Hackaday Links: April 19, 2015

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Bang & Olufsen have made some pretty amazing equipment for a long, long time. That last part can become a problem. [Oliver] found the electrolytic caps on his Beomaster 2400 were causing problems. He completely recapped the unit, all the electrolytics anyway, and the pictures of the process are nothing short of eye-candy.

The closure of the Bacman forums marks the end of an era. For years this has been among the top (okay, it’s definitely been the top one but we don’t want to start a flamewar) sites for handheld and console modding. Here’s just one random example of the many projects we covered from that community (note that main link is now sadly 404). The closure message cites the near-absolute death of modding. We haven’t thought about it much, but these mods were futuristic. Then smartphones.

Fans of How It’s Made and 3D printing will want to tune in on April 30th at 9pm EST. The show does a fantastic job of showing off the amazing story behind how all the stuff in our lives comes to be visited LulzBot in Loveland, Colorado for a segment on the manufacturing process of a 3D printer.

We’re not sure why we didn’t lead with this: All celebrate, for humanity is saved! The secret behind getting something out of nothing has been discovered. This reactionless generator has been tested at efficiencies as high as 250%. We’re working on a way to bottle all that extra juice and sell it at outrageous prices.

The thing about free energy is that you become dependent on it. What if the laws of physics return from vacation and the thing stops working? Then you have a robot apocalypse with all kinds of hidden messages and puzzles in it.

48 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: April 19, 2015

    1. Man, the comment sections on these free energy websites are so hard to read. Why can’t highschool physics rejects and Tesla cultists at least run things through a spell checker before posting?

  1. FRUITLOOPS!

    Y’know, if someone took the time to dissect all the “overunity” claims which involve anything to do with AC (be they LC resonant circuits, self-resonant transformers, or rotating motors/generators like this), I bet they’d find the common reason why they have all “measured” greater than 100% efficiency is a total lack of understanding how to PROPERLY measure power in AC circuits.

    And just to point out what that is, for anyone who doesn’t know: record a voltage WAVEFORM, and a current WAVEFORM, multiply the WAVEFORMS together, THEN take the time average over one cycle. That’s the totally anal way to record actual power produced. If the waveforms are pure sinewaves then you can get away by multiplying RMS of each then by the power factor, but doing calculations on the waveforms themselves is the only way to do it.

    Classic example of this, which I actually built purely because the transformer design looked cool, is the “Nunez coil” (http://1stopenergies.com/). It’s just a 1:1 turns ratio air-core transformer with a very high interwinding capacitance. Feed it with AC at the resonant frequency and you can easily get much more than a 1:1 stepup ratio. Naturally, he then proceeds to power things like LED strings, fluorescent tubes etc. Yet his “measurements” all use true RMS meters, and multiplying the RMS voltage and current together! BULLSHIT! Especially with an LED string – very non-sinusoidal current. Multiply RMS values together and you can easily get “overunity”.

    I wish these people would stop spreading this crap around, or even worse, screwing money out of people as the Nunez (plural) are doing…..

  2. Oh dear god! Another “engineer” that can’t calculate power! And this guy is the former Executive Director of Nuclear Power Corporation of India!

    Even hearing “over-unity” makes me cringe and think of things like “Dean Drives” and “Hubbard Coils”.

    These things are good for a laugh though.

    1. D level means management… On the other hand, basic power calculation should be part of the engineering education. Wishful thinking isn’t real science.

      If a Universe supports “free energy” type of process that generates more energy than its input, chances are that it is unstable and will blow itself up.

  3. So just to confirm, this is fake. I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about in that article but I really want it to be true. Maybe it runs on hopes and dreams?

          1. FO, what do you mean ‘It’s India’ BASXXXX ? India is sending crafts to Mars and building everything from battle gears to nuclear weapons, so before shitting from ur mouth, think. If one guy retired from a high management post decides to go con-man way, it does not give you right to show ur shit to world. Thr are hundreds of ppl all over the world (including ur idiotic land) who are con-men. Rather u do belong to a civilization which is based on looting and conning others. Dixx-head.

