Jack In, The 2023 Cyberdeck Challenge Starts Now

June 20, 2023 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

The modern laptop is truly a masterpiece of engineering, craming an incredible amount of processing power into a thin and lightweight package that can run for hours on its internal batteries, all for just a few hundred bucks. Combine that with the ubiquitous smartphone, and it’s safe to say that the state of mobile computing has never been better.

Despite this, over the last several years we’ve watched cyberdecks go from a few one-off examples to a vibrant community of truly personal computing devices. While there are some exceptions, most of them are larger, more expensive, and less portable than what’s available on the commercial market. But that’s not the point — a cyberdeck should be a reflection of the hacker that built it, not the product of a faceless megacorp.

Which is why we’re excited to officially announce the 2023 Cyberdeck Challenge, starting now and running all summer through to August 15th.

Whether it’s a ridiculously over the top wearable that wouldn’t look out of place in a cyberpunk anime or a pocket-sized gadget that you operate with a handful of unlabeled buttons, we want to see it. All we ask is that it be a functional device capable of some useful amount of computing, anything beyond that is up to you. Turn in one of the top three designs, and you’ll earn a $150 USD DigiKey shopping spree, just what you need to pack a few extra bells and whistles into your rig.

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Punched Cards Are In The Cloud, With This Arduino

June 20, 2023 by Jenny List 15 Comments

Grizzled veterans of the computing industry will relate stories of submitting projects on stacks of punched cards, something those of us who stored their 8-bit works on audio cassettes could only imagine. But for those who fancy experimenting with the format it’s still possible to make a basic card reader using LEDs and light sensors, as [Nino Ivanov] has done using an Arduino Uno as the brains. And these aren’t just for show, each of his cards holds a LISP program that runs in a cloud service.

The Uno does the job of reading, passing its data over its USB serial port to a tablet. On the tablet the serial data is piped to a cloud API to a LISP interpreter. It seems a needlessly complex way to run a factorial program and it’s certainly a little over the top, but on the other hand we love it as a glorious combination of the old and the new. With only 23 characters per card it’s quite an impressive feat to even fit a program on the format, perhaps writing code to fit on minimalist punched cards like this could become a programming challenge in its own right for a generation accustomed to mega-and gigabytes.

If you fancy a go yourself, this isn’t the first punched card reader we’ve shown you.

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Cottonization: Making Hemp And Flax Fibers Into The Better Cotton

June 20, 2023 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

These days it’s hard to imagine that fabrics were ever made out of anything other than cotton or synthetic fibers, yet it wasn’t too long ago that hemp and flax-based fabrics — linen — were the rule rather than the exception. Cotton production has for centuries had the major disadvantages of requiring a lot of water and pesticides, and harvesting the cotton was very labor-intensive, making cotton rather expensive. In order to make separating the cotton fibers from the seed easier, improved versions of the cotton gin (‘cotton engine’) were developed, with the 19th century’s industrial revolution enabling a fully automated version.

What makes cotton attractive is the ease of processing these fibers, which are part of the seed pod. These fibers are 25 mm – 60 mm long, 12 μm – 45 μm fine fibers that can be pulled off the seeds and spun into yarn or whatever else is needed for the final product, much like wool. Hemp and flax fibers, in contrast, are extracted from the plant stem in the form of bast fibers. Rather than being pure cellulose, these fibers are mostly a mixture of cellulose, lignin, hemicellulose and pectin, which provide the plant with rigidity, but also makes these fibers coarse and stiff.

The main purpose of cottonization is to remove as much of these non-cellulosic components as possible, leaving mostly pure cellulose fibers that not only match the handleability of cotton fibers, but are also generally more durable. Yet cottonization used to be a long and tedious process, which made bast fiber-based textiles expensive. Fortunately, the steam explosion cottonization method that we’ll be looking at here may be one of the methods by which the market will be blown open for these green and durable fibers.

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Cosmic Ray Navigation

June 20, 2023 by Al Williams 19 Comments

GPS is a handy modern gadget — until you go inside, underground, or underwater. Japanese researchers want to build a GPS-like system with a twist. It uses cosmic ray muons, which can easily penetrate buildings to create high-precision navigation systems. You can read about it in their recent paper. The technology goes by MUWNS or wireless muometric navigation system — quite a mouthful.

With GPS, satellites with well-known positions beam a signal that allows location determination. However, those signals are relatively weak radio waves. In this new technique, the reference points are also placed in well-understood positions, but instead of sending a signal, they detect cosmic rays and relay information about what it detects to receivers.

The receivers also pick up cosmic rays, and by determining the differences in detection, very precise navigation is possible. Like GPS, you need a well-synchronized clock and a way for the reference receivers to communicate with the receiver.

Muons penetrate deeper than other particles because of their greater mass. Cosmic rays form secondary muons in the atmosphere. About 10,000 muons reach every square meter of our planet at any minute. In reality, the cosmic ray impacts atoms in the atmosphere and creates pions which decay rapidly into muons. The muon lifetime is short, but time dilation means that a short life traveling at 99% of the speed of light seems much longer on Earth and this allows them to reach deep underground before they expire.

