Author: Zoe Skyforest

3698 Articles

The Great Green Wall: Africa’s Ambitious Attempt To Fight Desertification

May 9, 2024 by 62 Comments

As our climate changes, we fear that warmer temperatures and drier conditions could make life hard for us. In most locations, it’s a future concern that feels uncomfortably near, but for some locations, it’s already very real. Take the Sahara desert, for example, and the degraded landscapes to the south in the Sahel. These arid regions are so dry that they struggle to support life at all, and temperatures there are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet.

In the face of this escalating threat, one of the most visionary initiatives underway is the Great Green Wall of Africa. It’s a mega-sized project that aims to restore life to barren terrain.

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Your Open-Source Client Options In The Non-Mastodon Fediverse

May 8, 2024 by 22 Comments

When things started getting iffy over at Twitter, Mastodon rose as a popular alternative to the traditional microblogging platfrom. In contrast to the walled gardens of other social media channels, it uses an open protocol that runs on distributed servers that loosely join together, forming the “Fediverse”.

The beauty of the Fediverse isn’t just in its server structure, though. It’s also in the variety of clients available for accessing the network. Where Twitter is now super-strict about which apps can hook into the network, the Fediverse welcomes all comers to the platform! And although Mastodon is certainly the largest player, it’s absolutely not the only elephant in the room.

Today, we’ll look at a bunch of alternative clients for the platform, ranging from mobile apps to web clients. They offer unique features and interfaces that cater to different user preferences and needs. We’ll look at the most notable examples—each of which brings a different flavor to your Fediverse experience.

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MUDLink Is Making UART Data Links More Reliable

May 3, 2024 by 20 Comments

Many of us have used UARTs to spit data from one system or chip to another. Normally, for quick and dirty maker projects, this is good enough. However, you’ll always get the odd dropped transmission or glitch that can throw a spanner in the works if you’re not careful. [Jake Read] decided to work on a system that could use UARTs while being far more reliable. Enter MUDLink.

MUDLink is a library that works with an Arduino’s UART port and stacks on a bit of protocol to clean things up. It uses a packetized method of sending data to ensure that transmissions are received reliably as intended by the sender. Packets are framed using a method called Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing, which is a nice lightweight way of doing so. The system also uses CRC16-CCITT as an error checking mechanism. There’s also an ack-and-retransmit system for ensuring any dropped transmissions are repeated and received successfully.

If you need reliable UART transmissions without too much overhead, you might want to look at what Jake is doing. It’s a topic we’ve looked at before, too.

Start Your Creepy Jack-O-Lantern Project Early This Year With Gourdan

May 2, 2024 by 1 Comment

For a lot of us, projects take time, and they have to be squeezed in around the regular chores of real life. Thus, if you’re starting your Halloween builds after the holiday displays have already hit the stores, you’re probably too late. We’re here to implore you to start building early this year—and you can take inspiration from a great pumpkin called Gourdan.

Gourdan is the work of [Braden Sunwold]. It’s a pumpkin with a fearsome visage and creepy eyes that follow you around the room. This is achieved thanks to a Raspberry Pi 3 nestled within Gourdan’s gourdy body. Gourdan’s eyes are a pair of 1.54-inch LCDs which display animated eyes. Thus, no mechanical wizardry is required here—it’s all done digitally. A camera attached to the Raspberry Pi tracks people with the aid of OpenCV, and the eyes are created and animated with the help of Adafruit example code.

There’s never a better time to start hacking for Halloween than right now. And hey, who knows—your neighbour might have kicked off in January, so they’ll have an almighty head start. They could have something really impressive in the works!

And don’t forget—you can always send us your holiday hacks, whatever the time of year! Just hit up the tipsline. Happy making!

3D Printed Wheels Passively Transform To Climb Obstacles

May 2, 2024 by 15 Comments

Wheels do a great job at rolling over all kinds of terrain, particularly if you pair them with compliant tires. However, they’re not perfect, and can get stumbled by things like large vertical steps. Enter the PaTS-Wheel — a compliant mechanism that can tackle such obstacles with ease.

The PaTS-Wheel takes advantage of printable flexural hinges. Under regular conditions, it exists as a simple round wheel. However, when presented with a step obstacle, its individual segments can bend and flex to grab on to the step and hoist the vehicle up. It all happens passively as a result of the wheel’s structure, no actuators or control system are needed to achieve this action.

The video below does a great job of explaining the concept in raw engineering terms, as well as showing it in action. If you really want to drill down though, dive into the research paper. The design outperformed smooth wheels and whegs in climbing ability, and was able to match smooth wheels in simple tests of flat ground power consumption. The results are very impressive.

We’ve seen other transforming wheels before, like these wheg-like constructions, but nothing so passive and elegant as these. Video after the break.

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NASA Is Now Tasked With Developing A Lunar Time Standard, Relativity Or Not

May 2, 2024 by 82 Comments

A little while ago, we talked about the concept of timezones and the Moon. It’s a complicated issue, because on Earth, time is all about the Sun and our local relationship with it. The Moon and the Sun have their own weird thing going on, so time there doesn’t really line up well with our terrestrial conception of it.

Nevertheless, as humanity gets serious about doing Moon things again, the issue needs to be solved. To that end, NASA has now officially been tasked with setting up Moon time – just a few short weeks after we last talked about it! (Does the President read Hackaday?) Only problem is, physics is going to make it a damn sight more complicated!

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Building A Mechanical Keyboard As A Learning Project

May 2, 2024 by 2 Comments

[Thomas Rinsma] wanted to learn about designing PCBs. Thus, he set about a nifty project that would both teach him those lessons and net him something useful in the process. The result was kb1, a mechanical keyboard of his own design!

You might think [Thomas] would have started with a basic, barebones design, but he didn’t shy away from including some neat features. His keyboard has a “tenkeyless” layout, and uses Cherry MX-style switches, as has become the norm in the mechanical keyboard world. It has a 16×2 LCD display for user feedback, a rotary encoder, and it even has an RGB backlight for every key thanks to SK6812 addressable LEDs. Running the show is a Raspberry Pi Pico, equipped with the KMK firmware. The board actually uses twin PCBs as the enclosure, which is a nifty trick.

It’s remarkably fully featured for a first time build.