NASA Taps Webb To Help Study 2032 Asteroid Threat

February 13, 2025 by 43 Comments

In all likelihood, asteroid 2024 YR4 will slip silently past the Earth. Based on the data we have so far, there’s an estimated chance of only 2.1% to 2.3% that it will collide with the planet on December 22nd, 2032. Under normal circumstances, if somebody told you there was a roughly 98% chance of something not happening, you probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. There’s certainly a case to be made that you should feel that way in regards to this particular event — frankly, it’s a lot more likely that some other terrible thing is going to happen to you in the next eight years than it is an asteroid is going to ruin your Christmas party.

That being said, when you consider the scale of the cosmos, a 2+% chance of getting hit is enough to raise some eyebrows. After all, it’s the highest likelihood of an asteroid impact that we’re currently aware of. It’s also troubling that the number has only gone up as further observations of 2024 YR4’s orbit have been made; a few weeks ago, the impact probability was just 1%. Accordingly, NASA has recently announced they’ll be making time in the James Webb Space Telescope’s busy scientific schedule to observe the asteroid next month.

So keeping in mind that we’re still talking about an event that’s statistically unlikely to actually occur, let’s take a look at what we know about 2024 YR4, and how further study and analysis can give us a better idea of what kind of threat we’re dealing with.

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Budget-Minded Synthetic Aperture Radar Takes To The Skies

February 13, 2025 by 18 Comments

Unless you work for the government or a large corporation, constrained designs are a fact of life. No matter what you’re building, there’s likely going to be a limit to the time, money, space, or materials you can work with. That’s good news, though, because constrained projects tend to be interesting projects, like this airborne polarimetric synthetic aperture radar.

If none of those terms make much sense to you, don’t worry too much. As [Henrik Forstén] explains, synthetic aperture radar is just a way to make a small radar antenna appear to be much larger, increasing its angular resolution. This is accomplished by moving the antenna across a relatively static target and doing some math to correlate the returned signal with the antenna position. We saw this with his earlier bicycle-mounted SAR.

For this project, [Henrik] shrunk the SAR set down small enough for a low-cost drone to carry. The build log is long and richly detailed and could serve as a design guide for practical radar construction. Component selection was critical, since [Henrik] wanted to use low-cost, easily available parts wherever possible. Still, there are some pretty fancy parts here, with a Zynq 7020 FPGA and a boatload of memory on the digital side of the custom PCB, and a host of specialized parts on the RF side.

The antennas are pretty cool, too; they’re stacked patch antennas made from standard FR4 PCBs, with barn-door feed horns fashioned from copper sheeting and slots positioned 90 to each other to provide switched horizontal and vertical polarization on both the receive and transmit sides. There are also a ton of details about how the radar set is integrated into the flight controller of the drone, as well as an interesting discussion on the autofocusing algorithm used to make up for the less-than-perfect positional accuracy of the system.

The resulting images are remarkably detailed, and almost appear to be visible light images thanks to the obvious shadows cast by large objects like trees and buildings. We’re especially taken by mapping all combinations of transmit and receive polarizations into a single RGB image; the result is ethereal.

A Transparent BB-8 Build Using Christmas Ornaments

February 13, 2025 by 10 Comments

The cool thing about the droids of Star Wars is that they’re not that hard to recreate in real life. R2-D2 is a popular choice, but you can even build yourself a neat little BB-8 if you’re so inclined. [Piyush] has built a particularly compelling example that’s transparent, which lets you see the internals and how it all works.

The build makes creative use of a pair of Christmas ornaments. They are perhaps the cheapest and easiest way to source a clear plastic sphere. One serves as the “head”, while the other serves as the larger spherical body. Inside, an Arduino Pro Micro is running the show. It’s hooked up to a L293D motor driver which runs the drive motors and the reaction wheel motor which provides stability, while a separate MOSFET is on hand to run the gear motor which controls the head.

