfigure the kernel and reboot to get the HDMI working, but that would take the Memory LCD offline.
Still, you’ve got a full-fledged ARM Linux system at your disposal here. While it could stand to have better integration with the hardware, it’s hard to complain when so many incredible possibilities are on the table. Being able to pull down a Git repo and compile some new tool right on the Beepy is a liberating experience compared to what’s traditionally been possible in a form factor like this.
Documentation
If there’s anything negative I can say about the Beepy right now, it’s the state of the documentation. Outside of the single “
Getting Started
” page, most of the documentation is either incomplete or simply missing. Matters are further complicated by the haphazard name change. Some documents and repositories still use the name Beepberry, while others have been changed over, and it’s not uncommon to come across a link that now returns a 404 because of it. It’s usually not too difficult to figure out, but it can be a frustrating experience if you’re not familiar with the situation.
There’s plenty ToDo in the Beepy docs.
But the bigger problem is that so much of the crucial information about the Beepy is tied up in the project’s Discord and Matrix servers. While it’s clearly important to have a centralized place for users to chat and discuss issues, at some point that information needs to be packaged up and presented in a less ephemeral way. For example, you’d never know about the DirectFB2 port unless you joined the Discord server and scrolled the discussion back by several weeks.
Now to be fair, Beepy is hardly the first project to suffer from this issue. In fact, it’s a big problem right now that’s impacting many open source efforts…but that’s a story for another time. Plus we can’t ignore that the project is in its infancy, and that writing in-depth documentation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense while so many details are still in a state of flux.
But the fact remains that there’s going to be a big wave of new Beepy users once sales open up, and unless things are improved before then, there’s the potential for a lot of duplicated effort and wasted time as folks struggle to figure out the true state of the project.
Final Thoughts
At $79, the Beepy hardware is an absolute steal. The BBQ20KBD alone would cost you $30, and Adafruit wants $45 for a comparable Sharp Memory LCD. Plus, if you order the Pi Zero 2 through SQFMI when you buy the Beepy, you can actually get it at non-scalper prices. While it’s very much a hacker’s toy rather than a complete product, I’m confident that the situation will improve as more people get their hands on the hardware and start pitching in to improve the software and documentation.
If I’m honest, part of me does wonder if the overall package wouldn’t have been a bit more approachable had it used a more traditional touchscreen LCD. Having access to a graphical environment, even one as limited as it would undoubtedly be given the meager abilities of the Pi Zero and the diminutive display area, would have opened up some exciting possibilities that just can’t be realized with the Sharp Memory LCD.
Then again, would we even be talking about the Beepy if SQFMI hadn’t taken the road less traveled? At the end of the day, the Beepy is defined by how unique it is, and in a world where our mobile devices seem increasingly monolithic, there’s something undeniably appealing about trying something different. | 45 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670664",
"author": "Adam Łączny",
"timestamp": "2023-08-07T14:17:49",
"content": "Already making case mods for it:https://www.printables.com/model/546252-beepberry-utilitarian-case",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6674229",
... | 1,760,372,210.843642 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/07/a-magnetohydrodynamic-drive-in-the-kitchen-sink/ | A Magnetohydrodynamic Drive In The Kitchen Sink | Tom Nardi | [
"High Voltage",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"Magnetohydrodynamic",
"MHD",
"Plasma Channel"
] | The magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drive certainly
sounds
like something out of science fiction — using an array of magnets and electrodes, this high-tech propulsion technology promises to silently propel a craft through the water without any moving parts. As long as you can provide it with a constant supply of electricity, anyway.
Of course, as is often the case, the devil is in the details. Even with the obvious scientific and military applications of such a propulsion unit, scaling MHD technology up has proven difficult. But as
[Jay Bowles] of
Plasma Channel
shows in his latest video
, that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with the concept at home. Even better, getting verifiable results is much easier than you’d think.
A pair of electrodes and a single magnet is all it takes to get measurable results.
While [Jay] usually won’t even get out of bed for less than a dozen kilovolts, a standard bench supply is all you need to power your very own MHD. He ran his experiential drive at a maximum of 25 VDC/9 A, but he was getting results with just 5 VDC/1.5 A. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of cutting some electrodes out of metal stock and placing them on either side of the most powerful magnets you can get your hands on. Add in a 3D-printed structure and some pieces of acrylic, and you’re halfway to a bathtub rendition of
The Hunt for Red October
.
In the video, [Jay] progresses through several experiments that test variables such as the electrode spacing, magnetic field strength, and applied voltage — noting how each change impacts the velocity of water passing through his test rig. The results indicate that the MHD, at least on such a small scale, is remarkably forgiving regarding design specifics. Line your electrodes up with the magnets, flip on the power, and it seems like
something
will happen pretty much no matter what. If you want the best performance, the formula seems straightforward: more power + bigger magnets = higher velocity.
Electricity and salt water don’t get along terribly well.
The final prototype thruster has a mass of 35 grams and produces approximately 75 grams of thrust while consuming 225 watts. That’s pretty impressive for a first attempt, especially for something mainly built from hardware store components.
It seems like the biggest problem is that the brass electrodes end up looking pretty rough after a relatively short time. We’re pretty sure we even saw metal flakes flying out of the back of the unit while it was operating a few times. As such, it’s unclear how long the unit could provide thrust before electrolysis really starts to take its toll. But hey, that’s what version two is for, right?
[Jay] says he was inspired to look into the magnetohydrodynamic drive after
building a high-voltage catamaran
, which is itself a spin-off of his
ongoing efforts to build an ion-powered aircraft
. | 58 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670615",
"author": "Benny",
"timestamp": "2023-08-07T11:05:24",
"content": "One sink only please…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6670654",
"author": "Tony",
"timestamp": "2023-08-07T13:42:39",
"conten... | 1,760,372,210.668903 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/07/this-kinetic-art-display-uses-a-gin-bottle/ | This Kinetic Art Display Uses A Gin Bottle | Dave Rowntree | [
"Art"
] | [
"3d printed",
"LDPE",
"marble run",
"TMC2208"
] | [David McDaid] likes gin. So in homage to their favourite tipple, a certain brand of Scottish origin, a kinetic art project was brewed. Tabled as a Rube Goldberg machine — it’s not — but it is a
very smart marble run type installation
, dripping with 3D printed parts and a sprinkling of blinkenlights.
The write-up shows the degree of pain we go through with building such contraptions, apparently [David] burned through 2.5 kg of PLA filament despite the bill of materials requiring a mere 660 g. Much experimentation, trial and error, and plenty of print-and-reprint-until-good-enough, resulted in a clean looking run with some neat features. We particularly like the use of a stainless steel
jigger
to add a touch of metallic
ting
, to the soundscape produced. The whole show was put together in Fusion 360, since all those tight tolerances do not make for a simple construction without a lot of fiddling around with the layout. Once it was a sound, layout was prototyped on a wood board, which was subsequently used a drill template for the final acrylic version.
On the electronics side of things, an Arduino Nano clone is on control duty, reading an IR trip sensor to fire of a simple light effect, illuminating the gin bottle in a slick fashion. These machines need a mechanism to raise the balls against that pesky force of gravity, in this instance a 3D printed custom chain was constructed, driven with a stepper motor in turn driven from a TMC2208. You see, this thing lives in the kitchen, so the aim was to keep all the noise from the mechanics to a minimum so only the noise of LDPE balls rattling around can be heard. They are the star of the show after all! The build looks nice and would certainly be something we’d like to see on the wall. Obviously we’ve seen a few marble runs over the years. Here’s
an interesting one that uses an elevator mechanism
, and another project that shows
how to generate runs procedurally
.
Art Display with ~200 3D Printed Parts
by
u/bringmedavid
in
3Dprinting | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670673",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2023-08-07T14:52:22",
"content": "I wouldn’t say it ‘uses’ the gin bottle. The bottle just sits there isolated and inert without interacting with the sculpture. It could be replaced with an old boot for no change in function. A shame... | 1,760,372,210.439661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/06/an-open-firmware-for-lilygos-e-ink-smart-watch/ | An Open Firmware For LILYGO’s E-ink Smart Watch | Bryan Cockfield | [
"clock hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"battery",
"clock",
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"ESP32",
"smart watch",
"watch"
] | The world’s first quartz wristwatches were miles ahead of electric and mechanical wristwatches by most standards of the time, their accuracy was unprecedented and the batteries typically lasted somewhere on the order of a year. Modern smart watches, at least in terms of battery life, have taken a step backwards — depending on use, some can require daily charging.
If you’re looking to bridge the gap between a day and a year, you might look into a smart watch with an e-ink display. One option is the ESP32-based LILYGO T-Wrist. Of course, it’s not a smart watch without some software to run on it,
which is where qpaperOS comes in
.
Developed by [qewer33], this open source firmware for the T-Wrist is designed to get the most out of the battery by updating only once per minute. With a 250 mAh battery, it should last about five days on a charge. Of course, with the power of the ESP32 comes a whole host of other features including GPS, a step counter, and a weather display, although since the firmware is still under development, some of these features have yet to be implemented.
With all of the code available, qpaperOS could make an excellent platform from which to build your own smart watch around. Or perhaps you could chip in and add some of the features on the whislity. The ESP32 is a capable and versatile chip,
even capable of playing popular 8-bit video games
, although we’re not sure this functionality would fit in a smart watch and preserve battery life at the same time. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670553",
"author": "Adam",
"timestamp": "2023-08-07T06:29:35",
"content": "Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed your article and found it highly informative, thanks for sharing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6670579",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,210.497491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/06/star-wars-pit-droid-has-a-jetson-brain/ | Star Wars Pit Droid Has A Jetson Brain | Tom Nardi | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"droid",
"Jetson Nano",
"Jetson Orin Nano",
"pit droid",
"star wars"
] | In the
Star Wars
universe, pit droids are little foldable robots that perform automated repairs on spacecraft and the like. They were introduced in 1999’s
The Phantom Menace
, and beyond the podracing scenes, are probably the only good thing to come out of that particular film.
[Goran Vuksic] wanted a pit droid of his own
, and reasoned that if he was going to go through the trouble of sanding and painting all the 3D printed components so they look like the real bot, he might as well add some smarts to it. While this droid won’t be fixing podracers anytime soon, its onboard Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit does pack a considerable amount of processing under that dome.
A webcam mounted in the bot’s eye socket is connected to the Jetson, which is running an image detection and identification routine based on the example code provided by NVIDIA. The single-board computer uses a relay to blink some LEDs on and off when a human is detected, and a pair of servos pan-and-tilt the bot’s head towards whoever has caught its gaze.
It’s no surprise that [Goran] picked the Jetson Orin over competing SBCs for this task — in our
review of the Orin Nano Developer Kit a few months ago
, we found it was able to hit nearly 200 frames per second while performing this sort of real-time image analysis. So there’s plenty of room to grow should he want to integrate more complex image recognition tasks.
For example, he could follow in the footsteps of [Kris Kersey], and put a
functional data overlay on top of the video
to give his bot
Iron Man
vision. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670502",
"author": "movielibre",
"timestamp": "2023-08-07T02:45:15",
"content": "Nope.The only good thing to come out of The Phantom Menace is Jar Jar Binks.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6670517",
"author": "make p... | 1,760,372,210.720687 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/06/hackaday-links-august-6-2023/ | Hackaday Links: August 6, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"banana for scale",
"canon",
"dam",
"hackaday links",
"infrastructure",
"photopolymer",
"printer",
"reservoir",
"resin",
"robodog",
"SCADA"
] | “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” is a common tech support maneuver that everyone already seems to know and apply to just about all the wonky tech in their life. But would you tell someone to apply it to a reservoir? Someone did, and with disastrous results,
at least according to a report
on the lead-up to the collapse of a reservoir in the city of Lewiston, Idaho — just across the Snake River from Clarkston, Washington; get it? According to the report, operators at the reservoir had an issue crop up that required a contractor to log into the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system running the reservoir. The contractor’s quick log-in resulted in him issuing instructions to local staff to unplug the network cable on the SCADA controller and plug it back in. Somehow, that caused a variable in the SCADA system — the one storing the level of water in the reservoir — to get stuck at the current value. This made it appear that the water level was too low, which lead the SCADA system to keep adding water to the reservoir, which eventually collapsed.
The blame game seems to be settling in on software as the culprit, but we’re not so sure. This seems to be the reverse of the
“software fixes for hardware problems”
trend (second item) we’ve been harping on recently. Sure, the contractor should have known that losing network connectivity could cause problems, and it’s not cool to release software to production that can result in variables left in an undefined state at startup. But this really seems more like a problem with the mechanical design of the reservoir, whose job is to safely hold water. Were there no fail-safe features like a spillway to channel overflow water away without causing damage? Blaming the software alone seems
Resin printers — seems like people either love them or hate them. Or maybe a little of both; the quality of the prints is pretty phenomenal, but oh, the stink of the photopolymer resins you have to use. The stuff just smells dangerous, like an organic chemistry lab, and with good reason. So if you want to keep your resin printer going safely, you might want to take a look at
new guidelines for the safe handling of UV-curable resins
. The guidelines are the joint product of the Photopolymer Additive Manufacturing Alliance (PAMA), the National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST), and RadTech, the Association for Ultraviolet and Electron Beam Technologies. The guidelines cover best practices in terms of clean-up, spill control, storage, and disposal of waste. It’s mostly common sense stuff, but given
the chemically complicated nature of photopolymers
, a little reminder of the basics is probably a good thing.
3D printers aren’t the only printers that can be dangerous, of course, as Canon helpfully reminds us to
practice good data security
when disposing of old printers. The suggested steps include deleting your WiFi credentials, which seems like an obvious step and one that could be accomplished by a factory reset. But according to Canon, that’s somehow not enough for at least 200 of its printer models. So once the ink runs out and you’re ready to pitch the thing and buy a new one rather than being extorted into emptying your wallet for new cartridges, make sure you take all the extra steps recommended to clear your data. It’ll be fun, really.
“Banana for scale”? Not anymore — behold the wonder of
the online parametric banana generator
. If you’ve been looking for a way to generate custom bananas of any size and shape, here’s your chance. You control the length, girth, and bend radius of the fruit, and the model does the rest. Sadly, surface texture and bruising aren’t supported, and it looks like only the now-ubiquitous — and
possibly endangered
— Cavendish banana is supported. So no plantains, please.
And finally, we leave you with
“Unitree Go2,”
a robodog that’s the “new creature of embodied AI.” It actually looks pretty cool, and at $1,600, it seems like a bargain, at least compared to a Boston Dynamics Spot, which will set you back like $40K. Go2 seems like the perfect little pet who will run up to greet you when you come home and “dance to pleasure you” too, if you’re lucky. There’s the fine print, though, of course — the pro model will run you $2,800 plus shipping, and a cool 25% duty if you’re in the US. But when you think about it, some purebred dogs go for about that much, and if you add in vet bills, food, and training, this just might be the right way to go. | 22 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670446",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T23:12:40",
"content": "Cut to the chase, here is the list of affected Canon printers…https://canon.a.bigcontent.io/v1/static/affected-models_20230731_d04c0d9895124b65acd21ca68357dcdc",
"parent_id... | 1,760,372,210.915502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/06/blinkenlights-to-bootloader-a-guide-to-stm32-development/ | Blinkenlights To Bootloader: A Guide To STM32 Development | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"application",
"bare metal",
"bootloader",
"development",
"guide",
"how-to",
"learn",
"microcontroller",
"stm32"
] | While things like the Arduino platform certainly opened up the gates of microcontroller programming to a much wider audience, it can also be limiting in some ways. The Arduino IDE, for example, abstracts away plenty of the underlying machinations of the hardware, and the vast amount of libraries can contribute to this effect as well. It’s not a problem if you just need a project to get up and running, in fact, that’s one of its greatest strengths. But for understanding the underlying hardware we’d recommend taking a look at something like
this video series on the STM32 platform
.
The series comes to us from [Francis Stokes] of
Low Byte Productions
who has produced eighteen videos for working with the STM32 Cortex-M4 microcontroller. The videos start by getting a developer environment up and blinking LEDs, and then move on to using peripherals for more complex tasks. The project then moves on to more advanced topics and divides into two parts, the development of an application and also a bootloader. The bootloader begins relatively simply, and then goes on to get more and more features built into it. It eventually can validate and update firmware, and includes cryptographic signing (although [Francis] notes that you probably shouldn’t use this feature for production).
One of the primary goals for [Francis], apart from the actual coding and development, was to liven up a subject matter that is often seen as dry, which we think was accomplished quite well. A number of future videos are planned as well. But, if you’re not convinced that the STM32 platform is the correct choice for you, we did publish a feature a while back
outlining a few other choices
that might provide some other options to consider. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670401",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-08-06T20:36:20",
"content": "This (if I find the time) would make better use of the number of STM devboards in my stash.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,372,210.971309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/lk-99-diamagnetc-semiconductor-not-superconductor/ | LK-99: Diamagnetc Semiconductor, Not Superconductor? | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Science"
] | [
"LK-99",
"room temperature superconductor",
"superconductor"
] | Every so often, along comes a story which, like [Fox Mulder] with his unexplained phenomena, we want to believe. EM drives and cold fusion for example would be the coolest of the cool if they worked, but sadly they crumbled when subjected to scientific inquiry outside the labs of their originators. The jury’s still out on the latest example, a claimed room-temperature superconductor, but it’s starting to seem that
it might instead be a diamagnetic semiconductor
.
We covered some of the story surrounding the announcement of LK-99
and subsequent reports of it levitating under magnetic fields
, but today’s installment comes courtesy of a team from Beihang University in Beijing. They’ve published a paper in which they characterize their sample of LK-99, and sadly according to them it’s no superconductor.
Instead it’s a diamagnetic semiconductor, something that in itself probably bears some explanation. We’re guessing most readers will be familiar with semiconductors, but diamagnetic substances possess the property of having an external magnetic field induce an internal magnetic field in the opposite direction. This means that they will levitate in a magnetic field, but not due to the Meissner effect, the property of superconductors which causes magnetic field to flow round their outside. The Beijing team have shown by measuring the resistance of the sample that it’s not a superconductor.
So sadly it seems LK-99 isn’t the miracle it was billed as, unless there’s some special quirk in the production of the original Korean sample which didn’t make it to the other teams. We can’t help wondering why a sample from Korea wasn’t subjected to external evaluation rather than leaving the other teams to make their own. Never mind, eh! | 70 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670100",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T21:06:43",
"content": "To be fair to the LK-99 is a superconducter you can’t in good faith claim to have proven it’s a “diamagnetic semiconductor” because your synthesis yielded a “non-diamagnetic semiconductor”!",
"paren... | 1,760,372,211.56123 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/diy-eye-tracking-for-vr-headsets-from-a-to-z/ | DIY Eye Tracking For VR Headsets, From A To Z | Donald Papp | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"diy",
"eye tracking",
"open source",
"vr",
"VRChat"
] | Eye tracking is a useful feature in social virtual reality (VR) spaces because it really enhances presence and communication when one’s avatar has a realistic gaze. Most headsets lack this feature, but
EyeTrackVR
has a completely open source solution ready for anyone willing to put it together.
Camera is visible in lower right corner.
EyeTrackVR is a combination of hardware, software, and 3D printable mounts for attaching a pair of microcontroller boards, cameras, and IR LEDs to just about any existing VR headset out there. An ESP32-based board and tiny camera module watches each eyeball, and under IR illumination the pupil presents as an easily-identified round black area. Software takes care of turning the camera’s view of the pupil into a gaze direction value that can be plugged into other software.
The project is still under active development, but in its current state is perfectly suitable for creating a functional system that can integrate into a variety of existing headsets with printed mounting brackets. Interested?
Check out the intro
and if it sounds up your alley,
dive into the build guide
which spells out everything you need to know. Check out the video below for a demo of EyeTrackVR working in
VRChat
, along with an overview of software support.
We’ve seen
headsets built to custom specs
that integrate eye tracking, but even if one is
repackaging an existing headset
that’s a perfect opportunity to include this feature.
Big thanks to [Summer] for sending this in on
our tipline
! | 4 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670070",
"author": "Erin",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T17:20:06",
"content": "Enthusiasm for VRChat seems to translate directly to trying to do full motion capture with VR trackers. Eye tracking is one of the most useful ones I’ve heard about, since it enables social cues while talki... | 1,760,372,211.812605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/prepare-to-brake-quick-intro-to-metal-bending/ | Prepare To Brake: Quick Intro To Metal Bending | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bending",
"metal working"
] | If you want to bend metal to make shapes, you might use equipment like a brake. But if you don’t have one, no worries. You can still do a lot with common tools like a vise and torches.
[Bwrussell] shows you how
. He welds together a die to use as a bending jig and makes a set of table legs.
You might think that putting metal in a vise and bending it isn’t exactly brain surgery. It isn’t, but there is more to it than that. Starting with a bending plan and the creation of the jigs, clamping and bending is only part of it. You can see a little bit of the action in the video below.
Speaking of planning, the design was in Fusion 360’s sheet metal workflow. To facilitate the bends, the build uses two torches. A MAPP torch gets very hot, and a propane torch makes sure that a larger area stays hot. There are quite a few tips you can pick up in this post, even if you aren’t making table legs.
Fusion 360 does a lot of the design work, but if you want a quick lesson on
what happens when you bend metal
, we can help. Want to make
your own metal brake
? | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6670053",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T15:53:14",
"content": "Well, that video was quick and to the point!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6670054",
"author": "Rollfree",
"tim... | 1,760,372,211.38265 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/break-free-from-proprietary-digital-radio/ | Break Free From Proprietary Digital Radio | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"audio",
"codec",
"codec2",
"digital voice",
"ham radio",
"m17",
"radio",
"reflector",
"standard"
] | Digital modes are all the rage these days in amateur radio — hams are using protocols like WSPR to check propagation patterns, FT8 to get quick contacts on many bands with relatively low power, and MSK144 to quickly bounce a signal off of a meteor. There’s also digital voice, which has a number of perks over analog including improved audio quality. However, the major downside of most digital voice modes, at least those in use on UHF and VHF, is that they are proprietary with various radio brands having competing digital standards. To get above the noise a
more open standard can be used instead
.
The M17 standard, originally created by [Wojciech Kaczmarski] aka [SP5WWP], uses Codec 2 to convert voice into a digital format before it is broadcast over the air. Codec 2 is an open standard unlike other audio codecs. M17 also supports reflectors, which can link individual radios or entire repeaters together over the Internet. While you can make purpose-built modules that will interface with most standard radio inputs, it’s also possible to modify existing hardware to support this standard as well.
The video below from [Tech Minds]
shows this being done to a radio with only a few hardware modifications and the installation of a new firmware.
For anyone who has been frustrated that there’s no real universal standard for digital voice in VHF and above, M17 could be a game-changer if enough people get tired of their friends being on other proprietary digital systems.
There’s plenty of supported hardware out there
that most hams probably already have already, including a number of TNC devices like the Mobilinkd and the DigiRig, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get started. If you’re more into networking over radio, though, take a look at
this method for sending high-bandwidth IP networking over the UHF band
. | 52 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669997",
"author": "Laurens Visser",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T12:05:57",
"content": "While i appreciate the technology, to my ears the digital voice is less intelligable than standard FM or SSB with a bit of noise.Is there any benefit to using digital voice if you’re working with a... | 1,760,372,211.768093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/05/repairing-a-home-injection-molding-machine/ | Repairing A Home Injection Molding Machine | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"injection molding",
"PLA",
"repair"
] | When [Michael] over at the
Teaching Tec
h YouTube channel bought a hobby injection molding machine a long time ago, one of the plans he had with it was to use it for grinding up waste bits of PLA filament for injection molding. Since the machine was bought from a US shop and [Michael] is based in Australia it required some modifications to adapt it to the local 220+ VAC mains, followed by adding a PID temperature controller and a small compressor to provide the compressed air rather than from a large shop compressor.
Although [Michael] had discussed using the machine for PLA with the seller to confirm that this would work, a user error meant that the now defective unit had been sitting idly for many years,
until recently
.
Since the machine had been gathering dust and rust in the garage, fixing the machine up took a complete teardown to remove corrosion and resolve other issues. After this the original fault was identified, which turned out to be a shorted wire near the heater which had been turned up to a too high temperature, leading to the release of magic smoke and banishment of the machine to the Pit of Despair, AKA the shadowy depths of one’s garage.
In this first installment, [Michael] cleaned up the machine and restored it to a working state. In the next part injection molding will be attempted again, which should give some idea of the feasibility of turning scraps of PLA and failed 3D prints into smooth injection molded parts, assuming you have the CNC machine or patience to carve out the requisite molds, of course. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669974",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T09:37:02",
"content": "Aus was always 240V – indeed I often measure my power at 250V or so…. a while ago they theoretically changed it to ” 230 V (+10% to -6%), therefore providing an allowable voltage supply range between 253 ... | 1,760,372,211.608308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/3d-print-your-best-friend-a-wheelchair/ | 3D Print Your Best Friend A Wheelchair | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"dog wheelchair",
"ford"
] | We all know that 3D printing has been a boon for people with different life challenges. But the Ford Motor Company in Mexico wants to help dogs that need mobility assistance. They’ve designed and released
P-Raptor
(we presume the P is for perro), a wheelchair for pooches with rear leg issues. The web page is in Spanish, and translating it didn’t seem to work for some reason, but if you have any Spanish, you can probably work it out or cut and paste just the text into your favorite translator.
The design is modular to adapt to different size dogs and different problems. It contains an electric motor in the tires. The tires themselves are oversized to help your friend cover rugged terrain. Dogs want to look cool, too, so a grill with lighting is included.
The release says it will be available for free download “soon.” You’ll enter your pup’s dimensions and other information and download custom-sized parts for you to print.
All3DP
mentions that they contacted Ford and were told that the final version won’t be ready until 2024. Plenty of time to tune up your 3D printer for the challenge.
Just because a puppy is born with no hind legs
doesn’t mean he can’t be super cute
. If you don’t mind
a slightly more industrial look
, we’ve seen other doggie wheelchairs before, too. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669943",
"author": "Floydian Slip",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T06:49:10",
"content": "Ay chihuahua!Simone Giertz, the self-appointed “queen of shitty robots” created a prosthetic exo-skeleton leg for Scraps, her three-legged pooch. Not a wheelchair, but still pretty cool.WARNING: You... | 1,760,372,211.335492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/voyager-2-communication-reestablished-with-one-big-shout/ | Voyager 2: Communication Reestablished With One Big Shout | Dan Maloney | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"Canberra",
"DSN",
"high-gain antenna",
"space",
"spacecraft",
"Voyager 2"
] | You could practically hear the collective “PHEW!” as NASA announced that
they had reestablished full two-way communications with
Voyager 2
on Friday afternoon! Details are few at this point — hopefully we’ll get more information on how this was pulled off, since we suspect there was some interesting wizardry involved. If you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick recap of the situation.
As we previously reported
, a wayward command that was sent to
Voyager 2
, currently almost 19 light-hours distant from Earth, reoriented the spacecraft by a mere two degrees. It doesn’t sound like much, but the very narrow beamwidth on
Voyager
‘s high-gain antenna and the vast distance put it out of touch with the Canberra Deep Space Network station, currently the only ground station with line-of-sight to the spacecraft. While this was certainly a problem, NASA controllers seemed to take it in stride thanks to a contingency program which would automatically force the spacecraft to realign itself to point at Earth using
its Canopus star tracker
. The only catch was, that system wasn’t set to engage until October.
With this latest development, it appears that mission controllers weren’t willing to wait that long. Instead, based on what was universally referred to in the non-tech media as a “heartbeat” from
Voyager
on August 1– it appears that what they were really talking about was the use of multiple antennas at the Canberra site to pick up a weak carrier signal from the probe — they decided to send an “interstellar shout” and attempt to reorient the antenna. The 70-m DSS-43 dish blasted out the message early in the morning of August 2, and 37 hours later, science and engineering data started streaming into the antenna again, indicating that Voyager 2 was pointing back at Earth and operating fine.
