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https://hackaday.com/2025/02/07/when-ignoring-spam-loses-you-an-ice-surfacer-patent/ | When Ignoring Spam Loses You An Ice Surfacer Patent | Donald Papp | [
"News"
] | [
"ice",
"patents",
"skating rink",
"spam",
"zamboni"
] | Bear with us for a moment for a little background. The Rideau Canal Skateway in Ottawa is the world’s largest natural skating rink, providing nearly 8 km of pristine ice surface during the winter. But maintaining such a large ice surface is a challenge. A regular Zamboni can’t do it; the job is just too big. So the solution is a custom machine called the
Froster
, conceived by Robert Taillefer and built by Sylvain Fredette.
Froster
spans almost twenty meters, and carries almost 4000 L of water. There’s no other practical way to maintain almost 8 km of skating rink.
A patent was filed in 2010, granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, and later lost because
important notifications started going to an apparently unchecked spam folder
. The annual fee went unpaid, numerous emails went unanswered, an expiry date came and went, and that was that.
It’s true that emailed reminders (the agreed-upon — and only — method of contact) going unnoticed to spam was what caused Robert to not take any action until it was too late. We’d all agree that
digital assistants in general need to get smarter
, and that includes being better at informing the user about automatically-handled things like spam.
But what
truly
cost Robert Taillefer his patent was having a single point of failure for something very, very important. The lack of any sort of backup method of communication in case of failure or problem meant that this sad experience was, in a way, a disaster just waiting to happen. At least that’s how the Federal Court saw it when he took his complaint to them, and that’s how they continued to see it when he appealed the decision.
If you’ve never heard of the Rideau Canal Skateway or would like to see the
Froster
in action, check out
this short video
from the National Capital Commission of Canada, embedded just under the page break. | 47 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095320",
"author": "ben",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T21:26:15",
"content": "Its sees a little odd that someone decided it was worth patenting a one-off machine invented specifically for the demands of the world’s-largest-X. How many machines do you hope to sell/collect royalties, to ... | 1,760,371,645.102865 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/07/growing-a-gallium-arsenide-laser-directly-on-silicon/ | Growing A Gallium-Arsenide Laser Directly On Silicon | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"gallium arsenide",
"laser",
"semiconductor"
] | As great as silicon is for semiconductor applications, it has one weakness in that using it for lasers isn’t very practical. Never say never though, as it turns out that you can now
grow lasers directly on the silicon
material. The most optimal material for solid-state lasers in photonics is gallium-arsenide (GaAs), but due to the misalignment of the crystal lattice between the compound (
group III-V
) semiconductor and silicon (IV) generally separate dies would be produced and (very carefully) aligned or grafted onto the silicon die.
Naturally, it’s far easier and cheaper if a GaAs laser can be grown directly on the silicon die, which is what
researchers from IMEC now have done
(
preprint
). Using standard processes and materials, GaAs lasers were grown on industry-standard 300 mm silicon wafers. The trick was to accept the lattice mismatch and instead focus on confining the resulting flaws through a layer of silicon dioxide on top of the wafer. In this layer trenches are created (see top image), which means that when the GaAs is deposited it only contacts the Si inside these grooves, thus limiting the effect of the mismatch and confining it to within these trenches.
There are still a few issues to resolve before this technique can be prepared for mass-production, of course. The produced lasers work at 1,020 nm, which is a shorter wavelength than typically used, and there are still some durability issues due to the manufacturing process that have to be addressed. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095312",
"author": "Rock Erickson",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T20:59:23",
"content": "How can you even do reaseach on semiconductor manufacturing those times? All of the equipment is at fabs which are guarded by heavily-armed private security. They’re not going to let some university... | 1,760,371,644.702742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/07/hack-on-self-quest-system-basics/ | Hack On Self: Quest System Basics | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News"
] | [] | Whenever I play an RPG, whether it’s Fallout or Cyberpunk 2077, I complete every single quest available to me. The quests grab my attention in an unprecedented way – doesn’t hurt that there’s rewards and progression markers attached. Of course, these systems are meticulously designed to grab attention, making sure you can enjoy the entirety of the game’s content.
Does quest progression in an RPG tangibly impact my life? No. Do they have control over my attention? Yes, for sure. My day-to-day existence is the opposite – my real-life decisions impact me significantly, and yet, keeping attention on them is a struggle. Puzzling, disturbing – and curious. I feel like I’ll never forgive myself if I ignore this problem any longer.
So, I wrote a simple quest system prototype. As usual, it worked, it failed, and it taught me things. Here’s how I did it.
Adjusted To Self First
Quick prototyping is a bane of mine, and I’m forced to study it – I can only spend so much time on any given topic before I can barely pay attention to it. So, no fancy UIs, no roadmaps, I’m writing software that has the lowest interaction resistance possible for me specifically.
My laptop remains my platform of choice – I’m no phone app developer, really, I hate developing for smartphones. Modern smartphones are content consumption machines first, everything else second, and it feels like the user’s actual wellbeing is barely in the top 10. Besides, typing on a physical keyboard is the fastest prototyping and hardware interaction method I know. Smartphones no longer have physical keyboards, you know, the focus on content consumption means that screen real estate is king.
Oh, and I do have Notepad++ constantly open on my laptop! What about storing my quests in a text file, say,
quests.txt
, in a somewhat computer-friendly format? Then, a constantly running program could reads changes from this file, rewriting it when appropriate. Sounds simple enough, and so the
parser.py
was born.
I had a few wishes for this program. The main one was: never deleting any file contents by mistake or to enforce structure; everything I type into the file is important and can’t be lost. Aside from that, leaving comments on tasks and quests felt paramount, too – the text file isn’t just a data storage, it’s a user interface, and it needs human-friendly features.
I enter the quest into quests.txt, Ctrl+S, and
my parser automatically adds IDs to every item in-place
At the same time, I needed to make it software-friendly – always parseable and modifiable, letting me do things like automatically marking quest tasks as complete or incomplete, or tying task completion into each other, or auto-marking them, or tying them to real-world events. This resulted in two main features: a rigid-ish structure for quest formatting, and auto-adding machine-parseable quest IDs. Still, I made sure it was easy for me to edit quests and tasks, and put the IDs somewhere they wouldn’t get in the way!
Built, Tweaked, Working
A day-two was spent intensely building
parser.py
into a self-sufficient prototype, and it grew from 20 lines of parsing code experiment into a full program, left to constantly run in the background monitoring for
quests.txt
file changes. Then, I split my Notepad++ window into two panes, and put the
quests.txt
document into one of them, open semi-permanently – thankfully, my laptop screen is wide enough for that.
Easy enough to use day to day, always at my fingertips, collecting data – this script satisfied a few of my human-friendly device design guidelines. I went on making new quests and adding tasks as I remembered them, as well as updating the script itself, adding features and fixing bugs as needed. For brevity, I’ll call this whole process “questing”.
I mark one of the tasks as [x], then Ctrl+S, and
the completed item is automatically moved to the bottom of the quest
The most useful feature, without a doubt, was auto-sorting quest tasks, so that completed tasks would immediately go to the bottom of the quest’s task list – way easier on the eyes. Another feature was task completion/clear logging, as usual, JSON separated by newlines – which unexpectedly gave me timestamps that helped me remember and track time-sensitive medication.
Some features were less expected but still necessary. I am intimately familiar with data loss, so I wrote a quick
quests.txt
backup script, and added a daily task for myself – do backups. As luck would have it, I accidentally deleted half of the
quests.txt
file contents, just as I was about to back it up. So, I had to spend about an hour restoring the file state from the day-old backup file and task log items – those really came in handy!
I’ve used the script for about a month – quite a jump from the “two weeks constant”. A lot of smaller hack-on-self projects stay in my life for two weeks at most – any longer than that, and I struggle to pay attention to them. This one worked for longer – a very good sign. Most importantly, even though I’m currently not using this questing system, I keep mentally coming back to it throughout my days, and my main thought is “wish it worked better for me right now”.
A Focus Point
The best thing about this questing system, I started building habits at a surprisingly fast rate. This was genuinely shocking, in all of the good ways, and seriously reassuring. The questing system helped me find some extra focus – as long as I stayed within the “dailies” quest, that is.
One thing about .txt file as frontend – to have the file be processed, I need to Ctrl+S, alt-tab to other program, alt-tab back, and click “Yes” in this box.
The “Dailies” quest was the only one that actually worked all throughout. As I’ve added quests and tasks, the file grew a ton, currently sitting at 530 lines. Well, my screen fits 40 lines at a time, so most quests stayed always out of reach, easy to forget – just the Dailies quest has 80 lines. There was no ability to highlight tasks I wanted to suggest to myself, or to make a task stand out as more important.
The main limiter this questing system was definitely the UI – the more it grew, the harder it was for me to scroll through the text file and notice the tasks I needed to do. In a way, the system was a good augment, helping me overcome my struggles with Doing All The Things I Want Done, until it grew to the point where it no longer gave me a consistent single point of focus, an always-accessible line in the .txt file that I could look at to spot my daily-tasks-to-do. It’s a predictable limitation of the text file UI, and I could only push it so much.
There was another fun failure mode: the more I used the script, the more I did things in the real world, the less I’d be spending next to my laptop. On days where I wasn’t next to my laptop, the script’s powers would break completely, of course. Basically, the more off-my-laptop tasks I was doing, the less my script would work – so much for helping me exercise, move, and get out more!
“Dailies” were the most fun part of the system, still – as I’m writing this, I’m becoming more and more certain that this UI could work well for me again if I did a few more upgrades to it and limited it to the “Dailies” quest. So, same interface but less overwhelming, a tighter focus, and a few more most-needed ease of use features – feels like I should try that out sometime soon!
Lessons
A lot of fruit lays unpicked on the
parser.py
field, even with the current text-file UI. Automatically marking all of the “Dailies” tasks completed on a “start of day” trigger, for one! Reminders for medication. Tracking ‘underappreciated’ daily tasks, giving me summaries or notifications that point out ‘daily’ tasks I’ve been neglecting but might still want to do. Quick action keybinds for common actions, just like I do with my anti-crash and anti-distraction scripts, so that I can quickly mark common tasks as completed – without having to unlock my laptop, find the task in the file, and mark it as complete. Graphing of my activity, too, of course it always feels like graphing my data will give some good insights, but it’s not easy for me to do just yet – hopefully it will be easy soon!
No regrets on picking text file as the UI&backend for the initial prototype, though! I’d do it the same all over again – the flexibility has really helped. I even think that a text file format is a great UI for desktop using the quest system – as long as it’s not the backend, so, the quests are actually stored somewhere else. Basically, an editing option, or a human-readable backup format, we could always use more of those.
What about features I could implement given a different UI and backend? More context sensitivity, for one. For example, suggestions on tasks to do depending on how long I’ve been awake, where I am physically right now (home/work/travel/etc), and other context that’s relatively easy to get but still missing. Cross-device task control and sync. Perhaps, the most fun aspect – a “points”/”levels” score keeping system, maybe even with “streak” features!
The concept works, even if it struggles to scale. It needs a better UI, a way more well-suited backend, tighter integration into my day-to-day life, influencing me in a more context-aware and kind way. Quests are good, the current system is good, and it will work better after an upgrade. In particular, you are soon to see a way more suitable and flashy user interface – as always, stay tuned! | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095255",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T18:35:48",
"content": "Great article as always Arya. I have noticed that you and I often share similar objectives but take very different approaches.I have noticed that I am very good at completing things when I have someone ... | 1,760,371,644.845415 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/07/hackaday-podcast-episode-307-cnc-tattoos-the-big-chill-in-space-and-pcb-things/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 307: CNC Tattoos, The Big Chill In Space, And PCB Things | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | The answer is: Elliot Williams, Al Williams, and a dozen or so great hacks. The question? What do you get this week on the Hackaday podcast? This week’s hacks ran from smart ring hacking, to computerized tattoos. Keyboards, PCBs, and bicycles all make appearances, too.
Be sure to try to guess the “What’s that sound?” You could score a cool Hackaday Podcast T.
For the can’t miss this week, Hackaday talks about how to dispose of the body in outer space and when setting your ship’s clock involved watching a ball drop.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download the MP3 tariff-free.
Episode 307 Show Notes:
News:
Hackaday Europe 2025 Tickets On Sale, And CFP Extended Until Friday
What’s that Sound?
Take your shot at our trademark sound challenge
!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Hacking The 22€ BLE SR08 Smart Ring With Built-In Display
Do, Dare Or Don’t? Getting Inked By A 3D Printer
3D Printed CNC Wood Burner
A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu
Need A Small Keyboard? Build Your Own!
Electroplating DIY PCB Vias At Home Without Chemical Baths
Bicycle Adds Reliability With Second Chain
https://patents.google.com/patent/US11655004B2/
Custom PCB Is A Poor Man’s Pick And Place
What Is The Hour? It’s XVII O’ Clock
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
What Is The Hour? It’s XVII O’ Clock
Investigating Electromagnetic Magic In Obsolete Machines
Understanding The T12 Style Soldering Iron Tip
Al’s Picks:
The Clever Design Behind Everyday Traffic Poles
The Lowest-Effort Way Yet To Make 3D Printed Lenses Clear
Communicating With Satellites Like It’s 1957
Can’t-Miss Articles:
What Happens If You Die In Space?
Telling Time Used To Be A Ball | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095318",
"author": "Joseph C Hopfield",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T21:13:49",
"content": "Back-pedal shifting goes back more than 100 years, but only one chain.(You almost certainly also don’t understand how back pedal braking works either, we’re just used to them)",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,371,644.656214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/07/this-week-in-security-medical-backdoors-strings-and-changes-at-lets-encrypt/ | This Week In Security: Medical Backdoors, Strings, And Changes At Let’s Encrypt | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"backdoor",
"let's encrypt",
"mirai",
"This Week in Security"
] | There are some interesting questions afoot, with the news that
the Contec CMS8000 medical monitoring system has a backdoor
. And this isn’t the normal debug port accidentally left in the firmware. The
CISA PDF
has all the details, and it’s weird. The device firmware attempts to mount an NFS share from an IP address owned by an undisclosed university. If that mount command succeeds, binary files would be copied to the local filesystem and executed.
Additionally, the firmware sends patient and sensor data to this same hard-coded IP address. This backdoor also includes a system call to enable the
eth0
network before attempting to access the hardcoded IP address, meaning that simply disabling the Ethernet connection in the device options is not sufficient to prevent the backdoor from triggering. This is a stark reminder that in the firmware world, workarounds and mitigations are often inadequate. For instance, you could set the gateway address to a bogus value, but a slightly more sophisticated firmware could trivially enable a bridge or alias approach, completely bypassing those settings. There is no fix at this time, and the guidance is pretty straightforward — unplug the affected devices.
Reverse Engineering Using… Strings
The Include Security team
found a particularly terrifying “smart” device to tear apart
: the GoveeLife Smart Space Heater Lite. “Smart Space Heater” should probably be terrifying on its own. It doesn’t get much better from there, when the team found checks for firmware updates happening over unencrypted HTTP connections. Or when the UART password was reverse engineered from the readily available update. It’s not a standard Unix password, just a string comparison with a hardcoded value, and as such readily visible in the
strings
output.
Now on to the firmware update itself. It turns out that, yes, the device will happily take a firmware update over that unencrypted HTTP connection. The first attempt at running modified firmware failed, with complaints about checksum failures. Turns out it’s just a simple checksum appended to the firmware image. The device has absolutely no protection against running custom firmware. So this leads to the natural question, what could an attacker actually do with access to a device like this?
The proof of concept attack was to toggle the heat control relay for every log message. In a system like this, one would hope there would be hardware failsafes that turn off the heating element in an overheat incident. Considering that this unit has been formally recalled for over 100 reports of overheating, and at least seven fires caused by the device, that hope seems to be in vain.
AMD Releases
We wrote about the mysterious AMD vulnerability
a couple weeks ago
, and the time has finally come for
the full release
. It’s officially
CVE-2024-56161
, “Improper signature verification in AMD CPU ROM microcode patch loader”. The primary danger seems to be malicious microcode that could be used to defeat AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) technology. In essence, an attacker with root access on a hypervisor could defeat this VM encryption guarantee and compromise the VMs on that system.
This issue was
found by the Google Security Team
, and
there is a PoC published
that demonstrates the attack with benign effects.
The Mirai Two-fer
The Mirai botnet seems to have picked up a couple new tricks, with separate strains now
attacking Zyxel CPE devices
and
Mitel SIP phones
. Both attacks are actively being exploited, and the Zyxel CPE flaw
seems to be limited to an older, out-of-support family of devices
. So if you’re running one of the approximately 1,500 “legacy DSL CPE” devices, it’s time to pull the plug. Mitel has
published an advisory as well
, and is offering firmware updates to address the vulnerability.
Let’s Encrypt Changes
A service many of us depend on is making some changes. Let’s Encrypt is
no longer going to email you
when your certificate is about to expire. The top reason is simple. It’s getting to be a lot of emails to send, and sending emails can get expensive when you measure them in the millions.
Relatedly, Let’s Encrypt is also about to roll out new
six-day certificates
. Sending out email reminders for such short lifetimes just doesn’t make much sense. Finally from Let’s Encrypt is a very useful new feature, the IP Address certificate. If you’ve ever found yourself wishing you didn’t have to mess with DNS just to get an HTTPS certificate, Let’s Encrypt is about to have you covered.
Bits and Bytes
There’s
a Linux vulnerability in the USB Video Class driver
, and CISA has issued an active exploit warning for it. And it’s interesting, because it’s been around for a very long time, and it was disclosed in a Google Android Security Bulletin. It’s been suggested that this was a known vulnerability, and was used in forensic tools for Android, in the vein of Cellebrite.
Pretty much no matter what program you’re using, it’s important to never load untrusted files.
The latest application to prove this truism is GarageBand
. The details are scarce, but know that versions before 10.4.12 can run arbitrary code when loading malicious images.
Ever wonder how many apps Google blocks and pulls from the app store? Apparently
better than two million
in 2024. The way Google stays mostly on top of that pile of malware is the use of automated tools, which now includes AI tools. Which, yes, is a bit terrifying, and has caused problems in other Google services. YouTube in particular comes to mind, where channels get content strikes for seemingly no reason, and have trouble finding real human beings at Google to take notice and fix what the automated system has mucked up.
And finally,
echoing what Kee had to say
on the subject, cryptocurrency fraud really is just fraud. And
[Andean Medjedovic] of Canada found that out the hard way
, after his $65 million theft landed him in jail on charges of wire fraud, computer hacking, and attempted extortion. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095217",
"author": "Moi",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T15:30:38",
"content": "Voila ce que c’est quand on confie la programmation et le codage du firmware a des macaques payés 2 bananes a l’heure……",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,644.799193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/07/split-flap-clock-makes-a-nice-side-quest-in-larger-project/ | Split-Flap Clock Makes A Nice Side Quest In Larger Project | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"hall effect",
"NXP K22",
"rtc",
"split flap",
"stepper"
] | Sometimes projects spawn related projects that take on a life of their own. That’s OK, especially when the main project is large and complex, In that case, side-quest projects provide a deliverable that can help keep the momentum of the whole project going. The mojo must flow, after all.
That seems to be what’s going on with
this beautiful split-flap clock build
by [Erich Styger]. It’s part of a much larger effort which will eventually see 64 separate split-flap units chained together. This project has been going on for a while;
we first featured it back in 2022
when it was more of a prototype. Each unit is scratch-built, using laser-cut fiberboard for parts like the spool and frame, thin PVC stock for the flip cards, and CNC-cut vinyl for the letters and numbers. Each unit is powered by its own stepper motor.
To turn four of these displays into a clock, [Erich] milled up a very nice enclosure from beech. From the outside it’s very clean and simple, almost like something from Ikea, but the inside face of the enclosure is quite complex. [Erich] had to mill a lot of nooks and crannies into the wood to provide mounting space and clearance for the split-flap mechanism, plus a thinned-down area at the top of each window to serve as a stop for the flaps. The four displays are controlled by a single controller board, which houses an NXP K22FN512 microcontroller along with four stepper drivers and interfaces for the Hall-effect sensors needed to home each display. There’s also an RS-485 interface that lets the controllers daisy-chain together, which is how the big 64-character display will be controlled.
We’re looking forward to that, but in the meantime, enjoy the soft but pleasant flappy goodness of the clock in the brief video below. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095180",
"author": "Erich Styger",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T13:24:19",
"content": "Thanks for the review! Actually the larger display with 64 split-flaps is using one MCU with some shift registers. You can see the state of the build at the start of the year in my other article:http... | 1,760,371,645.03367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/07/quix-furniture-for-modular-furniture-fun/ | Quix Furniture For Modular Furniture Fun | Navarre Bartz | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"furniture",
"gridbeam",
"modular",
"modular design",
"Open Structures",
"QUIX"
] | If you’re someone who moves a lot, or just likes to change your decor, the limitations of conventional furniture can be a bit of a pain. Why not build your furniture modularly,
so it can change with you
?
QUIX is a modular building system designed for furnishings developed by [Robert Kern]. Giving people the ability to “build any kind of furniture in minutes with no tools,” it seems like a good gateway for people who love building with LEGO but find the pegs a little uncomfortable and expensive for full-sized chairs and couches. Anything that makes making more accessible is an exciting development in our book.
Featuring a
repeating series of interlocking hooks
, the panels can be produced via a number of techniques like CNC, laser cutter, or even smaller
3D printed models
. Dowels and elastic bands serve as locks to prevent the furniture from tilting and since you have such a wide variety of panel materials to choose from, the color combinations can range from classic plywood to something more like
a Mondrian
.
If you’re looking for more modular inspiration for your house, how about gridbeam or
Open Structures
? If you’re wanting your furniture more musically-inclined,
try Doodlestation instead
.
Thanks to [DjBiohazard] for the tip! | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095150",
"author": "Jelle",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T11:50:19",
"content": "Mostly a designers wet dream? Somehow making X that does not need Y has a lot of appeal, but it the result is not very nice/beautiful/useful. There are lots of designs that offer reconfigure ability without... | 1,760,371,644.949873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/rc-cars-with-first-person-video-all-with-an-esp32/ | RC Cars With First Person Video, All With An ESP32 | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32-CAM",
"first person video",
"remote control"
] | Those little ESP32-CAM boards which mate the WiFi-enabled microcontroller with a small parallel-interface camera module have been with us for years, and while they are undeniably cool to play with, they sometimes stretch the available performance in trying to process and stream video. [Mattsroufe] has made a very cool project with one of them, not only managing to stream video from a small model car,
but also to control the steering and motor
by means of servos and a little motor driver.
Sadly it’s not entirely a stand-alone device, as the ESP32 streams video to a web server with some Python code to handle the controls. The server can aggregate several of them on one page though, for perhaps a little real-life quad-screen
Mario Kart
action if you have enough of the things. We can see that this idea has plenty of potential beyond the mere fun of driving a toy car around though, but to whet your appetite there’s a demo video below.
We’ve seen enough of the ESP32-cam before, but
perhaps more as a photographic device
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094978",
"author": "unochepassa",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T06:49:46",
"content": "Ten year ago I did something very similar with a Raspberry Pi . The purpose was checking the cats when I was not home (hence the name: the cat lurker). It was self contained and, through a VPN, usable... | 1,760,371,644.744738 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/solid-tips-for-designing-assistive-technology-or-anything-else-really/ | Solid Tips For Designing Assistive Technology (Or Anything Else, Really) | Donald Papp | [
"how-to",
"News"
] | [
"assistive",
"design",
"tips"
] | Do you make things, and have you got almost ten minutes to spare? If not, make the time because
this video by [PrintLab] is chock-full of healthy and practical design tips
. It’s about effective design of Assistive Technology, but the design concepts extend far beyond that scope.
It’s about making things that are not just functional tools, but objects that are genuinely desirable and meaningful to people’s lives. There are going to be constraints, but constraints aren’t limits on creativity. Heck, some of the best devices are fantastic in their simplicity,
like this magnetic spoon
.
It’s not just about functionality. Colors, textures, and style are all meaningful — and have never been more accessible.
One item that is particularly applicable in our community is something our own [Jenny List] has talked about:
don’t fall into the engineer-saviour trap
. The video makes a similar point in that it’s easy and natural to jump straight into your own ideas, but it’s critical not to make assumptions. What works in one’s head may not work in someone’s actual life. The best solutions start with a solid and thorough understanding of an issue, the constraints, and details of people’s real lives.
Another very good point is that designs don’t spring fully-formed from a workbench, so prototype freely using cardboard, models, 3D printing, or whatever else makes sense to you. Don’t be stingy with your prototyping! As long as you’re learning something each time, you’re on the right path.
And when a design is complete? It has the potential to help others, so share it! But sharing and opening your design isn’t just about putting the files online. It’s also about making it as easy as possible for others to recreate, integrate, or modify your work for their own needs. This may mean making clear documentation or guides, optimizing your design for ease of editing, and sharing the rationale behind your design choices to help others can build on your work effectively.
The whole video is excellent, and it’s embedded here just under the page break. Does designing assistive technology appeal to you? If so, then you may be interested in the
Make:able challenge
which challenges people to design and make a 3D printable product (or prototype) that improves the day-to-day life of someone with a disability, or the elderly. Be bold! You might truly help someone’s life. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094951",
"author": "CHRIS",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T03:41:21",
"content": "A while ago I participated in the Aging Innovation Challenge. The prompt was to design assistive devices to help aging individuals remain in their homes for longer through self reliance.Our device ended up ... | 1,760,371,644.996111 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/t1-is-a-risc-v-cray/ | T1 Is A RISC-V Cray | Al Williams | [
"FPGA",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"RISC-V",
"vector processing",
"vector processor"
] | The crux of most supercomputers is the ability to operate on many pieces of data at once — something video cards are good at, too. Enter
T1
(short for Torrent-1), a RISC-V vector inspired by the Cray X1 vector machine.
T1 has support for features, including lanes and chaining. The chip contains a version of the Rocket Core for scalar operations, but there’s no official support for using it. The project claims you could easily replace that core with any other RISC-V CPU IP.
By focusing on parallelism instead of out of order execution, the design gets to skip branch prediction, register renaming, and similar problems.
There is an emulator if you want to experiment. You can even grab a docker image for easy installation. This doesn’t look like something you could pick up in an hour, so prepare to spend some time. Everything is bare-metal, too, so leave your favorite development tools at home.
The project uses
Chisel
, which we’ve covered before. The build system seems very complex, but based on Nix Flakes, so it should be understandable.
If your high-performance RISC-V dreams are more
conventional
, there’s work going on in that area, too.
Title graphic from
Freepik
. | 16 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094879",
"author": "Ray",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T00:22:44",
"content": "“Everything is bare-metal, too, so leave your favorite development tools at home.”Espressif ESP chips were a P.I.T.A. until the core for Arduino was written. Sure, big shops could afford the expensive tool$, ... | 1,760,371,644.897506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/running-doom-on-an-apple-lightning-to-hdmi-adapter/ | Running Doom On An Apple Lightning To HDMI Adapter | Maya Posch | [
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"Apple Lightning",
"doom"
] | As a general rule of thumb, anything that has some kind of display output and a processor more beefy than an early 90s budget PC can run Doom just fine. As [John] AKA [Nyan Satan]
demonstrates in a recent video
, this includes running the original Doom on an Apple Lightning to HDMI Adapter. These adapters were required after Apple moved to Lightning from the old 30-pin connector which had dedicated pins for HDMI output.
As the USB 2.0 link used with Lightning does not have the bandwidth for 1080p HDMI, compression was used, requiring a pretty beefy processor in the adapter. Some enterprising people at the time took a
hacksaw to one of these adapters
to see what’s inside them and figure out the cause of the visual artifacts. Inside is a 400 MHz ARM SoC made by Samsung lovingly named the S5L8747. The 256 MB of RAM is mounted on top of the package, supporting the RAM disk that the firmware is loaded into.
Although designed to only run the Apple-blessed firmware, these adapters are susceptible to the same
Checkm8 bootROM exploit
, which enables the running of custom code. [John]
adapted this exploit
to target this adapter, allowing this PoC Doom session to be started. As the link with the connected PC (or Mac) is simply USB 2.0, this presumably means that sending keyboard input and the like is also possible, though the details are somewhat scarce on this aspect. | 26 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094864",
"author": "lightislight",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T23:39:10",
"content": "Wow. Sometimes I wonder if we’re taking this a little far. Then I am reminded, we must keep going.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8094959",
... | 1,760,371,645.394897 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/a-great-use-for-ai-wasting-scammers-time/ | A Great Use For AI: Wasting Scammers Time! | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"chatbot",
"phone scammers"
] | We may have found the killer app for AI. Well, actually, British telecom provider O2 has.
