Faux Aircon Units, Made Entirely From 2D Cuts

2D design and part fabrication doesn’t limit one to a 2D finished product, and that’s well-demonstrated in these Faux Aircon Units [Martin Raynsford] created to help flesh out the cyberpunk-themed Null Sector at the recent 2018 Electromagnetic Field hacker camp in the UK. Null Sector is composed primarily of shipping containers and creative lighting and props, and these fake air conditioner units helped add to the utilitarian ambiance while also having the pleasant side effect of covering up the occasional shipping container logo. Adding to the effect was that the fan blades can spin freely in stray air currents; that plus a convincing rust effect made them a success.

Fan hubs, showing spots for fan blades to be glued. With the exception of embedded bearings, the entire hub (like the rest of the unit) is made from laser-cut MDF.

The units are made almost entirely from laser-cut MDF. The fan blades are cut from the waste pieces left over from the tri-pronged holes, and really showing off the “making 3D assemblies out of 2D materials” aspect are the fan hubs which are (with the exception of bearings) made from laser-cut pieces; a close-up of the hubs is shown here.

Capping off the project is some paint and the rusted appearance. How did [Martin] get such a convincing rust effect? By using real rust, as it turns out. Some cyanoacrylate glue force-cured with misted water for texture, followed by iron powder, then vinegar and hydrogen peroxide with a dash of salt provided the convincing effect. He was kind enough to document the fake rust process on his blog, complete with photos of each stage.

Null Sector showcased a range of creativity; it’s where this unusual headdress was spotted, a device that also showed off the benefits of careful assembly and design.

Creating Antimatter On The Desktop — One Day

If you watch Star Trek, you will know one way to get rid of pesky aliens is to vent antimatter. The truth is, antimatter is a little less exotic than it appears on TV, but for a variety of reasons there hasn’t been nearly as much practical research done with it. There are well over 200 electron accelerators in labs around the world, but only a handful that work with positrons, the electron’s anti-counterpart. [Dr. Aakash Sahai] would like to change that. He’s got a new design that could bring antimatter beams out of the lab and onto the desktop. He hasn’t built a prototype, but he did publish some proof-of-concept simulation work in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.

Today, generating high-energy positron beams requires an RF accelerator — miles of track with powerful electromagnets, klystrons, and microwave cavities. Not something you are going to build in your garage this year. [Sahai] is borrowing ideas from electron laser-plasma accelerators (ELPA) — a technology that has allowed electron accelerators to shrink to mere inches — and turned it around to create positrons instead.

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Bot Makes Etch A Sketch Art In One Continuous Line

Introduced in 1960 for the princely sum of $2.99 ($25.00 today), Etch A Sketch was to become a standard issue item for the Baby Boomers’ toy box. As enchanting as the toy seems, it’s hard to see why it had staying power: it was hard for young fingers to twirl the knobs, diagonal lines and smooth curves required a concert pianist’s fine motor control, and whatever drawings we managed to make were erased at the slightest jostle of the tablet.

Intent on righting these wrongs, [Sunny Balasubramanian] not only motorized an Etch A Sketch, but he’s also given it a mind of its own in a way. For those unfamiliar with the toy, it’s basically a manual X-Y plotter that drags a stylus across the underside of a glass screen, scraping off a silver powder clinging to the glass to make dark lines. Replacing the knobs with steppers is straightforward, of course, but driving them is the trick. [Sunny] hooked his up to a Raspberry Pi and wrote some Python code to drive them. The Pi also accepts input image files and processes them for rendering through the plotter, first doing Canny edge detection in OpenCV, then plotting a single path through the largest collection of connected pixels in the image. From there it’s just a matter of spinning the motors to create surprisingly detailed images. Check out the short video below to see it in action.

It’s hardly the first automatic Etch A Sketch we’ve seen – here’s one that automates everything including the shake to erase the drawing. That one cheats a little though, in that it rasters across the screen like a CRT. We really like how this one just does a single path. Pretty clever.