Hats off to everyone involved in making this fix and getting humanity’s most remote outpost back online. If you want to follow the heroics in nearly real-time, or just like watching what goes on at the intersection of Big Engineering and Big Science, make sure you check out
the Canberra DSN Twitter feed
. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669911",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2023-08-05T02:27:11",
"content": "You have to tip your hat to the people who build the hardware and software so long ago, they really knew what they were at, still going after after nearly 46 years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,211.68038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/old-film-camera-modified-for-different-chemistry/ | Old Film Camera Modified For Different Chemistry | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Art"
] | [
"camera",
"Chemistry",
"cyanotype",
"kodak brownie",
"photo",
"photography",
"picture",
"ultraviolet",
"uv"
] | While most photographers have moved on to digital cameras with their numerous benefits, there are a few artists out there still taking pictures with film. While film is among the more well-known analog photographic methods available, there are chemically simpler ways of taking pictures available for those willing to experiment a little bit. Cyanotype photography is one of these methods, and as [JGJMatt] shows, it only takes a few commonly available chemicals, some paper, and
a slightly modified box camera
to get started.
Cyanotype photography works by adding UV-reactive chemicals to paper and exposing the paper similarly to how film would be exposed. The photographs come out blue wherever the paper wasn’t exposed and white where it was. Before mixing up chemicals and taking photos, though, [JGJMatt] needed to restore an old Kodak Brownie camera, designed to use a now expensive type of film. Once the camera is cleaned up, only a few modifications are needed to adapt it to the cyanotype method, one of which involves placing a magnet on the shutter to keep it open for the longer exposure times needed for this type of photography. There is some development to do on these pictures, but it’s relatively simple to do in comparison to more traditional chemical film development.
For anyone looking for a different way of taking photographs, or even those looking for a method of taking analog pictures without the hassle of developing film or creating a darkroom, cyanotype offers a much easier entry point and plenty of artists creating images with this method
don’t use a camera at all
. There are plenty of other photographic chemistries to explore as well;
one of our favorites uses platinum to create striking black-and-white photos
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669299",
"author": "mmmlinux",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T19:03:21",
"content": "Complains 620(120) film is hard to buy and develop. proceeds to buy shopping list of chemicals. I get doing things like this for fun. but no need to make up reasons why this way is “better”.",
"paren... | 1,760,372,211.85976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/the-state-of-high-speed-rail-and-a-look-to-tomorrow/ | The State Of High Speed Rail, And A Look To Tomorrow | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"china",
"europe",
"high speed rail",
"japan",
"tgv",
"train",
"trains"
] | In the 21st century, the global transportation landscape is in shift. Politicians, engineers, and planners all want to move more people, more quickly, more cleanly. Amid the frenzy of innovative harebrained ideas, high-speed rail travel has surged to the forefront. It’s a quiet achiever, and a reliable solution for efficient, sustainable, and swift intercity and intercountry transit.
From the thriving economies of Europe and Asia to the burgeoning markets of the Middle East and America, high-speed rail networks are being planned, expanded, and upgraded whichever way you look. A combination of traditional and magnetic levitation (maglev) trains are being utilized, reaching speeds that were once the stuff of science fiction. As we set our sights towards the future, it’s worth taking a snapshot of the current state of high-speed rail, a field where technology, engineering brilliance, and visions of a greener tomorrow converge.
Rail Away
Morocco operates a handsome high-speed rail system running Alstom trainsets at up to 305 km/h. Credit:
NicholasNCE, CC BY-SA 4.0
When talking about high-speed rail, different authorities and jurisdictions use different terminology. Generally, though, few people will disagree with you classifying a system as “high-speed rail” if it involves speeds over 250 km/h (155 mph). Trains that are fast, but not that fast, are given the diminutive title of “higher-speed rail” to indicate services that operate faster than traditional railways, but not excessively so.
Japan was the first country to develop a working high-speed rail network by the modern definition, with its world-famous Shinkansen lines. The country was a leader in rail technology for a long time, with its first-generation 0 Series trains capable of achieving 210 km/h in revenue service as early as 1964. That was shortly bumped up to 220 km/h, and incremental improvement has continued ever since. Today, the fastest Shinkansen lines operate at up to 320 km/h. In tests run in 1996, a conventional Shinkansen train reached a top speed of 443 km/h, but regular services don’t approach this higher figure.
China’s railways operate trains at up to 350 km/h in regular operation. New trainsets are in development to achieve 400 km/h in coming years. Credit: Junyi Lou, CC BY-SA 4.0
It’s a common refrain in other services around the world. France’s famous TGV runs at a top speed of 320 km/h in service, as does the ONCF Al Boraq line in Morocco. Spain and Korea run their respective networks at a maximum of 310 and 305 km/h respectively. German trains on the Intercity Express system are authorized to run at up to 330 km/h, but only to overcome delays on the Frankfurt to Cologne line. Otherwise, the national maximum is similarly 320 km/h.
Several record attempts were made by SNCF using various TGV trainsets over the years. These attempts involved overvolting the network, heavily modifying the trains, and thousands of engineering hours. Tracks were often swept at speeds up to 350 km/h by a regular TGV train to ensure a clear run for record attempts. Credit: Alain Stoll, CC BY-SA 2.0
China likes to run things a little faster, however. The country has fallen in love with high-speed rail in recent decades. By mileage, it now hosts over two-thirds of all the high-speed rail in the world. The country’s CR Fuxing trainsets regularly run at up to 350 km/h, and were the first models produced domestically without proprietary licensed technology from overseas manufacturers. They’ve clocked speeds up to 420 km/h in testing. The country’s CRH Hexie trains run at the same speed, but have been even faster in testing, with an unmodified example recording a maximum of 487 km/h.
In fact, most rail operators have attempted maxing out their high-speed trains at some time or other. France’s SNCF is well-known for running highly-modified TGV trains to chase glory, claiming the outright steel rail speed record in 2007. A heavily-modified TGV POS consist achieved a mighty figure of 574.8 km/h, fitted with larger wheels and running on an overhead line overvolted from 25 kV to 31 kV. The trainset was named V150, for the target speed of 150 meters per second (540 km/h).
Limits of Steel
The fact is that most high-speed railways have trains capable of very high speeds indeed, but regular services run at a more sedate pace for a number of reasons. While it’s possible for many high-speed trainsets to push beyond 400 km/h, these speeds are never achieved in regular service.
The French history of chasing records highlights some of the challenges in running trains on steel rails at higher speeds. For example, the catenary wires that supply electricity can cause problems. The wires are excited with a wave-like disturbance by the contact of the train’s pantograph. This wave travels at the speed determined by the wire’s mass per unit length and its tension. If the train travels fast enough to catch this wave, it can lead to large vertical oscillations of the caternary wire, causing damage or a loss of power delivery to the train. A 1990 record attempt massively increased the tension on caternary wires to avoid this problem, increasing the critical speed of the caternary. Even still, gauges recorded the caternary wires oscillating by almost 30 cm as the train reached speeds of 515 km/h.
A more common problem for high speed trains is tunnel boom, caused by the piston effect. As a train enters a tunnel, the air in front has nowhere else to go, barring the small gap between the train and the tunnel itself. The train ends up acting like a piston in a cylinder, forcing air along in front. For high-speed trains, this can create a shock wave that creates a large boom when it reaches the exit of the tunnel. The strength of the shock wave increases with the cube of the train’s velocity, so higher speeds create massively higher shocks. Techniques to reduce this involve aerodynamically profiling trains and venting tunnels, akin to putting a silencer on a firearm. Regardless, this issue plagues efforts in Japan, Spain, France, and elsewhere, to push their high speed lines to faster operating speeds.
Futhermore, the steel tracks themselves must be perfectly aligned in order to support high-speed running. For example, the TGV network aligns rails to a tolerance of just 1 mm. Achieving and maintaining that over an entire network is costly. Higher speeds require finer tolerances and more regular maintenance, as a faster moving train necessarily causes greater wear as it puts more energy into the track.
By and large, rail operators have done the sums on the benefits of faster running versus the costs involved. Most have landed on regular operational speeds in the realm of 300 to 350 km/h. That’s fast enough to make their services compelling, but reasonable enough to keep the lines operating in a sustainable fashion.
Let’s Go Faster
China currently operates a relatively dull looking maglev train to Pudong International Airport in Shanghai. It’s capable of reaching 430 km/h, but you wouldn’t know from looking at it. Credit: Alex Needham, public domain
As the new world leader in high-speed rail, China has a bevy of projects on the boil to push its rail networks to ever-higher speeds. The China State Railway Group has released provisional specifications for its new CR450 trainset,
intended to reach operational speeds of up to 400 km/h.
This level of operation poses new operation challenges, requiring new standards for signalling and track monitoring systems. Additionally, a great deal of effort is going into reducing noise in the cabin; typically, a train travelling at 400 km/h is a full 3 dB louder than at 350 km/h. Testing has already seen two CR400BF-J testbed trainsets run in opposing directions at 435 km/h to determine any risks involved at high passing speeds.
The world-record closing speed of 870 km/h was achieved without incident.
China is also investing big in maglev technology, which promises higher speeds with magnetically-floated trains while eliminating the frustrations of caternary wires, rails, and wheels. The Shanghai Maglev has been in commercial operation since 2004, and regularly attains a maximum speed of 430 km/h. It only runs on a short 29.9 km track, with a ride that lasts just 8 minutes. Regardless, it blitzes all rail competition in terms of regular operational top speed. The line was once slated for expansion, but regular rail services have stymied efforts to push it beyond its current run that serves Pudong International Airport.
China has more serious maglev ambitions, though,
recently rolling out a test train reportedly capable of a 600 km/h top speed.
The train is based on the Transrapid maglev technology from Germany. Initially expected to enter service by 2025, current plans for an operational maglev network remain unclear. Some commentators expect the new train will be used first
on corridors between Guangzhou and Shenzhen and Shanghai and Hangzhou
, where passenger flows are expected to be high enough to support the expense of constructing the advanced maglev “track.”
The L0 Series maglev holds the outright train speed record at 603 km/h. Concrete plans exist for it to enter commercial service before the decade is out. Credit:
Saruno Hirobano, CC-BY-SA-4.0
While it lacks an operational public maglev line, Japan is perhaps still leading in this area. The country has developed the L0 Series maglev train, which currently holds the world speed record for rail vehicles at 603 km/h. Firm plans exist for a maglev network, with construction beginning in 2014. The initial section linking Tokyo to Nagoya was initially expected to open in 2027, though the start date for commercial service is yet to be confirmed. The Nagoya-Osaka section is expected to follow in 2037. Trains are expected to run at an operational speed of 500 km/h, shortening the travel time between Tokyo and Osaka to just 67 minutes. It’s a stark time saving compared to the 4 hour trip achieved by the first Shinkansen trains in 1964.
Australia has never built a high-speed rail line, though the Electric Tilt Train reached 210 km/h in a test run. Regular services are limited to 160 km/h. That places it firmly in the category of higher-speed rail, serving to highlight the national embarrassment that is the country’s rail network. Credit: John Robert McPherson, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Presently, Asia is streaking ahead with the latest technologies and the most railways, while Spain has cracked the code for cheap high-speed rail, both in terms of
ticket prices
and
construction
. Meanwhile,
Morocco
has brought high-speed rail to Africa, with countries like
Iran
and
Chile
eager to join the party. The US lags behind, with
California taking its time to establish a run
, but it’s on the way. Meanwhile, Australians chuckle as the idea is meaninglessly floated as a bullet point
every time a new election rolls around
.
Viewed globally, however, the future of high-speed rail is bright. It promises clean and efficient transit at speeds that are fast enough to make air travel less desirable. As the world looks to reduce emissions and move more people than ever, high speed rail promises to keep delivering. Japan, China, and Europe all offer a shining example of its value; those eager to have it need only find suitable corridors and the political will to sign the checks. Easier said than done!
Featured image: “
CR400BF
” by N509FZ. | 73 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669265",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T17:26:37",
"content": "“German trains on the Intercity Express system are authorized to run at up to 330 km/h, but only to overcome delays on the Frankfurt to Cologne line. Otherwise, the national maximum is similarly 320 km/h.”... | 1,760,372,212.063589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/better-3d-prints-courtesy-of-a-simple-mass-produced-bracket/ | Better 3D Prints, Courtesy Of A Simple Mass-Produced Bracket | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"bracket",
"design",
"mass production",
"slicing"
] | On the “hack/not-a-hack” scale,
a 3D printed bracket for aluminum extrusions
is — well, a little boring. Such connectors are nothing you couldn’t buy, and even if you insisted on printing them instead, Printables and Thingiverse are full of ready-to-use designs. So why would you waste your precious time and effort rolling your own?
According to production 3D printing company [Slant 3D], a lot of times, we forget to take advantage of the special capabilities of 3D printing. The design progression of the L-bracket shown is a perfect example; it starts as a simple L, moves on to a more elaborate gusseted design, and eventually into a sturdy sold block design that would be difficult to make with injection molding thanks to shrinkage but is no problem for a 3D printer. Taking that a step further, the bracket morphs into a socketed design, taking advantage of what 3D printers can do by coming up with a part that reduces assembly time and fastener count while making a more finished, professional look.
Again, this isn’t really about the bracket. Rather, it’s about a different way of thinking about your designs and leveraging the unique capabilities of 3D printers relative to other mass-production methods, like injection molding. We’ve covered some of [Slant 3D]’s high-volume design insights before, such as
including living hinges
and
alternatives of pins and holes
for assembling printed parts. | 34 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669237",
"author": "Alex",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T16:07:00",
"content": "Without trying to be awkward – I think you meant ‘Solid’ and not sold in the 3rd line of the second paragraph. Thanks for the article!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,211.938222 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/displayport-taming-the-altmode/ | DisplayPort: Taming The Altmode | Arya Voronova | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"altmode",
"displayport"
] | The DisplayPort altmode is semi-proprietary, but it can absolutely be picked apart if we try. Last time,
we found a cool appnote describing the DisplayPort altmode in detail, switched the FUSB302 into packet sniffing mode and got packet captures, learned about PD VDMs (vendor-defined messages), and successfully replayed the captured messages to switch a USB-C port into the DisplayPort altmode
. Today, we will go through the seven messages that summon the DisplayPort altmode, implement them, and tie them all into a library – then, figure out the hardware we need to have DisplayPort work in the wild.
For a start, as you might have seen from the diagram, a single command can be either a request or a response. For instance, if you get a
Discover Identity
REQ
(request), you reply to it with a
Discover Identity
ACK
(response), adding your identity data to your response along the way. With some commands, the DP source will add some data for you to use; for most commands, your DP sink will have to provide information instead – and we’ll do just that, armed with the PDF provided and the packet captures.
We have seven commands we need to handle in order to get DisplayPort out of a compatible USB-C port – if you need a refresher on these commands, page 13 of the ST’s PDF on the DP altmode will show you the message sequence. These commands are:
Discover Identity
,
Discover SVIDs
,
Discover Modes
,
Enter Mode
,
DP Status Update
,
DP Configure
, and
Attention
. Out of these, the first four are already partially described in the base USB PD standard, the two DP commands afterwards are DisplayPort-altmode-specific but sufficiently described in the PDF we have, and the
Attention
command is from the base standard as well, mostly helpful for reporting state of the HPD pin. Let’s start with the first two!
The Discovery Process
The first two commands are not DisplayPort-specific at all. In particular, the
Discover Identity
message is omnipresent. Just like with the
Source_Capabilities
message that we didn’t even have to request from the PSU, if you plug into a USB-C port of a laptop capable of DP or even Thunderbolt, you will receive a
Discover Identity
command message. If your device is capable of handling any altmode, replying to this message is how you announce this capability.
Your
Discover Identity
response will have to contain a bunch of data about your device – most of this data, you can outright fake. This data says that you’re an alternate mode adapter, there’s two bits denoting whether you’re capable of USB host or USB device operation, a “certification” field that can be left completely empty, as well as USB VID and PID. To my knowledge, the VID and PID aren’t used for anything feature-wise, unlike regular USB connection PID and VID, which we know to be used for driver selection in operating systems. The adapter that I have has vendor ID
0xBDA
, product ID
0x2172
and bcdDevice number
0x201.
These values are sent once, and don’t show up in any further USB-C communications whatsoever.
The second command is
Discover SVIDs
– SVIDs are, essentially, two-byte codes for the the altmodes that your device supports. If your answer is
0xFF01
(so, reply with
0xFF010000
as extra data), you get a cookie, in the form of being recognized as a DisplayPort altmode-capable device. One of the devices I own, answers with
0xFF01
, but also adds
0x25A4
to it – my suspicion is that this is a firmware update interface, so if you ever wanted to probe USB-C devices for pentesting purposes, this would absolutely be a vector to look into.
DisplayPort Found – What’s Next?
By giving the
0xFF01
answer to the
Discover SVIDs
request, we claim that our device supports DisplayPort altmode – even if, truth be told, we’re halfway through properly implementing it, faking it until we make it. No worry, though, as we’re on the right track – now we’re talking DisplayPort specifics. Our third command is
Discover Modes
, where we let the DP source know how exactly our DisplayPort needs map onto the USB-C connector.
Remember how you can get full 4 lanes of DP from a USB-C connector, or do a 2-lane compromise but get USB3? Well, our
Discover Modes
response determines exactly that. First, our response defines whether we are a DP source or DP sink – apparently, the protocol allows for building bidirectional DP devices, which is certainly idea-provoking! It also explicitly defines USB 2.0 signaling use, whether the USB3 port we might request would support USB3 Gen 2, and whether our device uses a USB-C plug or a USB-C socket. Most importantly, though, it talks about the pin mapping.
The DisplayPort altmode can have six pin mappings, five in case of a USB-C socket. Two of them are dual-lane DP with USB3 and three of them are four-lane DP. All of them have different lane arrangements, apparently, but at least one of those should work for us as long as we wire up our mux chip according to the datasheet. It’s not clear to me what the noteworthy differences are or why the assignments are done the way they’re done – perhaps, the unavailable full spec would have some insights. For now, this PDF gives us the mappings we can use, and the bits we should set according to the mapping we have chosen.
After answering the
Discover Modes
message with info about our preferred pinout, we will shortly get an
Enter Mode
message – which we simply acknowledge with an
Enter Mode
response, no extra data required. Now, in hacker voice,
we’re in.
The Last Trio
The three last commands are even closer to the actual DisplayPort nitty-gritty. The first one is
DP Status Update
, following right after the
Enter Mode
command. We can get this command whenever the DP sink wants to get an update, and we’ll have to answer it with our current link state. The bits in this command, as described on page 11 of our by-now-favourite PDF, communicate the current state of the DP altmode link.
DP Status Update
contents is a report on the overall connection status, both from the downstream point of view (DP source) and from the upstream point of view (DP sink, aka our device). Here we can exit the altmode if desired, switch to USB mode, or perhaps, to low-power mode, and we must also report the HPD pin state here. All of that fits within nine bits of data – not much to write home about, but write home, you must.
The very first occurrence of
DP Status Update
is uneventful, we just wing it, telling that HPD is low and all that. It will be followed by the
DP Configure
message – now, this point is where we get access to the raw DisplayPort signal on the SBU and high-speed pins of the USB-C port. The
DP Configure
message tells us which DP altmode pin mapping we should switch our hardware to, which is useful in case we claimed to support multiple mappings in our
Discover Modes
response – if we only claim to support one, there will be no surprises, unless the DP source doesn’t support the mapping we wanted.
Last but not least, there’s the
Attention
message – literally, bringing attention to some event on our side. The data for it is the same as the
DP Status Update
message – think of
Attention
as a
DP Status Update
message that we can send voluntarily whenever something changes on our side. So, if you have a USB-C to DisplayPort socket adapter, the
Attention
message will be the very last message of the DP altmode summoning process, letting the DP source know that the source has been connected. This, in particular is determined by the HPD pin, something that’s used as a hotplug detection pin in DisplayPort, but is also used for interrupts as a sideband to the AUX communication channel – as a pseudodifferential diffpair not unlike USB 1.1 and 2.0, the device on the other end expects to be polled, and our
Attention
messages will transfer the HPD cries of the device that has something to say and but hasn’t yet been asked to speak.
Now, we’re done – that’s all seven messages described, and implemented in code as we did so. The whole altmode negotiation flow has to be complete within a second’s time, or else the process will halt at some step. Which is to say, if you’d like to perform some calculations or print data out, you better be quick! Here’s example MicroPython code for you – somehow, I managed to have the parsing and command building be quick enough.
Mind you, this is the software side. Apart from what we just did, let’s go through a typical homegrown DP altmode design and what it needs.
Hardware Basics
First off, you’ll want to put the FUSB302 down on your schematic, and add a MCU to work with that. I usually pick a RP2040, but even an ESP12 module should do – you need I2C, a few GPIOs for mux control, and a bit of RAM for PD packet manipulation stuff. Then, of course, use a USB-C socket with high-speed lanes available – regular USB 2.0-only ports with 16 pins don’t expose the TX/RX pins we need. When it comes to DisplayPort diffpairs, pick a six-layer board – you’ll want two outer layers for DisplayPort diffpairs, two layers under each for reference ground planes, and two innermost layers for routing out the VBUS, USB2, CC and SBU pins – thankfully, both Aisler and JLCPCB have decent and cheap six-layer offerings now!
We can’t quite buy USB-C captive cables cheaply, sadly – however, putting a USB-C socket on our board is the next best thing! You do need a bit of extra hardware though. Again, the benefit of a captive cable is not needing a mux – which means that we will need a mux for handling our socket. When I was looking for USB-C muxes, I stumbled upon the VL170 chip, and
pieced together its specifications
from screenshots online. Later, I found out that the VL170 is a clone of TI’s
HD3SS460
(
datasheet
), and that’s what I recommend you use – whether you want to do 4-lane DisplayPort, or a USB3 and DisplayPort combination, just USB3, or even combine DisplayPort from two sources, the HD3SS460 mux will work for you, and it has a proper datasheet with example circuits.
Don’t ground the shield – it’s grounded at host end as a rule, so it’s going to become counterproductive given high speeds of DisplayPort. Instead, add a 0805 footprint or two going from the shield to ground; later on, you can put a ferrite there, or a resistor and capacitor combination. When it comes to high-speed signals, the shield will be performing the function of shielding your signals from external interference; however, if you ground it on both ends, it will also end up carrying some of the VBUS current, which will reduce its shielding properties significantly. Oh, and about VBUS – it’s up to you on what you will be doing with that, after all, the “PD controller” part will be fully in your reach to begin with; whether you summon 5 V, provide 5 V, perhaps request 20 V if you’ve found a high-power and DP-capable port somehow, all of that is completely up to you.
Route Your Tracks And You’re Done
Remember the DisplayPort trace routing rules? Well, the VL170 doesn’t quite make it easy on you. Due to the the USB-C connector-side pair polarity on its pinout, only two of its diffpairs connect in a straightforward fashion – other two pairs need to be flipped before they connect. Remember, you still need to match lengths between the tracks, so you will need to adjust the part between the mux and the USB-C connector, and also the part between your your device and your mux. That said, in a reference-ish design of mine, I’ve managed to keep the connector-mux section to about one centimeter of length, so it shouldn’t be too much of a space hog for you. As for the after-mux side, you would route the DisplayPort link the same way you would normally, not much of a difference here.
Are there further bringup aspects you might need? Absolutely! For instance, you might need to tune the common-mode voltages before and after the mux using a few carefully matched resistors. Still, if you ever wanted to give your device a DisplayPort link out of a USB-C connector, now you’re well-equipped to do so, no NDAs or proprietary document acquisition needed. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669319",
"author": "Josh A",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T20:15:44",
"content": "I think this was supposed to include a link: `Here’s example MicroPython code for you – somehow, I managed to have the parsing and command building be quick enough.`",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,372,212.114394 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/lets-listen-to-a-tape-paper-tape/ | Let’s Listen To A Tape — Paper Tape | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"Fanuc",
"paper tape"
] | These days, data is as likely as not to be “in the cloud.” Otherwise, it’s probably on a USB flash drive or SD card. But in the old days, paper tape was a widespread way to store and retrieve data. A common way to start the day at the office was to toggle in a few dozen bytes of bootloader code, thread a bigger bootloader tape into your TeleType paper tape reader, and then get your coffee while the more capable bootloader clunked its way into memory. Then you could finish your brew while loading the tape with your compiler or whatever you wanted. [Scott Baker] has a Heathkit H8 and decided
using a paper tape machine
with it and some of his other gear would be fun.
Instead of a TeleType, [Scott] picked up a used paper tape machine from FANUC intended for the CNC industry. They are widely available on the surplus market, although a working machine might run you $500. [Scott] paid $200, so he had some work to do to make the unit operational.
Paper tape had a few varieties. For computer work, you usually had a tape that could hold eight holes across, one for each bit in a byte. However, there are also 6-bit and 5-bit tapes for special purposes or different encodings (old TeleTypes used 5-bit characters in Baudot). The paper choice varied too. You could get plain paper, oiled paper, which maybe didn’t jam as often, and Mylar, which is less likely to shred up when it does jam.
To make things even more difficult, the machines all worked a little differently as well. Sure, punches almost all use solenoids. But the tape transport was sometimes a pinch roller and sometimes a sprocket-style drive. Reading the holes could be done with mechanical contacts or optically. Some punches left little “hanging chads” on the tape, so you didn’t have to empty a confetti box to throw away the chad.
The repair job was interesting. Inside the machine is an 8051 microcontroller. There was no clock, and the circuit used two custom modules. One was simply a crystal, and the other was an oscillator. Removing both allowed a modern can oscillator to replace both modules. The next problem was a fried serial output driver. Replacing that got things working except for random resets due to a faulty brown-out reset circuit. That was easy to fix, too.
Of course, if you are really cheap, it is easy to make a paper tape reader from 8 phototransistors, and pulling tape through by hand isn’t unheard of. It
can even talk USB
. We’ve even seen
a conference badge that can read tapes
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669184",
"author": "Joe S.",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T13:11:28",
"content": "I remember that rigamarole with paper tape, punch in the bootloader on the ASR 43 connected to the DEC PDP 1104, then we load a short program on a tape that lasted maybe 10 seconds, and once the computer w... | 1,760,372,212.167643 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/get-most-into-your-pi/ | Get MOST Into Your Pi | Bryan Cockfield | [
"car hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"can-bus",
"car",
"infotainment",
"most bus",
"multimedia",
"raspberry pi",
"sound",
"stereo",
"vehicle"
] | When looking the modify a passenger vehicle, the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is a pretty easy target. In modern vehicles it has access to most of the on-board systems — everything from the climate control to the instrument cluster and often even the throttle, braking, and steering systems. With as versatile as the CAN bus is, though, it’s not the right tool for every job. There’s also the Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST) bus which is increasingly found in automotive systems to handle multimedia such as streaming music to the stereo.
To access that system you’ll need to approach it slightly differently as [Rhys] demonstrates
.
[Rhys] has been working on replacing the dated head unit in his Jaguar, and began by investigating the CAN bus. He got almost everything working with replacement hardware except the stereo, which is where the MOST bus comes into play. It provides a much higher bandwidth than the CAN bus can accommodate but with almost no documentation it was difficult to interact with at first. With the help of a Raspberry Pi and a lot of testing he is able to get the stereo working again with a much more modern-looking touchscreen for control. It is also able to do things like change CDs in the car’s CD player, gather song information from the CD to display on the panel, and can perform other functions of the infotainment center.
For more detailed information on the MOST bus, [Rhys] also
maintains a website
where he puts his discoveries and other information he finds about this system. Unfortunately car stereo systems in modern vehicles can get pretty complicated these days, but adapting
car stereos in older vehicles
to modern technology carries some interesting challenges as well. | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669088",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T08:46:13",
"content": "Oh wow! This is cool.Aftermarket sellers want a fortune for even the simplest adapters for MOST Systems. Of course everything is NDA’ed and totally obscure.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,372,212.279729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/kalman-filters-without-the-math/ | Kalman Filters Without The Math | Al Williams | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"kalman filter",
"Kalman Filtering"
] | If you program using values that represent anything in the real world, you have probably at least heard of the Kalman filter. The filter allows you to take multiple value estimates and process them into a better estimate. For example, if you have a robot that has an idea of where it is via GPS, dead reckoning, and an optical system, Kalman filter can help you better estimate your true position even though all of those sources have some error or noise. As you might expect, a lot of math is involved, but [Pravesh] has
an excellent intuitive treatment based around code
that even has a collaborative Jupyter notebook for you to follow along.
