Simple 3D-Printed Table Loom For Complex Weavings

August 17, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 16 Comments

The loom has been a transformative invention throughout history, shaping the textile industry from simple hand looms to complex, fully automated machines. Now, thanks to advancements in 3D printing, this age-old craft is being revitalized by modern makers. One such creator, [Fraens], has recently designed a unique 3D-printed table loom with eight shafts, offering a simpler yet innovative approach to weaving. This project is a fresh take on traditional looms, blending centuries of design knowledge with contemporary technology.

[Fraens], a longtime enthusiast of looms, has spent considerable time studying the countless designs that have evolved over more than 200 years. Drawing inspiration from these, he has crafted a more accessible version—a table loom that can be operated using levers to control the warp threads. Unlike larger, more complex looms, this 3D-printed model allows users to experiment with various weaving patterns easily, using different colors and sequences to create beautiful, intricate designs. [Fraens] provides guidance on how to adapt patterns meant for larger looms to this compact, lever-operated version on his website and in a detailed video tutorial.

This project is perfect for anyone interested in weaving or DIY technology. [Fraens]’ 3D-printed loom offers a new way to explore textile creation, making it both approachable and rewarding. To see this innovative loom in action and learn how to build your own, check out the video below.

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Retrotechtacular: Powerline Sagging And Stringing In The 1950s

August 17, 2024 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

While high-voltage transmission lines are probably the most visible components of the electrical grid, they’re certainly among the least appreciated. They go largely unnoticed by the general public — quick, name the power line closest to you right now — at least until a new one is proposed, causing the NIMBYs and BANANAs to come out in force. To add insult to injury, those who do notice the megastructures that make modern life possible rarely take a moment to appreciate the engineering that goes into stringing up hundreds of miles of cable and making sure it stays up.

Not so the Bonneville Power Administration, the New Deal-era federal agency formed to exploit the hydroelectric abundance of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, which produced this 1950 gem detailing the stringing and sagging of power lines. Unsurprisingly, the many projects needed to wire together the often remote dams to the widely distributed population centers in an area that was only just starting to see growth began in the BPA’s offices, where teams of engineers hunched over desks worked out the best routes. Paper, pencil, and slide rules were the tools of the trade, along with an interesting gadget called a conductor sag template, a hardware implementation of the catenary equation that allowed the “sagger” to determine the height of each tower. The conductors, either steel-cored aluminum or pure copper, were also meticulously selected based on tensile strength, expected wind and ice loading, and the electrical load the line was expected to carry.

Once the engineers had their say, the hard work of physically stringing the wires began out in the field. One suspects that the work today is much the same as it was almost eighty years ago, save for much more stringent health and safety regulations. The prowess needed to transfer the wires from lifting sheaves to the insulators is something to behold, and the courage required to work from ladders hanging from wires at certain death heights is something to behold. But to our mind, the real heroes were the logistics fellows, who determined how much wire was needed for each span and exactly where to stage the reels. It’s worth sparing a moment’s thought for the daring photographer who captured all this action, likely with little more than a leather belt and hemp rope for safety.

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Spy Tech: Making Microdots

August 17, 2024 by Al Williams 17 Comments

It isn’t just a spy movie trope: secret messages often show up as microdots. [The Thought Emporium] explores the history of microdots and even made a few, which turned out to be — to quote the video you can see below — “both easier than you might think, and yet also harder in other ways.”

If you want to hide a secret message, you really have two problems. The first is actually encoding the message so only the recipient can read it. However, in many cases, you also want the existence of the message to be secret. After all, if an enemy spy sees you with a folder of encrypted documents, your cover is blown even if they don’t know what the documents say.

Today, steganography techniques let you hide messages in innocent-looking images or data files. However, for many years, microdots were the gold standard for hiding secret messages and clandestine photographs. The microdots are typically no bigger than a millimeter to make them easy to hide in plain sight.

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40,000 FPS Omega camera captures Olympic photo-finish

Olympic Sprint Decided By 40,000 FPS Photo Finish

August 17, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 55 Comments

Advanced technology played a crucial role in determining the winner of the men’s 100-meter final at the Paris 2024 Olympics. In a historically close race, American sprinter Noah Lyles narrowly edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by just five-thousandths of a second. The final decision relied on an image captured by an Omega photo finish camera that shoots an astonishing 40,000 frames per second.

This cutting-edge technology, originally reported by PetaPixel, ensured the accuracy of the result in a race where both athletes recorded a time of 9.78 seconds. If SmartThings’ shot pourer from the 2012 Olympics were still around, it could once again fulfill its intended role of celebrating US medals.

Omega, the Olympics’ official timekeeper for decades, has continually innovated to enhance performance measurement. The Omega Scan ‘O’ Vision Ultimate, the camera used for this photo finish, is a significant upgrade from its 10,000 frames per second predecessor. The new system captures four times as many frames per second and offers higher resolution, providing a detailed view of the moment each runner’s torso touches the finish line. This level of detail was crucial in determining that Lyles’ torso touched the line first, securing his gold medal.

