The Ultimate Guide To Artisan USB Cables

September 4, 2019 by Tom Nardi 45 Comments

If you’ve gone through the trouble of building your own customized mechanical keyboard, the last thing you want to do is plug it into your computer with some plebeian USB cable from the local electronics shop. Your productivity, nay livelihood, depends on all those 1s and 0s being reproduced with the crisp fidelity that’s only possible with a high-end USB cable. Anything less would be irresponsible.

Or at least, that’s what the advertising on the back of the package would say if we tried to sell the custom USB cables built by [Josef Adamčík]. But alas, he’s decided to give away all the details for free so that anyone can build their own delightfully overengineered USB cables. Do you need a paracord USB cable with GX12 aviation connectors in the middle? Of course not. But you still want one, don’t you?

As [Josef] admits in his blog post, there’s nothing particularly special about what he’s doing here. If you can splice wires together, you can build your own bespoke USB cables. But what attracted us to his write-up was the phenomenal detail he goes into. Every step is clearly explained and includes a nice, well-lit, photo to illustrate what he’s doing. Honestly, when the documentation for soldering some USB connectors onto a wire looks this good, there’s no excuse why more substantial projects get little more than a few blurry shots.

Of course, even for those of us who are no stranger to the ways of the soldering iron, there’s likely a few ideas you can pull from this project. We particularly liked his tip for taping the USB connector to the workbench while soldering it rather than trying to get it to stay in a vise, and his method for adding a coil the cable with a wooden jig and a heat gun is definitely something to file away for future use.

Then again in an era where even the lowly-USB cable can potentially be a security threat, or simply not live up to published specifications, rolling your own might not be such a bad idea.

3D Printing May Be The Key To Practical Scramjets

September 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

The first scramjet, an airbreathing jet engine capable of pushing an aircraft beyond Mach 5, was successfully flown in the early 1990s. But while pretty much any other technology you could imagine has progressed by leaps and bounds in the nearly 30 years that have passed, the state-of-the-art in hypersonic scramjets hasn’t moved much. We still don’t have practical hypersonic aircraft, military or otherwise, and any missiles that travel at those sort of speeds are rocket powered.

This is somewhat surprising since, at least on paper, the operating principle of the scramjet is simplicity itself. Air rushing into the engine is compressed by the geometry of the inlet, fuel is added, the mixture is ignited, and the resulting flow of expanded gases leaves the engine faster than it entered. There aren’t even any moving parts inside of a scramjet, it’s little more than a carefully shaped tube with fuel injectors and ignitors in it.

Unfortunately, pulling it off in practice is quite a bit harder. Part of the problem is that a scramjet doesn’t actually start working until the air entering the engine’s inlet is moving at around Mach 4, which makes testing them difficult and expensive. It’s possible to do it in a specially designed wind tunnel, but practically speaking, it ends up being easier to mount the engine to the front of a conventional rocket and get it up to speed that way. The downside is that such flights are one-way tickets, and end with the test article crashing into the ocean once it runs out of fuel.

But the bigger problem is that the core concept is deceptively simple. It’s easy to say you’ll just squirt some jet fuel into the stream of compressed air and light it up, but when that air is moving at thousands of miles per hour, keeping it burning is no small feat. Because of this, the operation of a scramjet has often been likened to trying to light a match in a hurricane; the challenge isn’t in the task, but in the environment you’re trying to perform it in.

Now, both Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman think they may have found the solution: additive manufacturing. By 3D printing their scramjet engines, they can not only iterate through design revisions faster, but produce them far cheaper than they’ve been able to in the past. Even more importantly, it enables complex internal engine geometries that would have been more difficult to produce via traditional manufacturing.

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Null Shard Build Blurs Line Between Game And Reality With Laser Cutting, Mold Making, 3D Printing

September 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

In The Room Three, players are tasked with collecting mysterious objects known as “Null Shards”. But it seems one player, who goes by the name [Juiceman], took this challenge a bit literally. Starting with promotional art released for the game, he embarked on an epic journey to create a replica “Null Shard” that ended up looking so good that one of them is currently residing in a place of honor at the headquarters of developer Fireproof Games.

The developers had previously released image files to create a papercraft version of the Null Shard on their website, so [Juiceman] based his initial CAD work on these designs. But it turned out the surface texture was a little too complex to laser etch into acrylic without making a soupy mess. He simplified it a bit, while trying to retain the overall effect. From the superb laser-etched acrylic master he made a silicone mold started casting the eight triangular panels needed for two copies of the Shard.

To hold it all together [Juiceman] create a “skeleton” pyramid by first experimenting with designs on a traditional plastic FDM printer. After a few tries he had a workable design and switched over to a laser sintering machine, giving the final frame a gorgeous texture. With the cast panels installed and a few coats of paint, he had his Null Shards.

The final step was to turn down a piece of ash to make a nice base, and 3D print the feet and “claw” mount for the Shard using the same laser sintering process. The finished product looks fantastic, and apparently lives on a shelf next to a similarly constructed replica of the “Lament Configuration” puzzle cube from the Hellraiser films. [Juiceman] says the two replicas are the first entries into his “Geometries of Hell” collection, which incidentally, we’ve decided will officially be the name of our first metal album. All we need to do now is learn how to play instruments.

We’ve previously looked at how 3D printing and a dash of dedication can create some incredible prop builds, and once upon a time, we even ran a Sci-Fi Contest that challenged our readers to bring their favorite movie and game objects into the real world. Builds like this are a perfect example of what happens when a dedicated hacker or maker gets inspired by a piece of entertainment that really resonates with them.

