The Digital Ham Hack Chat

July 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, July 13 at noon Pacific for The Digital Ham Hack Chat with Rosy Schechter and John Hays!

For most of its existence, amateur radio has been the quintessence of the analog arts. From the very earliest days of radio, hobbyists have been piecing together circuits to ply the radio spectrum, using whatever bits of RF wizardry they managed to pick up — or invent — along the way. From the architecture of the radios to the nature of the conversations they had over the airwaves, ham radio was very much an analog experience.

But if hams are anything, they’re resourceful, and they’ve got a long history of leveraging whatever the current state of the art happens to be. And so when electrical engineering began to dive into the digital world, so too did the hams. Radioteletype, facsimile, and other text-and-data modes lead to things like packet radio, which in turn gave us powerful tools like APRS, FT8, and PACTOR, upon which the current rich infrastructure of location reporting, weak signal digital contacts and beacons, and email service independent of an Internet connection have been built. There’s even a complete TCP/IP network using amateur radio as the physical layer, which even predates the widespread public Internet by many years.

Amateur radio always has been at the forefront of digital communications, but it takes work to keep hams in their leadership position in the field. To help with that, Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) was established. ARDC is a non-profit dedicated to supporting amateur radio and digital communication science and technology, chiefly through their programs of grants that are available to fund the development of technically innovative open and non-profit projects in amateur radio.

For this Hack Chat, ARDC Executive Director Rosy Schechter (KJ7RYV) and Staff Lead John Hays (K7VE) will be joining us to discuss the world of digital communications on the ham bands. Here’s your chance to share your experiences with digital modes, find out about what’s new in digital comms, and find out how to participate in the ARDC grant program and possibly fund the next big thing for the digital ham.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 13 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

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Watching A Boat Get Welded Together Is Workshop ASMR

July 11, 2022 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

If you’ve been on the Internet long enough to know about Hackaday, we’ll wager you’re familiar with the concept of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) — a tingling sensation in the scalp that’s said to be triggered by certain auditory stimuli. There are countless videos on YouTube that promise to give you “the tingles” using everything from feather dusters to overly starched shirts, but for us, the tool of choice is apparently a Lincoln Electric Magnum PRO 100SG spool gun in the hands of [Bob].

You’ll want a friend to help wrangle the panels.

Admittedly we can’t promise the latest Making Stuff video will induce a euphoric physical sensation for all viewers, but at the very least, we think you’ll agree that watching [Bob] and his brother methodically welding together the twelve foot hull of what will eventually be a custom jet boat is strangely relaxing.

While we usually associate [Bob] with scratch builds, this time he’s actually working his way through a commercial kit. Sold by Jet Stream Adventure Boats, the kit includes the pre-cut aluminum panels that make up the hull, stringers, and top deck — niceties like a windshield and seats are offered as extras. The engine and jet drive need to be salvaged from an existing personal watercraft (PWC), but that will have to wait for a future video. For now, there’s a boat-load (get it?) of tack welding to be done.

The build process looks to go pretty smoothly, except for when they attempt to put the bow of the boat together. Unable to get the two side panels to meet properly, [Bob] eventually has to contact the manufacturer. After some back and forth, it turns out that a bit must have broken on the CNC when the hull panel went through, as a key cut was made nearly 8 inches (20 cm) too short. He was able to complete the cut with a jigsaw and continue on with the build, but we’re still scratching our heads at how this wasn’t caught before it got shipped out.

It won’t be the first homemade boat we’ve covered, but given [Bob]’s attention to detail, we’re particularly excited to see how this one develops in future videos. Especially since he’s ~~foolishly~~ bravely asked the commenters to come up with a name for his new craft.

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NASA’s Flying Telescope Is Winding Down Operations

July 11, 2022 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is arguably the best known and most successful observatory in history, delivering unprecedented images that have tantalized the public and astronomers alike for more than 30 years. But even so, there’s nothing particularly special about Hubble. Ultimately it’s just a large optical telescope which has the benefit of being in space rather than on Earth’s surface. In fact, it’s long been believed that Hubble is not dissimilar from contemporary spy satellites operated by the National Reconnaissance Office — it’s just pointed in a different direction.

There are however some truly unique instruments in NASA’s observational arsenal, and though they might not have the name recognition of the Hubble or James Webb Space Telescopes, they still represent incredible feats of engineering. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an airborne infrared telescope built into a retired airliner that is truly one-of-a-kind.

Unfortunately this unique aerial telescope also happens to be exceptionally expensive to operate; with an annual operating cost of approximately $85 million, it’s one of the agency’s most expensive ongoing astrophysics missions. After twelve years of observations, NASA and their partners at the German Aerospace Center have decided to end the SOFIA program after its current mission concludes in September.

With the telescope so close to making its final observations, it seems a good time to look back at this incredible program and why the US and German space centers decided it was time to put SOFIA back in the hangar.

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Injecting A Bit Of Rust Via DLL

July 11, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 16 Comments

Ever been frustrated that a software package was missing a feature you want? In the best-case scenario, the software would be open source and you could just tweak the code and rebuild. But in many cases, the software is closed-source. In the case of [Faster than lime], he found a SNES emulator (Snes9X) that didn’t support controllers to showcase the technique. So with a little bit of Rust, he wrote some code that could be injected into the emulator via DLL injection.

