The world has been shaken to its core by a respiratory virus pandemic. Humanity has been raiding the toolbox for every possible weapon in the fight, whether that be masks, vaccinations, or advanced antiviral treatments.
As far as medicine has come in tackling COVID-19 in the past two years, the ultimate solution would be to cut the number of people exposed to the pathogen in the first place. Improving our ventilation methods may just be a great way to cut down on the spread. After all, it’s what they did in the wake of the Spanish Flu.
The station receives signals from any of several satellites which use LoRa for telemetry, like the FossaSat series of PocketQube satellites. Even with a sub-optimal setup consisting of a magnetic mount antenna stuck outside a window, [Alberto] is able to receive telemetry from satellites over 2,000 kilometers distant. He also built a smaller variant which is battery powered for portable use.
The construction of this ground station makes use of standard off-the-shelf items with a Heltec ESP32-based LoRa / WiFi module as the heart. This module is one of several supported by the TinyGS project, which provides receiver firmware and a worldwide telemetry network consisting of 1,002 stations as of this writing. The firmware has a lot of features, including OTA updates and auto-tuning of your receiver to catch each satellite as it passes overhead.
The TinyGS project started out as a weekend project back in 2019 to use an ESP32 to receive LoRa telemetry from the FossaSat-1 satellite, and has expanded to encompass all satellites, and other flying objects, using LoRa-based telemetry. It uses Telegram to distribute data, with a message being sent to the channel anytime any station in the network receives a telemetry packet from a satellite.
If you’re interested in getting your feet wet receiving satellite signals, this is an easy project to start with that won’t break the bank.
My first job out of grad school was with a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a small outfit, and everyone had a “lab job” in addition to whatever science they were hired to do — a task to maintain the common areas of the lab. My job was to maintain the water purification systems that made sure everyone had an ample supply of pure, deionized water to work with. The job consisted of mainly changing the filter and ion-exchange cartridges of the final polishing units, which cleaned up the tap water enough for science.
When I changed the filter packs, I was always amazed and revolted by the layers of slime and sediment in them. A glimpse out the window at the banks of the river Charles — love that dirty water — was enough to explain what I was seeing, and it was a lesson in just how much other stuff is mixed in with the water you drink and cook with and bathe in.
While we humans can generally do pretty well with water that rates as only reasonably pure, our industrial processes are quite another thing. Everything from power plants to pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities needs water of much, much higher purity, but nothing requires purer water than the specialized, nanometer-scale operations of a semiconductor fab. But how does ordinary tap water get transformed into a chemical of such purity that contaminants are measured in parts per trillion? And how do fabs produce enough of this ultrapure water to meet their needs? With some big chemistry.
What would a HAL9000 look like if it eye were yellow and sat atop a front panel inspired by an Altair 8800? You’d have today’s feature, [Stephan]’s BerlinUhr, a gorgeous little take on a Berlin Clock.
At Hackaday, we have a soft spot for clock builds. They’ve graced our pages from early times. When we saw this ultra cool Berlin Clock, we couldn’t resist the urge to share it with all of our readers. For those of you not familiar with a Berlin Clock, it’s a clock that consists of 24 lights, and was the first of its kind back in 1975.
[Stephan]’s build is notable because not only is it a beautiful design, but the work that went into the design and build. At several inches tall, the BerlinUhr is supported solely by a USB-C connection, although it can also be hung on a wall. The RTC is backed up by a CR1216, and an ATtiny167 provides the brains for the operation.
A neat part of the build comes with the KPS-3227 light sensor, used to adjust the LED brightness according to ambient lighting. Rather than being a straightforward part to insert into the PCB, KiCad’s footprint had some pins reversed, causing [Stephan] to learn how to correct it and contribute the fix to KiCad. Well done!
A common enough microcontroller project is to create some form of logic analyzer. In theory, it should be pretty easy: grab some digital inputs, store them, and display them. But, of course, the devil is in the details. First, you want to grab data fast, but you also need to examine the trigger in real time — hard to do in software. You may also need input conditioning circuitry unless you are satisfied with the microcontroller’s input characteristics. Finally, you need a way to dump the data for analysis. [Gusmanb] has tackled all of these problems with a simple analyzer built around the Raspberry Pi Pico.
On the front and back ends, there is an optional board that does fast level conversion. If you don’t mind measuring 3.3 V inputs, you can forego the board. On the output side, there is custom software for displaying the results. What’s really interesting, though, is what is in between.
The simple PCB is completely optional.
The Pico grabs 24 bits of data at 100 MHz and provides edge and pattern triggers. This is impressive because you need to look at the data as you store it and that eats up a few instruction cycles if you try to do it in software, dropping your maximum clock rate. So how does this project manage it?
It uses the Pico’s PIO units are auxiliary dedicated processors that aren’t very powerful, but they are very fast and deterministic. Two PIO instructions are enough to handle the work for simple cases. However, there are two PIOs and each has four separate state machines. It still takes some work, but it is easier than trying to run a CPU at a few gigahertz to get the same effect. The fast trigger mode, in particular, abuses the PIO to get maximum speed and can even work up to 200 MHz with some limitations.
If you want to try it, you can use nothing more than a Pico and a jumper wire as long as you don’t need the level conversion. The project page mentions that custom software avoids using OpenBench software, which we get, but we might have gone for Sigrok drivers to prevent having to reinvent too many wheels. The author mentions that it was easier to roll your own code than conform to a driver protocol and we get that, too. Still, the software looks nice and even has an SPI protocol analyzer. It is all open source, so if you want other protocols before the author gets to them, you could always do it yourself.
You might recognize [Robert Dunn] from his YouTube channel Aging Wheels, where he hacks on all sorts of automotive delights. On his other channel, Under Dunn, [Robert] tends to focus on building things. In this case, his nine chickens grew a bit, and he needs a new coop for his twenty chickens, three turkeys, and two geese. The build, the video, and the outcome are all typical of [Robert Dunn]’s videos- that is to say fun, informative, and easy to follow along with.
Rather than building on to his existing coop that was designed for less than a dozen chickens, [Robert] decided to start from scratch. Using CAD to overcomplicate matters at every possible step, the build flies together with impressive speed- but never quite takes off until the very last moment.
The video highlights all the things we want to see: The CNC’ing, the fails (including one very large fall-flat-on-your-face moment), the recovery from the fails, routed butt joints, and screen door handles. It’s also got all of the overengineered goodness we’ve all come to love. You’ll also enjoy his solution to moving, then fixing, then finally installing the coop.
If you enjoyed this, and watching people fail, check out [Robert]’s Fail Of The Week that we featured a while back.
TensorFlow is a machine learning and AI library that has enabled so much and brought AI within the reach of most developers. But it’s fair to say that it’s not for the less powerful computers. For them there’s TensorFlow Lite, in which a model is created on a larger machine and exported to a microcontroller or similarly resource-constrained one. [Nick Bild] has probably taken this to its extreme though, by achieving this feat on a Commodore 64. Not just that, but he’s also done it using Commodore BASIC.
TensorFlow Lite works by the model being created as a C array which is then parsed and run by an interpreter on the microcontroller. This is a little beyond the capabilities of the mighty 64, so he has instead created a Python script that does the job of the interpreter and produces Commodore BASIC code that can run on the 64. The trusty Commodore was one of the more powerful home computers of its day, but we’re fairly certain that its designers never in their wildest dreams expected it to be capable of this!