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Gaze Upon This Daft Punk Helmet’s Rows Of Utterly Perfect Hand-Soldered LEDs

The iconic robot helmets of Daft Punk feature prominently as challenging DIY hardware projects in their own right, and the results never disappoint. But [Nathaniel Stepp]’s photo gallery of his own version really sets the bar in both quality and attention to detail. The helmet uses a Teensy 3.2 as the main processor, and the visor consists of 328 hand soldered through-hole APA106 addressable RGB LEDs. A laser cut panel serves as the frame for the LEDs, and it was heat-formed to curve around the helmet and mate into the surrounding frame. Each LED is meticulously hand-soldered, complete with its own surface mount decoupling cap; there’s no wasted space or excess wire anywhere to be seen. It looks as if a small 3D printed jig was used to align and solder the LEDs one or two columns at a time, which were then transferred to the visor for final connections with the power bus and its neighboring LEDs.

After the whole array was assembled and working, the back of each LED appears to have then been carefully coated in what looks like Plasti-Dip in order to block light, probably to minimize the blinding of the wearer. A small amount of space between each LED allows the eyeballs inside the helmet to see past the light show in the visor.

The perfectly done array of LEDs in the visor is just one of the design elements showing the incredible workmanship and detail in [Nathaniel]’s helmet. His website promises more build details are coming, but in the meantime you can drink in the details shown in the aforementioned photo gallery.

With Halloween approaching, you might be interested in rolling your own Daft Punk inspired helmet. Not ready to do everything from scratch? No problem, because it’s never been easier to make your own with the help of a 3D printer and some LED strips.

[via SparkFun Blog]

Give Yourself A Sixth Sense With An Arduino

If you carry a smartphone around in your pocket, you have a GPS navigation system, a compass, an altimeter, and a very powerful computer at your fingertips. It’s the greatest navigational device ever created. To use this sextant of the modern era you’ve got to look down at a screen. You need to carry a phone around with you. It’s just not natural.

For this entry into the Hackaday Prize, [Vojtech Pavlovsky] has an innovative solution to direction finding that will give you a sixth sense. It’s a headband that turns your temples into the input for a clever way to find yourself around the city or a forest, and it does it with just an Arduino and a few other bits.

The idea behind the Ariadne Headband is to create a haptic navigation system for blind people, runners, bikers, or really anybody. It does this by mounting four vibration motors on a headband, connecting those motors to an Arduino, sniffing data from a digital compass, and getting data over Bluetooth from an Android app.

All of these parts come together to form a new sense — a sense of direction. By simply telling the app to make sure you’re always oriented North, or to guide you along the grid of city streets, this headband becomes an inconspicuous and extraordinarily useful way to get around.

Retrotechtacular: Here’s How They Programmed The EDSAC Computer

When you write a program for your computer, whether it is a desktop machine, a microcontroller, or a supercomputer, the chances are that you use software tools to help you get the job done. High level languages, compilers, linkers, assemblers, debuggers, and code libraries have become so integrated that in many cases you will barely be aware of their existence. To all intents and purposes this huge toolchain will be the computer. But the first computer programmers had none of these luxuries. They had to hand assemble their own binaries, check them by hand, and debug them by guessing what had happened when they failed.

EDSAC I, 1948, W.Renwick with 5 hole tape reader and Creed teleprinter. Copyright Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Reproduced by permission. [CC BY 2.0 UK]
EDSAC I, 1948, W.Renwick with 5 hole tape reader and Creed teleprinter. Copyright Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Reproduced by permission. [CC BY 2.0 UK]
EDSAC (Electronic delay storage automatic calculator) was the first computer operated by the University of Cambridge in the UK and one of the first few computers in the entire world when it was built in the late 1940s. It is the subject of the 1951 film you’ll find embedded below. Originally produced for a conference, the video sports a 1976 introduction and narration from the machine’s creator Professor Maurice Wilkes. It doesn’t take us through the design of the machine itself, instead it concentrates on the workflow required to program it.

The Paper-Heavy Process of Programming EDSAC

To illustrate the programming process, a committee of people who would now call themselves computer scientists, but probably then called themselves mathematicians, breaking a formula into subroutines before the code is laboriously hand assembled. The linking process is performed manually too by the secretary who types the code into a teletype for transfer to a punched tape. When a library function is required she reaches into a filing cabinet for the roll of tape containing it before running it through a tape duplicator to add it to the program. Finally the completed tape is checked and added to a job queue that consists of a row of hooks on the wall. Never complain that your toolchain is unwieldy again!