This camera is part of Omega’s broader technological advancements for the Paris 2024 Olympics, which include advanced Computer Vision systems utilizing AI and high-definition cameras to track athletes in real-time. For a closer look at how technology decided this historic race, watch the video by Eurosport that captured the event.

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A small physical version of the game 2048, played with LEDs as numbers and tilt for input.

2024 Tiny Games Challenge: It’s 2048, But With LEDs

August 17, 2024 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Remember the game 2048? You slide numbered tiles around on a grid, combining them until you have one tile with a value of 2048 (although it’s possible to go higher). Legend has it that 2048 was created by a bored teenager in the space of a weekend to see if he could program a game from scratch.

It only took a couple of weekends for [David] to get Tiny2048 up and running. In this version, each RGB value represents a number value, and input comes from a rudimentary gesture detector — tilt it this way and that to move the LEDs and combine the ‘numbers’. As you might imagine, it was a bit tricky to use colors to represent numbers, so each one had to be sufficiently unique.

[David] says that the LED matrix is a string of WS2812 LEDs in a grid formation, controlled by an ESP32-S3-MINI-1. Although this may be overkill, [David] broke out a bunch of IO at the top of the board so it can be used in the future as a dev board. Be sure to check it out in blinkenlight action after the break!

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Your Data In The Cloud

August 17, 2024 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

I try not to go off on security rants in the newsletter, but this week I’m unable to hold back. An apparent breach of a data aggregator has resulted in a monster dataset of US, UK, and Canadian citizens names, addresses, and social security numbers. As a number of reports have pointed out, the three billion records in the breach likely contain duplicate individuals, because they include all the addresses where you’ve lived, and there have only been on the order of 450 million US social security numbers issued anyway.

But here’s the deal. Each of these data aggregators, and each of the other companies that keep tons of data on you, are ticking time bombs. Maybe not every one of them gets breached, but there’s certainly enough incentive for the bad guys to try to do so. (They are looking to sell the NPD dataset mentioned above for $3.5 million.)

My gut feeling is that eventually all of the information on everyone will be released. Maybe then it will cease to be interesting to new crops of crooks, because there’s nothing new to learn.

On the other hand, the sheer quantity of identity thefts that this, and future breaches, will unleash on us all is mind-boggling. In the case of legitimate data aggregators like this one, requesting to have had your data out of their dataset appears to have been a viable defense. But for every one legit operator, there are others that simply track you. When they get hacked, you lose.

This breach is likely going to end in a large lawsuit against the company in question, but it almost certainly won’t be big enough to cover the damage to everyone in the affected countries. Is it time that companies that hold large datasets will have to realize that the data is a liability as well as an asset?

For years, the first Air Force One sat neglected and forgotten in an open field at Arizona’s Marana Regional Airport. (Credit: Dynamic Aviation)

The First Air Force One And How It Was Nearly Lost Forever

August 17, 2024 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Although the designation ‘Air Force One’ is now commonly known to refer to the airplane used by the President of the United States, it wasn’t until Eisenhower that the US President would make significant use of a dedicated airplane. He would have a Lockheed VC-121A kitted out to act as his office as commander-in-chief. Called the Columbine II after the Colorado columbine flower, it served a crucial role during the Korean War and would result the coining of the ‘Air Force One’ designation following a near-disaster in 1954.

This involved a mix-up between Eastern Air Lines 8610 and Air Force 8610 (the VC-121A). After the Columbine II was replaced with a VC-121E model (Columbine III), the Columbine II was mistakenly sold to a private owner, and got pretty close to being scrapped.

In 2016, the plane made a “somewhat scary and extremely precarious” 2,000-plus-mile journey to Bridgewater, Virginia, to undergo a complete restoration. (Credit: Dynamic Aviation)

Although nobody is really sure how this mistake happened, it resulted in the private owner stripping the airplane for parts to keep other Lockheed C-121s and compatible airplanes flying. Shortly before scrapping the airplane, he received a call from the Smithsonian Institution, informing him that this particular airplane was Eisenhower’s first presidential airplane and the first ever Air Force One. This led to him instead fixing up the airplane and trying to sell it off. Ultimately the CEO of the airplane maintenance company Dynamic Aviation, [Karl D. Stoltzfus] bought the partially restored airplane after it had spent another few years baking in the unrelenting sun.

Although in a sorry state at this point, [Stoltzfus] put a team led by mechanic [Brian Miklos] to work who got the airplane in a flying condition by 2016 after a year of work, so that they could fly the airplane over to Dynamic Aviation facilities for a complete restoration. At this point the ‘nuts and bolts’ restoration is mostly complete after a lot of improvisation and manufacturing of parts for the 80 year old airplane, with restoration of the Eisenhower-era interior and exterior now in progress. This should take another few years and another $12 million or so, but would result in a fully restored and flight-worthy Columbine II, exactly as it would have looked in 1953, plus a few modern-day safety upgrades.

Although [Stoltzfus] recently passed away unexpectedly before being able to see the final result, his legacy will live on in the restored airplane, which will after so many years be able to meet up again with the Columbine III, which is on display at the National Museum of the USAF.