Year: 2016

Long-Term Review: Weller Magnastat Soldering Iron

June 1, 2016 by 43 Comments

One of the things you find yourself doing as a young engineer is equipping yourself with the tools of your trade. These will be the foundations upon which your career is built in a way that a diploma or degree certificate will never be, for the best degree in the world is less useful if the quality of your tools renders you unable to capitalise upon it. You may be lucky enough to make some of them yourself, but others you’ll lust after as unaffordable, then eventually put the boat out a little to buy at the limit of your meager income.

Your bench may have a few of these lifetime tools. They could be something as simple as screwdrivers or you may have one of those indestructible multimeters, but in my case my lifetime tool is my soldering iron. At some time in 1992 I spent about £60($173 back then), a lot of money for a student, on a mains-powered Weller Magnastat. The World Wide Web was still fairly fresh from Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT in those days, so this meant a trip to my university’s RS trade counter and a moment poring over a telephone-book-sized catalogue before filling in an order slip.

The Magnastat is a simple but very effective fixed-temperature-controlled iron. The tip has a magnet on its rear end which holds closed a power switch for the heating element. When the tip has heated to the Curie temperature of the magnet, it loses its magnetism and the switch opens. The temperature falls to below the Curie temperature and the magnetism returns, the switch closes, the tip warms up again, and the cycle repeats itself. The temperature of the tip is thus dictated by the magnet’s Curie temperature, and Weller provides a range of tips fitted with magnets for different temperatures.

The result is an iron with enough power to solder heat-sucking jobs that would leave lesser irons gasping for juice, while also having the delicacy to solder tiny surface-mount components without destroying them or lifting tracks. It’s not a particularly small or lightweight iron if you are used to the featherlight pencil irons from today’s soldering stations, but neither is it too large or heavy to be unwieldy. In the nearly quarter century I have owned my Magnastat it has had a hand in almost everything I have made, from hi-fi and tube amplifiers through radio transmitters, stripline filters, kits, and too many repairs to mention. It has even been pressed into service plastic-welding a damaged motorcycle fairing. It has truly been a lifetime tool.

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The Most Powerful Diesel Engine

June 1, 2016 by 71 Comments

Ever. Literally.

A gearhead friend of ours sent along a link to a YouTube video (also embedded below) promising the world’s most powerful engine. Now, we’ll be the first to warn you that it’s just an advertisement, and for something that you’re probably not going to rush out and buy: the Wärtsilä 14RT marine engine.

A tiny bit of math: 96 cm cylinder diameter times 250 cm piston stroke = 1,809,557 CC. And it generates around 107,000 HP. That’s a fair bit, but it runs at a techno-music pace: 120 BPM RPM. With twelve cylinders, we’d love to hear this thing run. Two-strokes make such a wonderful racket! Wonder if they’ve tried to red-line it? It’s a good thing we don’t work at Wärtsilä.

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Kids! Don’t Try This At Home! Robot Destroys Mankind

June 1, 2016 by 194 Comments

From the Forbin Project, to HAL 9000, to War Games, movies are replete with smart computers that decide to put humans in their place. If you study literature, you’ll find that science fiction isn’t usually about the future, it is about the present disguised as the future, and smart computers usually represent something like robots taking your job, or nuclear weapons destroying your town.

Lately, I’ve been seeing something disturbing, though. [Elon Musk], [Bill Gates], [Steve Wozniak], and [Stephen Hawking] have all gone on record warning us that artificial intelligence is dangerous. I’ll grant you, all of those people must be smarter than I am. I’ll even stipulate that my knowledge of AI techniques is a little behind the times. But, what? Unless I’ve been asleep at the keyboard for too long, we are nowhere near having the kind of AI that any reasonable person would worry about being actually dangerous in the ways they are imagining.

