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https://hackaday.com/2024/10/10/a-power-supply-with-ultra-high-resolution-current-measurement-built-in/ | A Power Supply With Ultra High Resolution Current Measurement Built In | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"nanoampere",
"power supply"
] | Need to do some real fine power consumption measurements? [Gero Müller] was in that exact situation, and wasn’t happy with the expensive off-the-shelf tools for doing the job. Thus, he built his own.
Meet nanoTracer.
nanoTracer measures small current draws in very high resolution.
The concept of the device is simple. It’s a power supply that measures current on a nanoampere scale, and on microsecond intervals. It can deliver from 0 to 5.125 volts in 256 steps, and up to 100 mA of current. It has a sampling bandwidth of 1 MHz, at 2 million samples per second, with effective dynamic range from 100 mA all the way down to 100 nA. For capturing microscopic changes in current draw, that’s invaluable. The device also features a UART for talking to an attached project directly, and additional pins for taking further ADC measurements where needed.
Right now, it’s at an early prototype stage, and [Gero] tells us the software is “very basic” right now. Still, it’s easy to see how this device would be very useful to anyone working to optimize power consumption on low-power projects. One wonders if there are some applications in power-based side-channel attacks, too.
We’re hoping to learn more about nanoTracer from [Gero] soon—how it was built, how it works, and what it’s really like to use. Perhaps one day down the line, the design might even become available for others that could use such a nifty tool. There’s no mucking about
when you get down to nanoamps
, after all. If you’ve cooked up something similar in your own lab, don’t hesitate to
let us know
! | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8049048",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2024-10-11T03:37:51",
"content": "Is this for side channel attacks?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8049212",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2024-10-11T18:31:... | 1,760,371,768.050892 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/10/building-a-sound-camera-for-under-400/ | Building A Sound Camera For Under $400 | Lewin Day | [
"News"
] | [
"camera",
"raspberry pi",
"sound camera"
] | [Benn Jordan] had an idea. He’d heard of motion amplification technology, where cameras are used to capture tiny vibrations in machinery and then visually amplify it for engineering analysis. This is typically the preserve of high-end industrial equipment, but [Benn] wondered if it really had to be this way. Armed with a modern 4K smartphone camera and the right analysis techniques,
could he visually capture sound
?
The video first explores commercially available “acoustic cameras” which are primarily sold business-to-business at incredibly high prices. However, [Benn] suspected he could build something similar on the cheap. He started out with a 16-channel microphone that streams over USB for just $275, sourced from MiniDSP, and paired it with a Raspberry Pi 5 running the acoular framework for acoustic beamforming. Acoular analyses multichannel audio and visualizes them so you can locate sound sources. He added a 1080p camera, and soon enough, was able to overlay sound location data over the video stream. He was able to locate a hawk in a tree using this technique, which was pretty cool, and the total rig came in somewhere under $400.
The rest of the video covers other sound-camera techniques—vibration detection, the aforementioned motion amplification, and some neat biometric techniques. It turns out your webcam can probably detect your heart rate, for example.
It’s a great video that illuminates just what you can achieve with modern sound and video capture.
Think SIGGRAPH-level stuff
, but in a form you can digest over your lunchbreak. Video after the break.
[Thanks to ollie-p for the tip.] | 23 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048964",
"author": "Evaprototype",
"timestamp": "2024-10-10T20:57:51",
"content": "I remember a project where they used a XMOS controller to make a sound camera or at least allowed for moving around the environment virtually to locate sounds.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,371,768.279943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/3d-printed-bearings-with-filament-rollers/ | 3D Printed Bearings With Filament Rollers | Danie Conradie | [
"Parts",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed parts",
"bearings"
] | Commodity bearings are a a boon for makers who to want something to rotate smoothly, but what if you don’t have one in a pinch? [Cliff] of might have the answer for you, in the form of
3D printed bearings
with filament rollers.
With the exception of the raw filament rollers, the inner and outer race, roller cage and cap are all printed. It would also be possible to design some of the components right into a rotating assembly. [Cliff] makes it clear this experiment isn’t about replacing metal bearings — far from it. Instead, it’s an inquiry into how self-sufficient one can be with a FDM 3D printer. That didn’t stop him from torture testing the design to its limits as wheel bearings on an off-road go-cart. The first version wasn’t well supported against axial loads, and ripped apart during some more enthusiastic maneuvers.
[Cliff] improved it with a updated inner race and some 3D printed washers, which held up to 30 minutes of riding with only minimal signs of wear. He also made a slightly more practical 10 mm OD version that fits over an M3 bolt, and all the design files are downloadable for free. Cutting the many pieces of filament to length quickly turned into a chore, so a simple cutting jig is also included.
Let us know in the comments below where you think these would be practical. We’ve covered some other 3D printed bearing that use
printed races
, as well as a
slew bearing that’s completely printed
. | 24 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048614",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T23:34:12",
"content": "It’s not clear that those filament rollers even, you know,rolled.I’ve had really good luck just using a polished stainless steel shaft on plain close-fitting PLA, lubricated by silicone grease. As long as t... | 1,760,371,768.653756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/fail-of-the-week-the-case-of-the-curiously-colored-streetlights/ | Fail Of The Week: The Case Of The Curiously Colored Streetlights | Dan Maloney | [
"Fail of the Week"
] | [
"COB",
"fail of the week",
"led",
"phosphor",
"repair",
"streetlight",
"yag"
] | What color are the street lights in your town? While an unfortunate few still suffer under one of the awful colors offered by vapor discharge lamps, like the pink or orange of sodium or the greenish-white of mercury, most municipalities have moved to energy-saving LED streetlights, with a bright white light that’s generally superior in every way. Unless, of course, things go wrong and the lights start to mysteriously change colors.
If you’ve noticed this trend in your area, relax; [NanoPalomaki] has an in-depth and surprisingly interesting analysis of
why LED streetlights are changing colors
. After examining a few streetlights removed from service thanks to changing from white to purple, he discovered a simple explanation. White LEDs aren’t emitting white light directly; rather, the white light comes from phosphors coating the underlying LED, which emits a deep blue light. The defunct units all showed signs of phosphor degradation. In some cases, the phosphors seemed discolored, as if they experienced overheating or chemical changes. In other LEDs the phosphor layer was physically separated from the backing, exposing the underlying LEDs completely. The color of these damaged modules was significantly shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, which was obviously why they were removed from service.
Now, a discolored LED here and there does not exactly constitute a streetlight emergency, but it’s happening to enough cities that
people are starting to take notice
. The obvious solution would be for municipalities to replace the dodgy units Even in the unlikely event that a city would get some compensation from the manufacturer, this seems like an expensive proposition. Luckily, [NanoPalomaki] tested a solution: he mixed a wideband phosphor into a UV-curable resin and painted it onto the lens of each defective LED in the fixture. Two coats seemed to do the trick.
We have to admit that we have a hard time visualizing a city employee painstakingly painting LEDs when swapping out a fixture would take an electrician a few minutes, but at least it’s an option. And, it’s something for hobbyists and homeowners faced with the problem of wonky white LEDs to keep in mind too. | 119 | 37 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048552",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T20:06:46",
"content": "In my city the manufacturer was replacing some under warranty; however the problem was noticed after a significant number of units were installed and now there’s no money to pay for the time and effor... | 1,760,371,768.595559 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/floss-weekly-episode-804-the-ai-alliance-asimov-was-right/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 804: The AI Alliance — Asimov Was Right | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"OggCamp",
"unconference"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
and and
Dan Lynch
chat with Anthony Annunziata about Open Source AI and the AI Alliance. We get answers to our burning AI questions, and talk about the difficulty of defining what Open Source means for these large models.
https://thealliance.ai/
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 | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8049233",
"author": "defdefred",
"timestamp": "2024-10-11T19:28:36",
"content": "I’m the only one to see a bald man with a big open mouth?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,371,767.9373 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/braun-ts2-radio-turns-68-gets-makeover/ | Braun TS2 Radio Turns 68, Gets Makeover | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Radio Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"Braun",
"restoration",
"tube radio"
] | The Braun TS2 radio was a state-of-the art tube set in 1956. Today it still looks great, but unsurprisingly, the one that [Manuel Caldeier] has
needed a little tender loving care
. The table radio had a distinct style for its day and push-buttons. However, the dial glass and the speaker grill needed replacement. Even more interesting, the radio has a troublesome selenium rectifier, giving him the perfect chance to try out his new selenium rectifier solid-state replacement.
The radio is as good-looking inside as it is outside. You can tell that this isn’t his first restoration, as he has several tricks to test things at different stages of the project.
While the radio looked good, it smelled of smoke, which required a big effort to clean. The dial glass was intact enough for him to duplicate it in a graphic program and print it on a transparent adhesive sticker. With a deep breath, he removed the original markings from the glass so he could add the sticker to it. That didn’t work because the label needed cutouts. So now he is waiting for a piece of acrylic that will have the art UV printed on it.
We want to see the next part as we imagine the radio sounds as good as it looks when it is working. If you want to know more about the
rectifier replacement
, we covered that earlier. Even years later, Braun would have a
clean aesthetic
. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048504",
"author": "Peter Puffer",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T16:35:20",
"content": "That earth contact at 10:38 💀💀💀 For personal user safety it should be at least crimped “eye” connector or better yet use a WAGO terminal.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,768.097652 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/lagrange-points-and-why-you-want-to-get-stuck-at-them/ | Lagrange Points And Why You Want To Get Stuck At Them | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Asteroids",
"james webb space telescope",
"Lagrange",
"orbital dynamics",
"space"
] | Visualization of the Sun-Earth Lagrange points.
Orbital mechanics is a fun subject, as it involves a lot of seemingly empty space that’s nevertheless full of very real forces, all of which must be taken into account lest one’s spacecraft ends up performing a sudden lithobraking maneuver into a planet or other significant collection of matter in said mostly empty space. The primary concern here is that of gravitational pull, and the way it affects one’s trajectory and velocity. With a single planet providing said gravitational pull this is quite straightforward to determine, but add in another body (like the Moon) and things get trickier. Add another big planetary body (or a star like our Sun), and you suddenly got yourself the
restricted three-body problem
, which has vexed mathematicians and others for centuries.
The three-body problem concerns the initial positions and velocities of three point masses. As they orbit each other and one tries to calculate their trajectories using Newton’s laws of motion and law of universal gravitation (or their later equivalents), the finding is that of a chaotic system, without a closed-form solution. In the context of orbital mechanics involving the Earth, Moon and Sun this is rather annoying, but in 1772 Joseph-Louis Lagrange found a family of solutions in which the three masses form an equilateral triangle at each instant. Together with earlier work by Leonhard Euler led to the discovery of what today are known as Lagrangian (or Lagrange) points.
Having a few spots in an N-body configuration where you can be reasonably certain that your spacecraft won’t suddenly bugger off into weird directions that necessitate position corrections using wasteful thruster activations is definitely a plus. This is why especially space-based observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope love to hang around in these spots.
Stable and Unstable Stable
Although the definition of Lagrange points often makes it sound like you can put a spacecraft in that location and it’ll remain there forever, it’s essential to remember that ‘stationary’ only makes sense in particular observer’s reference frame. The Moon orbits the Earth, which orbits the Sun, which ultimately orbits the center of the Milky Way, which moves relative to other galaxies. Or it’s just the expansion of space-time which make it appear that the Milky Way moves, but that gets one quickly into the fun corners of theoretical physics.
A contour plot of the effective potential defined by gravitational and centripetal forces. (Credit:
NASA
)
Within the Earth-Sun system, there are five Lagrange points (L1 – L5), of which L2 is currently the home of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and was the home to previous observatories (like the NASA
WMAP
spacecraft) that benefit from always being in the shadow of the Earth. Similarly, L1 is ideal for any Sun observatory, as like L2 it is located within easy communication distance
Perhaps shockingly, the L3 point is not very useful to put any observatories or other spacecraft, as the Sun would always block communication with Earth. What L3 has in common with L1 and L2 is that all of these are unstable Lagrange points, requiring course and attitude adjustments approximately every 23 days. This contrasts with L4 and L5, which are the two ‘stable’ points. This can be observed in the above contour plot, where L4 and L5 are on top of ‘hills’ and L1 through L3 are on ‘saddles’ where the potential curves up in one direction and down another.
One way to look at it is that satellites placed in the unstable points have a tendency to ‘wander off’, as they don’t have such a wide region of relatively little variance (contour lines placed far from each other) as L4 and L5 do. While this makes these stable points look amazing, they are not as close to Earth as L1 and L2, and they have a minor complication in the fact that they are already occupied, much like the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points.
Because of how stable the L4 and L5 points are, the Earth-Moon system ones have found themselves home to the
Kordylewski clouds
. These are effectively concentrations of dust which were first photographed by Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1961 and confirmed multiple times since. Although a very faint phenomenon, there are numerous examples of objects caught at these points in e.g. the Sun-Neptune system (
Neptune trojans
) and the Sun-Mars system (
Mars trojans
). Even our Earth has
picked up a couple
over the years, many of them asteroids. Of note that is the Earth’s Moon is not in either of these Lagrange points, having become
gravitationally bound
as a satellite.
All of which is a long way to say that it’s okay to put spacecraft in L4 and L5 points as long as you don’t mind fragile technology sharing the same region of space as some very large rocks, with an occasional new rocky friend getting drawn into the Lagrange point.
Stuff in Lagrange Points
A quick look at the Wikipedia list of
objects at Lagrange points
provides a long list past and current natural and artificial objects at these locations, across a variety of system. Sticking to just the things that we humans have built and sent into the Final Frontier, we can see that only the Sun-Earth and Earth-Moon systems have so far seen their Lagrange points collect more than space rocks and dust.
Starting with Sun-Earth, the L1 point has:
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (
SOHO
, ESA)
Advanced Composition Explorer (
ACE
, NASA)
Global Geospace Science WIND (
GGS
, NASA)
Deep Space Climate Observatory (
DSCOVR
, NOAA)
Aditya-L1
(ISRO)
These will be joined if things go well by
IMAP
in 2025 along with
SWFO-L1
,
NEO Surveyor
in 2027. These spacecraft mostly image the Sun, monitor solar wind, image the Earth and its weather patterns, for which this L1 point is rather excellent. Of note here is that strictly taken most of these do not simply linger at the L1 point, but rather follow a
Lissajous orbit
around said Lagrange point. This particular orbital trajectory was designed to compensate for the instability of the L1-3 points and minimize the need for course corrections.
Moving on, the Sun-Earth L2 point is also rather busy:
Gaia
space observatory (ESA)
Spektr-RG
astrophysics observatory (Russian-German)
James Webb Space Telescope (
JWST
, NASA, ESA, CSA)
Euclid
space telescope (ESA)
Chang’e 6
orbiter (CNSA)
Many of the planned spacecraft that should be joining the L2 point are also observatories for a wide range of missions, ranging from general observations in a wide range of spectra to exoplanet and comet hunting.
Despite the distance and hazards of the Sun-Earth L4 and L5 points, these host the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (
STEREO
) A and B solar observation spacecraft. The OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa 2 spacecraft have passed through or near one of these points during their missions. The only spacecraft planned to be positioned at one of these points is ESA’s
Vigil
, which is scheduled to launch by 2031 and will be at L5.
Contour plot of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. (Credit: NASA)
Only the Moon’s L2 point currently has a number of spacecraft crowding about, with NASA’s
THEMIS
satellites going through their extended mission observations, alongside the Chinese relay satellite
Queqiao-2
which supported the Chang’e 6 sample retrieval mission.
In terms of upcoming spacecraft to join the sparse Moon Lagrange crowd, the Exploration Gateway Platform was a Boeing-proposed lunar space station, but it was discarded in favor of the
Lunar Gateway
which will be placed in a polar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) with an orbital period of about 7 days. This means that this space station will cover more of the Moon’s orbit rather than remain stationary. It is intended to be launched in 2027, as part of the NASA Artemis program.
Orbital Mechanics Fun
The best part of orbits is that you have so many to pick from, allowing you to not only pick the ideal spot to idle at if that’s the mission profile, but also to transition between them such as when traveling from the Earth to the Moon with e.g. a
trans-lunar injection
(TLI) maneuver. This involves a low Earth orbit (LEO) which transitions into a powered, high eccentric orbit which approaches the Moon’s gravitational sphere of influence.
Within this and low-energy transfer alternatives the restricted three-body problem continuously applies, meaning that the calculations for such a transfer have to account for as many variables as possible, while in the knowledge that there is no perfect solution. With our current knowledge level we can only bask in the predictable peace and quiet that are the Lagrange points, if moving away from all those nasty gravity wells like the Voyager spacecraft did is not an option. | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048465",
"author": "me",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T14:31:23",
"content": "Wonderful article. Thank you!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8048474",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T14:49:00",
"content": "Sure... | 1,760,371,768.433037 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/dot-matrix-printer-brings-old-school-feel-to-todays-headlines/ | Dot-Matrix Printer Brings Old School Feel To Today’s Headlines | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"api",
"dot matric",
"news",
"php",
"printer",
"raspberry pi",
"serial"
] | If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the hot-button issue du jour happens to be. Welcome to the future.
If like us you long for a simpler way to get your news, [Andrew Schmelyun] has a partial solution with
this dot-matrix news feeder
. It’s part of his effort to detox a bit from the whole algorithm thing and make the news a little more concrete. He managed to chase down a very old Star Micronics printer with a serial interface, which he got on the cheap thanks to the previous owner not being sure if it worked. It did, at least after some cleaning, and thanks to a USB-to-serial and the efforts of Linux kernel hackers through the ages, was able to echo output to the printer from a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
From there, getting a daily news feed was as simple as writing some PHP code to mine the APIs of a few selected services. We’re perplexed and alarmed to report that Hackaday is not among the selected sources, but we’re sure this was just a small oversight that will be corrected in version 2. The program runs as a
cron
job so that a dead-tree version of the day’s top stories is ready for [Andrew]’s morning coffee.
We’ve seen similar news printers before; we particularly like
this roll-feed paper version
. But for a seriously retro feel, we’d love to see this done on
a real teletype
. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048422",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T12:07:41",
"content": "This idea reminds me a bit of my dad.He once had hacked an electric typewriter on thermal printer basis into a serial printer.The keyboard was removed, the electronic PCB was visible.You could attach it to... | 1,760,371,768.000364 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/09/what-happened-to-duracell-powercheck/ | What Happened To Duracell PowerCheck? | Al Williams | [
"Battery Hacks",
"classic hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"battery tester",
"duracell"
] | Remember Duracell’s PowerCheck? The idea was that a strip built into the battery would show if the battery was good or not. Sure, you could always get a meter or a dedicated battery tester — but PowerCheck put the tester right in the battery.
[Technology Connections] has an interesting video
on how these worked and why you don’t see them today. You can see it below.
Duracell didn’t invent the technology. The patent belonged to Kodak, and there were some patent issues, too, but the ones on the Duracell batteries used the Kodak system. In practice, you pushed two dots on the battery, and you could see a color strip that showed how much capacity the battery had left. It did this by measuring the voltage and assuming that the cell’s voltage would track its health. It also assumed — as is clearly printed on the battery — that you were testing at 70 degrees F.
The temperature was important because the secret to the PowerCheck is a liquid crystal that turns color as it gets hot. When you press the dots, the label connects a little resistor, causing the crystals to get warm. The video shows the label taken apart so you can see what’s inside of it. The resistor isn’t linear so that’s how it changes only part of the bar to change color when the battery is weak but not dead.
It is a genius design that is simple enough to print on a label for an extremely low cost and has virtually no components. PowerCheck vanished from batteries almost as suddenly as it appeared. Some of it was due to patent disputes. But the video purports that normal people don’t really test batteries.
Watch out for
old batteries in gear
. Of course, if you want to really test batteries, you are going to need
more equipment
. | 83 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048372",
"author": "Benik3",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T08:17:02",
"content": "I probably still have one of these testers at home. I peeled it off the battery and attached 2 wires to it with a small screw and nut. I used it as a universal AA battery tester :D",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,371,768.217293 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/printed-rack-holds-pair-of-lattepandas-in-style/ | Printed Rack Holds Pair Of LattePandas In Style | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"cluster",
"intel N100",
"Jay Doscher",
"Lattepanda",
"mini-itx"
] | ARM single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are great for some applications — if you need something that’s energy efficient or can fit into a tight space, they’re tough to beat. But sometimes you’re stuck in the middle: you need more computational muscle than the average SBC can bring to the table, but at the same time, a full-size computer isn’t going to work for you.
Luckily, we now have options such as the LattePanda Mu powered by Intel’s quad-core N100 processor. Put a pair of these modules (with their associated carrier boards) on your desktop, and you’ve got considerable number-crunching capabilities in a relatively small package.
Thanks to [Jay Doscher] we’ve got a slick 3D printed rack
that can keep them secure and cool, complete with the visual flair that we’ve come to expect from his creations.
While you might be able to get away with leaving a Raspberry Pi naked on your workbench while it hosts your MQTT server, Mini-ITX boards like the LattePanda Mu carriers used in this project need a bit more protection. Even if you didn’t want to print out the whole rack, you could run off just one of the individual “Compute Unit” cases that [Jay] has designed and made freely available. Complete with stylish handle, the brutalist box will do nicely to keep gerfingerpoken und mittengraben at a minimum.
But if you do have a pair of these x86 beauties at your disposal, going all the way and printing the skeletonized rack the cases lock into looks like it would be well worth the investment of time and filament. The open design and 140 mm Noctua fan mounted in the bottom keeps airflow at a maximum, to the point that [Jay] says he doesn’t even need to run individual fans on the LattePanda boards.
This design is something of an evolution of the
N100 Obelisk that [Jay] created back in May
, which was able to hold more mini computers and used a more chimney-like approach to heat management. Though you can start to see the
origins of his unique visual style
, which
combines sci-fi and militaristic elements
, much earlier than that. | 25 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048181",
"author": "Bobtato",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T13:41:11",
"content": "I do like this kind of sci-fi design. But I haven’t begged anyone to stop using the word “brutalist” wrong for a while, so here:“[New] Brutalism” is a design agenda that foregrounds the raw, undecorated n... | 1,760,371,768.347303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/barbies-video-has-never-looked-so-good/ | Barbie’s Video Has Never Looked So Good | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"barbie",
"camcorder",
"MiniDVR"
] | For those who missed it, there’s been something of a quiet revolution in the world of analogue video over the last year, due to the arrival of inexpensive “MiniDVR” devices. These little modules are a complete video recorder including battery, recording PAL or NTSC composite video and audio to SD card. They’ve become the box of choice for camcorder enthusiasts, but that’s not where the fun ends. [Max Vega] has taken a Barbie video camera toy from 2001
and added a MiniDVR to make it into a fully self-contained novelty camcorder
. But this isn’t a simple case of duct-taping the DVR to the toy, instead it’s a comprehensive upgrade resulting in a device which could almost have been a real product.
The original toy had a small transmitter which could send over a short distance to a receiver that connected to a domestic VCR, so all that circuitry had to go. The camera itself is a small enough module in the fake lens assembly, with an easily identifiable output cable with the required composite signal. The video below the break steps through the proces of making the space for the MiniDVR module, and putting in extensions for all its buttons, and the SD card. Finally it has a new power supply module with an associated USB-C input, providing juice to both DVR and camera.
The result has what we can only describe as a pleasingly retro feel, in that it’s not of high quality and the colour is, well,
Never The Same
. But when a smartphone can record HD video that’s not the point, instead it’s there to be a retro toy, and in that it succeeds completely. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048138",
"author": "Karman",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T10:01:52",
"content": "I know that buck step-up integrated with the battery charger. The buck is always on, even if the load is disconnected. This will totally dry out the battery even if the load is off. I’ve experience this my... | 1,760,371,768.698418 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/gps-tracking-in-the-trackless-land/ | GPS Tracking In The Trackless Land | Al Williams | [
"gps hacks"
] | [
"gps",
"iridium"
] | Need a weekend project? [Cepa] wanted a GPS tracker that would send data out via LTE or the Iridium network. Ok, maybe that’s one for a very long weekend. However, the
project was a success
and saw service crossing the Barents Sea in the Arctic. Not bad.
Apparently, [Cepa] is very involved in sharing tracks to odd and remote places. While you may not have cell service in the middle of the Barents Sea, you can always see Iridium. The device does make some sacrifices to the expense of satellite communications. On LTE, the system pings your location every ten seconds. Without it, it dials up the sat connection once an hour. However, it does store data on a SD card, so — presumably — you get caught up when you have a connection.
Hardware-wise, the setup uses an STM32 BlackPill, an OLED, and some off-the-shelf GPS, LTE, and Iridium modules. The system uses an RTOS, which might be overkill, but it makes it easy to program complex behaviors.
In practice, the tracker lost LTE about 20 nautical miles from the Norwegian coast and used the satellite until it was closer to the coast of Svalbard. The problem is that satellite communications come at a high cost. According to the post, the monthly fee was £13, with another £14 for 100 credits, which translates to about 5kB of data. That adds up quickly.
Iridium, however, is sometimes the only choice if you are in the
middle of the ocean
or an otherwise
inaccessible part of the world
. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048097",
"author": "Yorick",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T06:20:46",
"content": "I think there’s quite a few alternatives to Iridium nowadays, Sateliot have just launched (using NB-IOT) and Astrocast have been around for some years now.From what I remember Astrocast has a flat monthly ... | 1,760,371,768.901341 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/using-donor-immune-cells-to-mass-produce-car-t-autoimmune-therapies/ | Using Donor Immune Cells To Mass-Produce CAR-T Autoimmune Therapies | Maya Posch | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"autoimmune disease",
"autoimmunity",
"CAR t-cell therapy"
] | As exciting as immunotherapies are in terms of fighting cancer, correcting autoimmune disorders and so on, they come with a major disadvantage. Due to the current procedure involving the use of a patient’s own immune (T) cells, this making such therapies rather expensive and involved for the patient. Recent research has therefore focused on answering the question whether T cells from healthy donors could be somehow used instead, with promising results from a recent study on three human patients,
as reported
in
Nature
.
The
full study results
(paywalled) by [Xiaobing Wang] et al. are published in
Cell
, with the clinical trial details available on the
ClinicalTrials.gov
website. For this particular trial the goal was to attempt to cure the autoimmune conditions of the three study participants (being necrotizing myopathy (
IMNM
) and diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (
dcSSc
)). The T cells used in the study were obtained from a healthy 21-year old woman, and modified with chimeric antigen receptors targeting B (memory) cells. Using CRISPR-Cas9 the T cells were then further modified to prevent the donor cells from attacking the patient’s cells and vice versa.
After injection, the CAR-T cells got to work, multiplying and seeking out the target B cells, including the pathogenic ones underlying the autoimmune conditions. This persisted for a few weeks until the CAR-T cells effectively vanished and new B cells began to emerge, with a clear decrease in autoantibodies. Two months after beginning treatment, all three participants noted marked improvements in their conditions, which persisted at 6 months. For the woman with IMNM, muscle strength had increased dramatically with undetectable autoantibody levels, and the two men with dcSSc saw scar tissue formation reversed and their skin condition improve massively.
It remains to be seen whether this period of remission in these patients is permanent, and whether there any side effects of CAR-T cell therapy. We
previously reported on CAR-T cell
therapies and the many promises which they hold. Depending on the outcome of these early trials, it could mean that autoimmune conditions, allergies and cancer will soon be worries of the past, marking another massive medical milestone not unlike the invention of vaccines and the discovery of antibiotics. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048155",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T11:20:44",
"content": "Amazing.It’s a small sample size, so I won’t get too excited, but… amazing.Whenever I hear about something else they can do with CRISPR I’m just astounded.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,371,768.941066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/the-piezoelectric-glitching-attack/ | The Piezoelectric Glitching Attack | Jenny List | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"glitching",
"piezoelectric",
"virtual memory"
] | Many readers will be familiar with the idea of a glitching attack, introducing electrical noise into a computer circuit in the hope of disrupting program flow and causing unexpected behaviour which might lead to hitherto unavailable access to memory or other system resources. [David Buchanan] has written a piece investigating glitching attacks on PC memory, and
the tool he’s used is the ubiquitous piezoelectric lighter
.
Attaching a short piece of wire to one of the lines on a SODIMM memory module, he can glitch a laptop at will with the lighter through the electromagnetic noise its discharge creates. It’s a cool trick, but the real meat of the write-up lies in his comprehensive description of how virtual memory works, and how a glitch can be used to break out of the “sandbox” of memory allocated to a particular process. He demonstrates it in a video which we’ve placed below the break, in which he gains root access and runs an arbitrary piece of code on a Linux laptop. It’s probable that not many of us have the inclination to do this for ourselves, but even so it’s fascinating to know how such an attack works. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048064",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T02:02:36",
"content": "Fascinating article. I wonder though…Given the ESD sensitivity of parts like these, what is the difference in threshold is between injection of a useful EMI “glitch” and a game-over fry?",
"parent_i... | 1,760,371,768.844619 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/the-turing-machine-made-real-in-lego/ | The Turing Machine Made Real, In LEGO | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"lego",
"Lego ideas",
"Turing machine"
] | The British mathematician and pioneer of computing Alan Turing published a paper in 1936 which described a Universal Machine, a theoretical model of a computer processor that would later become known as a Turing Machine. Practical computers don’t quite follow the design of a Turing Machine, but if we are prepared to sacrifice its need for an infinitely long paper tape it’s quite possible to build one. This is what [The Bananaman] has done using LEGO as a medium, and if you’d like one for yourself
you can even vote for it on the LEGO ideas website
.
There’s a video for the project which we’ve placed below, and it goes into quite some detail on the various mechanisms required. Indeed for someone used to physical machinery it’s a better explanation through seeing the various parts than many paper explanations. Not for the first time we’re bowled over by what is possible through the use of the LEGO precision mouldings, this is a machine which would have been difficult and expensive to build in the 1930s by individually machining all its parts.
With just shy of six thousand supporters and a hefty 763 days left at time of writing, there’s plenty of time for it to garner support. But if you want one don’t delay, boost the project by voting for it early.
Thanks [Furby73] for the tip! | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048009",
"author": "D",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T20:07:39",
"content": "“but if we are prepared to sacrifice its need for an infinitely long paper tape it’s quite possible to build”Common misconception. There was never any such requirement.A Turing Machine can emulate any other co... | 1,760,371,769.001081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/jawncon-0x1-kicks-off-friday-tickets-almost-gone/ | JawnCon 0x1 Kicks Off Friday, Tickets Almost Gone | Tom Nardi | [
"cons"
] | [
"hacker conference",
"JawnCon",
"philadelphia"
] | Of all nature’s miraculous gifts, few can compare to the experience of witnessing a new hacker con grow. If you’re in the Philadelphia area this weekend, you can get a front-row seat to this rare spectacle as
JawnCon moves into its second year
.
