Gonzo Film Making With The Raspberry Pi

February 28, 2025 by 8 Comments

Gonzo journalism has been a hip thing since the 1970s or so, a way of covering a story in a compelling format with more subjectivity and less objectivity. The style has since been applied to all sorts of media, including film—and indeed, the makers of the Gonzo Pi.

The Gonzo Pi is a camera with an open source design, yes, but it’s also a lot more than that. It’s intended to be an entire platform for film-making, all in the one housing. Camera-wise, the design combines a Raspberry Pi with the requisite first-party High Quality Camera, and warps it up in a 3D printed housing. You can build it up with a viewfinder and whatever old-school C-mount or 8 mm film lenses you can lay your hands on.

Beyond that, there’s an editing platform baked in to the device. It’s not unlike the tools in so many social media apps these days. The idea of the Gonzo Pi is that rather than shooting a whole ton of footage and takes and poring over them in great detail later, instead, you run and gun with the device and edit as you go. You can shoot retakes as you need, and even dub in more audio as necessary as you compose your film on the hoof. It’s intended to change the way you make films by virtue of its unique compositional paradigm.

We’ve featured some neat homebrew cameras before, to be sure, but none that quite put the edit suite right in the box.

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Copying Commodore Data Tapes, 40 Years Late

February 28, 2025 by 41 Comments

Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy them with standard audio equipment. You’d need something like this 1560 datasette from [Jan].

The core problem with using Hi-Fi equipment to copy tapes storing data instead of audio is that data tapes need to be much more precise in order to avoid losses that might not be noticeable in an audio recording. In the 80s computer companies like Commodore built tape drives specifically for their computers, so [Jan]’s project uses two of these 1530 drives to build this “1560” datasette. (No working 1530 hardware was harmed in this build.) An inverter circuit in one tape deck is used to provide the signal to write the data to the other tape, reliably copying data from these data tapes in a way Hi-Fi never could.

[Jan] does lament not having something like this back in the 80s when the Commodore was in its heyday, but there’s still a dedicated retrocomputing scene for these machines that will get plenty of use out of projects like this. If you need to go the other direction in time, there are also interfaces that allow data tapes from old Commodores to be read by modern computers with USB.

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Bringing A Current Dumping Amplifier Back To Life

February 27, 2025 by 9 Comments

Over the years there have been many different audio amplifier designs which have found favour for a while and then been supplanted by newer ideas. One of them has crossed the bench of [Jazzy Jane], it’s a current dumping amplifier from the mid-1980s. A nicely-done home-made project on stripboard mounted on a wooden base board, it sports a power supply, RIAA pre-amp board, and the amplifier itself.

The current dumping amplifier is one that combines a small class A amplifier with a hefty class B one, and through feedback trickery uses the combination to remove the crossover distortion of the class B stage. It’s a simple yet elegant circuit with fewer parts than an equivalent class AB amplifier, and there was a time back in the day when it was all the rage. This one has an op-amp providing the class A part and a complimentary pair of Darlington pairs as the class B.

The video below the break shows the process of bringing the amp back to life, a process mostly concerned with the power supply. There are a set of tantalum capacitors which have failed, and the replacements she’s using turn out to have problems too. They’re a period part for a project of this age, but we might have been tempted to go for another capacitor type here.

The result is an unusual amplifier, brought back to life. You may have seen [Jane] feature here before, with her 1950s signal generator.

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A blue-gloved hand holds a glass plate with a small off-white rectangular prism approximately one quarter the area of a fingernail in cross-section.

AI Helps Researchers Discover New Structural Materials

February 27, 2025 by 18 Comments

Nanostructured metamaterials have shown a lot of promise in what they can do in the lab, but often have fatal stress concentration factors that limit their applications. Researchers have now found a strong, lightweight nanostructured carbon. [via BGR]

Using a multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MBO) algorithm trained on finite element analysis (FEA) datasets to identify the best candidate nanostructures, the researchers then brought the theoretical material to life with 2 photon polymerization (2PP) photolithography. The resulting “carbon nanolattices achieve the compressive strength of carbon steels (180–360 MPa) with the density of Styrofoam (125–215 kg m−3) which exceeds the specific strengths of equivalent low-density materials by over an order of magnitude.”

While you probably shouldn’t start getting investors for your space elevator startup just yet, lighter materials like this are promising for a lot of applications, most notably more conventional aviation where fuel (or energy) prices are a big constraint on operations. As with any lab results, more work is needed until we see this in the real world, but it is nice to know that superalloys and composites aren’t the end of the road for strong and lightweight materials.