It’s a fantastic tutorial that shows the technique. He starts by creating a Rust project that uses the DLL-Syringe crate (the rust version of dependency management). This crate does much of the heavy lifting involved with injecting a DLL into a target process. The rest of the journey is an excellent process of going through the Windows documentation and implementing the features. The DLL just reads the controller and then sends the right input to the program. In the end, [Faster than lime] has a great injected DLL and we have a wonderful time learning about Rust and debugging in an injection environment!

It’s been a while since we last covered DLL injection, and it’s nice to see how the process has evolved. Video after the break.

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A Custom Outdoor Cooking Station For City Life

July 11, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 13 Comments

[shoobs] relocated from Australia to Luxembourg, and was really missing the whole outdoor cooking scene that is apparently very common in those parts. Now living in a modest apartment building in the city, he had no easy way to recreate some of his favorite cooking methods — specifically that of Wok Hei (breath of a wok) — the art of Cantonese stir-frying which uses searing heat and a lot of flinging around of the food to mix it up with the burning oil. This results in a complex set of reactions utilizing smoking, caramelization, and Maillard reactions to produce the classic Cantonese smoky flavor. Not wanting an off-the-shelf solution [shoobs] took it on himself to build a balcony cooking station capable of the temperatures needed for Wok Hei, and documented it for our viewing pleasure.

Nice custom laser cut details on the regulator mounting

The build started with sourcing a free-standing burner unit from Alibaba, which proved to be a little less powerful (at 30 kW) than ideal, but still sufficient. After locating a matching regulator and pressure gauge capable of the needed flow rate to feed the hungry burner, the next task was to construct a sturdy enough bench to mount it all. This was constructed from Douglas fir slabs, butt-jointed using a 3D printed drilling jig for ease of construction.

Using a flatbed scanner, the existing burner base was digitized in order to make a model suitable for laser-cutting a new mounting plate from steel. [Shoobs] isn’t lucky enough to have access to a metal-capable laser cutter — he sent his cad files off to a cutting service.

A second plate was mounted below with a sufficient gap above the bench to act as a heat shield. This keeps the wooden worktop safe from the heat. Whilst he was laser cutting steel, [shoobs] took the opportunity to design a few other custom parts to mount the regulator and other bits, because, why wouldn’t you? We reckon the end result is pretty nice, in a minimalist and understated way.

We’re no strangers to neat cooking hacks ’round these parts, here’s a nice double-sausage burner for those emergency situations and if you need a custom BBQ burner, then look no further.

Grok Rust In A Flash

July 10, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 19 Comments

Here at Hackaday, we are big proponents of using the best tool for the job (or making your own tool if required). But when all you know how to use is Java, everything looks object-oriented. Bad jokes aside, it is important to have many tools at your disposal to allow you to choose wisely. Why not spend a few minutes with [No Boilerplate] and understand the basics of Rust?

The focus of the video is to go through as much Rust as possible and teach you how to read it. The idea is that rather than work your way from basic concepts, [No Boilerplate] will go over the vast majority of what you’ll see in a Rust-based program. Whether you’re coming from an object-oriented, functional, or just plain C-based background; you’ll feel comfortable since he makes an effort to compare to what you already know. Some of Rust’s more unique features are covered such as mutability, scope, matching, and strings. However, lifetimes, closures, and traits were left out to keep the video short. These topics are covered in an excellent blog post by [Faster than lime] which this video was based on.

What isn’t discussed is running Rust in a no-std environment like a PIC32. Rust has seen exciting development over the past few years with the Linux kernel getting rusty and the compiler getting continually better. Video after the break.

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Venting Your PC Outside

July 10, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 83 Comments

As the power requirements of CPUs and GPUs in modern gaming machines continue to rise, they are quickly becoming more and more of a space heater that happens to play games. If you’re using your PC in a tight space with a door shut, you might find the temperature in your office rising relatively rapidly. Some solutions to this include fans, window AC units, or moving the computer somewhere else and routing cables back to the office. The fine folks at [Linus Tech Tips] tried something a little out of the box by putting the whole computer in a box.

We don’t usually cover [Linus Tech Tips] here at Hackaday, but we thought the approach was somewhat novel. PC cases have many exhaust fans and holes, so it’s hard to extract the hot air from a single point. So after purchasing a comically large but cheapish “plant” growing tent, they could enclose the PC and remove the heat through some insulated ducting. A laser-cut adapter plate and 3d printed hose connector allowed the hose to sit in the window to vent outside. An inline fan pulls all the needed air from the tent to the outside. Ultimately, the temperature in the room stayed chill while some benchmarks were running, but there was speculation that the fan was pulling in air from the rest of the apartment to vent the PC’s heat. We’d love to see a more closed system with a heat exchanger to the outside.

Perhaps they can borrow [Diy Perks]’s bellow PC build and connect the hose right to it, getting rid of the tent. Video after the break.

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