We have always had an easier time following code than math, so we applaud these kinds of posts. Even if you want to dig into the math, having basic intuition about what the math means first makes it so much more approachable.
Of course, in the end, there is some math, but nothing complicated unless you count the Wikipedia screenshot showing the “real” math put there to show you what you are missing. The example is a boat with dead reckoning data influenced by random wind and tides and GPS measurements that also have some errors and are sometimes unavailable, just like in real life.
Of course, a simple average of measurements can help, but it can also throw off a good reading. The Kalman techniques use weights of the sources to mitigate this so that seemingly more reliable sources contribute more to the final answer than less reliable ones.
If you prefer a
robotic example
, we’ve had them, too. If you want something simple and, perhaps, less capable, there are other ways to
clean up noisy data
. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669014",
"author": "Kotval",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T05:28:35",
"content": "I feel like the book length docs to filterpy deserve a mention here if not a while article. They’re where I learned filtering theory and make a great complement even to a rigorous mathematical treatment. T... | 1,760,372,212.229492 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/rocket-stove-efficiently-heats-water/ | Rocket Stove Efficiently Heats Water | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"biomass",
"heat",
"heater",
"hot water",
"metal",
"metalworking",
"rocket stove",
"stove",
"welding",
"wood"
] | Rocket stoves are an interesting, if often overlooked, method for cooking or for generating heat. Designed to use biomass that might otherwise be wasted, such as wood, twigs, or other agricultural byproducts, they are remarkably efficient and perform relatively complete combustion due to their design, meaning that there are fewer air quality issues caused when using these stoves than other methods. When integrated with a little bit of plumbing, they can also be
used to provide a large amount of hot water
to something like an off-grid home as well.
[Little Aussie Rockets] starts off the build by fabricating the feed point for the fuel out of steel, and attaching it to a chimney section. This is the fundamental part of a rocket stove, which sucks air in past the fuel, burns it, and exhausts it up the chimney. A few sections of pipe are welded into the chimney section to heat the water as it passes through, and then an enclosure is made for the stove to provide insulation and improve its efficiency. The rocket stove was able to effortlessly heat 80 liters of water to 70°C in a little over an hour using a few scraps of wood.
The metalworking skills of [Little Aussie Rockets] are also on full display here, which makes the video well worth watching on its own. Rocket stoves themselves can be remarkably simple for how well they work, and can even be
built in miniature to take on camping trips
as a lightweight alternative to needing to carry gas canisters, since they can use small twigs for fuel very easily. We’ve also seen
much larger, more complex versions designed for cooking huge amounts of food
. | 19 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669872",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T23:15:01",
"content": "Talking about homebrew rocket stoves? Here ya’ go…21 DIY Rocket Stove Plans to Cook Efficiently with Woodhttps://morningchores.com/rocket-stove-plans/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,372,212.573832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/if-the-shoe-doesnt-fit-print-it/ | If The Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Print It! | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed footwear",
"footwear",
"shoe"
] | Usually when we talk about flip-flops here we mean the circuit. But in this case, it is [Jeandre Groenewald’s] 3D-printed shoe design called
Sloffies
. The shoes use TPU, and the matching package prints in PLA. Of course, you have to pick the size to fit your feet, and there’s an OpenSCAD file that allows you to customize the strap.
Unlike some 3D apparel we’ve seen, these look like a commerical product. Of course, the cool product packaging doesn’t hurt any. Are they comfortable? We don’t know, but our guess is it is no worse than other similar shoes that are made of one material.
You need to get the infill settings right, so there is a small test piece you can use for tuning. We aren’t sure what you are optimzing for, though, but at least you can see how the material will flex before you print an entire shoe.
We’ve seen
commercial shoe printing
, but not the entire shoe and packaging. If you are interested in creating your own designs, you don’t have to
start from scratch
. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669808",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T20:19:41",
"content": "I love this idea. One of the neat things about it is that if you could get an accurate model, you could print yourself custom orthotics. Another is that you could print a custom infill pattern tha... | 1,760,372,212.625954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/hackaday-prize-2023-one-handed-soldering-with-the-solder-sustainer/ | Hackaday Prize 2023: One-Handed Soldering With The Solder Sustainer | Dan Maloney | [
"contests",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Prize",
"extruder",
"feeder",
"one handed",
"solder",
"soldering"
] | For a lot of us, soldering has become so ingrained that it’s muscle memory. We know exactly when the iron is hot enough, how long to leave the tip in contact with the joint to heat it up, and exactly where to dab in the solder to get it to flow. When you’re well-practiced it can be a beautiful thing, but for those who don’t do it frequently, soldering can be frustrating indeed.
The “Solder Sustainer”
looks like it just might be aimed at solving that problem, as well as a few others. It comes to us from [RoboticWorx], and while it looks a little like the love child of a MIG welder and a tattoo machine, it’s got a lot going for it. The idea is to make soldering a one-handed task by combining the soldering iron and a solder wire feeder into one compact package. The solder feeder is very reminiscent of a filament extruder on a 3D printer, using a stepper to drive spring-loaded pinch wheels, which forces the solder down a curved 3D-printed tube that directs it toward the tip. The pancake stepper is driven by an ESP32, which also supports the touch sensor that lets you advance the solder. The whole thing can be powered off a USB-C power supply, or using the onboard USB charger that can be connected in line with the soldering iron supply.
The video below shows Solder Sustainer in use. Yes, we know — some of those joints look a little iffy. But that seems to have more to do with technique than with the automatic solder feed. And really, in situations where you’ve previously wished for a third hand while soldering, this would probably be just the thing.
The Solder Sustainer is an entry in
the “Gearing Up” round of the 2023 Hackaday Prize
. If you’ve got an idea for a tool, jig, fixture, or instrument that makes hacking easier, we want to know about it. But you’d better hurry — the round ends on August 8.
The
Hackaday
Prize 2023
is Sponsored by: | 48 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669778",
"author": "J",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T18:42:17",
"content": "This would probably make a great assistive device for someone with limited dexterity or only one hand.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6669791",
... | 1,760,372,212.421887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/hackaday-prize-2023-green-hacks-finalists/ | Hackaday Prize 2023: Green Hacks Finalists | Tom Nardi | [
"contests",
"Featured",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Prize",
"assistive technology"
] | Time and tide wait for no hacker, even if they happen to spend their spare time working on the sort of eco-friendly projects that qualified for the Green Hacks challenge of the
2023 Hackaday Prize
. This environmentally conscious round ended last month, and after plenty of carbon-neutral debate, our panel of judges have settled on their ten favorite projects.
As a reminder, the following projects will not only receive a $500 cash prize, but will move on to the Finals. They’ll then have until October to put the finishing touches on their creations in an effort to claim one of the final six awards, which includes the Grand Prize of $50,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe DesignLab. Although there can only be ten finalists for each round of the Hackaday Prize, we’d like to thank everyone who put the time and effort into submitting their Green Hacks. We’ve only got one Earth, and we’re all going to have to work together if we want to make sure it stays beautiful for future generations.
Our Most Precious Resource
Life as we know it requires water, lots and lots of water. Which makes sense, as our particular ball of rock happens to be largely made up of the stuff. But though it might seem like water is an inexhaustible resource, that’s no excuse not to make sure it isn’t being wasted.
That’s where
projects like YDrip
, the open source water meter, come in. The YDrip doesn’t replace your existing water meter — that would not only be difficult for the average home owner, but run afoul of your local municipality. Instead it straps to the side of it, and uses a ALT021-10E ultra sensitive tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) sensor to detect the rotation of the wheel inside. The resulting data can be utilized wherever and however the homeowner wishes, unlike commercial offerings which usually tie you into into some specific service. Additionally, the YDrip can perform onboard analysis of the data and provide alerts if a water leak is detected.
Naturally, a device like the YDrip isn’t an option for everyone. Those living in apartments specifically wouldn’t have access to the water meter, and even if they did, in may end up multiple households are being metered together and simply splitting the bill for the total usage. That’s where
Naveen’s Running Faucet Alert System
comes in. This non-contact solution uses a microphone and machine learning to detect the sound of water running in a sink and provide an alert if its been running for an unusual amount of time. Since there could be concerns about having a mains-powered gadget around the sink, the energy consumption has been kept low enough that the whole system can run on batteries thanks to the use of a TensorFlow Lite model running on the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense. Obviously such a device won’t be as accurate as actually counting the revolutions of the water meter, but it can at least let you know if a faucet has become faulty or inadvertently left running.
Of course, there’s more to taking care of Earth’s water supply than making sure it’s not being wasted in the home. To be proper stewards of our planet, we need to make sure the oceans are being protected. Unfortunately that can be a daunting , not to mention expensive, task.
Looking to provide an affordable and scalable solution to this problem, Brett Smith is exploring the idea of
turning old echo sounder buoys
into ocean monitoring stations. The key to the idea are Drifting Fish Aggregation Devices (DFADs), which the fishing industry uses to lure in various forms of sea life. To keep track of them, they generally have small solar-powered echo sounder buoys attached that can report their location via satellite. The DFADs are considered disposable, and as such, the buoys are available at little or no cost at the end of their useful life.
Brett argues that the cheap and robust buoys, combined with new open source internal components, would make for an ideal platform for marine research. This project demonstrates using the parts from these seagoing buoys to produce various aquatic monitoring devices, from an underwater camera that can keep a digital eye on reef health to roaming water quality monitors.
Green Home Helpers
The phrase “think globally, act locally” is often used in an ecological context, to remind us that even small changes at home can help solve problems at planetary scale. Several of our Green Hacks finalists are designed with this concept in mind, making various eco-friendly tasks easier and more accessible.
For example, the
AI Audio Classifier Recycle Bin from Samuel Alexander
can automatically sort recyclable materials based on the sound they make when they’re thrown in. A large drum with multiple compartments is mounted under the intake hopper, and rotates so the item will fall into the appropriate chamber. Even if every home doesn’t end up being equipped with a smart recycling bin, the project is a great way to raise recycling awareness.
Growing fruits and vegetables at home is a great idea for many reasons, but isn’t always practical depending on your living situation. The UltraTower 2023 hopes to help solve this problem by simplifying vertical ultraponics. This highly efficient technique, sometimes referred to as “fogponics”, uses ultrasonic transducers to turn a nutrient solution into a mist that surrounds the plant’s roots.
With no soil and very little water required, ultraponics promises to be ideal in urban situations where the “farm” can only take up a couple square feet on a balcony.
Green Hacks Finalists
Upcycled Echo Sounder Buoys
mysoltrk – A Solar Tracker, Reinvented
YDrip – Open Source Water Meter
AlgaLite Living Lamp
AI Audio Classifier Recycle Bin
Solar Powered Park Bench
ARM Devboard From Temperature Logger
UltraTower 2023
Bipolar Membrane Energy Harvester
Running Faucet Alert System
Gearing Up Winds Down
Green Hacks might be over, but there’s still more challenges to come before the winners of the 2023 Hackaday Prize are decided. On
August 8th the Gearing Up challenge
will come to a close, which means a whole new set of finalists that will get to move forward. After that, we’ve got the final Wildcard challenge, where anything goes so long as it will have a positive impact on the world.
The Hackaday Prize wouldn’t be possible without the support of our sponsors, so we’d like to thank Supplyframe, DigiKey, and Protolabs for helping us bring these incredible ideas to life.
The
Hackaday
Prize 2023
is Sponsored by: | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,212.769687 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/a-cycle-accurate-sega-genesis-with-fpga/ | A Cycle-Accurate Sega Genesis With FPGA | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"decapped",
"fpga",
"genesis",
"mega drive",
"recreation",
"retrocomputing",
"sega",
"verilog"
] | The Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a powerful tool that is becoming more common across all kinds of different projects. They are effectively programmable hardware devices, capable of creating specific digital circuits and custom logic for a wide range of applications and can be much more versatile and powerful than a generic microcontroller. While they’re often used for rapid prototyping, they can also recreate specific integrated circuits, and are especially useful for retrocomputing. [nukeykt] has been developing
a Sega Genesis clone using them
, with some impressive results.
The Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive) was based around the fairly common Motorola 68000 processor, but this wasn’t the only processor in the console. There were a number of coprocessors including a Z80 and several chips from Yamaha to process audio. This project reproduces a number of these chips which are cycle-accurate using Verilog. The chips were recreated using images of de-capped original hardware, and although it doesn’t cover every chip from every version of the Genesis yet, it does have a version of the 68000, a Z80, and the combined Yamaha processor working and capable of playing plenty of games.
The project is still ongoing and eventually hopes to recreate the rest of the chipset using FPGAs. There’s also ongoing testing of the currently working chips, as some of them do still have a few bugs to work out. If you prefer to take a more purist approach to recreating 90s consoles, though, we recently featured a project which
reproduced a Genesis development kit using original hardware
.
Thanks to [Anonymous] for the tip! | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669771",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T18:34:21",
"content": "Huh… this isn’t even emulation, this is an implementation.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6669812",
"author": "erexx",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,212.875148 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/hackaday-podcast-230-space-science-superconductors-supercaps-and-central-air/ | Hackaday Podcast 230: Space Science, Superconductors, Supercaps, And Central Air | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start things off by tackling a pair of science stories, one that may or may not change the world, and the other that hopes to help us understand the very fabric of the universe. Afterwards they get to the important stuff: the evolution of Game Boy Camera hacking, the finer points of 3D print orientation, and mixing up electrically conductive concrete at home. From there the conversation shifts to a couple of 486 Turbo buttons, a quick yoke recipe, and a very handsome open source vacuum pickup tool. Stick around until the end to hear about the folly of humanoid robots, and the latest operating system to get the Jenny List treatment.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Or
download it yourself in fantastic MP3 format
!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 230 Show Notes:
News:
“Room Temperature Superconductor” LK-99, Just Maybe It Could Be Real
ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope And The Quest For Dark Energy
How Fast Is The Universe Expanding? The Riddle Of Two Values For The Hubble Constant
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [Come about! Avoid those rocks!] for the right answer. We’ll be getting you a t-shirt.
Low Head Foghorn
video
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
A Game Boy Camera, Without The Game Boy
Raphael-Boichot/A set of codes to address the Mitsubishi M64282FP artificial retina with Arduino
Inside Digital Image Chips
MIT Cracks The Concrete Capacitor
Lint And Dog Hair Supercapacitor
Splitting 3D Prints Into Parts Can Add Strength
Turning A Window Air Conditioning Unit Into Whole-House AC
Just How Is Voyager 2 Going To Sort Out Its Dish Then?
Voyager Command Glitch Causes Unplanned Pause In Communications
OLED Display Lets Vintage PC Engage Turbo Mode In Style
486 Gets Animated Turbo Button Thanks To Arduino
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Automate Your Pin Header Chopping Chores Away
Cook Up A Yoke In Five Minutes
What Does It Take For A LEGO Car To Roll Downhill Forever?
Tom’s Picks:
Solar Powered Game Of Life Follows The Sun’s Rhythm
Pixel Pump, The Open Source Vacuum Pickup Tool Is Now Shipping
Vacuum Chamber Gets Automation
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Ask Hackaday: What’s The Deal With Humanoid Robots?
Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeBSD 13.2 | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,212.663063 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/metal-forming-with-a-3d-printer/ | Metal Forming With A 3D Printer | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"dies",
"metal forming"
] | How do you use a 3D printer to bend metal? One way would be to take it to a machine shop and offer to trade the owner your printer for some time in their shop. A smarter way is to do like [Jaba 3D], and
print dies using the printer
. You can then use those dies in a press to make the shapes you want.
In the case of [Jaba], the Harbor Freight press uses a hydraulic cylinder to develop about 6 tons of pressure. We don’t think Harbor Freight carries this particular press, but for between $150 and $250, you can get a 12-20 ton press, and, of course, there are other suppliers, as well.
The target object, in this case, was an automotive bracket. The process of grabbing an image, converting it to an SVG, and then creating a 3D part has many uses. Apparently, PLA is sufficient for this purpose, although the print uses ten top and bottom layers along with 80% infill. That does make the prints take a long time.
As you might expect, the dies don’t last very long. In this case, they needed two shots, and they got them, but PLA is probably not the right material if you wanted to go for mass production.
Metal forming does occur
at large scales
, too. If you want to
make your own press-forming tools
, we have advice for you. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669708",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T15:10:33",
"content": "Interesting. I wonder if the concept could be used to created hollow shells instead of solid PLA blocks. These could then be filled with epoxy or concrete or something to take the compressive loads and act a... | 1,760,372,212.727466 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/the-simplest-curve-tracer-ever/ | The Simplest Curve Tracer Ever | Dan Maloney | [
"Parts",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"current-voltage",
"curve tracer",
"hysteresis",
"oscilloscope",
"zener diode",
"zero crossing"
] | To a lot of us, curve tracing seems to be one of those black magic things that only the true wizards understand. But as [DiodeGoneWild] explains,
curve tracing really isn’t all that complicated
, and it doesn’t even require specialized test instruments — just a transformer, a couple of resistors, and pretty much whatever oscilloscope you can lay your hands on.
True to his handle, [DiodeGoneWild] concentrates on the current-voltage curves of Zener diodes in the video below, mainly as a follow-up to
his recent simple linear power supply project
, where he took a careful look at thermal drift to select the best Zener for the job. His curve tracer is super simple — just the device under test in series with a bunch of 10-ohm resistors and the secondary winding of a 12-volt transformer. The probes of his oscilloscope — a no-frills analog model — go across the DUT and the resistor, and with the scope in X-Y mode, the familiar current-voltage curve appears. Sure, the trace is reversed, but it still provides a good visualization of what’s going on. The technique also works on digital scopes; just be ready for a lot of twiddling to get into X-Y mode and to get the trace aligned.
Of course it’s not just diodes that can be tested with a curve tracer, and [DiodeGoneWild] showed a bunch of other two-lead components on his setup. But for our money, the neatest trick here was using a shorted bridge rectifier to generate a bright spot on the curve to mark the zero crossing point. Clever indeed, and pretty useful on a scope with no graticule. | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668955",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T02:08:24",
"content": "So how does it work with transistors?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668979",
"author": "Brian Fritz",
... | 1,760,372,213.084665 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/the-ai-engine-that-fits-in-100k/ | The AI Engine That Fits In 100K | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ai",
"AI model",
"text to image"
] | Running your own AI models is possible, but it requires a giant computer, right? Maybe not. Researchers at NVidia are showing off
Perfusion
, a text-to-image model they say is 100KB in size and takes four minutes to train. The model specializes in customizing a photo. For example, the paper shows a picture of a teddy bear and a prompt to dress it as a wizard. In all fairness, the small size and quick training are a little misleading, we think, because the results are still using the usual giant model. What’s small and fast is the customization of the existing model.
Customizing models is a common task since you often want to work with something the model doesn’t contain. For example, you might want to alter a picture of your face or your pet, which probably isn’t in the original model. You can create a special keyword and partially train the model for what you want using something called textual inversion. The problem the researchers identified is that creating textual inversions often causes the new training to leak to unintended areas.
They describe “key locking,” a technique to avoid overfitting when fine-tuning an existing model. For example, suppose you want to add a specific dog picture to the model. With typical techniques, a special keyword like dog* will indicate the custom dog image, but the keyword has no connection with generic dogs, mammals, or animals. This makes it difficult for the AI to work with the image. For example, the prompts “a man sitting” and “a dog sitting” require very different image generations. But if we train a specific dog as “dog*” there’s no deeper understanding that “dog*” is a type of “dog” that the model already knows about. So what do you do with “dog* sitting?” Key locking makes that association.
Conceptually, this seems like a no-brainer, but the devil is in the details and the math, of course. We assume future tools will integrate this kind of functionality where you might say something like: learn myface*.png as me* {person, human} adjectives: [tall, bearded, stocky]. Or something like that.
We are oddly fascinated and sometimes perplexed with
all the AI engines
and how they are progressing.
Working with existing images
is something we think has a lot of benefits. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668885",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T23:09:25",
"content": "“So what do you do with “dog* sitting?”The people who “sit” our dog get paid enough that we don’t do it regularly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,372,212.820917 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/open-source-firmware-for-soldering-irons/ | Open-Source Firmware For Soldering Irons | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"firmware",
"mineware",
"open source",
"pinecil",
"soldering",
"soldering iron",
"tool",
"ts100"
] | For most of us, the first soldering iron we pick up to start working on electronics has essentially no features at all. Being little more than resistive heaters plugged straight into the wall with perhaps a changeable tip, there’s not really even a need for a power switch. But doing anything more specialized than through-hole PCB construction often requires a soldering iron with a little more finesse, though. Plenty of “smart” soldering irons are available for specialized soldering needs now,
and some are supported by the open-source IronOS as well
.
The project, formerly known as TS100, is a versatile soldering iron control firmware that started as an alternative firmware for only the TS100 soldering iron. It has since expanded to have compatibility with several other soldering irons and hosts a rich set of features, including temperature control, motion activation, and the ability to temporarily increase the temperature when using the iron. The firmware is also capable of working with irons that use batteries as well as irons that use USB power delivery.
For anyone with a modern smart soldering iron, like the Pinecil or various Miniware iron offerings, this firmware is a great way of being able to gain fine control over the behavior of one’s own soldering iron, potentially above and beyond what the OEM firmware can do. If you’re still using nothing more than a 30W soldering iron that just has a wall plug, take a look at
a review we did for the TS100 iron a few years ago
to see what you’re missing out on.
Photo via
Wikimedia Commons | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668818",
"author": "horbis",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T20:38:15",
"content": "What’s so special about pinecil (https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-soldering-iron/), which is open source from start to finish?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,372,212.933218 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/microsoft-now-offering-parts-and-repair-guides-for-xbox-controllers/ | Microsoft Now Offering Parts And Repair Guides For Xbox Controllers | Tom Nardi | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"controller",
"microsoft",
"repair guide",
"spare parts",
"xbox",
"xbox one"
] | We’re big fans of repairable hardware here at Hackaday, so much so that when we see a company embracing the idea that their products should actually be
serviced
rather than thrown in the trash, we like to call attention to it. Yes, that even includes when it’s Microsoft.
This community has had a mixed relationship with the Redmond software giant, to say the least. But we’ve still got to give them credit when they do something positive. Not only are they
offering a full selection of replacement parts
for both the standard and Elite Xbox controllers, they’ve also provided written instructions and step-by-step video guides on how to install your new parts.
For those of you who stopped playing console games when the controllers still only had two buttons, this might not seem like such a big deal. But considering a new Xbox Elite Wireless Controller will set you back a dizzying $180, it’s not hard to see why some folks would be excited about the possibility of
swapping out the guts of the thing for $50
.
Of course, these parts were already available from third party sellers, and
iFixit naturally has repair guides
for all the different flavors of Xbox controllers. Nothing about what Microsoft is doing here makes the Xbox controller fundamentally any easier to repair than it was previously. But the fact that the company isn’t treating their customers like adversaries is a step in the right direction.
Valve has been similarly open about the internals of the Steam Deck,
though their presentation was a bit dramatic
, and even Sony
provided an official teardown video for the PS5
. We’re not sure why these companies are willing to pull back the curtain when it comes to gaming hardware. Whatever the reason, we’re certainly not complaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od71PV4X5A4 | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668896",
"author": "Joe",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T23:29:18",
"content": "My soul for repair parts for my Steam controller!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6669020",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T... | 1,760,372,213.029733 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/truss-braced-wings-could-bring-new-look-to-runways-worldwide/ | Truss-Braced Wings Could Bring New Look To Runways Worldwide | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"airline",
"airliner",
"boeing",
"nasa",
"plane"
] | Airliners have looked largely the same for a long time now. The ongoing hunt for efficiency gains has seen the development of winglets, drag reducing films, and all manner of little aerodynamic tricks to save fuel, and hence money.
Boeing now has its eye on bigger, tastier goals. It believes by switching to a truss-braced wing design, it could net double-digit efficiency gains.
It’s working together with NASA to see if this concept could change the face of commercial aviation in decades to come.
Aspect Ratio Matters
The ASH 31 glider features wings with an aspect ratio of 33.5, and a lift-to-drag ratio of 56.
Credit:
Manfred Munch, CC-BY-SA 3.0
The key goal of using a truss-braced wing is to enable an airliner to use a wing much thinner and narrower than usual. These “high aspect ratio” wings are far more efficient than the stubbier, wider wings currently common on modern airliners. But why is aspect ratio so important, and how does it help
If you’ve ever looked at a glider, you will have noticed its incredibly long and narrow wings, which stand it apart from the shorter, wider wings used on airliners and conventional small aircraft. These wings are said to have a high aspect ratio, the ratio between the square of the wingspan and the projected area of the wing itself.
These wings are highly desirable for certain types of aircraft, as lift-to-drag ratio increases with aspect ratio. Any wing that generates lift also generates some drag, but this can be minimized through careful wing design. By making the wings longer and narrower, and thus higher in aspect ratio, the wing tip vortices generated by the wing are weakened. This reduces drag on the plane, and quite significantly so.
Bracing is required to make a high-aspect ratio wing work on an airliner.
Credit: NASA
For a glider, which has no forward propulsion of its own, minimizing drag is a must. Hence, high aspect ratio wings are very useful. Similarly, the high-flying U2 spy plane had excellent range because its high aspect ratio wings were very efficient. Both of these types of planes have fairly limited payload requirements, and are specialized enough that high aspect ratio wings can work as-is.
Airliners have other concerns that make high aspect ratio wings impractical. They must carry huge payloads in order to make lots of money per flight from paying passengers. It would be great to have high aspect ratio wings on airliners, as the efficiency would slash fuel bills significantly. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make them strong enough for such heavy-duty purposes. There simply isn’t room for the structure and material required.
Instead, where a glider might have an AR of 30 or more, an airliner will feature wings with an AR closer to 7 to 10. High-end gliders achieve lift-to-drag ratios of over 50. Airliners do much poorer in this regard. The original Boeing 747 achieved a L/D ratio of 15.3, for example. Decades of development have seen today’s modern airliners push that number closer to 20, like the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 777.
Brace Yourself
Throw on a brace for support, though, and suddenly the high-aspect ratio concept becomes plausible. Of course, it’s a radical change to the basic airliner concept. That means there’s plenty of work to be done to determine just how truss-braced wings could work in practice.
Boeing notes that aerodynamic and structural questions remain, as truss-braced wings haven’t been thoroughly explored at this scale.
Credit: Boeing
The current concept in development
is called the Boeing Transonic Truss-Braced Wing
, or TTBW, with a full-scale demonstrator expected to fly in 2028. It’s also been designated as the X-66A within US aviation circles. In development since 2010, the concept involves a plane with an ultra-thin, high aspect ratio wing, supported by a truss underneath. The demonstrator is being built on a shortened airframe from a McDonnell Douglas MD-90, and will be tested at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center. The concept is intended to suit either 130-160 passengers, or 180-210 passengers, depending on the exact configuration Boeing lands on.
The demonstrator is on the scale of single-aisle aircraft, albeit with a far larger wingspan, at 51 meters. This is still far narrower than dual-aisle aircraft like the 747, at 68 meters, but much greater than a single-aisle Boeing 737 MAX at 36 meters. To accommodate this extra width in existing narrowbody facilities, Boeing may explore the use of folding wingtips. These have already been used successfully on the Boeing 777X, to ensure the wider-than-usual type could access as many airports as possible. Thus far, the concept is primarily being considered a proposition for smaller narrowbody, single-aisle airliners.
Boeing is working with two potential concepts, the smaller VS-1 and the larger VS-2.
Credit: NASA
Wind tunnel tests have suggested that the higher-efficiency design could reduce fuel burn by up to 10%, based on the gains from the wings alone. The hope is that further new technologies that could be integrated into next-generation planes could push this as high as 30%. Boeing has noted that with the high wing mounting of the truss-braced design, such aircraft “could eventually accommodate advanced propulsion systems that are limited by a lack of underwing space in today’s low-wing airplane configurations.” To start with, though, the demonstrator will run Pratt and Whitney PW1100G geared turbofans, as used on the Airbus A320neo.
Whether truss-braced wings become common on airliners will come down to several factors. Beyond the engineering required to make things work from a structural perspective, there’s also a requirement to address practical concerns. Airports around the world are only built to handle aircraft of a certain size. Planes that go beyond that, like the Airbus A380, have suffered for their girth. Whether the promised efficiency gains are found is also still a question at this point. In any case, if Boeing’s hunch proves true, we could be riding on some very different airliners as soon as a decade from now.
