A 489 Megapixel Camera For Not A Lot

June 12, 2023 by 26 Comments

The megapixel wars of a decade ago saw cameras aggressively marketed on the resolution of their sensors, but as we progressed into the tens of megapixels it became obvious even to consumers that perhaps there might be a little more to the quality of a digital camera than just its resolution. Still, it’s a frontier that still has a way to go, even if [Yunus Zenichowski]’s 489 megapixel prototype is a bit of an outlier. As some of you may have guessed it’s a scanner camera, in which the sensor is a linear CCD that is mechanically traversed over the focal plane to capture the image line by line.

In the 3D printed shell are the guts of a cheap second-hand Canon scanner, and the lens comes from a projector. Both these components make it not only one of the highest resolution cameras we’ve ever brought you, but also by no means the most expensive. It’s definitely a work in progress and the results of a sensor designed for the controlled environment of a document scanner being used with real-world light leave something to be desired, but even with the slight imperfections of the projector lens it’s still a camera capable of some fascinating high-resolution photography. The files are all available, should you be interested, and you can see it in action in the video below the break.

It’s by no means the first scanner camera we’ve brought you, though some of the earlier projects now have dead links. It is however easily the one with the highest resolution.

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Passionate Hams Make Their Mark On The Hack Chat

June 12, 2023 by 63 Comments

Let’s be honest — there are some not very pleasant stereotypes associated with amateur radio, at least if you ask outsiders. Hams are often thought of as being in two camps: old guys who can’t figure out modern technology or conspiracy theorists who think their knowledge of radio will give them an edge after the world becomes a post-apocalyptic hellscape. We’ll leave it to you to decide which is the worse brush to be painted with.

As is often the case, the best way to fight such ignorance is with education and outreach. Events like our weekly Hack Chat are a perfect platform for that, as it allows the curious to ask questions and get answers directly from subject matter experts. This is precisely why we invited Mark Hughes and Beau Ambur to helm last week’s Chat. The fact that they’re both relatively recent licensees makes them uniquely qualified to shed some light on what it’s like to become part of the ham radio community in the 21st century. As an added bonus, they’re both sharp and articulate technologists — about as far as you can get from the mental image of the doddering old granddad who prefers the simplicity of the Morse key to those newfangled smarty-phones.

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High Voltage Ion Engines Take Trip On The High Seas

June 12, 2023 by 21 Comments

Over the last several months, we’ve been enjoying a front-row seat as [Jay Bowles] of Plasma Channel has been developing and perfecting his design for a high voltage multi-stage ionic thruster. With each installment, the unit has become smaller, lighter, and more powerful. Which is important, as the ultimate goal is to power an RC aircraft with them.

There’s still plenty of work to be done before [Jay] will be able to take his creation skyward, but he’s making all the right moves. As a step towards his goal, he recently teamed up with [RcTestFlight] to attach a pair of his thrusters — which have again been further tweaked and refined since we last saw them — to a custom catamaran hull. The result is a futuristic craft that skims across the water with no moving parts and no noise…if you don’t count the occasional stray arc from the 40,000 volts screaming through its experimental thrusters, anyway. Continue reading “High Voltage Ion Engines Take Trip On The High Seas” →

Spy Tech: Unshredding Documents

June 12, 2023 by 38 Comments

Bureaucracies generate paper, usually lots of paper. Anything you consider private — especially anything that could get you in trouble — should go in a “burn box” which is usually a locked trash can that is periodically emptied into an incinerator. However, what about a paper shredder? Who hasn’t seen a movie or TV show where the office furiously shreds papers as the FBI, SEC, or some other three-letter-agency is trying to crash the door down?

That might have been the scene in the late 1980s when Germany reunified. The East German Ministry of State Security — known as the Stasi — had records of unlawful activity and, probably, information about people of interest. The staff made a best effort to destroy these records, but they did not quite complete their task.

The collapsing East German government ordered documents destroyed, and many were pulped or burned. However, many of the documents were shredded by hand, stuffed into bags, and were awaiting final destruction. There were also some documents destroyed by the interim government in 1990. Today there are about 16,000 of these bags remaining, each with 2,500 to 3,000 pieces of pages in them.