Detecting muons might not be as hard as you think. Even a Raspberry Pi can do it.

Creating Lithography-Free Photonic Reprogrammable Circuits

June 20, 2023 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

The field of photonics has seen significant advances during the past decades, to the point where it is now an integral part of high-speed, international communications. For general processing photonics is currently less common, but is the subject of significant research. Unlike most photonic circuits which are formed using patterns etched into semiconductor mask using lithography, purely light-based circuits are a tantalizing possibility. This is the focus of a recent paper (press release, ResearchGate) in Nature Photonics by [Tianwei Wu] and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania.

What is somewhat puzzling is that despite the lofty claims of this being ‘the first time’ that such an FPGA-like device has been created for photonics, this is far from the case, as evidenced by e.g. a 2017 paper by [Kaichen Dong] and colleagues (full article PDF) in Advanced Materials. Here the researchers used a slab of vanadium dioxide (VO₂) with a laser to heat sections to above 68 °C where the material transitions from an insulating to a metallic phase and remains that way until the temperature is lowered again. The μm-sized features that can be created in this manner allow for a wide range of photonic devices to be created.

A rewritable metacanvas. a) Schematic of laser writing different photonic operator patterns on a metacanvas. b) Temperature-dependentresistance of a VO2 film. c) Optical images from writing and erasing process on the metacanvas. . d) Diagram showing the mathematical matrix (F) is compiled onto a metacanvas in the form of a photonic operator for manipulation of light waveform (I ). e) Schematic of a metacanvas programmed as a beam steerer with a steering angle ϕ. (Credit: Dong et al., 2018) — A rewritable metacanvas. a) Schematic of laser writing different photonic operator patterns on a metacanvas. b) Temperature-dependent resistance of a VO2 film. c) Optical images from writing and erasing process on the metacanvas. . d) Diagram showing the mathematical matrix (F) is compiled onto a metacanvas in the form of a photonic operator for manipulation of light waveform. e) Schematic of a metacanvas programmed as a beam steerer with a steering angle ϕ. (Credit: Dong et al., 2018)

What does appear to be different with the photonic system presented by [Wu] et al. is that it uses a more traditional 2D approach, with a slab of InGaAsP on which the laser pattern is projected. Whether it is more versatile than other approaches remains to be seen, with the use of fully photonic processors in our computers still a long while off, never mind photonics-accelerated machine learning applications.

What’s In A Slip Ring?

June 19, 2023 by Jenny List 20 Comments

We know that when [Big Clive] puts up another video, the chances are we’re in for another fascinating look into a piece of tech on his bench. The latest is a slip ring assembly, and he gives it a teardown to reveal its secrets.

For most of us, the only place we encounter a slip ring is in some electric motors or alternators when it provides a connection via a conductive ring and a graphite brush from a fixed component to a rotating one. But they also appear as components in their own right wherever a rotating assembly needs an electrical contact, and it’s one of these that [Clive] has on his bench. It’s a compact unit with an impressive six conductors, and its manufacturer boldly claims that it’s good for mains voltages. We’re going with the verdict in the video below the break. That’s wishful thinking, given the size of the unit.

Inside is a rotor with six brass rings and a couple of decent little bearings, while the other half of the unit is a set of gold-plated spring contacts. There is extensive use of potting, and the verdict is that this is a surprisingly good quality component for the eBay price. We look forward to our community finding inventive uses for them. Having a ready-made unit sure beats making your own.

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Using Trash To Keep Plastic Trash Out Of Oceans By Kabooming Them

June 19, 2023 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

For a few years now, [Richard] of Tropical Ocean Cleanup fame has been working hard to clean the Philippines of the plastic trash that litters everything, and washes down the canals and rivers into the ocean. Using nothing but what is essentially trash – old car tires, rope and empty soda bottles – he creates ‘kabooms’ that prevent this trash floating in the canals from polluting the beaches, kill wildlife and gather in the oceans. In a recent video he covers how he creates these systems, and the basics of how they are installed.

We previously covered [Richard]’s efforts, and although these kabooms have received a few tweaks along the way, the basic principle has remained the same. The empty bottles provides the buoyancy, while the tires are excellent structural elements that can take a beating from the weather and debris. Some of the kabooms are lashed together with rope, while for other types holes are drilled into the tires using a hole saw, all of which help to create a self-supporting trash capture system that can be installed easily with a group of volunteers.

Fetching the thus captured trash is still a bit of a struggle, requiring a fair bit of manual labor, nets and boats from local fishermen when they have some spare time, but the effect is very much noticeable on the nearby beaches. In addition to these trash capturing kabooms, [Richard] also promotes trash collecting at schools, organizes trash pick-up events and trash collecting points, to raise local awareness of the need to keep plastic trash out of the environment and burn pits.

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