Counting Down To The Final Atlas Rocket

October 4, 2021 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

The Atlas family of rockets have been a mainstay of America’s space program since the dawn of the Space Age, when unused SM-65 Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were refurbished and assigned more peaceful pursuits. Rather than lobbing thermonuclear warheads towards the Soviets, these former weapons of war carried the first American astronauts into orbit, helped build the satellite constellations that our modern way of life depends on, and expanded our knowledge of the solar system and beyond.

Naturally, the Atlas V that’s flying today looks nothing like the squat stainless steel rocket that carried John Glenn to orbit in 1962. Aerospace technology has evolved by leaps and bounds over the last 60 years, but by carrying over the lessons learned from each generation, the modern Atlas has become one of the most reliable orbital boosters ever flown. Since its introduction in 2002, the Atlas V has maintained an impeccable 100% success rate over 85 missions.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end. After more than 600 launches, United Launch Alliance (ULA) has announced that the final mission to fly on an Atlas has been booked. Between now and the end of the decade, ULA will fly 28 more missions on this legendary booster. By the time the last one leaves the pad the company plans to have fully transitioned to their new Vulcan booster, with the first flights of this next-generation vehicle currently scheduled for 2022.

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Flame-Spitting Dragon Head Heats Up Halloween

October 4, 2021 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

Halloween is looming, and [Jonathan Gleich] decided that an ideal centerpiece would be a flame-spitting dragon’s head. It started with an economical wall-mount dragon’s head, combined with a variety of off-the-shelf components to become something greater.

Dragon head with arc ignitor lit — Spark from high-voltage ignitor, right at the torch opening.

The fire comes from a kind of propane torch sold as a weed killer set, which looks a little like a miniature tiger torch. The flow of propane is limited by a regulator (which keeps the flame short and fixed), and controlled with a gas-rated 12 V solenoid valve. Ignition is done with the help of a spark igniter that fires up on demand, fed by a high-voltage ignition coil. The two combine at the Dragon’s mouth, where the flame originates, but the electrical components are otherwise isolated from the gas elements as much as possible.

The dragon head is made of acrylic, and if exposed to enough heat acrylic will first melt, then burn. To help avoid a meltdown, the dragon breathes fire only intermittently. [Jonathan] also gave the mouth area a heat-resistant barrier made from generous layers of flame-blocking mortar and sealants from the hardware store. The finishing touch comes in the form of bright red LEDs in the eyes, which give the head a bit more life.

Watch the ignitor in action and see the head spewing flames in the two short videos embedded below. The head should make for some good pictures come Halloween, and is a good example of how repurposing off-the-shelf items can sometimes be just what is needed for a project.

Interested in something smaller, but still fiery? Check out this pet fire-breathing dragon project for all your robotic animal companion needs. Continue reading “Flame-Spitting Dragon Head Heats Up Halloween” →

This Audio Mixer Is A Eurorack

October 4, 2021 by Jenny List 14 Comments

Music making and DJing have both become arts predominantly pursued in a computer, as the mighty USB interface has subsumed audio, MIDI, and even DJ turntable interface controllers. There was a time though when an indispensable part of any aspiring performer’s equipment would have been an analog mixer, a device for buffering and combining multiple analog audio signals into a single whole. A mixer is still a useful device though, and [Sam Kent] has produced a very nice one that takes the form of a set of Eurorack modules made from PCB material. There are two types of modules, the main channel module which you can think of as the master module, and a series of isolator modules that handle the individual inputs.

Mixer preferences are as individual as each user, so for example where we’d expect sliders he’s used rotary potentiometers, and for us placing the master channel on the left-hand side is unfamiliar. But that’s the beauty of a modular design, there’s nothing to stop anyone building one of these to simply configure it as they wish. We notice that for a mixer described as for DJs there’s no RIAA preamp for the turntable fans, but it’s not impossible to fix with an off-board preamp. Otherwise, we like it and have a sudden hankering for it to be 1992 again with a pair of Technics SL1200s and a room full of people.

Designing a mixer, even a simple one, isn’t easy. Our own [Lewin Day] wrote a retrospective of his experiences with one.