As The Guardian
reports, they have an AI chatbot that acts like a 78-year-old grandmother and receives phone calls. Of course, since the grandmother—Daisy, by name—doesn’t get any real phone calls, anyone calling that number is probably a scammer. Daisy’s specialty? Keeping them tied up on the phone.
While this might just seem like a prank for revenge, it is actually more than that. Scamming people is a numbers game. Most people won’t bite. So, to be successful, scammers have to make lots of calls. Daisy can keep one tied up for around 40 minutes or more.
You can see some of Daisy’s antics in the video below. Or listen to Daisy do her thing in the second video. When a bogus tech support agent tried to direct Daisy to the Play Store, she replied, “Did you say pastry?” Some of them became quite flustered. She even has her own
homepage
.
While we have mixed feelings about some AI applications, this is one we think everyone can get onboard with. Well, everyone but the scammers.
It might not do voice, but you can
play with local AI models
easily now. Spoofing scammers is the perfect job for the worst
summer intern
ever. | 63 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094703",
"author": "Jan Prägert",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T18:47:52",
"content": "Hello, this is Lenny!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM(Alles kommt zurück, auch Hosen mit Schlag.)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "80... | 1,760,371,645.917623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/lorentz-cannon-fires-lightning/ | Lorentz Cannon Fires Lightning | Al Williams | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"lightning gun",
"marx generator",
"plasma gun"
] | [Editor’s note: This video disappeared, but
it has been archived here.
We’re leaving the original links as-were in case they come back up.]
The aptly named [LightingOnDemand] has created a
Lorentz cannon
that can fire a lightning bolt. Honestly, as you can see in the video below, it looks like something from a bad 1950s science fiction movie. The inspiration was researchers using rockets trailing thin wires to attract lightning.
How does the tiny wire carry that much juice? It doesn’t, really. The wire vaporizes into plasma, and if the pulse is fast enough,
the Lorentz force
hold the plasma together. The rest is non-trivial high-voltage engineering.
The original gun used a Marx bank that weighed 4,000 pounds and towered 8 feet above the ground. It looked like a Gatling gun with a laser target designator.
The original capacitors were picked up from scrap and didn’t work with a high enough voltage. Raising the voltage killed many of the capacitors. Fast-forward 30 years, and high-voltage caps are cheaper and better. The new version was able to pop 150,000 volts over a sizable gap. Perfect for destroying any hostile big-screen TVs.
Based on the scaling, they estimate that a 30-foot-high Marx tower could project plasma over a quarter of a mile away. We know you aren’t likely to try this at home, but it is a fun video to watch. And, of course, Marx generators are good for other things, too. They
aren’t hard to build
. We’ll stick with
a ray gun
. | 29 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094676",
"author": "dudefromthenorth",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T17:38:42",
"content": "“video is private”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8094678",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T17:39:22",
... | 1,760,371,645.797863 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/how-do-we-deal-with-microplastics-in-the-ocean/ | How Do We Deal With Microplastics In The Ocean? | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"cellulose",
"chitin",
"foam",
"microplastics",
"ocean",
"plastic",
"science"
] | Like the lead paint and asbestos of decades past, microplastics are the new awful contaminant that we really ought to do something about. They’re particularly abundant in the aquatic environment, and that’s not a good thing. While we’ve all seen heartbreaking photos of beaches strewn with water bottles and fishing nets, it’s the invisible threat that keeps environmentalists up at night. We’re talking about microplastics – those tiny fragments that are quietly infiltrating every corner of our oceans.
We’ve dumped billions of tons of plastic waste into our environment, and all that waste breaks down into increasingly smaller particles that never truly disappear. Now, scientists are turning to an unexpected solution to clean up this pollution
with the aid of seashells and plants.
Sticky Solution
A team of researchers
has developed what amounts to a fancy sponge for sucking up microplastics, made using readily available natural materials—chitin from marine creatures, and cellulose from plants. When these materials are processed just right, they form a super-porous foam that readily “adsorbs” microplastic material, removing it from the water. If you’re not familiar with the term, adsorbtion is simple—it refers to material clinging on to the surface of a solid, rather than being
absorbed
into it.
To create the material, researchers took chitin and cellulose, and broke down the natural hydrogen bonds in both materials, which allowed them to be reconstructed into a new foam-like form. The result is a very porous material that has negatively- and positively-charged areas on the surface that can effectively bond with microplastic particles. Indeed, the foam effectively grabs plastic particles through a combination of electrostatic attraction, physical entrapment, and other intramolecular forces. It both attracts microplastics via physical forces and entangles them, too.
The foam is assembled from chitin and cellulose, with the aid of some readily-available reagents. Credit:
Research paper
The foam performed well in testing, capturing from 98% to 99.9% of microplastics. Even more impressive, the foam maintained a removal efficiency above 95% even after five usage cycles, a positive sign for its practical longevity. The material shows particular affinity for common plastics that show up in litter and other waste streams—like polystyrene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA).
Of course, polluted water on Earth is a more complex mix than just water and plastic. Take a sample and you’re going to find lots of organic matter, bacteria, and other pollutants mixed in. The researchers put their foam through its paces with four different samples from real-world contexts—taken from agriculture irrigation, lake waters, still water, and coastal waters. While contaminants like ethanol and methylene blue cut the adsorption capacity of the foam by up to 50%, that wasn’t the case all round. Surprisingly, some contaminants actually improved its performance. When heavy metals like lead were present, the foam’s plastic-capturing ability increased, and it gained a similar benefit from the presence of bacteria like
e.Coli
. Testing like this is crucial for proving the foam’s viability outside of simple laboratory tests. Removing plastic from clean water is one thing; removing it from real samples is another thing entirely.
The foam is able to ensnare microplastic particles in a variety of ways—pure mechanical entrapment, electrostatic attraction, and other intramolecular forces. Credit:
Research paper
The beauty of this approach lies in its simplicity and accessibility. Unlike some high-tech solutions requiring expensive materials or complex manufacturing, the foam is made out of materials that can be sourced in abundance. Chitin is readily available from seafood processing waste, and cellulose can be sourced from agricultural byproducts.
The research paper
also explains the basic methods of preparing the hybrid foam material, which are well within the abilities of any competent lab and chemical engineer.
Some environmental contaminants hurt the performance of the foam, but others are actually beneficial to its plastic-trapping mission. Credit:
Research paper
While this foam won’t single-handedly solve our ocean plastic crisis, it represents a promising direction in environmental remediation. The challenge now lies in scaling up production and developing practical deployment methods for real-world conditions. Developing the foam was step one—the next step involves figuring out how to actually put it to good use to sieve the oceans clean.
Stopping plastic contamination at the source
is of course the ideal, but for all the plastic that’s already out there, there’s still a lot to be done.
Featured image: “
Microplastic
” by Oregon State University | 47 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094598",
"author": "Rock Erickson",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T15:10:39",
"content": "We could build a truly massive parallel facility of centrifugae (say the size of Los Santos) that would remove microplastics leaving behind water. It could also be used to extract minute quantities ... | 1,760,371,646.245725 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/lorem-ipsum-36-dolor-sit-amet-keyboard/ | Lorem Ipsum 36? Dolor Sit Amet Keyboard! | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Gateron LP switches",
"low-profile",
"monoblock split",
"raspberry pi",
"rp2040",
"split keyboard"
] | You know, it’s a tale as old as custom mechanical keyboards. [penkia] couldn’t find any PCBs with 36 keys and Gateron low-profile switch footprints,
so they made their own and called it the LoremIpsum36
. Isn’t it lovely?
This baby runs on an RP2040, which sits flush as can be in a cutout in the PCB. This maneuver, along with the LP switches in hard-to-find SK-33 sockets results in quite the thin board.
[penkia] says that
despite using a 3 mm tray for added rigidity, the entire thing is thinner than the Nuphy Air60 v2, which is just over half an inch (13.9 mm) thick. For keycaps, [penkia] has used both
XVX
profile and
FKcaps’ LPF
.
And yeah, that area in the middle is crying out for
something
; maybe a trackball or something similar. But [penkia] is satisfied with it as-is for the first version, so we are, too.
Do you like 36-key boards, but prefer curves?
Check out the Lapa keyboard, which doubles as a mouse
. | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094537",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T12:15:39",
"content": "Might as well go split colemak if you put this much effort in.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8094558",
"author": "Sykobee"... | 1,760,371,645.532884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/06/a-tube-the-wooden-kind/ | A Tube, The Wooden Kind | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"dowel",
"woodworking"
] | While we aren’t heavy-duty woodworkers, we occasionally make some sawdust as part of a project, and we admire people who know how to make wood and do what they want. We were surprised when [Newton Makes] showed
a wooden dowel
that was quite long and was mostly hollow. The wall was thin, the hole was perfectly centered, and he claimed he did not use a drill to produce it. Check it out in the video below and see what you think.
We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we can tell you that making something that long with a drill or even a drill press would be very difficult. The problem is that drills have runout — the bits are usually not totally centered, so the bit doesn’t spin like you think it does. Instead, it spins and rotates around a small circle.
At the chuck, that small circle isn’t a big deal. But the further you get from the chuck, the bigger the runout circle gets. So a 10 cm long drill bit won’t amplify the runout much, but a 100 cm bit will make more of a cone shape unless the drill press is very accurate.
Take your guess, go watch the video, then come back and tell us if you guessed correctly. We didn’t. If you want to get better at
woodworking
, we can help. If you get really good, you can
bend wood
to your will. | 21 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094517",
"author": "Jannie",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T11:00:37",
"content": "Gluing two halves together hardly counts as “Drilling holes”. But clickbait titles aside it will functionally be very strong.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,371,645.644616 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/this-thermometer-rules/ | This Thermometer Rules! | Jenny List | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"attiny85",
"PCB ruler",
"thermometer"
] | A PCB ruler is a common promotional item, or design exercise. Usually they have some sample outlines and holes as an aid to PCB design, but sometimes they also incorporate some circuitry. [Clovis Fritzen] has given us an ingenious example, in the form of
a PCB ruler with a built-in thermometer
.
This maybe doesn’t have the fancy seven segment or OLED display you were expecting though, instead it’s an ATtiny85 with a lithium cell, the minimum of components, a thermistor for measurement, and a couple of LEDs that serve as the display. These parts are interesting, because they convey the numbers by flashing. One LED is for the tens and the other the units, so count the flashes and you have it.
We like this display for its simplicity, we can see the same idea could be used in many other places.On a PCB ruler, it certainly stands apart from the usual.
It has got plenty of competition though
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094543",
"author": "Mandlebrot",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T12:26:53",
"content": "Neat enough as a project. Some component slimming/simplification:ATtiny chips have a built in voltage reference at ~1.1 v – you can measure that versus the unknown supply and find the supply (battery) ... | 1,760,371,645.6871 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/breaking-usps-halts-inbound-packages-from-china-and-hong-kong-posts/ | Breaking: USPS Halts Inbound Packages From China And Hong Kong Posts | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Parts"
] | [
"china",
"import",
"parts",
"tariff"
] | Update
: The USPS has now resumed acceptance of inbound packages from China. According to the updated Service Alert, they are currently working with Customs and Border Protection to “implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs.’
Some troubling news hit overnight as the United States Post Office
announced via a terse “Service Alert”
that they would suspend acceptance of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong Posts, effective immediately.
The Alert calls it a temporary suspension, but gives no timeline on when service will be restored. While details are still coming together, it seems likely that this suspension is part of the Trump administration’s Chinese tariff package, which went into effect at midnight.
Specifically, the administration looks to close the
“de minimis” exemption
— a loophole which allowed packages valued under $800 USD to pass through customs without having to pay any duties or fees. Those packages will now not only be subject to the overall 10% tax imposed by the new tariff package, but will now have to be formally processed through customs, potentially tacking on even more taxes and fees.
The end result is that not only will your next order of parts from AliExpress be more expensive, but it’s likely to take even longer to arrive at your door. Of course, this should come as no surprise. At the end of the day, this is precisely what the administration aims to accomplish with the new tariffs — if purchasing goods from overseas is suddenly a less attractive option than it was previously, it will be a boon to domestic suppliers. That said, some components will be imported from China regardless of who you order them from, so those prices are still going to increase.
Other carriers such as FedEx and UPS will also have to follow these new rules, but at the time of this writing, neither service had released a statement about how they intend to comply. | 104 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094190",
"author": "Cs",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T12:06:41",
"content": "Can’t they just pass on the duty payments to the customer like in China – EU trade?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8094191",
"author": "davedar... | 1,760,371,646.151083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/how-3d-printing-helps-bring-uss-cod-memorial-to-life/ | How 3D Printing Helps Bring USSCodMemorial To Life | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts"
] | [
"preservation",
"replacement parts",
"warship",
"WW2"
] | The USS
Cod
is a
Gato
-class submarine that saw combat in the Second World War and today operates as a museum ship in Cleveland, Ohio. While many other surviving WWII-era subs were cut into pieces or otherwise modified for public display,
Cod
is notable for being intact and still in her wartime configuration. It’s considered to be one of the finest submarine restorations in the world, and in a recent video from their official YouTube page, we get a look at
how 3D printing is used to keep the 82 year old submarine looking battle-ready
.
In the video below, President of the
USS
Cod
Submarine Memorial
[Paul Farace] is joined by one of the volunteers who’s been designing and printing parts aboard the submarine. While the
Cod
is in remarkable condition overall, there’s no shortage of odd bits and pieces that have gone missing over the sub’s decades of service.
3D printing is being used to recreate replica batteries for
Cod
Many of these parts are all but unobtainable today, so being able to recreate a look-alike based on drawings and images of the original components is an incredible asset to the team as they work towards accurately recreating what it was like to live and work aboard a
Gato
-class submarine.
A prime example from the video has to deal with the Mark 27 torpedo that’s on display aboard
Cod.
The team knew from contemporary images and diagrams that there was supposed to be a small “spinner” propeller at the nose of the torpedo, but it was missing on theirs. So after measuring the opening, a printed facsimile was created which could slide into the nose of the torpedo without requiring any glue or other modifications to the original artifact. The video also references a larger project to create replica batteries for
Cod — w
hile the recreated cells are primarily made of painted wood, the terminals and other details on the top are 3D printed.
As we saw underneath the battleship USS
New Jersey
, solving the unique challenges presented by the preservation of these floating museums often takes some out of the box thinking. Makes us wonder how often those in the hacking and making community get a chance to lend their skills towards projects like these. If you’ve ever found yourself hacking around in a museum, floating or otherwise,
we’d love to hear about it
. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094382",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T20:47:24",
"content": "Absolutely fascinating. I remember visiting a submarine museum in the UK many years ago, and touring a similar WWII-era diesel-electric boat, and marveling at how a large crew could operate in such a confin... | 1,760,371,646.009054 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/custom-pcb-is-a-poor-mans-pick-and-place/ | Custom PCB Is A Poor Man’s Pick And Place | Dan Maloney | [
"PCB Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"jig",
"KiCAD",
"smd components"
] | Surface mount devices have gotten really small, so small that a poorly timed sneeze can send your 0603 and 0402 parts off to live with the dust motes lurking at the edge of your bench. While soldering such parts is a challenge, it’s not always size that matters. Some parts with larger footprints can be a challenge because of the pin pitch, and getting them to land just right on the PCB pads can be a real pain.
To fight this problem, [rahmanshaber] came up with
this clever custom PCB fixture
. The trick is to create a jig to hold the fine-pitch parts securely while still leaving room to work. In his case, the parts are a couple of SMD ribbon cable connectors and some chips in what appear to be TQFP packages. [rahmanshaber] used FreeCAD to get the outline of each part from the 3D model of his PCB, and KiCad to design the cutouts; skip to 7:30 or so in the video below if you don’t need the design lesson. The important bit is to leave enough room around the traces so that the part’s leads can rest of the PCB while still having room to access them.
Using the fixture is pretty intuitive. The fixture is aligned over the footprint of the part and fixed in place with some tape. Solder paste is applied to the pads, the part is registered into the hole, and you’re ready for soldering. [rahmanshaber] chose to use a hot plate to do the soldering, but it looks like there’s enough room for a soldering iron, if that’s your thing.
It’s a simple idea, but sometimes the simplest tools are the best. We’ve seen lots of other simple SMD tools, from
assembly jigs
to
solder paste stencil fixtures
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094155",
"author": "Cody",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T08:54:33",
"content": "If the parts don’t align themselves when they reflow, then you probably didn’t use the right amount of solder paste or there is something wrong with the footprint.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,645.962985 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/the-lowest-effort-way-yet-to-make-3d-printed-lenses-clear/ | The Lowest-Effort Way Yet To Make 3D Printed Lenses Clear | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"resin printing",
"transparent"
] | This technique shared by [Andy Kong] is for 3D printed lenses, but would probably be worth a shot for any resin prints that need to be made nice and clear.
The link to his post on X is here
, but we’ll summarize below.
It’s entirely possible to print lenses on a resin printer, but some amount of polishing is inevitable because an SLA print still has layer lines, however small. We have seen
ways to minimize the work involved
to get a usable lens, but when it comes right down to it the printing process creates tiny (but inevitable) surface imperfections that have to be dealt with, one way or another.
3D-printed lenses fresh (and wet) from the printer look clear, but have tiny surface imperfections that must be dealt with.
One technique involves applying a thin layer of liquid resin to the surface of the printed lens, then curing it. This isn’t a complete solution because getting an even distribution of resin over the surface can be a challenge. [Andy] has refined this technique to make it ridiculously simple, and here’s how it works.
After printing the lens, place a drop of liquid resin on the lens surface and stretch some cling wrap over the lens. The cling wrap conforms to the shape and curve of the lens while trapping a super thin layer of liquid resin between the cling wrap film and the lens surface. One then cures the resin while holding the cling film taut. After curing, [Andy] says the film peels right off, leaving an ultra-smooth surface behind. No tedious polishing required!
But what about the flat back of the lens? [Andy] suggests that instead of using cling film (which is better at conforming to a curved surface) simply use a drop of resin in a similar way to bond the flat side of the lens to a smooth piece of glass. Or bond the backs of two lenses together to make a duplex lens. This technique opens quite a few possibilities!
Even if one isn’t 3D printing optical lenses, we suspect this technique might be applicable to
making crystal-clear 3D prints
with a little less effort than would otherwise be needed.
Keep it in mind, and if you find success (or failure!)
let us know on the tips line
because we
absolutely
want to hear about it. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094015",
"author": "Ject",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T03:34:18",
"content": "I love seeing all these 3D printing innovations. Genius!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8094043",
"author": "Gareth Alexander Baus",
"timestamp... | 1,760,371,646.313121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/inside-project-delilah/ | Inside Project Delilah | Al Williams | [
"History"
] | [
"alan turing",
"encryption",
"SIGSALY"
] | The invention of the computer is a tricky thing to pinpoint. There were some early attempts that were not well known and some early attempts that were deliberately secret. [Alan Turing]’s efforts with Colossus were top secret for years, and while that work built on earlier efforts in Poland, [Turing] has as much claim to be the father of computers as anyone. But [Jack Copland] points out in a recent post that the famous computer scientist was also involved in another secret project:
Delilah
.
While [Turing] is best known for his work breaking ciphers at Bletchley Park, he also put time in on a second project about ten miles away in a secret electronics lab at Hanslope Park. There he worked with an assistant, [Donald Bayley] on Delilah — a portable system for encrypting voice transmissions.
The keyword is “portable.” In 1942, Bell Labs created SIGSALY for the U.S. Army to encrypt voice. It took up an entire room and weighed about 25 metric tons. [Turing] found a way to get the job done in a box that, including power, weighed in at 39 kilograms — not a cellphone, but portable in a truck. For comparison, an SCR-300 (the backpack radio used in the war, carried by “the lucky soldier”) weighed about 17 kilos with a full-sized battery.
The machine worked by generating a pseudo-random number sequence, synchronized with a similar unit on the other end of the transmission. Voice input was converted to digital, the numbers added on one end were transmitted, and the same numbers were subtracted from the other end. The result was not perfect for a number of reasons, but you could understand it, reportedly. But with the end of the war, interest in voice encryption wore off, and [Turing] and [Bayley] went on to other projects.
Luckily, [Bayley] saved his papers, which were auctioned off after his death for nearly half a million dollars. Without those papers, we wouldn’t know much about Delilah outside of a previously
classified report
(paywalled) and
a few other notes
.
The British National Museum of Computing
rebuilt the device
back in 2024, and you can see a video about it below. You can also see an interview in the video below with [Turing’s] nephew that mentions Delilah at the very end.
Title photo from The National Archives, London. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093970",
"author": "Joseph R.",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T01:09:32",
"content": "The more I learn about Sir Turing, the more I respect the unbridled genius he was.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8094179",
"author": "H... | 1,760,371,646.366223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/cyberbass-brings-bass-guitar-to-modern-era/ | Cyberbass Brings Bass Guitar To Modern Era | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bass",
"electric guitar",
"guitar",
"music",
"woodworking"
] | For better or worse, the fundamental design of guitars has remained familiar since they electrified around a century ago. A few strings, a fretboard, and a body of some sort will get you most of the way there for an acoustic guitar, with the addition of electromagnetic pickups and wiring for electric variants. However, technology has advanced rapidly in the last 100 years outside the musical world, so if you want to see what possibilities lie ahead for modernizing guitars
take a look at the Cyberbass created by [Matteo]
.
The guitar starts its life as many guitars do: with a block of wood. One of the design goals was to be able to use simple tools to build the guitar, so the shape of the instrument was honed with a Japanese hacksaw and the locations for the pickups and other electronics were carved out with chisels.
The neck of the guitar was outsourced
since they take some pretty specialized tools to build
, so simply bolting it to the body takes care of that part of the build, but [Matteo] had a few false starts setting the bridge in the exact location it needed to be.
Luckily he was able to repair the body and move the bridge. With the core of the guitar ready, it was on to paint and then to its custom electronics. [Matteo] built in not only a set of pickups and other common electric guitar parts but also integrated a synth pedal into the body as well as including a chromatic tuner.
With everything assembled and a few finishing touches added including a custom-engraved metal signature plate, the Cyberbass is ready to go on tour. [Matteo] learned a lot about guitar building in general, as well as a few things about electronics relating to musical instruments (including how expensive tuners work just as well as cheap ones). | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093944",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T22:58:24",
"content": "Rose tinted memories of early YouTube and people grafting Kaoss Pads into guitars.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8093975",
"author": "Bill En... | 1,760,371,646.573649 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/what-is-the-hour-its-xvii-o-clock/ | What Is The Hour? It’s XVII O’ Clock | Kristina Panos | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"Adafruit trinket",
"clock",
"LARPers",
"roman numerals",
"rtc",
"watch"
] | When live-action role playing, or LARPing, one must keep fully in tune with the intended era. That means no digital watches, and certainly no pulling out your fantastic rectangle from the future to find out if you’re late picking up the kid.
So what do you do when you’re LARPing at 2 PM, but you gotta be back at the soccer practice field by 5 PM? Well, you fashion a period-appropriate timepiece like [mclien]’s
17 o’ Clock
. Visually, it’s about as close to a pocket sundial as you can get. It’s deliberately non-connected, and its only function is to tell the time.
But how? If you visually divide the watch across the top and bottom, you get two sets of Roman numerals. The top half handles the hour, and the bottom half the minute. [mclien] started designing this in 2018 and picked it back up in the second half of 2024.
Back to the non-connected part. The only permanently-powered part of the project is a high-precision real-time clock (RTC). The rest uses a power latching circuit, which turns on the Adafruit Trinket M0 to show the time using a NeoPixel ring. Be sure to check out the awesome project logs with fantastic pictures throughout.
Looking for a smarter pocket watch?
It’s time you built one yourself
. And speaking of
pocket sundials… | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093884",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T19:50:57",
"content": "That’s period perfect alright, question is “What period?” It’s still an electronic watch. Why can’t I build a website with a similar display and access that with my phone? Alternative... | 1,760,371,646.426504 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/making-products-for-fun-and-probably-no-profit/ | Making Products For Fun And (Probably No) Profit | Navarre Bartz | [
"Business",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"business",
"manufacturing",
"simone giertz"
] | If you’re like most makers, you have a few product ideas kicking about, but you may not have made it all the way to production of those things. If you’re thinking about making the leap, [Simone Giertz] recently discussed all the perils and pitfalls of the process
from idea to reality
.
The TLDR is that there’s a big difference between making one item and making hundreds or thousands of them, which you probably already knew, but it is nice to see what sort of issues can crop up in this seemingly simple example of the Yetch Screwdriver Ring. It turns out that the metalworking skills of tool making and jewelry making rarely overlap in the contract manufacturing world.
[Giertz] also shares some of the more mundane, yet terrifying, parts of business like finally committing to bulk orders and whether it’s wise to go with intermediaries when working with suppliers overseas. She also keys us into parts of the process where things can go wrong, like how product samples typically use a different manufacturing process than bulk for practical reasons and how you need to have very specific quality control requirements not just decide if a product is good enough based on vibes.
If you’d like some more advice on making your own products, check out [Carrie Sundra]’s Supercon talk about
Manufacturing on a Shoestring Budget
. | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094503",
"author": "mtr",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T07:45:10",
"content": "Beautiful! IMHO, it would largely benefit (in various ways) from diamonds and pozidriv ;) Look up “Wera diamond coated bits”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,646.63901 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/investigating-electromagnetic-magic-in-obsolete-machines/ | Investigating Electromagnetic Magic In Obsolete Machines | Bryan Cockfield | [
"hardware"
] | [
"analog",
"magnetic field",
"motor",
"position sensor",
"rotor",
"selsyn",
"synchro",
"transformer"
] | Before the digital age, when transistors were expensive, unreliable, and/or nonexistent, engineers had to use other tricks to do things that we take for granted nowadays. Motor positioning, for example, wasn’t as straightforward as using a rotary encoder and a microcontroller. There are a few other ways of doing this, though, and [Void Electronics]
walks us through an older piece of technology called a synchro (or selsyn)
which uses a motor with a special set of windings to keep track of its position and even output that position on a second motor without any digital processing or microcontrollers.
Synchros are electromagnetic devices similar to transformers, where a set of windings induces a voltage on another set, but they also have a movable rotor like an electric motor. When the rotor is energized, the output windings generate voltages corresponding to the rotor’s angle, which are then transmitted to another synchro. This second device, if mechanically free to move, will align its rotor to match the first. Both devices must be powered by the same AC source to maintain phase alignment, ensuring their magnetic fields remain synchronized and their rotors stay in step.
While largely obsolete now, there are a few places where these machines are still in use. One is in places where high reliability or ruggedness is needed, such as instrumentation for airplanes or control systems or for the electric grid and its associated control infrastructure. For more information on how they work,
[Al Williams] wrote a detailed article about them a few years ago
. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094437",
"author": "limroh",
"timestamp": "2025-02-06T00:30:26",
"content": "I think I have one of those as a satellite dish rotation motor.It’s not in use but I took apart the “remote” once and mostly saw just a bunch of windings in motor-like arrangement and concluded that it mus... | 1,760,371,646.728413 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/good-looking-hat-does-retro-displays-right/ | Good-Looking HAT Does Retro Displays Right | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"hat",
"HT16K33",
"LED driver",
"raspberry pi",
"raspberry pi hat"
] | Mick Jagger famously said that
you cain’t always get what you want
. But this is Hackaday, and we make what we want or can’t get. Case in point: [Andrew Tudoroi] is drawn to retro LEDs and wanted one of Pimoroni’s micro-LED boards pretty badly, but couldn’t get his hands on one.
You know how this ends — with [Andrew] designing his first PCB
.
The Pitanga hat is equally inspired by additional fruit that [Andrew] had lying around in the form of an 8devices Rambutan board. (Trust us, it’s a fruit.) With some research, he discovered the HT16K33 LED driver, which checked all the boxen.
The first version worked, but needed what looks like a couple of bodge wires. No shame in that! For the next revision, [Andrew] added buttons and decided to make it into a Raspberry Pi HAT.
This HAT is essentially a simple display with a basic input device, and a beauty at that. You can see all the various cool displays that [Andrew] tried both here and in the project log. Although he included pads for an ARM M0 microcontroller, he never did populate it. Maybe in the future.
