Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recount the coolest hacks from the past week. Most clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but we discuss one that uses a tuning fork… like the kind you use to tune a piano. Ghidra is a powerful reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA that was recently put to good use changing an embedded thermometer display from Celsius to Fahrenheit. We talk turkey on the Texas power grid problems and Tesla’s eMMC failures. And of course there’s some room for nostalgia as we walk down memory lane with the BASIC programming language.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
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Episode 106 Show Notes:
New This Week:
- Trouble With The Texas Power Grid As Cold Weather Boosts Demand, Knocks Out Generators
- Texas’ natural gas production just froze under pressure – The Verge
- No, frozen wind turbines aren’t to blame for Texas’ power outages
- Anti-icing and De-icing Technologiesfor Wind Turbines (PDF)
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Print-in-Place Connectors Aim To Make Wiring Easier
- Tuning Fork Keeps This Throwback Digital Clock Ticking
- Ghidra Used To Patch Fahrenheit Into An Air Quality Meter
- Spinach Photo Prints
- Truck Bed Liners Improve 3D Prints
- Manned Electric Helicopter With 7 Tail Rotors
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Mike’s Picks:
Phase differences in large area synchronous AC grids determine the direction of the power flow, and in order to produce a phase difference one area must run higher or lower in frequency for some time to build it up. This is why the frequency in different parts of the AC grid differs, and it’s the average frequency which is maintained over time by controlling the amount of production and consumption between areas.
Texas has the difficulty of sitting in the middle of the western and eastern grids, which would demand them to juggle both systems while adhering to both, and they don’t want to saturate their power transmission capacity by having large power transfers between the two, so they keep apart from both.
It would make little sense to interconnect anyhow, since transmitting power over such a large distance (coast to coast) using the regular AC grid would result in tremendous losses. The huge differences between east and west would cause large power flows that would saturate the Texan grid and mess with their own system.