Hackaday Podcast 198: Major Tom On The ISS, 3DP Ovals And Overhangs, Inside A Mini Cheetah Clone

December 23, 2022 by Dan Maloney No comments

As we slide into the Christmas break, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney look at the best and brightest of this week’s hacks. It wasn’t an easy task — so much good stuff to choose from! But they figured it out, and talked about everything from impossible (and semi-fractal) 3D printing overhangs and the unfortunate fishies of Berlin’s ex-aquarium, to rolling your own FM radio station and how a spinning Dorito of doom is a confusing way to make an electric vehicle better.

Think it’s no fun when your friend forgets to pick you up at the airport? Wait until you hear about what it’s like to get stuck on the ISS, and the incredibly risky way you might have to get home. Interested in the anatomy and physiology of a cloned robo-dog? Then let the master do a teardown and give you his insight. We’ll make some time for tea, cross our eyes for stereo photos, and dive into the mechanics of the USB-C.

Download the podcast and put it on a minidisc for the reindeer.

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!

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Old Robotic Vacuum Gets A New RC Lease On Life

December 22, 2022 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

To our way of thinking, the whole purpose behind robotic vacuum cleaners is their autonomy. They’re not particularly good at vacuuming, but they are persistent about it, and eventually get the job done with as little human intervention as possible. So why in the world would you want to convert a robotic vacuum to radio control?

For [Lucas], the answer was simple: it was a $20 yard sale find, so why not? Plus, he’s got some secret evil plan to repurpose the suckbot for autonomous room mapping, which sounds like a cool project that would benefit from a thorough knowledge of this little fellow’s anatomy and physiology. The bot in question is a Hoover Quest. Like [Lucas] we didn’t know that Hoover made robotic vacuums (Narrator: they probably don’t) but despite generally negative online reviews by users, he found it to be a sturdily built and very modular and repairable unit.

After an initial valiant attempt at reverse engineering the bot’s main board — a project we encourage [Lucas] to return to eventually — he settled for just characterizing the bot’s motors and sensors and building his own controller. The Raspberry Pi Zero he chose may seem like overkill, but he already had it set up to talk to a PS4 game controller, so it made sense — right up until he released the Magic Smoke within it. A backup Pi took the sting out of that, and as the brief video below shows, he was finally able to get the bot under his command.

[Lucas] has more plans for his new little buddy, including integrating the original sensors and adding new ones. Given its intended mission, we’d say a lidar sensor would be a good addition, but that’s just a guess. Whatever he’s got in store for this, we’re keen to hear what happens.

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Big Chemistry: Liquefied Natural Gas

December 21, 2022 by Dan Maloney 44 Comments

The topic of energy has been top-of-mind for us since the first of our ancestors came down out of the trees looking for something to eat that wouldn’t eat them. But in a world where the neverending struggle for energy has been abstracted away to the flick of a finger on a light switch or thermostat, thanks to geopolitical forces many of us are now facing the wrath of winter with a completely different outlook on what it takes to stay warm.

The problem isn’t necessarily that we don’t have enough energy, it’s more that what we have is neither evenly distributed nor easily obtained. Moving energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed is rarely a simple matter, and often poses significant and interesting engineering challenges. This is especially true for sources of energy that don’t pack a lot of punch into a small space, like natural gas. Getting it across a continent is challenging enough; getting it across an ocean is another thing altogether, and that’s where liquefied natural gas, or LNG, comes into the picture.

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More Detail On That Fantastic Lego OLED Brick

December 20, 2022 by Dan Maloney 39 Comments

It’s always great when we get a chance to follow up on a previous project with more information, or further developments. So we’re happy that [“Ancient” James Brown] just dropped a new video showing the assembly of his Lego brick with a tiny OLED screen inside it. The readers are too, apparently — we got at least half a dozen tips on this one.

We’ve got to admit that this one’s a real treat, with a host of interesting skills on display. Our previous coverage on these bedazzled bricks was disappointingly thin on details, and now the original tweets even seem to have disappeared entirely. In case you didn’t catch the original post, [James] found a way to embed a microcontroller and a remarkably small OLED screen into a Lego-compatible brick — technically a “slope 45 2×2, #3039” — that does a great job of standing in for a tiny computer monitor.

