Working Model Reveals Amazing Engineering Of Webb’s Mirror Actuators

February 8, 2022 by Dan Maloney 29 Comments

We end up covering a lot of space topics here on Hackaday, not because we’re huge space nerds — spoiler alert: we are — but because when you’ve got an effectively unlimited budget and a remit to make something that cannot fail, awe-inspiring engineering is often the result. The mirror actuators on the James Webb Space Telescope are a perfect example of this extreme engineering, and to understand how they work a little better, [Zachary Tong] built a working model of these amazing machines.

The main mirror of the JWST is made of 18 separate hexagonal sections, the position of each which must be finely tuned to make a perfect reflector. Each mirror has seven actuators that move it through seven degrees of freedom — the usual six that a Stewart platform mechanism provides, plus the ability to deform the mirror’s curvature slightly. [Zach]’s model actuator is reverse-engineered from public information (PDF) made available by the mirror contractor, Ball Aerospace. While the OEM part is made from the usual space-rated alloys and materials, the model is 3D printed and powered by a cheap stepper motor.

That simplicity belies the ingenious mechanism revealed by the model. The actuators allow for both coarse and fine adjustments over a wide range of travel. A clever tumbler mechanism means that only one motor is needed for both fine and coarse adjustments, and a flexure mechanism is used to make the fine adjustments even finer — a step size of only 8 nanometers!

Hats off to [Zach] for digging into this for us, and for making all his files available in case you want to print your own. You may not be building a space observatory anytime soon, but there’s plenty about these mechanisms that can inform your designs.

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Wordle Reverse-Engineering And Automated Solving

February 8, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 15 Comments

Simplified Absurdle decision tree for a single letter guess from a set of three possible options

We don’t know about you, but we have mixed feelings about online puzzle fads. On one hand, they are great tool to help keep one sharp, but they’re just everywhere. The latest social-media driven fad, Wordle, may be a little bit too prevalent for our liking, with social media timelines stuffed with updates about the thing. [Ed Locard] was getting a bit miffed with friends’ constant posts about ‘Today’s Wordle’, and was hoping they’d get back to posting pictures of their dogs instead, so did what any self-respecting hacker would do, and wrote a python script to automate solving Wordle puzzles, in a likely futile attempt to get them to stop posting.

Actually, [Ed] was more interested in building a solver for a related game, Absurdle, which is described as an adversarial variant of Wordle. This doesn’t actually select a single word, but uses your guesses so far to narrow down a large pool of possible words, keeping you guessing for longer. Which is pretty mean of it. Anyway, [Ed] came up with a tool called Pyrdle, (GitHub project) which is essentially a command version of Absurdle, that has the capability of also solving Wordle as a byproduct. It turns out the JS implementation of Wordle holds the entire possible wordlist, client-side, so the answer is already sitting in your browser. The real interest part of this project is the approach to automated problem solving of puzzles with a very large potential set of solutions. This makes for an interesting read, and infinitely more so than reading yet another Wordle post.

And one final note; if you’re not at all onboard with this, love Wordle, and can’t get enough, you might like to install [brackendawson]’s comically titled (command) notfoundle shell handler, for some puzzling feedback on your command-line slip-ups. Well, it amused us anyway.

Puzzle projects hit these pages once in a while. Here’s the annual Xmas GCHQ puzzle, If you’re more into physical puzzles, with an electronics focus (and can solder) check out the DEF CON 29 puzzle badge!

A Tuning Fork Clock, With Discrete Logic

February 8, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 8 Comments

[Willem Koopman aka Secretbatcave] was looking at a master clock he has in his collection which was quite a noisy device, but wanted to use the matching solenoid slave clock mechanism he had to hand. Willem is a fan of old-school ‘sector’ clocks, so proceeded to build his ideal time piece — Vibrmatic — exactly the way he wanted. Now, since most time keeping devices utilise a crystal oscillator — which is little more than a lump of vibrating quartz — why not scale it up a bit and use the same principle, except with a metal tuning fork? (some profanity, just to warn you!)

A crystal oscillator operates in a simple manner; you put some electrical energy in, it resonates at its natural frequency, you sense that resonance, and feed it back into it to keep it sustaining. With a tuning fork oscillator, the vibration forcing and the feedback are both done via induction, coils act as the bridge between the electronic and mechanical worlds.

By mounting the tuning fork onto a shock mounting, the 257 Hz drone was kept from leaking out into the case and disturbing the household. This fork was specified to be 256 Hz, but [Willem] reckons the drag of the electromagnets pushed it off frequency a bit. Which make sense, since its a mechanical system, that has extra forces acting upon it.

The sector face was CNC cut from aluminium, the graphics engraved, then polished up a bit. Finally after a spot of paint, it looks pretty smart. Some nice chunks of upcycled wood taken from some building work spoils formed the exposed enclosure. On the electronics side, after totally ignoring the frequency error, and then tripping over a bunch of problems such as harmonics in the oscillation, and an incorrectly set-up divider, a solution which seemed to work was found, but like always, there are quite a few more details to the story to be found in the build log.

We’ve seen a tuning fork clock recently, like this 440 Hz device by [Kris Slyka] that the project above references, and whilst we’re talking about tuning forks, here’s a project log showing the insides of those ubiquitous 32.768 kHz crystal units.

