One Of The Largest Large Format Cameras You Will Ever Have Seen

July 31, 2021 by Jenny List 19 Comments

When fate lands a very high quality lens in front of you, what do you do with it? If you are [Tim Hamilton], the solution is obvious. Use it in a huge large-format camera.

The lens came from a newspaper magnifier made redundant by digitalisation and used as a paperweight. It’s an extremely high quality piece of optical equipment so seeing it wasted in this way was a source of distress. So after characterising it an enormous scaled-up box and bellows was constructed, and set upon a suitably substantial wheeled tripod.

Instead of a huge piece of film or some unobtainable giant electronic sensor, the image is projected onto a large screen at the rear of the camera. A modern digital camera is mounted inside the box just beneath the lens and photographs the screen, resulting in the feel of the largest of large format cameras with the convenience of a digital format. The resulting images have a special quality to them that recalls pictures from the past, and definitely makes the camera a special if slightly inconvenient device.

This may be one of the larger cameras we’ve featured, but it’s not the first that uses a similar technique.

British Big Rigs Are About To Go Green

July 31, 2021 by Jenny List 78 Comments

An increasing fact of life over the coming years will be the decarbonisation of our transport networks, for which a variety of competing solutions are being touted. Railways, trucks, cars, and planes will all be affected by this move away from fossil fuels, and while sectors such as passenger cars are making great strides towards electric drive, there remain some technical hurdles elsewhere such as with heavy road freight. To help inform the future of road transport policy in the UK then, the British government are financing a series of trials for transportation modes that don’t use internal combustion. These will include a battery-electric fleet for the National Health Service and a hydrogen-powered fleet in Scotland, as well as a trial of the same overhead-wire system previously given an outing in Germany, that will result in the electrification of a 12.4 mile section of the M180 motorway in Lincolnshire.

We’ve written about the overhead electrification project in Germany in the past and subjected it to a back-of-envelope calculation that suggested the total costs for a country such as the UK might be surprisingly affordable. The M180 is something of a backwater in the UK motorway network though, so it will be interesting to see how they approach the problem of finding real-world loads for their tests that ply such a short and isolated route. We’d expect the final picture to include all three technologies in some form, which can only be a good thing if it increases the available electric and hydrogen infrastructure. We’ll follow this story, though sadly we may not be able to blag a cab ride on the M180 in one of the trucks.

The Man-Machine

July 31, 2021 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

This week we saw a couple DIY tools for small-run manufacturing at home that help make your life easier if you’re climbing out of the happy bucket and into the pit of despair — when you’re making enough of the item that it’s not fun any more, but you still don’t have the volume to leave the manufacturing to someone else.

The first was an automatic through-hole soldering machine made from a 3D printer. This actually makes sense even if you’re getting boards assembled for you, because through-hole pads are a lot more expensive than SMT parts, and they usually charge per pin. Put a 2×20 pin header on your project, and it can end up costing a lot. Or you can robotificate the solution.

This week’s second solution really caught my eye. PnPassist is machine that turns your PCB around, locates a laser crosshair over the next SMT piece that you need to place, and even has an OLED screen that tells you what to put there. There are many great mechanical design choices here, but what really drew my attention is how well this machine fills a gap between manual and fully automatic pick-and-place.

I know you hate looking back and forth between the board and the schematic or parts list, trying to find just where Q23 is on the darn board, or looking up resistor values. With PnPassist, you still have to do the placing, but with machine guidance. If you don’t have the money or the space for a fully automatic PnP, this is an obvious win, but also for short runs when loading up the reels takes more time than populating the board, this could be a huge win.

I love this kind of human-capability-enhancing machine, and I’m always happy to see a design like this. It reminds me of the very clever Shaper Origin, or even just this handy automatic XY table for drilling many precise holes. In all these cases, there’s some part of the problem that would be hard to solve, require extremely bulky or expensive machinery, or can just be more simply accomplished by a meatbag. But combining machine precision with the human element produces something more than the sum of the parts.

What’s your favorite human-enhancing tool?

