Who Is Responsible For Your Safety?

September 10, 2022 by Elliot Williams 182 Comments

We recently posted a video where some ingenious metal-shop hackers made a simple jig to create zig-zag oil grooves on the inside of a cylinder, and the comment section went wild. What ensued was a flood of complaints that the video displayed unsafe shop practices, from lack of safety glasses to wearing flip-flops while operating a lathe.

Where the comments went off the rails were people asking Hackaday to remove our discussion of the video, because the commenters thought that we were somehow implicitly encouraging open-toed footwear in the presence of machine tools. We certainly weren’t! We wanted you all to see the clever machining hack, and be inspired to build your own. We figure that you’ve got the safety angle covered.

Now don’t get me wrong – there were safety choices made in the video that I would not personally make. But it also wasn’t my shop and I wasn’t operating the machines. And you know who is ultimately responsible for the safety in my basement shop? Me! And guess who is responsible for safety in your shop.

But of course, none of us know everything about every possible hazard. (Heck, I wrote just that a few weeks ago!) So while we’re sympathetic with the “that’s not safe!” crew, we’re not going to censor inspiring hacks just because something done along the way wasn’t done in the way we would do it. Instead, it’s our job, in the comment section as in Real Life™, to help each other out and share our good safety tips when we can.

You’ll see some crazy stuff in videos, and none of it is to be repeated without thinking. And if you do see something dodgy, by all means point it out, and mention how you would do it better. Turn the negative example around for good, rather than calling for its removal. Use the opportunity to help, rather than hide.

But also remember that when the chips are flying toward your personal eyeballs, it’s up to you to have glasses on. We all do potentially hazardous things all the time, and it’s best to be thinking about the risks and their mitigation. So stay safe out there. Keep on learning and keep on hacking!

Why You’ve Never Heard About Nintendo’s U-Force

September 5, 2022 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

90’s kids think that the Power Glove was the coolest game peripheral of the epoch. We might have thought so too, until we heard about Don’t Touch: The Story of the U-Force from [The Gaming Historian].

The device itself folded up like a laptop, and on the two surfaces had four IR LED/sensor pairs. All of these combined would localize your fist in space for playing Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, or would work with various other passive controller add-ons like a flight yoke for playing Top Gun. (One of the coolest bits is the flip-out IR reflectors triggered by the buttons in the yoke.)

All-in-all, the video’s take is that a number of factors doomed the U-Force to play second fiddle to the Power Glove. Battling Mattel’s marketing prowess is obvious, but other things like manufacturing problems due to bad hinges and inconsistent IR sensors delayed release and added cost. In the end, though, [Dave Capper], the U-Force’s inventor, puts it down simply to non-convincing gameplay. There were no blockbuster games that used it to its full potential.

At the time, the U-Force utilized more IR LEDs than any other consumer electronic device.

We think there’s interesting hacker potential in a simple interface like this. Perhaps its biggest Achilles heel outside of the lack of a killer application was the fact that it required calibration. We can imagine all sorts of awesome interactions, and we’re not afraid of a little tweaking. Or maybe we would update the sensors to something more modern, like those inexpensive time-of-flight distance units.

Thanks [Karl Koscher] for bringing this documentary to our attention in the comments about the very similarly interesting laser theremin project we featured last year. It’s definitely opened our eyes to an old interaction of the past that would seem no less magical today.

Continue reading “Why You’ve Never Heard About Nintendo’s U-Force” →

Streamlining The Toolchain

September 3, 2022 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

Sometimes I try to do something magical, and it works. Most of the time this happens because other people have done a good part of the work for me, and shared it. I just cobble a bunch of existing tools into a flow that fits my needs. But the sum of all the parts is often less than the whole, when too many of the steps involve human intervention. Tools made for people simply keep the people in the loop.

For instance, I wanted to take a drawing that my son made into a stamp, by way of a CNC machine and whatever scrap wood we have kicking around in the basement. It’s easy enough, really. Take the photo, maybe use a little tweaking in GIMP to get the levels right, export it into Inkscape for the line detection and maybe even make the GCode right there, or take it off to any convenient SVG-to-GCode tool.

While this works straight out of the box for me, it turns out that’s because I have experience with all of the sub-tools. First, it helps a lot if you get the exposure right in the first place, and that’s not trivial when your camera’s light meter is aiming for grey, but the drawing is on white paper. Knowing this, you could set it up to always overexpose, I guess.

