Hackaday Podcast 203: Flashlight Fuel Fails, Weird DMA Machines, And A 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Flex

January 27, 2023 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about all the hacks that are fit to print. This week’s episode starts off with a discussion about the recently unveiled 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, and how hackers more often than not thrive when forced to work within these sort of narrow parameters. Discussion then continues to adding a virtual core to the RP2040, crowd-sourced device reliability information, and mechanical Soviet space computers. We’ll wrap things up by wondering what could have been had Mattel’s ill-fated ThingMaker 3D printer actually hit the market, and then engage in some wild speculation about the issues plaguing NASA’s latest Moon mission.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Available in the cloud, or as download!

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 203: Flashlight Fuel Fails, Weird DMA Machines, And A 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Flex” →

Casting Custom Resin Buttons For The Steam Deck

January 26, 2023 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

If you play games on multiple consoles, you’re probably familiar with the occasional bout of uncertainty that comes with each system’s unique button arrangement. They’re all more or less in the same physical location, but each system calls them something different. Depending on who’s controller you’re holding, the same button could be X, A, or B. We won’t even get started on colors.

Overhearing her partner wish the buttons on his Steam Deck matched the color scheme of the Xbox, [Gina Häußge] (of OctoPrint fame) decided to secretly create a set of bespoke buttons for the portable system. There was only one problem…she had no experience with the silicone molding process or epoxy resins which would be required for such an operation.

Toothpicks were used to make channels in the mold.

Luckily we have the Internet, and after researching similar projects that focused on other consoles, [Gina] felt confident enough to take apart Steam’s handheld and extract the original plastic buttons. These went into a clever 3D printed mold box, which was small enough to put into a food vacuum container for degassing purposes. The shape of the buttons necessitated a two-piece mold, into which [Gina] embedded two channels: one to inject the resin, and another that would let air escape.

The red, green, blue, and yellow resins were then loaded into four separate syringes and forced into the mold. It’s critically important to get the orientation right here, as each button has a slightly different shape. It sounds like [Gina] might have mixed up which color each button was supposed to be during an earlier attempt, so for the final run she made a little diagram to keep track. After 24 hours she was able to peel the mold apart and get a look at the perfectly-formed buttons, but it took 72 hours before they were really cured enough to move on to the next step.

[Gina] applied the legends with a sheet of rub-on lettering, which we imagine must have been quite tricky to get lined up perfectly. Since the letters would get worn off after a few intense gaming sessions without protection, she finally sealed the surface of each button by brushing on a thin layer of UV resin and curing it with a flashlight of the appropriate wavelength.

There are a fair number of steps involved, and a fair bit of up-front cost to get all the materials together, but there’s no denying the final result looks phenomenal. Especially for a first attempt. We wouldn’t be surprised if the next time somebody wants to head down this particular path, it’s [Gina]’s post that guides them on their way.

NASA Lunar Probe Finds Out It’s Not Easy Being Green

January 23, 2023 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

If you’re a space fan, these are very exciting days. There’s so much happening overhead that sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with the latest news. Artemis I just got back from the Moon, the International Space Station crew are dealing with a busted Soyuz, SpaceX is making incredible progress with their Starship architecture, CubeSats are being flung all over the solar system, and it seems like every month a new company is unveiling their own commercially-developed launch vehicle.

So with everything going on, we wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard about NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission. The briefcase-sized spacecraft was launched aboard a special “rideshare” flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket back on December 11th — tagging along with two other craft heading to our nearest celestial neighbor, the Japanese Hakuto-R lander, and a small rover developed by the United Arab Emirates. There was a time when a launch like that would have been big news, but being that it was only the second of seven launches that SpaceX performed in December alone, it didn’t make many headlines.

But recently, that’s started to change. There’s a growing buzz around Lunar Flashlight, though unfortunately, not for the reasons we’d usually hope. It seems the diminutive explorer has run into some trouble with its cutting-edge “green” propellant system, and unless the issue can be resolved soon, the promising mission could come to an end before it even had a chance to start.

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3D Printed Triptych Shows Trio Of AI-Generated Images

January 20, 2023 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Fascinated by art generated by deep learning systems such as DALL-E and Stable Diffusion? Then perhaps a wall installation like this phenomenal e-paper Triptych created by [Zach Archer] is in your future.

The three interlocking frames were printed out of “Walnut Wood” HTPLA from ProtoPasta, and hold a pair of 5.79 inch red/black/white displays along with a single 7.3 inch red/yellow/black/white panel from Waveshare. There are e-paper panels out there with more colors available if you wanted to go that route, but judging by the striking images [Zach] has posted, the relatively limited color palettes available on these displays doesn’t seem to be a hindrance.

Note the clever S-shaped brackets holding in the displays.

To create the images themselves, [Zach] wrote a script that would generate endless customized portraits using Stable Diffusion v1.4, and then manually selected the best to get copied over to a 32 GB micro SD card. The side images were generated on the dreamstudio.ai website, and also dumped on the card.

Every 12 hours a TinyPico ESP32 development board in the frame picks some images from the card, applies the necessary dithering and color adjustments to make them look good on the e-paper, and then updates the displays. Continue reading “3D Printed Triptych Shows Trio Of AI-Generated Images” →

Machining With Electricity Explored In The Hack Chat

January 20, 2023 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

As a Hackaday reader, it’s safe to assume you’ve got a better than average understanding of electricity. There’s also an excellent chance you’re familiar with machining, and may even have a lathe or old mill in the workshop. But combining the two, and actually machining a piece of metal with electricity, isn’t something that many home gamers can boast first-hand experience with.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an interest. To help answer the burning (or at least, sparking) questions from the community, CEO and founder of Voxel Innovations Daniel Herrington stopped by this week’s Hack Chat to talk about the cutting edge of both electric discharge machining (EDM) and the closely related field of electrochemical machining (ECM). While his company uses the technology to produce components at incredible scales, Daniel got his start tinkering in the garage like so many of us, enabling him to provide both a professional and hobbyist prospective on the technologies.