Running Friday into Saturday at Arcadia University, JawnCon 0x1 promises to be a celebration of technology, with a unique bend towards the glory days of the 80s and 90s — back when screeching noises coming out of the back of your computer was nothing to worry about. With talks that cover resurrecting payphones and spinning up your own AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), to a
badge that will let attendees literally dial into an array of early Internet services
, hackers of a certain vintage should feel right at home.
JawnCon Modem Badge
No gray beard? No problem. The early Internet theme certainly isn’t meant to exclude the younger players. In fact, quite the opposite. There’s an undeniable benefit to studying the fundamentals of any topic, and just as the
4-bit badge from Supercon 2022
gave many attendees their first taste of programming bare metal, JawnCon 0x1 ticket holders will get the opportunity to study protocols and techniques which you don’t often get a chance to work with these days. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen pppd?
As of this writing there are still tickets available, but it’s getting down to the wire so we wouldn’t recommending sitting on that fence for too much longer. Judging by
what this team managed to pull off in their first year
, we’re confident that JawnCon 0x1 (and beyond) are going to be well worth the trip. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047999",
"author": "Will Belden",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T19:30:10",
"content": "I have to know…. was this an intentional misspell?…with a unique bend towards thegorydays of the 80s and 90s — back when screeching noises …",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,769.27627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/thatll-go-over-like-a-cement-airplane/ | That’ll Go Over Like A Cement Airplane | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Art"
] | [
"casting",
"concrete"
] | Most of us have made paper airplanes at one time or another, but rather than stopping at folded paper, [VirgileC] graduated to 3D printing them out of PLA. Then the obvious question is:
can you cast one in cement
? The answer is yes, you can, but note that the question was not: can a cement plane fly? The answer to that is no, it can’t.
Of course, you could use this to model things other than non-flying airplanes. The key is using alginate, a natural polymer derived from brown seaweed, to form the mold. The first step was to suspend the PLA model in a flowerpot with the holes blocked. Next, the flowerpot gets filled with alginate.
After a bit, you can remove the PLA from the molding material by cutting it and then reinserting it into the flower pot. However, you don’t want it to dry out completely as it tends to deform. With some vibration, you can fill the entire cavity with cement.
The next day, it was possible to destroy the alginate mold and recover the cement object inside. However, the cement will still be somewhat wet, so you’ll want to let the part dry further.
Usually, we see people
print the mold directly
using flexible filament. If you don’t like airplanes, maybe that’s
a sign
. | 37 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048344",
"author": "Guest Mythbusters watcher",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T05:40:59",
"content": "Some additional watching for cement planes can fly – if done correctly …https://youtu.be/HU29bVFWNqo?si=jJvtONrUEd5l0PVmInvestigated ca 18 years ago in the mythbusters.",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,371,769.446003 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/soaring-at-scale-modular-airship-design/ | Soaring At Scale: Modular Airship Design | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"aircraft",
"airship",
"lighter-than-air"
] | If you’re looking for an intriguing aerial project, [DilshoD] has you covered with his unique twist on modular airships. The project,
which you can explore in detail here
, revolves around a modular airship composed of individual spherical bodies filled with helium or hydrogen—or even a vacuum—arranged in a 3x3x6 grid. The result? A potentially more efficient airship design that could pave the way for lighter-than-air exploration and transport.
The innovative setup features flexible connecting tubes linking each sphere to a central gondola, ensuring stable expansion without compromising the airship’s integrity. What’s particularly interesting is [DilshoD]’s use of hybrid spheres: a vacuum shell surrounded by a gas-filled shell. This dual-shell approach adds buoyancy while reducing overall weight, possibly making the craft more maneuverable than traditional airships. By leveraging materials like latex used in radiosonde balloons, this design also promises accessibility for makers, hackers, and tinkerers.
Though this concept was originally submitted as a patent in Uzbekistan, it was unfortunately rejected. Nevertheless, [DilshoD] is keen to see the design find new life in the hands of Hackaday readers. Imagine the possibilities with a modular airship that can be tailored for specific applications. Interested in airships or modular designs? Check out some past
Hackaday articles on DIY airships
like this one
, and
dive into [DilshoD]’s full project here
to see how you might bring this concept to the skies. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048331",
"author": "Gene M",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T02:39:02",
"content": "Interesting concept. The redundancy of lifting bodies reduces the potential for a single failure being catastrophic. Can the vacuum container be made lighter than a helium/hydrogen envelope? (Nonvariabl... | 1,760,371,769.230177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/a-flip-digit-clock-binary-style/ | A Flip Digit Clock, Binary Style | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"binary clock",
"flip-dot"
] | Flip digit clocks are a prized piece of consumer electrical ephemera, providing as they do a digital display without significant electronics. Making your own flip digit display involves some drudgery in the production of all those flip cards, but how would it seem if the complexity was reduced? Go from base 10 to base 2 for example, and a binary flip digit display can be made from flip dot display parts. [Marcin Saj]
has done just that
, resulting in a timepiece that’s a few bits out of the ordinary.
Under the hood though it’s slightly more conventional, with the trusty ATmega328 and Arduino bootloader, whose software drives the dot electromagnets via a set of MOSFET drivers. It’s a nice project which if you want there’s a Kickstarter to buy one, but the files are also available
from a GitHub repository
if you’d like to have a go for yourself. Meanwhile you can see it in action in the video below the break.
We like this clock, as it’s different from the norm in Arduino clocks. It’s not however the first flip dot clock we’ve seen,
this one has a full dot matrix display
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048304",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T23:27:07",
"content": "Neat, I give it a 1010 out of 10.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8048308",
"author": "ゴムゴムゴムゴムパドパドドダダ",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T23:43:22"... | 1,760,371,769.3216 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/mechanical-tool-changing-3d-printing-prototype/ | Mechanical Tool Changing 3D Printing Prototype | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"tool changer"
] | Tool changing 3D printers
are hot. The idea is that instead of switching filament, you swap out hot ends or other tools. That isn’t a new idea. However, most tool changers are expensive. [Engineers Grow] has one that is simple and inexpensive, relying on the printer’s own motors and some clever mechanics.
The first step was to make a modified extruder that allowed the filament to load and unload. The first attempt didn’t work well, but that is the nice thing about 3D printing — it is easy to try again. There is only one extruder, which is good from the standpoint that you don’t need a control board with many outputs and you avoid the expense of multiple extruders.
The next step is a spring-loaded filament guide to load and unload the new extruder. That didn’t work at first, either. Worse, fixing the problems required yet another redesign of the extruder.
The hot end holds with magnets. This isn’t always as stable as you would like, but it should work, especially with the pin alignment scheme. The tool plate engages with the head and moves to the side to break the magnetic grip. A bracket works the levers to handle the filament changes.
Everything seemed to work when manually moving things around. Macro development eventually wound up with everything working with two heads after troubleshooting a few issues. Of primary concern is the hot ends are not rigidly held, and docking wasn’t always repeatable. However, this is just a prototype and it does work. It only needs more rigidity and repeatability.
Outside of the printer itself, the changer costs about $100, although that will change depending on the number of extruders. Since the whole thing is printer-specific and not fully functional, there are no models or code — and it sounds like [Engineers Grow] plans to make them available only if you have a membership. But the idea is sound, and there is enough information in the video for you to do your own experiments using this mechanical-only design. Let us know what you come up with.
We’ve seen
passive changers
on CNC before. Many of the others we’ve seen use
electromagnets
. Our own [Sonya Vasquez] did a take on this with
Jubilee
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048262",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T20:04:37",
"content": "Be a shame if makerbot had recent patents on this. (they do, from a couple years ago)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8048379",
"author": "Lar",
... | 1,760,371,769.360076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/3d-printering-listen-to-klipper/ | 3D Printering: Listen To Klipper | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"3d printing",
"klipper"
] | I recently wrote about
using Klipper to drive my 3D printers
, and one natural question is: Why use Klipper instead of Marlin? To some degree that’s like asking why write in one programming language instead of another. However, Klipper does offer some opportunities to extend the environment more easily. Klipper runs on a Linux host, so you can do all of the normal Linux things.
What if you wanted to create a custom G-code that would play a wave file on a speaker? That would let you have custom sounds for starting a print, aborting a print, or even finishing a print.
If you recall, I mentioned that the Klipper system is really two parts. Well, actually more than two parts, but two important parts at the core. Klipper is, technically, just the small software stub that runs on your 3D printer. It does almost nothing. The real work is in Klippy, which is mostly Python software that runs on a host computer like a Raspberry Pi or, in my case, an old laptop.
Because it is Python and quite modular, it is very simple to write your own extensions without having to major surgery or even fork Klipper. At least in theory. Most of the time, you wind up just writing G-code macros. That’s fine, but there are some limitations. This time, I’m going to show you how easy it can be using the sound player as an example.
Macros All the Way Down
Normally, you think of gcode as something like: G1 X50 Y50. Some of the newer codes don’t start with G, but they look similar. But with Klipper, G1, M205, and MeltdownExtruder are all legitimate tokens that could be “G-code.”
For example, suppose you wanted to implement a new command called G_PURGE to create a purge line (case doesn’t matter, by the way). That’s easy. You just need to put in your configuration file:
[gcode_macro g_purge]
gcode:
# do your purge code here
The only restriction is that numbers have to occur at the end of the name, if at all. You can create a macro called “Hackaday2024,” but you can’t create one called “Hackaday2024_Test.” At least, the documentation says so. We haven’t tried it.
There’s more to macros. You can add descriptions, for example. You can also override an existing macro and even call it from within your new macro. Suppose you want to do something special before and after a G28 homing command:
[gcode_macro g28]
description: Macro to do homing (no arguments)
rename_existing: g28_original
gcode:
M117 Homing...
g28_original
M117 Home done....
Not Enough!
By default, your G-code macros can’t call shell commands. There are some ways to add that feature, but letting a file just run any old command seems like an unnecessary invitation for mayhem. Instead, we’ll write a Klippy “extra.” This is a Python class that resides in your
klipper/klippy/extra
directory.
Your code will run with a config object that lets you learn about the system in different ways. Suppose you are writing code to set up one single item, and it doesn’t make sense that you might have more than one. For example, consider an extra that raises the print speed for all printing. Then, you’d provide an entry point,
load_config
, and it would receive the config object.
However, it is more common to write code to handle things that could — at least in theory — have multiple instances. For example, if you wanted to control a fan, you might imagine that a printer could have more than one of these fans. In that case, you use
load_config_prefix
. That allows someone who writes a configuration file to specify multiple copies of the thing you define:
[hackaday_fan fan1]
pin: 8
[hackaday_fan_fan2]
pin: 9
The Sounds
In this case, we do want to allow for different sounds to play, so we’ll use
load_config_prefix
. Here’s the
short bit of code
that does the trick:
# Play a sound from gcode
#
# Copyright (C) 2023 Al Williams
#
#
# This file may be distributed under the terms of the GNU GPLv3 license.
import os
import shlex
import subprocess
import logging
class AplayCommand:
def __init__(self, config):
self.name = config.get_name().split()[-1] # get our name
self.printer = config.get_printer()
self.gcode = self.printer.lookup_object('gcode') # get wave and path
wav = config.get('wave')
path = config.get('path',None)
if path!=None:
wav = "aplay "+path+'/'+wav
else:
wav = "aplay " + wav
self.wav = shlex.split(wav) # build command line
self.gcode.register_mux_command( # register new command for gcode_macro
"APLAY", "SOUND", self.name,
self.cmd_APLAY_COMMAND, # worker for new command
desc=self.cmd_APLAY_COMMAND_help) # help text
cmd_APLAY_COMMAND_help = "Play a sound"
def cmd_APLAY_COMMAND(self, params):
try:
proc = subprocess.run(self.wav) # run aplay
except Exception:
logging.exception(
"aplay: Wave {%s} failed" % (self.name))
raise self.gcode.error("Error playing {%s}" % (self.name))
# main entry point
def load_config_prefix(config):
return AplayCommand(config)
Note that the
AplayCommand
object does all the actual configuration when you initialize it with a config object. So, to create an “aplay object” in your config files:
[aplay startup]
wave: powerup.wav
path: /home/klipper/sounds
[aplay magic]
wave: /home/klipper/sounds/wand.wav
Then, to use that sound in a macro, you only need to use:
[gcode_macro get_ready]
gcode:
aplay sound=startup
You can make as many different sounds as you like, and if you provide an entire path for the wave parameter, you can omit the path. Optional parameters like this require a default in your code:
path = config.get('path',None)
Obviously, this assumes your Klipper computer has
aplay
installed and the wave files you want to play. Or, switch players and use whatever format you want.
You can read more about options and other things you can do in the “Adding a host module” section of the
code overview documentation
. Another good resource is
the source code for the stock extras
, many of which aren’t really things you’d probably consider as extra.
So next time you want to add some features to your printer, you can do it in Python with less work than you probably thought. Haven’t tried Klipper? You can
learn more
and get set up
fairly quickly
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048321",
"author": "Leonardo",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T01:23:03",
"content": "Klippwr needs a host. Marlin not.Klipper Is More expensive.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8048323",
"author": "Gryd3",
"timestam... | 1,760,371,769.495206 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/running-game-boy-games-on-stm32-mcus-is-peanuts/ | Running Game Boy Games On STM32 MCUs Is Peanuts | Maya Posch | [
"Games"
] | [
"gameboy",
"stm32"
] | Using a STM32F429 Discovery board [Jan Zwiener] put together a Game Boy-compatible system called
STM32Boy
. It is based around the
Peanut-GB
Game Boy emulator core, which is a pretty nifty and fast single-header GB emulator library in C99. Considering that the average 32-bit MCU these days is significantly faster than the ~4 MHz 8-bit Sharp SM83 (Intel 8080/Zilog Z80 hybrid) in the original Game Boy it’s probably no surprise that the STM32F429 (up to 180 MHz) can emulate this 8-bit SoC just fine.
Since Peanut-GB is a library, the developer using it is expected to provide their own routines to read and write RAM and ROM and to handle errors. Optional are the line drawing, audio read/write and serial Tx/Rx functions, with the library providing reset and a host of other utility functions. Audio functionality is provided externally, such as using the provided MiniGB APU. Although fast, it comes with a range of caveats that limit compatibility and accuracy.
For STM32Boy, [Jan] uses the LCD screen that’s on the STM32 development board to render the screen on, along with a Game Boy skin. The LCD’s touch feature is then used for the controls, as can be elucidated from the
main source file
. Of note is that the target GB ROM is directly compiled into the firmware image rather than provided via an external SD card. This involves using the
xxd
tool to create a hex version of the ROM image that can be included. Not a bad way to get a PoC up and running, but we imagine that if you want to create a more usable GB-like system it should at least be able to play more than one game without having to reflash the MCU. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048319",
"author": "superryuboy2",
"timestamp": "2024-10-09T01:12:56",
"content": "I was long awaiting for stm32 devices to do this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8048340",
"author": "Macs",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,371,769.532948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/08/recycling-tough-plastics-into-precursors-with-some-smart-catalyst-chemistry/ | Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Science"
] | [
"plastic",
"polyethylene",
"polypropylene",
"recycling",
"science"
] | Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we think of plastic as recyclable, too, that’s often not the case—while some plastics like PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are easily reused, others just aren’t.
Indeed, the world currently produces an immense amount of polyethylene and polypropylene waste. These materials are used for everything from plastic bags to milk jugs and for microwavable containers—and it’s all really hard to recycle. However,
a team at UC Berkeley might have just figured out how to deal with this problem.
Catalytic
Here’s the thing—polyethylene and polypropylene are not readily biodegradable at present. That means that waste tends to pile up. They’re actually quite tough to deal with in a chemical sense, too. It’s because these polymers have strong carbon-carbon bonds that are simply quite difficult to break. That means it’s very hard to turn them back into their component molecules for reforming. In an ideal world, you can sometimes capture a very clean waste stream of a single type of these plastics and melt and reform them, but generally, the quality of material you get out of this practice is poor. It’s why so many waste plastics get munched up and turned into unglamorous things like benches and rubbish bins.
At Berkley, researchers were hoping to achieve a better result, turning these plastics back into precursor chemicals that could then be used to make fresh new material.
The subject of a new paper in
Science
is a new catalytic process that essentially vaporizes these common plastics, breaking them down into their hydrocarbon building blocks. Basically, they’re turning old plastic back into the raw materials needed to make new plastic. This has the potential to be more than a nifty lab trick—the hope is that it could make it easy to deal with a whole host of difficult-to-recycle waste products.
Combining the plastics in a high-pressure reactor with ethylene gas and the catalyst materials breaks the polymer chains up into component molecules that can be used to make new plastics. Credit: UC Berkeley
The team employed a pair of solid catalysts, which help push along the desired chemical reactions without being consumed in the process. The first catalyst, which consists of sodium on alumina, tackles the tough job of breaking the strong carbon-carbon bonds in the plastic polymers. These materials consists of long chains of molecules, and this catalyst effectively chops them up. This typically leaves a broken link on one of the polymer chain fragments in the form of a reactive carbon-carbon double bond. The second catalyst, tungsten oxide on silica helps that reactive carbon atom pair up with ethylene gas which is streamed through the reaction chamber, producing propylene molecules as a result. As that carbon atom is stripped away, the process routinely leaves behind another double bond on the broken chain ready to react again, until the whole polymer chain has been converted. Depending on the feed plastic, whether it’s polyethylene, polypropylene, or a mixture, the same reaction process will generate propylene and isobutylene as a result. These gases can then be separated out and used as the starting points for making new plastics.
Before and after—the plastic has been converted to gas, leaving the catalytic material behind. Credit: UC Berkeley
What’s particularly impressive is that this method works on both polyethylene and polypropylene—the two heavy hitters in plastic waste—and even on mixtures of the two. Traditional recycling processes struggle with mixed plastics, often requiring tedious and costly sorting. By efficiently handling blends, this new approach sidesteps one of the major hurdles in plastic recycling.
To achieve this conversion in practice is relatively simple. Chunks of waste plastic are sealed in a high-pressure reaction vessel with the catalyst materials and a feed of ethylene gas, with the combination then heated and stirred. The materials react, and the gas left behind is the useful precursor gases for making fresh plastic.
In lab tests, the catalysts converted a near-equal mix of polyethylene and polypropylene into useful gases with an efficiency of almost 90%. That’s a significant leap forward compared to current methods, which often result in lower-value products or require pure streams of a single type of plastic. The process also showed resilience against common impurities and should be able to work with post-consumer materials—i.e. stuff people have thrown away. Additives and small amounts of other plastics didn’t significantly hamper the efficiency, though larger amounts of PET and PVC did pose a problem. However, since recycling facilities already separate out different types of plastics, this isn’t a deal-breaker.
The process can even run efficiently with a mixture of polypropylene and polyethylene. Note that propene is just another word for propylene. Credit: UC Berkeley
One of the most promising aspects of this development is the practicality of scaling it up. The catalysts used are cheaper and more robust than those in previous methods, which relied on expensive, sensitive metals dissolved in liquids. Solid catalysts are more amenable to industrial processes, particularly continuous flow systems that can handle large volumes of material.
Of course, moving from the lab bench to a full-scale industrial process will require further research and investment. The team needs to demonstrate that the process is economically viable and environmentally friendly on a large scale. But the potential benefits are enormous. It could actually make it worthwhile to recycle a whole lot more single-use plastic items, and reduce our need to replace or eliminate them entirely. Anything that cuts plastic waste streams into the environment is a boon, too. Ultimately, there’s still a ways to go, but it’s promising that solutions for these difficult-to-recycle plastics are finally coming on stream. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "8048190",
"author": "zoenagy3466",
"timestamp": "2024-10-08T14:25:48",
"content": "Plastic as battery! Since we have plastic explosives.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8048222",
"author": "aki009",
"timestamp": "2024-10... | 1,760,371,769.607452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/hack-on-self-the-alt-tab-annihilator/ | Hack On Self: The Alt-Tab Annihilator | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Lifehacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ADHD",
"attention tracking",
"data collection",
"sense of time"
] | Last time,
I told you about a simple script I made to collect data about my laptop activity, talked about why collecting data about yourself is a moral imperative, and shared the upgraded script with you alongside my plans for it. Today, I will show you a problem I’ve been tackling, with help of this script and the data it gives, and I also would love to hear your advice on a particular high-level problem I’m facing.
Today’s problem is as old as time – I often can’t focus on tasks I badly need done, even ones I want done for myself. This has been a consistent problem in my life, closing off opportunities, getting me to inadvertently betray my friends and family, hurting my health and well-being, reinforcing a certain sort of learned helplessness, and likely reinforcing itself as it goes, too.
It’s deeply disturbing to sit down fully intending to work on a project, then notice no progress on it hours later, and come to a gut-wrenching realization you’ve had hundreds of such days before – I think this screws with you, on a fundamental level. Over the years, I’ve been squeezing out lessons from this failure mode, making observations, trying out all sorts of advice, in search of a solution.
Join me today in non-invasive brain augmentation and reprogramming, as I continue trying to turn my life around – this time, with help of my laptop, a computer that I already spend a ton of time interfacing with. Ever notice that starting work on a task is often the hardest part of it? It’s the same for me, and I decided to hack away at it.
Staying On Track
As you might recall from the last article, I wrote a program that produces a stream of “currently open window” data – which is a good proxy for “what I’m doing right now”. That looks like a good start for figuring out when I’m planning to do a specific task and end up doing something else entirely!
Starting small, what kind of specific problem could I solve here? Let’s see. There’s a difficulty jump when I’m starting certain kinds of tasks (like writing articles!), but the difficulty lowers a fair bit once I’ve been typing for a few minutes. In that crucial time, it’s way too easy for me to Alt-Tab and get distracted, and not just then – I also become more distractable when I stumble upon a hard-to-write block of text. As you might imagine, Alt-Tabbing when things are hard is the undesirable kind of habit to develop, and I’m concerned that this habit is priming me to give up early when I’m struggling. It’s definitely not the kind of brain wiring I ever wanted to have!
I don’t even notice when I Alt-Tab away from a task I’m not yet focused on. It’s not a conscious reaction – instead, it’s more like a split-second reflex. This concerns me – Alt-Tabbing from a hard task is not something I genuinely think I should do, it’s more of a coping mechanism, and an effective one at that.
how to quickly build helpful tools that are easy to use? consider this.
The idea to fix this problem was simple – making noises into my headphones when I Alt-Tab into something I’m not supposed to Alt-Tab into, and stopping the noises once I’m back on track, very rudimentary negative feedback. I already rely on headphones to listen to music and videos as I write, so that’s the actuator sorted out.
As for classification, I could classify the windows as I went about it, using hotkeys – unknown windows resulting in a noise by default, requiring me to whitelist windows manually. Whitelisting makes the most sense – there’s an infinite amount of possible distractions, and a limited amount of windows I want to be focused into. An important project was upcoming, and I couldn’t afford to fail it, so I switched into “I must have this ready today” mode and finished it in an evening’s time.
A lot of required building blocks, were things I already had developed by then – for instance, it’s best for me to monitor hotkeys using direct
evdev
input, instead of DE-provided mechanisms, which are limited, and I had enough code for it written already. As for audio, the usual
import pygame
trick everyone uses to play short audio clips from Python, was nowhere near quick enough, and didn’t even really let me control audio playback. Instead, I wrote a small proof-of-concept library using gstreamer to play audio files on a whim. I pilfered an online sound effect library a little, arming myself with files like
Siren.wav
,
Martian Scanner.wav
and
Alarm Alert Effect.wav
, then glued the building blocks together, added a simple task tracking system on top, and got a working prototype.
The algorithm currently is simple and effective. Press a hotkey to start a new task or resume a previous one – a task contains a list of “good” windows, and optionally a list of “bad” windows. There’s a global whitelist of known-good windows, containing mostly window titles like
New Window - Firefox
and
Save As
. When I open a new window, the system starts beeping at me within half a second – giving me immediate feedback that my Alt-Tab was perhaps uncalled for. As it’s beeping, I have the option to either whitelist a window for this specific task, or blacklist it – the whitelisting stops the beeping immediately, and the latter raises the beeping noise intensity next time I switch to the window again. As I’m working Alt-Tabbing between windows I need, the workplace is, and whenever I switch to a blacklisted window, I instantly get a notification that this particular window switch is not something I want myself to be doing.
Hotkeys are focused on the right side of the keyboard, using right Ctrl and AltGr – an underutilized hotkey space.
Hotkey input, audio output – the system ties into the “flow” state pretty damn well, as long as I am wearing headphones – they are required for this specific augment program. And thankfully, I wear my headphones 24/7 already. Of course, I had to make the algorithm less obtrusive – make the relationship between “current window” and “what I’m doing right now” into a more direct one.
There’s a few heuristics I’ve added, that “normalize” the window name – for instance, Notepad++ adds an
*
in front of the title if you haven’t yet saved the document, which makes the window title change every time you save your text file, Discord, Gmail and YouTube append unread notification numbers in front of the tab (each in their own way), and GIMP puts the currently open image resolution in the title, which results in plenty of beeps as I’m resizing article images for Hackaday articles. Also, I ended up adding a few of my closest friends’ nicknames into the global whitelist – people I want to make sure I always pay attention to.
Does it Work?
Exceptionally well – I just used this system to write the very words you’re reading, this entire article, and many articles you might’ve read before. The audio files seem to lose their effectiveness over time, but I’ll soon be trying out swapping the files to a different sound – it’s not like there’s a shortage of siren sounds online. As you might noticed, in the end, I’ve built something like Windows Recall, except my program is a thousand times simpler, to its benefit. It is also consensual, open-source, and it actually does something directly useful for me, not to mention that it does not capture any passwords or private messages by accident.
I’ve been using this script for the past few months’ time, and my life is notably better nowadays because of it. Sometimes it’s finishing an article where the conclusion can’t quite seem to come into words, sometimes it’s pushing myself through writing a tricky email I must send out, and sometimes it’s staying in a chatroom with a friend helping them as they’re dealing with some emotional turmoil. Alt-Tabbing away from these situations never helps me or anyone else, somehow, it’s a reflex I ended up with, and I’m hell bent on rooting it out. Slowly, over time, it
helps me re-align my life
in the way I always wished it to be.
One thing I’ve noticed over time – this project focuses mainly on negative reinforcement. I don’t want to lean into negative reinforcement – it has notable negative consequences. For me, I often don’t want to switch into “task” mode when I’m supposed to work on something. This means that I have to look for various ways to add positive reinforcement sources to my life, and, I’m coming up short. I’ve also noticed that I rarely ever blacklist windows – instead, leaving the even distracting ones in the “beeping” state; associating a distraction window with a more-intense beep is not something I can quite teach myself to do automatically, somehow, even though I adore everything else about the system. There absolutely are methods of positive reinforcement that can work, so not tapping into that feels like a major waste.
I want to ask you all about positive reinforcement – it’s something I am a little baffled about. I strongly suspect that a cultural layer is missing here, because it feels so much easier to think of methods for negative reinforcement than positive reinforcement. Is it that my culture doesn’t treat positive reinforcement with the respect it deserves, or did I get trapped in a self-reinforcing loop because I only knew to put points in a specific skill tree? Maybe a mix of these two, maybe something else, the outcome here is the same – I struggle to come up with positive reinforcement methods, and today’s augment reflects it.
Positive Reinforcement: Gamification?
We have quite a few shining examples of positive reinforcement done right, like videogames – they rely a ton on it, at their core, tapping into fundamental human drives I didn’t even know I had. Some do it a little too well, usually, when money gets involved.
There’s a wealth of material on just how much focus you can extract from someone – the video above is a good introduction. Modern-day mobile games are a well-known offender, to the point where smartphone gaming companies
hire behavioural
psychology researchers,
who
then get paid to
figure out
ways of capturing our attention and converting it into money
,
hijacking the brains of people most susceptible.
The consequences of the mobile game microtransaction-backed reinforcement loops are pretty daunting, and have a close parallel with gambling – from people pushed to recklessly spend their money, to increased suicidality and depression, and most often, significantly reduced ability to achieve tasks in day-to-day life. Remember the perils of external data collection? Once again, large entities wield significant power over us, in ways we barely discuss, and we get none of the benefits – even though we could benefit tremendously if we started to use the same methods.
honestly, I just want this kind of menu, but for tasks that actually benefit me
Videogame-tailored methods sure work well on me, in particular – I’ve spent dozens upon dozens of hours in videogames, feeling pretty fulfilled in life as I go through a list of in-game tasks, or perfect a level time after time. It’s not an unpopular topic, either – you’ll find
quite
a few
open-source
solutions
trying to tap into it. Where’s my own quest menu, and why can’t I have a quest progression system for my real-life tasks? Why is this system of positive reinforcement reserved to virtual stories that I will forget in a year’s time?
I’ve only started learning about all the yet-unexplored ways of positive reinforcement harnessing, and there’s a ton of them that could work pretty well, and I keep discovering new options – just that they’re harder to think of. Audio feedback works for me well when it comes to noticing unwanted Alt-Tab presses – what about figuring out when I’m doing well, and giving me audio feedback on it too? Tracking time spent in whitelisted windows, together with monitoring typing speed, the system could put pleasant sounds in my headphones as long as I’m focused, reminding me that I’m on the right track, or maybe provide a summary right after. Could this help, or would it be distracting? Can’t know until I finally try them out, one by one.
What about keeping a running-tally summary of what I hack on, and perhaps creating some sort of “streak” or “levelling” system? Maybe, each morning, giving me an overview on how my days went? I’ve written
a “productivity calendar” program
before, a generator of printable PDFs for each month. Every day, I’d try and write in my day-to-day tasks with a ballpoint pen.
“Productivity” is not a word I use anymore – I find it tainted, typically aimed
at you
from the outside world. Today, I’d call this a “hacking calendar”.
It largely failed to uphold itself – the A4 sheet of paper and a pen were easy to lose track of, given how I move from place to place all the time. It would be pretty simple to repurpose this script, however, putting task summaries into the empty boxes and regenerate it every hour. Say, I have this summary generate & open automatically each morning, right after I wake up – could it help? What about adding messages from the past into the mix? I’m probably jumping ahead a bit too much here – this one’s a whole self-hacking topic of its own.
Once again, sadly, I have committed the sin of not collecting enough data over time – this program, too, needs to grow an API. The bringup of my software stack has been pretty recursive, in a bad way, aimed at solving exactly the problems preventing me from working on it – an uphill climb with no peak in sight. Seems like I really ought to forgive myself for this journey taking years. Exploring new ground, with what feels like barely enough language to describe it, is not a pleasant process, but today’s Alt-Tab Annihilator program has helped me gain a strong foothold that felt long overdue, and it helped me spot a fundamental weakness in the way I learn, too.
