The third and final round of the 2024 Supercon talks announcements brings us to the end, and the full schedule is now up on Hackaday.io.
With Supercon just a couple weeks away, we hope you have your tickets already! Stay tuned tomorrow for a badge reveal.
Continue reading “2024 Supercon: Third Round Of Super Speakers”
Well, that was “fun”. Last week, we wrote a newsletter post about the state of Hackaday’s comments. We get good ones and bad ones, and almost all the time, we leave you all up to your own devices. But every once in a while, it’s good to remind people to be nice to our fellow hackers who get featured here, because after all they are the people doing the work that gives us something to read and write about. The whole point of the comment section is for you all to help them, or other Hackaday readers who want to follow in their footsteps.
Someone decided to let loose a comment-reporting attack. It works like this: you hit the “report comment” button on a given comment multiple times from multiple different IP addresses, and our system sends the comments back to moderation until a human editor can re-approve them. Given the context of an article about moderation, most everyone whose comment disappeared thought that we were behind it. When more than 300 comments were suddenly sitting in the moderation queue, our weekend editors figured something was up and started un-flagging comments as fast as they could. Order was eventually restored, but it was ugly for a while.
We’ve had these attacks before, but probably only a handful of times over the last ten years, and there’s basically nothing we can do to prevent them that won’t also prevent you all from flagging honestly abusive or spammy comments. (For which, thanks! It helps keep Hackaday’s comments clean.) Why doesn’t it happen all the time? Most of you all are just good people. Thanks for that, too!
But despite the interruption, we got a good discussion started about how to make a comment section thrive. A valid critique of our current system that was particularly evident during the hack is that the reported comment mechanism is entirely opaque. A “your comment is being moderated” placeholder would be a lot nicer than simply having the comment disappear. We’ll have to look into that.
You were basically divided down the middle about whether an upvote/downvote system like on Reddit or Slashdot would serve us well. Those tend to push more constructive comments up to the top, but they also create a popularity contest that can become its own mini-game, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing. Everyone seemed pretty convinced that our continuing to allow anonymous comments is the right choice, and we think it is simply because it removes a registration burden when someone new wants to write something insightful.
What else? If you could re-design the Hackaday comment section from scratch, what would you do? Or better yet, do you have any examples of similar (tech) communities that are particularly well run? How do they do it?
We spend our time either writing and searching for cool hacks, or moderating, and you can guess which we’d rather. At the end of the day, our comments are made up of Hackaday readers. So thanks to all of you who have, over the last week, thought twice and kept it nice.
In this tremendously educational video, [Linus Åkesson] takes us through how he develops a synthesizer and a sequencer and editor for it on the Commodore 64, all in BASIC. While this sounds easy, [Linus] is doing this in hard mode: all of the audio is generated by POKE, and it gets crazier from there. If you’re one of those people out there who think that BASIC is a limited language, you need to watch this video.
[Linus] can do anything with POKE. On a simple computer like the C64, the sound chip, the screen chips, and even the interrupts that control program flow are all accessible simply by writing to the right part of memory. So the main loop here simply runs through a lot of data, POKEing it into memory and turning the sound chip on and off. There’s also a counter running inside the C64 that he uses to point into a pitch lookup table in the code.
But the inception part comes when he designs the sequencer and editor. Because C64 BASIC already has an interactive code editor, he hijacks this for his music editor. The final sequencer interface exists inside the program itself, and he writes music in the code, in real time, using things like LIST and editing. (Code is data, and data is code.) Add in a noise drum hack, and you’ve got some classic chiptuney sounds by the end.
We love [Linus]’s minimal C64 exercises, and this one gets maximal effect out of a running C64 BASIC environment. But that’s so much code in comparison to his 256-byte “A Mind is Born” demo. But to get that done, he had to use assembly.
Thanks [zogzog] for the great tip!
Continue reading “Linus Live-Codes Music On The Commodore 64”
More than a couple folks have written us saying that their entries into the Supercon Add-On Contest got caught up in the Chinese fall holidays. Add to that our tendency to wait until the last minute, and there still more projects out there that we’d like to see. So we’re extending the deadline one more week, until October 22nd.
If you’re just tuning in now, well, you’ve got some catching up to do. Supercon Add-Ons are another step forward in the tradition of renaming the original SAO. One of our favorite resources on the subject comes from prolific SAO designer [Twinkle Twinkie], and you can even download PCB footprints over there on Hackaday.io.
Don’t know why you want to make an SAO? Even if you’re not coming to Supercon this year? Well, our own [Tom Nardi] describes it as a low barrier to entry, full-stack hardware design and production tutorial. Plus, you’ll have something to trade with like-minded hardware nerds at the next con you attend.
We’ve already seen some killer artistic entries, but we want to see yours! We know the time’s tight, but you can still get in a last minute board run if you get started today. And those of you who are sitting at home waiting for boards to arrive, wipe that sweat from your brow. We’ll catch up with you next Tuesday!
[Editor’s Note: After we posted this, we got hit by a comment-report attack, and about 1,000 (!) comments across the whole site got sent back into the moderation queue on Saturday. We’ve since re-instated them all, but that took a lot of work.
About halfway down the comments in this article, the majority of comments are “hey, why did you delete this?” We didn’t, and they should be all good now. We debated removing the “try deleting this!” comments, but since we didn’t delete them in the first place, we thought we should just leave them. It makes a royal mess of any discussion, and created a lot more heat than light, which is unfortunate.]