[Thanks to Lauren for the tip]

Ham Radio Gets Embedded RTL-SDR

September 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

We usually think of the RTL-SDR as a low-cost alternative to a “real” radio, but this incredible project spearheaded by [Rodrigo Freire] shows that the two classes of devices don’t have to be mutually exclusive. After nearly 6 months of work, he’s developed and documented a method to integrate a RTL-SDR Blog V3 receiver directly into the Yaesu FT-991 transceiver.

The professional results of the hack are made possible by the fact that the FT-991 already had USB capability to begin with. More specifically, it had an internal USB hub that allowed multiple internal devices to appear to the computer as a sort of composite device.

Unfortunately, the internal USB hub only supported two devices, so the first order of business for [Rodrigo] was swapping out the original USB2512BI hub IC with a USB2514BI that offered four ports. With the swap complete, he was able to hang the RTL-SDR device right on the new chip’s pins.

Of course, that was only half of the battle. He had a nicely integrated RTL-SDR from an external standpoint, but to actually be useful, the SDR would need to tap into the radio’s signal. To do this, [Rodrigo] designed a custom PCB that pulls the IF signal from the radio, feed it into an amplifier, and ultimately pass it to the SDR. The board uses onboard switches, controlled by the GPIO ports on the RTL-SDR Blog V3, for enabling the tap and preamplifier.

In the video after the break, you can see [Rodrigo] demonstrate his modified FT-991. This actually isn’t the first time somebody has tapped into their Yaesu with a software defined radio, though this is surely the cleanest install we’ve ever seen.

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RuneScape GBA Controller Is A Nostalgic Mash-Up

September 2, 2019 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

For gamers, the early 2000s certainly stand out as a memorable era. The dawn of the 21st century ushered in the sixth generation of home video game consoles, with Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all releasing their systems within a few years of each other. Nintendo also released their Game Boy Advance at around the same time, representing a minor revolution for mobile gaming. On the PC front, a free-to-play MMORPG called RuneScape was redefining people’s expectations of browser-based software.

Now, thanks to modern technology and the expert guidance of [TiKevin83], these varied bits of video game history can be used in conjunction for maximum rose-tinting effect. Using homebrew software on the GameCube and a healthy collection of wires and adapters, the GBA can be used as a controller for your adventures through the realm of Gielinor. After nearly two decades, the dreams of gamers everywhere have come true.

Well, that might be a stretch. In fact, we’d wager that nobody in human history has ever looked at the GBA and thought it would be a particularly good controller for an MMORPG. Watching the video after the break, it’s not hard to see why. Using the handheld system’s digital pad to control the mouse in RuneScape looks to be precisely as clunky as you’d imagine. But of course, that’s hardly the point.

So how is it accomplished? A homebrew tool for the GameCube’s “Game Boy Player” accessory allows the GBA, when connected to the console via the appropriate adapter cable, to mimic a standard controller. Once the GBA is running in this mode, it can then be connected to the computer using a Wii U to USB adapter. Finally, the program JoyToKey is used to map the GBA’s buttons to mouse and keyboard input for “Old School” RuneScape.

If you’d like to do something similar but aren’t quite committed enough to collect up all the Nintendo-branded ephemera this method requires, you may be interested in this DIY adapter that allows the venerable GBA to be used as a standard Bluetooth controller.

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The Gorgeous Hardware We Can’t Take Our Eyes Away From

August 30, 2019 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

High resolution digital cameras are built into half of the devices we own (whether we want them or not), so why is it still so hard to find good pictures of all the incredible projects our readers are working on? In the recently concluded Beautiful Hardware Contest, we challenged you to take your project photography to the next level. Rather than being an afterthought, this time the pictures would take center stage. Ranging from creative images of personal projects to new ways of looking at existing pieces of hardware, the 100+ entries we received for this contest proved that there’s more beauty in a hacker’s parts bin than most of them probably realize.

As always, it was a struggle to narrow down all the fantastic entries to just a handful of winners. But without further adieu, let’s take a look at the photos that we think truly blurred the line between workbench and work of art:

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Kilopower: NASA’s Offworld Nuclear Reactor

August 28, 2019 by Tom Nardi 107 Comments

Here on Earth, the ability to generate electricity is something we take for granted. We can count on the sun to illuminate solar panels, and the movement of air and water to spin turbines. Fossil fuels, for all their downsides, have provided cheap and reliable power for centuries. No matter where you may find yourself on this planet, there’s a way to convert its many natural resources into electrical power.

But what happens when humans first land on Mars, a world that doesn’t offer these incredible gifts? Solar panels will work for a time, but the sunlight that reaches the surface is only a fraction of what the Earth receives, and the constant accumulation of dust makes them a liability. In the wispy atmosphere, the only time the wind could potentially be harnessed would be during one of the planet’s intense storms. Put simply, Mars can’t provide the energy required for a human settlement of any appreciable size.

The situation on the Moon isn’t much better. Sunlight during the lunar day is just as plentiful as it is on Earth, but night on the Moon stretches for two dark and cold weeks. An outpost at the Moon’s South Pole would receive more light than if it were built in the equatorial areas explored during the Apollo missions, but some periods of darkness are unavoidable. With the lunar surface temperature plummeting to -173 °C (-280 °F) when the Sun goes down, a constant supply of energy is an absolute necessity for long-duration human missions to the Moon.

Since 2015, NASA and the United States Department of Energy have been working on the Kilopower project, which aims to develop a small, lightweight, and extremely reliable nuclear reactor that they believe will fulfill this critical role in future off-world exploration. Following a series of highly successful test runs on the prototype hardware in 2017 and 2018, the team believes the miniaturized power plant could be ready for a test flight as early as 2022. Once fully operational, this nearly complete re-imagining of the classic thermal reactor could usher in a whole new era of space exploration.

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