Fail Of The Week: The Demise Of Lil’ Screwy

March 20, 2014 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

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The subject of this Fail of the Week installment is entertaining if nothing else. [Chris] decided to see what kind of forces his home-built 100 ton press could stand up to. Turns out the press failed at punching a 1.5″ hole through 1/2″ plate steel.

If you didn’t see it back in February make sure you take a gander at the premier of Lil’ Screwy. The diminutive press packed quite a bit of punch, using four hand-cranked screws to knock out holes in metal. [Chris] decided to tie-one-on and take his lathe for a spin to machine the larger 1.5″ punch set.

He probably should have known when he switched from a 4-foot ratchet to a crescent wrench with a 12-foot pipe for leverage that this was going to be more than the press could handle. The bottom plate seen in the image above is beginning to cup, which in turn jams up the screws in the off-kilter threads.

We fell a bit guilty in admitting we love to see equipment pushed to the point of failure like this. But perhaps that’s part of what this column is all about. Our favorite is still the PCB shear failure, but this comes in at a close second. Check out the video presentation after the break; just be warned that there’s a bit of rough language as part of the narrative.

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You Are Fined 1 Credit For A Violation Of The Verbal Morality Statute

March 20, 2014 by Mike Szczys 55 Comments

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Some citizens can control their language and others cannot. What is a civilized society to do? In a dystopian future you can count on electronic monitoring. But wait, the future is now… or it will be in a few weeks. [Tdicola] is building the verbal morality monitor from Demolition Man as his entry in Hackaday’s ongoing Sci-Fi Contest.

Currently the project is in the early planning phase, but holy cow this is a fantastic idea! For those that didn’t see the glorious 1993 feature film, the young [Stallone] pictured above is accepting a ticket (as in: he must pay for his violation) from the tattle-tale wall-mounted computer. Everything about this device is completely feasible using today’s tech. It needs voice recognition and a list of naughty words, a way to play a pre-recorded message, and a printer to spit out the tickets. The build log for the project outlines all of this, as well as possible cost and sources for each.

We’ve been wondering who it was that injected an Artificial Intelligence into our project hosting system. We see both [tdicola] and [colabot] are on the team for this build. The names are too conveniently similar to be a coincidence, don’t you think?

Multimeters Without A Country: Fluke’s Broad Trademark Bans Yellow Multimeter Imports

March 19, 2014 by Mike Szczys 249 Comments

Check out this SparkFun Digital Multimeter. Does it make your blood boil to see them ripping off Fluke by using the color yellow? From SparkFun’s side of the story that’s exactly what’s happened here. They have a shipment of 2000 of these things stuck in customs. The trademark being infringed upon can be found in their article. Fluke owns the trademark on multimeters with a dark face and yellow border. Great. This seems like a wonderful idea, right up there with Apple owning tablets that are shaped like a piece of paper.

Okay, so if you’re not crying big fat tears for Fluke being taken advantage of in this way let’s talk about more immediate issues than fixing trademark, patent, copyright, and all of the other screw-the-little-guy type of laws (not that SparkFun is necessarily the little guy but you know what we mean). The DMMs sitting in a warehouse are costing SparkFun $150 per day. We believe they have no option of choosing a warehouse with a lower cost as we must be talking a pallet or two, right? The only two options they do have are shipping them back to China where they were manufactured, or having them destroyed. The former will cost more in re-import tariffs than the cost of the product, and the latter comes with a $150/hour disposal fee and no metric on which to judge how long it would actually take. We hate seeing this kind of waste, but sure enough 2000 DMMs are headed for the shredder in a couple of days.

We know you already have your flaming sword in hand, but simmer down for just a second. Fluke makes great products, ask anyone. And companies the world over defend their trademarks. Hopefully there will soon be a positive response from Fluke on this one. If you would like to politely encourage them to do the right thing we found Fluke’s Facebook page URL in the SparkFun comments thread. Both are worth browsing.

[Thanks Chris via Reddit]

Hackaday In Shanghai: Electronica And A Gathering

March 18, 2014 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

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Whether you live in Shanghai, are at Electronics China representing your company, or by dumb luck just happen to be in town this week you can meet some of the Hackaday crew and score yourself some sweet swag.

Anyone in town on Thursday night will want to get a ticket to Hackaday: The Gathering. Right now it’s all sold out, but we hope anyone with a ticket who is unable to use it will cancel so that another may take your place. Free food, drink, t-shirts, stickers, and other swag await… no wonder the tickets are already gone!

