Hackaday Links: February 4, 2024

February 4, 2024 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

Things may not have gone as planned last week for the flying cellphone on Mars, but just because Ingenuity‘s flying career is over doesn’t mean there’s no more work to do. NASA announced this week that it’s going to try a series of “wiggle” maneuvers on Ingenuity‘s rotors, in an attempt to get a better look at the damage to the blade tips and possibly get some clues as to what went wrong. The conjecture at the moment seems to be that a large area of relatively featureless terrain confused the navigation system, which uses down-facing cameras to track terrain features. If the navigation program couldn’t get a bead on exactly how far above the ground it was, it’s possible the copter came in too hard and caused the rotor tips to dig into the regolith. There seems to be some photographic suggestion of that, with what looks like divots in the ground about where you’d expect the rotor tips to dig in, and even scraps of material that look out of place and seem to be about the same color as the rotor blades. All this remains to be seen, of course, and we’re sure that NASA and JPL are poring over all available data to piece together what happened. As much as we hate to say goodbye to Ingenuity, we eagerly await the post-mortem.

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Tricky 3D Printed Joinery Problem? Give Heat Staking A Try

February 3, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

When you just can’t 3D print something as a monolithic part, you’re going to have to join pieces together. In such cases, most of us instinctively include threaded inserts or nut slots in the design, or even reach for a tube of CA glue. But perhaps you should be thinking more along the lines of heat-staking your printed parts together.

Although you might not be familiar with the term, if you’ve looked inside anything made out of plastic, chances are good you’ve seen a heat-staked joint. As [Richard Sewell] explains, a heat-staked joint is nothing more than the classic mortise-and-tenon made from plastic where the tenon stands proud of the joint face so it can be softened with heat. The tenon spreads out so the joint can’t be pulled apart. A variant on the theme includes a mortise with a generous chamfer so the melted tenon can spread out, providing not only extra resistance to pull-out be also a more flush surface.

To melt the joint, [Richard] simply uses a soldering iron and a little pressure. To spread out both the heat and the force a bit, he uses the barrel of the iron rather than a tip, although we could see a broad chisel tip being used for smaller joints. Either way, a layer of Kapton tape helps keep the iron from getting gunked up with melted plastic. [Richard] lists a host of advantages for this kind of plastic joinery, including eliminating the need for additional hardware. But we think the best feature of this joint is that by avoiding monolithic prints, each aspect of a part can have its layer lines optimized.

While it probably isn’t applicable everywhere, heat-staking looks like a technique to keep in mind. We’d love to see [Stefan] over at CNC Kitchen do some of his testing magic on these joints, like he did for threaded inserts.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 255: Balloon On The Moon, Nanotech Goblets, And USB All The Way

February 2, 2024 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

This week, Dan joined Elliot for a review of the best and brightest hacks of the week in Episode 0xFF, which both of us found unreasonably exciting; it’s a little like the base-2 equivalent of watching the odometer flip over to 99,999. If you know, you know. We had quite a bumper crop of coolness this week, which strangely included two artifacts from ancient Rome: a nanotech goblet of colloidal gold and silver, and a perplexing dodecahedron that ends up having a very prosaic explanation — probably. We talked about a weird antenna that also defies easy description, saw a mouse turned into the world’s worst camera, and learned how 3D-printed signs are a whole lot easier than neon, and not half bad looking either. As always, we found time to talk about space, like the legacy of Ingenuity and whatever became of inflatable space habitats. Back on Earth, there’s DIY flux, shorts that walk you up the mountain, and more about USB-C than you could ever want to know.

And don’t forget that to celebrate Episode 256 next week, we’ll be doing a special AMA segment where we’ll get all the regular podcast crew together to answer your questions about life, the universe, and everything. If you’ve got a burning question for Elliot, Tom, Kristina, Al, or Dan, put it down in the comment section and we’ll do our best to extinguish it.

Grab a copy for yourself if you want to listen offline.

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Hackaday Links: January 28, 2024

January 28, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

From the “No good deed goes unpunished” files, this week came news of a German programmer who probably wishes he had selected better clients. According to Heise Online (English translation), a freelance programmer — referred to only as “defendant” in the article — was retained by a company to look into a database problem in their system. His investigation revealed that the customer’s database was being filled with log messages from a third-party service called Modern Solution GmbH & Co. KG. over a MySQL connection to a remote server. Assuming this connection was dedicated for his client’s use, the programmer looked at the executable used to make the connection with a text editor, which revealed a password in plain text. Upon connecting to the remote database, he found that it not only contained data for all of Modern Solution’s customers, but also data for all the end users of their customers.