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Mouse Whisperer Keeps You Working, Even When You Need A Break

December 19, 2022 by Dan Maloney 144 Comments

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, right? What about when life hands you annoyingly intrusive work-from-home policies that require you to physically stay at your computer even though you really, REALLY need to go to the bathroom, but can’t be trusted to act like a responsible adult who won’t get diverted by TV or the fridge on the way back? In that case, you build something like the Mouse Whisperer — because malicious compliance is the best kind of compliance.

To be fair, [andrey.malyshenko] does list other plausible use cases for what amounts to an automatic mouse wiggler. Like many of us, [andrey] isn’t a fan of logging back in from screen locks, and recognizes that not absolutely every minute of work requires staring at one’s screen. There’s also the need for bio-breaks, of course, and the Mouse Whisperer is designed to accommodate these use cases and more.

The design is quite compact, occupying barely more space than a wireless mouse dongle. Plugged into a USB port, the ATtiny85 mostly sits idle, waiting to detect the touch of a finger on an exposed pad via a TTP223. The dongle then goes into a routine that traces lazy circles with the mouse pointer, plus flashes an RGB LEB on the board, because blinkenlights are cool. The mouse wiggling continues until you come back from your Very Important Business and touch the pad again.

Now, if anyone is actually monitoring you remotely, the circling mouse pointer is going to look a wee bit sus. Fear not, though — the code uses a *.h file to define the circle, so other patterns should be possible. Either way, the Mouse Whisperer is a nice solution, and it’s considerably more compact and integrated than some of the alternatives we’ve seen.

Hackaday Links: December 18, 2022

December 18, 2022 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

By now everyone has probably seen the devastation wrought by the structural failure of what was once the world’s largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium. The scale of the tank, which until about 5:50 AM Berlin time on Friday graced the lobby of the Raddison Blu hotel, was amazing — 16 meters tall, 12 meters in diameter, holding a million liters of saltwater and some 1,500 tropical fish. The tank sat atop a bar in the hotel lobby and was so big that it even had an elevator passing up through the middle of it.

But for some reason, the tank failed catastrophically, emptying its contents into the hotel lobby and spilling the hapless fish out into the freezing streets of Berlin. No humans were killed by the flood, which is miraculous when you consider the forces that were unleashed here. Given the level of destruction, the displaced hotel guests, and the fact that a €13 million structure just up and failed, we’re pretty sure there will be a thorough analysis of the incident. We’re pretty interested in why structures fail, so we’ll be looking forward to finding out the story here.

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Citizen-Driven Network Monitors Public Service Radio For Natural Disaster Alerts

December 17, 2022 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Time is of the essence in almost every emergency situation, especially when it comes to wildfires. A wind-driven fire can roar across a fuel-rich landscape like a freight train, except one that can turn on a dime or jump a mile-wide gap in a matter of seconds. Usually, the only realistic defense against fires like these is to get the hell out of their way as soon as possible and make room for the professionals to do what they can to stop the flames.

Unfortunately, most people living in areas under threat of wildfires and other natural disasters are often operating in an information vacuum. Official channels take time to distribute evacuation orders, and when seconds count, such delays can cost lives. That’s the hole that Watch Duty seeks to fill.

Watch Duty is a non-profit wildfire alerting, mapping, and tracking service that provides near-real-time information to those living in wildfire country. Their intelligence is generated by a network of experienced fire reporters, who live in wildfire-prone areas and monitor public service radio transmissions and other sources to get a picture of what’s going on in their specific area. When the data indicate an incident is occurring, maps are updated and alerts go out via a smartphone app. Reporters have to abide by a strict code of conduct designed to ensure the privacy of citizens and the safety of first responders.

While Watch Duty’s network covers a substantial area of California — the only state covered so far — there were still a significant number of dead zones, mostly in the more remote areas of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and in the northern coastal regions. To fill these gaps, Watch Duty recently launched Watch Duty Echo, which consists of a network of remote listening posts.

Each station is packed with RTL-SDR receivers that cover a huge swath of spectrum used by the local fire, law enforcement, EMS agencies — any organization likely to be called to respond to an incident. In addition, each station has an SDR dedicated to monitoring ADS-B transponders and air band frequencies, to get a heads-up on incidents requiring aerial support. The listening posts have wideband discone antennas and a dedicated 1090-MHz ADS-B antenna, with either a cellular modem or a Starlink terminal to tie into the Watch Duty network.

Hats off to the folks at Watch Duty for putting considerable effort into a system like this and operating it for the public benefit. Those who choose to live close to nature do so at their own risk, of course, but a citizen-driven network that leverages technology can make that risk just a little more manageable.