Author: Navarre Bartz

246 Articles

A bright orange sailboat with solar panels on the wing sail and the hull of the craft. A number of protuberances from the wing are visible containing instruments and radio equipment.

Saildrones Searching The Sea For Clues To Hurricane Behavior

July 29, 2024 by 26 Comments

Hurricanes can cause widespread destruction, so early forecasting of their strength is important to protect people and their homes. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is using saildrones to get better data from inside these monster storms.

Rising ocean temperatures due to climate change are causing hurricanes to intensify more rapidly than in the past, although modeling these changes is still a difficult task. People on shore need to know if they’re in store for a tropical storm or a high strength hurricane to know what precautions to take. Evacuating an area is expensive and disruptive, so it’s understandable that people want to know if it’s necessary.

Starting with five units in 2021, the fleet has gradually increased in size to twelve last summer. These 23ft (7m), 33ft (10m), or 65ft (20m) long vessels are propelled by wing sails and power their radio and telemetry systems with a combination of solar and battery power. No fossil fueled vessel can match the up to 370 days at sea without refueling that these drones can achieve, and the ability to withstand hurricane winds and sea conditions allow scientists an up-close-and-personal look at a hurricane without risking human lives.

We’ve covered how the data gets from a saildrone to shore before, and if you want to know how robots learn to sail, there’s a Supercon talk for that.

Thanks to [CrLz] for the tip!

A black and brown planner opened like a laptop. Inside is a greyscale eink phone inside a brown piece of MDF on top, and a black keyboard fills the bottom half.

Foliodeck Squeezes A Writerdeck Into A Planner

July 29, 2024 by 2 Comments

When it comes to writing, sometimes a computer or smartphone is just too distracting to keep on task. [vagabondvivant] found this to be the case and rolled their own distraction-free writing tool, the Foliodeck.

With the increasing availability of parts for cyberdecks, it’s not too surprising to see we’re seeing the emergence of the writerdeck. Typically designed to be a no frills word processing device, they are designed to help their creators focus on writing and not be subject to the myriad notifications present trying to work with a more general computing device or smartphone.

In this case, [vagabondvivant] took a classy looking planner folio and removed its paper management components to leave a fabric and leather shell. The heart of the assembly is a HiSense A5 eink smartphone magnetically attached to a piece of MDF cut to mate the phone to the planner shell. A 10 Ah powerbank slots into the MDF below the keyboard which is also magnetically attached, and the whole thing zips up nicely. Future improvements are planned like a hinge, so it doesn’t have to be propped against something and a custom-built mechanical keyboard.

This isn’t the first writerdeck we’ve seen, and we’ve seen some other writer-focused decks and typewriter replacements.

Continue reading “Foliodeck Squeezes A Writerdeck Into A Planner” →

Three different keyboard devices with greyscale LCDs on top are on a white table. In the back left is a beige one with grey keys, front and center is a black model, and to the right is a translucent blue model with black keys being held up by a hand.

A Brief History Of AlphaSmart

July 29, 2024 by 18 Comments

There are a handful of gadgets that do one thing so well that they become cult classics long after the company that made them has moved on or closed up shop. [This Does Not Compute] takes us through the history of the AlphaSmart word processor which started as an educational tool, but finds itself in many a writer’s bag today.

The original AlphaSmart bears more than a passing resemblance to its Apple contemporaries since the company was founded by two Apple engineers. The Cupertino company didn’t see the value in the concept, but didn’t lean on any non-competes to keep the pair from pursuing the idea on their own time either. What resulted was a dead simple word processor that could be had for 1/5 of what a new computer typically cost in the era, which was particularly attractive for the target market of schools.

After several successful years, the pressure of PDAs and then smartphones from one side and cheaper laptops from the other meant school districts no longer wanted single-purpose devices when they could have a fully-fledged computing experience for students. We wonder if that was the right call, with so many now wanting distraction-free devices, but it was the end of the road for the company either way.

Our own [Kristina Panos] and [Tom Nardi] have shown us the guts of the Neo and of one of its competitors, the Writer, respectively. If you have a Neo of your own in need of replacement keycaps, you can print them.

Continue reading “A Brief History Of AlphaSmart” →

On the left, a transluscent yellowy-tan android head with eyes set behind holes in the face. On the right, a bright pink circle with small green eyes. It is manipulated into the image of a smiling face via its topography.

A Robot Face With Human Skin

July 25, 2024 by 30 Comments

Many scifi robots have taken the form of their creators. In the increasingly blurry space between the biological and the mechanical, researchers have found a way to affix human skin to robot faces. [via NewScientist]

Previous attempts at affixing skin equivalent, “a living skin model composed of cells and extracellular matrix,” to robots worked, even on moving parts like fingers, but typically relied on protrusions that impinged on range of motion and aesthetic concerns, which are pretty high on the list for robots designed to predominantly interact with humans. Inspired by skin ligaments, the researchers have developed “perforation-type anchors” that use v-shaped holes in the underlying 3D printed surface to keep the skin equivalent taut and pliable like the real thing.

