Author: Jenny List

3427 Articles

How To Build A Small Solar Power System

December 30, 2023 by 41 Comments

We live in an exciting time with respect to electrical power, one in which it has never been easier to break free from mains electricity, and low-frequency AC power in general. A confluence of lower-power appliances and devices using low-voltage external switch-mode supplies, readily available solar panels and electronic modules, and inexpensive high-capacity batteries, means that being your own power provider can be as simple as making an online order.

But which parts should you choose? Low Tech Magazine has the answer, in the form of a guide to building a small solar power system. The result is an extremely comprehensive guide, and though it’s written for a general audience there’s still plenty of information for the Hackaday reader.

Perhaps the most important part is that it’s demystifying the subject, there in front of us are a set of pretty straightforward recipes for personal power. The computer this is being written on spends a significant proportion of its time on the road with the ever-present company of a very hefty USB-C power pack for example, and the realization that a not-too-expensive solar panel and USB PD source could lessen the range anxiety and constant search for a train seat with a socket for a writer on the move is quite a powerful one.

Take a look and see whether your life could use bit of inexpensive off-grid power, meanwhile we’re quite pleased that the USB-C PD standard has eased some of the DC problems we expressed frustration at back in 2016.

Gentoo Linux, Now A Bit Less For The 1337

December 29, 2023 by 37 Comments

Among users of Linux distributions there’s a curious one-upmanship, depending on how esoteric or hardcore  your distro is. Ubuntu users have little shame, while at the other end if you followed Linux From Scratch or better still hand-compiled the code and carved it onto the raw silicon with a tiny chisel, you’re at the top of the tree*. Jokes aside though, it’s fair to say that if you were running the Gentoo distribution you were something of a hardcore user, because its source-only nature meant that everything had to be compiled to your liking. We’re using the past tense here though, because in a surprise announcement, the distro has revealed that it will henceforth also be available as a set of precompiled binary packages.

There may be readers with long and flowing neckbeards who will decry this moment as the Beginning of the End, but while it does signal a major departure for the distro if it means that more people are spurred to take their Linux usage further and experiment with Gentoo, this can never be a bad thing. Gentoo has been on the list for a future Jenny’s Daily Drivers OS review piece, and while we’re probably going to stick with source-only when we do it, it’s undeniable that there will remain a temptation to simply download the binaries.

Meanwhile this has been written on a machine running Manjaro, or Arch-for-cowards as we like to call it, something that maybe confers middle-ranking bragging rights. Read a personal tale of taking off those Linux training wheels.

* Used a magnifying glass? You’re just not cutting it!

This Baby ‘Scope Is Within Your Reach

December 29, 2023 by 19 Comments

The modern oscilloscope is truly a marvelous instrument, being a computer with a high-speed analogue front end which can deliver the function of an oscilloscope alongside that of a voltmeter and a frequency counter. They don’t cost much, and having one on your bench gives you an edge unavailable in a previous time. That’s not to dismiss older CRT ‘scopes though, the glow of a phosphor trace has illuminated many a fault finding procedure. These older instruments can even be pretty simple, as [Mircemk] demonstrates with a small home-made example that we have to admit to rather liking.

At its heart is a small 5 cm round CRT tube, with an off-the-shelf buck converter supplying the HT, a neon lamp relaxation oscillator supplying the timebase, and a set of passive components conditioning the signal to the deflection plates. The whole thing runs from 12 V and fits in a neat case. It has one huge flaw in that there is no trigger circuit, and sadly this compromises its usefulness as an instrument. Our understanding of a neon oscillator is a little rusty but we’re guessing the two-terminal neon lamp would have to be replaced by one of the more exotic gas-filled tubes with more electrodes, of which one takes the trigger pulse.

Even without a trigger it’s still a neat device, so take a look at it. Perhaps surprisingly we’ve seen few CRT ‘scopes made from scratch here at Hackaday, but never fear, here’s one used as an audio visualiser.

The Gopher Revival Is Upon Us

December 29, 2023 by 39 Comments

A maxim for anyone writing a web page in the mid 1990s was that it was good practice to bring the whole thing (including graphics) in at around 30 kB in size. It was a time when the protocol still had some pretence of efficient information delivery, when information was self-published, before huge corporations brought everything under their umbrellas.

