Author: Jenny List

3367 Articles

You Paid For This Paper. Now You Can Read It Without Paying Again

August 26, 2022 by 44 Comments

There is probably very little among the topics covered here at Hackaday that doesn’t have its roots somewhere in scientific research. Semiconductor devices for example didn’t simply pop into being in Bell Labs or Texas Instruments, the scientists and engineers who created them did so standing on the shoulders of legions of earlier researchers who discovered the precursor steps that made them possible. As many readers will know, scientific research for its own sake is expensive, so much so that much of it is funded by governments, from your taxes. The research papers with the findings are then hidden from public view behind paywalls by the publishers who distribute them, an injustice which should soon be over for Americans, thanks to a White House memorandum paving the way for federally funded research to be freely available to the public at no cost by no later than 2025.

The academic publishing business originates in the days when paper was king, and it has several tiers. Officially an academic journal is usually the product of a professional body in its field, but it is normal for the publishing itself to be contracted out to a specialist academic publishing company. They accept submissions of papers, edit them, and arrange peer reviewers, before publishing the journals. Originally this was a paper process, but while journals are still printed it’s the Internet through which they are now read. The publishers pay nothing to the researcher for their paper and often only a nominal sum to the reviewers for their input, but charge a hefty subscription for access to the content. As you might imagine it’s an extremely lucrative business, so as this Hackaday scribe saw when she worked in that industry, the publishers and the learned bodies are in no hurry to kill their golden goose.

This move to open access may make few immediate waves outside the world of scientific publishing, but it affirms the principle that taxpayers should be able to see the fruits of their spending. As such it will be of benefit to less-well-off researchers and institutions worldwide. Rest in peace Aaron Swartz, if only you could have seen this day!

White House pic: Matt H. Wade, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Buy The Right To Build A Nakagin Tower Anywhere

August 25, 2022 by 41 Comments

We’re guessing that among Hackaday’s readership are plenty of futurists, and while the past might be the wrong direction in which to look when considering futurism, we wouldn’t blame any of them for hankering for the days when futurism was mainstream.

Perhaps one of the most globally iconic buildings of that era could have been found in Tokyo, in the form of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 Metabolist apartment block. This pioneering structure, in which individual apartments were conceived as plug-in units that could be moved or changed at will, never achieved its potential and was dismantled, looking more post-apocalyptic than futuristic in early 2022, but it could live on in both digital form and reconstructed elsewhere as the rights to its design are being auctioned.

Unfortunately there appears to be some NFT mumbo-jumbo associated with the sale, but what’s up for auction is a complete CAD model along with the rights to build either real or virtual copies of the building. It’s unlikely that any Hackaday readers will pony up for their own Metabolist skyscraper, but the interest lies not only in the love of a future that never quite happened, but in the engineering behind the structure. Where this is being written as in many other places there is simultaneously a chronic housing shortage and a housing system wedded to the outdated building techniques of a previous century, so the thought of updated equivalents of the Nakagin Tower offering the chance of modular interchangeable housing in an era perhaps more suited to it than the 1970s is an intriguing one. Now that we’re living in the future, perhaps it’s time to give futurism another chance.

Regular readers will have spotted this isn’t the first time we’ve brought you a taste of futuristic living.

Header: Svetlov Artem, CC0.

Telephoto Lens Without The Fiscal Pain

August 24, 2022 by 20 Comments

If you’re in the market for a telephoto lens, the available range of optics for your camera is limited only by the size of your bank account. So when [Pixels and Prisms] promises a telephoto for $13 USD it has to be worth a second look, right? Where’s the catch.

The lens has a 3D printed shell containing the optics, with associated focusing and aperture, and has a mount designed for Canon cameras to give a result with 163 mm focal length and f/2.5 . When a Canon lens costs many times more it’s evident that there is some compromise involved, and it comes in the lens system being very simple and comprised of off-the-shelf surplus lenses without the great effort put in by the manufacturer to correct distortion. The result is nonetheless a very creditable lens even if not the first choice for a paparazzo in pursuit of an errant politician.

The real interest for us in this open source project comes in it being something of an experimenter’s test bed for lenses. There’s no need to use the combination shown and the design can be readily adapted for other lenses, so spinning one’s own lens system becomes a real possibility. Plus it’s achieved the all-too-easy task of engaging a Hackaday writer’s time browsing the stock of the Surplus Shed.

