VanMoof E-Bike Bankruptcy: The Risks Of Cloud-Connected Transport

July 23, 2023 by Maya Posch 66 Comments

When the bankruptcy of VanMoof, the company behind a series of e-bikes, was announced recently, many probably shrugged at this news. After all, what is an e-bike but a regular bicycle that has some electronics and a battery strapped to it to assist with cycling? Unfortunately for owners of a VanMoof e-bike, their fancy wheels come with a Bluetooth-connected smartphone app that somehow involves storing a special encryption key on the VanMoof servers, as detailed by [Gergely Orosz] at the Pragmatic Engineer. Without this key that is connected to your VanMoof account, your VanMoof app cannot communicate with your VanMoof e-bike.

Although basic functionality of the e-bike will be retained, features such as setting the gear modes, changing assistance mode, locking the bicycle and other features not exposed on the bicycle itself will be lost. Essentially this is the equivalent of losing the remote control to a modern-day TV and getting locked out of 90% of the device’s features.

Fortunately, as [Gergely] and others are (urgently) pointing out to VanMoof e-bike owners, this special key can be downloaded with a Key Exporter project on GitHub, as well as obtained and used with an alternative app by Cowboy Bikes, which is a competitor of VanMoof. The unfortunate reality remains, however, that should you lose this special key, you are going to be in a world of pain as your expensive e-bike now is mostly an e-brick.

(Thanks to [Jan Praegert] for the tip)

Keeping Thermal Plants Cool Without Breaking The Cooling Water Budget

July 13, 2023 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

Steam generators in thermal (steam-cycle) power plants require a constant influx of cool water to maximize the transfer of thermal energy. How this water is cooled again in the condensor after much of the steam’s thermal energy has been spent in the steam turbines or heat exchangers is a very important consideration in the design and construction of these plants. The most obvious and straightforward system is direct “once-through” cooling, where the water is drawn straight from a nearby river or other body of water and released after passing through the condenser. This type of system is by far the cheapest, but is also impacted by both the seasons and environmental considerations.

Where cool surface water is less abundantly available, evaporative cooling in a recirculating system such as with spray ponds and cooling towers is a good alternative. Although slightly more costly, a big benefit of these is that they require far less water and have much more control over the intake water temperature, which can raise plant efficiency. Finally, dry cooling is essentially a closed-loop system, which is exceedingly useful in areas where water is scarce. This latter type of cooling is what allows thermal plants to operate even in desert regions.

As the global climate changes – with more extreme weather events – picking the right cooling solution is more important than ever, and has us looking at retrofitting existing thermal plants with more efficient solutions. If you were ever curious how power plants keep the cool side cool, read on!

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MicroLisp: Lisp For Microcontrollers Now Has Lisp-Based ARM Assembler

July 10, 2023 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

In a way it feels somewhat silly to market a version of Lisp as targeting resource-constrained platforms, considering the systems it ran on back in the 1960s, but as time goes on, what would have given 1970s Big Iron a run for its money is now a sub-$5 microcontroller that you can run uLisp (MicroLisp) on. This particular project now even has an ARM assembler that is written in Lisp whose source code (GitHub) fits on a mere two A4-sized pages.

ULisp currently supports five platforms, being AVR-nano (ATmega328 and similar low-cost AVRs), AVR, ARM, ESP (8266 and 32), as well as RISC-V. The purpose of this assembler is to execute native ARM instructions when running on an ARM board, since uLisp itself runs a Lisp interpreter on the platform. When executed natively like this, a considerable speed-up of the task can be expected, as illustrated by a number of ARM assembler examples in the documentation.

Running a Fibonacci sequence that takes 24.6 seconds with the Lisp version on an Adafruit Metro M4 is reduced to a mere 61 ms when ARM assembly is used instead. This shouldn’t be too shocking, since this assembler essentially bypasses the Lisp runtime, coming closer to what would be the performance of firmware written in e.g. C. However, it also demonstrates that with this ARM assembler it is possible to have your Lisp and still get native performance when you want it, all using Lisp code.

Testing the World's Thinnest Boombox with a modular setup containing the basic components.

Supercon 2022: Joe Grand And The Thinnest Boombox

July 10, 2023 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

Boomboxes are one of those status symbols that define the 1980s and part of the 1990s, being both a miracle of integration and the best way to share your love of music with as many people as possible. Naturally, this led Joe Grand to figure that it would make it a perfect subject for a modern take on such an iconic device. The primary inspiration for this came from a piezo speaker developed by TDK called the ‘PiezoListen’. These are piezo devices that can be less than a millimeter thick, while still claiming to reproduce a broad range of audio frequencies.

