Author: Jenny List

3365 Articles

Could India Be The Crucial Battleground For Open Access To Scientific Research?

December 9, 2021 by 16 Comments

One of the hottest topics in the world of scientific publishing over the last couple of decades has been the growing pressure to release the fruits of public-funded scientific research from the paywalled clutches of commercial publishers. This week comes news of a new front in this ongoing battle, as a group of Indian researchers have filed an intervention application with the help of the Indian Internet Freedom Foundation in a case that involves the publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society who have filed a copyright infringement suit against in the Delhi High Court against the LibGen & Sci-Hub shadow library websites.

The researchers all come from the field of social sciences, and they hope to halt moves to block the websites by demonstrating their importance to research in India in the light of unsustainable pricing for Indian researchers. Furthermore they intend to demonstrate a right of access for researchers and teachers under Indian law, thus undermining the legal standing of the original claim.

We’re not qualified to pass comment on matters of Indian law here at Hackaday, but we feel this will be a case worth watching for anyone worldwide with an interest in open access to research papers. If it can be established that open access shadow libraries can be legal in a country the size of India, then it may bring to an end the somewhat absurd game of legal whack-a-mole that has raged over the last decade between the sites on their untouchable Russian servers and heavy-handed academic publishers who perhaps haven’t moved on from their paper publishing past. It’s time for a fresh start with the way academic publishing works, and maybe this will provide the impetus for that to happen.

For those wondering what the fuss is about, we’ve looked at the issue in the past.

Indian flag image: © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA.

Rubber Tyres Before There Were Tyres

December 8, 2021 by 24 Comments

Sometimes there is pleasure in watching an expert demonstrating his craft, particularly so when the craft is unusual or disappearing. A video came our way of just such a thing, and it’s of a craft so rare that it’s possible few of us will have considered it. We’re used to buying tyres for our motor vehicles that come pre-made in a mould for the size of our wheels, but how many of us have considered where the origins of the rubber tyre lie? How did a 19th-century horse-drawn buggy get its tyres? [EngelsCoachShop] take us through the process, putting rubber on a set of wooden carriage wheels.

These wheels would originally have had iron rims, that must have provided a jarring ride on cobbled roads of the day. English coach-builders of the mid 19th century were the first to fit solid rubber tyres, and it’s this type of tyre that’s being fitted in the video. Instead of the rubber ring we might expect the tyre is cut from a length of vulcanised rubber extrusion with a significant overlap, then a pair of high-tensile wires are fed through holes in the extrusion. The impressive part is the jig for creating the tyre, in which the rubber is compressed to a tight fit on the wheel before the wires are cut and their ends brazed together. Once the wheel is released from the jig  the compressed tyre expands to the point at which its ends meet, making a perfect circular tyre held tightly on the rim. Few of us will ever see this for real, but we’re privileged to see it on the screen.

We may not deal with wooden wheels very often, but this isn’t the first set we’ve seen.

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Spacing Out: Telescopes, Politics, And Spacecraft Design

December 7, 2021 by 9 Comments

Let’s launch into a round-up of stories that are out of this world, as we take a look at what’s happening in the realm of space exploration.

Ten Billion Dollars For A Telescope? Don’t Drop It!

Perhaps the most highly anticipated space mission of the moment is the James Webb Space Telescope, an infra-red telescope that will be placed in an orbit around the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point from which it will serve as the successor to the now long-in-the-tooth Hubble telescope. After many years of development the craft has been assembled and shipped to French Guiana for a scheduled Ariane 5 launch on the 22nd of December. We can only imagine what must have gone through the minds of the engineers and technicians working on the telescope when an unplanned release of a clamp band securing it to the launch vehicle adapter sent a vibration throughout the craft. Given the fragility of some of its components this could have jeopardised the mission, however after inspection it was found that no damage had occurred and that space-watchers and astronomers alike can breathe easy.

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Is The Game Up For Baofeng In Europe?

December 5, 2021 by 121 Comments

For radio enthusiasts worldwide, the inexpensive Chinese handheld radios produced by the likes of Baofeng and other brands have been a welcome addition to their arsenal. They make an ideal first transceiver for a new licensee, a handy portable for any radio amateur, and an inexpensive basis for UHF or VHF experimentation. Unfortunately with the low cost comes something of a reputation for not having the cleanest spectral output, and it seems that this has caught the attention of regulators in Germany and Poland. In Germany this has resulted in the announcement of a sales prohibition (PDF in German) which seems likely to be repeated across the rest of the EU.

