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https://hackaday.com/2024/11/11/retrogadgets-oscilloscope-cameras/ | Retrogadgets: Oscilloscope Cameras | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"camera",
"oscilloscope",
"polaroid"
] | Today, if you want to get a picture from your oscilloscope — maybe to send to a collaborator or to stick in a document or blog post — it is super easy. You can push an image to a USB stick or sometimes even just use the scope’s PC or web interface to save the picture directly to your computer. Of course, if it is on the computer, you could use normal screen capture software. But that hasn’t always been the case. Back in the days when scopes were heavy and expensive, if you wanted to capture an image from the tube, you took a picture. While you might be able to hold up your camera to the screen, they made specific cameras just for this purpose.
Of course, these cameras took film. For example, the Contax GCCM in the video below was made for 35mm film. It wasn’t just for documentation, either. You didn’t have storage scopes, so if you wanted to make precise measurements of something that didn’t recur often enough to give you a stable trace, one way to measure it was to grab a photo.
Shake It
The problem with that is that you have to develop the roll of film before you get your results. That’s why most of us used Polaroid scope cameras like the Tektronix ones you can see in this
vintage Tektronix brochure
on the Vintagetek website.
A typical camera was made to fit around your scope’s CRT and had a “hood.” It locked onto the screen and ended in a standard camera. Often, there was an eyepiece or some other arrangement that let you see the screen. Some of them swung clear when you weren’t using them and some you simply had to pull off the scope’s screen. There were also adapters for normal cameras like the one in the video below.
While you could get backs that took ordinary film, most people used Polaroid backs that took a single piece of Polaroid film — at least, once Polaroid film existed. Once you took the shot, you had to use a smelly squeegee that came with the film to fix the image. Microscope cameras often used this same sort of film.
Lots of Vendors
Of course, Tektronix didn’t have the market cornered. You usually had a camera that matched your scope, like the HP camera in the video below. If you were really decked out, you also had a cart that you could wheel your heavy scope around to where you wanted to use it.
No one uses these today, right? Um, maybe
that’s not accurate
. If you think CRT oscilloscopes are retro, you haven’t
seen these
. When we took a lot of scope pictures, we were always glad for that
Polaroid film
. | 23 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060705",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T18:30:16",
"content": "I like how the HP has a manual shutter release, not something electronic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8060729",
"author": "The Commenter ... | 1,760,371,735.086541 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/10/building-a-motor-feed-for-the-ue1-vacuum-tube-computers-paper-tape-reader/ | Building A Motor Feed For The UE1 Vacuum Tube Computer’s Paper Tape Reader | Maya Posch | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"paper tape",
"tape reader"
] | Building a paper tape reader by itself isn’t super complicated: you need a source of light, some photoreceptors behind the tape to register the presence of holes and some way to pull the tape through the reader at a reasonable rate. This latter part can get somewhat tricky, as
Usagi Electric
‘s [David Lovett] discovered
while adding this feature
to his vacuum tube-era DIY reader. This
follows on
what now seems like a fairly simple aspect of the photosensors and building a way to position said photosensors near the paper tape.
As the feed rate of the paper tape is tied to the reading speed, and in the case of [David]’s also contains the clock for the custom tube-based UE1 computer, it determines many of the requirements. With 8 bits per line, the tape forms the ROM for the system, all of which has to be executed and used immediately when read, as there is no RAM to load instructions into. This also necessitates the need to run the tape as an endless loop, to enable ‘jumping’ between parts of this paper-based ROM by simple masking off parts of the code until the desired address is reached.
For the motor a slot car motor plus speed-reduction gear was chosen, with a design to hold these then designed in FreeCAD. Courtesy of his brother’s hobby machine shop and a CAD professional’s help, producing these parts was very easy, followed by final assembly. Guides were added for the tape, not unlike with a cassette player, which allowed the tape to be pulled through smoothly. Next up is wiring up the photodiodes, after which theoretically the UE1 can roar into action directly running programs off paper tape. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060443",
"author": "sbrk",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T00:13:01",
"content": "I’d like to see someone make a punch…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8060586",
"author": "BaZ",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T10:48:42",
... | 1,760,371,735.202597 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/10/component-tester-teardown/ | Component Tester Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Teardown",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Component Tester",
"hameg",
"oscilloscope"
] | In the modern age, when you hear “component tester” you probably think of one of those cheap microcontroller-based devices that can identify components and provide basic measurements on an LCD screen. However, in the past, these were usually simple circuits that generated an XY scope plot. The trace would allow an experienced operator to identify components and read a few key parameters. [Thomas] tears down an old
Hameg device
that uses this principle in the video below.
The unit is in a nice enclosure and has a feature that controls the amount of current the unit uses in the excitation signal. It plugs into the wall, and you can connect the component under test with either test leads or a socket. The output, of course, is a pair of BNCs for the scope’s X and Y inputs.
Compared to some homebrew projects that are similar, the PCB inside the device seems more complex. The output of most devices like this uses the line frequency (50 or 60 Hz). This one, however, has its own drive oscillator that operates at a different frequency.
Each type of component has a tell-tale trace on the scope. We found the tunnel diode trace especially interesting. Capacitors are circles, diodes make a definite step shape. There’s a table from the manual near the end of the video.
Most of these devices
are much simpler
, using a transformer to generate the AC sweep and a simple mechanism to measure the current. That makes them quite
easy to build
and they are still surprisingly useful. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060398",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-10T20:59:13",
"content": "So, it’s a curve tracer?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8060620",
"author": "Aqib Idrees",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,371,735.588079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/10/building-a-diy-nipkow-disk-display/ | Building A DIY Nipkow Disk Display | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"nipkow",
"nipkow disk",
"television"
] | Before flat screen technologies took over, we associate TV with the CRT. But there were other display technologies that worked, they just weren’t as practical. One scheme was the Nipkow disk, and [Bitluni] decided to build
a working demonstration
of how such a system works.
Essentially, there’s a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it. As the disk spins, a light behind it turns on or off. If you time everything right, you get an image that can move. This particular model uses stepper motors, which is a bit of a modern concession.
The result was actually much better than you might guess, but a far cry from a modern display device, of course. The screen material needed a little tweaking, but even the initial results were very impressive. If this were trying to be practical, it would probably require a bit more work on the light source and screen.
Interestingly, the Nipkow disk arrangement was just as suitable for scanning as displaying. Instead of a light behind the wheel, you simply used a light sensor. Of course, in practice, getting everything synchronized and mass-producing high-resolution sets would have been a tremendous challenge a century ago.
Not that people didn’t try. There were even
color systems using mechanical wheels
. In the 1930s, people were sure your TV would
contain spinning disks
. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060293",
"author": "Frank Wilhoit",
"timestamp": "2024-11-10T12:50:24",
"content": "The CBS color system was not based on the Nipkow principle.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8060400",
"author": "The Commenter Former... | 1,760,371,735.469979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/10/a-beautifully-illustrated-guide-to-making/ | A Beautifully Illustrated Guide To Making | Navarre Bartz | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"book",
"diy",
"projects"
] | If you’ve ever been wondering what you should make next, it can be a daunting task to decide with the firehose of inspiration coming straight from the series of tubes that makeup the World Wide Web. Perhaps a more curated
digital catalog of projects
would help?
Featuring “1000 Useful Things to Make,” [NODE]’s
Make it Yourself
is a beautifully-illustrated catalog of open source and DIY projects spanning a number of domains including camping gear, furniture, music, and maker tools. Each image is a link to the original project and there’s a handy icon by each denoting what skills are needed, such as sewing or 3D printing.
If you haven’t seen [NODE]’s work before, he uses line art to illustrate his projects and has given all of these projects the same treatment on the (virtual) page with credits to the original creators in the footnotes. We hope a future edition will include tractors and houses to truly rival the Sears catalog of yore, but it’s hard to complain when we already have so many projects we could choose to build.
Many of the projects may seem familiar, if slightly fancier when illustrated in line art, like the
Ploopy headphones
, this
retro audio player
, or the
Keybon adaptive macro pad
. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060252",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-11-10T09:38:37",
"content": "If in doubt, make tools to help you make more things!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8060257",
"author": "Prfesser",
"timestamp": "2024... | 1,760,371,735.639366 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/inside-an-arcade-joystick/ | Inside An Arcade Joystick | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Teardown"
] | [
"arcade game",
"Joystick"
] | If you ever played an arcade game and wondered what was inside that joystick you were gripping, [Big Clive] can
save you some trouble
. He picked up a cheap replacement joystick, which, as you might expect, has a bunch of microswitches. However, as you can see in the video below, there are some surprising features that make sense when you think about it.
For one, there are plates you can put on the bottom to limit the joystick’s travel depending on the game. That is, some games only want the stick to move up and down or left and right. The knobs are quite nice, and [Clive] mentions the size and thread of the knob with the idea you could use them in different applications. You can also buy replacement knobs if you don’t want to get the whole assembly.
The mechanics are rugged but straightforward. The circuit board is surprisingly stylish but also simple. Still interesting to see what’s inside one of these, even though the schematic is extremely simple.
If you need an excuse to use one of these, how about an
arcade table
? If you aren’t a woodworker, grab
a 3D printer
instead. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060349",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2024-11-10T17:40:23",
"content": "Why most of the early coin op games just had those flat buttons that could be abused and not break. I had wished back then that joysticks had switches that would open back up if pushed hard or just tilt... | 1,760,371,735.248716 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/brick-layers-the-promise-of-stronger-3d-prints-and-why-we-cannot-have-nice-things/ | Brick Layers: The Promise Of Stronger 3D Prints And Why We Cannot Have Nice Things | Maya Posch | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"FDM",
"patents"
] | It is a fact of life that 3D printed parts from an FDM (fused deposition modeling) printer have weaknesses where the layers join. Some of this is due to voids and imperfect layer bonding, but you can — as [Geek Detour] shows us —
work around some of this
. In particular, it is possible to borrow techniques from brick laying to create a pattern of alternating blocks. You can check out the video below.
The idea of ‘brick layers’ with FDM prints was
brought to the forefront
earlier this year by [Stefan] of
CNC Kitchen.
Seven months after that video you still can’t find the option for these layers in any popular slicers. Why? Because of a 2020 patent filed for this technique by a 3D printing company which offers this feature in its own slicer. But is this patent even valid?
It’s no surprise that prior art already exists in the form of a 1995 Stratasys patent. The above image shows an excerpt from the 1995 Stratasys patent, covering the drawings of FDM layers, including brick layers. This covered all such ways of printing, but the patent expired in 2016. In 2019, a PrusaSlicer ticket was opened, requesting this feature. So what happened? A second patent filed in 2020 assigned to Addman Intermediate Holdings:
US11331848B2
.
The new 2020-filed patent next to a drawing in the 1995 Stratasys patent. (Credit: Geek Detour, YouTube)
This 2020 patent turns out to cover effectively the same claims as the Stratasys patent. Hilariously, the 2020 patent references the Stratasys patent but proceeds to give the wrong patent ID, a pattern that persists with other referenced patents in the same text, making one question who wrote (and verified) the patent.
Our guess is that the patent offices involved did not do due diligence, and this new patent is invalid. Yet until it is invalidated by a court challenge, we might have to wait until 2040 before we, too, can print brick layers with our FDM machines.
This isn’t the first time patents have blocked
3D printed innovation
. Or given credit to
the wrong inventor
. | 87 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060226",
"author": "krbindustries",
"timestamp": "2024-11-10T07:08:28",
"content": "Both the article and the original video discuss that the 2020 patent is invalid. So how can we ensure this patent is removed? Unfortunately, it seems unless another business tries to use the “invent... | 1,760,371,735.401064 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/heres-code-for-that-ai-generated-minecraft-clone/ | Here’s Code For That AI-GeneratedMinecraftClone | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Games"
] | [
"ai",
"diffusion model",
"game engine",
"image generator"
] | A little while ago
Oasis
was showcased on social media, billing itself as the world’s first playable “AI video game” that responds to complex user input in real-time.
Code is available on GitHub
for a down-scaled local version if you’d like to take a look. There’s a bit more detail and background in the accompanying
project write-up
, which talks about both the potential as well as the numerous limitations.
We suspect the focus on supporting complex user input (such as mouse look and an item inventory) is what the creators feel distinguishes it meaningfully from
AI-generated
DOOM
. The latter was a concept that demonstrated AI image generators could (kinda) function as real-time game engines.
Image generators are, in a sense, prediction machines. The idea is that by providing a trained model with a short history of what just happened plus the user’s input as context, it can generate a pretty usable prediction of what should happen next, and do it quickly enough to be interactive. Run that in a loop, and you get some pretty impressive clips to put on social media.
It is a neat idea, and we certainly applaud the creativity of bending an image generator to this kind of application, but we can’t help but really notice the limitations. Sit and stare at something, or walk through dark or repetitive areas, and the system loses its grip and things rapidly go in a downward spiral we can only describe as “dreamily broken”.
It may be more a demonstration of a concept than a properly functioning game, but it’s still a very clever way to leverage image generation technology. Although, if you’d prefer AI to keep the game itself untouched take a look at
neural networks trained to use the
DOOM
level creator tools
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060113",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2024-11-10T00:16:50",
"content": "my only complaint is that it was only compatible with the worst possible browser (chrome).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8060238",
"a... | 1,760,371,735.148038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/all-aboard-the-good-ship-benchy/ | All Aboard The Good Ship Benchy | Jenny List | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed boat",
"Benchy"
] | We’ll go out on a limb here and say that a large portion of Hackaday readers are also boat-builders. That’s a bold statement, but as the term applies to anyone who has built a boat, we’d argue that it encompasses anyone who’s run off a Benchy, the popular 3D printer test model. Among all you newfound mariners, certainly a significant number must have looked at their Benchy and wondered what a full-sized one would be like. Those daydreams of being captain of your ship may not have been realized, but [Dr. D-Flo]
has made them a reality for himself with what he claims is the world’s largest Benchy
. It floats, and carries him down the waterways of Tennessee in style!
The video below is long but has all the details. The three sections of the boat were printed in PETG on a printer with a one cubic meter build volume, and a few liberties had to be taken with the design to ensure it can be used as a real boat. The infill gaps are filled with expanding foam to provide extra buoyancy, and an aluminium plate is attached to the bottom for strength. The keel meanwhile is a 3D printed sectional mold filled with concrete. The cabin is printed in PETG again, and with the addition of controls and a solar powered trolling motor, the vessel is ready to go. Let’s face it, we all want a try! | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060062",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T22:26:56",
"content": "Funny. Seven years, two printers and many thousands of prints here. Not one has been a Benchy. I guess I’m a minority.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,371,735.019544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/hidman-brings-modern-input-to-vintage-pcs/ | HIDman Brings Modern Input To Vintage PCs | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ch559",
"kvm",
"microcontroller",
"mouse",
"PS/2",
"usb"
] | Retro computing enthusiasts, rejoice!
HIDman
, [rasteri]’s latest open source creation
, bridges the gap between modern USB input devices and vintage PCs, from the IBM 5150 to machines with PS/2 ports. Frustrated by the struggle to find functioning retro peripherals, [rasteri] developed HIDman as an affordable, compact, and plug-and-play solution that even non-techies can appreciate.
The heart of HIDman is the CH559 microcontroller, chosen for its dual USB host ports and an ideal balance of power and cost-efficiency. This chip enables HIDman’s versatility, supporting serial mice and various keyboard protocols. Building a custom parser for the tricky USB HID protocol posed challenges, but [rasteri]’s perseverance paid off, ensuring smooth communication between modern devices and older systems.
Design-wise, the project includes a thoughtful circuit board layout that fits snugly in its case, marrying functionality with aesthetics. Retro computing fans can jump in by building HIDman themselves using the files in the GitHub repository, or by
opting for the ready-made unit. | 34 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059993",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T18:39:35",
"content": "I really dig the configuration interface. very elegant. teminds me of talking to a computer with an asr33 or vt320",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,371,735.542944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/the-badge-hacks-of-supercon/ | The Badge Hacks Of Supercon | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"badge hacks"
] | We just got home from Supercon and well, it was super. It was great to see everyone, and
meet a whole bunch of new folks to boot!
The talks were great, and you can
see a good half of them already on the Hackaday YouTube channel
, so for that you didn’t even have to be there.
The badge hacks
were, as with most years, out of this world. I’ll admit that my cheeks were sore from laughing so much after emceeing it this year, due in no small part to two hilarious AI projects, both of which were also righteous hacks in addition to full-on comedy routines. A group of six programmers got all of their hacks working together, and the I2C-to-MQTT bridge had badges blinking in sync even in the audience. You want blinkies? We had blinkies.
But the hack that warmed everyones’ hearts was “
I figured it out
” by [Connie]. Before this weekend, she had never coded MicroPython and didn’t know anything about I2C. But yet by Sunday afternoon, she made a sweet spiral animation on the LED wheel, and blinked the RGBs in the touchwheel.
What I love about the Hackaday audience is that, when the chips are down, someone doing something new for the first time is valued as much as some of the more showy work done by more experienced programmers. Hacking is also about learning and pushing out boundaries after all. The shouts for “I figured it out” were louder than any others in the graphics hacks category, it took home a prize, and I was smiling from ear to ear.
Hackaday can learn from this too. [Connie]’s hack definitely shows the need for another badge-hack category, first timers, because we absolutely should recognize first tries. There was also a strong petition / protest from people who had worked new hacks onto previous year’s badges – like
[Andy] and [koppanyh]’s addition of bit-banged I2C to the Voja 4 badge
from two years ago, and [Instant Arcade]’s
Polar Pacman
, which he named “Ineligible for this Competition” in protest. Touche.
We’re stoked to learn new things, see new hacks, and basically just catch up with everything folks did over the weekend. We can’t wait to see what you’re up to next year!
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
! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059970",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T17:09:25",
"content": "Sounds like an incredible time. Thank you for sharing the experience with us through YouTube. Seeing Connie’s experience really highlights how fun it must be to learn and be inspired by such a great gro... | 1,760,371,735.689939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/nix-automated-fuzz-testing-finds-bug-in-pdf-parser/ | Nix + Automated Fuzz Testing Finds Bug In PDF Parser | Donald Papp | [
"Security Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"bug",
"fuzz testing"
] | [Michael Lynch]’s adventures in
configuring Nix to automate fuzz testing
is a lot of things all rolled into one. It’s not only a primer on fuzz testing (a method of finding bugs) but it’s also a how-to on automating the setup using Nix (which is a lot of things, including a kind of package manager) as well as useful info on effectively automating software processes.
[Michael] not only walks through how he got it all up and running in a simplified and usefully-portable way, but he actually found a buffer overflow in
pdftotext
in the process! (Turns out someone else had reported the same bug a few weeks before he found it, but it demonstrates everything regardless.)
[Michael] chose fuzz testing because using it to find security vulnerabilities is conceptually simple, actually doing it tends to require setting up a test environment with a complex workflow and a lot of dependencies. The result has a high degree of task specificity, and isn’t very portable or reusable. Nix allowed him to really simplify the process while also making it more adaptable. Be sure to check out
part two
, which goes into detail about how exactly one goes from discovering an input that crashes a program to tracking down (and patching) the reason it happened.
Making fuzz testing easier (and in a sense, cheaper) is something people have been interested in for a long time, even going so far as to see whether
pressing a stack of single-board computers into service as dedicated fuzz testers
made economic sense. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059903",
"author": "Harry Pray IV",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T14:28:25",
"content": "Nice to see Nix mentioned on here. Hackaday in particular has so many writeups where the author is simply spending the whole time talking about how to install some tooling to do what they did. The... | 1,760,371,736.826536 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/09/exploring-the-physics-behind-cooling-towers/ | Exploring The Physics Behind Cooling Towers | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"evaporative cooling"
] | A characteristic of any thermal power plant — whether using coal, gas or spicy nuclear rocks — is that they have a closed steam loop with a condenser section in which the post-turbine steam is re-condensed into water. This water is then led back to the steam generator in the plant. There are many ways to cool the steam in the condenser, including directly drawing in cooling water from a nearby body of water. The most common and more efficient way is to use a cooling tower, with a
recent video by [Practical Engineering]
explaining the physics behind these.
For the demonstration, a miniature natural draft tower is constructed in the garage from sheets of acrylic. This managed to cool 50 °C water down to 20 °C by merely spraying the hot water onto a mesh that maximizes surface area. The resulting counter-flow means that no fan or the like is needed, and the hyperboloid shape of the cooling tower makes it incredibly strong despite having relatively thin walls.
The use of a natural draft tower makes mostly sense in cooler climates, while in hotter climates having a big cooling lake may make more sense. We covered the
various ways to cool thermal plants
before, including direct intake, spray ponds, cooling towers and water-free cooling solutions, with the latter becoming a feature of new high-temperature fission reactor designs. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059837",
"author": "Illucidator",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T09:41:55",
"content": "Totally unrelated, but it made me revisit my mild obsession with Ranque-Hilsch vortex tubes. I swear their voodoo coolers",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,371,736.262363 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/retrotechtacular-computer-generate-video-1968-style/ | Retrotechtacular: Computer-Generate Video 1968 Style! | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"demoscene",
"Retrotechtacluar"
] | [Classic Microcomputers] read in a book that there was
a computer-generated film
made in the late 1960s, and he knew he had to watch it. He found it and shared it along with some technical information in the video below.
Modern audiences are unlikely to be wowed by the film — Permutations — that looks like an electronic spirograph. But for 1968, this was about as high tech as you could get. The computer used was an IBM mainframe which would have cost a fortune either to buy or to rent the hours it would take to make this short film. Now, of course, you could easily replicate it on even your oldest PC. In fact, we are surprised we haven’t seen any recreations in the demoscene.
The end credits list [John Whitney] working under an IBM research grant as the author of the film. The programming was by [Jack Citron], and it was apparently put together at the UCLA School of Medicine.
According to [Classic Microcomputers], the display was static and black and white, but animation on 16mm film and color filters made it more interesting.
Was this the birth of the
demoscene
? Usually, when we watch old IBM videos, it is of
the data center
, not the data! | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059869",
"author": "Tom G",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T12:07:29",
"content": "I remember going, in the mid/late 70s, to a cinema screening of several of Whitney’s works, including Permutations. They were clearly ground-breaking, albeit a little tedious en masse.",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,371,736.666691 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/ramsey-numbers-and-the-appearance-of-order-in-random-numbers/ | Ramsey Numbers And The Appearance Of Order In Random Numbers | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"mathematics",
"Ramsey theory"
] | Proof without words of the two-color case of Ramsey’s theorem. (Credit: CMG Lee,
Wikimedia
)
Generally when assuming a chaotic (i.e. random) system like an undirected graph, we assume that if we start coloring these (i.e. assign values) with two colors no real pattern emerges. Yet it’s been proven that if you have a graph with a certain set of vertices, coloring the resulting lines in this manner will always result in a clique forming. This
phenomenon has been investigated
for nearly a century now after its discovery by British mathematician [Frank P. Ramsey].
The initial discovery concerned a graph with 6 vertices, providing the lowest number of vertices required. Formally this is written as
R(3, 3)
, with subsequent cases of these
Ramsey numbers
discovered. They are part of
Ramsey theory
, which concerns itself with the question of what the underlying properties are that cause this apparent order to appear, which requires us to discover more cases.
Finding the number for a particular instance of
R(m, n)
can be done the traditional way, or brute-forcing it computationally. Over the decades more advanced algorithms have been developed to help with the search, and people from different fields are mingling as they are drawn to this problem. So far the pay-off of this search are these algorithms, the friendships created and perhaps one day a deep insight in the causes behind this phenomenon that may have implications for physics, chemistry and other fields. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059806",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T05:40:11",
"content": "Perhaps we will discover a message in the pattern that instructs us to build a device that will permit a traveler to go through a wormhole to another star system to initiate contact with an alien species…... | 1,760,371,736.781714 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/11/videonics-the-dawn-of-home-video-editing-revisited/ | Videonics: The Dawn Of Home Video Editing, Revisited | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"directed plus",
"editing",
"vcr",
"VHS",
"video",
"videonics",
"youtube"
] | Here’s a slice of history that will make any retro-tech fan grin: before TikTok and iMovie, there was a beast called
the Videonics DirectED Plus
. This early attempt at democratizing video editing saved enthusiasts from six-figure pro setups—but only barely. Popular Science recently brought this retro marvel back to life in a video made using the very system that inspired it. Picture it: 1987, VHS at its peak, where editing your kid’s jazz recital video required not just love but the patience of a saint, eight VCRs, three Videonics units, two camcorders, and enough remotes to operate a space shuttle.
The Videonics DirectED Plus held promise with a twist. It offered a way to bypass monstrous editing rigs, yet mastering its panel of buttons felt like deciphering hieroglyphs. The ‘Getting Started’ tape was the analog era’s lifeline, often missing and leaving owners hunting through second-hand stores, forgotten basements, and enthusiast forums. Fast forward to today, and recreating this rig isn’t just retro fever—it’s a scavenger hunt.
Once assembled, the system resembled a spaghetti junction of cables and clunky commands. One wrong button press could erase precious minutes of hard-won footage. Still, the determination of DIY pioneers drove the machine’s success, setting the stage for the plug-and-play ease we now take for granted.
These adventures into retro tech remind us of the grit behind today’s seamless content creation. Curious for more?
Watch the full journey by Popular Science here
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060731",
"author": "Felix Domestica",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T20:02:40",
"content": "I had a high-end consumer JVC camcorder and compatible VCR where it was possible to program in a sequence of cuts to be copied from the camcorder onto a tape on the VCR, with clean transition bet... | 1,760,371,736.713469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/11/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-all-the-espionage/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With All The Espionage | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"biblically accurate",
"espionage",
"IBM Selectric",
"macro cube",
"Selectric II",
"stenography",
"toyota racing development",
"USSR",
"wooden keyboard"
] | [Ziddy Makes] describes this cute little guy as
a biblically-accurate keyboard
. For the unfamiliar, that’s a reference to biblically-accurate angels, which have wings (and sometimes eyes) all over the place. They’re usually pretty scary to behold. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Image by [Ziddy Makes] via
GitHub
But this? This is the opposite of scary. Sure, there are keys everywhere. But it’s just so darn adorable. You know what? It’s those keycaps.
This 16-key macro cube uses a Pro Micro and a system of PH2 5p ribbon cables to connect the four four-key sisterboards to the main board. A 3D-printed base holds all the boards in place. Out of all the switches in the world, [Ziddy] chose Otemu Blues. Clack!
Although it may take some getting used to, this seems like it would be a fun way to input macros. I can see the case for putting some rubber feet on the bottom, otherwise it might scoot around on the desk. That might be cute, but only the first couple of times, you know?
Lexicon Has A Handy Words Layer
[Ewen] wrote in to tell me about
Lexicon
, a keyboard he designed while reading Marcin Wichary’s most excellent
Shift Happens
. One idea spawned by the book was a keyboard aimed at writing prose faster and more easily. The result is an input device that marries a stenography-light concept with the BASIC shortcut-having ZX Spectrum.
The key is in those three Space bars. They each produce Space when pressed briefly, but when long-pressed bring up a different layer — Symbols, Function, and Words. “Symbols” refers to the various awesome Unicode symbols that come out of that layer, including neat typographical marks. “Function” comprises the Function keys plus extras.
Image by [Ewen] via
GitHub
Thanks to the special Words layer, the user can quickly input common words such as ‘and’, ‘said’, and ‘she’. So how in the world would the user remember how to do all of that? Well, it’s actually pretty easy. There is one word per key, and they are married up alphabetically. So ‘a’ is for ‘and’, ‘s’ is for ‘said’ and ‘x’ is for ‘she’. Each number key gets you that word spelled out — 1 delivers ‘one’ and 2 gives you ‘two’, and so on.
But [Ewen] didn’t stop there. There’s a whole subset of words that are accessible by combining the Words key with two alpha keys, such as ‘SM’ for ‘some’. Users can easily combine shortcuts to produce longer words, like ‘SM1’ for ‘someone’.
Under the hood of this 65% keyboard, you’ll find an RP2040 running the QMK firmware. Although the Lexicon is not open-source, there’s nothing stopping you from taking this idea and running with it in another language. If you want to get a hold of one,
check out [Ewen]’s Etsy for kits and completed boards
.
