When Tail Lights Lose Touch With Reality

September 9, 2023 by Jenny List 129 Comments

To study the history of the automobile is to also be a student of technological progress — as with each decade’s models come new innovations to make them better handling, more corrosion-resistant, faster, more efficient, or whatever the needs of the moment dictate. But sometimes that technological advancement goes awry and works against the motorist, making for a vehicle that’s substantially worse than what went before. [FordTechMakuloco] has a video with an example in a Ford pickup, which we believe deserves to be shared.

The problem with the vehicle was simple enough, indeed it’s one we’ve had in the past ourselves. Water got into a tail light, and corroded some connectors. The difference with this Ford though was that such a simple fault took out the whole car, and that the fix for a simple tail light cost $5600. The first was due to a vehicle-wide CAN bus going down due to the electrical short, and the second was due to the assembly containing an assortment of wiring and modules which couldn’t be replaced separately. These included some form of side-facing parking radar, a component unnecessary for operation of the light itself. Some relatively straightforward design and component supply decisions such as separating subsystems across multiple CAN busses, ensuring individual modules are separately available, and even designing connectors to face downwards and self-drain, could have fixed it, but the automaker chose instead to build in some planned obsolescence. Would you buy a Ford truck after seeing the video below the break?

We’ve written here before about how automotive design has taken this wrong path, and even advanced a manifesto as to how they might escape it. This Ford tail light seems to us an egregious example of electronics-as-the-new-rust rendering what should be a good vehicle into a badly designed piece of junk, and honestly it saddens us to see it. Oddly, there was once a time when a Ford truck was about as good as you could get.

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Clean Water, From A Plant-Based Filter

September 9, 2023 by Jenny List 20 Comments

If you’re an outdoors person, one of the earliest things you learned was probably that in-field water sources can’t always be trusted as drinkable. A clear mountain stream could have a dead sheep in it just upstream, for example. Maybe you learned to boil it, or perhaps add chemical tablets. Up-to-date campers have a range of filters at their disposal thanks to nanotechnology, but such devices aren’t the only options to avoid sickness. [BeraAjan] has built one using plant xylem.

The inspiration for this filter came from an MIT paper, and the plant xylem in question isn’t the thin layer we were expecting but a far thicker one found in young conifer branches. In fact, the whole twig without its bark is placed in a tube, and the water filters through it.

It’s fair to say that this isn’t the fastest of filters though, as you can see in the video below the break. He’s combined a few individual filters, but maybe it’s not for the easily bored.

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Large Format Photos Without The Large Price Tag

September 9, 2023 by Jenny List 37 Comments

There’s a good reason that the go-to format for most film photographers is 35 mm, in that it provides a mix of convenience and cost. Shooting huge large-format negatives in the style of a 19th-century photographer can return astounding pictures with detail and lens effects unavailable on relatively tiny cameras, but it’s hardly the most convenient or cheapest medium. [Amos Chapple] may have a way to cut those costs though, by using a digital camera to capture the image projected by the camera onto a screen where the film would otherwise be.

He’s following in the footsteps of a Ukrainian photographer who tried the same technique photographing the projected image from the lens side, but that approach gave disappointing results due to the offset angle. Instead he’s placing the camera behind a translucent screen, having his DSLR behind a sheet of waxed paper held at the focal plane.

The results are we’d have to say, stunning. The old Soviet Ukrainian camera he’s using is something of a beast, but his photos of dancers at a folk festival have that other-worldly look to them which might well have something form the 1890s about it. We like it a lot and perhaps it’s tempting to fashion a poor-mans version using a cardboard box, and try for ourselves. Long-time readers will know it’s not the only attempt to digitize a large format camera we’ve seen.

Transistor Radio Repair, More Complex Than It Seems

September 7, 2023 by Jenny List 48 Comments

The humble transistor radio is one of those consumer devices that stubbornly refuses to go away, but it’s fair to say that it’s not the mover and shaker in the world of electronics it might once have been. Thus it’s also not a staple of the repair bench anymore, where fixing a pocket radio might have been all in a day’s work decades ago now they’re a rare sight. [David Tipton] has a Philips radio from we’re guessing the later half of the 1960s which didn’t work, and we’re along for the ride as he takes us through its repair.

