Month: April 2019

The Only Cassette Player Worth Owning In 2019

April 2, 2019 by 73 Comments

Vinyl has the audiophiles to keep it relevant, and CDs still have the people who are scared of streaming music, but who mourns for the cassette tape? Yesterday we would have said nobody, but now that [Igor Afanasyev] has unleashed his latest creation onto an unsuspecting world, we aren’t so sure anymore. A portable tape player that started as a $5 find from the Goodwill is now an outrageously gorgeous piece of electronic art thanks to 3D printing and a liberal application of LEDs.

After freeing the tape mechanism from the original enclosure and extraneous electronics like the AM/FM tuner, [Igor] got to work designing a retro styled enclosure for the hardware which would show off the complex electromechanical bits which would traditionally be hidden. With the addition of a clever 3D printed holder, he was even able to add microswitches under the original player’s buttons so he could detect the player’s current state without having to modify the electronics. This lets the finished player change the color of the RGB LEDs based on what it’s currently doing.

[Igor] came up with a very clever way of integrating light-up icons into the case by placing bright LEDs behind specially crafted thin sections of the print. It looked awesome in his tests, but after the considerable sanding, priming, and painting it took to turn the 3D printed parts into a production-quality enclosure, the LEDs are no longer visible on the final product. Even though they didn’t work in this particular case, we think it’s a brilliant technique worthy of stealing further research.

The detail that [Igor] but into this build is phenomenal. Seeing all the individual components he had to design and print to make the final product come together is really nothing short of inspirational. Projects like these are where 3D printing really shines, as trying to replicate this build with traditional manufacturing techniques would be an absolute nightmare.

If you can’t quite shake the feeling that you’ve seen this name or attention to detail before, it’s for good reason. Last year we covered another build showing the knack [Igor] has for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

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Components Cut In Half Reveal Their Inner Beauty

April 2, 2019 by 7 Comments

We rarely take a moment to consider the beauty of the components we use in electronic designs. Too often they are simply commodities, bought in bulk on reels or in bags, stashed in a drawer until they’re needed, and then unceremoniously soldered to a board. Granted, little scraps of black plastic with silver leads don’t exactly deserve paeans sung to their great beauty – at least not until you cut them in half to reveal the beauty within.

We’ve seen a little of what [Tube Time] has accomplished here; recall this lapped-down surface-mount inductor that [electronupdate] did a while back. The current work is more extensive and probably somewhat easier to accomplish because [TubeTime] focused mainly on larger through-hole components such as resistors and capacitors. It’s not clear how the sections were created, but it is clear that extreme care was taken to lap down the components with enough precision that the inner structures are clearly visible, and indeed, carefully enough that some, most notably the LED, still actually work. For our money, though, the best looking cross-sections are the capacitors, especially the electrolytic, for which [Tube Time] thoughtfully provides both radial and axial sections. The little inductor is pretty cool too. Some of the component diagrams are annotated, too, which makes for fascinating reading.

Honestly, we could look at stuff like this all day.

Thanks to [Stuart Rogers] for the tip.

Let A Dinosaur Show You The Future

April 1, 2019 by No comments

Our lives in the 21st century are in part governed by a series of systems which we rarely encounter directly but which can have a great impact upon our lives. The oil futures market, for example, for which [Igor Nikolic] has created a real-time visualisation in the form of a clock in which the “hand” is a plastic dinosaur (As ever, XKCD reminds us that oil contains homeopathic quantities of real dinosaur, but it makes a good talking point).

The clock is part of a series continuing from his previous grid balance lamp project which monitored supply and demand in the electricity grid, and takes a feed of oil futures pricing to an MQTT server which is then picked up by an ESP8266 in the clock. The dinosaur hand is attached to a stepper motor, the position of which is set according to the market movements. There are also three LEDs whose colours change according to price. The whole is mounted on a plaque made from the top of an oil drum, and placed for effect over a map of the Port of Rotterdam, one of Europe’s busiest trading hubs.

Monitoring of these invisible socio-technical systems is a fascinating subject, and in the past we have brought you news of the very real impact they can have on entire continents when international politics intrude.

Who Knew Cut Grass Would Be So Tricky To Move!

April 1, 2019 by 22 Comments

Like all publications, here at Hackaday we are besieged by corporate public relations people touting press releases. So-and-so inc. have a new product, isn’t it exciting! But we know you, our readers, we know you like hacks, and with the best will in the world, the vast majority of such things have nothing of the hack about them. Just occasionally though a corporate offering does contain a hack, and today we have a fascinating one from Charm Industrial, who are doing their best to make hydrogen from biomass. They were finding cut grass to be an extremely difficult material to handle, and their account of how they managed to feed it from a hopper into their machinery makes for interesting reading.

