Author: Jenny List

3248 Articles

Make A Cheap Robot Mower Much Smarter

July 2, 2024 by 15 Comments

The Parkside range of tools as sold in European Lidl stores may be reasonably priced, but it contains some products of far better quality than their modest cost would suggest. This means that Parkside hacking has become as much of a cottage industry as IKEA hacking, and they’re a firm favorite for modifications. [Lambertus] has taken a Parkside robot mower, and converted it from a relatively mundane device to a fully-connected smart robot, with the aid of an ESP8266.

The hardware is surprisingly simple, as all that’s really needed is a stop/go command. This can be readily found by hooking up to the input from the mower’s rain sensor, allowing the ESP to control its operation. Then there’s an accelerometer to allow it to count motion, and a hookup tot he battery to measure voltage. The firmware uses ESPHome, resulting in a mower now connected to home automation.

This isn’t the first time we’ve shown you someone upgrading the smarts on  robot mover, and of course we’ve also taken a tour through the history of lawn mowers in general.

Fork! Ladybird Browser And SerenityOS To Go Separate Ways

July 2, 2024 by 10 Comments

In the monthly Ladybird Browser update video which we’ve placed below, SerenityOS founder [Andreas Kling] announced an interesting development. The browser has been forked from the OS that has been its progenitor, and both projects will now proceed separately. This frees the browser from the SerenityOS insistence on avoiding external libraries, and allows it to take advantage of stable, fast, and mature open source alternatives. This is already paying dividends in compatibility and speed, and is likely to lead further towards a usable everyday browser as time goes by.

As the world of fully-featured web browser engines has contracted from a number of different projects to little more than Google’s Blink and Mozilla’s Gecko, Ladybird has found itself in an unexpected position. It is vital that the browser market retains some competition and does not become a Google monoculture, so while it might not seem so at first glance, the news of Ladybird going alone has the potential to be one of the most far-reaching open source stories of the year.

If you’d like to try Ladybird you’ll have to get your hands slightly dirty and build it yourself, but we’d expect ready-built versions to appear in due course. We took a look at an earlier version of Ladybird last year, as well as SerenityOS itself.

Continue reading “Fork! Ladybird Browser And SerenityOS To Go Separate Ways” →

So Much Going On In So Few Components: Dissecting A Microwave Radar Module

July 1, 2024 by 17 Comments

In the days before integrated circuits became ubiquitous, providing advanced functionality in a single package, designers became adept at extracting the maximum use from discrete components. They’d use clever circuits in which a transistor or other active part would fulfill multiple roles at once, and often such circuits would need more than a little know-how to get working. It’s not often in 2024 that we encounter this style of circuit, but here’s [Maurycy] with a cheap microwave radar module doing just that.

Continue reading “So Much Going On In So Few Components: Dissecting A Microwave Radar Module” →

Casting Concrete With A 3D-Printed Mould

July 1, 2024 by 20 Comments

We’re accustomed to covering the use of 3D printing in casting, usually as a lost-PLA former in metal casting. That’s not the only use of the technique though, and perhaps one of the simplest is to use a 3D-printed mould for casting concrete. It’s what [ArtByAdrock] is doing in their latest video, casting an ornamental owl model.

The first part of the video below the break deals with the CAD steps necessary to produce the mould, and depending on your CAD proficiency may not be the most interesting part. The process creates a mould with two halves, a pouring hole, and registration points. Then a 3D printer produces it using flexible TPU. The pour is then simplicity itself, using a casting cement mix at a consistency similar to pancake batter. The video shows how a release spray provides easy separation, and the result is a fresh concrete owl and a mould ready for the next pour.

We can see that maybe readers have only so much space in their lives for concrete owls, but this process could be a valuable part of the armoury when it comes to making some less decorative items. It’s not the first time we’ve looked at this type of work.