Just having these speakers is only part of the solution, of course, which led Joe down the rabbithole of not only figuring out the components that should go into the system, but also how to get it all on a single PCB and see how far one can push different solder mask colors with an appropriately boombox-like design. At its core is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that runs Mopidy, to provide music server functionality. Also added are some RGB lighting and touch controls.

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Reviving Interlisp With The Medley Interlisp Project

July 9, 2023 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

Within the Artificial Intelligence and natural language research communities, Lisp has played a major role since 1960. Over the years since its introduction, various development environments have been created that sought to make using Lisp as easy and powerful as possible. One of these environments is Interlisp, which saw its first release in 1968, and its last official release in 1992. That release was Medley 2.0, which targeted various UNIX machines, DOS 4.0, and the Xerox 1186. Courtesy of the Interlisp open source project (GitHub), Medley Interlisp is available for all to use, even on modern systems.

The documentation contains information on how to install Medley on Linux but also Mac and Windows (via WSL1 or WSL2). For those just curious to give things a swing, there’s also an online version you can log into remotely. What Medley Interlisp gets you is an (X-based) GUI environment in which you can program in Lisp, essentially an IDE with a debugger and the (in)famous auto-correction tool for simple errors such as typos, known as the DWIM (Do What I Mean), which much like the derived version in Emacs seeks to automatically fix simple issues like misspellings without forcing the developer to fix it and restart the compilation.

Thanks to [Pixel_Outlaw] for the tip and for also telling us about a project they wrote using Medley Interlisp for the Spring Lisp Game Jame 2023 titled Interlisp Fifteen Puzzle.

Miniware TS1C: A Cordless Soldering Iron With A Station

July 9, 2023 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

Most soldering irons in the market seem to fall into a few distinct categories. They either provide a full-blown station to which the soldering iron is wired, powered straight by mains, or an iron powered by DC power. The Miniware TS1C takes up an interesting position here in that it features both a station you put the iron into and adjust the temperature, as well as a fully cordless iron. Sounds too good to be true, perhaps, but a recent Tom’s Hardware review by [Les Pounder] seems to think it has real merit.

Behind the glossy exterior and marketing, we find a cordless soldering iron that uses a supercapacitor to power itself when it is not inserted into the station, with communication between the iron and station performed using Bluetooth. This way, you can keep an eye on both the tip temperature and the remaining charge left, which [Les] found to be sufficient for soldering about 80 smaller joints, with the marketing claiming it can solder 180 size 0805 SMD parts with one charge.

The advantage of having a station is that it is the part that is wired to a power bank or wall wart, with the temperature setting performed using a chunky dial. The station also provides a place for the iron in between soldering sessions, but in order to recharge the iron, the brass bands near the front have to be pushed into the holder for them to make contact. This also makes one-handed removal of the iron from the holder not as easy as you’d hope.

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Creating A Joule-Thomson Cryocooler And A Little Bit Of History At Home

July 7, 2023 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

The fun part about crycoolers is that there are so many different and exciting ways to make stuff cold, based on a wide variety of physics. This is why after first exploring the Stirling/GM cycle and vapor-compression to create a cryocooler that he could liquefy nitrogen with, [Hyperspace Pirate] is exploring a Joule-Thomson cooler, which is also misspelled as ‘Joule-Thompson’ by those who don’t mind take some liberties with history. Either way, the advantage of the adiabatic Joule-Thomson effect is that it is significantly simpler than the other methods — having been invented in the 19th century and used for the earliest forms of refrigeration.

This is what peak Joule-Thomson prototype cooler performance looks like.

The big difference between it and other technologies is that the effect is based on throttling the flow of a gas as it seeks to expand, within specific temperature and pressure ranges to ensure that the temperature change effect is positive (i.e. the temperature of the gas decreases). The net result is that of a cooling effect, which as demonstrated in the video can be used with successive stages involving different gases, or a gas mixture, to reach a low enough temperature at which nitrogen (contained in the same gas mixture) liquefies and can be collected.

Although not a very efficient process, if your local electricity costs allow it, running the compressor in a closed loop version isn’t that expensive and worth it for the science alone. Naturally, as with any experimental setup involving a range of gases, a compressor and other components, getting it to run perfectly on the first try is basically impossible, which is why this is so far Part 1 of another series on cryocoolers at home (or in the garage).

If you’re interested in the previous work [Hyperspace Pirate] has done with DIY cyrocoolers, take a look at our coverage from earlier this year.

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