A Soft Soldering Jig For Hard Projects

April 5, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 21 Comments

We’ve seen some absolutely gorgeous freeform circuit sculptures. There’s a mystic quality to taking what has normally been hidden away for safety and reliability reasons and putting it on display for everyone to see. Of course, creating these unique circuit sculptures takes considerable time and effort. [Inne] created several silicone soldering jigs to help with these tricky joints.

While a vice or helping hands is crucial for many joints, when dealing with tiny SMD components and exacting angles, you need something a little more specialized. Double-sided tape is often recommended, but heat ruins the adhesive and SMD components like to stick to soldering iron tips. Since silicone tends to be heat resistant, it makes a decent material for soldering on. [Inne] uses a city analogy with the cups for soldering called plazas, each with a hole (called a manhole) leading to a foot-switch vacuum pump to keep parts in place. The OpenSCAD code is available on GitHub under a GPLv3 license. It generates a two-part mold that you can cast in A-8/A-15 silicone.

It’s a clever project that makes it far easier to assemble gorgeous circuit sculptures. We love the design and thought that went into it, particularly the naming scheme as we often find appropriately naming variables in OpenSCAD quickly becomes difficult.

A white, house-shaped clock with the words "TEMPUS NECTIT" written in faux Roman script in black on a strip of silver at the base of the "roof." a white power cord extends from the left of the enclosure, and the center of the clock is a 22 pin knitting machine wheel with one pin covered in silver metalic. A white plastic peg extends from the bottom right of the enclosure to hold the feedstock yarn.

Tempus Nectit, A DIY Knitting Clock With Instructions

April 5, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 1 Comment

We’re no strangers to unusual clocks here at Hackaday, and some of our favorites make time a little more tangible like [Kyle Rankin]’s knitting clock.

Inspired by our coverage of [Siren Elise Wilhelmsen]’s knitting clock, [Rankin] decided to build one of his own. Since details on the build from the original artist were sparse, he had to reverse engineer how the device worked. He identified that a knitting clock is essentially a knitting machine with a stepper motor replacing the hand crank.

Using a Raspberry Pi with an Adafruit motor hat connected to a stepper motor and a 3D printed motor adapter, [Rankin] was able to drive the knitting machine to do a complete round of knitting every twelve hours. By marking one of the knitting pegs as an hour hand, the clock works as a traditional clock in addition to its year-long knitting task. [Rankin] says he still has some fine tuning to work on, but that he’s happy to have had the chance to combine so many of his interests into a single project.

If you’re looking for more knitting hacks, check out this knitted keyboard instrument or a knitted circuit board.

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Retrotechtacular: Solder Like Its 1944!

April 5, 2023 by Al Williams 37 Comments

When we first saw this 1944 US Office of Education film about hand soldering, we figured it might still have some good information. Well, perhaps it does, but the 1944 soldering was with a giant iron, and the work looked more like metal bricks than anything we’ve soldered lately. Of course, the physics is all the same, but some of the terminology, like “sweating in” isn’t anything we’ve heard before, although we have heard of sweat soldering.

They do show some electronic soldering on components, including some interesting-looking coils. But the irons look more like a bad science fiction movie’s idea of a lightsaber. The solder is equally huge, of course.

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Typewriter Mashup Becomes 120-Year-Old Teletype

April 5, 2023 by Jenny List 13 Comments

Vintage typewriters can be beautiful and elegant devices. But there’s a limit to their value if, as with the 1903 Remington owned by [Daniel Ross], they are fire-damaged and have a seized mechanism. What did he do with what was essentially a piece of scrap metal? Produce an unholy mashup of the vintage machine and a 1988 Sharp daisy wheel typewriter to make a steampunk-style teletype, of course!

Stripping down both machines was evidently no easy task, and the result he’s achieved has the Sharp’s printer mechanism at 90 degrees to its original orientation sitting below the roller in the space once occupied by the Remington’s type bars. We’re sad to see that the keyboard on the older machine appears to be inoperable, but on the other hand each letter does light up as it’s typed.

