What have you been working on during the Great Chip Shortage? [NanoRobotGeek] has been living up to their handle and building BEAM robots that are smaller than any we’ve seen before. What are BEAM robots, you say? Technically it stands for Biology Electronics Aesthetics and Mechanics, but basically the idea is to mimic the movement of bugs, usually with found components, and often with solar power. Here’s a bunch of tutorials to get you started.
This was before the large, flat storage capacitor came and covered everything up.
This here is an example of a photovore or photopopper — it moves toward light using simple logic by charging up a capacitor and employing a voltage monitor to decide when there’s enough to run two tiny vibration motors that make up its legs and feet.
[NanoRobotGeek] started in a great place when they found these 25% efficient monocrystalline solar panels. They will even make the bot move indoors! If you want to build one of these, you can’t beat [NanoRobotGeek]’s guide. Be sure to watch it toddle around in the demo video after the break.
You know, we’re not sure how this escaped our attention for so long. Blame it on the summer heat. Did you know that [Look Mum No Computer] opened a museum of obsolete technology a few weeks ago?
This Museum is (Not) Obsolete is located by the seaside in the Ramsgate section of Kent, England, where you’ll also find the Micro Museum, a collection of computing and video game history. [LMNK] says it took 10 months to build the museum, which is a maze of vintage delights including decades of computers and computer accessories, signal generators, VFDs, vacuum tubes, old phone equipment, and 50 years’ worth of 150-in-one electronics kits. This list doesn’t even sort of start to scratch the surface.
Around every turn there are forgotten technological gems and never-heard-ofs, plus the space is peppered with [LMNK]’s own superb synth creations. (Who could forget the Furby Organ?) The goal is to make it as interactive as possible, and to keep growing the collection. So far, [LMNK] has welcomed visitors of all backgrounds and ages, which is exactly what he was after. Can’t quite make it to Ramsgate? Us either. Do what we did and take the video tour below.
We’ve all heard of the Fisher Space Pen. Heck, there’s even an episode of Seinfeld that focuses on this fountain of ink, which is supposed to be ready for action no matter what you throw at it. The legend of the Fisher Space Pen says that it can and will write from any angle, in extreme temperatures, underwater, and most importantly, in zero gravity. While this technology is a definite prerequisite for astronauts in space, it has a long list of practical Earthbound applications as well (though it would be nice if it also wrote on any substrate).
You’ve probably heard the main myth of the Fisher Space Pen, which is that NASA spent millions to develop it, followed quickly by the accompanying joke that the Russian cosmonauts simply used pencils. The truth is, NASA had already tried pencils and decided that graphite particles were too much of an issue because they would potentially clog the instruments, like bags of ruffled potato chips and unsecured ant farms.
A Space-Worthy Instrument Indeed
Usually, it’s government agencies that advance technology, and then it trickles down to the consumer market at some point. But NASA didn’t develop the Space Pen. No government agency did. Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company privately spent most of the 1960s working on a pressurized pen that didn’t require gravity in the hopes of getting NASA’s attention and business. It worked, and NASA motivated him to keep going until he was successful.
Then they tested the hell out of it in all possible positions, exposed it to extreme temperatures between -50 °F and 400 °F (-45 °C to 204 °C), and wrote legible laundry lists in atmospheres ranging from pure oxygen to a total vacuum. So, how does this marvel of engineering work?
The Fisher Space Pen’s ink cartridge is pressurized to 45 PSI with nitrogen, which keeps oxygen out in the same manner as potato chip bags. Inside is a particularly viscous, gel-like ink that turns to liquid when it meets up with friction from the precision-fit tungsten carbide ballpoint.
Between the viscosity and the precision fit of the ballpoint, the pen shouldn’t ever leak, but as you’ll see in the video below, (spoiler alert!) snapping an original Space Pen cartridge results in a quick flood of thick ooze as the ink is forced out by the nitrogen.
