When we talk about emissions these days, we typically talk about cutting them back for the good of the environment. However, the climate system is a complex beast, and one we’re still learning to understand.
As it turns out, cutting back on emissions may have unexpected or undesirable effects. Some scientists are concerned that cuts to human-induced sulfur emissions may actually be warming the Earth.
Continue reading “Reduced Sulfur Emissions Could Cause Climate Shock”
Hydrogen has long been touted as the solution to cleaning up road transport. When used in fuel cells, the only emissions from its use are water, and it eliminates the slow recharging problem of battery-electric vehicles. It’s also been put forth as a replacement for everything from natural gas supplies to laptop batteries.
Toyota has been pushing hard for hydrogen technology, and has worked to develop vehicles and infrastructure to this end. The company’s latest efforts involve a toteable hydrogen cartridge – letting you take hydrogen power on the go!
Continue reading “Toyota’s Cartridge Helps Make Hydrogen Portable”
Robot arms and grippers do important work every hour of every day. They’re used in production lines around the world, toiling virtually ceaselessly outside of their designated maintenance windows.
They’re typically built out of steel, and powered by brawny hydraulic systems. However, some scientists have gone for a smaller scale approach that may horrify the squeamish. They’ve figured out how to turn a dead spider into a useful robotic gripper.
The name of this new Frankensteinian field? Why, it’s necrobotics, of course!
Continue reading “Dead Spider Becomes Robot Gripper: It’s Necrobotics!”
The C64 may be the best-selling computer of all time, but Commodore made several machines before that, too. [Mjnurney] always loved the Commodore PET, and set about building some new machines in the PET’s unique all-in-one form factor.
The case design started with measurements taken from an original Commodore PET, of which [Mjnurney] has three. Then, it was modified and extended to make room for a proper keyboard. The case also mounts a 14″ IPS display, two 15W speakers, and a gas strut enabling the case to be propped open for easy maintenance. It’s actually made out of real sheet metal, too!
The primary version mounts an Amiga 500 inside, including its classic keyboard. However, [Mjnurney] has developed a PC version, too. Both look great, and it’s wild to see Netflix displayed on a machine that looks more at home in 1977. Perhaps most of all, though, we love the dual floppy drives just below the screen.
Throwback cases pay tribute to some of our favorite machines. The tiny ones are perhaps the cutest of all.
Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2022: A Functional Commodore PET Tribute”
Retrograde clocks are unique, in that they eschew the normal fully-circular movement for the hands. Instead, the hands merely sweep out a segment of a circular arc, before jumping back to their start position to begin again. They’re pretty rare to find, but [Jamie Matthews] decided he had to have one. Thusly, he elected to build his own!
For his build, [Jamie] started with a regular off-the-shelf clock movement you might find in any hobbyist clock build. From there, he affixed his own witches’ brew of racks and gears to the output in order to create the desired semi-circular mechanism. The arcane mechanism enables the clock to tell time over roughly a 180-degree arc.
It’s relatively simple to make one of your own, too. The parts are all readily 3D printable, with [Jamie] reporting it took less than 8 meters of filament to produce the geartrain for his build. You can even print the clock face if you don’t want to CNC cut it out of acrylic.
Overall, it’s a fun look at an often-forgotten part of our horological history. Desktop 3D printing really does enable the creation of some exciting, different clock designs. Video after the break.
Back in the early days of the home computer revolution, data was commonly saved on tape. Even better, those tapes would make an almighty racket if you played them on a stereo, because the data was stored in an audio format. The Simple Universal Modem from [Anders Nielsen] is built to work in a similar way, turning data into audio and vice versa.
The project consists of a circuit for modulating data into audio, and demodulating audio back into data. It’s “universal” because [Anders] has designed it to be as format-agnostic as possible. It doesn’t matter whether you want to store data on a digital voice recorder, a cassette deck, or an old reel-to-reel. This build should work fairly well on all of them!
On the modulation side of things, it’s designed to be as analog-friendly as possible. Rather than just spitting out rough square waves, it modulates them into nice smooth sine waves with fewer harmonics. On the demodulation side, it’s got an LM393 comparator which can read data on tape and spit out a clean square wave for easy decoding by digital circuitry.
If you find yourself trying to recover old data off tapes, or writing to them for a retrocomputing project, this build might be just what you need. [Anders] even goes as far as demonstrating its use with an old reel-to-reel deck in a helpful YouTube video.
There really were some weird ways of storing data way back when. Just ask IBM. Video after the break.
Continue reading “Simple Universal Modem Helps Save And Load Data From Tape”
Sometimes you need to display a number nice and large, making it easily readable at a good distance. [Lewis] has just the thing for that: a big expandable 7-segment display.
The build is modular, allowing it to be extended from 2 to 10 digits and beyond. The digits themselves are made of 3D-printed parts assembled onto acrylic. These can then be ganged up in a wooden frame for displaying larger numbers with more digits. Individual elements are lit by addressable LEDs, and the project can be built using an Arduino Nano or an ESP8266 for control. The latter opens up possibilities for controlling the screen over WiFi, which could prove useful.
[Lewis] has built his own version for a local swim club, where it will be used as a laptimer. Other applications could be as a scoreboard in various sports, or to confuse your neighbours by displaying random numbers in your front yard.
We’ve seen a similar build from [Ivan Miranda] that served well as a workshop clock, too. Video after the break.
Continue reading “You Can Build A Giant 7-Segment Display Of Your Very Own”