Smart Guys Posturing

Keep in mind, I’m interpreting their comments as saying (essentially): “Soon machines will think and then they will out-think us and be impossible to control.” It is easy to imagine something like a complex AI making a bad decision while driving a car or an airplane, sure. But the computer that parallel parks your car isn’t going to suddenly take over your neighborhood and put brain implants in your dogs and cats. Anyone who thinks that is simply not thinking about how these things work. The current state of computer programming makes that as likely as saying, “Perhaps my car will start flying and we can go to Paris.” Ain’t happening.

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DIY plastic shredder with gears and safety

Scratch-Fabricated Plastic Gobbling Shredder Brings Recycling Home

June 1, 2016 by 10 Comments

[Jason Knight], an intern at FabLab RUC, has worked hard for 9 months to make a sheet plastics shredder for HDPE and LDPE from things like plastic bags, bubble wrap and air cushion packaging with the goal of recycling the shredded plastic. Why shred these things? When broken down to smaller pieces they can be melted in a consumer grade oven (like where you cook your frozen pizzas) then molded into new objects or extruded into 3D printing filament.

We especially like his big homemade 1.1 inch (30mm) thick wooden gears, for transferring the rotation from the motor to the cutting shafts while giving a step up in torque. As you can see in the video below, the gears definitely add an extra look of power to the machine.

The blades are the shape you most often see in shredders, gear-like disks side-by-side with teeth cut from them that pull the plastic in while shredding it (in contrast to this lower-throughput experimental DIY shredder made with two steel pipes). [Jason’s] multiple teeth are a bit of work to fabricate — not only were all the teeth milled from sheet metal but they then had to be individually sanded to remove burrs from the edges. It was worth it, as this has no problem chewing waste plastics to pieces.

Shredders can be dangerous machines for wandering fingers so [Jason] added a few safety features. Those include a drawer that you open to insert your plastic into the shredding area and a guard that completely surrounds the gears. And both features include transparent plastic areas so that you can still watch the impressive working parts in action.

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Transistor Logic Clock Has 777 Transistors

June 1, 2016 by 23 Comments

Sometimes, the parts list says it all. 777 transistors, 1223 resistors, 136 LEDs, 455 crimp connectors, 41 protoboards and 500 grams of solder. That’s what went into this transistor logic clock build.

While additional diodes and capacitors were tolerated in this project, a consequent implementation of a discrete transistor logic clock, of course, does not contain a quarz oscillator. Instead, it extracts its clock signal from the mains frequency in its power supply. Because mains frequency is slow, it can be stepped down to a clock-applicable 1 Hz by a simple counter unit which already spreads its discrete transistors across 4 protoboards.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Ears On The Back Of Your Head

May 31, 2016 by 11 Comments

From context clues, we can tell that [TVMiller] has been in and around NYC for some time now. He has observed a crucial weakness in the common metropolitan. Namely, they deafen themselves with earphones, leaving them senseless in a hostile environment.

To fix this problem, he came up with a simple hack, the metrophone. An ultrasonic sensor is hung from a backpack. The user’s noise making device of choice is plugged into one end, and the transducer into the other. When the metropolitan is approached from the rear by a stalking tiger or taxi cab, the metrophone will reduce the volume and allow the user to hear and respond to their impending doom. Augmentation successful.

The device itself consists of an off-the-shelf ultrasonic sensor, an Arduino, and a digital potentiometer. It all fits in a custom 3D printed enclosure and runs of two rechargeable coin cells. A simple bit of code scales the volume to the current distance being measured by the ultrasonic sensor once a threshold has been met.

In the video after the break, you can observe [TVMiller]’s recommended method for tranquilizing and equipping a metropolitan in its natural habitat without disturbing its patterns or stressing it unduly.

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Fixing The Terrible Range Of Your Cheap NRF24L01+ PA/LNA Module

May 31, 2016 by 66 Comments

nRF24L01+ PA/LNA module specs look great on paper. Wireless communication up to 1000m in a small package readily available from a variety of cheap sources in China? The hard work of software connectivity already done by a variety of open source projects? Sounds great! But if you mashed BUY and are getting maybe 1% of that range, don’t worry because thanks to these clear directions, they can be fixed.

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