Software Defined Instrumentation Hack Chat

April 25, 2022 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, April 27 at noon Pacific for the Software Defined Instrumentation Hack Chat with Ben Nizette!

Imagine, if you will, the perfect electronics lab. Exactly how it looks in your mind will depend a lot upon personal preferences and brand loyalty, but chances are good it’ll be stocked to the gills with at least one every conceivable type of high-precision, laboratory-grade instrument you can think of. It’ll have oscilloscopes with ridiculously high bandwidths, multimeters with digits galore, logic analyzers, waveform generators, programmable power supplies, spectrum analyzers — pretty much anything and everything that can make chasing down problems and developing new circuits easier.

Alas, the dream of a lab like this crashes hard into realities like being able to afford so many instruments and actually finding a place to put them all. And so while we may covet the wall of instruments that people like Marco Reps or Kerry Wong enjoy, most of us settle for a small but targeted suite of instruments, tailored to our particular needs and budgets.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be that way, though, and with software-defined instrumentation, you can pack a lab full of virtual instruments into a single small box. Software-defined instrumentation has the potential to make an engineering lab portable enough for field-service teams, flexible enough for tactical engineering projects, and affordable for students and hobbyists alike.

Ben Nizette is Product Manager at Liquid Instruments, the leader in precision software-defined instrumentation. He’s the engineer behind Moku:Go, the company’s first consumer product, which squeezes eleven instruments into one slim, easily transported, affordable package. He’s been in the thick of software-defined instrumentation, and he’ll drop by the Hack Chat to talk about the pros and cons of the virtual engineering lab, what it means for engineering education, and how we as hobbyists can put it to work on our benches.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, April 27 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

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a 3D printed box with a Terminator head watching a camera

Machine Vision Helps You Terminate Failing 3D Print Jobs

April 25, 2022 by Robin Kearey 13 Comments

If you’re a 3D printer user you’re probably familiar with that dreaded feeling of returning to your printer a few hours after submitting a big job, only to find that it threw an error and stopped printing, or worse, turned half a spool of filament into a useless heap of twisted plastic. While some printers come with remote monitoring facilities, [Kutluhan Aktar]’s doesn’t, so he built a device that keeps a watchful eye on his 3D printer and notifies him if anything’s amiss.

The device does this by tracking the movement of the print head using a camera and looking for any significant changes in motion. If, for example, the Y-axis suddenly stops moving and doesn’t resume within a reasonable amount of time, it will generate a warning message and send it to its owner through Telegram. If all three axes stop moving, then either the print is finished or some serious error occurred, both of which require user intervention.

The camera [Kutluhan] used is a HuskyLens AI camera that can detect objects and output a set of 3D coordinates describing their motion. A set of QR-like AprilTags attached to the moving parts of the 3D printer help the camera to identify the relevant components. The software runs on a Raspberry Pi housed in a 3D-printed enclosure with a T-800 Terminator head on top to give it a bit of extra presence.

[Kutluhan]’s description of the project covers lots of detail on how to set up the camera and hook it up to a Telegram bot that enables it to send automated messages, so it’s an interesting read even if you’re not planning to 3D print something to check on your 3D printer. After all, software like Octoprint has many similar features, but having an independent observer can still be a good safety feature to prevent some types of catastrophic failure.

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Axiom’s Private ISS Mission Was No Space Vacation

April 25, 2022 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

In an era where anyone with deep enough pockets can hitch a ride to the edge of space and back, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Axiom’s Ax-1 mission to the International Space Station was little more than a pleasure cruise for the four crew members. Granted it’s a higher and faster flight than the suborbital hops that the likes of William Shatner and Jeff Bezos have been embarking on, but surely it must still be little more than a publicity stunt organized by folks with more money than they know what to do with?

Thankfully, there’s a bit more to it than that. While the mission was privately funded, the Ax-1 crew weren’t just orbital sightseers. For one thing, there was plenty of real-world experience packed into the SpaceX Dragon: the mission was commanded by Michael López-Alegría, a veteran NASA astronaut, and crew members Larry Connor and Eytan Stibbe are both accomplished pilots, with the latter clocking in thousands of hours on various fighter jets during his time with the Israeli Air Force.

But more importantly, they had work to do. Each member of the crew was assigned a list of experiments they were to conduct, ranging from medical observations to the testing of new hardware. Of course there was some downtime — after all, if you spent $50 million on a ticket to space, you’d expect to have at least a little fun — but this wasn’t just a photo op: Axiom was looking for results. There was no hiding from the boss either, as López-Alegría is not just the Mission Commander, he’s also Axiom’s Vice President of Business Development.

Which makes sense when you consider the company’s ultimate goal is to use the ISS as a springboard to accelerate the development of their own commercial space station. The data collected during Ax-1 is going to be critical to Axiom’s path forward, and with their first module already under construction and expected to launch by 2025, there’s no time to waste.

So what did the crew members of the this privately funded mission to the International Space Station accomplish? Let’s take a look at a few of the more interesting entries from the docket.

