Day: August 14, 2024

Autonomous Boat Plots Lake Beds

August 14, 2024 by 5 Comments

Although the types of drones currently dominating headlines tend to be airborne, whether it’s hobbyist quadcopters, autonomous delivery vehicles, or military craft, autonomous vehicles can take nearly any transportation method we can think of. [Clay Builds] has been hard at work on his drone which is actually an autonomous boat, which he uses to map the underwater topography of various lakes. In this video he takes us through the design and build process of this particular vehicle and then demonstrates it in action.

The boat itself takes inspiration from sailing catamarans, which have two hulls of equal size connected above the waterline, allowing for more stability and less drag than a standard single-hulled boat. This is [Clay]’s second autonomous boat, essentially a larger, more powerful version of one we featured before. Like the previous version, the hulls are connected with a solar panel and its support structure, which also provides the boat with electrical power and charges lithium-iron phosphate batteries in the hull. Steering is handled by two rudders with one on each hull, but it also employs differential steering for situations where more precise turning is required. The boat carries a sonar-type device for measuring the water depth, which is housed in a more hydrodynamic 3d-printed enclosure to reduce its drag in the water, and it can follow a waypoint mission using a combination of GPS and compass readings.

Like any project of this sort, there was a lot of testing and design iteration that had to go into this build before it was truly seaworthy. The original steering mechanism was the weak point, with the initial design based on a belt connecting the two rudders that would occasionally skip. But after a bit of testing and ironing out these kinks, the solar boat is on its way to measure the water’s depths. The project’s code as well as some of the data can be found on the project’s GitHub page, and if you’re looking for something more human-sized take a look at this solar-powered kayak instead.

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The experimental setup for entanglement-distribution experiments. (Credit: Craddock et al., PRX Quantum, 2024)

Entangled Photons Maintained Using Existing Fiber Under NYC’s Streets

August 14, 2024 by 12 Comments

Entangled photons are an ideal choice for large-scale networks employing quantum encryption or similar, as photons can use fiber-optical cables to transmit them. One issue with using existing commercial fiber-optic lines for this purpose is that these have imperfections which can disrupt photon entanglement. This can be worked around by delaying one member of the pair slightly, but this makes using the pairs harder. Instead, a team at New York-based startup Qunnect used polarization entanglement to successfully transmit and maintain thousands of photons over the course of weeks through a section of existing commercial fiber, as detailed in the recently published paper by [Alexander N. Craddock] et al. in PRX Quantum (with accompanying press release).

The entangled photons were created via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a warm rubidium vapor. This creates a photon with a wavelength of 795 nm and one with 1324 nm. The latter of which is compatible with the fiber network and is thus transmitted over the 34 kilometers. To measure the shift in polarization of the transmitted photos, non-entangled photons with a known polarization were transmitted along with the entangled ones. This then allowed for polarization compensation for the entangled photos by measuring the shift on the single photons. Overall, the team reported an uptime of nearly 100% with about 20,000 entangled photons transmitted per second.

As a proof of concept it shows that existing fiber-optical lines could in the future conceivably be used for quantum computing and encryption without upgrades.

Handsome Sim Racing Button Box Is A Super Easy Build

August 14, 2024 by 8 Comments

Sim racing is a lot more complex than playing Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit. You need buttons for all kinds of stuff, from headlights to brake balance to traction control. If you want to control all that in an intuitive and realistic manner, you’ll want to build yourself a decent button pad like [Chris Haye] has done. It’s surprisingly easy, too!

Very cool.

[Chris] is quite a serious racer, and needed four button boxes. He wanted to do this on the cheap, so he decided to build his first three boxes around the Zero Delay Arcade USB Encoder, a cheap controller board available on eBay for around £7. Arcade buttons were sourced off Amazon to populate the black project boxes which acted as the housings.

