Author: Al Williams

4003 Articles

Hackaday Podcast Episode 307: CNC Tattoos, The Big Chill In Space, And PCB Things

February 7, 2025 by 3 Comments

The answer is: Elliot Williams, Al Williams, and a dozen or so great hacks. The question?  What do you get this week on the Hackaday podcast? This week’s hacks ran from smart ring hacking, to computerized tattoos. Keyboards, PCBs, and bicycles all make appearances, too.

Be sure to try to guess the “What’s that sound?” You could score a cool Hackaday Podcast T.

For the can’t miss this week, Hackaday talks about how to dispose of the body in outer space and when setting your ship’s clock involved watching a ball drop.

 

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T1 Is A RISC-V Cray

February 6, 2025 by 16 Comments

The crux of most supercomputers is the ability to operate on many pieces of data at once — something video cards are good at, too. Enter T1 (short for Torrent-1), a RISC-V vector inspired by the Cray X1 vector machine.

T1 has support for features, including lanes and chaining. The chip contains a version of the Rocket Core for scalar operations, but there’s no official support for using it. The project claims you could easily replace that core with any other RISC-V CPU IP.

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A Great Use For AI: Wasting Scammers Time!

February 6, 2025 by 61 Comments

We may have found the killer app for AI. Well, actually, British telecom provider O2 has. As The Guardian reports, they have an AI chatbot that acts like a 78-year-old grandmother and receives phone calls. Of course, since the grandmother—Daisy, by name—doesn’t get any real phone calls, anyone calling that number is probably a scammer. Daisy’s specialty? Keeping them tied up on the phone.

While this might just seem like a prank for revenge, it is actually more than that. Scamming people is a numbers game. Most people won’t bite. So, to be successful, scammers have to make lots of calls. Daisy can keep one tied up for around 40 minutes or more.

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Lorentz Cannon Fires Lightning

February 6, 2025 by 28 Comments

[Editor’s note: This video disappeared, but it has been archived here. We’re leaving the original links as-were in case they come back up.]

The aptly named [LightingOnDemand] has created a Lorentz cannon that can fire a lightning bolt. Honestly, as you can see in the video below, it looks like something from a bad 1950s science fiction movie. The inspiration was researchers using rockets trailing thin wires to attract lightning.

How does the tiny wire carry that much juice? It doesn’t, really. The wire vaporizes into plasma, and if the pulse is fast enough, the Lorentz force hold the plasma together. The rest is non-trivial high-voltage engineering.

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A Tube, The Wooden Kind

February 6, 2025 by 21 Comments

While we aren’t heavy-duty woodworkers, we occasionally make some sawdust as part of a project, and we admire people who know how to make wood and do what they want. We were surprised when [Newton Makes] showed a wooden dowel that was quite long and was mostly hollow. The wall was thin, the hole was perfectly centered, and he claimed he did not use a drill to produce it. Check it out in the video below and see what you think.

We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we can tell you that making something that long with a drill or even a drill press would be very difficult. The problem is that drills have runout — the bits are usually not totally centered, so the bit doesn’t spin like you think it does. Instead, it spins and rotates around a small circle.

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Inside Project Delilah

February 4, 2025 by 13 Comments

The invention of the computer is a tricky thing to pinpoint. There were some early attempts that were not well known and some early attempts that were deliberately secret. [Alan Turing]’s efforts with Colossus were top secret for years, and while that work built on earlier efforts in Poland, [Turing] has as much claim to be the father of computers as anyone. But [Jack Copland] points out in a recent post that the famous computer scientist was also involved in another secret project: Delilah.

While [Turing] is best known for his work breaking ciphers at Bletchley Park, he also put time in on a second project about ten miles away in a secret electronics lab at Hanslope Park. There he worked with an assistant, [Donald Bayley] on Delilah — a portable system for encrypting voice transmissions.

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Telling Time Used To Be A Ball

February 4, 2025 by 14 Comments

If you watch the New Year’s festivities from New York, you know that they mark midnight with the dropping of a big, gaudy ball. You might assume this was just an arbitrary gimmick, but it turns out dropping balls has a place in the history of timekeeping, especially for ships at sea. The New York ball doesn’t work precisely the same, but it was clearly inspired by an ancient method of indicating the time.

Apparently, even the ancient Greeks used ball dropping to indicate time. But the modern ball got its start with [Captain Robert Wauchope], who installed one at Portsmouth, England, in 1829. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich got one in 1833, which you can see working in the video below.

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