Meanwhile at the electronics side the components from the Sharp have been transferred to a custom PCB, and the whole can be driven from a 300-baud serial line. As can be seen from the video below the break, the result is an unholy love-child of two typewriters that could scarcely be more different, but somehow it works to make an impressive whole.

If this project looks a little familiar to Hackaday readers, it’s because we’ve mentioned it in passing before. It’s hooked up to his COSMAC Elf retrocomputer, and we saw it in passing a couple of years ago at a much earlier stage of construction before the custom PCB and light-up keyboard.

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How Tattoos Interact With The Immune System Could Have Impacts For Vaccines

April 5, 2023 by Lewin Day 40 Comments

Tattoos are an interesting technology. They’re a way of marking patterns and designs on the skin that can last for years or decades. All this, despite the fact that our skin sloughs off on a regular basis!

As it turns out, tattoos actually have a deep and complex interaction with our immune system, which hold some of the secrets regarding their longevity. New research has unveiled more insight into how the body responds when we get inked up.

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Classic Film Camera Goes Digital With Game Boy Tech

April 5, 2023 by Robin Kearey 8 Comments

Despite having been technologically obsolete for a decade or two, analog photography is still practiced by hobbyists and artists to achieve a particular aesthetic. One might imagine a similar thing happening with early digital cameras, and indeed it has: the Game Boy Camera has seen use in dozens of projects. [Michael Fitzmayer] however decided to combine the worlds of analog and early digital photography by equipping a Holga with the image sensor from a Game Boy Camera.

The Holga, if you’re not familiar, is a cheap film camera from the 1980s that has achieved something of a cult following among retro-photography enthusiasts. By equipping it with the sensor from what was one of the first mass-market digital cameras, [Michael] has created a rather unusual digital point-and-shoot. The user interface is as simple as can be: a single button to take a photo, and nothing else. There’s no screen to check your work — just as with film, you’ll have to wait for the pictures to come back from the lab.

The sensor used in the Game Boy Camera is a Mitsubishi M64282FP, which is a 128 x 128 pixel monochrome CMOS unit. [Michael] hooked it up to an STM32F401 microcontroller, which reads out the sensor data and stores it on an SD card in the form of a bitmap image.

With no film roll present, the Holga has plenty of space for all the electronics and a battery. The original lens turned out to be a poor fit for the image sensor, but with a bit of tweaking the Game Boy optics fit in its place without significantly altering the camera’s appearance.

[Michael] helpfully documented the design process and shared all source code on his GitHub page. Holgas shouldn’t be hard to find to find, but if none are available in your area you can just roll your own. The Game Boy Camera is actually one of the most versatile cameras out there, having been used for everything from video conferencing to astrophotography.

A NOR Gate For An ALU?

April 5, 2023 by Jenny List 18 Comments

If you know anything about he design of a CPU, you’ll probably be able to identify that a critical component of all CPUs is the Arithmetic Logic Unit, or ALU. This is a collection of gates that can do a selection of binary operations, and which depending on the capabilities of the computer, can be a complex component. It’s a surprise then to find that a working CPU can be made with just a single NOR gate — which is what is at the heart of [Dennis Kuschel]’s My4th single board discrete logic computer. It’s the latest in a series of machines from him using the NOR ALU technique, and it replaces hardware complexity with extra software to perform complex operations.

Aside from a refreshingly simple and understandable circuit, it has 32k of RAM and a 32k EPROM, of which about 9k is microcode and the rest program. It’s called My4th because it has a Forth interpreter on board, and it has I2C and digital I/O as well as a serial port for its console.

This will never be a fast computer, but the fact that it computes at all is ts charm. In 2023 there are very few machines about that can be understood in their entirety, so this one is rather special even if it’s not the first 1-bit ALU we’ve seen.

Thanks [Ken Boak] for the tip.