Author: Jenny List

3569 Articles

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written as in many other places there is simultaneously a chronic housing shortage and a housing system wedded to the outdated building techniques of a previous century, so the thought of updated equivalents of the Nakagin Tower offering the chance of modular interchangeable housing in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.

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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.

Fridge Compressor Teardown Reveals Engineering Compromises

August 20, 2022 by 108 Comments

Probably one of the most reliable devices you will have in your house is the refrigerator, as its compressor has the minimum of moving parts and carries its own lubrication. It’s not uncommon to find fridges many decades old still in use, and fridges are far more likely to be discarded due to broken fittings rather than a failed compressor. An interesting teardown of a failed fridge compressor comes from [turbokinetic], who gives us a professional analysis of how shortcomings in its construction caused it to fail. It’s both an opportunity for a look at the inside of a fridge compressor, and a commentary on the quality of consumer grade hardware.

Electrically the unit seemed unhurt, but the motor wouldn’t pump anything. Cutting the lid off revealed the motor, and it was soon established that the bearing had failed. As the teardown proceeded the conclusion was that the fault lay in the oil being too low viscosity. The designer had picked a very light oil in pursuit of low friction for lower energy consumption, but had ended up with one too light to provide adequate coverage within the bearing. The compressor has a lifetime of around ten years baked into it from manufacture, whether the designer intended it to or not.

You can see the full video below the break, but meanwhile this isn’t the first fridge compressor we’ve seen.

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