Author: Zoe Skyforest

3746 Articles

Fixing A Tractor Dashboard From Over 10,000 Miles Away

February 3, 2024 by 6 Comments

[BuyItFixIt] is well known as a dab hand at, well, fixing things… and presumably buying them, too. Recently, they received an email calling for help of the former kind. One of their Australian viewers owned the same model of tractor, but with a dead digital dash. Thankfully, help was at hand!

The problem turned out to be due to a dead EEPROM on the Australian tractor. In contrast, [BuyItFixIt] had a perfectly working dashboard on their tractor. Thus, they set about disassembling the dash and dumping the EEPROM to try and sort the stricken farm implement. This posed some risk of ending up with two dead dashboards, necessitating a careful hand. In any case, the Case tractor had a fairly simple dash with a majority of through-hole components, making it fairly easy to work with. The Microchip 93LC46B chip was in a DIP package, and was removed with the aid of some low-melting point solder in short order. The contents of the EEPROM were then dumped to a file using a XGecu T48 programmer.

With the file sent off via email, the Australian tractor owner flashed a fresh EEPROM and reinstalled it in their cluster. They were greeted with success, with the only complication being that the hours reading on the cluster had to be corrected to match the previous reading on their machine.

It’s a fairly simple story of fixing an embedded system, but it’s an educational one. It also comes with a deeper dive into how the CASE dashboard works. Just about anyone with basic electronic skills could pull this off and save an entire tractor in the process. It’s great to see these jobs documented so that we can all learn useful basic skills like these. Video after the break.

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Navigate Burning Man With Ease With This Custom Tool

February 1, 2024 by 7 Comments

When setting up a city in the desert, the team behind Burning Man does its best to lay things out in an ordered fashion. Even still, getting around at ground level can be a challenge at times, and it’s easy to get lost. To help get around easier, [Zach] developed a nifty GPS device built specifically for navigating the ephemeral clock-like city.

The device is built for a few simple purposes. It shows where you are, it helps you navigate somewhere you’ve been before, and it helps you navigate to portable toilets. It’s set up to be usable both on bike and on foot, the typical ways of getting around the playa. Since Black Rock City is fairly simple, it uses an arrow to point to a desired waypoint, and is capable of storing up to five points of interest. It’s built using a cheap GNSS receiver and transflective LCD screen, and a Pi Pico is the brains of the operation.

The value of the device is obvious, particularly when exploring deeper areas of the playa, or after the road signs have been removed or structures have been taken down or burnt to ashes. We’ve seen some other great projects from the desert festival before, too. If you’ve got your own playa-spec hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Robot Can Read Braille Much Faster Than Humans With New Sensor

February 1, 2024 by 25 Comments

Braille is a method of physical writing used to allow humans to read by touch — most commonly used as a substitute for printed text by those who may be visually impaired. Both displaying Braille and reading it is difficult to do with machines, but there has been a development in the latter area. A research team has trained a robot to read Braille at a speed far exceeding humans.

The robot was developed by a team at the University of Cambridge. Rather than trying to read Braille by touch, it instead uses a camera and an image recognition algorithm to do the job. Their solution is a bit ironic in a way, given the purpose Braille was created for. The robot can quickly sweep across a Braille display, working at a rate of up to 315 words per minute at 87% accuracy. That’s roughly twice as fast as a human reading Braille, with a similar level of accuracy. Some nifty de-blurring algorithms were needed to achieve this speed from the camera’s video feed.

We’ve also seen some impressive development on the other side of all those little bumps, with two Braille devices taking home awards during the final Hackaday Prize in 2023.
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Polynesian Wayfinding Traditions Let Humans Roam The Pacific Ocean

February 1, 2024 by 24 Comments

Polynesian cultures have a remarkable navigational tradition. It stands as a testament to human ingenuity and an intimate understanding of nature. Where Western cultures developed maps and tools to plot courses around the world, the Polynesian tradition is more about using human senses and pattern-finding skills to figure out where one is, and where one might be going.

Today, we’ll delve into the unique techniques of Polynesian navigation, exploring how keen observation of the natural world enabled pioneers to roam far and wide across the breadth of the Pacific.

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Cheap Hack Gets PCI-X Card Working In PCI Slot

February 1, 2024 by 10 Comments

PCI and PCI-X are not directly compatible, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that means you’re out of luck if you need to use a PCI-X card in a machine that only has basic PCI slots. And yet, that needn’t be the case. As [Peter] shows us, you can work around this with a cheap hacky hack. Our favorite kind!

[Peter] had a PCI-X RAID card that he wanted to use on his Socket 7-based computer. The 3ware 9550SX PCI-X card is 3.3 V only, and doesn’t fit in a typical PCI slot. It’s not compatible mechanically or electrically. Enter a PCI-X riser, which gets around the missing notch that would normally not let the card sit in the slot. Other than that, it just took masking off some pins to avoid damage from the 5 V rail. Throughput is good, too, reportedly sitting at roughly 60-70 MB/s.

The hard part is probably finding a PCI-X riser; PCI-Express stuff is far more common. Few of us need to deal with PCI-X anymore, but if you’re working on some ancient industrial hardware or something, this hack might just save your beans from the roast pot one day.

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Check Out These Amazing Self-Soldering Sleeves From World War II

January 31, 2024 by 18 Comments

Imagine you’re a commando, doing some big secret mission on the continent in the midst of World War II. You need to hook up some wires to your explosive charges, and time is of the essence. Do you bust out the trusty Weller and see if those petulant Axis chaps will let you plug it in somewhere? No! You use a pyrotechnic self-soldering sleeve, as [Our Own Devices] explains.

Like so many British inventions during the war, the sleeves really are ingenious. They were developed by the Special Operation Executive, an organization charged with sabotage and subversion operations in then-occupied Europe.

The soldering sleeves were designed to make electrical connections between detonators and firing wires for explosives.  The sleeves consist of a copper tube through which wires to be joined are fed, with a lump of solder in the middle. The assembly is covered in pyrotechnic material with a safety match-style starter chemical dosed on top. Using the sleeves is simple. First, two stripped wires are fed into either end of the copper tube. The starter the sleeve is then ignited using the box, just like striking a match. The pyrotechnic material then gets red hot, melting the solder and making the connection.

It’s well worth watching the video to see how these field-expedient devices actually work. We’ve explored the use of more-typical solder sleeves before, too. Video after the break.

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The Cockpit Voice Recorder Controversy

January 31, 2024 by 75 Comments

Every time there’s a plane crash or other aviation safety incident, we often hear talk of the famous “black box”. Of course, anyone these days will tell you that they’re not black, but orange, for visibility’s sake. Plus, there’s often not one black box, but two! There’s a Flight Data Recorder (FDR), charged with recording aircraft telemetry, and a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), designed to record what’s going on in the cabin.

It sounds straightforward enough, but the cockpit voice recorder has actually become the subject of some controversy in recent times. Let’s talk about the basics of these important safety devices, and why they’re the subject of some debate at the present time.

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