Continue reading “Casting Concrete With A 3D-Printed Mould” →

An IBM M2 Keyboard Lives Again

July 1, 2024 by 1 Comment

There’s a mystique in old keyboard circles around the IBM Model M, the granddaddy of PC keyboards with those famous buckling spring key switches. The original Model M was a substantial affair with a sheet metal backplane that would probably serve well as a weapon in a zombie apocalypse and still allow writing a Hackaday piece afterward, but later on in the life of these ‘boards there was also a lighter version. The M2 as these models are dubbed has a few known problems, and [Anders Nielsen] scored one online that turned out to have dodgy capacitors. His video, below the break, takes us through the disassembly of his M2 and provides a relaxing tour of these not-quite-so-famous peripherals.

As you’d expect, three-decade-old plastic isn’t always in the best shape, so disassembly and unlatching all those little tabs has to be performed with care. The keys come off and the springs are on show, but we get a nasty shock when they all fall out of place as the top is removed. It appears the rookie mistake is to not turn the ‘board upside down before parting it. Replacing the caps is an easy process after all that, and we get a little dive into the 6805 processors used in model Ms.

If you have a model M of any description then you’re probably at home with the clack-clack-clack sound they make, but have you ever looked at its ancestor, the model F?

Continue reading “An IBM M2 Keyboard Lives Again” →

A Vintage AC Bridge Teardown

June 30, 2024 by 2 Comments

If you ever encounter a British engineer of a certain age, the chances are that even if they use a modern DMM they’ll have a big boxy multimeter in their possession. This is the famous Avo 8, in its day the analogue multimeter to have. Of course it wasn’t the only AVO product, and [Thomas Scherrer OZ2CPU] is here with another black box sporting an AVO logo. This one’s an AC bridge, one of a series of models manufactured from the 1930s through to the late 1940s, and he treats us to a teardown and restoration of it.

Most readers will probably be familiar with the operation of a DC Wheatstone Bridge in which two resistances can be compared, and an AC bridge is the same idea but using an AC source. A component under test is attached to one set of terminals while one with a known value is put on the other, and the device can then be adjusted for a minimum reading on its meter to achieve a state of balance. The amount by which it is adjusted can then be used as a measure of the difference between the two parts, and thus the value of an unknown part can be deduced.

In the case of this AVO the AC is the 50Hz (remembering that this is a British instrument) mains frequency, and the reading from the bridge is taken via a single tube amplifier to a rectifier circuit and the meter. Inside it’s a treasure trove of vintage parts with an electrolytic capacitor that looks as though it might not be original, with a selenium rectifier and a copper oxide signal diode in particular catching our eye. This last part is responsible for some reading anomalies, but after cleaning and lubricating all the switches and bringing up the voltage gently, he’s rewarded with a working bridge. You can see the whole story in the video below the break.

Test equipment from this era is huge, so perhaps not all of you have the space for something like this. Some of us have been known to own other AVO products though.

Continue reading “A Vintage AC Bridge Teardown” →

Can We Ever Achieve Fusion Power?

June 29, 2024 by 51 Comments

Fusion power has long held the promise of delivering near-endless energy without as many unfortunate side effects as nuclear fission. But despite huge investment and some fascinating science, the old adage about practical power generation being 20 years away seems just as true as ever. But is that really the case? [Brian Potter] has written a review article for Construction Physics, which takes us through the decades of fusion research.

For a start, it’s fascinating to learn about the many historical fusion process, the magnetic pinch, the stelarator, and finally the basis of many modern reactors, the tokamak. He demonstrates that we’ve made an impressive amount of progress, but at the same time warns against misleading comparisons. There’s a graph comparing fusion progress with Moore’s Law that he debunks, but he ends on a positive note. Who knows, we might not need a Mr. Fusion to arrive from the future after all!

Fusion reactors are surprisingly easy to make, assuming you don’t mind putting far more energy in than you’d ever receive in return. We’ve featured more than one Farnsworth fusor over the years.