It’s an extremely conventional design of the era, with a self-oscillating mixer, 455 kHz IF amplifier, and class AB audio amplifier. The devices are a little archaic by today’s standards, with comically low-gain germanium transistors and passives from the Ark. Injecting a signal reveals that the various stages all work, but that mixer isn’t oscillating. A lot of fault-finding ensues, and perhaps with a little bit of embarrassment, he eventually discovers a blob of solder shorting a collector resistor to ground. All isn’t over though, for the volume pot is also kaput. Who knew that the track from a modern component could be transplanted into one from the 1960s?

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Where Did Electronic Music Start?

September 7, 2023 by Jenny List 53 Comments

A culture in which it’s fair to say the community which Hackaday serves is steeped in, is electronic music. Within these pages you’ll find plenty of synthesisers, chiptune players, and other projects devoted to synthetic sound. Not everyone here is a musician of obsessive listener, but if Hackaday had a soundtrack album we’re guessing it would be electronic. Along the way, many of us have picked up an appreciation for the history of electronic music, whether it’s EDM from the 1990s, 8-bit SID chiptunes, or further back to figures such as Wendy Carlos, Gershon Kingsley, or Delia Derbyshire. But for all that, the origin of electronic music is frustratingly difficult to pin down. Is it characterised by the instruments alone, or does it have something more specific in the music itself? Here follows the result of a few months’ idle self-enlightenment as we try to get tot he bottom of it all.

Will The Real Electronic Music Please Stand Up?

Page from the Telharmonium patent, showing the tone wheels — If you own a synthesiser, the Telharmonium is its daddy.

Anyone reading around the subject soon discovers that there are several different facets to synthesised music which are collectively brought together under the same banner and which at times are all claimed individually to be the purest form of the art. Further to that it rapidly becomes obvious when studying the origins of the technology, that purely electronic and electromechanical music are also two sides of the same coin. Is music electronic when it uses an electronic instrument, when electronics are used to modify the sound of an acoustic instrument, when it is sequenced electronically often in a manner unplayable by a human, or when it uses sampled sounds? Is an electric guitar making electronic music when played through an effects pedal?

The history of electronic music as far as it seems from here, starts around the turn of the twentieth century, and though the work of many different engineers and musicians could be cited at its source there are three inventions which stand out. Thaddeus Cahill’s tone-wheel-based Telharmonium US patent was granted in 1897, the same year as that for Edwin S. Votey’s Pianola player piano, while the Russian Lev Termen’s Theremin was invented in 1919. In those three inventions we find the progenital ancestors of all synthesisers, sequencers, and purely electronic instruments. If it appears we’ve made a glaring omission by not mentioning inventions such as the phonograph, it’s because they were invented not to make music but to record it. Continue reading “Where Did Electronic Music Start?” →

Intel’s Chips Light The Way To Faster Processor Arrays

September 7, 2023 by Jenny List 19 Comments

It’s very likely indeed that whatever you are reading this on will have a multi-core processor. They’re now the norm, but the path to they octa-or-more-core chip in your phone has gone from individual processors with PCB interconnects through many generations of ever faster on-chip ones.

But what if your power needs are so high-end that you need more cores that can be fitted on one chip, but without the slow PCB interconnect to another? If you’re Intel, you develop a multi-core processor with an on-chip photonic interconnect. It talks to the neighboring ones in its cluster at full speed, via light.

The chip in question isn’t one you’ll see in a machine near you, instead it’s inspired by the extremely demanding requirements for DARPA’s HIVE graph analytics program. So this is a machine for supercomputers in huge data centers rather than desktop computers, it will be assembled into multi-die packages with that chip-to-chip optical networking built in. But your computer today is the equal of a supercomputer from not that many years ago, so never say you won’t one day be using its descendant technologies.

Finally, A Machine To Organize Resistors!

September 6, 2023 by Jenny List 37 Comments

Perhaps it’s a side-effect of getting older, but it seems like reading the color bands on blue metal-film resistors is harder than it was on the old brown carbon ones. So often the multimeter has to come out to check, but it’s annoying. Thus we rather like [Mike]’s Resistorganizer, which automates the process of keeping track of the components.

At its heart is a fairly simple concept, with the microcontroller reading the value of a resistor by measuring the voltage from a potential divider. The Resistorganizer extends this using an array of analogue multiplexer chips, and is designed to plug into one side of a breadboard with the idea being that each line can have a resistor connected to earth through it. Of course it’s not quite as simple as that, because to maintain a readable range a set of resistors must be switched in and out to form the other half of the divider for different ranges. Thus another multiplexer chip performs that task.

Finally a set of digital multiplexers handles an LED to see which of the many resistors is currently selected through a pair of buttons, and a dot-matrix LCD display delivers the value. We want one already!