Still, there’s some experience needed in post-processing. If you haven’t played around with both image processing and image editing software, you don’t know how they’re going to interact. And finally, there are more parameters to tweak to get the CNC milling done than a beginner should have to decide.

In short, I had a toolchain up and running in a jiffy, and that’s a success. But in terms of passing it on to my son, it was a failure because he would have to learn way too many sub-tools to make it work for him. Bummer. I’m left wondering if I can streamline all of the parts to work together well enough, or whether I’m simply needed in the loop.

The Quiet Before The Storm?

August 27, 2022 by Elliot Williams 82 Comments

My wife and I are reading a book about physics in the early 1900s. It’s half history of science and half biography of some of the most famous physicists, and it’s good fun. But it got me thinking about the state of physics 120 years ago.

What we’d now call classical mechanics was fully settled for quite a while, and even the mysterious electricity and magnetism had been recently put to rest by Maxwell and Heaviside. It seemed like there was nothing left to explain for a while. And then all the doors broke wide open.

As much as I personally like Einstein’s relativity work, I’d say the most revolutionary change in perspective, and driver of the most research in the intervening century, was quantum mechanics. And how did it all start? In the strangest of ways – with Niels Bohr worrying about why hydrogen and helium gasses gave off particular colors when ionized, which lead to his model of the atom and the idea of energy in quantum packets. Or maybe it was De Broglie’s idea that electrons could behave like waves or magnets, from slit and cathode-ray experiments respectively, that lead to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Either way, the birth of the strangest and most profound physics revolution – quantum mechanics – came from answering some ridiculously simple and straightforward questions. Why does helium emit pink, and how do TVs work? (I know, they didn’t have TVs yet…) Nobody looking at these phenomena, apart or together, could have thought that answering them would have required a complete re-thinking of how we think about reality. And yet it did.

I can’t help but wonder if there are, in addition to the multi-bazillion dollar projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, some simpler phenomena out there that we should be asking “why?” about. Are we in a similar quiet before the storm? Or is it really true that the way to keep pushing back the boundaries of our ignorance is through these mega-projects?

2022 Hackaday Supercon: Call For Proposals Extended

August 23, 2022 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

Good news, procrastinators and those of you who simply have not yet worked up the nerve to submit! The 2022 Hackaday Supercon Call for Proposals has been extended one more week. You’ve been waiting until the last minute? Well, it’s now one minute past the last minute, but we’ve got your back. You have until Thurs, Sep. 1 to get your talk or workshop proposal in. (We’re not extending it twice!)

Everyone has a good story to share. Whether it’s a tale of software or hardware, or that tricky “firmware” that falls somewhere in the middle, we have a crowd who would love to hear it. You almost never leave a project as the same person who entered it, and you should tell us your story. We have two talk tracks, one for shorter talks and demos of around 20 minutes, and one for epic sagas of 45 minutes or so. Whether you’re a first-time presenter or a seasoned pro, we’d like to hear about your hacks.

To sweeten the pot, all presenters get in free. So what are you waiting for? Send in your ideas now – you’ve got a couple months to get the slides into shape.

Dream Projects Face Reality

August 20, 2022 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

Do you ever get a project stuck in your mind? An idea so good you just keep thinking about it? Going over iterations and options and pros and cons in the back of your mind, or maybe on paper, but having not yet subjected it to the hard work of pulling it into reality? I’ve had one of those lurking around for the last couple weeks, and it’s time for me to get building.

And I’ve got to get started soon, because it’s rare that any project makes the leap from thought to reality unscathed, and when I hold on to the in-thought project too long, I become far too fond of some of the details and nuances that just might not make the cut, or might get in the way of getting a first pass finished. When I really like a (theoretical) solution to a (theoretical) problem, I’ll try to make it work a lot longer than I should, and I can tell I’m getting attached to this one now.

The only cure to this illness is to get prototyping. When the rubber hits the road, and the bolts are tightened, either the solution is a good one or it’s not, and no amount of dreaming is going to change that. Building is a great antidote to the siren song of a dream project. Although it feels now like I don’t want the fantasy to have to adapt to reality, as it inevitably will, I know that getting something working feels a lot better. And it frees me up to start dreaming on the next project… To the workshop!