Of course, this project was not without its challenges. For one thing, there was power compatibility to wrestle with. The Pi can sometimes work with I²C devices at 5 V, but this isn’t ideal long-term. So [Andrew] put the LED driver on the 3.3 V I²C bus. Despite the data sheet calling for 4.5 to 5.5 V, the setup worked fine. But for better reliability, [Andrew] threw a dedicated I²C logic level converter chip into the mix.
Don’t forget, you can run a noble amassment of HATs with
the PiSquare
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095308",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T20:52:00",
"content": "The Holtek HT16K33 LED/keyboard driver IC is at End Of Life (EOL) as of April 30, 2022. It is replaced by the HT16K33A with a release date of 31-March-2022. See here:https://www.holtek.com/webapi/168740/EOL... | 1,760,371,647.327045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/floss-weekly-episode-819-session-its-all-abot-the-metadata/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 819: Session, It’s All Abot The Metadata | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Deepseek",
"FLOSS Weekly"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
talks Session and cryptocurrency skepticism with Kee Jefferys! Why fork Signal? How does Session manage to decentralize? And why the cryptocurrency angle? Listen to find out!
https://getsession.org/
https://github.com/oxen-io/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8095305",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2025-02-07T20:37:52",
"content": "He said today “Back to plastic!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,646.678906 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/investigating-why-animals-sleep-from-memory-sorting-to-waste-disposal/ | Investigating Why Animals Sleep: From Memory Sorting To Waste Disposal | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"drosophila melanogaster",
"sleep"
] | What has puzzled researchers and philosophers for many centuries is the ‘why’ of sleep, along with the ‘how’. We human animals know from experience that we need to sleep, and that the longer we go without it, the worse we feel. Chronic sleep-deprivation is known to be even fatal. Yet exactly why do we need sleep? To rest our bodies, and our brains? To sort through a day’s worth of memories? To cleanse our brain of waste products that collect as neurons and supporting cells busily do their thing?
Within the kingdom of
Animalia
one constant is that its brain-enabled species need to give these brains a regular break and have a good sleep. Although what ‘sleep’ entails here can differ significantly between species, generally it means a period of physical inactivity where the animal’s brain patterns change significantly with slower brainwaves. The occurrence of so-called rapid eye movement (REM) phases is also common, with dreaming quite possibly also being a feature among many animals, though obviously hard to ascertain.
Most recently strong evidence has arisen for sleep being essential to remove waste products, in the form of so-called glymphatic clearance. This is akin to lymphatic waste removal in other tissues, while our brains curiously enough lack a lymphatic system. So is sleeping just to a way to scrub our brains clean of waste?
Defining Sleep
Drosophila melanogaster.
For us mammals, sleep is literally something that we grow up with, with newborn mammals spending most of their time sleeping. Yet sleep is a universal phenomenon, not just
among animals
, but also among unicellular organisms who display pronounced circadian rhythms. This suggests that there is a definite physical cause for these regular periods of rest, further supported by the fact that in animals which posses a brain there is not a single species which does not require sleep.
This is a pattern which can be seen by small animals like insects, with
Drosophila melanogaster
(fruit flies)
requiring about 2.5 hours of sleep
each day, according to a number of studies. These studies also showed that
D. melanogaster
will suffer the effects of sleep deprivation if forced to stay awake. Afterwards they will sleep for significantly longer, and if kept from sleeping for extended periods of time, these little flies will die from lack of sleep. All of which is very similar to us big-brained humans, albeit that we require more like 7-9 hours of sleep each circadian cycle.
With sleep clearly being an essential part of survival, animals have developed a wide range of ways to be able to do so safely. From everyone’s favorite avian theropod dinosaurs grasping firmly onto a tree branch or similar while asleep, to wasps using their mandibles to do much the same and various animals opting to only sleep one half of their brains at a time with
unihemispheric slow-wave sleep
, something observed with avian, aquatic and terrestrial species.
Waking Up From Mysticism
Throughout history, sleep was most commonly seen as something mystical, related to dreams and visions, with purportedly gods and other mystical sources sending dreams as auguries. Equally it was regarded as something very similar to death, with poets like John Keats postulating the question “Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream”. This is a cultural phenomenon which is still easy to recognize in today’s plentiful dream interpretation books, along with euphemistic phrases for death that make it seem akin to a very long sleep.
Since we began to be able to examine the sleeping brain in more detail, it’s become much easier to regard the brain as an organic computer with the observable activity from ‘brain waves’ providing a clear indication of what it is currently doing. This is also where we discovered the importance of
slow-wave sleep
(SWS), characterized by relatively slow delta waves. It’s the third stage in non-rapid eye movement (
NREM
) sleep, characterized by the least amount of activity in the brain. It is also associated with healing and restoration of the brain’s tissues and energy supplies.
Interestingly, although we have evidence of NREM being an essential part of the brain’s functioning, in particular
memory consolidation
, its role in memory retention has been put into question. It was originally thought that REM sleep was essential for consolidating memories into long-term storage, but studies have shown this assumption to be incorrect. More interestingly, staying awake while not sleep-deprived does not appear to negatively impact this learning process, with e.g. a
2004 review article in
Cell
by Robert P. Vertes suggesting that sleep may not be important at all for memory consolidation.
Theoretically this should mean that we animals would have no reason to carve out hours each Sun cycle for a long nap each day, barring the physical needs of the brain tissues that so gently slosh about in our craniums.
Mind’s Gutter
While our body’s cells are busy doing their thing, their metabolic wastes keep piling up and have to be removed. In vertebrates, this is handled by the lymphatic system. This is an extensive network of branching vessels, lymph nodes, lymphatic tissues, etc. which in many respects mirrors the body’s circulatory system and is in fact an extension of it. Through the lymphatic system a significant part of blood plasma is returned to circulation after it and its nutrients have reached tissues via capillary action, allowing for efficient drainage of metabolic wastes at the same time.
Norepinephrine-mediated metabolic waste clearance in the brain. (Credit:
Natalie L. Hauglund et al.
, Cell, 2025)
Although the brain does not possess a lymphatic system of its own, in 2012 a
‘glymphatic system’
was proposed
for the brain, recognizing the importance of the glial cells to achieve a similar function as the lymphatic system. This system would enhance the function of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that envelops the central nervous system (CNS), as simple diffusion won’t suffice. Subsequent studies have revealed more details of how this system works, with a very recent
January 2025 study in
Cell
by Natalie L. Hauglund et al. uncovering the role of norepinephrine (
noradrenaline
) release during NREM sleep.
Released by the
locus coeruleus
in the brainstem, noradrenaline causes arteries to contract, which is a process that tends to fluctuate fairly randomly throughout the day as the animal is active. During NREM sleep, however, the release of noradrenaline in the mice-under-test was seen to oscillate in a very deterministic manner. This results predictably in the countless arteries in the brain alternatingly contracting and relaxing, creating a pulsing motion that serves to pump CSF. Along with this motion metabolic waste products and anything else that’s not supposed to be there is effectively flushed from the brain into the surrounding CSF from where the waste products can be filtered out.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating findings here are the effects of sleeping aids, like the tested
zolpidem
. Crucial in this study was that the mice were allowed to fall asleep naturally rather than being put under artificially. This allowed for a direct comparison between natural and zolpidem-induced sleep. Somewhat disturbingly, the zolpidem mice showed half the level of noradrenaline waves and more than a 30% reduction in fluid transport. This strongly suggests that the use of such sleeping aids may hamper the brain’s glymphatic system, with potentially harmful consequences over time.
Other implications here are the potential effects of glymphatic system disorders, whether aging-related or not. As already suggested in the earlier referenced 2012 study by Jeffrey J Iliff et al., conditions such as Alzheimer’s and similar may be induced or worsened by a failing glymphatic system, as evidenced by the collecting of protein plaques amidst dying neurons.
Although this most recent study involved mice and not humans, there are very good reasons to assume that the same principle of noradrenaline-induced pulsations is something that persists within the brains of many if not most animals. Even a tiny fruit fly may have to take a break for this exact reason, sleeping for a few hours. Possibly dreaming fruitfully as its brain readies itself for another busy day.
Featured image: “
Sleeping arctic fox (
Vulpes lagopus
)
” by Rama | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094380",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T20:44:47",
"content": "7-9, but I believe there’s a group that can get along fine on five or less without ill effect.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8094413",
"... | 1,760,371,647.078092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/hacking-the-22e-ble-sr08-smart-ring-with-built-in-display/ | Hacking The 22€ BLE SR08 Smart Ring With Built-In Display | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [] | In the process of making everything ‘smart’, it would seem that rings have become the next target, and they keep getting new features. The ring that
[Aaron Christophel] got his mittens on is the SR08
, which appears to have been cloned by many manufacturers at this point. It’s got an OLED display, 1 MB Flash and a Renesas DA14585 powering it from a positively adorable 16 mAh LiPo battery.
The small scale makes it an absolute chore to reverse-engineer and develop with, which is why [Aaron] got the €35
DA14585 development kit
from Renesas. Since this dev kit only comes with a 256 kB SPI Flash chip, he had to replace it with a 1 MB one. The reference PDFs, pinouts and custom demo firmware are provided on his
GitHub account
, all of which is also explained in the video.
Rather than hack the ring and destroy it like his first attempts, [Aaron] switched to using the Renesas Software Update OTA app to flash custom firmware instead. A CRC error is shown, but this can be safely ignored. The ring uses about 18 µA idle and 3 mA while driving the display, which is covered in the provided custom firmware for anyone who wants to try doing something interesting with these rings. | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094315",
"author": "Seth G",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T17:52:01",
"content": "For the life of me, I don’t see what the attraction is to these devices (specifically “smart” rings). they seem completely impractical for anything useful.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"rep... | 1,760,371,647.01586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/05/what-happens-if-you-die-in-space/ | What Happens If You Die In Space? | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"death",
"nasa",
"space"
] | There are no two ways about it—space will kill you if you give it half a chance. More than land, sea, or air, the space environment is entirely hostile to human existence. Precision-engineered craft are the bare minimum just to ensure human survival. Even still, between the vacuum, radiation, micrometeorites, and equipment failures, there are plenty of ways for things to go catastrophically wrong beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Despite the hazards, most spacefaring humans have completed their missions without injury. However, as we look to return to the Moon, tread on Mars, and beyond, it’s increasingly likely that future astronauts could pass away during longer missions. When that inevitably happens, the question is simple—how do you deal with death in space?
Unlikely, But Possible
For the Apollo 11 mission, there was no hope of rescue in the event something went wrong. A speech was prepared for President Nixon to cover off this dreaded eventuality. Credit:
National Archives
Death almost never occurs during space missions. That’s a testament to the hard work and engineering prowess of space agencies around the world. As of early 2024, 644 people have reached space by the FAI definition—crossing the Kármán line at 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
Of all of those people, just 18 have died during a mission. In each case, the mission ended with the deaths of the entire crew, and usually the destruction of the spacecraft itself. Notably, only once incident occurred above the Kármán line—during the Soyuz 11 mission, when the crew capsule underwent decompression in space.
In a total mission loss, where a vehicle has crashed or life support has failed, it has been left up to support crews to recover the remains of those involved. They are then handled with the usual deference and respect as per the cultures of those involved. The procedure is ultimately no different from any other sort of traumatic emergency event involving loss of life.
Often, practical rescue or recovery has been impossible for the most ambitious space missions, making it a moot point. Failure was often total. President Nixon famously had a speech on hand if the Apollo 11 mission
didn’t go to plan
and the astronauts got stuck on the Moon. Sombre words were all that was on offer; there was no more that could be done in the event of calamity.
Practical Realities
Longer missions increase the chance that an astronaut could die, even of natural causes, at some point along the way.
Future space missions, however, could see more difficult situations arise. When a whole crew or entire spacecraft is lost, it’s a tragedy, and there is little to do but pick up the pieces and mourn those lost. The problem becomes multifaceted when there is only a partial loss, such as one member of a larger crew—and their body or remains must be dealt with.
Imagine a mission to Mars. With our primitive technology, it would involve months of travel there, and many months back—not counting any time spent on the surface. Outside of accidents or equipment failure, the sheer length of the mission provides plenty of time for old-fashioned human fallibility to claim the lives of one or more crew members. A heart attack, a burst appendix, or even just choking on food could see an astronaut die, while the rest of the crew are left to deal with the loss of their fellow crew member.
On Earth, these problems are easily dealt with. If you die on land, you’re sent to a mortuary, and later interred, cremated, or dealt with in whatever way your next of kin or culture sees fit. If you pass on a plane, there are simple routines for dealing with your body until it can be delivered to the relevant authorities. On a ship, it’s much the same, and there’s also the tradition of burial at sea which is both well-established and particularly expeditious.
The logistics of space travel don’t present such convenient options. The body of a dead crew member presents multiple issues. Beyond the problem of decomposition and biohazard, there’s also the psychological ramifications for the other astronauts having to share a cramped craft with their deceased colleague. Simple solutions are out, too. UN regulations effectively forbid simply releasing bodies into space, particularly in orbits around Earth; even just the space junk problems make that a non-starter. Even if we were to make it to the Moon, or Mars, it’s not as simple as burying a body, either. At our early stage of exploration, it would be considered incredibly poor form to contaminate another planet or moon in this way. It could destroy a great deal of scientific value, and flies in the face of proper quarantine rules.
A body bag (referred to as the Body Back) was NASA and Promessa’s proposed solution to dealing with bodies during space flight. Credit: Promessa
NASA did develop one solution, at least to the back-of-the-envelope level.
It worked with a green burial company called Promessa
on a tidy and compact solution for dealing with astronaut deaths in space itself. The concept involved placing the deceased inside a GoreTex bodybag, and then placing the bag outside the craft, using the cold vacuum of space to freeze the body to incredibly low temperatures. The body would then be vibrated to the point it shattered and decomposed into something approximating a powder. Imagine smashing a flower frozen with liquid nitrogen, and you’re getting the right idea.
From there, the remains would be dehydrated until the bag contained just 25 kilograms or so of non-descript human remains. This solution was lightweight, which is critical for spaceflight, and solved the problem of decomposition and biohazard. It also saved space on the craft and avoided astronauts needing to bunk next to a decaying corpse of a fellow crew member. Beyond the study, NASA never developed this to a working viable capability.
The cold of space would freeze the body, which could then be vibrated into dust with a robot arm and then dehydrated for easy storage. Credit: Promessa
Realistically, deaths in space will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. In more recent years, NASA has spent some time
refining its position on the topic
, and astronaut Chris Hadfield noted that practice exercises
referred to as ‘death sims’
are carried out, so crews don’t go in entirely unprepared. But ultimately, the specifics of any given situation will guide the response. An astronaut that dies during an extravehicular activity might be left in their spacesuit, as the airtight garment might ease conditions during their transport back to Earth, for example. Forensic examinations may take place, too, and basic funeral rites or similar may be undertaken. In extreme cases on longer missions, burial on planetary surface or airlock jettison may be considered to maintain viable conditions for the rest of the crew, even if regulations officially don’t allow it.
In extreme conditions, crews may have no option for bringing a deceased crewmember back to Earth. Credit: NASA
Death is never easy to deal with. Space travel just adds a whole lot of complications that make it a practical and logistical headache, beyond the usual grief and psychological trauma. It’s unlikely to get any easier, and space agencies will be hoping their prepared procedures will remain untested as long as possible as we continue to reach for the stars. | 51 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8094274",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T15:31:31",
"content": "A thought-provoking article.“it would be considered incredibly poor form to contaminate another planet or moon in this way.”Says who, exactly? We’ve left dead machines on numerous bodies, not including... | 1,760,371,646.941001 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/more-details-on-why-deepseek-is-a-big-deal/ | More Details On Why DeepSeek Is A Big Deal | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"Deepseek",
"LLM",
"reasoning"
] | The DeepSeek large language models (LLM) have been making headlines lately, and for more than one reason.
IEEE Spectrum has an article that sums everything up very nicely
.
We shared the way
DeepSeek made a splash
when it came onto the AI scene not long ago, and this is a good opportunity to go into a few more details of why this has been such a big deal.
For one thing, DeepSeek (there’s actually two flavors, -V3 and -R1, more on them in a moment) punches well above its weight. DeepSeek is the product of an innovative development process, and freely available to use or modify. It is also indirectly highlighting the way companies in this space like to label their LLM offerings as “open” or “free”, but stop well short of actually making them open source.
The DeepSeek-V3 LLM was developed in China and reportedly cost less than 6 million USD to train. This was possible thanks to developing
DualPipe
, a highly optimized and scalable method of training the system despite limitations due to export restrictions on Nvidia hardware.
Details are in the technical paper for DeepSeek-V3
.
There’s also
DeepSeek-R1
, a chain-of-thought “reasoning” model which handily provides its thought process enclosed within easily-parsed
<think>
and
</think>
pseudo-tags that are included in its responses. A model like this takes an iterative step-by-step approach to formulating responses, and benefits from prompts that provide a clear goal the LLM can aim for. The way DeepSeek-R1 was created was itself novel. Its training started with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) which is a human-led, intensive process as a “cold start” which eventually handed off to a more automated reinforcement learning (RL) process with a rules-based reward system. The result avoided problems that come from relying too much on RL, while minimizing the human effort of SFT. Technical
details on the process of training DeepSeek-R1 are here
.
DeepSeek-V3 and -R1 are freely available in the sense that one can access the full-powered models online or via an app, or download distilled models for local use on more limited hardware. It is free and open as in accessible, but not
open source
because not everything needed to replicate the work is actually released. Like with most LLMs, the training data and actual training code used are not available.
What
is
released and making waves of its own are the technical details of how researchers produced what they did, and that means there are efforts to try to make an actually open source version. Keep an eye out for
Open-R1
! | 48 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093491",
"author": "Vik",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T00:14:13",
"content": "I see a FLOSSAIatHome project in the making.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8093492",
"author": "Daniel Thomas Erickson",
"timestamp": "2025-02-... | 1,760,371,647.281976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/communicating-with-satellites-like-its-1957/ | Communicating With Satellites Like It’s 1957 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"antenna",
"contact",
"dual-band",
"ham radio",
"QSO",
"radio",
"repeater",
"satellite",
"uhf",
"VHF"
] | When the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was put into orbit around Earth, anyone in the path of the satellite could receive the beeps transmitted by the satellite provided they had some simple radio equipment. Of course, there was no two-way communication with this satellite, and it only lasted a few weeks before its batteries died. Here in the future, though, there are many more satellites in orbit and a few are specifically meant for ham radio operators. And, like the ’50s,
it doesn’t take too much specialized equipment to communicate with them
, although now that communication can be two-way.
The first step in this guide by [W2PAK] is to know where these satellites are in the sky. The simplest way to do that is to use a smartphone app called GoSatWatch and, when configured for a specific location, shows the satellites currently overhead. After that it’s time to break out the radio gear, which can be surprisingly inexpensive. A dual-band handheld is required since satellite uplink and downlink can be on different bands, and
the antenna can be made from simple parts as well as [W2PAK] demonstrates in a separate video
. Combined, this can easily be done for less than $100. [W2PAK] also goes over the proper format and etiquette for a satellite contact as well, so a new operator can pick it up quickly.
Using satellites as repeaters opens up a lot of capabilities when compared to terrestrial communications. Especially for operators with entry-level licenses who are restricted to mostly VHF and UHF, it adds a challenge as well as significantly increased range compared to ground-based repeaters and line-of-sight communications. There are plenty of activities around satellites that don’t require a license at all, too,
like this project which downloads weather imagery from weather satellites
. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093474",
"author": "Cris",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T22:46:45",
"content": "I made a dual band Yagi for this with a scrap wood boom, some aluminum elements (from a discarded aluminum power line), BNC connector, some old TV coax and a coil. Maybe not the best performance but sure was... | 1,760,371,647.190516 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/examining-the-vulnerability-of-large-language-models-to-data-poisoning/ | Examining The Vulnerability Of Large Language Models To Data-Poisoning | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"large language model"
] | Large language models (LLMs) are wholly dependent on the quality of the input data with which these models are trained. While suggestions that people eat rocks are funny to you and me, in the case of LLMs intended to help out medical professionals, any false claims or statements dripping out of such an LLM can have dire consequences, ranging from incorrect diagnoses to much worse. In a
recent study published in
Nature Medicine
by [Daniel Alexander Alber] et al. the ease with which this data poisoning can occur is demonstrated.
According to their findings, only 0.001% of training tokens have to be replaced with medical misinformation to order to create models that are likely to produce medically erroneous statement. Most concerning is that such a corrupted model isn’t readily discovered using standard medical LLM benchmarks. There are filters for erroneous content, but these tend to be limited in scope due to the overhead. Post-training adjustments can be made, as can the addition of
RAG
, but none of this helps with the
confident bull excrement
due to corruption.
The mitigation approach that the researchers developed cross-references LLM output against biomedical knowledge graphs, to reduce the LLM mostly for generating natural language. In this approach LLM outputs are matched against the graphs and if LLM ‘facts’ cannot be verified, it’s marked as potential misinformation. In a test with 1,000 random passages detected issues with a claimed effectiveness of 91.9%.
Naturally, this does not guarantee that misinformation does not make it past these knowledge graphs, and largely leaves the original problem with LLMs in place, namely that their outputs can never be fully trusted. This study also makes it abundantly clear how easy it is to corrupt an LLM via the input training data, as well as underlining the broader problem that
AI is making mistakes that we don’t expect
. | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093386",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T19:44:11",
"content": "A really good reason why LLMs should not be used in any application where they could put lives in danger. Also, the preponderance of “confident bull excrement” AND the simultaneous preponderance of... | 1,760,371,647.142596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-keyboard-configurator/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Keyboard Configurator | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Bennett Junior",
"IBM Selectric",
"keyboard configurator",
"modular keyboard",
"pocket typewriter",
"VIK standard",
"wooden keyboard"
] | Have you ever wished you could experiment with different layouts super easily, just by adding or removing a few switches here and there and printing a new case? Well, [heyisjambo] says that it’s more than possible with
menura, the modular keyboard system
.
So many lovely options! Image by [heyisjambo] via
GitHub
[heyisjambo] is happy with 36 keys, but is reduced-count-curious and wanted a way to explore without a lot of wasted time and
PCBs
.
At the same time, [heyisjambo] wanted to experiment with split vs. uni-body construction, and especially the different shapes that are possible when tweaking the angle and distance between them.
And as if that weren’t enough, there’s support for [Sadek Baroudi]’s
VIK standard
for interfacing data between PCBs, which calls for an FPC 12-pin, 0.5 mm pitch connector and allows for ultra-cool magnetic connectors. This way, you can easily add things like displays, trackpads, and trackballs in the between the halves.
Thanks for the tip, [calculus]!
Cosmos Keyboard Configurator Is Out of This World
Well, this is probably the coolest thing I’ve seen this week. Cosmos is
an utterly customizable keyboard configurator
by [Lost Pistachio] that
uses a scan of your hand
to figure out what thumb clusters, curvature, and layout are right for you, without wasting time and plastic on physical prototypes. You should go check it out, especially to see the cool and noodly finger animations in the demo.
Image by [LostPistachio] via
Cosmos Keyboard Configurator
At the top left you’ll find Basic, Advanced, and Expert modes, where Expert is playing directly with the code. You can mess with the thumb cluster keys by moving them around directly with the mouse. You want a trackball? Boom, trackball.
Did I mention that it does all this in the browser? Oh, except for a couple of things things, which are accessible with a PRO account. This costs a measly $10 and is good for a lifetime, yours or theirs.
Yes, there are a lot of settings, but it’s easy enough to get started with
the docs page
, which outlines some recommendations for everything from the layout to the microcontroller.
Thanks for the tip, [Timothée]!
The Centerfold: The Hacktrick
Image by [tschibo00] via
reddit
No, this isn’t some sci-fi prop. It’s real, and it’s spectacular. This is [tschibo00]’s
Hacktrick
— a gasket-mounted keyboard that uses converted key tops from an IBM Selectric I typewriter. The golf ball type element is not just for looks — it’s mounted on a special adapter and acts as encoder to scroll up/down, left/right, and push down.
The switches are mounted sideways in order to accept the keycaps without an adapter. Since the Selectric key tops are normally mounted on levers and wider in the north-south direction, the switches must be rotated, and a cross-slit Dremeled into the underside of each beautiful, double-shot key top. This way, they can still be used on a Selectric. In case you’re wondering, that case was resin-printed by a board house, although [tschibo00] sanded, painted, and clear-coated it many times.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Bennett/Junior
Introduced in 1907,
the Junior
was Charles Almon Bennett’s first typewriter. It had no paper table and utilized ink rollers. Evidently, it had numerous issues with alignment. But one thing is certain; this was truly a pocket-sized typewriter.
Image by [Lucas Dul] via
The Mechanical Type
These issues were all addressed with Bennett’s second machine, which he named after himself. The Bennett had a paper table, ribbon spools, and no alignment issues. Even so, it was difficult to type on.
First off, the keys are way too close together, which is just bad for typing in general, plus it made the wrists begin to ache after a while.
And you see how they overlap? Pressing one depresses the keys beneath it as well — hit Q, and A and Z go down with it. But hey, at least it’s ortholinear, eh? And plus, look where the Space bar is.
These things are
small
: just 11″ x 5″ x 2″ and a mere 4.5 pounds. They have the honor of being the smallest typewriters ever manufactured with full keyboards. If you want to take a deeper dive into one of these machines, be sure to check out
[Lucas Dul]’s exploration of a Junior
. You may remember [Lucas] from
a previous Keebin’
.
There’s Nothing Wooden About This Design
Look, I don’t happen to have any experience clacking on a wooden keyboard, although I welcome it with open arms. And unless I get some serious skills and/or cash, it’s probably going to be a while.
Image via
Yanko Design
That said, the folks at Yanko Design got their hands on
an Alice60 made (almost) completely out of wood
, and rave about the sound, the tactility, the whole nine.
We know what plastic sound and feels like. But even the nicest plastics get slick over time with finger oils. I’m not saying that will magically go away with a wooden keyboard, only that one can imagine the oils seasoning the wood rather that ruining it.
This offering from Epomaker x Feker is currently
available for pre-order for a cool $549
. Not bad for something so lovely, which will undoubtedly provide a keyboarding experience like none other.
This is certainly not the first wooden keyboard we’ve seen, and it’s not even the first commercial offering. If you’re not into ergonomics and have the means to spend twice as much,
check out this wooden rectangle from Hacoa
. If you want to make one yourself, take a look at
[Bo Yao]’s carpenter tau number
, or
[Steve M. Potter]’s Scrabble tile affair
.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093408",
"author": "Dave Boyer",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T20:42:09",
"content": "Have you ever wished you could experiment with different layouts super easily, just by adding or removing a few switches here and there and printing a new case?No. My daily driver is a $15 A4Tech PS/2 ... | 1,760,371,647.418297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/underwater-robotics-hack-chat/ | Underwater Robotics Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, February 5 at noon Pacific for the
Underwater Robotics Hack Chat
with Tony White!
Almost anywhere you look, there’s a good chance you can see a robot at work. Whether they’re sweeping your floors, delivering a snack, building a car, or even driving one, robots are everywhere on this planet. And since over 70% of this planet is covered in water, it makes sense that robots should be there, too. Getting a robot to work underwater at all is one thing, but getting it to work underwater reliably can be quite a challenge. Water always finds a way to ruin your day, after all, and this reality only worsens when you add a little salt into the mix.
Tony White
knows the marine engineering field well, having worked in the space for over a decade. He’s currently an applications engineer at
Blue Robotics
, where he’s worked on everything from full-size autonomous surface vessels to underwater swarm robots. He’s stopping by the Hack Chat to talk about the harsh engineering realities of underwater automation, so if you’ve ever wanted to take the plunge, you’ll want to come to this Hack Chat for sure.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093366",
"author": "Notum",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T18:41:42",
"content": "The answer is ultrasound.Oh, sorry, the chat hasn’t started yet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8093385",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,647.364851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/a-cordless-soldering-iron-with-a-difference/ | A Cordless Soldering Iron With A Difference | Jenny List | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"microwave oven",
"silicon carbide",
"soldering iron"
] | Many decades ago, when soldering was an activity more often associated with copper fabrication than with electronics, a soldering iron would have been a large lump of copper on a shaft with a wooden handle. You would heat it in a gas flame, and use its pointed end for your soldering. Electric irons have made this a thing of the past, but the basic idea is still one with some merit. [Shake the Future] is here with a modern take on such an iron,
one that is heated in the microwave oven
.