The Electronica China conference started Tuesday at Shanghai New International Expo Centre, but it runs through Wednesday and Thursday as well. We’re attending, but we don’t actually have a dedicated booth. Hackaday is piggybacking with EEFocus, the Chinese contingent of our parent company. Both [Matt] and [Alek] will be hanging around the EEFocus booth (#W3.3686) shucking out hackaday T-shirts if you ask for one. Before he left, [Matt] mentioned that he’s excited to attend lectures on connected medical devices, the Automotive and EV boards, as well as the embedded systems forum.

Retrotechtacular: Breaking Atoms To Break The Ice

March 18, 2014 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

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This documentary from 1959 gives a satisfyingly thorough look inside a nuclear powered icebreaking ship called Lenin. This actually set a couple of world’s-firsts: it was the first nuclear powered surface vessel and the first civilian vessel to be powered thusly.

The ship was built to clear shipping paths to the northern ports of Russia. Testing of both ice and models of the ship design point to the ability to break ice layers that are two meters thick. This requires a lot of power as ice-breakers generally use their hull shape and gravity to break the ice by driving up onto it to bend the ice to the breaking point. The Lenin achieved this power using its nuclear reactor to heat steam which drove electric generators. The energy produced drove three screws to power the vessel.

Of course this was back in the day when control panels were substantial, which you can get a peek at starting half-way through the twenty-minute film. This includes a demonstration of the ship’s network of radiation sensors which alert the control room, and sound a local alarm when they are triggered. During it’s 30-year operational life the vessel had a couple of accidents stemming from refueling operations. You can find more on that over at the Wikipedia page, but stick with us after the jump to see the vintage reel.

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Hacking The Sci-Fi Contest Team Requirement

March 17, 2014 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

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We saw that some readers were not entirely happy with the team requirement for our Sci-Fi contest, which is running right now. We figured that those who do not work well with others might commit a bit of fraud to get around the requirement. But we’re delighted that someone found a much more creative solution. Why not enlist an AI to collaborate on your project?

[Colabot] is a hacker profile over on hackaday.io which is driven by ELIZA, a computer program that achieves limited interaction through natural language. Supposedly you add [Colabot] to your project and as it questions. We asked one on the profile page and are still awaiting the response. We think this itself could be a qualifying entry for the Sci-Fi contest if someone can find the right thematic spin to put on it.

As far as contest entries go there are only seven so far. Since everyone who submits an entry gets a T-shirt, and there are 15 total prize packages, we encourage you to post your entry as soon as possible. We want to see teams from hackerspaces and we can cryptically tell you that good things come to teams who post their project with the “sci-fi-contest” tag early!

Hackaday Links: March 16, 2014

March 16, 2014 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Tape decks are fertile hacking ground. In this offering from [Erich] the speed of the motor has been turned into a MIDI instrument. Drive it faster and the pitch rises, slower and it falls. There are all kinds of other magnetic tape hacks around here, this tape delay is a classic.

[Dbever] needed a reason to use a big 7-segment display module. He opened up the drill press at his Hackerspace, Pumping Station One, and added a sensor which shows the RPM of the drill on the display. Hackaday was lucky enough to be invited for a tour of the space last fall.

There’s a lot of hype about 3D printing… and rightly so since it’s the radest; which is even better than being “the most rad”. But if you don’t have access to one that shouldn’t stop you. Here’s an example of making robot parts using polymorph instead of 3D printing (or laser cutting) them.

If you’re living in the east-coast metroplex and are unable to travel to Maker Faire Bay Area this Spring you can still get in on some live hacking. Check out MassHack which takes place the same May weekend but in Boston instead of San Fran.

Blimps; not as cool as quadcopters but orders of magnitude less likely to go down in flames (as it were). Draw some inspiration for your own build from silent_runner. The graceful travel of these lighter-than-air-craft make for an interesting camera platform. Here’s a POV video inside of a church, and some shots from the ground while in the woods. [Thanks Oliver]

We try not to pimp crowd-funding campaigns just for the sake of getting them to the goal. But we hope you’ll agree that the Gamebuino we saw a few months back makes a strong argument for backers. Their Indiegogo for the Arduino-compatible handheld gaming rig is over half-way there after just a couple of days.