A LiPo Cell Makes A 4AA Pack For A GameBoy

July 31, 2021 by Jenny List 14 Comments

Electronic toys of yesteryear were fantastic objects of desire, but came with the fatal flaw of requiring batteries. Batteries that cost more than the average youngster’s pocket money and for which the pestered parent were usually unwilling to fork out every couple of days to support an incessant playing habit. It’s something [Sen] has addressed for the Nintendo Game Boy, and rather than cutting the device up and soldering wires, the result is a unit that neatly slots into the existing 4AA battery enclosure.

The Nintendo rechargable Game Boy pack. — Much more convenient than Nintendo’s own effort!

Electrically it’s a simple case of wiring up an Adafruit module and a pouch cell, but that’s not the essence of the job in this case. Instead a huge quantity of work and iteration has gone into CAD design to the perfect-fitting pack. It’s sure to be a boon for today’s Game Boy player, but much more than that it should be of interest to owners of far more devices that take four AA cells. Most of us probably keep a few packs of AAs for just those moments, perhaps meanwhile something like this could be a handy thing to have instead.

More traditional conversions resort to extreme measures, as with this Game Boy Color.

Developing The First ICs In Orbit

July 31, 2021 by Jenny List 19 Comments

Over six decades of integrated circuit production we’ve become used to their extreme reliability and performance for a very reasonable price. But what about those first integrated circuits from the early 1960s? Commercial integrated circuits appeared in 1961, and recently Texas Instruments published a fascinating retrospective on the development of their first few digital ICs.

TI’s original IC product on the market was the SN502, a transistor flip-flop that debuted at $450 (about $4100 today), which caught the interest of NASA engineers who asked for logic functions with a higher performance level. The response was the development of the 51 series of logic chips, whose innovation included on-chip interconnects replacing the hand interconnects of the SN502. Their RCTL logic gave enough performance and reliability for NASA to use, and in late 1963 the Explorer 18 craft carried a telemetry system using the SN510 and SN514 chips into orbit. 52 and 53 series chips quickly followed, then in 1964 the 54 series TTL chips which along with their plastic-encapsulated 74 series equivalents are still available today.

Considering that in 1961 the bleeding edge of integrated circuit logic technology was a two-transistor chip with hand interconnects, it seems scarcely conceivable that by ten years later in 1971 the art had advanced to the point at which the first commercially available microprocessors would be produced. It’s unlikely that many of us will stumble upon any of the three-figure SN1-series logic chips, but to read about them is a fascinating reminder of this pivotal moment in the history of electronics.

Header: Mister rf, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Build That Catan Board You Designed

July 30, 2021 by Rich Hawkes 5 Comments

A couple of months ago, we posted about the one day design [Sam March] did of an electronic Settlers of Catan board. Now he’s released a video with the second half. His first video was about the design of the game, specifically the electronic components. In this video, [Sam] takes us through the physical build of the board.

A couple of visits to his local maker space allows him to cut both the wooden parts of the board, as well as the acrylic hexes that go on top of each piece. Even with a CNC machine, there’s still some clean-up that needs to be done. After cleaning up the edges of the wood with a chisel and staining it, it’s time to put the circuit boards in, wire them up and program them. The build includes a dice roller – pushing a button shows the number rolled by lighting up the tiles in the form of the rolled number. The final touch is having some friends over to actually play the game.

Between the design process in the last article and the build process in this one, we get a good look at the way [Sam] designs things from beginning to finished product. Take a look at our previous article on [Sam]’s design as well as some other Catan articles.

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Rare Radio Receiver Teardown

July 30, 2021 by Al Williams 15 Comments

We’ll admit we haven’t heard of the AGS-38, it reminds us of the shortwave receivers of our youth, and it looks like many that were made “white label” by more established (and often Japanese) companies. [Jeff] found a nice example of this Canadian radio and takes it apart for our viewing pleasure. He also found it was very similar to a Layfayette receiver, also made in Japan, confirming our suspicions.

The radio looks very similar to an Eico of the same era — around the 1960s. With seven tubes, radios like this would soon be replaced by transistorized versions.

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