It seems what has happened is that the quality of the Baofeng radios on sale doesn’t match that claimed in their conformity documents, which should honestly come as a surprise to nobody. It is interesting that the paperwork mentions the Baofeng UV-5R specifically, as it seems likely to us that an inevitable game of whack-a-mole will ensue with the same radios appearing under ever more brand names and part numbers. The basic UV-5R already appears under a number of variants, for example the one where this is being written is a near-identical but slightly more powerful BF-F8, so this should again come as no surprise.

If you live in Europe should you panic buy a Baofeng while you still can? Probably not, unless you really need one. Something tells us they will remain readily available from the usual overseas sources for years to come. Meanwhile this isn’t the first time a regulator has raised questions about this type of radio.

Thanks [2ftg] for the tip.

Header image: Варвара Каминская, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Medieval History Of Your Favourite Dev Board

December 1, 2021 by 20 Comments

It’s become something of a trope in our community, that the simplest way to bestow a level of automation or smarts to a project is to reach for an Arduino. The genesis of the popular ecosystem of boards and associated bootloader and IDE combination is well known, coming from the work of a team at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, in Northern Italy. The name “Arduino” comes from their favourite watering hole, the Bar di Re Arduino, in turn named for Arduin of Ivrea, an early-mediaeval king.

As far as we can see the bar no longer exists and has been replaced by a café, which appears on the left in this Google Street View link. The bar named for Arduin of Ivrea is always mentioned as a side note in the Arduino microcontroller story, but for the curious electronics enthusiast it spawns the question: who was Arduin, and why was there a bar named after him in the first place?

The short answer is that Arduin was the Margrave of Ivrea, an Italian nobleman who became king of Italy in 1002 and abdicated in 1014. The longer answer requires a bit of background knowledge of European politics around the end of the first millennium, so if you’re ready we’ll take Hackaday into a rare tour of medieval history.

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Buy A Piece Of The Pi?

November 30, 2021 by 62 Comments

The various companies and organisations that supply our community have achieved differing levels of success, with some staying as kitchen-table operations and others reaching the giddy heights of multinational commerce. Perhaps none has risen so far as Raspberry Pi though, as there are reports that the developer of single board computers might be seeking a £400m listing on the London Stock Exchange some time next year. The news is that they have sought the advice of investment bankers over the possibility of a float, seeking to secure further investment to further develop their product portfolio.

We’re not investment advisers here at Hackaday so we’re not going to suggest whether or not to bet your shirt on Pi shares, instead our interest lies in what this might mean for their family of products. It’s an inevitable process for any start-up that achieves major success that it will over time progress from being directed by vision to being directed by commerce, and perhaps a listing could be the culmination of this process. It’s fair to say that we tinkerers probably represent less of a market than education or industry to the Pi folks, so how might we win or lose when the suits take the helm?

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Finally, Tame The Si5351!

November 26, 2021 by 12 Comments

The Si5351 is an extremely useful device, containing multiple clock generators with many versatile programming options that go well beyond its original purpose of providing a clock for digital circuitry. It has in particular found a spot in RF projects, where it provides a cheap and effective stand-in for a variable frequency oscillator in everything from receivers to VNAs. It’s fair to say that programming the Si5351 isn’t the easiest of tasks though, and joining the various attempts to make this simpler is [MR-DOS], who has created an Si5351 library for the STM32 range of ARM Cortex M processors. Fortunately for those afflicted by the semiconductor shortage there’s the advice that porting it to other architectures should only require the relatively manageable task of modifying the i2c function for the new hardware.

Instead of being a full abstraction layer for frequency generation, this library provides functions to give access to the nuts-and-bolts of the chip such as PLL dividers. Thus there’s a need to understand the workings of a PLL and calculate its parameters, while in return much more flexibility over the chip’s operation can be had. We like this approach even though it requires a little more work from the developer.

Over the years this device has attracted a variety of libraries, this isn’t the first we’ve featured.

Header image: Adafruit Industries (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)