Machine-shredded documents were too small to recover, but the hand-shredded documents should be possible to reconstruct. After all, they do it all the time in spy movies, right? With modern computers and vision systems, it should be a snap.

You’d think so, anyway.

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Spaying Cats In One Shot

June 12, 2023 by 61 Comments

Feral cats live a rough life, and programs like Trap, Neuter, Release (TNR) attempt to keep their populations from exploding in a humane way. Researchers in Massachusetts have found a non-surgical way to spay cats that will help these efforts.

A single dose of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) gene therapy suppresses ovarian follicle formation, essentially turning off the ovulation cycle. After following the test cats for two years, none had kittens, unlike the cats in the control group. Other major hormones like estrogen were unaffected in the cats and they didn’t exhibit any negative side effects. The researchers said it will be some time before the treatment can be widely deployed, but it offers hope for helping our internet overlords and the environs they terrorize inhabit.

For those of you doing TNR work, you might want to try this trap alert system to let you know you’ve caught a cat for spaying or neutering. If you’d rather use a cat treat dispenser to motivate your code monkeys, then check out this hack.

A Modular Analogue Computer

June 12, 2023 by 20 Comments

We are all used to modular construction in the analogue synth world, to the extent that there’s an accepted standard for it in EuroRack. But the same techniques are just as useful wherever else analogue circuits need to be configured on the fly, such as in an analogue computer. It’s something [Rainer Glaschick] has pursued, with his Flexible Analog Computer, an analogue computer made from a set of modules mounted on breadboard strips.

Standard modules are an adder and an integrator, with the adder also having inverter, comparator, and precision rectifier functions. The various functions can be easily configured by means of jumpers, and there are digital switches on board to enable or disable outputs and inputs. he’s set up a moon landing example to demonstrate the machine in practice.

We’re not going to pretend to be analogue computer experts here at Hackaday,but we naturally welcome any foray into analogue circuitry lest it become a lost art. If you’d like to experiment with analogue computing there are other projects out there to whet your appetite, and of course they don’t even need to be electronic.

Characterizing Singular Atoms Using X-Ray Spectroscopy And Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

June 11, 2023 by No comments

Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STMs) are amazing tools which can manipulate singular atoms, but they cannot characterize these atoms as they act only on the outer electron shell. Meanwhile X-ray spectroscopy is a great tool for characterizing materials, but has so far been unable to scale down to singular atoms. This is where a recent study (paywalled, see summary article) by Tolulope M. Ajayi and colleagues demonstrates how both STM and X-rays can be combined in order to characterize singular atoms.

Structure of a part of the supramolecular complex used to measure the x-ray absorption spectrum of a single iron atom. The iron atom (red) is held within several ring-shaped structures. (Credit: Ajayi et al., 2023)
Structure of a part of the supramolecular complex used to measure the x-ray absorption spectrum of a single iron atom. The iron atom (red) is held within several ring-shaped structures. (Credit: Ajayi et al., 2023)

This research builds on previous research on synchrotron X-ray STM (SX-STM) which has been used for nanoscale imaging since 2009, but not down to the scale of a singular atom yet. Key to this achievement was to synthesize supramolecular complexes that could act as ‘tweezers’ to hold the atom under investigation in place and away from atoms of the same species. This not only allowed the atom to be identified using SX-STM, it also demonstrated that more subtle chemical properties of the atom can be analyzed in this manner, such as the way it interacts with other atoms.

The information gleaned this way matches up with what we know about the two atoms used in the study: iron and the rare earth terbium, with the latter’s lack of hybridization of its f orbitals (ℓ = 3) observable. For less well-studied atoms this method could provide a very efficient way to get a detailed overview of its properties. What is more, in future studies the researchers hope to use polarized X-rays to also obtain information about an atom’s spin state, opening interesting possibilities in areas such as spintronics and memory technologies.

Heading image: As the tip was scanned across ten positions in a sample containing two terbium atoms, it picked a signal only from the positions (2 and 9) where terbium was located (left: STM image; right: sketch of the corresponding molecular structure). (Credit: Ajayi et al, 2023)