The original EDSAC was decommissioned in the late 1950s after serving the university and spawning a commercial version, the LEO, which became the first ever computer manufactured for use in commerce. That was not the end of the EDSAC story though, because in this century a team at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park set about recreating EDSAC as an exhibit. And as luck would have it a member of that team was at the recent Electromagnetic Field hacker camp to give a talk about their work which you will also find below.

Building a Faithful Reproduction of EDSAC

Tony Abbey gives us both a history of the machine and a description of its architecture, followed by a run through their efforts in rebuilding it. You may be surprised by some of the unexpected facts from the talk. For instance, while all the tubes used in the EDSAC are still available, their bases are not. Equivalents were sourced from China, but team members had to modify them with dental drills.

They also needed to manufact the 1940s-style tube chassis, and the solution to that problem happened to be just down the road. Bletchley is part of modern-day Milton Keynes, a post-war new town that is also home to another famous name: Marshall amplifiers. Tube amps are built in a surprisingly similar way, so they took on the manufactured challenge. Not all the parts of the new EDSAC are original though. The memory used mercury delay lines in 1949, but for 2018 recreation the computer has a delay line using nickel wire and modern components. Tony admits that even that has caused problems, and there is a simulator using a microcontroller.

You can see the restored EDSAC at the National Museum of Computing. We visited it in 2016, and you can read our review. Meanwhile if you are an FPGA wizard, you can even have a virtual EDSAC of your own.

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Maker Faire NY: Developing For The Final Frontier

The cost of getting a piece of hardware into space is now cheaper than ever, thanks in no small part to the rapid progress that’s been made by commercial launch providers such as SpaceX. In the near future, as more low-cost providers come online, it should get even cheaper. Within a few years, we could be seeing per kilogram costs to low Earth orbit that are 1/10th what they were on the Space Shuttle. To be sure, this is a very exciting time to be in the business of designing and building spacecraft.

But no matter how cheap launches to orbit get, it’ll never be cheaper than simply emailing some source code up to the International Space Station (ISS). With that in mind, there are several programs which offer students the closest thing to booking passage on a Falcon 9: the chance to develop software that can be run aboard the Station. At the 2018 World Maker Faire in New York we got a chance to get up close and personal with functional replicas of the hardware that’s already on orbit, known in space parlance as “ground units”.

On display was a replica of one of the SPHERES free-flying satellites that have been on the ISS since 2006. They are roughly the size of a soccer ball and utilize CO2 thrusters and ultrasonic sensors to move around inside of the Station. Designed by MIT as a way to study spaceflight techniques such as docking and navigation without the expense and risk of using a full scale vehicle, the SPHERES satellites are perhaps the only operational spacecraft to have never been exposed to space itself.

MIT now runs the annual “Zero Robotics” competition, which tasks middle and high school students with solving a specific challenge using the SPHERES satellites. Competitors run their programs on simulators until the finals, which are conducted using the real hardware on the ISS and live-streamed to schools.

We also saw hardware from “Quest for Space”, which is a company offering curricula for elementary through high school students which include not only the ground units, but training and technical support when and if the school decides to send the code to the matching hardware on the Station. For an additional fee, they will even work with the school to design, launch, and recover a custom hardware experiment.

Their standard hardware is based on off-the-shelf platforms such as Arduino and LEGO Mindstorms EV3, which makes for an easy transition for school’s existing STEM programs. The current hardware in orbit is setup for experiments dealing with heat absorption, humidity, and convection, but “Quest for Space” notes they change out the hardware every two years to provide different experiment opportunities.

Projects such as these, along with previous efforts such as the ArduSat, offer a unique way for the masses to connect with space in ways which would have been unthinkable before the turn of the 21st century. It’s still up for debate if anyone reading Hackaday in 2018 will personally get a chance to slip Earth’s surly bonds, but at least you can rest easy knowing your software bugs can hitch a ride off the planet.