Mining And Refining: Cobalt, The Unfortunately Necessary Metal

October 18, 2022 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

The story of humankind is largely a tale of conflict, often brought about by the uneven distribution of resources. For as long as we’ve been down out of the trees, and probably considerably before that too, our ancestors have been struggling to get what they need to survive, as often as not at the expense of another, more fortunate tribe. Food, water, land, it doesn’t matter; if They have it and We don’t, chances are good that there’s going to be a fight.

Few resources are as unevenly distributed across our planet as cobalt is. The metal makes up only a fraction of a percent of the Earth’s crust, and commercially significant concentrations are few and far between, enough so that those who have some often end up at odds with those who need it. And need it we do; what started in antiquity as mainly a rich blue pigment for glass and ceramics has become essential for important industrial alloys, high-power magnets, and the anodes of lithium batteries, among other uses.

Getting access to our limited supply of cobalt and refining it into a useful metal isn’t a trivial process, and unfortunately its outsized importance to technological society forces it into a geopolitical role that has done a lot to add to human misery. Luckily, market forces and new technology are making once-marginal sources viable, which just may help us get the cobalt we need without all the conflict.

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Playdate Handheld Turned Typewriter

October 18, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

The Playdate is an interesting gaming system. It’s a handheld, has a black and white screen, and superficially reminds us a little bit of the original Game Boy, right down to the button layout. But the fact that it has a second controller that pops out of the side, that this controller is a crank, and that the whole system was made by the same people that made Untitled Goose Game, makes us quite intrigued. Apparently it has made an impact on others, too, because this project turns the gaming system into a typewriter.

The Playdate doesn’t have native support for USB accessories unless it’s plugged into this custom 3D printed dock. Inside of the dock is a Teensy 4.1 which handles some translation between the keyboard and the console. Once the dock is taken care of the text editor needs to be side-loaded to the device as well. The word processor has the ability to move the cursor around, insert and delete text, and the project’s creator, [t0mg], plans to add more features in future versions like support for multiple files, changing the font, and a few other things as well.

For anyone interested in recreating this project, all of the printable files, the text editor, and the schematics are all available in the GitHub repo. It’s an impressive project for a less well-known console that we haven’t seen many other hacks for, unless you count this one-off Arduboy project which took some major inspiration from the Playdate’s crank controller.

Kodak Film Factory Revealed

October 18, 2022 by Dave Walker 50 Comments

Anybody born before the mid 1990s will likely remember film cameras being used to document their early years. Although the convenience of digital cameras took over and were then themselves largely usurped by mobile phones, there is still a surprising variety of photographic film being produced. Despite the long pedigree, how many of us really know what goes into making what is a surprisingly complex and exacting product? [Destin] from SmarterEveryDay has been to Rochester, NY to find out for himself and you can see the second in a series of three hour-long videos shedding light on what is normally the strictly lights-out operation of film-coating.

Kodak first digital camera 1975 — Kodak’s first attempt at a digital camera in 1975. The form-factor still left something to be desired…

Kodak have been around in one form or another since 1888, and have been producing photographic film since 1889. Around the turn of the Millennium, it looked as though digital photography (which Kodak invented but failed to significantly capitalize on) would kill off film for good, and in 2012 Kodak even went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which gave it time to reorganize the business.

They dramatically downsized their film production to meet what they considered to be the future demand, but in a twist of fortunes, sales have surged in the last five years after a long decline. So much so, in fact, that Kodak have gradually grown from running a single shift five days per week a few years ago, to a 24/7 operation now. They recently hired 300 Film Technicians and are still recruiting for more, to meet the double-digit annual growth in demand.

[Destin] goes to great lengths to explain the process, including making a 3D model of the film factory, to better visualize the facility, and lots of helpful animations. The sheer number of steps is mind-boggling, especially when you consider the precision required at every step and the fact that the factory runs continuously… in the dark, and is around a mile-long from start to finish. It’s astonishing to think that this process (albeit at much lower volumes, and with many fewer layers) was originally developed before the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight.

We recently covered getting a vintage film scanner to work with Windows 11, and a little while back we showed you the incredible technology used to develop, scan and transmit film images from space in the 1960s.

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