Author: Bryan Cockfield

1755 Articles

Native Alaskan Language Reshapes Mathematics

April 18, 2023 by 83 Comments

The languages we speak influence the way that we see the world, in ways most of us may never recognize. For example, researchers report seeing higher savings rates among people whose native language has limited capacity for a future tense, and one Aboriginal Australian language requires precise knowledge of cardinal directions in order to speak at all. And one Alaskan Inuit language called Iñupiaq is using its inherent visual nature to reshape the way children learn and use mathematics, among other things.

Arabic numerals are widespread and near universal in the modern world, but except perhaps for the number “1”, are simply symbols representing ideas. They require users to understand these quantities before being able to engage with the underlying mathematical structure of this base-10 system. But not only are there other bases, but other ways of writing numbers. In the case of the Iñupiaq language, which is a base-20 system, the characters for the numbers are expressed in a way in which information about the numbers themselves can be extracted from their visual representation.

This leads to some surprising consequences, largely that certain operations like addition and subtraction and even long division can be strikingly easy to do since the visual nature of the characters makes it obvious what each answer should be. Often the operations can be seen as being done to the characters themselves, instead of in the Arabic system where the idea of each number must be known before it can be manipulated in this way.

This project was originally started as a way to make sure that the Iñupiaq language and culture wasn’t completely lost after centuries of efforts to eradicate it and other native North American cultures. But now it may eventually get its own set of Unicode characters, meaning that it could easily be printed in textbooks and used in computer programming, opening up a lot of doors not only for native speakers of the language but for those looking to utilize its unique characteristics to help students understand mathematics rather than just learn it.

Building An Electron Microscope For Research

April 14, 2023 by 10 Comments

There are a lot of situations where a research group may turn to an electron microscope to get information about whatever system they might be studying. Assessing the structure of a virus or protein, analyzing the morphology of a new nanoparticle, or examining the layout of a semiconductor all might require the use of one of these devices. But if your research involves the electron microscope itself, you might be a little more reluctant to tear down these expensive devices to take a look behind the curtain as the costs to do this for more than a few could quickly get out of hand. That’s why this research group has created their own electron detector.

Specifically, the electron detector is designed for use in a scanning electron microscope, which is typically used for inspecting the surface of a sample and retrieving a high-resolution, 3D image of it compared to transmission microscopes which can probe internal structures. The detector is built on a four-layer PCB which includes the photodiode sensing array, a series of amplifiers, and a power supply. All of the circuit diagrams and schematics are available for inspection as well thanks to the design being licensed under the open Creative Commons license. For any research team looking to build this, a bill of materials is also included, as is a set of build instructions.

While this is only one piece of the puzzle surrounding the setup and operation of an electron microscope, its arguably the most important, and also greatly lowers the barrier of entry for anyone looking to analyze electron microscope design themselves. With an open standard, anyone is free to modify or augment this design as they see fit which is a marked improvement over the closed and expensive proprietary microscopes out there. And, if low-cost microscopes are your thing be sure to check out this fluorescence microscope we featured that uses readily-available parts to dramatically lower the cost compared to commercial offerings.

Low-Cost Display Saved By RP2040

April 14, 2023 by 23 Comments

Anyone looking for components for electronics projects, especially robotics, microcontrollers, and IoT devices, has likely heard of Waveshare. They are additionally well-known suppliers of low-cost displays with a wide range of resolutions, sizes, and capabilities, but as [Dmitry Grinberg] found, they’re not all winners. He thought the price on this 2.8-inch display might outweigh its poor design and lack of documentation, and documented his process of bringing it up to a much higher standard with a custom driver for it.

The display is a 320×240 full-color LCD which also has a touchscreen function, but out-of-the-box only provides documentation for sending data to it manually. This makes it slow and, as [Dmitry] puts it, “pure insanity”. His ultimate solution after much poking and prodding was to bit-bang an SPI bus using GPIO on an RP2040 but even this wasn’t as straightforward as it should have been because there are a bunch of other peripherals, like an SD card, which share the bus. Additionally, an interrupt is needed to handle the touchscreen since its default touch system is borderline useless as well, but after everything was neatly stitched together he has a much faster and more versatile driver for this display and is able to fully take advantage of its low price.

For anyone else attracted to the low price of these displays, at least the grunt work is done now if a usable driver is needed to get them up and running. And, if you were curious as to what [Dmitry] is going to use this for, he’s been slowly building up a PalmOS port on hardware he’s assembling himself, and this screen is the perfect size and supports a touch interface. We’ll keep up with that project as it progresses, and for some of [Dmitry]’s other wizardry with esoteric displays make sure to see what he’s done with some inexpensive e-ink displays as well.

It’s Opposite Day For This Novel Wankel Engine

April 14, 2023 by 28 Comments

The Wankel engine seems to pop up in surprising places every so often, only to disappear into the ether before someone ultimately resurrects it for a new application and swears to get it right this time. Ultimately they come across the same problems that other Wankels suffered from, namely poor fuel efficiency and issues with reliability. They do have a surprising power-to-weight ratio and a low parts count, though, which is why people keep returning to this well, although this time it seems like most of the problems might have been solved simply by turning the entire design inside out.

