Day: November 9, 2021

Teardown: Analog Radionic Analyzer

November 9, 2021 by 67 Comments

Have you ever looked up a recipe online, and before you got to the ingredients, you had to scroll through somebody’s meandering life story? You just want to know how many cans of tomato paste to buy, but instead you’re reading about cozy winter nights at grandma’s house? Well, that’s where you are right now, friend. Except instead of wanting to know what goes in a lasagna, you just want to see the inside of some weirdo alternative medicine gadget. I get it, and wouldn’t blame you for skipping ahead, but I would be remiss to start this month’s teardown without a bit of explanation as to how it came into my possession.

So if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’ll tell you a story about an exceptionally generous patron, and the incredible wealth of sham medical hokum that they have bestowed upon the Hackaday community…

Continue reading “Teardown: Analog Radionic Analyzer” →

Flip-Dot Oscilloscope Is Flippin’ Awesome

November 9, 2021 by 6 Comments

Oscilloscope displays have come a long way since the round phosphor-coated CRTs that adorned laboratories of old. Most modern scopes ship with huge, high-definition touch screens that, while beautiful, certainly lack a bit of the character that classic scopes brought to the bench. It’s a good thing that hackers like [bitluni] are around to help remedy this. His contribution takes the form of what may be both the world’s coolest and least useful oscilloscope: one with a flip-dot display.

Yup — a flip-dot display, in all it’s clickedy-clacky, 25×16 pixel glory. The scope can’t trigger, its maximum amplitude is only a couple of volts, and its refresh rate is, well, visible, but it looks incredible. The scope is controlled by an ESP32, which reads the analog signal being measured. It then displays the signal via an array of driver ICs, which allow it to update the dots one column at a time by powering the tiny electromagnets that flip over each colored panel.

Even better, [bitluni] live-streamed the entire build. That’s right, if you want to watch approximately 30 hours of video covering everything from first actuating a pixel on the display to designing and assembling a PCB to drive it, then you’re in luck. For the rest of us, he was kind enough to make a much shorter summary video you can watch below. Of course, this scope doesn’t run Doom like some others, but its probably only a matter of time.

Thank to [Zane Atkins] for the tip!

Continue reading “Flip-Dot Oscilloscope Is Flippin’ Awesome” →

Development Of Magnetic Locking Idea Shows Great Progress

November 9, 2021 by 18 Comments

No matter how its done, with whatever level of fakery, magnetic levitation just looks cool.  We don’t know about you, but merely walking past the tackiest gadget shop, the displays of levitating and rotating objects always catches our eye. Superconductors aside, these devices are pretty much all operating in the same way; an object with a permanent rare-earth magnet is held in a stable position between a pair of electromagnets one above and one below, with some control electronics to adjust the field strength and close the loop.

But, there may be another way, albeit a rather special case, where a magnet can not only be levitated, but locked in place using a rotating magnetic field. The video shows a demonstration of how the mass of a magnet can be used to phase lock it against a rotating field. In essence, the magnet will want to rotate to align with the rotating magnetic field, but its mass will mean there is a time delay for the force to act and rotation to occur, which will lag the rotating magnetic field, and if it is phased just so, the rotation will be cancelled and the magnet will be locked in a stable position. Essentially the inertia of the magnet can be leveraged to counteract magnet’s tendency to rapidly rotate to find a stable position in the field.

Whilst the idea is not new, Turkish experimenter [Hamdi Ucar] has been working on this subject for some time (checkout his YouTube channel for a LOT of content on it), even going as far as to publish a very detailed academic paper on the subject. With our explanation here we’re trying to simplify the subject for the sake of brevity, but since the paper has a lot of gory details for the physicists among you, if you can handle the maths, you can come to your own conclusions.

Continue reading “Development Of Magnetic Locking Idea Shows Great Progress” →