Chris playing his tiny pinball machine

Tiny Pinball Is As Cute As Pi

March 27, 2022 by 8 Comments

Pinball machines are large, complex, and heavy boxes of joy and delight. However, when you don’t have the money or space for one, you have to make your own mini Raspberry Pi-powered one.

With access to a local makerspace and a bit of extra free time, [Chris Dalke] had plans to capture the flavor of a full-scale pinball machine in a small package. Laser-cut Baltic birch forms the enclosure, and a screen makes up the playing field rather than a physical ball. An Arduino Uno handles the three buttons, the four LED matrixes, and a solenoid for haptic feedback, communicating

with the Pi via serial. Unfortunately, even with a relatively decent

volume inside, it is still a tight squeeze.

Rather than use an off-the-shelf pinball game, [Chris] wrote his own in C using raylib and raygui, two handy libraries that can be included in the project quickly. SQLLite3 writes high scores out to disk. All in all, an inspiring project that has a very high level of polish.

If you’re looking for a tiny pinball machine but want more of the classic pinball feel, why not look at this scale pinball machine?

Continue reading “Tiny Pinball Is As Cute As Pi” →

Peltier Cloud Chamber Produces Some Lovely Trails

March 27, 2022 by 6 Comments

[Advanced Tinkering] over on YouTube has some pretty unique content, on subjects of chemistry and physics that are a little more, interesting let’s say — anyone fancy distilling cesium? The subject of this build is the visualization of ionizing radiation tracks, with one of our old favorite physics demonstrators, the venerable cloud chamber. The build video (embedded below,) shows the basic construction and performance of a Peltier effect cooler setup. The system is used to create a layer of supersaturated (and cold) alcohol vapor in which the radiation source or other experiment can be immersed.

Peltier modules are a great solution for moving heat from one surface to another, but they are not terribly efficient at it, especially if you don’t keep the hot side temperature in check. Effectively they are a short-distance heat pump, so you need to dump the hot-side heat elsewhere. The method [Advanced Tinkering] chose here was to use a pair of off-the-shelf water cooling blocks, mounted into a 3D printed plate. The hot side dumps into a pair of fan-cooled radiators. Four double-layer Peltier modules are wired in parallel to a 60A power supply, which seems like a lot, but Peltier modules are hungry little things. A reasonable amount of power is needed to drive the cooling fans and water pump. The vapor source is a simple pad of liquid alcohol at the top of the stack, just above a metal screen which is held at a high voltage. The vertical electric field allows visualization of the charge of emitted particles, which will curve up or down depending on their polarity.

As can be seen from the second video linked below, some really nice cloud trails are produced, so it looks like they got the setup just right!

Do you need all this complexity to visualize simple radiation paths? No, you don’t, but just temper your expectations. Peltier-based builds are not uncommon, here’s another one, but some builders say they’re not very robust, so this build uses phase-change technology instead for some serious runtimes.

Continue reading “Peltier Cloud Chamber Produces Some Lovely Trails” →

Who Needs Yeast When You Have Lab Equipment?

March 26, 2022 by 32 Comments

This particular story on researchers successfully making yeast-free pizza dough has been making the rounds. As usual with stories written from a scientific angle, it’s worth digging into the details for some interesting bits. We took a look at the actual research paper and there are a few curious details worth sharing. Turns out that this isn’t the first method for yeast-free baking that has been developed, but it is the first method to combine leavening and baking together for a result on par with traditional bread-making processes.

Some different results from varying the amount of pressure released during the baking process.

Basically, a dough consisting of water, flour, and salt go into a hot autoclave (the header image shows a piece of dough as seen through the viewing window.) The autoclave pressurizes, forcing gasses into the dough in a process similar to carbonating beverages. Pressure is then released in a controlled fashion while the dough bakes and solidifies, and careful tuning of this process is what controls how the bread turns out.

With the right heat and pressure curve, researchers created a pizza whose crust was not only pleasing and tasty, but with a quality comparable to traditional methods.

How this idea came about is interesting in itself. One of the researchers developed a new method for thermosetting polyurethane, and realized that bread and polyurethane have something in common: they both require a foaming (proofing in the case of bread) and curing (baking in the case of bread) process. Performing the two processes concurrently with the correct balance yields the best product: optimized thermal insulation in the case of polyurethane, and a tasty and texturally-pleasing result in the case of pizza dough. After that, it was just a matter of experimentation to find the right balance.

The pressures (up to 6 bar) and temperatures (145° Celsius) involved are even pretty mild, relatively speaking, which could bode well for home-based pizza experimenters.