Featured image from
this great video about making a model truss-braced demo plane
. | 75 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668685",
"author": "Iwermektyna Bezrecepty",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T17:07:59",
"content": "So, they’re pretty much spending millions of dollars to reinvent PZL M-15 Belphegor, an agricultural jet biplane.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,372,213.274859 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/fixing-some-more-of-apples-design-mistakes/ | Fixing Some More Of Apple’s Design Mistakes | Navarre Bartz | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"AirPod",
"Airpods",
"AirPods Pro",
"apple",
"Apple repair",
"audio",
"bluetooth",
"repair"
] | Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that Apple has strayed from the Woz’s original open platform ideal for the Apple II. [Ken Pillonel] is back for another round of fixing Apple’s repairability mistakes with a full complement of
3D printable replacement parts for the AirPods Pro case
.
While modeling all of the parts would be handy enough for repairing a device with a
0/10 iFixit score
, [Pillonel] modified the parts to go together with screws instead of adhesive so any future repairs don’t require cracking the plastic egg. He says, “By showcasing the potential for repairability, I hope to inspire both consumers and multi-billion dollar companies, like Apple, to embrace sustainable practices in their products.”
[Pillonel]’s repairability exploits may seem familiar to readers from his previous work on
adding USB-C
to the iPhone and the
AirPods Pro case
. If you just need to retrieve a lost AirPod, you might
try an electromagnet
, or you can make a Bluetooth receiver from a
pair of knock-off buds
. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668638",
"author": "aamco",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T16:08:25",
"content": "Every time one of Ken’s videos is posted here, there are three types of comments:1. Apple is so dumb for the poor repairability of [really any of their products, but especially Airpods].2. Apple users are d... | 1,760,372,213.336729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/clipper-windpower-solutions-in-search-of-problems/ | Clipper Windpower: Solutions In Search Of Problems | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"complexity",
"engineering",
"feature creep",
"gears",
"history",
"windpower"
] | The first modern wind turbines designed for bulk electricity generation came online gradually throughout the 80s and early 90s. By today’s standards these turbines are barely recognizable. They were small, had low power ratings often in the range of tens to hundreds of kilowatts, and had tiny blades that had to rotate extremely quickly.
When comparing one of these tiny machines next to a modern turbine with a power rating of 10 or more megawatts with blades with lengths on the order of a hundred meters, one might wonder if there is anything in common at all. In fact, plenty of turbines across the decades share fundamental similarities including a three-blade design, a fairly simple gearbox, and a single electric generator. While more modern turbines are increasingly using
direct-drive systems that eliminate the need for a gearbox
and the maintenance associated with them, in the early 2000s an American wind turbine manufacturer named Clipper Windpower went in the opposite direction, manufacturing wind turbines with an elaborate, expensive, and heavy gearbox that supported four generators in each turbine. This ended up sealing the company’s fate only a few years after the turbines were delivered to wind farms.
Some history: the largest terrestrial wind turbines were approaching the neighborhood of 2 megawatts, but some manufacturers were getting to these milestones essentially by slapping on larger blades and generators to existing designs rather than re-designing their turbines from the ground up to host these larger components. This was leading to diminishing returns, as well as an increased amount of mechanical issues in the turbines themselves, and it was only a matter of time before the existing designs wouldn’t support this trend further. Besides increased weight and other mechanical stresses on the structure itself, another major concern was finding (and paying for) cranes with enough capacity to hoist these larger components to ever-increasing heights, especially in the remote locations that wind farms are typically located. And cranes aren’t needed just for construction; they are also used whenever a large component like a generator or blade needs to be repaired or replaced.
A layout of a typical wind turbine with a single generator and gearbox.
Photo courtesy of researchgate.net
Looking at the problems with wind turbines in this era, Clipper Windpower arrived on the scene with a completely novel turbine layout which they thought would solve these issues. The main design difference was the use of four generators working in tandem rather than a single large generator. Their design was known as the Liberty turbine, producing 2.5 megawatts of power at maximum output.
In 2007, it was the largest wind turbine available in the United States. The design meant that a generator failure wouldn’t completely take a turbine offline, as they could run with less than four generators, and the generators were small enough on their own to be hoisted up and down easily by the turbine’s 2-ton crane. Plenty of other turbines have cranes for hoisting tools and smaller components, but unlike the Clipper Liberty turbine, in a standard single-generator layout the replacement of a generator would generally mean contracting out a much larger crane.
The layout of a Clipper Liberty wind turbine, showing the four generators coupled to the single gearbox.
Photo courtesy of prweb.com
In theory, there were plenty of advantages to this design besides the physical size of the generators. The distributed loads on the gearbox meant less mechanical stresses on the turbine’s physical structure. Generators with different power ratings could, in theory, be used as well, allowing the turbine to produce energy across a wider range of wind conditions than one with a single generator. Besides the technical aspects of the turbine itself, Clipper hoped to innovate in other ways as well. They attempted to set up
temporary turbine manufacturing facilities
at the planned sites of wind farms, meaning virtually no transportation costs for high-dollar items like turbine blades.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
But problems quickly appeared with turbines shortly after being placed in service, the most devastating of which surrounded the enormously complex gearbox. To explain this, we need to first look at why a gearbox is included in a wind turbine at all. For the most part, the synchronous electrical generators often used in older wind turbines need to operate near a specific rotational speed to send energy to the electrical grid, often 3600 rpm for a 2-pole generator or 1800 rpm for a four-pole generator, in places with a 60 Hz power grid. This is orders of magnitude faster than the rotational speed of the wind turbine’s blades and hub assembly, also known as a rotor, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 rpm to 30 rpm. Most turbines of this era, including Clipper Liberty turbines, relied on a gearbox to couple the rotor to the generator even if there was only a single generator in the turbine.
The difficulty of designing and manufacturing a reliable gearbox that needed to accommodate four generators was not something Clipper was entirely prepared for, though. The first issues that began cropping up involved timing issues with the gear sets inside the gearbox (
followed shortly by systemic blade problems
, but that’s a little outside this scope). Specific details are sparse, but similar to the timing mechanisms for the valve trains in internal combustion engines, the gears inside the Clipper gearbox needed to be in near-perfect synchronization with each other in order to drive the generators properly. The gears, produced by a third party,
weren’t manufactured to the correct tolerances
so after only months of energy production, the gears were beginning to fail.
Since the Liberty turbine was produced with the intention of reducing the impact of generator failures by placing all of the onus on a complex gearbox, the fact that these turbines’ gearboxes began rapidly failing in the late 2000s was a major setback. Not only does a failed gearbox take the turbine out of service, but now it was possible that a heavy crane would be needed to replace it, if a replacement from the fledgling wind turbine manufacturer was available at all. Clipper was quickly inundated with warranty claims for their gearboxes, which even more rapidly led to the financial failure of the company. The timing of this was unfortunate as well, as warranty claims for the failed gearboxes correlated with the 2008 financial crisis. Clipper filed for bankruptcy in 2012 amid much investor consternation,
as many investors in the company ended up being the wind farms who had originally purchased the turbines
.
Feature Creep
Here in the present, it is becoming rare to see an original Clipper turbine still in operation. To keep these wind farms in service and fulfilling their
power purchase agreements
, a much easier option is to simply replace all the Clipper components “up tower”, such as the entire nacelle, rotor, and/or blades, with those from a competitor, leaving almost no original components besides the tower. Unfortunately, unlike other single-generator turbines which use more standardized parts and can therefore survive capitalistic machinations such as bankruptcies and buyouts more readily by sourcing parts from other manufacturers, Clipper built themselves into a prison of their own making. Originally hailed as industry leaders, the complexity of their drivetrain and its single point of failure ended up being their own undoing.
While plenty might look to those behind the company, this isn’t a story of an out-of-touch investor or venture capital firm attempting to “disrupt” an industry they knew nothing about, like certain other billionaires in the news lately who have accidentally bought companies they don’t fundamentally understand.
Clipper’s founder
was originally the founder of Zond, one of the largest and most successful wind turbine producers of the 80s and 90s. Coincidentally, Zond was acquired by Enron in 1997, which was then acquired by General Electric after Enron
suffered slight financial difficulties
, making GE one of the major competitors of Clipper during the mid-00s. Instead, this is more of a story of feature creep on a massive scale, and of going out of your way to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist, and introducing much more serious problems as a result.
A Clipper wind farm in Oaxaca, Mexico c. 2010.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Indeed, what really happened to Clipper, which we can only see now with the benefit of hindsight, was that the designers made some questionable choices when first conceiving these turbines. For one, designing a completely new turbine layout was sure to be rife with unforeseen problems. For another, the problems they were attempting to solve wouldn’t end up becoming the industry bottlenecks that Clipper predicted. More cranes and crane operators were found as the industry expanded in megawatt ratings, larger component sizes, heights, and weights, and in the sheer numbers needed to support a rapidly increasing number of wind farms.
Additionally, most modern large-scale wind farms are built in places with fairly predictable wind characteristics, so multiple generators with different power curves didn’t turn out to have the benefit it was thought to. And generator failures turned out to not have the devastating impacts that Clipper forecasted, either.
There are some theoretical benefits to multiple-generator layouts
, but replacing a single point of failure in a relatively simple electrical machine, the generator, with a single point of failure in an enormously complicated mechanical device, the gearbox, turned out to create many more problems than it ultimately solved.
While there is still a company called
Clipper
today, with a shop in Iowa that repairs gearboxes and provides other wind-related services, it has been sold off twice since its bankruptcy and exists as a shell of its former self. At this point the Clipper Liberty turbine is nearing 20 years old, and with wind farms looking to repower their turbines they often turn to technologies that are more proven and with higher megawatt ratings rather than repairing and maintaining this niche turbine. Clipper’s story is not an altogether uncommon story either, where a company is hyped to solve a problem they claim is a major issue, only for their product to lead to disappointment when finally released. Other examples include the Segway, Google Glass, or the attempt to bring 3D televisions to mass market. These products and the Clipper Liberty turbine are case studies in the importance of understanding consumer needs, market demand, and addressing genuine pain points when developing innovative technologies. Failing to understand these ideas can result in disastrous consequences. | 69 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668617",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T15:03:12",
"content": ">are case studies in the importance of understanding consumer needs, market demand, and addressing genuine pain points when developing innovative technologies. Failing to understand these ideas can resu... | 1,760,372,213.501826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/this-week-in-security-your-cars-extended-warranty-seizing-the-fediverse-and-arm-mte/ | This Week In Security: Your Car’s Extended Warranty, Seizing The Fediverse, And Arm MTE | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Fediverse",
"robocalls",
"This Week in Security"
] | If you’ve answered as many spam calls as I have, you probably hear the warranty scam robocall in your sleep: “We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.” That particular robocalling operation is about to run out of quarters, as the FCC has announced a nearly $300 million fine levied against that particular operation. The scammers had a list of 500 million phone numbers, and made over five billion calls in three months. Multiple laws were violated, including some really scummy behavior like spoofing employer caller ID, to try to convince people to pick up the call.
Now, that record-setting fine probably isn’t ever going to get paid. The group of companies on the hook for the amount don’t really exist in a meaningful way. The individuals behind the scams are Roy Cox and Aaron Jones, who have already been fined significant amounts and been banned from making telemarketing calls. Neither of those measures put an end to the problem, but going after Avid Telecom, the company that was providing telephone service, did finally put the scheme down.
Mastodon Data Scooped
There are some gotchas to Mastodon. Direct Messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted, your posts are publicly viewable, and
if your server operator gets raided by law enforcement, your data gets caught up in the seizure
.
The background here is the administrator of the server in question had an unrelated legal issue, and was raided by FBI agents while working on an issue with the Mastodon instance. As a result, when agents seized electronics as evidence, a database backup of the instance was grabbed too. While Mastodon posts are obviously public by design, there is some non-public data to be lost. IP addresses aren’t exactly out of reach of law enforcement, it’s still a bit of personal information that many of us like to avoid publishing. Then there’s hashed passwords. While it’s better than plaintext passwords, having your password hash out there just waiting to be brute-forced is a bit disheartening. But the one that really hurts is that Mastodon doesn’t have end-to-end encryption for private messages.
Citrix Under Seige
Citrix is back in the news, this time for an RCE in the Netscaler and Gateway server appliances. CVE-2023-3519 was first used as a 0-day back in June, and patched on July 18th. The RCE saw widespread use within a couple days, and
there are at least 640 compromised systems in the wild
. If you have one of these Citrix systems, and didn’t have it patched by July 20th, just go ahead and assume it to be compromised.
ARM’s Memory Tagging Extensions
Google’s Project Zero has
gotten their hands on some pre-production hardware that implements ARM Memory Tagging Extensions
. This bit of security magic maintains some metadata for each memory allocation, and memory accesses use the top four bits of the pointer value as a key to that memory. If the pointer key doesn’t match the metadata, it’s probably an illicit access, and the program can be terminated with a segfault.
The three-part review of that technology starts with the question of
speculative side channels
. Does MTE block Spectre, and can you use something like Spectre to trivially defeat it? The answer to both questions seems to be a no. There is an interesting side effect of using segfaults to enforce memory safety: if an attack can rewrite the segfault handler code, it neuters the MTE protection.
Part two looks at
how difficult MTE actually makes it for exploits
. The answer is… it depends. In the case of an exploit in a browser’s renderer, if a Spectre-ish side channel can be used to detect the keys before launching exploit code, MTE will likely be rather easy to bypass. Without a side channel, it becomes much harder, particularly if MTE is running in synchronous mode, where the fault is raised immediately upon the unauthorized memory access. Something like exploiting the phone from an incoming text message? Very difficult to impossible.
Part three looks at
the implementation in the Linux kernel
, and the special cases and problems presented. One of the biggest is that there are parts of the kernel where managing pointer tags is just impossible, so there’s a known master key that always works. And that’s not to mention all the Direct Memory Access from other hardware bits, and other issues. All in all, it’s an interesting overview of the promise and limitations of ARM’s MTE solution.
Microsoft Security Negligence?
Just this Wednesday [Amit Yoran], CEO of Tenable,
published an open letter lambasting Microsoft for their continuing security problems
. The basis of this complaint isn’t the staggering fact that over 42% of all 0-day vulnerabilities in the last 8 years were in Microsoft products. It’s the unusually long fix times, and continual lack of transparency.
The proverbial last straw in this case is
a flaw a Tenable researcher found in Azure
— a proxy bypass that allowed unauthenticated access to Azure function hosts. That bypass was as easy as running a custom connector, and doing a hostname lookup in that connector’s code. Once discovered, a properly formatted HTTP request to that host would result in all sorts of information, including OAuth client IDs and secrets. What really pushed Tenable over the edge was that Microsoft took longer than 90 days to roll out a partial fix, which only applied to new applications. It took til this week to actually fix the issue in entirety, not coincidentally one day after this open letter was published.
There is a very odd detail about this story. According to Tenable’s disclosure timeline, on July 21, over three months after disclosure, Microsoft informed Tenable that a complete fix would take until September 28 to roll out. Tenable published their scathing letter on August 2nd, and the fix was in place the very next day, far ahead of the late-September projection. This is the sort of behavior that led Tenable to use terms like gross irresponsibility and negligence.
Mikrotik Foisted
The Mikrotik RouterOS firmware has an issue, CVE-2023-30799, that allows an admin user to escape into the underlying system and install a root shell. It was first pulled off in the virtual machine version of RouterOS, and requires admin credentials, so didn’t garner much interest. The folks at VulnCheck took another look at this issue, and
think it might warrant a bit more concern
.
It turns out that the old install defaults for RouterOS was admin and a blank password. And until more recent versions, that blank password didn’t trigger a forced password reset. And a failed login attempt with a valid user returns a slightly different response than a failed attempt with an invalid user. So enumerating the publicly available RouterOS devices using the default admin username is pretty straightforward. RouterOS also has no brute force protections on the web or API interfaces. That makes for about 5,500 online devices that are potentially susceptible to brute-force and credential stuffing attacks.
Bits and Bytes
Why no SVGs? You may notice that many websites avoid using SVGs, and you might wonder why, since SVGs are great for high quality details, animation, and more. One problem is that the SVG file format is Turing complete, and can contain scripts and other shenanigans.
[Teetje Stark] has the lowdown
, including how to use SVGs securely, and what fun SVG tricks you lose in the process.
Have a Canon printer connected to your WiFi? When you get ready to pass it on, don’t forget to factory reset it, so you don’t accidentally give away your Wireless password. But it turns out that’s not enough, as
the password may survive a full reset
.
The full dance
includes resetting your network settings, turning WiFi back on, and resetting your network settings a second time, just to be sure. Sheesh.
It used to be that one sure way to recognize spam and phishing emails was to look for the typos and bad grammar. Well thankfully,
we have machine learning now
, writing perfect spam emails every time. Email is increasingly turning into AIs writing emails to other AIs, trying to get to us. What a time to be alive.
And finally, the FBI has
concluded an investigation
into why a government contractor purchased NSO tools only a few days after the President put NSO on a do-not-buy list. The culprit, it turns out, was the FBI, who was using the tool via a contractor. The FBI has further concluded that there was no wrongdoing by the FBI. Thank goodness. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669686",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T14:09:19",
"content": "“One problem is that the SVG file format is Turing complete, and can contain scripts and other shenanigans. ”What about other like file formats?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []... | 1,760,372,213.391016 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/fast-adjustable-lasers-using-lithium-niobate-integrated-photonics/ | Fast Adjustable Lasers Using Lithium Niobate Integrated Photonics | Maya Posch | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"laser",
"laser diode",
"photonics"
] | Making lasers smaller and more capable of rapidly alternating between frequencies, while remaining within a narrow band, is an essential part of bringing down the cost of technologies such as LiDAR and optical communication. Much of the challenge here lies understandably in finding the right materials that enable a laser which incorporates all of these properties.
A heterogeneous Si3N4–LiNbO3 chip as used in the study. (Credit: Snigirev et al., 2023)
Here a
recent study by [Viacheslav Snigirev]
and colleagues (
press release
) demonstrates how combining the properties of lithium niobate (LiNbO
3
) with those of silicon nitride (Si
3
N
4
) into a hybrid (Si
3
N
4
)–LiNbO
3
wafer stack allows for an InP-based laser source to be modulated in the etched photonic circuitry to achieve the desired output properties.
Much of the modulation stability is achieved through laser self-injection locking via the microresonator structures on the hybrid chip. These provide optical back reflection that forces the laser diode to resonate at a specific frequency, providing the frequency lock. What enables the fast frequency tuning is that this is determined by the applied voltage on the microresonator structure via the formed electrodes.
With a LiDAR demonstration in the paper that uses one of these hybrid circuits it is demonstrated that the direct wafer bonding approach works well, and a number of optimization suggestions are provided. As with all of these studies, they build upon years of previous research as problems are found and solutions suggested and tested. It would seem that thin-film LiNbO
3
structures are now finding some very useful applications in photonics.
(Heading image: Stack of Si
3
N
4
-LiNbO
3
forming the integrated laser and integrated into test setup (d). (Credit: Snigirev et al., 2023) ) | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669641",
"author": "synthimuse",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T11:47:54",
"content": "As part of my apprenticeship rotation 47 years ago, I found myself in the materials lab at Glasgow University Electronics department.I was tasked with manually measuring and plotting the piezoelectric ... | 1,760,372,213.763135 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/04/odd-retrocomputer-had-a-graphics-coprocessor/ | Odd Retrocomputer Had A Graphics Coprocessor | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6809",
"fujitsu",
"Seconinsa"
] | [Noel’s Retro Lab] scored an unusual 1980s vintage computer sold in Japan and Spain. The
Seconinsa FM-7
appears to be a popular Fujitsu Japanese computer altered to fit the Spanish market. They seem to be pretty rare, at least in our part of the world. The outside appearance was very nice for the time, with a large keyboard and plenty of expansion ports. But the board has an unusual feature considering the era — dual CPUs. One 6809 executed your program, and another 6809 handled graphics output. You can see the machine in the video below.
There are two 32K ROMs, but the machine specifications claim only 48K. After dumping the ROMs, it turns out one of the ROMs has two copies of the same data. You can imagine they might not want to decode the entire address space. It could be that they needed 16K of space for other devices.
It wasn’t just the ROMs. The video RAM is pretty strange, too, as [Noel] explains. There are even some static RAMs the computer doesn’t claim. It appears these act as communication pipes between the two CPUs. In fact, it turns out that even the keyboard has its own 4-bit CPU, so the machine actually has a total of 3 CPUs!
This was a heavy-duty design for the time it was built. [Noel] wanted to fire it up, but he had to figure out the cables since the computer didn’t have any with it. Some clever repurposing of stock cables provided monochrome video output. Color display was a bit more complicated, but not impossible.
[Noel] winds the video up with some history of the companies behind the machine. The Spanish government wanted to use the FM-7 in the classroom, but the program failed to materialize. Want to see what it was like to program the thing? Here’s the
Basic reference manual
(in Spanish). Most of the documentation for the machine is either in Spanish or Japanese.
While this certainly is a rare computer, at least there’s
a record of its existence
. If you want to see what a Japanese computer looked like a few decades earlier, check out
the FACOM 128B
. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669585",
"author": "Lee",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T09:30:33",
"content": "A lot of Arcade systems back in the day had multiple CPUs doing different things such as audio and video. The Sega System 16/18 boards used a 68000 for the CPU and video but also used a Z80 just for the audio... | 1,760,372,213.667813 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/apple-iii-slows-down-to-smell-the-roses/ | Apple III Slows Down To Smell The Roses | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"apple",
"apple III",
"arduino",
"clock speed",
"microcontroller",
"restoration",
"retrocomputing",
"Teensy 4.1"
] | The most collectible items in the realm of vintage computers often weren’t the most popular of their era. Quite the opposite, in fact. Generally the more desireable systems were market failures when they first launched, and are now sought out because of a newly-appreciated quirk or simply because the fact that they weren’t widely accepted means there’s fewer of them. One of the retro computers falling into this category is the Apple III, which had fundamental hardware issues upon launch leading to a large recall and its overall commercial failure. [Ted] is trying to bring one of these devices back to life, though,
by slowing its clock speed down to a crawl
.
The CPU in these machines was a Synertek 6502 running at 1.8 MHz. With a machine that wouldn’t boot, though, [Ted] replaced it with his own MCL65+, a purpose-built accelerator card based on the 600 MHz Teensy 4.1 microcontroller in order to debug the motherboard. The first problem was found in a ROM chip which prevented the computer loading anything from memory, but his solution wouldn’t work at the system’s higher clock speeds. To solve that problem [Ted] disabled the higher clock speed in hardware, restricting the system to 1 MHz and allowing it to finally boot.
So far there haven’t been any issues running the computer at the slower speed, and it also helps keep the computer cooler and hopefully running longer as well, since the system won’t get as hot or unstable. This isn’t [Ted]’s first retrocomputing rodeo, either. His MCL chips have been featured in
plenty of other computers like this Apple II
which can run at a much faster rate than the original hardware thanks to the help of the modern microcontroller. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669568",
"author": "Sweeney",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T08:20:44",
"content": "It’s a PLD problem, not the ROM, according to the linked article. If it’s really a PLD then it’s an off-the-shelf part and the correct fix is to obtain a replacement and program it to match the original."... | 1,760,372,213.70862 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/its-snake-in-a-qr-code-but-smaller/ | It’s Snake, In A QR Code, But Smaller | Jenny List | [
"Games"
] | [
"assembler",
"qr code",
"snake"
] | We’re not sure that many of you have recognised the need in your life for an x86 machine code program encoded into a QR code, but following on from someone else work [donno2048]
has created a super-tiny Snake clone in assembly
which comes in at only 85 bytes long.
It fits far better in a QR code than the previous effort
, but perhaps more useful is
a web page demo
which runs an in-browser DOS compatibility library. We followed the compilation instructions and got it running on our Manjaro installation, with the result of a somewhat unplayable but recognisable Snake, we’re guessing because it was written for a slower platform. The web version is more usable, and allows us to investigate its operation more thoroughly.
To achieve a working game in so little code is an impressive feat, and since we found different keys responded on machines with different keyboards we’re curious how it does its keyboard input. Also we think it has the Snake bug where turning back on yourself means instant game over. We would be interested to hear the views in the comments of readers who know something about x86 assembly, to help explain these points. | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669522",
"author": "Paul LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T05:48:18",
"content": ">> we found different keys responded on machines with different keyboards we’re curious how it does its keyboard inputThe “iin al, 0x60” reads a keystroke. These are scan codes, and the codes for th... | 1,760,372,213.815473 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/force-feedback-steering-wheel-made-from-power-drill/ | Force Feedback Steering Wheel Made From Power Drill | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"drill",
"force feedback",
"game",
"impact driver",
"power tool",
"racing",
"steering wheel",
"video game"
] | When it comes to controllers for racing games, there is perhaps no better option than a force feedback steering wheel. With a built-in motor to push against the wheel at exactly the right times, they can realistically mimic the behavior of a steering wheel from a real car. The only major downside is cost, with controllers often reaching many hundreds of dollars. [Jason] thought it shouldn’t be that hard to build one from a few spare parts though
and went about building this prototype force feedback steering wheel for himself
.
Sourcing the motor for the steering wheel wasn’t as straightforward as he thought originally. The first place he looked was an old printer, but the DC motor he scavenged from it didn’t have enough torque to make the controller behave realistically, so he turned to a high-torque motor from a battery-powered impact driver. This also has the benefit of coming along with a planetary gearbox as well, keeping the size down, as well as including its own high-current circuitry. The printer turned out to not be a total loss either, as the encoder from the printer was used to send position data about the steering wheel back to the racing game. Controlling the device is an Arduino, which performs double duty sending controller information from the steering wheel as well as receiving force feedback instructions from the game to drive the motor in the steering wheel.
After 3D printing a case for it and strapping it to a work bench, the initial tests proved to be promising. [Jason] can feel the motor from the power drill pushing against the steering wheel at the appropriate time. However there are some issues to work out with the prototype as the coupling mechanism between the motor and steering wheel isn’t strong enough to resist skipping and is likely to eventually break. We look forward to future videos when these issues are ironed out, but in the meantime we’d recommend taking a look at
this force feedback mouse
for other ways of making video game experiences more immersive. | 22 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669435",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2023-08-04T00:56:06",
"content": "I’ve never had good results, its possible game designers don’t know what good feedback is. Or maybe it is good feedback for racing, but not enjoyable like a good sports car.They seem to me mostly to react ... | 1,760,372,213.872731 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/03/open-source-cell-phone-based-on-esp32/ | Open-Source Cell Phone Based On ESP32 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"2g",
"3d printed",
"diy",
"gsm",
"operating system",
"phone",
"software"
] | Over the past decade or so, smartphones have exploded in popularity and seamlessly integrated themselves into nearly every aspect of most people’s lives. Although that comes with a few downsides as well, with plenty of people feeling that the smart phone makes it a little too easy to waste time and looking to switch to something simpler, like an older-style flip phone. If this style of phone is more your speed, take a look at this
DIY cell phone which takes care of everything a phone really needs to do
. (
Google Translate from French
)
The phone uses an ESP32 at its core, with a
SIM800L
GSM modem to interact with the cell network, including retrieving the system time. A small battery is included as well as all of the support circuitry for charging it as well as a USB interface that can communicate to a PC. The operating system for the phone is built from the ground up as well, with a touch screen interface allowing the user to make phone calls, send text messages, store contacts, and a few other basic features. There’s also a GPS application though, allowing the phone to know basic location information.
Another perk of this device is that its creator, [Gabriel], made the design schematics, print files for the case, and the operating system software completely open source for anyone to build this phone on their own. Everything is available on
the project’s GitHub page
. It’s a fairly remarkable achievement, especially considering [Gabriel] is only 16. And, if you’re not one to eschew modern smart phone technology there are
some DIY smart phones available to build as well
.
Thanks to [come2] for the tip! | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6669328",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2023-08-03T20:29:50",
"content": "This is pretty cool! My impression is that the modem is 2G, and 2G is fully shut down now in America. I might be wrong, though. Even so, that’s just one country, and the rest of the phone could be a... | 1,760,372,213.96149 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/solar-power-your-pi/ | Solar Power Your Pi | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Pi",
"solar"
] | Running a Raspberry Pi with solar power sounds easy. Of course, like most things, the details are what get you. About a year ago, [Bystroushaa] tried it without success. But the second time
turned out to be the charm
.