Thankfully, I know that I can ask advice from your all. What’s your experiences, ideas, and opinions on positive reinforcement methods? What kind of positive reinforcement methods do you use for yourself, or wish that someone explored? | 43 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047966",
"author": "aleksclark",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T17:18:20",
"content": "Fundamentally, doing stuff on computers means that positive reinforcement is hard. If I dig a ditch, the ditch is real, and does a thing. I can go look at it later. There are things one can do on a com... | 1,760,371,769.867598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/vehicle-to-everything-the-looming-smart-traffic-experience/ | Vehicle-To-Everything: The Looming Smart Traffic Experience | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"C-V2X",
"vehicle-to-everything"
] | Much of a car’s interaction with the world around it is still a very stand-alone, analog experience, regardless of whether said car has a human driver or a self-driving computer system. Mark I eyeballs or equivalent computer-connected sensors perceive the world, including road markings, traffic signs and the locations of other road traffic. This information is processed and the car’s speed and trajectory are adjusted to ideally follow the traffic rules and avoid unpleasant conversations with police officers, insurance companies, and/or worse.
An idea that has been kicked around for a few years now has been to use wireless communication between cars and their environment to present this information more directly, including road and traffic conditions, independent from signs placed near or on the road. It would also enable vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V), which somewhat like the transponders in airplanes would give cars and other vehicles awareness of where other traffic is hanging out. Other than V2V, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) would also include communication regarding infrastructure (V2I), pedestrians (V2P) and an expansive vehicle-to-network (V2N) that gives off strong
Ghost in the Shell
vibes.
Is this is the future of road traffic? The US Department of Transport (DOT) seems to think that its deployment will be a good thing, but V2X has been stuck in regulatory hurdles. This may now change, with the
DOT releasing a roadmap
for its deployment.
CB Radio On Steroids
Cobra 18 WX ST II mobile Citizens’ band radio, with a toggle to receive NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards, scanning the CB band, and a toggle for Channels 9 and 19. (Credit: Zuzu, Wikimedia Commons)
No doubt many of us have used or are aware of the existence of
Citizens Band radio
(CB for short), which is a radio system operating around the 27 MHz band, first popularized in the US during the 1950s and gaining world-wide popularity during the 1970. It is an early example of an ubiquitous communication system that was, and is, used both by citizens at home and installed in just about any type of vehicle and boat. For truckers in particular it provides a means to obtain constant updates on road conditions, as well as for truck-to-truck communications should the need arise.
Over the years CB has become less relevant to the average citizen, who these days is equipped with a smartphone and drives a vehicle that has more computing power and communication options than the Space Shuttle. While connected to the internet, they can get route updates, warnings about road condition and construction, etc. delivered to various apps on the smartphone, to the infotainment system, a dedicated satnav device and so on. Yet the concept remains of being tied into some form of communication network that provides information that would otherwise be hard to come by.
Meanwhile features such as cruise control and collision avoidance systems (
CAS
) keep tabs on what is going on around the vehicle and any potential traffic rule violations to some extent. The number and types of CAS and other forms of
advanced driver-assistance systems
(ADAS) in modern cars keep increasing, using everything from LIDAR and cameras to millimeter-wave radar systems to prevent collisions, keep the car in the current lane, detect braking cars ahead and integrate data obtained via a data link on upcoming traffic lights and other notable features long before they become visible.
With such a long list of safety features and data links a part of an increasing number of vehicles on the road, it raises the question of whether this V2X deployment would do more than to standardize and expand upon much of the technology that is already out and about on the roads today.
Defining V2X
As with many marketing-buzzword-bingo-laden terms, it is probably a good idea to take a look at the overview of the
National V2X Deployment Plan
(PDF) which the US DOT recently released. The title for the document makes it clear that the primary consideration is that of safety, specifically increasing road safety by preventing collisions and with it the deaths and injuries that occur on US roads every year.
Motor vehicle fatalities
on US roads hit 42,512 deaths in 2022, or 12.76 per 100,000 inhabitants. More worryingly is an increase in pedestrian and bicycle fatalities, with 81% more pedestrians dying in 2022 compared to 2013.
So how would V2X prevent these fatalities? If we scroll down to page 11 of the DOT document to the actual roadmap, we can see that for the period of 2024 – 2028 the short-term goals are to deploy V2X on 20% of national highways and have the top 75 US metro areas equip 25% of their intersections with the technology. For vehicles, two manufacturers would commit to producing vehicles capable of using the selected 5.895 – 5.925 GHz band by the 2028 model year. From that period the V2X system would be expanded to cover more of the highways and intersections.
If we consult the referenced
ITS America National V2X Deployment Plan
which was published in Aril of 2023, we can get a bit more background information. ITS America is a collaboration of infrastructure owners and operators (IOO) and the aforementioned OEMs. The V2X-enabled cars would have 5.9 GHz-enabled radios, which communicate with road-side units (RSU) to exchange relevant information, building upon the knowledge gained so far from
Cellular-V2X
(C-V2X) trials.
The RSUs would be placed at intersections, where it could eliminate many crashes while also providing the driver with information on when a traffic light will turn green and prevent the running of red lights. In addition, V2X-enabled cars would also be able to communicate with V2X-enabled bicyclists, pedestrians and similar, who would also have a V2X-enabled device on their person or bike. This would then communicate with the vehicles ADAS, ideally preventing collisions between the vehicle and these much squishier traffic participants. These personal V2X devices could be integrated into smartphones at some point, for example.
Casualties Versus Security
On one hand it sounds wonderful if cars and trucks can effectively no longer hit pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, etc. because of V2X-ADAS integration, but there are some concerns regarding privacy and security. There is the obvious worry about spoofed V2X messages that might mess with traffic, or even cause the very casualties that it sought to avoid. To this end the DOT hosts the
ITS Cybersecurity Research Program
, which among other things is working on ensuring trusted communications between vehicles, infrastructure and other parties in a V2X-enabled system.
This would seem to involve some secure way to signing messages, while guaranteeing some level of anonymity. The former would seem to be standard secure communication practice, while the latter makes sense when the goal of V2X vis-à-vis other traffic participants is to merely avoid becoming kinetically intimate. In order to avoid said collision, you only need need to know where the vehicle, bike or pedestrian in question is roughly located before any onboard sensors can detect it.
Presumably this might include common scenarios such as a person running out from behind a row of parked cars into traffic, or another car popping out from a narrow side street in one of those harrowingly picturesque ancient city centers. The scenarios referenced in the documents are left turns and intersection crossings, but presumably one could come up with many more scenarios.
Implementation-Dependent
Waymo’s self-driving Chrysler Pacifica, Mountain View.
To circle back to the question asked at the beginning, of whether V2X is the future of road traffic, it’s hard to give a definitive answer here. Although the benefits are stark, and the technologies required neither new nor bleeding edge, one only has to look at the sometimes outright hostility that for example battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) as well as self-driving cars receive. Even though BEVs are over a century old by now, and self-driving cars like those from
Alphabet’s Waymo
are demonstrating clearly superior incidents-per-kilometer statistics than human drivers, bias persists.
If V2X wants to succeed, it should be implemented and handled in a way that works with these biases, rather than against them. If lives are saved due V2X-enabled cars with a human driver pulling off a superhuman collision avoidance maneuver, or a child not run over after running into traffic because the V2X-enabled truck already stopped before the child came into view, then those are convincing arguments.
Perhaps V2X will have an easier time here than self-driving cars and BEVs, as it does not seek to change or replace anything, no more than that ADAS features in today’s cars do. It might even be quite realistic to retrofit V2X into existing vehicles, significantly promoting kinetic hesitancy in close traffic situations, but these are all things that we will have to wait and see what happens. | 47 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047933",
"author": "MitoK",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T15:06:51",
"content": "It’s weird. To me a car always seemed to represent a certain freedom and independance, but everybody just lets cars become part of some very icky total tracking and control system from the ‘authorites’ and ... | 1,760,371,769.695008 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/first-benchies-in-stainless-steel-with-lasers/ | First Benchies In Stainless Steel, With Lasers | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"metal 3d printer",
"sintering",
"stainless steel"
] | DIY 3D printing in metal is a lot more complicated than we thought. And
this video from [Metal Matters] shows two approaches, many many false starts, and finally, a glorious 78.9% success
! (And it’s embedded below for your enjoyment.)
The first half of the video is dedicated to the work on a laser welding system that doesn’t pan out in the end at all. But the missteps are worth watching as well, and they hammer home the difficulties of melting metal reliably with nothing more than coherent light. Things like reflection, the difficulty of getting good process control cameras, and finally the whole thing slumping as multiple layers stack up on each other make this approach to 3D construction look nearly impossible.
Indeed, around halfway through the video,
the focus shifts toward a metal-powder sintering machine
, and this one is a success! Metal dust is deposited layer by layer, and fused with a totally different laser. The tricky bits here range from esoteric problems like making the laser fuse the metal dust without blasting it, to simple things like the geometry of the scraper that ensures even layer heights. And once you’ve got all that down, getting a good pattern down for 2D infill in metal is non-trivial.
A sweet half-scale metal Benchy emerges at the end, so why does [Metal Matters] call this a 78.9% success? Because that’s the density of the final print, and he is shooting for 100%. But we wouldn’t be so harsh. We’ve seen
how far he’s come since the first machines
, and this is a huge advance. We’re looking forward to the next video update in a year or two!
Thanks to [Jonas] for the tip! | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047892",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T12:02:43",
"content": "Summary of the video: I did that and it did not work. Then I did that, and it did not work. Than I did that, and it did not work, too. I than did that, did not work. ||I did that, did not work.||Then... | 1,760,371,769.771862 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/07/wifi-meets-lora-for-long-range/ | WiFi Meets LoRa For Long Range | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"LoRa",
"wifi"
] | What do you get when you cross WiFi and LoRa? Researchers in China have been doing this, and they call the result
WiLo
. They claim to get reliable connections over about half a kilometer. Typical WiFi runs 40 to 60 meters, barring any Pringle’s cans or other exotic tricks.
According to [Michelle Hampson] writing in IEEE Spectrum, the researchers manipulated Wi-Fi’s OFDM multiplexing to emulate LoRa’s chirp-spreading signal. The advantage is that existing WiFi hardware can use the protocol to increase range.
While LoRa is known for being economical with power, this might not be the case with repurposed WiFi devices. The researchers plan to explore ways to make WiLo more energy efficient. You can read the
research paper
if you want to dig into the details.
There are also some efficiency issues. The WiFi header, trailer, and preamble can’t contribute to the fake LoRa signal, so they are ignored by the LoRa receiver. We aren’t sure, but we wondered if some or most WiFi cards are now based on SDR technology anyway. If you had the internal details of the SDR, it seems like you could simply reprogram the entire unit to do whatever protocol you wanted. Still, those details are probably hard to obtain.
LoRa seems
prime for hacking
. Of course,
500 meters is just the tip of the iceberg
. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047829",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T08:25:17",
"content": "Even if some WiFi devices are based on SDR, the firmware is a notorious closed-off blob. Reverse-engineering this might be possible, but it’s unlikely to be practical.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,371,770.105495 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/towards-solderless-pcb-prototyping/ | Towards Solderless PCB Prototyping | Elliot Williams | [
"cnc hacks",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"bare conductive",
"glue",
"pcb assembly",
"pick and place",
"Z-tape"
] | When we think of assembling a PCB, we’re almost always thinking about solder. Whether in paste form or on the spool, hand-iron or reflow, some molten metal is usually in the cards. [Stephen Hawes] is looking for a solderless alternative for prototyping, and he
shows us the progress he’s made toward going solderless in this video
.
His ulterior motive? He’s the designer of the
LumenPNP open-source pick-and-place machine
, and is toying with the idea of a full assembly based just on this one machine. If you strapped a conductive-glue extruder head on the machine in addition to the parts placer, you’d have a full assembly in one step. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
[Stephen] first tries Z-tape, which is really cool stuff. Small deformable metal balls are embedded in a gel-like tape, and conduct in only the Z direction when parts are pushed down hard into the tape. But Z-tape is very expensive, requires a bit of force to work reliably, and [Stephen] finds that the circuits are intermittent. In short, Z-tape is not a good fit for the PNP machine.
But what [Stephen] does find works well is a graphite-based conductive glue. In particular, he likes the Bare Conductive paint. He tries another carbon-based paint, but it’s so runny that application is difficult, while the Bare stuff is thick and sticky. (They won’t tell you their secret formula,
but it’s no secret how the stuff is basically made
.) That ends up looking
very
promising, but it’s still pretty spendy, and [Stephen] is looking to make his own conductive paste/paint pretty soon. That’s particularly appealing, because he can control the stickiness and viscosity, and he’ll surely let us in on the secret sauce.
(We’re armchair quarterbacking here, but the addition of a small amount of methyl cellulose and xanthan gum works to
turn metal powder into a formable, printable metal clay
, so it might make a carbon paste similarly adjustably sticky.)
We love the end-goal here: one machine that can apply a conductive paint and then put the parts into the right place, resulting in a rough-and-ready, but completely hands-off assembly. You probably wouldn’t want to use this technique if the joint resistance was critical, or if you needed the PCB to stand up to abuse. There’s a reason that everyone in industry uses molten metal, after all. But for verifying a quick one-off, or in a rapid-prototyping environment? This would be a dream.
We’ve seen other wacky ways to go solderless before.
This one uses laser-cut parts to hold the components on the PCB
, for instance. And for simply joining a couple wires together,
we have many more solutions, many thanks to you all in the comments
! | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047791",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T05:25:59",
"content": "Seems like a fun project, it would be pretty cool if a PnP machine could replace the reflow process. Although I’m not sure it will save much time at all.Back when I was a child, I made my own version of... | 1,760,371,770.046173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/reversing-type-1-diabetes-with-a-patients-own-stem-cells/ | Reversing Type 1 Diabetes With A Patient’s Own Stem Cells | Maya Posch | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"diabetes",
"type 1 diabetes"
] | Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune condition whereby the patient’s own immune system attacks the pancreatic islets, destroying them in the process. Since these islets are responsible for producing insulin in response to blood sugar (glucose) levels, the patient is thus required to externally inject insulin for the remainder of their life. That was the expected scenario, but it appears that this form of diabetes may soon be treatable, with one woman now being free of the condition for a year already,
as reported in
Nature
, referencing an article by
[Shusen Wang] et al.
that describes the treatment and the one-year result.
Most notable with this study is that the researchers didn’t use the regular method to create pluripotent stem cells. These cells were extracted from the patient, to revert back to this earlier developmental stage. They were not modified using genes, but
rather singular chemicals
(
PDF
). The advantage of this is that it avoids having to modify the cell’s genomes, which could conceivably cause issues like cancer later on. This was one of the first time that this method was used in a human subject, with islet cells formed and about 1.5 million of them injected into the patient’s abdominal muscles, a novel site for this procedure.
This location made these islets easy to keep track of, and easier to remove in case of any issues compared to the usual injection site within the liver. Fortunately for this woman, no complications occurred and one year later she is still free of any diabetes symptoms. Two other patients in the trial are also seeing very positive results, leaving only the question of whether the auto-immune condition that originally caused the islet destruction still exists. Since this female patient is taking immunosuppressants for a previous liver transplant it’s a hard to thing to judge, especially since we understand the causes behind type 1 diabetes so poorly.
Regardless, this and other trials using pluripotent cells, transplanted islets and more offer the prospect of a permanent treatment for the many people who suffer from type 1 diabetes.
Featured image: “
Human induced pluripotent stem cell colony
” National Eye Institute/NIH | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047767",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T02:48:54",
"content": "The trick of trying this in an already immune suppressed patient is insightful. But for the public please consider what one of my heme-Onc professors always said. This is trading one terrible disease for an... | 1,760,371,769.993441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/hackaday-links-october-6-2024/ | Hackaday Links: October 6, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"acrylic",
"Anthropause",
"aquarium",
"astronaut",
"berlin",
"collapse",
"corpse",
"COVID",
"death",
"elevator",
"forensic",
"hackaday links",
"iss",
"lockdown",
"lunar surface",
"pandemic",
"promession",
"structure failure"
] | Remember that time a giant cylindrical aquarium in a Berlin hotel bar catastrophically failed and left thousands of fish homeless?
We sure do
, and further recall that at the time, we were very curious about the engineering details of how this structure failed so spectacularly. At the time, we were sure there’d be plenty of follow-up on that score, but life happened and we forgot all about the story. Luckily, a faithful reader named Craig didn’t, and he helpfully ran down a few follow-up articles that came out last year that are worth looking at.
The first
is from prosecutors in Berlin with a report offering three possibilities: that the adhesive holding together the acrylic panels of the aquarium failed; that the base of the tank was dented during recent refurbishment; or that the aquarium was refilled too soon after the repairs, leading to the acrylic panels drying out. We’re a little confused by that last one just from an intuitive standpoint, but each of these possibilities seems hand-wavy enough that the report’s executive summary could have been “Meh,
Scheiße
happens.”
The conclusions reached in the prosecutor’s report come from
a forensic analysis
conducted by Professor Christian Bonten, who the building owners commissioned to get to the bottom of things. The work began soon after the accident with an on-site analysis of the debris field, followed by laboratory studies of 90 tonnes of recovered shards. They put over 1,100 hours into the effort, examining evidence down to the molecular level via chemical analysis of the polymer chains in the acrylic. Still, the best they could come up with was that the collapse was “sudden and unexpected,” a sentiment the fish would no doubt agree with, and that there was no way anyone could have predicted it. That’s a bit frightening; while the world isn’t exactly littered with giant aquaria like this, they aren’t unknown either, and the idea that any of these structures could fail without warning is chilling. Especially if you’re a fish.
The Covid pandemic lockdowns were difficult for a lot of people, but they did provide a (hopefully) unique opportunity to observe just how much the activity of 8 billion people has on our planet. We recall a ton of non-intuitive results such as decreased background noise in seismic observations, pollution maps that suddenly cleared up, and even changes in the behavior of wildlife. But one impact we really didn’t see coming during “The Anthropause” was
a decrease in the surface temperature on the Moon
. Researchers looked at data from six sites on the near side of the Moon during lunar nights from 2017 to 2023, and found a subtle but unmistakable dip in temperatures during April and May of 2020, the peak of the lockdowns. They explain that the decrease was due to lower longwave IR emissions from the Earth’s surface thanks to decreased greenhouse gas emissions during the period, which we find pretty fascinating.
One of the benefits of writing for Hackaday is the crazy random rabbit holes that we get to go down, especially when we’re doing research for an article. Such a thing happened this week with a random thought that popped up while reading something about the International Space Station: What would they do if someone died up there? Thankfully, we’ve had precious few space fatalities in the last 70 years, and those have mostly been restricted to launch and reentry, and hence have been — ahem — extremely energetic deaths.
But with two space stations in orbit hosting long-duration crews in an inhospitable environment, eventually the law of averages is going to catch up to us and someone is just going to die up there. Then what? We found
an article from 2021
that attempts to answer this with the help of the indispensable Commander Chris Hadfield, who offers insights that suggest his tours on the ISS have given him plenty of time to mull it over. But the real treat in the article is the idea of adapting an idea known as “promession,” which would involve freezing a corpse in liquid nitrogen and then rapidly vibrating it to break it into tiny bits, suitable for rapid composting. The on-orbit version would skip the liquid nitrogen and use the cold of space, with a robotic arm used to vibrate the astronautsicle and pulverize him or her. The article takes some weird turns — Martian cannibals? — which is understandable given that at the time it was written, NASA didn’t really have a plan for what to do with dead astronauts. But fear not, because
they seem to be working on it now
.
And finally, we stumbled across
a video looking into the mysterious inner workings of vintage elevator controls
that we found strangely compelling. The elevator in question is a Schindler lift with an odd design; rather than sliding doors on both the car and the landings, this one just has the doors on the landings, and those are swing-type doors. It’s fascinating to watch the doors glide by as the elevator goes up and down the cleanest elevator shaft we’ve ever seen. Even tidier is the hoist room, which is filled with the snappiest relays and coolest old controls you’ll ever see. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047762",
"author": "ゴム",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T01:47:25",
"content": "So, maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but the greenhouse effect doesn’t make sense to me as an explanation for the moon thing. I thought the greenhouse effect stopped heat from radiating out to space as mu... | 1,760,371,770.431312 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/tinkering-with-klipper-making-the-manipilator-robotic-arm/ | Tinkering With Klipper: Making The ManiPilator Robotic Arm | Heidi Ulrich | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"klipper",
"manipilator",
"robot arm",
"robotics"
] | [Leo Goldstien]’s entry into the world of robotics has been full of stops and starts. Like many beginners, he found traditional robotics instructions overwhelming and hard to follow, bogged down with dense math that often obscured the bigger picture. So he decided
to approach things differently
and create something with his own hands. The result? A 3D-printed robotic arm he affectionately calls “ManiPilator.”
This article is the first in a three-part series documenting [Leo]’s hands-on approach to learning robotics from the ground up. Building ManiPilator became an opportunity to learn by doing, and the project took him on a journey of experimenting, failing, and eventually succeeding in tasks that seemed deceptively simple at first glance. Each hurdle provided him with insights that more traditional learning methods hadn’t delivered. Below is one of the videos [Leo] captured, to show one step in the process: doing a check using multiple motors.
To make his project work, [Leo] relied on open-source software like Klipper, piecing together code and hardware in a way that made sense to him. In sharing his story, he offers fellow beginners an approachable perspective on robotics, with practical insights and candid reflections on the challenges and breakthroughs.
[Leo]’s project shows that there’s more than one way to start exploring robotics, and that sometimes the best way to learn is simply to dive in and start building.
Follow along with his journey
as he tackles the complexities of robotics, one step at a time. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047730",
"author": "Peter Puffer",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T21:07:05",
"content": "bogged down with dense math that often obscured the bigger picture.Yeah. Forward and inverse kinematics, Jacobians, DH parameters and all the other sutff is a bit PITA to learn and later implement in... | 1,760,371,770.157621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/tearing-down-a-digital-scope-from-78/ | Tearing Down A Digital Scope From ’78 | Heidi Ulrich | [
"hardware",
"Teardown"
] | [
"analog",
"analog oscilloscope",
"datalab",
"digital scope",
"ieee",
"oscilloscope",
"scope",
"transient recorder"
] | If you’re a fan of vintage electronics and DIY tinkering, you’ll find
this teardown by [Thomas Scherrer]
fascinating. In a recent video, he delves into a rare piece of equipment: the Data Lab Transient Recorder DL 901. This device looks like a classic one-channel oscilloscope, complete with all the knobs and settings you’d expect.
The DL 901, made by Data Laboratories Ltd., is a mystery even to [Thomas], who couldn’t find any documentation online. From the DC offset and trigger settings to the sweep time controls, the DL 901 is equipped to handle slow, high-resolution analog-to-digital conversion. The circuitry includes TTL chips and a PMI DAAC 100, a 10-bit digital-to-analog converter. [Thomas] speculates it uses a successive approximation technique for analog-to-digital conversion—a perfect blend of analog finesse and digital processing for its time.
Despite its intriguing features, the DL 901 suffers from a non-responsive analog input system, limiting the teardown to a partial exploration. For those who enjoyed past Hackaday articles on oscilloscope teardowns and analog tech, this one is a treat.
Watch the video
to see more details and the full process of uncovering this vintage device’s secrets. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047761",
"author": "Mitsuru Yamada",
"timestamp": "2024-10-07T01:30:51",
"content": "I built my own digital sampler with almost the same functionality as this one from scratch in 1979. I just published its contents in a Hackaday project, so this teardown explanation is deeply movin... | 1,760,371,770.241895 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/3d-printed-hydrofoil-goes-from-model-scale-to-human-scale-with-flight-controller/ | 3D Printed Hydrofoil Goes From Model Scale To Human Scale With Flight Controller | Danie Conradie | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"dRehmFlight",
"e-foil",
"hydrofoil",
"rctestflight"
] | Hydrofoils have been around for several decades, but watching a craft slice through the water with almost no wake never get old. In the videos after the break, [rctestflight] showcases his ambitious project: transforming a standup paddleboard into a
rideable hydrofoil with active stabilization
.
Unlike conventional electric hydrofoil boards that depend on rider skill for balance, [rctestflight] aims to create a self-stabilizing system. He began by designing a
small-scale model
, complete with servo-controlled ailerons and elevators, dual motors for differential thrust, and a
dRehmFlight
flight controller. A pair of sonar sensors help the flight controller maintain constant height above the water. The wings are completely 3D printed, with integrated hinges for flight control surfaces slots for wiring and control components. It’s better suited for 3D printing than RC aircraft since it’s significantly less sensitive to weight, allowing for more structural reinforcement. The small scale tests were very successful and allowed [rctestflight] to determine that he didn’t need the vertical stabilizer and rudder.
The full-sized version features a scaled up wing, larger servos and motors attached to an 11-foot standup paddleboard — minus its rear end — mounted on commercially available e-foil booms. A foam battery box stores a hefty LiFePO4 battery, while the electronics from the smaller version are repurposed here. Despite only catching glimpses of this larger setup in action at the end of the video, it promises an excitingly smooth lake ride we would certainly like to experience.
We’ve seen several
3D printed hydrofoils
around here, but this promised to be the
largest
successful attempt. Don’t fail us [Daniel]. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047683",
"author": "RoboJ1M",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T16:22:09",
"content": "Wow, so it IS possible!I’ve been pondering this for ages, whether you could add a fly-by-wire system to a hydrofoil.I was thinking about whether I could design a safer water-speed-record craft with fly-by... | 1,760,371,770.198351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/2view-the-self-erasing-vhs-tape-with-paperclip-hack/ | 2View: The Self-Erasing VHS Tape With Paperclip Hack | Maya Posch | [
"Teardown",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"2view",
"drm",
"VHS"
] | The back of the 2View VHS box. The instructions are all in Dutch, as its (sole) launch market. (Credit: Techmoan, YouTube)
Over the decades the video and music industries have tried a wide range of ways to get consumers to buy ‘cheaper’ versions of albums and music, but then limit the playback in some way. Perhaps one of the most fascinating ones is the 2View, as
recently featured
by [Matt] over at
Techmoan
on Youtube. This is a VHS tape which works in standard VHS players and offers you all the goodness that VHS offers, like up to 512 lines of PAL video and hard-coded ads and subtitles, but also is restricted to just playing twice. After this second playback and rewinding, the tape self-erases and is blank, leaving you with just an empty VHS tape you can use for your own recordings.
As a form of analog restrictions management (ARM) it’s pretty simple in how it works, with [Matt] taking the now thankfully erased
Coyote Ugly
tape apart for a demonstration of the inside mechanism. This consists out of effectively just two parts: one plastic, spring-loaded shape that moves against one of the tape spools and follows the amount of tape, meaning minutes watched, and a second arm featuring a permanent magnet that is retained by an inner track inside the first shape until after rewinding twice it is released and ends up against the second spool, erasing the tape until rewound, after which it catches in a neutral position. This then left an erased tape that could be safely recorded on again.
Although cheaper than a comparable VHS tape without this limit, 2View was released in 2001, when in the Netherlands and elsewhere DVDs were demolishing the VHS market. This, combined with the fact that a simple bent paperclip could be stuck inside to retain the erase arm in place to make it a regular VHS tape, meant that it was really a desperate attempt that quickly vanished off the market | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047640",
"author": "Steve",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T11:42:53",
"content": "Where did 512 lines come from for PAL’s number of lines? Analogue 625/50 PAL as used across (Western) Europe (apart from SECAM France) has 575 active lines (made up of 2 x 287.5 fields).(In digital formats... | 1,760,371,770.311024 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/06/automated-pixel-art-with-marbles/ | Automated Pixel Art With Marbles | Danie Conradie | [
"Art",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"color sensor",
"marble machine",
"sorting machine"
] | Marble machines are a fun and challenging reason to do engineering for the sake of engineering. [Engineezy] adds some color to the theme, building a
machine to create 16×16 marble images
automatically. (Video embedded below.)
The core problem was devising ways to sort, lift, place, and dump marbles in their correct positions without losing their marbles—figuratively and literally. Starting with color detection, [Engineezy] used an RGB color sensor and Euclidian math to determine each marble’s color. After trying several different mechanical sorting mechanisms, he settled on a solenoid and servo-actuated dump tube to drop the marble into the appropriate hopper.
After sorting, he faced challenges with designing a mechanism to transport marbles from the bottom hoppers to the top of the machine. While paddle wheels seemed promising at first, they tended to jam—a problem solved by innovating with Archimedes screws that move marbles up smoothly without clogs. The marbles are pushed into clear tubes on either side of the machine, providing a clear view of their parade to the top.
Perhaps most ingenious is his use of constant-force springs as a flexible funnel to guide the marbles to a moving slider that drops them into the correct column of the display. When a picture is complete, sliding doors open on the bottom of the columns, dumping the marbles into a chain lift which feeds them into the sorting section. Each of the mechanisms has a mirrored version of the other side, so the left and right halves of the display operate independently.
The final product is slow, satisfying and noisy kinetic testament to [Engineezy]’s perseverance through countless iterations and hiccups.
Marble machines can range from
minimalist
to ultra-complex
musical monstrosities
, but never fail to tickle our engineering minds. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047616",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T08:26:37",
"content": "Don’t these people have jobs?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8047627",
"author": "Why",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T09:52:20",
... | 1,760,371,770.360459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/why-electric-trains-sound-the-way-they-do/ | Why Electric Trains Sound The Way They Do | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"Electric motor",
"electric train",
"pwm"
] | If you’re a seasoned international rail traveler you will no doubt have become used to the various sounds of electric locomotives and multiple units as they start up. If you know anything about electronics you’ll probably have made the connection between the sounds and their associated motor control schemes, but unless you’re a railway engineer the chances are you’ll still be in the dark about just what’s going on. To throw light on the matter, [Z&F Railways]
have a video
explaining the various control schemes and the technologies behind them.
It’s made in Scotland, so the featured trains are largely British or in particular Scottish ones, but since the same systems can be found internationally it’s the sounds which matter rather than the trains themselves. Particularly interesting is the explanation of PWM versus pattern mode, the latter being a series of symmetrical pulses at different frequencies to create the same effect as PWM, but without relying on a single switching frequency as PWM does. This allows the controller to more efficiently match its drive to the AC frequency demanded by the motor at a particular speed, and is responsible for the “gear change” sound of many electric trains. We’re particularly taken by the sound of some German and Austrian locomotives (made by our corporate overlords Siemens, by coincidence) that step through the patterns in a musical scale.
