Are you using a desk mouse like some kind of… normal computer user? Why, beg the heavens? For you could be using an air mouse, of your very own creation! [Misfit Maker] shows the way. Check out what he made in the video below.
An air mouse is a mouse you use in the air—which creates at least one major challenge. Since you’re not sliding along a surface, you can’t track the motion by mechanical friction like a ball mouse or by imaging as in an optical mouse. Instead, this build relies on a gyroscope sensor to track motion and translate that into pointer commands. The build relies on an ESP32-C3 as the microcontroller at the heart of things. It communicates with an MPU6050 gyroscope and accelerometer to track motion in space. It then communicates as a human interface device over Bluetooth, so you can use it with lots of different devices. The mouse buttons—plus media control buttons—are all capacitive touch-sensitive, thanks to an MPR121 touch sensor module.
There’s something neat about building your own tools to interface with the machines, almost like it helps meld the system to your whims. We see a lot of innovative mouse and HID projects around these parts.
In 2015, Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone founded Relativity Space around an ambitious goal: to be the first company to put a 3D printed rocket into orbit. While additive manufacturing was already becoming an increasingly important tool in the aerospace industry, the duo believed it could be pushed further than anyone had yet realized.
Rather than assembling a rocket out of smaller printed parts, they imagined the entire rocket being produced on a huge printer. Once the methodology was perfected, they believed rockets could be printed faster and cheaper than they could be traditionally assembled. What’s more, in the far future, Relativity might even be able to produce rockets off-world in fully automated factories. It was a bold idea, to be sure. But then, landing rockets on a barge in the middle of the ocean once seemed pretty far fetched as well.
An early printed propellant tank.
Of course, printing something the size of an orbital rocket requires an exceptionally large 3D printer, so Relativity Space had to built one. It wasn’t long before the company had gotten to the point where they had successfully tested their printed rocket engine, and were scaling up their processes to print the vehicle’s propellant tanks. In 2018 Bryce Salmi, then an avionics hardware engineer at Relatively Space, gave a talk at Hackaday Supercon detailing the rapid progress the company had made so far.
Just a few years later, in March of 2023, the Relativity’s first completed rocket sat fueled and ready to fly on the launch pad. The Terran 1 rocket wasn’t the entirely printed vehicle that Ellis and Noone had imagined, but with approximately 85% of the booster’s mass being made up of printed parts, it was as close as anyone had ever gotten before.
The launch of Terran 1 was a huge milestone for the company, and even though a problem in the second stage engine prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, the flight proved to critics that a 3D printed rocket could fly and that their manufacturing techniques were sound. Almost immediately, Relativity Space announced they would begin work on a larger and more powerful successor to the Terran 1 which would be more competitive to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
Now, after an administrative shakeup that saw Tim Ellis replaced as CEO, the company has released a nearly 45 minute long video detailing their plans for the next Terran rocket — and explaining why they won’t be 3D printing it.
Some slicers have introduced brick layers, and more slicers plan to add them. Until that happens, you can use this new script from [Geek Detour] to get brick layer goodness on Prusa, Orca, and Bambu slicers. Check out the video below for more details.
The idea behind brick layers is that outer walls can be stronger if they are staggered vertically so each layer interlocks with the layer below it. The pattern resembles a series of interlocking bricks and can drastically increase strength. Apparently, using the script breaks the canceling object functionality in some printers, but that’s a small price to pay. Multi-material isn’t an option either, but — typically — you’ll want to use the technique on functional parts, which you probably aren’t printing in colors. Also, the Arachne algorithm option only works reliably on Prusa slicer, so far.
The video covers a lot of detail on how hard it was to do this in an external script, and we are impressed. It should be easier to write inside the slicer since it already has to figure out much of the geometry that this script has to figure out by observation.
Shell scripting is an often forgotten programming environment, relegated to simple automation tasks and little else. In fact, it’s possible to achieve much more complex tasks in the shell. As an example, here’s [calebccf] with an emulated 6502 system in a busybox ash shell script.