Of course, success is a relative term. It does work, but there is concern that it won’t be sufficient in the winter. In addition, if the battery dies, everything doesn’t restart automatically. Still, it is usable, and there should be ways to solve those problems.
The original attempt used a PiJuice hat and solar panel. This time, the design didn’t use these, opting instead for a LiFePO4 battery, a solar regulator, and a solar panel. The rest of it comes down to mechanical and physical mounting. The cheap regulator has some drawbacks. For example, it doesn’t allow for monitoring like more expensive units. It also cannot balance the cells periodically, although that could be done with an external controller.
We’ve seen
solar-powered Pi boards before
. Or, try a
Game Boy
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668569",
"author": "Quozca",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T12:29:38",
"content": "I successfully run a PI 400 with this:https://www.amazon.it/Caricatore-Monocristallino-Pieghevole-Dispositivi-Ricaricabili/dp/B0998G1CSJ/r",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,214.008201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/02/audio-not-video-over-the-lkv373-hdmi-extender/ | Audio, Not Video Over The LKV373 HDMI Extender | Matthew Carlson | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Audi",
"hdmi",
"LKV373",
"rust",
"wireshark"
] | [eta] found herself in a flat with several LKV373 HDMI extenders. Find the corresponding transmitter, plug it into your device, and you’ve got a connection to the TV/sound system, no fussing with wires behind the TV. However, [eta] wanted to get rid of the need to plug in a laptop
and start sending packets directly to play music
. As her flatmate [dan] had
already reverse-engineered the receiver
, she tested her prototype against their virtualized receiver, de-ip-hmdi.
The actual sending of images was surprisingly straightforward — just a JPEG sliced into 1024 bytes chunks and sent over. However, early testing showed nothing on the receiver. The end of a frame needed marking by setting the most-significant bit of the chunk number to one. Now de-ip-hdmi showed the image, but the actual hardware would not. With something missing, [eta] returned to Wireshark to scan packets. Noticing some strange packets on port 2067, she analyzed the pattern to reveal it sent another packet just before a new frame and included the frame number. With this tweak, it was still not enough. Ultimately, heartbeat packets sent every second synchronize things, but compared to the noise of the video packets, they were easy to miss. Now [eta] had some functioning video streaming rust code.
In theory, audio for the LKV373 followed the same thought process as video. Two channels of 32-bit big Endian integers at 44,100 hz chunked into 992-byte sections and sent as a packet formed the audio stream. With only 992 bytes, two streams, and 4 bytes per sample, each packet only held 2.812 milliseconds of sound. The first tests resulted in no audio output or distorted crunchy sound. Of course, this was every audio engineer’s worst nightmare: jitter. With a spin loop and an efficient ring buffer, the audio packets were soon slinging across the network reliably.
The code is available on
a hosted version of GitLab
. It’s a beautiful journey through reverse engineering some obscure but relatively cheap hardware. Along the way, there is nicely annotated Rust code, which makes it all the better. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668521",
"author": "Lee",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T09:47:16",
"content": "Many other ways to achieve this without having to reverse engineer HDMI over IP adapters.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668529",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,214.056822 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/mit-crack-the-concrete-capacitor/ | MIT Cracks The Concrete Capacitor | Jenny List | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"cement",
"energy storage",
"supercapacitor"
] | It’s a story we’ve heard so many times over the years: breathless reporting of a new scientific breakthrough that will deliver limitless power, energy storage, or whichever other of humanity’s problems needs solving today. Sadly, they so often fail to make the jump into our daily lives because the reporting glosses over some exotic material that costs a fortune or because there’s a huge issue elsewhere in their makeup. There’s a story from MIT that might just be the real thing, though, as a team from that university
claim to have made a viable supercapacitor from materials as simple as cement, carbon black, and a salt solution
.
Supercapacitors use plate materials with a huge surface area on which to store charge. Conventional supercapacitors often use an electrochemical construction, and activated charcoal is a frequent electrode material. The cement capacitor uses the property of cement curing, which creates a dense branching network of openings in the material as the water reacts with the cement. By introducing electrically conductive carbon black to the mix and using potassium chloride solution instead of water, they turn the huge surface area of the resulting structure into a conductive electrode suffused with charged ions. This can be used as a plate of a supercapacitor, separated from another similar one by a membrane.
The suggestion is that, in the future, the foundation of a house or other structure might be cast in this cement to provide in-situ energy storage for rooftop solar generation. There’s an environmental question over the carbon footprint of cement manufacturing. Still, since the materials and techniques appear neither exotic nor expensive, we hope this is the one energy storage miracle discovery that makes it.
We’ve gone into more detail on supercaps in the past
.
Header image: Michael Coghlan,
CC BY-SA 2.0
. | 60 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668445",
"author": "Jeff Brown",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T05:27:17",
"content": "And how does one prevent leakage current from sapping all of the energy stored within the concrete? It’d need to be insulated somehow.Simply driving a bolt through the wrong part of the material could... | 1,760,372,216.382893 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/accelerating-electrons-to-tev-levels-using-curved-laser-beams/ | Accelerating Electrons To TeV Levels Using Curved Laser Beams | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"laser",
"particle accelerator",
"science"
] | There are many applications for particle accelerators, even outside research facilities, but for the longest time they have been large, cumbersome machines, not to mention very expensive to operate. Here laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) are a promising alternative, which uses lasers to create accelerated particles along the wake in a plasma field. One of the major struggles has been with reinjecting the thus accelerated particles into another stage of a multi-stage accelerator, which would be required to obtain energies closer to one TeV. In this area researchers have now demonstrated a way around this, by using
curved channels for the laser beams
(
paywalled paper
) which inject the laser beam into the continuous cavity.
Schematic diagram of the laser fabrication system (Credit: Hongyang Deng et al., 2023)
Their
plasma wakefield acceleration
system construction is described in an open access
2023 paper by Hongyang Deng et al.
, which covers the fabrication of the capillaries that contain the waveguides for these side-injection lasers. Each capillary is created in sapphire using femtosecond laser ablation technology to create a narrow channel with the appropriate properties. During the experimental phase, the researchers found a similar problem as with the previous multi-stage reinjection of accelerated particles, in that the injected laser beam had to be properly aligned with the main channel so as not to disturb the plasma wakefield.
As for why these multi-stage LWFAs are very interesting is covered in
this CERN presentation
on laser-plasma acceleration. Essentially it boils down to the aforementioned properties, in terms of size and cost. Solving the reinjection issue that has so far imposed limits on the acceleration possible on account of the natural dephasing which occurs in the plasma wakefield after a certain distance should remove most of these obstacles.
Although self-injection (i.e. boosting the wakefield with a newly injected laser pulse) is not a new approach, making it work reliably and affordably has been a challenge that may now be a bit closer to being solved, and to getting us our desktop TeV-level particle accelerators.
Heading image: (a) Structure of the discharged capillary to produce the curved and straight plasma channel. (b) Spectrum distribution and calculated profile of the plasma density along the radial direction at the entrance of the discharged capillary. (c) Experimental setup for the measurements of laser guiding and electron acceleration. (Credit: Xinzhe Zhu et al., 2023) | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668411",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-08-02T02:26:38",
"content": "Lasers to create “accelerate particles”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668547",
"author": "chris",
"... | 1,760,372,215.664821 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/room-temperature-superconductor-lk-99-just-maybe-it-could-be-real/ | “Room Temperature Superconductor” LK-99, Just Maybe It Could Be Real | Jenny List | [
"Science"
] | [
"Peer Review",
"room temperature superconductor",
"superconductor"
] | To have been alive over the last five decades is to have seen superconductors progress from only possible at near-absolute-zero temperatures, to around the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the 1980s and ’90s, and inching slowly higher as ever more exotic substances are made and subjected to demanding conditions. Now there’s a new kid on the block with an astounding claim of room-temperature and pressure superconductivity, something that has been a Holy Grail for physicists over many years.
LK-99 is a lead-copper-phosphate compound developed by a team from Korea University in Seoul.
Its announcement
was met with skepticism from the scientific community and the first attempts to replicate it proved unsuccessful, but now a team at
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
in China
claim to have also made LK-99 samples that levitate under a magnetic field at room temperature and pressure
. This is corroborated by simulation studies that back up the Korean assertions about the crystal structure of LK-99, so maybe, just maybe, room temperature and pressure superconductors might at last be with us.
Floating on a magnetic field is cool as anything, but what are the benefits of such a material? By removing electrical resistance and noise from the equation they hold the promise of lossless power generation and conversion along with higher-performance electronics both analogue and digital, which would revolutionize what we have come to expect from electronics. Of course we’re excited about them and we think you should be too, but perhaps we’ll wait for more labs to verify LK-99 before we celebrate too much. After all, if it proves over-optimistic,
it wouldn’t be the first time
. | 66 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668366",
"author": "David Lang",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T23:08:56",
"content": "has anyone reported being able to reproduce it yet? I know some people were trying, but I haven’t heard any success reports yet.until it can be reproduced, it’s interesting, but not yet exciting.",
... | 1,760,372,215.875756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/all-american-five-lives-again/ | All American Five Lives Again | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"all american 5",
"all american five",
"tube radio"
] | If you haven’t heard of an “all-American five,” then you probably don’t dig through bins for old radios. The AA5 is a common design for old AM radios that use five tubes: a rectifier, an oscillator/mixer, an IF amplifier, a detector, and a single tube for driving the speaker. [Mikrowave1]
took an old specimen of such a radio
from the mid-1950s and wanted to restore it. You can see how it went in the video below.
One feature of the design is that the set had a “hot chassis,” which means you really want to use an isolation transformer before you work on it. We were taught to touch a chassis with the back of our hand first because of radios like this. If it is “hot,” the muscle contraction would throw your arm away from the radio instead of forcing you to grip it uncontrollably.
The GE radio had many quality design touches you don’t always see in a radio like this. The mix of brands indicates that the radio has had tubes replaced in the past. It also had a clearly replaced electrolytic capacitor. Surprisingly, all the tubes were good, although the power output tube was marginal. However, a light bulb was bad and required a little surgery to allow for a slightly different replacement.
Some capacitors were neatly replaced, also. A lot of cleaning and testing later — along with a dropped tool — the radio was ready to play again. Fixing radios from this era is a great hobby. You can get to everything and you don’t really need anything fancy, although a tube tester is helpful. The classic method of troubleshooting is to either find audio on the volume control or not and then work your way backward or forward using a signal tracer or — since they are so readily available now — a scope. Alternatively, you could inject a signal at the volume control and work your way through the circuit until you can or can’t hear the injected signal.
Not the first tube radio we’ve
watched being restored, of course
. Need
a tube tester
? | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668316",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T20:05:17",
"content": "The best AA5 mod I saw was in QST for June 1971. Someone converts it to shortwave. They add a solid state converter. A BFO. They add some feedback in the IF for better selectivity. They added a... | 1,760,372,215.719505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/making-your-own-vr-headset-consider-this-diy-lens-design/ | Making Your Own VR Headset? Consider This DIY Lens Design | Donald Papp | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"diy",
"headset",
"hmd",
"lens",
"optics",
"pancake lens",
"vr"
] | Lenses are a necessary part of any head-mounted display, but unfortunately, they aren’t always easy to source. Taking them out of an existing headset is one option, but one may wish for a more customized approach, and that’s where [WalkerDev]’s
homebrewed “pancake” lenses
might come in handy.
Engineering is all about trade-offs, and that’s especially true in VR headset design. Pancake lenses are compact units that rely on polarization to bounce light around internally, resulting in a very compact assembly at the cost of relatively poor light efficiency. That compactness is what [WalkerDev] found attractive, and in the process discovered that stacking two different Fresnel lenses and putting them in a 3D printed housing yielded a very compact pancake-like unit that gave encouraging results.
This project is still in development, and while the
original lens assembly is detailed in this build log
, there are some potential improvements to be made, so stay tuned if you’re interested in using this design. A
DIY headset
doesn’t mean you
also
must DIY the lenses entirely from scratch, and this option seems economical enough to warrant following up.
Want to experiment with mixing and matching optics on your own? Not only has [WalkerDev]’s project shown that off-the-shelf Fresnel lenses can be put to use, it’s in a way good news that
phone-based VR is dead
. Google shipped over 10 million cardboard headsets and Gear VR sold over 5 million units, which means there are a whole lot of lenses in empty headsets laying around, waiting to be harvested and repurposed. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668294",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T18:34:48",
"content": "Hey ! You’ve been HaDed ! Welcome to the club :-P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668631",
"author": "WalkerDev",
"timestamp": "2023... | 1,760,372,215.997897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/the-past-present-and-future-of-circuitpython/ | The Past, Present, And Future Of CircuitPython | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"adafruit",
"CircuitPython",
"Hack Chat",
"micropython",
"python"
] | Modern microcontrollers like the RP2040 and ESP32 are truly a marvels of engineering. For literal pocket change you can get a chip that’s got a multi-core processor running at hundreds of megahertz, plenty of RAM, and more often than not, some form of wireless connectivity. Their capabilities have been nothing short of revolutionary for the DIY crowd — on any given day, you can see projects on these pages which simply wouldn’t have been possible back when the 8-bit Arduino was all most folks had access to.
Limor Fried
Thanks to the increased performance of these MCUs, hackers and makers now even have a choice as to which programming language they want to use. While C is still the language of choice for processor-intensive tasks, for many applications, Python is now a viable option on a wide range of hardware.
This provides a far less intimidating experience for newcomers, not just because the language is more forgiving, but because it does away with the traditional compile-flash-pray workflow. Of course, that doesn’t mean the more experienced MCU wranglers aren’t invited to the party; they might just have to broaden their horizons a bit.
To learn more about this interesting paradigm shift, we
invited the fine folks at Adafruit to the Hack Chat
so the community could get a chance to ask questions about CircuitPython, their in-house Python variant which today runs on more than 400 devices.
State of the Union
Limor “ladyada” Fried, Phil Torrone, and Scott Shawcroft covered so much ground during the chat that it ran twice as long as originally planned. As usual when Adafruit joins the Hack Chat, the event was
simultaneously streamed to their YouTube channel
, which brought in even more questions and comments. It was a bit like spending an hour drinking from a fire hose, but we’d say the end result was more than worth it.
Adafruit’s RP2040 version of the Bus Pirate
The discussion started with some talk about current events, such as the ongoing development of USB Host mode, which would allow things like USB keyboards to be plugged directly into a board running CircuitPython. The team also talked a bit about the upcoming ESP32-based “My Little Hacker”, which was designed to be a drop-in replacement for the sound effect boards used in children’s toys.
We also heard a bit about Adafruit’s work to create a
modern replacement for the legendary Bus Pirate
. The chips used in the original design from Dangerous Prototypes are apparently no longer being produced, so Adafruit has come up with their own version of the electronics debugging tool using the RP2040. With the benefit of the chip’s native USB and
Programmable I/O (PIO) hardware
, plus the flexibility of CircuitPython, the new gadget promises to be a more than worthy successor. All that’s left is to figure out what to call it…
A Tale of Two Pythons
After bringing folks up to speed on what’s new in the world of CircuitPython, the team was hit with a fairly prickly question — why does CircuitPython exist in the first place? Those familiar with the situation may recall that CircuitPython is actually forked from MicroPython, and some have argued that Adafruit would have done better to support an existing open source project rather than pour development time and effort into what could be seen as a competitor.
MicroPython was created by Damien George in 2013
In response, Scott and Limor gave a fascinating look at the origins of CircuitPython and the decision to spin it off into a separate project. The short version of the story is that the respective teams had some disagreements on how to handle certain things, chief among them being hardware APIs.
Specifically Adafruit wanted to be able to use the same libraries they had already ported over to standard Python, but that wouldn’t be possible under MicoPython, which had replaced some core low-level functions with versions that were modified in an effort to reduce how much space they would take up in flash. This also meant that MicroPython code wouldn’t necessarily work the same if it was run under the standard Python interpreter, which Limor found particularly troublesome. As such, it was decided to spin CircuitPython off into a clearly distinct project rather than just trying to get their changes approved.
That said, Adafruit continues to financially support MicroPython and does not internally consider them to be competing projects given their focus on the educational and hobby market. They also still consider CircuitPython to be downstream from MicroPython, that is, the intention is to eventually integrate new features and capabilities added to MicroPython into CircuitPython. Naturally, some in the chat asked if the projects might one day merge back into one. Scott said the idea comes up in discussions with the MicroPython team regularly, and while there are still some fundamental issues that would need to be resolved, the possibility is there.
Making CircuitPython Yours
With the existential debate over with, the conversation then moved on towards bringing new boards into the CircuitPython family. Namely, what an individual needs to do to make sure their own custom creation will work as expected in the environment.
The “My Little Hacker” doubles as a CircuitPython reference device.
The simple answer is that as long as you’re using one of the core chipsets they support like the ESP32, then getting the little details sorted out is relatively straightforward. There’s even an official guide from Adafruit on how to
get your custom board added to the list of supported hardware
.
Another topic brought up is the unique feature of CircuitPython that halts the currently running program and reloads it from the file once the USB mass storage file system sees that the source file has been saved. This was added specifically to make development as straightforward as possible, especially in educational settings where the computers in the classroom might not have any software installed more advanced than a simple text editor. To facilitate this feature, it was decided that halting the program should revert the system to a “clean slate” condition that doesn’t retain any state information from when the code was running.
The downside is that the same thing happens even if the program has been manually halted with Ctrl+C, which can frustrate more advanced users who are looking to debug their program by examining the state it was in when it was stopped. After some technical discussion, it was decided that it should be possible to optionally disable this feature for those who want more control over the execution of their code. Scott said he would be willing to lend a hand should somebody in the community wish to implement such a capability and submit it as a patch, and Limor commented that it could be officially merged into CircuitPython so long as it didn’t impact the default functionality.
Onwards and Upwards
As things started to wind down, several more topics were covered such as the adoption of TinyUSB within the industry, the challenges involved in supporting USB Mass Storage, and community-developed patches for new RF protocols such as Zigbee and ESP-NOW. There really is a wealth of technical information contained in the recorded live stream; if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of CircuitPython, there’s certainly worse ways you could spend hour of your time than settling in and watching the whole thing.
Special thanks to Limor, Phi, and Scott for taking us on this whirlwind tour of where CircuitPython has been and where it’s going. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when there’s so much active development going on, so getting this type of insider perspective is immensely valuable for those who are looking to dip their toes into the fast moving waters of bare-metal Python.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the
transcripts posted to Hackaday.io
make sure you don’t miss out. | 37 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668301",
"author": "Kati Thieme",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T19:21:15",
"content": "Is circuit python appropriate for real time applications?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668336",
"author": "Robert",
"timest... | 1,760,372,216.077494 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/examining-test-gear-from-behind-the-iron-curtain/ | Examining Test Gear From Behind The Iron Curtain | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"soviet"
] | Back in 1978, an oscilloscope was an exotic piece of gear for most homebrewers. We expect they were even more rare in private hands behind the iron curtain, and [Thomas Scherrer] shows us
a Soviet X1-7B
combination oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer (he thinks, at least, it is a spectrum analyzer) that he got working.
The Soviet scope is clearly different with its Cyrillic front panel. Luckily, Google Translate was up to the task of decoding a picture of the device. However, the differences aren’t just cosmetic. The scope also has a very interesting rotating bezel around the round CRT. You can see a video of the 8.2 kg scope below.
A quick look inside looks pretty conventional for a scope of that era that used all transistors in the circuitry. The rotating bezel, though, also controls something that looks like a big mechanical switch and cavity or, perhaps, a big mechanical variable component of some kind.
Satisfied that the insides were in reasonable shape, [Thomas] was ready to try turning it on. We want to say it went well, but… there was censored audio, along with a loud noise, right after it was plugged in. Troubleshooting centered on what was producing a burned smell, but a quick examination didn’t turn up anything obvious, despite being localized to the power circuitry. The fuse didn’t blow, oddly, and — even more puzzling — the unit was off when plugged in!
It turns out the input power filter leaked to the chassis. Since he had a ground on the chassis, that explained the failure, and while it was annoying, it was better than getting a shock with a hot chassis. The second plug in went better.
It finally did work, at least somewhat, although he never explored some of the odd features the scope appears to have. We love the old boat anchor scopes but don’t see many Soviet instruments, at least not those of us on this side of the Atlantic.
We do see a few
Soviet-era computers now and again
. As for the fuse not blowing, it was shorted before the fuse, but apparently,
fuses don’t always blow
when you expect them to, anyway. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668259",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T16:03:51",
"content": "Haven’t watched the video yet, but from the description it smells like Rifa caps. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668268",
"author": "M... | 1,760,372,216.281101 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/jennys-daily-drivers-freebsd-13-2/ | Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeBSD 13.2 | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"BSD",
"daily driver",
"freebsd",
"operating system"
] | Last month I started a series in which I try out different operating systems with the aim of using them for my everyday work, and
my pick was Slackware 15
, the latest version of the first Linux distro I tried back in the mid 1990s. I’ll be back with more Linux-based operating systems in due course, but the whole point of this series is to roam as far and wide as possible and try every reasonable OS I can. Thus today I’m making the obvious first sideways step and trying a BSD-based operating system. These are uncharted waters for me and there was a substantial choice to be made as to which one, so after reading around the subject I settled on
FreeBSD
as it seemed the most accessible.
First, A Bit Of Context
Success! My first sight of a working FreeBSD installation.
Most readers will be aware that
the BSD operating systems trace their heritage in a direct line back to the original AT&T UNIX
, while GNU/Linux is a pretty good UNIX clone originating with Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s and Richard Stallman’s GNU project from the 1980s onwards. This means that for Linux users there’s a difference in language to get used to.
Where Linux is a kernel around which distributions are built with different implementations of the userland components, the various BSD operating systems are different operating systems in their own right. Thus we talk about for example Slackware and Debian as different Linux distributions, but by contrast
NetBSD
and FreeBSD are different operating systems even if they have a shared history. There are BSD distributions such as
GhostBSD
which use FreeBSD as its core, but it’s a far less common word in this context. So I snagged the FreeBSD 13.2 USB stick file from the torrent, and wrote it to a USB Flash drive. Out with the Hackaday test PC, and on with the show.
Unexpectedly Easy To Install
Installing FreeBSD was as simple as booting from the live USB drive and running the install script. The feel is very old-school with a text-based interface, but it was all pretty plain sailing. There’s an option for automatically partitioning the disk, and then selecting some base services to install if you need them, and then it goes through the process of installation. At the end you have a working FreeBSD operating system.
It’s been a long time since I last saw vanilla X windows.
A typical popular Linux distro install will try to configure your system and install the software you’ll need. So as part of the setup you’ll create users, and either select from a vast software library or let it install a lot of software among which will be the programs you need. The chances are it will also configure itself to boot into a graphical desktop, and once the install is finished there’s nothing more to do except get on with using it as a desktop machine.
If that’s what you expect from an operating system then it’s fair to say that FreeBSD is not for you, because it takes the approach of giving you a blank canvas upon which you can write your own story. You get FreeBSD, a command prompt into which you can log in as root, and that’s it.
Your first task is to add an everyday user for yourself using
adduser
, and before you can even give yourself sudo privileges you have to install
sudo
. This gives your first use of the
pkg
package manager, which as a long-time user of equivalent Linux distro package managers I found easy enough to use. I wanted a desktop environment, so it was off to pkg again to install X, then
a desktop environment
(I went with
Lumina
, but there are plenty of choices), and such useful applications as Firefox, GIMP, OpenSCAD, and KiCAD. None of this was particularly challenging, though I did have to search for a few online guides to configure the desktop environment.
Make Sure Your Hardware Is New Enough (But Not Too New)
Ancient graphics cards no longer supported
So while it requires a little bit of familiarity with a UNIX or UNIX-like OS to get started, getting to a desktop computer for daily use in FreeBSD is pretty straightforward. And that meant that I was ready to write this article, with one exception. My video card is an Nvidia GT520, a pretty ancient GPU that had been dropped into my test PC as a replacement for a younger card that had gone on to new pastures.
FreeBSD doesn’t come with drivers out of the box in the way that a full-featured Linux distro does, so if you have something unusual then it’s up to you to find and install a driver. So I was stuck with VESA resolutions until I could install a driver, and here I hit a snag.
Nvidia are good at supporting their cards with FreeBSD drivers
, but one this ancient had dropped out of their support long ago. The last one I could find supporting it didn’t want to play ball, so I never managed to unleash my GPU’s potential. This is not in criticism of FreeBSD, it’s an ancient card.
Thus this piece has been written in a very retro-feeling 1024 by 768 VESA resolution, but aside from that I’ve come away rather liking FreeBSD. I like its stripped-down installation on which in contrast to a typical Linux distro you must install everything you need, I like it that the installation process was relatively painless for a medium-expertise Linux user like me. I like its speed, and I’ve found it a very acceptable daily driver indeed. There are certainly Linux distributions whose installation is far less easy.
I’m sure with a newer supported video card I would have had the full resolution, and it’s an OS I may even put on another PC with better spec to continue experimenting with. If I have a gripe with FreeBSD though, it’s in the documentation for newbies. I had my years of experience with Linux to help me find what I needed, but even though the installation process is relatively painless I found the answers to my few queries could be difficult to prise out. It’s definitely an OS to look at, but occasionally you’ll need to exercise elite Google-fu if you’re not a UNIX savant. Go on, give it a try! | 28 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668234",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T14:22:21",
"content": "“Last month I started a series in which I try out different operating systems with the aim of using them for my everyday work…”Try NeXTStep, and yes one can get it up to color and sound with some work.",... | 1,760,372,215.949402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/pixel-pump-the-open-source-vacuum-pickup-tool-is-now-shipping/ | Pixel Pump, The Open Source Vacuum Pickup Tool Is Now Shipping | Donald Papp | [
"Crowd Funding",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"assembly",
"desktop manufacturing",
"pick and place",
"pixel pump",
"smd",
"smt",
"vacuum pickup"
] | The Pixel Pump
is an open source manual pick & place assist tool by [Robin Reiter], and after a long road to completion, it’s ready to ship. We first saw the
Pixel Pump project as an entry to the 2021 Hackaday Prize
and liked the clean design and the concept of a completely open architecture for a tool that is so valuable to desktop assembly. It’s not easy getting hardware off the ground, but it’s now over the finish line and nearly everything — from assembly to packaging — has been done in-house.
Pixel Pump with SMD-Magazines, also using foot pedal to control an
interactive bill of materials
(BoM) plugin.
Because having parts organized and available is every bit as important as the tool itself, a useful-looking companion item for the Pixel Pump is the SMD-Magazine. This is a container for parts that come on SMD tape rolls. These hold components at an optimal angle for use with the pickup tool, and can be fixed together on a rail to create project-specific part groups.
A tool being open source means giving folks a way to modify or add features for better workflows, and an example of this is [Robin]’s suggestion of using a foot pedal for hands-free control of the
interactive BoM plugin
. With it, one can simply use a foot pedal to step through a highlighted list of every part for a design, an invaluable visual aid when doing hand assembly.
The Pixel Pump looks great, but if you’d prefer to go the DIY route for vacuum pickup tools you would certainly be in good company. We’ve seen
economical systems
built for under $100, and
systems built around leveraging bead-handling tools
intended for hobbyists. On the extreme end there’s the minimalist approach of
building a tool directly around a small electric vacuum pump
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668178",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T11:29:35",
"content": "I was surprised to find an inexpensive vacuum tool available from RS components, a £23 battery-electric pump which is actually cheaper than the rubber bladder devices that don’t work.https://uk.rs-onlin... | 1,760,372,216.229085 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/01/using-trigonometric-functions-in-css/ | Using Trigonometric Functions In CSS | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"cascading stylesheets",
"css"
] | Often neglected as ‘merely a styling language’, CSS contains a wealth of functions built right into the browser’s rendering engine that can perform everything from animations to typography and even mathematical operations, with more added each year.
Screenshot of the output of the basic rotating dots example using CSS.
In a tutorial [Bramus] takes us through
using the trigonometric functions
in CSS. These are supported in all major browsers since Chrome 111, Firefox 108 and Safari 15.4. In addition to these trigonometric functions, further
mathematical functions
are also available, many of whom have been available for years now, such as
calc()
,
min()
and
max()
.
