Cracking Open The Prince Floppy After The Purple Reign

November 23, 2021 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

Readers of a certain vintage will no doubt remember the time when Prince eschewed his royal position and became an unpronounceable symbol. People had no choice but to refer to him as TAFKAP, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, and members of the music press were sent a 3.5″ floppy disk with a font file containing a single character — that gender-transcending shape that would soon become another one of Prince’s guitars. But it’s 2021, and now you can get it from the Internet Archive. Fun fact: the file wasn’t ever locked down. In fact, the symbol was available on Prince’s Compuserve and fan club CD-ROM.

While some people trawl auction sites for overalls and weird keyboards, others look for ridiculous items from the zeitgeist, like a copy of this floppy. Take [Anil Dash] for instance. [Anil] finally pulled the trigger after 15 years of debating this particular purchase. [Anil]’s interest was reignited after reading this analysis of whether the symbol could ever be put into Unicode. (Between being trademarked, a logo, and a personal character, it’s ineligible for inclusion.)

Earlier this week, [Anil] teamed up with Adafruit to extract the data from the floppy. The Twitter thread that ensued led readers to another old source of the font — the 1994 game Prince Interactive. We wonder if they broke out the oscilloscope, though it doesn’t look like it.

Thanks for the tip, [pt and limor]!

Observing A Plant’s Vascular System With X-Ray Video

November 23, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

[Ben Krasnow] has a knack for showing us what’s inside of things while they’re moving. This week’s Applied Science experiment has him making time-lapse X-ray videos of things. This plant’s vascular system is just one of a few examples, the others being a dial clock and the zoom lens on a DSLR.

The trick here is having an X-ray sensing panel that can be reused. It takes around five seconds of exposure to grab each 40×40 cm frame which are then assembled back into video.

Now watching mechanisms move is cool — [Ben’s] video back in 2015 to show what a phonograph needle in the groove of a vinyl record looks like under a scanning electron microscope is still one for the coolest “camera tricks” we’ve ever seen pulled off. But watching the vascular system of a plant function is the recipe for one of those ah-ha educational moments, so we hope that 7th-grade biology teachers everywhere will find their way to this video.

The apparatus is described in great detail, but regular Hackaday readers will most likely want to focus in on the teardown of the X-ray panel, which [Ben] describes as a giant digital camera sensor tuned for receiving the X-rays. The source is a 50 kV 1 mA tube that he compares to what is used at the dental office. (Obviously this requires forethought to ensure his automated time-lapse setup will fail safe with the X-ray tube.) A Cyclone III FPGA drives the panel, communicating with the sensor array via two Ethernet interfaces.

A friend sent a the broken panel to [Ben] and he was able to easily repair a MOSFET that got knocked out of place. [biluni] shows up in the comments of this video, sharing his recollection from working in the industry 15 years ago that a panel like this would have cost $150k! But considering the stellar resolution, and repeatable use, it sure as heck beats the old film process.

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Live Jam Kit Helps Electronic Musicians Stay In Sync

November 23, 2021 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

Jamming live with synths and drum machines can be fun, but for [Christian], there was a little something missing. He was looking for a way to keep everyone in the group on the beat and rocking out, and decided to build something to help.

The ethos of the build was to put one person ultimately in charge of the mix using Ableton. This stops the volume race, as each musician turns their own volume up and the jam devolves into a noisy mess. Each musician also gets a sync button they can hit if their instrument has drifted out of time. Everyone in the jam also gets their own monitor signal in their headphones, as well as a looper as well.

Individual players in the electronic jam can whip up a cool little loop, and spit it out to the main controller running Ableton using the looper. Then, they can mix up something else in their headphones without disrupting the main mix, before spitting it out as a loop again.

[Christian]’s demo video does a great job of showing how it all works. We particularly like the sync button, which gets rid of the usual frustrations when a sequencer in the jam trips over the tempo signal.

It’s all built with a Teensy, and seems like a great way to organize a jam with a bunch of different synths and drum machines. We’d certainly love to join in the fun.

We’ve seen other fun jam kits too, like this neat networked solution. Video after the break.

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A disposable wireless phone charger made from molded cardboard pulp.

Charging Phones With The Power Of Paper Pulp

November 23, 2021 by Kristina Panos 22 Comments

Here it is, the most exciting reveal since the Hackaday Prize ceremony — [Eric Strebel] uses the pulp mold he designed and built over the three previous videos. In case you missed our coverage so far, [Eric] set out to design an eco-friendly wireless charger that’s meant to be disposable after six months to a year of use, and looks good doing it.

[Eric] started by cutting up a lot of cardboard and pulping it in a brand-new Oster blender that honestly looks to be pretty heavy duty. Pulping consists of blending the cardboard bits with water until a soupy chili-like consistency is reached. That blender lasted all of 20 minutes before breaking, so [Eric] promptly replaced it with a Ninja, which was way more up to the challenge of cardboard.

