Author: Jenny List

3378 Articles

What’s New, From 1927

January 2, 2023 by 13 Comments

Here we are at the start of the new year, which for the Internet Archive means a note about what has just entered the public domain. 1927’s finest previously copyrighted materials are now up for grabs in the public domain, which means there’s a treasure trove of films, books, and music to freely copy and remix.

Their article highlights a few notable pieces of 1927’s popular culture , of which we suggest you should definitely take note of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis if you have any interest in sci-fi, but for Hackaday readers there’s not much else in the article itself relating to technology. Delving into the archive for 1927 is still a fascinating pastime though, because beyond the interest of seeing what’s now free it led onto what was the state of technology in the 1920s. And here we find ourselves as much navigating the English language as we do the library itself, because so much of what we do uses vocabulary from the decades since. Continue reading “What’s New, From 1927” →

A Bicycle Trailer Fit For Heavy Haulage

January 2, 2023 by 8 Comments

One of the problems of being a cyclist is that a bicycle just isn’t designed to carry much more than a human. You can get panniers and hang shopping bags from the handlebars, but sooner or later there’s a load which just doesn’t fit. At that point there’s only one way forward that involves staying on two wheels: find a bike trailer. If you fancy building one yourself, then there’s La Charette (French language, Google Translate link), an open-source three-wheeler design from France.

Construction is a sturdy welded box section tube spaceframe, with the single wheel at the front providing steering, and a towing bar attached to the seat post of the bicycle. Along with the impressive load capacity comes the problem of towing it, and for the cyclist with less-than-superhuman strength there’s the option of an electrically-driven front wheel. Stopping the whole thing is an essential feature with loads this size, and to that end there’s an inertial braking system operated by the force on the towing bar.

All in all it appears to be a useful trailer, albeit on the large side for storage when not being used. It’s certainly one of the larger bike trailers we’ve seen, though not perhaps the most stylish.

Thanks [Jeff] for the tip!

Get To Know Touch With This Dev Board

December 31, 2022 by 5 Comments

In the catalogue of the Chinese parts supplier LCSC can be found many parts not available from American or European suppliers, and thus anyone who wants to evaluate them can find themselves at a disadvantage. [Sleepy Pony Labs] had just such a part catch their eye, the Sam&Wing AI08 8 channel capacitive touch controller. How to evaluate a chip with little information? Design a dev board, of course!

The chip tested is part of a family all providing similar functionality, but with a variety of interface options. The part tested has eight touch inputs and a BCD output. Said output is used to feed a 74 series decoder chip and drive some LEDs. The touch pads were designed with reference to a Microchip application note which incidentally makes for fascinating reading on the subject as it covers far more than just simple touch buttons.

Whether or not you’ll need this touch chip is a matter for your own designs, however, what this project demonstrates is that with the ready availability of cheap custom PCBs and unexpected parts it’s not beyond reason to create boards just for evaluation purposes.

Perhaps the subject of a previous Hackaday piece would have found this board useful.

If You Can’t See A Solar Panel, That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not There

December 31, 2022 by 45 Comments

In the shift away from fossil fuel energy sources, there has been a huge expansion in solar power. We’ve seen solar thermal plants in the desert and photovoltaic panel farms covering huge areas of land, but perhaps the most potential comes from placing the panels on rooftops. In some parts of the world this is encouraged through a system of subsidies, as is the case in Italy. But what if your building is part of a protected world heritage site such as the Roman city of Pompeii? The answer comes in the form of traditional roof tiles that hide their photovoltaic elements under a polymer skin that looks for all the world like a traditional Roman pan tile. As is so often the case with such products, the manufacturer’s description page is cagey about the details in the name of protecting their invention. What they do tell us is that the tile uses conventional solar cells mounted underneath the polymer layer, which is described as “opaque at the sight but translucent to sun rays“. This sounds like an inherent contradiction, so naturally, we’re intrigued as to how it works. Continue reading “If You Can’t See A Solar Panel, That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not There” →

Audio Old And New Meet In Perfect Harmony

December 30, 2022 by 20 Comments

There’s an uneasy meeting in the world of audio between digital and analogue. Traditional analogue audio reached a level of very high quality, but as old-style media-based audio sources have fallen out of favor there’s a need to replace them with ones that reflect a new digital audio world. To do this there are several options involving all-in-one Hi-Fi separates at a hefty price, a cheaper range of dongles and boxes for each digital input, or to do what [Keri Szafir] has done and build that all-in-one box for yourself.

The result is a 1U 19″ rack unit that contains an Orange Pi for connectivity and streaming, a hard drive to give it audio NAS capability, plus power switching circuitry to bring all the older equipment under automation. Good quality audio is dealt with by using a Behringer USB audio card, on which in a demonstration of how even some digital audio is now becoming outdated, she ignores the TOSlink connector.

The rear panel has all the connectors for power, USB, network, and audio laid out, while the front has an array of status lights and switches. We particularly like the hand-written lettering, which complements this as a homebrew unit. It certainly makes the Bluetooth dongle dangling at the back of our amplifier seem strangely inadequate.

If audio is your thing, we had a look at some fundamentals of digital audio as part of our Know Audio series.

Robot Rebellion Brings Back BBC Camera Operators

December 30, 2022 by 22 Comments

The modern TV news studio is a masterpiece of live video and CGI, as networks vie for the flashiest presentation. BBC News in London is no exception, and embraced the future in 2013 to the extent of replacing its flesh-and-blood camera operators with robotic cameras. On the face of it this made sense; it was cheaper, and newsroom cameras are most likely to record as set range of very similar shots. A decade later they’re to be retired in a victory for humans, as the corporation tires of the stream of viral fails leaving presenters scrambling to catch up.

A media story might seem slim pickings for Hackaday readers, however there’s food for thought in there for the technically minded. It seems the cameras had a set of pre-programmed maneuvers which the production teams could select for their different shots, and it was too easy for the wrong one to be enabled. There’s also a suggestion that the age of the system might have something to do with it, but this is somewhat undermined by their example which we’ve placed below being from when the cameras were only a year old.

Given that a modern TV studio is a tightly controlled space and that detecting the location of the presenter plus whether they are in shot or not should not have been out of reach in 2013, so we’re left curious as to why they haven’t taken this route. Perhaps OpenCV to detect a human, or simply detecting the audio levels on the microphones before committing to a move could do the job. Either way we welcome the camera operators back even if we never see them, though we’ll miss the viral funnies.

Continue reading “Robot Rebellion Brings Back BBC Camera Operators” →

The Sweetest Glue In The World

December 29, 2022 by 19 Comments

Perhaps we’re not alone in having a penchant for gummy sweets, but we have to admit to never following the train of thought shared by [Lost Art Press]. Upon finding that a hide glue ingredient was raw gelatin obtained from a confectionery company, they stored away the knowledge and eventually tried making some glue using Haribo Goldbears from a gas station.

Melting the anthropomorphised sweets in a pot with a little water produced a thin glue, which was tried on a couple of bits of wood. The test joint duly stuck together, and after a few weeks for it to set it was time to test it. Simply hitting it with a hammer caused the wood to fracture, but using more traditional hide glue dissolving techniques with water or alcohol gave the expected result of parting it.

So a pretty usable hide glue for woodworking can be made using gummy sweets. We think it’s pretty cool, but perhaps given how easy it is to buy either the real thing or a PVA-based alternative, that this is one for the MacGyver file. Should you ever find yourself stranded in a gas station unable to save the world for want of a bit of glue then now you have the crucial bit of knowledge. Until then, leave out Haribo Goldbears alone!

Thanks [Aaron Tagliaboschi] for the tip!