The Centerfold: Keep On Truckin’
Image by [FarmersOnlyJim] via
reddit
Man, this setup is fire
! Don’t recognize the color scheme? It’s those hues from the Toyota Racing Development (TRD) days of the 1980s. The keyboard is a Keychron K8 Pro, and [FarmersOnlyJim] custom-dyed those MOA-profile keycaps. The neat part is that [Jim] offers their dye process right there in the comments. Come for the color scheme, and stay for the bunny tax in the gallery.
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: Espionage Via IBM Selectric II
So your girl caught
this video by [Retro Tech or Die]
and then picked up a Selectric II a few days later for about $5 with the coupon savings. It’s all gummed up inside, and I’ll have to address that on my own as my local shop no longer deals with Selectrics.
Image via
YouTube
Anyway, back to the video.
We’ve covered this topic before
, but it’s been a long time, and this is a nice refresher. The Selectric was a revolutionary typing machine, and the correcting Selectric II a little bit more so. Because of this, government and other offices purchased them in large quantities.
At the height of US-Russian tensions, the Soviets saw an opportunity for espionage in these electromechanical marvels and planted bugs in the Selectric IIs inside the United States embassy in Moscow.
It’s surprisingly easy to get inside a Selectric II
, and it only took the spies about 30 minutes to open and bug each machine.
Selectric IIs were in use at the embassy from 1982 until 1984 when the bugs were discovered. For more than a year, the Soviets were able to read documents of all sensitivity levels even before officials had laid eyes on them. A tiny sensing device picked up the keystrokes and transmitted them to antennas hidden in the walls. These signals were relayed to a nearby listening station and decoded using probability tables.
Image via
YouTube
These bugs were so small that they could only be detected by x-rays. Housed inside a metal bar of the typewriter, they used magnet meters to detect the disturbances as letters were typed. The transmitted signals were disguised inside television broadcast frequencies.
Because of the way the Selectric II is designed internally, the Soviets were only able to get the alphanumeric characters. They could not capture Shift, Space, Backspace, or Tab. Furthermore, they were compressing six bits of information down to four, which made probability tables pretty much the only option.
It’s a fascinating story for sure. And I’ll let you know how it works out with my Selectric II.
ICYMI: This Lovely Wooden Keyboard
Image via
YouTube
It’s not often that we describe things as stunning, especially keyboards, which tend to be plastic-based rectangular life forms. But then there’s
this wooden keyboard
from Hacoa via [ProcessX].
Watch as the beautiful wood is routed out, and stay for the delicate and tedious process that produces each finished keycap.
I must admit that I was a little disappointed (or maybe caught off-guard) to see the lovely wooden keycaps being overlaid on plastic ones, but as one commenter pointed out, the stresses of wood grain running through an MX-style keycap stem would be pretty high.
Speaking of the keycaps, they are finished off with laser-engraved legends which will surely never wear out, but are bound to get, let’s say, seasoned over time. As much as I’d like to know how it feels to type on a wooden keyboard, this kind of project seems incredibly far out of reach. But
we’ve certainly seen wooden keyboards before
.
Yes we have
.
Even macro pads
.
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
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060675",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T16:53:44",
"content": "Nice range of the subject!Good work Kristina!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8060687",
"author": "craig",
"times... | 1,760,371,736.392736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/11/the-constant-monitoring-and-work-that-goes-into-jwsts-optics/ | The Constant Monitoring And Work That Goes Into JWST’s Optics | Donald Papp | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"jwst",
"mirrors",
"webb"
] | The James Webb Space Telescope’s array of eighteen hexagonal mirrors went through an intricate (and lengthy) alignment and calibration process before it could begin its mission — but the process is far from being a one-and-done. Keeping the telescope aligned and performing optimally requires
constant work from its own team dedicated to the purpose
.
Alignment of the optical elements in JWST are so fine, and the tool is so sensitive, that even small temperature variations have an effect on results. For about twenty minutes every other day, the monitoring program uses a set of lenses that intentionally de-focus images of stars by a known amount. These distortions contain measurable features that the team uses to build a profile of changes over time. Each of the mirror segments is also checked by being imaged selfie-style every three months.
This work and maintenance plan pays off. The team has made over 25 corrections since its mission began, and JWST’s optics continue to exceed specifications. The increased performance has direct payoffs in that better data can be gathered from faint celestial objects.
JWST was
fantastically ambitious and is extremely successful
, and as a science instrument it is jam-packed with amazing bits, not least of which are
the actuators responsible for adjusting the mirrors
. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,736.620101 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/11/why-the-saturn-v-used-kerosene-for-its-hydraulics-fluid/ | Why The Saturn V Used Kerosene For Its Hydraulics Fluid | Maya Posch | [
"Space"
] | [
"fueldraulics",
"hydraulics",
"saturn v"
] | We usually think of a hydraulic system as fully self-contained, with a hydraulic pump, tubing, and actuators filled with a working fluid. This of course adds a lot of weight and complexity that can be undesirable in certain projects, with the Saturn V Moon rocket demonstrating a solution to this which is still being used to this day. In a blast-from-the-past, a
December 1963 article
originally published in
Hydraulics & Pneumatics
details the kerosene-based hydraulics (fueldraulics) system for the S-1C stage’s gimbal system that controlled the four outer engines.
Rather than a high-pressure, MIL-H-5606 hydraulic oil-based closed loop as in the Saturn I, this takes kerosene from the high-pressure side of the F1 rocket engine’s turbopump and uses it in a single-pass system. This cuts out a separate hydraulic pump, a hydraulic reservoir, which was mostly beneficial in terms of reducing points of failure (and leaks), ergo increasing reliability. Such was the theory at the time at least, and due to issues with RP-1 kerosene’s relatively low flash point and differences in lubricity properties, ultimately RJ-1, RP-1 and MIL-H-5606 were used during checkout leading up to the launch.
In hindsight we know that this fueldraulic system worked as intended with all Saturn V launches, and today it’s
still used
across a range of aircraft in mostly jet engines and actuators elsewhere of the Boeing 777 as well as the F-35. In the case of the latter it only
made the news
when there was an issue that grounded these jets due to badly crimped lines. Since fueldraulics tends to be lower pressure, this might be considered a benefit in such cases too, as anyone who has ever experienced a hydraulic line failure can attest to.
Featured image: Gimbal systems proposed for the F-1, oxygen-kerosene engine with a fueldraulic system. (Source: Hydraulics & Pneumatics, 1963) | 38 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060575",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T09:41:22",
"content": "Kerosene! How could they!-t. Reader wholly ignorant about hydraulic systems",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8060607",
"author": "CRJEEA",... | 1,760,371,736.582118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/10/cheap-sensor-changes-personality/ | Cheap Sensor Changes Personality | Al Williams | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Teardown"
] | [
"home automation",
"humidity sensor"
] | If you want to add humidity and temperature sensors to your home automation sensor, you can — like [Maker’s Fun Duck] did — buy some generic ones for about a buck. For a dollar, you get a little square LCD with sensors and a button. You even get the battery.
Can you reprogram the firmware to bend it to your will
? As [Duck] shows in the video below, you can.
The device advertises some custom BLE services, but [Duck] didn’t want to use the vendor’s phone app, so he cracked the case open. Inside was a microcontroller with Bluetooth, an LCD driver, a sensor IC, and very little else.
The processor is an ARM Cortex M0, a PHY6222 with very low power consumption. The LCD is a very cheap panel with no drivers onboard. All the drive electronics are on the PCB. The sensor is a CHT8305C which uses I2C.
Luckily, the PHY6222 has a publically available SDK with English documentation. The PCB has two sets of UART pads and it is possible to flash the chip via one of the UARTs.
Eventually, [Duck] put a custom firmware on the box, but we were intrigued by the idea that for a buck you could get a little low-power ARM module with an LCD and a sensor. It seems like you could do more with this, although we are sure the LCD is not very general purpose, surely this little box could act as a panel meter, a countdown timer, or lots of other things with some custom firmware.
These are, of course, knock offs of the slightly more expensive Xiaomi sensors, and those are
flashable
, too. We aren’t sure how accurate either sensor is, but
humidity measurement
is a complex topic. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060530",
"author": "The one",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T06:23:47",
"content": "Its very much just a flashing manual for the custom firmware that Victor pvvx made:https://github.com/pvvx/THB2Even trying to hide it as much as possible by a fork…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,371,736.200363 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/10/welcome-to-subtropolis-the-limestone-mine-turned-climate-controlled-business-complex/ | Welcome To SubTropolis: The Limestone Mine Turned Climate-Controlled Business Complex | Maya Posch | [
"Uncategorized"
] | [
"cave",
"climate control"
] | After extracting all the useful stuff from a mine, you are often left with a lot of empty subterranean space without a clear purpose. This was the case with the Bethany Falls limestone mine, near Kansas City, Missouri, which left a sprawling series of caverns supported by 16′ (4.9 meter) diameter pillars courtesy of the used mining method.
As detailed by [Benjamin Hunting]
in a recent article on the
Hagerty
site, this made it a fascinating place for a business complex development now called
SubTropolis
that among other things is used for car storage by Ford and long-term stamp storage by the US Post Office. (Check out their cool period photos!)
The reason for this is the extremely stable climate within these man-made caverns, with relative humidity hovering around a comfortable 40% and temperatures stable year-round at about 21 °C (70 °F), making it ideal for storing anything that doesn’t like being placed outdoors, while saving a lot on airconditioning costs. With Ford one of the biggest companies in SubTropolis, this means that many companies providing customization services for vehicles have also moved operations inside the complex.
With the only negative being a lack of daylight, it seems like the perfect place for many businesses and (evil) lairs, assuming electrical power and constant air circulation are provided.
Featured image: “
Subtropolis
” by [ErgoSum88] | 32 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060492",
"author": "Eric Mockler",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T03:46:34",
"content": "There’s one in Rosendale, NY also",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8060493",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T03:49:53",
... | 1,760,371,736.332867 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/10/hackaday-links-november-11-2024/ | Hackaday Links: November 10, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | Fair warning, while the first item this week has no obvious connection to hacking,
when 43 Rhesus monkeys escape from a lab
, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. The tiny primates broke free from Alpha Genesis, a primate research facility in South Carolina. The monkey jailbreak seems to have occurred sometime on Wednesday, shortly after which the sheriff of Beaufort County was notified to be on the lookout for the tribe. Luckily, none of the animals has been used in any kind of infectious disease research, so this likely won’t be the origin story for anything apocalyptic. At least some of the animals were quickly located, doing their monkey thing in the woods and getting to swing from real trees for probably the first time in their lives. Alpha Genesis employees are trying to lure the monkeys back to captivity with food, but we suspect they’re too smart for that. They’ll probably come back on their own recognizance or when they get bored and realize that the real world isn’t all they thought it would be. When it’s all done we’d love to hear details about the breakout; was it something the monkeys got together and planned, or did one of the humans mess up?
With apologies in advance for the pun, there’s been a lot of buzz lately about tech billionaires falling over themselves to be the first to add “nuclear power mogul” to their CVs with reactor-powered AI data centers. In the early lead was Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, but it looks like he might have reached an unexpected hurdle in the form of
a rare species of bee
in residence near the site where he was planning to build the data center.
The original article
is aggressively paywalled and we haven’t been able to find out exactly what species of bee bested Zuck or what the specific concerns are, although we suspect that it’s disruption of habitat due to construction activities for the data center itself rather than anything related to the nuclear power aspect, since the deal was with an operator of an existing power plant. But fear not — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all waiting in the wings with their own nuclear ambitions, so carbon-free AI searches thanks to controlled nuclear fusion will surely soon be a thing.
Although the bees may have thwarted Zuck, not so the Seven Seas, as news leaks indicate that
Meta is in the process of building a globe-spanning underseas fiber optic cable
. The cable is said to go from coast to coast in the USA the long way, starting in South Carolina across the Atlantic to a landing in Portugal, down the coast of Africa and around the Cape, up to India before heading through to Australia and back across the Pacific to California. The cable is said to carry 16 pairs of fibers and could provide Meta with 320 Tbps of data capacity. That’s a lot of memes.
While you’ve probably never heard of Elwood Edwards, who
passed away this week at the age of 74
, you’ve certainly heard his voice. Mr. Edwards was the announcer who recorded the famous “You’ve got mail!” email alert for AOL, along with other audio blurbs for the once-ubiquitous ISP. He worked in broadcasting, both AM radio and television, and voiced commercials and announcements before being recommended for the email gig by his wife, who worked at the company that would eventually become AOL, Quantum Computer Services. He got $200 for the session, which he recorded on a cassette tape in his living room, and which would be heard 35 million times a day at AOL’s peak. Not too shabby.
And finally, as proof that we’re living in the weirdest possible timeline comes the story of
The Baguette Bandits
. It seems that a hacker group — the other kind — broke into French company Schneider Electric and stole 40 GB of data, issuing a $125,000 ransom demand payable in baguettes. The hackers apparently penetrated Schneider via the company’s Jira system and claimed to have specific data on internal projects and issues along with 400,000 lines of user data, which they threatened to release unless they got the baked goods. They did stipulate that they’d halve the ransom amount if Schneider would publically acknowledge the breach. We’re not sure if they want half the number of baguettes or if they want the same number of loaves all cut in half, but either way, it’s a lot of bread. More puns are possible, but we think we’ll leave them all on the table. Seems the yeast we can do. | 21 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060445",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T00:42:56",
"content": "Monkey story not hack related?Do we know for sure that the monkeys didn’t hack their way out?Some careless lab tech leaves YouTube playing videos from “The Lock Picking Lawyer” in the lab and chaos ensues.... | 1,760,371,736.943622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/ask-hackaday-how-much-would-you-stake-on-an-online-retailer/ | Ask Hackaday: How Much Would You Stake On An Online Retailer | Jenny List | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Interest"
] | [
"amazon",
"counterfeit",
"tools"
] | On the bench where this is being written, there’s a Mitutoyo vernier caliper. It’s the base model with a proper vernier scale, but it’s beautifully made, and it’s enjoyable to see younger hardware hackers puzzle over how to use it. It cost about thirty British pounds a few years ago, but when it comes to quality metrology instruments that’s really cheap. The sky really is the limit for those in search of ultimate accuracy and precision. We can see then why this Redditor was upset when
the $400 Mitutoyo they ordered from Amazon turned out to be nothing of the sort
. We can’t even call it a fake, it’s just a very cheap instrument stuffed oddly, into a genuine Mitutoyo box.
Naturally we hope they received a refund, but it does raise the question when buying from large online retailers; how much are we prepared to risk? We buy plenty of stuff from AliExpress in out community, but in that case the slight element of chance which comes with random Chinese manufacture is offset by the low prices. Meanwhile the likes of Amazon have worked hard to establish themselves as trusted brands, but is that misplaced? They are after all simply clearing houses for third party products, and evidently have little care for what’s in the box. The £30 base model caliper mentioned above is an acceptable punt, but at what point should we go to a specialist and pay more for some confidence in the product?
It’s a question worth pondering as we hit the “Buy now” button without thinking. What’s your view? Let us know in the comments. Meanwhile,
we can all be caught with our online purchases
.
Thanks [JohnU] for the tip. | 69 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059425",
"author": "Tadpole",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T12:07:42",
"content": "It is important, especially in this day and age, to remove liablity responsibilites from platforms such as amazon if we want to encourage their growth, and corrospondily the growth in GDP that the country... | 1,760,371,737.051047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/teaching-a-pi-pico-e-ink-panel-new-tricks/ | Teaching A Pi Pico E-Ink Panel New Tricks | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"e-ink",
"pi pico",
"rp2040"
] | We’ve noticed that adding electronic paper displays to projects is getting easier. [NerdCave] picked up a 4.2-inch E-ink panel but found its documentation a bit lacking when it came to using the display under MicroPython.
Eventually he worked it out
, and was kind enough to share with the rest of the class.
These paper-like displays draw little power and can hold static images. There were examples from the vendor of how to draw some simple objects and text, but [NerdCave] wanted to do graphics. There was C code to do it, but it wasn’t clear how to port it to Python.
The key was to use the
image2cpp
website (we’ve
used it before, but you can also use GIMP
). Instead of C code, though, you get the raw bytes out and place them in your Python code. Once you know the workflow, it isn’t that hard, and this is an inexpensive way to add a different kind of display to your projects. The same image conversion will help you work with other displays, too.
We aren’t sure what driver chip this particular display uses, but if you have one with the UC8151/IL0373, you can find some
amazing MicroPython drivers for those chips
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059473",
"author": "Tutunkommon",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T13:49:34",
"content": "Awesome! I’m actually working on a project now using the Waveshare Pico-ePaper-2.9 Using C instead of python. They really are cool, though finicky, devices.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,371,737.205234 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/help-wanted-keep-the-worlds-oldest-windmills-turning/ | Help Wanted: Keep The World’s Oldest Windmills Turning | Navarre Bartz | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"engineering",
"generation",
"mill",
"milling",
"milling grain",
"power",
"wind power",
"Wind turbine"
] | While the Netherlands is the country most known for its windmills, they were originally invented by the Persians. More surprisingly,
some of them are still turning after 1,000 years
.
The ancient world holds many wonders of technology, and some are only now coming back to the surface like the
Antikythera Mechanism
. Milling grain with wind power probably started around the 8th Century in Persia, but in Nashtifan, Iran they’ve been keeping the mills running generation-to-generation for over 1000 years. [Mohammed Etebari], the last windmill keeper is in need of an apprentice to keep them running though.
In a world where vertical axis wind turbines seem like a new-fangled fad, it’s interesting to see these
panemone windmills
are actually the original recipe. The high winds of the region mean that the timber and clay structure of the asbad structure housing the turbine is sufficient for their task without all the fabric or man-made composites of more modern designs. While drag-type turbines aren’t particularly efficient, we do wonder how some of the lessons of repairability might be used to enhance the longevity of modern wind turbines. Getting even 100 years out of a turbine would be some wicked ROI.
Wooden towers aren’t just a thing of the past either, with
new wooden wind turbines
soaring 100 m into the sky. Since you’ll probably be wanting to generate electricity and not mill grain if you made your own,
how does that work anyway
? | 35 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059379",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T07:09:35",
"content": "But a thousand year functional product is bad for the bottom line!! Planned obsolecense?!Bte what date is DATE? Placeholder left behind?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,737.439499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/using-ai-to-help-with-assembly/ | Using AI To Help With Assembly | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"6502",
"6510",
"assembly",
"commodore",
"developer",
"generative AI",
"large language model",
"programming",
"sprite",
"video game"
] | Although generative AI and large language models have been pushed as direct replacements for certain kinds of workers, plenty of businesses actually doing this have found that using this new technology can cause more problems than it solves when it is given free reign over tasks. While this might not be true indefinitely, the real use case for these tools right now is as a kind of assistant to certain kinds of work. For this they can be incredibly powerful
as [Ricardo] demonstrates here, using Amazon Q to help with game development on the Commodore 64
.
The first step here was to generate code that would show a sprite moving across the screen. The AI first generated code in all caps, as was the style at the time of the C64, but in [Ricardo]’s development environment this caused some major problems, so the code was converted to lowercase. A more impressive conversion was done in the next steps, as the program needed to take advantage of the optimizations found in the Assembly language. With the code converted to 6502 Assembly that can run on the virtual Commodore, [Ricardo] was eventually able to show four sprites moving across the screen after several iterations with the AI, as well as change the style of the sprites to arbitrary designs.
Although the post is a bit over-optimistic on Amazon Q as a tool specifically for developers, it might have some benefits over other generative AIs especially if it’s capable at the chore of programming in Assembly language. We’d love to hear anyone with real-world experience with this and whether it is truly worth the extra cost over something like Copilot or GPT 4. For any of these generative AI models, though, it’s probably worth trying them out while they’re in their early stages. Keep in mind that there’s
a lot more than programming
that can be done with some of them as well. | 30 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059331",
"author": "Garth Wilson",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T03:15:46",
"content": "I find, in my work, that the first, and possibly hardest part of the programming work is understanding the problem and its interrelated factors, and what kind of approach you want to the solution. I... | 1,760,371,737.308197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/diy-lock-nuts/ | DIY Lock Nuts | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"lathe",
"lock nut",
"locknut",
"nylock"
] | If you have a metal lathe just looking for some work, why not make your own lock nuts? That’s what [my mechanics insight] did when
faced with a peculiar lock nut that needed replacing in a car
. We can’t decide what we enjoyed more in the video you can watch below: the cross-section cut of a lock nut or the oddly calming videos of the new nut being turned on a lathe.
The mystery of the lock nut, though, isn’t how it works. The nylon insert is just a little too small for the bolt, and the bolt, being harder than nylon, taps a very close-fitting hole in the nylon as you tighten it. The real mystery is how that nylon got in there to start with.
As the video shows, you fabricate the nut with an open area to accept the nylon ring. Then, you use a tool to crimp the edges down to trap the ring. The video shows all the pieces being made: the nut, the ring, and the crimping tool.
As you might deduce, the crimping tool has to be harder than the nut material, so that takes some extra effort. But all the work is done on the lathe except the crimping. He uses a vise, but we’d imagine that an arbor press is more commonly used.
Lock washers and nuts
seem like a simple topic, but it is way more complex than you probably thought. Way
more complex
.
Thanks to [the gambler] for the
tip
! | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059270",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T00:13:26",
"content": "Nice work, but I wonder if you could just mill a depression inside the nut and then pour some compound into the head of the nut and then mill most of the hardened compound out to get the equivalent of a... | 1,760,371,737.363157 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/disposable-vape-batteries-power-ebike/ | Disposable Vape Batteries Power EBike | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"battery",
"bms",
"disposable",
"ebike",
"recycling",
"vape",
"waste"
] | There are a lot of things that get landfilled that have some marginal value, but generally if there’s not a huge amount of money to be made recycling things they won’t get recycled. It might not be surprising to most that this is true of almost all plastic, a substantial portion of glass, and even a lot of paper and metals, but what might come as a shock is that plenty of rechargeable lithium batteries are included in this list as well. It’s cheaper to build lithium batteries into one-time-use items like disposable vape pens and just throw them out after one (or less than one) charge cycle,
but if you have some spare time these batteries are plenty useful
.
[Chris Doel] found over a hundred disposable vape pens after a local music festival and collected them all to build into a battery powerful enough for an ebike. Granted, this involves a lot of work disassembling each vape which is full of some fairly toxic compounds and which also generally tend to have some sensitive electronics, but once each pen was disassembled the real work of building a battery gets going. He starts with testing each cell and charging them to the same voltage, grouping cells with similar internal resistances. From there he assembles them into a 48V pack with a battery management system and custom 3D printed cell holders to accommodate the wide range of cell sizes. A 3D printed enclosure with charge/discharge ports, a power switch, and a status display round out the build.
With the battery bank completed he straps it to his existing ebike and hits the trails, easily traveling 20 miles with barely any pedal input. These cells are only rated for 300 charge-discharge cycles which is on par for plenty of similar 18650 cells, making this an impressive build for essentially free materials minus the costs of filament, a few parts, and the sweat equity that went into sourcing the cells. If you want to take an ebike to the next level of low-cost, we’d recommend pairing this battery
with the drivetrain from the Spin Cycle
.
Thanks to [Anton] for the tip! | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059213",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T21:39:52",
"content": "Oh, this should be an interesting set of comments. Volatile. Inflammatory, even.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8059221",
"author": "Mike Barber",... | 1,760,371,737.489247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/2023-hackaday-supercon-one-year-of-progress-for-project-boondock-echo/ | 2023 Hackaday Supercon: One Year Of Progress For Project Boondock Echo | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"2023 Hackaday Superconference",
"boondock echo",
"Hackaday Prize",
"radio"
] | Do you remember the fourth-place winner in the 2022 Hackaday Prize? If it’s slipped your mind, that’s okay—it was Boondock Echo. It was a radio project that aimed to make it easy to record and playback conversations from two-way radio communications. The project was entered via
Hackaday.io,
the judges dug it, and it was one of the top projects of that year’s competition.
The project was the brainchild of Mark Hughes and Kaushlesh Chandel. At the 2023 Hackaday Supercon, Mark and Kaushlesh (KC) came back to tell us all about the project,
and how far it had come one year after its success in the 2022 Hackaday Prize.
Breaker, Breaker
The talk begins with a simple video explainer of the
Boondock Echo
project. Basically, it points out the simple problem with two-way radio communications. If you’re not sitting in front of the receiver at the right time, you’re going to miss the message someone’s trying to send you. Unlike cellular communications, Skype calls, or email, there’s no log of missed calls or messages waiting for you. If you weren’t listening, you’re out of luck.
The device works with conventional amateur radios and can capture messages, store them in the cloud, and even react to them.
Mark was inspired to create a device to solve these problems by his father’s experience as an emergency responder with FEMA. Often, his father would tell stories about problems with radios and missed transmissions, and Mark had always wondered if something could be done.
Boondock Echo is the device that hopes to change all that. It’s a device designed for recording and playback of two-way radio communications. The hardware is based around the ESP32, which is able to capture analog audio from a radio, digitize it, and submit it to the Boondock Echo online service. This also enables more advanced features—the system can transcribe audio to text, and even do keyword monitoring on the results and email you any important relevant messages.
The Boondock Echo service can be set up to react to keywords and provide notifications in turn.
Rather amazingly, Hackaday actually helped spawn this project. Mark had an idea of what Boondock Echo should do, but he didn’t feel like he had the full set of technical skills to implement it. Then, Mark met KC via a Hackaday Hackchat, and the two started a partnership to develop the project further. Eventually, they won fourth place in the 2022 Hackaday Prize, which netted them a tasty $10,000 which they could use to develop the project further. They then brought in Mark’s friend Jesse on the hardware side, and things really got rolling.
The hope was to start producing and delivering Boondock Echo devices. Of course, nobody is immune to production hell, and it was no different for this team. KC dives into the story of how the device relied on the ESP32-A1S module. When they went to make more, this turned out to be problematic. They found some of the purchased modules worked and some didn’t. Stripping the RF shields off the pre-baked modules, they found that while they all included audio codec chips marked “8388,” some modules had a different layout and functioned differently. And these were parts with FCC IDs, identical part numbers, and everything! This turned into a huge mess that derailed the project for some time. The project had to be retooled to work with the ESP32-based AI Thinker Audio Kit, to which they added a custom “sidekick” board to handle interfacing with the desired radio hardware.
Dodgy parts caused a great deal of trouble for the team.
Mark notes that there were some organizational lessons learned through this difficult journey. He talks about the value of planning and budgets when it comes to any attempt to escape the “Valley of Death” as a nascent startup. Mark also explains how Boondock Echo came to seek investors to grow further when he realized they didn’t have the resources to make it on their own.
“You don’t go out asking for $10,000 from family and friends, you go out and you ask for a heck of a lot more than that from professional investors,” explains Mark. “It’s a lot easier to come up with $100,000 than $10,000, because the venture capitalists don’t play in the $10,000 price range.” Of course, he notes that this comes with a tradeoff—investors want a stake in the company in exchange for cold, hard cash. Moving to this mode of operation involved creating a company and then dividing up shares for all the relevant stakeholders—a unique challenge of its own. Mark and KC explain how they handled the growing pains and grew their team from there.
The successful live demo was a moment of some joy. It used a modified Supercon badge to display transcription of an audio message captured by a Boondock Echo device.
The rest of the talk covers the product itself, and we get a demo of what it can do. KC and Mark show us how the Boondock Echo units capture audio, record it, and submit it to the cloud. From there, we get to see how things like AI transcription, keyword triggers, and notifications work, and there’s even a fun live demo. Beyond that, Mark explains how you can order the hardware
via CrowdSupply
, and sign up with the
Boondock Echo cloud service.
It’s not just neat to see a cool project, it’s neat to see something like this grow from an idea into a fully-fledged business. Even better, it grew out of the Hackaday community itself, and has flourished from there. It’s a wonderful testament to what hackers can achieve with a good idea and the will to pursue it. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059408",
"author": "zoenagy3466",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T10:03:11",
"content": "Repeat after me, Meshtastic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8059465",
"author": "Helena",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T13:38:54",
... | 1,760,371,737.535863 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/diy-digital-caliper-measures-up/ | DIY Digital Caliper Measures Up | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"calipers",
"position sensing"
] | You might wonder why [Kevin] wanted to
build digital calipers
when you can buy them for very little these days. But, then again, you are reading Hackaday, so we probably don’t need to explain it.
The motivation, in this case, was to learn to build the same mechanism the commercial ones use for use in precise positioning systems. We were especially happy to see that [Kevin’s] exploration took him to a
Hackaday.io
project which led to collaboration between him and [Mitko].
