The transport of goods with cargo ships and especially container ships is the backbone of today’s economies, with about 90% of non-bulk cargo transported with them. This is in addition to the large number of oil tankers and LNG carriers. Unfortunately, due to their use of diesel engines they are also responsible for about 3.5% of the world’s CO2 emissions, in addition to 18 – 30% of nitrogen oxide and 9% of sulfur oxides.
Although the switch to low-sulfur diesel (ULSD) and the use of speed limits has reduced some of these pollutants, the shipping industry sees itself faced with the necessity to decarbonize in order to meet the obligations of the Paris Agreement. This essentially means finding a way to switch from diesel engines to an alternative which has comparable or better fuel costs, produces no or almost no pollutants and will not negatively affect logistics.
[Brian Brocken] is at it again, building mechanisms that are as striking in their aesthetic as they are in their function. This time around, he’s extended a project we recently featured by adding a menacing 3D-printed shredder attachment. When you hear “3D-printed shredder” you think that paper is all you’ll be able to feed it, but this beast can eat its own by shredding parts from failed prints.
His original goal in building the high-torque 3D-printed gear box we looked at back in August was to show that 3D printed parts can be functional and not merely decorative. Using it as a winch to pull a car did a good job of that, but this goes much further. The very nature of shredder blades is to tear apart objects, but the forces that destroy those things are also present on the shredder parts themselves. Still, as you can see in the video below, the counter-rotating twin-shaft shredder mechanism does its work without catastrophic damage to the blades which were printed with “least 25 percent infill for the structural parts”, and up to five outer perimeters.
The result is a shredder that can gobble up small pieces of failed prints, in addition to chewing on paper, cardboard, and polystyrene with ease. [Brian] does show a few failures along the way, all in the gearbox itself. The first was a defect in the housing that let an gear shaft pop loose and was fixed up with a reprint. The second is a catastrophic gear failure when trying to shred a soda bottle. This is not surprising as PET is quite tough and not brittle like the waste prints were. The shredder teeth got bogged down, and the power of the motor strips teeth from a few gears. But when working, it’s oddly satisfying to watch that powerful gear ratio chip away at sacrificial materials.
[Martin Fasani] has set out to build a beautiful low power E-Ink Calendar he can hang on his wall. But perhaps more importantly, the work he has done makes it easier for everyone in the future to have a e-ink display. Many battery-powered e-ink projects connect to some server, download a bitmap image, display the new image, and then go into a deep sleep power mode. [Martin’s] project is no different, but it uses a handy microservice that does the conversion and rendering for you.
The firmware for this ESP32/ESP32S2 based calendar is open sourced on GitHub, with a version based on the Arduino framework as well as the native ESP-IDF framework. One particularly fantastic part of the firmware is a C++ component called CalEPD that drives e-paper displays. CalEPD extends the Adafruit_GFX class and is broken out in a separate repo, making it easy to consume on other projects. Since this supports dozens of different e-paper displays, this simplifies the process of building a calendar with different screens. The firmware includes a Bluetooth setup flow from a smartphone or tablet. This means you can quickly configure how often it wakes up, what it queries, and other important features.
The hardware shown in the demo video has a 7.5″ Waveshare screen with 800 x 400 resolution nestled inside a 3D-printed shell. There is also a 5,000 mAh battery with an ESP32 TinyPICO powering the whole system. The TinyPICO was picked for its incredible deep sleep power consumption. All this fits into a frame just 11 mm thick, for which STL files are available. [Martin] continues to work on this calendar display and has recently added support for FocalTech touch panel controllers. We’re excited to see where he takes it next!
This isn’t the first e-ink display project we’ve seen but this is a great reference to build your own. If you need another good starting point, this weather display might give you that little bit of inspiration you need.
There have been various reincarnations of the Commodore C64 over the years, and [Dave Van Wagner] has created one that can run on an STM32F429ZI Discovery development board. These dev boards have been around quite a few years and feature a 2.4 inch color TFT LCD in addition to the typical I/O circuitry, and are a pretty good value — [Dave] says they currently sell for under $30 through distribution.