Not for the first time we’re left wondering why electric vehicle manufacturers have considered fake internal combustion noises to make their cars sound sporty, when the sound of true electrical power is right there. The video is below the break. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047601",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T06:57:06",
"content": "I think this video is a boring ripoff of the much more interesting Beno’s video “Why do trains make interesting sounds”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOm8ePMg1dE",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,371,770.486627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/memristors-are-cool-radiation-resistant-memristors-even-moreso/ | Memristors Are Cool, Radiation-resistant Memristors Even Moreso | Donald Papp | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"memristor",
"radiation",
"space"
] | Space is a challenging environment for semiconductors, but researchers have shown that a specific type of memristor (the hafnium oxide memristor, to be exact) actually
reacts quite usefully when exposed to gamma radiation
. In fact, it’s even able to leverage this behavior as a way to measure radiation exposure. In essence, it’s able to act as both memory and a sensor.
Being able to resist radiation exposure is highly desirable for space applications. Efficient ways to measure radiation exposure are just as valuable. The hafnium oxide memristor looks like it might be able to do both, but before going into how that works, let’s take a moment for a memristor refresher.
A memristor is essentially two conductive plates between which bridges can be made by applying a voltage to “write” to the device, by which one sets it to a particular resistance. A positive voltage causes bridging to occur between the two ends, lowering the device’s resistance, and a negative voltage reverses the process, increasing the resistance. The exact formulation of a memristor can vary. The memristor was conceived in the 1970s by Leon Chua, and HP Labs created a working one in 2008. An (expensive)
16-pin DIP was first made available in 2015
.
A hafnium oxide memristor is a bit different. Normally it would be write-once, meaning a negative voltage does not reset the device, but researchers discovered that exposing it to gamma radiation appears to weaken the bridging, allowing a negative voltage to reset the device as expected. Exposure to radiation also caused a higher voltage to be required to set the memristor; a behavior researchers were able to leverage into using the memristor to measure radiation exposure. Given time, a hafnium oxide memristor exposed to radiation, causing it to require higher-than-normal voltages to be “set”, eventually lost this attribute. After 30 days, the exposed memristors appeared to recover completely from the effects of radiation exposure and no longer required an elevated voltage for writing. This is the behavior the article refers to as “self-healing”.
The
research paper
has all the details, and it’s interesting to see new things relating to memristors. After all, when it comes to electronic components it’s been quite a long time since we’ve seen something genuinely new. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047569",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T04:56:04",
"content": "There is a company called “Knowm Inc.” that sells something called the “Memristor Discovery” board for $365.00 USD.[1][2][3]Knowm Inc. has done some interesting work with the behavioral modelling of various... | 1,760,371,770.534543 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/quake-in-276-kb-of-ram/ | QuakeIn 276 KB Of RAM | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"arduino",
"assembly",
"doom",
"limitations",
"memory",
"nano matter",
"overclocking",
"port",
"programming",
"quake",
"rendering"
] | Porting the original
DOOM
to various pieces of esoteric hardware is a rite of passage in some software circles. But in the modern world, we can get better performance than the 386 processor required to run the 1993 shooter for the cost of a dinner at a nice restaurant — with plenty of other embedded systems blowing these original minimum system requirements out of the water.
For a much tougher challenge,
a group from Silicon Labs decided to port
DOOM
‘s successor,
Quake
, to the Arduino Nano Matter Board platform
instead even though this platform has some pretty significant limitations for a game as advanced as Quake.
To begin work on the memory problem, the group began with a port of
Quake
originally designed for Windows, allowing them to use a modern Windows machine to whittle down the memory usage before moving over to hardware. They do have a flash memory module available as well, but there’s a speed penalty with this type of memory. To improve speed they did what any true gamer would do with their system: overclock the processor. This got them to around 10 frames per second, which is playable, but not particularly enjoyable. The further optimizations to improve the FPS required a much deeper dive which included generating lookup tables instead of relying on computation, optimizing some of the original C programming, coding some functions in assembly, and only refreshing certain sections of the screen when needed.
On a technical level,
Quake
was a dramatic improvement over
DOOM,
allowing for things like real-time 3D rendering, polygonal models instead of sprites, and much more intricate level design. As a result, ports of this game tend to rely on much more powerful processors than
DOOM
ports and this team shows real mastery of their hardware to pull off a build with a system with these limitations. Other
Quake
ports we’ve seen
like this one running on an iPod Classic
require a similar level of knowledge of the code and the ability to use assembly language to make optimizations.
Thanks to [Nicola] for the tip! | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047531",
"author": "Lee",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T23:15:46",
"content": "“optimizing some of the original C programming”Hope you mean QuakeC.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8047546",
"author": "LordNothing",
... | 1,760,371,770.840839 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/see-the-pause-and-attach-technique-for-3d-printing-in-action/ | See The “Pause-and-Attach” Technique For 3D Printing In Action | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Art"
] | [
"3d printed",
"print and attach",
"stringing"
] | [3DPrintBunny] is someone who continually explores new techniques and designs in 3D printing, and her latest is one she calls
“pause-and-attach”
, which she demonstrates by printing a vase design with elements of the design splayed out onto the print bed.
The splayed-out elements get peeled up and attached to the print during a pause.
At a key point, the print is paused and one peels up the extended bits, manually attaching them to sockets on the main body of the print. Then the print resumes and seals everything in. The result is something that appears to defy the usual 3D printer constraints, as you can see here.
Pausing a 3D print to insert hardware (like nuts or magnets) is one thing, but we can’t recall seeing anything quite like this approach. It’s a little bit reminiscent of
printing foldable structures to avoid supports
in that it prints all of its own self-connecting elements, but at the same time it’s very different.
We’ve seen [3DPrintBunny]’s innovative approaches before with
intentional stringing used as a design element
and like the rest of her work, it’s both highly visual and definitely it’s own thing. You can see the whole process in a video she posted to social media, embedded below.
I tried out another 'pause-and-attach' type print today using some strings. The strings give it extra flexibility and allow me to add a twist😁
pic.twitter.com/gIytsb8NEm
— 3DPrintBunny (@3DPrintBunny)
October 3, 2024 | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047556",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2024-10-06T02:35:11",
"content": "As somebody who mostly prints geometric shapes (various parts for projects) I think this is very cool and has lots of potential applications to avoid printing tall skinny stuff that doesn’t lend itself wel... | 1,760,371,770.737307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/introducing-the-kanachord-plus-keyboard-%e3%82%ab%e3%83%8a%e3%82%b3%e3%83%bc%e3%83%89%e3%83%bb%e3%83%97%e3%83%a9%e3%82%b9%e3%83%bb%e3%82%ad%e3%83%bc%e3%83%9c%e3%83%bc%e3%83%89/ | Introducing The KanaChord Plus Keyboard カナコード・プラス・キーボード | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cherry mx",
"japanese",
"macro keyboard",
"macro pad",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | We love to watch your projects grow as much as you do. Really, we’re like proud grandparents around here. So it’s great to see that
[Mac Cody] is back with the KanaChord Plus Keyboard
, which supports an astounding 6,165 Kanji as well as 6,240 of the most common Japanese words that contain Kanji. This is all in addition to supporting the Kana characters, which make up the rest of Japanese writing (more on that in a minute).
If you need to input Japanese, this is a dream come true. If you’re trying to learn Japanese in the first place, this could be exactly what you need to become fluent.
Input errors are shown with red lighting.
Without getting into it too much, just know that the Japanese writing system is made up of Kanji, which are Chinese characters, Hirigana, and Katakana. The latter two are collectively known as the Kana, and there’s this table that lays out the pairing of vowels and consonants. For [Mac Cody], it was this layout that inspired this chording keyboard that covers all three.
What this keyboard actually does is generate Unicode macros to render Japanese characters using chords — pressing multiple keys at once as you would on a piano. The most obvious improvement aside from the huge gain in characters is the display.
As with
the original KanaChord
, one of the great features of the KanaChord Plus is that it uses color in order to indicate character type, Kana mode, and even provide error feedback. Another is the slide switch that selects one of three Unicode key sequences in order to support different computer platforms.
But the touchscreen display is the addition where things get really interesting. As Kana are typed, an incremental Input Method Editor (IME) searches the embedded dictionaries to display an ordered list of Japanese words and Kanji that the user can scroll through and select.
Just like the original, the brains of this operation is a Raspberry Pi Pico. [Mac Cody] used an Adafruit NeoKey 5×6 Ortho Snap-Apart keyboard PCB and 30 Cherry MX switches that we choose to believe are blue. Looking toward the future, [Mac Cody] plans to support the Pico 2, and will update GitHub when everything is ready. Again,
there’s a ton of detail in the hardware section
, so be sure to check that out. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047461",
"author": "xavier",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T17:25:25",
"content": "This is actually cool as hell!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8047465",
"author": "Mac Cody",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T17:36:58",
"conten... | 1,760,371,770.77948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/where-is-the-end-of-diy/ | Where Is The End Of DIY? | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"abstraction",
"diy",
"newsletter"
] | Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on
how lead and silver are refined
and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al wondering at the complexity of the constructed world in which we live: If you think hard enough about anything around you right now, you’d probably be able to recreate about 0% of it again from first principles.
Smelting lead and building a cellphone are two sides of coin, in my mind. The process of getting lead out of galena is simple enough to comprehend, but it’s messy and dangerous in practice. Cellphones, on the other hand, are so monumentally complex that I’d wager that no single person could even describe all of the parts in sufficient detail to reproduce them. That’s why they’re made by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of experience with the tech – the only way to build a cellphone is to split the complicated task into many subsystems.
Smelting lead is a bad DIY project because it’s simple in principle, but prohibitive in practice. Building a cellphone from the ground up is incomprehensible in principle, but ironically entirely doable in practice if you’re willing to buy into some abstractions.
Indeed, last week
we saw a nearly completely open-source build of a simple smartphone
, and the secret to making it work is knowing the limits of DIY. The cell modem, for instance, is a black box. It’s an abstract device that you can feed data to and read data from, and it handles the radio parts of the phone that would take forever to design from scratch. But you don’t need to understand its inner workings to use it. Knowing where the limits of DIY are in your project, where you’re willing to accept the abstraction and move on, can be critical to getting it done.
Of course, in an ideal world, you’d want the cell modem to be like smelting lead – something that’s possible to understand in principle but just not worth DIYing in practice. And of course, there are some folks out there who hack on cell modem firmware and others who could do the radio engineering. But despite my strong DIY urges, I’d have to admit that the essential complexity of the module simply makes it worth treating as a black box. It’s very probably the practical limit of DIY.
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
! | 72 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047409",
"author": "Gus Mueller",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T14:20:20",
"content": "When I read “Al and I” — I of course read that as “Artificial Intelligence and I.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8047449",
"author": ... | 1,760,371,771.150784 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/an-open-source-mirrorless-camera-youd-want-to-use/ | An Open Source Mirrorless Camera You’d Want To Use | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"digital camera",
"full frame",
"Mirrorless compact"
] | Making a digital camera is a project that appears easy enough, but it’s one whose complexity increases depending on the level to which a designer is prepared to go. At the simplest a Raspberry Pi and camera module can be stuck in a 3D printed case, but in that case, the difficult work of getting the drivers and electronics sorted out has already been done for you.
At the other end of the scale there’s [Wenting Zhang]’s
open source mirrorless digital camera project
, in which the design and construction of a full-frame CCD digital camera has been taken back to first principles. To understand the scale of this task, this process employs large teams of engineers when a camera company does it, and while it’s taken a few years and the software isn’t perhaps as polished as your Sony or Canon, the fact it’s been done at all is extremely impressive.
Inside is a Kodak full-frame sensor behind the Sony E-mount lens, for which all the complex CCD timing and acquisition circuitry has been implemented. The brains of the show lie in a Xilinx Zynq ARM-and-FPGA in a stack of boards with a power board and the CCD board. The controls and battery are in a grip, and a large display is on the back of the unit.
We featured an earlier version of this project last year
, and this version is a much better development with something like the ergonomics, control, and interface you would expect from a modern consumer camera. The screen update is still a little slow and there are doubtless many tweaks to come, but this really feels close to being a camera you’d want to try. There’s an assembly video which we’ve placed below the break, feast your eyes on it. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047394",
"author": "Exentio",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T12:48:06",
"content": "Still work to do about the image quality, maybe it’s a detective sensor since there are weird vertical lines/artifacts in the pictures, and color science is all but easy, but I’m very excited at the idea ... | 1,760,371,770.895662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/05/phoniebox-a-family-friendly-simple-music-box/ | Phoniebox: A Family-Friendly Simple Music Box | Arya Voronova | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"home hacks",
"how-to",
"Musical Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"jukebox",
"phoniebox",
"raspberry pi",
"rfid",
"RFID music bot",
"rfid reader"
] | Ever hear of
the Phoniebox project?
If not – tune in, that’s a hacker’s project your entire family will appreciate. Phoniebox is
a software suite and tutorial
for building a jukebox controlled through RFID cards, and it can play audio from a wide variety of sources – music and playlists stored locally, online streams like internet radio stations, Spotify, podcasts of your choice, and so on. It’s super easy to build – get a Raspberry Pi board, connect an NFC reader to it, wire up a pair of speakers, and you’re set. You can assemble a PhonieBox together with your kids over the weekend – and many do.
Want some inspiration, or looking to see what makes Phoniebox so popular?
Visit the Phoniebox gallery
– it’s endearing to see just how many different versions have been built over the six years of project’s existence. Everyone’s Phoniebox build is different in its own special way – you bring the hardware, Phoniebox brings well-tested software and heaps of inspiration.
You already have a case to house a Phoniebox setup – if you think you don’t,
check the gallery,
you’ll find that you do. Experiencing a problem? There’s a wealth of troubleshooting advice and tutorials, and a helpful community. Phoniebox is a mature project and its scale is genuinely impressive – build one for your living room, or your hacker’s lair, or your hackerspace.
RFID-controlled
jukeboxes
are
a
mainstay
on
Hackaday
, so it’s cool to see a project that gives you all the tools to build one. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047348",
"author": "mrrepel",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T08:23:10",
"content": "How about hacking the “original” box, the Tonybox?https://gt-blog.de/toniebox-hacking-how-to-get-started/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8047357",... | 1,760,371,770.937074 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/mechanical-switch-sci-calc-is-also-a-macropad/ | Mechanical Switch Sci-Calc Is Also A Macropad | Navarre Bartz | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"calculator",
"display",
"keyboard",
"macropad",
"mechanical keyboard",
"mechanical switch",
"mechanical switches",
"odd inputs",
"programming",
"reverse polish notation",
"RPN",
"Scientific Calculator",
"usb"
] | Smartphones have replaced a desktop calculator for most folks these days, but sometimes that tactility is just what you need to get the mathematical juices flowing. Why not spruce up the scientific calculator of yore with the
wonders of modern microcontrollers
?
While you won’t be able to use Sci-Calc on a standardized test, this classy calculator will let you do some pretty cool things while clacking on its mechanical choc switches. Is it a calculator? Obviously. Is it an Arduboy-compatible device that can play simple games like your
TI-84
? Yes. Is it also a macropad and ESP32 dev board? Why not? If that isn’t enough, it’s also takes both standard and
RPN inputs
.
[Shao Duan] has really made this device clean and the menu system that rewrites main.bin based on the program selection is very clever. Escape writes main.bin back into the ROM from the SD card so you can select another application. A few classic games have already been ported, and the process looks fairly straightforward for any of your own favorites.
If you’re hankering for more mathy inputs, checkout the
Mathboard
or the
MCM/70
from 1974. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047358",
"author": "ew3e3",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T09:03:34",
"content": "Normal keyboard 40% will be ok. I love a chocolate layout.Good mechanical keys is a good idea.In my opinion rotor or potenciometer and keys upper then screen (on edge not top) and thin not fat device will b... | 1,760,371,771.191176 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/this-bluetooth-gatt-course-is-a-must-watch/ | This Bluetooth GATT Course Is A Must Watch | Arya Voronova | [
"how-to",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"gatt",
"Pi Pico W",
"Raspberry Pi Pico W"
] | Bluetooth is a backbone technology for innumerable off-the-shelf and hacker devices. You should know how to work with it – in particular, nowadays you will certainly be working at the Bluetooth GATT (Generic Attribute) layer. This
two
-part project by [V. Hunter Adams] of Cornell fame spares no detail in making sure you learn Bluetooth GATT for all your hacking needs – not only will you find everything you could want to know, you also get example GATT server and client application codebases to use in your projects, designed to work with the commonly available Pi Pico W!
What’s better than a visual demonstration?
The video below
shows the GATT server running on a Pico W – handling six different parameters at once. [Hunter] pokes at the server’s characteristics with a smartphone app – sending string data back and forth, switching an LED, and even changing parameters of audio or video color output by the Pico. Flash
the server code
into your Pico W, play with it, read through it, and follow
the tutorial
to learn what makes it tick.
What if you already have a GATT server device you’re looking to control? Having gone through the server tutorial, get out a second Pico W – you get
the GATT client tutorial
, of course, also accompanied by
a video
and
example code.
This client is a user interface for the GATT server we just brought up, operated through commandline, and equipped with features like notifications. You might not even notice it happen, but you’ll have two Pi Picos connected through a Bluetooth link in no time, accompanied by a university-grade detailed explanation of every single aspect. If that’s not enough for you to hack your device of choice, well, give it some time to sink in.
Really, if you are looking to play with Bluetooth, you couldn’t find a better tutorial to start your project off of – or just to understand BT GATT at a level an average hacker could only dream of. No matter if you’re looking to
capture data from your treadmill
,
liberate
your
continuous glucose monitor
, or
hack gun safes
for research purposes, this is a kickass course to crack open. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047470",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T18:01:36",
"content": "I work with BLE, I learn everything there is, I finish the job. I forget everything. Ad infinitumI am not kidding, this has happened 3 times now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,371,771.286688 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/how-to-revive-a-tandon-floppy-drive/ | How To Revive A Tandon Floppy Drive | Heidi Ulrich | [
"hardware",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"5.25\"",
"disk",
"diskdrive",
"floppies",
"floppy",
"grease weasel",
"greaseweazel",
"ibm"
] | In this episode of [Adrian’s Digital Basement], we dive into the world of retro computing with a focus on diagnosing and
repairing an old full-height 5.25-inch floppy drive
from an IBM 5150 system. Although mechanically sound, the drive had trouble reading disks, and Adrian quickly set out to fix the issue. Using a Greaseweazle—a versatile open-source tool for floppy disk diagnostics—he tests the drive’s components and explores whether the fault lies with the read/write head or electronic systems.
The repair process provides fascinating insights into the Tandon TM100-1 floppy drive, a key player in vintage computing. Adrian explains how the drive was designed as a single-sided unit, yet hints at potential double-sided capability due to its circuit board, raising possibilities for future tweaks. Throughout the video, Adrian shares handy tips on ensuring proper mechanical maintenance, such as keeping lubrication in check and ensuring correct spring tension. His attention to detail, especially on termination resistors, provided vital knowledge for anyone looking to understand or restore these old drives.
For fans of retro tech, this episode is a must-watch! Adrian makes complex repairs accessible, sharing both technical know-how and nostalgic appreciation. For those interested in similar hacks, past projects like the
Greaseweazle tool itself
or other
Amiga
system repairs are worth exploring. To see Adrian in action and catch all the repair details, check out
the full video
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047287",
"author": "k-ww",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T23:13:33",
"content": "As a side note – the initial 5-1/4 drives we used at Q1 for the Micro-Lite systems had a ‘wow’ problem – there was a one rotation long speed variation that interfered with reading when the disk was written ... | 1,760,371,771.241661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/single-rotor-drone-spins-for-360-lidar-scanning/ | Single Rotor Drone Spins For 360 Lidar Scanning | Danie Conradie | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"drone",
"lidar",
"Swashplate"
] | Multiple motors or servos are the norm for drones to achieve controllable flight, but a team from MARS LAB HKU was able to a
360° lidar scanning drone
with full control on just a single motor and no additional actuators. Video after the break.
The key to controllable flight is the
swashplateless propeller
design that we’ve seen a few times, but it always required a
second propeller
to counteract self-rotation. In this case, the team was able to make that self-rotation work so that they could achieve 360° scanning with a single fixed LIDAR sensor. Self-rotation still needs to be slowed, so this was done with four stationary vanes. The single rotor also means better efficiency compared to a multi-rotor with similar propeller disk area.
The LIDAR comprises a full 50% of the drone’s weight and provides a conical FOV out to a range of 450m. All processing happens onboard the drone, with point cloud data being processed by a LIDAR-inertial odometry framework. This allows the drone to track and plan its flight path while also building a 3D map of an unknown environment. This means it would be extremely useful for indoor or underground environments where GPS or other positioning systems are not available.
All the design files and code for the drone are up on
GitHub
, and most of the electronic components are off-the-shelf. This means you can build your own, and the expensive lidar sensor is not required to get it flying. This seems like a great platform for further experimentation, and getting usable video from a normal camera would be an interesting challenge. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047247",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T20:50:50",
"content": "I assume I missed something – if the drone only has a single motor, how does it control its horizontal movement? Does it have more than one motor or is it doing something clever like maybe increasing thrust ... | 1,760,371,771.339173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/interactive-project-teaches-lessons-about-electromagnets-and-waves/ | Interactive Project Teaches Lessons About Electromagnets And Waves | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"education",
"electromagnet",
"electromagnets",
"learning",
"recorded sound",
"teaching",
"waves"
] | Whether you’re a kid or a nerdy adult, you’ll probably agree that the interactive exhibitions at the museum are the best. If you happened to get down to the Oregon Science Festival in the last couple of years, you might have enjoyed “Catch The Wave!”—a public education project to teach people about electromagnets and waves.
Even better, [Justin Miller] has written up how he built this exciting project.
Catch The Wave! consists of four small tabletop cabinets. Each has physical controls and a screen, and each plays its role in teaching a lesson about electromagnets and sound waves, with a context of audio recording and playback.
The first station allows the user to power up an electromagnet and interact with it using paper clips. They can also see the effect it has on a nearby compass. The second illustrates how reversing current through an electromagnet can reverse its polarity, and demonstrates this by using it to swing a pendulum. The third station then ties this to the action of a speaker, which is effectively a fancy electromagnet—and demonstrates how it creates sound waves in this way. Finally, the fourth station demonstrates the use of a microphone to record a voice, and throws in some wacky effects for good fun.
If you’ve ever tried to explain how sound is recorded and reproduced, you’d probably have loved to had tools like these to do so. We love
a good educational project
around these parts, too. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047245",
"author": "KenN",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T20:44:28",
"content": "I absolutely love this sort of interactive science display. We had the Ontario Science Centre (currently dismantled and to be downsized by our joke of a provincial govt) and it had one hall full of this sor... | 1,760,371,771.375328 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/hackfest-enschede-the-type-of-indoor-event-we-wanted-all-along/ | HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"hacker conference",
"hackfest",
"maker conference",
"Netherlands"
] | I’m sitting at a table writing this in the centre of a long and cavernous industrial building, the former print works of a local newspaper, I’m surrounded by hardware and software hackers working at their laptops, around me is a bustling crowd admiring a series of large projects on tables along the walls, and the ambient sound is one of the demoscene, chiptunes, 3D-printed guitars, and improbably hurdy-gurdy music. Laser light is playing on the walls, and even though it’s quite a journey from England to get here, I’m home. This is
Hackfest Enschede
, a two-day event in the Eastern Dutch city which by my estimation has managed the near-impossible feat of combining the flavour of both a hacker event and a maker faire all in one, causing the two distinct crowds to come together.
The Best Of Both Worlds, In One Place
To give an idea of what’s here it’s time for a virtual trip round the hall. I’ll start with the music, aside from the demosceners there’s
Printstruments
with a range of 3D-printedmusical instruments, and
Nerdy Gurdy
, as you may have guessed, that hacker hurdy-gurdy I mentioned. This is perhaps one of few places I could have seen a spontaneous jam session featuring a 3D-printed bass and a laser-cut hurdy-gurdy. Alongside them were the Eurorack synthesisers of
Sound Force
, providing analogue electronic sounds aplenty.
Try Ubuntu Touch on your mobile
The hall made for an amazing venue
This printer prints with Lego
Eurorack synths to play with
The unique Dutch Holborn computer
The 64 you always wanted
Competing with the musicians are the sounds of 8-bit gaming, as the
Home Computer Museum
are here with an array of Dutch computers including the Philips range, a Tulip PC, and the super-futuristic Holborn business computer. They’re joined by
Atari Invasion
, and I’m as always pleased to see youngsters discovering the machines my generation had at their age, for themselves. The more hacker side of the hardware community is here in force, with the local
Fablab Saxion
and
Tkkrlab hackerspace
. The Fablab had brought along a really neat Lego assembling robot derived from a 3D printer. Then there’s
badge.team
showing off their electronic event badges, and the ever-enthusiastic Mitch Altman bringing his soldering workshop. This representts only a snapshot of what’s here, I’ve also seen printing (the old-fashioned kind), combat robots, dancing corn starch,
Yvo de Haas
‘ robot tentacles, and Ubuntu Mobile, to name but a few others.
Can We Capture This, And Bottle It?
Such an array of cool stuff is always good to see, but my take-away from this event lies not on the tables at the hall. Instead it’s in the way that here they’ve managed to capture what was great about the early maker events, the raw edge of creativity before all the STEM and webshops selling blinky LEDs moved in, and maintain an attraction for people from the hacker community. I think the key to the success lies in combining the stuff described above with a more hacker-friendly set of talks, and oddly in the venue itself. Enschede is easy to get to but not somewhere that demands premium prices on everything, so going along wasn’t the deal-breaker that a more shiny event might have been.
It’s great to see an event’s first try draw to a close with a feeling of success, and we hope there will be another Hackfest to go to in Enschede next year. But I’m more interested to see whether this event may seed others, fresh new events trying a similar formula. I hope I’ll see you there. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047233",
"author": "Wes",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T19:50:52",
"content": "I miss the Maker Faires. There was one in Denver for a few years, but they quit having them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8047504",
"author": "Lon... | 1,760,371,771.432029 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/hackaday-podcast-episode-291-walking-in-space-lead-in-the-earth-and-atoms-under-the-diy-microscope/ | Hackaday Podcast Episode 291: Walking In Space, Lead In The Earth, And Atoms Under The DIY Microscope | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | What have you missed on Hackaday this week? Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare notes on their favorites from the week, and you are invited. The guys may have said too much about the Supercon badge this year — listen in for a few hints about what it will be about.
For hacks, you’ll hear about scanning tunneling microscopes, power management for small Linux systems, and lots of inertial measurement units. The guys talked about a few impossible hacks for consumer electronics, from hacking a laptop, to custom cell phones.
Of course, there are plenty more long-form articles of the week, including a brief history of what can go wrong on a spacewalk and how to get the lead out (of the ground). Don’t forget to take a stab at the
What’s That Sound
competition and maybe score a sweet Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Use this link to teleport a DRM-free MP3 to your location
.
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 291 Show Notes:
News:
Supercon is almost here!
What’s that Sound?
Do you know the sound?
Let us know and get a chance at a coveted Hackaday Podcast T
.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Building A 3D Printed Scanning Tunneling Microscope
Cheap DIY Microscope Sees Individual Atoms
Homebrew Probe Tip Etcher Makes Amazingly Sharp Needles
Creating Video Games With AI: A Mario Example
Pi Zero Power Optimization Leaves No Stone Unturned
Inside The F-4 Attitude Indicator
Retrotechtacular: Sychros Go to War and Peace
Easily Build This IMU Array Sandbox
IMU Sensor Fusion
Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
MikroPhone – Open, Secure, Simple Smartphone
2024 SAO Contest: We’ve Got SAOs For Your SAOs
Man-in-the-Middle PCB Unlocks HP Ink Cartridges
Al’s Picks:
Blinking An LED Passively
3D Printed Jellyfish Lights Up
Add USB-C To Your AirPods The Easy Way
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Polaris Dawn, And The Prudence Of A Short Spacewalk
Mining And Refining: Lead, Silver, And Zinc | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047402",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2024-10-05T13:14:50",
"content": "So much to explore – in so little time… Luv U HaD :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8047887",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timesta... | 1,760,371,771.508753 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/v-cut-vias-test-your-whole-panel-at-once/ | V-Cut Vias Test Your Whole Panel At Once | Arya Voronova | [
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"panelization",
"v-cut",
"via"
] | We might consider PCB panels as simply an intermediate step towards getting your PCBs manufactured on the scale of hundreds. This is due to, typically, an inability to run traces beyond your board – and most panel generators don’t give you the option, either. However, if you go for hand-crafted panels or modify a KiKit-created panel, you can easily add extra elements – for instance, why not add vias in the V-Cut path to preserve electrical connectivity between your boards?
[Adam Gulyas] went out and tried just that
, and it’s a wonderfully viable method. He shows us how to calculate the via size to be just right given V-Cut and drilling tolerances, and then demonstrates design of an example board with discrete component LED blinkers you can power off a coin cell. The panel gets sent off to be manufactured and assembled, but don’t break the boards apart just yet — connect power to the two through-hole testpoints on the frame, and watch your panel light up all at once.
It’s a flashy demonstration – even more so once you put light-diffusing spheres on top of the domes. You could always do such a trick with mousebites, but you risk having the tracks tear off the board, and, V-Cuts are no doubt the cleanest way to panelize – no edge cleaning is required after breaking the boards apart. Want to learn about panel design? We’ve
written
and
featured
multiple
guides
for you over the years. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047154",
"author": "Electronic Eel",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T15:39:59",
"content": "I often do something similar at work. But not with V-cuts, as this is too fragile in my opinion.I use mousebites and route power, GND and SWD through small traces on the inner layers between the m... | 1,760,371,773.048529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/pulley-system-makes-headphone-cables-more-managable/ | Pulley System Makes Headphone Cables More Managable | Lewin Day | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cable",
"cable management",
"headphones"
] | It’s 2024. You’ve probably got one or more pairs of wireless headphones around the house. [Barnso] prefers wired headphones with a long cable, but he also decries the fact that it often gets tangled in his chair. The solution?
A pulley system to make everything easier.
The concept is simple. [Barnso]’s system uses three pulleys. The headphone cable goes to the PC, and then runs over the first pulley. It then runs under a second pulley which is free to move, but weighted so that it naturally wants to fall down under gravity. The cable then comes back up over a third pulley, and then runs to the headphones on [Barnso]’s head. Basically, it’s a super simple cable retraction mechanism that keeps the long headphone cable organized and in one place.