The theory behind the mechanism is simple but does get into some ugly-looking trigonometry. Electrically, you feed eight sine waves with different phases into the assembly and measure the phase of the signal you receive.
Pulse density modulation is sufficient for the driving signals. The math is a bit more complex, but nothing you can’t do with a modern CPU. To set the correct parameters, a PC-based test setup allowed different runs to determine the best parameters for the final implementation.
Of course, the whole thing still needs some packaging to use as either a practical pair of calipers or for unrelated positioning duty. But it does work and it should be straightforward to adapt it for any purpose.
We’ve looked
inside calipers
before. If you are only making measurements with calipers one way, you may be
missing out
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059758",
"author": "Shara",
"timestamp": "2024-11-09T00:19:29",
"content": "Brilliant! Then, we need to put this into 3D printer / CNC for absolute positioning head",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8059830",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,737.731277 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/a-tiny-chemistry-lab/ | A Tiny Chemistry Lab | Bryan Cockfield | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"Chemistry",
"glucose",
"microcontroller",
"modular",
"optical",
"sensors",
"syringe pump"
] | While advances in modern technology have allowed average people access to tremendous computing power as well as novel tools like 3D printers and laser cutters for a bare minimum cost, around here we tend to overlook some of the areas that have taken advantage of these trends as well. Specifically in the area of chemistry, the accessibility of these things have opened up a wide range of possibilities for those immersed in this world, and
[Marb’s Lab] shows us how to build a glucose-detection lab in an incredibly small form factor
.
The key to the build is a set of three laser-cut acrylic sheets, which when sandwiched together provide a path for the fluid to flow as well as a chamber that will be monitored by electronic optical sensors. The fluid is pumped through the circuit by a custom-built syringe pump driven by a linear actuator, and when the chamber is filled the reaction can begin. In this case, if the fluid contains glucose it will turn blue, which is detected by the microcontroller’s sensors. The color value is then displayed on a small screen mounted to the PCB, allowing the experimenter to take quick readings.
Chemistry labs like this aren’t limited to one specific reaction, though. The acrylic plates are straightforward to laser cut, so other forms can be made quickly. [Marb’s Lab] also made the syringe pump a standalone system, so it can be quickly moved or duplicated for use in other experiments as well. If you want to take your chemistry lab to the extreme,
you can even build your own mass spectrometer
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059713",
"author": "ereIamJH",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T22:06:30",
"content": "Anyone know where the design files or more information on this can be found?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8059737",
"author": "Ostracus",
... | 1,760,371,737.594628 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/combination-safety-glasses-and-measurement-tool/ | Combination Safety Glasses And Measurement Tool | Navarre Bartz | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"analog measurement",
"brass",
"eyeglasses",
"measurement",
"ruler",
"safety glasses",
"simone giertz"
] | While rulers and tape measures are ubiquitous, they always seem to disappear when you need them. We know you’d never forget your safety glasses (safety first!), so what if
they were also a measuring tool
?
Starting by snapping pieces from a folding yardstick, [Simone Giertz] and [Laura Kampf] worked out a rough prototype before letting [Giertz] complete the project in brass. Some initial issues with the weight of the frames were alleviated by switching to a lighter weight plate material and using thinner frames and weight-saving holes near the ear pieces.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so we’ll let somebody else decide whether or not these will be the newest fashion craze. But it’s hard to argue with the timelessness of brass unless you have a copper allergy. We could definitely see a less expensive plastic version catching on in makerspaces for the PPE bin.
Want some other cool wearable gear? How about [Giertz]’s
grocery bag hat
, an
evening gown with servo-driven flowers
, or a shirt that
reflects heat out the atmospheric window
? | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059643",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T19:47:38",
"content": "But what if I need a tape measure and need to wear safety glasses at the same time? OH NOEZ!Seriously, this has a nerd-cool look but from a practical perspective it’s like having a pencil on the end of you... | 1,760,371,737.808934 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/the-rogue-emperor-and-what-to-do-about-them/ | The Rogue Emperor, And What To Do About Them | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"community",
"governance",
"open source software"
] | The chances are if you know someone who is a former Apple employee, you’ll have heard their Steve Jobs anecdote, and that it was rather unflattering to the Apple co-founder. I’ve certainly heard a few myself, and quick web search will reveal plenty more. There are enough of them that it’s very easy to conclude the guy was not a very pleasant person at all.
At the same time, he was a person whose public persona transcended reality, and his fan base treated him with an almost Messianic awe. For them everything he touched turned to gold, every new feature on an Apple product was his personal invention, every one of his actions even the not-so-clever ones were evidence of his genius, and anyone who hadn’t drunk the Apple Kool-Aid was anathema. You’ll still see echoes of this today in Apple fanboys, even though the shine on the company is perhaps now a little tarnished.
It’s easy to spot parallels to this story in some of today’s tech moguls who have gathered similar devotion, but it’s a phenomenon by no means limited to tech founders. Anywhere there is an organisation or group that is centred around an individual, from the smallest organisation upwards, it’s possible for it to enter an almost cult-like state in which the leader both accumulates too much power, and loses track of some of the responsibilities which go with it. If it’s a tech company or a bowls club we can shrug our shoulders and move to something else, but when it occurs in an open source project and a benevolent dictator figure goes rogue it has landed directly on our own doorstep as the open-source community. It’s happened several times that I can immediately think of and there are doubtless more cases I am unaware of, and every time I am left feeling that our community lacks an adequate mechanism to come through it unscathed.
In theory, the advantage of open-source software is that it provides choice. If something offends you about a project you can switch to an alternative, or if you are a software developer you can simply fork it or write your own competitor. Both of those points you’ll still see trotted out by open source developers when they face criticism, yet both of them are increasingly fantastical. The scale of many large pieces of software means that there is an inevitable progression towards a single dominant project, and the days when all users of open source software were capable of writing it are long gone if they ever existed at all. In many cases the reality of large open source projects is one of lock-in just as much as in the proprietary world; if you’ve put a lot of effort into adopting something then you’re along for the ride as the cost of changing your path are too significant to ignore.
So how can we as the open source community deal with a rogue emperor in a project we rely on? In some cases the momentum can eventually gather enough to generate an alternative path, you will probably come up with the same examples I’m thinking of as I write this. But all too often either a loyal Praetorian Guard of developers protect their leader, or a firm grip on the non-open-source IP surrounding the ecosystem keeps the problematic figure in place despite all attempts to move forward. Perhaps it’s time not to consider the problem after it happens, but
before
.
A central plank of the open source community lies in the licence. It sets down the framework under which the software can be used and shared, and there are a huge number of choices to reflect the varying ideals of software developers. It’s a great system in what it sets out to do, but I feel there’s an aspect of open source software it fails to address. Perhaps as well as considering how the IP is regulated, a licence should also commit the project to a system of governance, much in the manner that a country will have a constitution. If this constitution is written to maintain good governance and combat the threat of a rogue emperor it could only make for more stability, and since any code contributions would be made under its terms it would be very difficult for someone intent on breaking that governance structure to remove.
One thing is for sure, it’s becoming wearisome to find afresh every few months that a piece of software you use every day is associated with problematic people or behaviours.
Something
needs to be done, even if it’s not quite my suggestion here. What do you think? Tell us in the comments. | 134 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059578",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T18:12:26",
"content": "My hope is the AI take over soon.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8059596",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T18:39:14",
... | 1,760,371,738.022887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/hackaday-podcast-episode-295-circuit-graver-zinc-creep-and-video-tubes/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 295: Circuit Graver, Zinc Creep, And Video Tubes | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | With Superconference 2024 in the books, Dan joined Elliot, fresh off his flight back from Pasadena, to look through the week (or two) in hacks. It was a pretty good crop, too, despite all the distractions and diversions. We checked out the cutest little quadruped, a wireless antenna for wireless communications, a price-tag stand-in for paper calendars, and a neat way to test hardware and software together.
We take the closest look yet at why Arecibo collapsed, talk about Voyager’s recent channel-switching glitch, and find out how to put old Android phones back in action. There’s smear-free solder paste application, a Mims-worthy lap counter, and a PCB engraver that you’ve just got to see. We wrap things up with a look at Gentoo and pay homage to the TV tubes of years gone by — the ones in the camera, for the TV sets.
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 295 Show Notes:
News:
Voyager 1 Fault Forces Switch To S-Band
What’s that Sound?
Fill in
this form
for your chance to win. Be specific!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Rapid Prototyping PCBs With The Circuit Graver
Zinc Creep And Electroplasticity: Why Arecibo Collapsed
Little Quadruped Has PCB Spine And No Wiring
Hardware-in-the-Loop Continuous Integration
Reusing An Old Android Phone For GPIO With External USB Devices
Portable Solder Paste Station Prevents Smears With Suction
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Random Wire Antenna Uses No Wire
PicoROM, A DIP-32 8-Bit ROM Emulator
Split-Flap Clock Flutters Its Way To Displaying Time Without Numbers
Dan’s Picks:
Word Of The Day Calendar Is Great Use Of E-Paper
Use PicoGlitcher For Voltage Glitching Attacks
Clever Circuit Makes Exercise Slightly Less Boring
Can’t-Miss Articles:
I Installed Gentoo So You Don’t Havtoo
Handbook:Main Page – Gentoo wiki
Capturing Light In A Vacuum: The Magic Of Tube Video Cameras | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8060647",
"author": "David Plass",
"timestamp": "2024-11-11T15:11:22",
"content": "Best use of bleeps during What’s That Sound.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,738.059846 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/fuzzy-skin-finish-for-3d-prints-now-on-top-layers/ | Fuzzy Skin Finish For 3D Prints, Now On Top Layers | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"fuzzy skin",
"non-planar",
"slicer"
] | [TenTech]’s
Fuzzyficator
brings fuzzy skin — a textured finish normally limited to sides of 3D prints — to the top layer with the help of some non-planar printing, no hardware modifications required. You can watch it in action in the video below, which also includes details on how to integrate this functionality into your favorite slicer software.
Little z-axis hops while laying down the top layer creates a fuzzy skin texture.
Fuzzyficator essentially works by moving the print nozzle up and down while laying down a top layer, resulting in a textured finish that does a decent job of matching the fuzzy skin texture one can put on sides of a print. Instead of making small lateral movements while printing outside perimeters, the nozzle does little z-axis hops while printing the top.
Handily, Fuzzyficator works by being called as a post-processing script by the slicer (at this writing, PrusaSlicer, Orca Slicer, and Bambu Studio are tested) which also very conveniently reads the current slicer settings for fuzzy skin, in order to match them.
Non-planar 3D printing
opens new doors but we haven’t seen it work like this before. There are a variety of ways to experiment with non-planar printing for those who like to tinker with their printers. But there’s work to be done that doesn’t involve hardware, too. Non-planar printing also requires
new ways of thinking about slicing
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059558",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T17:29:19",
"content": "Sounds like a great idea!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8059586",
"author": "Harvie.CZ",
"timestamp": "2024-11-... | 1,760,371,738.115099 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/08/this-week-in-security-linux-vms-real-ai-cves-and-backscatter-tor-dos/ | This Week In Security: Linux VMs, Real AI CVEs, And Backscatter TOR DoS | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"backscatter",
"LLM",
"This Week in Security",
"tor"
] | Steve Ballmer famously called Linux “viral”, with some not-entirely coherent complaints about the OS. In a hilarious instance of life imitating art, Windows machines
are now getting attacked through malicious Linux VM images
distributed through phishing emails.
This approach seems to be intended to fool any anti-malware software that may be running. The VM includes
the chisel tool
, described as “a fast TCP/UDP tunnel, transported over HTTP, secured via SSH”. Now that’s an interesting protocol stack. It’s an obvious advantage for an attacker to have a Linux VM right on a target network. As this sort of virtualization does require hardware virtualization, it might be worth disabling the virtualization extensions in BIOS if they aren’t needed on a particular machine.
AI Finds Real CVE
We’ve talked about some rather unfortunate use of AI, where a
spiring security researchers asked an LLM to find vulnerabilities in a project like curl
, and then completely wasted a maintainer’s time on those bogus reports. We happened to interview
Daniel Stenberg on FLOSS Weekly this week
, and after he recounted this story, we mused that there might be a real opportunity to use LLMs to find vulnerabilities, when used as a way to direct fuzzing, and when combined with a good test suite.
And now, we have
Google Project Zero bringing news of their Big Sleep LLM project finding a real-world vulnerability in SQLite
. This tool was previously called
Project Naptime
, and while it’s not strictly a fuzzer, it does share some similarities. The main one being that both tools take their educated guesses and run that data through the real program code, to positively verify that there is a problem. With this proof of concept demonstrated, it’s sure to be replicated. It seems inevitable that someone will next try to get an LLM to not only find the vulnerability, but also find an appropriate fix.
Slipping Between Parsers
Something else interesting from our conversation with Daniel was the
trurl
tool, that makes the curl url parser available as a standalone tool. The point being that there are often security problems that arise from handling URLs and other user-provided data with different parsers. And
that’s the story [Andrea Menin] has to tell
, taking a look at how file parsers handle file uploads a bit differently.
More specifically, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) check a handful of metrics on file uploads, like the file extension, MIME Type, the “magic” first few bytes of the file, file size, filename sanitization, and more. This gets complicated when an application uses
multipart/form-data
. Files and parameters get chunked, separated by boundary delimiter strings.
So one trick is to hide strings that the WAF would normally block, by sneaking them inside a multipart upload. Another trick is to use the same name field multiple times. The WAF may ignore the repeated names, and the application itself may not ignore the repetition in the same way. There are many more, from inconsistent quotes, to omitting an expected carriage return in the upload, to failing to mention that your filename contains UTF characters.
Backscatter TOR DoS
[delroth] got a nasty surprise.
He got an abuse@ email
, letting him know that one of his server VMs was sending SSH probes around the Internet. Unless you’re SSH scanning on purpose, that’s not a good surprise. That’s bad for two reasons. First off, it really implies that your server has been compromised. And second, it’s going to put your IP on multiple spam and abuse blacklists.
The natural response was to start looking for malware. The likely culprits were a Syncthing relay, a Mastodon instance, a Tor relay, and a Matrix server. The odd thing was that none of those services showed signs of compromise. The breakthrough came when [delroth] started looking close at port 22 traffic captured by a running tcpdump. No outgoing packets were getting captured, but TCP reset packets were coming in.
And really, that’s the whole trick: Send bogus SSH packets from a spoofed IP address, to a bunch of servers around the Internet, and some of them will generate complaints. Anyone can generate raw packets with spoofed IP addresses. The catch is that not everyone can successfully send that traffic, since many ISPs do BCP38 scrubbing, where “impossible” traffic gets dropped. This traffic was impossible, since those source IPs were coming from the wrong network.
The only real question is “why?” The answer seems to be TOR. While [delroth] does run a TOR node, it’s not an exit node, which is usually enough to keep the IP out of trouble. While TOR does make some guarantees about traffic anonymity, it doesn’t make any guarantees about hiding the IPs of network nodes. And it seems that it’s recently become someone’s hobby to trigger exactly these attacks on TOR nodes.
Bits and Bytes
A pair of developers
have started working on hardening for the PHP language
and server components. That means adding back safe-unlink, doing memory isolation to make heap spraying harder, and removing trivial ways to trivially get powerful primitives. PHP may not be the cool kid on the block any more, but it’s still very widely used, and making exploitation just a bit harder is a clear win.
Cisco’s Unified Industrial Wireless Software
had a trivial command injection attack
allowing for arbitrary command execution as root. This was limited to devices running with Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul mode turned on. So far this flaw hasn’t been found in real attacks, but such a flaw in industrial equipment isn’t great.
And finally, Electronic Arts had
an improperly secured web API endpoint
, and [Sean Kahler] found it and started looking around. It turns out that API included a swagger json, which documents the entire API. Score! In the end, the API allowed for moving a “persona” from one account to another, and that eventually allows for full account takeover. Yikes. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059562",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T17:37:33",
"content": "OT:?Speaking of LLMs, I’m surprised how well the Markov Chain on my Android devices are at guessing my next word. So, do they start out as a generic model and then adapt to my... | 1,760,371,738.157814 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/hear-a-vintage-sound-chip-mimic-the-real-world/ | Hear A Vintage Sound Chip Mimic The Real World | Donald Papp | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"70s",
"80's",
"audio",
"AY-3-8910",
"vintage"
] | Sound chips from back in the day were capable of much more than a few beeps and boops, and [InazumaDenki] proves it in a video recreating
recognizable real-world sounds with the AY-3-8910
, a chip that was in everything from arcade games to home computers. Results are a bit mixed but it’s surprising how versatile a vintage sound chip that first came out in the late 70s is capable of, with the right configuration.
Recreating a sound begins by analyzing a spectrograph.
Chips like the AY-3-8910 work at a low level, and rely on being driven with the right inputs to generate something useful. It can generate up to three independent square-wave tones, but with the right approach and setup that’s enough to get outputs of varying recognizability for a pedestrian signal, bird call, jackhammer, and referee’s whistle.
To recreate a sound [InazumaDenki] begins by analyzing a recording with a spectrogram, which is a visual representation of frequency changes over time. Because real-world sounds consist of more than just one frequency (and the AY-3-8910 can only do three at once), this is how [InazumaDenki] chooses what frequencies to play, and when. The limitations make it an imperfect reproduction, but as you can hear for yourself, it can certainly be enough to do the job.
How does one go about actually programming the AY-3-8910? Happily there’s
a handy Arduino AY3891x library
by [Andreas Taylor] that makes it about as simple as can be to explore this part’s capabilities for yourself.
If you think retro-styled sound synthesis might fit into your next project, keep in mind that just about any modern microcontrollers has more than enough capability to do things like
80s-style speech synthesis entirely in software
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059114",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T17:29:21",
"content": "And now it’s sound chips on motherboards.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8059133",
"author": "Kelly",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T18:09:26",
... | 1,760,371,738.31172 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/mechanisms-tension-control-bolts/ | Mechanisms: Tension Control Bolts | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"Bolts",
"civil engineering",
"construction"
] | If there’s an enduring image of how large steel structures used to be made, it’s probably the hot riveting process. You’ve probably seen grainy old black-and-white films of a riveting gang — universally men in bib overalls with no more safety equipment than a cigarette, heating rivets to red heat in a forge and tossing them up to the riveters with a pair of tongs. There, the rivet is caught with a metal funnel or even a gloved hand, slipped into a waiting hole in a flange connecting a beam to a column, and beaten into submission by a pair of men with pneumatic hammers.
Dirty, hot, and dangerous though the work was, hot riveted joints were a practical and proven way to join members together in steel structures, and chances are good that any commercial building that dates from before the 1960s or so has at least some riveted joints. But times change and technology marches on, and riveted joints largely fell out of fashion in the construction trades in favor of bolted connections. Riveting crews of three or more men were replaced by a single ironworker making hundreds of predictable and precisely tensioned connections, resulting in better joints at lower costs.
Bolted joints being torqued to specs with an electric wrench might not have the flair of red-hot rivets flying around the job site, but they certainly have a lot of engineering behind them. And as it turns out, the secret to turning bolting into a one-person job is mostly in the bolt itself.
A Desk With a View
My first exposure to tension control bolts started with getting really lucky at work. Back in the early 2000s my department relocated, and somehow I managed to get a desk with an actual window. Being able to look out at the world was amazing, but then one day the company started building an addition right outside my window. That was a mixed bag for me; true, I’d lose my view as the six-story structure was built, but in the meantime, I’d get to watch its construction from the comfort of my desk.
I watched with amazement as the steel frame went up, the ironworkers quickly and efficiently bolting the columns and beams together. One thing I noticed was that bolting seemed to be a one-man job, with a single ironworker tightening the nut with an electric wrench without the need for anyone backing up the head of the bolt on the other side of the connection. This perplexed me; how could the bolt not just spin in the hole?
I got my answer when I saw something fall out of the wrench after the ironworker removed it from the tightened connection. From my perch by the window it looked like the end of a splined shaft, and I could see that one end was obviously sheared off. That’s when I noticed that all the as-yet untightened bolts had the same spline sticking out past the nut, and it all clicked: the spline must fit into a socket inside the wrench coaxial to the socket that tightens the nut, which holds the bolt so the nut can be tightened. What’s more, it was clear that you could use this scheme to automatically torque the connection by designing the spline to shear off at the required torque. Genius!
Stretch and Snap
While I wasn’t quite right with my analysis, I was pretty close. I only learned much later (like, while researching this article) that the bolts used for structural framing are called tension control bolts, or TCBs, and that there’s a lot of engineering that goes into them. But to understand them, we have to take a look at bolted connections, and find out how they work to keep everything from buildings to bridges from falling down.
We’ve taken
an in-depth look at bolted connections
before, but for the TL;DR set, the short story is that bolts are essentially really strong springs. When you tighten a nut on a bolt, the bolt stretches a bit, which provides a clamping force on whatever is trapped between the head of the bolt and the nut. The degree of stretching, and therefore the amount of clamping force, depends on the strength of the material used to make the bolt, the size of the bolt, and the amount of torque applied. That’s why most bolted assemblies have a specified torque for all the bolts in the joint.
For structural steel, joints between framing members are carefully designed by structural engineers. A host of calculations go into each joint, resulting in detailed bolting plans. Some joints have a lot of bolts, sometimes 20 or more depending on the application. The hole pattern for each member is determined before any steel is cut, and each framing member usually arrives from the fabricator with the exact number of holes specified in the plan. The plan also specifies which grade of TC bolt is to be used on each joint — more on that below — as well as the diameter and length of each bolt.
Typical tension control bolts. The internal socket on the shear wrench grips the spline feature at the far end to counter the torque applied while tensioning the bolt, then twists it off. Source:
LeJeune Bolt
As ironworkers build the frame, they first use a spud wrench to line up the bolt holes in the two members they’re bolting together. A spud wrench is a large open-end or adjustable wrench on a long handle that tapers to a point. The handle is used to drift the bolt holes into alignment while the ironworker inserts a TC bolt into the other holes. The bolts are initially just hand-tightened, but a critical part of the assembly process, called snugging or pre-tensioning, follows.
Snugging is somewhat loosely defined as the tightness achieved “with a few impacts” of an impact wrench, or “the full effort of an ironworker” using a standard spud wrench. Everything about snugging is very subjective, since the number of “ugga-duggas” that count as a few impact wrench blasts varies from user to user, and ironworkers similarly can apply a wide range of force to a wrench. But the idea is to bring the framing members into “firm contact,” which generally amounts to about 10 kps or “kips”, which is 10,000 pounds per square inch (about 70 MPa).
Once all the bolts in the joint are pre-tensioned, final tensioning is performed. The tool I saw those ironworkers using on TC bolts all those years ago goes by many names, with “shear wrench” or “TC gun” being the most generic. It’s also known as a “LeJeune gun” after a major manufacturer of TC bolts and tooling. Some shear wrenches are pneumatically powered, but more are electrically operated, with cordless guns becoming increasingly popular. The final tightening cycle begins by engaging the TC bolt spline with the internal socket and the nut with the outer socket. The outer socket tightens the nut to a specified torque, at which point a slip-clutch shifts power transmission from the outer socket to the inner socket, reversing the direction of rotation in the process. This applies enough torque to the spline to twist it clean off the TC bolt at the weakest point — the narrowed neck between the spline and the threaded section of the bolt. This leaves the bolt properly tensioned and with just the right amount of thread showing.
Tools of the Trade
TC bolts generally come in two grades: A325 and A490. Both are based on ASTM International standards, with A325 bolts covering the tensile range of 120 to 150 kps (830 to 1,040 MPa), and A490 covering 150 to 173 kps (1,040 to 1,190 MPa). Most TC bolts have a rounded head, since there’s no need to grip the bolt from the head end. That provides a smoother surface on the head side of the joint, making it less likely to get damaged during installation. Depending on the application, TC bolts can be treated to prevent corrosion, either with galvanizing or a passivated treatment.
If a TC bolted joint needs to be taken apart, the fact that the spline has already been snapped off presents a problem. To get around this, a special accessory for the wrench known as a reaction bar is used. This is essentially an inner socket sized for the nut and an outer ring with a sturdy torque arm welded to it. The arm jams against an adjacent nut and provides the counter-rotation needed to loosen the nut.
Lot testing is also very important for code compliance. This involves picking random TC bolts from every lot to test on a Skidmore-Wilhelm machine, which hydraulically measures the tension on a bolt. Strict procedures for pretensioning and final tensioning of each bolt are followed, and results are recorded as part of the engineering records of a structure. | 54 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059048",
"author": "m1ke",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T15:17:24",
"content": "Nice quality article. Thank you for teaching me something new.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8059293",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Kno... | 1,760,371,738.260006 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/the-most-inexpensive-apple-computer-possible/ | The Most Inexpensive Apple Computer Possible | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"apple",
"emulation",
"mac",
"macintosh",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"retro",
"retro computing",
"vga"
] | If Apple has a reputation for anything other than decent hardware and excellent industrial design, it’s for selling its products at extremely inflated prices. But there are some alternatives if you want the Apple experience on the cheap. Buying their hardware a few years out of date of course is one way to avoid the bulk of the depreciation,
but at the extreme end is this working Mac clone that cost just $14
.
This build relies on the fact that modern microcontrollers absolutely blow away the computing power available to the average consumer in the 1980s. To emulate the Macintosh 128K, this build uses nothing more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Pico. There’s a little bit more to it than that, though, since this build also replicates the feel of the screen of the era as well. Using a “hat” for the Pi Pico
from [Ron’s Computer Videos]
lets the Pico’s remaining system resources send the video signal from the emulated Mac out over VGA, meaning that monitors from the late 80s and on can be used with ease. There’s an option for micro SD card storage as well, allowing the retro Mac to have an incredible amount of storage compared to the original.
The emulation of the 80s-era Mac is available
on a separate GitHub page
for anyone wanting to take a look at that. A VGA monitor is not strictly required, but we do feel that displaying retro computer graphics on 4K OLEDs leaves a little something out of the experience of older machines like this, even if they are emulated. Although
this Macintosh replica with a modern e-ink display
does an excellent job of recreating the original monochrome displays of early Macs as well. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058953",
"author": "CJay",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T12:32:04",
"content": "“If Apple has a reputation for anything other than decent hardware and excellent industrial design, it’s for selling its products at extremely inflated prices.”*grabs popcorn, soda, sits back and waits for t... | 1,760,371,738.43386 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/07/reviewing-the-worlds-2nd-smallest-thermal-camera/ | Reviewing The World’s 2nd Smallest Thermal Camera | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Reviews",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"ir camera"
] | A thermal camera is a very handy tool to have, and
[Learn Electronics Repair] wanted to try out the Thermal Master P2
for electronic repair, especially since it claims to have a 15 X digital zoom and 1.5 degree accuracy. The package proudly states the device is the “World 2nd Smallest Thermal Camera” — when only the
second
best will do.
The camera is tiny and connects to a PC or directly to a tablet or phone via USB C. However, it did look easier to use on the end of a cable for probing things like a PC motherboard. The focus was fairly long, so you couldn’t get extremely close to components with the camera. The zoom somewhat makes up for that, but of course, as you might expect, zooming in doesn’t give you any additional resolution.
He also compares the output with that of a multimeter he uses that includes an IR camera (added to our holiday gift list). That multimeter/camera combo focuses quite closely, which is handy when picking out a specific component. It also has a macro lens, which can zoom up even more.
We’ve looked at — or, more accurately,
through
— IR cameras in the past. If you are on a tight budget and you have a 3D printer, you
might try this method for thermal imaging
, but it doesn’t use the printer the way you probably think. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058905",
"author": "Thomas Anderson",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T09:16:34",
"content": "I have an Infiray camera that’s much smaller than this, I guess I own the world’s smallest IR camera :))",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "80... | 1,760,371,738.375409 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/check-your-clip-leads/ | Check Your Clip Leads | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"clip leads",
"fake chips"
] | [Matthias] bought cheap clip leads online and, wisely, decided to check them. We’ve had the same experience that he’s had. Sometimes, these cheap leads are crimped and don’t make good contact. However, you can usually solder them and completely fix them.
Not this time
, however, as you can see in the video below.
The resistance for the leads was a bit on the high side, which is usually a sure sign of this problem. But soldering didn’t really make a big difference. A homemade clip lead, for example, read under 20 milliohms, but a test lead from the new batch read about 260 milliohms even after being soldered.