To do the actual molding, [Eric] mixed his pulpy chili with ~30 L of water in a tub big enough to accommodate the long brass mold. He dipped the mold to gather a layer of pulp and pulled it, and then pressed the wireless charger in place to create a pocket for it in the final, dried piece which he later replaced with an acrylic disk of the same diameter. [Eric] points out that a part like this would probably dry within ten minutes in an industrial setting. Even though he set it on top of a food dehydrator, it still took 4-5 hours to dry. Soup’s on after the break.

This isn’t [Eric]’s first wireless charger. A few years ago, he prototyped a swiveling version in urethane foam that does portrait or landscape.

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Significantly Improved Egg Timer Makes Pictionary Better

November 23, 2021 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

The traditional sand timer, known colloquially as an egg timer, served its purpose well over the centuries since its development. However, [MakerPaul] realised it had some significant flaws that were ruining Pictionary, and set out to fix the problem.

If you’re not looking directly at an egg timer, it’s easy to miss the moment when the timer runs out. Resetting the timer before it runs out also requires waiting for the sand to filter to one side. Clearly the world needs a better mousetrap.

The tipping timer from [MakerPaul] solves both those issues. In this design, sand flows down into an offset area, which tips the device over when reaching a certain time limit. Additionally, turning the device upside down and then rotating it instantly reloads the sand, meaning the timer can be reused immediately.

[MakerPaul] first came up with the idea about 20 years ago, refining it during the recent lockdowns. The design files are freely available for anyone that wishes to build one. [MakerPaul] isn’t commercializing the idea, but mentions that it would be great if anyone using it makes a donation to the Mind mental health charity.

Most timers we feature are electronic and digital, but it’s easy to appreciate the elegance of what [MakerPaul] has achieved here. As a bonus, he documented the entire project and its application in under 90 seconds. How good is that? Video after the break.

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Firefox Brings The Fire: Shifting From GLX To EGL

November 23, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 55 Comments

You may (or may not) have heard that Firefox is moving from GLX to EGL for the Linux graphics stack. It’s an indicator of which way the tides are moving in the software world. Let’s look at what it means, why it matters, and why it’s cool.

A graphics stack is a complex system with many layers. But on Linux, there needs to be an interface between something like OpenGL and a windowing system like X11. X11 provides a fundamental framework for drawing and moving windows around a display, capturing user input, and determining focus, but little else. An X11 server is just a program that manages all the windows (clients). Each window in X11 is considered a client. A client connects to the server over a Unix process socket or the internet.

OpenGL focuses on what to draw within the confines of the screen space given by the window system. GLX (which stands for OpenGL Extension to the X window system) was originally developed by Silicon Graphics. It has changed over the years, gaining hardware acceleration support and DRI (Direct Rendering Interface). DRI is a way for OpenGL to talk directly to the graphical hardware if the server and the client are on the same computer. At its core, GLX provides OpenGL functions to X11, adds to the X protocol by allowing 3d rendering commands to be sent, and an extension that reads rendering commands and passes them to OpenGL.

EGL (Embedded-System Graphics Library) is a successor of GLX, but it started with a different environment in mind. Initially, the focus was embedded systems, and devices such as Android, Raspberry Pi, and Blackberry heavily lean on EGL for their graphical needs. Finally, however, Wayland decided to use EGL as GLX brought in X11 dependencies, and EGL offers closer access to hardware.

When Martin Stránský initially added Wayland support to Firefox, he used EGL instead of GLX. Additionally, the Wayland implementation had zero-copy GPU buffer sharing via DMABUF (a Linux kernel subsystem for sharing buffers). Unfortunately, Firefox couldn’t turn on this improved WebGL’s performance for X11 (it existed but was never stable enough). Nevertheless, features kept coming making Wayland (and consequently EGL) a more first-class citizen. Now EGL will be enabled by default in Firefox 94+ with Mesa 21+ drivers (Mesa is an implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other specifications that translate commands into instructions the GPU can understand).

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An array of open-source clocks that play Pac-Man (or Mrs. Pac-Man).

ESP32 Pac-Man Clock Keeps Track Of How Long You Watch It

November 23, 2021 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

There are so many elements that make a good clock worth looking at for much longer than necessary. Not only is this clock quite cool to behold, it plays Pac-Man around the time! Yes, of course you can interact with the Pac-Man — touching the edges of the screen will make him go left, right, up, or down accordingly. You can also change to Ms. Pac-Man and make all the animations go normal speed, fast, or crazy-fast.

[TechKiwiGadgets] built a Pac-Man clock a few years ago that was well-received, but not cheap or easy to mimic. Since then, they have ported the code to the ESP32 and made a new version that has fewer and friendlier components. Not only that, they have great instructions for building the ESP32 shield on protoboard and also offer the shield as an open-source fab-able PCB. Still too much work? The complete kit version is available over on Tindie. Be sure to check it out in crazy speed mode action after the break.

Although this isn’t the first Pac-Man clock we’ve seen, it devotes equal attention to the time and the game, whereas this one is more about the game itself.

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