It’s nice to see a simple mechanism that makes life easier, particularly one that solves a problem so many of us have faced in real life. The construction shown in the video is almost (intentionally?) maddeningly hacky but it does the job. If you prefer to go wireless, though,
we can show you how to do that too
. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046813",
"author": "AZdave",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T19:37:12",
"content": "Uhh … imagine what happens as soon as you grab the headphones too quickly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8046814",
"author": "Jan",
"timesta... | 1,760,371,773.248069 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/supercon-2023-cory-doctorow-with-an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/ | Supercon 2023: [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse | Navarre Bartz | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"2023 Hackaday Superconference",
"competition",
"enshittification",
"Federal Trade Commission",
"Hackaday SuperConference",
"keynote",
"new good web",
"politics",
"public policy",
"tech industry",
"workers"
] | Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful of middlemen with a stranglehold on the way we interact with information, commerce, and even other people. Where’s the disintermediated future we were promised? More importantly, can we make a “new good web” that puts users first? [Cory Doctorow] has a plan to reverse what he’s come to call enshittification, or the lifecycle of the extractionist tech platform, and he shared it with us as the
Supercon 2023 keynote
.
As [Doctorow] sees it, there’s a particular arc to every evil platform’s lifecycle. First, the platform will treat its users fairly and provide enough value to accumulate as many as possible. Then, once a certain critical mass is reached, the platform pivots to exploiting those users to sell them out to the business customers of the platform. Once there’s enough buy-in by business customers, the platform squeezes both users and businesses to eke out every cent for their investors before collapsing in on itself.
Doctorow tells us, “Enshittification isn’t inevitable.” There have been tech platforms that rose and fell without it, but he describes a set of three criteria that make the process unavoidable.
Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)
Given the state of things, should we just give up on the internet and go back to the
good old days of the paleolithic
? [Doctorow] tells us all is not lost, but that it will take a concerted effort both in the tech and political spheres to reverse course. The first tactic to take back the internet he examines is antitrust law.
For the last 40 years or so, antitrust has been toothless in the United States and most of the world.
We’re finally seeing this change in the US
, UK, Canada, Australia, EU, and China as these governments have turned their eyes to the decades of damage caused by rubber stamping mergers and breaking up monopolies is back on the table. This is a slow process, but a necessary one to regain control of the internet. That said, we don’t want to wait on the slow wheels of the justice system to be our only recourse.
When we stopped enforcing antitrust law, we ended good fire, we accumulated fire debt, and now we have wildfires
.
Our tech companies have terminal gigantism, and they’re on fire all the time. It’s time to stop trying to make the tech giants better. It’s time to start evacuating them so they can burn
.
In your heart, you know we could have a better internet than this one, and a better tech industry too.
Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.” First up is limiting the twiddling by companies behind closed doors without legal recourse for users. Comprehensive privacy laws with a private right to action are a good start. This lets you sue a company if your privacy is violated instead of hoping that a prosecutor somewhere thinks that enough people have been harmed to bring a case from the government end of things.
A couple other things that could help are ending worker misclassification through the “gig economy” so that workers are treated as actual employees instead of “independent contractors,” and applying existing consumer protection standards to search engines and platforms so that results are what you’re looking for instead of deceptive ads masquerading as the item or information you want.
Laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) are another step in the right direction, forcing platforms to have APIs that allow other platforms to connect to them. This makes switching costs low for leaving these platforms that mostly get big based on network effects. What if a platform builds the API then shuts it down either for “security” or lets it deprecate to not working again? We have to make sure that Big Tech’s incentives are aligned so that their APIs running well is preferable to the status quo of behind-the-scenes twiddling. In addition to the mandatory APIs, we need to make it legal again to tinker and hack the services ourselves.
By restoring the right to mod a service to restore a broken API, then the platform has the choice to “keep the API and lose my discontented users or, nerf the API and get embroiled in unquantifiable risk from guerilla warfare with all of you. Against engineers who have the attackers’ advantage, meaning I have to be perfect and make no mistakes, and they only have to find one mistake that I’ve made and exploit it.” Since tech giants are driven by investors, and the only thing investors hate more than losing money is surprises, this gives companies a strong incentive to make sure their APIs are operating adequately. The largest stock sell off in history was after a Facebook investor meeting where they announced users had grown more slowly than expected. The uncertainty was enough to start a fire sale despite continued growth.
Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”
If you think this is all too fringey to ever topple the current regime, [Doctorow] reminds us that the current economic order seemed far fetched in the post-war US, but neoliberal economist [Milton Friedman] was ready. He’s often quoted as saying, “Some day, there will be a crisis, and when crisis comes, ideas that are lying around can move from the fringe to the center in an instant.” [Doctorow] exhorts us to be spreading ideas of how to build a better world around, so that as we flit from crisis to crisis they can move to the center of the Overton window and succeed.
Be sure to checkout the full talk for more examples and colorful descriptions of what we need to do to build a “new good web.” | 69 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046789",
"author": "john",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T18:04:50",
"content": "I dunno. You get a hundred smelly humans in a poorly ventilated room you might want an activated carbon face mask in addition to N95.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"... | 1,760,371,773.446489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/add-usb-c-to-your-airpods-the-easy-way/ | Add USB-C To Your AirPods The Easy Way | Navarre Bartz | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"AirPod",
"Airpods",
"AirPods Pro",
"apple",
"Apple Lightning Connector",
"Apple repair",
"audio",
"bluetooth",
"repair",
"USB C"
] | While the death of Apple’s Lightning Connector can’t come soon enough, swapping the ports on their products as “category-defining innovations” seems a bit of a stretch. [Ken Pillonel] has
designed a set of streamlined, repairable, USB-C adapters
for the AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max that show Apple what innovation really means.
If you’ve followed [Pillonel]’s work in the past, you’ll know he’s as a big a fan of repairability as we are here, so this isn’t just a cheap knockoff dongle that’ll be in the trash as fast as your
counterfeit wireless earbuds
. In the video below, he walks us through his quest start-to-finish to design something compact that gives you all the joys of USB-C without the pain of buying a whole new set of headphones.
We like the iteration on the connector, showing that
flexible circuits
can do some amazing things, but are still subject to failure at extreme angles. Using a combination of 3D printing, a cool robot sandblasting machine, a pick-and-place, and some old fashioned hand soldering, [Pillonel] treats us to a polished final product that’s put together with actual screws and not adhesive.
His designs are all open source
, so you can DIY, or he sells finished copies in his shop if you want to give one to your less-than-techy relatives.
[Pillonel] may seem familiar as he’s the guy who
added USB-C
to the iPhone before Apple and redesigned the
AirPods Pro case
for repairability. Apple is getting
better about repair
in some of its devices, for sure, but unsurprisingly, hackers do it better. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046773",
"author": "Spheremachine",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T17:01:42",
"content": "If you’re buying new, you might want to consider not rewarding Apple for being Apple and tryhttps://shop.fairphone.com/fairbuds",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,773.094214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/polaris-dawn-and-the-prudence-of-a-short-spacewalk/ | Polaris Dawn, And The Prudence Of A Short Spacewalk | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"apollo",
"commercial space",
"EVA",
"gemini",
"human spa"
] | For months before liftoff, the popular press had been hyping up the fact that the
Polaris Dawn mission would include the first-ever private spacewalk
. Not only would this be the first time anyone who wasn’t a professional astronaut would be opening the hatch of their spacecraft and venturing outside, but it would also be the first real-world test of SpaceX’s own extravehicular activity (EVA) suits. Whether you considered it a billionaire’s publicity stunt or an important step forward for commercial spaceflight, one thing was undeniable: when that hatch opened, it was going to be a moment for the history books.
But if you happened to have been watching the live stream of the big event earlier this month, you’d be forgiven for finding the whole thing a bit…abrupt. After years of training and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis both spent less than eight minutes outside of the Dragon capsule. Even then, you could argue that calling it a space
walk
would be a bit of a stretch.
Neither crew member ever fully exited the spacecraft, they simply stuck their upper bodies out into space while keeping their legs within the hatch at all times. When it was all said and done, the Dragon’s hatch was locked up tight less than half an hour after it was opened.
Likely, many armchair astronauts watching at home found the whole thing rather anticlimactic. But those who know a bit about the history of human spaceflight probably found themselves unable to move off of the edge of their seat until that hatch locked into place and all crew members were back in their seats.
Flying into space is already one of the most mindbogglingly dangerous activities a human could engage in, but opening the hatch and floating out into the infinite black once you’re out there is even riskier still. Thankfully the Polaris Dawn EVA appeared to go off without a hitch, but not everyone has been so lucky on their first trip outside the capsule.
A High Pressure Situation
The first-ever EVA took place during the Voskhod 2 mission in March of 1965. Through the use of an ingenious inflatable airlock module, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was able to exit the Voskhod 3KD spacecraft and float freely in space at the end of a 5.35 m (17.6 ft) tether. He attached a camera to the outside of the airlock, providing a visual record of yet another space “first” achieved by the Soviet Union.
This very first EVA had two mission objectives, one of which Leonov had accomplished when he successfully rigged the external camera. The last thing he had to do was turn around and take pictures of the Voskhod spacecraft flying over the Earth — a powerful propaganda image that the USSR was eager to get their hands on. But when he tried to activate his suit’s camera using the trigger mounted to his thigh, he found he couldn’t reach it. It was then that he realized the suit had begun to balloon around him, and that moving his arms and legs was taking greater and greater effort due to the suit’s material stiffening.
After about ten minutes in space Leonov attempted to re-enter the airlock, but to his horror found that the suit had expanded to the point that it would no longer fit into the opening. As he struggled to cram himself into the airlock, his body temperature started to climb. Soon he was sweating profusely, which pooled around his body within the confines of the suit.
Unable to cope with the higher than anticipated internal temperature, the suit’s primitive life support system started to fail, making matters even worse. The runaway conditions in the suit caused his helmet’s visor to fog up, which he had no way to clear as he was now deep into a failure mode that the Soviet engineers had simply not anticipated. Not that they hadn’t provided him with a solution of sorts. Decades later, Leonov would reveal that there was a suicide pill in the helmet that he could have opted to use if need be.
With his core temperature now elevated by several degrees, Leonov was on the verge of heat stroke. His last option was to open a vent in his suit, which would hopefully cause it to deflate enough for him to fit inside the airlock. He noted that the suit was currently at 0.4 atmosphere, and started reducing the pressure. The safety minimum was 0.27 atm, but even at that pressure, he couldn’t fit. It wasn’t until the pressure fell to 0.25 atm that he was able to flex the suit enough to get his body back into the airlock, and from there back into the confines of the spacecraft.
In total, Alexei Leonov spent 12 minutes and 9 seconds in space. But it must have felt like an eternity.
Gemini’s Tricky Hatch
In classic Soviet style, nobody would know about the trouble Leonov ran into during his spacewalk for years. So when American astronaut Ed White was preparing to step out of the Gemini 4 capsule three months later in June of 1965, he believed he really had his work cut out for him. Not only had the Soviets pulled off a perfect EVA, but as far as anyone knew, they had made it look easy.
So it’s not hard to imagine how White must have felt when he pulled the lever to open the hatch on the Gemini spacecraft, only to find it refused to budge. As it so happens, this wasn’t the first time the hatch failed to open. During vacuum chamber testing back on the ground, the hatch had refused to lock because a spring-loaded gear in the mechanism failed to engage properly. Luckily the second astronaut aboard the Gemini capsule, James McDivitt, was present when they had this issue on the ground and knew how the latch mechanism functioned.
Ed White
McDivitt felt confident that he could get the gear to engage and allow White to open the hatch, but was concerned about getting it closed. Failing to open the hatch and calling off the EVA was one thing, but not being able to secure the hatch afterwards meant certain death for the two men. Knowing that Mission Control would almost certainly have told them to abort the EVA if they were informed about the hatch situation, the astronauts decided to go ahead with the attempt.
As he predicted, McDivitt was able to fiddle with the latching mechanism and got the hatch open for White. Although there were some communication issues during the spacewalk due to problems with the voice-operated microphones, the EVA went very well, with White demonstrating a hand-held maneuvering thruster that allowed him to fly around the spacecraft at the end of his tether.
White was having such a good time that he kept making excuses to extend the spacewalk. Finally, after approximately 23 minutes, he begrudgingly returned to the Gemini capsule — informing Mission Control that it was “the saddest moment of my life.”
The hatch had remained open during the EVA, but now that White was strapped back into the capsule, it was time to close it back up. Unfortunately, just as McDivitt feared, the latches wouldn’t engage. To make matters worse, it took White so long to get back into the spacecraft that they were now shadowed by the Earth and working in the dark. Reaching blindly inside the mechanism, White was once again able to coax it into engaging, and the hatch was securely closed.
But there was still a problem. The mission plan called for the astronauts to open the hatch so they could discard unnecessary equipment before attempting to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. As neither man was willing to risk opening the hatch again, they instead elected to stow everything aboard the capsule for the remainder of the flight.
Overworked, and Underprepared
At this point the Soviet Union and the United States had successfully conducted EVAs, but both had come dangerously close to disaster. Unfortunately, between the secretive nature of the Soviets and the reluctance of the Gemini 4 crew to communicate their issues to Mission Control, NASA administration started to underestimate the difficulties involved.
NASA didn’t even schedule EVAs for the next three Gemini missions, and the ambitious spacewalk planned for Gemini 8 never happened due to the mission being cut short due to technical issues with the spacecraft. It wouldn’t be until Gemini 9A that another human stepped out of their spacecraft.
The plan was for astronaut Gene Cernan to spend an incredible two hours outside of the capsule, during which time he would make his way to the rear of the spacecraft where a prototype Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (AMU) was stored. Once there, Cernan was to disconnect himself from the Gemini tether and don the AMU, which was essentially a small self-contained spacecraft in its own right.
Photo of the Gemini spacecraft taken by Gene Cernan
But as soon as he left the capsule, Cernan reported that his suit had started to swell and that movement was becoming difficult. To make matters worse, there were insufficient handholds installed on the outside of the Gemini spacecraft, making it difficult for him to navigate his away along its exterior. After eventually reaching the AMU and struggling desperately to put it on, Mission Control noted his heart rate had climbed to 180 beats per minute. The flight surgeon was worried he would pass out, so Mission Control asked him to take a break while they debated if he should continue with the AMU demonstration.
At this point Cernan noted that his helmet’s visor had begun to fog up, and just as Alexei Leonov had discovered during his own EVA, the suit had no system to clear it up. The only way he was able to see was by stretching forward and clearing off a small section of the glass by rubbing his nose against it. Realizing the futility of continuing, Commander Thomas Stafford decided not to wait on Mission Control and ordered Cernan to abort the EVA and get back into the spacecraft.
Cernan slowly made his way back to the Gemini’s hatch. The cooling system in his suit had by now been completely overwhelmed, which caused the visor to fog up completely. Effectively blind, Cernan finally arrived at the spacecraft’s hatch, but was too exhausted to continue. Stafford held onto Cernan’s legs while he rested and finally regained the strength to lower himself into the capsule and close the hatch.
When they returned to Earth the next day, a medical examination revealed Cernan had lost 13 pounds (5.8 kg) during his ordeal. The close-call during his spacewalk lead NASA to completely reassess their EVA training and procedures, and the decision was made to limit the workload on all future Gemini spacewalks, as the current air-cooled suit clearly wasn’t suitable for long duration use. It wasn’t until the Apollo program introduced a liquid-cooled suit that American astronauts would spend any significant time working outside of their spacecraft.
The Next Giant Leap
Thanks to the magic of live streaming video, we know that the Polaris Dawn crew was able to complete their brief EVA without incident: no shadowy government cover-ups, cowboy heroics, or near death experiences involved.
With the benefit of improved materials and technology, not to mention the knowledge gained over the hundreds of spacewalks that have been completed since the early days of the Space Race, the first private spacewalk looked almost mundane in comparison to what had come before it.
But there’s still much work to be done. SpaceX needs to perform further tests of their new EVA suit, and will likely want to demonstrate that crew members can actually get work done while outside of the Dragon. So it’s safe to assume that when the next Polaris Dawn mission flies, its crew will do a bit more than just stick their heads out the hatch. | 39 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046747",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T16:08:20",
"content": "Honestly, I was very disappointed due to the suit itself: it had neither thermal insulation nor water-based cooling, so the capsule had to be oriented to guarantee that it was in the shadow and avoid o... | 1,760,371,773.339183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/pi-zero-power-optimization-leaves-no-stone-unturned/ | Pi Zero Power Optimization Leaves No Stone Unturned | Arya Voronova | [
"how-to",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"pi zero",
"Pi Zero 2",
"Pi Zero W",
"power consumption",
"profiler",
"profiling",
"Raspberry Pi Zero",
"Raspberry Pi Zero W",
"Zero W"
] | If you’ve ever designed a battery-powered device with a Pi Zero, you have no doubt looked into decreasing its power consumption. Generic advice, like disabling the HDMI interface and the onboard LED, is omnipresent, but [Manawyrm] from [Kittenlabs] goes beyond the surface-level, and
gifts us an extensive write-up
where every recommendation is backed with measurements. Armed with the Nordic Power Profiler kit and an SD card mux for quick experimentation, she aimed at two factors, boot time and power consumed while booting, and made sure to get all the debug information we could use.
Thanks to fast experimentation cycles and immediate feedback, we learn plenty of new things about what a Pi Zero does and when, and how we can tame various power-hungry aspects of its behavior. Disabling the GPU or its aspects like HDMI output, tweaking features like HAT and other peripheral probing, and even tactical overclocking during boot – it’s an extensive look at what makes a Pi Zero tick, and no chance for spreading baseless advice or myths.
All in all, this write-up helps you decrease the boot time from twelve seconds to just three seconds, and slash the power budget of the boot process by 80%. Some recommendations are as simple as config.txt entries, while others require you to recompile the kernel. No matter the amount of effort you can put into power optimization, you’ll certainly find things worth learning while following along, and [Manawyrm]’s effort in building her solar-powered Pi setup will help us all build
better Pi-Zero
-powered
solar devices
and
handhelds
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046665",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T11:17:41",
"content": "9.5J to 1.438J is almost 85% energy reduction!A Raspberry pi is overkill for a device that takes pictures and sends them over WiFi. I guess an ESP32 might consume less energy per picture.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,371,773.718235 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/the-1924-martian-signal-a-cosmic-curiosity/ | The 1924 Martian Signal: A Cosmic Curiosity | Heidi Ulrich | [
"History",
"Space"
] | [
"extraterrestrial life",
"interstellar",
"mars",
"radio",
"signal",
"space"
] | In an age where our gadgets allow us to explore the cosmos, we stumbled upon sounds from a future past:
an article on historical signals from Mars
. The piece, written by [Paul Gilster] of
Centauri Dreams
, cites a
Times
essay published by [Becky Ferreira] of August 20. [Ferreira]’s essay sheds light on a fascinating, if peculiar, chapter in the history of the search for extraterrestrial life.
She recounts an event from August 1924 when the U.S. Navy imposed a nationwide radio silence for five minutes each hour to allow observatories to listen for signals from Mars. This initiative aimed to capitalize on the planet’s close alignment with Earth, sparking intrigue and excitement among astronomers and enthusiasts alike.
Amid the technological optimism of the era, a dirigible equipped with radio equipment took to the skies to monitor potential Martian messages. The excitement peaked when a series of dots and dashes captured by the airborne antenna suggested a “crudely drawn face.” Some scientists speculated that this could be a signal from a Martian civilization, igniting a media frenzy. Yet, skeptics, including inventor C. Francis Jenkins, suggested these results were merely a case of radio frequency interference—an early reminder of the challenges we face in discerning genuine signals from the noise of our own planet.
As we tinker with our devices and dream of interstellar communication, the 1924 incident reminds us that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a blend of curiosity, creativity, and, often,
misinterpretation
. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046640",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T09:18:54",
"content": "Oh, come on. The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one. I’m convinced there can be no living thing on that remote, forbidding, planet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,371,773.202114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/laptop-gpu-upgrade-with-just-a-little-reballing/ | Laptop GPU Upgrade With Just A Little Reballing | Arya Voronova | [
"laptops hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"bga",
"BGA soldering",
"laptop gpu",
"NVIDIA",
"ram upgrade",
"reballing"
] | Modern gaming laptops are in an uncomfortable spot – often too underpowered for newest titles, but too bulky to be genuinely portable. It doesn’t help they’re not often upgradeable, so you’re stuck with what you’ve bought – unless, say, you’re a hacker equipped some tools for PCB reflow? If that’s the case, welcome to
[TechModLab]’s video
showing you the process of upgrading a laptop’s soldered-on NVIDIA GPU, replacing the 3070 chip with a 3080.
You don’t need much – the most exotic tool is a BGA rework station, holding the mainboard steady&stiff and heating a specific large chip on the board with an infrared lamp from above. This one is definitely a specialty tool, but we’ve seen hackers build their own. From there, some general soldering tools like flux and solder wick, a stencil for your chip, BGA balls, and a $20 USB-C hotplate are instrumental for reballing chips – tools you ought to have.
Reballing was perhaps the hardest step of the journey – instrumental for preparing the GPU before the transplant. Afterwards, only a few steps were needed – poking a BGA ball that didn’t connect, changing board straps to adjust for the new VRAM our enterprising hacker added alongside the upgrade, and playing with the driver process install a little. Use this method to upgrade from a lower-end binned GPU you’re stuck with, or perhaps to repair your laptop if artifacts start appearing – it’s a worthwhile reminder about methods that laptop repair shops use on the daily.
Itching to learn more about BGAs? You absolutely should
read this article series
by our own [Robin Kearey]. We’ve mostly seen reballing used for upgrading RAM on
laptop
and
Raspberry
Pi
boards, but seeing it being used for an entire laptop is nice – it’s the same technique, just scaled up, and you always can start by practicing at a smaller scale. Now, it might feel like we’ve left the era of upgradable GPUs on laptops, and today’s project might not necessarily help your worries – but
the Framework 16
definitely bucks the trend. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046632",
"author": "Mr Creosote",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T09:02:25",
"content": "Maybe not in the spirit of this blog, but there’s an extremely lazy way to achieve the same result. Buy the higher spec version of the motherboard from China via aliexpress, swap the board, sell your ... | 1,760,371,773.139326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/this-week-in-security-zimbra-dns-poisoning-and-perfctl/ | This Week In Security: Zimbra, DNS Poisoning, And Perfctl | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"dns",
"great firewall",
"linux",
"This Week in Security"
] | Up first this week is a warning for the few of us still brave enough to host our own email servers. If you’re running Zimbra, it’s time to update, because
CVE-2024-45519 is now being exploited in the wild
.
That vulnerability is a pretty nasty one, though thankfully requires a specific change from default settings to be exposed.
The problem is in
postjournal
. This logging option is off by default, but when it’s turned on, it logs incoming emails. One of the fields on an incoming SMTP mail object is the
RCPT TO:
field, with the recipients made of the to, cc, and bcc fields. When
postjournal
logs this field, it does so by passing it as a bash argument. That execution wasn’t properly sanitized, and wasn’t using a safe call like
execvp()
. So, it was possible to inject commands using the
$()
construction.
The details of the attack are known, and researchers are seeing early exploratory attempts to exploit this vulnerability. At least one of these campaigns is attempting to install webshells, so at least some of those attempts have teeth. The attack seems to be less reliable when coming from outside of the trusted network, which is nice, but not something to rely on.
New Tool Corner
What is that binary doing on your system? Even if you don’t do any security research, that’s a question you may ask yourself from time to time. A potential answer is
WhoYouCalling
. The wrinkle here is that WYC uses the Windows Event Tracing mechanism to collect the network traffic strictly from the application in question. So it’s a Windows only application for now. What you get is a packet capture from a specific executable and all of its children processes, with automated DNS capture to go along.
DNS Poisoning
Here’s a mystery. The folks at Assetnote
discovered rogue subdomains
from several of their customers, showing up with seemingly random IP addresses attached. A subdomain like
webproxy.id.customer.vn
might resolve with 10 different addresses, when querying on
alibabadns.com
.
That turned out to be a particularly important clue. These phantom subdomains were all linked to the Chinese Internet in some way, and it turns out that each subdomain had some interesting keyword in it, like webproxy or VPN. This seems to be a really unique way to censor the Internet, as part of the Chinese Great Firewall. The problem here is that the censorship can escape, and actually poison DNS for those subdomains for the rest of the Internet. And because sometimes the semi-random IPs point at things like Fastly CDN or old cPanel installs. A bit of legwork gets you the equivalent of subdomain takovers. Along with the story, Assetnote have shared a tool to check domains for this issue.
Virtual Name Tags Bring the Creep Factor
What do you get when you combine Internet-connected smart glasses with LLM doing facial recognition? The optimistic opinion is that you get
virtual nametags for everybody you meet
. I’ve played a video game or two that emulates that sort of ability. Taking a bit more cynical and realistic view, this auto-doxxing of everyone in public strays towards dystopian.
perfctl
There’s a newly discovered Linux malware,
perfctl
, that
specializes in stealth, combined with Monero mining
. The malware is also used to relay traffic, as well as install other malware in compromised machines. The malware communicates over TOR, and uses some clever tricks to avoid detection. Log in to a compromised machine, and the Monero mining stops until you log back out.
The malware is
particularly difficult to get rid of
, and as always, the best solution is to carefully back up and then wipe the affected machine. One of the tells to look for is a machine that’s hard charging when it has no business being spun up to 100% CPU usage, and then when you log in and look for the culprit, it drops to normal.
Bits and Bytes
[nv1t] found a kid’s toy, the Kekz Headphones, and
they just begged to be taken apart
. This toy has a bunch of audio on an SD Card, and individual NFC-enabled tokens that triggers playback of the right file. This one is interesting from an infosec perspective, because the token actually supplies the encryption key for the file playback, making it a nominally secure system. After pulling everything apart, it became apparent that the encryption wasn’t up to the task, with only about 56 possible keys for each file.
Something we’ve continually talked about is how the subtle mismatches in data parsing often lead to vulnerabilities. [Mahmoud Awali] has noticed this, too, and decided to put together
a comparison of how different languages handle HTTP parameters
. Did you know that Ruby uses the semicolon as a parameter delimiter? There are a bunch of quirks like this, and this is the sort of material that you’ll need to find that next big vulnerability.
And finally, speaking of Ruby, are you familiar with Ruby’s
class pollution category of vulnerabilities
? It’s akin to Python and JavaScript’s prototype pollution, and not entirely unlike Java’s deserialization issues. If Ruby is your thing, go brush up on how to avoid this particular pitfall. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047196",
"author": "Lord Kimbote",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T18:04:21",
"content": "The smart glasses thing is decidedy a mixed bag. Leaving aside the doxxing/police state implications already abundantly explored elsewhere methinks there’s value for the people too in hit-and-run and... | 1,760,371,773.48926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/the-raspberry-pi-500-hints-at-its-existence/ | The Raspberry Pi 500 Hints At Its Existence | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"all-in-one",
"raspberry pi 400",
"raspberry pi 500"
] | It’s fairly insignificant in the scheme of things, and there’s no hardware as yet for us to look at, but there it is. Tucked away in a device tree file,
the first mention of a Raspberry Pi 500
. We take this to mean that the chances of an upgrade to the Pi 400 all-in-one giving it the heart of a Pi 5 are now quite high.
We’ve
remarked before
that one of the problems facing the Raspberry Pi folks is that a new revision of the regular Pi no longer carries the novelty it might once have done, and certainly in hardware terms (if not necessarily software) it could be said that the competition have very much caught up. It’s in the Compute Module and the wildcard products such as the all-in-one computers that they still shine then, because even after several years of the 400 it’s not really seen an effective competitor.
So we welcome the chance of an all-in-one with a Pi 5 heart, and if we had a wish list for it then it should include that mini PCI-E slot on board for SSDs and other peripherals. Such a machine would we think become a must-have for any space-constrained bench. | 61 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047086",
"author": "Rastersoft",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T12:19:43",
"content": "A model with power, usb and video through a single USB-C would be THE product.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8047118",
"author": "Blue... | 1,760,371,773.666765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/04/need-high-power-li-ion-charging-how-about-100-w/ | Need High-Power Li-Ion Charging? How About 100 W | Arya Voronova | [
"Battery Hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"Li-ion",
"liion",
"lithium charging",
"Lithium-ion battery",
"USB-C PD",
"usbc"
] | Ever want a seriously powerful PCB for charging a Li-Ion pack? Whatever you want it for,
[Redherring32] has got it
— it’s a board bearing the TPS25750D and BQ25713 chips, that lets you push up to 100 W into your 1S Li-Ion pack through the magic of USB Power Delivery (USB-PD).
Why do you need so much power? Well, when you put together a large amount of Li-Ion cells, this is how you charge it all at once – an average laptop might charge the internal battery at 30 W, and it’s not uncommon for laptop batteries to be dwarfed by hackers’-built packs.
A 4-layer creation peppered with vias, this board’s a hefty one — it’s not often that you see a Li-Ion charger designed to push as much current as possible into a cell, and the chips are smart enough for that. As far as the onboard chips’ capabilities go, the board could handle pack configurations from 1S to 4S, and even act as a USB-PD source — check the IC configuration before you expect to use it for any specific purpose.
Want a simpler charger, even if it’s less powerful? Remember, you can
use PPS-capable PD chargers for topping up Li-Ion packs,
with barely any extra hardware required. | 21 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8047022",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T09:27:11",
"content": "Off topic, but still. Remember to work as close to your operational voltage as possible. Yes you can step-up/down anything to anything but voltage conversion ratios exist and you’re not getting any youn... | 1,760,371,773.778603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/mobius-keyboard-wastes-little-space/ | Mobius Keyboard Wastes Little Space | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Google Japan",
"japanese",
"Japanese keyboard",
"keyboard",
"mobius",
"mobius strip",
"ortholinear keyboard"
] | What is with all the wasted space on keyboards? There’s a whole back side just sitting there doing nothing. But how can you use the back at the same time as the front?
All the board sandwiches must be wired together like this, natch.
Just when we think Google Japan can’t possibly produce another weird, amazing keyboard that actually works and comes with full documentation, they go and outdo themselves with
this ortholinear Mobius thing that wastes (almost) no space.
(Japanese,
translated
) Be sure to check out the video after the break where hilarity ensues.
This crazy thing is made up of 26 modules, each with 8 key switches, four on a side. Do the math — that’s a total of 208 keys! More than enough to stretch out around the table and do some group programming without rubbing elbows. All the switches are hot-swappable, and there’s even RGB backlighting. The controller here is the STM32F042F4P6.
So what are all the extra keys for? Well, the keyboard is half in Japanese and half QWERTY, and has a set of emoji keys as well for the full programming experience. You can also
make a paper version
if you want to test out the topology.
Be sure to check out the documentation
, because it’s pretty interesting how this keyboard is put together. And no, we’re not sure how to set it down and use it without accidental key presses. Suppose that’s part of the charm?
Have you ever wondered
what happened to all the Japanese computers of yore?