A thermal camera indicated the problem was actually the wire. At first, he thought the wire was just very thin. While it was thin, that wasn’t the real problem. The wire looked normal enough, but sanding the wire showed that it might be only copper-coated. Turns out, a magnet would grip the clip leads meaning they were iron wires coated with copper.
We were amazed at how many leads he was able to find with iron in them, primarily those with clips on at least one end. Oddly, mouse cables were also magnetic.
So, the lesson is to test the resistance and pass a magnet over those wires. Depending on your application, a few hundred milliohms might not matter. But you should at least know that some of your clip leads may have an order-of-magnitude difference in conductivity.
If you need an
easy milliohmeter
, there are plenty of options. You can even just
haywire something up
on a breadboard, or — like in the video — use a 1A current and measure millivolts. | 53 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058876",
"author": "The Gerb",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T06:16:06",
"content": "I ended up junking the “fake” wire, and reusing the clips with pieces of regular hookup wire. If the clips were bad, replaced them with some good quality Japanese small alligator clips I found cheaply on... | 1,760,371,738.522309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/leaf-mission-seeks-to-grow-plants-on-the-moon/ | LEAF Mission Seeks To Grow Plants On The Moon | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"hydroponics",
"moon"
] | Credit: Space Lab
We have seen a recent surge of interest in whether it’s possible to grow potatoes and other plants in Martian soil, but what is the likelihood that a future (manned) lunar base could do something similar? To that end [Space Lab] is developing
the LEAF project
that will be part of NASA’s upcoming
Artemis III
lunar mission. This mission would be the first to have Americans return to the Moon by about 2028, using the somewhat convoluted multi-system SLS-Starship-Lunar Gateway trifecta. The LEAF (Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora) science module will feature three types of plants (rape (
Brassica Rapa
), duckweed and cress (
Arabidopsis thaliana
) ) in an isolated atmosphere.
The
main goal
of this project is to find out how the plants are affected by the lunar gravity, radiation and light levels at the landing site at the south pole. This would be the equivalent of a hydroponics setup in a lunar base. After about a week of lunar surface time the growth chamber will be split up into two: one returning back to Earth for examination and the other remains on the surface to observe their long-term health until they perish from cold or other causes.
This is not the first time that growing plants on the lunar surface has been attempted, with
China’s Chang’e 4
mission from 2019. The lander’s Lunar Micro Ecosystem featured a range of seeds as well, which reportedly successfully sprouted, but the project was terminated after 9 days instead of the planned 100 due to issues with heating the biosphere during the brutal -52°C lunar night. Hopefully LEAF can avoid this kind of scenario when it eventually is deployed on the Moon. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058872",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T05:43:52",
"content": "Pretty sure if plant life could exist it would exist without mankind’s intervention. Otherwise you do it in an artificial environment… like a greenhouse… with we have been doing for a very long time",
... | 1,760,371,738.574588 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/clever-circuit-makes-exercise-slightly-less-boring/ | Clever Circuit Makes Exercise Slightly Less Boring | Dan Maloney | [
"home hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bounceless",
"counter",
"retroreflector",
"stairs"
] | We say this with the greatest respect, but [Joel] — your exercise routine is horrible! Kudos for getting up and doing something, but 108 trips up and down the stairs? That sounds like torture, not exercise. Even [Joel] admits that it’s so boring that he loses count, and while we’d bet that he isn’t likely to restart the routine when that happens, it’s still annoying enough that he built
this clever little lap counter
to automate the task.
We kid, of course; any exercise is better than no exercise, and the stairs offer few excuses for skipping the daily workout. To bust the boredom problem, [Joel] toyed with a couple of ideas for toting up his laps before landing on a beam-break optical system with sensors at the top and the bottom of the stairs. Worried about the potential for false triggering by swinging arms and legs, he searched for ideas for bounceless switch circuits in the old
“Engineer’s Notebook” by [Forrest Mims]
and found a circuit close enough to modify for his needs. Each sensor setup has a high-output red LED and a phototransistor on one side of the stairwell, and a retroreflector on the opposite wall. Breaking the beam switches off the LED on that sensor and switches the other one on, to save on battery power.
The sensor’s flips and flops are counted and displayed on a three-digit seven-segment LED; [Joel] offers no detail on the counter itself, but with [Mims] as his muse, we suspect it’s something like the three-digit BCD counter circuit a few pages on from the bounceless switch circuit. The lap counter is shown in action in the brief video below. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058825",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2024-11-07T01:48:54",
"content": "I had the same problem.I go to the gym and walk around the jogging ring and get so lost in thought I lose track of how many circuits I make.…so I bought one of those mechanical click counters on eBay for $... | 1,760,371,738.619936 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/rapid-prototyping-pcbs-with-the-circuit-graver/ | Rapid Prototyping PCBs With The Circuit Graver | Dave Rowntree | [
"PCB Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"carving",
"craver",
"flexure",
"pcb",
"rapid prototyping"
] | Walking around the alley at Hackaday Supercon 2024, we noticed an interesting project was getting quite a bit of attention, so we got nearer for a close-up.
The ‘Circuit Graver’ by [Zach Fredin]
is an unconventional PCB milling machine, utilizing many 3D printed parts, the familiar bed-slinger style Cartesian bot layout and a unique cutting head. The cutting tool, which started life as a tungsten carbide lathe tool, is held on a rotary (‘R’) axis but can also move vertically via a flexure-loaded carriage driven by a 13 kg servo motor.
The stocky flexure took a lot of iteration, as the build logs will show. Despite a wild goose chase attempting to measure the cutting force, a complete machine solution was found by simply making everything stiff enough to
prevent the tool from chattering across the surface of the FR4 blank. Controlling and maintaining the rake angle was a critical parameter here. [Zach] actually took an additional step, which we likely wouldn’t have thought of, to have some copper blanks pre-fabricated to the required size and finished with an ENIG coating. It’s definitely a smart move!
To allow the production of PCB-class feature sizes compatible with a traditional PCB router, the cutting tool was sharpened to a much smaller point than would be used in a lathe using a stone. This reduced the point size sufficiently to allow feature sizes down to 4 mils, or at least that’s what initial characterization implied was viable. As you can see from the build logs, [Zach] has achieved a repeatable enough process to allow building a simple circuit using an SMT 74HC595 and some 0402 LEDs to create an SAO for this year’s Supercon badge. Neat stuff!
We see a fair few PCB mills, some 3D printed, and some not. Here’s
a nice one that fits in that former category
. Milling PCBs is quite a good solution for the rapid prototyping of electronics. Here’s
a guide about that
. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058767",
"author": "adobeflashhater again",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T22:22:29",
"content": "Seems we’ve re-discovered the idea behind “Shaper” machines.Learning what tool point geometries and feed velocities give the smoother cuts in a chosen material can be a large curve. Check ar... | 1,760,371,738.776575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/floss-weekly-episode-808-curl-gotta-download-em-all/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 808: Curl – Gotta Download ’em All | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"curl",
"FLOSS Weekly"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
and
Randal Schwartz
chat with
Daniel Stenberg
about curl! How many curl installs are there?! What’s the deal with CVEs? How has curl managed to not break its ABI for 18 years straight? And how did Daniel turn all this into a career instead of just a hobby? Watch to find out!
https://daniel.haxx.se/
https://curl.se/
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 | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058738",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T20:08:03",
"content": "Your link for Daniel Stenberg takes us to Xitter, which he no longer uses. How about this link instead?https://daniel.haxx.se/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,371,738.823676 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/supercon-2023-restoring-the-apollo-guidance-computer/ | Supercon 2023: Restoring The Apollo Guidance Computer | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"2023 Hackaday Superconference",
"agc",
"apollo",
"Apollo Guidance Computer",
"Apollo program",
"nasa"
] | Humans first visited the Moon in 1969. The last time we went was 1972, over 50 years ago. Back then, astronauts in the Apollo program made their journeys in spacecraft that relied on remarkably basic electronics that are totally unsophisticated compared to what you might find in an expensive blender or fridge these days. Core among them was the Apollo Guidance Computer, charged with keeping the craft on target as it travelled to its destination and back again.
Marc Verdiell, also known as CuriousMarc, is a bit of a dab hand at restoring old vintage electronics. Thus, when it came time to restore one of these rare and storied guidance computers, he was ready and willing to take on the task. Even better, he came to the
2023 Hackaday Supercon
to tell us how it all went down!
Restoration
You might have heard whispers of this effort before, or seen some of
our prior coverage.
Indeed, the effort to resurrect this Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) began in earnest back in late 2018. This particular example of the AGC was found in an electronics recycler in 1976, and the plan was to restore it prior to the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing in 1969. Marc worked with Carl Claunch, Ken Shirriff, and Mike Stewart on the project, and documented much of it on his YouTube channel
under the name [CuriousMarc].
As Marc explains, Apollo actually had four main computers. There was the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) which was charged with steering the Saturn V from launch, along with the Flight Control Computer which was actually an analog machine. There were then two identical Apollo Guidance Computers (AGC)—one was in the Apollo Command Module (Apollo CM), and one was in the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). There was also the Abort Guidance System for handling any situation where things got out of hand. With the aid of old NASA diagrams, Marc shows us where the AGC lived in the Command Module and the LEM.
The AGC pictured alongside the DSKY.
The Apollo program marked the first time humans had trusted the piloting a spacecraft or aircraft to a computer system. The AGC was designed by MIT, built by Raytheon, and it weighed 70 pounds and drew 50 watts. While it looks bulky and heavy by today’s standards, it was wildly compact and efficient by 1960s standards. The interface for the AGC was the DSKY—short for “Display and Keyboard.” It’s how the astronauts controlled and interacted with the AGC during the mission. The AGC was absolutely mission critical. In the words of NASA engineer Dan Lickly, ‘The AGC did everything.” It was responsible for orienting the spacecraft, controlling rocket burns and guiding the craft into orbit, and for handling the landing of the lunar module as well as re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
The AGC was built with a highly modular design.
Marc tells us how one example of the Apollo Guidance System ended up at an electronics scrapper in 1975, by order of one of NASA’s engineers. It soon ended up in the hands of hacker Jimmie Loocke, who got his hands on a full two tons of Apollo program hardware. Years later, one Mike Stewart reached out to Jimmie, hoping to look at a real AGC and take some measurements for the sake of working on a replica. When this was happening, Jimmie in turn asked if the device could be powered on, and eventually a team was assembled to try and make that happen. The first attempt happened in a Houston hotel room in October 2018, and the project took off from there.
The talk includes tons of glorious internal shots of the AGC, serial number RAY 14, which was built for an engineering test series. The AGC was assembled from stacks of neatly-arranged modules full of integrated circuits, all connected through an elegantly wire-wrapped backplane. In fact, this was one of the earliest computers that relied on integrated circuits. All of these were dual 3-input NOR gates or analog amplifier ICs. As non-flight hardware, most of the modules in this AGC weren’t potted, which had the benefit of making them easier to work on. However, two of the modules for the core memory did have potting which would make them harder to work on.
Wire-wrap construction was considered highly reliable—critical for human space missions.
Repairing and restoring the AGC was aided by official schematics, so the team knew what they were working with. Modules were tested, and the core memory—essentially the RAM—was found bad. There was also no core rope memory—essentially the ROM for the AGC which stored the program. A rope memory emulator from Raytheon was used instead for this engineering test article. This was for ease of development, as it allowed changing the stored program more easily than rewiring a core rope memory device. However, the Raytheon emulator device was undocumented, which took some reverse engineering work to figure out. Still, powering up the device with no RAM or ROM was a positive experience—the AGC still tried to boot and there were some minor signs of life.
The rest of the talk outlines how the AGC was brought fully back to life. The team improvised an FPGA memory emulator, X-rayed failed components, and built replicas of things they couldn’t replace, all in service of the final goal. Sneaky hacks were used to get bits and pieces functional again against the ods.Even connectors had to be remade from scratch since the AGC used long-forgotten standards that are no longer in use. The fact that Marc works for connector supplier Samtec proved particularly useful in this case. Prepare to choke on your beverage when he explains how much that cost.
The team were able to show their restoration work to
Eldon Hall
, the engineer who led the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
We won’t spoil the whole journey here, because Marc’s talk is worth watching from start to finish. There are plenty of twists and turns, and all along, you’re waiting for that ultimate delight—the joy every hacker knows when the beleagured machine finally roars into life. Never mind the wonderful heartwarming moments at the end.
It’s simply wonderful to see a dedicate team bring this storied hardware back to life—and even better to see them flying simulator missions with the real AGC hardware doing its thing. It’s a fantastic restoration effort and one that was documented in intimate detail, and it’s joyous that we get to see everything that went into making this happen. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058718",
"author": "a_do_z",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T18:40:31",
"content": "English to English translation: “dab hand at” = “good at”Now I dig you.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8059518",
"author": "abjq",
... | 1,760,371,739.102468 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/hardware-in-the-loop-continuous-integration/ | Hardware-in-the-Loop Continuous Integration | Elliot Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"hardware testing",
"test rig"
] | How can you tell if your software is doing what it’s supposed to? Write some tests and run them every time you change anything. But what if you’re making hardware? [
deqing] has your back with the
Automatic Hardware Testing rig.
And just as you’d expect in the software-only world, you can fire off the system every time you update the firmware in your GitHub.
A Raspberry Pi compiles the firmware in question and flashes the device under test. The cool part is the custom rig that simulates button presses and reads the resulting values out. No actual LEDs are blinked, but the test rig looks for voltages on the appropriate pins, and a test passes when the timing is between 0.95 and 1.05 seconds for the highs and lows. Firing this entire procedure off at every git check-in ensures that all the example code is working.
So far, we can only see how the test rig would work with easily simulated peripherals. If your real application involved speaking to a DAC over I2C, for instance, you’d probably want to integrate that into the test rig, but the principle would be the same.
Are any of you doing this kind of mock-up hardware testing on your projects? Is sounds like it could catch bad mistakes before they got out of the house. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058659",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T17:00:31",
"content": "Been on a few projects that do this. For github you set the pi as a self hosted runner. Typically compilation isn’t done on the raspberry pi as it’s not got a great amount of compute. The raspberry pi CI st... | 1,760,371,738.984377 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/what-happens-if-you-speedrun-making-a-cpu/ | What Happens If You Speedrun Making A CPU? | Julian Scheffers | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"8-bit CPU",
"CPU architecture",
"speedrun"
] | Usually, designing a CPU is a lengthy process, especially so if you’re making a new ISA too. This is something that can take months or even years before you first get code to run. But what if it wasn’t? What if one were to try to make a CPU as fast as humanly possible? That’s what I asked myself a couple weeks ago.
Relative ROM size. Left: Stovepipe, center: [Ben Eater]’s, right: GR8CPU Rev. 2
Enter the
“Stovepipe” CPU
(I don’t have an explanation for that name other than that I “needed” one). Stovepipe’s hardware was made in under 4 hours, excluding a couple small bugfixes. I started by designing the ISA, which is the simplest ISA I ever made. Instead of continuously adding things to make it more useful, I removed things that weren’t strictly necessary until I was satisfied. Eventually, all that was left were 8 major opcodes and a mere 512 bits to represent it all. That is far less than
GR8CPU
(8192 bit), my previous in this class of CPU, and still less than
[Ben Eater]’s breadboard CPU
(2048 bit), which is actually less flexible than Stovepipe. All that while taking orders of magnitude less time to create than either larger CPU. How does that compare to other CPUs? And: How is that possible?
Stovepipe was made at break-neck speeds
Like I said earlier, Stovepipe’s hardware was finished after a mere 4 hours. Add another 2 total hours for the assembler I made afterwards, for a total of 6 including the programs, spread over one week. I estimate GR8CPU was originally designed in just over a year, including tooling, in occasional afternoons after school spent designing. That timespan is notably over 50 times longer than the week that Stovepipe was spread over. In a similar light, Boa³²’s minimum viable product (RV32I) was completed in almost exactly two months, or 8-ish weeks. Still, 8 times as long as Stovepipe took to make. I have no concrete numbers of course but I believe that the real time spent in hours to be even worse for both GR8CPU and Boa³²; almost certainly more than 50x and 8x the hours (so 300 and 48 at the very bare minimum) respectively. How is that possible?
Because it is a simple CPU
Part of it is, of course, experience. GR8CPU,
which has appeared on Hackaday long before I was a writer
, was my second ever microarchitecture and [Ben Eater] didn’t exactly start studying CPUs immediately after his YouTube series like I did. However, Stovepipe is also an exercise in minimalism; unlike both GR8CPU and [Ben Eater]’s, the only user-accessibe register is the accumulator and every calculation with a second operand has to deal with memory. It has 256 bytes of RAM, on par with GR8CPU, but no I/O ports of any kind; all I/O must be memory-mapped. Stovepipe instructions take 1 cycle to fetch and 1-3 to run (except NOP, which takes 0 cycles to run). On par with both GR8CPU and [Ben Eater]’s, it has a carry out flag and zero flag.
Compare this to my most recent previous CPU,
Boa³²
(a RISC-V implementation), which is larger by a seemingly extreme amount despite being only about as powerful as modern microcontrollers. It’s 32-bit, has 31 general-purpose registers, 3 of which are usually used for special purposes, a full 4GiB address space, 512KiB of which contains RAM, hardware multiply/divide and atomics, etc. And most importantly, is pipelined and has separate address and data busses, unlike Stovepipe, GR8CPU and [Ben Eater]’s, all of which are multi-cycle single-bus architectures with a dedicated address register.
But how does it perform?
Let’s compare two programs: Computing the fibonacci sequence and multiplying an 8-bit number; across three CPUs: Stovepipe, GR8CPU and Boa³². I will write it in assembly for all three, ignoring Boa³²’s hardware multiply to keep it fair. Let’s dust off the old projects for a short moment, shall we?
CPU
Multiply set-up
Multiply loop
Fibonacci set-up
Fibonacci loop
GR8CPU
27
22-38
24
40
Boa³²
2
7-8
3
8
Stovepipe
18
22-29
15
27
To my surprise, GR8CPU actually performs significantly worse than Stovepipe, mainly due to it needing 3 cycles to load an instruction compared to Stovepipe’s 1. On the other hand, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, Boa³² wipes the floor with both Stovepipe and GR8CPU because of its 32 registers and pipelined nature. It executes most instructions in a single cycle spread over its 5-stage pipeline.
Conclusion
Trying to speedrun making a CPU was clearly a success given the scope; in merely 4 total hours, I made a CPU that outperforms my old 8-bit CPU while being much smaller. The whole exercise shows that simpler is sometimes better, though not always, because the speed-optimized Boa³² easily beats the size-optimized Stovepipe in a landslide performance victory. Stovepipe, however, completely demolishes most CPUs I know in terms of size; [Ben Eater]’s, GR8CPU and better-known CPUs like the 8086, 6502, z80, etc. are all easily defeated by Stovepipe in this respect. That’s not a world record, though; I believe that [olofk]’s
SERV
CPU is smaller than Stovepipe, though I cannot make a direct comparison due to Stovepipe existing only in a logic simulator.
By the way: If I do ever do a Stovepipe 2, I’ll record the entire time with an actual speedrun timer ;)
A screenshot of Stovepipe, because you all (rightly) asked for one. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058563",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T15:12:31",
"content": "FPGA?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8058574",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T15:19:29",
... | 1,760,371,739.173684 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/amazon-receives-faa-approval-for-mk30-delivery-drone/ | Amazon Receives FAA Approval For MK30 Delivery Drone | Maya Posch | [
"drone hacks",
"News"
] | [
"amazon",
"Amazon Prime Air",
"robot delivery"
] | It’s been about a decade since Amazon began to fly its delivery drones, aiming to revolutionize the online shopping experience with rapid delivery of certain items. Most recently Amazon got
permission from the FAA
to not only start flying from its new Arizona-based location, but also to fly beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) missions with the new MK30 drone. We reported on this new MK30 drone
which was introduced earlier this year
along with the news of the Amazon Prime Air delivery service ceasing operations in California and moving them to Arizona instead.
This new drone has got twice the range as the old MK27 drone that it replaces and is said to be significantly quieter as well. The BLOS permission means that the delivery drones can service areas which are not directly visible from the warehouse with its attached drone delivery facility. With some people within the service range of the MK27 drones having previously complained about the noise levels, we will see quickly enough whether the MK30 can appease most.
As for the type of parcels you can have delivered with this service, it is limited to 2.27 kg (~5 lbs), which is plenty for medication and a range of other items where rapid delivery would be desirable. | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058507",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T14:01:34",
"content": "Medication? Does bubbletea count? Thats all I see delivered here in Shenzhen",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8059068",
"author": "Anon",
... | 1,760,371,738.908428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/06/a-co2-traffic-light-on-an-sao/ | A CO2 Traffic Light On An SAO | Dave Rowntree | [
"cons",
"home hacks"
] | [
"2024 Supercon",
"air quality",
"co2",
"micropython",
"sao",
"SCD40"
] | [David Bryant] clearly has an awareness of the impact of an excess concentration of CO
2
in the local environment and has designed an
SAO board to add a CO
2
traffic light indicator
to one of the spare slots on the official Hackaday Supercon 2024 badge.
The part used is the Sensirion SCD40 ‘true’ CO2 sensor, sitting atop an Adafruit rider board. [David] got a leg up on development by creating a simple SAO breakout board, which could have either the male and female connectors fitted, as required. Next, he successfully guessed that the badge would be based around the RP2040 running MicroPython and hooked up an Adafruit Feather RP2040 board to get started on some software to drive the thing. This made hooking up to the official badge an easy job. Since the SAO has only two GPIOs, [David] needed to decode these to drive the three LEDs. There are a few ways to avoid this, but he wanted to relive his earlier EE college years and do it the direct way using a pair of 74HC00 quad NAND gate chips.
We’ve seen a few CO
2
monitors over the years. This
sleek little unit
is based around the Seeeduino XIAO module and uses an LED ring as an indicator. Proper CO
2
monitors can be a little pricey, and
there are fakes out there
. Finally, CO
2
is not the only household pollutant;
check out this project
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058433",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T09:24:17",
"content": "There’s an ‘i’ missing in Sensirion :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8058453",
"author": "Dave Rowntree",
"timestamp": "2024-1... | 1,760,371,739.040207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/flirting-with-kessler-why-space-debris-physics-make-it-such-an-orbital-pain/ | Flirting With Kessler: Why Space Debris Physics Make It Such An Orbital Pain | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"orbital debris",
"orbital mechanics",
"space debris"
] | Picture in your mind a big parking lot with 131 million cars on it. Now imagine that they are spread out over the entire Earth’s inhabited areas. Although still a large number, it is absolutely dwarfed by the approximately 1.47 billion cars registered and in use today, with room to spare for houses, parks and much more. The 131 million represents the total number of known and estimated
space debris objects
in Earth orbit sized 1 mm and up, as per the European Space Agency. This comes on top of the approximately 13,200 satellites still in Earth orbit of which 10,200 are still functional.
Now imagine that most of these 131 million cars of earlier are sized 10 cm or smaller. Spaced out across the Earth’s entire surface you’d not be able to see more than at most one. Above the Earth’s surface there are many orbital planes and no pesky oceans to prevent millimeter and centimeter-sized cars from being spaced out there. This gives a rough idea of just how incredibly empty Earth’s orbital planes are and why from the International Space Station you rarely notice any such space debris until a small bit slams into a solar panel or something equally not amusing.
Cleaning up space debris seems rather unnecessary in this perspective, except that even the tiniest chunk travels at orbital velocities of multiple kilometers per second with kinetic energy to spare. Hence your task: to chase down sub-10 cm debris in hundreds of kilometers of mostly empty orbital planes as it zips along with destructive intent. Surely this cannot be so difficult with lasers on the ISS or something?
Orbital Delta V
Upper stage of a Japanese H-2A rocket which has been in orbit since 2009. It’s one of the largest pieces of orbital debris. (Credit:
Astroscale
)
When it comes to achieving and maintaining an orbit, velocity is everything. Go too fast (escape velocity) and you will zip out of the orbit into the darkness of space. Go too slow and you’ll find yourself becoming intimately familiar with the intricacies of atmospheric plasma formation. This means that for space debris to become a problem, it needs to get this correct amount of initial velocity relative to Earth from somewhere, which generally happens as a result of a rocket launch discarding pieces that remain in orbit, catastrophic satellite or rocket failure, a dropped tool by an astronaut, or even the use of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons creating a shower of particles that may or may not achieve orbit.
Once in orbit, the altitude determines just how stable that orbit is, with atmospheric drag being one of the prime factors in
orbital decay
. For debris in fairly low orbits close to the Karman line (~100 km altitude) atmospheric effects are quite noticeable and debris in these orbits will decay rapidly, sometimes burning up in as little as hours to weeks. Other orbits will experience some atmospheric drag, but only so slight that the decay period is measured in years or decades. For the International Space Station (ISS), its altitude is maintained between 370 and 460 km, with atmospheric drag decreasing its altitude by about 2 km per month.
As currently the largest man-made object in Earth orbit, the ISS’ atmospheric drag is of course rather significant. The Japanese H-2A rocket’s upper stage that launched the GOSAT satellite into space in 2009 has continued to passively orbit Earth since then at an altitude far above that of the ISS. Although this type of object may one day re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, it would be far in the future, with every active mission doing their utmost to not get hit by the thing.
Meanwhile there is a lot of sub-10 cm debris zipping around in orbit, for which their orbital decay would be insignificant due to their small size, and their exact position uncertain.
Scheduling A Meeting
Damaged solar arrays on Mir’s Spektr module following a collision with an unmanned Progress spacecraft in September 1997 (Credit:
NASA
)
For something large like a rocket upper stage, we are able to track the objects using
ground- and space-based observations
. This knowledge is what recently allowed a company called Astroscale to get a spacecraft to a distance of about 50 meters from the GOSAT mission’s upper stage as part of the
ADRAS-J space debris mission
. Even this took careful orbital mechanics, as the reconnaissance spacecraft was maneuvered closer to its unsuspecting target. In future missions this approach should theoretically end up with the prey being pushed to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.
An important aspect to note here is that with all cases of
orbital rendezvous
, it’s a nerve-wrecking experience even when you control all aspects of both spacecraft, such as when a spacecraft docks with the ISS. Since each will appear to be effectively motionless relative to each other it seems an easy task, as with moving closer to another person on the surface of the Earth. Instead the experience is closer to trying to meet up with another person while both of you are skydiving. Even the slightest change in your trajectory can send you careening into the other person, far away from them, or have you begin to spin uncontrollably.
Tiny Needles In A Big Haystack
Measurement data used by the NASA ODPO to describe the orbital debris populations in the near-Earth space environment. (Credit:
NASA ODPO
)
As the above graphic makes clear, our ability to detect space debris is highly dependent on its size and altitude, with our ability to detect smaller debris quite limited. For anything that’s smaller than something like an intact rocket stage, we rely heavily on statistics to predict how many of such objects are likely in orbit. This means that most orbital debris management
relies on passive defenses
, such as the
Whipple shield
which provides a ballistic armor to dissipate the energy of an impact.
Number of orbital objects by type. (Credit: ESA)
As the number of objects in orbit and with it debris increases, such defenses will be increasingly tested, and parts of spacecraft which cannot be protected – such as solar panels – will increasingly get hit by said debris. This is where we enter the territory of the infamous
Kessler syndrome
. Imagine these increasing strikes doing more damage, which causes parts of spacecraft to be destroyed and produce more debris, which in turn will damage and destroy additional active orbital objects, which will produce more debris, ad nauseam.
The point here is not that Earth’s orbits will be ‘full’, but rather it would turn the orbital planes above Earth’s surface into the equivalent of walking into a large room that seems empty, but out of seemingly nowhere a few specks of metal and maybe a bolt will suddenly impact into your body with a few km/s. If you know that this is the case, the higher this chance gets, the fewer people will be inclined to set foot into said room.
In a
2022 review article
by Barış Can Yalçın et al. in
Frontiers in Space Technologies
the issues of space debris is examined, along with a series of methods that are being investigated as potential debris removal methods. These include ways to ‘nudge’ the target object in a variety of ways, others actively seek to capture the target with a harpoon, net, foam, etc. There is also the idea to use lasers to destroy the target, which runs into many practical concerns, not the least of which is the amount of energy required for a usable laser system.