3D Printed Maglev Switches Are So Hot Right Now

February 8, 2022 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

It doesn’t happen all the time, but over the years we’ve noticed that once we feature a project, a number of very similar builds often find themselves in our tip line before too long. Of course, these aren’t copycats; not enough time has passed for some competitive maker to spin up their own version. No, most of the time it’s somebody else who was working on a very similar project in isolation, and who now for the first time realizes they aren’t alone.

Thanks to this phenomenon we’re happy to report that yet another 3D printable magnetic levitation switch has come to light. Developed by [famichu], this take on the concept is markedly different from what we’ve seen previously, which in a way makes the whole thing even more impressive. It’s one thing for multiple hackers to develop similar projects independently of each other, as the end goal often dictates the nature of the design itself. But here we’re seeing a project that took the same core concepts and ran in a different direction. Continue reading “3D Printed Maglev Switches Are So Hot Right Now” →

Palm Portable Keyboard Goes Wireless

February 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 19 Comments

Long ago when digital portables where in their infancy, people were already loath to type on tiny keyboards, stylus or not. So Palm made a sweet little portable keyboard that would fold up and fit in your cargo pocket. And what do we have now for luxury typing on the go? Rubber roll-up jelly keebs? That’s a hard no from this scribe.

But why mess with the success of the the Palm Portable Keyboard? It just needs to be updated for our times, and that’s exactly what [Xinming Chen] did with their PPK Bluetooth adapter.

Inspired by the work of [cy384] to make a USB adapter as well as [Christian]’s efforts with the ESP32, [Xinming Chen] points out that this version is more power efficient, easier to program, and has a built-in Li-Po charging circuit. It also uses the hardware serial port instead of the software serial, which saves brainpower.

There’s really not much to this build, which relies on the Adafruit Feather nRF52840 and will readily work with Palm III and Palm V keyboards. Since the PPK is RS-232 and needs to be TTL, this circuit also needs a voltage level inverter which can be made with a small handful of components. We love that there’s a tiny hidden switch that engages the battery when the adapter clicks on to the connector.

The schematic, code, and STL files are all there in the repository, so go pick up one of these foldy keebs for cheap on the electronic bay while they’re still around. Watch the demo video unfold after the break.

Want an all-in-one solution for typing on the go? Check out the history of tiny computers.

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Industrial Sewing Machine: Acquired

February 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 106 Comments

Well, it’s done. After weeks of trawling Craigslist, an hour-long phone call with an intelligent stranger about a different machine that wasn’t going suit my needs, and a two-week delay while the seller and I waited out their unintentional COVID exposure, I am the proud new owner of a vintage Consew 206RB-3 industrial sewing machine.

So far, it is exactly what I wanted — at least a few decades old, in decent shape, built by a reputable maker, and it has a clutch motor that I can upgrade to a servo motor if I wish. I even like the color of the head, the table, and the little drawer hiding on the left side. Connie Consew is perfect!

Decidedly Not Portable

The internet was right — these things are heavy. According to the manual, the machine head alone weighs 25.5 kg (56 lbs). The motor probably weighs another 50-60 lbs. There’s a small wooden peg sticking up from the table that has the job of holding the head whenever it is tilted back for maintenance or bobbin changes. I’ll admit I didn’t trust the little peg at first, but it does a fine job of supporting all that weight on a single point of contact about an inch in diameter.

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IBM Eagle Has A Lot Of Qubits

February 8, 2022 by Al Williams 7 Comments

How many qubits do you need in a quantum computer? Plenty, if you want to anything useful. However, today, we have to settle for a lot fewer than we would like. But IBM’s new Eagle has the most of its type of quantum computer: 127-qubits. Naturally, they plan to do even more work, and you can see a preview of “System Two” in the video below.

The 127 qubit number is both impressively large and depressingly small. Each qubit increases the amount of work a conventional computer has to do to simulate the machine by a factor of two. The hope is to one day produce quantum computers that would be impractical to simulate using conventional computers. That’s known as quantum supremacy and while several teams have claimed it, actually achieving it is a subject of debate.

Like any computer, more bits — or qubits — are better than fewer bits, generally speaking. However, it is especially important for modern quantum systems since most practical schemes require redundancy and error correction to be reliable in modern implementations of quantum computer hardware. What’s in the future? IBM claims they will build the Condor processor with over 1,000 qubits using the same 3D packaging technology seen in Eagle. Condor is slated for 2023 and there will be an intermediate chip due in 2022 with 433 qubits.

Scaling anything to a large number usually requires more than just duplicating smaller things. In the case of Eagle and at least one of its predecessors, part of the scaling was to use readout units that can read different qubits. Older processors with just a few qubits would have dedicated readout hardware for each qubit, but that’s untenable once you get hundreds or thousands of qubits.

Qubits aren’t the only measure of a computer’s power, just like a conventional computer with more bits might be less capable than one with fewer bits. You also have to consider the quality of the qubits and how they are connected.

Who’s going to win the race to quantum supremacy? Or has it already been won? We have a feeling if it hasn’t already been done, it won’t be very far in the future. If you think about the state of computers in, say, 1960 and compare it to today, about 60 years later, you have to wonder if that amount of progress will occur in this area, too.

Most of the announcements you hear about quantum computing come from Google, IBM, or Microsoft. But there’s also Honeywell and a few other players. If you want to get ready for the quantum onslaught, maybe start with this tutorial that will run on a simulator, mostly.

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