The project began earlier this year when [Dave] set out to write a command line program in C# that emulated C64 Basic. He had written a 6502 emulator many years earlier, but had not tested it. [Dave] went on a programming binge in March and got it up and running over a very long weekend. He subsequently decided to add support for VIC-20, TED, and PET as well.
Even though [Dave] says C# is a beautiful language, he subsequently ported the program into C (an ugly language?) in order to run on the Discovery board, swapping the command line terminal interface for real LCD video and a USB keyboard. There’s also an Arduino version (terminal interface only). It runs about 15% slower than a real C64, and there are some limitations still like no SID. But overall, this is a great project and a low-cost way to emulate a C64 in an embedded format. If you want to explore further, here is the Mbed project for the STM32F429, and you can find the Arduino and C# versions on his GitHub page. You may remember [Dave] from the C128 video hack we wrote about last year.
URL shortening services like TinyURL or Bitly have long become an essential part of the modern web, and are popular enough that even Google killed off their own already. Creating your own shortener is also a fun exercise, and in its core doesn’t require much more than a nifty domain name, some form of database to map the URLs, and a bit of web technology to glue it all together. [Nelsontky] figured you don’t even have to build most of it yourself, but you could just (ab)use GitHub for it.
Using GitHub Pages to host the URL shortening website itself, [nelsontky] actually repurposes GitHub’s issue tracking system to map the shortened identifier to the original URL. Each redirection is simply a new issue, with the issue number serving as the shortening identifier, and the issue’s title text storing the original URL. To map the request, a bit of JavaScript extracts the issue number from the request, looks it up via GitHub API, and if a valid one was found (and API rate limits weren’t exceeded), redirects the caller accordingly. What’s especially clever about this is that GitHub Pages usually just serves static files stored in a repository, so the entire redirection logic is actually placed in the 404 error handling page, allowing requests to any arbitrary paths.
When it was released back in 2012, the Basis B1 fitness tracker was in many ways ahead of its time. In fact, the early smartwatch was so impressive that Intel quickly snapped up the company and made it the cornerstone of their wearable division. Unfortunately a flaw in their next watch, the Basis Peak, ended up literally burning some wearers. Intel was forced to recall the whole product line, and a year later dissolved their entire wearable division.
Given their rocky history, it’s probably no surprise that these gadgets can be had quite cheaply on the second hand market. But can you do anything with them? That’s what [Ben Jabituya] recently decided to find out, and the results of his experiments certainly look very promising. So far he hasn’t found a way to activate a brand-new Basis watch, but assuming you can get your hands on one that was actively being used when Intel pulled the plug, his hacks can be used to get it back up and running.
Examining the downloaded sensor logs.
The Basis Android application has long since been removed from the Play Store, but [Ben] said it wasn’t too hard to find an old version floating around on the web. After decompiling the application he discovered the developers included a backdoor that lets you configure advanced options that would normally be hidden.
How do you access it? As a reminder of the era in which the product was developed, you simply need to log into the application using Jersey and Shore as the username and password, respectively.
Between the developer options and API information he gleaned from the decompiled code, [Ben] was able to create a faux Basis authentication server and point the application to it. That let him get past the login screen, after which he was able to sync with the watch and download its stored data. Between examinations with a hex editor and some open source code that was already available online, he was able to write a Python script for parsing the data which he’s been kind enough to share with the world.
We’re very pleased to see an open source solution that not only gets these “bricked” smartwatches back online, but allows the user to keep all of the generated data under their own control. If you’d like to do something similar with a device that doesn’t have a history of releasing the Magic Smoke, the development of an open source firmware for more modern fitness trackers might be of interest.
Dishwashers are great at washing dishes and even rinsing them, most of the time. Where they tend to fail is in the drying part. Somehow these things dry hot enough to warp stoneware dishes, but not so well that things are actually dry when you open the door. Blame it on the lack of air movement.
[Ivan Stepaniuk] is listening for the dishwasher’s frequencies with a microphone, amplifying them with a trusty LM386, and using an STM32 blue pill to crunch the audio. [Ivan] has plans to incorporate an ESP8266 board for IoT, presumably to get a notification when the door has been opened successfully. Check out the demo after the break.