Friggin’ Lasers On Spacestations
Damage observed to ISS solar array 3A, panel 58 (cell side on left, Kapton backside on right). Note by-pass
diode is disconnected due to MMOD impact. (Credit: Hyde et al., 2019)
Using laser systems has seen a number of proposed systems, including a few that would be mounted on the ISS. The wildest idea here has been to use a ground-based laser that would heat orbital debris to change its orbital trajectory as a so-called
laser broom
. Although a lot of such projects have seen some level of funding and intended deployment dates, to this day it has remained a purely theoretical matter. With the disposal of rocket stages and defunct satellites much better regulated these days than a few decades ago, it seems the sense of urgency has deflated along with it.
Fact of the matter remains that orbital debris remains a hazard, however. One only has to observe the impacts on the ISS to get a sampling of the debris density in just low Earth orbit. For a sense of scale, even a relatively small object with a weight of 50 grams impacting with a relative speed of 15 km/s imparts the
equivalent energy
of a 1 kg of TNT. The generally much smaller debris that hits the ISS on a regular basis is not quite as destructive, but its traces are quite distinctive, from holes in the solar panel to visible impacts in the windows.
There would seem to be three distinct approaches to orbital debris: one is based around prevention and disposal of large debris, while another focuses on active defense, such as equipping a space station with sensors and (laser) turrets to take out debris. The third would be the fairly random sweeping of orbit, to actively or passively track down and neutralize debris, especially the type that is generally not tracked today.
What is clear is that we do not lack options to deal with orbital debris, but the complications of orbital mechanics and the low debris density makes for a fun game of finding needles in haystacks. Except that these needles are super small and can draw serious blood. | 37 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058210",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T15:49:57",
"content": "Humanity’s record for cleaning up our messes is a very large data setthat does not bode well for our near earth orbital environmentespecialy considering the monitisation,militerisation,and politisisation... | 1,760,371,740.942982 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/ai-not-needed-for-hackaday-projects/ | AI Not Needed For Hackaday Projects | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"computational linguistics",
"generative text"
] | It was Supercon this weekend, and Hackaday staffers made their way to Pasadena for what was by all accounts an excellent event. Now they’re all on their way home on red-eye flights and far from their benches, so spare a thought for the lonely editor holding the fort while they’ve been having fun. The supply of cool hacks for your entertainment must continue, so what’s to be done? Fortunately Hackaday writer [Anne Ogborn] has the answer, in the form of
an automated Hackaday article generator
.
We once had a commenter make a withering insult that one of our contributors’ writing styles looked like the work of an AI driven bot, a sentence that the writer in question treasures enough to have incorporated in their Hackaday email signature. [Anne] is a data scientist and Prolog programmer by trade so knows a bit about AI, and she has no need for such frippery. Instead she’s made a deck of cards each marked with a common theme among the work featured here, and generating new article titles is a simple case of drawing cards from the pack and assembling the resulting sentence.
The result is both amusing and we think, uncannily on the mark. Who wouldn’t want an ESP8266 powered cardboard drone? We think it will make a valuable addition to the Hackaday armoury, to be brought out on days such as the first of April, when there’s always an unexpected shortage of hacks. Video below the break. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058155",
"author": "Stph",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T12:24:36",
"content": "The “cardboard drone” part has already been worked out:https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-03/ukraine-war-australian-made-cardboard-drones-russia-warfare/102804120",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,740.859149 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/flaming-power-wheels-skeleton-wins-halloween/ | Flaming Power Wheels Skeleton Wins Halloween | Jenny List | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"FPV",
"halloween",
"Power Wheels"
] | When the project description starts with the sentence
“I use an RC remote and receiver, an esp32, high-current motor drivers, servos, an FPV camera, and a little propane”,
you know that this is one which deserves a second look. And so [gearscodeandfire]’s Halloween project caught our eye. It’s
a pink Power Wheels jeep driven by a skeletal rider
, and the best part is that the whole thing is remote controlled down to a pan-and-tilt skull, a first-person video feed, and even real flames.
At its heart is an ESP32 with a set of motor controllers and relays to do the heavy lifting. The controller is a standard radio remote controller, and the first-person view is an analogue feed as you’d find on a drone. The skeleton is given a child-like appearance by discarding the original adult-proportioned plastic skull and replacing it with a much larger item. The thought that plastic Halloween skulls are available in a range of standard sizes and can be considered as a part in their own right is something we find amusing. The propane burner is supplied from a small cylinder via a solenoid valve, and ignited with the spark from a high-voltage transformer.
The result, we think, wins Halloween hands down. Twelve-foot skeletons are
SO
2023!
The video is below the break.
https://hackaday.io/project/199110-ghost-toddler-esp32-fpv-pan-tilt-power-wheels | 48 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058128",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T10:53:15",
"content": "Real fire seems totally unnecessary for a Halloween prop.Doubley so for one that gets driven around in public.This would break several city ordinances here.You want to have a pyro display in your yard?Fine. G... | 1,760,371,740.807697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/ipod-clickwheel-games-preservation-project/ | IPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project | Navarre Bartz | [
"Games",
"ipod hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"ipod",
"ipod games",
"virtual machine"
] | The iPod once reigned supreme in the realm of portable music. Hackers are now working on
preserving one of its less lauded functions — gaming
. [via
Ars Technica
]
The run of 54 titles from 2006-2009 may not have made the iPod a handheld gaming success, but many still have fond memories of playing games on the devices. Unfortunately, Apple’s Fairplay DRM has made it nearly impossible to get those games back unless you happened to backup your library since those games can’t be downloaded again and are tied to both the account and iTunes installation that originally purchased the game.
Fortunately, intrepid hackers found syncing their iPods (or iTunes libraries) with working copies of the games could reauthorize the games via Apple’s servers to a secondary iTunes installation. Any supported iPod could then be linked to this installation and get the games as well. Through the wonders of virtualization, the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project by [Olsro] allows you to install many of these games on your own iPod with an iTunes install inside a Windows 10 VM which saves the expense of shipping iPods all over the place.
Looking for some more ways to get into iPod hacking? How about
some upgrades
or a look back at how
the first iPod hacks started
? | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,740.7139 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/humble-television-tubes-make-an-fm-regenerative-radio/ | Humble Television Tubes Make An FM Regenerative Radio | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"radio",
"regenerative receiver",
"tube radio"
] | The regenerative radio is long-ago superseded in commercial receivers, but it remains a common project for electronics or radio enthusiasts seeking to make a simple receiver. It’s most often seen for AM band receivers or perhaps shortwave ham band ones, but it’s a circuit which also works at much higher frequencies. [Perian Marcel] has done just this, with
a regenerative receiver for the FM broadcast band
.
The principle of a regenerative receiver is that it takes a tuned radio frequency receiver with a wide bandwidth and poor performance, and applies feedback to the point at which the circuit is almost but not quite oscillating. This has the effect of hugely increasing the “Q”, or quality factor of the receiver, giving it much more sensitivity and a narrow bandwidth. They’re tricky to tune but they can give reasonable performance, and they will happily slope-demodulate an FM transmission.
This one uses two tubes from consumer grade TV receivers, the “P” at the start of the part number being the giveaway for a 300mA series heater chain. The RF triode-pentode isn’t a radio part at all, instead it’s a mundane TV field oscillator part pushed into service at higher frequencies, while the other triode-pentode serves as an audio amplifier. The original circuit from which this one is adapted
is available online
, All in all it’s a neat project, and a reminder that exotic parts aren’t always necessary at higher frequencies. The video is below the break. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058135",
"author": "Awen",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T11:15:37",
"content": "It’s a superregen circuit but this article talks about regen :/ two different beasts",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8058253",
"author": "Josh... | 1,760,371,741.274573 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/a-lesson-in-rf-design-thanks-to-this-homebrew-lna/ | A Lesson In RF Design Thanks To This Homebrew LNA | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"bandpass",
"bias tee",
"LNA",
"low noise amplifier",
"LRPT",
"Noise figure",
"PGA-103",
"satellite",
"vna"
] | If you’re planning on working satellites or doing any sort of RF work where the signal lives down in the dirt, you’re going to need a low-noise amplifier. That’s typically not a problem, as the market is littered with dozens of cheap options that can be delivered in a day or two — you just pay your money and get to work. But is there a case to be made for rolling your own LNA?
[Salil, aka Nuclearrambo] thinks so, and he did a nice job
showing us how it’s done
. The first step, as always, is to define your specs, which for [Salil] were pretty modest: a low noise figure, moderate gain, and good linearity. He also wanted a bandpass filter for the 2-meter amateur radio band and for weather satellite downlinks, and a bias-tee to power the LNA over the coax feedline. The blog post has a detailed discussion of the electrical design, plus some good tips on PCB design for RF applications. We also found the discussion on bias-tee design helpful, especially for anyone who has ever struggled with the idea that RF and DC can get along together on a single piece of coax.
Part 2
concentrates on testing the LNA, mostly using hobbyist-grade test gear like the
NanoVNA
and
tiny SA
spectrum analyzer. [Salil]’s tests showed the LNA lived up to the design specs and more, making it more than ready to put to work with an RTL-SDR.
Was this more work than buying an LNA? Absolutely, and probably with the same results. But then again, what’s to learn by just getting a pre-built module in the mail? | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058302",
"author": "DerAxeman",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T20:18:51",
"content": "Be careful joining ground pours across filter elements(for some it can be done with no ill effects). It can cause signals to leak along the ground pour before reaching the ground plane through the vias.... | 1,760,371,740.677229 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/power-over-skin-makes-powering-wearables-easier/ | Power-Over-Skin Makes Powering Wearables Easier | Navarre Bartz | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"health",
"wearable",
"Wearables",
"workout"
] | The ever-shrinking size of electronics and sensors has allowed wearables to help us quantify more and more about ourselves in smaller and smaller packages, but one major constraint is the size of the battery you can fit inside. What if you could
remotely power a wearable device instead
?
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University were able to develop a power transmitter that lets power flow over human skin to remote devices over distances as far a head-to-toe. The human body can efficiently transmit 40 MHz RF energy along the skin and keeps this energy confined around the body and through clothing, as the effect is capacitive.
The researchers were able to develop several proof-of-concept devices including “a Bluetooth
ring with a joystick, a stick-and-forget medical patch which logs data, and a sun-exposure patch with a screen — demonstrating user input, displays, sensing, and wireless communication.” As the researchers state in the paper, this could open up some really interesting new wearable applications that weren’t possible previously because of power constraints.
If you’re ready to dive into the world of wearables, how about this
hackable smart ring
or a
wearable that rides rails
? | 33 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057969",
"author": "Bear Naff",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T21:20:47",
"content": "It’s almost a little sad to see the Personal Area Network (PAN) concept from the 90’s devolve into a “mere” power-delivery system. The original idea had been to use this technology to link worn compone... | 1,760,371,741.225866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/random-wire-antenna-uses-no-wire/ | Random Wire Antenna Uses No Wire | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"carbon fiber",
"ham radio"
] | Ideally, if you are going to transmit, you want a properly-tuned resonant antenna. But, sometimes, it isn’t practical. [Ham Radio Rookie] knew about random wire antennas but didn’t want a wire antenna. So, he took carbon fiber extension poles and Faraday tape and made a “
random stick
” antenna. You can check it out in the video below.
We aren’t sure what normal people are doing with 7-meter-long telescoping poles, but — as you might expect — the carbon fiber is not particularly conductive. That’s where the tape comes in. Each section gets some tape, and when you stretch it out, the tape lines up.
We aren’t sure how these poles are constructed, but the video claims that the adjacent sections couple capacitively. We aren’t sure about that as the carbon fiber
won’t be very conductive
, but it probably isn’t a very good insulator, either. Then again, the poles may have a paint or other coating along the surface. So without seeing it, it is hard to say what’s coupling the elements.
He admits this is experimental and there is more work to do. However, it seems cheap and easy to setup. The hardest part is tapping an M10 hole in the end cap to allow things to mount.
We suppose you could
make your own tubes
, but it hardly seems worth the trouble. If you cut or drill this stuff, you might want
to take precautions
. | 40 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058398",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T06:14:54",
"content": "im more interested in the measurement accuracy of that tattoo over time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8058434",
"author": "Andrew",
... | 1,760,371,741.089986 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/zinc-creep-and-electroplasticity-why-arecibo-collapsed/ | Zinc Creep And Electroplasticity: Why Arecibo Collapsed | Dan Maloney | [
"News"
] | [
"Arecibo",
"collapse",
"electroplasticity",
"spelter socket",
"zinc creep"
] | It’s been nearly four years since the Arecibo Telescope collapsed, an event the world got to witness in unprecedented detail thanks to strategically positioned drones. They captured breathtaking video of one of the support cables pulling from its socket as well as the spectacularly destructive results of 900 tons of scientific instruments crashing into the 300-meter primary reflector. But exactly why did those cable sockets fail?
A new report
aims to answer that question, and in the process raises some interesting questions of its own.
The proximate causes of the collapse
have been known for a while, including the most obvious and visible one, the failure of the zinc “spelter sockets” that were cast around the splayed ends of the wire ropes to hold them in place. The new report agrees with this conclusion, at least in part, implicating “zinc creep,” or the tendency for zinc to deform over time under load. Where it appears to differ, though, is with the quality of workmanship on the sockets, finding no issues with the way the individual wires in the failed support cable were manually splayed within the socket before the molten zinc was poured. The report also points out that the collapse probably started when Hurricane Maria swept over Puerto Rico 39 months before the collapse, after which zinc creep in the sockets seemed to accelerate.
But why did the sockets fail? As the report points out, spelter sockets are commonly used to anchor cables that support heavy loads under conditions similar to the tropical climate at Arecibo. After ruling out every other cause, the committee was left with the conclusion that Arecibo itself may have been to blame for the accelerated zinc creep, thanks to electrical currents induced in the cables and sockets when the telescope’s powerful transmitters were used. They call this “long-term, low-current electroplasticity.” Electroplastic effects have been observed since the 1950s, and while far from certain that’s what happened here, the thought is that skin-effect currents induced in the support cables flowed to ground through the zinc sockets, increasing the plasticity of the metal and accelerating the zinc creep that ultimately led to collapse.
Case closed? Hardly. The electroplasticity mechanism for the Arecibo collapse offered by this report is almost a “diagnosis of exclusion” situation. It makes sense, though; since no other spelter sockets have ever failed this way in a century of use, there’s a good chance that the root cause was specific to Arecibo, and since it was once the world’s most powerful radio transmitter, it seems like a red flag that bears further investigation. | 33 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058383",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T03:14:45",
"content": "Bottom line: a structure well advanced into it’s functional lifespan and inadequate maintenance. With all of the infrastructure built around the telescope over the years and the fruits of the research car... | 1,760,371,741.015554 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/picorom-a-dip-32-8-bit-rom-emulator/ | PicoROM, A DIP-32 8-Bit ROM Emulator | Dave Rowntree | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"arcade",
"DIP-32",
"emulation",
"eprom",
"MiSTER",
"rom",
"rp2040",
"usb",
"USB C"
] | As we all know, when developing software for any platform or simply hacking a bit of code to probe how something works, the ability to deploy code rapidly is a huge help. [Martin Donlon], aka [wickerwaka], is well known in retro gaming and arcade hardware reverse engineering circles and had the usual issues figuring out how an arcade CPU board worked while developing a MiSTer core. Some interesting ASICs needed quite a bit of poking, and changing the contents of socketed ERPOMs is a labour-intensive process. The solution was
PicoROM
, a nicely designed ROM emulator in a handy DIP-32 form factor.
As the title suggests, PicoROM is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040. It emulates an 8-bit ROM up to 2MBits in size with speeds up to 100ns. Since it uses the RP2040, USB connectivity is simple, enabling rapid uploading of new images to one (or more) PicoROMs in mere seconds. A vertically orientated USB-C connector allows multiple PicoROMs to be cabled to the host without interfering with neighbouring hardware. The firmware running on core 1 passes data from the internal 264K SRAM, using the PIO block as a bus interface to the target. A neat firmware feature is the addition of a mechanism to use a ROM region as a bidirectional control channel, which the software running on the target can use to communicate back to the host computer. This allows remote triggering of actions and the reporting of responses. Responses which may not be physically observable externally. [Martin] is using this feature extensively to help probe the functionality of some special function chips on the target boards, which is still a slow process but helped massively by reducing that critical software iteration time. The PCB was designed with KiCAD. The project files for which can be found
here
.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the RP2040 used for ROM emulation;
here’s a pile of wires that does the same job
. It just isn’t as pretty. Of course, if you really must use EPROMs, then
you could give this sweet programmer a look over
. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058369",
"author": "Vincent P Crabtree",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T02:02:35",
"content": "Anyone know where I can just buy this?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8058392",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2024-... | 1,760,371,741.32111 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/split-flap-clock-flutters-its-way-to-displaying-time-without-numbers/ | Split-Flap Clock Flutters Its Way To Displaying Time Without Numbers | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"art",
"clock",
"split flap"
] | Here’s a design for a split-flap clock that doesn’t do it the usual way. Instead of the flaps showing numbers ,
Klapklok
has a bit more in common with flip-dot displays.
Klapklok updates every 2.5 minutes.
It’s an art piece that uses custom-made split-flaps which flutter away to update the display as time passes. An array of vertically-mounted flaps creates a sort of low-res display, emulating an analog clock. These are no ordinary actuators, either. The visual contrast and cleanliness of the mechanism is fantastic, and the sound they make is less of a chatter and more of a whisper.
The sound the flaps create and the sight of the high-contrast flaps in motion are intended to be a relaxing and calming way to connect with the concept of time passing. There’s some interactivity built in as well, as the Klapklok also allows one to simply draw on it wirelessly with via a mobile phone.
Klapklok has a total of 69 elements which are all handmade. We imagine there was really no other way to get exactly what the designer had in mind; something many of us can relate to.
Split-flap mechanisms are wonderful for a number of reasons, and if you’re considering making your own be sure to check out this
easy and modular DIY reference design
before you go about re-inventing the wheel. On the other hand, if you
do
wish to get clever about actuators maybe check out this
flexible PCB that is also its own actuator
. | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058316",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T21:29:41",
"content": "…Put it inside a frame designed after the old-school Macintosh cursor wristwatch",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8058318",
"author": "Hirudinea",
... | 1,760,371,741.41745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/open-source-robot-transforms/ | Open-Source Robot Transforms | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"articulating arms",
"configuration",
"ESP32",
"open source",
"platform",
"robot",
"transformer",
"walking",
"wheels"
] | Besides Pokémon, there might have been no greater media franchise for a child of the 90s than the Transformers, mysterious robots fighting an intergalactic war but which can inexplicably change into various Earth-based object, like trucks and airplanes. It led to a number of toys which can also change shapes from fighting robots into various ordinary objects as well. And, perhaps in a way of life imitating art, plenty of real-life robots have features one might think were inspired by this franchise
like this transforming quadruped robot
.
Called the CYOBot, the robot has four articulating arms with a wheel at the end of each. The arms can be placed in a wide array of positions for different operating characteristics, allowing the robot to move in an incredibly diverse way. It’s based on a previous version called the
CYOCrawler
, using similar articulating arms but with no wheels. The build centers around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, giving it plenty of compute power for things like machine learning, as well as wireless capabilities for control or access to more computing power.
Both robots are open source and modular as well, allowing a range of people to use and add on to the platform. Another perk here is that most parts are common or 3d printed, making it a fairly low barrier to entry for a platform with so many different configurations and options for expansion and development. If you prefer robots without wheels, though,
we’d always recommend looking at Strandbeests for inspiration
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8059504",
"author": "Jackantubis",
"timestamp": "2024-11-08T15:06:19",
"content": "Tachikoma is on the way :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8061114",
"author": "tyler?",
"timestamp": "2024-11-12T18:14:36",
... | 1,760,371,741.361522 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/ubiquitous-successful-bus-hacking-usb-2-hubs/ | Ubiquitous Successful Bus: Hacking USB 2 Hubs | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"Slider"
] | [
"usb",
"usb 2",
"USB hub"
] | We’ve been recently looking into USB 2.0
– the ubiquitous point-to-point communications standard. USB 2 is completely different from USB 3, the blue-connector next-generation USB standard. For instance, USB 2 is a full-duplex pseudo-differential bus, and it’s not AC-coupled. This makes USB2 notoriously difficult to galvanically isolate, as opposed to USB 3. On the other hand, USB 2 is a lot easier to incorporate into your projects. And perhaps the best way to do so is to implement a USB hub.
USB 2 hubs are, by now, omnipresent. it doesn’t cost much to add to your board, and you truly have tons of options. The standard option is 4-port hubs – one uplink port to your host, four downlink ports to your devices. If you only have two or three devices, you might be tempted to look for a hub IC with a lower amount of ports, but it’s not worth bothering – just use a 4-port chip, and stock up on them.
What about 7-port chips? You will see those every now and then – but take a close look at the datasheet. Some of them will be two 4-port chips inside a single package, with four of the ports bottlenecked compared to the three other ports – watch out! Desktop 7-port hubs are basically guaranteed to use two 4-port ICs, too, so, again, watch out for bottlenecks.
lsusb -t
will help you determine the hub’s structure in case you don’t want to crack its case open, thankfully.
Recommendations? I use SL2.1 chips – they’re available in an SO16 package, very unproblematic, to-the-point pinout and easily hand-solderable. CH334 is a close contender, but watch out because there are different variants of this chip that differ by both package and pinout, so if you’re buying a chip with a certain letter, you will want to stick to it. Not just that, be careful – different variants run out at different rates, so if you lock yourself into a CH334 variant, consider stocking up on it.
There’s no shortage of Western-origin chips, either – Texas Instruments is a leader here no doubt. If you ever fear running out of hub ICs in your stock while assembling something, you can prepare for this in advance by leaving zero-ohm footprints under the hub’s package. USB 2 doesn’t care for stubs much, and such a hack is very easy to do with SL2.1 in particular. Got two extra ports left over? Put them on a PC-case style dual USB2 9-pin header – there’s never a shortage of fun accessories compatible with it!
Powering USB2 hub ICs is easy – they tend to include a 5 V to 3.3 V linear regulator inside, so you can power them from a 5 V source directly. On the other hand, if you don’t have any 5 V to spare, the overwhelming majority of hub ICs can be powered from 3.3 V directly – usually, that requires shorting the hub’s 5 V input to 3.3 V, but not necessarily. If the datasheet is unclear on 3.3 V-only operation, leave in some 0R jumpers. And, of course, make sure to add 100 nF or similar capacitors – one per hub IC’s power pin. Remember the disclaimer about built-in RC oscillators in MCUs being imprecise? Same goes for hubs – if your hub boasts an internal RC oscillator, don’t trust it, make sure you have a crystal footprint you can populate if you get stability issues.
Putting some USB port pins to the outside world? You will want to protect them from harm – or, rather, you will want to protect your expensive CPU from harm.
Please, Consider ESD Diodes
The black SOT23-6 footprint is a group of ESD diodes – small, cheap, and it’s easy to add in case you ever need it, which you very well might.
Bringing USB somewhere far, or even just using it as your link to the external world? You should really use ESD diodes – or at least plan them in and give yourself the option to populate them later. There’s no shortage of USB2-capable ESD diodes, after all, and ESD problems are closer than you might expect.
For instance, I’ve recently built a pocket device consisting of a battery-powered Pi Zero and a USB soundcard connected to wired headphones, with a pretty standard kind of long cable. I wear a lot of synthetic clothes, in particular, hoodies and jackets, and I kept having the Pi reboot every time I took my jacket off or put it on, through static electricity induced into the headphone wires through the cable insulation, going into the USB port on the Pi Zero.
So, I went and put ESD diodes on the USB 2 pins, using the footprint I previously added to my board “just in case” but didn’t populate, and this failure mode has instantly disappeared for good. Remember, footprints are free, and bodges cost time. Want a recommendation? The four-channel diodes are pretty good for USB 2; look for the SRV-05 footprint in KiCad, in the SOT-23-6 package. It’s a generic enough footprint that there’s no shortage of ESD diode packs in the same footprint, they’re low-capacity enough that you can even use it for purposes like captouch pad protection, and they will also work for applications like Ethernet or externally available GPIOs.
Do you need ESD diodes? Yes, just add the footprint. Same goes for over-current control switches, by the way – I’ve already talked about the SY6820, but it bears repeating. Your entire system doesn’t have to reboot when you short-circuit a USB port on the board, and a cheap current-limited switch IC will let you ensure that’s the case, while also letting you switch the port power on and off, as a nice bonus.
This was just a few tips on and around USB 2 hubs and connectors, but I hope it helps you out with your projects. | 28 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058252",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T18:10:52",
"content": "Inre: 4 port hubsLast month I dug through a box of parts and it had maybe 5 or more USB (1.1?) hubs in it…Plus another 3 elsewhere.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,741.747443 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/tracking-hydrogen-in-space-with-a-home-radio-telescope-for-21-cm-emissions/ | Tracking Hydrogen In Space With A Home Radio Telescope For 21 Cm Emissions | Maya Posch | [
"how-to",
"Space"
] | [
"milky way",
"Radio Telescope"
] | What do you get when you put a one-meter parabolic dish, an SDR, a Raspberry Pi, and an H1-LNA for 21 cm emissions together? The answer is: a radio telescope that can track hydrogen in the Milky Way as well as the velocities of hydrogen clouds via their Doppler shifts, according to a paper by [Jack Phelps] titled “
Galactic Neutral Hydrogen Structures Spectroscopy and Kinematics: Designing a Home Radio Telescope for 21 cm Emission
“.
The hardware pipeline consists of three parts: antenna, signal conditioners, and computer, as per the above graphic by [Jack Phelps]. The solid lines are low-loss microwave coax LMR-400 cable, and the dotted line represents USB 3.0 between the RTL-SDR and Raspberry Pi 4 system. This Raspberry Pi 4 runs a
pre-made OS image
(
NsfSdr
) by [Dr. Glenn Langston] at the National Science Foundation, which contains scripts for hydrogen line observation, calibration and data processing.
After calibration, the findings were verified using publicly available data, and the setup could be used to detect hydrogen by pointing the antenna at the intended target in space. Although a one-meter parabolic dish isn’t going to give you the most sensitivity, it’s still pretty rad that using effectively all off-the-shelf components and freely available software, you too can have your own radio telescope. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8058244",
"author": "cmholm",
"timestamp": "2024-11-05T17:54:53",
"content": "I used to have a one meter for long distance wifi, shame I gave it away during a major move.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8058256",
"author": "... | 1,760,371,741.677259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/supercon-2024-badge-add-on-winners/ | Supercon 2024: Badge Add-On Winners | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"2024 Hackaday Superconference",
"Simple Add-On"
] | This year we challenged the Hackaday community to develop
Shitty
Simple
Supercon Add-Ons (SAO) that did more than just blink a few LEDs
. The SAO standard includes I2C data and a pair of GPIO pins, but historically, they’ve very rarely been used. We knew the talented folks in this community would be able to raise the bar, but as they have a tendency to do, they’ve exceeded all of our expectations.
As we announced live during the closing ceremony at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, the following four SAOs will be put into production and distributed to all the attendees at Hackaday Europe in Spring of 2025.
Best Overall: SAO Multimeter
For the “Best Overall” category, we only intended to compare it with the other entries in the contest. But in the end, we think there’s a strong case to be made that
[Thomas Flummer] has created the greatest SAO of all time
. So far, anyway.
This add-on is a fully functional digital multimeter, with functions for measuring voltage, resistance, and continuity. The design is a pure work of art, with its structure combining stacked PCBs and 3D printed parts. There’s even tiny banana plugs to connect up properly scaled probes. Incredible.
In the documentation [Thomas] mentions there are additional functions he didn’t have time to include in the firmware, such as modes to analyze the I2C and GPIO signals being received. Now that it’s been selected for production, we’re hoping he’ll have the time to get the code finished up before its European debut.
Fun: Etch sAo Sketch
This
SAO recreates the iconic art toy
in a (hopefully) non-trademarked way, with a 1.5″ inch 128 x 128 grayscale OLED display and a pair of trimpots capped with 3D printed knobs. Drawing is fun enough, but the nostalgia really kicks in when you give it a good shake — the onboard LIS3DH 3-axis accelerometer picks up the motion and wipes the display just like the real thing.
Created by [Andy Geppert], this SAO isn’t just a pretty face. Flipping it over shows an exceptionally clever technique for connecting the display board to the main PCB. Tiny metal balls (or “alignment spheres” if you want to get fancy) mate up with the mounting holes on the OLED board and center it, and a touch of solder locks it all in place.
Fine Art: Bendy SAO
While this
wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing SAO
might look like the sort of thing that would be outside of a used car dealership, but creator [debraansell] managed to shrink it down so the point that it’s reasonable to plug into your badge. More or less.