There’s also an HC-05 module for Bluetooth communication, and a BNO055 sensor for motion tracking and ensuring the robot stays the right way up. 3D printed components are used prodigiously to cram everything together tightly enough to fit. There’s even a printed charging base to juice up the little droid. Controlling the robot is as simple as using a smartphone with an app created in the MIT App Inventor.

If you’ve never built a spherical rolling robot before—and few of us have—this design is a great reference for your own work. We’ve seen a few BB-8s over the years, most of which dropped shortly after the movie was released. Continue reading “A Transparent BB-8 Build Using Christmas Ornaments” →

On The Original Punched Cards

February 12, 2025 by 20 Comments

If you mention punch cards to most people, they’ll think of voting. If you mention it to most older computer people, they’ll think of punching programs for big computers on cards. But punched cards are much older than that, and [Nichole Misako Nomura] talks about how the original use was to run looms and knitting machines and — thanks the Internet Archive — you can still find old cards to drive modern machines.

According to the post, a dedicated group of people own old commercial knitting machines, and with some work, they can use archived punch cards with patterns that predate the computerized world. The Jacquard loom was famously the first machine to use cards like this, and it is no secret that they were the inspiration for Hollerith’s use of cards in the census, which would eventually lead to the use of cards for computing.

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Automatic Pill Dispenser Is Cheap And Convenient

February 12, 2025 by 20 Comments

If you’re taking any medication, you probably need to take it in a certain dose on a certain schedule. It can quickly become difficult to keep track of when you’re taking multiple medications. To that end, [Mellow_Labs] built an automated pill dispenser to deliver the right pills on time, every time.

The pill dispenser is constructed out of 3D printed components. As shown, it has two main bins for handling two types of pills, controlled with N20 gear motors. The bins spin until a pill drops through a slot into the bottom of the unit, with the drop detected by a piezo sensor. It uses a Beetle ESP32 as the brains of the operation, which is hooked up with a DS1307 real-time clock to ensure it’s dosing out pills at the right time. It’s also wired up with a DRV8833 motor driver to allow it to run the gear motors. The DRV8833 can run up to four motors in unidirectional operation, so you can easily expand the pill dispenser up to four bins if so desired.

We particularly like how the pill dispenser is actually controlled — [Mellow_Labs] used the ESP32 to host a simple web interface which is used for setting the schedule on which each type of pill should be dispensed.

We’ve featured some other pill dispenser builds before, too.

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DIY Microwave Crucibles

February 12, 2025 by 16 Comments

You know the problem. You are ready to melt some metal in your microwave oven, and you don’t have any crucibles. Not to worry. [Shake the Future] will show you how to make your own. All you need is some silicon carbide, some water glass (sodium silicate), and some patience.

The crucible takes the shape of a glass container. Don’t get too attached to it because the glass will break during the crucible construction. You can also use 3D-printed forms.

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Will Embodied AI Make Prosthetics More Humane?

February 12, 2025 by 14 Comments

Building a robotic arm and hand that matches human dexterity is tougher than it looks. We can create aesthetically pleasing ones, very functional ones, but the perfect mix of both? Still a work in progress. Just ask [Sarah de Lagarde], who in 2022 literally lost an arm and a leg in a life-changing accident. In this BBC interview, she shares her experiences openly – highlighting both the promise and the limits of today’s prosthetics.

The problem is that our hands aren’t just grabby bits. They’re intricate systems of nerves, tendons, and ridiculously precise motor control. Even the best AI-powered prosthetics rely on crude muscle signals, while dexterous robots struggle with the simplest things — like tying shoelaces or flipping a pancake without launching it into orbit.

That doesn’t mean progress isn’t happening. Researchers are training robotic fingers with real-world data, moving from ‘oops’ to actual precision. Embodied AI, i.e. machines that learn by physically interacting with their environment, is bridging the gap. Soft robotics with AI-driven feedback loops mimic how our fingers instinctively adjust grip pressure. If haptics are your point of interest, we have posted about it before.

The future isn’t just robots copying our movements, it’s about them understanding touch. Instead of machine learning, we might want to shift focus to human learning. If AI cracks that, we’re one step closer.