Drone Filming Chile’s Urban Bike Race Takes Some Fancy Radio Gear

April 27, 2022 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Drones have revolutionized the world of videography in perhaps the biggest way since the advent of digital hardware. They’re used to get shots that are impractical or entirely impossible to get by any other means. The [Dutch Drone Gods] specialize in such work. When it came to filming an urban mountain bike race in a dense Chilean city, they had to bust out some serious tricks.

The FPV video feed was grainy, but good enough to keep the pilot on track. The drone carried a separate second camera for capturing high-quality footage of the run.

Typically, running a drone chase cam behind a biker would require some good first-person flying skills and a quick drone. However, for the Red Bull Valparaiso Cerro Abajo urban downhill event, this alone would not be enough. The tight course winds down staircases between thick concrete walls and even through houses, presenting huge challenges to maintaining signal integrity. Without a clear video signal, the pilot can’t fly the drone without crashing.

To make this all possible, the team used a variety of techniques to help combat the uncooperative radio environment. Directional antennas were used to target different sections of the course. Additionally, a second drone was flown high above the course carrying a radio repeater, helping provide a better line-of-sight contact to the camera drone following the riders when the buildings would otherwise block the signal to the pilot.

Even with all this work, the signal was still scratchy and would cut out at some points. However, with a bit of blind faith when cutting through the worst areas, the [Dutch Drone Gods] and the [Red Bull] team were able to put together an amazing FPV drone shot shadowing [Tomas Slavik] on his run down the extremely difficult urban course.

Details on the precise hardware are scarce. However, it’s something that any experienced drone builder could probably whip up without too much trouble. The idea of using a drone-based repeater is particularly exciting, and something we’re sure could help out many pilots who find themselves operating in difficult urban environments.

We’ve seen plenty of great FPV stories over the years, from early experiments in the 1980s to fun DIY cockpit builds of today. Video after the break.

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CAD Sketcher, It’s Parametric CAD For Blender

April 27, 2022 by Anne Ogborn 37 Comments

It’s very early days for CAD Sketcher, a new parametric CAD add-on for Blender by [hlorus], but it looks very promising.

We do a lot of 3D work and like Blender as an environment. It’s always annoying that Blender doesn’t do parametric modeling, so we’re forced into a dedicated CAD package. Blending the two for that robot ocelot is always particularly annoying.

CAD Sketcher lets the user make a ‘sketch’, a 2D drawing. They then constrain it, saying “this line is vertical, that line is parallel to this one”, until the sketch is fully defined. It’s a normal part of parametric modelling. This is powerful when your model needs refined over and over.

There’s an old adage, “Better a tool that does 90% of the job well than one that does 100% poorly”. For CAD systems, (and much other software), we’d suggest “Better a tool that does 90% of the job well and works with whatever does the other 10%”.

3D render of gaurd — Guard Drawn In CAD Sketcher And Blender

We tried a test part, and being in Blender’s universe showed its value. CAD Sketcher doesn’t do bevels and rounds yet, and probably won’t for a while. But Blender’s perfectly happy doing them.

It’s not going to put SolidWorks out of business any time soon, but it’s a very promising new development. We hope it gathers some community and encourage contributions.

We cover CAD frequently, like the recent advances with CadQuery and the port of OpenSCAD to WASM.

[thanks paulvdh]

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Digital To Analog In The Darkroom

April 27, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

As the world becomes more and more digital, there are still a few holdouts from the analog world we’ve left behind. Vinyl records are making quite the comeback, and film photography is still hanging on as well. While records and a turntable have a low barrier for entry, photography is a little more involved, especially when developing the film. But with the right kind of equipment you can bridge the gap from digital to analog with a darkroom setup that takes digital photographs and converts them to analog prints.

The project’s creator, [Muth], has been working on this project since he found a 4K monochrome display. These displays are often used in resin 3D printers, but he thought he could put them to use developing photographs. This is much different from traditional darkroom methods, though. The monochrome display is put into contact with photo-sensitive paper, and then exposed to light. Black pixels will block the light while white pixels allow it through, creating a digital-to-analog negative of sorts. With some calibration done to know exactly how long to expose each “pixel” of the paper, the device can create black-and-white analog images from a digital photograph.

[Muth] notes that this method isn’t quite as good as professional print, but we wouldn’t expect it to be. It creates excellent black-and-white prints with a unique method that we think generates striking results. The 4K displays needed to reproduce this method aren’t too hard to find, either, so it’s fairly accessible to those willing to build a small darkroom to experiment. For those willing to go further, take a look at some other darkroom builds we’ve seen in the past.

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DIY Bench PSU Looks Like A Million Bucks But Is Easy On The Budget

April 27, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 29 Comments

As one becomes more and more involved in hobbies that involve electronics of almost any kind, it becomes necessary to graduate from wall warts and USB power breakout boards and move up to something more substantial. One great way to do this is to repurpose an old computer PSU, and that’s exactly what the excellent writeup by [Mukesh Sankhla] shows us how to do.

Starting with an ATX power supply from a derelict computer that was otherwise heading to to the bin, [Mukesh] walks us through the teardown of the power supply as well as how we can rebuild it in a snazzy 3d printed case complete with a voltage readout.

Now it’s easy to say “Sure, this is just another ATX PSU project” but the care that went into making a nice case adds a lot to build. There’s another element that is extremely important: The power resistor across the 5 Volt power bus. There are cheap kits online that will break out an ATX PSU into banana plugs, but they omit this vital piece. Depending on the ATX power supply being used, they may be unstable without the load.

