A disposable wireless phone charger made from molded cardboard pulp.

Charging Phones With The Power Of Paper Pulp

November 23, 2021 by 22 Comments

Here it is, the most exciting reveal since the Hackaday Prize ceremony — [Eric Strebel] uses the pulp mold he designed and built over the three previous videos. In case you missed our coverage so far, [Eric] set out to design an eco-friendly wireless charger that’s meant to be disposable after six months to a year of use, and looks good doing it.

[Eric] started by cutting up a lot of cardboard and pulping it in a brand-new Oster blender that honestly looks to be pretty heavy duty. Pulping consists of blending the cardboard bits with water until a soupy chili-like consistency is reached. That blender lasted all of 20 minutes before breaking, so [Eric] promptly replaced it with a Ninja, which was way more up to the challenge of cardboard.

To do the actual molding, [Eric] mixed his pulpy chili with ~30 L of water in a tub big enough to accommodate the long brass mold. He dipped the mold to gather a layer of pulp and pulled it, and then pressed the wireless charger in place to create a pocket for it in the final, dried piece which he later replaced with an acrylic disk of the same diameter. [Eric] points out that a part like this would probably dry within ten minutes in an industrial setting. Even though he set it on top of a food dehydrator, it still took 4-5 hours to dry. Soup’s on after the break.

This isn’t [Eric]’s first wireless charger. A few years ago, he prototyped a swiveling version in urethane foam that does portrait or landscape.

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Significantly Improved Egg Timer Makes Pictionary Better

November 23, 2021 by 24 Comments

The traditional sand timer, known colloquially as an egg timer, served its purpose well over the centuries since its development. However, [MakerPaul] realised it had some significant flaws that were ruining Pictionary, and set out to fix the problem.

If you’re not looking directly at an egg timer, it’s easy to miss the moment when the timer runs out. Resetting the timer before it runs out also requires waiting for the sand to filter to one side. Clearly the world needs a better mousetrap.

The tipping timer from [MakerPaul] solves both those issues. In this design, sand flows down into an offset area, which tips the device over when reaching a certain time limit. Additionally, turning the device upside down and then rotating it instantly reloads the sand, meaning the timer can be reused immediately.

[MakerPaul] first came up with the idea about 20 years ago, refining it during the recent lockdowns. The design files are freely available for anyone that wishes to build one. [MakerPaul] isn’t commercializing the idea, but mentions that it would be great if anyone using it makes a donation to the Mind mental health charity.

Most timers we feature are electronic and digital, but it’s easy to appreciate the elegance of what [MakerPaul] has achieved here. As a bonus, he documented the entire project and its application in under 90 seconds. How good is that? Video after the break.

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Firefox logo displayed on screen

Firefox Brings The Fire: Shifting From GLX To EGL

November 23, 2021 by 55 Comments

You may (or may not) have heard that Firefox is moving from GLX to EGL for the Linux graphics stack. It’s an indicator of which way the tides are moving in the software world. Let’s look at what it means, why it matters, and why it’s cool.

A graphics stack is a complex system with many layers. But on Linux, there needs to be an interface between something like OpenGL and a windowing system like X11. X11 provides a fundamental framework for drawing and moving windows around a display, capturing user input, and determining focus, but little else. An X11 server is just a program that manages all the windows (clients). Each window in X11 is considered a client. A client connects to the server over a Unix process socket or the internet.

OpenGL focuses on what to draw within the confines of the screen space given by the window system. GLX (which stands for OpenGL Extension to the X window system) was originally developed by Silicon Graphics. It has changed over the years, gaining hardware acceleration support and DRI (Direct Rendering Interface). DRI is a way for OpenGL to talk directly to the graphical hardware if the server and the client are on the same computer. At its core, GLX provides OpenGL functions to X11, adds to the X protocol by allowing 3d rendering commands to be sent, and an extension that reads rendering commands and passes them to OpenGL.

EGL (Embedded-System Graphics Library) is a successor of GLX, but it started with a different environment in mind. Initially, the focus was embedded systems, and devices such as Android, Raspberry Pi, and Blackberry heavily lean on EGL for their graphical needs. Finally, however, Wayland decided to use EGL as GLX brought in X11 dependencies, and EGL offers closer access to hardware.

When Martin Stránský initially added Wayland support to Firefox, he used EGL instead of GLX. Additionally, the Wayland implementation had zero-copy GPU buffer sharing via DMABUF (a Linux kernel subsystem for sharing buffers). Unfortunately, Firefox couldn’t turn on this improved WebGL’s performance for X11 (it existed but was never stable enough). Nevertheless, features kept coming making Wayland (and consequently EGL) a more first-class citizen. Now EGL will be enabled by default in Firefox 94+ with Mesa 21+ drivers (Mesa is an implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other specifications that translate commands into instructions the GPU can understand).