Recently, this idea of the small web has been experiencing something of a quiet comeback. [Serge Zaitsev]’s essay takes us back to a time before the Internet as we know it was born, and reminds us of a few protocols that have fallen by the wayside. Finger or Gopher, both things we remember from our student days, but neither of which was a match for the browser.

All is not lost though, because the Gemini protocol is a more modern take on minimalist Internet information sharing. It’s something like the web, but intentionally without the layer upon layer of extraneous stuff, and it’s been slowly gathering some steam. Every time we look at its software list it becomes more extensive, and we live in hope that it might catch on for use with internet-connected microcontroller-based computing. The essay is a reminder that the internet doesn’t have to be the web, and doesn’t have to be bloated either.

CoreXY On The Pi Pico

December 28, 2023 by 8 Comments

There are enough off-the-shelf CoreXY mechanisms out there that for the cost of an AliExpress order it’s possible to quickly and cheaply make yourself a plotter. But [Koushani Das], [Mahathi Andavolu] and [Dengyu Tu] are completing their project for Cornell University’s ECE 5730 course, so of course they have designed one from the ground up. Happily for us it seems to be fairly easy to replicate, so you can build one too if it takes your fancy.

The write-up makes for an interesting dive into the nitty-gritty of design, for which we hope they managed to secure a decent grade. The hardware itself seems pretty straightforward as does the pair of stepper controllers and RP2040 they use to run the thing, and their explanation of the math behind the CoreXY coordinate system is genuinely interesting for those of us who’ve never taken the time to consider it.

All the good stuff can be found in a GitHub repository if you’d like to take this further, and meanwhile they’ve also put up a demo video which you can see below the break. We like this little plotter, and we hope others will take its design and run with it.

Want more CoreXY explanation? We’re happy to oblige.

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A High-End Studio Multiplexer Surrenders To An Arduino

December 27, 2023 by 17 Comments

The equipment used in professional radio and TV studios is both extremely high quality and very expensive indeed, and thus out of the reach of an experimenter. Happily as studios are refurbished there’s a steady supply of second-hand equipment which can be surprisingly cheap, but as [Nathan] found out with a Quartz audio router, comes with no control software. What’s to be done with what’s essentially a piece of junk? Remove its brain and replace it with one that can be controlled, of course!

On the PCB alongside a bank of switch matrices is an FPGA which does the heavy lifting. That’s “heavy” in a limited sense, because all it does is handle the chip select lines for the matrices and write data to their registers. This is a task that can be handled by a microcontroller, so in goes an Arduino Nano, which along with a few other board modifications delivers a serial-controlled studio router.

The interesting part for us in this project comes from a look at the date codes on the board, they’re from the early 2000s. This is (roughly) contemporary with the ATmega chip on the Arduino, so we’re curious as to why the designers saw fit to use an FPGA when the microcontrollers of the day were clearly up to the task for much less outlay. We suspect a touch of millennium-era price inflation, but we can’t be sure.

Meanwhile, old broadcast kit has featured here before.

An RC Tank Chassis That’s Not Messing About

December 26, 2023 by 3 Comments

It’s not uncommon to see a tracked robot build on these pages, but it’s fair to say that many of them are somewhat on the small side. That was where [iforce2d] started, but the idea of making a more capable version just wouldn’t go away. Thus, he’s come back and made what looks to be a very promising, fully capable outdoor RC tank chassis, one that, within reason, we think should eventually be able to go anywhere.

For plenty of power, he’s using a pair of hoverboard motors with a chain reduction drive and in turn, a couple of shafts to the tracks. The chassis is a TIG-welded aluminium affair, while the tracks are an early incarnation with machined MDF drive wheels and a homemade tread. The suspension is a work of machined-aluminium art, though, and while there are teething troubles as he takes it for a spin, we can see plenty of potential as its deficiencies are ironed out.  Take a look at it in the video below the break.

If large-size R/C tanks are your thing, we have another for you to look at.

Continue reading “An RC Tank Chassis That’s Not Messing About” →