All The Sticky Labels You Could Ever Need: No DRM, Just Masking Tape

May 9, 2022 by 58 Comments

Printable sticky labels are a marvelous innovation, but sadly also one beset by a variety of competing offerings, and more recently attempts by manufacturers to impose DRM on their media. Fortunately they don’t have to rely on expensive printers or proprietary rolls of stickies, as [michimartini] demonstrates with the masking tape plotter. It’s a tiny pen plotter that writes your label onto the tape.

At its heart is the popular grbl G-code to motion parser, and its mechanism uses the lead screw axis from a DVD drive. Not for this project simply another hacked-apart drive mechanism though, for it has a custom-designed carriage for the axis. It’s 3D printed, and to ensure the least friction possible for a pen using only its weight to keep contact with the tape it was heated up once assembled to ensure all parts had a chance to bed in. Meanwhile the tape roll forming the X axis is turned directly by a standard stepper motor.

We like this project a lot, and look forward to any refinements to the idea. Meanwhile, it’s not the first custom label printer we’ve shown you.

A Raspberry Pi As An Offboard Display Adapter

May 9, 2022 by 6 Comments

The humble USB-C port has brought us so many advantages over its USB ancestors, one of which is as a handy display output for laptops. Simply add an inexpensive adapter and you can hook up everything from a mobile phone upwards to an HDMI display or projector. There’s a snag though, merely having USB-C is not enough as the device has to support the display feature. It’s a problem [Gunnar Wolf] had to face with a Lenovo ARM laptop, and his solution is unexpected. Instead of an adapter, he’s used a Raspberry Pi 3 and some software tricks.

The obvious route to an off-board Pi mirroring onboard video is to use VNC, which he tried but found wanting due to lagginess. As a user of the Wayland compositor he found he could instead use wf-recorder and send its output to a stream, and thus capture his screen in a way that the Pi could read over the network. It’s not quite as convenient a solution as a pure-hardware adapter, but at least it allowed him to share the screen.

It’s surprising how often we find projects needing to mirror the display of a computer using what hardware is to hand, at least this one is more elegant than some others.

Autogyro Models Are Hard — Even For [Peter Sripol]

May 9, 2022 by 12 Comments

Aviation consists of two major groups. Airplane enthusiasts, and helicopter enthusiasts. The two groups rarely get along, each extolling the virtues of their chosen craft. Somewhere in between are autogyro folks. People who like vehicles that blend the best (or worst) of both airplanes and helicopters. Aviation master [Peter Sripol] has dipped his toes into the autogyro world, but not without some trouble.

Autogyros are propelled by a propeller, like a plane. They also have a tail section that works similar to a fixed-wing aircraft. That’s where the similarities end though. Lift for autogyros comes in the form of a rotating set of blades, much like a helicopter. Autogyro rotors aren’t powered during flight. They utilize autorotation. The blades freewheel, spun by the air as the craft moves forward.

[Peter] recently got his hands on a full-scale autogyro. So it made sense to build a model to help learn to fly. This isn’t [Peter’s] first attempt with autogyro models. He’s built a few in the past, with limited success. This time he started from scratch and ran into even more problems!

Continue reading “Autogyro Models Are Hard — Even For [Peter Sripol]” →

How A Smartphone Is Made, In Eight “Easy” Blocks

May 9, 2022 by 21 Comments

The smartphone represents one of the most significant shifts in our world. In less than thirteen years, we went from some people owning a dumb phone to the majority of the planet having a smartphone (~83.7% as of 2022, according to Statista). There are very few things that a larger percentage of people on this planet have. Not clean water, not housing, not even food.

How does a smartphone work? Most people have no idea; they are insanely complicated devices. However, you can break them down into eight submodules, each of which is merely complex. What makes them work is that each of these components can be made small, at massive economies of scale, and are tightly integrated, allowing easy assembly.

So without further ado, the fundamental eight building blocks of the modern cellphone are: the application processor, the baseband processor, a SIM card, the RF processor, sensors, a display, cameras & lenses, and power management. Let’s have a look at them all, and how they fit together.

Continue reading “How A Smartphone Is Made, In Eight “Easy” Blocks” →

Verbot Goes To The Dark Side

May 9, 2022 by 14 Comments

What happens to old, neglected 1980s toy robots? According to the [Randi Rain], they turn to the dark side! Way back in the ’80s, Tomy had an entire line of robots — from keychain wind-up toys to rolling, talking machines almost 2 feet tall. Tucked into the middle of this line was Verbot. Verbot’s claim to fame is that it is a voice-controlled robot. More than that, it was speaker-dependent. Train the robot with commands like “go forward” and then watch as it responds to your every command.

As you might guess, the speech recognition wasn’t great by today’s standards. Recognition was handled by a Microcontroller — a Mitsubishi product that was possibly a mask programmed 8051 variant. Pretty novel for an 80s toy — in fact, there’s a patent for it.

Continue reading “Verbot Goes To The Dark Side” →

Will We Ever Shake The Polaroid Picture?

May 9, 2022 by 47 Comments

Today, most of us carry supercomputers in our pockets that happen to also take instantly-viewable pictures.This is something that even the dumbest phones do, meaning that we can reasonably draw the conclusion that photographic capability has become a basic feature of everyday carry, a necessity of 21st century life.

Despite the unwashed masses of just-plain-bad photographs clouding the digital landscape, photography itself remains as important as ever so we can retain and disseminate information as history unfolds. In a sense, the more instant, the better — unless it comes at the cost of image quality. The invention of photography is on par with the printing press or with language itself in that all three allow us to communicate within our own time as well as preserve The Way Things Were in frozen silence. And no invention made vivid preservation more convenient than the instant camera.

Continue reading “Will We Ever Shake The Polaroid Picture?” →

Looking Forward To EMF Camp: Teasing Us With A Schedule

May 9, 2022 by 5 Comments

As we gear up for a summer in the field, or more accurately in a series of fields, it’s time to turn our attention towards Eastnor Castle in the Western English county of Herefordshire, venue for the upcoming Electromagnetic Field hacker camp. Sadly we’ve got no badge to tease you with, but they’ve released a list of the talks that will fill their schedule. There are so many to choose from, we can only mention a few in this article.

We’ll certainly be taking the time to watch [Russell Couper] describe his electric motorcycle project. He’s no stranger to unusual bike builds, having given us a diesel machine at EMF 2016. Then of course there’s our own [Dave Rountree], who will be hacking the radio spectrum with GNU Radio. Sure to be an interesting talk.

One feature of this camp we’re very interested in will be CuTEL, a wired copper telephone network on the field. We’ll be taking along our trusty GPO 746 to be part of it of course, but for those without one, there’s [Matthew Harrold]’s talk on building a copper telephone network in a field.

Our cursory scan of the list finishes up with [Alistair MacDonald] on how not to start a hackerspace. We’ve seen our fair share of hackerspace drama over the years, so whether this one causes pain for ex-hackerspace-directors or not, it promises to be informative for anyone in the hackerspace world.

At the time of writing there are still some EMF tickets for sale, so if the beginning of your June is free we can heartily recommend it. To get a flavour of the event, read our 2018 review.