Day: January 5, 2022

Does This Lead Make My Car Look Fat?

January 5, 2022 by 64 Comments

When looking at the performance of a vehicle, weight is one of the most important factors in the equation. Heavier vehicles take more energy to accelerate and are harder to stop. They’re also more difficult to control through the corners. Overall, anything that makes a vehicle heavier typically comes with a load of drawbacks to both performance and efficiency. You want your racecar as light as possible.

However, now and then, automakers have found reason to intentionally add large weights to vehicles. We’ll look at a couple of key examples, and discuss why this strange design decision can sometimes be just what the engineers ordered.

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Dice Rolls From The Beginning Of Time

January 5, 2022 by 30 Comments

Generating random numbers might seem like a trivial task, that is until the numbers need to be truly random for cryptography or security reasons. When that’s the case, it turns out that these numbers are really “pseudo-random” and follow a predictable pattern. Devices that can produce truly random numbers often do it by sampling random events in the real world rather than relying on a computer to do it directly, like this machine which simulates a dice roll by looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The cosmic microwave background radiation exists in the infrared at the farthest edges of the observable universe as a remnant of the big bang. It’s an excellent source of randomness, but tapping into it poses a bit of a challenge. For this build, [iSax] is using an old Soviet-era Geiger tube to detect the appropriate signal, and a Nixie tube to display the dice roll. After the device detects two particles from the Big Bang, the device measures the amount of time that passed between the detection of both particles and uses this number to calculate the dice roll.

While it takes a little bit longer to roll this dice than a traditional one since it has to wait to detect the right kind of particles, if you really need the randomness it can’t be beat. It certainly works as dice, but we can also see some use for generating truly random numbers for other applications as well. For some other sources of random inspiration be sure to check out our own [Voja Antonic]’s deep dive into truly random number generation.

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WiFi bird box with phone showing video of a rubber ducky

Building A WiFi-Enabled Bird Box On The Cheap

January 5, 2022 by 12 Comments

[Jude] was looking for a fun DIY project for him and his son and thought that a bird box might be a good option. He wanted to equip the box with a WiFi camera so he could watch his little guests from his phone but didn’t find any suitable, inexpensive, commercially-available options. So with that, he built one himself.

He did, however, start with a generic bird box, which he bought online, and then modified with his particular features of interest. He wanted the project to be scalable so after-school programs and other kids clubs could easily implement his design within a classroom setting. He figured minimizing the woodwork would make the project easier for children.

He added a dowel to the generic bird box he bought online, but cautions that readers need to investigate if a dowel would attract invasive species in their area. He found a relatively inexpensive WiFi-enabled endoscope that he noted was far more affordable than the camera-equipped, commercially-available bird boxes he found earlier. He craftily used a plastic syringe as a waterproof spy hole that housed the endoscope, allowing him to easily slip the camera in and out of the bird box without disturbing its occupants. He noted that the 3 mL syringe had the perfect inner diameter to fit the endoscope rather snugly.

[Jude] doesn’t intend to have the endoscope active 24/7, so he needed a way to seal the access hole when the camera was not in use. His many years at Dyson taught him that implementing a removable, water-tight, rubber seal is not as easy as people may think. Fortunately, the rubber stopper at the tip of the syringe’s plunger was naturally a perfect removable seal and he could use it to plug the access hole when the endoscope was not in use.

The endoscope was mostly waterproof, except for the WiFi transmitter, so [Jude] needed to place that end of the device in a waterproof enclosure. He said these are often called “IP rated” enclosures and he figured these could come in handy for any number of outdoor electronics projects so we imagine this might come in handy for a lot of our readers as well.

Mother nature has certainly inspired many projects here at Hackaday and [Jude]’s bird box is no exception. Cool project!