We did.
Thanks for the tip, [CityZen]! | 25 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046983",
"author": "Geert van Dijk",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T05:40:40",
"content": "Hang this baby up vertically with some bearings, add some physical index notches or bumps to grip and spin! This is the way!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,773.88449 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/on-the-nature-of-electricity-recreating-the-early-experiments/ | On The Nature Of Electricity: Recreating The Early Experiments | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"discharge",
"history",
"mercury",
"phosphorous",
"STATIC",
"triboelectric",
"vacuum"
] | Bits of material levitating against gravity, a stream of water deflected by invisible means, sparks of light appearing out of thin air; with observations like those, it’s a wonder that the early experiments into the nature of electricity progressed beyond the catch-all explanation of magic. And yet they did, but not without a lot of lamb’s bladders and sulfur globes, and not a little hand waving in the process. And urine — lots and lots of urine.
Looking into these early electrical experiments and recreating them is the unlikely space [Sam Gallagher] has staked out with the
“Experimental History of Electricity,”
a growing playlist on his criminally undersubscribed YouTube channel.
The video
linked below is his latest, describing the apparatus one Francis Hauksbee used to generate static electric charges for his early 18th-century experiments. Hauksbee’s name is nowhere near as well-known as that of Otto von Guericke or William Gilbert, who in the two centuries before Hauksbee conducted their own experiments and who both make appearances in the series. But Hauksbee’s machine, a rotating glass globe charged by the lightest touch of a leather pad, which [Sam] does a fantastic job recreating as closely as possible using period-correct materials and methods, allowed him to explore the nature of electricity in much greater depth than his predecessors.
But what about the urine? As with many of the experiments at the time, alchemists used what they had to create the reagents they needed, and it turned out that urine was a dandy source of phosphorous, which gave off a brilliant light when sufficiently heated. The faint light given off by mercury when shaken in the vacuum within a barometer seemed similar enough that it became known as the “mercurial phosphor” that likely inspired Hauksbee’s electrical experiments, which when coupled with a vacuum apparatus nearly led to the invention of the mercury discharge lamp, nearly 200 years early. The more you know.
Thanks to [RoGeorge] for the tip. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,371,773.814476 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/3d-print-a-stenciling-frame-for-your-pcb/ | 3D Print A Stenciling Frame For Your PCB | Arya Voronova | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"how-to",
"PCB Hacks"
] | [
"laser stencils",
"metal SMT stencils",
"pcb frame",
"smd stencil",
"SMT stencil",
"SMT stencils",
"solder stencil",
"solder stencils",
"stencil",
"stenciling"
] | For many a hacker, stenciling a board for the first time is a game-changing experience – the solder joints you get, sure do give your PCB the aura of a mass-manufactured device. Now, you might not get a perfect print – and neither did [Atul R]. Not to worry, because if you have a 3D printer handy,
he’s showing you how to design a 3D-printed frame
using Blender and TinkerCAD, making your solder paste print well even if you’re trying to rest a giant stencil on top of a tiny board.
[Atul]’s situation was non-characteristic – the project is a 2mm thick PCB designed to plug right into a USB port, so the usual trick of using some scrap PCBs wouldn’t work, and using a 3D-printed frame turned out to be key. To get it done, he exported a
.wrl
from KiCad, processed it in Blender, and then designed a frame with help of TinkerCAD. These techniques, no doubt, will translate into your CAD of choice – especially if you go with
.step
export instead of
.wrl
.
This kind of frame design will get you far, especially for boards where the more common techniques fail – say, if you need to assemble a double-sided board and one side is already populated. Don’t have a stencil? You could surely make a 3D printed stencil, too, both
for KiCad boards
and
for random Gerber files.
Oh, and don’t forget
this 3D-printable stencil alignment jig
, while you’re at it – looks like it ought to save you quite a bit of trouble. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046900",
"author": "jenningsthecat",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T23:42:59",
"content": "“Don’t have a stencil? You could surely make a 3D printed stencil, too…”Thanks for that! It’s been quite a while since I last designed a PCB, and it was easy to solder by hand. But if I ever need ... | 1,760,371,774.020896 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/03/a-lightweight-balloon-tracker-for-high-altitude-missions/ | A Lightweight Balloon Tracker For High Altitude Missions | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"balloon tracker",
"bme280",
"gps",
"high altitude balloon",
"pressure sensor"
] | It’s pretty easy to take a balloon, fill it up with helium, and send it up in to the upper atmosphere. It’s much harder to keep track of it and recover it when it falls back to Earth. If you’re trying to do that, you might find some value
in the Tiny4FSK project from the New England Weather Balloon Society.
Tiny4FSK is intended to be a very small solution for high-altitude tracking. As you might have guessed from the name, it communicates via 4FSK—four frequency shift keying. Basically, it communicates data via four separate tones. Based around the SAMD21G18A microcontroller, it’s designed to run on a single AA battery, which should last for anywhere from 10-17 hours. It communicates via a Si4063 transmitter set up to communicate on 433.2 MHz, using the
Horus Binary v2 system
. As for data, it’s hooked up with a GPS module and a BME280 environmental sensor for location. The balloon can figure out where it is, and tell you the temperature, pressure, and humidity up there, too.
If you’re looking for a lightweight balloon tracker, this one might be very much up your alley.
We’ve featured other projects in this vein, too.
Meanwhile, if you’re developing something new in the high-altitude ballooning space, you could keep it to yourself. Or, alternatively, you could tell us
via the tipsline
and we’ll tell everybody else. Your call! | 47 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046820",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T20:07:50",
"content": "Quite the same as re-flashed RS41 (with RS41ng software which can do Horus v2 too). 10-17 hours battery time in what temperature?And this is not lightweight in terms of high altitude ballooning, looks actua... | 1,760,371,773.969498 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/voyager-2s-plasma-spectrometer-turned-off-in-power-saving-measure/ | Voyager 2’s Plasma Spectrometer Turned Off In Power-Saving Measure | Maya Posch | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"Voyager 2"
] | The Voyager 2 spacecraft’s energy budget keeps dropping by about 4 Watt/year, as the plutonium in its nuclear power source is steadily dropping as the isotope decays. With 4 Watt of power less to use by its systems per year, the decision was made to
disable the plasma spectrometer (PLS) instrument
. As
also noted
by the NASA Voyager 2 team on Twitter, this doesn’t leave the spacecraft completely blind to plasma in the interstellar medium as the plasma wave subsystem (PWS) is still active. The PLS was instrumental in determining in 2018 that Voyager 2 had in fact left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. The PLS on Voyager 1 had already broken down in 1980 and was turned off in 2007.
After saving the Voyager 1 spacecraft the past months from a
dud memory chip
and switching between increasingly
clogged up thrusters
, it was now Voyager 2’s turn for a reminder of the relentless march of time and the encroaching end of the Voyager missions. Currently Voyager 2 still has
four active instruments
, but by the time the power runs out, they’ll both be limping along with a single instrument, probably somewhere in the 2030s if their incredible luck holds.
This
incredible feat was enabled
both by the hard work and brilliance of the generations of teams behind the two spacecraft, who keep coming up with new tricks to save power, and the simplicity of the radioisotope generators (RTGs) which keep both Voyagers powered and warm even in the depths of interstellar space. | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046374",
"author": "Robert Heffernan",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T02:14:14",
"content": "Going to be a sad day when the shutdown command is sent into the void.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8046623",
"author": "aliali... | 1,760,371,774.080312 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/mikrophone-open-secure-simple-smartphone/ | MikroPhone – Open, Secure, Simple Smartphone | Arya Voronova | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Phone Hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"imx8",
"open smartphone",
"open-source smartphone",
"SiFive",
"smartphone"
] | Modern smartphones try and provide a number of useful features to their users, and yet, they’re not exactly designed with human needs in mind. A store-bought smartphone will force a number of paradigms and features onto you no matter whether you want them, and, to top it off, it will encroach on your privacy and sell your data. It’s why self-built and hacker-friendly smartphone projects keep popping up, and
the MikroPhone project
fills a new niche for sure, with its LTE connectivity making it a promising option for all hackers frustrated with the utter state of smartphones today.
MikroPhone is
open-source in every single aspect possible,
and it’s designed to be privacy-friendly and easy to understand. At its core is a SiFive Freedom E310, a powerful RISC-V microcontroller – allowing for a feature phone-like OS that is easy to audit and hard to get bogged down by. You’re not limited to a feature phone OS, however – on the PCB, you will find a slot for an NXP i.MX8M-based module that can run a Linux-based mobile OS of your choice. MikroPhone’s display and touchscreen are shared between the Linux module and the onboard MCU, a trick that reminds us of
the MCH2022 badge
– you get as much “smartphone” as you currently need, no more, no less.
The cool features at MikroPhone’s core don’t end here. The MikroPhone has support for end-to-end encrypted communications, kept to its feature-phone layer, making for a high bar of privacy protection – even when the higher-power module might run an OS that you don’t necessarily fully trust. Currently, MikroPhone
is a development platform
, resembling the PinePhone’s
Project Don’t Be Evil board
back when PinePhone was just starting out, and just like with PinePhone, it wouldn’t be hard to minify this platform into a pocket-friendly form-factor, either. The PinePhone has famously become a decent smartphone replacement option in the hacker world, even helping kick off a few mobile OS projects and resulting
in a
trove
of hacks
to grace
our
pages
. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046299",
"author": "asdf",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T23:35:18",
"content": "Neat but can it run doom?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8047168",
"author": "clancydaenlightened",
"timestamp": "2024-10-04T15:52:18... | 1,760,371,774.339312 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/witchs-staff-build-is-a-rad-glowing-costume-prop/ | Witch’s Staff Build Is A Rad Glowing Costume Prop | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"Adafruit Feather",
"costume",
"costume prop",
"led",
"neopixel",
"witch's staff"
] | Let’s say you’re going to a music festival. You could just take water, sunscreen, and a hat. Or, you could take a rad glowing witch’s staff to really draw some eyes and have some fun.
[MZandtheRaspberryPi] recently undertook just such a build for a friend and we love how it turned out.
The concept was to build a staff or cane with a big glowing orb on top. The aim was to 3D print the top as a very thin part so that LEDs inside could glow through it. Eventually, after much trial and error, the right combination of design and printer settings made this idea work. A Pi Pico W was then employed as the brains of the operation, driving a number of through-hole Neopixel LEDs sourced from Adafruit.
Power was courtesy of a long cable running out of the cane and to a USB power bank in the wielder’s pocket. Eventually, it was revealed this wasn’t ideal for dancing with the staff. Thus, an upgrade came in the form of an Adafruit Feather microcontroller and a 2,000 mAh lithium-polymer battery tucked inside the orb. The Feather’s onboard hardware made managing the lithium cell a cinch, and there were no more long cables to worry about.
The result? A neat costume prop that looks fantastic. A bit of 3D printing and basic electronics is all you need these days to build fun glowing projects, and we always love to see them. Halloween is right around the corner — if you’re building something awesome for your costume, don’t hesitate to
let us know! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046288",
"author": "kgsws",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T21:57:10",
"content": "Imagine this with laser diodes. Laser light “specks” would make this look more unusual … or “magical”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8046308",
"a... | 1,760,371,774.270753 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/floss-weekly-episode-803-unconferencing-with-oggcamp/ | FLOSS Weekly Episode 803: Unconferencing With OggCamp | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"FLOSS Weekly",
"OggCamp",
"unconference"
] | This week
Jonathan Bennett
and and Simon Phipps chat with Gary Williams about OggCamp! It’s the Free Software and Free culture unconference happening soon in Manchester! What exactly is an unconference? How long has OggCamp been around, and what should you expect to see there? Listen to find out!
https://ogg.camp
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 | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046310",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-10-03T00:13:19",
"content": "Any relation to Ogg Vorbis?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8046553",
"author": "Bob Gorgeous",
"timest... | 1,760,371,774.419987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/retrotechtacular-another-thing-your-tv-no-longer-needs/ | Retrotechtacular: Another Thing Your TV No Longer Needs | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Retrotechtacular",
"Slider"
] | [
"analog tv",
"converter",
"uhf",
"VHF"
] | As Hackaday writers we don’t always know what our colleagues are working on until publication time, so we all look forward to seeing what other writers come up with. This week it was [Al Williams] with “
Things Your TV No Longer Needs
“, a range of gadgets from the analogue TV era, now consigned to the history books. On the bench here is a device that might have joined them, so in taking a look at it now it’s by way of an addendum to Al’s piece.
When VHF Was Not Enough
In a Dutch second-had store while on my hacker camp travels this summer, I noticed a small grey box. It was mine for the princely sum of five euros, because while I’d never seen one before I was able to guess exactly what it was. The “Super 2” weighing down my backpack was a UHF converter, a set-top box from before set-top boxes, and dating from the moment around five or six decades ago when that country expanded its TV broadcast network to include the UHF bands. If your TV was VHF it couldn’t receive the new channels, and this box was the answer to connecting your UHF antenna to that old TV.
It’s a relatively small plastic case about the size of a chunky paperback book, on the front of which is a tuning knob and scale in channels and MHz, on the top of which are a couple of buttons for VHF and UHF, and on the back are a set of balanced connectors for antennas and TV set. It’s mains powered, so there’s a mains lead with an older version of the ubiquitous European mains plug. Surprisingly it comes open with a couple of large coin screws on the underside, so it’s time to take a look inside.
Inside: A Familiar Sight
The guts of the tuner in the converter.
TV tuner front end block diagram. Chetvorno,
[CC0]
.
At first sight it’s fairly simple: a conventional mains DC power supply with no regulator and a metal tuner can. The scale mechanism is a string-and-gears affair, something quite common back in the day but a rare sight today. Unclipping the lid of the tuner can reveals its secret, this is the front end of a UHF TV tuner modified slightly to produce an output on a VHF broadcast channel.
We’ve covered UHF TV tuners in the past
, but if you’ve never encountered them here’s how they worked. Inside the can is a series of cavity tuned circuits containing two transistors. One of them is wired as an RF amplifier that works on the signal from the antenna, and the other is an oscillator. By mixing the amplified antenna signal with the oscillator output it’s possible to filter out an intermediate frequency, which is their difference. This was always 36 MHz, chosen because it lies just below the VHF broadcast band, and since this tuner needs to feed an unmodified VHF television, its output frequency will be a bit higher. We’re guessing that it’s been modified for a 41.25 MHz output, corresponding to the European VHF channel 1.
So in front of me I have a European thing that your TV no longer needs, and it’s one that probably didn’t have a very long market life. It’s a snapshot of a moment in consumer electronics history, when the number of channels could be counted on far less than the fingers of a hand. With analogue TV now long switched off it’s not even got a use any more except as a curio, so it joins the pile of museum-pieces
alongside the 8-track player
. Meanwhile if you’d like to see how an American city handled the UHF transition,
we’ve been back to 1950s Portland
, too. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046209",
"author": "IanS",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T17:10:47",
"content": "Of course, UK TVs would not have benefited from that device as the UHF transmissions were in 625 lines, and had a totally different standard to the VHF 405 line pictures.Incidentally, I used to have an earli... | 1,760,371,774.545177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/drive-for-show-putt-for-dough/ | Drive For Show, Putt For Dough | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"aiming",
"computer vision",
"electromagnet",
"golf",
"golf club",
"putter",
"robot",
"robotics"
] | Any golfer will attest that the most impressive looking part of the game—long drives—isn’t where the game is won. To really lower one’s handicap the most important skills to develop are in the short game, especially putting. Even a two-inch putt to close out a hole counts the same as the longest drive, so these skills are not only difficult to master but incredibly valuable. To shortcut some of the skill development, though,
[Sparks and Code] broke most rules around the design of golf clubs to construct this robotic putter
.
The putter’s goal is to help the golfer with some of the finesse required to master the short game. It can vary its striking force by using an electromagnet to lift the club face a certain amount, depending on the distance needed to sink a putt. Two servos lift the electromagnet and club, then when the appropriate height is reached the electromagnet turns off and the club swings down to strike the ball. The two servos can also oppose each other’s direction to help aim the ball as well, allowing the club to strike at an angle rather than straight on. The club also has built-in rangefinding and a computer vision system so it can identify the hole automatically and determine exactly how it should hit the ball. The only thing the user needs to do is press a button on the shaft of the club.
Even the most famous golfers will have problems putting
from time to time so, if you’re willing to skirt the rules a bit, the club might be useful to have around. If not, it’s at least a fun project to show off on the golf course to build one’s credibility around other robotics enthusiasts who also happen to be golfers. If you’re looking for something to be more of a coach or aide rather than an outright cheat, though,
this golf club helps analyze and perfect your swing
instead of doing everything for you. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046277",
"author": "Nick Racco",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T21:16:32",
"content": "amazing",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8046287",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T21:55:51",
"content": "Rodney Dangerfiel... | 1,760,371,774.38134 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/mining-and-refining-lead-silver-and-zinc/ | Mining And Refining: Lead, Silver, And Zinc | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"cupellation",
"froth",
"Idaho",
"lead",
"Mining and Refining",
"silver",
"sulfide",
"zinc"
] | If you are in need of a lesson on just how much things have changed in the last 60 years, an anecdote from my childhood might suffice. My grandfather was a junk man, augmenting the income from his regular job by collecting scrap metal and selling it to metal recyclers. He knew the current scrap value of every common metal, and his garage and yard were stuffed with barrels of steel shavings, old brake drums and rotors, and miles of copper wire.
But his most valuable scrap was lead, specifically the weights used to balance car wheels, which he’d buy as waste from tire shops. The weights had spring steel clips that had to be removed before the scrap dealers would take them, which my grandfather did by melting them in a big cauldron over a propane burner in the garage. I clearly remember hanging out with him during his “melts,” fascinated by the flames and simmering pools of molten lead, completely unconcerned by the potential danger of the situation.
Fast forward a few too many decades and in an ironic twist I find myself living very close to the place where all that lead probably came from, a place that was also blissfully unconcerned by the toxic consequences of pulling this valuable industrial metal from tunnels burrowed deep into the Bitterroot Mountains. It didn’t help that the lead-bearing ores also happened to be especially rich in other metals including zinc and copper. But the real prize was silver, present in such abundance that the most productive silver mine in the world was once located in a place that is known as “Silver Valley” to this day. Together, these three metals made fortunes for North Idaho, with unfortunate side effects from the mining and refining processes used to win them from the mountains.
All Together Now
Thanks to the relative abundance of their ores and their physical and chemical properties, lead, silver, and zinc have been known and worked since prehistoric times. Lead, in fact, may have been the first metal our ancestors learned to smelt. It’s primarily the low melting points of these metals that made this possible; lead, for instance, melts at only 327°C, well within the range of a simple wood fire. It’s also soft and ductile, making it easy enough to work with simple tools that lead beads and wires dating back over 9,000 years have been found.
Unlike many industrial metals, minerals containing lead, silver, and zinc generally aren’t oxides of the metals. Rather, these three metals are far more likely to combine with sulfur, so their ores are mostly sulfide minerals. For lead, the primary ore is galena or lead (II) sulfide (PbS). Galena is a naturally occurring semiconductor, crystals of which lent their name to the early “crystal radios” which used a lump of galena probed with a fine cat’s whisker as a rectifier or detector for AM radio signals.
Geologically, galena is found in veins within various metamorphic rocks, and in association with a wide variety of sulfide minerals. Exactly what minerals those are depends greatly on the conditions under which the rock formed. Galena crystallized out of low-temperature geological processes is likely to be found in limestone deposits alongside other sulfide minerals such as sphalerite, or zincblende, an ore of zinc. When galena forms under higher temperatures, such as those associated with geothermal processes, it’s more likely to be associated with iron sulfides like pyrite, or Fool’s Gold. Hydrothermal galenas are also more likely to have silver dissolved into the mineral, classifying them as argentiferous ores. In some cases, such as the mines of the Silver Valley, the silver is at high enough concentrations that the lead is considered the byproduct rather than the primary product, despite galena not being a primary ore of silver.
Like a Lead Bubble
How galena is extracted and refined depends on where the deposits are found. In some places, galena deposits are close enough to the surface that open-cast mining techniques can be used. In the Silver Valley, though, and in other locations in North America with commercially significant galena deposits, galena deposits follow deep fissures left by geothermal processes, making deep tunnel mining more likely to be used. The scale of some of the mines in the Silver Valley is hard to grasp. The galena deposits that led to the Bunker Hill stake in the 1880s were found at an elevation of 3,600′ (1,100 meters) above sea level; the shafts and workings of the Bunker Hill Mine are now 1,600′ (488 meters)
below
sea level, requiring miners to take an elevator ride one mile straight down to get to work.
Ore veins are followed into the rock using a series of tunnels or stopes that branch out from vertical shafts. Stopes are cut with the time-honored combination of drilling and blasting, freeing up hundreds of tons of ore with each blasting operation. Loose ore is gathered with a slusher, a bucket attached to a dragline that pulls ore back up the stope, or using mining loaders, low-slung payloaders specialized for operation in tight spaces.
Ore plus soap equals metal bubbles. Froth flotation of copper sulfide is similar to the process for extracting zinc sulfide. Source:
Geomartin
, CC BY-SA 4.0
Silver Valley galena typically assays at about 10% lead, making it a fairly rich ore. It’s still not rich enough, though, and needs to be concentrated before smelting. Most mines do the initial concentration on site, starting with the usual crushing, classifying, washing, and grinding steps. Ball mills are used to reduce the ore to a fine powder, mixed with water and surfactants to form a slurry, and pumped into a broad, shallow tank. Air pumped into the bottom of the tanks creates bubbles in the slurry that carry the fine lead particles up to the surface while letting the waste rock particles, or gangue, sink to the bottom. It seems counterintuitive to separate lead by floating it, but froth flotation is quite common in metal refining; we’ve seen it used to concentrate everything from lightweight
graphite
to ultradense
uranium
. It’s also important to note that this is not yet elemental lead, but rather still the lead sulfide that made up the bulk of the galena ore.
Once the froth is skimmed off and dried, it’s about 80% pure lead sulfide and ready for smelting. The Bunker Hill Mine used to have the largest lead smelter in the world, but that closed in 1982 after decades of operation that left an environmental and public health catastrophe in its wake. Now, concentrate is mainly sent to smelters located overseas for final processing, which begins with roasting the lead sulfide in a blast of hot air. This converts the lead sulfide to lead oxide and gaseous sulfur dioxide as a waste product:
After roasting, the lead oxide undergoes a reduction reaction to free up the elemental lead by adding everything to a blast furnace fueled with coke:
Any remaining impurities float to the top of the batch while the molten lead is tapped off from the bottom of the furnace.
Zinc!
A significant amount of zinc is also located in the ore veins of the Silver Valey, enough to become a major contributor to the district’s riches. The mineral sphalerite is the main zinc ore found in this region; like galena, it’s a sulfide mineral, but it’s a mixture of zinc sulfide and iron sulfide instead of the more-or-less pure lead oxide in galena. Sphalerite also tends to be relatively rich in industrially important contaminants like cadmium, gallium, germanium, and indium.
Most sphalerite ore isn’t this pretty. Source:
Ivar Leidus
, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Extraction of sphalerite occurs alongside galena extraction and uses mostly the same mining processes. Concentration also uses the froth flotation method used to isolate lead sulfide, albeit with different surfactants specific for zinc sulfide. Concentration yields a material with about 50% zinc by weight, with iron, sulfur, silicates, and trace metals making up the rest.
Purification of zinc from the concentrate is via a roasting process similar to that used for lead, and results in zinc oxide and more sulfur dioxide:
Originally, the Bunker Hill smelter just vented the sulfur dioxide out into the atmosphere, resulting in massive environmental damage in the Silver Valley. My neighbor relates his arrival in Idaho in 1970, crossing over the Lookout Pass from Montana on the then brand-new Interstate 90. Descending into the Silver Valley was like “a scene from Dante’s
Inferno
,” with thick smoke billowing from the smelter’s towering smokestacks trapped in the valley by a persistent inversion. The pine trees on the hillsides had all been stripped of needles by the sulfuric acid created when the sulfur dioxide mixed with moisture in the stale air. Eventually, the company realized that
sulfur
was too valuable to waste and started capturing it, and even built a fertilizer plant to put it to use. But the damage was done, and it took decades for the area to bounce back.
Recovering metallic zinc from zinc oxide is performed by reduction, again in a coke-fired blast furnace which collects the zinc vapors and condenses them to the liquid phase, which is tapped off into molds to create ingots. An alternative is electrowinning, where zinc oxide is converted to zinc sulfate using sulfuric acid, often made from the sulfur recovered from roasting. The zinc sulfate solution is then electrolyzed, and metallic zinc is recovered from the cathodes, melted, further purified if necessary, and cast into ingots.
Silver from Lead
If the original ore was argentiferous, as most of the Silver Valley’s galena is, now’s the time to recover the silver through the Parke’s process, a solvent extraction technique. In this case, the solvent is the molten lead, in which silver is quite soluble. The dissolved silver is precipitated by adding molten zinc, which has the useful property of reacting with silver while being immiscible with lead. Zinc also has a higher melting point than lead, meaning that as the temperature of the mixture drops, the zinc solidifies, carrying along any silver it combined with while in the molten state. The zinc-silver particles float to the top of the desilvered lead where they can be skimmed off. The zinc, which has a lower boiling point than silver, is driven off by vaporization, leaving behind relatively pure silver.
To further purify the recovered silver, cupellation is often employed. Cupellation is a pyrometallurgical process used since antiquity to purify noble metals by exploiting the different melting points and chemical properties of metals. In this case, silver contaminated with zinc is heated to the point where the zinc oxidizes in a shallow, porous vessel called a cupel. Cupels were traditionally made from bone ash or other materials rich in calcium carbonate, which gradually absorbs the zinc oxide, leaving behind a button of purified silver. Cupellation can also be used to purify silver directly from argentiferous galena ore, by differentially absorbing lead oxide from the molten solution, with the obvious disadvantage of wasting the lead:
Cupellation can also be used to recover small amounts of silver directly from refined lead, such as that in wheel weights:
If my grandfather had only known. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046168",
"author": "Josiah David Gould",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T14:16:37",
"content": "I grew up and still live in the “Tri-State Mining District” in southern Missouri. Lots of lead history here, lots of damage still around. Chances are if you got shot by an American in WWI the l... | 1,760,371,774.479879 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/supercon-2023-thea-flowers-renders-kicad-projects-on-the-web/ | Supercon 2023: Thea Flowers Renders KiCad Projects On The Web | Arya Voronova | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"PCB Hacks",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Supercon",
"2023 Hackaday Superconference",
"kicanvas"
] | Last year’s Supercon, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting Thea [Stargirl] Flowers, who told us about her KiCanvas project, with its trials, its tribulations, and its triumphs. KiCanvas brings interactive display of KiCad boards and schematics into your browser, letting you embed your PCB’s information right into your blog post or online documentation.
Give the KiCanvas plugin a URL to your KiCad file, and it will render your file in the browser, fully on the fly. There’s no
.jpg
to update and re-upload, no jobs to re-run each time you find a mistake and update your board – your files are always up to date, and your audience is always able to check it out without launching KiCad.
Images are an intuitive representation for schematics and PCB files, but they’re letting hackers down massively. Thea’s KiCanvas project is about making our KiCad projects all that more accessible to newcomers, and it’s succeeded – nowadays, you can encounter KiCanvas schematic embeds in the wild
on various hackers’ blogs.
The Typescript code didn’t write itself, and neither was it easy – she’s brought a fair few war stories to the DesignLab stage.
A hacker’s passion to share can move mountains. Thea’s task was a formidable one, too – KiCad is a monumental project with a decades-long history. There are quite respectable reasons for someone to move this particular mountain – helping you share your projects quickly but extensively, and letting people learn about your projects without breaking a sweat.
Thea talks about how you will see hackers struggle with a common problem constantly when sharing PCB designs. You can embed a schematic
.jpg
into your blog post, but it remains just that – an image. You can’t click on a component to learn its value, or highlight a net to show where it travels, or even easily zoom in/out. Same goes for board layer images, and don’t even think about displaying different layers interactively. Hackers deserve better.
The core design decisions of KiCanvas are aimed at making the embed plug-and-play, helping us adopt the plugin all that much easier, no matter the environment we’re embedding it into. Keeping in line with jQuery-like developer friendliness traditions, KiCanvas is easy to add to your webpage, it has no external depedencies, and it gives you all the control over how your schematic or board is represented.
Exhibit A: a switch-case block that took 15 seconds to scroll through
Of course, Thea didn’t get the project this far without a hitch. Parsing KiCad files might feel like quite a hacker-friendly task – KiCad is open-source, its files are plaintext S-expressions, and you can even make meaningful changes to KiCad boards and schematics in a text editor. If you think that’s all there is to it, strap in, because you should listen to the horrors.
File formats change between Git revisions, parsing is tightly coupled to object structure building, notations used in different places are often incompatible. If you came to see elegant code, tough luck, it’s time for you to learn about the giant switch-case statements that bring your board to life each time you double click on a KiCad file.
From emoticon-laden developer comments you will find when you finally track down an annoying problem within the source code, to intricacies of converting S-expressions into entities representing features of your board, there is no shortage of nuances that make KiCad’s rendering great and KiCanvas’s rendering impressive, and that’s before you learn what makes up for 90% of KiCanvas plugin’s filesize.
The stories highlight the KiCanvas project as the truly impressive feat it is under the surface, and it makes sense that a hacker of Thea’s caliber would be a board member of the Open Source Hardware Association. It was a fun talk to attend, and if you haven’t had the pleasure, do treat yourself to the video – it’s a story of perfectly targeting a universal problem as far as sharing culture of hackerdom goes, a project unshakeably driven to completion despite the unapproachable demeanor of the KiCad codebase, witty remarks woven throughout. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of story making for a fun evening watch, as it’s always a pleasure to listen to a hacker who has recently returned from a successfully completed mission.
It’s Not About What You Can Do For KiCanvas
It’s not just about the talk – you’re likely in the audience for KiCanvas, we see you, don’t hide behind your resistance to exploring new cool tools. Not all new tools are worthwhile, sure, but KiCanvas very much is. The next time you want to share your project with the world, you should try out KiCanvas.
Say, are you looking at a project created with the nightly edition of KiCad?