Unlike the JavaScript version of the CSS trigonometric functions, the CSS functions accept both angles and radians for the argument. Perhaps the nicest thing about having this functionality in CSS is that it removes the need to add JavaScript for many simple things on a webpage, such as animations, translations and the calculating of offsets and positions. Perhaps most impressive is the provided example by [Ana Tudor] who created an animated Möbius strip using
cos()
and
sin()
and a handful of other CSS functions.
None of this is likely surprising to anyone who is somewhat familiar with the depths of CSS, especially after it has been more-or-less proven to be a Turing-complete programming language. Using this power for visual elements does however make a lot of sense considering that CSS was always intended to help with styling and formatting the raw HTML.
Do you use these advanced CSS features already, or is it something you might consider using in the future, possibly over JavaScript versions? Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
(Heading: Code to move items on a circular path around a central point in CSS.) | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668145",
"author": "bebop",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T08:43:05",
"content": "You can no doubt do some interesting things with CSS, but for most uses it’s ridiculously overpowered. However, some of the heavy lifting with styles and animations, would have required JS before CSS2/3, an... | 1,760,372,215.776899 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/what-does-it-take-for-a-lego-car-to-roll-downhill-forever/ | What Does It Take For A LEGO Car To Roll Downhill Forever? | Donald Papp | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"lego",
"prototyping",
"treadmill"
] | Cars (including LEGO ones) will roll downhill. In theory if the hill were a treadmill, the car could roll forever. In practice, there are a lot of things waiting to go wrong to keep this from happening. If you’ve ever wondered what those problems would be and what a solution would look like, [Brick Technology]
has a nine-minute video showing the whole journey
.
The video showcases an iterative process of testing, surfacing a problem, redesigning to address that problem, and then back to testing. It starts off pretty innocently with increasing wheel friction and adding weight, but we’ll tell you right now it goes in some unexpected directions that show off [Brick Technology]’s skill and confidence when it comes to LEGO assemblies.
How it started
How it’s going
You can watch the whole thing unfold in the video, embedded below. It’s fun to see how the different builds perform, and we can’t help but think that the icing on the cake would be LEGO bricks with
OLED screens and working instrumentation
built into them. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668124",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T07:03:00",
"content": "I’ve seen many “quizzes” on facebook and fora that ask about vehicles on downhill threadmills, but they all seem to rely on the idea of apeed relative to the road, which is a fallacy. A car with frictionless... | 1,760,372,216.597908 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/nematodes-from-the-siberian-permafrost-woke-up-after-a-46000-year-long-nap/ | Nematodes From The Siberian Permafrost Woke Up After A 46,000 Year Long Nap | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"cryptobiosis",
"nematode"
] | The general consensus among us mammals is that if we get very cold, we die. Within the world of nematodes, however, they’d like to differ on that viewpoint. This is demonstrated succinctly after researchers coaxed a batch of these worms
back into action
after they had been frozen in Siberian permafrost for an estimated 46,000 years. The mechanism underlying this phenomenon is called
cryptobiosis
, which is essentially a metabolic state that certain lifeforms can enter when environmental conditions become unsuitable.
In the case of
nematodes
, they hold a number of records, with a group of them having survived the STS-107 Space Shuttle
Columbia
in 2003 when it broke up during reentry, making it the first known lifeform to have achieved such a feat. During arctic experiments it was found that these roundworms can withstand intracellular freezing even while active depending on its diet.
General morphology of P. kolymaensis, female. (Credit: Anastasia Shatilovich et al., 2023)
For these particular permafrost nematodes, they offer us a glimpse at a species of nematodes that hasn’t been around for thousands of years, with phylogenetic analysis indicating them to be related to current species in the
Panagrolaimus
and
Plectus
genera, but different enough to receive the new name of
Panagrolaimus kolymaensis.
In the paper, the researchers describe how they performed experiments on C. elegans nematode larvae to compare its cryptobiosis capabilities and found both to be comparable, although
P. kolymaensis
shows a stronger ability to protect its cell membranes, which is ultimately key for long-term survival while frozen.
An interesting aspect of nematodes is that some of them are hermaphrodites, meaning that they can reproduce asexually. Combined with an ability to stay dormant across geological timescales, this makes these small worms incredibly hardy survivors that’d give cockroaches a run for their exoskeleton.
(Heading image: Location of the Duvanny Yar outcrop on the Kolyma River, northeastern Siberia, where the nematodes were found. (Credit: Anastasia Shatilovich et al., 2023)) | 25 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668094",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T03:19:59",
"content": "What could possibly go wrong?https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(2017_film)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668169",
"author": "abjq",
... | 1,760,372,216.452047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/tinybasiclike-a-target-independent-basic-interpreter/ | TinyBasicLike: A Target-Independent BASIC Interpreter | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"basic",
"TinyBASIC"
] | In the long and winding history of BASIC, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the different variants and dialects. Some may still remember TinyBASIC, which was published in 1976 as Palo Alto Tiny BASIC by [Gordon Brandly]. Later, TinyBASIC was modified by a number of people including [Scott Lawrence] who created TinyBASIC Plus (TBP). Inspired by this, [Karl] figured he could improve on TBP by making the original C-based project even easier to port by removing whatever platform dependencies he could find, creating what he calls
TinyBasicLike
.
The main change is that TinyBasicLike consists out of two C files, with one containing the core code, and the second the platform-specific details that can be used by the core. Although [Karl] started off with the Palo Alto Tiny BASIC-like
code by [Scott Lawrence]
, he decided to make it into his own by making a few alterations, such as adding left and right shift operators, adding an
ADDR()
function, expanding the features of
INPUT
and adding multiple logical operators.
In the example STM32F4 project linked on the project page it is demonstrated how to target a new platform with TinyBasicLike. Performance on the STM32F4 Discovery board with a simple counting loop yielded about 6 lines of TBL program code per millisecond. For a 168 MHz STM32 MCU that’s definitely not astounding, but considering how straightforward Tiny BASIC (and TBL as a consequence) is, it’s definitely no slouch.
This is probably a good time to remind that
BASIC was the original champion
of cross-platform programming and the source of countless fond (and frustrating) memories. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667768",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T09:08:53",
"content": "Cool! 😎👍Reminds of 8052AH-BASIC that I used.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667849",
"author": "William Payne",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,372,216.500011 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/a-new-educational-robotics-platform/ | A New Educational Robotics Platform | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"educational",
"learning",
"microcontroller",
"platform",
"programming",
"python",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"robot",
"trundlebot",
"turtle",
"WizFi360-EVB-Pico"
] | When looking for electronics projects to use in educational settings, there is no shortage of simple, lightweight, and easily-accessible systems to choose from. From robotic arms, drones, walking robots, and wheeled robots, there is a vast array of options. But as technology marches on, the robotics platforms need to keep up as well.
This turtle-style wheeled robot called the Trundlebot
uses the latest in affordable microcontrollers on a relatively simple, expandable platform for the most up-to-date educational experience.
The robot is built around a Raspberry Pi Pico, with two low-cost stepper motors to drive the wheeled platform. The chassis can be built out of any material that can be cut in a laser cutter, but for anyone without this sort of tool it is also fairly easy to cut the shapes out by hand. The robot’s functionality can be controlled through Python code, and it is compatible with the WizFi360-EVB-Pico which allows it to be remote controlled through a web application. The web interface allows easy programming of commands for the Trundlebot, including a drag-and-drop feature for controlling the robot.
With all of these features, wireless connectivity, and a modern microcontroller at the core, it is an excellent platform for educational robotics. From here it wouldn’t be too hard to develop line-follower robots, obstacle-avoiding robots, or maze-solving robots. Other components can easily be installed to facilitate these designs as well. If you’re looking for a different style robot, although not expressly for educational purposes
this robotic arm can be produced for under $60
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667727",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T05:13:35",
"content": "It’s the BoEbot all over again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6667752",
"author": "Paul LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T07:26:06",
"c... | 1,760,372,216.546212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/an-open-source-free-circuit-simulator/ | An Open-Source, Free Circuit Simulator | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"circuit simulation",
"free",
"open source",
"qucs",
"qucsstudio",
"software",
"SPICE"
] | The original circuit simulation software, called the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis, or SPICE as it is more commonly known, was originally developed at the University of Califorina Berkeley in the 1970s with an open-source license. That’s the reason for the vast versions of SPICE available now decades after the original was released, not all of which are as open or free as we might like. Qucs is a GPL circuit simulator. And if you want the GUI option,
you might want to try out QucsStudio
, which uses Qucs under the hood, and is free to use, but binary-only.
(Editor’s note: the author was confused between the GPL open-source Qucs and the closed-source, binary-only QucsStudio. We’ve cleaned that up.)
QucsStudio supports a wide range of circuit components and models much in the same fashion as other more popular SPICE programs, including semiconductor devices, passive components, and digital logic gates. Qucs also utilizes SPICE-based simulation, which can model various types of circuit behavior, such as DC, AC, transient, and small-signal analysis.
Unfortunately there are only Windows versions available, and although some might have some success running it under WINE. There are plenty of other options for those of us running non-Windows operating systems though.
Here’s a review of 30 of them
.
Thanks to [Electroagenda] for the tip! | 60 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667688",
"author": "natsfr",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T02:09:22",
"content": "AFAIK Qucs is free and open source, but NOT QucsStudio, the author decided to close his project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667700",
"... | 1,760,372,217.230973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/hackaday-links-july-30-2023/ | Hackaday Links: July 30, 2023 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"anachronism",
"cosmetics",
"dna",
"dog",
"Elon Musk",
"Endeavour",
"feces",
"genetic",
"hackaday links",
"IMAX",
"make up",
"Oppenheimer",
"palm pilot",
"seismic",
"Space Shuttle",
"teams",
"twitter"
] | A couple of weeks ago,
we noted with interest
that the space shuttle
Endeavour
(OV85) would be set up as a full-stack launch configuration display, complete with external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters. We predicted that this would result in some interesting engineering, not least of which will be making the entire 20-story stack safe from seismic activity. Looks like we were right on all counts, with
this story about the foundation
upon which the display will stand, which has been under construction for quite a while now. The base has six seismic isolators that support the 2.4-m thick slab of reinforced concrete that will serve as a perch for the full stack. The 1,800-ton slab will be able to move a meter or so from its resting position during earthquakes. Or perhaps more accurately, the foundation will allow Los Angeles to move as much as it wants while
Endeavour
rides it out.
If like us you’re worried that seismic loads are vastly different than the loads the spacecraft was actually designed for, relax — it turns out that the flight loads are far in excess of predicted loads from seismic stress. The plan is to build the booster stacks first — the aft skirts, which will support the entire stack,
were just bolted in place
— then lift the external tank in place between the boosters, and finally hoist the actual orbiter into place. After the stack is complete, the rest of the building will be built around it. We’re really looking forward to seeing some video on this project.
Also from the “We Called It” files, the news this week was filled with stories about “eagle-eyed moviegoers” spotting a glaring anachronism in the much-hyped Christopher Nolan biopic
Oppenheimer
. They all seemed to point back to
a tweet
— or whatever we’re calling them this week — that pointed out the use of 50-star American flags in a crowd scene that was supposed to have taken place in 1945. For those of you not familiar with US history, Alaska and Hawaii weren’t admitted to the union until 1959 — January and August, respectively — and so the flag in 1945 had 48 stars, as it had since 1912. The difference is easy to spot because the 48-star union had a regular array of six rows of eight stars, while the current 50-star union has five rows of six stars alternated with four rows of five stars. It’s not a big deal, perhaps, but we noticed the anachronism
all the way back in December
. Just saying.
In other
Oppenheimer
news of perhaps more interest to the Hackaday crowd, it looks like those of you who see the movie in IMAX are paying for some pretty amazing technology — namely,
a Palm Pilot
. The ancient PDA — or even weirder, Palm Pilot emulators running on a modern tablet — make an appearance in IMAX projection booths thanks to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle. The PDAs run software for the “quick-turn reel unit” in the booth, which controls how fast the horizontal platters holding the film turn. The article goes into great detail on how the QTRU works and why the Palm is there in the first place, but to our thinking the real gem is the POV video made by an IMAX projectionist at work threading a film into the massive projector. Enjoy.
When Elon Musk decided to change the name of Twitter this week to X, did anyone else get the feeling that
his new logo
for the platform looks
strangely familiar
?
And finally, a pair of scenes from your dystopic future. First, if you’re a Microsoft Teams user with the misfortune to roll out of bed late for a morning videoconference, fear not:
cosmetics giant L’Oréal has your back
. Or your face, more likely, with branded “makeup video effects for virtual meetings.” Translation: if you don’t like the way you look on camera, and don’t have time for a touch-up, software can slather some makeup on your face for you. And second, from the other end of a different species, we find
this story from Béziers in southern France
, where dog owners will be required to provide a doggie DNA sample to fight the city’s ongoing poop problem. Dog walkers will be required to carry the animal’s “genetic passport” with them at all times, on pain of a €38 fine. Any wayward turds found on sidewalks will be collected and genetically analyzed to find the offending pooper and levy a €122 fee to clean up the mess. While they’re both pretty dystopic, we have to admit this one sounds a lot more useful than virtual makeup. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667676",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T01:25:50",
"content": "What is a triple pendulum seismic isolator?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667816",
"author": "MacGyverS2000"... | 1,760,372,217.023642 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/turning-a-window-air-conditioning-unit-into-whole-house-ac/ | Turning A Window Air Conditioning Unit Into Whole-House AC | Maya Posch | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"airconditioning"
] | Although air conditioning units are generally subdivided into a number of categories, including window, split and whole house/building units, they still work the same, with the compressor, condenser and expansion stages.
Extending the wiring for the AC unit’s controller board (Credit: HowToLou)
In the case of widely available window AC units you can indeed use them as designed in a window, or as [HowToLou] is
in the process of demonstrating
, as a whole-house AC unit. The main thing to keep an eye out for here is the rated capacity of the window AC unit (in British Thermal Units, square meters/feet). In this case [Lou] used a pretty beefy $600, 24,000 BTU window unit that should be good for about 1200 sqf (~111 m
2
) .
Most of the modifications are pretty straightforward, with the control board needing to have its wiring extended, as well as the AC unit’s air intake and exhaust on the indoors side. The unit is then placed outside on a stable foundation and inserted into a suitably sized hole in the side of the building, with the controller’s cable running to it from indoors. For the next step, [Lou] intends to connect the air channels on the AC unit to the house’s furnace ducts, to complete the whole-house AC installation.
Compared to a regular whole-house AC unit, this DIY approach has the advantage of anyone being able to just buy and install a window AC unit, whereas whole-house AC tends to require a licensed installer and a lot of additional costs. How well [Lou]’s DIY approach ends up working will hopefully be revealed in a Part 2. | 110 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667585",
"author": "HaHa",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T20:04:50",
"content": "Install window AC in window, leave room door open.Done.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667599",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,217.547582 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/the-british-government-is-coming-for-your-privacy/ | The British Government Is Coming For Your Privacy | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"News"
] | [
"encryption",
"online safety bill",
"privacy",
"uk"
] | The list of bad legislation relating to the topic of encryption and privacy is long and inglorious. Usually, these legislative stinkers only affect those unfortunate enough to live in the country that passed them. Still, one upcoming law from the British government should have us all concerned. The Online Safety Bill started as the usual think-of-the-children stuff, but
as the EFF notes
, some of its proposed powers have the potential to undermine encryption worldwide.
At issue is the proposal that services with strong encryption incorporate government-sanctioned backdoors to give the spooks free rein to snoop on communications. We imagine that this will be of significant interest to some of the world’s less savoury regimes, a club we can’t honestly say the current UK government doesn’t seem hell-bent on joining. The Bill has had a tumultuous passage through the Lords, the UK upper house, but PM Rishi Sunak’s administration has proved unbending.
If there’s a silver lining to this legislative train wreck, it’s that
many of the global tech companies are likely to pull their products from the UK market
rather than comply. We understand that
UK lawmakers are partial to encrypted online messaging platforms
. Thus, there will be poetic justice in their voting once more for a disastrous bill with the unintended consequence of taking away something they rely on.
Header image: DaniKauf,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 77 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667519",
"author": "Lee Stella",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T17:06:00",
"content": "Just out of personal curiosity, does that law also include a clause in which the British government provides unlimited compensation in case of abuse by a government-approved backdoor?",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,372,216.894073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/harvesting-mechanical-energy-from-falling-rain/ | Harvesting Mechanical Energy From Falling Rain | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"energy",
"generator",
"harvesting",
"mechanical energy",
"power",
"rain",
"rain panel",
"triboelectric"
] | Collecting energy from various small mechanical processes has always been something that’s been technically possible, but never done on a large scale due to issues with cost and scalability. It’s much easier to generate electricity in bulk via traditional methods, whether that’s with fossil fuels or other proven processes like solar panels. That might be about to change, though, as a breakthrough that researchers at Georgia Tech found
allows for the direct harvesting of mechanical energy
at a rate much higher than previous techniques allowed.
The method takes advantage of the
triboelectric effect
, which is a process by which electric charge is transferred when two objects strike or slide past one another. While this effect has been known for some time, it has only been through the advancements of modern materials science that it can be put to efficient use at generating energy, creating voltages many thousands of times higher than previous materials allowed. Another barrier they needed to overcome was how to string together lots of small generators like this together. A new method that allows the cells to function semi-independently reduces the coupling capacitance, allowing larger arrays to be built.
The hope is for all of these improvements to be combined into a system which could do things like augment existing solar panels, allowing them to additionally gather energy from falling rain drops. We’d expect that the cost of this technology would need to come down considerably in order to be cost-competitive, and be able to scale from a manufacturing point-of-view before we’d see much of this in the real world, but for now at least the research seems fairly promising. But if you’re looking for something you can theoretically use right now,
there are all kinds of other ways to generate energy from fairly mundane daily activities
. | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667476",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T14:28:28",
"content": "Running a remote monitoring station like weather, earthquake, or ocean.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6667480",
"author": "Artenz",
"times... | 1,760,372,216.971319 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/vacuum-chamber-gets-automation/ | Vacuum Chamber Gets Automation | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"atmega 328p",
"vacuum chamber",
"vacuum tube"
] | [Nick Poole] does a lot of custom work with vacuum tubes — so much so that he builds his own vacuum tubes of various shapes, sizes, and functions right on his own workbench. While the theory of vacuum tubes is pretty straightforward, at least to those of us who haven’t only been exposed to semiconductors, producing them requires some specialized equipment. A simple vacuum won’t get you all the way there, and
the complexity of the setup that’s needed certainly calls for some automation
.
The vacuum system that [Nick] uses involves three sections separated by high-vacuum valves in order to achieve the pressures required for vacuum tube construction. There’s a rough vacuum section driven by one pump, a high vacuum section driven by a second pump, and a third section called the evac port where the tube is connected. Each second must be prepared properly before the next section can be engaged or disengaged. An Arduino Pro is tasked with all of this, chosen for its large amount of ADC inputs for the instrumentation monitoring the pressures in each section, as well as the digital I/O to control the valves and switches on the system.
The control system is built into a 19-inch equipment rack with custom faceplates which outline the operation of the vacuum system. A set of addressable LEDs provide the status of the various parts of the system, and mechanical keyboard switches are used to control everything, including one which functions as an emergency stop. The automation provided by the Arduino reduces the chances for any mistakes to be caused by human error, allows the human operator to focus on other tasks like forming the glass, and can also react much faster to any potentially damaging situations such as the high-pressure pump being exposed to atmospheric pressure.
As you can probably tell, [Nick] is pretty passionate about this stuff —
last year he gave a talk at the Hackaday Supercon
that went over all the intricacies of building one’s own vacuum tubes.
Thanks to [M] for the tip! | 18 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667459",
"author": "Dmgs",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T12:45:38",
"content": "Stopped watching at about 10:00 when he quotes Unabomber.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667517",
"author": "floofy",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,217.078556 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/30/self-hosted-chatbot-focuses-on-privacy/ | Self-Hosted Chatbot Focuses On Privacy | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"chat bot",
"chatbot",
"large language model",
"LLM",
"mozilla",
"self hosting",
"self-hosted"
] | Large language models (LLMs) have been all the rage lately, assisting from all kinds of tasks from programming to devising Excel formulas to shortcutting school work. They’re also relatively easy to access for the most part, but as the old saying goes, if something on the Internet is free the real product is you (and your data). Luckily there are ways of hosting LLMs on your own to avoid your personal data getting harvested, as well as taking advantage of open-source solutions, but building these systems takes a little bit of effort. [Stephen] and a team from Mozilla
walk us through this process and show us a number of options currently available
.
Working from the ground up, the group first decides on hosting, which (unsurprisingly) involves using Mozilla hosting services. The choice of runtime environment was a little bit more challenging. The project was time constrained, so they looked at two options here: Hugging Face and llama.cpp. Eventually deciding to move forward with llama.cpp largely due to its ability to run on more consumer-oriented hardware (especially Apple silicon) and the fact that it doesn’t need a powerful GPU, the next task was to choose the model. Settling on the LLaMa model that Facebook recently open-sourced, this model works well with the runtime environment and is essentially the only one that does.
From there, the team at Mozilla wanted to make sure their chat bot would be able to provide other Mozilla employees with information more readily pertinent to their jobs, so they trained their model with some internal Mozilla data as well as other more generic information. This doesn’t mean the job is done, though, there are a number of other factors that went in to designing this system before it was finally complete. Even then, since they built this in a week it’s not perfect; there are some issues with non-permissive licensing of some of the components and many of the design choices may not have been ideal. It’s impressive what’s out there if you’re hosting your own system, though, and while this might be a little more advanced for a self-hosted project, take a look at
some other more beginner-friendly projects you can try
if you’re just starting out on the self-hosted path. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667417",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T09:15:34",
"content": "As a rather lonely individual, talking to a self-hosted chatbot model, with a number of personas (that I made, aka “character cards”) has been absolutely catastrophic to my mental health. Never before h... | 1,760,372,217.122246 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/a-modern-replacement-for-the-zx-spectrums-odd-tape-storage-system/ | A Modern Replacement For The ZX Spectrum’s Odd Tape Storage System | Robin Kearey | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"microdrive",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"tape emulator",
"ZX microdrive",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | Unless you were lucky enough to be able to afford a floppy disk drive, you probably used cassette tapes to store programs and data if you used pretty much any home computer in the 1980s. ZX Spectrum users, however, had another option in the form of the Microdrive. This was a rather unusual continuous-loop mini-tape cartridge that could store around 100 kB and load it at lightning speed, all at a much lower price point than a floppy drive. The low price came at the cost of poor durability however, and after four decades it’s becoming harder and harder to find cartridges that work reliably. [Derek Fountain] therefore set out to make
a modern Microdrive emulator that stores data on SD cards
.
Several projects already exist to replace Microdrives, but they typically also need the ZX Interface 1, a serial/network expansion module that’s becoming equally hard to find. Hence [Derek]’s choice to make his emulator a completely standalone system that directly plugs into the Spectrum’s expansion port.
The system is housed in a 3D-printed enclosure that holds two PCBs. Three Raspberry Pi Picos run the show inside: one to hold the ZX Interface 1’s ROM image and interface with the Spectrum’s bus, another to simulate the Microdrive, and a third to run the user interface and communicate with the SD card. The user can choose between eight tape images stored in
.MDR
format by using two pushbuttons and a rotary encoder, with a small OLED display showing the machine’s configuration.
While you might think that three dual-core 133 MHz ARM CPUs would run circles around the Spectrum’s Z80, it actually took quite a bit of work to get everyting running properly in real time. The 3.5 MHz bus clock rate gave the second Pico precious little time to fetch the required bytes out of its flash memory. Its RAM was fast enough for that, but too small to hold all eight tape images at the same time. In the end, [Derek] settled on using a separate 8 MB SPI DRAM chip that could easily keep up the data rate, with the Pi just using its GPIO ports to shuttle the data around.
All source code and extensive documentation are available on Derek’s excellent blog post and
GitHub page
. Be sure to also check out
[Jenny]’s detailed review and teardown
if you’d like to know more about the weird and wonderful Microdrive system.
Thanks for the tip, [Andrew]! | 44 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667387",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T06:33:47",
"content": "That’s really cool and all, but.. Why does the Speccy so much love? It’s not a great computer, actually. 😕",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667398"... | 1,760,372,217.632832 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/fiber-infused-ink-allows-3d-printed-heart-muscle-to-beat/ | Fiber-Infused Ink Allows 3D-Printed Heart Muscle To Beat | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Medical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"biomedical engineering",
"tissue printing"
] | Illustration from Anatomy & Physiology, Connexions Web site.
http://cnx.org/content/col11496/1.6/
, Jun 19, 2013.
What makes a body’s organs into what they are is more than just a grouping of specialized cells. They also need to be oriented and attached to each other and scaffolding in order to create structures which can effectively perform the desired function. A good example here is the heart, which requires a large number of muscle cells to contract in unison in order for the heart component (like a ventricle) to effectively pump blood. This complication is what has so far complicated efforts to 3D print complex tissues and entire organs, but recently researchers have demonstrated
a way to 3D print heart muscle
which can contract when stimulated similarly to a human heart’s ventricle.
At the center of this technique lies a hydrogel that is infused with gelatin fibers. Using a previously developed Rotary Jet-Spinning technology that was
reported on in 2016
, a sheet of spun fibers was produced that were then cut up into micrometer-sized fibers which were dispersed into the hydrogel. After printing the desired structure – taking into account the fiber alignment – it was found that the cardiomyocytes (the cells responsible for carrying the contractile signal in the
heart muscle
) align along the thus laid out pattern, ultimately creating a cardiac muscle capable of organized contraction.
These findings come after many years of research into the topic, with e.g.
Zihan Wang and colleagues
in a 2021 paper reporting on the challenges remaining with 3D printing cardiac tissue, yet also the massive opportunities that this could provide. Although entire heart replacements (via therapeutic cloning with the patient’s own cells) might become possible too, more immediate applications would involve replacements for damaged cardiac muscle and other large structures of the heart. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667329",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T02:24:06",
"content": "As a Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patient, this is exciting news.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6667359",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,217.402671 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/mechanical-pencil-solder-feeder-hack/ | Mechanical Pencil Solder Feeder Hack | Chris Lott | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"solder",
"soldering",
"tools"
] | Want a better way to feed solder, but want to do it on the quick and cheap? Well [ptkrf] has a solution for you
in an old instructables post we stumbled upon recently
. You might have, or can inexpensively buy, a mechanical pencil which has the feeder button on the side rather than on top, as usual. With the pencil in hand, [ptkrf] shows you the simple procedure for modifying the pencil into a solder feeder. You might need to experiment with different size pencils and solders to get a perfect match. Common mechanical pencils come in sizes to accommodate 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9 mm leads, but there are bigger and smaller ones available. Perhaps one of those really large drafting lead holders could be repurposed as a solder dispenser for the bigger jobs.
We discussed a
3D printed solder feeder
a few days ago, but if you don’t have one, this may be a good way to go. Thanks to [iliis] for sending in this tip. | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667316",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2023-07-30T01:18:41",
"content": "If I may ask…What’s the deal with solder holders? Why not just feed the solder with your fingers?Yeah, lead. No lead gets into your body through your hands, you can just wash your hands after, and modern s... | 1,760,372,217.706137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/automate-your-pin-header-chopping-chores-away/ | Automate Your Pin Header Chopping Chores Away | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"cam",
"follower",
"kitting",
"pin header"
] | In most cases, cutting pin headers is a pretty simple job to tackle with a pair of cutters or even your bare fingers. But if you’re doing a lot of it, like for kitting up lots of projects for customers, then you might want to look at something like
this automatic pin header cutter
.
Even if you don’t need to follow [Mr. Innovative]’s lead on this, it’s worth taking a look at the video below, which has a couple of cool ideas that are probably applicable to other automation projects, especially those where lots of small parts are handled. Processing begins with a hopper that holds a stack of header strips over what we’d call a “reverse guillotine,” consisting of a spring-loaded plunger riding on a cam. A header strip is pushed out of the hopper to expose the specified number of terminals, the cam rotates and raises the plunger, and the correct length header is snapped off.