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An array of open-source clocks that play Pac-Man (or Mrs. Pac-Man).

ESP32 Pac-Man Clock Keeps Track Of How Long You Watch It

November 23, 2021 by 1 Comment

There are so many elements that make a good clock worth looking at for much longer than necessary. Not only is this clock quite cool to behold, it plays Pac-Man around the time! Yes, of course you can interact with the Pac-Man — touching the edges of the screen will make him go left, right, up, or down accordingly. You can also change to Ms. Pac-Man and make all the animations go normal speed, fast, or crazy-fast.

[TechKiwiGadgets] built a Pac-Man clock a few years ago that was well-received, but not cheap or easy to mimic. Since then, they have ported the code to the ESP32 and made a new version that has fewer and friendlier components. Not only that, they have great instructions for building the ESP32 shield on protoboard and also offer the shield as an open-source fab-able PCB. Still too much work? The complete kit version is available over on Tindie. Be sure to check it out in crazy speed mode action after the break.

Although this isn’t the first Pac-Man clock we’ve seen, it devotes equal attention to the time and the game, whereas this one is more about the game itself.

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Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From The 1940s

November 23, 2021 by 15 Comments

If you can’t imagine writing a letter on a typewriter and putting it in a mailbox, then you take computers for granted. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More niche applications begat niche machines, and a number of them are on display in this film that the Computer History Archives Project released last month. Aside from the File-o-matic Desk, the Addressograph, or the Sound Scriber, there a number of other devices that give us a peek into a bygone era.

One machine that’s still around, although in a much computerized form, is the stenograph. Not so popular these days is the convenient stenograph carrier, allowing a patient’s statement to be recorded bedside in the hospital immediately after a car accident. Wire recorders were all the rage in 1947, as were floppy disks (for audio, not data). Both media were used to time-shift dictation. Typing champions like Stella Pajunas could transcribe your letters and memos at 140 WPM using an electric typewriter, outpacing dot matrix printers but a snail’s pace compared to a laser jet.

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Metal 3D printed Benchy

Ender 3 Meets MIG Welder To Make A Metal Benchy — Kind Of

November 23, 2021 by 20 Comments

When you can buy a 3D printer at Aldi, you pretty much know that 3D printing has been reduced to practice. At least for the plastic version of 3D printing; metal printing is another thing entirely. It’s easy to squeeze out a little molten plastic in a controlled fashion, but things get a little more — energetic — when you try to do the same with metal.

At least that’s what [Lucas] has been experiencing with his attempts to build a metal 3D printer over on his Cranktown City YouTube channel. Granted, he set himself up for a challenge from the get-go by seeking to stick a MIG welder onto an Ender 3, a platform that in no way was ready for the abuse it was about to endure. Part 1 of the video series below shows the first attempt, which ended badly for both the printer and for the prints.

But that first prototype, melted parts notwithstanding, gave [Lucas] enough to go on for the improvements of version 2, including a better build plate, heat shielding for the printer’s tender bits, and a legit MIG welder wire feeder. [Lucas] also built current control in, with a clever non-destructive interface to the welder controls. These improvements were enough to attempt a Benchy print, which started out pretty decent but got a bit droopy toward the end.

As imperfect as it is, the Benchy is a vast improvement over the formless blobs from version 1, and the printer holds quite a bit of promise for the future. One thing you can’t accuse [Lucas] of is giving up on a project too easily; after all, he built a laser cutter from scratch, including the laser tube.

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DIY High Flow 3D Printing Nozzle

November 23, 2021 by 50 Comments

Sometimes advances happen when someone realizes that a common sense approach isn’t the optimal one. Take radio. Success in radio requires bigger antennas and more power, right? But cell phones exist because someone realized you could cram more people on a frequency if you use less power and smaller antennas to limit the range of each base station. With FDM 3D printing, smaller nozzles were all the rage for a while because they offer the possibility of finer detail. However, these days if you want fine detail you should be using resin-based printers and larger nozzles offer faster print times and stronger parts. The Volcano hotend started this trend but there are other options now. [Stefan] over at CNC Kitchen decided to make his own high flow nozzle and he claims it is better than other options.

Don’t get too carried away with the DIY part. As you can see in the video below, he starts with a standard nozzle, so it is really a nozzle conversion or hack. The problem with high flow isn’t the hole in the nozzle. It is melting the plastic fast enough. The faster the plastic moves through the nozzle, the less time there is for it to melt.

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