The project also leaves a lot of room for adding your own hacks such as variable voltage and current limiting. We think this PSU would be a great (and great looking) addition to any hacker’s workbench. If ATX Power Supply get your electrons flowing, check out this entire computer built into a gutted ATX PSU.

Hackaday Prize 2022: Glass Tube Solar Thermionic Converters

April 27, 2022 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Typically, if you want to convert solar energy into electrical energy, you use either photovoltaic (PV) cells, or you use the sunlight to create steam to turn a turbine. Both of these methods are well-established and used regularly in both small- and grid-scale applications. However, [Nick Poole] wanted to investigate an alternative method, using thermionic converters for solar power generation.

[Nick] has been gearing up to produce various styles of vacuum tubes, and noted that the thermionic effect that makes them work could also be used to generate electricity. They are highly inefficient and produce far less power than a photovoltaic solar cell, meaning they’re not in common use. However, as [Nick] notes, unlike PV cells etched in silicon, a thermionic converter can be built with basic glassworking tools, requiring little more than a torch, a vacuum pump, and a spot welder.

Experiments with a large lens to focus sunlight onto a 6V3A diode tube showed promise. [Nick] was able to generate half a volt, albeit at a tiny current, with the design not being optimized for thermionic conversion. Further experiments involved electrically heating a pair of diode tubes, which was able to just barely light an LED at 1.7 V and a current of 7.5 uA. The conversion efficiency was a lowly 0.00012%, around 5 orders of magnitude worse than a typical PV cell.

[Nick]’s hope is that he can produce a tube designed specifically to maximize thermionic conversion for energy generation purposes. It’s likely there is some low-hanging fruit in terms of gains to be made simply by optimizing the design for this purpose, even if the technique can’t compete with other solar generation methods.

In any case, we’re eager to see what [Nick] comes up with! We love to see makers building tubes in their own home workshops.

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2022 Hackaday Prize: Get Your Planet-Friendly Power On!

April 27, 2022 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

Time flies! This weekend marks the end of the first stage of the 2022 Hackaday Prize, and your chance to enter your alternative-energy projects. There are ten $500 prizes up for grabs, and there’s still time to whip up a project page over on Hackaday.io to showcase it.

In this round, we’re looking for projects that harvest their own energy — solar, wind, heat, vibration, you name it — or projects that make it easier to collect, store, or use renewable energy. Whether this is microwatts or megawatts, the scale of the project is up to you! As long as it’s using or making it easier to use clean energy, we want to see it.

So far, we’ve seen some great projects, ranging from a optimizes the tilt angle of a home solar installation to a demonstration of using a new type of lithium-ion capacitor to add solar power to smaller projects. We really love [MartMet]’s simple Bluetooth thermometer hack, which adds a supercapacitor and solar cell to an outdoor thermometer, and then uses hacked firmware to log the charge status over a year of use! We’re suckers for good data.

The sun is not the only game in town, though. There are a surprising number of projects based on human energy production in emergency situations, from cranking to shaking. Thermionic converters were new to us, but we love explorations of fringe tech. Other traditional favorites like wind and water may make more sense for larger applications. And don’t forget how you’re going to store all this juice you’ve collected.

[Nick Poole]’s thermionic converter array

[Anuradha Gunawardhana]’s 18650 Pack

In short, we’ve got a bunch of great entries, but we’re still missing yours! There’s no minute like the last minute: if you’ve done some work in clean or renewable energy, set yourself up a Hackaday.io project page now. You’ll help make all our projects cleaner, and stand a good chance of taking home some real money to boot!

Once we’ve handled power, the next round is “Reuse, Recycle, Revamp” where any tech that uses recycled parts or facilitates reuse, repair, or recycling is fair game!

No-Laser CNC Engraver Is Something New Under The Sun

April 27, 2022 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

Hooking up a laser to a CNC gantry isn’t exactly an Earth-shattering innovation, but it does make for a useful tool. Even a cheap diode laser mounted to an old 3D printer can do engraving, marking, or even light-duty cutting. But what about a laser engraver without the laser? Can that be of any use?

Apparently, the answer is yes, if you can harness the power of the sun. That’s what [Lucas] did with his solar-tracking CNC engraver, the build of which is shown in the video below. The idea is pretty simple — mount a decent-sized magnifying lens where the laser optics would normally go on a laser engraver, and point the thing at the sun. But as usual, the devil is in the details. The sun has a nasty habit of moving across the sky during the day, or at least appearing to, so [Lucas] has to add a couple of extra degrees of freedom to a regular X-Y CNC rig to track the sun. His tracking sensor is simplicity itself — four CdS photocells arranged with a pair of perpendicular shades, and an Arduino to drive the gimbals in the correct direction to keep all four sensors equally illuminated. He had some initial problems getting the jerkiness out of the control loop, but the tracker eventually kept the whole thing pointing right at the Sun.

So how does it work? Not bad, actually — [Lucas] managed to burn some pretty detailed designs into a piece of wood using just the sun. He mentions adding a shutter to douse the cutting beam to allow raster patterns, but even better might be a servo-controlled iris diaphragm to modulate beam intensity and control for varying sun conditions. He might also check out this solar engraver we covered previously for some more ideas, too.

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