The business end of the iron is a normal soldering iron bit, but behind it is a piece of sintered silicon carbide wrapped in ceramic fibre and covered with Kapton tape and a high-temperature-resin 3D printed shield. On the back of that is a 3D-printed handle. The whole thing is put in the microwave oven for a few tens of seconds to heat to temperature, and thereafter, you have however long the thermal mass of the silicon carbide holds the temperature in which to do your soldering.
It’s an interesting idea that we can see has some use in situations where you need an iron for a quick job away from your bench but within reach of the kitchen. We like the lateral thinking, and it’s certainly fascinating to see the construction. But in an age of USB-C power packs and irons we have more convenient soldering on the go, so we’re not sure how useful it would be to us.
Silicon carbide is an interesting material,
it’s not the first time we’ve written about it being used in a high temperature application
. | 38 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093324",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T16:39:14",
"content": "hahaha i was thinking of using a bit of thin steel rod and a bic lighter for the ‘soldering iron to weld plastic’ trick, rather than gumming up the tip on my ‘real’ iron. but putting it in the microwave!!... | 1,760,371,647.49391 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/usb-hub-a-dub-dub-weird-edge-cases-are-my-ruin/ | USB Hub-A-Dub-Dub: Weird Edge Cases Are My Ruin | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"error",
"livestream",
"streaming",
"usb"
] | The Universal Serial Bus. The one bus to rule them all. It brought peace and stability to the world of computer peripherals. No more would Apple and PC users have to buy their own special keyboards, mice, and printers. No more would computers sprout different ports for different types of hardware. USB was fast enough and good enough for just about everything you’d ever want to plug in to a computer.
We mostly think of USB devices as being plug-and-play; that you can just hook them up and they’ll work as intended. Fiddle around around with some edge cases, though, and you might quickly learn that’s not the case. That’s just what I found when I started running complicated livestreams from a laptop…
Fool To Try
You’d think an i7 with 16 GB of RAM would be well equipped to handle some audio software, 40 plugins, and a couple of webcams.
When I’m not writing 5,000 words a day as the most forgettable journalist online, I’m running a musical livestream on Twitch. I invented
Drumbeats and Dicerolls
—
a show in which I roll dice in order to write music in Ableton Live. The dice choose the instruments and sometimes even the notes, and then it’s up to me to turn all that into a coherent song.
The concept is simple enough, but on the technical side, it gets a little complicated. Video-wise, I use two webcams—one for me, one to film the dice as I roll them. That’s two USB devices right there. Then I have my mouse and keyboard, both running via a single Logitech wireless dongle. Finally, I have my Steinberg UR22 audio interface—basically a soundcard in an external box that has musician-friendly hookups for professional-grade mics and speakers.
It all adds up to four USB devices in total, all with USB-A ports. That doesn’t sound like much. Only,
since my desktop was stolen
, I only have a laptop to run the whole show. That presented an immediate hurdle, as my laptop only has two USB-A ports on board, plus a USB-C port on the rear.
I figured I’d hook up a USB-C hub with a few extra ports, and along with my monitor’s additional USB hub, I’d be all good. Trouble struck as I first attempted to stream in this way. Both webcams worked, with one of them even running through a separate NVIDIA Broadcast tool to do some background removal. However, the audio was problematic. Every ten to twenty seconds or so, the sound would drop out or stutter. It was incredibly jarring for a music stream.
Not So Simple
My Razer Kiyo webcam, complete with aftermarket privacy shield.
I was frustrated. This was a problem I’d never had before. In normal life, I’d always just plugged whatever device into whatever USB port with no problems. Even when I’d chained hubs off hubs, I’d seen little issue, even with high-bandwidth devices like HD webcams or portable hard drives. And yet, here I stood. I was plugging, but the gear wasn’t playing.
At first, I figured I just had to tweak my software setup. I was using the Steinberg UR-22 via the Windows Wave drivers in Ableton. I figured if I just used the professional-grade ASIO sound driver instead, my stuttering problem would go away. However, then I found that my streaming software couldn’t naturally capture audio from this device. This necessitated pulling in the Reastream plugin to truck audio from Ableton into Streamlabs, but that wasn’t so hard. I tried a test recording offline, and it all worked great. No stutters, no problems. Only, as soon as I tried streaming live… the stuttering was back, in a big way.
My Logitech C920E webcam. Forgive the beige walls.
For my second stream, I switched things up. I ended up using a USB headset plugged right into my laptop’s native ports for audio, back with the Windows drivers, and kept the Steinberg UR-22 just for recording vocals into the machine. This worked great, with no stuttering on playback. But I had a new problem—only one of my webcams would work at a time. Oh, and the mic feed from the Steinberg was dropping out randomly, ruining my vocal recordings.
Looking at the mess of cables and daisy-chained hubs in front of me, I realized I had to simplify. I put the Steinberg device on the most direct hookup, straight to the laptop’s USB-A port, and set it back up in ASIO mode. Then I connected both webcams to a Lenovo docking station, hooked up by USB-C. I eliminated any extra hubs, ditched the USB headset, and had the most critical device—the Steinberg—connected by a single cable. This had to solve it, right?
My Steinberg UR22 interface, which has never faltered at a gig—but flatly refuses to stop stuttering when I’m livestreaming.
Well, the webcams were now humming along nicely, probably because they now had enough power from the docking station instead of an unpowered hub. But were all the problems fixed? Alas, no. Try as I might, the Steinberg device would stutter every few seconds or so. I double-checked that I didn’t have a CPU, RAM, or hard drive issue—everything came back clear. But for some reason, two webcams and an ASIO device was making the audio choke.
Brick Walls
Hours more troubleshooting rushed by. After all this, I’ve come to findings that confound me as an engineer. I can run two HD webcams and a USB headset with no dropouts, just using basic Windows audio drivers. And yet, trying to use the Steinberg audio interface, it just falters. Even with the webcams degraded to ultra low resolution! This interface has seen me through thick and thin, but it just won’t work under these conditions. Despite the fact it’s using the same sample rate as the USB headset, and should surely be using a similar amount of bandwidth. Regardless, its driver tells me there’s a USB problem and I can’t seem to solve it.
This error plagues me.
The one thing that itches my brain is that the stuttering seems to only happen when I’m streaming live online. When I’m not streaming video, the Steinberg happily operates as rock-solid as the cheap headset. The thing is, my network connection is via a PCI-Express WiFi chip baked into the laptop, so… that’s not even a USB thing.
When I started writing this a week ago, I thought I’d have solved it by now. I’d have a nice clear answer about what went wrong and how I figured it all out. That didn’t come to pass. Part of me wants to rush out and build a desktop PC with a real amount of ports to see if eliminating hubs and nonsense solves my problems. The other part of me wants to redouble my efforts to track down the issue with every last USB inspection utility out there. I’ll probably do the latter and update this article in due course.
Instead of a neat solution, all I’m left with is confusion and a cautionary tale. Just because you can plug a bunch of USB devices together, it doesn’t mean they’ll all work properly and play nicely together. Our computers are more complicated than we expect, it’s just they’re better at hiding it from us these days.
The Update
Would you believe, the comment section here did just what I hoped? It helped me solve the issue!
The clue was in the text above, I just hadn’t gotten my thoughts in the right order. Several people noted that I had explained there were zero audio dropouts when using two webcams and the Steinberg audio interface when screen recording. The problem only occurred when I was livestreaming to Twitch.tv. Did it have something to do with network traffic?
Device Manager seems to indicate everything is hooked up the way you’d expect. So why is heavy WiFI traffic causing USB issues and other slowdowns?
Indeed it did. In fact, I soon found out my laptop had another oddball performance issue. When uploading a large file online, my laptop would stutter even just playing back a simple video file stored on disk. It seems for whatever reason, heavy WiFi traffic brings my laptop to a standstill and affects the USB interface too.
This makes little sense to me. I flipped through Device Manager, and found that the WiFi adapter was connected via the laptop’s PCI interface, just like the Ethernet adapter. And yet, for whatever reason, I can stream just fine with my audio interface and two webcams as long as I have a wired network connection.
Maybe the problem wasn’t USB at all, and just presenting that way. I’m still trying to uncover the root cause, because I’m not sure why WiFi would affect the USB interface, and, indeed, one audio device more than another. Regardless, I got my solution with the aid of the Hackaday community, and for that, I am grateful. | 67 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093280",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T15:08:41",
"content": "Regarding the webcams, IIRC some don’t down sample on the device but always stream full data and let the software resample the selected dimensions so there is no effect/release of the bandwidth",
... | 1,760,371,647.698191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/ble-rain-gauge-sips-water-and-batteries/ | BLE Rain Gauge Sips Water And Batteries | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ble",
"nRF5283",
"rain gauge"
] | It isn’t that hard to make an electronic rain gauge if you have a steady source of power or you don’t mind changing batteries often. But [Matthew Ford] offers a third option:
a simple device with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module that can get a few years of a pair of AA batteries
.
The approach has several advantages. Batteries make the device self-contained, and changing them infrequently is an obvious win. In addition, the BLE allows the device to be wireless and send data directly to an Android device. Thanks to a WH-SP-RG rain gauge, there’s not much to that part. The smart part is an nRF52832 module and some minor parts. The phone side uses an off-the-shelf Android app.
In a project like this, it is critical to have timers that really put the CPU to sleep. [Matthew] had to modify the Arduino libraries to allow the lp_timer objects to make it to an hour. Without the modifications, the timer can only reach 8.5 minutes. Sure, you could stack them, but that means taking a power hit multiple times an hour which would affect battery life.
Not the most complex project, but more complexity would mean lower battery life, so — as they say — less is more. We couldn’t help but think that with rechargeable batteries and a small solar panel, this could last a very long time.
LoRa, of course, is
another choice
. You can make
3D print a tipping bucket device
, too. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093138",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T12:13:01",
"content": "nRF chips are pretty much the best when you want BLE and low power even though I hate using their Zephyr based Connect SDK.Still Nordic chips are top notch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,647.813159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/stepper-motor-operating-principle-and-microstepping-explained/ | Stepper Motor Operating Principle And Microstepping Explained | Maya Posch | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"microstepping",
"stepper motor"
] | The [Denki Otaku] YouTube channel
took a look recently at some stepper motors
, or ‘stepping motors’ as they’re called in Japanese. Using a 2-phase stepper motor as an example, the stepper motor is taken apart and its components explained. Next a primer on the types and the ways of driving stepper motors is given, providing a decent overview of the basics at the hand of practical examples.
As great as theoretical explanations are, there’s a lot of value in watching the internals of a stepper motor move when its coils are activated in order. Also demonstrated are PWM-controlled stepper motor drivers before diving into the peculiarities of microstepping, whereby the driving of the coils is done such that the stator moves in the smallest possible increments, often through flux levels in these coils. This allows for significantly finer positioning of the output shaft than with wave stepping and similar methods that are highly dependent on the number of phases and coils.
As demonstrated in the video, another major benefit of microstepping is that it creates much smoother movement while moving, but also noted is that servo motors are often what you want instead. This is a topic which we addressed
in our recent article
on the workings of stepper motors, with particular focus on the 4-phase 28BYJ-48 stepper motor and the disadvantages of steppers versus servos. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093124",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T10:28:30",
"content": "Actually a very decent explanation",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8093974",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2025-02-05T01:44:54... | 1,760,371,647.747624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/do-dare-or-dont-getting-inked-by-a-3d-printer/ | Do, Dare Or Don’t? Getting Inked By A 3D Printer | Heidi Ulrich | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"3d print",
"3d printing",
"body modification",
"tattoo",
"tattoo gun"
] | This
unusual tattoo hack by [Emily The Engineer]
is not for the weak of heart, but let’s be frank: we kind of know her for that. And she gives out a warning, albeit
at a good 10 minutes in
, to not do this at home. What she’s about to do takes creativity and tech obsession to the next level: to transform a 3D printer into a functional tattoo machine. Therefore, [Emily] ingeniously modified one of her standard 3D printers to operate two-dimensionally, swapped its plastic extruder for a tattoo gun, and, yes, even managed to persuade a willing participant to try it out.
The entire process can be seen in [Emily]’s video below, which humorously yet meticulously documents the journey from Sharpie test runs to actually inking skin. Aside from a lot of tongue-in-cheek trial and error, this project requires a sheer amount of problem-solving. [Emily] employs firmware edits to bypass safety checks, and clever hardware adaptations to ensure smooth transitions between strokes. One impressive upgrade is the emergency solenoid system, a literal panic button to stop the machine mid-tattoo in case of trouble—a critical addition for something with needles involved!
This hack sits on the edge of DIY body modification, raising eyebrows and technical questions alike. If you missed the warning and are now frantically searching for tattoo removal options, know
we’ve covered some
(but you might be rightfully scared of automating that, too, at this point). If you haven’t lifted a finger while reading this, just do the safe thing: watch [Emily]’s video, and tinker about the subsequent purposes this discovery creates for 3D printing or tattoo art. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093061",
"author": "Sjaak",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T06:53:11",
"content": "At least there is is an option to run a spelling/grammar checker or run in through some fancy AI before making it permanent.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,371,647.973974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/how-the-main-frame-became-the-mainframe-an-etymological-dissertation/ | How The Main Frame Became The Mainframe: An Etymological Dissertation | Maya Posch | [
"History",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"etymology",
"mainframe"
] | In his most recent article, [Ken Shirriff] takes a break from putting ASICs under a microscope, and instead does the same
in a proverbial manner with the word ‘mainframe’
. Although these days the word ‘mainframe’ brings to mind a lumbering behemoth of a system that probably handles things like finances and other business things, but originally the ‘main frame’ was just one of many ‘frames’. Which brings us to the early computer systems.
We have all seen the photos of early computer systems, which not only filled rooms, but which also tended to consist of multiple units. This was something which the designers of the IBM 701 computer seem to have come up with, to make it possible to transport and install computer systems without cranes and the breaking out of walls. Within the IBM 701 system’s internal documentation, the unit containing the core logic was referred to as the ‘main frame’, alongside the ‘power frame’, the ‘core frame’, etc.
From this [Ken] then traces how the word ‘main frame’ got reused over the years, eventually making it outside of the IBM world, with a 1978
Radio Electronics
magazine defining the ‘mainframe’ as the enclosure for the computer, separating it seemingly from peripherals. This definition seems to have stuck, with
BYTE
and other magazines using this definition.
By the 1960s the two words ‘main frame’ had already seen itself hyphenated and smushed together into a singular word before the 1980s redefined it as ‘a large computer’. Naturally marketing at IBM and elsewhere leaned into the word ‘mainframe’ as a token of power and reliability, as well as a way to distinguish it from the dinky little computers that people had at home or on their office desk.
Truly, after three-quarters of a century, the word ‘mainframe’ has become a reflection of computing history itself. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093060",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T06:53:06",
"content": "“…tended to consist out of multiple units”Should be“…tended to consist of multiple units”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8093074",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,647.866099 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/hackaday-links-february-2-2025/ | Hackaday Links: February 2, 2025 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"abduction",
"asteroid",
"boom",
"electron",
"hackaday links",
"IP bullying",
"kidnapping",
"nintendo",
"orbitals",
"quantum",
"Roadster",
"robot server",
"super mario",
"supersonic",
"tesla",
"test flight",
"wave function",
"XB-1"
] | All things considered, it was a very bad week for aviation here in the United States. Three separate crashes, two of which involved US military aircraft, have left over 70 people dead. We’ll spare you the details since there are plenty of other places to get news like that, but we did want to touch on one bright spot in this week’s aviation news:
the first successful supersonic flight by a US-made civilian aircraft
. There are a lot of caveats to that claim, but it’s clear that Boom Supersonic is on a path to commercializing supersonic air transportation for the first time since the Concorde was retired. Their XB-1 “Baby Boom” test aircraft managed three separate supersonic runs during the January 28 test flight over the Mojave test range. As usual, Scott Manley has
excellent coverage of the test flight
, including a look at how Boom used a Starlink terminal and an iPhone to stream cockpit video.
It’s been more than 20 years since Concorde was retired, and while the planes were an engineering marvel, they always seemed like a solution in search of a problem. The Analog’s
Weekend Wire
has a good rundown of the economics driving the design of Boom’s Overture airliner, including a look at how a plane with fewer seats than the Concorde and a slow top speed can make money for airlines. The company is targeting service on more than 600 routes, and they’ve already got orders from three major carriers and the US Department of Defense for a plane that hasn’t been built yet, so they must be onto something. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, and how supersonic planes will change air travel.
“Look, up in the sky! Is that an asteroid with a chance to wipe out humanity?” Sorry, no,
it’s just a Tesla Roadster
. Elon’s former ride was briefly mistaken for an asteroid after spotting it in early January. The object was given the designation 2018 CN41 for about a day before astronomers deleted the entry from the International Astronomical Union’s
Minor Planet Electronic Circular
once it became clear that the object’s orbital matched “artificial object 2018-017A, Falcon Heavy upper stage with Tesla Roadster.” So, disappointing news to those looking for a cosmic solution to our woes, but cheer up — there’s always
2024 YR4 to look forward to
.
So is robot kidnapping going to be a thing now? It appears so if
this attempted abduction of a robot server
is any indication. The alleged crime took place at a pho joint in San Jose, California, which uses a robot to deliver food to its customers. The perp entered the establishment under the guise of needing the restroom, but once he emerged he tried to abscond with the service bot, which appears to be
a BellaBot
from Pudu Robotics. He was either pretty motivated or pretty jacked — the bot weighs in at a hefty 55 kilos, and he just dead-lifted the awkwardly shaped bot and headed for the door. He was foiled by restaurant employees as he tried to wrestle it into the back of a Honda CR-V before giving up and fleeing the scene. No word if the $18,000 bot was damaged during the attempted heist, or if the wait staff would have been on the hook for the replacement cost had the thief succeeded.
Score one for the little guy as
a grocery store in Costa Rica wins a trademark battle against gaming giant Nintendo
. The shop in question is owned by a chap named Mario and calls itself “Super Mario,” a fact which caught the attention of Nintendo’s IP team when Mario’s son Charlito went to renew their trademark application with the Cost Rican trademark authority. Nintendo sent out a nastygram, Mario and Carlito stood their ground, and the Costa Rica National Registry backed them up. As a bonus, Super Mario has had a bump in business as a result of coverage of the dustup.
Streisand Effect
much?
And finally, if you remember the good old days when the atomic model was just a small solar system with electron planets whizzing around a nucleus star, you’ll probably remember the cognitive dissonance of learning that that’s not at all how electrons work. Having to wrap your head around probablity clouds and oddly shaped orbitals was a real challenge, one that we never fully managed. Until now, that is, with the help of Mahesh over at FloatHeadPhysics and
his excellent walkthrough of atomic orbitals
. The key insight for us was realizing the “wave function” of electrons is analogous to standing waves on a string, and that the probability of finding a electron at any point along the string is least at the nodes. Expanding that concept to three dimensions and throwing in a little of Schrödinger’s magic makes is much easier to visualize how the various orbitals get their shapes. There’s still a little hand-waving, at least for us — we’re still not sure how these orbitals interact with each other, for example — but we’re a lot further along now. Thanks, Mahesh! | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092925",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T02:00:22",
"content": "Guess there were no porches nearby. Grab a bot instead.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8092932",
"author": "s",
"timestamp": "2025-02-03T02... | 1,760,371,647.91568 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/is-fire-conductive-enough-to-power-a-lamp/ | Is Fire Conductive Enough To Power A Lamp? | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"fire",
"physics",
"physics demonstrations"
] | Is fire conductive? As ridiculous that may sound at first glance, from a physics perspective the rapid oxidation process we call ‘fire’ produces a lot of substances that can reduce the electrical insulating (dielectric) properties of air. Is this change enough to allow for significant current to pass? To test this, [The Action Lab] on YouTube
ran some experiments
after being called out on this apparent fact in the comments to an earlier video.
Ultimately what you need to make ‘fire’ conductive is to have an appreciable amount of plasma to reduce the dielectric constant, which means that you cannot just use any rapid oxidation process. In the demonstration with lights and what appears to be a (relatively clean-burning) butane torch, the current conducted is not enough to light up an incandescent or LED light bulb, but can light up a 5 mm LED. When using his arm as a de-facto sensor, it does not conduct enough current to be noticeable.
The more interesting experiment here demonstrates the difference in dielectric breakdown of air at different temperatures. As the dielectric constant for hot air is much lower than for room temperature air, even a clean burning torch is enough to register on a multimeter. Ultimately this seems to be the biggest hazard with fire around exposed (HV) electrical systems, as the ionic density of most types of fire just isn’t high enough.
To reliably strike a conductive plasma arc, you’d need something like
explosive (copper) wire and a few thousand joules
to pump through it. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092859",
"author": "Tim Andersson",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T22:49:02",
"content": "Shocking thumbnail presenting some dude going at mains cables with a blowtorch means I won’t even bother to watch the video. To hell with Your Tube clickbaity earnings, I have better things to do.",... | 1,760,371,648.219751 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/giving-a-proprietary-power-supply-the-boot/ | Giving A Proprietary Power Supply The Boot | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"atx power supply",
"SFF"
] | You’ve probably noticed that everywhere you go — the doctor’s office, hotels, or retail shops, there are tiny PCs everywhere. These small PCs often show up on the surplus market for a very good price, but they aren’t quite full-blown PCs. They usually have little option for expansion and are made to be cheap and small. That means many of them have custom and anemic power supplies. We aren’t sure if [bm_00] needed a regular power supply to handle a graphics card or if the original power supply died, but either way, the HP small-form-factor box needed a new power supply. It took some clever work to be able to use
a normal power supply in the little box
.
At first, we thought this wouldn’t be much of a story. The motherboard surely took all the regular pins, so it would just be a matter of making an adapter, right? Apparently not. The computers run totally on 12V and the motherboard handles things like turning the computer on and off. The computer also was trying to run the power supply’s fan which needed some work arounds.
Granted, you could just wire the power supply to be on all the time, but it is nice to be able to turn everything off. The plan was to use the always-on 5V standby rail to drive a pair of relays. One relay senses the computer’s on/off switch and triggers the ATX power supply to turn on.
The problem is the computer wants to draw a little 12V power all the time. So, in an odd turn of events, a small boost converter changes the 5V standby voltage to enough current to drive the PC in the “off” mode. When the power supply’s 5V rails turn on, they throw the other relay to disconnect the boost converter and supply the real 12V supply.
There’s only one problem with that. The motherboard sees a power glitch when the switch occurs. So, there’s a hefty capacitor to smooth out the transient. Well, there’s another problem. In some cases, though, the boost converter couldn’t provide enough power for the motherboard before the boot process.
Honestly, we think we would just put a switch or a power strip in the supply’s AC cord and have been done with it. But we admire the tenacity and ingenuity.
Then again, you could just
put the PC in the power supply
. Around here, old power supplies usually
get benched
. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092787",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T18:38:09",
"content": "I’m old enough to remember when an “HP” logo on a device mean you had purchased the very best–or at least one of the very best– of that piece of electronics gear.These days, the only ‘hack” better than ... | 1,760,371,648.084445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/telling-time-used-to-be-a-ball/ | Telling Time Used To Be A Ball | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"navigation",
"time ball",
"timekeeping"
] | If you watch the New Year’s festivities from New York, you know that they mark midnight with the dropping of a big, gaudy ball. You might assume this was just an arbitrary gimmick, but it turns out dropping balls has a place in the history of timekeeping, especially for ships at sea. The New York ball doesn’t work precisely the same, but it was clearly inspired by an ancient method of indicating the time.
Apparently, even the ancient Greeks used ball dropping to indicate time. But the modern ball got its start with [Captain Robert Wauchope], who installed one at Portsmouth, England, in 1829. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich got one in 1833, which you can see working in the video below.
The Problem to Solve
The time ball in Greenwich (photo by [ChrisO]
CC-BY-SA-3.0
)
Ships need accurate timing for navigation purposes, so when you made harbor, you wanted to set your clocks in case they were a bit off. But if you were far from the nearby town, you might not be able to hear a clocktower bell or a cannon shot at noon. Even if you did, the speed of sound could be significant. The signal needs to be something visible and preferably something that can indicate that it is “almost” time to get people’s attention.
You want something tall so it can be easily seen. You also need something that clearly indicates the exact moment of the time mark, so that precludes something like raising or dropping a signal flag.
The Solution
[Wauchope’s] idea was to put a tower with a ball near a solar observatory with an accurate clock. Every day at noon, someone would sight the sun and determine the exact moment of noon, setting the accurate clock.
Then, at 1300, an hour later, you’d drop the ball. Everyone could set their clock to coincide with the ball drop. The moment the ball started falling was 1300.
About 1255, you’d raise the ball halfway. Around 1258, it would go to the top of the rod going through the center of the ball. The release would be at exactly 1300.
The American Take
The Boston Time Ball in 1881 (Public Domain)
Well, that’s not usually true in the United States. The first ball in the US was at the United States Naval Observatory in 1845. They would drop their ball at noon, exactly.
The Times Square ball first dropped on January 1, 1908. However, in another American difference, the stroke of midnight is when the ball reaches the bottom, not the instant it starts to drop.
End of the Ball
Of course, radio time signals made this technology obsolete. Still, there are about sixty balls still around, including many in Australia, the United Kingdom, and several scattered in other parts of the world. In the United States, you can find time balls at the Naval Observatory, the New York City Titanic Memorial, and the Plymouth Light in Massachusetts.
The Greenwich Time Ball located at the Royal Observatory in London still drops its ball every day at 1300, as you saw in the earlier video. The guide at Greenwich mentions that the expression “on the ball” relates to time balls, but we’ve also read it is a sports idiom, so we aren’t sure about that. Surprisingly, it isn’t the tallest Time Ball in England. That honor goes to the one in Hull, which, as you can see below, was recently restored and is once again operational. You can also watch
a deep dive into the history
of that particular ball.
Ships at sea have driven our
time-keeping technology
in many ways. Not to mention things like GPS or
LORAN
.
Featured image: “
Working New Years Eve Social Media for NBC
” by Anthony Quintano. Thumbnail: “
Newyearseve loz batrch
” by Alex Lozupone. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093857",
"author": "AbraKadabra",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T18:36:43",
"content": "Looks to be an excellent lightning rod.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8093868",
"author": "threeve",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T19:11:56"... | 1,760,371,648.273035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/freedesktop-and-alpine-linux-looking-for-new-hosting/ | Freedesktop And Alpine Linux Looking For New Hosting | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Software Development"
] | [
"Alpine Linux",
"foss",
"Freedesktop"
] | A well-known secret in the world of open source software is that many projects rely on donated hosting for everything from their websites to testing infrastructure. When the company providing said hosting can no longer do so for whatever reason, it leaves the project scrambling for a replacement. This is what just happened for Alpine Linux,
as detailed on their blog
.
Modern-day infrastructure, as visualized by XKCD. (Credit: Randall Munroe)
Previously Equinix Metal provided the hosting, but as they are shutting down their bare-metal services, the project now has to find an alternative. As described in the blog post, this affects in particular storage services, continuous integration, and development servers.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Equinix was also providing hosting for the Freedesktop.org project.
In a post on their GitLab
, [Benjamin Tissoires] thanks the company for supporting them as long as they have, and details the project’s current hosting needs.
As the home of X.org and Wayland (and many more), the value of Freedesktop.org to the average user requires no explanation. For its part, Alpine Linux is popular in virtualization, with Docker images very commonly using it as a base. This raises the uncomfortable question of why such popular open source projects have to depend on charity when so many companies use them, often commercially.
We hope that these projects can find a new home, and maybe raise enough money from their users to afford such hosting themselves. The issue of funding (F)OSS projects is something that regularly pops up, such as the question of whether
FOSS bounties for features
are helpful or harmful. | 37 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093806",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T17:02:04",
"content": "Alpine is not a project you host lightly, with a monthly transfer of about 800TB.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8093809",
"author": "Tom",
... | 1,760,371,648.164926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/a-closer-look-at-the-tanmatsu/ | A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"handhelds hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"badge.team",
"computer",
"handheld"
] | A few weeks ago
we brought you news of a new palmtop computer for hackers
, powered by the new Espressif ESP32-P4 application processor. The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is a compact handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display, and while it currently exists at the final prototype stage there is a pre-order page upon which you can reserve an early production model for yourself. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to give one a close-up inspection, so it was time to hot-foot it on the train to a Dutch hackerspace in order to bring you a preview.