There are several fascinating tricks at work here, from lighting the PCB from the back using side-firing LEDs to the integrated slip rings. If this one didn’t look so good, it would have been a strong contender for the “Least Manufacturable” Honorable Mention.
Functional: Vectrex SAO
Creating a
replica of the Vectrex at SAO scale
would have been an impressive enough accomplishment, but [Brett Walach] took this one all the way and made it playable.
The display is a 7 x 10 Charlieplexed LED matrix, while the “joystick” is implemented with a 1-button capacitive touch sensor. A PIC16F886 microcontroller runs the simplified version of
Scramble
, and there’s even a speaker for era-appropriate audio.
But that’s not all! This SAO was also designed to be hacked — so not only is all the hardware and software open source, but there’re various jumpers to fiddle with various settings and an I2C control protocol that lets you command the action from the badge.
Honorable Mentions
As usual, this contest had several Honorable Mentions categories — while we would have loved to put all of these SAOs into production, there’s only so much we can do before now and Spring.
[Jeremy Geppert]’s
SAO LoRa Walkie Talkie
was a judge favorite, for its simple good looks and the extra functionality that it brings to the table. [Scorch Works]’s
SAO Infinity Mirror
was absolutely beautiful to see in person, and makes a fantastic display when many of them get together. And [MakeItHackin]’s
Skull of Fate SAO
not only looked super when its eyes scan the room, but it could read your future as well!
Best Communication:
Using I2C to get SAOs to talk to the badge (or each other) was a big part of this contest, but we were also on the lookout for entries which helped facilitate badge-to-badge communications.
The
Badge Tag NFC SAO from [Thomas Flummer]
is a perfect example of both — it uses the NXP NTAG I2C Plus to provide 2K of read-write storage that can be accessed either internally through the I2C bus by the badge, or externally by an NFC device such as a smartphone. Modeled after a traditional conference name tag, this SAO was designed to make it easier for sharing your contact info with others during a busy con.
Infrared Communication SAO by [Alec Probst]
brings infrared communications to the party, while looking like a classic TV remote. Though the original idea was to get this working in conjunction with the badge to
act as a sort of TV-B-Gone
, it ended up being used as part of a laser tag game during Supercon.
The
GAT Nametag SC8 from [true]
tackles communication on a more human level by providing a digital name tag for your badge. This compact board’s secret trick is the ability to make sure your name is legible no matter what its orientation thanks to a LIS2DW12 accelerometer that can detect the SAO’s orientation relative to the ground. RGB LEDs catch the viewer’s eye, but it’s the incredible firmware with seemingly endless options for text styling and tweaks that really set this build apart.
Light Show:
There’s little question that
Featuring You! from [Nanik Adnani]
is a perfect entry for this category. Nominally, it’s a little arrow you can write your name on and use a name tag. But power it up and you can dazzle anyone standing too close with its array of marching white LEDs. In a particularly nice touch, the circuit is implemented with only discreet components — no microcontroller.
The
reDOT_RGB from [Alex]
is a tiny 5×7 RGB LED matrix with a minuscule ATtiny816 MCU around the back to control the show. At just 8 x 11 mm, it’s hard to overstate just how tiny this SAO is.
While on the subject of tiny boards, the
Persistence of Vision POV Display
is another entry not much larger than the SAO connector itself. Using a row of five tiny white LEDs and a ADXL345 accelerometer, [Michael Yim] is able to write text in mid-air thanks to the gullibility of the human eye.
Least Manufacturable:
Simple Add-Ons are essentially an art form, so it’s not surprising to find that they don’t often lend themselves to mass production. Several of the entries this year would be a real challenge to make in large numbers, but the one that really keeps us up at night is the
ultra tiny smart SAO from [Alex].
This board is designed to fit inside the space between four header pins. Thanks, but no thanks.
Raising the Bar
Our hope this year was to elevate the Simple Add-On from a decorative piece of flair to something functional, and potentially, even useful. The results were incredible, and while we can only pick four winners this time around, every entry helped push the state-of-the-art forward in its own way. It’s hard to imagine how the SAO envelope can be pushed any further, but we can’t wait to find out. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057889",
"author": "Markus Bindhammer",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T18:10:31",
"content": "Congratulations to the winners. So many nice entries!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057979",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly... | 1,760,371,741.63262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/pi-zero-to-ar-building-diy-augmented-reality-glasses/ | Pi Zero To AR: Building DIY Augmented Reality Glasses | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"ar",
"augmented reality",
"bluetooth",
"goggles",
"lens",
"pi zero",
"resin"
] | If you’re into pushing tech boundaries from home, this one’s for you.
Redditor [mi_kotalik] has crafted ‘Zero’
, a custom pair of DIY augmented reality (AR) glasses using a Raspberry Pi Zero. Designed as an affordable, self-contained device for displaying simple AR functions, Zero allows him to experiment without breaking the bank. With features like video playback, Bluetooth audio, a teleprompter, and an image viewer, Zero is a testament to what can be done with determination and creativity on a budget.
The original Reddit thread
includes videos, a build log, and links to documentation on X, giving you an in-depth look into [mi_kotalik]’s journey. Take
a sneak peek through the lens here
.
Creating Zero wasn’t simple. From designing the frame in Tinkercad to experimenting with transparent PETG to print lenses (ultimately switching to resin-cast lenses), [mi_kotalik] faced plenty of challenges. By customizing SPI displays and optimizing them to 60 FPS, he achieved an impressive level of real-time responsiveness, allowing him to explore AR interactions like never before. While the Raspberry Pi Zero’s power is limited, [mi_kotalik] is already planning a V2 with a Compute Module 4 to enable 3D rendering, GPS, and spatial tracking.
Zero is an inspiring example for tinkerers hoping to make AR tech more accessible, especially after the fresh news of
both Meta and Apple cancelling their attempts
to venture in the world of AR. If you are into AR and eager to learn from an original project like this one, check out
the full Reddit thread
and explore Hackaday’s past coverage on
augmented reality experiments
. | 36 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057866",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T17:37:07",
"content": "Blurry!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057929",
"author": "matt",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T19:51:11",... | 1,760,371,741.825667 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/i-installed-gentoo-so-you-dont-havtoo/ | I Installed Gentoo So You Don’t Havtoo | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Featured",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"compile",
"customization",
"gentoo",
"init system",
"installations",
"linux",
"macbook",
"old hardware",
"source",
"source code",
"USE flags"
] | A popular expression in the Linux forums nowadays is noting that someone “uses Arch btw”, signifying that they have the technical chops to install and use Arch Linux, a distribution designed to be cutting edge but that also has a reputation of being for advanced users only. Whether this meme was originally posted seriously or was started as a joke at the expense of some of the more socially unaware Linux users is up for debate. Either way, while it is true that Arch can be harder to install and configure than something like Debian or Fedora, thanks to excellent documentation and modern (but optional) install tools it’s no longer that much harder to run than either of these popular distributions.
For my money, the true mark of a Linux power user is the ability to install and configure Gentoo Linux and use it as a daily driver or as a way to breathe life into aging hardware. Gentoo requires much more configuration than any mainline distribution outside of things like
Linux From Scratch
, and has been my own technical white whale for nearly two decades now. I was finally able to harpoon this beast recently and hope that my story inspires some to try Gentoo while, at the same time, saving others the hassle.
A Long Process, in More Ways Than One
My first experience with Gentoo was in college at Clemson University in the late ’00s. The computing department there offered an official dual-boot image for any university-supported laptop at the time thanks to major effort from the Clemson Linux User Group, although the image contained the much-more-user-friendly Ubuntu alongside Windows. CLUG was largely responsible for helping me realize that I had options outside of Windows, and eventually I moved completely away from it and began using my own Linux-only installation. Being involved in a Linux community for the first time had me excited to learn about Linux beyond the confines of Ubuntu, though, and I quickly became the type of person featured in
this relevant XKCD
. So I fired up an old Pentium 4 Dell desktop that I had and attempted my first Gentoo installation.
For the uninitiated, the main thing that separates Gentoo from most other distributions is that it is source-based, meaning that users generally must compile the source code for all the software they want to use on their own machines rather than installing pre-compiled binaries from a repository. So, for a Gentoo installation, everything from the bootloader to the kernel to the desktop to the browser needs to be compiled when it is installed. This can take an extraordinary amount of time especially for underpowered machines, although its ability to customize compile options means that the ability to optimize software for specific computers will allow users to claim that time back when the software is actually used. At least, that’s the theory.
It didn’t work out too well for me and my Dell, though, largely because Dell of the era would put bottom-basement, obscure hardware in their budget computers which can make for a frustrating Linux experience even among the more user-friendly distributions due to a general lack of open-source drivers. I still hold a grudge against Dell for this practice in much the same way that I still refuse to use Nvidia graphics cards, but before I learned this lesson I spent weeks one summer in college with this Frankensteined computer, waiting for kernels and desktop environments to compile for days only to find out that there was something critical missing that broke my installations. I did get to a working desktop environment at one point, but made a mistake with it along the way and decided, based on my Debian experiences, that re-installing the operating system was the way to go rather than actually fixing the mistake I had made. I never got back to a working desktop after that and eventually gave up.
This experience didn’t drive me away from Gentoo completely, though. It was always at the back of my mind during any new Linux install I performed, especially if I was doing so on underpowered hardware that could have benefited from Gentoo’s customization. I would try it occasionally again and again only to give up for similar reasons, but finally decided I had gained enough knowledge from my decades as a Debian user to give it a proper go. A lot has changed in the intervening years; in the days of yore an aspiring Gentoo user had to truly start at the ground up, even going as far as needing to compile a compiler. These days only Gentoo developers take these fundamental steps, providing end users with a “Stage 3” tarball which contains the core needed to install the rest of Gentoo.
Bringing Out The Best of Old Hardware
And I do have a piece of aging hardware that could potentially benefit from a Gentoo installation. My mid-2012 Macbook Pro (
actually featured in this article
) is still a fairly capable machine, especially since I only really need a computer these days for light Internet browsing and writing riveting Hackaday articles. Apple long ago dropped support for this machine in macOS meaning that it’s no longer a good idea to run its native operating system. In my opinion, though, these older, pre-
butterfly
Macs are still excellent Linux machines aside from minor issues like finding the correct WiFi drivers. (It also can’t run libreboot,
but it’s worth noting that some Macs even older than mine can
.) With all of that in mind I got to work compiling my first Linux kernel in years, hoping to save my old Macbook from an e-waste pile.
There’s a lot expected of a new Gentoo user even with modern amenities like the
stage 3 tarball
(and even then, you have to pick a stage file from a list of around 50 options), and although the handbooks provided are fairly comprehensive they can be confusing or misleading in places. (It’s certainly recommended to read the whole installation guide first and even perform a trial installation in a virtual machine before trying it on real hardware.) In addition to compiling most software from source (
although some popular packages like Firefox, LibreOffice, and even the kernel itself are available as precompiled binaries now
), Gentoo requires the user to configure what are called USE flags for each package which specify that package’s compile options. A global USE flag file is also maintained to do things like build GNOME, Bluetooth, even 32-bit support into every package, while specific package USE flags are maintained in other separate files. For example, when compiling GIMP, users can choose which image formats they want their installation of GIMP to support. There’s a second layer of complexity here too as certain dependencies for packages can be “masked” or forbidden from being installed by default, so the user will also need to understand why certain things are masked and manually unmask them if the risk is deemed acceptable.
One thing that Gentoo has pioneered in recent years is the use of what it calls distribution kernels. These are kernel configurations with sane defaults, meaning that that they’ll probably work for most users on most systems on the first try. From there, users can begin tweaking the kernel for their use case once they have a working installation, but they don’t have to do that leg work during the installation process anymore. Of course, in true Gentoo fashion, you can still go through the process of configuring the kernel manually during the install if you choose to.
Aside from compiling a kernel, Gentoo also requires the user to make other fundamental choices about their installation during the install process that most other major distributions don’t. Perhaps the biggest one is that the user has to choose an init system, the backbone of the operating system’s startup and service management systems. Generally most distributions decide for you, with most larger distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Arch going with systemd by default. Like anything in the Linux world, systemd is controversial for some, so there are alternatives with OpenRC being the one with the most acceptance in the Gentoo world. I started out with OpenRC in my installations but found a few pieces of software that I use regularly don’t play well with it, so I started my build over and now use systemd. The user also can select between a number of different bootloaders, and I chose the tried-and-true Grub seeing no compelling reason to change at the moment.
In addition, there’s no default desktop environment, so you’ll also need to choose between GNOME, KDE, XFCE, any other desktop environment, or among countless window managers. The choice to use X or Wayland is up to you as well. For what it’s worth, I can at least report that GNOME takes about three times as long to compile as the kernel itself does, so keep that in mind if you’re traveling this path after me.
It’s also possible you’ll need to install a number of drivers for hardware, some of which might be non-free and difficult to install in Gentoo while they might be included by default in distributions like Ubuntu. And, like everything else, they’ll need to be compiled and configured on your machine as well. For me specifically, Gentoo was missing the software to control the fans on my MacBook Pro, but this was pretty easy to install once I found it. There’s an additional headache here as well with the Broadcom Wi-Fi cards found in older Macs, which are notoriously difficult pieces of hardware to work with in the Linux world. I was eventually able to get Wi-Fi working on my MacBook Pro, but I also have an 11″ MacBook Air from the same era that has a marginally different wireless chipset that I still haven’t been able to get to work in Gentoo, giving me flashbacks to my experience with my old Dell circa 2007.
This level of granularity when building software and an overall installation is what gives Gentoo the possibility for highly optimized installations, as every package can be configured for the user’s exact use case for every package down to the kernel itself. It’s also a rolling release model similar to Arch, so in general the newest versions of software will be available for it as soon as possible while a Debian user might have to wait a year or two for the next stable release.
A Few Drawbacks
It’s not all upside, though. For those without a lot of Gentoo experience (including myself) it’s possible to do something like spend a day and a half compiling a kernel or desktop environment only to find out a critical feature wasn’t built, and then have to spend another day and a half compiling it again with the correct USE flags. Or to use the wrong stage file on the first try, or realize OpenRC won’t work as an init system for a specific use case, or having Grub inscrutably be unable to find the installation. Also, don’t expect Gentoo to be faster out-of-the-box than Debian or Fedora without a customization effort, either; for me Gentoo was actually slower than Debian in my benchmarks without a few kernel and package re-compiles. With enough persistence and research, though, it’s possible to squeeze every bit of processing power out of a computer this way.
Personally, I’m not sure I’m willing to go through the amount of effort to migrate my workstations (and especially my servers) to Gentoo because of how much extra configuration is required for often marginal performance gains thanks to the power and performance capabilities of modern hardware. Debian Stable will likely remain my workhorse for the time being for those machines, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone install Gentoo who doesn’t want to get into the weeds with their OS. But as a Linux hobbyist
there’s a lot to be said for using other distributions that are a little more difficult to use than Debian or even Arch
, although I’d certainly recommend using a tool like Clonezilla to make backups of your installation from time to time so if you do make the same mistakes I made in college you can more easily restore your system. For me, though, I still plan to keep Gentoo on my MacBook Pro since it’s the machine that I tinker with the most in the same way that a classic car enthusiast wants to keep their vehicle on the road and running as well as it did when it was new. It also lets me end forum posts with a sardonic “I use Gentoo, btw” to flex on the Arch users, which might be the most important thing of all. | 72 | 43 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057805",
"author": "Mandlebrot",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T15:22:32",
"content": "Ah, memories of a Pentium III building the kernel for hours… only to realise I’d forgotten to build in file system support for ext3. Was powerful in that you could avoid unnecessary junk, and have opti... | 1,760,371,742.121371 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/reusing-an-old-android-phone-for-gpio-with-external-usb-devices/ | Reusing An Old Android Phone For GPIO With External USB Devices | Maya Posch | [
"Android Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"smart phone",
"upcycling"
] | Each year millions of old smartphones are either tossed as e-waste or are condemned to lie unloved in dusty drawers, despite the hardware in them usually being still perfectly fine. Reusing these little computers for another purpose once the phone’s manufacturer drops support is made hard by a range of hardware and software (driver) issues. One possible way
to do so is suggested
by [Doctor Volt] in a video where a Samsung Galaxy S4 is combined with a USB-connected FT232R board to add external GPIO.
The idea is pretty simple: the serial adapter is recognized by the existing Android OS and within the standard Android development environment this module can be used. Within this demonstrator it’s merely used to blink some LEDs and react to inputs, but it shows how to reuse one of these phones in a non-destructive manner. Even better is that the phone’s existing sensors and cameras can still be used as normal in this way, too, which opens a whole range of (cheap) DIY projects that can be programmed either in Java/Kotlin or in C or C++ via the Native Development Kit.
The only wrinkle is that while the phone is connected like this, charging is not possible. For the S4 it’s easy to solve as it has a removable battery, so an external power input was wired in with a dummy battery-sized bit of perfboard. With modern phones without removable batteries simultaneous USB/audio dongle and charging usage via the USB-C connector is claimed to be possible, but this is something to check beforehand. | 44 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057767",
"author": "Pete",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T13:35:20",
"content": "I really wish there were a nice looking, flush wall mount with a bezel for some of these older devices. They would make great HA control panels, and would even have enough processor to run a SLM voice assis... | 1,760,371,742.013813 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/04/how-to-shoot-actors-with-arrows-sans-cgi/ | How To Shoot Actors With Arrows Sans CGI | Navarre Bartz | [
"News"
] | [
"film",
"movie magic",
"movies",
"practical effect",
"special effects",
"visual effect"
] | Today, movie effects are mostly done in CGI, especially if they’re of the death-defying type. [Tyler Bell] shows us how they
shot actors with arrows before CGI
.
Almost every medieval movie has someone getting shot with an arrow, but how do you do that non-destructively? [Bell] shows us two primary methods that were used, the pop up rig and steel pronged arrows. The pop up rig is a spring loaded device with one end of an arrow attached that pops up when a mechanism is triggered. [Bell] 3D printed his own version of the mechanism and shows us how it can be used to great effect on shots from the side or rear of the victim.
But what about straight on shots where the rig would be blatantly obvious? That’s when you get to actually shoot the actor (or their stunt double anyway). To do this safely, actors would wear wooden body armor under their costumes and arrows with two small prongs would be shot along a wire into the desired impact site. We appreciate [Bell] using a mannequin for testing before letting his brother shoot him with an arrow. That’s definitely the next level above a trust fall.
We even get a look at using air cannons to launch arrow storms at the end which is particularly epic. Looking for more movie magic? How about the effects from
King Kong
or
Flight of the Navigator
?
Thanks to [Xerxes3rd] on Discord for the tip! | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057710",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T09:44:47",
"content": "It’s a bit wild just how tame 150 arrows fired at once looks. Google suggests that the English army at the battle of Agincourt had about 5,000 archers, so one volley of arrows would be about 30 times as many... | 1,760,371,742.176598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/building-a-discrete-14-bit-string-dac/ | Building A Discrete 14-Bit String DAC | Maya Posch | [
"hardware"
] | [
"dac",
"digital to analog"
] | The discrete 14-bit DAC under test. (Credit: Sine Lab, YouTube)
How easy is it to build your own Digital to Analog Converter (DAC)? Although you can readily purchase a wide variety of DACs these days, building your own can be very instructive, as the [Sine Lab] on YouTube
explores in a recent video
with the construction of a discrete 14-bit DAC. First there are the different architectures you can pick for a DAC, which range from R-2R (resistor ladder) to delta-sigma versions, each having its own level of complexity and providing different response times, accuracy and other characteristics.
The architecture that the [Sine Lab] picked was a String DAC with interpolator. The String type DAC has the
advantage
of having inherently monotonic output voltage and better switching-induced glitch performance than the R-2R DAC. At its core it still uses resistors and switches (transistors), with the latter summing up the input digital value. This makes adding more bits to the DAC as easy as adding more of these same resistors and switches, the only question is how many. In the case of a String DAC that’d be 2
N
, which implies that you want to use multiple strings, as in the above graphic.
Scaling this up to 16-bit would thus entail 65,536 resistors/switches in the naive approach, or with 2 8-bit strings 513 switches, 512 resistors and 2 buffers. In the actual design in the video both MOSFETs and 74HCT4051 multiplexers were used, which also necessitated creating two buses per string to help with the input decoding. This is the part where things get serious in the video, but the reasoning for each change and addition is explained clearly as the full 6-bit DAC with interpolator is being designed and built.
One big issue with discrete DACs comes when you have to find matching MOSFETs and similar, which is where LSI DACs are generally significantly more precise. Even so, this discrete design came pretty close to a commercial offering, which is pretty impressive. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057733",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T10:51:07",
"content": "I’d have loved to hear a side-by-side comparison of DAC8831 vs. the discrete DAC. With its wonky INL and below-commercial-grade DNL, one can imagine that if there is any audible signature associated with th... | 1,760,371,741.936531 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/gnss-reception-with-clone-sdr-board/ | GNSS Reception With Clone SDR Board | Alexander Rowsell | [
"gps hacks",
"News",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"gnss",
"PocketSDR",
"RF",
"sdr"
] | We love seeing the incredible work many RF enthusiasts manage to pull off — they make it look so easy! Though RF can be tricky, it’s not quite the voodoo black art that it’s often made out to be. Many radio protocols are relatively simple and with tools like gnuradio and PocketSDR you can quickly put together a small system to receive and decode just about anything.
[Jean-Michel] wanted to
learn more about GNSS and USB communication
. Whenever you start a project like this, it’s a good idea to take a look around at existing projects for designs or code you can reuse, and in this case, the main RF front-end board is taken from the PocketSDR project. This is then paired with a Cypress FX2 development board, and he re-wrote almost all of the PocketSDR code so that it would compile using sdcc instead of the proprietary Keil compiler. Testing involved slowly porting the code while learning about using Python 3 to receive data over USB, and using other equipment to simulate antenna diversity (using multiple antennas to increase the signal-to-noise ratio):
Testing antenna diversity
The main board uses two MAX2771 GNSS front-ends, which filter and convert the received signals to either a digital output or optionally as I and Q outputs for conversion with discrete ADCs. This data is then read by the 8051 core on the FX2, and the data is sent over USB to maintain a fast and reliable stream. On the PC side, this can be decoded using the original PocketSDR software, or one can build a decoder using gnuradio.
The result is a working GNSS decoder. If you would like to see more detail about the project, [Jean-Michel] put together a YouTube video talking about his work in cloning and porting the code, which you can see below: | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057675",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T06:35:56",
"content": "Maybe its my low IQ that I never understood the purpose of using I-Q while sampling RF signals. No explanation really made sense at a base level.Or maybe because I have a CS degree.",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,371,742.297597 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/measuring-temperature-without-a-thermometer/ | Measuring Temperature Without A Thermometer | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"bunsen burner",
"calorimetry",
"physics",
"specific heat",
"thermometer"
] | If you need to measure the temperature of something, chances are good that you could think up half a dozen ways to do it, pretty much all of which would involve some kind of thermometer, thermistor, thermocouple, or other thermo-adjacent device. But what if you need to measure something really hot, hot enough to destroy your instrument? How would you get the job done then?
Should you find yourself in this improbable situation, relax — [Anthony Francis-Jones] has you covered with
this calorimetric method for measuring high temperatures
. The principle is simple; rather than directly measuring the temperature of the flame, use it to heat up something of known mass and composition and then dunk that object in some water. If you know the amount of water and its temperature before and after, you can figure out how much energy was in the object. From that, you can work backward and calculate the temperature the object must have been at to have that amount of energy.
For the demonstration in the video below, [F-J] dangled a steel ball from a chain into a Bunsen burner flame and dunked it into 150 ml of room-temperature water. After a nice long toasting, the ball went into the drink, raising the temperature by 27 degrees. Knowing the specific heat capacity of water and steel and the mass of each, he worked the numbers and came up with an estimate of about 600°C for the flame. That’s off by a wide margin; typical estimates for a natural gas-powered burner are in the 1,500°C range.
We suspect the main source of error here is not letting the ball and flame come into equilibrium, but no matter — this is mainly intended as a demonstration of calorimetry. It might remind you of bomb calorimetry experiments in high school physics lab, which can also be used to
explore human digestive efficiency
, if you’re into that sort of thing. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057456",
"author": "I Alone Possess The Truth",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T03:09:20",
"content": "Insert your own “not a hack” comment here. You’re actually using a thermometer to MEASURE TWO temperatures, then CALCULATING a third.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,742.234223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/the-phantom-psp-crafting-the-handheld-sony-never-sold/ | The Phantom PSP: Crafting The Handheld Sony Never Sold | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Games",
"handhelds hacks",
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"console",
"handheld",
"PCBWay",
"phantom playstation",
"playstation",
"playstation portable",
"sony"
] | In the world of retro gaming, some legends never die – especially the ‘phantom’ PSP, Sony’s mythical handheld that never saw the light of day. While that elusive device remains a dream, hacker and gaming wizard
[Kyle Brinkerhoff]
built his own – and Macho Nacho made a video about it. His creation, which also goes by the name ‘Playstation Zero’, isn’t just another handheld emulator; it’s a powerful, custom-built system that revives the classics and plays them on a portable device that feels like the future.
Driven by a hunger for the ultimate gaming experience, [Kyle] set out to blend modern tech with retro gaming magic. He started with the Raspberry Pi, loading it up with emulation software for all the iconic systems—from NES and SNES to the Sega Genesis and Game Boy. But [Kyle] didn’t just slap on an off-the-shelf emulator; he dived into the code himself, optimizing and tweaking for lightning-fast responsiveness, so each game plays like it’s running on the original hardware. That’s hacking in true form: pushing the limits of software and hardware until they work exactly the way you want them to. Best of all: he published it all open source for others to use.
In the spirit of
the Geneboy—a handheld Sega Genesis
built by [Downing] and featured on Hackaday back in 2012—[Kyle]’s device pairs handheld emulation with the consoles all nineties kids wanted for Christmas. To capture the tactile thrill of vintage gaming, [Kyle] went a step further by designing and 3D-printing a custom controller layout that mimics the feel of the original systems. If watching someone neatly soldering a pcb sounds relaxing to you, don’t skip
the middle part of his video
. Although this little beast is packed with all bells and whistles you’d expect to see on a Raspberry Pi, it does lack one serious thing: battery life. But, [Kyle] is open about that, and hopes to improve on that in a future version.
If you want to see the full build, check out the video below. Or, immediately dive into
[Kyle]’s Github
, order the cute Takara shell, and get started! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057472",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T06:46:21",
"content": "Raspi zero feels like a bit anemic to me for this purpose but then again the creator tweaked the actual emulator code to make it better so maybe it’s okay.My biggest gripe is the screen. Its tiny, and d... | 1,760,371,742.440359 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/3d-printed-hardware-sorter-keeps-it-simple/ | 3D Printed Hardware Sorter Keeps It Simple | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"elevator",
"hardware",
"mechanical",
"sorter",
"sorting"
] | If you’re like us, you’ve got at least one bin dedicated to keeping the random hardware you just can’t bear to part with. In our case it’s mostly populated with the nuts and bolts left over after finishing up a car repair, but however it gets filled, it’s a mess. The degree to which you can tolerate this mess will vary, but for [EmGi], even a moderately untidy pile of bolts was enough to spur
this entirely 3D-printed mechanical bolt sorter
.
The elements of this machine bear a strong resemblance to a lot of the sorting mechanisms we’ve seen used on automated manufacturing and assembly lines. The process starts with a hopper full of M3 cap head bolts of varying lengths, which are collated by a pair of elevating platforms. These line up the bolts and lift them onto a slotted feed ramp, which lets them dangle by their heads and pushes them into a fixture that moves them through a 90° arc and presents them to a long sorting ramp. The ramp has a series of increasingly longer slots; bolts roll right over the slots until they find the right slot, where they fall into a bin below. Nuts can also feed through the process and get sorted into their own bin.
What we like about [EmGi]’s design is its simplicity. There are no motors, bearings, springs, or other hardware — except for the hardware you’re sorting, of course. The entire machine is manually powered, so you can just grab a handful of hardware and start sorting. True, it can only sort M3 cap head bolts, but we suspect the design could be modified easily for other sizes and styles of fasteners. Check it out in action in the video below.
Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean we don’t like more complicated hardware sorters, like
the ones [Christopher Helmke] builds.