His final button pad looks straight out of a GT3 race car, but it’s the simplest of the bunch. It’s literally just a USB numpad with a carbon vinyl wrap applied and some home-printed labels. One suspects the feel isn’t particularly high-quality but the look is top tier. If you’re a streamer that wants to build a hardcore-looking setup, this is a great way to go.

[Chris] estimates that each box took maybe an hour to build, tops. It’s a great example of solution-focused design. He could have gotten out his own microcontroller and done a custom PCB and all that, and the results surely would have been good. But it would have taken far longer! It’s hard to beat the speed of wiring together Amazon arcade buttons with the Arcade USB Encoder’s pre-terminated wire harness. If you’re more interested in sim racing than building button boxes, it’s a great way to do a custom pad fast.

Best of all? [Chris] says he managed to put these all together for £60—quite a feat of bargain engineering. We’ve featured some other builds along these lines before, too—even using vintage aircraft controls! Video after the break.

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Handheld Oscilloscope Meter Reviewed

August 14, 2024 by 24 Comments

We live in a time where there’s virtually no excuse not to have some kind of oscilloscope. As [IMSAI Guy] shows in a recent video, for what you might expect to pay for a decent meter, you can now get one that includes a scope. There are several options out there but it is hard to know how much to spend to get the best possible product. The Zoyi ZT-702S that he looks at costs under $80. But is it worth it?

Scopes that connect to your PC are often very inexpensive. You can also find little toy scopes that use a microcontroller and a little LCD screen. Even though the specs on these are usually appalling, they will still let you visualize what’s happening in a circuit. Sure, you want an expensive bench scope with lots of channels sometimes, but often, you just need to see a signal in broad strokes. Having a scope and a meter together is very handy.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 796: Homebrew, I’m More Of A Whopper Guy

August 14, 2024 by 1 Comment

This week Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with John Britton and Mike McQuaid about Homebrew! That’s the missing package manager for macOS; and Workbrew, the commercial offering built on top of it. We cover lots of territory, like why the naming scheme sounds like it was conceived during a pub visit, how Workbrew helps businesses actually use Homebrew, and why you might even want to run Homebrew on a Linux machine!

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Hacker Tactic: Pimp Your Probes

August 14, 2024 by 30 Comments

Is your multimeter one of your trusty friends when building up boards, repairing broken gadgets, and reverse-engineering proprietary ones? Is it accompanied by a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope at times?

Having a proper probing setup is crucial for many a task, and the standard multimeter probes just won’t do. As a PCB is slipping under your grip as you’re trying to hold the standard multimeter probes on two points at once, inevitably you will ponder whether you could be doing things differently. Here’s an assortment of probing advice I have accumulated.

Beyond The Norm

There’s the standard advice – keep your board attached firmly to a desk, we’ve seen gadgets like the Stickvise help us in this regard, and a regular lightweight benchtop vise does wonders. Same goes for using fancy needle probes that use gravity to press against testpoints – they might be expensive, but they are seriously cool, within limits, and you can even 3D-print them!

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A Really Low Level Guide To Doing Ethernet On An FPGA

August 14, 2024 by 7 Comments

With so much of our day-to-day networking done wirelessly these days, it can be easy to forget about Ethernet. But it’s a useful standard and can be a great way to add a reliable high-throughput network link to your projects. To that end, [Robert Feranec] and [Stacy Rieck] whipped up a tutorial on how to work with Ethernet on FPGAs. 

As [Robert] explains, “many people would like to transfer data from FPGA boards to somewhere else.” That basically sums up why you might be interested in doing this. The duo spend over an hour stepping through doing Ethernet at a very low level, without using pre-existing IP blocks to make it easier. The video explains the basic architecture right down to the physical pins on the device and what they do, all the way up to the logic blocks inside the device that do all the protocol work.

If you just want to get data off an embedded project, you can always pull in some existing libraries to do the job. But if you want to really understand Ethernet, this is a great place to start. There’s no better way to learn than doing it yourself. Files are on GitHub for the curious. Continue reading “A Really Low Level Guide To Doing Ethernet On An FPGA” →