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.
Head out to your next corporate conference, and you’ll probably be handed a little paper badge in a plastic holder so people can learn what to call you (or whether they should talk to you at all). It serves a function, but it’s a little soulless. [Aahan Sharma]’s Eye-D badge is a touch more interesting.
At the heart of the build is an ESP32-C6 microcontroller. It’s a capable part, with clock speed configurable up to 160 MHz, and wireless connectivity baked in. It’s hooked up to an 8 x 16 matrix of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs, creating a color 128-pixel display. [Aahan] took advantage of the onboard Bluetooth Low Energy connection of the ESP32 to enable the display to be readily controlled by a smartphone, tablet, or laptop.
It can be configured to display a name, social handle, or custom message as desired. Beyond that, it can display animations, like an eye scanning around the room, Nyan Cat, or fire or Matrix-like effects just for the fun of it. There’s also a Draw Mode that lets one create their own pixel art on the display, too. [Aahan] wanted the build to feel like a serious conference badge, rather than a random electronic trinket, so whipped up a custom enclosure. The LEDs, microcontroller, and a battery, are all wrapped up in a tidy 3D printed housing with a ring for easily hanging the badge from clothes, lanyard, bag, or similar.
Although everyone has their own reasons for exploring a new hobby, one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Meshtastic and MeshCore has been the incredible accessibility offered by off-grid LoRa mesh networks. You don’t need any expensive hardware or a license to get on the air — armed with a $20 microcontroller dev board and open source software, you could be on the mesh in minutes. Then came the really exciting part, seeing who else was out there. The low barrier of entry and ad-hoc nature of these projects meant there was a good chance you’d soon find yourself exchanging messages with other like-minded folks in the area.
Or at least, that’s how it used to be. With the recent revelation that their default radio configurations have potentially been in violation of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) regulations governing amateur usage of the 900 MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band, the users and developers of both Meshtastic and MeshCore have been sent scrambling. Getting in compliance isn’t necessarily a technical challenge. In fact, Meshtastic has already introduced changes aimed to address the issue and anyone running the latest alpha release can be sure that their initial radio configuration will meet FCC standards.
But unfortunately, this introduces a new problem. While it’s easy enough to get new installations of Meshtastic and MeshCore operating in a mode that keeps the FCC happy, doing so breaks compatibility with everything that’s already been deployed. The community will be fractured into distinct strata depending on when they first configured their hardware, with an added dash of confusion from the more rebellious users who will undoubtedly refuse to migrate over to the new settings.
What was once easy and accessible has just gotten a whole lot more complicated.
There are plenty of ways to mod an existing GBA to be better than the original, but this build recreates the console from the ground up. It’s basically a brand new motherboard that replaces the original entirely, requiring only the CPU and RAM to be harvested from the original board.
It’s perfect for when you find a badly-damaged handheld that needs heavy repair, because every other part on the board can be purchased new. You can buy a nice shiny screen kit online, and even upgrade to LiPo power if so desired. The new motherboard also eliminates sound issues that are common when upgrading the screen in a classic GBA, and there’s stereo audio available on the headphone jack as standard. Battery life is also improved compared to the original.
If you’ve got a haggard old GBA in need of repair, or you just want to build the best classic handheld you can, it’s worth taking a look at this build. You might also appreciate previous works from [Bucket Mouse], like his efforts to improve the original Game Boy.
When it comes to clockwork, there is a spectrum — some people love the ticking, and some people hate it, while most fall into the broad middle of indifference. Once upon a time, Pope Alexander VII fell into the “hate it” category, and commissioned a silent timepiece from [Fratelli Campani] in 1656. Three hundred seventy years later, [Many Vices] sought out to re-create the mechanism in extruded plastic thanks to the efforts of watchmaker [Carlo G. Croce], who documented his brass recreation in this PDF file and his own videos.
While the archaeology of recreating the mechanism from old photos is interesting, the mechanism itself is the real showpiece. The secret, as you might be able to tell from the photographs, is an eccentric crank escapement that provides continuous movement rather than the traditional anchor escapement whose periodic movements creates the distinctive ‘tick’ and ‘tock’. [Many] tests both in his video so you can hear the difference and see how much power is wasted with the crank escapement, which doesn’t keep going very long.
We wonder if carefully tuning the flywheel he’s using to match the frequency of the swinging pendulum would help a little there. Likewise, his linear-rail-based spring pendulum modification — though it does look awesome and we’d love a train-themed clock using it — doesn’t come close to providing the runtime of traditional clockwork. That’s probably why the anchor escapement persisted for centuries, even if some people and Popes couldn’t stand the tick-tock.
If you own a Jaguar XJ220 or the rarer XJR-15, you’re probably not short on money or real estate. You may, however, be finding it hard to lay your hands on a diagnostic tool that is compatible with the ancient Zytek ECU. Thankfully, [Tom Radom], is working to change that.
As the owner of XJ220 chassis #50, [Tom] was unlucky enough to see the dreaded check engine light come on last year. He was lucky enough to get his hands on an SPD-1039 interface, built to talk to the Zytek ECU that runs the car. However, he was painfully aware that these devices are now incredibly rare and hard to come by, even given the tiny limited market of owners of 1990s Jaguar supercars. Thus, he set about building a replacement.
An initial effort to open up and reverse engineer the Zytek interface failed, mostly because it had been potted rather successfully in silicone. Thus, [Tom] took a new tack. He hooked up a logic analyser between the interface and the car, recording the traffic between the two. This captured data allowed [Tom] to recreate the interface using a FT232RNL bridge to chat to the Zytek engine control unit. There was no attempt to rebuild the software—the original DOS-based diagnostic still runs perfectly fine in an emulator. It was just the hardware interface from a serial port to the car that needed to be recreated.
[Tom] has been building the modules and supplying them to owners of XJ220, XJ220S, and XJR-15 models at no charge. He believes simply having a viable diagnostic tool available will increase the value of these classic cars by more than the costs he incurred to develop the interface. Interested parties can submit their details via webform on Port220.com.