Here’s one,
for reference. Maybe, you don’t even have KiCad installed on this particular computer? Either way, no need to install the latest nightlies – just go to
kicanvas.org
and paste your project’s GitHub URL, yes, just the URL to the repository (
or click here
), wait a little, and effortlessly view the KiCad board in question. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045962",
"author": "Mark Topham",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T17:47:19",
"content": "Ha, was just starting to look at this project, as I’m trying to make a local project file for a project with multiple PCB, and wanting to use renderings in other tools. I think one supports web pages ... | 1,760,371,774.594454 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/hp-webos-touchpad-gets-with-the-usb-c-times/ | HP WebOS TouchPad Gets With The USB-C Times | Arya Voronova | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"HP TouchPad",
"TouchPad",
"USB-C PD",
"usbc",
"webos"
] | Despite HP shuttering their WebOS project some time ago, the operating system has kept a dedicated following. One device in particular, the HP TouchPad, was released just a month before webOS went under and is still a favorite among hackers — giving the device the kind of love that HP never could. [Alan Morford] from the
pivotCE
blog
shares the kind of hack
that helps this device exist in a modern-day world: a USB-C upgrade for charging and data transfer.
The inline micro USB port used is a perfect fit for a USB-C upgrade, with only small amounts of PCB and case cutting required. Just make sure to get a breakout that has the
appropriate 5.1 K resistors onboard
, and follow [Alan]’s tutorial closely. He shows all the points you need to tap to let your TouchPad charge and transfer data to your computer, whether for firmware flashing or for daily use.
This hack doesn’t preserve the USB-OTG feature, but that’s fixable with a single WUSB3801. Apart from that, this mod is perfect for keeping your webOS tablet alive and kicking in today’s increasingly USB-C dominated world. Once you’ve done it, you might want to take care of your
PlayStation 4 controllers
and
Arduino Uno boards
, too. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045998",
"author": "omnichad",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T20:59:49",
"content": "The operating system is also now owned by LG and used in most of their TVs. It’s not just a dead tablet OS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "80460... | 1,760,371,774.641317 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/java-ring-one-wearable-to-rule-all-authentications/ | Java Ring: One Wearable To Rule All Authentications | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"1-wire",
"2-factor",
"ibutton",
"java",
"Java Ring",
"two-factor authentication"
] | Today, you likely often authenticate or pay for things with a tap, either using a chip in your card, or with your phone, or maybe even with your watch or a Yubikey. Now,
imagine doing all these things way back in 1998
with a single wearable device that you could shower or swim with. Sound crazy?
These types of transactions and authentications were more than possible then. In fact, the Java ring and its iButton brethren were poised to take over all kinds of informational handshakes, from unlocking doors and computers to paying for things, sharing medical records, making coffee according to preference, and much more. So, what happened?
Just Press the Blue Dot
Perhaps the most late-nineties piece of tech jewelry ever produced, the Java Ring is a wearable computer. It contains a tiny microprocessor with a million transistors that has a built-in Java Virtual Machine (JVM), non-volatile storage, and an serial interface for data transfer.
A family of Java iButton devices and smart cards, including the Java Ring, a Java dog tag, and two Blue Dot readers. Image by [youbitbrain] via
reddit
Technically speaking, this thing has 6 Kb of NVRAM expandable to 128 Kb, and
up to 64 Kb of ROM
(PDF). It runs the Java Card 2.0 standard, which is discussed in the article linked above.
While it might be the coolest piece in the catalog, the Java ring was just one of many ways to get your iButton. But wait, what is this
iButton
I keep talking about?
In 1989, Dallas Semiconductor created a storage device that resembles a coin cell battery and uses the 1-Wire communication protocol. The top of the iButton is the positive contact, and the casing acts as ground. These things are still around, and
have many applications from holding bus fare in Istanbul to the immunization records of Canadian cows
.
For $15 in 1998 money, you could get a Blue Dot receptor to go with it for sexy hardware two-factor authentication into your computer via serial or parallel port. Using an iButton was as easy as pressing the ring (or what have you) up against the Blue Dot.
Indestructible Inside and Out, Except for When You Need It
It’s a hefty secret decoder ring, that’s for sure.
Made of of stainless steel and waterproof grommets, this thing is built to be indestructible. The batteries were rated for a ten-year life, and the ring itself for one million hot contacts with Blue Dot receptors.
This thing has several types of encryption going for it, including 1024-bit RSA public-key encryption, which acts like a PGP key. There’s a random number generator and a real-time clock to disallow backdating transactions. And the processor is driven by an unstabilized ring oscillator, so it constantly varies its clock speed between 10 and 20 MHz. This way, the speed can’t be detected externally.
But probably the coolest part is that the embedded RAM is tamper-proof. If tampered with, the RAM undergoes a process called rapid zeroization that erases everything. Of course, while Java Rings and other iButton devices maybe be internally and externally tamper-proof, they can be lost or stolen quite easily. This is part of why the iButton came in many form factors, from key chains and necklaces to rings and watch add-ons. You can see some in the brochure below that came with the ring:
Check out the lofty language on this thing!
The Part You’ve Been Waiting For
I seriously doubt I can get into this thing without totally destroying it, so these exploded views will have to do. Note the ESD suppressor.
Exploded view. Image via
GBPPR
(PDF)
The construction of the iButton itself. Image via
IJRACSE
(PDF)
So, What Happened?
I surmise that the demise of the Java Ring and other iButton devices has to do with barriers to entry for businesses — even though receptors may have been $15 each, it simply cost too much to adopt the technology. And although it was stylish to Java all the things at the time, well, you can see how that turned out.
If you want a Java Ring, they’re on ebay. If you want a modern version of the Java Ring, just
dissolve a credit card and put the goodies in resin
. | 30 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045924",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T14:16:17",
"content": "Dallas TouchMemory ? we had a customer in ’96 (in Argentina) that use the Dallas versions DS1994 for access to a lab where vaccines were produced. It was used in a high humidity environment, the people of Dal... | 1,760,371,774.844081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/the-challenges-of-charging-drones-from-power-lines/ | The Challenges Of Charging Drones From Power Lines | Danie Conradie | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"autonomous drone",
"inspection",
"power lines"
] | Drones that charge right on the power lines they inspect is a promising concept, but comes with plenty of challenges. The
Drone Infrastructure Inspection and Interaction (Diii) Group
of the University of South Denmark is tackling these challenges head-on.
The
gripper
for these drones may seem fairly straightforward, but it needs to inductively charge, grip, and detach reliably while remaining simple and lightweight. To attach to a power line, the drone pushes against it, triggering a cord to pull the gripper closed. This gripper is held closed electromagnetically using energy harvested from the power line or the drone’s battery if the line is off. Ingeniously, this means that if there’s an electronics failure, the gripper will automatically release, avoiding situations where linemen would need to rescue a stuck drone.Accurately mapping power lines in 3D space for autonomous operation presents another hurdle. The team successfully
tested mmWave radar
for this purpose, which proves to be a lightweight and cost-efficient alternative to solutions like LiDAR.
We
briefly covered
this project earlier this year when details were limited. Energy harvesting from power lines isn’t new; we’ve seen similar concepts applied in government-sanctioned
spy cameras
and
border patrol drones
. Drones are not only used for inspecting power lines but also for more adventurous tasks like
clearing debris off them with fire
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045895",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T11:45:51",
"content": "I’m thinking a power line inspecting drone could move on the power lines instead of flying. I’m sure there already are devices that move on a cable. This obviously needs to move so that it can pass the electr... | 1,760,371,774.772248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/very-tiny-cube-has-384-rgb-leds/ | Very Tiny Cube Has 384 RGB LEDs | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"cube",
"glowable",
"glowables",
"LED cube",
"leds",
"ws2812b"
] | When it comes to making things that glow, there are two ways to stand out from the crowd. You can make something very big, or something very small. [DIY GUY Chris] has done the latter,
producing a tiny LED cube that he says is the world’s smallest.
As is so often the way, the build relies on tiny WS2812B-compatible LEDs in a 1 mm x 1 mm form factor. They’re mounted on a series of teeny interlocking PCBs that come together to build a cube that’s just 8 cubic centimeters in volume. Power is courtesy of a small lithium-ion cell that lives inside the cube. Data and power signals flow around the cube via solder connections along the edges of the faces of the cube. Running the show is an ATmega328P, the same microcontroller you’d find in an Arduino Uno. It’s responsible for sending out commands to the LEDs to create various animations.
We can’t speak to [Chris’s] claim about being the world’s smallest, but it is small. We’ve seen other builds in a similar vein, like this barely-larger D20 with
a full 2400 LEDs
, though. Video after the break. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046134",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T11:09:19",
"content": "Very nice! Just a minor drawback: without diffuser, you can clearly see light position shifting in every single led for pure R G or B color, which i find a little annoying.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,371,774.884792 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/ceefax-the-original-news-on-demand/ | Ceefax: The Original News On Demand | Heidi Ulrich | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"bbc",
"ceefax",
"interactive media",
"Minitel",
"teletext",
"viditel"
] | Long before we had internet newsfeeds or Twitter, Ceefax delivered up-to-the-minute news right to your television screen. Launched by the BBC in 1974, Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service, offering millions of viewers a mix of news, sports, weather, and entertainment on demand. Fast forward 50 years, and the iconic service is being
honored with a special exhibition at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge
.
At its peak, Ceefax reached over 22 million users. [Ian Morton-Smith], one of Ceefax’s original journalists, remembers the thrill of breaking stories directly to viewers, bypassing scheduled TV bulletins. The teletext interface, with its limited 80-word entries, taught him to be concise, a skill crucial to news writing even today.
We’ve talked about Ceefax in the past, including in 2022 when we explored
a project bringing Ceefax back to life using a Raspberry Pi
. Prior to that, we delved into its broader influence on early text-based information systems in
a 2021 article
.
But Ceefax wasn’t just news—it was a global movement toward interactive media, preceding the internet age. Services like Viditel and the
French Minitel
carried forward the idea of interactive text and graphics on screen. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045802",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T05:40:22",
"content": "1974? i wonder what hardware was used. a state of the art 4004? even graphics chips were not invented yet. I really would love to know.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,775.004336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/building-a-3d-printed-scanning-tunneling-microscope/ | Building A 3D Printed Scanning Tunneling Microscope | Dave Rowntree | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"diy",
"piezo actuator",
"scanning tunneling microscope",
"stm",
"Teensy 4.1"
] | YouTuber [MechnicalRedPanda] has
recreated a DIY STM hack
we covered about ten years ago, updating it to be primarily 3D-printed, using modern electronics,
making it much more accessible to many folks.
This simple STM setup utilises a piezoelectric actuator constructed by deliberately cutting a piezo speaker into four quadrants. With individual drive wires attached to the four quadrants. [MechPanda] (re)discovered that piezoelectric ceramic materials are not big fans of soldering heat. Still, in the absence of ultrasonic welding equipment, he did manage to get some wires to take to the surface using low-temperature solder paste.
As you can tell, you can only image conductive samples
A makeshift probe holder was glued on the rear side of the speaker actuator, which was intended to take a super sharp needle-like piece of tungsten wire. Putting the wire in tension and cutting at a sharp angle makes it possible with many attempts to get some usable points. Usable, in this instance, means sharp down the atomic level. The sample platform, actuator mount and all the connecting parts are 3D-printed with PA-CF. This is necessary to achieve enough mechanical stability with normal room temperature fluctuations. Three precision screws are used to level the two platforms in a typical kinematic mount structure, which looks like the only hard-to-source component. A geared stepper motor attached to the probe platform is set up to allow the probe to be carefully advanced towards the sample surface.
Graphite is not orange. This is a false-colour image!
The next issue concerns vibration damping of the whole assembly. This was achieved with a simple hanging sprung platform, damped using an aluminium plate and magnets mounted underneath—a simple and effective eddy-current damper setup. For the electronics, a Teensy 4.1 runs the show, driving the four quadrants via a brace of
AD5761 serial DACs
and a few summing amplifiers.
Three DACs generate the X, Y and Z signals, which are sent to the quadrants as Z+/-X and Z+/-Y, and the fourth DAC generates a sample bias signal. The tunnelling current picked up by the probe tip is first sent to a preamplifier constructed using a very high gain transconductance (current-to-voltage) amplifier. However, the part used was not identified.
The whole assembly is electrically shielded with metallic tape, including the cable running down the main analog board, which hosts an
LTC2326 ADC
that can handle the bipolar differential signal being fed to it. The software was programmed using the Arduino stack for ease of use. The reason for the high-speed micro is the need to control the scanning signals based on the measured tunnelling current to form a control loop. We didn’t dig into precisely how that works! As can be seen from the video, he managed to get some quite decent images of the surface of a freshly peeled HOPG (graphite) lab specimen, so the setup works, and the noise sources are under control.
To read along, check out the
project GitHub page
, but more importantly, the
original project
by [Dan Berard].
Thanks to [rolmie] for the tip! | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045792",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T04:28:31",
"content": "Use some Sorbothane pads feet or sheets to calm the machine down more stable up too 90% reduction of Vibration noise.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbothane",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,371,774.948431 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/creating-video-games-with-ai-a-mario-example/ | Creating Video Games With AI: AMarioExample | Lewin Day | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Games"
] | [
"ai",
"machine learning",
"mario"
] | Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be doing everything these days. Making images, making videos, and replacing most of us real human writers if you believe the hype. Maybe it’s all over! And yet, we persist, to write about yet another job taken over by AI:
creating video games.
The research paper
is entitled “
Video Game Generation: A Practical Study using Mario.
” The basic idea is whether a generative AI model can create an interactive video game by first training it on an existing game.
MarioVGG, as it is called, is a “text-to-video model.” It hasn’t built the
Mario
game that you’re familiar with, though. It takes player commands as text inputs—such as “run, or “jump”—and then outputs video frames showing the result in the ‘game.’ The model was trained on a dataset of frame-by-frame
Super Mario Brothers
game play, combined with data on user inputs at the time. The model shows an ability to generate believable video output for given player inputs, including basic game physics, item interactions, and collisions. It’s able to do this in a chained way, so that it can reasonably simulate a player making multiple actions and moving through a level of the game.
It’s not like playing a
real
Mario
game
yet, by any means. Regardless, the AI model has shown an ability to replicate the world of the game in a way that behaves relatively consistently with its established rules. If you’re in the field of video game development, though, you probably don’t have a lot to worry about just yet—you probably moved past making basic
Mario
clones years ago, so you’ve got quite an edge for now! | 22 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046137",
"author": "Cheese Whiz",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T11:29:53",
"content": "Oh boy, I can’t wait for the Steam store to get overrun with AI generated slop!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8046214",
"author": "Ti... | 1,760,371,775.336103 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/02/easily-build-this-imu-array-sandbox/ | Easily Build This IMU Array Sandbox | Arya Voronova | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"iCE40",
"IMU",
"imu array"
] | These days we’re used to our devices containing an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that lets it know its position relative to the Earth. They’re mechanical devices at heart, and so they’re not infallible, with a few well-known failure modes — but we can try and help it. One way that’s getting some attention is to put many MEMS IMUs on a single PCB, connect it to an FPGA, then process their data all together to make for a more sensitive IMU or filter out drift. Want to join in?
Here’s an open source implementation from [will127534].
With 32 individual ICM-42688-P SPI-connected IMUs and the beloved ICE40 chip at the center of the board, this PCB is a powerful platform to help you jump onto the new direction of the IMU research world. There’s example Verilog code that tests the board’s workings, and you can pair it with a Pi Pico running MicroPython to test out its raw capabilities. After that, the stage is yours.
The board is cheap to order online, easy to assemble yourself if you must, or have JLCPCB assemble it — just solder some capacitors on the backside afterwards. There’s a breakout, but it’s mostly for tests. This board is very much designed to be a module in a bigger system, [will] mentions that he’s building a
geophone.
Clever array-based hacks are en vogue, it would feel – here’s
a LED array from [mitxela]
that
uses LEDs as sensors. | 28 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046096",
"author": "Kannan",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T08:40:01",
"content": "umm… would sourcing the MMUs from different vendors improve the umm.. what is it called? accuracy? or precision? or redundancy?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,371,775.221942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/bbc-micro-a-retro-revamp-with-the-68008-upgrade/ | BBC Micro: A Retro Revamp With The 68008 Upgrade | Heidi Ulrich | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"68008",
"BBC Micro",
"cpu",
"os 9",
"os9",
"thermal camera"
] | The BBC Microcomputer, launched in the early 1980s, holds a special place in computing history. Designed for educational purposes, it introduced a generation to programming and technology. With its robust architecture and community-driven modifications, the BBC Micro remains a beloved project for retro computing enthusiasts. [
Neil] from
Retro4U
has been delving into this classic machine
, showcasing the fascinating process of repairing and upgrading his BBC Micro with a 68008 CPU upgrade.
Last week, [Neil] shared his progress, unveiling advancements in his repairs and upgrades. After tackling a troublesome beep issue, he successfully managed to get the BBC running with 32 KB of functional memory, allowing him to boot into BASIC. But he wasn’t stopping there. With ambitions set on installing the 68008 CPU, [Neil]’s journey continued.
The 68008 board offers significant enhancements, including multitasking capabilities with OS-9 and its own hard drive and floppy disk controller. However, [Neil] quickly encountered challenges; the board’s condition revealed the usual broken capacitors and a few other faulty components. After addressing these issues, [Neil] turned his attention to programming the necessary ROM for OS-9.
Looking to get your hands dirty? [Neil] has shared a PDF of
the upgrade circuit diagram
. You can also join the discussion with fellow enthusiasts on his Discord channel, linked in the video description. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046202",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T16:48:07",
"content": "So… upgrading a BBC Micro to be a Sinclair QL?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8046323",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,371,775.089834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/rog-ally-community-rebuilds-the-proprietary-asus-egpu/ | ROG Ally Community Rebuilds The Proprietary Asus EGPU | Arya Voronova | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Asus",
"eGPU",
"rog ally"
] | As far as impressive hacks go, this one is more than enough for your daily quota. You might remember the ROG Ally, a Steam Deck-like x86 gaming console that’s graced our pages a couple of times. Now, this is a big one – from the ROG Ally community, we get a
fully open-source eGPU adapter for the ROG Ally
, built by reverse-engineering the proprietary and overpriced eGPU sold by Asus.
We’ve seen this journey unfold over a year’s time, and the result is glorious – two different PCBs, one of them an upgraded drop-in replacement board for the original eGPU, and another designed to fit a common eGPU form-factor adapter. The connector on the ROG Ally is semi-proprietary, but its cable could be obtained as a repair part. From there, it was a matter of scrupulous
pinout reverse-engineering,
logic analyzer protocol captures
,
ACPI
and
BIOS
decompiling,
multiple PCB revisions
and months of work – what we got is a masterpiece of community effort.
Do you want to learn how the reverse-engineering process has unfolded? Check out the
Diary.md
– it’s certainly got something for you to learn, especially if you plan to walk a similar path; then, make sure to read up all the other resources
on the GitHub
, too! This achievement follows a trend from the ROG Ally community, with us having featured
dual-screen mods
and
battery replacements
before – if it continues the same way, who knows, maybe next time we will see a BGA replacement or laser fault injection. | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046039",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T02:37:10",
"content": "Considering ASUS will void your warranty over a scratch on the case I wouldn’t touch one with a 10 foot pole",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8046048"... | 1,760,371,775.273522 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/xiaomi-m365-battery-fault-just-remove-a-capacitor/ | Xiaomi M365 Battery Fault? Just Remove A Capacitor | Arya Voronova | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bms",
"xiaomi",
"Xiaomi M365"
] | Electric scooters have long been a hacker’s friend, Xiaomi ones in particular – starting with M365, the Xiaomi scooter family has expanded a fair bit. They do have a weak spot, like many other devices – the battery, something you expect to wear out.
Let’s say, one day the scooter’s diagnostics app shows one section of the battery going way below 3 volts. Was it a sudden failure of one of the cells that brought the whole stage down? Or perhaps, water damage after a hastily assembled scooter? Now, what if you measure the stages with a multimeter and it turns out they are perfectly fine?
Turns out, it might just be a single capacitor’s fault.
In a YouTube video,
[darieee] tells us all about debugging a Xiaomi M365 battery with such a fault – a BQ76930 controller being responsible for measuring battery voltages. The BMS (Battery Management System) board has capacitors in parallel with the cells, and it appears that some of these capacitors can go faulty.
Are you experiencing this particular fault? It’s easy to check – measure the battery stages and see if the information checks out with the readings in your scooter monitoring app of choice. Could this be a mechanical failure mode for this poor MLCC? Or maybe, a bad batch of capacitors? One thing is clear, this case is worth learning from, adding this kind of failure to your
collection of fun LiIon pack tidbits.
This pack seems pretty hacker-friendly – other packs lock up when anything is amiss,
like the Ryobi batteries do,
overdue for someone to really spill their secrets! | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8046024",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T23:46:51",
"content": "I wonder if these same kind of faults crop up in EV Car batteries? Be a shame to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to replace a 2 cent cap. (Of course I’m sure Tesla wouldn’t be overly upset if y... | 1,760,371,775.490457 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/print-yourself-penrose-wave-tiles-as-an-excellent-conversation-starter/ | Print Yourself Penrose Wave Tiles As An Excellent Conversation Starter | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"geometry",
"mathematics",
"maths",
"penrose",
"penrose tile",
"penrose wave tile",
"roger penrose",
"tiles"
] | Ah, tiles. You can get square ones, and do a grid, or you can get fancier shapes and do something altogether more complex. By and large though, whatever pattern you choose, it will normally end up repeating on some scale or other. That is, unless you go with something like a Penrose Wave Tile. Discovered by mathematician Roger Penrose, they never exactly repeat, no matter how you lay them out.
[carterhoefling14] decided to try and create Penrose tiles at home
—with a 3D printer being the perfect route to do it. Creating the tiles was simple—the first step was to find a Penrose pattern image online, which could then be used as the basis to design the 3D part in Fusion 360. From there, the parts were also given an inner wave structure to add further visual interest. The tiles were then printed to create a real-world Penrose tile form.
You could certainly use these Penrose tiles as decor, though we’d make some recommendations if you’re going that path. For one, you’ll want to print them in a way that optimizes for surface quality, as post-processing is time consuming and laborious. If you’re printing in plastic, probably don’t bother using these as floor tiles, as they won’t hold up. Wall tiles, though? Go nuts, just not as a splashback or anything. Keep it decorative only.
You can learn plenty more about Penrose tiling
if you please.
We do love a bit of maths around these parts, too
. If you’ve been making your own topological creation, don’t hesitate to
drop us a line. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045995",
"author": "0xdeadbeef",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T20:42:52",
"content": "Is it just me, or does the thumbnail seem somewhat reminiscent of Western Europe?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8065316",
"author": "e... | 1,760,371,775.393533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/2024-sao-contest-weve-got-saos-for-your-saos/ | 2024 SAO Contest: We’ve Got SAOs For Your SAOs | Kristina Panos | [
"contests"
] | [
"2024 Supercon SAO Contest",
"SAOAO"
] | So, we heard you like SAOs. How about some SAOs for your SAO? That’s exactly what’s going on here with [davedarko]’s SAOAO —
introducing the Supercon Add-On Add-On standard
, which is inspired by
another minibadge standard
by [lukejenkins]. At most, an SAOAO is 19×19 mm and features a 1.27 mm 3-pin header. As [davedarko] says, no pressure to do I²C, just bring the vibes.
All SAOAOs use the Yo Dawg SAO baseplate, which has room for three SAOAOs. Because six pins is often too many to make a few LEDs light up, the SAOAO standard uses a mere three pins. Not only are SAOAOs easier to route, the pins can’t even be mirrored accidentally because VCC is in the middle, and both outside pins are grounds.
Want to get your hands on some of these bad boys? [davedarko] is bringing 100 Yo Dawg SAO baseplates and 200 SAOAOs to Supercon. But if you want to make your own, you are more than welcome to do so. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045980",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T19:46:41",
"content": "I am waiting for someone to abuse the standard and come up with a power-pulsing based communication protocol. Simplified SAO over SAOSAO? SSoS?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,371,775.440533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/doing-1080p-video-sort-of-on-the-stm32-microcontroller/ | Doing 1080p Video, Sort Of, On The STM32 Microcontroller | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"1080p",
"chip",
"microcontroller",
"stm32",
"vga",
"video"
] | When you think 1080p video, you probably don’t think STM32 microcontroller. And yet!
[Gabriel Cséfalvay] has pulled off just that through the creative use of on-chip peripherals.
Sort of.
The build is based around the STM32L4P5—far from the hottest chip in the world. Depending on the exact part you pick, it offers 512 KB or 1 Mbyte of flash memory, 320 KB of SRAM, and runs at 120 MHz. Not bad, but not stellar.
Still, [Gabriel] was able to push 1080p at a sort of half resolution. Basically, the chip is generating a 1080p widescreen RGB VGA signal. However, to get around the limited RAM of the chip, [Gabriel] had to implement a hack—basically, every pixel is RAM rendered as 2×2 pixels to make up the full-sized display. At this stage, true 1080p looks achievable, but it’ll be a further challenge to properly fit it into memory.
Output hardware is minimal. One pin puts out the HSYNC signal, another handles VSYNC. The same pixel data is clocked out over R, G, and B signals, making all the pixels either white or black. Clocking out the data is handled by a nifty combination of the onboard DMA functionality and the OCTOSPI hardware. This enables the chip to hit the necessary data rate to generate such a high-resolution display.
There’s more work to be done, but it’s neat to see [Gabriel] get even this far with such limited hardware. We’ve seen others
theorize similar feats on chips like the RP2040 in the Pi Pico, too
. Video after the break. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045680",
"author": "Michael Bradley",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T20:34:22",
"content": "So its 1920×1080 / 2 –> 960×540 –> Well I sure hope they can do it.I can do 800×600 –> that is 592×600 with a single pic24ep along with individual fg/bg color per line.The SPI output has 2pixel wi... | 1,760,371,775.536132 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/iphone-15-gets-dual-sim-through-fpc-patch/ | IPhone 15 Gets Dual SIM Through FPC Patch | Arya Voronova | [
"iphone hacks",
"Phone Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"fpc patch",
"iphone",
"iPhone 15",
"modchip"
] | It can often feel like modern devices are less hackable than their thicker and far less integrated predecessors, but perhaps it’s just that our techniques need to catch up. Here’s an outstanding hack that
adds a dual SIM slot
to a US-sold eSIM iPhone 15/15 Pro, while preserving its exclusive mmwave module. No doubt, making use of the boardview files and schematics, it shows us that smartphone modding isn’t dead — it could be that we need to acknowledge the new tools we now have at our disposal.
When different hardware features are region-locked, sometimes you want to get the best of both worlds. This mod lets you go the entire length seamlessly, no bodges. It uses a lovely looking flexible printed circuit (FPC) patch board to tap into a debug header with SIM slot signals, and provides a customized Li-ion pouch cell with a cutout for the SIM slot. There’s just the small matter of using a CNC mill to make a cutout in the case where the SIM slot will go, and you’ll need to cut a buried trace to disable the eSIM module. Hey, we mentioned our skills needed to catch up, right? From there, it appears that iOS recognizes the new two SIM slots seamlessly.
The video is impressive and absolutely worth a watch if modding is your passion, and if you have a suitable CNC and a soldering iron, you can likely install this mod for yourself. Of course, you lose some things, like waterproofing, the eSIM feature, and your warranty. However, nothing could detract from this being a fully functional modkit for a modern-day phone, an inspiration for us all. Now, perhaps one of us can take a look at building a mod helping us do parts transplants between phones,
parts pairing be damned. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045657",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T19:22:42",
"content": "fpc means Free Pascal Compiler … to me. So … I see that isn’t what was meant here. I was curious :) .",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8045677",
... | 1,760,371,775.697802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/supercon-2023-going-into-deep-logic-waters-with-the-picos-pio-and-the-pis-smi/ | Supercon 2023 – Going Into Deep Logic Waters With The Pico’s PIO And The Pi’s SMI | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Slider"
] | [
"2023 Hackaday Superconference",
"pi pico",
"PIO",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rp2040",
"SMI"
] | The Raspberry Pi has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and we’ve become plenty familiar with the Pi Pico in the last three years as well. Still, these devices have a great deal of potential if you know where to look. If you wade beyond the official datasheets, you might even find more than you expected.
Kumar is presently a software engineer with Google, having previously worked for Analog Devices earlier in his career. But more than that, Kumar has been doing a deep dive into maxing out the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi and the Pi Pico, and shared some great findings in an excellent talk at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.
Under The Hood
Kumar begins by noting that a great many resources went into the creation of this talk. Worthy of note are Jeremy Bentham’s blog, which provided plenty of details on the Raspberry Pi and the workings of the Secondary Memory Interface (SMI). Beyond that, the Pi Pico documentation proved fruitful, as did several logic analyzer projects from out in the wild. Kumar collated this knowledge along with plenty of research, and put together a guide to some of the deeper functionality of the hardware with regards to the concept of a Pi Pico-based logic analyzer capable of running at 100 megasamples per second.
Kumar’s concept is for a hat that has an RP2040 connected to the Raspberry Pi via the SMI interface. It in turn is controlled via its debug pins.
Kumar notes the RP2040 chip at its heart has the useful Programmable I/O (PIO) subsystem, which allows for doing various I/O and data tasks quickly and efficiently. However, the chip is still limited to just 256 KB of RAM and a 1.5 MB/sec max data speed over USB. However, by combining the Pico with a Raspberry Pi 4, Kumar reckons its possible to create a 16 bit, 100 megasample/sec logic analyzer by using the right techniques. For looking at 3.3 V logic, the minimum hardware required would just be a Raspberry Pi and a single RP2040 microcontroller.
However, a little extra functionality never goes astray. Kumar talks about building a prototype HAT add-on that adds a separate LDO regulator for the RP2040, 5 V tolerant logic buffers, and an I2C input expander to create a pretty useful little logic analyzer. Kumar’s original idea was to use the Pi Pico itself, but there was a problem. With only 26 usable GPIOs, it’s not possible to get 16-bits in and out of the device very easily. Hence, the idea to use the raw RP2040 for direct access to all the necessary pins. However, there was still a problem. The PIO subsystem can only control 30 pins.
Kumar was hacking on the prototype up to the last minute.
To get around this, Kumar noted that the less-flexible SIO subsystem can control all 36 GPIO pins. Kumar found a way to use the dual cores of the Pi Pico to sample the GPIOs via the SIO hardware every clock cycle while remaining in sync. Basically, the SIO hardware samples the inputs, puts the results in RAM, and then the DMA subsystem trucks this over to the PIO. The PIO then handles clocking the data out to the attached Raspberry Pi as required. Combining this technique with overclocking the Pi Pico would help Kumar nail the 100 megasamples/sec target; at the stock clockrate, it wouldn’t be fast enough.
Things only get more complicated from there. Kumar explains issues around bus contention within the Pico, as well as how to clock data into the Pi via the SMI interface. It’s poorly documented, but
Jeremy Bentham’s blog
was a big help. The talk gets into the nitty gritty here, diving into the precise conditions needed to pipe lots of data out of the RP2040 and into the Pi itself. Meanwhile, the Pi itself gets control over the RP2040 via the SWD pins and GDB debugging with OpenOCD. Everything was then laced together with some code crafted with the aid of ChatGPT.
