Author: Zoe Skyforest

3657 Articles

Can We Repurpose Old Wind Turbine Blades?

October 8, 2021 by 92 Comments

Wind turbines are a fantastic, cheap, renewable source of energy. However, nothing lasts forever, and over time, the blades of wind turbines fatigue and must be replaced. This then raises the question of what to do with these giant waste blades. Thankfully, a variety of projects are exploring just those possibilities.

A Difficult Recycling Problem

Around 85% of a modern wind turbine is recyclable. The problem is that wind turbine blades currently aren’t. The blades last around 20 to 25 years, and are typically made of fiberglass or carbon fiber. Consisting of high-strength fibers set in a resin matrix, these composite materials are incredibly difficult to recycle, as we’ve discussed previously. Unlike metals or plastics, they can’t just be melted down to be recast as fresh material. Couple this with the fact that wind turbine blades are huge, often spanning up to 300 feet long, and the problem gets harder. They’re difficult and expensive to transport and tough to chop up as well.

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Building Your Own Filing Machine From A Kit

October 7, 2021 by 17 Comments

Files are a very useful important tool if you’re machining your own parts. They can do plenty of shaping themselves on smaller parts in particular. Powering such a tool just makes sense, and a die filer or filing machine is essentially just that, reciprocating a file up and down for you. They’re highly prized amongst clockmakers and model builders, and [jeanluc83] decided to build one at home.

The design chosen was the MLA-18 filing machine, for which castings and parts can be purchased from a company called Metal Lathe Accessories. However, it’s far from a simple screw-together kit. [jeanluc83] goes through the full process of painting, machining, and assembling the kit, which takes quite a bit of work to do properly.

Notably, the design is quite old fashioned in that it does not include its own power source. Instead, the MLA-18 filing machine is fitted with a pulley, such that it can be driven from a motor on a bench. A 1/4 horsepower motor running at roughly 1725 RPM is recommended for best results.

Filing machines aren’t exactly something you’ll find at every hardware store or Harbor Freight, so you might find building your own is the right way to go. Hackaday is, after all, full of examples of hackers building their own tools!

Furter Burner Cooks The Wieners Just So

October 6, 2021 by 31 Comments

Sometimes you’re hungry for two sausages, and not a sausage more. [Wesley] designed his Furter Burner to handle precisely these situations, and it looks to cook up a pair of wieners a treat. (Video, embedded below.)

The process starts with a couple of wooden stunt wieners, and some foam board, with which [Wesley] roughs out a design. From there, a CAD design is drawn up and parts routed out of compressed board to troubleshoot the assembly further. Later moving on to a plywood version, having a wooden prototype quickly reveals plenty of things to improve, from adding handles to the grill surface to air holes to allow combustion.

The design goes through a couple of further iterations in metal before completion. The final result is impressive—resulting in a twin-wiener cooker that burns coals, complete with skewers for easy sausage handling and bearing [Wesley’s] own logo.

The video shows off the benefits of the iterative design process. It also demonstrates why it often makes sense to rough out designs in cheaper materials before going to the heavy stuff, particularly in a case like [Wesley]’s where the metal parts can only be cut off-site. Refining the design in-house first saves a lot of mucking around.

We’ve seen [Wesley]’s work before, too – like this impressive workshop storage solution.

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Yes, You Can Put Out A Burning Gas Well With A Nuclear Bomb

October 5, 2021 by 30 Comments

Nuclear explosives were first developed as weapons of war in the pitched environment of World War II. However, after the war had passed, thoughts turned to alternative uses for this new powerful technology. Scientists and engineers alike dreamed up wild schemes to dig new canals or blast humans into space with the mighty power of the atom.

Few of these ever came to pass, with radiological concerns being the most common reason why. However, the Soviet Union did in fact manage to put nuclear explosions to good use for civilian ends. One of the first examples was using a nuke to plug an out-of-control gas well in the mid 1960s.