We’ve seen AI help identify battery materials already and this seems to be one avenue where generative AI isn’t just about making embarrassing photos or making us less intelligent.

Convert A Cheap Tube Preamp Into A Headphone Amp With Jenny

February 27, 2025 by 21 Comments

Big-name tube amplifiers often don’t come cheap. Being the preserve of dedicated audiophiles, those delicate hi-fis put their glass components on show to tell you just how pricy they really ought to be. If you just want to dip your toe in the tube world, though, there’s a cheaper and more accessible way to get started. [Jenny List] shows us the way with her neat headphone amp build.

The build starts with an off-the-shelf preamp kit based around two common 6J1 tubes. These Chinese pentode valves come cheap and you can usually get yours hands on this kit for $10 or so. You can use the kit as-is if you just want a pre-amp, but it’s not suitable for headphone use out of the box due to its high-impedance output. That’s where [Jenny] steps in.

You can turn these kits into a pleasing headphone amp with the addition of a few choice components. As per the schematic on Github, a cheap transformer and a handful of passives will get it in the “good enough” range to work. The transformer isn’t perfect, and bass response is a compromise, but it’s a place to start your tinkering journey. Future work from [Jenny] will demonstrate using a MOSFET follower to achieve much the same result.

We’ve seen a great number of headphone amplifiers over the years, including one particularly attractive resin-encased example. Video after the break.

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A blue and white, 3D printed rose sits on a black surface with a fuzzy tan background behind it.

Thermorphs: Self-Folding 3D Prints

February 27, 2025 by 3 Comments

Prints separating from the build plate or warping when you don’t want them to is a headache for the additive manufacturer. [CNC Kitchen] walks us through a technique to use that warping to our advantage.

Based on a paper by researchers at the Morphing Matter Lab at UC Berkeley, [CNC Kitchen] wanted to try making 3D printed objects that could self-assemble when placed in hot water. Similar to a bimetal strip that you find in simple thermostats, the technique takes advantage of the stresses baked into the print and how they can relax when reaching the glass transition temperature of the polymer. By printing joints with PLA and TPU layers, you can guide the deformation in the direction you wish, and further tune the amount of stress in the part by changing the print speed of different sections.

[CNC Kitchen] found that Hilbert curve infill slows the printer down sufficiently to create relatively stress-free sections of a print to create flat sections which is an improvement over the original researchers’ all TPU flat sections with respect to rigidity. We’ve covered how to reduce warping in 3D prints, but now we can use those techniques in reverse to design self-assembling structures. These parts, being thermoplastic, can also be heated, reformed, and then exhibit shape memory when placed back into hot water. It’s very experimental, but we’re curious to see what sort of practical or artistic projects could be unlocked with this technique.

We’ve seen a few other interesting techniques with folded objects like laser cutter origami, some flat-to-folded 3D prints that might be interesting to try with this technique, and also folded hybrid mechanisms made with laser cutting and 3D printing.

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The rust language logo being branded onto a microcontroller housing

Esp-hal, A Stable-API ESP32 HAL Gift For Your Rust Code

February 27, 2025 by 14 Comments

Looking to write Rust on the ESP32? You’re in luck, a new challenger has entered the scene, looking to help you write code that lasts – [Scott Mabin] and the team from Espressif have brought us the esp-hal 1.0.0-beta. From a personal project to an Espressif-sponsored one to an effort under Espressif’s wing, [Scott] tells us about the arduous journey of bringing first-class Rust support to ESP32 chips, Xtensa and RISC-V alike.

In particular, esp-hal, with the hal part standing for Hardware Abstraction Layer, focuses on providing you with a stable API to access hardware, making sure your code can remain stable for years to come. For now, you get drivers for GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C, as well as a number of auxiliary features like time and SoC reset, more than enough for a large amount of projects we hackers build with a generic MCU in mind.

Next stop? WiFi and BLE support, of course, an ESP32 just doesn’t feel the same without these two. Rust is a fun and seriously promising language, and it’s a joy to use! So, if you have a wireless-less project in mind and you’re looking for a HAL, try out the esp-hal, it might just be exactly what you need.

If you’re looking for examples, here’s an STM32 touchpad project with Rust firmware, a PIC32 Rust blinky demo, and we’ve even featured larger projects like this ESP32 open-source (reverse-engineered) WiFi MAC stack being written in Rust. In case you missed it, we’ve introduced Rust to you a couple of times, even as far as 2015!