It’s Time You Built A Smart Pocket Watch

September 13, 2023 by 39 Comments

There’s just something about a pocket watch that screams class compared to the barbaric act of bending your arm, or the no-fun way of looking at your phone.

But smartwatches are dumb, analog things that mostly look pretty. Or are they? [JGJMatt] proves otherwise with their stunning DIY smart pocket watch. It is essentially a cheap smart watch from Amazon stuffed into the shell of an old pocket watch, but you know it’s not quite that simple.

On the easier side of things, [JGJMatt] had to come up with a 3D-printed bracket to hold the smart watch’s guts. On the harder end of the spectrum, he ended up building the charging port into the crown, where the latch used to be.

This is a beautiful build for sure, and a great way to reuse something that might otherwise end up thrown away or melted down.

Looking for a cool alternative pocket watch that’s a little easier to build? Check out [JGJMatt]’s pocket sundial.

3D Printed RC Car Is Geared For Speed

September 13, 2023 by 7 Comments

You can always go out and buy an RC car off the shelf. However, it’s readily achievable to print your own design that has many of the features of off-the-shelf models, as demonstrated by [Jinan].

[Jinan] set about creating a rear-wheel-drive design with a low center of gravity for good handling. Two large 5.2 Ah batteries slung low in the chassis help keep the car planted when cornering. [Jinan] also developed a double-wishbone suspension setup up front to handle bumps with ease.

With his eyes on top speed, [Jinan] needed a drivetrain that could handle sustained high RPM operation without failure. During the development process, [Jinan] spent plenty of time learning about the mathematics behind gear shapes before relying on a built-in CAD generator to do the job for him. Armed with proper gearing, he focused on making sure the driveshafts and other links wouldn’t fail at speed.

[Jinan] doesn’t shy away from diving into the engineering of his design, analyzing failures and improving on his designs along the way. It’s no surprise his design was able to reach 66 km/h (41 MPH) after his rigorous development process.  It’s compelling watching, and a great way to learn something.

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You’ve Got Mail: Automatic For The People

September 13, 2023 by 15 Comments

When we last left the post office, I told you all about various kinds of machinery the USPS uses to move mail around. Today I’m going to tell you about the time they thought they could automate nearly every function inside the standard post office — and no, it wasn’t anytime recently.

By 1953, the post office badly needed modernization. When Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was appointed that year, he found the system essentially in shambles. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, the USPS had done absolutely no spending beyond the necessary, with little to no investment in the future. But Summerfield was an ideas man, and he had the notion to build a totally automated post office. One of them would be located in Providence, Rhode Island and be known as Project Turnkey — as in a turnkey operation. The other would be located in Oakland, California, and serve as a gateway to the Pacific.

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How Three Letters Brought Down UK Air Traffic Control

September 13, 2023 by 51 Comments

The UK bank holiday weekend at the end of August is a national holiday in which it sometimes seems the entire country ups sticks and makes for somewhere with a beach. This year though, many of them couldn’t, because the country’s NATS air traffic system went down and stranded many to grumble in the heat of a crowded terminal. At the time it was blamed on faulty flight data, but news now emerges that the data which brought down an entire country’s air traffic control may have not been faulty at all.

Armed with the official incident report and publicly available flight data, Internet sleuths theorize that the trouble was due to one particular flight: French Bee flight 731 from Los Angeles to Paris. The flight itself was unremarkable, but the data which sent the NATS computers into a tailspin came from two of its waypoints — Devil’s Lake Wisconsin and Deauville Normandy — having the same DVL identifier. Given the vast distance between the two points, the system believed it was looking at a faulty route, and refused to process it. A backup system automatically stepped in to try and reconcile the data, but it made the same determination as the primary software, so the whole system apparently ground to a halt.

It’s important to note that there was nothing wrong with the flight plan entered in by the French Bee pilots, and that early stories blaming faulty data were themselves at fault. However we are guessing that air traffic software developers worldwide are currently scrambling to check their code for this particular bug. We’re fortunate indeed that safety wasn’t compromised and only inconvenience was the major outcome.

