This Piano Does Not Exist

March 12, 2024 by Jenny List 9 Comments

A couple of decades ago one of *the* smartphone accessories to have was a Bluetooth keyboard which projected the keymap onto a table surface where letters could be typed in a virtual space. If we’re honest, we remember them as not being very good. But that hasn’t stopped the idea from resurfacing from time to time.

We’re reminded of it by [Mayuresh1611]’s paper piano, in which a virtual piano keyboard is watched over by a webcam to detect the player’s fingers such that the correct note from a range of MP3 files is delivered.

The README is frustratingly light on details other than setup, but a dive into the requirements reveals OpenCV as expected, and TensorFlow. It seems there’s a training step before a would-be virtual virtuoso can tinkle on the non-existent ivories, but the demo shows that there’s something playable in there. We like the idea, and wonder whether it could also be applied to other instruments such as percussion. A table as a drum kit would surely be just as much fun.

This certainly isn’t the first touch piano we’ve featured, but we think it may be the only one using OpenCV. A previous one used more conventional capacitive sensors.

The Insurance Buys The Wheelchair, But Not The App To Run It

March 9, 2024 by Jenny List 36 Comments

The writer Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe the way that services decline in quality as their users become the product. He was talking about online services when he came up with the word, but the same is very much true when it comes to hardware. Items which once just worked now need apps and online services, with marginal benefit to the user if any. It’s one thing when it’s your soundbar or your washing machine, but thanks to Lemmy user [@win95] from the Netherlands we’ve seen a far more egregious example. People with disabilities are being provided with new powered wheelchairs through their medical insurance, but are then discovering that unaffordable in-app purchases are needed to use their features. Continue reading “The Insurance Buys The Wheelchair, But Not The App To Run It” →

Older Nissan Leafs Lose Their App, Are They The First Of Many?

March 7, 2024 by Jenny List 103 Comments

There was a time when all you needed to use your car was a key. On older vehicles it was a traditional metal key, on more recent ones it had some kind of RFID chip for the immobilizer. As vehicles have become more and more computers on wheels though, the key has disappeared in favor of an electronic key using RF, and in many cases a smartphone application. It’s even used as a selling point: “Look how amazing our car is, you open it with an app!”

Now the obvious flaw is beginning to show in this strategy, as Nissan Leafs made before 2016 and on the road in the UK are to have their app support withdrawn. The manufacturer cites the withdrawal of 2G services, but this seems a little fishy when you consider that the older networks will continue to exist in some form until 2030.

Frankly, there’s part of us that welcomes this news. On one hand, it affects relatively few early adopters. But at the same time, it has the promise of finally educating a gullible public that while a car may last into its second or third decade, the superfluous technology with which it has been loaded probably won’t. If it makes consumers clamor for longer support, or better built vehicles, it can only be a good thing. We’re guessing stories like this will become increasingly common in the next few years — luckily for Leaf owners, its relatively trivial loss of functionality won’t be the worst among them.

If the carmakers have forgotten how to make a vehicle without the dross, we’d be delighted to remind them.

Header: Kārlis Dambrāns, CC BY 2.0.

Thanks [CampGareth] for the tip.

How Powerful Should An Electric Bike Be? The UK Is Asking

March 6, 2024 by Jenny List 119 Comments

As electric drives sweep their way to dominance in the automotive world, there’s another transport sector in which their is also continuing apace. Electric-assisted bicycles preserve the feeling of riding a bike as you always have, along with an electric motor to effortlessly power the rider over hill and dale. European electric two-wheelers are limited to a legal top speed of about 15 miles per hour and a 250 watt motor, but in a post-Brexit dash for independence the British government are asking whether that power should be increased to 500 watts.

The Westminster politicians think such a move will make electric bikes more attractive to consumers, and along with a move to motorcycle-style throttles rather than pedal-to-go throttles they want it to accelerate the take-up of greener transport in a country with plenty of hills. Meanwhile cycling groups and safety groups are concerned, the former whether the move is needed at all, and the latter over the fire risk from more powerful battery packs.

The Hackaday electric bike stable gives us a bit of experience on the matter, and our take is that with a 15 mile-per-hour limit there’s little point in upping the motor power. There’s a 350 watt European limit for three-wheelers though, which we could see would really benefit from a raise if applied to cargo bikes. We can however see that a readily-available supply of cheap 500 W motors would be worth having.

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Damn Small Linux 2024

March 5, 2024 by Jenny List 37 Comments

There was a time when the gulf between a new computer and one a decade or more old was so large as to be insurmountable; when a Pentium was the chip to have an older computer had a 16-bit 8086 or 286. Here in the 2020s, though, that divide is less stark. While a machine from the mid-2000s may no longer be considered quick, it can still run modern and useful software.