You might expect grass to flow from a conical hopper like an ungainly liquid, but in fact it readily clogs and forms bridges, blocking the outlet. Changing the design of the hopper made little difference, so they tried an auger. The auger simply compressed the blockage harder, resulting in the counter-intuitive strategy of running the auger in reverse. But even that didn’t work, leaving the area round the auger clear but the rest of the grass as a solid clump. Rotating plows were tried with multiple different profiles followed, but finally they settled upon a vibrating bin activator. It’s a crash course in materials handling, and though the Hackaday bench is likely to avoid having to handle cut grass except when emptying the lawnmower, it’s still worth a look.

We may have done very little with handling cut grass, but we’ve certainly taken a look at creating it.

Make A Non-Contact Voltage Probe

April 1, 2019 by 10 Comments

You’ve probably seen probes that detect live wires in, for example, home wiring, without having to actually probe the wire. These are sometimes used to test strings of Christmas lights, too. We’ve even seen the sensors built into a voltmeter. [Crazy Couple] has a few do-it-yourself versions that can do the job. You can see the circuits in the video below.

A contactless probe picks up the changing magnetic field around an unshielded wire with an AC voltage on it. Current doesn’t have to be flowing since it picks up the voltage (for example, you can detect voltage on a switch that is turned off or a Christmas tree light that is burned out. There are several different circuits using chips ranging from a CMOS IC to a 555. There’s also a version with three bipolar transistors.

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Now Toto’s Africa Is Stuck In Our Heads

April 1, 2019 by 24 Comments

April Fool’s Day is bad. April Fool’s Day is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. For one day a year, we’re inundated with pieces that can, accurately and without any sense of irony, be called fake news. YouTube is worse. But you know what’s worse than April Fool’s Day? A hundred children playing plastic recorders. But it’s April Fool’s Day, and things must get worse. Here’s a vacuum cleaner playing Africa by Toto.

This is the latest build from [James Bruton] or [Ecks Robots Dot Co Dot UK], who is the king of building just about anything with 3D printers. He’s got a BB8 and some of the cooler Star Wars droids, a Hulkbuster, and openDog. When it comes to confabulating robotics and 3D printers, [James] is the king. But this is April Fool’s Day, and if you’re a big YouTuber, you need to do something annoying. [James] is the king.

This build uses a Henry vacuum cleaner, a canister vacuum with a silk screened face, because why not, and you’re not truly living until you put googly eyes on your Roomba. Also, all vacuums in England are Hoovers, because reasons. In collaboration with [Mothcub], [James] adapted cheap children’s plastic recorders to a Henry vacuum cleaner with a few 3D printed parts, some servo-controlled valves, and a bit of plastic tubing. While using cheap kid’s recorders as the tone generator in what is effectively a pipe organ is interesting (the stickers over the holes are a great idea), this is something that should not be done ever. This idea should not be replicated. These recorders are not in tune and I don’t know how because they’re just one piece of plastic that came out of the same mold.

The servos, and therefore the entire pipe organ, are controlled via MIDI, which makes this the first DIY MIDI pipe organ we’ve seen. It’s a proof of concept, and a pretty good one. It also sounds terrible. This is proof that cheap plastic recorders don’t sound good. The video is below, and I highly suggest skipping the second half.

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Bye Bye Vi: GNU/Linux Distros Drop Support

April 1, 2019 by 167 Comments

If you grew up with Unix systems like we did, you’ll be sorry to hear the news: vi, the noble text editor that has served us so well these 40 years, is going away — from many GNU/Linux systems, anyway. As of this writing, GNU/Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE — four of the five most popular GNU/Linux distributions — have all announced that they will no longer ship the ‘vi’ editor as part of their base installs. For those of us who got our start in the punched-card era and still think of files as a collection of lines instead of a stream of bytes, this is a major blow. But, we can all take some comfort in the fact that, at least for now, the stripped-down version of vim synonymous with vi on these systems will continue to be available from package repositories.

The reasons for the move aren’t entirely clear to us, but from what we can see on the GNU/Linux mailing lists, the confusing modal interface and the fact that novice (and many seasoned) users can’t figure out how to save a file and exit the program seem to have influenced the decision. Also cited were support changes expected as GNU/Linux gains in popularity. As the user base expands to include less technically-savvy individuals, fewer people will be able to fix their constant boot issues, which is the primary use-case for vi. Replacing the self-help model will be a support infrastructure where users can take their machines to “GNU/Linux Geniuses” who will solve the problems for them.

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