The Challenges Of Charging Drones From Power Lines

October 1, 2024 by Danie Conradie 17 Comments

Drones that charge right on the power lines they inspect is a promising concept, but comes with plenty of challenges. The Drone Infrastructure Inspection and Interaction (Diii) Group of the University of South Denmark is tackling these challenges head-on.

The gripper for these drones may seem fairly straightforward, but it needs to inductively charge, grip, and detach reliably while remaining simple and lightweight. To attach to a power line, the drone pushes against it, triggering a cord to pull the gripper closed. This gripper is held closed electromagnetically using energy harvested from the power line or the drone’s battery if the line is off. Ingeniously, this means that if there’s an electronics failure, the gripper will automatically release, avoiding situations where linemen would need to rescue a stuck drone.Accurately mapping power lines in 3D space for autonomous operation presents another hurdle. The team successfully tested mmWave radar for this purpose, which proves to be a lightweight and cost-efficient alternative to solutions like LiDAR.

We briefly covered this project earlier this year when details were limited. Energy harvesting from power lines isn’t new; we’ve seen similar concepts applied in government-sanctioned spy cameras and border patrol drones. Drones are not only used for inspecting power lines but also for more adventurous tasks like clearing debris off them with fire. Continue reading “The Challenges Of Charging Drones From Power Lines” →

Very Tiny Cube Has 384 RGB LEDs

October 1, 2024 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

When it comes to making things that glow, there are two ways to stand out from the crowd. You can make something very big, or something very small. [DIY GUY Chris] has done the latter, producing a tiny LED cube that he says is the world’s smallest.

As is so often the way, the build relies on tiny WS2812B-compatible LEDs in a 1 mm x 1 mm form factor. They’re mounted on a series of teeny interlocking PCBs that come together to build a cube that’s just 8 cubic centimeters in volume. Power is courtesy of a small lithium-ion cell that lives inside the cube. Data and power signals flow around the cube via solder connections along the edges of the faces of the cube. Running the show is an ATmega328P, the same microcontroller you’d find in an Arduino Uno. It’s responsible for sending out commands to the LEDs to create various animations.

We can’t speak to [Chris’s] claim about being the world’s smallest, but it is small. We’ve seen other builds in a similar vein, like this barely-larger D20 with a full 2400 LEDs, though. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Very Tiny Cube Has 384 RGB LEDs” →

Ceefax: The Original News On Demand

September 30, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 21 Comments

Long before we had internet newsfeeds or Twitter, Ceefax delivered up-to-the-minute news right to your television screen. Launched by the BBC in 1974, Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service, offering millions of viewers a mix of news, sports, weather, and entertainment on demand. Fast forward 50 years, and the iconic service is being honored with a special exhibition at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

At its peak, Ceefax reached over 22 million users. [Ian Morton-Smith], one of Ceefax’s original journalists, remembers the thrill of breaking stories directly to viewers, bypassing scheduled TV bulletins. The teletext interface, with its limited 80-word entries, taught him to be concise, a skill crucial to news writing even today.

We’ve talked about Ceefax in the past, including in 2022 when we explored a project bringing Ceefax back to life using a Raspberry Pi. Prior to that, we delved into its broader influence on early text-based information systems in a 2021 article.

But Ceefax wasn’t just news—it was a global movement toward interactive media, preceding the internet age. Services like Viditel and the French Minitel carried forward the idea of interactive text and graphics on screen.

Building A 3D Printed Scanning Tunneling Microscope

September 30, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 11 Comments

YouTuber [MechnicalRedPanda] has recreated a DIY STM hack we covered about ten years ago, updating it to be primarily 3D-printed, using modern electronics, making it much more accessible to many folks. This simple STM setup utilises a piezoelectric actuator constructed by deliberately cutting a piezo speaker into four quadrants. With individual drive wires attached to the four quadrants. [MechPanda] (re)discovered that piezoelectric ceramic materials are not big fans of soldering heat. Still, in the absence of ultrasonic welding equipment, he did manage to get some wires to take to the surface using low-temperature solder paste.