Thanks to [john] for the tip. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057427",
"author": "Alyx",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T22:08:01",
"content": "Clever device, though requires the screws to have approximately the same head height and shape (probably chokes on button heads) for them to roll straight.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,371,742.490032 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/supercon-2024-streaming-live/ | Supercon 2024: Streaming Live | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"2024 Hackaday Supercon",
"2024 Hackaday Superconference"
] | The 2024 Hackaday Supercon is on in Pasadena, but if you couldn’t make it to sunny California this year, don’t worry. We’ve got a
live streams of the main stage talks
, and all of the second track talks are being recorded and will be put up on the YouTube channel after the con.
If you’re watching from home and want to join the conversation, today might be a good time to join the
official Hackaday Discord server
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057631",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T23:57:12",
"content": "They did that last year too, so this year I knew to look further.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,742.526551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/dont-forget-your-curve-tracer/ | Don’t Forget Your Curve Tracer | Jenny List | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"curve tracer",
"oscilloscope",
"tester"
] | As cheap microcontrollers have given us an impressive range of test equipment trinkets to play with, it’s easy to forget some of the old standabys. A curve tracer for example, the relatively simple circuit allowing the plotting of electronic component response curves on an oscilloscope. Lest we forget this useful device, here’s [Gary LaRocco] with
a video describing one that’s so easy to build, anyone could do it
.
It’s a simple enough premise, a low AC voltage comes from a mains transformer and is dropped down to the device under test through a resistor. The X and Y inputs of the ‘scope are configured to show the current and the voltage respectively, and the result is a perfect plot of the device’s IV curve. The best part is that it’s designed for in-circuit measurement, allowing it to be used for fault-finding. There’s a demonstration at the end with a variety of different parts, lest we needed any reminder as to how useful these devices can be.
The cost of one of these circuits is minimal, given that the transformer is likely to come from an old piece of consumer electronics.
It’s not the first simple curve tracer we’ve seen
, but we hope it will give you ideas. The video is below the break. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057380",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T17:33:15",
"content": "I once planned to do the same thing … 60 Hz transformer for the x-axis, some FET current sources for the drive steps, and some floating current sensors for the y-axis readout. I went with the DCA75 Pro in... | 1,760,371,742.569545 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/the-tsushin-booster-a-pc-engine-modem-add-on-with-a-twist/ | The Tsushin Booster – A PC Engine Modem Add-on With A Twist | Dave Rowntree | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"basic",
"dial-up",
"games",
"map editor",
"modem",
"NEC",
"PC engine",
"pots",
"programming",
"sprite editor"
] | Sometimes, hardware projects get cancelled before they have a chance to make an impact, often due to politics or poor economic judgment. The
Tsushin Booster
for the PC Engine is one such project, possibly the victim of vicious commercial games between the leading Japanese console manufacturers at the tail end of the 1980s. It seems like a rather unlikely product: a modem attachment for a games console with an added 32 KB of battery-backed SRAM. In addition to the bolt-on unit, a dedicated software suite was provided on an EPROM-based
removable cartridge, complete with a BASIC interpreter and a collection of graphical editor tools for game creation.
Internally, the Tsushin booster holds no surprises, with the expected POTS interfacing components tied to an OKI M6826L modem chip, the SRAM device, and what looks like a custom ASIC for the bus interfacing.
It was, however, very slow, topping out at only 1200 Baud, which, even for the period, coupled with pay-by-minute telephone charges, would be a hard sell. The provided software was clearly intended to inspire would-be games programmers, with a complete-looking BASIC dialect, a comms program, a basic sprite editor with support for animation and
even a map editor. We think inputting BASIC code via a gamepad would get old fast, but it would work a little better for graphical editing.
PC Engine hacks are thin pickings around these parts, but to understand a little more about the ‘console wars’ of the early 1990s,
look no further than this in-depth architectural study
. If you’d like to get into the modem scene but lack original hardware,
your needs could be satisfied with openmodem
. Of course, once you’ve got the hardware sorted, you need some to connect to. How about
creating your very own dial-up ISP
? | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057362",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T16:26:53",
"content": "Where’s the SuperCon live stream?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057366",
"author": "0xdeadbeef",
... | 1,760,371,742.727756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/how-purdue-hackers-made-a-big-sign-that-theyre-really-proud-of/ | How Purdue Hackers Made A Big Sign That They’re Really Proud Of | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"led",
"purdue",
"university"
] | Let’s say you’ve got a fun little organization that does things together under a collective branding or banner. Maybe you want to celebrate that fact with some visually appealing signage? Well, that’s pretty much how [Jack] of the Purdue Hackers felt,
so he and the gang put together a sizable logo sign to advertise their makerspace.
[Jack] explains that The Sign, as it is known, embodies the spirit of the Purdue Hackers. Basically, it’s about making something cool and sharing it with the world. He then outlines how they came to develop a “shining monument” to their organization with the use of LEDs and 3D printed components. The blog post explains how the group began with small prototypes, before stepping up to build a larger version for display in their makerspace window. It also chronicles the twists and turns of the project, including budget snarls and PCB errors that threatened to derail everything.
Ultimately, though, the Purdue Hackers prevailed, and The Sign has been shining bright ever since. Files are on GitHub for the curious, because it’s all open source! Meanwhile, if you’ve been cooking up your own
neat signage projects
, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line! | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057264",
"author": "Geoffrey",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T11:29:13",
"content": "As a European I am confused, the sign looks great, but I was thinking first about some similar named thing that may or may not have caused an opioid epidemic in the USA.",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,371,742.778445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/hackaday-links-november-3-2024/ | Hackaday Links: November 3, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"atlas",
"chopsticks",
"gait",
"hackaday links",
"hull crack",
"infinite monkey",
"liberty ship",
"SpaceX"
] | “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?”
Perhaps not anymore, if
this Ig Nobel-worthy analysis of the infinite monkey theorem
is to be believed. For the uninitiated, the idea is that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of keyboards, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare or some other famous writer would appear. It’s always been meant to be taken figuratively as a demonstration of the power of time and randomness, but some people just can’t leave well enough alone. The research, which we hope was undertaken with tongue firmly planted in cheek, reveals that it would take longer than the amount of time left before the heat death of the universe for either a single monkey or even all 200,000 chimpanzees in the world today to type the 884,647 words of Shakespeare’s complete works in the proper order.
We feel like they missed the point completely, since this is supposed to be about an infinite number of monkeys. But if they insist on sticking with real-world force monkey labor, what would really be interesting is an economic analysis of project. How much space would 200,000 chimps need? What would the energy requirements be in terms of food in and waste out? What about electricity so the monkeys can see what they’re doing? If we’re using typewriters, how much paper do we need, and how much land will be deforested for it? Seems like you’ll need replacement chimps as they age out, so how do you make sure the chimps “mix and mingle,” so to speak? And how do you account for maternity and presumably paternity leave? Also, who’s checking the output? Seems like we’d have to employ humans to do this, so what are the economic factors associated with that? Inquiring minds want to know.
Speaking of ridiculous calculations, when your company racks up a fine that only makes sense in exponential notation, you know we’ve reached new levels of stupidity. But here we are, as a Russian court has imposed
a two-undecillion rouble fine on Google
for blocking access to Russian state media channels. That’s 2×10
36
roubles, or about 2×10
33
US dollars at current exchange rates. If you’re British and think a billion is a million million, then undecillion means something different entirely, but we don’t have the energy to work that out right now. Regardless, it’s a lot, and given that the total GPD of the entire planet was estimated to be about 100×10
12
dollars in 2022, Google better get busy raising the money. We’d prefer they don’t do it the totally-not-evil way they usually do, so it might be best to seek alternate methods. Maybe a bake sale?
A couple of weeks back
we sang the praises of SpaceX after they managed to absolutely nail the landing of the Starship Heavy booster after its fifth test flight by managing to pluck it from the air while it floated back to the launch pad. But the amazing engineering success was
very close to disaster
according to Elon Musk himself, who discussed the details online. Apparently SpaceX engineers shared with him that they were scared about the “spin gas abort” configuration on Heavy prior to launch, and that they were one second away from aborting the “chopsticks” landing in favor of crashing the booster into the ground in front of the launch pad. They also expressed fears about spot welds on a chine on the booster, which actually did rip off during descent and could have fouled on the tower during the catch. But success is a hell of a deodorant, as they say, and it’s hard to argue with how good the landing looked despite the risks.
We saw a couple of interesting stories on humanoid robots this week, including one about a robot with
a “human-like gait.”
The bot is from China’s EnginAI Robotics and while its gait
looks pretty good
, there’s still a significant uncanny valley thing going on there, at least for us. And really, what’s the point? Especially when you look at something like
this new Atlas demo
, which really leans into its inhuman gait to get work done efficiently. You be the judge.
And finally, we’ve always been amazed by Liberty ships, the class of rapidly produced cargo ships produced by the United States to support the British war effort during WWII. Simple in design though they were, the fact that US shipbuilders were able to ramp up production of these vessels to the point where they were building a ship every eight hours has always been fascinating to us. But it’s often true that speed kills, and
this video
shows the fatal flaw in Liberty ship design that led to the loss of some of the early ships in the class. The short video details the all-welded construction of the ships, a significant advancement at the time but which wasn’t the cause of the hull cracks that led to the loss of some ships. We won’t spoil the story, though. Enjoy. | 22 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057638",
"author": "Robert",
"timestamp": "2024-11-04T00:55:41",
"content": "“If you’re British and think a billion is a million million”No, we don’t. Back in Victorian times there was a British Billion of 10^12, back then we called 10^9 a Milliard. Nowadays every Brit regards a bi... | 1,760,371,742.982735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/all-you-need-for-artificial-intelligence-is-a-commodore-64/ | All You Need For Artificial Intelligence Is A Commodore 64 | Maya Posch | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"artificial intellegence",
"basic",
"commodore 64"
] | Artificial intelligence has always been around us, with [Timothy J. O’Malley]’s 1985 book on
AI projects for the Commodore 64
being one example of this. With AI defined as being the theory and development of systems that can perform tasks that normally requiring human intelligence (e.g. visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making), this book is a good introduction to the many ways that computer systems for decades now have been able to learn, make decisions and in general become more human-like. Even if there’s no electronic personality behind the actions.
In the book’s first chapter, [Timothy] isn’t afraid to toss in some opinions about the true nature of intelligence and thinking. Starting with the concept that intelligence is based around storing information and being able to derive meaning from connections between stored pieces of information, the idea of a basic AI as one would use in a game for the computer opponent arises. A number of ways of implementing such an AI is explored in the first and subsequent chapters, using Towers of Hanoi, chess, Nim and other games.
After this we look at natural language processing – referencing ELIZA as an example – followed by heuristics, pattern recognition and AI for robotics. Although much of this may seem outdated in this modern age of LLMs and neural networks, it’s important to realize that much of what we consider ‘bleeding edge’ today has its roots in AI research performed in the 1950s and 1960s. As [Timothy] rightfully states in the final chapter, there is no real limit to how far you can push this type of AI as long as you have more hardware and storage to throw at the problem. This is where we now got datacenters full of GPU-equipped systems churning through vector space calculations for the sake of today’s LLM & diffusion model take on ‘AI’.
Using a Commodore 64 to demonstrate the (lack of) validity of claims is not a new one, with recently a group of researchers using one of these breadbin marvels
to run an Ising model
with a tensor network and outperforming IBM’s quantum processor. As they say, just because it’s new and shiny doesn’t necessarily mean that it is actually better. | 49 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057594",
"author": "WacKEDmaN",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T21:19:09",
"content": "yawn…. there where earlier books on AI for the amstrad CPC…from 1984…“On the Road to Artificial Intelligence : Amstrad CPC 464”..on writing AI programs in BASICanyone who reads these old books will real... | 1,760,371,742.866499 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/polygons-on-a-lathe/ | Polygons On A Lathe | Anne Ogborn | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"machining",
"manual machining"
] | Most professionals would put a polygon on the end of a turned part using a milling machine. But many a hobbyist doesn’t have a mill. And if the polygon needs to be accurately centered, remounting the stock costs accuracy.
[Mehamozg]
demonstrates you can turn a polygon on a lathe
.
Polygons on shaft ends are surprisingly common, whether you are replacing a lost chuck key, need an angular index, or need a dismountable drive. As the video shows, you can definitely make them on the lathe.
But how the heck does this work? It seems like magic.
Lets start by imagining we disengage and lock the rotating cutter in [Mehamozg]’s setup and run the lathe. If the tool is pointed directly at the center we are just turning normally. If we angle the tool either side of center we still get a cylinder, but the radius increases by the sin of the angle.
Now, if we take a piece of stock with a flat on it and plot radius versus angle we get a flat line with a sin curve dip in it. So if we use [Mehamozg]s setup and run the cutter and chuck at the same speed, the cutter angle and the stock angle increase at the same time, and we end up with a flat on the part. If the cutter is rotating an even multiple of the chuck speed, we get a polygon.
The rub in all this is the cutter angle.. At first we were convinced it was varying enormously. But the surface at the contact point is not perpendicular to the radius from center to contact. So it cancels out, we think. But our brains are a bit fried by this one. Opinions in the comments welcomed.
We like this hack. It’s for a commonly needed operation, and versatile enough to be worth fiddling with the inevitable pain of doing it the first time. For a much more specialized machining hack,
check out this tool that works much the same in the other axis
. | 16 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057561",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T18:49:20",
"content": "But many a hobbyist doesn’t have a millCool trick, but many a hobbyist’s lathe can’t do that turny tool trick either. My Chinesium lathe can’t, but I do also have a Chinesium mill.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,742.920341 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/oscillator-needs-fine-tuning/ | Oscillator Needs Fine-Tuning | Bryan Cockfield | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"frequency",
"oscillator",
"oven oscillator",
"temperature controlled oscillator",
"temperature-control",
"txco"
] | Since their invention more than a century ago, crystal oscillators have been foundational to electronic design. They allow for precise timekeeping for the clocks in computers as well as on our wrists, and can do it extremely accurately and inexpensively to boot. They aren’t without their downsides though; a quartz watch might lose or gain a few seconds a month due to variations in temperature and other non-ideal environmental situations, but for working in the world of high-frequency circuits this error is unacceptable. For that you might reach for something like an oven oscillator, a circuit with a temperature controlled chamber able to keep incredibly precise time.
[IMSAI Guy]
found this 10 MHz oven oscillator
on a site selling bulk electronics at bargain basement prices. But as is unsurprising for anyone who’s used a site like this to get cheap circuits, it didn’t quite hit its advertised frequency of 10.000000 MHz. The circuit design is capable of this amount of accuracy and precision, though, thanks to some cleverly-designed voltage dividers and filtering. One of those voltage dividers allows a potentiometer to control a very narrow range of output frequencies, and from the factory it was outputting between 9.999981 and 9.9999996 MHz. To get it to actually output a 10 MHz wave with eight significant digits of accuracy, a pull-up resistor on the voltage divider needed to be swapped out.
While this was a fairly simple fix, one might wonder how an off-the-shelf component like this would miss the mark in such an obvious way but still go into production. But that’s one of life’s great mysteries and also the fun of sourcing components like this. In this case, the oven oscillator was less than $10.
But these circuits aren’t always as good of a deal as they seem
. | 26 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057525",
"author": "BobH",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T15:55:17",
"content": "Maybe they are on the surplus market because they are out of spec?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057528",
"author": "Jan",
"timesta... | 1,760,371,743.252439 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/m-2-makes-an-unusual-microcontroller-form-factor/ | M.2 Makes An Unusual Microcontroller Form Factor | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"M.2",
"rp2040"
] | When we think of an m.2 slot in our laptop or similar, it’s usually in the context of its PCI connectivity for high-speed applications such as solid state disks. It’s a connector that offers much more than that interface though, making it suitable for some unexpected add-ons. As an example [MagicWolfi]
has produced an m.2 card which contains the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi Pico
.
The board itself has the familiar m.2 edge connector at the bottom, and the RP2040 GPIO lines as postage-stamp indentations round the edges. On the m.2 front is uses the USB interface as well as a UART and the I
2
C lines, as well as some of the interfaces we’re less familiar with such as ALERT, WAKE, DISABLE1/2, LED 1/2, and VENDOR_DEFINED.
On one level this provides a handy internal microcontroller card with which you can do all the things you’d expect from a Pi Pico, but on another it provides the fascinating possibility of the Pico performing a watchdog or other function for the host device. We would be genuinely interested to hear more about the use of the m.2 slot in this way.
If you’d like to know more about m.2,
we’ve taken a look at it in more depth
. | 41 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057504",
"author": "alialiali",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T12:30:16",
"content": "The M.2 connector has an issue that is becoming increasingly more common.It started with USB in a small way, then PCI, USB-C expanded it and M.2 inherited it somewhat.What is it, what device can I plug ... | 1,760,371,743.150356 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/03/beth-deck-is-a-framework-powered-gaming-handheld/ | Beth Deck Is A Framework-Powered Gaming Handheld | Navarre Bartz | [
"Games",
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"diy handheld",
"framework",
"Framework laptop",
"handheld gaming"
] | DIY gaming handhelds have long been the purview of the advanced hacker, with custom enclosures and fiddly soldering making it a project not for the faint of heart. [Beth Le] now brings us a custom handheld for the beginner that
can be assembled in 15 minutes and doesn’t require any soldering
.
These claims might seem suspicious at first, but the fact that the build is powered by a Framework mainboard makes the dream seem attainable. Using an 8″ touchscreen and a rehoused mobile device controller, the 3D printed enclosure turns the PCB and battery into an interesting alternative to a Steam Deck.
[Beth] recommends waiting for the forthcoming revision 2 to make your own as she is working on refining the model. She also suggests printing in PC or PETG since PLA is too brittle and ABS warping can be an issue for tolerances with the pogo pins. In any case, this is definitely a project to keep your eye on if you enjoy gaming on the go.
As you know,
we love Framework
around here and the Cambrian Explosion of high-powered custom builds it’s enabled. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a
Framework-Powered handheld either
. If you’re looking for a different form factor, we’ve also seen
portable all-in-ones
,
keyboard PCs
, and
slabtops too
. | 22 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057487",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T08:37:23",
"content": "Oh, fancy, me like ❤️One little downer is the arrangement of the controls, i don’t like the current trend with one analog up and one analog down, but it can’t be helped if we are going to reuse a ready mad... | 1,760,371,743.316437 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/transforming-pawn-changes-the-game/ | Transforming Pawn Changes The Game | Navarre Bartz | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printed mechanism",
"3d printer",
"3d printing",
"chess",
"chess piece",
"game",
"mechanism",
"transformation"
] | 3D printing has allowed the hobbyist to turn out all sorts of interesting chess sets with either intricate details or things that are too specialized to warrant a full scale injection molded production run. Now, the magic of 3D printing has allowed [Works By Design] to change the game by making pawns that can
automatically transform themselves into queens
.
Inspired by a CGI transforming chess piece designed by [Polyfjord], [Works By Design] wanted to make a pawn that could transform itself exist in the real world. What started as a chonky setup with multiple springs and a manually-actuated mechanism eventually was whittled down to a single spring, some pins, and four magnets as
vitamins
for the 3D printed piece.
We always love getting a peek into the trial-and-error process of a project, especially for something with such a slick-looking final product. Paired with a special chess board with steel in the ends, the magnets in the base activate the transformation sequence when they reach the opposite end.
After you print your own,
how about playing chess against the printer
? We’d love to see a version
machined from metal
too.
Thanks to [DjBiohazard] on Discord for the tip! | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057474",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-11-03T07:25:56",
"content": "Very cool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8058534",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2024-11-06T14:20:12",
"content": "I ag... | 1,760,371,743.072259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/02/an-rp2040-based-pc-fx-development-cartridge/ | An RP2040-based PC-FX Development Cartridge | Dave Rowntree | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"cartridge",
"emulation",
"FX-BMP",
"NEC",
"PC-FX",
"rp2040",
"sram"
] | [David Shadoff] has a clear soft spot for the NEC console systems and has been collecting many tools and data about them. When developing with these old systems, having a way to upload code quickly is a real bonus, hence the creation of the
PC-FX Dev Cart
. Based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040, the custom cartridge PCB has everything needed to run software uploadable via a USB-C connection.
While the PC-FX is a CDROM-based system, it does sport a so-called FX-BMP or backup memory port cartridge slot, which games can use to save state and perform other special functions. Under certain circumstances, the PC-FX can be instructed to boot from this memory space, and this cartridge project is intended to enable this. Having a quick way to upload and execute code is very useful when exploring how these old systems work, developing new applications, or improving the accuracy of system emulators. The original FX-BMP cartridge has little more inside than a supercapacitor-backed SRAM and a custom interfacing IC, and of course, it would be quite a hassle to use this to develop custom code.
The RP2040 isn’t really being too tasked in this application, with one core dedicated to emulating a 128K x 8 SRAM, handling the PC-FX bus interface, and the other doing duty on the USB side. At the top of the PCB are a pair of
74LVC16T245
16-bit level shifter ICs, which need to be translated from the 5 Volt console voltage domain into the 3.3 Volts at which the microcontroller operates. Power for the board is taken from the USB, not the console, enabling code to be uploaded before powering up the target. This way, the power budget of the console isn’t compromised, and the cartridge can be initialized before powering up and booting.
[David] Needed to overclock the RP2040 to 240 MHz, way beyond the specification limit of 133 MHz, because despite the PIO block being fast enough to emulate the required interface timing, the latency passing data between the PIO and the CPU core was too large, hence the need for GPIO-based solution. The project was created in KiCAD; the
design files
can be found here, and only one mistake has been found so far!
[David] is also heavily involved with documenting and collecting all the PC-FX resources available in the wild. These
can be found in this GitHub repo
. It doesn’t look like we’ve covered the PC-FX before, but we have seen a few hacks about its older sibling, the PC Engine and the closely related TurboGrafx-16. Here’s
a simple PC engine-to-TurboGrafx converter board
for starters. If you lack the genuine hardware, do not despair;
here is an FPGA-based emulator
. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057259",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T10:46:55",
"content": "This is a spot where the RP2040 particularly shines. Its PIO cores makes it super easy to implement a hardware interface. Sigh, if only its GPIOs where 5V tolerant, it would even by easier, not mandating leve... | 1,760,371,743.188467 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/a-neat-trick-to-3d-print-with-fewer-warping-issues/ | A Neat Trick To 3D Print With Fewer Warping Issues | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"print bed",
"print warping",
"warping"
] | Warping! It messes up your 3D printed parts, turning them into a useless, dimensionally-inaccurate mess. You can design your parts around it, or try and improve your printer in various ways. Or, you can check out
some of the neat tricks [Jan] has to tackle it.
The basic concept is a particularly valuable one. [Jan] notes that ABS and PLA are relatively compatible. In turn, he found that printing ABS parts on top of a thin layer of PLA has proven a great way to improve bed adhesion and reduce warping. He’s extended this technique further to other material combinations, too. The trick is to find two materials that adhere well to each other, where one is better at adhering to typical print beds. Thus, one can be used to help stick the other to the print bed. [Jan] also explains how to implement these techniques with custom G-Code and manual filament changes.
We’ve been discussing the issue of warping prints
quite often of late
. It’s a common problem we all face at one time or another! Video after the break. | 25 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057204",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T05:33:39",
"content": "Enclosed bed chamber is another.https://www.wevolver.com/article/3d-print-warping",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057340",
"author": "Set... | 1,760,371,743.384656 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/apple-forces-the-signing-of-applications-in-macos-sequoia-15-1/ | Apple Forces The Signing Of Applications In MacOS Sequoia 15.1 | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Software Development"
] | [
"apple",
"appledrm",
"drm",
"macOS"
] | The dialogue that greets you when you try to open an unsigned application in MacOS Sequoia 15.1.
Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for an Apple Developer ID certificate. Starting with MacOS Sequoia 15, the easy bypassing of this feature with e.g. holding Control when clicking the application icon is now
no longer an option
, with version 15.1 disabling ways to bypass this completely. Not unsurprisingly, this change has caught especially users of open source software like OpenSCAD by surprise, as evidenced by
a range
of
forum posts
and GitHub
tickets
.
The issue of having to
sign applications
you run on MacOS has been a longstanding point of contention, with HomeBrew applications affected and the looming threat for applications sourced from elsewhere, with OpenSCAD
issue ticket #880
from 2014 covering the saga for one OSS project. Now it would seem that to distribute MacOS software you need to have an Apple Developer Program membership, costing $99/year.
So far it appears that this forcing is deliberate on Apple’s side, with the FOSS community still sorting through possible workarounds and the full impact.
Thanks to [Robert Piston] for the tip. | 137 | 33 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057184",
"author": "dianea",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T03:11:30",
"content": "Looks like Linux is back on the menu",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057268",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-11-02T11:40:19",
... | 1,760,371,743.70381 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/fix-that-old-remote-with-graphite/ | Fix That Old Remote With Graphite | Danie Conradie | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"button",
"graphite powder",
"IR remote"
] | A button that stopped working has probably led to more than a few smashed remotes over the years. Fortunately [pescado99] has shared a beautifully simple
cure for dead or dying remote buttons
: graphite dry lubricant.
Most remotes operate by pushing a conductive carbon coating on the back of the button onto a pair of contacts on the PCB. Unfortunately, that conductive coating can wear off, leaving you with a dead or dying button. The video after the break [pescado99] demonstrates how to use a cotton swab to apply powdered
graphite
to the rear of the buttons to make them conductive again. A soft pencil can also be used, but the graphite works better.
This beautifully simple hack is too good not to share and could save many remotes from landfills. If you’re more interested in upgrading remote, you can
build your own universal remote
or
replace it with a web browser
. | 47 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057148",
"author": "Sean",
"timestamp": "2024-11-01T23:08:15",
"content": "In the past, I’ve used CA glue to attach a little dot of aluminum foil to the button",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057312",
"author": "alia... | 1,760,371,743.788647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/building-a-hydrogen-powered-foam-dart-cannon/ | Building A Hydrogen-Powered Foam Dart Cannon | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"blaster",
"hho gas",
"nerf blaster",
"water"
] | Nerf blasters are fun and all, but they’re limited by the fact they have to be safe for children to play with. [Flasutie] faced no such restrictions when building
his giant 40 mm foam dart launcher
, and it’s all the better for it.
This thing is sizeable—maybe two to four times bigger than your typical Nerf blaster. But that’s no surprise, given the size of the foam ammunition it fires. [Flasutie] shows us the construction process on how the 3D-printed blaster is assembled, covering everything from the barrel and body assembly to the chunky magazine. Loading each round into the chamber is a manual process, vaguely akin to a bolt-action mechanism, but simplified.
It’s the method of firing that really caught our eye, though. Each round has a cartridge and a foam projectile. Inside the cartridge is a quantity of flammable HHO gas generated, presumably, from water via electrolysis. The blaster itself provides power to a spark gap in the cartridge that ignites the gas, propelling the projectile through the barrel and out of the blaster.
We’ve seen plenty of Nerf blasters and similar builds around these parts, including some with
a truly impressive rate of fire
. Video after the break. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057120",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-01T20:44:04",
"content": "Nice build. Nice video.Where are the STLs?obSafetyNanny: because it uses ignited expanding gas, it would be classified as a firearm in the USA",
"parent_id": null,
"dep... | 1,760,371,743.844134 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/the-nixie-tube-multimeter-that-almost-made-a-comeback/ | The Nixie Tube Multimeter That Almost Made A Comeback | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"AVO",
"avometer",
"da14",
"multimeter",
"nixie",
"nixie multimeter",
"teardown"
] | In a world of digital monotony, the Avo DA14 digital multimeter, with its vintage nixie tube charm, is a refreshing gem.
Recently refurbished by [Thomas Scherrer]
, this multimeter video review is a blend of nostalgia and tech savvy. The DA14 not only has style, but substance — delivering resistance, current, and voltage measurements that make you wonder why more multimeters didn’t stick with this stylish glow.
As [Thomas] starts by powering up the DA14, we were instantly captivated as the Nixie tubes illuminate in their retro orange. With each twist of the dial, he demonstrates just how intuitive the multimeter is to operate, walking us viewers through each function while giving some extra love to its calibration process—a neat front-panel potentiometer that requires just a touch of finesse to get perfect readings.