The problem facing the owner of such older hardware though is that as operating systems advance their requirements and eclipse their machine’s capabilities. A perfectly good machine becomes less useful, not because the tasks it needs to be used for are beyond it, but because the latest OS is built with higher-spec hardware in mind. The subject of today’s test is an operating system designed to make the best of older hardware, and it’s one with a pedigree. Damn Small Linux, or DSL, first appeared in 2005 as a tiny distro for the old machines of the day, and after a long hiatus it’s back with a 2024 edition.

Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Damn Small Linux 2024” →

Retrotechtacular: The Free Piston Engine

March 4, 2024 by Jenny List 20 Comments

We all know how a conventional internal combustion engine works, with a piston and a crankshaft. But that’s by no means the only way to make an engine, and one of the slightly more unusual alternatives comes to us courtesy of a vintage Shell Film Unit film, The Free Piston Engine, which we’ve placed below the break. It’s a beautiful period piece of mid-century animation and jazz, but it’s also an introduction to these fascinating machines.

We’re introduced to the traditional two-stroke diesel engine as thermally efficient but not smooth-running, and then the gas turbine as smooth but much more inefficient. The free piston engine, a design with opposed pistons working against compressed air springs and combining both compression and firing strokes in a single axis, doesn’t turn anything in itself, but instead works as a continuous supplier of high pressure combustion gasses. The clever part of this arrangement is that these gasses can then turn the power turbine from a gas turbine engine, achieving a smooth engine without compromising efficiency.

This sounds like a promising design for an engine, and we’re introduced to a rosy picture of railway locomotives, ships, factories, and power stations all driven by free piston engines. Why then, here in 2024 do we not see them everywhere? A quick Google search reveals an inordinately high number of scientific review papers about them but not so many real-world examples. In that they’re not alone, for alternative engine designs are one of those technologies for which if we had a dollar for every one we’d seen that didn’t make it, as the saying goes, we’d be rich.

It seems that the problem with these engines is that they don’t offer the control over their timing that we’re used to from more conventional designs, and thus the speed of their operation also can’t be controlled. The British firm Libertine claim to have solved this with their line of linear electrical generators, but perhaps understandably for commercial reasons they are a little coy about the details. Their focus is on free piston engines as power sources for hybrid electric vehicles, something which due to their small size they seem ideally suited for.

Perhaps the free piston engine has faced its biggest problem not in the matter of technology but in inertia. There’s an old saying in the computer industry: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM“, meaning that the conventional conservative choice always wins, and it’s fair to guess that the same applies anywhere a large engine has been needed. A conventional diesel engine may be a complex device with many moving parts, but it’s a well-understood machine that whoever wields the cheque book feels comfortable with. That’s a huge obstacle for any new technology to climb. Meanwhile though it offers obvious benefits in terms of efficiency, at the moment its time could have come due to environmental concerns, any internal combustion engine has fallen out of fashion. It’s possible that it could find a life as an engine running on an alternative fuel such as hydrogen or ammonia, but we’re not so sure. If new free piston engines do take off though, we’ll be more pleased than anyone to eat our words.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Free Piston Engine” →

A Better Use For The AGP Slot, Decades Later

March 3, 2024 by Jenny List 25 Comments

For a while around a quarter century ago PC motherboards came with a special slot, a little shorter than the PCI slots which ruled the roost back then, and offset from them further into the case. This was the Accelerated Graphics Port, or AGP, a standard created to more quickly serve the 3D graphics cards which were then taking the world by storm. It was everywhere for a few years, then in the mid-2000s it was replaced by PCI Express and faded into obscurity. [Peter] has a Socket 7-based NAS with an AGP slot, and was left wondering whether the unused port could be put to a worthwhile purpose.

AGP is a superset of PCI clocked at 66 MHz, and usually benefiting from having its own exclusive bridge to the processor bus. Thus he reasoned that he could make an AGP to PCI adapter and it might work, as the right connections are all there. A hacked-together version was made by butchering two riser cards, and when a network card worked quite happily he knew he was on to something and made a PCB. There’s a caveat that it only works with 66-MHz capable PCI cards so not everything will work, but if you’re one of the very few people who must be in the market for one, he can do you a PCB.

We’d normally end with a link to a related project here, but we must instead congratulate [Peter]. As far as we can find, this is Hackaday’s first AGP hack, two decades later. Continue reading “A Better Use For The AGP Slot, Decades Later” →