Realizing he’d unintentionally wandered into verboten territory, the programmer immediately backed out and contacted Modern Solutions. They quickly fixed the issue, and then just as quickly reported him to the police. Their “investigation” revealed that the programmer had “decompiled” the executable to obtain the password, in violation of German law. The judge agreed, stating that merely looking at and using the password constituted a criminal offense, regardless of intent and despite the fact that Modern Solution had provided the password to the programmer’s client when they sold them the software. The upshot of all of this nonsense? A €3,000 fine for the programmer, if the verdict stands on appeal. It could have been worse, though; German law allows for up to three years in prison for such offenses.

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Reviving A Sensorless X-Ray Cabinet With Analog Film

January 26, 2024 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

In the same way that a doctor often needs to take a non-destructive look inside a patient to diagnose a problem, those who seek to reverse engineer electronic systems can greatly benefit from the power of X-ray vision. The trouble is that X-ray cabinets designed for electronics are hideously expensive, even on the secondary market. Unless, of course, their sensors are kaput, in which case they’re not of much use. Or are they?

[Aleksandar Nikolic] and [Travis Goodspeed] strongly disagree, to the point that they dedicated a lot of work documenting how they capture X-ray images on plain old analog film. Of course, this is nothing new — [Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen] showed that photographic emulsions are sensitive to “X-light” all the way back in the 1890s, and film was the de facto image sensor for radiography up until the turn of this century. But CMOS sensors have muscled their way into film’s turf, to the point where traditional silver nitrate emulsions and wet processing of radiographic films, clinical and otherwise, are nearly things of the past. Continue reading “Reviving A Sensorless X-Ray Cabinet With Analog Film” →

So Long And Thanks For All The Flights: Ingenuity Permanently Grounded After 72 Flights

January 25, 2024 by Dan Maloney 43 Comments

Just a few hours ago, NASA dropped some devastating news: Ingenuity will fly no more. Three years after dropping from the belly of the Perseverance rover and after 72 flights through the thin Martian atmosphere, the little helicopter that could now can’t, after having sustained damage to one or more of its rotors during its final landing.

Shadow of *Ingenuity*‘s rotor blade, showing damage suffered during a rough landing.

NASA’s terminal diagnosis of Ingenuity comes from a photo from one of the helicopter’s cameras, which shows a chunk missing from the tip of one of its rotors, likely caused by a rough landing after transiting a flat, sandy area that may have confused the aircraft’s navigational cameras.

While this is anything but good news, it’s not at all unexpected and in a way long overdue. Ingenuity was designed for a primary mission of just five flights, which it accomplished all the way back in May of 2021. There was heavy speculation at the time that Ingenuity might not even do that; we can recall one of the team members suggesting the odds were that Ingenuity’s tenure as the first controlled powered flying machine on another world would end as twisted wreckage in the newest, smallest crater on Mars.

But happily, Ingenuity proved the oddsmakers — and possibly those wishing to temper expectations — spectacularly wrong. In fact, by the fourth flight, it was clear that Ingenuity was in it for the long haul, enough so that NASA redefined its mission to “operational demonstration” and gave it another 30 sols of flight time. This gave the team the flight time needed to prove the helicopter’s worth as a scout for Perseverance and not just a distracting sideshow from the primary mission of searching for signs of ancient life on Mars.

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This Unique Flip-Flop Uses Chemistry And Lasers

January 24, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

One of the first logic circuits most of us learn about is the humble flip-flop. They’re easy enough to build with just a couple of NOR or NAND gates, and even building one up from discrete components isn’t too much of a chore. But building a flip-flop from chemicals and lasers is another thing entirely.

That’s the path [Markus Bindhammer] took for his photochromic molecular switch. We suspect this is less of an attempt at a practical optical logic component and more of a demonstration project, but either way, it’s pretty cool. Photochromism is the property by which molecules reversibly rearrange themselves and change color upon exposure to light, the most common example being glass that darkens automatically in the sun. This principle can be used to create an optical flip-flop, which [Markus] refers to as an “RS” type but we’re pretty sure he means “SR.”

The electronics for this are pretty simple, with two laser modules and their drivers, a power supply, and an Arduino to run everything. The optics are straightforward as well — a beam splitter that directs the beams from each laser onto the target, which is a glass cuvette filled with a clear epoxy resin mixed with a photochromic chemical. [Markus] chose spiropyran as the pigment, which when bathed in UV light undergoes an intramolecular carbon-oxygen bond breakage that turns it into the dark blue pigment merocyanine. Hitting the spot with a red laser or heating the cuvette causes the C-O bond to reform, fading the blue spot.

The video below shows the intensely blue dot spot developing under UV light and rapidly fading thanks to just the ambient temperature. To make the effect last longer, [Markus] cools the target with a spritz from a CO₂ cartridge. We imagine other photochromic chemicals could also be employed here, as could some kind of photometric sensor to read the current state of the flip-flop. Even as it is, though, this is an interesting way to put chemistry and optics to work.

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