Arduboy Mini Is A Fresh Take On An 8-bit Favorite

December 22, 2022 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

We’ve always been big fans of the Arduboy here at Hackaday. When creator Kevin Bates showed us the original prototype back in 2014, the idea was to use his unique method of mounting components inside routed holes in the PCB to produce an electronic business card that was just 1.6 mm thick. But the Internet quickly took notice of the demos he posted online, and what started as a one-off project led to a wildly successful Kickstarter for a sleek handheld gaming system that used modern components and manufacturing techniques to pay homage to the 8-bit retro systems that came before it.

It’s the sort of hacker success story that we live for around here, but it didn’t end there. After the Kickstarter, the Arduboy community continued to grow, thanks in no small part to Kevin never forgetting the open source principles the product was built on.

He took an active role in the growing community, and when some Arduboy owners started tinkering with adding external storage to their systems so they could hold hundreds of games at a time, he didn’t chastise them for exploring. Instead, he collaborated with them to produce not only a fantastic add-on modification for the original Arduboy, but a new version of the Arduboy that had the community-inspired modifications built in.

Now Kevin is back with the Arduboy Mini, which not only retains everything that made the original a success, but offers some exciting new possibilities. There’s little doubt that he’s got another success on his hands as well as the community’s backing — at the time of this writing, the Kickstarter campaign for the $29 USD Mini has nearly quadrupled its funding goal.

But even still, Kevin offered us a chance to go hands-on with a prototype of the Arduboy Mini so that anyone on the fence can get a third party’s view on the new system. So without further ado, let’s take a look at how this micro machine stacks up to its full-sized counterparts.

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Damaged Soyuz May Leave Crew Without A Ride Home

December 19, 2022 by Tom Nardi 54 Comments

Though oddly beautiful in its own way, it’s a sight no astronaut wants to see: their spacecraft, the only way they have to return to Earth, ejecting countless iridescent droplets of something into space.

When the crew of Apollo 13 saw their craft literally bleeding out on their trip to the Moon it was clear the mission, and ultimately their lives, were in real jeopardy. Luckily the current situation is not nearly as dire, as the leaking Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the International Space Station doesn’t pose any immediate danger to those aboard the orbiting laboratory. But it’s still an unprecedented situation, and getting its crew home will require engineers on the ground to make some very difficult decisions.

This situation is still developing, and neither NASA nor their Russian counterpart Roscosmos have released much in the way of specifics. But we can make some educated guesses from the video and images we’ve seen of the stricken Soyuz capsule, and from what’s been shown to the public so far, things aren’t looking good.

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Battery Engineering Hack Chat Gets Charged Up

December 16, 2022 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Turn the clock back a couple of decades, and the only time the average person would have given much thought to batteries was when the power would go out, and they suddenly needed to juice up their flashlight or portable radio. But today, high-capacity batteries have become part and parcel to our increasingly digital lifestyle. In fact, there’s an excellent chance the device your reading this on is currently running on battery power, or at least, is capable of it.

So let’s get to know batteries better. What’s the chemical process that allows them to work? For that matter, what even is a battery in the first place?

It’s these questions, and more, that made up this week’s Battery Engineering Hack Chat with Dave Sopchak. Our last Hack Chat of 2022 ended up being one of the longest in recent memory, with the conversation starting over an hour before the scheduled kickoff and running another half hour beyond when emcee Dan Maloney officially made his closing remarks. Not bad for a topic that so often gets taken for granted.

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NASA Aces Artemis I, But The Journey Has Just Begun

December 12, 2022 by Tom Nardi 51 Comments

When NASA’s Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean yesterday afternoon, it marked the end of a journey that started decades ago. The origins of the Orion capsule can be tracked back to a Lockheed Martin proposal from the early 2000s, and development of the towering Space Launch System rocket that sent it on its historic trip around the Moon started back in 2011 — although few at the time could have imagined that’s what it would end up being used for. The intended mission for the incredibly powerful Shuttle-derived rocket changed so many times over the years that for a time it was referred to as the “Rocket to Nowhere”, as it appeared the agency couldn’t decide just where they wanted to send their flagship exploration vehicle.

But today, for perhaps the first time, the future of the SLS and Orion seem bright. The Artemis I mission wasn’t just a technical success by about pretty much every metric you’d care to use, it was also a public relations boon the likes of which NASA has rarely seen outside the dramatic landings of their Mars rovers. Tens of millions of people watched the unmanned mission blast off towards the Moon, a prelude to the global excitement that will surround the crewed follow-up flight currently scheduled for 2024.

