The Solar System Is Weirder Than You Think

June 17, 2024 by Elliot Williams 50 Comments

When I was a kid, the solar system was simple. There were nine planets and they all orbited in more-or-less circles around the sun. This same sun-and-a-handful-of-planets scheme repeated itself again and again throughout our galaxy, and these galaxies make up the universe. It’s a great story that’s easy to wrap your mind around, and of course it’s a great first approximation, except maybe that “nine planets” thing, which was just a fluke that we’ll examine shortly.

What’s happened since, however, is that telescopes have gotten significantly better, and many more bodies of all sorts have been discovered in the solar system which is awesome. But as a casual astronomy observer, I’ve given up hope of holding on to a simple mental model. The solar system is just too weird.

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Magic Cane Is The Secret Behind Lightsaber

June 17, 2024 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

Everyone has a lightsaber or two lying around the house, but not everyone has a lightsaber that extends and retracts automatically. And that’s because, in the real world, it’s not an easy design challenge. [HeroTech]’s solution for the mechanism is simple and relies on an old magician’s trick: the appearing cane. (Video, embedded below.)

An appearing cane is a tightly coiled up spring steel sheet that springs, violently, to its full length when a pin is released, but they can’t retract while the audience is looking. This is fine for magic tricks, but a lightsaber has to be able to turn off again. Here, an LED strip does double duty as source of glow but also as the cable that extends and retracts the appearing cane spring. A motor and spool to wind up the LED strip takes care of the rest.

There are still a number of to-dos in this early stage prototype, and the one mentioned in the video is a tall order. Since the strip doesn’t illuminate out the sides, the lightsaber has two good viewing angles, and two bad ones. The plan is to rotate the LED strip quickly inside the sheath: an approach that was oddly enough used in the original movie prop, as demonstrated in this documentary. Doing this reliably in an already packed handle is going to be a challenge.

If you’re thinking you’ve seen a magic-cane lightsaber before, well, maybe you saw this video. And if you want a light saber with real lasers, check out this build that brings its own fog machine. Take that, Darth Vader!

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When Your Rope Is Your Life

June 15, 2024 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Climbers care a lot about their ropes because their lives literally depend on them. And while there’s been tremendous progress in climbing rope tech since people first started falling onto hemp fibers, there are still accidents where rope failure is to blame.

This long, detailed, and interesting video from [Hard is Easy] follows him on a trip to the Mammut test labs to see what’s up with their relatively new abrasion-resistant rope. His visit was full of cool engineering test rigs that pushed the ropes to breaking in numerous ways. If you climb, though, be warned that some of the scenes are gut-wrenchingly fascinating, watching the ropes fail horribly in well-shot slow-mo.

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Giant Brains, Or Machines That Think

June 15, 2024 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

Last week, I stumbled on a marvelous book: “Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think” by Edmund Callis Berkeley. What’s really fun about it is the way it sounds like it could be written just this year – waxing speculatively about the future when machines do our thinking for us. Except it was written in 1949, and the “thinking machines” are early proto-computers that use relays (relays!) for their logic elements. But you need to understand that back then, they could calculate ten times faster than any person, and they would work tirelessly day and night, as long as their motors keep turning and their contacts don’t get corroded.

But once you get past the futuristic speculation, there’s actually a lot of detail about how the then-cutting-edge machines worked. Circuit diagrams of logic units from both the relay computers and the brand-new vacuum tube machines are on display, as are drawings of the tricky bits of purely mechanical computers. There is even a diagram of the mercury delay line, and an explanation of how circulating audio pulses through the medium could be used as a form of memory.

All in all, it’s a wonderful glimpse at the earliest of computers, with enough detail that you could probably build something along those lines with a little moxie and a few thousands of relays. This grounded reality, coupled with the fantastic visions of where computers would be going, make a marvelous accompaniment to a lot of the breathless hype around AI these days. Recommended reading!

Tight Handheld CRT Asteroids Game Curses In Tuscan

June 12, 2024 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

How many Arduini does it take to make a tiny CRT Asteroids game? [Marco Vallegi] of MVV Blog’s answer: two. One for the game mechanics and one for the sound effects. And the result is a sweet little retro arcade machine packed tightly into a very nicely 3D printed case.

If you want to learn to curse like a Tuscan sailor, you can watch the two-part video series, embedded below, in its entirety. Otherwise, we have excerpted the good stuff out of the second video for you.

For instance, we love the old-school voice synthesis sound of the Speak and Spell. Here, playback is implemented using the Talkie library for Arduino, and [Marco] is using the BlueWizard software on a dated Macbook for recording and encoding. (We’d use the more portable Python Wizard ourselves.) Check out [Marco] tweaking the noise parameters here to get a good recording.

And since the Talkie Arduino library uses PWM on a digital output pin to create the audio, the high-frequency noise was freaking out his simple transistor amplifier. Here, [Marco] adds a feedback capacitor to cancel that high-frequency hash out.

The build needs to be quite compact, and the stacked-Arduino-with-PCB-case design is tight. And the 3D-printed case has a number of nice refinements that you might like. We especially like the use of thin veneers that cover the case all around with the build-plate’s surface texture, and the contrasting “Asteroids” logos are very nice.

All in all, this is a really fun build that’s also full of little details that might help you with your own projects. Heck, even if it just encourages you to play around with the Talkie library, it’s worth your time in our opinion. And while you’re at it, you can turn on the subtitles and pick up some vocab that’ll make your nonna roll over in her grave.

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The World’s First DIY Minicomputer Was Almost Australian

June 12, 2024 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

The EDUC-8, a DIY minicomputer design that came out in “Electronics Australia” magazine, was almost the world’s first in August 1974. And it would have been tied for the world’s first if inventor [Jamieson “Jim” Rowe] hadn’t held back from publishing to rework the design to expand the memory to a full 256 bytes. The price of perfectionism?

Flash forward 50 years, and [Gwyllym Suter] has taken on the job of recreating the EDUC-8 using modern PCBs, but otherwise staying true to the all-TTL design. He has all of his schematics up on the project’s GitHub, but has also sent us a number of beauty shots that we’re including below. Other than the progress of PCB tech and the very nice 3D-printed housing, they look identical. We have to admit that we love those wavy hand-drawn traces on the original, but we wouldn’t be sad about not having to solder in all those jumpers.

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Raspberry Pi Goes Public

June 11, 2024 by Elliot Williams 57 Comments

We’ve heard rumors for the last few months, and now it looks like they’ve come true: the business side of Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Holdings has become a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange.

We heard rumblings about this a while back, and our own [Jenny List] asked the question of what this means for the hobbyist and hacker projects that use their products. After all, they’ve been spending a lot of money making new silicon, and issuing stock helps them continue. Jenny worried that they’d forget that what sells their hardware is the software, but ends up concluding that they’ll probably continue doing more of the same thing, just with better funding.

Raspberry Pi CEO [Eben Upton] said basically the same when we asked him what a floatation would mean for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is the non-profit arm of the Raspberry Empire, and which is responsible for a lot of the educational material and outreach that they do. (Fast-forward to minute 40.) Before the share issue, the Foundation wholly owned Holdings, and received donations to fund its work. Now that there has been a floatation, it looks like the Foundation will owns 70% of Holdings, and will use this endowment to finance its educational mission.

We don’t have a crystal ball, but we suspect this changes not much at all. Raspberry Pi Holdings Ltd is doing great business by producing niche single-board computers that appeal both to the hacker and industrial markets, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation now has a more concrete source of funding to continue its educational goals. But the future will tell!