This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
In the news, we’ve launched a brand-new contest! Yes, the Green-Powered Challenge is underway, and we need your entry to truly make it a contest. You have until April 24th to enter, so show us what you can do with power you scrounge up from the environment around you!
On What’s That Sound, Kristina was leaning toward some kind of distant typing sounds, but [Konrad] knew it was our own Tom Nardi’s steam heat radiator pinging away.
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with an exploration of all the gross security vulnerabilities in a cheap WiFi extender, and we take a look inside a little black and white pay television like you’d find in a Greyhound station in the 80s and 90s.
We also discuss the idea of mixing custom spray paint colors on the fly, a pen clip that never bends out of shape, and running video through a guitar effects pedal. Finally, we discuss climate engineering with disintegrating satellites, and the curse of everything device.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.
Episode 360 Show Notes:
News:
What’s that Sound?
- Congrats to [Konrad] who knew this was Tom Nardi’s radiator!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Exploring Security Vulnerabilities In A Cheap WiFi Extender
- Vend-o-Vision: Trading Quarters For Watching TV In Public
- Using A Solid-State Elastocaloric Cooler To Freeze Water
- Color Mixing Spray Paint On The Fly
- NASA Uses Mars Global Localization As GNSS Replacement For The Perseverance Rover
- Designing A Pen Clip That Never Bends Out Of Shape
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Kristina’s Picks:
I have fiddled around with block printing, but that is next level, Kristina!
Thank you so much! :D
Very cool print!
The spray paint mixing got me thinking about progreasive cavity pumps (good luck printing these), and then about perhaps fitting a rotary encoder to a peristaltic pump in an attempt to servo out the flow pulsation.
Turns out there is a better way involving a single eccentric cylinder in place of 2-3 pinch rollers to deliver pulsation-free flow, as well as modulating it to pump with an arbitrary rate waveform:
https://www.ifte.de/mitarbeiter/lienig/ESTC_2020.pdf
*progressive
(thanks, capacitive touch)
The sound in the radiator (if it is circulating hot water) could be from the air bubbles carried by the water breaking to the surface (there’s a tiny slice of air on top of the elements). There are a lot of bubbles in the pumped hot water.
Loved this episode! The mix of quirky hacks and deep-dive tech discussions is exactly why I tune in every week. Kristina’s “What’s That Sound” segment always cracks me up, and the rubber band fridge hack blew my mind—never thought of using elastocaloric effects like that!
Regarding the robot in room localization problem. I went to a hackathon/demo where they had racing robots on a track and one of the entries used an upwards facing camera (instead of forward facing) to look at the lights and other ceiling features to learn the track. The race was setup that the human could pilot the robot for one or two laps (to teach/train the course) and then it had to be automated for the real race.