But, as with all good tinkering tales, things go downhill when issues with analog inputs and the display pop up. A teardown reveals a beautifully complex inner assembly of transformers, rectifiers, and circuit boards, giving the DA14 its impressive yet fragile structure. When the critical defective display chip is found, hopes for a full repair dim. His story ends without a revival, but if you want to see a similar attempt that did get resurrected – albeit without those nixie digits –
take a look at this LCD transplant we covered previously
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057131",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-11-01T21:36:18",
"content": "Maybe this could help him with driving the Nixies:https://electronbunker.ca/eb/Nixie.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,371,743.883968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/capturing-light-in-a-vacuum-the-magic-of-tube-video-cameras/ | Capturing Light In A Vacuum: The Magic Of Tube Video Cameras | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"camera tube",
"newvicon",
"vidocon"
] | Cameras are a funny rabbit hole to fall down as a hacker, because we have well over a century of items to pick and choose from, a lot of which can be had for relative pennies. In my case I have more of them than I’d care to mention, mostly film cameras and 8mm movie cameras, but there are one or two that are entirely different. My first interest in electronics came through PAL televisions, so it’s hardly surprising that along the way I’ve also acquired more than one chunky old tube-based video camera. These devices are now long ago supplanted by their solid state replacements, but they retain a fascination for me as the mirror of the CRT-based TV sets I know so well. It’s time for a fascinating descent into the world of analogue video.
Electrons chasing light, chasing electrons
A raster scan pattern. Ian Harvey, Public domain.
The basic mode of operation behind all but some of the very earliest electronic camera tubes is that an electron gun paints its raster of electrons onto a light-sensitive target, and the current flowing through the electron beam varies in proportion to the light at each particular point on the target. This can be used to create a voltage, which when combined with the various sync pulses makes a video signal that would be understood by a monitor. The various different types of tubes have names such as Iconoscope, Emitron, or Vidicon, and while the main differences between those various types of tube lie in the combination of materials and design of their targets. Successive generations of tube made improvements to sensitivity and noise performance, first combining photoemissive layers with electron multiplying layers to amplify the video signal in much the same way as a photomultiplier tube does, and then using photoconductive targets to vary the conductivity of the target depending on the light at a particular point.
Time for some real cameras
The RCA vidicon in place.
The tube camera I’ve owned the longest is probably the best to have the lid off and see its internals, it’s an RCA security camera from the mid 1980s. Very sturdily built in the USA, mine is the 625-line version for the European market. Opening it up there’s another echo of the CRT monitor, with the same deflection and signal panels you’d find at the other end of the chain. On top is a sync generator panel, which is far more than a simple pair of oscillators. Instead it’s stuffed with circuitry to produce the full standard sync timings with odd and even fields. Lifting out the sync panel reveals the tube, in this case a vidicon with a photoconductive target, encased in its magnetic focus and deflection coils. This is a monochrome camera, so everything is pretty easy to understand.
Matsushita were evidently proud of their one-tube colour camera tech.
When a colour analogue video camera is explained, it usually starts with a diagram of a light path with a couple of bean splitters and a set of filters to supply red, green, and blue images to three different tubes. This produced those high quality broadcast images, but at the expense of significant expense and complexity. As colour home video equipment appeared in the 1970s there appeared a demand for single-tube colour cameras, and to that end the manufacturers came up with a variety of similar tubes with RGB stripe filters over their targets. A couple of these cameras have come my way, both of which have Panasonic Newvicon tubes. These differentiate between red, green, and blue parts of the image by their amplitudes, and while the image is definitely colour, I’d be lying if I said it was broadcast quality.
Here in 2024 there’s very little reason to use a tube camera unless as I am you are seeking a partcular aesthetic, That said, they remain a fun and forgotten piece of consumer electronics to experiment with, so pick one up and have a play should you see one. Looking at the whole system of both camera and monitor it’s possible to see the beauty of analogue television, in the way that every part of the system exists in perfect synchronisation. Imagine the TV sets of a whole country tuned to the same channel, and all synchronised to within a fraction of a microsecond, and you’ll see what I mean even though the idea of everyone watching the same show together is now more than faintly ridiculous.
If this has tickled your fancy,
here’s more from the PAL coalface.
Header: Kyle Senior,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 33 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057060",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2024-11-01T17:06:39",
"content": "“the idea of everyone watching the same show together is now more than faintly ridiculous”What about live sports?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8057... | 1,760,371,743.978191 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/30/kolibrios-the-operating-system-that-fits-on-a-1-44-mb-3-5-floppy-disk/ | KolibriOS: The Operating System That Fits On A 1.44 MB 3.5″ Floppy Disk | Maya Posch | [
"Reviews",
"Software Development"
] | [
"KolibriOS",
"MenuetOS",
"operating systems"
] | While most operating systems are written in C and C++, KolibriOS is written in pure x86 assembly and as a result small and lightweight enough to run off a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk, as demonstrated in
a recent video
by [Michael].
Screenshot of the KolibriOS desktop on first boot with default wallpaper.
As a fork of 32-bit MenuetOS back in 2004,
KolibriOS
has since followed its own course, sticking to the x86 codebase and requiring only a modest system with an i586-compatible CPU, 8 MB of RAM and VESA-compatible videocard. Unlike MenuetOS’ proprietary x86_64 version, there’s no 64-bit in KolibriOS, but at this level you probably won’t miss it.
In the video by [Michael], the OS boots incredibly fast off both a 3.5″ floppy and a CD-ROM, with the CD-ROM version having the advantage of more software being provided with it, including shareware versions of
DOOM
and
Wolfenstein 3D
.
Although web browsers (e.g. Netsurf) are also provided, [Michael] did not get Ethernet working, though he doesn’t say whether he checked the
hardware compatibility list
. Quite a few common 3Com, Intel and Realtek NICs are supported out of the box.
For audio it was a similar story, with the hardware compatibility left unverified after audio was found to be not working. Despite this, the OS was fast, stable, runs
DOOM
smoothly and overall seems to be a great small OS for x86 platforms that could give an old system a new lease on life. | 29 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8056573",
"author": "scott_tx",
"timestamp": "2024-10-31T02:06:06",
"content": "I was just thinking about menuet today after I took the new BeOS for a test spin.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8056640",
"author": "Jos... | 1,760,371,744.094634 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/30/pi-pico-lays-down-the-groove/ | Pi Pico Lays Down The Groove | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"drum machine",
"groovebox",
"live music",
"loop",
"pi pico",
"raspberry pi",
"sequencer"
] | From the 60s to perhaps the mid-00s, the path to musical stardom was essentially straight with very few forks. As a teenager you’d round up a drummer and a few guitar players and start jamming out of a garage, hoping to build to bigger and bigger venues. Few people made it for plenty of reasons, not least of which was because putting together a band like this is expensive. It wasn’t until capable electronic devices became mainstream and accepted in popular culture in the last decade or two that a few different paths for success finally opened up, and
this groovebox shows just how much music can be created this way
with a few straightforward electronic tools.
The groovebox is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and includes enough storage for 16 tracks with a sequencer for each track, along with a set of 16 scenes. Audio plays through PCM5102A DAC module, with a 160×128 TFT display and a touch-sensitive pad for user inputs. It’s not just a device for looping stored audio, though. There’s also a drum machine built in which can record and loop beats with varying sounds and pitches, as well as a sample slicer and a pattern generator and also as the ability to copy and paste clips.
There are a few limitations to using a device this small though. Because of memory size it outputs a 22 kHz mono signal, and its on-board storage is not particularly large either, but it does have an SD card slot for expansion. But it’s hard to beat the bang-for-the-buck qualities of a device like this, regardless, not to mention the portability. Especially when compared with the cost of multiple guitars, a drum set and a bunch of other analog equipment, it’s easy to see how musicians wielding these instruments have risen in popularity recently.
This 12-button MIDI instrument could expand one’s digital musical capabilities even further
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8056545",
"author": "Tomsz",
"timestamp": "2024-10-30T23:12:20",
"content": "Roland MC-101.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8056571",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2024-10-31T01:55:17",
"content": "Basically a MO... | 1,760,371,744.023351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/30/tearing-down-nintendos-alarmo-alarm-clock/ | Tearing Down Nintendo’s Alarmo Alarm Clock | Maya Posch | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"alarm clock",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Alarmo"
] | All your Nintendo Alarmo are belong to mew~ (Credit: GaryOderNichts, Blogspot)
Most of us will probably have seen Nintendo’s latest gadget pop up recently. Rather than a Switch 2 announcement, we got greeted with a Nintendo-branded alarm clock. Featuring a 2.8″ color LCD and a range of sensors, it can detect and respond to a user, and even work as an alarm clock for the low, low price of €99. All of which takes the form of Nintendo-themed characters alongside some mini-games. Naturally this has led people like [Gary] to buy one to see
just how hackable
these alarm clocks are.
As can be expected from a ‘smart’ alarm clock it has 2.4 GHz WiFi connectivity for firmware and content download, as well as a 24 GHz millimeter wave presence sensor. Before [Gary] even had received his Alarmo, others had already torn into their unit, uncovering the main MCU (STM32H730ZBI6) alongside a 4 GB eMMC IC, as well as the MCU’s SWD pads on the PCB. This gave [Gary] a quick start with reverse-engineering, though of course the MCU was protected (readout protection, or RDP) against firmware dumps, but the main firmware could be dumped from the eMMC without issues.
After this [Gary] had a heap of fun decrypting the firmware, which seems to always get loaded into the external octal SPI RAM before execution, as per the boot sequence (see featured image). This boot sequence offers a few possibilities for inserting one’s own (properly signed) contents. As it turns out via the USB route arbitrary firmware binaries can be loaded, which provided a backdoor to defeat RDP. Unfortunately the MCU is further locked down with Secure Access Mode, which prevents dumping the firmware again.
So far firmware updates for the Alarmo have not nailed shut the USB backdoor, making further reverse-engineering quite easy for the time being. If you too wish to hack your Alarmo and maybe add some feline charm, you can
check [Gary]’s GitHub project
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8056697",
"author": "Craig",
"timestamp": "2024-10-31T11:54:00",
"content": "Will u actually be able to make the screen brighter the one i got which is my second because I thought it was broke is really dull even with brigh turned up 🤷 Craig in Yorkshire",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,371,744.138485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/30/floss-weekly-episode-807-bitten-by-the-penguin/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 807: Bitten By The Penguin | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"3d printing",
"ActivityPub",
"FLOSS Weekly",
"mastodon"
] | This week,
Jonathan Bennett
and
Dan Lynch
chat with Josh Bressers, VP of Security at Anchore, and host of the Open Source Security and Hacker History podcasts. We talk security, SBOMs, and how Josh almost became a Sun fan instead of a Linux geek.
–
https://opensourcesecurity.io
–
https://hackerhistory.com
–
https://infosec.exchange/@joshbressers
–
https://anchore.com
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 | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,744.175827 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/30/haiku-oss-beta-5-release-brings-us-into-a-new-beos-era/ | Haiku OS’s Beta 5 Release Brings Us Into A New BeOS Era | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Software Development"
] | [
"BeOS",
"haiku",
"operating system"
] | The name BeOS is one which tends to evoke either sighs of nostalgia or blank stares, mostly determined by one’s knowledge of the 1990s operating system scene. Originally released in 1995 by Be Inc., it was featured primarily on the company’s PowerPC-based BeBox computers, as well as being pitched to potential customers including Apple, who was looking for a
replacement for MacOS
. By then running on both PowerPC and x86-based systems, BeOS remained one of those niche operating systems which even the free Personal Edition (PE) of BeOS Release 5 from 1998 could not change.
As one of the many who downloaded BeOS R5 PE and installed it on a Windows system to have a poke at it, I found it to be a visually charming and quite functional OS, but saw no urgent need to use it instead of Windows 98 SE or 2000. This would appear to have been the general response from the public, as no BeOS revival ensued. Yet even as BeOS floundered and Be Inc. got bought up, sold off and dissected for its parts, a group of fans who wanted to see BeOS live on decided to make their own version. First called OpenBeOS and now Haiku, it’s a fascinating look at a multimedia-centric desktop OS that feels both very 1990s, but also very modern.
With the
recent release
of the R1 Beta 5 much has been improved, which raises the interesting question of how close Haiku is to becoming a serious desktop OS contender.
Writing A Haiku
Although some parts of BeOS (e.g. Tracker and Deskbar UI components) were open sourced with BeOS R5, for the most part the code of the
Haiku
project has been written from scratch. What helped a lot here was that even beyond the modular hybrid kernel the entire architecture of BeOS focused on modularity, allowing these developers in the early 2000s to gradually create new components to replace the proprietary ones in BeOS while testing them for regressions and bugs.
Even so, it took until September 2009 for the
first Alpha
release to be published, following eight years of intensive work. The first Beta came nine years later, at the end of September 2018, by which time support for x86_64 systems had also been added. This created an interesting inflection point, as only the 32-bit x86 version is fully binary compatible with BeOS R5, while the 64-bit version merely has compatible APIs. Unless you intend to run proprietary BeOS software this is probably not much of a concern, of course.
Currently, the Haiku project describes the OS as an ‘easy to use and lean open source operating system’, rather than limiting itself to being merely a way to run 1990s BeOS applications. The implications of this are covered in the
general FAQ
on the Haiku website along with a whole range of other common questions. The tl;dr is that while Haiku grew out of BeOS, its focus is mostly on maintaining BeOS’s unified vision for the desktop OS experience, which is why merely putting another skin around the Linux kernel would not have worked.
This drive to keep Haiku as a spiritual successor to BeOS can be seen in this and many other aspects, from its general appearance, to the name. Within BeOS the use of
haiku
(Japanese short-form poetry) was quite common, in particular in its
NetPositive
web browser error messages
, such as:
Sites you are seeking
From your path they are fleeing
Their winter has come.
So What Does It Do?
Inevitably, when someone is confronted with Yet Another Open Source OS (YAOSO), the first question that comes to mind is what it does that another OS does not. After all, there are so many hobby OSes out there, all too often merely written to promote one’s pet language like Zig, Dart, NodeJS, Rust, D or another collection of letters that may or may not be infuriating to search for on the Internet. All of these OSes will tend to have a GUI, a file & internet browser, maybe someone has ported Tux Racer and some other bits of Linux userland, but with less functionality than the average Linux distribution these OS projects mostly spend a lot of time coming to terms with being less relevant than BeOS R5 and OS/2 Warp still are in the 2020s.
Here Haiku of course is a far cry from a hobby OS. Its kernel is inspired by the NewOS kernel, written by a former Be Inc. employee, it uses C++ and even GCC 2.x in places for that BeOS compatibility, but for new code you will be using a current C++ toolchain. You find the same GUI-centric user interface as BeOS had, though in the Terminal application you quickly find that it’s as familiar as any Linux or BSD shell, a pattern which persists in its POSIX compatibility. Meanwhile the overall user experience feels familiar to both old-school BeOS users and the average Windows user.
Although this is decidedly a personal matter, Haiku for me is a breath of fresh air compared to Yet Another Linux Distro (YALD) in the user interface consistency and the sheer snappiness. Booting Haiku takes seconds before you’re on the desktop, and the whole experience is that of a nimble single-user desktop system, rather like something such as Windows 98, except even faster and less crash-y. As for what it does when you’re on the desktop, it of course has the usual assortment of web browsers, office applications, multimedia players and editors, but as said earlier all of that is rather beside the point when the real question is whether you can use it as a daily driver.
This was also the point of a
recent video
by the
Action Retro
channel on YouTube, in which Haiku as a daily driver OS is attempted and found to be working quite well, even with video hardware acceleration in the Beta 4 release not implemented yet. My own experiences this year with Beta 4 and 5 mostly confirm this take, albeit mostly from the experience of a software developer doing some serious application porting.
Basically, how badly does Haiku break when you try to use it as a serious OS and port FFmpeg and Qt5-based applications to it?
No YALD, Just Haiku
While I am not sure how enthusiastic I am about swapping the Windows-style taskbar (incidentally replicated by most Linux GUIs) for the BeOS-style Deskbar, or the BeOS window decorations, you do get used to these differences. To get started with porting software you ideally use the
pkgman
package manager, which is reminiscent of FreeBSD’s pkg (and ports, incidentally). As I found out earlier this year when I ported my
FFmpeg-based NymphCast project
to Haiku, the OS is a lot closer to FreeBSD than Linux in many respects, including its file stat handling. This means no hacky
lstat64()
as on 64-bit dirty Linux platforms.
The whole string of dependencies required by the NymphCast project were all present and easily installed with
pkgman
, with the next challenge being that Haiku does not follow the Linux or BSD filesystem conventions. This is not unexpected, as it’s a desktop OS with absolutely no need to pretend that it dates back to an era when PDP-8s roamed the Earth. Instead it’s a multimedia-focused OS from the 1990s, with a filesystem that has a lot of added meta-data features, and a
layout
for installed applications and development files that is mostly non-confusing.
The only real showstoppers that I came across during the porting of NymphCast was a lack of IPv6 support in Haiku, and stability issues in Beta 4, but switching to Beta 5 (nightly) and improving IPv6 handling in my code fixed this. Running through the compilation and installation procedure again on Beta 5 recently, I encountered no stability issues, just an issue (
#6400
) in the SDL2 package for Haiku that makes SDL2-based applications still somewhat of a no-go until the responsible hack gets fixed, at least from how I understand the issue.
Qt5-based NymphCast Player running on Haiku Beta 5.
For fun, I also tried building the Qt5-based NymphCast Player client in Haiku R1 Beta 5, which succeeded with absolutely zero issues. This application ran fine, connected to NymphCast server and media server instances running elsewhere on the network just fine, allowing me to control them as I would have on any other OS. How perfectly boring.
Is It Boring Enough?
In the question of whether an OS can be a daily driver I feel that there’s a lot being implied. When I consider my own OS preferences, having used MS-DOS, Win3.x, Win9x, Win2k, etc., as well as desktop Linux since SuSE Linux 6.3 in ’99, the BSDs, OS X and MacOS (post-OS X), I feel strongly that a good daily driver OS is one that is so utterly boring and Just Works™ that you spend as little time as possible thinking about the OS, while maximizing the time you are productive, have fun playing games, being online, and so on.
Windows has become more and more boring in this regard until Windows 7, when it began to tailspin with Windows 8 and is with Windows 11 less functional than Windows 3.11, or Windows 9x during the delightful winmodem days. Similarly OS X/MacOS decided to lock down the OS with its
rootless
‘feature’, among other unpopular decisions with power users and developers. Combined with the many bugs in MacOS (e.g. in its printer spool that existed since at least 10.4), I was happy to move to Windows 10, which is only infuriating due to the
horrid Flat Design Language
and completely unnecessary Settings app.
Although 1998 was supposed to be the Year of the Linux Desktop, the fact remains that Linux as a desktop OS is not boring, but a constant exercise in troubleshooting the window manager, desktop environment, audio subsystem, a kernel module that vanished after a kernel upgrade, an uncooperative driver, hunting down a non-existent driver for a new WiFi dongle and so on. This is why I use Linux on an almost daily basis, but run a Windows desktop system.
When it pertains to Haiku, I feel that there’s some real potential for it to become as boring as Windows 2000, or even Windows XP or 7. I will be using Haiku more the coming months and likely years as it matures towards Release 1, along with ReactOS and similar open source OSes that strive to provide the user with the most boring and pleasantly unremarkable desktop experience possible. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8056464",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2024-10-30T18:01:02",
"content": "It’s been a while since I used BeOS; the first time from a CD included with a magazine, a runnable demo, that ran even better if you cloned the CD filesystem to a HD…(ran completely unlike a demo at t... | 1,760,371,744.246671 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/30/use-picoglitcher-for-voltage-glitching-attacks/ | Use PicoGlitcher For Voltage Glitching Attacks | Dave Rowntree | [
"Security Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fault injection",
"pi pico",
"rp2040",
"voltage glitch",
"voltage glitching"
] | We see a fair few glitcher projects, especially the simpler voltage glitchers. Still, quite often due to their relative simplicity, they’re little more than a microcontroller board and a few components hanging off some wires.
PicoGlitcher
by Hackaday.IO user [Matthias Kesenheimer] is a simple voltage glitcher which aims to make the hardware setup a little more robust without getting caught up in the complexities of other techniques. Based on the Raspberry Pico (obviously!), the board has sufficient niceties to simplify glitching attacks in various situations, providing controllable host power if required.
A pair of
74LVC8T245
(according to the
provided BoM
) level shifters allow connecting to targets at voltages from 1.8 V to 5 V if powered by PicoGlitcher or anything in spec for the ‘245 if target power is being used. In addition to the expected RESET and TRIGGER signals, spare GPIOs are brought out to a header for whatever purpose is needed to control a
particular attack. If a programmed reset doesn’t get the job done, the target power is provided via a TPS2041 load switch to enable cold starts. The final part of the interface is an analog input provided by an SMA connector.
The glitching signal is also brought out to an SMA connector via a pair of transistors; an
IRLML2502
NMOS performs ‘low power’ glitching by momentarily connecting the glitch output to ground. This ‘crowbarring’ causes a rapid dip in supply voltage and upsets the target, hopefully in a helpful way. An
IRF7807
‘NMOS device provides a higher power option, which can handle pulse loads of up to 66A. Which transistor you select in the Findus glitching toolchain depends on the type of load connected, particularly the amount of decoupling capacitance that needs to be discharged. For boards with heavier decoupling, use the beefy IRF7807 and accept the glitch won’t be as sharp as you’d like. For other hardware, the faster, smaller device is sufficient.
The software to drive PicoGlitcher
and the
hardware design files for KiCAD
are provided on the
project GitHub page
. There also appears to be an Eagle project in there. You can’t have too much hardware documentation! For the software, check out
the documentation
for a quick overview of how it all works and some nice examples against some targets known to be susceptible to this type of attack.
For a cheap way to
glitch an STM8, you can just use a pile of wires
. But for something a bit more complicated, such as a Starlink user terminal,
you need something a bit more robust
. Finally, voltage glitching doesn’t always work, so the
next tool you can reach for is a picoEMP
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8056460",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2024-10-30T17:50:50",
"content": "I swear the timing of some of some of these articles is uncanny. I literally just made my own glitcher for a problem we’ve come across at work. It’s got a screen and buttons to make adjustments afk. I’d t... | 1,760,371,744.291082 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/30/supercon-2023-cuddly-companion-bots/ | Supercon 2023: Cuddly Companion Bots | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"companion",
"companion bot",
"companion bots",
"companion robots",
"cuddly",
"robot",
"robotics",
"robots",
"soft",
"textile arts"
] | Even in the advanced world of 2024, robots are still better in science fiction than in reality.
Star Trek
gave us the erudite and refined Data,
Rogue One
gave us the fierce yet funny K-2SO, and
Big Hero 6
gave us the caring charmer named Baymax. All these robots had smarts, capability, and agency. More than that, though—they were faithful(ish) companions to humans, fulfilling what that role entails.
The thing is, we’re not gonna get robots like that unless somebody builds them. [Angela Sheehan] is a artist and an educator, and a maker—and she’s trying to create exactly that. She came down to the 2023 Hackaday Supercon
to tell us all about her efforts to create cuddly companion bots for real.
Beep Boop
You might remember Angela from her 2019 Supercon costume—she showed up dressed as
a color-changing fairy
. In fact, she has dabbled in all kinds of fields, which has given her a broad skillset applicable to creating companion bots. She’s done lots of costuming and cosplay over the years, she’s worked in product design, and she brands herself a bit of a fashion hacker. These skills might not be particularly relevant to building a high-speed industrial robot arm to perform 2000 welds an hour. However, they come in absolute clutch when you’re trying to build a robot that acts as a soft, cuddly companion. She notes that she was inspired to create her own companion bots by the work of others formerly showcased by Hackaday—you might remember work in this field from
Alex Glow and Jorvon Moss.
That’s Nova, right there!
Angela’s talk soon tackles the elephant in the room—from the drop, you’ve probably been wondering about the cute critter perched on her shoulder. The long-tailed creature is named Nova, and she’s remarkably friendly and soothing once you get to know her.
Development took some time, with Angela doing lots of research and development to create the Nova we see today. “I actually did a lot of the prototyping and field testing for this bot in the library makerspace that I work at,” she explains. “It was great to see people who don’t know the inside and out of technology interact with [Nova] and I could pinpoint the moment that she became alive to people.” The bot got quite a response, transcending the level of basic machine to something a little more. “People wanted to come in and visit her and pet her,” says Angela. “That was such a powerful moment… that happened as soon as I started putting a face on her.” Angela doesn’t just tell the tale—during the talk, she passes Nova to the audience so they can interact with her up close. She explains that this is something that she does regularly—and we get to see photos of the lovely interactions Nova has had with dozens of smiling, happy people.
[Angela] covers some of the tools and techniques she used to develop her robot companion. At times, she looked to commercial products to figure out how to make something that’s properly cuddleable.
Nova leverages Angela’s skills in sewing, 3D modelling, and 3D printing. She explains how components like Nova’s wings were first drafted in Adobe Illustrator. From there, the structure was refined into actual models in Fusion 360, while a PCB was developed in Eagle for the lighting electronics.
The face, though, was perhaps most crucial—as is the case for any anthropomorphic character. She took inspiration from Toothless from
How To Train Your Dragon,
using a stuffed toy as reference. Initial attempts weren’t particularly satisfying though, so she learned 3D sculpting for a further attempt in clay. Feedback from Twitter helped her develop the face further into the Nova we see today. The eyes were sourced from an Etsy supplier specializing in doll eyes. Angela notes there’s some magic there—when backlit with LEDs, switching them on and off can create a really believable blink pattern that feels super realistic. “What are those elements that make it feel alive?” Angela muses. “There are just little pieces of the psychology of it that you can dial into and you can make something that feels very alive.”
Part of the development process was figuring out how to make the eyes and movements feel natural—like a living creature rather than a pile of electronics, motors, and lights.
The talk then covers the rest of the design that helps create the “illusion of life.” Angela explains using servos and a robot gripper mechanism to flap the wings, and dialing in the motion so it felt as authentic as possible. She also covers robustness, designing “cuddle-worthy” bodies, and the value of designing for modularity. There’s also a useful discussion about how to make these builds more accessible, including useful starting points like which microcontroller and code platforms are good to use.
Even better, we get a look into the companion bot community, and we learn about the emotional impact these robots can have. Sometimes that’s intentional, other times, it’s down to a happy accident. “There is an unintended effect with [Nova’s] servos, that it feels like a purr,” says Angela. “It’s very comforting right on your shoulder, and I was thinking maybe I should try and insulate it a little bit, but actually people love it.”
Nova puts smiles on faces wherever she goes. Angela is always letting people hold her and get to know her, and this kind of gleeful response is a common one.
Fundamentally, companion bots are a bit like virtual reality. We’ve seen a ton of products make big promises over the years, but we’ve never seen a killer app. However, as [Angela] demonstrates, it’s very possible to create something very real and very lovable if you pay attention to the right things. Perhaps it’s the personal touch that makes DIY companion bots so seemingly lifelike in a way that Furby never was.
In any case, if you’ve ever wanted a robot companion of your very own, there’s no reason you can’t start building your own. With maker skills, enthusiasm, and the will to succeed, you can create a fun and cuddly robot critter that has that magical spark of life. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8056696",
"author": "zoenagy3466",
"timestamp": "2024-10-31T11:52:02",
"content": "We need silent servos.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8056806",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2024-10-31T17:52:58",
... | 1,760,371,744.553786 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/producing-an-exquisite-wooden-keyboard/ | Producing An Exquisite Wooden Keyboard | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"wood",
"wooden"
] | Keyboards! They’ve been almost universally made out of plastic since the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, wood is a rather desirable material and it lends itself rather well to touch-heavy human interface devices. As [ProcessX] shows us, though, it can take quite a bit of work
to fabricate a keyboard entirely out of this material.
The video shows us the construction of a Japanese wooden keyboard from
Hacoa,
which retails for around $1000 USD. The video shows us how the wooden housing is produced from start to finish, beginning with the selection of some fine walnut. From there, we get to see how the frame is routed out and machined, along with the more delicate work to create all the keycaps out of wood, too. They’re laser engraved to give them high-quality markings that will last the test of time. What we don’t see is the construction of the electronics—it appears that’s handled separately, and the wooden frame and keycaps are then assembled around the otherwise complete existing keyboard.
It’s nice to see what it takes to produce commercial-quality parts like this out of wood.
We’ve seen other wooden keyboard builds before, too
.
[Thanks to John for the tip!] | 41 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8057026",
"author": "DougM",
"timestamp": "2024-11-01T15:39:14",
"content": "adding to my future project list.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8057027",
"author": "Christoph",
"timestamp": "2024-11-01T15:48:00",
"con... | 1,760,371,744.628697 |
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