Author: Al Williams

4506 Articles

MQTT Deep Dive

July 25, 2019 by 16 Comments

If you read Hackaday, it is a good bet you’ve heard of MQTT — Message Queueing Telemetry Transport. If you’ve not used MQTT before, you should check out Ably’s [Kayla Matthews’] post entitled  MQTT: A Conceptual Deep Dive paper. She does mention their MQTT protocol connector at the end, and has a few notes about Ably’s products, but most of the post is a normal white paper and has a lot of good info.

MQTT’s claim to fame, of course, is that it is very tiny and is made to minimize power consumption compared to heavier-weight protocols. When you are trying to provide or consume data from a device that has to last a year on a coin cell, MQTT is your friend.

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Tea Bot Solves Another First World Problem

July 24, 2019 by 19 Comments

In the movie Wall-E, future humans live in floating chairs and have everything done for them. Today, we grumble if we have to go to physically find a light switch or a remote control. How far away can floating chairs with screens be? T2, the Tea Bot, gets us one step closer to that. Using a laser-cut frame, an ESP8266, and a servo motor, the T2 brews your tea for exactly the right amount of time.

We were kind of hoping the robot would at least dunk the tea bag in and out, but it does provide a web interface that lets you select the brew. Of course, the code is available, so you could make modifications — maybe turn on a hotplate underneath the cup.

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The Great Moon Hoax — No Not That One!

July 23, 2019 by 71 Comments

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago, yet there are some people who don’t think it happened. This story is not about them. It turns out there was another great conspiracy theory involving a well-known astronomer, unicorns, and humanoids with bat wings. This one came 134 years before the words “We chose to go to the moon” were uttered.

The 1835 affair — known as the Great Moon Hoax — took the form of six articles published in The Sun, a newspaper in New York City. Think of it like “War of the Worlds” but in newspaper form — reported as if true but completely made up. Although well-known astronomer John Herschel was named in the story, he wasn’t actually involved in the hoax. Richard Adams Locke was the reporter who invented the story. His main goal seemed to be to sell newspapers, but he also may have been poking fun at some of the more outlandish scientific claims of the day.

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Hacking Shelters And Swimming Pools

July 18, 2019 by 44 Comments

How would you survive in a war-torn country, where bombs could potentially fall from the sky with only very short notice? And what if the bomb in question were The Bomb — a nuclear weapon? This concern is thankfully distant for most of us, but it wasn’t always so. Only 75 years ago, bombs were raining down on England, and until much more recently the threat of global thermonuclear war was encouraging school kids to “duck and cover”. How do you protect people in these situations?

The answers, naturally, depend on the conditions at hand. In Britain before the war, money was scarce and many houses didn’t have basements or yards that were large enough to build a family-sized bomb shelter in, and they had to improvise. In Cold War America, building bomb shelters ended up as a boon for the swimming pool construction industry. In both cases, bomb shelters proved to be a test of engineering ingenuity and DIY gumption, attempting to save lives in the face of difficult-to-quantify danger from above.

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Neural Network In Glass Requires No Power, Recognizes Numbers

July 16, 2019 by 59 Comments

We’ve all come to terms with a neural network doing jobs such as handwriting recognition. The basics have been in place for years and the recent increase in computing power and parallel processing has made it a very practical technology. However, at the core level it is still a digital computer moving bits around just like any other program. That isn’t the case with a new neural network fielded by researchers from the University of Wisconsin, MIT, and Columbia. This panel of special glass requires no electrical power, and is able to recognize gray-scale handwritten numbers.

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Hoverboard Circles Bastille Day

July 15, 2019 by 36 Comments

According to reports, a turbine-powered flying board buzzed around Bastille Day celebrations carrying its inventor [Franky Zapata] toting a rifle to promote the military applications of the Flyboard Air. You can see the video record, below.

We’ve heard the board costs a cool $250,000 so you may want to start saving now. There are several versions including one that qualifies in the United States as an ultralight. The board Zapata used can reach speeds of 190 km/h and can run for up to 10 minutes, although the website claims 200 km/h is possible and the company also claims to routinely reach 140 km/h. and 6 minute flight times.

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Pedal Faster! I Need To Join A Conference Call!

July 14, 2019 by 16 Comments

It is rare to find a car these days without some mechanism for charging a cell phone. After all, phones need charging all the time and we spend a lot of time in our cars. But what if you spend a lot of time on your bike? Five teens from Lynchburg, Virginia decided to build something to charge their phones from pedal power.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. Your alternator is charging your phone in your car, and bikes have had alternators connected to them for lights and other purposes. According to the team, you need to pedal about 4 miles per hour to get enough voltage to charge the phone. You can go faster though, because the circuit has a regulator. We especially liked how they determined the speed versus the voltage using a tachometer and an electric drill. We also liked the 3D printed parts such as the handlebar mount that you could probably repurpose for other things.

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