  4. Global warming will be really bad if someone actually invents a free energy source.

    I remember Don Lancaster once said:
    Finding a source of “Unlimited free energy” would be the most unimaginably heinous crime possible against humanity. For it would inevitably turn the planet into a cinder. Hastening an isoentropic heat death. If you find a free energy source, you damn well better find a new free energy sink as well.
    http://www.tinaja.com/glib/bashpseu.pdf

      1. What are you objecting to in that sentence? Now that I read it back I guess it might imply that I think that such a thing is possible. I don’t. The matrix won’t allow it. It would eventually cause an overflow error. :)

          1. Yes, Mark, I am mostly shitting you. Thus the smiley face on my post. But I do believe that there is a non zero chance that we are all part of a computer simulation. It would explain many things in quantum mechanics. And relativity…

    1. Damn – that’s a good read.

      I was going to write up some of the background science in a build-log for my HAD prize entry, but after reading Don’s polemic I’m totally going to use words like “suppression”, “oil company buyout”, “God”, “paid debunker”, “conspiracy”, “Tesla”, “disinformation” and “patent refusal”!

      (My inner slytherin is going “Bwa-ha-ha” just thinking about it.)

    2. Nonsense.

      The total energy used by humanity has no impact. An average of 18 terawatts in 2012. Compare that to the average energy provided by the sun, 174 petawatts. Our little contribution of 0.01% does nothing, at least not directly.

      It’s the pollutants released as a byproduct of that energy production that has a significant impact, by altering how much of that solar 174 petawatts is retained and for how long. If we were to invent a “free” energy source, as a result in the reduction of pollution, we could increase our energy usage by a *huge* amount without a net negative impact on global temperatures. Not infinitely, mind you. But more than enough that we could engage in wide-scale terraforming, for example by placing huge mylar mirrors in orbit or at Lagrange points to block solar energy, and stretching the limit much further still.

      Not to mention any “free” device might work as a Maxwell’s Demon, extracting energy from entropy, and likely removing heat in the process. So heat wouldn’t get produced, only recycled. Which is at least remotely feasible, as opposed to a device that extracts energy from nothing at all. Some LEDs are supposedly already capable of this feat, but only at very very low power, IIRC the effect disappears above a few picoamps.

      As for Don Lancaster… I like the guy. I’ve spoken a few times with him, he’s friendly and helpful. But he has some horrible biases and misconceptions when it comes to energy. Last I checked, he still tends to speak of hydrogen as if it were an *energy source* for fuel cells and whatnot. It isn’t. It doesn’t come separately, only in combination with oxygen as water; and energy input is required to separate it, in order to get the same (or less) energy out. Which only makes it an *energy storage medium*. Just to provide one example. I don’t place any faith in his energy-related rants.

    3. If you have free energy you can use it to radiate excess heat into space with a heat pump. In fact you can do it now. Sit at the focus of a big dish aimed at the sky at night. You are about 310K and the cosmic background is around 3K. You can guess which way the heat will flow.

    4. Rubbish! Just supposing we could get some new form of energy cheap/free and we used a great deal more of it. As long as the resulting heat can be radiated into space it doesn’t matter. Global Warming is a concern because we humans have added loads of extra greenhouse gases like CO2 to the atmosphere which is like adding an extra layer of insulation. The problem isn’t the energy we use it’s that it can’t escape. So if the ‘free’ energy doesn’t come from fossil fuel and helps reduce our CO2 emissions, that’s good, not bad.

  5. Have a look at some of the other stories on collective-evolution.com:

    “More Than 60 School Children Witness Non-Human Beings & A Large Craft Landing”

    “Why You Shouldn’t Be A Part Of The 90% Of Americans Who Still Use Microwaves”

  6. if emulators on smartphones are the future of playing retro games on the go then we need more people with the programming skill of byuu to write bsnes/higan quality emulators of other systems.

    1. No, we need more people with the programming skill of the MAME and MESS developers. Byuu is a prima donna who writes execrable, unportable and unmaintainable code, who seems to have an unfortunate crew of sycophants ready to lick his balls.

  7. I designed this type of “RLG” way back in 2000 when I was 14. Never got credit. In fact, my uncle rather sat me down and explained thermodynamics, kVA vs kW, entropy, friction losses and common sense. I guess this is why I’m an engineering project manager now and he is ex-project manager (Mind you, he is a project manager for construction, so maybe he was only part of the team that poured the concrete)

  8. Regarding the closure of Bacman’s website, modding isn’t dead, there are just fewer people interested in it or have not yet discovered it. A few modders (myself included) are carrying on the torch left by Bac’s site closure and created BitFix Gaming. We’re still modding!

  9. Inre: Bang and Olefsen refit
    (snark mode on) Audiophiles will condem his actions because he used newer, more robust components which will “obviously color” the signals traversing the amplifiers in ways the original magicia^H^H^^H^H^H^H engineers never intended. (snark mode off)

  10. The Bacman forums closure kind of makes me angry. I understand not wanting to maintain it anymore, but this violently removes a great amount of information form the internet that apparently was not archived before due to the site’s robots.txt file.

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