Naturally, the first big question to be addressed was the difference between EDM and ECM. Put simply, electric discharge machining uses high-voltage to literally blast away material from the workpiece. The resulting finish is generally rough, and progress through the material tends to be slow, but it’s relatively simple to implement.

In contrast electrochemical machining could be thought of as a sort of reverse electroplating process, as the material being removed from the workpiece is dissolved and transferred to the cathode — though in practice the flow of pressurized electrolyte keeps it from actually plating the negatively charged tool. ECM is a faster process than EDM and allows for an exceptionally smooth surface finish, but is considerably more challenging from a technical perspective. Continue reading “Machining With Electricity Explored In The Hack Chat” →

That Old ThinkPad Needs An Open Source 2.5″ IDE SSD

January 19, 2023 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

So you fancy yourself a FOSS devotee, do you? Running GNU/Linux on your old ThinkPad, avoiding devices that need binary blobs? Got LibreBoot installed too? Not bad, not bad. But what about the hard drive? Can you be sure you aren’t leaking some freedoms out of that spinning rust?

Well, worry no more. Thanks to the work of [dosdude1], we now have an open source solid state drive that’s designed to work with any device which originally used a 2.5 inch IDE hard drive. The choice of releasing it under the GPL v3 versus an open hardware license might seem an odd choice at first, but turns out that’s actually what the GNU project recommends currently for circuit designs.

Fair warning: all the chips on the board are BGA.

Which is precisely what we’re talking about here — just a circuit design done up in KiCad. There’s no firmware required, and the PCB features very little beyond the four BGA152/BGA132 NAND flash chips and the SM2236 controller IC. You’ve just got to get the board fabricated, obtain (or salvage) the chips, and suddenly your retro laptop is sporting the latest in mass storage technology.

So how does it work? The SM2236 is actually a CompactFlash (CF) controller, and since IDE and CF interfaces are so similar, the PCB doesn’t have to do much to adapt from one to the other. Sprinkle in a few NANDs, and you’ve got yourself a native SSD suitable for old school machines. [dosdude1] says the board can slot four 64 GB chips, which should be more than enough given the age of the systems this gadget will likely be installed in. There are a few catches though: the NAND chips need to be supported by the SM2236, and they all have to match.

If you need something even smaller, [dosdude1] produced a 1.8 inch SSD using the same techniques back in October of last year.

Continue reading “That Old ThinkPad Needs An Open Source 2.5″ IDE SSD” →

Domesticating Plasma With A Gorgeous Live Edge Table

January 19, 2023 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

If you’ve been reading Hackaday for any length of time, you’ll know we don’t often cover woodworking projects here. It’s not because we aren’t impressed with the skill and effort that folks put into them, and truth be told, we occasionally we even feel a pang of envy when looking at the final result. It’s just that, you know…they’re made of wood.

But when [Jay Bowles] of Plasma Channel sent in this live edge wooden table that features not only a pair of custom-made neon tubes but the burned out transistors and ICs from his previous high-voltage exploits — we knew this wasn’t exactly your grandpa’s idea of woodworking. In fact, he wisely offloaded a lot of the dead tree cutting and shaping to the burly gentlemen at the local sawmill so he could better focus his efforts on the sparky bits.

At its core, he’s created what’s generally known as a “river table” — a surface made of two or more pieces of live edge wood (that is, a piece of lumber that features at least one uncut edge) that are linked via a band of colored epoxy which looks like flowing water. It’s not uncommon to embed stones or even fake fish in the epoxy to really sell the underwater effect, but this is Plasma Channel we’re talking about, so [Jay] had other ideas.

The first step was hitting up a local neon supplier who could fabricate a pair of neon tubes which roughly followed the shape of his epoxy river. While he was waiting for them to be finished, [Jay] played around with a clever experimental rig that let him determine how thick he could pour the epoxy over the tubes before he lost the capacitive coupling effect he was going for. By embedding a short length of neon tube off-center in a block of epoxy, he could see how the thickness impacted his ability to manipulate the plasma with a wave of his hand just by flipping it over.

With the tube placed on clear standoffs, he was able to position it at the ideal depth for the final epoxy pours. It was around this time that he scattered the remains of his previous projects on the “bottom” of the river, so they can spend the rest of their days looking up at his latest technical triumph. We’re not sure if this is to punish the fallen silicon for giving up early or to honor their sacrifice in the name of progress, but in either event, we respect anyone who keeps a jar of blown components laying around for ritualistic applications.

Once the table was assembled, all that was left was to power the thing. Given his previous projects, [Jay] had no shortage of existing HV supplies to try out. But not being satisfied with anything in the back catalog, he ended up building a new supply that manages to pump out the required amount of juice while remaining silent (to human ears, at least). The unit is powered by a battery pack cleverly embedded into the legs of the table, and is easy to fiddle with thanks to a pulse-width modulation (PWM) module wired hooked to the input. All the components were then held in place with a wide array of custom brackets courtesy of his newly arrived 3D printer.

There’s a lot to love about this project, and more than a few lessons learned. Whether you’re interested in recreating the Tron-like effect of the neon tubes, or have been contemplating your own epoxy-pour worktable and want to see how a first-timer tackles it, this video is a great resource.

Continue reading “Domesticating Plasma With A Gorgeous Live Edge Table” →