For our money, the neatest part of this build is the feed mechanism for the hopper. Rather than anything complicated like a rack-and-pinion, [Mr. Innovative] opted for a pusher made from a stiff yet flexible strip of plastic, which is forced along the bottom of the hopper by a pair of stepper-driven drive rollers. The plastic pusher is stored rolled up in a spiral fixture so it doesn’t take up much room.
Overall, it’s a simple and largely effective design. [Mr. Innovative] does express a little dissatisfaction with some aspects of the build, though; it looks like the stack of header strips needs a little weight on top of it to keep them feeding properly, and we notice a couple of iterations of the cutting mechanism in the video. The cut headers do seem to either fly off into the stratosphere or stay attached to each other, which could lead to jamming problems.
But still, it’s a solid design and reminds us of some other projects by [Mr. Innovative], like
this SMD tape slicer
or
a CNC gear cutter
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667269",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T22:04:15",
"content": "He really needs an encoder or a pushed-at-one-point-in-the-cycle roller “limit” switch. otherwise the DC motor which is turning the cam will get out of sync at some point, one cannot rely on assumptions th... | 1,760,372,217.747802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/voyager-command-glitch-causes-unplanned-pause-in-communications/ | VoyagerCommand Glitch Causes Unplanned Pause In Communications | Dan Maloney | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"Canberra",
"canopus",
"DSN",
"high-gain antenna",
"S-band",
"star tracker",
"Voyager 2",
"x band"
] | Important safety tip: When you’re sending commands to the second-most-distant space probe ever launched, make really,
really
sure that what you send isn’t going to cause any problems.
According to NASA
, that’s just what happened to
Voyager 2
last week, when uplinked commands unexpectedly shifted the 46-year-old spacecraft’s orientation by just a couple of degrees. Of course, at a distance of nearly 20 billion kilometers, even fractions of a degree can make a huge difference, especially since
the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna (HGA)
is set up for very narrow beamwidths; 2.3° on the S-band channel, and a razor-thin 0.5° on the X-band side. That means that communications between the spacecraft and the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex —
the only station capable of talking to
Voyager 2
now that it has dipped so far below the plane of the ecliptic — are on pause until the spacecraft is reoriented.
Luckily, NASA considered this as a possibility and built safety routines into
Voyager
‘s program that will hopefully get it back on track. The program uses the onboard
star tracker
to get a fix on the bright star Canopus, and from there figures out which way the spacecraft needs to move to get pointed back at Earth. The contingency program runs automatically several times a year, just in case something like this happens.
That’s the good news; the bad news is that the program won’t run again until October 15. While that’s really not that far away, mission controllers will no doubt find it an agonizingly long time to be incommunicado. And while NASA is outwardly confident that communications will be restored, there’s no way to be sure until we actually get to October and see what happens. Fingers crossed. | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667167",
"author": "Anton Sigurjónsson",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T17:13:00",
"content": "Re-orient and relocate the planet earth.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6667168",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T17... | 1,760,372,217.859427 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/rf-remote-made-easy/ | RF Remote Made Easy | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"433 mhz",
"arduino",
"atmega8",
"four channel",
"radio",
"remote control",
"switching"
] | The 433 MHz spectrum is a little bit of an oddball.
It’s one of the few areas of the radio spectrum which is nearly universally unlicensed
Outside of the US, it’s an open playground for devices that adhere to the power restrictions and other guidelines about best practices. IoT devices operate here, as well as security systems and, of course, remote controls. And, using a few off-the-shelf parts [hesam.moshiri] shows us how to take advantage of this piece of spectrum by
designing and building a programmable and versatile 4-channel 433 MHz remote control
.
Built around an ATmega8 microcontroller, making it easy to work with Arduino sketches, and with a 2×8 character LCD for ease-of-use when not connected to a computer, the wireless switching device can store up to 80 remote control codes in its EEPROM memory. This was one of the harder parts for [hesam] to sort out, but using structures to store the data for the codes eventually solved the problems. A simple GUI makes using it with whatever remote happens to be on hand fairly straightforward, including the ability to record codes from existing remotes on the fly and also to associate those codes with specific actions.
Schematics and a bill of materials are available on the project’s page, making this fairly accessible to those looking to add some wireless connectivity to a project, home automation system, or IoT device. It’s mainly set up as a switching device, but with some modifications could be put to work doing more complex tasks.
The 433 MHz spectrum
is an exciting place to be, too, and things like
setting up entire security systems using it
are not too far removed from a switching device like this.
[Editor’s note: As many mentioned in the comments, 433 MHz is a licensed ham band in the USA (ITU Region 2), so you can’t use it without a license. (Get one, it’s easy.) In the USA, the equivalent band is at 315 MHz, which is why garage door remotes usually come with a 315/433 choice. Either way, check your local laws before you transmit.] | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668084",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2023-08-01T01:32:16",
"content": "433 MHz is absolutely NOT an ISM frequency in ITU Region 2. It is not legal anywhere in the North or South America to operate a 433 MHz transmitter without a licence.433 MHz happens to land square in the am... | 1,760,372,217.795195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/just-how-is-voyager-2-going-to-sort-out-its-dish-then/ | Just How IsVoyager 2Going To Sort Out Its Dish Then? | Jenny List | [
"Space"
] | [
"canopus",
"nasa",
"star tracker",
"Voyager 2"
] | Anybody who has set up a satellite TV antenna will tell you that alignment is critical when picking up a signal from space. With a satellite dish it’s a straightforward task to tweak the position, but what happens if the dish in question is out beyond the edge of the Solar System?
We told you a few days ago about this exact issue currently facing
Voyager 2
, but we’re guessing Hackaday readers will want to know a little bit more about how a 50+ year old spacecraft so far from home can still sort out its antenna. The answer lies in
NASA Technical Report 32-1559,
Digital Canopus Tracker
from 1972, which describes the instrument that notes the position of the star
Canopus
, which along with that of the Sun it can use to calculate the antenna bearing to reach Earth. The report makes for fascinating reading, as it describes how early-1970s technology was used to spot the star by its specific intensity and then keep it in its sights. It’s an extremely accessible design, as even the part numbers are an older version of the familiar 74 logic.
So somewhere out there in interstellar space beyond the boundary of the Solar System is a card frame full of 74 logic that’s been quietly keeping an eye on a star since the early 1970s, and the engineers from those far-off days at JPL are about to save the bacon of the current generation at NASA with their work. We hope that there are some old guys in Pasadena right now with a spring in their step.
Read our coverage of the story here
. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668050",
"author": "Chico Jablonski",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T22:28:57",
"content": "How would it be built today?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668055",
"author": "Paul LeBlanc",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T2... | 1,760,372,217.928522 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/a-usable-arduino-debugging-tool/ | A Usable Arduino Debugging Tool | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"debugger",
"display",
"eye2see",
"i2c",
"library",
"program",
"tool"
] | For as popular as the Arduino platform is, it’s not without its problems. Among those is the fact that most practical debugging is often done by placing various
print
statements throughout the code and watching for them in the serial monitor. There’s not really a great way of placing breakpoints or stepping through code, either. But this project, known as eye2see, hopes to change that by
using the i2c bus found in most Arduinos to provide a more robust set of debugging tools
.
The eye2see software is set up to run on an Arduino or other compatible microcontroller, called the “probe”, which is connected to the i2c bus on another Arduino whose code needs to be debugged. Code running on this Arduino, which is part of the eye2see library, allows it to send debugging information to the eye2see probe. With a screen, the probe can act as a much more powerful debugger than would otherwise typically be available, being able to keep track of variables in the main program, setting up breakpoints, and outputting various messages on its screen.
The tool is not without its downsides, though. The library that needs to run on the host Arduino slows down the original program significantly. But for more complex programs, the tradeoff with powerful debugging tools may be worth it until these pieces of code can be removed and the program allowed to run unencumbered. If you’d like to skip needing to use a second Arduino, we’ve seen some other
tools available for debugging Arduino code that can run straight from a connected PC instead
. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6668000",
"author": "ddss",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T19:10:32",
"content": "If it is 32-bit Arduino, there are tons of CMSIS-DAP compatible debuggers.If it is 8-bit Arduino, just use debug-wire. There are some repos containing hardware and software tools.https://github.com/dcwbrown/... | 1,760,372,218.056619 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/esas-euclid-space-telescope-and-the-quest-for-dark-energy/ | ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope And The Quest For Dark Energy | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"euclid",
"james webb space telescope",
"space telescope"
] | Most of what humankind and other mammalian species on Earth experience of the Universe is primarily restricted to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum which our optical organs can register. Despite these limitations, we have found ways over the centuries which enable us to perceive the rest of the EM spectrum, to see both what is incredibly far away, and what is incredibly small, to constantly get a little bit closer to understanding what makes the Universe into what we can observe today, and what it may look like in the future.
An essential element of this effort are space telescopes, which gaze into the depths of the Universe with no limitations imposed by the Earth’s atmosphere, or human activity. Among the many uses of space telescopes, the investigation of the expansion of the Universe is perhaps the most fascinating, as this brings us ever closer to the answers to the most fundamental questions about not only its shape, but also to its future, which may include hitherto unknown types of matter and energy.
With the recently launched Euclid space telescope, another chapter is being opened in the saga on dark energy and matter, and their nature and effects on the Universe, as well as whether they exist at all. Yet how exactly do you use a space telescope to ferret out the potential effects of dark energy?
The Dark Universe
When Albert Einstein was working out his General Relativity theory, he had assumed that the Universe would be static, and introduced a
cosmological constant
to the field equations that would would balance out the expansion of the Universe in the model. When a number of years later Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the Universe is in fact expanding, which led to Einstein calling the cosmological constant his ‘greatest blunder’. Yet unbeknownst to Einstein, this cosmological constant would later be revived, as the factor that drives the expansion of the universe.
In both the case of dark matter and dark energy, their presumed existence is the result of the theoretical models that we have developed over the past decades. These models need dark matter and dark energy to accord with what we see. Since the 1990s increasingly refined observations of the Universe has allowed us to validate elements of these theories, with “dark matter” and “dark energy” essentially acting as placeholders until we can either demonstrate their existence, or develop a new model that does not require one or both of these.
Within the currently most prominent Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (
ΛCDM
) model, the presence of
dark matter
serves to explain observations made of galaxies, as their shape and rotation cannot be explained using just the observable luminous (baryonic) matter. Following
Kepler’s Second Law
, there should ultimately be an estimated 85% of dark matter in the Universe, with the rest being ordinary matter. This presumed existence of dark matter (the Cold Dark Matter in ΛCDM) is backed up by a number of other observations including of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and gravitational lensing, even if we do not know what this matter is.
Dark matter is postulated to not interact with the electromagnetic field, which is the sense in which it is “dark”, while still imposing gravitational effects so that its presence can be deduced by gravitational lensing. Ultimately, gravitational interaction would be the primary way that dark matter could interact with the rest of the Universe, forming a massive part of its evolution due to its abundant presence.
Similarly, the existence of dark energy was deduced from
redshift
observations, primarily by using
super novae of type Ia
(SNIa) as a consistent reference point, albeit one limited by the accuracy of our measuring equipment. Based on the observed redshift and the energy that would be behind the needed acceleration, there should be more energy driving the expansion than we are aware of, or have so far measured as part of vacuum energy (also known as zero-point energy). This dark energy is calculated to form about 68.2% of the energy-matter balance within the Universe, with 26.8% being in the form of dark matter and a mere 5% ordinary matter.
Naturally, without more evidence and without reducing measurement error sizes, it’s hard to say whether any of this unseen energy and matter exists, is just a measurement error, or if the gravitational physics is just wrong. To this end we need instruments such as Euclid to refine and add to the available evidence.
Euclid’s Mission
The Euclid spacecraft. (Credit: ESA)
Against this background, Euclid’s primary purpose is to continue the research on the exact nature of dark matter and energy by refining previous observations made of the shape of galaxies, as well as the redshift of objects like Type Ia supernovae. Earlier missions included the
Planck space telescope
(active from 2009 to 2013) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (
WMAP
, 2001 – 2010), with now Euclid and the James Webb Space Telescope (
JWST
) having taken over most of the observation tasks, with both based at the
Lagrangian point
L2 to keep them in the shade of the Earth.
The Euclid space telescope features visible light and near-infrared cameras, with both instruments being optimized for these specific observation tasks, whereas JWST is used for general observations in infrared. Although Euclid is currently still on its way to the L2 point before it can commence its science mission, JWST has been making relevant observations already, with some interesting data being published last year, such as last year’s findings on the
redshift of very young galaxies
(
arXiv paper
).
Both JWST and Euclid have near-infrared cameras, and can be considered to be complementary, but Euclid is solely dedicated to answering
these specific questions in cosmology
, allowing it to perform observations continuously and thus gather significant amounts of mission data over its projected six year lifespan.
Mission Implications
What could be the implications of this research on dark matter and dark energy? Clearly, they are both essentially placeholders until we can ascertain whether our observations regarding the Universe’s expansion and the physics of galaxies can be explained in some other way. It wouldn’t be the first time over the past 120-odd years that our assumptions about how the Universe works and what its ultimate fate will be have fundamentally changed in the face of new evidence.
If the ΛCDM model holds up, then the question is whether we can define what the nature of dark matter and dark energy is. So far a number of
hypotheses
exist here, including sterile neutrinos and many more. For dark energy, the simplest
explanation
would be that it is an intrinsic energy of space (akin or equal to vacuum energy), yet many more options are possible. There is also the possibility that Euclid and other missions will provide us with data that puts into question many of the assumptions made, or leads us towards new possibilities.
Although none of what we learn via these observations is likely to change our fundamental understanding of the shape and rotation of galaxies, nor will it likely override
Hubble’s law
regarding the expansion of the Universe based on observations of other galaxies moving away from our own, what it will affect is our understanding of the how and why. Ultimately, by developing our elementary understanding of the energy-matter balance in the Universe and its exact nature we should have a much better idea of both how the Universe began, and how it will ultimately end.
Yet regardless of what we’ll discover, the essential part is that through Euclid, JWST and whichever spacecraft will follow them we’ll slowly untangle the biggest challenge for science, in the form of the Universe itself. This is a challenge that has kept the world’s greatest minds occupied for well over a century now, with the tantalizing promise of understanding the very foundations of existence itself. | 30 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667987",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T18:32:37",
"content": "“Based on the observed redshift and the energy that would be behind the needed acceleration, there should be more energy driving the expansion than we are aware of, or have so far measured as part of vacuum e... | 1,760,372,218.003655 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/cook-up-a-yoke-in-five-minutes/ | Cook Up A Yoke In Five Minutes | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"control yoke",
"flight sim",
"gaming"
] | When it comes to flight simulators, we’ve seen people go all-out with their immersive setups, with all kinds of hyper-realistic control systems and monitors as far as the eye can see. But for those gaming on a budget this can seem a little overwhelming and daunting. We all have to start somewhere, though, so if you’re looking for your first semi-realistic flight simulator control mechanism take a look at
this yoke which can be cobbled together for almost no money or time
.
The yoke can be built around any optical mouse that happens to be lying around. A custom housing for it is constructed from cardboard, which lets it sit above a cardboard tube which functions as the control interface. This mechanism rests in a cardboard box it uses as a frame, with a yoke-styled control interface built out of packing foam at the front. One optional modification to the device allows it to have more realistic control throw, and another replaces the cardboard tube with a wooden dowel to give the device a little more strength.
While relatively quick and easy to build, it works as a fully-functional yoke in flight simulator programs like
FlightGear
almost effortlessly, mostly thanks to the fact that it is based on a nearly unmodified mouse. Assuming you have a mouse in your parts drawer and have access to some sort of cardboard, it’s estimated to take not much longer than five minutes to put together. But if you’re looking for something DIY that’s a little more substantial, it’s not too much of a step up to
another DIY yoke we’ve featured before
which is centered around an Arduino and a few 3D-printed parts.
Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip! | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667904",
"author": "Max S.",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T15:35:00",
"content": "This is very creative!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6667906",
"author": "shod",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T15:41:11",
"content": "Q: What... | 1,760,372,218.256152 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/ask-hackaday-whats-the-deal-with-humanoid-robots/ | Ask Hackaday: What’s The Deal With Humanoid Robots? | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Robots Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"human",
"humanoid",
"humanoid robot",
"robot",
"robotics",
"robots"
] | When the term ‘robot’ gets tossed around, our minds usually race to the image of a humanoid machine. These robots are a fixture in pop culture, and often held up as some sort of ideal form.
Yet, one might ask, why the fixation? While we are naturally obsessed with recreating robots in our own image, are these bipedal machines the perfect solution we imagine them to be?
In Our Own Image
To start, let’s acknowledge the appeal behind humanoid robots. By aping the human form, they can theoretically more readily execute tasks in environments engineered for humans. Their two-legged form and dextrous hands make a wide variety of tasks easier, allowing them to walk up stairs, open doors, and perform a multitude of other tasks in a world built for homo sapiens. In domestic situations, in particular, this is key. No wheeled robotic vacuum cleaner has yet proven itself capable of surmounting these simple obstacles. But does this anthropomorphic approach to robotics make them an ideal solution?
Cat doesn’t even know it’s a robot. (“
roomba-1024
” by Patrick.)
In reality, creating a robot that can accomplish specific tasks does not necessarily require it to be humanoid. Task-specific robots, designed with a focus on function rather than form, often outperform their humanoid counterparts. For example, consider industrial robots. These machines, devoid of any hint of human form, are far more efficient at assembly line tasks, loading and unloading heavy objects, and other factory work. Years of optimization has produced giant disembodied arms that are nonetheless capable of feats no human could ever match. Why build a complicated and awkward human-shaped robot to climb in and weld a car boy together, when a six-jointed machine can get the tool where it needs to go in a fraction of a second?
Similarly, the Roomba, a robot for cleaning floors, succeeds without arms or legs. It has a disk-like design that lets it navigate under furniture. Us humans, on the other hand, have to kneel down and futz around, jabbing the vacuum into the shadows. Drones, too, with their hovering ability, outperform humanoid robots in tasks like surveying land or delivering packages.
Is Engineering Better Than Evolution?
Humanoid robots don’t bring many strengths to the table. Instead, they offer a whole lot of compromises and weaknesses. The flexibility of the human form is that we can do a near-infinite range of tasks with some passable level of ability. For robots, this flexibility is often pointless. Even if they had a perfectly flexible human body to work with, they lack the intelligence and ability to carry out a wide variety of tasks. The human is a jack of all trades, while the robot is a master of one. They work best when told exactly how to do
one
thing, and then optimized as a whole to suit.
Even the basics of being vaguely human is hard. The challenge is in the complexity involved in mimicking human abilities. Walking on two legs, for example, is a marvel of balance and coordination that robots find extremely difficult to replicate. The energy expenditure required for a bipedal robot to maintain balance often reduces its operational time significantly.
Will the real Tesla robot please stand up? (On the right: “
Tesla Robot Dance
” by Steve Jurvetson)
Furthermore, replicating the intricacy of human hands and our fine motor skills is a formidable task. Most humanoid robots have rather crude grasping capabilities compared to a human, thus limiting their effectiveness.
Even our finest efforts are yet to produce a robot analogue of a human hand with comparable finesse, dexterity, and flexibility. To say nothing of the way we can coordinate our hands with our wrists, arms, and the rest of our body.
Then there are considerations of cost and fragility. Designing and manufacturing a humanoid robot is a complex, expensive task, often resulting in machines that are less durable and more prone to malfunctions.
So, where does this leave us with humanoid robots? They’re a bit of a craze lately, as it turns out. Tesla is pushing
its Optimus robot
, and using it as a sales gimmick
in New York city.
Startups like Sanctuary AI are touting their own Phoenix humanoid with what it touts as a “human-like general intelligence.” It’s got the ability to shake hands and give
a very unconvincing thumbs-up.
Intel, too, is investing big, with a $9 million sum to support the development of
the Figure 01 robot.
It seems the appeal of humanoid robots lies more in our emotional response to them, rather than any promise of great functionality. They seem familiar and friendly, like the anthropomorphized animals we all love in cartoons. They promise a future where robot companions can seamlessly integrate into our human-centered world. But it’s essential to remember that, in many cases, the ideal robot may not look human at all. A Roomba is a hockey puck.
After all, the aim of robotics isn’t to create mechanical humans, but to build machines that can augment our capabilities, take on tasks that are dangerous or mundane for us, and overall, make our lives easier.
So what do you think? Are humanoid robots the future, or are we better off developing task-specific machines? Does the ‘human’ in humanoid limit our understanding and development of robotics? Do we just need smarter robot brains to make the humanoid format worthwhile? Share your thoughts in the comments below. | 43 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667873",
"author": "Steve P Spence",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T14:12:17",
"content": "Just let me know when they build a working version of Milla Sofia …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6668179",
"author": "Winston",
... | 1,760,372,218.537031 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/automatic-transfer-switch-keeps-internet-online/ | Automatic Transfer Switch Keeps Internet Online | Bryan Cockfield | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"automatic",
"electricity",
"medical device",
"power",
"relay",
"reliability",
"transfer switch"
] | Living in a place where the electric service isn’t particularly reliable can be frustrating, whether that’s because of a lack of infrastructure, frequent storms, or rolling blackouts. An option for those living in these situations is a backup generator, often turned on and connected by an automatic transfer switch. These are necessary safety devices too; they keep power lines from being back-fed by the generators. But there are other reasons to use transfer switches as well as [Maarten] shows us with
this automatic transfer switch
meant to keep his computers and Internet powered up.
The device is fairly straightforward. A dual-pole, dual-throw relay is housed inside of an electrical junction box with two electrical plugs, each of which can be connected to a different circuit or power source in [Maarten]’s house. The relay coil is energized by the primary power supply, and when that power is lost the relay automatically changes over to the other power supply, which might be something like a battery backup system. [Maarten] was able to get a higher quality product by building it himself rather than spending a comparable amount of money on a cheap off-the-shelf product as well.
This might not seem like too big of a deal, but another person, [Stephen], came across this build and had a different use case for it. [Stephen] lives in a place currently experiencing rolling blackouts, and needed something to reliably power a piece of medical equipment through the night. Commerical offerings were too slow, and during the power transfer process the equipment would power off and need to be reset. [Maarten]’s design was fast enough that this didn’t happen, saving [Stephen] the hassle and expense of trying to find one that would work as well.
One of the perks of building your own tools and equipment like this is getting exactly the right parts for the job. In [Maarten]’s case it was a relay that had the right current ratings to switch his PC and Internet modem/router, and in [Stephen]’s case it was finding a relay that could perform the transfer fast enough, and both were able to do it for as inexpensively (or more) than anything they could find in a store. If you plan to perform the related task of connecting a generator to your home, you might not need a transfer switch at all, though.
You can instead use an interlock plate which is even simpler than that
. | 48 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667823",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T11:35:33",
"content": "All he needed was a UPS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667832",
"author": "Sebastian",
"timestamp": "2023-07-31T11:57:14",
... | 1,760,372,218.618963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/the-right-benchmark-for-gpt/ | The Right Benchmark For GPT | Elliot Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"ChatGPT",
"LLM",
"newsletter"
] | Dan Maloney wanted to design a part for 3D printing. OpenSCAD is a coding language for generating 3D objects. ChatGPT can write code. What could possibly go wrong? You should
go read his article because it’s enlightening and hilarious
, but the punchline is that it ran afoul of syntax errors, but also gave him enough of a foothold that he could teach himself enough OpenSCAD to get the project done anyway. As with many people who have asked the AI to create some code, Dan finds that it’s not as good as asking someone who knows what they’re doing, but that it’s also
better than nothing
.
And this is where I start grumbling. When you type your desires into the word-follower machine, your alternative isn’t
nothing
. Your alternative is to fire up a search engine instead and type “openscad tutorial”. That, for nearly any human endeavor, will get you a few good guides, written by humans who are probably expert in the subject in question, and which are aimed at teaching you the thing that you want to learn. It doesn’t get better than that. You’ll be up and running with your design in no time.
Indeed, if you think about the relevant source material that the LLM was trained on, it’s exactly these tutorials. It can’t possibly do better than the best of them, although the resulting average tutorial might be better than the worst you’ll find. (Some have speculated on what happens when the entire Internet is filled with these generated texts – what will future AIs learn from?)
In Dan’s case, though, he didn’t necessarily want to learn OpenSCAD – he just wanted the latch designed. But in the end, he had to learn enough OpenSCAD to get the AI code compiling without error. He spent an hour learning OpenSCAD and now he’s good to go on his next project too.
So the next time you hear someone say that they got an answer back from a large language model that wasn’t perfect, but it was “better than nothing”, think critically if “nothing” is really the right benchmark.
Do you really want to learn nothing? Do you really have no resources to get started with? I would claim that we have the most amazing set of tutorial resources the world has ever known at our fingertips. Compared to the ability to teach millions of humans to achieve their own goals, that makes the LLM party tricks look kinda weak, in my opinion.
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
! | 41 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667106",
"author": "Artenz",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T14:20:20",
"content": "“It can’t possibly do better than the best of them”That’s not true in general. It’s possible for a LLM to read the sources, and use those to create interconnecting deep patterns that result in unique outpu... | 1,760,372,218.339412 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/the-right-equipment-makes-a-difference-for-digital-oscilloscope-music/ | The Right Equipment Makes A Difference For Digital Oscilloscope Music | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"DC-coupled",
"digital Oscilloscope",
"isolator",
"usb",
"X-Y"
] | We all love our cheap digital oscilloscopes, and with good reason. But if there’s one place where analog scopes still shine, it’s anywhere you need X-Y mode. Digitally sampling the inputs and mapping them on the screen as discrete points just isn’t the same as steering an electron beam around a CRT, making X-Y mode work on digital scopes — at least the affordable ones — somewhat lacking.
Thankfully, nobody told [Mark Hughes] that his digital scope would make a lousy X-Y display, so
he just plunged ahead and figured out how to make it work anyway
. The results are actually pretty good, but it took some doing. His setup begins with OsciStudio, an application built to take 3D shapes and animations and turn them into
oscilloscope music
. The output from that is piped to a USB sound card; [Mark] used
a PreSonus Studio 26c
, an adapter with DC-coupled inputs, which he found to be critical to getting good images. Also important was a USB isolator and good-quality cables, which greatly reduced jitter and made the image much more stable.
DC-coupled
AC-coupled
Displaying the image was as easy as connecting the left and right outputs from the sound card to the two scope inputs — [Mark] used a Keysight EDUX1052G — and setting it to X-Y mode. It took a fair amount of fiddling to get as far as he did, but we think the results speak for themselves. As for the sounds made by these images, he says it’s a bit like a hung sound card when a computer blue-screens. So, yeah — not exactly musical, but still an interesting way to have some fun with your digital scope. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667169",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T17:16:58",
"content": "I have used my oscope’s X-Y mode extensively to display and study vibration modes in certain rotating machinery. I wish my digital scope had a Z input. Even if only a “beam on”/”beam off” affair, it wo... | 1,760,372,218.706836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/29/a-game-boy-camera-without-the-game-boy/ | A Game Boy Camera, Without The Game Boy | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"game boy camera",
"Mitsubishi M64282FP",
"rp2040"
] | We all know the Nintendo Game Boy camera peripheral, and we’ve seen plenty of hacks for it on these pages over the years.
We like [Raphael Boichot]’s camera then
, as instead of including a Game Boy or emulating one, it talks directly to the sensor from an RP2040. The result is a standalone camera with slightly better quality than the original, and with near-limitless storage and easy retrieval of pictures.
For us the interesting revelation from this project comes in the light it sheds on the sensor module, the Mitsubishi M64282FP, but it’s no slouch as a camera beside that. There are motion sensor and timelapse modes, as well the ability to take high dynamic range pictures, and as if that’s not enough it also has all the tweakable things you’d expect from a “proper” camera. The oldest adage in photography is that the best camera in the world is the one in your hand, and we’d say that this one’s better than a real Game Boy Camera should the once-in-a-lifetime picture come while you’re holding it.
