When Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare their notes on the week in Hackaday, you know you’ll get at least one or two bad puns. How bad? Tune in and find out.
This week, Tom Nardi visits several in-person events, and Elliot and Al talk about smart buttons, Itanium, ejecting things from a rocket, and the infinite pickle. Will Elliot build the coin flipper? Will Al use plasma at his next cookout? Hard to say.
For the can’t miss articles, this week, Al swept the category with a post on splices and another on what human junk is still sitting on the moon.
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Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- DIY Smart Button Gets Surprisingly Complicated
- Itanium: The Great X86 Replacement That Never Was
- Photographing Rocket Chute Deployment At 10 Km
- DIY Weather Stations Report In From Chernobyl
- Hacking Fermentation For Infinite Pickles From Pass-thru Bioreactor
- Using Capacitance For Extremely Sensitive Proximity Sensing
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Al’s Picks:
With Al talking about switching plastics from A to B and having to throw out the intermediate mixes. The dum dum lollipop factory does something very clever when they switch flavors. The intermediate lollipops get wrapped with a “mystery flavor” label since the output is somewhere between known existing flavors.
Oh my god. Al mentioned Jelly Belly “flops” which are the same thing, but it didn’t make it into the final mix.
DIY power profiler: 100 mOhm resistor in the negative battery lead hooked up to an oscilloscope running at a slow roll. Export the voltage trace measured across the resistor to CSV, put it in a spreadsheet program, subtract the zero offset (idle level) and add all the numbers up.
If the trace unit is volts and seconds, the result is volt-seconds. Divide by your resistor value and you get amp-seconds. Divide again by 3600 and you get amp-hours.
How many times have I done this?! I even have some big old high-wattage, low-resistance resistors that I truck out for that duty sometimes.
I gave out a huge guffaw when Al mentioned Salvage One! I loved that show as a kid and watched the pilot again last year. It ddnt disappoint.