Edge-Lit 7-Segments Clock The New Normal

April 14, 2020 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

People keep saying that time has lost all meaning now, but we’re still over here divvying up the days with hacks. Most of the hacks you see here are open source. But if you want something even more transparent to meter out the meaninglessness, we invite you to make one of these clearly awesome see-through clocks, which happens to be both.

A word of warning though — according to [GeekMomProjects], this is an incredibly fiddly build with tight tolerances everywhere that acrylic meets acrylic or an LED strip. We can see how it might be like forcing fragile puzzle pieces together. Since the whole thing is crystal clear acrylic, light is going to go everywhere.

[GeekMomProjects] cleverly blocked the escaping light by painstakingly applying non-conductive adhesive foil to the edges of all the smaller pieces. In spite of all that work, we think it would be worth it to have such a fantastic timepiece glowing away the hours somewhere in the house.

Electronically speaking, this beauty is pretty simple. The lights run off of an ItsyBitsy M4 Express, and the time is separately fetched with an ESP8266. [GeekMomProjects] had so much fun that she made one with seconds and one without. Check out their RGB dance routine after the break.

If you prefer your blinky 7-segment clocks a bit more utilitarian, here’s a clock made of shelves.

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So What Is Protein Folding, Anyway?

April 14, 2020 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

The current COVID-19 pandemic is rife with problems that hackers have attacked with gusto. From 3D printed face shields and homebrew face masks to replacements for full-fledged mechanical ventilators, the outpouring of ideas has been inspirational and heartwarming. At the same time there have been many efforts in a different area: research aimed at fighting the virus itself.

Getting to the root of the problem seems to have the most potential for ending this pandemic and getting ahead of future ones, and that’s the “know your enemy” problem that the distributed computing effort known as Folding@Home aims to address. Millions of people have signed up to donate cycles from spare PCs and GPUs, and in the process have created the largest supercomputer in history.

But what exactly are all these exaFLOPS being used for? Why is protein folding something to direct so much computational might toward? What’s the biochemistry behind this, and why do proteins need to fold in the first place? Here’s a brief look at protein folding: what it is, how it happens, and why it’s important.

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Altium Has Its 2kicad Moment

April 14, 2020 by Kerry Scharfglass 49 Comments

Around these parts we tend to be exponents of the KiCad lifestyle; what better way to design a PCBA than with free and open source tools that run anywhere? But there are still capabilities in commercial EDA packages that haven’t found their way into KiCad yet, so it may not always be the best tool for the job. Altium Designer is a popular non-libre option, but at up to tens of thousands of USD per seat it’s not always a good fit for users and businesses without a serious need.

It’s hard to find an exciting photo of a dialog box

What do you do as a KiCad user who encounters a design in Altium you’d like to work with? Well as of April 3rd 2020, [Thomas Pointhuber] has merged the beginnings of a native Altium importer into KiCad which looks to be slated for the 6.0 release. As [Thomas] himself points out in the patch submission, this is hardly the first time a 3rd party Altium importer has been published. His new work is a translation of the Perl plugin altium2kicad by [thesourcerer8]. And back in January another user left a comment with links to four other (non-KiCad) tools to handle Altium files.

If you’d like to try out this nifty new feature for yourself, CNX has a great walkthrough starting at building KiCad from source. As for documents to test against the classic BeagleBone Black sources seen above can be found at on GitHub. Head past the break to check out the very boring, but very exciting video of the importer at work, courtesy of [Thomas] himself. We can’t wait to give this a shot!

Thanks for the tip [Chris Gammell]!

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NASA Needs Help From Gamers And Citizen Scientists

April 14, 2020 by Al Williams 2 Comments

NASA would like you to help them explore — not space — but the bottom of the ocean. For now, you’ll need an Apple device, although an Android version is in the works. While it might seem strange for the space agency to look underwater, the images they need to process are from fluid-lensing cameras that use techniques originally meant to remove distortion from the atmosphere from pictures of outer space. Turns out they can also unravel distortion caused by the ocean and clearly image coral reefs.

The phone app is in the form of a game and, according to NASA, even a first grader could play it. In the game, you are in command of an ocean research vessel, the Nautilus. You dive to examine coral and identify what you see. The game generates training data for a supercomputer at the Ames Research Center so it can recognize coral types even when taken with more conventional cameras.

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