Restoring A Sinclair C5 For The Road

May 10, 2025 by Jenny List 26 Comments

The Sinclair C5 was Sir Clive’s famous first venture into electric mobility, a recumbent electric-assisted tricycle which would have been hardly unusual in 2025. In 1985, though, the C5 was so far out there that it became a notorious failure. The C5 retains a huge following among enthusiasts, though, and among those is [JSON Alexander, who has bought one and restored it.

We’re treated to a teardown and frank examination of the vehicle’s strengths and weaknesses, during which we see the Sinclair brand unusually on a set of tyres, and the original motor, which is surprisingly more efficient than expected. Sir Clive may be gone, but this C5 will live again.

We’ve had the chance to road test a C5 in the past, and it’s fair to say that we can understand why such a low-down riding position was not a success back in the day. It’s unusual to see one in as original a condition as this one, it’s more usual to see a C5 that’s had a few upgrades.

A Single Chip Computer For The 8051 Generation

May 9, 2025 by Jenny List 37 Comments

The Intel 8051 series of 8-bit microcontrollers is long-discontinued by its original manufacturer, but lives on as a core included in all manner of more recent chips. It’s easy to understand and program, so it remains a fixture despite much faster replacements appearing.

If you can’t find an original 40-pin DIP don’t worry, because [mit41301] has produced a board in a compatible 40-pin format. It’s called the single chip computer not because such a thing is a novelty in 2025, but because it has no need for the support chips which would have come with the original.

The modern 8051 clone in use is a CH558 or CH559, both chips with far more onboard than the original. The pins are brought out to one side only of the board, because on the original the other side would interface with an external RAM chip. It speaks serial, and can be used through either a USB-to-serial or Bluetooth-to-serial chip. There’s MCS-BASIC for it, so programming should be straightforward.

We can see the attraction of this board even though we reach for much more accomplished modern CPUs by choice. Several decades ago the original 8051 on Intel dev boards was our university teaching microcontoller, so there remains here a soft spot for it. We certainly see other 8051 designs, as for example this Arduino clone.

There’s A Venusian Spacecraft Coming Our Way

April 29, 2025 by Jenny List 30 Comments

It’s not unusual for redundant satellites, rocket stages, or other spacecraft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. Usually they pass unnoticed or generate a spectacular light show, and very rarely a few pieces make it to the surface of the planet. Coming up though is something entirely different, a re-entry of a redundant craft in which the object in question might make it to the ground intact. To find out more about the story we have to travel back to the early 1970s, and Kosmos-482. It was a failed Soviet Venera mission, and since its lander was heavily over-engineered to survive entry into the Venusian atmosphere there’s a fascinating prospect that it might survive Earth re-entry.

A model of the Venera 7 probe, launched in 1970. — This model of the earlier Venera 7 probe shows the heavy protection to survive entry into the Venusian atmosphere. Emerezhko, CC BY-SA 4.0.

At the time of writing the re-entry is expected to happen on the 10th of May, but as yet due to its shallow re-entry angle it is difficult to predict where it might land. It is thought to be about a metre across and to weigh just under 500 kilograms, and its speed upon landing is projected to be between 60 and 80 metres per second. Should it hit land rather than water then, its remains are thought to present an immediate hazard only in its direct path.

Were it to be recovered it would be a fascinating artifact of the Space Race, and once the inevitable question of its ownership was resolved — do marine salvage laws apply in space? –we’d expect it to become a world class museum exhibit. If that happens, we look forward to bringing you our report if possible.

This craft isn’t the only surviving relic of the Space Race out there, though it may be the only one we have a chance of seeing up-close. Some of the craft from that era are even still alive.

Header: Moini, CC0.

Hydrogen Trains: Not The Success Germany Hoped They Would Be

April 29, 2025 by Jenny List 95 Comments

As transport infrastructure in Europe moves toward a zero-carbon future, there remain a number of railway lines which have not been electrified. The question of replacing their diesel traction with greener alternatives, and there are a few different options for a forward looking railway company to choose from. In Germany the Rhine-Main railway took delivery of a fleet of 27 Alstom hydrogen-powered multiple units for local passenger services, but as it turns out they have not been a success (German language, Google translation.). For anyone enthused as we are about alternative power, this bears some investigation.

It seems that this time the reliability of the units and the supply of spare parts was the issue, rather than the difficulty of fuel transport as seen in other failed hydrogen transport problems, but whatever the reason it seems we’re more often writing about hydrogen’s failures than its successes. We really want to believe in a hydrogen future in which ultra clean trains and busses zip around on hydrogen derived from wind power, but sadly that has never seemed so far away. Instead trains seem inevitably to be following cars, and more successful trials using battery units point the way towards their being the future.