A Little History, And First Impressions
Recesses in the case fit well against the hands.
Before looking at the device, it’s time for a little history. The Tanmatsu has its origin in
badge.team
, the Netherlands-based group that has produced so many European event badges over the years, and it was destined to eventually become the badge for the upcoming
WHY2025 hacker camp
. As sometimes happens in any community there has been a significant difference of opinion between the event orga and the badge.team folks that it’s inappropriate to go into here, so now it exists as a standalone project. It’s destined to be open-source in its entirety including hardware and software (and we will hold them to that, never fear), but because of the events surrounding its conception the full repositories will be not be made public until some time late in the summer.
Picking the Tanmatsu up and holding it, it’s a rectangular slab a bit larger and thicker than a CD case with that QWERTY keyboard and display on its front face, an array of ports including an SMA socket for a LoRA antenna on its sides, and an expansion connector on its rear. It has a sandwich construction, with a PCB front face, a 3D printed spacer, the PCB itself, and a 3D printed back cover all held together with a set of screws. The recesses on its bottom edge and the lower halves of the sides locate neatly with fingers and thumbs when it’s held in two hands for two-thumb typing. The keyboard is a silicone moulding as is common on this type of device, and while the keys are quite small it was not difficult to type on it. The display meanwhile feels of much higher quality than the SPI parts previously seen on badges.
A Hardware Quick Tour
All the main components are on the rear of the PCB.
Unscrewing the rear cover, and the circuitry is revealed. We must apologise for only having a mobile phone to hand to take photographs, but from the accompanying image you should be able to identify the main parts. In the centre of the board is the P4 processor, above it is an ESP32-C6 which does the job of a network card. To the left of that is an Ai-Thinker Ra-01SH LoRA module, and to the right is the power circuitry. Mid-right is a USB hub chip for the USB-A and USB-C sockets, and the microcontrollers. Below the P4 is an expansion connector, to the left of which is an audio DAC and amplifier with 3.5mm socket, and to the right of which is a CH32 microcontroller. This last component serves the keyboard, and performs housekeeping tasks for the device. The peripheral connectors aside from those already mentioned include a PMOD that doubles as JTAG and SAO, a micro SD socket, a Qwiic connector, and a camera connector that is compatible with certain Raspberry Pi cameras. Finally, there are three physical buttons on the left hand side. The battery, below the bottom of the photo, is the usual LiPo pouch cell with built-in protection, and it sits under the keyboard. On the front of the board next to the screen are some addressable LEDs. Having seen several earlier prototypes and now having held this production-ready model, we can say that the accumulated experience of the team behind it in making event badges really shows. It feels solid and ready for manufacture, and looking at the component choices we don’t find ourselves concerned by inappropriate connectors or annoying layouts.
The expansion port on the back is intended to foster an ecosystem of clip-on add-ons, with early signs of boards such as a Flipper Zero style RF hacking device and a companion board with interfaces for talking to computers in data centres being in the works. It is said that boards with MIDI, a high quality audio codec, and a camera, will follow.
What About The Software?
The GUI interface for the name tag editor.
The best hardware in the world is of limited use without software, so it’s time to look at this side of the device, The team behind the Tanmatsu have a history of producing badges with a common operating system platform supporting an app infrastructure, and this one continues that legacy.
It’s a new version of their OS for the P4, and we understand that as with the MCH2022 badge OS it is adapted from the AppFS system originally written for the PocketSprite game console, with the addition of a GUI launcher and an open source badge.team app store. It will support apps written in high level scripting languages such as MicroPython, as well as native apps compiled for the P4. The device we were handling had the OS with GUI and launcher, and a single name badge app installed. On an earlier prototype though, we saw work in progress on more useful apps, and even an x86 PC emulator running Windows 3.0. It’s clear that the OS is being designed for a productive pocket computer rather than a toy badge, and this is something we’ll give a more detailed look in the future.
In Conclusion
Having given the Tanmatsu a detailed physical examination and seen the operating system as it exists today, our conclusion is that it’s a device which is physically well-designed and ready for manufacture, and like the badges produced in the past by the same team, it shows every indication of being delivered on time and with working software. As we said earlier it will be fully open-sourced in the summer and we will hold them to that, and thus it’s a device that we’re quite excited about.
As a general purpose hacker’s palmtop computer it occupies an interesting space between devices such as the Flipper Zero or existing event badges, and Linux-based devices such as the uConsole or Raspberry Pi based machines. We think it wins handsomely over the Linux devices on price, so for anyone who wants the extra power of the full-fat OS the question becomes whether that convenience is worth the expenditure.
If you want one they can be pre-ordered
for €99.17 (about $102) if you are outside the EU and don’t have to pay sales tax, or €120 with the tax included for EU customers. We’ve got one on order, and we’ll being you our full review when it lands. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093778",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T16:03:46",
"content": "i’m just absolutely bewildered by the idea that hackaday will “hold them to” open source.i don’t have any reason to doubt the intent or follow through of badge.team. i expect it will be open source as muc... | 1,760,371,648.348774 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/homebrew-foil-and-oil-caps-change-your-guitars-tone/ | Homebrew Foil And Oil Caps Change Your Guitar’s Tone | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"audio",
"capacitor",
"electric",
"guitar",
"low pass filter",
"paper",
"tone"
] | How any string instrument sounds depends on hundreds of factors; even the tiniest details matter. Seemingly inconsequential things like whether the tree that the wood came from grew on the north slope or south slope of a particular valley make a difference, at least to the trained ear. Add electronics into the mix, as with electric guitars, and that’s a whole other level of choices that directly influence the sound.
To experiment with that, [Mark Gutierrez] tried rolling
some home-brew capacitors for his electric guitar
. The cap in question is part of the guitar’s tone circuit, which along with a potentiometer forms a variable low-pass filter. A rich folklore has developed over the years around these circuits and the best way to implement them, and there are any number of commercially available capacitors with the appropriate mojo you can use, for a price.
[Mark]’s take on the tone cap is made with two narrow strips of regular aluminum foil separated by two wider strips of tissue paper, the kind that finds its way into shirt boxes at Christmas. Each of the foil strips gets wrapped around and crimped to a wire lead before the paper is sandwiched between. The whole thing is rolled up into a loose cylinder and soaked in mineral oil, which serves as a dielectric.
To hold the oily jelly roll together, [Mark] tried both and outer skin of heat-shrink tubing with the ends sealed by hot glue, and a 3D printed cylinder. He also experimented with a wax coating to keep the oily bits contained. The video below shows the build process as well as tests of the homebrew cap against a $28 commercial equivalent. There’s a clear difference in tone compared to switching the cap out of the circuit, as well as an audible difference in tone between the two caps. We’ll leave the discussion of which sounds better to those with more qualified ears; fools rush in, after all.
Whatever you think of the sound, it’s pretty cool that you can make working capacitors so easily.
Just remember to mark the outer foil lead
, lest you spoil everything.
Thanks to [Eric] for the tip. | 47 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093679",
"author": "Commenter",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T12:24:37",
"content": "I really do not understand why audio electronics are like this, it seems on one hand you have typical consumer grade electronics with all SMD construction on a multilayer PCB built and designed like any... | 1,760,371,648.578319 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/04/understanding-the-t12-style-soldering-iron-tip/ | Understanding The T12 Style Soldering Iron Tip | Maya Posch | [
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"soldering iron",
"t12"
] | Soldering irons and their tips come in a wide range of formats and styles, with the (originally Hakko) T12 being one of the more interesting offerings. This is because of how it integrates not only the tip and heating element, but also a thermocouple and everything else in a self-contained package. In a recent video [Big Clive] decided to not only poke at one of these T12 tips,
but also do a teardown
.
These elements have three bands, corresponding to the power supply along with a contact for the built-in thermocouple. After a quick trip to the Vise of Knowledge, [Clive] allows us a glimpse at the mangled remnants of a T12, which provides a pretty good overview of how these tips are put together.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the length is a hollow tube through which the wires from the three contacts run. These power the ceramic heating element, as well as provide the soldering iron handle access to the thermocouple that’s placed near the actual tip.
With a simple diagram [Clive] explains how these T12 elements are then used to regulate the temperature, which isn’t too distinct from the average soldering iron with ceramic heating element, but it’s still nice to have it all integrated rather than having to try to carefully not damage the ceramic heater while swapping tips with the average soldering iron. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093747",
"author": "Otter",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T15:10:36",
"content": "Clive is a great creator. Fantastic to seem him featured here",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8093757",
"author": "Johan",
"timestamp": "2025-0... | 1,760,371,648.409222 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/the-clever-design-behind-everyday-traffic-poles/ | The Clever Design Behind Everyday Traffic Poles | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Engineering"
] | [
"engineering",
"light pole",
"roadside",
"Traffic Lights",
"traffic pole"
] | Ever stopped at a red light and noticed something odd about the poles holding up the traffic lights? Look closer next time—many of them appear to hover just above the concrete, anchored by visible bolts.
This video below explains it all
. It’s not a job left unfinished. It is actually clever design, and all about functionality and easy maintenance. Let’s break down why engineers prefer this so-called ‘floating’ base plate setup.
At first, you might think mounting poles directly into concrete would be more stable—after all, that’s how heavy columns are often installed. But traffic light poles are lightweight, hollow, and face constant wind pressure. Instead of brute stability, they need flexibility and precise alignment. Enter the standoff base plate. By resting on leveling nuts, these poles can be fine-tuned for perfect verticality, even when the ground shifts slightly over time. That’s critical for keeping your 30-foot pole from leaning like the Tower of Pisa.
The open design also simplifies maintenance. If the pole tilts after years of wear, it takes just a few nut adjustments to fix it—no heavy cranes required. Plus, the gap helps prevent moisture buildup, reducing corrosion. So next time you’re waiting at an intersection, you’ll know it’s not just clever engineering—it’s practical street smarts. If you’re an infrastructure nut, this
slightly older article
might spark your interest. | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093578",
"author": "g0730n",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T06:17:39",
"content": "Also if a car hits them its better if they just snap at the base",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8093717",
"author": "Panondorf",
"t... | 1,760,371,650.347491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/bicycle-adds-reliability-with-second-chain/ | Bicycle Adds Reliability With Second Chain | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"chain",
"drivetrain",
"freewheel",
"reliability",
"repair",
"shifting",
"two speed"
] | Ignoring the
International Cycling Union
‘s mostly arbitrary rules for what a bicycle is “supposed” to look like (at least if you want to race), there are actually reasons that the bicycling world has standardized around a few common parts and designs. Especially regarding the drivetrain, almost all bikes use a chain, a freewheel, and a derailleur if there are gears to shift because these parts are cheap, reliable, and easy to repair. But if you’re off grid in a place like Africa, even the most reliable bikes won’t quite cut it. That’s why a group called World Bicycle Relief designed and built the Buffalo bicycle, and the latest adds a second gear with a unique freewheel.
Bicycling YouTuber [Berm Peak] takes us through the design of this bike in his latest video which is also linked below. The original Buffalo bicycle was extremely rugged and durable, with a rear rack designed to carry up to 200 pounds and everything on the bike able to be repaired with little more than an adjustable wrench. The new freewheel adds a second gear to the bike which makes it easier to use it in hilly terrain, but rather than add a complicated and hard-to-repair derailleur the freewheel adds a second chain instead, and the rider can shift between the two gears by pedaling backwards slightly and then re-engaging the pedals.
Of course a few compromises had to be made here. While the new freewheel is nearly as rugged as the old one, it’s slightly more complex. However, they can be changed quite easily with simple tools and are small, affordable, and easy to ship as well. The bike also had to abandon the original coaster brake, but the new rim brakes are a style that are also easy to repair and also meant that the bike got a wheel upgrade as well. Bicycles like these are incredibly important in places where cars are rare or unaffordable, or where large infrastructure needed to support them is unreliable or nonexistent.
We’ve seen other examples of bicycles like these being put to work in places like India as well
.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 71 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8093548",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-02-04T03:36:39",
"content": "Interesting idea. I really wonder how well two chains will work: You need two exact lengths, they’ll stretch and wear differently, and sooner or later a chain will be thrown.And that plastic chain guard? H... | 1,760,371,650.583655 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/wearable-tech-tips-directly-from-the-queen/ | Wearable Tech Tips Directly From The Queen | Kristina Panos | [
"how-to",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"beginner",
"Beginners",
"LED wearables",
"sewing",
"tips",
"Wearables"
] | What’s the only thing cooler than building something electronic? That’s right — wearing it proudly for all to see.
But maybe you’re not into wearables. Maybe it’s because you’re afraid of sewing, or simply scared that you won’t be able to launder that blinkenshirt you’ve always wanted to make. Well, the undisputed queen of wearables — [Becky Stern] — has a bunch of
beginner tips for making DIY wearables
. She’s created dozens and dozens of wearable projects and matching tutorials over the years and
has graced these pages many times
.
As [Becky] points out, once you have your idea sorted, the next thing you need is the tools to get the skills to do the parts you don’t know how to do yet. Even if that’s almost all of it, then this is the guide for you. Importantly, [Becky] reminds us that we should only bite off what we can chew, and that ready-made modules and such are perfectly fine.
There are some tips here that may surprise you. For instance, [Becky] recommends against conductive thread for beginners who already know how to sew by hand, largely because of power delivery and other issues. She also is somewhat anti-lithium battery pouch, preferring instead to use a couple of AAs or a USB battery bank for the renewability aspect.
Be sure to check out the video after the break, which has these tips and more. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092751",
"author": "Curiosiate",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T16:06:44",
"content": "Good tips – especially on conductive threads potential issues, for those who may not come from electronics engineering.Some more tips, to anyone making wearables, from my journeys.(p)Leather is certain... | 1,760,371,650.115663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/custom-smartwatch-makes-diabetes-monitoring-easier-for-kids/ | Custom Smartwatch Makes Diabetes Monitoring Easier For Kids | Dan Maloney | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"cgm",
"continuous glucose monitor",
"Dexcom",
"diabetes",
"ESP32-S3",
"smart watch",
"T1D",
"wearable"
] | Living with Type 1 diabetes is a numbers game. There’s not a moment in the day free from the burden of tracking your blood glucose concentration, making “What’s your number?” a constant question. Technology can make that question easier to ask and answer, but for T1D patients, especially the kids who the disease so often impacts, all that tech can be a distraction.
To solve that problem for his son, [Andrew Childs] built
this custom T1D smartwatch
. An Apple Watch, which integrates easily into the Dexcom CGM ecosystem, seems an obvious solution, but as [Andrew] points out, strapping something like that on a nine-year-old boy’s wrist is a recipe for disaster. After toying with some prototypes and working out the considerable difficulties of getting a stable BLE connection — the device needs to connect to his son’s iPhone to get CGM data — [Andrew] started work on the physical design.
The watch uses an ESP32-S3 on a custom PCB, as well as a 1.69″ TFT IPS display and a LiPo battery. The board also has an accelerometer for activity monitoring and a vibrator for haptic feedback. Getting all that into a case was no mean feat, especially since some degree of water resistance and shockproofing would be needed for the watch to survive. [Andrew] had a case made by a local 3D printing company, and he managed to source custom-cut and silkscreened glass for the face. The result is remarkably professional-looking, especially for a software developer who hadn’t really stretched his maker wings much before tackling this project.
[Andrew] doesn’t appear to have made build files available yet, although he does say he intends to open-source the project at some point. We look forward to that as it’ll be a big help to anyone trying to hack diabetes care. Until then, if you need
a primer on continuous glucose monitoring
, we’re happy to oblige. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092705",
"author": "Christoph",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T13:15:46",
"content": "If the final goal is a commercial productt and not a “because I can” project, why not cooperate with a company that has experience in this area? E.g. Lilygo sells smartwatches with an espresssif chipset... | 1,760,371,650.684831 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/02/tiny-rc-four-wheeler-gets-chassis-upgrade-for-more-traction/ | Tiny RC Four-Wheeler Gets Chassis Upgrade For More Traction | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printer",
"car",
"tamiya",
"toy car"
] | [Azpaca] purchased a fun little toy car from Tamiya, only… there was a problem. The little off-roader wasn’t up to scratch—despite its four-wheel-drive, it couldn’t get over rough ground to save its life. Thus, it was time to
3D-print a better chassis that could actually get through it!
The problem was quite obvious. With no suspension and a rigid chassis, the vehicle would tend to end up with one or more wheels on the air on rough surfaces. To rectify this, [Azpaca] created a twisting chassis which would allow the wheels to better remain in contact with the ground. The design is relatively straightforward, and reuses much of the original drivetrain, including the simple brushed motor. However, with a pivot right behind the front wheels, it has much more traction on rocks and gravel, and can traverse these terrains much more easily.
Tamiya’s motorized toys
aren’t particularly well known in the West, but it’s neat to see the community that exists around modifying them around the world.
Design files
are available for the curious. If you’re not down with mods, perhaps you’d prefer to
print your own cars from scratch
. Video after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092679",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T11:14:17",
"content": "Nice work. But music choice for video is horrible there are some weird anime noises that make it hard to listen because interfering with talking.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,650.627609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/inside-a-vintage-oven-controlled-crystal-oscillator/ | Inside A Vintage Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator | Maya Posch | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"crystal oscillator",
"ocxo",
"oven controlled crystal oscillator"
] | Crystal oscillators are incredibly useful components, but they come with one little snag: their oscillation is temperature-dependent. For many applications the relatively small deviation is not a problem, but especially for precision instruments this is a deal breaker. Enter the oven controlled crystal oscillator, or OCXO. These do basically what it says on the tin, but what’s inside them?
[Kerry Wong] took apart
a vintage Toyocom TCO-627VC 10 MHz OCXO, revealing a lot more complexity than one might assume.
Inside the insulated enclosure there is of course the crystal oscillator itself, which has a heating coil wrapped around it. Of note is that other OCXOs that [Kerry] took apart had more insulation, as well as other ways of providing the thermal energy. In this particular unit a thermistor is attached to the crystal’s metal case to measure its temperature and provide feedback to the heating circuit. The ICs on the PCB are hard to identify due to the conformal coating, but at least one appears to be a 74LS00, alongside a 78L05 voltage regulator which reduces the 12V input voltage.
As an older OCXO it probably is a lot chunkier than newer units, but the basic principle remains the same, with a heating loop that ensures that the crystal inside the unit remains at the same temperature. | 8 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092647",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T08:26:53",
"content": "Wonderful teardown. I love seeing older electronics disassembled and analyzed.Story Time: My first job out of college we had a problem where a microcontroller in our prototype RF switch would start ha... | 1,760,371,650.163703 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/using-microwave-heating-to-locally-anneal-cnt-coated-fdm-prints/ | Using Microwave Heating To Locally Anneal CNT-Coated FDM Prints | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"annealing",
"carbon nanotubes",
"FDM"
] | The CNT coating between the layers is heated with microwaves to locally anneal. (Credit: Sweeney et al., Science Adv., 2017)
Layer adhesion is one of the weak points with FDM 3D printing, with annealing often recommended as a post-processing step. An interestingly creative method for this was
published in
Science Advances
back in 2017, featuring the work of researchers at Texas A&M University and citing previous work by other teams. In the paper by [Charles B. Sweeney] et al, they describe how they coated PLA filament with carbon nanotubes (CNTs), resulting in this CNT being distributed primarily between the individual layers of polymer.
This is useful because CNTs are quite sensitive to microwave radiation, resulting in the conversion to thermal energy, i.e. heat. Compared to traditional annealing where the entire part is placed into an oven or similar, this microwave-based heating – or locally induced RF (LIRF) as they call this method – localizes the heat to the interface between two layers.
The advantages of this approach are that it doesn’t change the dimensions of the part noticeably, it’s faster and more efficient, and the annealing between layers approaches the strength of traditional manufacturing. Unfortunately not too much seems to have happened with this approach since then, but considering that both CNTs (single & double-walled) and microwaves are readily available, there’s not much standing in the way of replicating these results. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092612",
"author": "Brutek",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T05:27:18",
"content": "OR, place a layer of superglue between each layer (use screw-on plastic nozzles on a separate controlled extruder)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8... | 1,760,371,650.747058 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/could-non-planar-infill-improve-the-strength-of-your-3d-prints/ | Could Non-Planar Infill Improve The Strength Of Your 3D Prints? | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"non-planar",
"non-planar 3D printing",
"python",
"script",
"slicer"
] | When you’re spitting out G-Code for a 3D print, you can pick all kinds of infill settings. You can choose the pattern, and the percentage… but the vast majority of slicers all have one thing in common. They all print layer by layer, infill and all. What if there was another way?
There’s been a lot of chatter in the 3D printing world about the potential of non-planar prints. Following this theme,
[TenTech] has developed a system for non-planar infill
. This is where the infill design is modulated with sinusoidal waves in the Z axis, such that it forms a somewhat continuous bond between what would otherwise be totally seperate layers of the print. This is intended to create a part that is stronger in the Z direction—historically a weakness of layer-by-layer FDM parts.
Files are
on Github
for the curious, and currently, it only works with Prusaslicer. Ultimately, it’s interesting work, and we can’t wait to see where it goes next. What we really need is a comprehensive and scientific test regime on the tensile strength of parts printed using this technique. We’ve featured
some other neat work in this space before, too.
Video after the break. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092370",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2025-02-02T00:59:45",
"content": "Unclear: How is this an improvement over (say) cubic infill, or even conventional gyroid?Really gotta make sure your travels avoid the infill mountains you create this way too.",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,371,650.414555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/taking-a-15-casio-f91w-5000-meters-underwater/ | Taking A $15 Casio F91W 5,000 Meters Underwater | Maya Posch | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"Casio F91W",
"submersible"
] | When considering our favorite spy movies and kin that involve deep-sea diving, we’d generally expect to see some high-end watch that costs thousands of dollars and is specially engineered to withstand the immense pressures kilometers below the ocean’s surface. Yet what about a humble Casio F91W that can be bought for about $15 if it’s the genuine article and not one of the millions of fakes? Over at the
Watches of Espionage
site they figured that they’d dress up one of these famous watches to give it the best possible shot at
surviving the crushing pressures at a depth of 5 km
.
The actual modification to the F91W was pretty mild, involving nothing but a ‘hydro-mod’ whereby oil is used to replace the air inside the watch case. Since oil is incompressible, nothing bad should happen to the watch. Theoretically at least. The Watch-Under-Test (WUT) was strapped to a US Navy’s CURV 21 remotely operated vehicle and dunked into the ocean before starting its descend into the inky darkness of the deep sea.
Although only hitting a measly 4,950 m, the watch survived just fine, showing that even if you’re a secret US operative on a deep-dive espionage mission, all you really need is one of these Casio watches. | 42 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092275",
"author": "Tony Moncter",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T21:21:42",
"content": "“a measly 4,950 km”Wut?? Picture shows meters not km",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8092284",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timesta... | 1,760,371,650.836528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/redbox-in-the-80s-meet-the-vhs-vending-behemoth/ | RedBox In The 80s: Meet The VHS Vending Behemoth | Lewin Day | [
"History",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"home video",
"VHS",
"video vendor"
] | Redbox was a company with a moderately interesting business model—it let you rent DVDs from automated kiosks. It’s an idea so simple it’s almost surprising it didn’t appear sooner. Only, it did—all the way back in the VHS age!
Meet the Video Vendor.
YouTuber [SpaceTime Junction] was able to track down one of these rare machines, which apparently formerly served an Ohio rental outlet called Kohnen’s. It’s a monstrous thing that stands taller and about three times wider than traditional vending machines, and it could hold up to 320 tapes in its robotic magazine. It’s got lashings of woodgrain, a green-on-black CRT, and the beautiful kind of clicky keys that went away after the 1980s.
[SpaceTime Junction] has
a bunch of videos
up on the machine, and you even get to see it powered up. It’s a little difficult to see what’s going on, because the machine is something like nine feet wide and it’s all shot in vertical video. There isn’t a whole lot of content on these obscurities out there, so this is a great place to start. Apparently, there were recently a hundred or more of these found living
in a Texas warehouse
according to Reddit, so we might see more of these popping up online soon.
[SpaceTime Junction] has toured that facility, too.
You can read more about the
fall of Redbox
, or
the cleanup afterwards
, in our prior coverage. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092209",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T18:41:56",
"content": "thanks for the warning: vertical video…. Brrr. only good for skyscrapers, doors and people standing upright.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8092... | 1,760,371,650.468107 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/time-vs-money-3d-printer-style/ | Time Vs Money, 3D Printer Style | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3d printer",
"newsletter",
"open source",
"rants"
] | A few months ago, Hackaday’s own Al Williams convinced me to buy a couple of untested, returned-to-manufacturer 3D printers. Or rather, he convinced me to buy one, and the incredible success of the first printer spurred me on to the second. TL;DR: Lightning didn’t strike twice, but I’d still rate it as worth my time. This probably isn’t a good choice for your first printer, but if you’ve done the regular maintenance on your first printer already, I’d recommend it for your second or twelfth.
As background, Al has been volunteering with local schools to teach a 3D printing summer class, and this means outfitting them with a 3DP lab on the dirt cheap. His secret is to buy last year’s model which has all of the features he needs – most importantly for the kids, automatic bed height probing – but to buy it from the scratch-and-dent shelf at Creality. Why? Because they are mid-grade printers, relatively new, but on deep discount.
How deep? I found an essentially endless supply of printers that retail for $300 on discount for $90 each. The catch? It might work, it might not. I bought my son one, because I thought that it would at least make a good project for us to work on together. Those plans were spoiled – it worked absolutely flawlessly from the moment we bolted it together, and he runs 24-hour jobs on the thing without fear. From the look of the build plate, it had been used exactly once and returned for whatever reason. Maybe the owner just didn’t want a 3D printer?
The siren song of straightforward success was too much for me to resist, and I picked another up to replace
my aging A8 which was basically a kit for a 3D printer
, and not a particularly good one at that, but could be made to work. My scratch-and-dent Creality came with a defective bed-touch sensor, which manifest itself as a random absolute refusal to print.
I took it apart, but the flaw is in the design of the V1 touch sensors – the solenoid requires more current to push down than the 3DP motherboard can reliably deliver. It works 100% of the time on my bench power supply, but
in situ
it fails about 30% of the time, even after hitting it with graphite and making sure everything is mechanically sound. Creality knows this and offers a free trade-in, just not for me. The new version of the Creality probe costs $50 new, but you can get cheap knock-off BL Touch models for $14. Guess what I did?
And guess what bit me? The cheapo touch probe descends a bit slower than the Creality version should, and the firmware is coded to time-out in an extra-short timeframe. Thankfully, Creality’s modifications to Marlin are all open source, and I managed to tweak and flash a new firmware that made it work 100% of the time, but this was at a cost of probably eight hours of bug-hunting, part-ordering, and firmware-compiling. That said,
I got some nice extra features along the way
, which is the advantage of a printer running open-source firmware.
So my $300 printer cost me $105, plus eight hours of labor. I only charge one coffee per hour for fun hardware debugging tasks, but you may have a different valuation. Taken together with my son’s printer, we have $600 worth of printer for under $200 plus labor, though, which starts to sound a little better.
Is gambling on an untested return 3D printer worth it? For us, I would say it was, and I’d do it again in a few years. For now, though, we’ve got three printers running and that’s all we need. Have you gone down this perilous path?
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
! | 28 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091937",
"author": "Smaxby",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T15:11:34",
"content": "Please tell me, where is this magical place? My FrankEnder needs a friend… or a sacrificial parts donor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8091938",
... | 1,760,371,650.907943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/casio-calculator-gets-new-keyboard/ | Casio Calculator Gets New Keyboard | Al Williams | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"calculator",
"casio",
"keyboard"
] | What do you do with a circa 1985 Casio FX-451 calculator with a bad keyboard? Well, if you are [Poking Technology], you transplant the inside of the calculator to
a new custom keyboard
. There are two videos that cover the process in detail, which you can watch below.
The calculator has a unique design. It looks like a simple calculator in a wallet. But the wallet opens to reveal an extended keyboard with all the scientific features onboard. Unsurprisingly, the membrane keys didn’t survive over four decades. Disassembling the unit was a challenge. Soldering wires to the keyboard lines was further complicated by the fact that some of the lines are on the back of the PCB and pass through to the top under the main IC.
The new keyboard is quite a bit larger than the original, making this more of a desk calculator, but that also means you can use high-quality keys. We’d love to see a 3D printed case to wrap it all up, but the bare PCB look has its charms, too.