As you can tell, you can only image conductive samples

A makeshift probe holder was glued on the rear side of the speaker actuator, which was intended to take a super sharp needle-like piece of tungsten wire. Putting the wire in tension and cutting at a sharp angle makes it possible with many attempts to get some usable points. Usable, in this instance, means sharp down the atomic level. The sample platform, actuator mount and all the connecting parts are 3D-printed with PA-CF. This is necessary to achieve enough mechanical stability with normal room temperature fluctuations. Three precision screws are used to level the two platforms in a typical kinematic mount structure, which looks like the only hard-to-source component. A geared stepper motor attached to the probe platform is set up to allow the probe to be carefully advanced towards the sample surface. Continue reading “Building A 3D Printed Scanning Tunneling Microscope” →

Doing 1080p Video, Sort Of, On The STM32 Microcontroller

September 30, 2024 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

When you think 1080p video, you probably don’t think STM32 microcontroller. And yet! [Gabriel Cséfalvay] has pulled off just that through the creative use of on-chip peripherals. Sort of.

The build is based around the STM32L4P5—far from the hottest chip in the world. Depending on the exact part you pick, it offers 512 KB or 1 Mbyte of flash memory, 320 KB of SRAM, and runs at 120 MHz. Not bad, but not stellar.

Still, [Gabriel] was able to push 1080p at a sort of half resolution. Basically, the chip is generating a 1080p widescreen RGB VGA signal. However, to get around the limited RAM of the chip, [Gabriel] had to implement a hack—basically, every pixel is RAM rendered as 2×2 pixels to make up the full-sized display. At this stage, true 1080p looks achievable, but it’ll be a further challenge to properly fit it into memory.

Output hardware is minimal. One pin puts out the HSYNC signal, another handles VSYNC. The same pixel data is clocked out over R, G, and B signals, making all the pixels either white or black. Clocking out the data is handled by a nifty combination of the onboard DMA functionality and the OCTOSPI hardware. This enables the chip to hit the necessary data rate to generate such a high-resolution display.

There’s more work to be done, but it’s neat to see [Gabriel] get even this far with such limited hardware. We’ve seen others theorize similar feats on chips like the RP2040 in the Pi Pico, too. Video after the break.

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IPhone 15 Gets Dual SIM Through FPC Patch

September 30, 2024 by Arya Voronova 11 Comments

It can often feel like modern devices are less hackable than their thicker and far less integrated predecessors, but perhaps it’s just that our techniques need to catch up. Here’s an outstanding hack that adds a dual SIM slot to a US-sold eSIM iPhone 15/15 Pro, while preserving its exclusive mmwave module. No doubt, making use of the boardview files and schematics, it shows us that smartphone modding isn’t dead — it could be that we need to acknowledge the new tools we now have at our disposal.

When different hardware features are region-locked, sometimes you want to get the best of both worlds. This mod lets you go the entire length seamlessly, no bodges. It uses a lovely looking flexible printed circuit (FPC) patch board to tap into a debug header with SIM slot signals, and provides a customized Li-ion pouch cell with a cutout for the SIM slot. There’s just the small matter of using a CNC mill to make a cutout in the case where the SIM slot will go, and you’ll need to cut a buried trace to disable the eSIM module. Hey, we mentioned our skills needed to catch up, right? From there, it appears that iOS recognizes the new two SIM slots seamlessly.

The video is impressive and absolutely worth a watch if modding is your passion, and if you have a suitable CNC and a soldering iron, you can likely install this mod for yourself. Of course, you lose some things, like waterproofing, the eSIM feature, and your warranty. However, nothing could detract from this being a fully functional modkit for a modern-day phone, an inspiration for us all. Now, perhaps one of us can take a look at building a mod helping us do parts transplants between phones, parts pairing be damned.

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Supercon 2023 – Going Into Deep Logic Waters With The Pico’s PIO And The Pi’s SMI

September 30, 2024 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and we’ve become plenty familiar with the Pi Pico in the last three years as well. Still, these devices have a great deal of potential if you know where to look. If you wade beyond the official datasheets, you might even find more than you expected.

Kumar is presently a software engineer with Google, having previously worked for Analog Devices earlier in his career. But more than that, Kumar has been doing a deep dive into maxing out the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi and the Pi Pico, and shared some great findings in an excellent talk at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.

Continue reading “Supercon 2023 – Going Into Deep Logic Waters With The Pico’s PIO And The Pi’s SMI” →