The Meta Portal and associated devices are effectively defunct, having been abandoned by the company in 2022. If you’ve still got one at home, you might be wondering what to do with it. That’s where Wormhole Display from [pgodlews] comes in handy.
The thing about the Meta Portal, and much of the rest of the related lineup, is that they were effectively just heavily branded Android tablets. The screens and speakers were good, and the basic functionality was all there — albeit locked down somewhat to prevent users from easily repurposing them at will. However, it’s possible to enable Android Debug Bridge (ADB) and turn the device to doing your own bidding.
To that end, [pgodlews] built Wormhole Display as an APK that can be dropped on to the Meta Portal to make it an extendable display for Apple devices. It shows up via AirPlay, letting you use it as a wireless display for your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. You can do screen mirroring or use it as an extended display, as desired, including use of the Portal’s speakers if needed. Under the hood, it’s an Android port of UxPlay, a Unix AirPlay server which uses Android’s MediaCodec and AudioTrack in place of GStreamer to take advantage of the Meta Portal’s onboard H.264 decoder.
Extended displays can be incredibly useful, so if you’ve got an old Meta Portal laying around, consider putting it back to work. We’ve seen it done with e-readers, too. If you’ve got your own hacks to repurpose old, forgotten hardware, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!
It’s not often we see a tube project here, so [Helge Fykse]’s PCL86 transceiver is a welcome find.
If you know anything about the European Pro-Electron device naming system you’ll be familiar with it as it applies to tubes. The first letter denotes the heater specification, for example “E” is for a 6.3 volt heater. Everyone wants the familiar 6.3 V devices, but they have a set of cousins which often pass unnoticed. “P” tubes have a 300 mA heater designed such that all tubes in a device could be connected in series at the same current. Of those tubes the PCL86 is a mundane example, filling the function taken in the semiconductor years by the LM386. It’s a small-signal triode and a power pentode in one device, and it’s an audio amplifier. Every 1960s TV set in Europe had one, and thus it’s a good choice for experimentation.
This transceiver is a conventional crystal oscillator and power amplifier on transmit, but with a flick of a switch it transforms into a direct conversion receiver in which the triode becomes oscillator and mixer while the pentode becomes an audio amplifier. It’s simple, and the video below the break explains it in great detail. We’re not sure whether or not it could unintentionally radiate in receive mode, but we’re guessing the energy would be tiny.
A simple tube project can make an interesting departure from modern surface mount electronics, so if you get the chance we’d suggest you try one. If you don’t need a transceiver, an audio amplifier is the archetypal PCL86 project.
If you want to do certain types of lab work with blood, you’ll need a centrifuge. It’s often possible to find serviceable units on the used market, but they may not meet your requirements if you’re doing something quite specific. For that reason, [Thomas Nguyen] decided to build his own centrifuge from scratch.
His goal was to separate T cells from blood for further lab analysis, and he needed to be able to work with blood in 15 mL conical tubes. Capable centrifuges weren’t affordable, but he figured he could build his own quite easily. To that end, he enlisted a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 3D printer, and an A2212 brushless motor with a 30 amp electronic speed controller.
Soon enough, he had a design for a fixed-angle centrifuge design that could spin up blood products to the required speed for separation. It has useful safety features, like an MPU-6050 for vibration detection to shut down in case of dangerous imbalance, and an IR sensor for monitoring and controlling rotational speed. For now, the project is still in development, with the first version built and spinning. [Thomas] aims to check that the build operates safely and can separate fluids like dyed water and glycerol successfully before running it with real blood products.
We’ve seen other successful DIY centrifuge builds before, too. Sometimes, the lab hardware you need is the lab hardware you build yourself. If it works and does the job safely, it can be all that you need to get your science goals coming to fruition.
Surveillance cameras from Flock Safety have become a controversial privacy battleground, as the communities in which they are installed wake up to their sinister potential, and stories roll in of law enforcement professionals abusing their access. One has had its disk contents dumped, and we’ve been treated to some insights courtesy of [Micah Lee]. In short: their approach to security is deeply flawed.
It’s interesting to find that instead of a custom hardened OS, these devices run Android. Not just Android, but Android 8.1, a long out of support version originally released in 2017. This is is the year Flock Safety was founded, which may or may not be coincidental. Like any old version of a widely used operating system it has a host of known vulnerabilities, none of which are patched on this version.
The Android version is small beer compared to the revelation that they contain a hard-coded and very open-access API key that can be used by any mildly curious miscreant to reveal information from any Flock camera using its MAC address. One would hope that a product marketed for use by law enforcement might have paid attention to such a basic lapse, but it seems not. Whether or not this can be corrected by a software upgrade and the leaked key deactivated without turning off the network depends on whether thy can do upgrades tailored to specific devices, but either way we wouldn’t like to be the team tasked with fixing that one.
