Ask Hackaday: Repair Café Or Not?

May 3, 2022 by Jenny List 82 Comments

A huge part of the work our community does, aside from making things and doing a lot of talking about the things we’d like to make, involves repair. We have the skills to fix our own stuff when it breaks, we can fix broken stuff that other people throw out when it breaks, and we can fix broken stuff belonging to other people. As our consumer society has evolved around products designed to frustrate repairs and facilitate instead the sale of new replacements for broken items this is an essential skill to keep alive; both to escape having to incessantly replace our possessions at the whim of corporate overlords, and to fight the never-ending tide of waste.

Repair Cafés: A Good Thing

A German repair cafe — A German repair café. , Redaktion NdW, CC BY 2.0

So we repair things that are broken, for example on my bench in front of me is a formerly-broken camera I’ve given a new life, on the wall in one of my hackerspaces is a large screen TV saved from a dumpster where it lay with a broken PSU, and in another hackerspace a capsule coffee machine serves drinks through a plastic manifold held together with cable ties.

We do it for ourselves, we do it within our communities, and increasingly, we do it for the wider community at large. The Repair Café movement is one of local groups who host sessions at which they repair broken items brought in by members of the public, for free. Their work encompasses almost anything you’d find in a home, from textiles and furniture to electronics, and they are an extremely good cause that should be encouraged at all costs.

For all my admiration for the Repair Café movement though, I have chosen not to involve myself in my local one. Not because they aren’t a fine bunch of people or because they don’t do an exceptionally good job, but for a different reason. And it symbolically comes back to an afternoon over thirty years ago, when sitting in a university lab in Hull, I was taught how to wire a British mains plug. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Repair Café Or Not?” →

Moon moving from inside a large glass sphere into screens of two vintage television sets

Blending Pepper’s Ghost, Synths, And Vintage TVs

May 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 10 Comments

We were recently tipped off to the work of [Joshua Ellingson], and digging in, we found an extensive collection of art and ongoing experiments, with synthesizers deforming and driving old black-and-white clips played on vintage television sets, objects jumping from screens into the real world and back, and cathode ray tube oscilloscopes drawing graphics in the air (loud sound!) (nitter). It’s recommended that you check out the short showcase videos we embedded below before you continue reading, because transcribing these visuals into words won’t do them justice.

In case you’re not up for a video, however, we shall try transcribing them anyway. Animals, shapes and figures appear in the real world, bound by glass spheres and containers, using the technique known as Pepper’s Ghost. A variety of screens used for creating that illusion – sometimes it’s a tablet, and sometimes it’s an old television set rested upside down on top of a glass aquarium. Vintage television sets are involved quite often in [Ellingson]’s experiments, typically found playing movie scenes and clips from their appropriate eras, or even used as one of the locations that a Pepper’s Ghost-enchanted object could move into — firmly a part of the same imaginary world turned real.

It’s not always that things move from a TV screen into their glass boundary, gaining an extra dimension in the process, but when it happens, the synchronization is impeccable. All of that is backed by — and usually controlled by — Moog synthesizer sounds, knob turns driving video distortions or aspects of an object movement. Not all of his clips have synthesizers, old TVs, or Pepper’s Ghost illusion in them, but every experiment of his contains at least two out of these three, working in unison to create impressions. And as much as the art value is undeniable, [Ellingson] also adds a whole lot of hacker value for us to take away!

[Ellingson] understands what goes into building optical illusions like Pepper’s Ghost — using a variety of different glassware, from Erlenmeyer flasks to teapots, producing a consistent and ongoing stream of new ideas with unique spins on them. His aim is to share and create beyond what his art can achieve, which is why he encourages us to try it out ourselves — with this one minute video of a quick Pepper’s Ghost build, using nothing but a generic tablet, an emptied-out plastic snow globe and a piece of cheap transparency film used for school projectors. If you want to go beyond, he’s made an extensive tutorial on illusions of the kind he does, their simplicities and complexities, and all the different ways you can build one.

We all benefit when an artist finds a technology and starts playing with it, closing the divide between technology and art – and by extension, the divide between technology and nature. Sometimes, it’s flowing light art installations where you are a boulder in route of plankton’s movement, other times, it’s through-hole component-packed printed circuit birds that sing not unlike the non-printed-circuit ones, or manipulation of CRT displays with function generator-driven coils to offset the beam and turn the image into a pattern of lines.

Continue reading “Blending Pepper’s Ghost, Synths, And Vintage TVs” →

Wearable Electronics Takes The 3D Printing Route

May 3, 2022 by Jenny List 6 Comments

There was a time when a cheap 3D printer was almost certain to mean an awful kit of parts, usually a so-called “Prusa i3”, which was of course as far away in quality from the machines supplied by [Josef Průša] himself as it’s possible to get. But as Chinese manufacturers such as Creality have brought machines with some quality and relaibility into the budget space these abominations have largely been crowded out. There are still cheap 3D printers to be found though, and it’s one of these that [3D Printing Professor] has mounted on his wrist (Nitter) for the ultimate in portable manufacturing.

The Easythreed K7 is a novel take on a 3D printer that positions the device more as a child’s toy than a desktop manufacturing solution. It’s somewhat limited in its capabilities by its tiny size but by all accounts it’s a usable machine, and at around $100 USD it’s about the cheapest 3D printer for sale on the likes of AliExpress. The wearable mount is probably best described as a forearm mount rather than a wrist mount, but has provision for a battery pack and a small roll of filament. And this contraption is claimed to work, but we maybe would think before committing to a day-long print with it.

This may be the smallest wearable 3D printer we’ve shown you so far, but it’s not the first. That achievement goes to Shenzhen maker [Naomi Wu], who strapped one on her back way back in 2017.

Thanks [J. Peterson] for the tip!