The researchers then designed a face that took advantage of the attachment method to allow their robot to have a convincing smile. Combined with other research, robots might soon have skin with touch, sweat, and self-repair capabilities like Data’s partial transformation in Star Trek: First Contact.

We wonder what this extremely realistic humanoid hand might look like with this skin on the outside. Of course that raises the question of if we even need humanoid robots? If you want something less uncanny, maybe try animating your stuffed animals with this robotic skin instead?

A person putting a screw into a CNC spoil board on the left of the image. Their drill is chartreuse and black. Clamps hold a rectangular board down at all four corners. The spindle of the CNC is just visible on the right hand side of the image.

Workholding Options For The Beginner CNC Operator

July 23, 2024 by 6 Comments

Designing a file to cut on a CNC is only part of the process. You also have to keep it in place while the machine does its work. [Garrett Fromme] walks us through five different work holding techniques.

Since every project is different and stock material can vary from thin veneer to much larger pieces, there’s no one right work holding method for every project, and not all methods are applicable to all materials. A vise is great for small projects that need to be held very securely and won’t be damaged, vacuum tables can make switching pieces quick in a production environment, fasteners will hold a piece securely at the expense of your spoil board, clamps are fairly versatile but fiddly to setup, and tape and CA glue are quick but require more consumables.

[Fromme] does a quick demonstration of setups with these different methods and their limitations, which is a great place to start for the beginner CNC operator. Just like 3D printers, CNCs are a far cry from the replicators in Star Trek that can automagically create what you ask it to, but proper workholding lets you waste less material and operate the machine more safely.

Our own [Elliot Williams] had a look at how CNCs aren’t as automated as you think. If you do need some CNC clamps, you might try these printable parametric clamps, or if you want something more beautiful, give these metal toe clamps a go.

Continue reading “Workholding Options For The Beginner CNC Operator” →

A small, white thermal printer with a cartoon cat face above the paper outlet. It is sitting on a black mat on top of a pale wooden table. A Raspberry Pi sits nearby.

Bluetooth Printer Works With AppleTalk

July 22, 2024 by 1 Comment

For retrocomputing enthusiasts, getting old computers to work with newer peripherals can be an exciting challenge or horrible headache. If you need to print out receipts from an old Mac, you might just be in luck now that [Hamin Mousavi] has gotten AppleTalk to work with cat printers.

[Mousavi] uses a Raspberry Pi 4 here in his version of the hack, but any Bluetooth capable computer running Linux should work. His command line screenshots are from a Debian-based system, but you should be able to translate to other systems as needed.

Thanks to previous work on these thermal printers, drivers are available for them on many other systems, so the tricky part comes down to getting the web connection to the printer working through the Linux box and then getting the Mac (in this case an iMac G3) to recognize the printer as something to install.

We’ve seen people do some really interesting things with thermal printers like making them D&D tools, breaking their paper DRM, and even black and white “Polaroids.”

Continue reading “Bluetooth Printer Works With AppleTalk” →

A cartoon of the Sun above a windmill and a solar panel with a lightning bolt going to a big grey gear with "AAAp" written on it. A small "e-" on a circle is next to it, indicating electricity transfer. Further to the right is an ADP molecule connected to a curved arrow going through the AAAp gear to turn into ATP. Three cartoon shapes, presumably illustrating biological processes are on the right with arrows pointing from the ATP.

Powering Biology With Batteries

July 21, 2024 by 18 Comments

We’ve all been there — you forgot your lunch, but there are AC outlets galore. Wouldn’t it be so much simpler if you could just plug in like your phone? Don’t try it yet, but biologists have taken us one step further to being able to fuel ourselves on those sweet, sweet electrons.

Using an “electrobiological module” of 3-4 enzymes, the amusingly named AAA (acid/aldehyde ATP) cycle regenerates ATP in biological systems directly from electricity. The process takes place at -0.6 V vs a standard hydrogen electrode (SHE), and is compatible with biological transcription/translation processes like “RNA and protein synthesis from DNA.”

The process isn’t dependent on any membranes to foul or more complicated sets of enzymes making it ideal for in vitro synthetic biology since you don’t have to worry about keeping as many components in an ideal environment. We’re particularly interested in how this might apply to DNA computing which we keep being promised will someday be the best thing since the transistor.

Maybe in the future we’ll all jack in instead of eating our daily food pill? If this all seems like something you’ve heard of before, but in reverse, maybe you’re thinking of microbial fuel cells.