We’ve featured a lot of lens projects over the years, but they more often take an existing camera lens as a starting point.

An ASCII Terminal Like It’s 1974

August 21, 2022 by 10 Comments

It’s quite probable that any of you who have built a keyboard will have done so using a matrix of keys connected to a microcontroller, or if you are old-school, a microprocessor. A CPU can scan the keyboard matrix with ease, and pass whatever is typed either to whatever software it is running, or to a host computer. There was a time however when available CPUs were not considered powerful enough to do all this and also perform a useful task, so a keyboard would have its own decoder chip that would output ASCII over a parallel interface. It’s an era [John Calhoun] harks back to with Adam74, a little ASCII terminal which takes its input from that 7-bit parallel port.

In the place of a forest of TTL chips which might have graced the originals, within that attractive curved laser cut acrylic case is an LCD display and a Teensy microcontroller board. There’s a level shifter for the classic 5 volt logic, and of course a small buzzer for the essential BEL character. In these days when a parallel interface is relatively rare, he describes the rediscovery of alternate earth lines in a ribbon cable to minimize cross-talk. Should you wish to try your own, everything can be found on GitHub.

All in all it’s a fun way to rediscover an old idea.

Why Didn’t We Think Of Making A Remote Trigger Button?

August 21, 2022 by 44 Comments

One of the many functions a digital oscilloscope offers over its analog ancestors is a trigger button. Alongside the usual electronic means of triggering the instrument, you can reach over and press a button to “freeze-frame” the action and preserve the trace. Sometimes doing it repeatedly it can become a chore to reach for the ‘scope. That’s where [Kevin Santo Cappuccio]’s remote trigger button comes in.

The button itself is about as simple a hack as it gets. The ‘scope was carefully dissected and some fine wires laid from the contacts within the front panel to a connector on the case. From there a cable goes to a box with a momentary action button switch. Plug in the box, and you can trigger the ‘scope from a distance!

We have to admit to rather admiring this hack, as needing to trigger the ‘scope is a well-known problem here. It’s easy to stab the wrong button and lose what you are looking for, so we’re rather surprised we didn’t think of this one ourselves. But then again from another viewpoint, it involves dissecting an expensive instrument which is best left unmolested. Perhaps manufacturers should consider adding this functionality.

This may be the most straightforward oscilloscope hack we’ve shown you, but it’s certainly not the first.

PicoStepSeq Is Small But Perfectly Formed

August 20, 2022 by 18 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Pico is what you might call the board of the moment, thanks to its combination of affordability, features, and continued availability during the component shortage. We have seen plenty of great projects using it, and the latest to float past is [todbot]’s PicoStepSeq, an extremely compact MIDI sequencer.

All the components are mounted on a PCB, with the sequencer’s eight steps selected by a row of buttons with integrated LEDs. The interface is via an SSD1306 OLED, and there is also a rotary encoder. Software comes courtesy of CircuitPython, and the output is delivered via a 3.5 mm TRS jack. Finally the whole is wrapped in a 3D printed enclosure.

The result is a sequencer that could almost be a product in its own right, and we think anyone whose interests lie in electronic music should find straightforward enough to build. All the files and information required to build your own can be found in the linked repository, and he’s placed a Tweet with a video online which we’ve embedded below the break.

Continue reading “PicoStepSeq Is Small But Perfectly Formed” →

Deepdeck: Going Beyond The Macro Pad

August 20, 2022 by 4 Comments

We’re used to the idea of a macropad, a small extension keyboard for your computer whose keys can be programmed to the functions of your choice. They can be made in many ways, but they all follow a similar functionality. Deepdeck from [Nick Velasquez] is another matter, an attempt to make a macropad with functionality that goes way beyond simply pressing keys.

At its heart is an ESP32 module, and it makes full use of both Bluetooth and wireless networking capabilities. It can use Bluetooth when connecting to the host computer, and the wireless connection hosts both the configuration interface via a web server and an Internet connection from which it derives those special powers.  This is a macropad with programmable keys just like all the others, but it also has the ability to connect to online APIs programmed by the user. This allows it to automate complex queries involving other sources into a keypress, which gives it many more possibilities.

A tool such as this one is one of those things which requires a bit of thought as to exactly how it might be used. A normal API connected device might display the weather on a screen for instance, but how often does one need to type the weather forecast? However we can see that this extra online dimension will find as yet unseen applications, and we look forward to the idea being taken up with other macropads.