If you can’t understand how [Poking] can love a calculator so much, you probably never
owned an HP-41C
, either. Of course, our retro calculator dreams also
include
Star Trek
. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091918",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T12:33:34",
"content": "I had this very calculator during the 1980s. The solar panels relieved me of the tyranny of battery changes (and made it thinner) and the fold-out design was very efficient and easy to use, as opposed to ... | 1,760,371,650.9483 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/01/antique-style-gps-looks-like-steampunky-fun/ | Antique-Style GPS Looks Like Steampunky Fun | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"brass",
"gps",
"steampunk"
] | These days, turn-by-turn GPS navigation isn’t considered special anymore. It’s in every smartphone and most cheap rental cars, and thus everybody expects you to figure out where you’re going. If you want a simpler and less robust navigation experience,
you might like to try the rather fancy RadioScout
.
The RadioScout is a build from [hardlyhumanfx]—a group of engineers and artists that collaborate on fun and whimsical projects. It looks like some kind of steampunk compass, and it kind of is—but at heart, it’s powered by GPS.
You program the RadioScout using the buttons on the front panel and a rotary phone dial to enter the latitude and longitude of your destination. It then uses an internal GPS receiver to compare that with your current location, and calculates a direct bearing to where you want to go. This bearing is displayed with a large compass-like needle run by a stepper motor, and you you can use it to guide yourself onwards.
It’s an attractive build that uses lots of neat parts. The team interfaced a microcontroller with a GPS receiver, a rotary dial, and 7-segment LEDs for the latitude and longitude display. The very real bell is neat, too. The whole thing is wrapped up in a brass and wooden case that would make you a star at just about any sci-fi convention.
The build video
is a little vague on the finer details, but experienced makers will be able to figure out how it all works.
You can actually
buy a RadioScout
if it’s something you must have, but one suspects the Hackaday set would probably prefer the homebrew route.
@hardlyhumanfx
#steampunk
gps i designed and built. this is just a rough prototype
♬ original sound – HardlyHumanFX
@hardlyhumanfx
as promised, a field test of the antique working GPS system I built! Available to buy now on our website HardlyHumanFX.com
#steampunk
#fallout
#vintage
♬ original sound – HardlyHumanFX
Thanks to [Charles] for the tip! | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091869",
"author": "olaf",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T09:22:17",
"content": "The problem with this kind of things, they only looks good if you have one of them in your stylish apartment, but you only can build them if you have the experience and personality of someone who build many ... | 1,760,371,651.00961 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/a-new-case-and-keyboard-for-the-timex-sinclair-1000/ | A New Case And Keyboard For The Timex Sinclair 1000 | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"keyboard",
"mechanical keyboard",
"sinclair zx-81",
"Timex",
"timex sinclair 1000"
] | The Timex Sinclair 1000 was a sleek and compact machine, and the US counterpart to the more well-known Spectrum ZX-81. Timex may not have come to dominate the computer market, but the machine still has its fans today, with [skidlz] being one of them. That inspired them to craft a new case and keyboard for their beloved machine,
putting a slimline twist on the old classic.
The new case finds some economies of size by eliminating the bulky RF modulator in favor of hacking in a cleaner composite out feed. In turn, this enabled the elimination of the channel switch that freed up more room. [skidlz] then designed a simple case using 2D laser-cut parts and dovetail joints, using superglue to assemble the individual pieces into a cohesive whole.
Meanwhile, the keyboard swap is obvious to anyone that ever used one of these things. The original was particularly unpleasant. In order to upgrade, [skidlz] decided to look to the compact Redragon K603 as an inspiration, giving the new build a longer travel and a nicer mechanical feel under one’s fingers.
The final result look great, and files are on Github for the curious. We’ve seen great work from [skidlz] before, too, in the form of this
microcassette storage project.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been cooking up your own retrocomputing projects, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091851",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T07:18:47",
"content": "Awseome! 😃The ZX81 may not have been as much of an popular toy computer as the C=64,but it was nice as a microcontroller with keyboard.It was cheap, small and black! It had many clones and it could be tin... | 1,760,371,651.054222 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/electroplating-diy-pcb-vias-at-home-without-chemical-baths/ | Electroplating DIY PCB Vias At Home Without Chemical Baths | Maya Posch | [
"chemistry hacks",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"diy pcb",
"electroplate",
"via"
] | Although DIY PCB making has made great strides since the early days of chemical etching, there’s one fly in the ointment: vias. These connect individual layers of the board with a conductive tube, and are essential for dual-layer PCBs, never mind boards with a larger layer stack. The industry standard way of producing them is rather cumbersome and doesn’t scale well to a hobby or prototyping context. Might there be a better way? This is the question that [Levi Janssen]
set out to answer with a new home PCB manufacturing project
.
The goal here is to still electroplate the vias as with the commercial solution, just without having to use chemical baths. This way it should be suitable for an automated setup, with a tool head that performs the coating of the via with a high-resistance conductive ink before the electroplating step, all without submerging the entire PCB. After an initial experiment showed promising results, [Levi] committed to a full prototype.
This turned out to be a bridge too far, so the prototype was scaled down to a simpler machine. This is where the main issue with electroplating one via at a time became clear, as a standard 0.3 mm via takes easily 10 minutes to electroplate, even with an increase in voltage. At that point ordering a PCB from China becomes the faster option if you have enough vias in the design. Fortunately [Levi] figures he may have some solutions there, so we’ll have to wait and see what those are in the next installment. The video is below the break. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091821",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T03:47:19",
"content": "It is unfortunate that [Levi Janssen] did not give details about why his prototype did not meet the performance of his proof of concept test. For my own use, I wouldn’t mind a less automatic soluti... | 1,760,371,651.125387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/automating-the-process-of-drawing-with-chalk/ | Automating The Process Of Drawing With Chalk | Lewin Day | [
"Art"
] | [
"chalk",
"plotter",
"polar coordinates",
"robot",
"sidewalk"
] | Chalk is fun to draw with, and some people even get really good at using it to make art on the sidewalk. If you don’t like tediously developing such skills, though, you could go another route.
[MrDadVs] built a robot to scrawl chalk pictures for him
, and the results speak for themselves.
The robot is known as AP for reasons you’ll have to watch the video to understand. You might be imagining a little rover that crawls around on wheels dotting at the pavement with a stick of chalk, but the actual design is quite different. Instead, [MrDadVs] effectively built a polar-coordinate plotter to make chalk pictures on the ground. AP has a arm loaded with a custom liquid chalk delivery system for marking the pavement. It’s rotated by a stepper motor with the aid of a 3D-printed geartrain that helps give it enough torque. It’s controlled by an ESP32 running the
FluidNC
software which is a flexible open-source CNC firmware. [MrDadVs] does a great job of explaining how everything works together, from converting cartesian coordinates into a polar format, to getting the machine to work wirelessly.
Building a capable
sidewalk chalk robot
seems like a great way to spend six months. Particularly when it can draw this well. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Antoine Leblond for the tip!] | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091785",
"author": "Preston Barnes",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T01:29:56",
"content": "So freaking awesome!!!!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8091842",
"author": "DrewTheMachinist",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T06:40:15",
... | 1,760,371,651.245819 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/forgotten-internet-giving-or-getting-the-finger/ | Forgotten Internet: Giving (or Getting) The Finger | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"finger",
"internet"
] | Hey, you know that guy in accounting, Marco? If you want to find out more about him, you’d probably go surf LinkedIn or maybe a social media site. Inside a company, you might look on instant messaging for a profile and even find out if he is at his desk or away. But back in the 1970s, those weren’t options. But if Marco was on the computer system, maybe you could finger him. While that sounds strange to say today, Finger was a common service provided by computer services at the time. It was like a LinkedIn profile page for the 1970s.
Based on
RFC 742
, Finger was the brainchild for [Les Earnest]. From a user’s point of view, you put a few files in your home directory (usually
.project
and
.plan
; both hidden files), and when someone “fingered” you, they’d see some human-friendly output about your account like your name and office location, if you were logged in or not, and the contents of your project and plan files.
Modern versions may also show your public PGP key and other data. You could usually put a file in your home directory called
.nofinger
if you wanted to stop people from fingering you.
Under the Covers
Behind the scenes, finger worked with a daemon on port 79 that handled TCP requests. By 1991,
RFC 1288
defined the protocol in more detail. Since it was a network service, you could finger people on other computers as long as port 79 was open.
Things were pretty freeform, so while some people had information in their plan files, others had jokes or even ASCII graphics. Most people didn’t know about them and ended up with the defaults.
Why Finger?
This PDP-10 surely was running a finger service. (photo
CC-BY-4.0
by [Gah4])
You might wonder why this was called finger. We always thought it was like the old mobster movies (“he put the finger on Lenny”). But it turns out, [Les] noted people using their fingers to trace through the verbose output of WHO command on WAITS, which was based on the operating system later known as TOPS-10, a common operating system on the PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers.
Incidentally, [Les] was the same guy who developed the SAIL keyboard that, as far as we know, introduced the META key you hear about in Emacs.
Cutting Off Finger
Finger is from a simpler time when you could assume people weren’t trying to hack into your system. Of course, they are. In 1988, the Morris worm exploited fingerd — the finger daemon — to spread itself among systems.
Between better alternatives, security concerns, and a general lack of awareness among new users, the writing was on the wall. Today, it is hard to find a system that provides finger services.
You could install finger, but we don’t recommend you keep it running for long. Ubuntu’s package manager, at least, will let you install both finger and fingerd easily.
Running finger with no arguments will show you a list of logged in users. Usually, you’d use it with a user ID, though:
$ finger alw
Login: alw Name: Al Williams
Directory: /home/alw Shell: /bin/bash
On since Sun Jan 12 13:51 (CST) on tty2 from :0
19 days 19 hours idle
On since Sun Jan 12 13:51 (CST) on pts/0 from :0
16 days 21 hours idle
On since Sun Jan 12 13:52 (CST) on pts/2 from tmux(1721804).%1
2 seconds idle
. . .
On since Wed Jan 15 13:48 (CST) on pts/7 from tmux(1721804).%4
13 days 21 hours idle
On since Fri Jan 17 11:40 (CST) on pts/11 from :0
11 days 23 hours idle
(messages off)
No mail.
Plan:
Write more Hackaday!
Sounds like a good plan.
In the 1980s, it seemed like finger would be around forever. But network tech can go from ubiquitous to forgotten
in a flash
. Just like
UUCP
in our last installment.
Featured image: The incredibly wittily titled “
Left Index Finger
” by Pixabay. | 27 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090998",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T15:24:43",
"content": "The command name always seemed too creepy to me!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8091016",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T... | 1,760,371,651.313229 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/rgb-led-display-simply-solves-the-ping-pong-ball-problem/ | RGB LED Display Simply Solves The Ping-Pong Ball Problem | Donald Papp | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"decoration",
"diy",
"led strip",
"LED wall",
"LED. ping pong",
"table tennis"
] | A few years ago [Brian McCafferty] created a nice big
RGB LED panel in a poster frame
that aimed to be easy to move, program, and display. We’d like to draw particular attention to one of his construction methods. On the software end of things there are multiple ways to get images onto a DIY RGB panel, but his assembly technique is worth keeping in mind.
The diameter of ping pong balls is a mismatch for the spacing of LEDs on a strip. The solution? A bit of force.
The technique we want to highlight is not the fact that he used table tennis balls as the diffusers, but rather the particular
manner
in which he used them. As diffusers, ping-pong balls are economical and they’re effective. But you know what else they are? An inconvenient size!
An LED strip with 30 LEDs per meter puts individual LEDs about 33 mm apart. A regulation ping-pong ball is 40 mm in diameter, making them just a
wee
bit too big to fit nicely. We’ve seen projects avoid this problem
with modular frames
that optimize spacing and layout. But [Brian]’s solution was simply to use force.
Observing that ping-pong balls don’t put up much of a fight and the size mismatch was relatively small, he just shoved those (slightly squashy) 40 mm globes into 33 mm spacing. It actually looks… perfectly fine!
We suspect that this method doesn’t scale indefinitely. Probably large displays
like this 1200 pixel wall
are not the right place to force a square peg into a round hole, but it sure seemed to hit the spot for his poster-sized display. Watch it in action in the video below, or see additional details on the project’s
GitHub repository
. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090920",
"author": "iooner",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T12:12:03",
"content": "I made it in 2020 :https://iooner.io/ping-pong-led-frame/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8090922",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timestamp": "2025... | 1,760,371,651.479722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/lessons-learned-when-restoring-an-amiga-1000/ | Lessons Learned, When Restoring An Amiga 1000 | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"Amiga 1000",
"chip sockets"
] | In the mid 1980s, there was a rash of 16-bit computers entering the market. One of them stood head and shoulders above the rest: Commodore’s Amiga 1000. It had everything that could reasonably be stuffed into a machine of the period, and multimedia capabilities the rest wouldn’t catch up on for years. [Celso Martinho] has managed to secure one of those first machines,
and has shared his tale of bringing it back to life
.
The post is as much a love letter to the Amiga and review of A1000 peripherals as it is a restoration, which makes it a good read for retrocomputing enthusiasts. He recapped it and it wouldn’t boot, the solution of which turned out to be a reminder for the rest of us.
The machine had a RAM upgrade in the form of a daughterboard under the processor, its pins had weakened the leaves of the processor socket so it wouldn’t make contact. So don’t forget to replace sockets as well as capacitors.
The resulting machine is much faster thanks to a modern upgrade with a much quicker processor, memory, and an SD card for storage. He goes into some of the other upgrades available today, all of which would have had early-1990s-us salivating. It’s fair to say that in 2025 an A1000 is more 40-year-old curio than useful modern computer, but we can’t fail to admit to a bit of envy.
The Amiga holds a special affection, here
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090921",
"author": "Tuco",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T12:12:14",
"content": "“One of them stood head and shoulders above the rest”Amiga ? seriously ?How about the Heathkit H-11 ?It was a 16 bit machine that ran off the DEC LSI-11 cpu.You could run all the PDP-11 libraries on it.",
... | 1,760,371,651.779979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/inside-vacuum-fluorescent-displays/ | Inside Vacuum Fluorescent Displays | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"vacuum fluorescent display",
"vfd"
] | VFDs — vacuum fluorescent displays — have a distinctive look, and [Anthony Francis-Jones] is generally fascinated with retro displays. So, it makes sense that he’d
build a VFD project
as an excuse to explain how they work. You can see the video below.
VFDs are almost miniature CRTs. They are very flexible in what they display and can even use color in a limited way. The project [Anthony] uses as an example is an indicator to show the video number he’s currently making.
The glass display is evacuated and, like a tube, has a getter to consume the last of the gas. There’s a filament that emits electrons, a grid to control their flow, and anodes coated with a fluorescent material. Unlike a regular tube, the filaments have to operate cool so they don’t glow under operation.
When the grid is positive, and the anode is also positive, that anode will glow. The anodes can be arranged in any pattern, although these are made as seven-segment displays. The filament on the tubes in this project runs on 1.5V, and the anodes need about 25V.
The project itself is fairly simple. Of course, you need a way to control the 25V anode and grid voltages, but that’s easy enough to do. It is possible to make VFDs in
unusual character shapes
. They work well as light sources
for projection displays
, too. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090887",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T10:20:41",
"content": "I have no excuse, but I’d hoped it was someone talking about making VFDs from scratch",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8091149",
"author": "CityZ... | 1,760,371,651.518115 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/using-guanella-baluns-as-impedance-transformers/ | Using Guanella Baluns As Impedance Transformers | Maya Posch | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"balun",
"transmission line transformer"
] | Guanella Impedance Transformer. (Credit: FesZ Electronics)
Even before entering the mystical realms of UHF design, radio frequency (RF) circuits come with a whole range of fun design aspects as well. A case in point can be found in transmission line transformers, which are commonly used in RF power amplifiers, with the Guanella transformer (balun) being one example. Allowing balanced and unbalanced (hence ‘balun’) systems to interface without issues, they’re both very simple and very complex. This type of transformer and its various uses is
explained in a video
by [FesZ Electronics], and also the
subject of an article
by [Dr. Steve Arar] as part of a larger series, the latter of which is recommended to start with you’re not familiar with RF circuitry.
Transmission line transformers are similar to regular transformers, except that the former relies on transmission line action to transfer energy rather than magnetic flux and provides no DC isolation. The Guanella balun transformer was originally described by Gustav Guanella in 1944. Beyond the 1:1 balun other configurations are also possible, which [Dr. Arar] describes in a
follow-up article
, and which are also covered in the [FesZ] video, alongside the explanation of another use of Guanella transformers: as an impedance transformer. This shows just how flexible transformers are once you can wrap your mind around the theory.
We have previously
covered RF amplifier builds
as well as some rather
interesting balun hacks
.
Heading image: The Guanella 1:1 balun. (Credit:
Steve Arar
) | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091030",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T16:40:01",
"content": "The Gnutella Transformer is a marvelous thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8092380",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,371,651.565761 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/going-brushless-salvaging-a-dead-drill/ | Going Brushless: Salvaging A Dead Drill | Heidi Ulrich | [
"hardware",
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"brushless",
"brushless motor",
"drill",
"motor",
"salvaged electronics",
"salvaging"
] | Let’s face it—seeing a good tool go to waste is heartbreaking. So when his cordless drill’s motor gave up after some unfortunate exposure to the elements, [Chaz] wasn’t about to bin it. Instead, he embarked on a brave journey to breathe new life into the machine by
swapping its dying brushed motor for a sleek brushless upgrade
.
Things got real as [Chaz] dismantled the drill, comparing its guts to a salvaged portable bandsaw motor. What looked like an easy swap soon became a true hacker’s challenge: incompatible gear systems, dodgy windings, and warped laminations. Not discouraged by that, he dreamed up a hybrid solution: 3D-printing a custom adapter to make the brushless motor fit snugly into the existing housing.
The trickiest part was designing a speed control mechanism for the brushless motor—an impressively solved puzzle. After some serious elbow grease and ingenuity, the franken-drill emerged better than ever. We’ve seen some
brushless hacks
before, and this is worth adding to the list. A great tool hack and successful way to save an old beloved drill. Go ahead and check out the video below! | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090789",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T02:08:31",
"content": "I recently threw away an older black & decker corded drill that was “intermittent.” Found the connections on the switch was loose. I probably could have fired it, but I already have three newer drills pl... | 1,760,371,651.661802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/taylorator-makes-mischief-on-the-airwaves/ | Taylorator Makes Mischief On The Airwaves | Tom Nardi | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"FM broadcast",
"LimeSDR mini",
"rf modulation",
"sdr",
"software-defined radio"
] | [Stephen] recently wrote in to share his
experiments with using the LimeSDR mini to conduct a bit of piracy on the airwaves
, and though we can’t immediately think of a legitimate application for spamming the full FM broadcast band simultaneously, we can’t help but be fascinated by the technique. Called the Taylorator, as it was originally intended to carpet bomb the dial with the collected works of Taylor Swift on every channel, the code makes for some interesting reading if you’re interested in the transmission-side of software defined radio (SDR).
The write-up talks about the logistics of FM modulation, and how quickly the computational demands stack up when you’re trying to push out 100 different audio streams at once. It takes a desktop-class CPU to pull it off in real-time, and eats up nearly 4 GB of RAM.
You could use this project to play a different episode of the
Hackaday Podcast
on every FM channel at once, but we wouldn’t recommend it. As [Stephen] touches on at the end of the post, this is almost certainly illegal no matter where you happen to live. That said, if you keep the power low enough so as not to broadcast anything beyond your home lab, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out. | 33 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090714",
"author": "CQCQcwho",
"timestamp": "2025-01-29T21:24:31",
"content": "…and enter the Haminators to nerdsplain the moral and legal ramifications of why this should not be talked about….in 3…2…1",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,371,651.729825 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/the-jell-o-glow-tensegrity-toy-you-didnt-know-you-needed/ | The Jell-O Glow Tensegrity Toy You Didn’t Know You Needed | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Art",
"LED Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"adafruit",
"gravity",
"jell-o",
"led",
"led strand",
"levitation",
"NOODS",
"tensegrity"
] | If you’re looking to add a pop of glowing whimsy to your workspace, check out this
vibrant jiggly desk toy
by [thzinc], who couldn’t resist the allure of Adafruit’s NOODS LED strands. [thzinc]’s fascination with both glowing LEDs and levitating tensegrity designs led to an innovative attempt to defy gravity once again.
The construction’s genius is all about the balance of tension across the flexible LED strands, with three red ‘arms’ and a blue ‘hanger’ arm supporting the central hub. [thzinc]’s early designs faced print failures, but by cleverly reorienting print angles and refining channel designs, he achieved a modular, sturdy structure. Assembly involved careful soldering, tension adjustments, and even a bit of temporary tape magic to perfect the wobbling equilibrium.
But, the result is one to applaud. A delightful, wobbly desk toy with a kind of a Jell-O vibe that dances to your desk’s vibrations while glowing like a mini neon sign. We’ve covered
tensegrity constructions
in the past, so with a little digging through our archives you’ll be able to find some unique variations to
build your own
. Be sure to read [thzinc]’s build story before you start. Feel free to combine the best out there, and see what you can
bring to the table!
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/113/773/736/360/665/399/original/215d71573ce1ba6c.mp4 | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091599",
"author": "Julianne",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T14:06:52",
"content": "I wouldn’t have guessed that LED filaments can take any amount of tension on them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8091614",
"author": "Er... | 1,760,371,651.860909 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/patching-up-failing-hearts-with-engineered-muscle-tissue/ | Patching Up Failing Hearts With Engineered Muscle Tissue | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"heart",
"stem cell"
] | As the most important muscle in our body, any serious issues with our heart are considered critical and reason for replacement with a donor heart. Unfortunately donor hearts are rather rare, making alternatives absolutely necessary, or at the very least a way to coax the old heart along for longer. A new method here seems to be literally patching up a patient’s heart with healthy heart tissue, per the first human study results by
[Ahmad-Fawad Jebran] et al. as published in
Nature
(as well as a partially
paywalled accompanying article
).
Currently, simple artificial hearts are a popular bridging method, which provide a patient with effectively a supporting pump. This new method is more refined, in that it uses induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from an existing hiPSC cell line (TC1133) which are then coaxed into forming cardiomyocytes and stromal cells, effectively engineered heart muscle (EHM). After first testing this procedure on rhesus macaque monkeys, a human trial was started involving a 46-year old woman with heart failure after a heart attack a few years prior.
During an operation in 2021, 10 patches of EHMs containing about 400 million cells each were grafted onto the failing heart. When this patient received a donor heart three months later, the removed old heart was examined and the newly grafted sections found to be healthy, including the development of blood vessels.
Although currently purely intended to be a way to keep people alive until they can get a donor heart, this research opens the tantalizing possibility of repairing a patient’s heart using their own cells, which would be significantly easier than growing (or bioprinting) an entire heart from scratch, while providing the benefit of such tissue patches grown from one’s own iPS cells not evoking an immune response and thus mitigating the need for life-long immune system suppressant drugs.
Featured image: Explanted heart obtained 3 months after EHM implantation, showing the healthy grafts. (Credit:
Jebran et al., 2025, Nature
) | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091400",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T04:55:44",
"content": "“As the most important muscle in our body, any issues with our heart are considered critical and reason for replacement with a donor heart.”How about “someissues with the heart”There are many, many cardiac ... | 1,760,371,651.818433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/copper-candle-burns-forever-just-add-fuel/ | Copper Candle Burns Forever… Just Add Fuel | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"alcohol",
"copper candle"
] | [Zen Garden Oasis] wanted to heat and light a space using a candle. But candles aren’t always convenient since they burn down and, eventually, you must replace them. So he built
copper candles
using a common copper pipe and an old glass jar. Of course, the candle still takes fuel that you have to replace, but the candle itself doesn’t burn down.
The basic idea is that the copper tube holds a high-temperature carbon wick that stays saturated with fuel. The fuel burns, but the wick material doesn’t. The copper part is actually concentric with a 3/4-inch pipe mostly enclosing a 1/2-inch pipe.
The inner pipe extends further, and there are several holes in each pipe for fuel and air flow. The extended part of the pipe will be the candle’s flame. The wick wraps the entire inner pipe, stopping when it emerges from the outer pipe.
The fuel is alcohol, just like the old burner in your childhood chemistry set. The flame isn’t very visible, but a little salt in the fuel can help make the burn more orange.
Of course, this is a flame, so you need ventilation. You’ll also want to take care to make sure the candle—or anything burning—doesn’t tip over or set something else on fire. These candles will store just fine, and they can even burn common rubbing alcohol, so they could be useful in an emergency to generate heat and light with no electricity. Even a small candle can generate heat around 300F. Bigger candles make more heat, and the video shows ways to capture the heat to make it more useful.
There are a number of useful comments about drilling a cleaner hole in the jar lid and better replacements for the JB Weld seal. We’d have suggested furnace cement, which is easy to find and cheap. | 49 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091198",
"author": "css",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T00:36:12",
"content": "Okay, I’ll be that guy… what makes this a candle and not, you know, a lamp?I mean, it’s a neat design for an alcohol burner lamp, but… isn’t it a lamp?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,652.018234 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/comparing-adhesives-for-gluing-petg-prints/ | Comparing Adhesives For Gluing PETG Prints | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"PETG"
] | Testing every kind of glue with PETG, including wood glue. (Credit: Cosel, YouTube)
PETG is a pretty great material to print 3D models with, but one issue with it is that gluing it can be a bit of a pain. In a
recent video by [Cosel]
(German language, with English auto-dub) he notes that he found that with many adhesives the adhesion between PETG parts would tend to fail over time, so he set out to do a large test with just about any adhesive he could get his hands on. This included everything from epoxy to wood glue and various adhesives for plastics
TL;DR: Some superglues seem to weaken PETG, and a construction polyurethane glue is the absolute winner.
For the test, two flat surfaces were printed in PETG for each test, glued together and allowed to fully dry over multiple days. After about a week each sample was put into a rig that tried to pull the two surfaces apart while measuring the force required to do so.
With e.g. two-part epoxy and super glue the parts would break rather than the glue layer, while with others the glue layer would give way first. All of these results are noted in the above graphic that has the force listed in Newton. The special notes and symbols stand for strong smell (‘Geruch’), the PETG itself breaking (‘Substrat gebrochen’) and high variability (‘hohe Streuung’) between the multiple samples tested per adhesive.
Interesting is that multiple superglues (‘Sekundenkleber’) show different results, while MMA (Methyl Methacrylate) and similar score the highest. The
Bostik P580
is a polyurethane construction adhesive, usually used for gluing just about anything to anything in interior and exterior applications, so perhaps its high score isn’t so surprising. Trailing at the end are the wood glue in last place, with the UHU general adhesive also scoring rather poorly.
Clearly there are many options for gluing PETG parts, but some are definitely more sturdy than others.
Thanks to [Risu no Kairu] for the tip. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091147",
"author": "Yet Another Robert Smith",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T21:22:31",
"content": "I do a lot of 3D printing using PETG, so this is very helpful. Many thanks for quality citizen science!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,371,651.931286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/retrotechtacular-the-tyranny-of-large-numbers/ | Retrotechtacular: The Tyranny Of Large Numbers | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular",
"Slider"
] | [
"automated manufacturing",
"bell",
"carbon film",
"precision",
"reliability",
"resistor",
"retrotechtacular",
"western electric"
] | Although much diminished now, the public switched telephone network was one of the largest machines ever constructed. To make good on its promise of instant communication across town or around the world, the network had to reach into every home and business, snake along poles to thousands of central offices, and hum through the ether on microwave links. In its heyday it was almost unfathomably complex, with calls potentially passing through thousands of electronic components, any of which failing could present anything from a minor annoyance to a matter of life or death.
The brief but very interesting film below deals with
“The Tyranny of Large Numbers.”
Produced sometime in the 1960s by Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the Bell System, it takes a detailed look at the problems caused by scaling up systems. As an example, it focuses on the humble carbon film resistor, a component used by the millions in various pieces of telco gear. Getting the manufacturing of these simple but critical components right apparently took a lot of effort. Initially made by hand, a tedious and error-prone process briefly covered in the film, Western Electric looked for ways to scale up production significantly while simultaneously increasing quality.