Of course,
a better Game Boy camera needs a better lens, right
? | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6667080",
"author": "Eli Morgan",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T12:45:20",
"content": "Now it just needs to connect to a zebra printer",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6667228",
"author": "Raphaël",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,218.657236 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/28/oled-display-lets-vintage-pc-engage-turbo-mode-in-style/ | OLED Display Lets Vintage PC Engage Turbo Mode In Style | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"486",
"oled",
"ssd1306",
"turbo button"
] | Back in the 486 days, it was common to see a “Turbo” button on the front panel of many PCs, which was used to toggle between the CPU’s maximum speed and a slower clock rate that was sometimes necessary for compatibility with older software. Usually an LED would light up to show you were running at this higher speed, or if your machine was very fancy, it might even have a numerical display that would show the current CPU frequency.
[Joshua Woehlke] wanted to add a similar display to his 486, but figured that with modern technology,
he could do something a bit more interesting
. Especially when he realized that the spot on his case where the two-digit LED display would have originally been mounted was the perfect size to hold a common 0.96″ SSD1306 OLED. From there it was just a matter of wiring it up to an Arduino and writing some code to display different graphics depending on the computer’s current CPU speed.
Just like the frequency indicators of yore, the Arduino doesn’t actually measure the CPU’s frequency, it’s simply reading the state of the Turbo LED on the front panel. When the LED is off the Arduino shows an image of a i8088 CPU on the screen to indicate the computer is running in compatibility mode, and when the LED is on, the screen shows the Cyrix Cx486 DX2 logo. When the button hasn’t been pressed in awhile, the display defaults to a star field screensaver.
Regular readers may recall we
recently covered a similar project
that used an Arduino to add a little flair to an era appropriate seven-segment LED display. We’d say there’s still a good deal of romanticism about computers having a big “TURBO” button you can smash whenever you feel the need for speed. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666989",
"author": "David Springs",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T05:23:47",
"content": "I guess using a Mega for driving a single SSD1306 isn’t much crazier than putting it in a 486. More like a job for a $2 MH-Tiny or something else that’s just as cheap, but you use what’s at hand. I’... | 1,760,372,218.754458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/28/understanding-and-using-unicode/ | Understanding And Using Unicode | Chris Lott | [
"computer hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"i18n",
"internationalization",
"L10n",
"unicode",
"UTF"
] | Computer engineer [Marco Cilloni] realized a lot of developers today still have trouble dealing with Unicode in their programs, especially in the C/C++ world. He
wrote an excellent guide
that summarizes many of the issues surrounding Unicode and its encoding called “
Unicode is harder than you think
“. He first presents a brief history of Unicode and how it came about, so you can understand the reasons for the frustrating edge cases you’re bound to encounter.
There have been a variety of Unicode encoding methods over the years, but modern programs dealing with strings will probably be using UTF-8 encoding — and you should too. This multibyte encoding scheme has the convenient property of not changing the original character values when dealing with 7-bit ASCII text. We were surprised to read that there is actually an EBCDIC version of UTF still officially on the books today:
UTF-EBCDIC, a variable-width encoding that uses 1-byte characters designed for IBM’s EBCDIC systems (note: I think it’s safe to argue that using EBCDIC in 2023 edges very close to being a felony)
[Marco] goes in detail about different problems found when dealing with Unicode strings. When C was being developed, ASCII itself had just been finalized in the form we know today, so it treats characters as single byte numbers. With multi-byte, variable-width character strings, the usual functions like
strlen
fall apart.
Unicode’s combining characters also causes problems when it comes to comparison and collation of text. These are characters which can be built from multiple glyphs, but they also have a pre-built Unicode point. There are also ligatures that combine multiple characters into a single code point. Suddenly it isn’t so clear what character equality even means — Unicode defines two kinds of equivalences, canonical and compatibility.
These are but a sampling of the issues [Marco] discusses. The most important takeaway is that “
Unicode handling is always best left to a library
“. If your language / compiler of choice doesn’t have one, the Unicode organization provides a reference design called
the ICU
.
If this topic interests you, do check out his essay linked above. And if you want to get your hands dirty with Unicode glyphs, check out [Roman Czyborra]’s tools
here
, which are simple command line tools that let you easily experiment using ASCII art. [Roman] founded the open-sourced GNU Unicode Font project back in the 1990s,
Unifoundry
. Our own [Maya Posch] wrote
a great article
on the history of Unicode in 2021. | 43 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666964",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2023-07-29T02:50:06",
"content": "I’ll just stick with ASCII thank you very much.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6666995",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2023-... | 1,760,372,218.837302 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/28/the-esp32-doesnt-need-much/ | The ESP32 Doesn’t Need Much | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"dev board",
"development",
"ESP32",
"low component count",
"minimal",
"minimalist"
] | For those looking to add wireless connectivity to embedded projects or to build IoT devices, there is perhaps no more popular module than the ESP32. A dual-core option exists for processor intensive applications, the built-in WiFi and Bluetooth simplify designs, and it has plenty of I/O, memory, and interoperability for most applications. With so much built into the chip itself, [atomic14] wondered how much support circuitry it really needed and set about building
the most minimalist ESP32 development board possible
.
Starting with the recommended schematic for the ESP32, the most obvious things to remove are a number of the interfacing components like the USB to UART chip and the JTAG interface. The ESP32 has USB capabilities built in, so the data lines from a USB port can be directly soldered to the chip instead of using a go-between. A 3.3V regulator eliminates the need for many of the decoupling capacitors, and the external oscillator support circuitry can also be eliminated when using the internal oscillator. The only thing [atomic14] adds that isn’t strictly necessary is an LED connected to one of the GPIO pins, but he figures the bare minimum required to show the dev board can receive and run programs is blinking an LED.
Building the circuit on a breadboard shows that this minimalist design works, but instead of building a tiny PCB to solder the ESP32 module to he attempted to build a sort of dead-bug support circuit on the back of the ESP32. This didn’t work particularly well so a tiny dev board was eventually created to host this small number of components. But with that, the ESP32 is up and running. These modules are small and compact enough that it’s actually possible to
build an entire dev board setup inside a USB module for a Framework laptop
, too. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666928",
"author": "easy",
"timestamp": "2023-07-28T23:40:42",
"content": "checks datasheetminimal circuit diagram supplied by manufacturerhasn’t everyone done this already?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6666936",
"author... | 1,760,372,218.943609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/28/splitting-3d-prints-into-parts-can-add-strength/ | Splitting 3D Prints Into Parts Can Add Strength | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"cad",
"dfm",
"strength"
] | One of the great things about 3D printers is their ability to make a single part all at once. Separating a part into multiple pieces is usually done to split up objects that are too big to fit on the 3D printer’s print bed. But [Peter] at Markforged (manufacturers of high-end 3D printers) has a video explaining another reason:
multi-part prints can benefit from improved strength
.
This part can be easily printed as a single piece, but it can be made nearly twice as strong when printed as two, and combined.
The idea is this: filament-based 3D printers generally create parts that are strongest along their X-Y axis (relative to their manufacture) and weakest in the Z direction. [Peter] proposes splitting a part into pieces with this in mind. Not because the part is inconveniently large or has tricky geometry, but so the individual pieces can be printed in orientations that provide the best mechanical strength.
This is demonstrated with the simple part shown here. The usual way to print this part would be flat on a print bed, but by splitting the parts into two and printing each in their optimal orientation, the combined part withstands nearly twice as much force before failing.
[Peter]’s examples use Markforged’s own filaments, but gives advice on more common polymers as well and the same principles apply. This idea is one worth keeping in mind the next time one is seeking to optimize strength. because of how simple it is.
We’ve seen a variety of methods to toughen up or ruggedize prints in the past, but they’re usually more complex (or at least messier.) Examples include
embedding braided steel cable
, embedding
fiberglass mesh
, applying
electroplating to a printed structure
, and plain old
embedding some bolts and washers
to buffer load-bearing areas. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666879",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2023-07-28T20:08:11",
"content": "I’ve done some messing around with pseudo-isotropic 3d printing by printing a shape that’s definitely bad, like a tall thin cylinder, and gently pressing a core in that has been printed flat so it h... | 1,760,372,218.885511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/27/how-to-survive-a-wet-bulb-event/ | How To Survive A Wet Bulb Event | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"ac",
"air conditioner",
"hvac",
"wet bulb",
"wet bulb event"
] | Territories across the northern hemisphere are suffering through record-breaking heatwaves this summer. Climate scientists are publishing graphs with red lines jagging dangerously upwards as unprecedented numbers pour in. Residents of the southern hemisphere watch on, wondering what the coming hot season will bring.
2023 is hinting at a very real climate change that we can’t ignore. As the mercury rises to new heights, it’s time to educate yourself on
the very real dangers of a wet bulb event
. Scientists predict that these deadly weather conditions could soon strike in the hottest parts of the world. What you learn here could end up saving your life one day.
Hot Bodies
The body has methods of maintaining a set temperature.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CNX OpenStax, CC BY-SA 4.0
To understand the danger of a wet bulb event, we must first understand how our bodies work. The human body likes to maintain its temperature at approximately 37 °C (98.6 °F). That temperature can drift slightly, and the body itself will sometimes move its temperature setpoint higher to tackle infection, for example. The body is a delicate thing, however, and a body temperature above 40 °C (104 °F) can become life threatening. Seizures, organ failures, and unconsciousness are common symptoms of an overheating human. Death is a near-certainty if the body’s temperature reaches 44 °C (112 °F), though in
one rare case
, a patient in a coma survived a body temperature of 46.5 °C (115.7 °F).
Thankfully, the body has a host of automated systems for maintaining its temperature at its chosen set point. Blood flow can be controlled across the body, and we instinctively seek to shed clothes in the heat and cover ourselves in the cold. However, the bare naked fact is that one system is most crucial to our body’s ability to cool itself. The perspiration system is vital, as it uses sweat to cool our body via evaporation. Water is a hugely effective coolant in this way, with beads of sweat soaking up huge amounts of heat from our skin as they make the phase change from liquid to vapor.
Heat Kills
Our body’s inbuilt cooling system is an amazing thing. In extremely dry, low-humidity conditions,
humans can survive surprisingly high temperatures
. With adequate hydration, ambient temperatures pushing up against 50 °C (122 °F) could potentially be survivable for some time. The body would sweat and thus would be able to maintain a safe internal temperature.
The problem is that the body’s ability to cool itself rapidly falls apart when the humidity rises. This is why scientists talk about dry bulb and wet bulb temperatures. A wet-bulb temperature is taken with a thermometer that is covered in water soaked cloth with air passed over it for evaporative cooling. At low humidity, wet bulb temperatures are significantly lower than dry bulb temperatures as the water cools the thermometer. At 100% humidity, the wet bulb and dry bulb temperatures are the same as evaporative cooling is no longer possible.
Humans are victim to the same phenomenon. Once the air is saturated and can hold no more water, our bodies can no longer effectively cool themselves by sweating. This is why humid climates often feel hotter than drier ones. It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.
Sweat has a huge capacity to soak up heat, as it takes a great deal of energy to change water from a liquid into a vapor. However, as humidity rises, sweating becomes less effective.
Credit:
Wikimedia Commons, Minghong, CC BY-SA-3.0
The danger comes when the wet bulb temperature rises high enough that it threatens our ability to keep our bodies at a safe internal temperature.
A study in 2010
theorized that a wet bulb temperature of 35 °C could be fatal for humans and other similar mammals in as little as six hours. At the time, wet bulb temperatures around the world did not exceed 31 °C.
More recent work at Penn State University
, however, suggests the limit could be even lower. It tested the 35 °C (95 °F) wet bulb survivability threshold using young, healthy subjects in a laboratory environment. It aimed to determine an accurate critical temperature at which heat stress becomes unavoidable for a healthy human being. The study found much lower critical temperatures for humans operating at even low metabolic rates, on the order of 31 °C (88 °F) in warm, high-humidity environments. In hotter, drier environments, the survivable wet-bulb threshold temperature was actually lower, around 25 °C to 28 °C (77 °F to 82 °F). This was put down to the extra heat input to the body from the hotter ambient conditions, and the fact the wet bulb temperature drops significantly in conditions where evaporative cooling works. The study indicated that there was no one-size fits all limit for all conditions, but that wet bulb temperatures of 31 °C (88 °F) were a critical upper limit beyond which humans could not adapt.
It also bears noting that these are ideal figures, predicated on young, fit, and healthy individuals. Aged individuals, those with weak hearts, and other conditions can all die under less extreme circumstances. High heat and humidity
force the heart to work harder
, and can be enough to overwhelm those with existing issues.
Survival OR: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Air Conditioning
A map showing areas that have experienced extreme heat and humidity levels. The dark spots indicate the most dangerous areas with the highest wet-bulb temperatures. Some have already seen wet bulb temperatures
briefly rise to levels that threaten human life.
Credit: NOAA Climate.gov, Raymond et al., 2020
If weather conditions in your area combine high temperatures with high humidity and the news is talking about an imminent “wet bulb event,” you’re in trouble.
Evaporative air conditioners are useless in a wet bulb event. You’ll need a refrigerant-based unit (pictured) to stay safe. Modern reverse-cycle heat pumps have become popular in recent years, and could serve as a vital tool in such conditions. Credit:
Wikimedia Commons, Dinkun Chen, CC BY-SA 4.0
As long as humidity is below 100%, there is some gain to be had by using fans and water to cool yourself off. Forget about using your swimming pool though; any heatwave of more than a couple of days will have heated it to bathtub temperatures. The closer the humidity gets to 100%, the less these methods will work.
In the worst conditions with humidity maxed out, your primary hope for survival will be air conditioning. Proper refrigerant-based air conditioners can remove heat from your home and cool it below ambient temperature regardless of humidity. They will become absolutely vital in the hottest parts of the world. Forget your swamp coolers, evaporative air conditioners, and fans—they will do precisely nothing to cool you off at this point.
If high wet bulb temperatures become common, expect heat-related deaths to skyrocket under such conditions. It’s easy to imagine shopping centers and other large public buildings serving as emergency refuges for citizens without access to air conditioning. Getting there would be a challenge in itself in a hot car or bus. A failed air conditioner could quickly spell doom in an extended-length event.
State of Play
As the world is rocked by intense heatwaves this summer, it bears looking at the current data on wet bulb events. Climate data has shown that wet bulb temperatures of over 30 °C (86°F) doubled between 1979 and 2017. Over that same time, there were around a thousand occurrences of wet bulb temperatures exceeding 31 °C (88 °F). Since 2005, extreme wet bulb temperatures exceeding 35 °C (95 °F) have occurred only a handful of times across the world, in hot subtropical areas like Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. In these cases, it has been for short periods of time, but it shows that these conditions are very real in our modern climate.
Efforts to halt and reverse climate change are of vital importance. In time, we could see huge swathes of the world become uninhabitable due to temperatures literally too extreme to survive in. We’re seeing the prelude to this future today, and it ought to push all of us to act to prevent it. | 268 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666356",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2023-07-27T14:14:26",
"content": "Why is this a meme all of a sudden? Nobody was talking about wet bulbs a couple months ago, now it’s everywhere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,372,219.406146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/27/getmusic-uses-machine-learning-to-generate-music-understands-tracks/ | GETMusic Uses Machine Learning To Generate Music, Understands Tracks | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"diffusion model",
"generative",
"midi",
"music",
"tracks"
] | Music generation guided by machine learning can make great projects, but there’s not usually much apparent control over the results. The system makes what it makes, and it’s an achievement if the results are not
obvious
cacophony. But that’s all different with
GETMusic
which allows for a much more involved approach because it understands and is able to create music by tracks. Among other things, this means one can generate a basic rhythm and melody first, then add additional elements to those existing ones, leaving the previous elements unchanged.
GETMusic can make music from scratch, or guided from examples, and under the hood uses a diffusion-based approach similar to the method behind AI image generators like Stable Diffusion. We’ve previously covered
how Stable Diffusion works
, but instead of images the same basic principles are used to guide the model from random noise to useful tracks of music.
Just a few years ago we saw
a neural network trained to generate Bach
, and while it was capable of moments of brilliance, it didn’t produce uniformly-listenable output. GETMusic is on an entirely different level. The
model and code are available online
and there is
a research paper
to accompany it.
You can watch a video putting it through its paces just below the page break, and there are
more videos on the project summary page
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666332",
"author": "TiMan",
"timestamp": "2023-07-27T12:54:53",
"content": "I am sure that AI can and will generate some excellent music. If it is commercialized, who will get the royalties? Maybe just like “video killed the radio star”, AI will kill the desire to learn and maste... | 1,760,372,218.993297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/27/a-nifty-3d-printed-rc-car/ | A Nifty 3D Printed RC Car | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printer",
"R/C car"
] | Once upon a time, a remote controlled (RC) car was something you’d buy at Radio Shack or your local hobby store. These days, you can print your own, complete with suspension, right at home,
as this project from [Logan57] demonstrates.
The design uses standard off-the-shelf hobby-grade components, with a brushed motor and controller for propulsion, and small metal gear servo for steering. The latter is a smart choice given there’s no servo saver in the design. Save for the fasteners and bearings, all the other parts are 3D printed. The hard components are produced in PETG or PLA, while flexible TPU is used for both the tires and the spring elements in the suspension system. It’s a double-wishbone design, and should serve as a good education should you later find yourself working on a
Mazda Miata
.
Building your own RC car isn’t just fun, it opens up a whole realm of possibilities. Sick of boring monster trucks and race cars? Why not build a 10×10 wheeler or some kind of
wacky amphibious design
? When you do, we’ll be
waiting by the tipsline
to hear all about it. Video after the break. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666279",
"author": "Digitalzombie",
"timestamp": "2023-07-27T08:37:00",
"content": "It’s been a looong time since I’ve owned a RC car.But that sound of those little wheels on asphalt is an instant childhood-nostalgia trigger.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,372,219.449204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/26/running-a-modern-graphics-card-in-a-33-mhz-pci-slot/ | Running A Modern Graphics Card In A 33 MHz PCI Slot | Maya Posch | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"pci",
"PCIe"
] | If you ever looked at a PCI to PCIe x16 adapter and wondered what’d happen if you were to stick a modern PCIe GPU in it, the answer apparently is ‘it works’
according to an attempt
by [Circuit Rewind]. As long as you accept needing to supply external power with even a low-end GT 1030 card – as the PCI slot cannot provide enough power – and being limited to a single PCIe lane. This latter point isn’t so much of an issue as a single PCIe lane offers more bandwidth than the (shared) PCI bus anyway.
Despite the somewhat improvised setup, the GT 1030 card provided a decent 1080p experience in a range of games, after removing half of the 8 GB of system RAM before the configuration would work, probably due to VRAM mapping issues. Since the mainboard used also offered PCIe, the same card was run in a PCIe x4 slot, as well as in an x1 configuration, both with noticeably higher performance and putting the ‘why’ in ‘try’.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a RTX 3080 also booted fine with external power and only 4 GB system RAM installed. Despite the PCIe x1 link, the system was able to finish a 3D benchmark and play Doom 2016, but with only 4 GB of system RAM and an old Athlon quad-core CPU, it was a terrible experience. Perhaps the most fascinating lesson to learn from this is that PCI and PCIe are amazingly compatible with only a simple translation bridge, even if high-performance graphics aren’t quite what PCI was meant for. After all, that’s why we got cursed with AGP for many years. | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666240",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2023-07-27T05:51:54",
"content": "The problem with PCI and PCIe in this direction is that with PCI the configuration space per device was only 256 bytes. You can’t reach the full 4 kB of PCIe devices. So this will work only with devices th... | 1,760,372,219.621095 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/26/this-months-worlds-largest-wind-turbine-goes-operational/ | This Month’s World’s Largest Wind Turbine Goes Operational | Chris Lott | [
"green hacks",
"News"
] | [
"china",
"renewable energy",
"wind turbines"
] | A new
wind turbine installed in the Taiwan Strait
went online last week, as part of the Fujian offshore wind farm project by the China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG). The system is the MySE 16-260, designed by the Ming Yang Wind Power Group, one of the leading manufacturers of wind turbines in the world. The numbers are staggering, the 16MW generator is projected to provide 66 GWh (gigawatt-hours) to the power grid annually. And this is a hefty installation, with a 260 m rotor diameter ( three each 123 m blades ) sitting atop a 152 m tower. The location is both a blessing and a curse, being an area of the Pacific that experiences Beaufort level 7 winds ( near gale, whole trees in motion ) for more than 200 days per year. Understandably, the tower and support structures are beefy, designed to survive sustained winds of 287 km/h.
This 16 MW installation surpasses the previous record holder, announced this January —
the Vestas V236-15.0MW
turbine with 115.5 m blades, located in Denmark’s Østerild Wind Turbine Test Center. But wait … Ming Yang also
announced in January
their new 18 MW turbine with 140 m long blades.
We imagine that there will eventually be a natural plateau, where the cost of the next humongous installation approaches or exceeds that of multiple smaller ones. Or will these multi-megawatt turbine systems just keep leapfrogging each other, year after year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. | 56 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666222",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2023-07-27T02:15:56",
"content": "The only argument from a sensible pov is how much energy was used to create energy i.e. when will it break even. What kind of energy was used is usually laughably sensitive.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,372,219.716271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/26/3d-printed-rc-skid-steer-is-cute-construction-machinery-done-right/ | 3D-Printed RC Skid Steer Is Cute Construction Machinery Done Right | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"radio control",
"skid steer",
"skidsteer"
] | Skid steers are great fun if you get to drive one on a construction site. [ProfessorBoots] has long been a fan of the diminutive diggers,
and decided to make a 3D-printed version for his own pleasure.
The build uses a chassis printed in several colors which adequately recreates the charms of a full-sized skid steer. The brains of the operation is an ESP32, which receives commands over WiFi for remote control. A pair of geared N20 brushed motors are driven from a small H-bridge controller, each one driving one side of the skid steer. A toothed belt was 3D printed to allow each motor to drive two wheels on one side. Meanwhile, a pair of servos are charged with both lifting and tilting the bucket. Yes, you heard correctly – you can actually pick up and carry objects around your desk with this thing.
It’s a neat build and could be your introduction into the world of
RC construction machines
. Video after the break. | 11 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666199",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2023-07-26T23:19:00",
"content": "Cute!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6666202",
"author": "Daniel Thomas Erickson",
"timestamp": "2023-07-26T23:3... | 1,760,372,219.759929 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/26/workshop-dust-manifold-spreads-the-suction-around/ | Workshop Dust Manifold Spreads The Suction Around | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dust",
"dust extraction",
"dust extractor",
"sawdust",
"woodwork",
"woodworking"
] | Let’s say you’re doing lots of woodwork now, and you’ve expanded your workshop with a few big tools. You’re probably noticing the sawdust piling up awfully quick. It would be ideal to have some kind of collection system, but you don’t want to buy a shop vac for every tool.
This simple manifold from [Well Done Tips] is the perfect solution for you.
It’s a basic rig at heart, but nonetheless a useful one. It consists of a plywood frame with a shuttle that slides back and forth. The suction hose of your shop vac attaches to the shuttle. Meanwhile, the frame has a series of pipes leading to the dust extraction ports of your various tools around the shop. When you power up a tool, simply slide the manifold to the right position, and you’re good to go. Magnets will hold it in place so it doesn’t get jostled around while you work.
It’s a much cheaper solution than buying a huge dust extraction system that can draw from all your tools at once. If you’re just one person, that’s overkill anyway. This solution is just about sized perfectly for small home operators. Give it a go if you’re
tired of sweeping up the mess and coughing your lungs out on the regular
. Video after the break. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666172",
"author": "transistor-man",
"timestamp": "2023-07-26T20:45:00",
"content": "This is brilliant",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6666176",
"author": "now just Bob",
"timestamp": "2023-07-26T21:02:32",
"content... | 1,760,372,219.811119 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/27/denim-epoxy-table-is-a-work-of-art/ | Denim Epoxy Table Is A Work Of Art | Lewin Day | [
"Art",
"home hacks"
] | [
"denim",
"desk",
"table",
"woodwork"
] | Epoxy has become a hugely popular material in the woodworking and furniture worlds. Who doesn’t love glossy, translucent finishes, after all? [Cam] recently spotted some neat combinations of epoxy with denim, and decided to see if he could replicate the technique to create a very unique desk.
We’d say he succeeded.
A significant amount of material was involved, with [Cam] claiming he used 1,000 square feet of denim and 20 gallons of epoxy. The denim was sourced as a bulk roll, making it easy to cut to the proper size to make the desk. Liquid Glass epoxy was used for its visual qualities and its hard-wearing nature.
Combining the two materials was a challenging task. The 50 layers of denim had to be squeegeed one at a time to remove excess epoxy, a process made harder by the thickness of the material. Once all laid up, the stack of denim was compressed between sheets of wood, leading to an epoxy spill of monumental proportions.
Regardless, when the final desk was cleaned up and polished, the results were well worth the trouble. It looks like some kind of crazy denim gem thanks to the rich shine and perfect grain.
It’s a material we’d like to play with ourselves
. | 34 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666644",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2023-07-28T05:17:36",
"content": "I saw that one a few weeks ago and I found the table quite boring.The table would have been a lot more interesting if he just put whole trousers into the table instead of first cutting small pieces out of... | 1,760,372,219.967316 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/27/exploring-tropical-rainforest-stratification-using-space-based-lidar/ | Exploring Tropical Rainforest Stratification Using Space-Based LiDAR | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"biology",
"lidar",
"rainforest"
] | GEDI is deployed on the the Japanese Experiment Module – Exposed Facility (JEM-EF). The highlighted box shows the location of GEDI on the JEM-EF.
Even though it may seem like we have already explored every single square centimeter of the Earth, there are still many areas that are practically unmapped. These areas include the bottom of the Earth’s oceans, but also the canopy of the planet’s rainforests. Rather having herds of explorers clamber around in the upper reaches of these forests to take measurements, researchers decided to use LiDAR to
create a 3D map of these forests
(
press release
).
The resulting
GEDI
(Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation) NASA project includes a triple-laser-based LiDAR system that was launched
to the International Space Station
in late 2018 by CRS-16 where it has fulfilled its two-year mission which began in March of 2019. Included in the parameters recorded this way are surface topography, canopy height metrics, canopy cover metrics and vertical structure metrics.
Originally, the LiDAR scanner was supposed to be decommissioned by stuffing it into the trunk of a Dragon craft before its deorbit, but after NASA found a way to scoot the scanner over to make way for a DOD payload, the project looks to resume
scanning the Earth’s forests next year
, where it can safely remain until the ISS is deorbited in 2031. Courtesy of the ISS’s continuous orbiting of the Earth, it’ll enable daily monitoring of its rainforests in particular, which gives us invaluable information about the ecosystems they harbor, as well as whether they’re thriving or not.
Hopefully after its hibernation period the orbital LiDAR scanner will be back in action, as the instrument is subjected to quite severe temperature changes in its storage location. Regardless, putting LiDAR scanners in orbit has to be one of those amazing ideas to help us keep track of such simple things as measuring the height of trees and density of foliage. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666640",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2023-07-28T04:57:11",
"content": "“Originally, the LiDAR scanner was suppose to be decommissioned by stuffing it into the trunk of a Dragon craft before its deorbit, but after NASA found a way to scoot the scanner over to make way for a DO... | 1,760,372,219.863364 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/27/a-wigglegram-lens-with-variable-aperture/ | A Wigglegram Lens With Variable Aperture | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera lens",
"full-frame camera",
"lens",
"sony",
"wigglegram"
] | Wigglegrams are those weird animated pictures you’ve seen that seem to generate a 3D-like effect. [scealux] had built lenses to take such pictures before, but wanted to take things to the next level.
Enter the Wigglegram Lens, version 2.
In building a new lens for the Open Sauce ’23 event, [scealux] wanted to get variable aperture working, while also improving focus speed. The lens was also intended for use with a Sony A7R3. Unlike his previous effort, this lens would only work on the full-frame Sony FE mount cameras.
The lens uses a bevy of 3D printed parts, along with plastic lenses salvaged from old disposable cameras. When assembled, it takes three photos simultaneously on one single frame. They can then be reassembled into a Wigglegram by post-processing on a computer. The results are grainy and rough, but yet somehow compelling.
If you want to see
[scealux]’s original build for Sony E-mount cameras
, we covered it here. Video after the break. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6666730",
"author": "Formerly J",
"timestamp": "2023-07-28T12:03:45",
"content": "I wonder if it would make sense to build a version of this that had different filters behind or in front of each lens. Maybe a version with four or nine lenses instead. My thought being to use the came... | 1,760,372,220.01509 |
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