What’s in the emulator? A simple 6502 system with RAM, ROM, and an emulated serial port on STDIO. It comes with the wozmon Apple 1 monitor and BASIC, making for a very mid-1970s experience. There’s even a built-in monitor and debugger, which from our memories of debugging hand-assembled 8-bit code back in the day, should be extremely useful.
Although the default machine has a generous 32k of RAM and 16k ROM, you can easily adjust these limits by editing machine.sh. In addition, you can get a log of execution via a socket if you like. Don’t expect it to run too fast, and we did have to adjust the #! line to get it to run on our system (we pointed it to bash, but your results may vary).
The Amiga has a lot of fans, and rightly so. The machine broke a lot of ground. However, according to [Dave Farquhar], one of the most popular models today — the Amiga 600 — was reviled in 1992 by just about everyone. One of the last Amigas, it was supposed to be a low-cost home computer but was really just a repackaged Amiga 1000, a machine already seven years old which, at the time, might as well have been decades. The industry was moving at lightspeed back then.
[Dave] takes a look at how Commodore succeeded and then lost their way by the time the 600 rolled out. Keep in mind that low-cost was a relative term. A $500 price tag was higher than it seems today and even at that price, you had no monitor or hard drive. So at a $1,000 for a practical system you might as well go for a PC which was taking off at the same time.
By the time Commodore closed down, they had plenty of 600s left, but they also had refurbished 500s, and for many, that was the better deal. It was similar to the 500 but had more features, like an external port and easy memory expansion. Of course, both machines used the Motorola 68000. While that CPU has a lot of great features, by 1992, the writing was on the wall that the Intel silicon would win.
Perhaps the biggest issue, though, was the graphics system. The original Amiga outclassed nearly everything at the time. But, again, the industry was moving fast. The 600 wasn’t that impressive compared to a VGA. And, as [Dave] points out, it couldn’t run DOOM.
There’s more to the post. Be sure to check it out. It is a great look into the history of the last of a great line of machines. Maybe if Commodore had embraced PC interfaces, but we’ll never know. [Dave’s] take on the end of the Amiga echos others we’ve read. It wasn’t exactly Doom that killed the Amiga. It was more complicated than that. But Doom would have helped.
If you think of old recording technology, you probably think of magnetic tape, either in some kind of cassette or, maybe, on reels. But there’s an even older technology that recorded voice on hair-thin stainless steel wire and [Mr. Carlson] happened upon a recorded reel of wire. Can he extract the audio from it? Of course! You can see and hear the results in the video below.
It didn’t hurt that he had several junk wire recorders handy, although he thought none were working. It was still a good place to start since the heads and the feed are unusual to wire recorders. Since the recorder needed a little work, we also got a nice teardown of that old device. The machine was missing belts, but some rubber bands filled in for a short-term fix.
The tape head has to move to keep the wire spooled properly, and even with no audio, it is fun to watch the mechanism spin both reels and move up and down. But after probing the internal pieces, it turns out there actually was some audio, it just wasn’t making it to the speakers.
The audio was noisy and not the best reproduction, but not bad for a broken recorder that is probably at least 80 years old. We hope he takes the time to fully fix the old beast later, but for now, he did manage to hear what was “on the wire,” even though that has a totally different meaning than it usually does.
“The brickings will continue until the printer sales improve!” This whole printer-bricking thing seems to be getting out of hand with the news this week that a firmware update caused certain HP printers to go into permanent paper-saver mode. The update was sent to LaserJet MFP M232-M237 models (opens printer menu; checks print queue name; “Phew!) on March 4, and was listed as covering a few “general improvements and bug fixes,” none of which seem very critical. Still, some users reported not being able to print at all after the update, with an error message suggesting printing was being blocked thanks to non-OEM toner. This sounds somewhat similar to the bricked Brother printers we reported on last week (third paragraph).