While the equipment used by the Western engineers to automate the production of resistors, especially the
Librascope LGP-30
computer that’s running the show,
may look quaint, there’s a lot about the process that’s still used to this day. Vibratory bowl feeders for the ceramic cores, carbon deposition by hot methane, and an early version of a SCARA arm to sputter gold terminals on the core could all be used to produce precision resistors today. Even cutting the helical groove to trim the resistance is similar, although today it’s done with a laser instead of a grinding wheel. There are differences, of course; we doubt current resistor manufacturers look for leaks in the outer coating by submerging them in water and watching for bubbles, but that’s how they did it in the 60s.
The productivity results were impressive. Just replacing the silver paint used for terminal cups with sputtered gold terminals cut 16 hours of curing time out of the process. The overall throughput increased to 1,200 pieces per hour, an impressive number for such high-reliability precision components, some of which we’d wager were still in service well into the early 2000s. Most of them are likely long gone, but the shadows cast by these automated manufacturing processes stretch into our time, and probably far beyond. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091116",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T19:36:37",
"content": "They actually make only one resistor, then bin-sort them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8091145",
"author": "Eric",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,652.05898 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/digital-paint-mixing-has-been-greatly-improved-with-1930s-math/ | Digital Paint Mixing Has Been Greatly Improved With 1930s Math | Lewin Day | [
"Art",
"Featured",
"Interest"
] | [
"art",
"color",
"color gamut",
"color mixing",
"paint",
"photoshop",
"rebelle",
"rgb"
] | You might not have noticed if you’re not a digital artist, but most painting and image apps still get color mixing wrong. As we all learned in kindergarten, blue paint and yellow paint makes green paint. Try doing that in Photoshop, and you’ll get something altogether different—a vague, uninspiring brownish-grey. It’s the same story in just about every graphics package out there.
As it turns out, there’s a good reason the big art apps haven’t tackled this—because it’s really hard! However, a team of researchers at Czech Technical University has finally cracked this long-standing problem. The result of their hard work is
Mixbox
, a digital model for pigment-based color mixing. Once again, creative application of mathematics has netted aesthetically beautiful results!
Come Up Off Your Color Chart
Combine yellow and blue paint, and the only light reflected by the pigments will be wavelengths in the green range. This is referred to as “subtractive” color mixing because each pigment is taking something away from white light. Credit: Lewin Day
The core issue lies in how digital art apps handle color. Most are built around the RGB color model, which is exactly how our monitors display color—but it’s nothing like how paint and color work in the real world. When you mix blue and yellow light, you get gray – exactly what happens in most digital painting software. Actual paint pigments interact with light in a much more complex way.
What we see when we look at paint is the light
reflected
from the pigments, not what was absorbed. Mixing paints ends up with a more complex situation, with the combined paint absorbing and scattering different wavelengths as light bounces around between pigment particles. Combine two paints, and you’re left with less reflected light because each different pigment absorbs a different part of the spectrum. You only see what’s left. This is also why you get a murky brown or black result when you mix a whole ton of different colors—the different pigments absorb light from all different parts of the spectrum, and reflect precious little to your eyes.
There’s actually been a mathematical model for the behavior of mixed paints since 1931 – the Kubelka-Munk (K-M) equations. Computer graphics researchers have known about it for decades, but it’s never widely been implemented in commercial software. That’s because implementing it would require tracking multiple pigment channels for every pixel instead of just three channels to cover red, green, and blue values. That was a particular deal-breaker in the early days of computing, but it remains a hurdle to this day. Most art software still relies on graphics pipelines built entirely around RGB. Beyond that, pigments don’t readily map to the whole gamut of available RGB colors.
Left, you can see the results of standard RGB color mixing, while to the right, you can see the results of the K-M method. The latter is far more representative of how paint mixes in real life. Credit:
Research paper
The breakthrough came when researchers realized they could knit the principles of the K-M model into the RGB space. Their hack works by decomposing RGB colors into a combination of four basic pigments. The team chose Phthalo Blue, Quinacridone Magenta, Hansa Yellow, and Titanium White as a reasonable basis. Then, they coded a routine to calculate how RGB colors should mix based on their component pigments, using the K-M model. For RGB colors that can’t be made up purely with pigments, there’s also a special “residual” term that accounts for “the missing part of red, green, and blue light that needs to be supplemented to the light reflected off of the pigment mixture in order to exactly match the original RGB color.” It lets the K-M model do its mixing magic without compromising the color space available to the user. The team then had to perform some pigment manipulations to ensure their model wouldn’t end up creating colors that lived outside of the RGB color space, either.
Getting this model to run at speed was a must; after all, nobody wants art software that lags when dragging a brush across the screen. The biggest hurdle to overcome was the mathematical operation to decompose RGB colors into their base pigments. To run this quickly, they pre-compute massive lookup tables that handle all the complex K-M math ahead of time. At runtime, the software only needs to do a few quick table lookups to figure out how colors should blend. The whole system acts as a drop-in replacement for regular RGB color mixing, requiring minimal changes to existing software.
The performance overhead is surprisingly minimal, with the model running only about two to three times slower than regular RGB mixing. On modern hardware, that translates to just milliseconds of lag. In most cases, the model can run at over 60 frames per second on a modern computer. The lookup tables add about 96MB of memory overhead, which is pretty much unnoticeable compared to the gigabytes of memory bloat in most modern software.
The K-M model proves far more authentic than standard color-mixing algorithms in commercial software. Credit:
research paper
The team has released their implementation
on GitHub
, opening the door for other developers to integrate proper pigment mixing into their own projects. The code has also been implemented in a simple web painting app
that you can try for yourself
, right in a browser. Alternatively, the system has been implemented in a commercial painting app called Rebelle. Whichever way you try it out, though, the results are equally impressive. With the mixing model at play, not only do blue and yellow finally make green, but you get all sorts of subtle effects that happen with real paint. For example, colors actually become more saturated when mixed with white instead of getting washed out.
The main limitation is that the system can only handle four base pigments at a time – adding more would make the lookup tables impractically large. More pigments might make it easier to cover the whole RGB gamut, but they also introduce issues for handling the maths in a neat and tidy manner. The researchers have suggested such expansion might be a valuable area for future work.
It’s quite easy to compare the validity of the K-M model simply by putting it next to real paint as an example. Credit:
research paper
In any case, this could be a game-changer for new digital artists coming from traditional media, where color mixing is so much more intuitive. It’s beautiful to see vibrant colors erupting from a canvas, whether real or digital. Now, the latter can more accurately approach the former, giving digital artists greater opportunity for rich expression, colors and all. | 41 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091069",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T18:24:20",
"content": "My mom was an art teacher (and a formally trained artist) and did the arts class in my primary school, and only really late in life I realised that not everyone has had such an extensive knowledge of houw co... | 1,760,371,652.151644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/30/a-1962-test-gear-teardown/ | A 1962 Test Gear Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"Boonton",
"q meter"
] | Although it sounds like some
Star Trek
McGuffin, a Q-Meter is a piece of test gear that measures the Q factor of a tuned circuit. [Thomas] got
a Boonton meter
from 1962 that wasn’t in very good shape, but it was a fun teardown, as you can see in the video below. The meter had signs of a prior modification or repair, but still a nice peek into some vintage gear.
The meter could measure up to 260 MHz (or megacycles in 1962 parlance) and had some unusual features, including an oddly wired AC transformer and a “voltage stabilizer” to ensure a constant AC voltage at the input. We have to admit, we miss the days when our test equipment had gears inside. Then again, we don’t miss the tubes and the high-voltage stuff. Because of the high frequency, the unit even has an oddball acorn tube that you rarely see.
You may notice the meter has a mirror in a strip on the face. This is a common feature of high-precision analog meter movements. The idea is that you move your head until the needle hides its own reflection in the mirror to avoid parallax errors in your reading.
This isn’t the first
Q meter
we’ve seen; in fact, one was pretty similar but a bit older. While you can get a lot of new gear cheap these days, there’s still something to be said for
vintage test equipment
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091044",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T17:05:06",
"content": "I love vintage test gear, and used to have a modest collection of it in my shack. I was particularly fond of the old Hewlett-Packard stuff. My favorite piece was my HP 5245L frequency counter that I p... | 1,760,371,652.209389 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/why-not-build-your-quadcopter-around-an-evaluation-board/ | Why Not Build Your Quadcopter Around An Evaluation Board? | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"quadcopter",
"stm32"
] | Quadcopters are flying machines. Traditionally, that would mean you’d optimize the design for lightweight and minimum drag, and you’d do everything in a neat and tidy fashion. The thing is, brushless motors and lithium batteries are so power-dense that you really needn’t try so hard.
A great example of that is this barebones quadcopter build from [hebel23] all the way back in 2015.
The build is based around the STM32F4 Discovery Board, which [hebel23] scored as a giveaway at Electronica in Munich way back when. It’s plopped on top of a bit of prototyping board so it can be hooked up to the four controllers driving the motors at each corner. The frame of the quadcopter similarly uses cheap material, in the form of alloy profiles left over from an old screen door. Other equipment onboard includes a GY-273 electronic compass module, a MPU6050 3-axis gyroscope and accelerometer to keep the thing on the straight and level, and the Fly Sky R9B RC receiver for controlling the thing.
It might look crude, but it gets off the ground just fine. We’ve seen
quadcopters using the STM32 in more recent years
with more refined designs, but there’s something amusingly elegant about lacing one together with an evaluation board and some protoboard in the middle. If you’re working on your own flying projects, don’t hesitate to
notify the tipsline! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8092054",
"author": "Julia Longtin",
"timestamp": "2025-02-01T16:41:58",
"content": "I am sure whatever bored electrical engineer who had to design that development board to be as bland as possible… would get a kick out of seeing it flying around. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,371,652.255204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/winter-proof-and-improve-your-resin-3d-printing/ | Winter-Proof (And Improve) Your Resin 3D Printing | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"curing",
"heater",
"resin",
"sla",
"tips",
"winterize"
] | Was your 3D printer working fine over the summer, and now it’s not? With colder temperatures comes an overall surge in print failure reports — particularly with resin-based printers that might reside in outbuildings, basements, or garages. If you think this applies to you, don’t miss [Jan Mrázek]’s
tips on improving cold-weather print results
. His tips target the main reasons prints fail, helping to make the process a little more resilient overall. [Jan]’s advice is the product of long experience and experimentation, so don’t miss out.
With environmental changes comes the possibility that things change
just enough
to interfere with layers forming properly. The most beneficial thing overall is to maintain a consistent resin temperature; between 22 and 30 degrees Celsius is optimal. A resin heater is one solution, and there are many
DIY options
using simple parts. Some of the newer (and more expensive) printers have heaters built in, but most existing hobbyist machines do not.
An extreme case of blooming.
Temperature control isn’t the only thing, either. Layer formation and build plate adhesion can all be improved by adding rest times between layers. Yes, this increases print time. It also allows resin to settle before the next layer, improving adhesion and preventing blooming (a rough texture caused by an imperfect cure.) Since resin flows less readily at lower temperatures, rest times can help improve results. The best setting depends heavily on your particular setup, so [Jan] gives tips on finding optimal rest times.
Most common knowledge and advice from well-meaning communities online focuses on increasing exposure time or blaming the build plate. [Jan] feels that these are ultimately the wrong way to go about addressing failures. Usually, an environmental change (like the arrival of winter) has simply pushed a printer that was not optimized in the first place outside of its narrow comfort zone. A little optimization can set things back on track, making the printer more resilient and reliable overall. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091758",
"author": "Cad the Mad",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T23:14:22",
"content": "I am so glad to see something like this in text form instead of yet another video I have to sit through.Very in-depth and very informative. I haven’t had any failures this bad in a while, but I have h... | 1,760,371,652.347098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/hackaday-podcast-episode-306-bambu-hacks-ai-strikes-back-john-deere-gets-sued-and-all-about-capacitors/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 306: Bambu Hacks, AI Strikes Back, John Deere Gets Sued, And All About Capacitors | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | It was Dan and Elliot behind the microphones today for a transatlantic look at the week in hacks. There was a bucket of news about AI, kicked off by Deepseek suddenly coming into the zeitgeist and scaring the pants off investors for… reasons? No matter, we’re more interested in the tech anyway, such as a deep dive into deep space communications from a backyard antenna farm that’s carefully calibrated to give the HOA fits. We got down and dirty with capacitors, twice even, and looked at a clever way to stuff two websites into one QR code. It’s all Taylor, all the time on every channel of the FM band, which we don’t recommend you do (for multiple reasons) but it’s nice to know you can. Plus, great kinetic art project, but that tooling deserves a chef’s kiss. Finally, we wrap up with our Can’t Miss articles where Jenny roots for the right to repair, and Al gives us the
finger(1)
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Download the zero-calorie MP3.
Episode 306 Show Notes:
News:
New Open Source DeepSeek V3 Language Model Making Waves
Prompt Injection Tricks AI Into Downloading And Executing Malware
Preventing AI Plagiarism With .ASS Subtitling
AI Mistakes Are Different, And That’s A Problem
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [StevePlusPlus] for guessing the Tamagotchi!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Supercon 2024: Joshua Wise Hacks The Bambu X1 Carbon
New Bambu Lab Firmware Update Adds Mandatory Authorization Control System
Bambu Connect’s Authentication X.509 Certificate And Private Key Extracted
Making The Longest-Distance Radio Contact Possible
Supercon 2023: Receiving Microwave Signals From Deep-Space Probes
Gamma-ray Scintillation Probe In A Paint Can
Capacitor Decoupling Chaos, And Why You Should Abandon 100 NF
Film Capacitors Can Go In The Wrong Way Round? Who Knew!
This QR Code Leads To Two Websites, But How?
How To Put Your Logo In A QR Code
Barcodes Enter The Matrix In 2027
Cool Kinetic Sculpture Has Tooling Secrets To Share
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Taylorator Makes Mischief On The Airwaves
Inside Vacuum Fluorescent Displays
Paper Tape – With LASERs!
A Little Pigment Helps With Laser Glass Engraving
Dan’s Picks:
3D Print Stamps, And Ink Stuff To Your Heart’s Content With These Tips
Bouncing Signals Off Of Satellites Other Than The Moon
DIY Probe Clamps To Ease Your PCB Work
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Forgotten Internet: Giving (or Getting) The Finger
GitHub – ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive: Collection of John Carmack’s .plan files
The FTC Take Action, Is Time Finally Up For John Deere On Right To Repair?
Federal Register :: Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,652.300592 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/ancient-pocket-computer-gets-a-usb-c-upgrade/ | Ancient Pocket Computer Gets A USB-C Upgrade | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"dos",
"dos palmtop",
"palmtop",
"USB C"
] | Remember the ZEOS Pocket PC? Perhaps you knew it as the Tidalwave PS-1000. Either way, it was a small clamshell computing device that was first released all the way back in 1992, and perhaps most accurately known as a DOS-based palmtop.
Over at [Robert’s Retro] on YouTube
, one of these fine devices was put through a repair and a modern upgrade program.
[Robert] educates us on the basics of the machine as he sets about the routine repairs so familiar to anyone in the retrocomputing scene. The first order of business is to clean up the damage to the battery compartment, which had suffered corrosion from leaking AA batteries. We get a solid look inside, and a walk-through on how to modify the device to run off USB-C power. It’s as simple as wiring up a small power module PCB and integrating that into the case, but it’s a neat mod done well—and it makes toying with the device much easier in 2025.
[Robert] has a cause he’s pursuing, though, when it comes to these old palmtops. He’s trying to identify the name of the oddball connectors these things used for the parallel and serial interfaces, and ideally, a source for the same. If you’ve got a tip on that, drop it in the comments.
Funnily enough, these things were
cloned like crazy
back in the day, so you might even find one under another name in your retro travels. They might be old, but somehow, it’s impossible for a piece of tech to
feel
old when you’re hooking it up with a USB-C port.
We’ve featured [Robert’s] work before
, too! | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091655",
"author": "Matthew Carlson",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T17:19:41",
"content": "I had an HP-200LX as a kid and man I loved that thing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8091724",
"author": "Russel Brooks",
... | 1,760,371,652.47758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/this-week-in-security-deepseeks-oopsie-ai-tarpits-and-apples-leaks/ | This Week In Security: DeepSeek’s Oopsie, AI Tarpits, And Apple’s Leaks | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Deepseek",
"speculative execution",
"Tarpits",
"This Week in Security"
] | DeepSeek has captured the world’s attention this week, with an unexpected release of the more-open AI model from China, for a reported mere $5 million training cost. While there’s lots of buzz about DeepSeek, here we’re interested in security. And
DeepSeek has made waves there
, in the form of
a ClickHouse database unintentionally opened to the world
, discovered by the folks from Wiz research. That database contained chat history and log streams, and API keys and other secrets by extension.
Finding this database wasn’t exactly rocket science — it reminds me of
my biggest bug bounty win
, which was little more than running a traceroute and a port scan. In this case it was domain and sub domain mapping, and a port scan. The trick here was knowing to try this, and then understanding what the open ports represented. And the ClickHouse database was completely accessible, leaking all sorts of sensitive data.
AI Tarpit
Does it really grind your gears that big AI companies are training their models on your content? Is an AI crawler ignoring your
robots.txt
? You might need help from
Nepenthes
. Now before you get too excited, let’s be clear, that this is a malicious software project. It will take lots of CPU cycles, and it’s explicitly intended to waste the time of AI crawlers, while also feeding gibberish into their training models.
The project takes the form of a website that loads slowly, generates gibberish text from a Markov chain, and then generates a handful of unique links to other “pages” on the site. It forms the web equivalent of an infinite “maze of twisty little passages, all alike”.
While the project has been a success, confirmed by the amount of time various web crawlers have spent lost inside,
AI companies are aware of this style of attack
, and mitigations are coming.
Check out the demo
, but don’t lose too much time in there.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/
Is The QR Code Blue and Black?
Or is it White and Gold
This is a really interesting bit of research happening
on a Mastodon thread
. The initial hack was a trio of QR codes, pointing to three different news sites, interleaved beneath a lenticular lens. Depending on the angle from which it was viewed, this arrangement led to a different site. That provoked [Christian Walther] to question whether the lens was necessary, or if some old-school dithering could pull off the same trick. Turns out that it sure can. One image, two URL. We’d love to see this extended to QR codes that register differently under different lighting, or other fun tricks.
Head over to Elliot’s coverage
for more on this one.
SLAPing and FLOPing Apple
Apple’s A and M chips have a pair of recently discovered
speculative execution flaws
, FLOP and SLAP. That’s
False Load Out Predictions and Speculation in Load Address Predictions
. FLOP uses mispredicted memory contents to access data, and SLAP uses mispredicted memory addresses. The takeaway is that Javascript running on one page can leak bytes from another web page.
Both of these attacks have their own wrinkles and complexities. SLAP has only been demonstrated in Safari, and is triggered by training the address prediction on an address layout pattern that leads into memory outside the real buffer. By manipulating Safari into loading another page in the same process as the attacker page, this can be used to leak buffer data from that other page.
FLOP is much more powerful, and works in both Safari and Chrome, and is triggered by training the CPU that a given load instruction tends to return the same data each time. This can be used in Safari to pull off a type confusion speculation issue, leading to arbitrary data leakage from any memory address on the system. In Chrome the details are a bit different, but the result is still an arbitrary memory read primitive.
The worst case scenario is that a compromised site in one tab can pull data from the rest of the system. There’s an impressive demo where a compromised tab reads data from ProtonMail running in a different tab. Apple’s security team is aware of this work, and has stated that it does not consider these attacks to be immediately exploitable as real world attacks.
Bits and Bytes
WatchTowr is
back with the details on another Fortigate vulnerability
, and this time it’s a race condition in the jsconsole management interface, resulting in an authentication bypass, and jumping straicht to super_admin on the system.
Unicode continues causing security problems, to no great surprise. Windows has a “Best-Fit” character conversion facility, which attempts to convert Unicode characters to their nearest ASCII neighbors. That
causes all sorts of problems
, in the normal divergent-parser-behavior way. When a security check happens on the Unicode text, but the Best-Fit conversion happens before the text is actually used, the check is neatly bypassed by the text being Best-Fit into ASCII.
And finally, Google’s Project Zero has
an in-depth treatment of COM object exploitation with IDispatch
. COM objects can sometimes be accessed across security boundaries, and sometimes those remote objects can be used to execute code. This coverage dives into the details of how the IDispatch interface can be used to trigger this behavior. Nifty! | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091638",
"author": "strawberrymortallyb0bcea48e7",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T16:22:38",
"content": "The internet is already scraped, and models are bootstrapped.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8091643",
"author": "threeve",... | 1,760,371,652.52859 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/a-history-of-copper-pours/ | A History Of Copper Pours | Al Williams | [
"History",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"copper fill",
"copper pour",
"ground plane",
"pcb"
] | If you compare a modern PCB with a typical 1980s PCB, you might notice — like [lcamtuf] did — that newer boards tend to have large areas of copper known as pours instead of empty space between traces. If you’ve ever wondered why this is,
[lcamtuf] explains
.
The answer isn’t as simple as you might think. In some cases, it is just because the designer is either copying the style of a different board or the design software makes it easy to do. However, the reason it caught on in the first place is a combination of high-speed circuitry and FCC RF emissions standards. But why do pours help with unintentional emissions and high-speed signals?
The answer lies in the inductance the pours add to the boards. Of course, there’s no free lunch. Adding inductance in this way also increases capacitance, which can be a bad thing.
The truth is, most of the boards we deal with would be fine with or without the pours. That’s a good thing, too, because the post illustrates how some common things can significantly reduce the effectiveness of the copper pours.
When we don’t send our boards out, we are usually more interested in
removing copper
. You also have to be careful when you want your
PCB to radiate
. | 39 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091569",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T12:04:13",
"content": "I mostly use pours to conserve the etching solution.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8091587",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,371,652.605854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/31/handy-online-metric-screw-nut-and-washer-generator/ | Handy Online Metric Screw, Nut, And Washer Generator | Donald Papp | [
"hardware",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3MF",
"fasteners",
"openscad",
"stl"
] | For those times when you could
really
use a quick 3D model,
this metric screw generator
will do the trick for screws between M2 and M16 with matching nuts and washers. Fastener hardware is pretty accessible, but one never knows when a 3D printed piece will hit the spot. One might even be surprised what can be usefully printed on a decent 3D printer at something like 0.08 mm layer height.
Behind the scenes, [Jason]’s tool is an
OpenSCAD
script with a very slick web-based interface that allows easy customization of just about any element one might need to adjust, including fine-tuning the thread sizing.
We’re fans of OpenSCAD here
and appreciate what’s going on behind the scenes, but one doesn’t need to know anything about it to use the online tool.
Generated models can be downloaded as
.3mf
or
.stl
, but if you really need a CAD model you’re probably best off looking up a part and downloading the matching 3D model from a supplier like
McMaster-Carr
.
Prefer to just use the OpenSCAD script yourself, instead of the web interface? Select “Download STL/CAD Files” from the dropdown of the project page to download
ScrewGenerator.scad
for local use, and you’re off to the races. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8091536",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-01-31T09:11:50",
"content": "There’s also a rather useful looking gearwheel generator by Jason too",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8091540",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,652.721122 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/floss-weekly-episode-818-i-dont-care-about-the-roman-empire/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 818: I Don’t Care About The Roman Empire | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Deepseek",
"FLOSS Weekly"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
,
Doc Searls
, and
Jeff Massie
talk about Deepseek, technical solutions to Terms of Service abuse, and more!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on
our YouTube Channel
? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us!
Take a look at the schedule here
.
Direct Download
in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along,
here’s the transcript for this week’s episode
.
Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast:
Spotify
RSS
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under
Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090764",
"author": "jbx",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T00:18:44",
"content": "Then what about the aqueduct ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8090769",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2025-01-30T00:58:22",
... | 1,760,371,652.653392 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/supercon-2024-joshua-wise-hacks-the-bambu-x1-carbon/ | Supercon 2024: Joshua Wise Hacks The Bambu X1 Carbon | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cons",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"Bambu X1",
"firmware",
"X1 Plus"
] | Bambu Labs have been in the news lately. Not because of the machines themselves, but because they are proposing a firmware change that many in our community find restricts their freedom to use their own devices.
What can be done? [Joshua Wise] gave a standout talk on the Design Lab stage at the 2024 Hackaday Superconference where he told the tale of his custom firmware for the Bambu X1 Carbon. He wasn’t alone here; the X1 Plus tale involves a community of hackers working on opening up the printer, but it’s also a tale that hasn’t ended yet. Bambu is striking back.
Classics of Getting Root
But first, the hacks. It took three and a half attacks to get the job done. The Bambu looks like a Linux machine, and it does everything over HTTPS, so that’s a difficult path. But the Bambu slicer software speaks to the printer over a custom API, and since the slicer can print, it
must
be able to send files to the printer.
Another hacker named [Doridian] had started working on getting in between the slicer and the printer, and the attack starts as every attack does – typing some keywords from the API into the Internet and finding the “confidential” documentation. Since you can download files using this API, you can start to get some binary files off the system. Bambu patched this one. [Doridian] then tried symlinks on an SD card, which worked for a little while, but Bambu patched this one too. Finally, they tried the old Johnny Droptables trick with a filename of a 3D model. This was also quickly patched.
Then [Joshua] got a message on Superbowl Sunday from a total stranger, [Balosh], who claimed he had a bootrom vulnerability that completely hosed the device because it’s baked into the firmware, and that’s an uncloseable door. [Fabian Masterbroek] wrote a
kexec
loadable module that lets you boot a second kernel from a running one, but it was written for the wrong platform. [Joshua] wrote the platform driver stuff to enable the swapover, shut everything down, and then reboot into a custom kernel.
What To Do When You Get In?
So [Joshua] was in. Now what to do? What features would you add to your own custom Bambu X1 Carbon firmware? Since it’s a Linux device, you might want a modern kernel, with better WiFi support and USB Ethernet. Maybe some security? An improved filesystem?
Here is a reverse-engineering nugget: The original UI is written in QML, which [Joshua] claims is horrible. He then uses
Unicorn Engine
, which is a spinoff of QEMU that emulates the CPU and lets him know where all the function calls go, and shows him the way to, for instance, turn on and off the backlight. Now he could write his own system.
Winning the Battle, Not Yet the War
Word of the hacks
got out on the Internets
and [Joshua] got in touch with folks at Bambu Lab. They worked to a compromise that allowed Bambu to save face – they would allow people to upload their own firmware to the printers: a great victory for hackers that lets us FTP into the devices and print our own files without going through the cloud. All’s well that ends well?
The talk ends with foreshadowing: a cautionary note from back in November 2024. [Joshua] calls it “unusual” that Bambu would simply say “OK, run your own code”. Vendors gotta be vendors, and he predicts that the cat and mouse games will continue.
How right he was
! But it looks like the game is, for now at least,
back in the mouse’s corner
. | 36 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090676",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2025-01-29T18:52:31",
"content": "Bambu Labs needs to tread more carefully. They are in a weird hobbyist marketplace. Unlike commonplace hardware like inkjets and laser printers, 3D printing is still not “mainstream enough”. A signif... | 1,760,371,652.804279 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/paper-tape-with-lasers/ | Paper Tape – With LASERs! | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"laser cutter",
"paper tape",
"punch tape"
] | Though it is many decades since paper tape was commonly used as a data input or storage medium, it still holds a fascination for many who work with computers. Over the years we’ve featured more than one paper tape related project, and the latest to come out way is [ColemanJW2]’s
8-bit ASCII paper tape generator
.
It’s natural to expect when talking about a paper tape generator that a machine of some type will emerge, probably with a large reel of tape, a whirring mechanical punch, and a big box of paper confetti. This one however is different, because it exists in software and produces an SVG file to cut the tape with a laser cutter. Common workshop equipment in 2025, but the stuff of science fiction when paper tape was current.
The software is a Python script, which has a friendly GUI. It applies 8-bit ASCII to the tape, and supports control codes and ANSI escape sequences. There’s a very short demonstration video of a tape being cut, which we’ve placed below the break.
If you make any tapes this way, see if you can find
a paper tape event badge
to read them. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090637",
"author": "Elliott",
"timestamp": "2025-01-29T16:41:12",
"content": "I have a script like this that generates punch cards for my 3d printed jacquard machine. I don’t really have a better way to do it, but man the time it takes to cut those holes adds up.",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,371,652.868184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/29/cool-kinetic-sculpture-has-tooling-secrets-to-share/ | Cool Kinetic Sculpture Has Tooling Secrets To Share | Dan Maloney | [
"Art"
] | [
"art",
"cnc",
"coil",
"kinetic",
"solenoid",
"tooling",
"winding"
] | Occasionally, we get a tip for a project that is so compelling that we just have to write it up despite lacking details on how and why it was built. Alternatively, there are other projects where the finished product is cool, but the tooling or methods used to get there are the real treat.