Hacker Camps Are Back. To Get You In The Mood, Here’s A Story From 1997

March 26, 2022 by 6 Comments

The past couple of years of the COVID pandemic have been rough in some unexpected ways, and it’s clear that our world will never be quite the same as it was beforehand. In our community, the hackerspaces are open again, and while the pandemic hasn’t gone away this year shows the promise of hosting the first major hacker camps to be held since 2019. We’re sure a number of you will be making your way to them. To give a taste of what is to come we’ve got a rare glimpse into hacker camps past.

The Netherlands events are held every four years outside pandemic disruptions, and we’re going back as far as 1997 for HIP, or Hacking In Progress, where [Christine Karman] kept a daily diary of the event. 25 years later it’s both a familiar account of a hacker camp and an interesting glimpse into a time when for much of the wider population an Internet connection was still a novelty. Continue reading “Hacker Camps Are Back. To Get You In The Mood, Here’s A Story From 1997” →

ATtiny85 Snake Game Is A Circuit Sandwich

March 26, 2022 by 3 Comments

If there’s any looming, unwritten rule of learning a programming language, it states that one must break in the syntax by printing Hello, World! in some form or another. If any such rule exists for game programming on a new microcontroller, then it is certainly that thou shalt implement Snake.

This is [__cultsauce__]’s first foray away from Arduinoville, and although they did use one to program the ATtiny85, they learned a lot along the way.

It doesn’t take much to conjure Snake with an ’85 — mostly you need a screen to play it on (an OLED in this case), some buttons to direct the snake toward the food dot, a handful of passives, and a power source.

[__cultsauce__] started by programming the microcontroller and then tested everything on a breadboard, both of which are admirable actions. Then it was time to make this plywood and cork sandwich, which gives the point-to-point solder joints some breathing room and keeps them from getting crushed. Be sure to check it out in action after the break, and grab the files from GitHub if you want to charm your own ‘tiny Snake.

There’s a ton you can do with this miniature microcontroller, and that includes machine learning.

Continue reading “ATtiny85 Snake Game Is A Circuit Sandwich” →

AI-Generated Sleep Podcast Urges You To Imagine Pleasant Nonsense

March 26, 2022 by 12 Comments

[Stavros Korokithakis] finds the experience of falling asleep to fairy tales soothing, and this has resulted in a fascinating project that indulges this desire by using machine learning to generate mildly incoherent fairy tales and read them aloud. The result is a fantastic sort of automated, machine-generated audible sleep aid. Even the logo is machine-generated!

The Deep Dreams Podcast is entirely machine-generated, including the logo.

The project leverages the natural language generation abilities of OpenAI’s GPT-3 to create fairytale-style content that is just coherent enough to sound natural, but not quite coherent enough to make a sensible plotline. The quasi-lucid, dreamlike result is perfect for urging listeners to imagine pleasant nonsense (thanks to Nathan W Pyle for that term) as they drift off to sleep.

We especially loved reading about the methods and challenges [Stavros] encountered while creating this project. For example, he talks about how there is more to a good-sounding narration than just pointing a text-to-speech engine at a wall of text and mashing “GO”. A good episode has things like strategic pauses, background music, and audio fades. That’s where pydub — a Python library for manipulating audio — came in handy. As for the speech, text-to-speech quality is beyond what it was even just a few years ago (and certainly leaps beyond machine-generated speech in the 80s) but it still took some work to settle on a voice that best suited the content, and the project gradually saw improvement.

Deep Dreams Podcast has a GitLab repository if you want to see the code that drives it all, and you can go to the podcast itself to give it a listen.

A Timex Datalink smartwatch next to an Arduino

Arduino Keeps Your Classic Timex Datalink In Sync

March 26, 2022 by 18 Comments

The Timex Datalink was arguably the first usable smartwatch, and was worn by NASA astronauts as well as geek icons like Bill Gates. It could store alarms, reminders and phone numbers, and of course tell the time across a few dozen time zones. One of the Datalink’s main innovations was its ability to download information from your PC — either through flashing images on a CRT monitor or through a special adapter plugged into a serial port.

With CRTs thin on the ground and original serial adapters fetching ludicrous prices online, classic Datalink users today may find it hard to keep their watches in sync with their Outlook calendars. Fortunately for them, [famiclone] came up with a solution: a DIY Datalink adapter based on an Arduino. It works the same way as Timex’s serial adapter, in that it receives data through the computer’s serial port and transmits it to the watch by flashing a red LED.

Updating your watch does require the use of the original Datalink PC software, which only runs on classic operating systems like Windows 95 or 98, so you’ll need to keep a copy of such an OS running. Luckily, it has no problem with virtual machines or USB COM ports, so at least you don’t need to keep vintage PC hardware around. Then again, whipping out a 1995 Pentium laptop to update your Timex watch would make for the ultimate geek party piece.

Love classic geeky watches? Check out this featured article we did on them a few years ago. If you’re interested in using computer monitors to transmit data optically, we’ve covered a few projects that do just that.