Do you kind of want a macropad, but aren’t sure that you would use it? Hackaday alum [Jeremy Cook] is now making and selling the JC Pro Macro on Tindie, which is exactly what it sounds like — a Pro Micro-based macro keypad with an OLED screen and a rotary encoder. In the video below, [Jeremy] shows how he made it into a music maker by adding a speaker and a small solenoid that does percussion, all while retaining the original macro pad functionality.
[Jeremy]’s original idea for a drum was to have a servo seesawing a chopstick back and forth on the table as one might nervously twiddle a pencil. That didn’t work out so well, so he switched to the solenoid and printed a thing to hold it upright, and we absolutely love it. The drum is controlled with the rotary encoder: push to turn the beat on or off and crank it to change the BPM.
To make it easier to connect up the solenoid and speaker, [Jeremy] had a little I²C helper board fabricated. There’s one SVG connection and another with power and ground swapped in the event it is needed. If you’re interested in the JC Pro Macro, you can pick it up in various forms over on Tindie. Of course, you might want to wait for version 2, which is coming to Kickstarter in October.
I keep saying I need to stay away from auction sites, but then I wouldn’t have as much fodder for Hackaday, would I? As I write this, I’m waiting on a Dell AT101W, which will be my first keeb with Alps switches. Well, hopefully it has Alps SKCM salmon or black switches — according to Deskthority, it might have rubber domes. If it doesn’t keyboard, I will probably salvage the switches and build something more ergonomic. Either way, I’m thinking we need a post about Alps switches, because some people think they’re even better than Cherry MX switches.
Human activity may be the main cause of climate change, but all these cows milling and mooing about don’t help, either. Everyone knows that cows produce methane-laden flatulence, but there’s another problem — their urine contains ammonia. The nitrogen leeches into the soil and turns into nitrous oxide, which is no laughing matter. So what’s the answer, giant diapers? No, just train them to use a toilet instead of the soil-let.
A pair of researchers from the University of Auckland traveled to a research institute’s farm in Germany with the hope of training a group of 16 calves to do their business in a special pen. The “MooLoo” is painted bright green and carpeted with artificial turf so it’s less weird for the cows. First they left the calves in the pen until they peed, and then gave it a reward of sugar water. From there, they started extended the animals’ distance from the MooLoo. Whenever the calves thought outside the box, they would be sprayed with water for three seconds. The results are kind of surprising: within an average of 15-20 urination sessions, 11 of the 16 cows had been trained successfully and were using the MooLoo 75% of the time. Watch a calf earn some sugar water after the break.
German cows mostly live in barns, but millions of other cows spend much of their time outside. So, how would that work? The researchers believe that cows could be trained to go when they gather for milking time. Makes sense to us, but how do you train cows on a large scale? Maybe with bovine VR?
How often does this happen to you? You find yourself describing something that happened in a game to someone, and they’re not sure they know what part of the map you’re talking about, or they’ve never gotten that far. Wouldn’t it be cool to make a bookmark in a video game so you can jump right to the beginning of the action and show your friend what you mean using the actual game?
That’s the idea behind [Joël Franusic] and [Adam Smith]’s fantastic Playable Quotes for Game Boy — clip-making that creates a 4-D nugget of gameplay that can either be viewed as a video, or played live within the bounds of the clip. The system is built on a modified version of the PyBoy emulator.
Left: the full game ROM. Right: a bookmarked slice of the game ROM with the rest set to zero.
Basically, a Playable Quote is made up of a save state and all that entails, plus a slice of the game’s ROM that includes just enough game data to recreate an interactive clip. Everything is zipped up and steganographically encoded into a PNG file. Here’s a Tetris quote you can play (or watch) right now — you might recognize it from the post thumbnail. You’ll find the others on the games site, which allows people to create and share and build on each other’s work.
There’s so much more that can be done with this type of immersive and interactive tool outside the realm of games, and we’re excited to see where this leads and what people do with it.
![[Look Mum No Computer] sits inside his new museum of obsolete technology and synth oddities.](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/this-museum-is-not-obsolete-800.jpeg?w=600&h=450)