“Homeokinesis,” a kinetic art installation by [Ricardo Weissenberg]
, ticks off both those boxes in a big way.
First, the project itself. Judging by the brief video clip in the reddit post below, Homeokinesis is a wall-mounted array of electromagnetically actuated cards. The cards are hinged so that solenoids behind them flip the card out a bit, making interesting patterns of shadow and light, along with a subtle and pleasing clicking sound. The mechanism appears to be largely custom-made, with ample use of 3D printed parts to make the frame and the armatures for each unit of the panel.
Now for the fun part. Rather than relying on commercial solenoids, [Ricardo] decided to roll his own, and built a really cool CNC machine to do it. The machine has a spindle that can hold at least eleven coil forms, which appear to be 3D printed. Blank coil forms have a pair of DuPont-style terminal pins pressed into them before mounting on the spindle, a job facilitated by another custom tool that we’d love more details on. Once the spindle is loaded up with forms, magnet wire feeds through a small mandrel mounted on a motorized carriage and wraps around one terminal pin by a combination of carriage and spindle movements. The spindle then neatly wraps the wire on the form before making the connection to the other terminal and moving on to the next form.
The coil winder is brilliant to watch in action — however briefly — in the video below. We’ve reached out to [Ricardo] for more information, which we’ll be sure to pass along. For now, there are a lot of great ideas here, both on the fabrication side and with the art piece itself, and we tip our hats to [Ricardo] for sharing this.
Development of my kinetic art installation
by
u/musicatristedonaruto
in
EngineeringPorn | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090591",
"author": "evelynmartin3022",
"timestamp": "2025-01-29T13:35:28",
"content": "Wow, this is so cool, the art installation looks amazing, and the custom CNC machine is impressive. this is video is awesome, I’d love to learn more about how it all works. thanks for the share."... | 1,760,371,652.969881 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/parcae-a-trio-of-spy-satellites/ | Parcae: A Trio Of Spy Satellites | Al Williams | [
"Space"
] | [
"parcae",
"spy satellite"
] | Did you ever hear of a satellite called Parcae (pronounced like park-eye)? If you haven’t, don’t feel bad—it was, after all, a top-secret project only revealed in July 2023. [Ivan Amato] not only heard about it, but also wrote a fascinating peek into the cloak-and-dagger world of
cold-war spy satellites
for this month’s IEEE Spectrum.
According to [Ivan], the satellite helped the United States to keep track of Russian submarines and was arguably the most capable orbiting spy platform ever. Or, at least, that we get to hear about.
Given that it was built in the 1970s, it was amazing that the satellite wasn’t very large. The craft itself seemed small compared to its solar panels. Even today, the satellite remains a bit of a mystery. While the NRO—the US spy satellite agency—did acknowledge its existence in 2023, there is very little official information about it, although, apparently, other curious people have unearthed data on Parcae over the years. According to the NRO, the satellites have not been in use since 2008.
The Parcae—named after the Romans’ three fates—worked in groups of three and launched in a “dispenser” that carried the trio of spaceships. They could listen to radio emissions from ships and use very accurate clocks to pinpoint their location based on the slight differences in the time each satellite heard the signal.
One of the system’s unique features was that thanks to a minicomputer, ship positions could be in users’ hands in minutes. That doesn’t sound so impressive today, but it was an amazing achievement for that time.
The article goes into more detail about how the individual satellites used a gravity boom for orientation and a lot of details about the designers. Of course, some of what Parcae could do is still secret for now, so there may be more to this story later.
Spy satellites can’t always hide from
backyard telescopes
. Spy satellites always have
impressive technology
and—presumably—big budgets. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090348",
"author": "unochepassa",
"timestamp": "2025-01-29T07:17:00",
"content": "For more info, please check the mandatory link to the Gunter’s database (thanks!):https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/noss-1.htm",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,652.9244 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/transition-metal-dichalcogenides-super-conducting-super-capacitor-semiconductors/ | Transition-Metal Dichalcogenides: Super-Conducting, Super-Capacitor Semiconductors | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"semiconductors",
"supercapacitors",
"superconductors"
] | Transition-metal dichalcogenides (
TMDs
) are the subject of an emerging field in semiconductor research, with these materials offering a range of useful properties that include not only semiconductor applications, but also in superconducting material research and in supercapacitors. A recent number of papers have been published on these latter two applications, with
[Rui] et al. demonstrating superconductivity
in (InSe
2
)
x
NbSe
2
. The superconducting transition occurred at 11.6 K with ambient pressure.
Two review papers on transition metal sulfide TMDs as supercapacitor electrodes were also recently published by
[Mohammad Shariq] et al.
and
[Can Zhang] et al.
showing it to be a highly promising material owing to strong redox properties. As usual there are plenty of challenges to bring something like TMDs from the laboratory to a production line, but TMDs (really
TMD monolayers
) have already seen structures like field effect transistors (FETs) made with them, and used in sensing applications.
TMDs consist of a transition-metal (M, e.g. molybdenum, tungsten) and a chalcogen atom (X, e.g. sulfur) in a monolayer with two X atoms (yellow in the above image) encapsulating a single M atom (black). Much like with other monolayers like graphene,
molybdenene
and
goldene
, it is this configuration that gives rise to unexpected properties. In the case of TMDs, some have a direct band gap, making them very suitable for transistors and perhaps most interestingly also for
directly growing 3D semiconductor structures
.
Heading image: Crystal structure of a monolayer of transition metal dichalcogenide.(Credit:
3113Ian, Wikimedia
) | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090460",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2025-01-29T10:33:09",
"content": "The secret sauce will be how to grow and package ,Transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMD’s), for each application.Supper caps need the highest possible surface area, per gram, and cm³ in order to be compe... | 1,760,371,653.017737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/testing-at-scale/ | Testing At Scale | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"pogo pins",
"Test jig",
"testing"
] | We’ve said it before: building one-offs is different from building at scale. Even on a small scale. There was a time when it was rare for a hobbyist to produce more than one of anything, but these days, access to cheap PC boards makes small production runs much more common. [VoltLog], for example, is selling some modules and found he was spending a lot of time testing the boards. The answer? A
testing jig
for his PC board.
Big factories, of course, have special machines for bulk testing. These are usually expensive. [VoltLog] found a place specializing in creating custom test jigs using 3D printing.
They also have some standard machines. He did have to modify his PCB to accommodate special test points. He sent the design files to the company, and they produced a semi-custom testing jig for the boards in about a month.
A Raspberry Pi runs the test and can even sense LEDs turning on if you need it to. Although the device is 3D printed, it looks very professional. The machine accepts an entire panel of PCBs and wedges pogo pins to the test points.
We were curious about the cost of this fixture. Of course, each one is unique, so the cost of his fixture will not be the same as yours, but it would still be nice to have an order-of-magnitude idea of the price. On the other hand, he claims his testing is now 15 times faster, so if you spend enough time testing, the cost is probably insignificant.
Replicating a design many times has
plenty of challenges
. While we do like the look of [VoltLog’s] machine, we also know you could roll your own
pogo pin setup
if you were on a budget. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090267",
"author": "Tony Moncter",
"timestamp": "2025-01-29T02:04:40",
"content": "“semi-custom testing jib” should probably be “semi-custom testing jig”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8090269",
"author": "Andrew",
... | 1,760,371,653.072874 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/your-vax-in-a-cloud-is-ready/ | Your VAX In A Cloud Is Ready | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"DEC",
"OpenVMS",
"vax",
"VMs"
] | For many people of a certain age, the DEC VAX was the first computer they ever used. They were everywhere, powerful for their day, and relatively affordable for schools and businesses. These minicomputers were smaller than the mainframes of their day, but bigger than what we think of as a computer today. So even if you could find an old one in working order, it would be a lot more trouble than refurbishing, say, an old Commodore 64. But if you want to play on a VAX, you might want to get a free membership on
DECUServe
, a service that will let you remotely access a VAX in all its glory.
The machine is set up as a system of conferences organized in notebooks. However, you do wind up at a perfectly fine VAX prompt (OpenVMS).
What can you do? Well, if you want a quick demo project, try editing a file called NEW.BAS (
EDIT NEW.BAS
). You may have to struggle a bit with the commands, but if you (from the web interface) click VKB, you’ll get a virtual keyboard that has a help button. One tip: if you start clicking on the fake keyboard, you’ll need to click the main screen to continue typing with your real keyboard.
Once you have a simple BASIC program, you can compile it (
BASIC NEW.BAS
). That won’t seem to do anything, but when you do a
DIR
, you’ll see some object files. (
LINK NEW
) will give you an executable and, finally,
RUN NEW
will pay off.
Some quick searches will reveal a lot more you can do, and, of course, there are also the conferences (not all of them are about VAX, either). Great fun! We think this is really connected to an Alpha machine running OpenVMS, although it could be an
emulator
. There are tons of
emulators
available in your browser. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090194",
"author": "Electronic Eel",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T21:43:59",
"content": "“The machine is set up as a system of conferences organized in notebooks.”uh, what? Is this some kind of Newspeak?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,371,653.350528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-diy-homing-keys/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The DIY Homing Keys | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"ball bearings",
"Cherry MX blues",
"F and J",
"homing keys",
"keeb girlies",
"photovoltaic",
"SAMD21",
"supercapacitor"
] | r/keebgirlies Is Totally a Thing Now
When [coral-bells] posted her first build to r/mechanicalkeyboards, she likely felt some trepidation. After all this is reddit we’re talking about, so right away you’ve got two layers of male-domination hobby.
Image by [coral-bells] via
reddit
What she likely didn’t expect was to be upvoted into the tens of thousands, or to receive such a response from other girlies who came out of the woodwork to share their builds.
And so
r/keebgirlies
was born, and already has a few thousand members. This is a brand-new subreddit for women and non-binary folks who are into mechanical keyboards. As it says in the sidebar, men are welcome but limited to the comments for now, so don’t go trying to post your builds. The girlies are currently seeking moderators, so give that some thought.
As for [coral-bells]’ lovely build, this is an Epomaker MS68 with MMD Vivian V2 switches, and those flowery keycaps are from Etsy. She is currently waiting for supplies to mod a Yunzii AL66, but wants to build a kit at some point.
Bear In Mind That You Can DIY Homing Keys
Ahh, homing keys. F and J, with their little bumps or lines that home your fingers on the… home row. The Kinesis Advantage doesn’t have them, unfortunately, but makes up for it with deep-dish DSA keycaps on the home row that are bright blue against a sea of black.
Image by [theTechRun] via
reddit
I still miss having bumps around because I like to pick at them sometimes when I can’t find the words I want. So there’s a good chance I will try
[theTechRun]’s DIY homing key method
at some point.
After trying and failing several ways, [theTechRun] came up with this ball bearing method lovingly outlined in the reddit post. Basically, you draw a line across the keycap where you want the bearings to sit, make indentations with a spring-loaded center punch set on the lowest pressure setting, then use an unfolded paperclip to dab super glue in the divots and set 1/16″ bearings in there. Evidently, two bearings feel nicer than one, and they look cooler, too.
This is a great step-by-step with shopping links for everything but the pencil. [theTechRun] offers a lot of tips as well, like erasing the pencil line before you set the bearings, and using a leveler to mark it in the first place.
The Centerfold: the Rainbow Connection
Image by [SpockIsMyHomeboy] via
reddit
Happy 8-year cake day to [SpockIsMyHomeboy], proud owner of a bunch of rainbows and
a lovely peripheral
. This is a KBDFans TET keyboard sporting GMK Panels keycaps on HMX Hyacinth V2U switches. That lovely artisan keycap is none other than a Muad’ib DuneDragon.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad?
Send me a picture
along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Merritt Had Merit
I keep featuring the odd index typewriter here and there because I want you to get the sense of how popular they used to be before the masses had really mastered the keyboard, whatever the layout might have been.
Image via
The Antikey Chop
The Merritt index typewriter
, which was marketed as “The People’s Type-Writer”, went for a cool $15 in the 1890s until the brand’s demise in 1896. That’s around $500 in 2025 money.
All versions of the Merritt were blindwriters that typed in a linear up-striking fashion. Thanks to a double Shift mechanism, the machine could produce 78 characters. The inking was handled with a couple of rollers. I find the layout intriguing and wonder how fast I could get going on the thing, though it seems like a recipe for a repetitive stress injury.
Interestingly, the Antikey Chop found an ad from 1901 that was placed by a department store. Hamburger & Sons claimed to have acquired “an immense quantity” of Merritts and were offering them for $3.98 and $4.98. They chose to market the machines as “typewriters for those who cannot afford typewriters”, “handy typewriters for tourists”, and “ideal machines for boys and girls”.
This Keyboard Charges Itself
Wireless keyboards are cool and all, but they whole keeping-it-charged thing adds a level of stress that many believe isn’t worth it. After all, what are you supposed to do when your keyboard is dead? Use the —
gasp —
laptop keyboard? Uh, no. I mean, unless you have a ThinkPad or something; those have pretty nice keyboards, or at least they did a few years ago.
Image by [Lenovo] via
PC Magazine
Lenovo is here for you with their Self-Charging Bluetooth Keyboard
, which debuted at CES. It uses a photovoltaic panel and supercapacitors to harness and store both solar and ambient artificial light. I don’t have to tell you that supercapacitors last much longer than lithium batteries.
I for one like the paint spatter design, but I wish only three keycaps were green. It’s a nitpick for sure, ignoring the elephant in the room with a sign around its neck that reads
ceci n’est pas une ergonomic keyboard
.
Bonus:
Lenovo also debuted the AdaptX Mouse
, a modular affair which appears to be a pretty sweet multi-functional peripheral for those who don’t want to carry too much. It can be a compact mouse, an ergonomic mouse, a travel hub, a memory card holder,
and
an emergency power bank. Sheesh! Unfortunately, it’s just a proof-of-concept for now. Gauntlet laid?
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 42 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090101",
"author": "andy",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T18:15:14",
"content": "umm wow this is what every week now?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8090104",
"author": "Matthew",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T18:29:40"... | 1,760,371,653.298954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/its-raining-from-the-bluesky/ | It’s Raining From The BlueSky | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"BlueSky",
"digital rain",
"matrix digital rain",
"tweets"
] | Which would you rather feel? The blast of a fire hose, or a cool, digital rain? That’s what we thought. Introducing
Blue Rain
— the fire hose that is the BlueSky feed, falling semi-cryptically down your screen in Matrix-style letter droplets. Ahh, isn’t that nice?
Now, the rain doesn’t have to be blue. You can change the color, the speed at which it falls, the font, the font size, and other stuff like toggling NSFW, uh, tweets. (Wait, what are we calling BlueSky messages, anyway? Skeets? Really?)
You can even choose between a few fonts for the rain. And if you want to like, actually read one of the skeets, just shoot one carefully with your mouse while it’s still falling.
[Simone] has the project files on
GitHub
, but you should really
read the blog post
. Inspired by the lovely
firehose3d
, [Simone] thought instead of displaying the BlueSky fire hose as digital rain.
First, she collects as many skeets as there are empty columns on a screen from a Jetstream sever. This is calculated based on font style and size. She wrote an algorithm loosely inspired by
CodePen
, which does digital rain. If the skeet doesn’t fully render by the time it reaches the bottom of the screen, the rest appears at the top of the same column and falls until it’s done displaying. Then the column clears out and waits for a new skeet.
Want to take Matrix-style digital rain on the go?
You can cram it onto a Pico, you know
.
Thanks for the tip, [FrancisF]! | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090112",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T18:54:18",
"content": "Skeet shooting is a thing ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8090168",
"author": "lol",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T20:23:18",
"content": "Trot... | 1,760,371,653.471355 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/big-chemistry-catalysts/ | Big Chemistry: Catalysts | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"Big Chemistry",
"catalysis",
"catalysts",
"reactor",
"refining"
] | I was fascinated by the idea of
jet packs
when I was a kid. They were sci-fi magic, and the idea that you could strap into an oversized backpack wrapped in tinfoil and fly around was very enticing. Better still was when I learned that these things weren’t powered by complicated rockets but by plain hydrogen peroxide, which violently decomposes into water and oxygen when it comes in contact with a metal like silver or platinum. Of course I ran right to the medicine cabinet to fetch a bottle of peroxide to drip on a spoon from my mother’s good silverware set. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed by the results.
My little impromptu experiment went wrong in many ways, not least because the old bottle of peroxide I used probably had little of the reactive compound left in it. Given enough time, the decomposition of peroxide will happen all by itself. To be useful in a jet pack, this reaction has to proceed much, much faster, which was what the silver was for. The silver (or rather, a coating of samarium nitrate on the silver) acted as a catalyst that vastly increased the rate of peroxide decomposition, enough to produce jets of steam and oxygen with enough thrust to propel the wearer into the air. Using 90% pure peroxide would have helped too.
As it is for jet packs, so it is with industrial chemistry. Bulk chemical processes can rarely be left to their own devices, as some reactions proceed so slowly that they’d be commercially infeasible. Catalysts are the key to the chemistry we need to keep the world running, and reactors full of them are a major feature of many of the processes of Big Chemistry.
Catalysis 101
The high school chemistry description of a catalyst is pretty simple: it’s a substance that helps a reaction to proceed without being consumed in the process. Take the case of the jet pack reaction, or rather a close alternative using another catalyst, manganese dioxide:
Manganese dioxide does not appear on either the reactant side of the equation or in the products. It only facilitates the reaction, and no matter how much peroxide you pour on it, the manganese dioxide will still be there — with a few practical caveats, which we’ll discuss below. The usual explanation for how catalysts work is that they lower the activation energy of a reaction, which in turn increases the rate of the reaction. That’s fine as far as it goes, and probably enough of an explanation for the practical needs of bulk chemistry, but diving just a bit deeper into the concepts will help explain the engineering of catalysts and chemical reactors.
Most of the catalysts used in bulk chemistry processes are heterogenous surface catalysts; heterogenous in that they are in a different physical state from the reactants, usually a solid catalyst with liquid or gaseous reactants, and surface in that the catalysis occurs at the interface between the reactant phase and the solid surface of the catalyst. Reactants can diffuse from their liquid or gaseous phase and adsorb onto the catalyst’s surface in close enough proximity to react with each other. Alternatively, reactants can migrate across the surface of the catalyst so they get close enough to react, but the key concept is that the catalyst acts something like a jig to keep the adsorbed reactants together long enough to do their thing. Once the reaction is complete, the product will release or desorb from the catalyst, freeing up the surface to be used by fresh reactants. This process — diffusion, adsorption, reaction, and desorption — is referred to as the catalytic cycle.
Catalyst Structure
Most catalysts for bulk chemistry rely on elements from the transition metals groups, that block of elements that lives between the “towers” at either side of the periodic table. In addition to silver and manganese, metals from this block commonly used as catalysts include palladium, platinum, rhodium, rhenium, and iridium. Vanadium, used to
produce sulfuric acid from sulfur dioxide
, is another important transition metal catalyst, as is iron, which catalyzes ammonia synthesis in the
Haber-Bosch process
. The rare earth elements in this block are also used for some processes.
While it makes for a good demonstration of catalysis, the example above of dripping hydrogen peroxide onto a pile of manganese is a bit simplistic. Practical industrial catalysts are highly engineered to maximize their effectiveness while standing up to reaction conditions, which often require (or create) extreme temperatures and pressures. Most industrial catalysts are classified as supported, which simply means that the active element or elements are applied to a non-catalytic physical structure that provides mechanical stability. Support materials run the gamut, from simple inorganic compounds like magnesium chloride to complex shapes made from silica, ceramics, or even plastics. The catalytic element can either be part of the support matrix or applied to the outer surface of the support, which is common for precious metal catalysts such as palladium or platinum.
Forbidden candies. Supported catalysts for fixed bed reactors take many forms, all optimized for packing, reactant flow, and maximum surface area. Source:
Shubhrapdil
, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The size and shape of the catalyst support is critical to its efficiency. A wide range of forms are used, with a tendency to shy away from spherical shapes as these tend to minimize surface area for a given volume. Cylindrical shapes are often used, and many catalysts have one or more holes passing through them, to increase their surface area. The size and shape of the particles also determine the flow characteristics of the catalyst, which is important in continuous chemical processes where the reactants need to pass through a catalyst. Catalytic cracking of crude oil into products like diesel, gasoline, and butane is a good example of a continuous flow catalytic process.
Even though catalysts aren’t used up in a reaction, they still wear out over time. Back in the days when it was still possible to buy leaded gasoline, it was pretty obvious when someone had mistakenly used the wrong gas in a car with a catalytic converter. The tetraethyl lead poisoned the catalysts in the exhaust system by coating the surface with lead compounds, blocking the active surface and leading to a characteristic rotten egg reek. Poisoning is just one way that catalysts become less effective over time; other common catalyst deactivation mechanisms include coking with heavy carbon deposits, fouling with unreacted compounds or contaminants, sintering of catalytic metal into large crystals rather than a smooth layer, and solid-phase transformation, where molecules from the support material migrate through the active layer and block access to it. Catalyst deactivation eventually reduces the efficiency enough that the spent catalyst has to be replaced.
Catalyst Service With a Smile
Containing reactants and the catalyst media requires some sort of vessel. These are generically known as reactors, and while they range widely in size and features, for big chemistry processes like crude oil refining or polymer production, reactors can be among the biggest components of a plant. Reactors often take the form of a large tank or even a tower, many meters high, wrapped in pipes and equipped with catwalks and manholes and bristling with sensors and monitors. Big reactors are often very strong, able to resist high temperatures and pressures, and depending on the corrosivity and reactivity of the reactants, they may be made from materials such as stainless steel or even alloys like Monel or Inconel.
A large refinery or chemical plant may have dozens or even hundreds of reactors, all of which will require service at some point. Changing out spent catalyst is a challenging and dangerous job, so chemical operators usually outsource the job to specialist firms that do nothing but service reactors. They employ catalyst technicians who are trained for confined-space entry so they can safely get inside the reactor to inspect or clean it. Even with the proper training and safety equipment such as hazmat suits that are just this side of legitimate space suits, confined-space entry is very dangerous and can be terrifying; claustrophobiacs need not apply.
Unloading a reactor is a slow and deliberate process. Reactors tend to run very hot, so operators have to plan ahead and leave plenty of time for the reactor to cool down before unloading. Consideration also has to be given to any physical or chemical changes that occurred to the catalyst during its life, which could present a dangerous situation. Some catalysts may have accumulated metal oxides which would react violently if exposed to air, releasing deadly gasses like sulfur dioxide. In such cases, the reactor may be filled with nitrogen, which complicates technician access. Alternatively, a protective resin can be added to the reactor to coat the catalyst particles and lock away the reactive oxides, making them safer to handle.
With some reactors holding tons of catalyst, removing the spent media can be a challenge. Some reactors have dump gates at the bottom, allowing the spent material to flow out under gravity. Other reactors only have a manhole at the top, meaning that the spent catalyst has to be vacuumed out. Large, powerful vacuum trucks are used for this job, often with confined-entry techs guiding the hose inside the reactor.
The spent catalyst presents a disposal problem. In days past, spent material was either landfilled or sometimes ground up and used as a replacement for sand or gravel in concrete. This isn’t terribly sustainable, though, and when the active material of the catalyst is something like platinum, downright wasteful. Catalyst recycling is a big industry now, with companies specializing in the process. Spent catalyst is trucked off to facilities where it is classified and graded before being stripped of any remaining reactants, which are recovered and recycled where possible. Stripped catalyst is roasted in a rotary kiln to oxidize the active metal, with sulfur dioxide and particulates captured by electrostatic precipitators and filters. The roasted media, known as calcine, is ground and leached with acids to solubilize the metals, and the leachate goes through a series of pyrometallurgical processes to recover the metals.
Once a reactor has been unloaded and inspected and any necessary repairs made, it needs to be refilled with fresh catalyst. There are two main methods for this. Sock loading is where catalyst service techs enter the reactor wearing full protective suits with breath apparatus. They often need to wear special shoes to distribute their weight — think snowshoes — and prevent crushing the catalyst bed. A long flexible tube, traditionally made of canvas and hence the name of the method, is lowered to the bottom of the reactor. Catalyst particles flow down the sock from a hopper while the techs guide the sock around to make an even bed. The sock is withdrawn as the bed rises, and the techs often use rakes and shovels to evenly distribute the material.
Another method is called dense loading. No technicians are required in the reactor; rather, a specialized dense loading tool in inserted into the tank through a central manhole at the top. The tool has a series of platforms that spin, distributing catalyst particles that are fed into the center of the tool from a hopper above. The gentle rain of catalyst particles free-falls in the reactor until it reaches the rising bed, where the particles bounce around until they settle into their lowest energy state. As the name suggests, dense loading yields a denser, more homogeneous catalyst bed, which allows more material to be packed into the same volume. This tends to make the reactor more efficient overall and increases catalyst life by decreasing hot spots. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8090050",
"author": "Owlman",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T15:33:17",
"content": "We didn’t run to silver spoons in our house but potassium permanganate was in my chemistry set (those were the days). Home peroxide was way too dilute to be particularly spectacular, even if you scavenged ... | 1,760,371,653.415971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/google-open-sources-pebbleos-new-pebble-device-in-development/ | Google Open Sources PebbleOS: New Pebble Device In Development | Maya Posch | [
"News"
] | [
"pebble",
"pebble watch"
] | The Pebble smartwatch was introduced in 2012 as part of a Kickstarter campaign and saw moderate success before the company behind it got bought out by Fitbit. Although a group of enthusiasts kept their Pebble devices alive, including via the alternate Rebble project for online services, it seemed that no new Pebble devices would grace this Earth. However, we now got a flurry of Pebble updates, with Google, the current owner of Fitbit,
open sourcing the PebbleOS
source, and [Eric Migicovsky] as the original Pebble founder
announcing new Pebble watches
.
These new Pebble watches would be very much like the original Pebble, though switching from a memory LCD to an e-paper screen but keeping compatibility with the original Pebble watch and its hackability. Currently there’s just a
rePebble site
where you can sign up for announcements. Over at the Rebble project people are
understandably excited
, with the PebbleOS source
available on GitHub
.
A lot of work still remains, of course. The Apache 2.0-licensed PebbleOS source was stripped of everything from fonts to the voice codec and Bluetooth stack, and of course bootstrapping whole new hardware production will require serious investment. Even so, for lovers of smart watches that work with modern-day smartphones, featuring an always-on display and amazing battery life the future has never been more bright.
Thanks to [Will0] for the tip. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8089991",
"author": "arturo182",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T12:58:56",
"content": "E-paper is what Pebble has been calling the Memory LCD before, so I don’t think they’re changing from it, just using the same terminology.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,653.642315 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2025/01/28/a-little-pigment-helps-with-laser-glass-engraving/ | A Little Pigment Helps With Laser Glass Engraving | Dan Maloney | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"engraving",
"glue",
"laser cutter",
"PVA",
"TiO2",
"titanium dioxide"
] | The range of materials suitable for even the cheapest laser cutter is part of what makes them such versatile and desirable tools. As long as you temper your expectations, there’s plenty of material to cut with your 40 watt CO
2
laser or at least engrave—just not glass; that’s a tough one.
Or is it? According to [rschoenm],
all it takes to engrave glass is a special coating
. The recipe is easy: two parts white PVA glue, one part water, and two parts powdered titanium dioxide. The TiO
2
is the important part; it changes color when heated by the laser, forming a deep black line that adheres to the surface of the glass. The glue is just there as a binder to keep the TiO2 from being blasted away by the air assist, and the water thins out the goop for easy spreading with a paintbrush. Apply one or two coats, let it dry, and blast away. Vector files work better than raster files, and you’ll probably have to play with settings to get optimal results.
With plain float glass, [rschoenm] gets really nice results. He also tried ceramic tile and achieved similar results, although he says he had to add a drop or two of food coloring to the coating so he could see it against the white tile surface. Acrylic didn’t work, but there are
other methods
to do that.
Thanks to [AbraKadabra] for the tip. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8089945",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2025-01-28T09:34:32",
"content": "“the TiO2 is the important part; it changes color when heated by the laser”So sunscreen or toothpaste might work too?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,371,653.725657 |
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