In a way it’s reassuring that the surveillance apparatus when it came was so incompetently managed, and we hope that these vulnerabilities will have moderated its effect. We’re sure more tasty discoveries will emerge as investigations proceed, and we’ve got the popcorn ready.
The Cheap Yellow Display is an all-in-one ESP32 board with a touchscreen, that’s as the name suggests, cheap. It’s appeared in a great many projects since it emerged from the depths of AliExpress, and today thanks to [Nickm324] it takes the turn of becoming a mini TV.
The tiny TV project world is one of successive developers building on previous works to deliver their own refinements on the idea, so this one borrows heavily from an earlier ESP32 project. Its twist on the idea is a single button interface using the CYD’s BOOT button. It supports a range of “channels” of which each one is a different piece of media played from the SD card. As far as we can see it’s only able to play synchronised .mjpeg and audio files, probably a shortcoming of the older ESP32 found on the CYD. The photo features a rather cutesy retro 3D printed TV case which annoyingly isn’t linked from the repository at the time of writing.
It’s a nice idea, and the CYD makes it as easy as possible with minimal wiring. Yes it’s a novelty, but we’re guessing there could be many non-novelty applications for it too. It’s certainly not the first such project we’ve seen, here’s an earlier one.
With an El Niño event in full swing those of us in the northern hemisphere have just had a roasting hot summer, and those in the southern are about to have one. We know what that means, even with the best laid plans the slightest bit of exercise is going to raise a lot of sweat. And if you’re carrying a backpack that means a soaking down your back. Never fear though, because for that one, [Crafterboi] is here with a fan-assisted back protector.
The idea is simple enough, an open framework that sits between you and the backpack, allowing air to flow. If that weren’t enough, there are a couple of 5 volt fans at the top to blow air through the space. It’s printed using PETG, because as he explains, on a really hot day some surfaces can exceed the temperature at which PLA starts to soften.
We like the idea of this project, but what we especially like is that his prototype was made of a pizza box. ten out of ten for resourcefulness! Meanwhile this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a cooling backpack as others have had Peltier systems and evaporative coolers. We would link you to them, but sadly those are both from Hackaday’s early years and link rot has taken their websites.
With the Earth’s atmosphere being effectively just a less dense fluid than the oceans around us, it’s reasonable to ask why we got wind turbines and wind mills quite literally everywhere across the globe to harvest the power in the wind, whereas ocean waves and currents aren’t being exploited quite as much. In a recent video by [Giordano Scarciotti] this issue with wave power is addressed, in particular the massive engineering challenges involved.
Internal view of the CorPower Ocean wave turbine buoy. (Credit: CorPower Ocean)
One of the main problems is simply one of cost, with wind energy having converged on a single design involving effectively the same three-bladed rotor, gondola and tower design that has been optimized for decades now. For wave energy there’s no such one-design-fits-all solution, with each attempted design having its own advantages and disadvantages that may prevent it from working in various sites, or incur high maintenance costs in the highly abusive marine environment.
Having more energy in waves than in wind is also both a benefit and a curse, as wave turbines have to work with the waves and not get demolished every time there’s a storm. Even wind turbines regularly fail in windy weather when e.g. the brakes fail, under conditions that would be considered mild in a marine context.
Also covered in the video is a new contender, in the form of CorPower Ocean’s new buoy-like design that bobs up and down on the surface. Here you need to carefully tune the turbine mechanism to work with the wave motion to extract the most energy. Their current design is be 19 meters tall, 9 meters wide and claimed to be capable of being installed in >40 meter deep water, producing power with a 40-60% capacity factor at 300 kW.
As yet another attempt at making wave energy turbines work, the most exciting aspect of it will be to see whether it can survive adverse weather, when careful tuning gets tossed out of the window and chaotic waves pummel what is essentially a very big hollow buoy. The single prototype has so far survived bad weather off the coast of Portugal during a year of testing, but the real test is long-term survival, as losing half your wave turbine farm to a really bad storm every five-odd years would quickly scuttle the project like it has previous commercial contesters.
Although not addressed in the video, the commercial challenge here is also not so much making the power generated over its lifetime (LCoE) economically attractive, but also its system integration cost in terms of required transmission lines, grid-level energy storage and backup power generators like baseload and standby power plants. Without equipping these wave power farms with grid-forming converters as TSOs are asking, dealing with reactive power to absorb and generate it, any resulting grid oscillations exacerbated by grid-following converters risk causing another expensive blackout as recently on the Iberian peninsula.