There were some kinks left to work out, with some aberrations that aren’t quite right in the data marked in red in Kumar’s testing.
By the time Supercon rolled around, Kumar was still tangling with some details. The system was passing data from RP2040 to the Raspberry Pi at 41.666 MHz, though there were
some
aberrations. There was work left to be done on flow control and some other details to get the thing more functional. Kumar also speculated that the Pi 5 might open up new avenues to further improve the project.
It’s always interesting to see a project that pushes the limits of existing hardware. Kumar might not have finished his project just yet, but this talk gives us a great look at the challenges you face when you start trying to truck masses of data into and out of an RP2040, and in to a Raspberry Pi to boot! | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045764",
"author": "Luís Outeiro",
"timestamp": "2024-10-01T01:55:22",
"content": "Hell yeah",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8046258",
"author": "Granny",
"timestamp": "2024-10-02T19:38:26",
"content": "This would b... | 1,760,371,775.806526 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/3d-printer-swaps-build-plates-to-automate-print-jobs/ | 3D Printer Swaps Build Plates To Automate Print Jobs | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printer",
"automation",
"Bambu",
"build plate"
] | [Andre Me] has long-standing interest in automating 3D print jobs, and his latest project is
automating build plate changes on the Bambu A1 Mini
.
Here’s how it works: each build plate gets a sort of “shoe” affixed to it, with which attachments on the printer itself physically interact when loading new plates and removing filled ones.
When a print job is finished, custom G-code causes an attachment on the printer to wedge itself under the build plate and peel it off until it is freed from the magnetic bed, after which the finished plate can be pushed towards the front. A stack of fresh build plates is behind the printer, and the printer slips a new one from the bottom when needed. Again, since the printer’s bed is magnetic, all one has to do is get the new plate to reliably line up and the magnetic attraction does the rest.
Some methods of automating print jobs rely on
ejecting the finished parts
and others
swap the print beds
. [Andre]’s is the latter type and we do really like how few moving parts are involved, although the resulting system has the drawback of requiring considerably more table space than just the printer itself. Still, it’s not at all a bad trade-off.
Watch it in action in the two videos embedded below.
The first
shows a time-lapse of loading and ejecting over 100 build plates in a row, and
the second
shows the whole system in action printing bowls in different colors. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045596",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T15:39:34",
"content": "I was skeptical until I saw just how dead simple the concept is with the bed slinger. Cool! My gut tells me this wouldn’t be that great for print farms (mostly because it’s so easy to make a coreXY ... | 1,760,371,775.759574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/static-electricity-and-the-machines-that-make-it/ | Static Electricity And The Machines That Make It | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"disk",
"electrophorus",
"electrostatic",
"electrostatics",
"leyden",
"leyden jar",
"leyden jars",
"STATIC",
"static electricity",
"van de graaff generator",
"wimshurst",
"wimshurst machine"
] | Static electricity often just seems like an everyday annoyance when a wool sweater crackles as you pull it off, or when a doorknob delivers an unexpected zap. Regardless, the phenomenon is much more fascinating and complex than these simple examples suggest. In fact, static electricity is direct observable evidence of the actions of subatomic particles and the charges they carry.
While zaps from a fuzzy carpet or playground slide are funny, humanity has learned how to harness this naturally occurring force in far more deliberate and intriguing ways. In this article, we’ll dive into some of the most iconic machines that generate static electricity and explore how they work.
What Is It?
Before we look at the fancy science gear, we should actually define what we’re talking about here. In simple terms, static electricity is the result of an imbalance of electric charges within or on the surface of a material. While positively-charged protons tend to stay put, electrons, with their negative charges, can move between materials when they come into contact or rub against one another. When one material gains electrons and becomes negatively charged, and another loses electrons and becomes positively charged, a static electric field is created. The most visible result of this is when those charges are released—often in the form of a sudden spark.
Since it forms so easily on common materials, humans have been aware of static electricity for quite some time. One of the earliest recorded studies of the phenomenon came from the ancient Greeks. Around 1000 BC, they noticed that rubbing amber with fur would then allow it to attract small objects like feathers. Little came of this discovery, which was ascribed as a curious property of amber itself. Fast forward to the 17th century, though, and scientists were creating the first machines designed to intentionally store or generate static electricity. These devices helped shape our understanding of electricity and paved the way for the advanced electrical technologies we use today. Let’s explore a few key examples of these machines, each of which demonstrates a different approach to building and manipulating static charge.
The Leyden Jar
An 1886 drawing of Andreas Cunaeus experimenting with his apparatus. In this case, his hand is helping to store the charge. Credit:
public domain
Though not exactly a machine for generating static electricity, the Leyden jar is a critical part of early electrostatic experiments. Effectively a static electricity storage device, it was independently discovered twice, first by a German named Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1745. However, it gained its common name when it was discovered by Pieter van Musschenbroek, a Dutch physicist, sometime between 1745 and 1746. The earliest versions were very simple, consisting of water in a glass jar that was charged with static electricity conducted to it via a metal rod. The experimenter’s hand holding the jar served as one plate of what was a rudimentary capacitor, the water being the other. The Leyden jar thus stored static electricity in the water and the experimenter’s hand.
Eventually the common design became a glass jar with layers of metal foil both inside and outside, separated by the glass. Early experimenters would charge the jar using electrostatic generators, and then discharge it with a dramatic spark.
The Leyden jar is one of the first devices that allowed humans to store and release static electricity on command. It demonstrated that static charge could be accumulated and held for later use, which was a critical step in understanding the principles that would lead to modern capacitors. The Leyden jar can still be used in demonstrations of electrostatic phenomena and continues to serve as a fascinating link to the history of electrical science.
The Van de Graaff Generator
A Van de Graaff generator can be configured to run in either polarity, depending on the materials chosen and how it is set up. Here, we see the generator being used to feed negative charges into an attached spherical conductor. Credit: Omphalosskeptic,
CC BY-SA 3.0
Perhaps the most iconic machine associated with generating static electricity is the Van de Graaff generator. Developed in the 1920s by American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff, this machine became a staple of science classrooms and physics demonstrations worldwide. The device is instantly recognizable thanks to its large, polished metal sphere that often causes hair to stand on end when a person touches it.
The Van de Graaff generator works by transferring electrons through mechanical movement. It uses a motor-driven belt made of insulating material, like rubber or nylon, which runs between two rollers. At the bottom roller, plastic in this example, a comb or brush (called the lower electrode) is placed very close to the belt. As the belt moves, electrons are transferred from the lower roller onto the belt due to friction in what is known as the triboelectric effect. This leaves the lower roller positively charged and the belt carrying excess electrons, giving it a negative charge. The electric field surrounding the positively charged roller tends to ionize the surrounding air and attracts more negative charges from the lower electrode.
As the belt moves upward, it carries these electrons to the top of the generator, where another comb or brush (the upper electrode) is positioned near the large metal sphere. The upper roller is usually metal in these cases, which stays neutral rather than becoming intensely charged like the bottom roller. The upper electrode pulls the electrons off the belt, and they are transferred to the surface of the metal sphere. Because the metal sphere is insulated and not connected to anything that can allow the electrons to escape, the negative charge on the sphere keeps building up to very high voltages, often in the range of hundreds of thousands of volts. Alternatively, the whole thing can be reversed in polarity by changing the belt or roller materials, or by using a high voltage power supply to charge the belt instead of the triboelectric effect.
The result is a machine capable of producing massive static charges and dramatic sparks. In addition to its use as a demonstration tool, Van de Graaff generators have applications in particle physics. Since they can generate incredibly high voltages, they were once used to accelerate particles to high speeds for physics experiments. These days, though, our particle accelerators are
altogether more complex.
Van de Graaff generators can be quite small, like this version used by science educators. Credit: Jared C. Benedict, CC BY-SA 3.0
Westinghouse famously built a huge Van de Graaff generator in 1937 which it referred to as the Atom Smasher. Credit: public domain
The Whimsical Wimshurst Machine
Two disks with metal sectors spin in opposite directions upon turning the hand crank. A small initial charge is able to induce charge in other sectors as the machine is turned. Credit:
public domain
Another fascinating machine for generating static electricity is the Wimshurst machine, invented in the late 19th century by British engineer James Wimshurst. While less famous than the Van de Graaff generator, the Wimshurst machine is equally impressive in its operation and design.
The key functional parts of the machine are the two large, circular disks made of insulating material—originally glass, but plastic works too. These disks are mounted on a shared axle, but they rotate in opposite directions when the hand crank is turned. The surfaces of the disks have small metal sectors—typically aluminum or brass—which play a key role in generating static charge. As the disks rotate, brushes made of fine metal wire or other conductive material lightly touch their surfaces near the outer edges. These brushes don’t generate the initial charge but help to collect and amplify it once it is present.
The key to the Wimshurst machine’s operation lies in a process called electrostatic induction, which is essentially the influence that a charged object can exert on nearby objects, even without touching them. At any given moment, one small area of the rotating disk may randomly pick up a small amount of charge from the surrounding air or by friction. This tiny initial charge is enough to start the process. As this charged area on the disk moves past the metal brushes, it induces an opposite charge in the metal sectors on the other disk, which is rotating in the opposite direction.
For example, if a positively charged area on one disk passes by a brush, it will induce a negative charge on the metal sectors of the opposite disk at the same position. These newly induced charges are then collected by a pair of metal combs located above and below the disks. The combs are typically connected to Leyden jars to store the charge, until the voltage builds up high enough to jump a spark over a gap between two terminals.
It is common to pair a Wimshurst machine with Leyden jars to store the generated charge. Credit:
public domain
The Wimshurst machine doesn’t create static electricity out of nothing; rather, it amplifies small random charges through the process of electrostatic induction as the disks rotate. As the charge is collected by brushes and combs, it builds up on the machine’s terminals, resulting in a high-voltage output that can produce dramatic sparks. This self-amplifying loop is what makes the Wimshurst machine so effective at generating static electricity.
The Wimshurst machine is seen largely as a curio today, but it did have genuine scientific applications back in the day. Beyond simply using it to investigate static electricity, its output could be discharged into Crookes tubes to create X-rays in a very rudimentary way.
The Electrophorus: Simple Yet Ingenious
One of the simplest machines for working with static electricity is the electrophorus, a device that dates back to 1762. Invented by Swedish scientist Johan Carl Wilcke, the electrophorus consists of two key parts: a flat dielectric plate and a metal disk with an insulating handle. The dielectric plate was originally made of resinous material, but plastic works too. Meanwhile, the metal disk is naturally conductive.
An electrophorus device, showing the top metal disk, and the bottom dielectric material, at times referred to as the “cake.” The lower dielectric was classically charged by rubbing with fur. Credit:
public domain
To generate static electricity with the electrophorus, the dielectric plate is first rubbed with a cloth to create a static charge through friction. This is another example of the triboelectric effect, as also used in the Van de Graaff generator. Once the plate is charged, the metal disk is placed on top of it. The disc then becomes charged by induction. It’s much the same principle as the Wimshurst machine, with the electrostatic field of the dielectric plate pushing around the charges in the metal plate until it too has a distinct charge.
For example, if the dielectric plate has been given a negative charge by rubbing, it will repel negative charges in the metal plate to the opposite side, giving the near surface a positive charge, and the opposite surface a negative charge. The net charge, though, remains neutral. But, if the metal disk is then grounded—for example, by briefly touching it with a finger—the negative charge on the disk can drained away, leaving it positively charged as a whole. This process does not deplete the charge on the dielectric, so it can be used to charge the metal disk multiple times, though the dielectric’s charge will slowly leak away in time.
Though it’s simple in design, the electrophorus remains a remarkable demonstration of static electricity generation and was widely used in early electrostatic experiments. A particularly well-known example is that of Georg Lichtenberg. He used a version a full two meters in diameter to create large discharges for his famous Lichtenberg figures. Overall, it’s an excellent tool for teaching the basic principles of electrostatics and charge separation—particularly given how simple it is in construction compared to some of the above machines.
Zap
Static electricity, once a mysterious and elusive force, has long since been tamed and turned into a valuable tool for scientific inquiry and education. Humans have developed numerous machines to generate, manipulate, and study static electricity—these are just some of the stars of the field. Each of these devices played an important role in furthering humanity’s understanding of electrostatics, and to a degree, physics in general.
Today, these machines continue to serve as educational tools and historical curiosities, offering a glimpse into the early days of electrical science—and they still spark fascination on the regular, quite literally. Static electricity may be an everyday phenomenon, but the machines that harness its power are still captivating today. Just go to any local science museum for the proof! | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045578",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T14:47:46",
"content": "Don’t forget the Pelletron !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8045582",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T15:02:36",
"content": "Th... | 1,760,371,775.984527 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/switch-your-rp2040-between-3-3-v-and-1-8-v/ | Switch Your RP2040 Between 3.3 V And 1.8 V | Arya Voronova | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"1.8v logic",
"devboard",
"rp2040"
] | Ever want to build a RP2040 devboard that has
everything
you could ever want? Bad news, “everything” also means adding 1.8 V GPIO voltage support. The good news is that
this write-up by [xenia]
explains the process of adding a “3.3 V/1.8 V” slide switch onto your board.
Some parts are obvious, like the need to pick a flash chip that works at either voltage, for instance. Unfortunately, most of them don’t. But there’s more you’d be surprised by, like the crystal, a block where the recommended passives are tuned for 3.3 V, and you need to re-calculate them when it comes to 1.8 V operation – not great for swapping between voltages with a flick of a switch. Then, you need to adjust the bootloader to detect the voltage supplied — that’s where the fun begins, in large part. Modifying the second stage bootloader to support the flash chip being used proved to be quite a hassle, but we’re graced with a working implementation in the end.
All the details and insights laid out meticulously and to the point, well-deserved criticism of Raspberry Pi silicon and mask ROM design choices, code fully in Rust, and a success story in the end – [xenia]’s write-up has all you could wish for.
Want to learn more about the RP2040’s bootloader specifically? Then check this out — straight out of Cornell, a
bootloader that’s also a self-spreading worm
. Not only is it perfect for updating your entire RP2040 flock, but it also teaches you everything you could want to know about RP2040’s self-bringup process. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045541",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T13:06:43",
"content": "as so many things need to change for a steady working board, I would opt to bake two distinct versions with different color soldermask to differentiate them. blue for 3.3 and white for 1.8v",
"paren... | 1,760,371,776.210992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/30/inside-the-f-4-attitude-indicator/ | Inside The F-4 Attitude Indicator | Al Williams | [
"Teardown",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"artificial horizon",
"attitude indicator",
"jet fighter",
"ken shirriff"
] | [Ken] recently obtained an attitude indicator—sometimes called an artificial horizon—from an F-4 fighter jet. Unlike some indicators, the F-4’s can rotate to show pitch, roll, and yaw, so it moves in three different directions. [Ken] wondered how that could work, so, like any of us, he
took it apart to find out
.
With the cover off, the device is a marvel of compact design. Then you realize that some of the circuit is inside the ball, so there’s even more than it appears at a quick glance. As you might have guessed, there are two separate slip rings that allow the ball to turn freely without tangling wires. Of course, even if you don’t tangle wires, getting the ball to reflect the aircraft’s orientation is an exercise in control theory, and [Ken] shows us the servo loop that makes it happen. There’s a gyroscope and synchros—sometimes known by the trade name selsyn—to keep everything in the same position.
You have to be amazed by the designers of things like this. Sophisticated both electrically and mechanically, rugged, compact, and able to handle a lot of stress. Good thing it didn’t have to be cheap.
We’ve seen inside
an ADI before
. If you want to make any of this look simple, check out the
mechanical flight computers from the 1950s
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045481",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T08:52:36",
"content": "A perfect desktop toy for a flat-earthian.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8045512",
"author": "Su Zet",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T10:58:21",
... | 1,760,371,776.111598 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/29/shoot-smooth-video-from-your-phone-with-the-syringe-slider/ | Shoot Smooth Video From Your Phone With The Syringe Slider | Donald Papp | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"diy",
"slider",
"syringe",
"video"
] | We love the idea [Btoretsukuru] shared that uses a simple setup called the
Syringe Slider
to take smoothly-tracked video footage of small scenes like model trains in action. The post is in Japanese, but the video is very much “show, don’t tell” and it’s perfectly clear how it all works. The results look fantastic!
Suited to filming small subjects.
The device consists of a frame that forms a sort of enclosed track in which one’s mobile phone can slide horizontally. The phone butts up against the plunger of an ordinary syringe built into the frame. As the phone is pushed along, it depresses the plunger which puts up enough resistance to turn the phone’s slide into a slow, even, and smooth glide. Want to fine-tune the resistance and therefore the performance? Simply attach different diameter tips to the syringe.
The results speak for themselves, and it’s a fantastically clever bit of work. There are plenty of DIY slider designs (some of which get
amazingly complex
) but they are rarely small things that can be easily gotten up close and personal with small subjects like mini train terrain.
「注射器スライダー」を使った滑らか撮影テクが進化しました！！
枠を作って注射器とスマホを収め、いろんなアングルでスライド動作できるようにしました！
動画10秒目からの作例もぜひ見てください！
#鉄道模型
#Nゲージ
#Bトレ
#ジオラマ
pic.twitter.com/57uVTeHOxq
— B作 (@Btoretsukuru)
September 24, 2024 | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045613",
"author": "noise",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T16:36:15",
"content": "Nice idea :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8045615",
"author": "Peter Puffer",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T16:46:06",
"content": "Maybe it’s... | 1,760,371,776.157358 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/29/some-spi-flash-chip-nuances-worth-learning/ | Some SPI Flash Chip Nuances Worth Learning | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"command set",
"flash memory",
"motherboard",
"spi flash"
] | Some hackers have the skills to help us find noteworthy lessons in even the most basic of repairs. For instance, is your computer failing to boot? Guess what, it could just be a flash chip that’s to blame — and, there’s more you should know about such a failure mode. [Manawyrm] and [tSYS] over at the
Kittenlabs
blog show us
a server motherboard fix
involving a SPI flash chip replacement, and tell us every single detail we should know if we ever encounter such a case.
They got some Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 boards for cheap, and indeed, one of the BIOS chips simply failed — they show you how to figure that one out. Lesson one: after flashing a SPI chip, remember to read back the image and compare it to the one you just flashed into it! Now, you might be tempted to take any flash chip as a replacement, after all, many are command-compatible. Indeed, the duo crew harvested a SPI chip from an ESP32 board, the size matched, and surely, that’d suffice.
That’s another factor you should watch out for. Lesson two is to compare the SPI flash commands being used on the two chips you’re working with. In this case, the motherboard would read the BIOS alright and boot just fine, but wasn’t able to save the BIOS settings. Nothing you couldn’t fix by buying the exact chip needed and waiting for it to arrive, of course! SPI flash command sets are fun and worth learning about — after all, they could be the key to
hacking your “smart” kettle.
Need a 1.8 V level shifter while flashing? Remember,
some resistors and a NPN transistor
is more than enough. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045446",
"author": "BIOS",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T03:53:57",
"content": "BIOS engineer here. There are SPI commands to ID the ROM chip. Some BIOS’s have a table that tell the BIOS how to use each supported chip. If the chip isn’t found in the table, functions that use the table, ... | 1,760,371,776.256503 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/29/hackaday-links-september-29-2024/ | Hackaday Links: September 29, 2024 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"a320",
"ai",
"aircraft",
"alert",
"am",
"ap",
"bitcoin",
"captcha",
"EAS",
"emergency",
"ev",
"hackaday links",
"Landsat 7",
"nasa",
"pentest",
"physical",
"radio",
"recaptcha",
"satellite",
"usgs",
"vault",
"YOLO"
] | There was movement in the “AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act” last week, with
the bill advancing
out of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and heading to a full floor vote. For those not playing along at home, auto manufacturers have been making moves toward deleting AM radios from cars because they’re too sensitive to all the RF interference generated by modern vehicles. The trouble with that is that the government has spent a lot of effort on making AM broadcasters the centerpiece of
a robust and survivable emergency communications system
that reaches 90% of the US population.
The bill
would require cars and trucks manufactured or sold in the US to be equipped to receive AM broadcasts without further fees or subscriptions, and seems to enjoy bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Critics of the bill will likely point out that while the AM broadcast system is a fantastic resource for emergency communications, if nobody is listening to it when an event happens, what’s the point? That’s fair, but short-sighted; emergency communications isn’t just about warning people that something is going to happen, but coordinating the response after the fact. We imagine Hurricane Helene’s path of devastation from Florida to Pennsylvania this week and the subsequent emergency response might bring that fact into focus a bit.
The US Geological Survey and NASA
bid goodbye to Landsat 7 this week
, 25 years into its five-year mission to watch the planet. Launched in 1999, the satellite’s imaging instruments were witness to many Earth changes, both natural and man-made. Its before-and-after images, like
this look at New Orleans
around the time of Hurricane Katrina, are especially striking. Despite suffering instrumentation problems within a few years of launch that degraded image quality on some of its sensors, Landsat 7 sent a wealth of geophysical data down to Earth, enough that it has over 210,000 citations in the scientific literature. The aging satellite was moved to a lower orbit in 2021 to make way for its newer cousins, Landsat 8 and 9, which put its polar sun-synchronous orbit out of sync with mission requirements. Despite this, it kept on grabbing images right up until May 28, 2024, when it grabbed
a picture of Las Vegas
that shows the dramatic increase in the size of the metro area over the last 25 years, along with the stunning decrease of Lake Mead.
How much do you enjoy captchas? If you’re anything like us, you’ve learned to loathe their intentionally fuzzy photos where you have to find traffic lights, stairs, motorcycles, or cars to prove you’re human. Well, surprise — just because you can (eventually) solve a captcha doesn’t make you a human.
It turns out that AI can do it too
. A security research group at ETH Zurich managed to modify YOLO to solve Google’s reCAPTCHAv2, saying it wasn’t even particularly hard to get it to pass the test 100% of the time within two tries. Think about that the next time you’re wondering if that tiny sliver of the rider’s helmet that intrudes just a tiny bit into one frame counts as a square containing a motorcycle.
We’re not much into cryptocurrency around here, but we do love vaults and over-the-top physical security, and that makes
this article
on a Swiss Bitcoin vault worth looking at. If you’re perplexed with the need for a physical vault to keep your virtual currency safe, we get it. But with people investing huge amounts of effort in excavating landfills for accidentally disposed hard drives containing Bitcoin wallets worth millions, it starts to make sense. The vault in this story is impressively well-protected, living deep within the granite of a Swiss mountain and protected from every conceivable threat. Ah, but it’s the inconceivable threats that get you, isn’t it? And when you put a lot of valuable things together in one place, well — let’s just say we’re eagerly awaiting the “based on a true story” heist film.
And finally, YouTube seems to be the go-to resource for how-to videos, and we’ve all likely gotten quick tutorials on everything from fixing a toilet to writing a will. So why not
a tutorial on changing a fuel filter on an Airbus A320
? Sure, you might not need to do one, and we’re pretty sure you’ll be arrested for even trying without the proper certifications, but it’s cool to see it done. All things considered, it doesn’t look all that hard, what with all the ease-of-maintenance features built into the Pratt and Whitney PW1100G engine. As we’ve spent many hours on a creeper in the driveway doing repairs that would better be done on the lift we can’t afford, we found the fact that the mechanic has to lie on his back on the tarmac to service a multimillion-dollar aircraft pleasingly ironic. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045431",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2024-09-30T02:45:03",
"content": "There seriously needs to be a mass-delete and reset of auto regulations. It’s 100% illegal to build anything that isn’t a piece of shit",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,371,776.371517 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/29/thinkpad-13-gets-nvme-support-with-three-jumpers/ | Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers | Arya Voronova | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"m2",
"NVMe",
"nvme ssd",
"thinkpad",
"thinkpad 13"
] | Hardware restrictions can be unreasonable, and at times, it can be downright puzzling just how arbitrary they are. Such is the case with the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 — it’s got a M.2 M-key socket, yet somehow only supports SATA SSDs in it, despite the CPU being new enough to support both SATA and NVMe effortlessly. [treble] got one of those laptops from a recycler, and
decided to figure out
just what this laptop’s deal is.
Armed with schematics, she and her friend looked at the M.2 implementation. The slot’s schematic sure looked ready to support either kind of drive, a surprising find. Here’s the catch — Lenovo only populated components for SATA drive support. All you need to switch from SATA to NVMe support is three magnet wire jumpers, or zero-ohm 0402 resistors, and voila; you can now use the significantly cheaper kind of M.2 drives in your ThinkPad.
All is documented, and [treble] even mentions that you could increase the link speed by adding more PCIe lane capacitors that Lenovo, again, left unsoldered. UEFI already has the modules needed to boot from NVMe, too – it’s an outright upgrade for your laptop with just a soldering iron’s touch required, and a reminder that proprietary tech will screw you over for entirely arbitrary reasons. Now, it’s not just laptops you can upgrade with a few resistors —
same goes for certain electric cars. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045298",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2024-09-29T20:41:34",
"content": "one of the coolest article this month.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "8045303",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2024-09-29T21:10:56",
... | 1,760,371,776.314163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/29/first-tentative-sales-of-tandem-perovskite-silicon-pv-panels/ | First Tentative Sales Of Tandem Perovskite-Silicon PV Panels | Maya Posch | [
"Science"
] | [
"perovskite",
"pv solar"
] | To anyone who has spent some time in photovoltaic (PV) power circles, the word ‘perovskite’ probably sounds familiar. Offering arguably better bandgap properties than traditional silicon cells, perovskite-based PV panels also promise to be cheaper and (literally) more flexible, but commercialization has been elusive. This is something which Oxford PV seeks to change,
with the claim
that they will be shipping the first hybrid perovskite-silicon panels to a US customer.
Although Oxford PV prefers to keep the details of their technology classified, there have been decades of research on pure perovskite PV cells as well as
tandem perovskite-silicon
versions. The reason for the tandem (i.e. stacked) construction is to use more of the solar rays’ spectrum and total energy to increase output. The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that you need to find ways to make each layer integrate in a stable fashion, with ideally the connecting electrodes being transparent. A good primer on the topic is found in
this 2021 review article
by [Yuanhang Cheng] and [Liming Ding].
The primary disadvantage of perovskites has always been their lack of longevity, with humidity, UV irradiation, temperature and other environmental factors conspiring against their continued existence. In a 2022 study by
[Jiang Liu] et al.
in
Science
it was reported that a perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell lost about 5% of its initial performance after 1,000 hours. A 2024 study by
[Yongbin Jin] et al.
in
Advanced Materials
measured a loss of 2% after approximately the same timespan. At a loss of 2%/1,000 hours, the perovskite layer would be at 50% of its initial output after 25,000 hours, or a hair over 2.85 years.
A quick glance through the
Oxford PV website
didn’t reveal any datasheets or other technical information which might elucidate the true loss rate, so it would seem that we’ll have to wait a while longer on real data to see whether this plucky little startup has truly cracked the perovskite stability issue.
Top image: Summary of tandem perovskite-silicon solar cell workings. (Credit: Yuanhang Cheng, Liming Ding, SusMat, 2021) | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045242",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2024-09-29T17:28:21",
"content": "I mean, there are definitely use-cases for higher efficiency panels where degradation doesn’t matter. I know because I work in one: scientific ballooning doesn’t care about the lifespan of the panels, because... | 1,760,371,776.423992 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/29/seven-day-movement-makes-a-rubbish-clock/ | Seven Day Movement Makes A Rubbish Clock | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"7 day clock",
"trash clock",
"week clock"
] | We see a lot of clocks here at Hackaday. Some of them are better than others, but this one from [John Graham-Cumming]
is definitely a rubbish clock
. It performs the simple yet vital task of keeping track of which day is which when it comes to trash collection.
The big revelation for us from this project is that the standard plastic battery clock mechanism which you’ll no doubt be familiar with from many cheap clocks can also be bought with gearing for a weekly rather than daily revolution. The physical hack is therefore a pretty simple one of mounting the movement with a single hand over a face showing the waste collections, and the write-up goes into more depth about the code for creating custom SVG clock faces. We’re already thinking of interesting stuff that can be done with one of these movements.
Meanwhile, we like this clock, but
it’s certainly not the first trash indicator we’ve seen
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045198",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2024-09-29T14:05:23",
"content": "We could use a 14 day clock to remind us of recycling pickup.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8045207",
"author... | 1,760,371,776.472226 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/29/curing-crt-cataracts-freshens-up-retro-roundy-tvs/ | Curing CRT Cataracts Freshens Up Retro Roundy TVs | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"cathode ray tube",
"crt",
"epoxy",
"restoration",
"retro",
"roundy",
"safety",
"tv"
] | It’s been a long time since the family TV has had a CRT in it, and even longer since that it was using what was basically an overgrown oscilloscope tube. But “roundies” were once a thing, and even back in the early 80s you’d still find them in living rooms on TV repair calls, usually sporting a characteristic and unsightly bullseye discoloration.
Fast-forward a few decades, and roundy TVs have become collectible enough that
curing their CRT cataracts
is necessary for restorationists like [shango066], a skill he demonstrates in the video below. The defect comes from the composite construction of CRTs — a safety feature added by television manufacturers wisely concerned with the safety aspects of putting a particle accelerator with the twin hazards of high vacuum and high voltage in the family home. The phosphor-covered face of the tube was covered by a secondary glass cover, often tinted and frosted to improve the admittedly marginal viewing experience. This cover was often glued in place with an epoxy resin that eventually oxidized from the edges in, making the bullseye pattern.
The remedy for this problem? According to [shango066], it’s heat, and plenty of it. After liberating the tube from the remarkably clean TV chassis, he took advantage of a warm summer’s day and got the tube face cooking under a black plastic wrap. Once things were warmed up, more heat was added to really soften the glue; you can easily see the softening progress across the face of the tube in the video below. Once softened, gentle prying with wooden chopsticks completes the job of freeing the safety lens, also in remarkably good shape.
With the adhesive peeled off in an oddly satisfying manner, all that’s left is a thorough cleaning and gluing the lens back on with a little silicone sealant around the edges. We’d love to see the restored TV in operation, but that’s left to a promised future video. In the meantime, please enjoy a look at t
he retro necessities TV owners depended on
in the good old days, which
really weren’t all that good
when you get down to it. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "8045220",
"author": "David Bridger",
"timestamp": "2024-09-29T16:18:55",
"content": "I’ve done 2 of them now, a Zenith and an RCA, and the resulting image, though not HD, is certainly watchable. I think it’s great that Shango and others (including me) have an interest in seeing youn... | 1,760,371,776.526436 |
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