This week Jonathan chats with Maurice Kalinowski about QT! That’s the framework that runs just about anywhere, making it easy to write cross-platform applications. What’s the connection with KDE? And how has this turned into a successful company? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 856: QT: Fix It Please, My Mom Is Calling”
When you’re designing a bounty hunter game for a five-day cyberpunk live-action-role-play out in the middle of the Mojave desert, you’ve got to bring something extra cool. But [Elli]’s Hackaday Supercon talk isn’t just about the hardware; it’s as much about the design philosophy behind the game – how you bring something immersive and exciting to hundreds of players.
The game itself is fairly simple: bounty hunters try to find the bounty, and when they do, they have a quick-draw to see who wins. Everyone is issued a color-coded Portable Data Node device, and when a hunter jacks into a bounty’s Node, a countdown begins, and the first to press the button after the display say “Go” wins.
But the simplicity of the game is by design, and [Elli] talks about the philosophy that she and her team followed to make it a success. If you’re designing a conference badge or an immersive game for a large group of people, take note.
The first principle is to focus on the people first before the tech. Here, that essentially means making the experience as simple as possible in order to leave room for the players to put their own spin on it – it’s a role-play event after all.
Next is providing opportunities over demands. In this game, for instance, if you’re playing the bounty hunter role, you have to deliver a “Declaration of Intent to Seize” when you encounter a bounty player, but what deciding on your personal catchphrase for this is left up to you. Continue reading “Elli Furedy Brings Cyberpunk Games To Life”
In a recent video, [Jason Jacques] demos the Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075 which was released in West Germany in the 1970s.
The Digital-Technik 2075 comes with a few components including a battery holder and 9 V battery, a push button, two 1 K resistors, a red LED, a 100 nF ceramic capacitor, a 100 µF electrolytic capacitor, a quad NAND gate IC, and a counter module which includes an IC and a 7-segment display. The kit also comes with wires, plugs, a breadboard, and a tool for extracting modules.
The Digital-Technik 2075 doesn’t use the spring terminals we see in other project labs of the time, such as the Science Fair kits from Radio Shack, and it doesn’t use modular Denshi blocks, such as we saw from the Gakken EX-150, but rather uses wire in conjunction with yellow plastic plugs. This seems to work well enough.
In the video, after showing us how to do switch debouncing, [Jason] runs us through making a counter with the digital components and then getting the counter to reset after it counts to five. This is done using NAND gates. Before he gets stuck into doing a project he takes a close look at the manual (which is in German) including some of the advertisements for other project labs from Busch which were available at the time. As he doesn’t speak German [Jason] prints out an English translation of the manual before working through it.
We’ve heard from [Jason] at Hackaday in recent history when we saw his Microtronic Phoenix Computer System which referenced the 2090 Microtronic Computer System which was also made by Busch.
Continue reading “The Busch Electronic Digital-Technik 2075 Digital Lab From The 1970s”
Headlights. Indicators. Trunk releases. Seatbelts. Airbags. Just about any part of a car you can think of is governed by a long and complicated government regulation. It’s all about safety, ensuring that the car-buying public can trust that their vehicles won’t unduly injure or maim them in regular operation, or in the event of accident.
However, one part of the modern automobile has largely escaped regulation—namely, the humble door handle. Automakers have been free to innovate with new and wacky designs, with Tesla in particular making waves with its electronic door handles. However, after a series of deadly incidents where doors wouldn’t open, regulators are now examining if these door handles are suitable for road-going automobiles. As always, regulations are written in blood, but it raises the question—was not the danger of these complicated electronic door handles easy to foresee?
We love and hate OpenSCAD. As programmers, we like describing objects we want to 3D print or otherwise model. As programmers, we hate all the strange things about OpenSCAD that make it not like a normal programming language. Maybe µCAD (or Microcad) is the answer. This new entry in the field lets you build things programmatically and is written in Rust.
In fact, the only way to get it right now is to build it from source using cargo. Assuming you already have Rust, that’s not hard. Simply enter: cargo install microcad. If you don’t already have Rust, well, then that’s a problem. However, we did try to build it, and despite having the native library libmanifold available, Rust couldn’t find it. You might have better luck.
It’s clock time again on Hackaday, this time with a lovely laser-cut biretrograde clock by [PaulH175] over on Instructables. If you’ve never heard of a ‘biretrograde clock,’ well, we hadn’t either. This is clearly a form of retrograde clock, which unlike the name implies doesn’t spin backwards but oscillates in its motion– the hands ‘go retrograde’ the same way the planets do.
The oscillating movement is achieved via a pair of cams mounted on the hour and minute shafts of a common clock mechanism. As the shafts (and thus cams) turn, the minute and hour arms are raised and drop. While that could itself be enough to tell the time, [Paul] goes one further and has the actual hands on pivots driven by a gear mechanism on the cam-controlled arms. You might think that that extra reversal is what makes this a ‘biretrograde clock’ but in the clockmaker’s world that’s just saying it’s a retrograde clock with two indicators: in this case, minute and second.
It’s a fairly rare way to make a clock, but we’ve seen one before. That older project was 3D printed, which might be more your speed; if you prefer laser-cutting, though, [Paul]’s Instructable includes SVG files. Alternatively, you could take a different approach and use voltmeters to get the same effect.
When AI is being touted as the latest tool to replace writers, filmmakers, and other creative talent it can be a bit depressing staring down the barrel of a future dystopia — especially since most LLMs just parrot their training data and aren’t actually creative. But AI can have some legitimate strengths when it’s taken under wing as an assistant rather than an outright replacement.
For example [Aarav] is happy as a lark when birdwatching, but the birds aren’t always around and it can sometimes be a bit of a wild goose chase waiting hours for them to show up. To help him with that he built this machine learning tool to help alert him to the presence of birds.
The small device is based on a Raspberry Pi 5 with an AI hat nested on top, and uses a wide-angle camera to keep an eagle-eyed lookout of a space like a garden or forest. It runs a few scripts in Python leveraging the OpenCV library, which is a widely available machine learning tool that allows users to easily interact with image recognition. When perched to view an outdoor area, it sends out an email notification to the user’s phone when it detects bird activity so that they can join the action swiftly if they happen to be doing other things at the time. The system also logs hourly bird-counts and creates a daily graph, helping users identify peak bird-watching times.
Right now the system can only detect the presence of birds in general, but he hopes to build future versions that can identify birds with more specificity, perhaps down to the species. Identifying birds by vision is certainly one viable way of going about this process, but one of our other favorite bird-watching tools was demonstrated by [Benn Jordan] which uses similar hardware but listens for bird calls rather than looking for the birds with a vision-based system.
