Polaroid In An Instant

July 31, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Edwin Land, were he alive, would hate this post. He wanted to be known for this scientific work and not for his personal life. In fact, upon his death, he ordered the destruction of all his personal papers. However, Land was, by our definition, a hacker, and while you probably correctly associate him with the Polaroid camera, that turns out to be only part of the story.

It was obvious that Land was intelligent and inquisitive from an early age. At six, he blew all the fuses in the house. He was known for taking apart clocks and appliances. When his father forbade him from tearing apart a phonograph, he reportedly replied that nothing would deter him from conducting an experiment. We imagine many Hackaday readers have similar childhood stories.

Optics

He was interested in optics, and at around age 13, he became interested in using polarized light to reduce headlight glare. The problem was that one of the best polarizing crystals known — herapathite — was difficult to create in a large size. Herapathite is a crystalline form of iodoquinine sulfate studied in the 1800s by William Herapath, who was unable to grow large sizes of the crystal. Interestingly, one of Herapath’s students noticed the crystals formed when adding iodine to urine from dogs that were given quinine.

Land spent a year at Harvard studying physics, but he left and moved to New York. He continued trying to develop a way to make large, practical, light-polarizing crystals. At night, he would sneak into labs at Columbia University to conduct experiments.

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An Antenna To Throw You For A Loop

July 29, 2024 by Al Williams 27 Comments

It is one of Murphy’s laws, we think, that you can’t get great things when you need them. Back in the heyday of shortwave broadcasting, any of us would have given a week’s pay for even a low-end receiver today. Digital display? Memory? Digital filtering? These days, you have radios, and they aren’t terribly expensive, but there isn’t much to listen to. Making matters worse, it isn’t easy these days to string wires around in your neighborhood for a variety of reasons. Maybe you don’t have a yard, or you have deed restrictions, or your yard lacks suitable space or locations. This problem is so common that there are a crop of indoor antennas that seem attractive. Since I don’t often tune in shortwave and I don’t want to have to reset my antenna after every storm, I decided to look at the Tecsun AN-48X along with a YouLoop clone from China. Let’s start with the Tecsun. Continue reading “An Antenna To Throw You For A Loop” →

Making USB Blaster Clones Work For Linux

July 29, 2024 by Al Williams 4 Comments

The last time we checked in with [Downtown Doug Brown], he had some cheap Altera USB Blaster clones that didn’t want to work under Linux. The trick at that time was to change the device’s 24 MHz clock to 12 MHz. This month, he’s found some different ones that don’t work, but now the clock change doesn’t work. What’s the problem?

He also picked up a Terasic clone, which does work on Linux and is considered, according to [Doug], the best of the clones. The units were superficially similar. So what follows is a lot of USB tracing and dumping of the CPLD chip’s configuration.

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Print Your Own Magnetic Connector

July 27, 2024 by Al Williams 22 Comments

If you have a late-model laptop, you’ve probably seen how the chargers magnetically snap into place. In theory, this should be easy to recreate for your own purposes. But why reinvent the wheel when [DarthKaker] has already done the work for you — assuming you only need two conductors.

The 3D-printed shells take the usual round magnets. Obviously, the north pole on one part should point to the south pole on the other part. In addition, if polarity matters, you should also have each housing contain one north-facing and one south-facing magnet so that the connectors will only mate one way.

It appears the project uses wires soldered or spot welded to the magnets. Heating magnets sometimes has bad effects, so we might try something different. For example, you could solder the wires to thin washers affixed to the magnets with epoxy, perhaps. Or use the magnets for alignment and make a different arrangement for the contacts, although that would take a different shell design.

We have talked about magnet soldering for connectors before. Don’t forget that you can build magnets into your prints, too.

A History Of Internet Outages

July 27, 2024 by Al Williams 31 Comments

We heard a story that after the recent hurricane, a man noted that while the house was sweltering hot because the power was still out, his kids were more anxious for the internet to come back online. The Internet is practically a basic necessity for most people, but as you may have noticed with the recent CrowdStrike debacle, the Internet isn’t always reliable. Granted, the problem in that case wasn’t the Internet per se, but a problem with many critical hosts that provide services. [Thomas Germain] from the BBC took the opportunity to recall some of the more bizarre reasons we’ve had massive Internet outages in the past.

While teens after a hurricane might miss social media, global outages can be serious business. With 8.5 million computers dead, 911 services went down, medical surgeries were canceled, and — of course — around 46,000 flights were canceled in a single day. We have short memories for these outages, but as [Thomas] points out, this was far from the first massive outage, and many of them have very strange backstories.

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Ask Hackaday: Is Shortwave On Life Support?

July 26, 2024 by Al Williams 123 Comments

Between World War II and Y2K, shortwave listening was quite an education. With a simple receiver, you could listen to the world. Some of it, of course, was entertainment, and much of it was propaganda of one sort or another. But you could learn a lot. Kids with shortwave radios always did great in geography. Getting the news from a different perspective is often illuminating, too. Learning about other cultures and people in such a direct way is priceless. Getting a QSL card in the mail from a faraway land seemed very exciting back then.

Today, the shortwave landscape is a mere shadow of itself. According to a Wikipedia page, there are 235 active shortwave broadcasters from a list of 414, so nearly half are defunct. Not only are there many “dead” shortwave outlets, but many of the ones that are left are either not aimed at the world market or serve a niche group of listeners.

You can argue that with the Internet, you don’t need radio, and that’s probably correct in some ways but misses a few important points. Indeed, many broadcasters still exist as streaming stations or a mix of radio and streaming. I have to admit I listen to the BBC often but rarely on the air. My computer or phone plays it in crystal clarity 24 hours a day.

A future Hackaday author in front of an Eico shortwave radio

So, while a 14-year-old in 1975 might be hunched over a radio wearing headphones, straining to hear NHK World Radio, these days, they are likely surfing the popular social media site of the week. You could easily argue that content on YouTube, Instagram, and the like can come from all over the world, so what’s the problem?

The problem is information overload. Faced with a shortwave radio, there were a limited number of options available. What’s more, only a small part of the band might be “open” at any given time. It isn’t like the radio could play games or — unless you were a ham — allow you to chat with your friends. So you found radio stations from Germany to South Africa. From China and Russia, to Canada and Mexico. You knew the capital of Albania. You learned a little Dutch from Radio Nederlands.

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Linux Fu: Failing Pipelines

July 25, 2024 by Al Williams 16 Comments

Bash is great for automating little tasks, but sometimes a little script you think will take a minute to write turns into a half hour or more. This is the story of one of those half-hour scripts.

I have too many 3D printers. In particular, I have three that are almost — but not exactly — the same, so each one has a slightly different build process when I want to update their firmware. In all fairness, one of those printers is heading out the door soon, but I’ll probably still wind up building firmware images for it.

My initial process was painful. I have a special directory with the four files needed to configure Marlin for each machine. I copy all four files and ask PlatformIO to perform the build. Usually, it succeeds and gives me a file that looks like firmware-yyyyddmmhhmm.bin or something like that.

The problem is that the build process doesn’t know which of the three machines is the target: Sulu, Checkov, or Fraiser. (Long story.) So, I manually look at the file name, copy it, and rename it. Of course, this is an error-prone process, and I’m basically lazy, so I decided to write a script to do it. I figured it would take just a minute to bundle up all the steps. I was wrong.

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