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Insteon Abruptly Shuts Down, Users Left Smart-Home-Less

April 25, 2022 by Arya Voronova 88 Comments

In today’s “predictable things that happened before and definitely will happen again”, Insteon, a smart home company boasting the Insteon ecosystem of devices built around their proprietary communication standards, has shut down their servers without a warning. For almost two decades, Insteon used to offer products like smart light switches, dimmers, relays, various sensors, thermostats – the usual home automation offerings, all linked into a cozy system. Looking through the Insteon subreddit’s history, there were signs of the company’s decline for good half a year now, but things were mostly stable – until about a week ago, when users woke up and noticed that parts of their smart home network stopped working, the mobile app would no longer respond, and the company’s resources and infrastructure went down. What’s more – the C-rank management has scrubbed their LinkedIn profiles from mentioning Insteon and SmartLabs (Insteon’s parent company).

Instantly, the Insteon subreddit has livened up. People, rightfully angry about being literally left in the dark, were looking for answers – as if mocking them, Insteon’s homepage claimed that all services were operational. Others, having expected the shutdown to eventually happen, started collecting and rehosting rapidly disappearing documentation, helping each other keep their tech up in the meantime, and looking into alternative platforms. It turned out to be imperative that users don’t factory reset their Insteon hubs, since those have to communicate with the currently Inste-Gone servers as part of initial configuration, diligently verifying the SSL certificates. Sadly, quite a few users, unaware and going through the usual solutions to make their network function again, are now left with hubs that are essentially bricked, save for a few lucky ones.
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Testing 7 Wago-like Wire Connectors For Science And Fire

April 25, 2022 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

At the intersection of saving a few bucks and expensive home insurance claims due to a house fire, we find clones of certified and tested electrical connectors, even when many would argue that so-called wire nuts are fire hazards no matter how many certification labels are on them. When it comes to no-fuss wire connectors, Wago clamp connectors are an attractive target to save some money on due to their perceived high cost. But how expensive are they really?

This was the thought behind a recent video by [GreatScott!] (also embedded after the break) when he hopped onto everyone’s favorite e-commerce website and searched for ‘clamp lever terminal’. The resulting selection of seven connectors come in a wide variety of shapes, colors and configurations, though all are supposedly rated for mains (250 VAC) voltage and safe enough to put into a permanent installation.

While running the connectors through their paces with high-current, fire and mechanical strength tests, the conclusion was that all are good enough for hobbyists use and some brief connections while testing, but that only the ones with independent certification marks (like VDE) filled him with enough confidence to consider using in house wiring. One of these being the connectors by the German brand ViD, which would seem to be a slightly cheaper alternative to the Wago connectors, with similar guarantees of safety.

At the end of the day it is the certification that matters, after all, since long-term reliability is of primary concern with house wiring, not whether a few Euros were saved on material costs.

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All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Flow: Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline

April 24, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 37 Comments

At over 1230 km (764 mi) in length, $10 billion in cost, and over a decade in the making, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was slated to connect the gas fields of Russia to Western Europe through Germany. But with the sanctions against Russia and the politics of the pipeline suffering a major meltdown, this incredible feat of engineering currently sits unused. What does it take to lay so much underwater pipe, and what challenges are faced? [Grady] over at Practical Engineering lays out out nicely for us in the video below the break.

A Bubble Curtain containing the disposal of WW2 ordinance

As with any undersea pipeline or cable, a survey had to be done. Instead of just avoiding great chasms, underwater volcanos, or herds of sharks with lasers, planners had to contend with culturally important shipwrecks, territorial waters, and unexploded ordnance dating from the second world war. Disposing of this ordinance in a responsible way meant employing curtains of bubbles around the explosion to limit the propagation of the explosion through the water- definitely a neat hack!

Speeding up the job meant laying several sections of pipe at once, and then tying them together after they were laid. The sheer amount of engineering, manpower and money involved are nothing short of staggering. Of course [Grady] makes it sound simple, and even shares his take on some of the geopolitical issues involved, such as Germany refusing to certify the line for use after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So far, the $10 billion pipeline is unused, and even Shell has walked away from its $5 billion investment.

Be sure to watch the whole video for even more fascinating details about the Nord Stream 2’s amazing engineering and construction. Check out a Robot Eel concept for the maintenance of underwater pipelines too.

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IBM PCjr Types Again, Thanks To KeybJr

April 24, 2022 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

Most of us think of keyboards — even vintage ones — as being fairly standardized and interchangeable, but that isn’t the case for the IBM PCjr. Its keyboard was quite unlike most others of its time, which means that a PCjr without an original keyboard is pretty much a dust collector. That’s what led [Jozef Bogin] to create the KeybJr, a piece of hardware that allows one to use any AT, XT, or PS/2 keyboard with the IBM PCjr.

The PCjr’s oddball keyboard can be a bit of a hassle for vintage computing enthusiasts.

What was strange about the PCjr’s keyboard? From the outside it looked pretty normal, but it definitely had its own thing going on. For one, the PCjr keyboard operated over a completely different protocol than the other keyboards of the time. In addition, its connection to the host was either by IR, or via its own wired cable adapter.

The KeybJr solves this by using an Arduino-based board to turn inputs from other keyboards of the time into something the PCjr expects. These signals are sent out and received either over infrared, or by the PCjr’s “K” port for a wired keyboard link.

Why bother with the IR functionality? Well, the connector and pins on the PCjr are not very rugged, and sometimes they are damaged. In those cases, it is nice to have the option of using a normal (for the time) keyboard over the IR link. Vintage hardware is not always in perfect shape, after all. That’s why things like ATX power supply adapters for the PCjr exist.

Want to give it a shot? There is a GitHub repository for the KeybJr, and you can see it in action in a brief video, embedded below.

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