Intentional Filament Stringing Helps Santa Soar

December 7, 2023 by 3 Comments

Stringing is when a 3D printer’s hot end moves through open air and drags a wisp of melted plastic along with it. This is normally undesirable, but has in the past been done intentionally to create some unconventional prints. Moonlight Santa from [3dprintbunny] shows considerable refinement in the technique, complete with color changes that really make the result pop.

Using a 3D printer’s stringing in a constructive way is something that has been leveraged really well. We remember seeing a lion with a fantastic mane by combining this method with a little post-processing and a blast from a heat gun. The technique has also been applied to make brush bristles (the printer strings filament across two handles, and after printing it is cut in half to make two brushes.)

This isn’t [3dprintbunny]’s first rodeo, either. We loved seeing her show what kind of objects were possible by using clever design, with no reliance on custom G-code or weird slicer tricks. The color changes by filament swaps really make this new one stand out.

One Less Binary Blob

December 7, 2023 by 36 Comments

Open-source software has gone a long way into making modern technology the way it is today. The Linux kernel alone is almost single-handedly holding up the entire Internet, and various other open-source projects allow for more access to computing resources not just because the software is often free, but because it’s possible to look under the hood and modify it for specific needs. Without open-source software available we often run into problems both expected, such as software licensing costs, and unexpected, which often come up because a developer can’t or won’t fix issues or add features. To that end, a group at Ghent University in Belgium are attempting to rectify a problem with the ESP32 by eliminating one of its binary blobs and replacing it with an open source driver.

The ESP32 is famously a low-cost microcontroller with on-board wireless capabilities, but its Wi-Fi functionality currently relies on closed-source software from Espressif. The team is currently working on building a fully working open-source networking stack with the hopes of enabling greater flexibility of these devices but also making things like security auditing possible. The other major goal is to improve low-cost mesh networking which is currently not available with the proprietary driver. Reverse engineering is the name of the game here, both from a hardware and a software level, but current versions of the software already able to send and receive packets.

The source code for the project is available on the team’s GitHub page for any open-source aficionados to take a look at. We certainly hope the project gains some steam, as any new open source project helps all of us using the platform. Open source projects frequently get stymied by a single or small handful of binary blobs too, often with little hope for recourse. Examples include Android being an open-source operating system but generally using the closed-source Google Play suite in practice, or Firefox including support for Adobe Flash. Another great example is that even computers running 100% open-source code once they boot their operating systems, there’s still some black boxes running in the background few of us think about.

Thanks to [Crote] for the tip!

Fail Of The Week: [Mark] Makes An Atari Cartridge

December 7, 2023 by 8 Comments

Part of the magic of the movies is that the actors always know what will happen next. There never has to be a scene where James Bond orders wine, and the sommelier has to correct his pronunciation, or he miscounts his hand at baccarat. Real life is rarely as smooth. Of course, YouTube is more akin to a movie than real life, and we always wonder how many flawlessly executed projects you see on YouTube really went that well. [Mark Fixes Stuff] left no scenes on the cutting room floor, though, in his realistic portrayal of his quest to build a nice-looking Atairi 2600 cartridge. Watch it below.

Spoiler alert: In the end, it all worked out. But getting there was a series of misadventures. Starting out with [Parker Dillman’s] PCB, he put together the insides of the cartridge, including a socket for the EPROM. He then resin-printed a case. Like many of our own projects, the first run wasn’t quite the size he expected. It was probably close enough, though, but then he realized the socket made the board too tall to fit in the enclosure.

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Upgrade Puts A Lot Of Zeroes On Kit-Built Frequency Counter

December 7, 2023 by No comments

If there’s anything more viscerally pleasing than seeing an eight-digit instrument showing a measurement with all zeroes after the decimal point, we’re not sure what it could. Maybe rolling the odometer over to another 100,000 milestone?

Regardless, getting to such a desirable degree of accuracy isn’t always easy, especially when the instrument in question is a handheld frequency counter that was built from a kit 23 years ago. That’s the target of [Petteri Aimonen]’s accuracy upgrade, specifically by the addition of a custom frequency reference module. The instrument is an ELV FC-500, which for such an old design looks surprisingly modern. Its Achille’s heel in terms of accuracy is the plain crystal oscillator it uses as a frequency standard, which has no temperature compensation and thus drifts by about 0.2 ppm per degree.

For a mains-powered lab instrument, the obvious solution would be an oven-controlled crystal oscillator. Those are prohibitive in terms of space and power for a handheld instrument, so instead a VCTCXO — voltage-controlled, temperature-compensated crystal oscillator — was selected for better stability. Unfortunately, no such oscillators matching the original 4.096-MHz crystal spec could be found; luckily, a 16.384-MHz unit was available for less than €20. All that was required was a couple of flip-flops to divide the signal by four and a bit of a bodge to replace the original frequency standard. A trimmer allows for the initial calibration — the “VC” part — and the tiny PCB tucks inside the case near the battery compartment.

We enjoyed the simplicity of this upgrade — almost as much as we enjoyed seeing all those zeroes. When you know, you know.

BASIC In Your Browser

December 7, 2023 by 30 Comments

If you are a certain age or just like retrocomputers, you probably have a soft spot for good old-fashioned BASIC. If you miss those days but don’t want to install a modern interpreter, you don’t have to. Just load a web page containing the “BASIC Anywhere Machine” from [CJ Veniot]. Worried about it being “in the cloud?” It isn’t? It runs in your browser, and if you are a TiddlyWiki fan, it will even live inside your Wiki, which you can host as you please.

The project has lots of features, including some integration back into TiddlyWiki, which we haven’t tried. But you can use graphics commands, work with the mouse, and do other fun things.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Biblically-Accurate Keyboard

December 7, 2023 by 5 Comments

Well, it was bound to happen at some point. [sporewoh]’s bunchiez40 keyboard for ants is made of mouse switches, which of course begs for a mouse made of keyboard switches.

Image by [sporewoh] via GitHub
[sporewoh]’s keyboards have been steadily shrinking, and they built this in order to get the smallest possible form factor for the number of keys. Surprisingly, since the mouse switches have an actuation force similar to some heavier MX-style switches (~70 g), [sporewoh] is able to squeeze 85 WPM out of it, albeit with some argument from the wrists.

If you want to build a bunchiez40, everything is available on GitHub, including the CAD files for that lovely anodized aluminium case. The typing video is coming soon, and I’m taking bets on whether it’s as quiet as a mouse, as one redditor joked.

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Making Visual Anagrams, With Help From Machine Learning

December 7, 2023 by 1 Comment

[Daniel Geng] and others have an interesting system of generating multi-view optical illusions, or visual anagrams. Such images have more than one “correct” view and visual interpretation.

What’s more, there are quite a few different methods on display: 90 degree flips and other (orthogonal) image rotations, color inversions, jigsaw permutations, and more. The project page has a generous number of examples, so go check them out!

The team’s method uses pre-trained diffusion models — more commonly known as the secret sauce inside image-generating AIs — to evaluate and work to combine the differences between different images, and try to combine and apply it in a way that results in the model generating a good visual result. While conceptually straightforward, this process wasn’t really something that could work without diffusion models driven by modern machine learning techniques.

The visual_anagrams GitHub repository has code and the research paper goes into details on implementation, limitations, and gives guidance on obtaining good results. Image generation is just one of the rapidly-evolving aspects of recent innovations, and it’s always interesting to see unusual applications like this one.