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Bicycles Are Bad At Towing, Even With Crawler Gears

October 4, 2021 by 43 Comments

Gearing can make a huge difference to a cyclist, enabling even the least fit rider to climb a steep hill, albeit slowly. [Berm Peak Express] took that to the next level, creating a super-low geared bicycle capable of actually towing seriously heavy loads.

The build consists of a custom 74-tooth sprocket for the rear wheel, paired with a 24-tooth chain ring for the pedals. The custom sprocket doesn’t have any holes drilled or other lightening measures taken, but given the slow speeds involved, the extra rotating mass probably isn’t much of an issue. With that gearing, 3.08 turns of the pedals will result in just one turn of the rear wheel, with the aim to provide tractor-like torque with the trade-off being incredibly low forward speed.

Installing the giant rear cog required using a 3D-printed guide to keep the chain tensioned, and the rear brakes are entirely absent, but it all came together. Bikes aren’t built for towing, and some issues are faced with dragging a Jeep as the bike struggles with balance and traction. However, with some effort, a grown adult can be towed in a child carriage up a hill, no problems.

The bike proves difficult to ride as the forward speed is so slow that balance is problematic. However, it was interesting to see the experiment run, and the wear marks on the hub from the huge loads put through the rear wheel. If you’re digging the weird bikes, though, check out this hubless design as well. Video after the break.

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Some Pleasing Experiments In 8-Bit Video Cards

October 3, 2021 by 13 Comments

These days, supply chain factors and high demand have made it incredibly difficult to lay one’s hands on a GPU. However, if you’re into older computers, you might find it hard to source old-school video cards too. Fear not, for [Dave’s Dev Lab] has been cooking up some experiments with a goal of eventually producing a new 8-bit ISA video card from scratch.

The long term goal is to recreate the original design of early IBM hardware, namely, the MDA and CGA video cards of decades past. The experiments center around the venerable Motorola 6845 which was widely used in computers in the 1980s. However, [Dave] intends to make them suitable for outputting to modern screens using typical VGA and DVI outputs, as well as those expected by modern TFT LCDs.

Thus far, [Dave] has achieved successful VGA output in a 40×35 text mode. With an 8×16 font, and the display running at 640×480 resolution at 60 Hz, everything hums along nicely. Similar experiments with a modern 480×272 LCD display have also worked well.

There’s a long way to go before [Dave’s] hardware is playing Commander Keen, but it’s great to see such effort being put into the platform. It could yet serve as a great upgrade for those wishing to use their vintage IBM metal without having to source a tired old CGA monitor.

We’ve seen similar work before too, with the Graphics Gremlin from [Tube Time] achieving a similar task. If you’ve been brewing up your own ISA hardware at home, do drop us a line.

Mouse And Keyboard Controls On The N64

October 1, 2021 by 11 Comments

The Nintendo 64 was one of the consoles that properly heralded in the era of 3D gaming. However, its controller is of a design we wouldn’t consider ideal today. For the FPS games that were so popular on the N64, a mouse and keyboard could do much better. [The Hypocaust] set out to make it happen.

The N64 polls the controller and receives button and analog stick data in return. Four bytes are sent by the controller, with 14 bits covering the buttons and 8 bits covering the horizontal and vertical axes of the analog stick, respectively. Thus, if keyboard presses and mouse movements from a PC could be pumped to a microcontroller which reformatted the data into signals the N64 could understand, everything would work nicely.

Initial attempts to get things working with code borrowed from a [James Read] faced an issue of a 3-second lag between keypresses and actions reaching the N64. Upgrading to a faster microcontroller only made things worse, taking the lag out to a full 16 seconds. The problem? The code borrowed for the project was storing keypresses in a buffer that was creating the delay. Once eliminated, the system worked.

An installer for the software is available, but you’ll have to be comfortable with running a strange executable if you want to use it. We’ve seen similar work before too, such as the USB64 project. Video after the break.

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