A traditional Wankel engine has a triangular-shaped rotor that rotates around a central shaft inside an oval-shaped housing. This creates three chambers which continually revolve around inside the engine as the rotor spins. The seals that separate the chambers are notoriously difficult to lubricate and maintain. Instead of using a rotor inside of a chamber, this design called the X-Engine essentially uses a chamber inside of a rotor, meaning that the combustion chamber and the seals stay in fixed locations instead of spinning around. This allows for much better lubrication of the engine and also much higher efficiency. By flipping the design on its head it is able to maintain a low moving parts count, high compression ratio, and small power-to-weight ratio all while improving reliability and performance and adding the ability to directly inject fuel rather than rely on carburetion or other less-ideal methods of fuel delivery that other Wankels require.

Astute internal combustion aficionados will note that this engine is still of a two-stroke design, and thus not likely to fully eliminate the emissions problems with Wankels in a way that is satisfactory to regulators of passenger vehicles. Instead, the company is focusing on military, commercial, and aerospace applications where weight is a key driver of design. We’ve seen time and time again how the Wankel fails to live up to its promises though, and we hope that finally someone has cracked the code on one that solves its key issues.

Electric Volkswagen Adds Rooftop Solar

April 13, 2023 by 46 Comments

Volkswagen has continually teased the release of a new Microbus in the same way that Duke Nukem Forever strung us all along in the 00s, but unlike the fated video game it seems as though Volkswagen is finally building a hip new van rather than continually teasing its release year after year. With the clunky name of I.D. Buzz, European drivers can expect to see them later this year while those in the North American market will have to wait until 2024. That release will have a camper-equipped option though, but you may also want to equip yours with some solar panels as well.

The German tuning shop ABT is behind this design, which adds 600 watts of solar fixed to the top of the van. The solar roof will generate electricity largely to power the van’s auxiliary systems and is being aimed at those who are looking to outfit this van as a camper and need something to power things like refrigerators, interior lighting, and various electronics while on extended stays. There is also some mention of a 1000 watt option but with the limited space available on the roof may involve a side panel of some sort.

ABT is also noting that this system can be used to extend the driving range and, while technically true, don’t expect to be driving an I.D. Buzz on entirely solar power unless you’re willing to let it sit to charge the battery for days at a time. Like other solar installations on vehicles we’ve seen from various ingenious builders, the lack of real estate available on passenger vehicles limits their use largely to auxiliary electrical loads, but it can be possible to drive a vehicle on solar energy alone with the right design.

There’s Cash In Them Old Solar Panels

April 12, 2023 by 82 Comments

The first solar panels may have rolled out of Bell Labs in the 1950s, with major press around their inconsistent and patchy adoption in the decades that followed, but despite the fanfare they were not been able to compete on a price per kilowatt compared to other methods of power generation until much more recently. Since then the amount of solar farms has increased exponentially, and while generating energy from the sun is much cleaner than most other methods of energy production and contributes no greenhouse gasses in the process there are some concerns with disposal of solar panels as they reach the end of their 30-year lifespan. Some companies are planning on making money on recycling these old modules rather than letting them be landfilled. Continue reading “There’s Cash In Them Old Solar Panels” →

Disabling Intel’s Backdoors On Modern Laptops

April 12, 2023 by 32 Comments

Despite some companies making strides with ARM, for the most part, the desktop and laptop space is still dominated by x86 machines. For all their advantages, they have a glaring flaw for anyone concerned with privacy or security in the form of a hardware backdoor that can access virtually any part of the computer even with the power off. AMD calls their system the Platform Security Processor (PSP) and Intel’s is known as the Intel Management Engine (IME).

To fully disable these co-processors a computer from before 2008 is required, but if you need more modern hardware than that which still respects your privacy and security concerns you’ll need to either buy an ARM device, or disable the IME like NovaCustom has managed to do with their NS51 series laptop.

NovaCustom specializes in building custom laptops with customizations for various components and specifications to fit their needs, including options for the CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, keyboard layout, and other considerations. They favor Coreboot as a bootloader which already goes a long way to eliminating proprietary closed-source software at a fundamental level, but not all Coreboot machines have the IME completely disabled. There are two ways to do this, the HECI method which is better than nothing but not fully trusted, and the HAP bit, which completely disables the IME. NovaCustom is using the HAP bit approach to disable the IME, meaning that although it’s not completely eliminated from the computer, it is turned off in a way that’s at least good enough for computers that the NSA uses.

There are a lot of new computer manufacturers building conscientious hardware nowadays, but (with the notable exception of System76) the IME and PSP seem to be largely ignored by most computing companies we’d otherwise expect to care about an option like this. It’s certainly still an area of concern considering how much power the IME and PSP are given over their host computers, and we have seen even mainline manufacturers sometimes offer systems with the IME disabled. The only other options to solve this problem are based around specific motherboards for 8th and 9th generation Intel desktops, or you can go way back to hardware from 2008 and install libreboot to eliminate, rather than disable, the IME.

Thanks to [Maik] for the tip!