As NASA’s commentators reminded viewers during the live streamed segments of the nearly 26-day long mission around the Moon, the test flight officially ushered in what the space agency is calling the Artemis Generation, a new era of lunar exploration that picks up where the Apollo left off. Rather than occasional hasty visits to its beautiful desolation, Artemis aims to lay the groundwork for a permanent human presence on our natural satellite.

With the successful conclusion of the Artemis I, NASA has now demonstrated effectively two-thirds of the hardware and techniques required to return humans to the surface of the Moon: SLS proved it has the power to send heavy payloads beyond low Earth orbit, and the long-duration flight Orion took around our nearest celestial neighbor ensured it’s more than up to the task of ferrying human explorers on a shorter and more direct route.

But of course, it would be unreasonable to expect the first flight of such a complex vehicle to go off without a hitch. While the primary mission goals were all accomplished, and the architecture generally met or exceeded pre-launch expectations, there’s still plenty of work to be done before NASA is ready for Artemis II.

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Printed Propeller Blades Repair Indoor Flyer

December 9, 2022 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Fair warning for readers with a weak stomach, the video below graphically depicts an innocent rubber band airplane being obliterated in mid-air by a smug high-tech RC helicopter. It’s a shocking display of airborne class warfare, but the story does have a happy ending, as [Concrete Dog] was able to repair his old school flyer with some very modern technology: a set of 3D printed propeller blades.

Now under normal circumstances, 3D printed propellers are a dicey prospect. To avoid being torn apart by the incredible rotational forces they will be subjected to, they generally need to be bulked up to the point that they become too heavy, and performance suffers. The stepped outer surface of the printed blade doesn’t help, either.

But in a lightweight aircraft powered by a rubber band, obviously things are a bit more relaxed. The thin blades [Concrete Dog] produced on his Prusa Mini appear to be just a layer or two thick, and were printed flat on the bed. He then attached them to the side of a jar using Kapton tape, and put them in the oven to anneal for about 10 minutes. This not only strengthened the printed blades, but put a permanent curve into them.

The results demonstrated at the end of the video are quite impressive. [Concrete Dog] says the new blades actually outperform the originals aluminum blades, so he’s has to trim the plane out again for the increased thrust. Hopefully the extra performance will help his spindly bird avoid future aerial altercations.

On the electrically powered side of things, folks have been trying to 3D print airplane and quadcopter propellers for almost as long as desktop 3D printers have been on the market. With modern materials and high-resolution printers the idea is more practical than ever, though it’s noted they don’t suffer crashes very well.

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Hackaday Podcast 196: Flexing Hard PCBs, Dangers Of White Filament, And The Jetsons’ Kitchen Computer

December 9, 2022 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start the Hackaday Podcast by talking about another podcast that’s talking about…Hackaday. Or more accurately, the recent Hackaday Supercon. After confirming the public’s adoration, conversation moves on to designing flexible PCBs with code, adding a rotary dial to your mechanical keyboard, and a simulator that lets you visualize an extinction-level event. We’ll wrap things up by playing the world’s smallest violin for mildly inconvenienced closed source software developers, and wonder how the world might have been different if the lady of the house had learned to read binary back in 1969.

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!

Download the podcast and play it on your Palm Pilot!

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Pi Pico QR Display Hands Out WiFi Info With Style

December 8, 2022 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

At this point, you’re likely aware that you can store your wireless network’s credentials in a QR code, so that anyone who wants to connect with their smartphone need only scan the 2D barcode. Whether you print it out on paper, extrude it out of plastic, or paint the thing on the wall, it still works the same. It’s a neat trick for when you’ve got friends and family over, and saves you having to explain your ponderously long WPA key.

But what if you want to change up the encryption key every so often? Sure would be a hassle to have to repaint the wall. Enter this interesting project from [Predrag Mijatovic], which uses a few scripts to automatically set up a new encrypted guest WiFi network and present the appropriate QR code on an OLED display attached to a Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s a bit convoluted, and almost certainly won’t work on your network without significant tweaks, but we’re intrigued by the idea.

As [Predrag] explains, the whole thing is based on a Latvian MikroTik router that can be configured over SSH. A Bash script generates a new encryption key by base64 encoding the output /dev/urandom, logs into the router to set up a new network using it, and then generates the matching ASCII QR code. With some sed trickery, the code is then embedded into a MicroPython program that gets uploaded to the connected Pi Pico.

In the video after the break [Predrag] takes us through the process manually so it’s easier to see what’s going on. Under normal circumstances, it would all happen automatically and would take just a few seconds to complete. We’d feel more comfortable if the scripts had some error correction that would allow them to gracefully exit if something goes wrong, but as a proof of concept, it certainly works.

We’d like to see this concept explored a bit further, perhaps using one of the physical QR code displays we’ve seen over the years. A programmable electronic paper display would also be a logical way to show off a dynamic QR code.

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