You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’s angular and futuristic designs, but it doesn’t have to be to your taste. Then someone else is like “you don’t even need a computer case.” Another commenter informed us that he doesn’t like to watch videos for the thirtieth time. (Yawn!)
What all of these comments have in common is that they’re negative, low value, non-constructive, and frankly have no place on Hackaday. The vast majority are just kind of Eeyorey complaining about how someone else is enjoying a chocolate ice cream, and the commenter prefers strawberry. But then some of them turn nasty. Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like. We publish a hack every three hours like a rubidium clockwork, with a couple of original content pieces scattered in-between on weekdays.
And don’t get us wrong: we love comments that help improve a project. There’s a not-so-fine line between “why didn’t you design it with trusses to better hold the load?” and “why did you paint it black, because blue is the superior color”. You know what we mean. Constructive criticism, good. Pointless criticism, bad.
It was to the point that we were discussing just shutting down the comments entirely. But then we got gems! [Maya Posch]’s fantastic explainer about the Lagrange points had an error: one of the satellites that Wikipedia said was at an earth-moon Lagrange point is actually in normal orbit around the moon. It only used the Lagrange point as a temporary transit orbit. Says who? One of the science instrument leads on the space vehicle in question. Now that is a high-value comment, both because it corrects a mistake and enlightens us all, but also because it shows who is reading Hackaday!
Or take [Al Williams]’s article on mold-making a cement “paper” airplane. It was a cool technique, but the commenters latched onto his assertion that you couldn’t fly a cement plane, and the discussions that ensued are awesome. Part of me wanted to remind folks about the nice mold-making technique on display, but it was such a joy to go down that odd rabbit hole, I forgive you all!
We have an official “be nice” policy about the comments, and that extends fairly broadly. We really don’t want to hear what you don’t like about someone’s project or the way they presented it, because it brings down the people out there who are doing the hard work of posting their hacks. And hackers have the highest priority on Hackaday.
DIY 3D printing in metal is a lot more complicated than we thought. And this video from [Metal Matters] shows two approaches, many many false starts, and finally, a glorious 78.9% success! (And it’s embedded below for your enjoyment.)
The first half of the video is dedicated to the work on a laser welding system that doesn’t pan out in the end at all. But the missteps are worth watching as well, and they hammer home the difficulties of melting metal reliably with nothing more than coherent light. Things like reflection, the difficulty of getting good process control cameras, and finally the whole thing slumping as multiple layers stack up on each other make this approach to 3D construction look nearly impossible.
Indeed, around halfway through the video, the focus shifts toward a metal-powder sintering machine, and this one is a success! Metal dust is deposited layer by layer, and fused with a totally different laser. The tricky bits here range from esoteric problems like making the laser fuse the metal dust without blasting it, to simple things like the geometry of the scraper that ensures even layer heights. And once you’ve got all that down, getting a good pattern down for 2D infill in metal is non-trivial.
A sweet half-scale metal Benchy emerges at the end, so why does [Metal Matters] call this a 78.9% success? Because that’s the density of the final print, and he is shooting for 100%. But we wouldn’t be so harsh. We’ve seen how far he’s come since the first machines, and this is a huge advance. We’re looking forward to the next video update in a year or two!
Continue reading “First Benchies In Stainless Steel, With Lasers”
When we think of assembling a PCB, we’re almost always thinking about solder. Whether in paste form or on the spool, hand-iron or reflow, some molten metal is usually in the cards. [Stephen Hawes] is looking for a solderless alternative for prototyping, and he shows us the progress he’s made toward going solderless in this video.
His ulterior motive? He’s the designer of the LumenPNP open-source pick-and-place machine, and is toying with the idea of a full assembly based just on this one machine. If you strapped a conductive-glue extruder head on the machine in addition to the parts placer, you’d have a full assembly in one step. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
[Stephen] first tries Z-tape, which is really cool stuff. Small deformable metal balls are embedded in a gel-like tape, and conduct in only the Z direction when parts are pushed down hard into the tape. But Z-tape is very expensive, requires a bit of force to work reliably, and [Stephen] finds that the circuits are intermittent. In short, Z-tape is not a good fit for the PNP machine.
But what [Stephen] does find works well is a graphite-based conductive glue. In particular, he likes the Bare Conductive paint. He tries another carbon-based paint, but it’s so runny that application is difficult, while the Bare stuff is thick and sticky. (They won’t tell you their secret formula, but it’s no secret how the stuff is basically made.) That ends up looking very promising, but it’s still pretty spendy, and [Stephen] is looking to make his own conductive paste/paint pretty soon. That’s particularly appealing, because he can control the stickiness and viscosity, and he’ll surely let us in on the secret sauce.
(We’re armchair quarterbacking here, but the addition of a small amount of methyl cellulose and xanthan gum works to turn metal powder into a formable, printable metal clay, so it might make a carbon paste similarly adjustably sticky.)
We love the end-goal here: one machine that can apply a conductive paint and then put the parts into the right place, resulting in a rough-and-ready, but completely hands-off assembly. You probably wouldn’t want to use this technique if the joint resistance was critical, or if you needed the PCB to stand up to abuse. There’s a reason that everyone in industry uses molten metal, after all. But for verifying a quick one-off, or in a rapid-prototyping environment? This would be a dream.
We’ve seen other wacky ways to go solderless before. This one uses laser-cut parts to hold the components on the PCB, for instance. And for simply joining a couple wires together, we have many more solutions, many thanks to you all in the comments!