We’re sure that more hydrogen transport projects will come and go before either the technological problems are overcome, or they fade away as impractical as the atmospheric railway. Meanwhile we’d suggest hydrogen transport as the example when making value judgements about technology.

Hackaday Podcast Ep 318: DIY Record Lathe, 360 Degree LIDAR, And 3D Printing Innovation Lives!

April 25, 2025 by Jenny List 2 Comments

This week Elliot Williams was joined by fellow Europe-based Hackaday staffer Jenny List, to record the Hackaday Podcast as the dusk settled on a damp spring evening.

On the agenda first was robotic sport, as a set of bipedal robots competed in a Chinese half-marathon. Our new Robot overlords may have to wait a while before they are fast enough chase us meatbags away, but it demonstrated for us how such competitions can be used to advance the state of the art.

The week’s stand-out hacks included work on non-planar slicing to improve strength of 3D prints. It’s safe to say that the Cartesian 3D printer has matured as a device, but this work proves there’s plenty more in the world of 3D printing to be developed. Then there was a beautiful record cutting lathe project, far more than a toy and capable of producing good quality stereo recordings.

Meanwhile it’s always good to see the price of parts come down, and this time it’s the turn of LIDAR sensors. There’s a Raspberry Pi project capable of astounding resolution, for a price that wouldn’t have been imaginable only recently. Finally we returned to 3D printing, with an entirely printable machine, including the motors and the hot end. It’s a triumph of printed engineering, and though it’s fair to say that you won’t be using it to print anything for yourself, we expect some of the very clever techniques in use to feature in many other projects.

The week’s cant-miss articles came from Maya Posch with a reality check for lovers of physical media, and Dan Maloney with a history of x-ray detection. Listen to it all below, and you’ll find all the links at the bottom of the page.

Still mourning the death of physical media? Download an MP3 and burn it to CD like it’s 1999!

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Ep 318: DIY Record Lathe, 360 Degree LIDAR, And 3D Printing Innovation Lives!” →

You Wouldn’t Steal A Font…

April 25, 2025 by Jenny List 67 Comments

In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began with “You wouldn’t steal a car.. “. It was enough of a part of the background noise of popular culture that it has become a meme in the 2020s, reaching many people with no idea of its origins. Now in a delicious twist of fate, it has been found that the font used in the campaign was itself pirated. Someone should report them.

The font in question is FF Confidential, designed by [Just van Rossum], whose brother [Guido] you may incidentally know as the originator of the Python programming language. The font in the campaign isn’t FF Confidential though, as it turns out it’s XBAND Rough, a pirated copy of the original. What a shame nobody noticed this two decades ago.

It’s a bit of fun to delight in an anti-piracy campaign being caught using a dodgy font, but if this story serves to tell us anything it’s that the web of modern intellectual property is so labyrinthine as to be almost impossible to navigate without coming a cropper somewhere. Sadly the people caught out in this case would be the last to call for reform of the intellectual property environment, but as any sane heads would surely agree, such reform is overdue.

If copyright gives you a headache, here’s our take on it.

A Bicycle Is Abandonware Now? Clever Hack Rescues Dead Light

April 24, 2025 by Jenny List 77 Comments

A bicycle is perhaps one of the most repairable pieces of equipment one can own — no matter what’s wrong with it, and wherever you are on the planet, you’ll be able to find somebody to fix your bike without too much trouble. Unfortunately as electric bikes become more popular, predatory manufacturers are doing everything they can to turn a bike into a closed machine, only serviceable by them.

That’s bad enough, but it’s even worse if the company happens to go under. As an example, [Fransisco] has a bike built by a company that has since gone bankrupt. He doesn’t name them, but it looks like a VanMoof to us. The bike features a light built into the front of the top tube of the frame, which if you can believe it, can only be operated by the company’s (now nonfunctional) cloud-based app.

The hack is relatively straightforward. The panel for the VanMoof electronics is removed and the works underneath are slid up the tube, leaving the connector to the front light. An off the shelf USB-C Li-Po charger and a small cell take the place of the original parts under a new 3D printed panel with a switch to run the light via a suitable resistor. If it wasn’t for the startling green color of the filament he used, you might not even know it wasn’t original.

We would advise anyone who will listen, that hardware which relies on an app and a cloud service should be avoided at all costs. We know most Hackaday readers will be on the same page as us on this one, but perhaps it’s time for a cycling manifesto to match our automotive one.

Thanks [cheetah_henry] for the tip.