Hackaday Links: January 22, 2017

What is a 1971 Ford Torino worth? It depends, but even a 2-door in terrible condition should fetch about $7 or $8k. What is a 1971 Ford Torino covered in 3D printed crap worth? $5500. This is the first ‘3D printed car’ on an auction block. It looks terrible and saying ‘Klaatu Varada Nikto’ unlocks the doors.

Old Apple IIs had a DB19 connector for external floppy drives. Some old macs, pre-PowerPC at least, also had a DB19 connector for external floppy drives. These drives are incompatible with each other for reasons. [Dandu] has a few old macs and one old Apple II 3.5″ external floppy drive. This drive can be hacked so it works with a Mac Classic. The hack is simply disconnecting one of the boards in the drive, and it only reads 400 and 800kB disks, but it does work.

The US Army is working on a hoverbike. Actually, it’s not a hoverbike, because it doesn’t have a saddle or a seat, but it could carry 300 pounds at 60 mph. That’s 136,000 grams at 135 meters per second for the rest of the world out there. This ‘hoverbike’ will be used for very quick resupply, and hopefully a futuristic form of jousting.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a few new microcontrollers built around the RISC-V core. The first is the HiFive1, a RISC-V on an Arduino-shaped board. The Open-V is another RISC-V based microcontroller, and now it too supports the Arduino IDE. That may not seem like much, but trust me: setting up the HiFive1 toolchain takes at least half an hour.

The NAMM show has been going on for the last few days, which means new electronic musical gear, effects pedals, and drum machines. This is cool, but somewhat outside our editorial prerogative. This isn’t. It’s a recording studio using a Rasberry Pi. Tracktion is working on a high-quality digital audio input and output add-on for the Pi 3. This is really cool, and you only need to look back at MPCs and gigantic Akai samplers from 15 years ago to see why.

Hey LA peeps. Sparklecon is next weekend. What’s Sparklecon? The 23B hackerspace pulls out the grill, someone brings a gigantic Tesla coil, we play hammer Jenga, and a bunch of dorks dork around. Go to Sparklecon! Superliminal advertising! Anyone up for a trip to the Northrop ham meetup next Saturday?

30 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: January 22, 2017

  1. 136,000 grams? 136Kg is the preferred form, both because it is preferred to use the appropriate prefix, and because Kg is the base unit.

    Yup, nitpicky. I have had bids rejected over this point, though.

      1. > Kg is the base unit

        Strange but true. Reason: simple convenience, in the late 1700s and early 1800s when these things were being decided, having a gram as the standard mass was recognised to be really inconvenient, too difficult when most things dealt with in every day life weigh a lot more than a gram, so it was decided to have the standard mass as 1000 times greater than the gram (which had been decided already), and therefore the gram got “back annotated” if you like to be 1000 times less than THE (as in the physical Kg prototype) Kg.

    1. If you’re going to pick oh him, you should have called him on his real mistake: 60MPH is more like 26 m/s. 135 meters per second is about 300 miles per hour! While I think a 300 MPH hoverbike would be completely awesome regardless of how many grams or kilograms of load it can carry, I don’t think that’s what they’re developing.

  2. I think this line in the artical about the car sums it up “artist who attended the Academy of Fine Arts ”

    Art seems to me to be – take some amazing technology and produce crap.

    1. Some editors at Hack-a-day are apparently still slightly butthurt following the latest metric vs. imperial bar brawl we had a few weeks ago.

      Funny how this witty comeback is riddled with mistakes…

      1. He went to Orange County Choppers, and they were still fighting about how much is 5 and 3/8s minus 2 and 7/32s. He rounded up the answer with two hogheads per furlong per forthnight, of course.

      1. This car is clearly an empty husk, with just enough mechanical components to allow it to be trailered. The frame was probably rusted completely through and worthless even for doing a restoration. For example there currently is a car on classiccars for $1000 with no bids that is a rolling frame (missing engine/transmission). If you consider that the artist probably didn’t care what car he started with its likely that the frame was a scrap frame that he got for free. Depending on the cost of the time on his 3d printer it is very possible that that artist made a few grand on this piece. The real sucker who bought it!

  3. hey how many people are going to sparkle con? I might consider going, don’t have lots to do these days, but don’t want to intrude on a close-knit groups hang out time by being the outsider/{insert odd number} wheel/ dude who doesn’t know anyone else.

  4. About six months back I was watching an interview with an art critic. On his table, he has this “cube” of… well… junk.

    The interviewer accidentally knocks the cube over. The interviewer quickly picks the cube up and “rights” it while apologizing.

    The “art critic” insults the interviewer saying something along the lines of “You’re not an artist, you wouldn’t understand real art.” and “that is a piece of art worth more than what you make in a year.” The interviewer apologizes again as the critic re-positions the cube. The camera focuses on the cube as the interviewer comments that it looks like trash. The critic explains that an artist did make it from the junkyard and used a compactor to make the cube but only a true artist would understand the message behind it.

    Yes… Garbage stuffed into a compactor then sold for what? 100k?

    That Ford Torino reminds me an awful lot like that cube of garbage.

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