Air traffic control doesn’t feature here too often, but we’ve previously looked at a much earlier system.

Header image: John Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Determining The Size Of The New US Lithium Deposit Amidst Exploding Demand

September 13, 2023 by 22 Comments

With demand for lithium in the world market projected to increase by 2040 to as much as eight times the demand in 2022, finding new deposits of this metal has become a priority. Currently most of the world’s lithium comes from Australia, Chile, China and Argentina, with potential new mining sites under investigation. One of these sites is the McDermitt caldera in the US, a likely remnant of the Yellowstone hotspot and resulting volcanic activity. According to a recent study (Chemistry World article) by Thomas R. Benson and colleagues in Science Advances, this site may not only contain between 20 to 40 million tons of lithium in the form of the mineral clay illite, but was also formed using a rather unique process.

This particular group of mineral clays can contain a number of other chemicals, which in this particular case is lithium due to the unique way in which the about 40 meter thick layer of sediment was formed. Although lithium is a very common metal, its high reactivity means that it is never found in its elementary form, but instead bound to other elements. Lithium is thinly distributed within the Earth’s crust and oceans. Incidentally, the Earth’s oceans contain by far the largest amount of lithium, at approximately 230 billion tons.

So how much lithium could be extracted from this new area, and how does this compare to the increasing demand?

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BingGPT Brings AI Chat To The Desktop

September 13, 2023 by 28 Comments

Interested in AI, but sick of using everything in a browser? Miss clicking on a good old desktop icon to open a local bit of software? In that case, BingGPT could be just the thing for you.

It’s nothing too crazy—just a desktop application that gives you access to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot. It’s available on a range of platforms, from Windows, to Apple, and Linux, and binaries are available for Intel, Apple Silicon, and ARM processors.

Using BingGPT is simple. Sign in with your Microsoft account, and away you go. There’s no need to use Microsoft Edge or any ugly browser plugins, and you can export your conversations to Markdown, PNG, and PDF for sharing beyond the program. It’s also complete with a range of keyboard shortcuts to speed your interaction with the large language model when it gets off track. There’s also the Compose button which can actually go ahead and write stuff for you.

Fundamentally, all the cool stuff is still coming in via the web, but it’s nice to be able to use Bing’s chatbot without having to succumb to the horrors of a Microsoft browser. It’s interesting to see how large language models are becoming an all-pervasive tool of late. If you’re building your own nifty projects in this area, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Portrait Of A Long Wave Station In Its Twilight Years

September 13, 2023 by 25 Comments

There’s a quirk of broadcasting in Europe left over from the earliest days of the medium, which our American readers may not have encountered. As well as the familiar AM band, Europeans and Africans also have a so-called long wave band, on which you’ll find AM broadcast stations between about 150 and 280 kHz. Long wave transmissions were an ideal solution in the 1920s and 1930s to the problem of achieving national coverage from a single transmitter, and were widely used by state broadcasters. In an age of digital streaming they are increasingly irrelevant, and [Ringway Manchester] takes a look at one of Britain’s last long wave transmitter sites at Droitwich not too far from Birmingham.

The site covers around 50 acres, and is home to a variety of both medium wave (AM, for Americans), and a single long wave transmitter carrying BBC Radio 4 on 198 kHz. As he takes us through its history in the video below the break we hear a rundown of most of the major events in British broadcasting, while few Brits will have visited this unassuming field it’s likely most of us will have listened to something sent from here.

The long wave antenna is a T-shaped affair strung between two masts. We’re guessing that the radiator is the vertical portion, with the bar of the T forming a capacitance with the ground to make up for the radiator being a fraction of the 1515 meter wavelength. The video is something of a tribute to this once-vital station, as the Radio 4 transmissions are likely to stop in 2024 and the medium wave ones over the following years. We have to admit to catching our BBC transmissions online these days, but we still have to admit a pang of sadness at its impending end.

This reminds us, we’ve taken a fond look at AM radio in the past.

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