A man riding a buggy pulled by a wooden contraption

Maakrapu Is A Buggy Drawn By A Five-Legged Beast

October 3, 2021 by Robin Kearey 18 Comments

The steampunk aesthetic can take on many forms, and while pipes, valves, and boilers can look great, having complicated machinery with lots of moving parts really makes your project shine. A team of steampunk enthusiasts over at Tampere Hacklab did this by building a vehicle named Maakrapu. It’s a two-wheeled buggy that looks like it’s being pulled forward by some kind of five-legged creature. The extremely smooth motion of its legs conjures up images of lobsters or crabs (“Maakrapu” means “land crab” in Finnish), and is also reminiscent of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeesten.

The wooden legs are linked together with a metal crankshaft, which was welded together from plasma-cut parts. A steering wheel is included to orient the legs in the direction of travel, although the actual steering of the vehicle is done through differential braking. An earlier version had no propulsion and was meant for downhill riding only, but this latest model comes with an electric motor and a battery, making it actually somewhat useful as an urban runabout.

The video embedded below shows the design of the Maakrapu as well as a long drive from the center of Tampere back to the Hacklab. If you like vehicles with lots of little moving legs like this, check out the Strandbeest Bicycle. For a more literal “steam”-punk experience, try this steam-powered bike.

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Telepresence Robot For “Doing The Rounds”

October 3, 2021 by Danie Conradie 10 Comments

When you are responsible for maintaining devices at a client’s location, software tools like remote desktop and SSH are great, but sometimes they are not enough. For some problems, you need to get eyes and hands on the device to figure out what’s going on and fix the problem. This is a challenge [Will Donaldson] from EDM Studio is all too familiar with. They develop and maintain interactive museum exhibits all over the world, so they created Omni, a modular telepresence robot for inspection, maintenance, and a variety of other tasks.

The Omni uses a set of three omni-wheels under its base, powered by DC geared motors with encoders, each controlled by a separate motor driver and Arduino Nano. A similar arrangement was used by Mark Rober for his domino art robot. The main controller is a Raspberry Pi 4 running ROS2 (Robot Operating System), which takes inputs from a 360 LIDAR sensor, high-quality camera module, and IMU.

All the components are mounted on a series of plates separated using threaded rods. This arrangement allows for maximum flexibility and space, especially the open-top plate, which has a grid of holes machined in to allow almost anything to be mounted. In this case, a robotic arm is mounted for manipulating the environment. Another neat feature is the charging station connector, consisting of two parallel metal strips on the outside of the robot.

Omni’s mission is very similar to that of Spot, the robotic dog from Boston Dynamics intended, among other things, for Industrial Inspection. What practical purposes would you use Omni for? Let us know in the comments below.

Hackaday Links: October 3, 2021

October 3, 2021 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

It’s one thing to speculate about what’s happening with the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, but it’s another to get an insider’s view on recent flight problems. As we previously reported, Ingenuity is starting to face a significant challenge, as a seasonal atmospheric pressure drop on Mars threatens to make the already rarefied air too thin to generate useful lift. Mission controllers tested the chopper at higher rotor speeds, and while that worked, later attempts to fly using that higher speed resulted in an abort. The article, written by one of the NASA/JPL engineers, is a deep dive into the problem, which occurred when Ingenuity sensed excessive wiggle in two of the servos controlling the rotor swashplate. The thought is that accumulated wear in the servos and linkages might be causing the problem; after all, Ingenuity has made thirteen flights so far, greatly exceeding the five flights originally programmed for it. Here’s hoping they can adapt and keep the helicopter flying, but whatever they do, it’ll have to wait a few weeks until Mars completes its conjunction and pops back out from behind the Sun.

With all the attention understandably paid to the recent 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, it’s easy to forget that barely a month after that day, a series of what appeared to be follow-on attacks started: the Anthrax Attacks. Members of Congress and media outlets were targeted via the mail with highly refined anthrax spores, leading to the deaths of five people, with dozens more injured and exposed to anthrax. IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article that goes into some of the technology that was rapidly deployed in an attempt to sanitize the mail, including electron beam and X-ray irradiation to kill any spores. The article also points out how this wasn’t the first time people were afraid of the mail; outbreaks of yellow fever in 1899 led to fumigation of the mail with sulfur, after perforating it with a wicked-looking paddle.

Attention PCB-design newbies — now’s your chance to learn the entire PCB design process from the ground up, with the guidance of industry professionals. TeachMePCB is back again this year, offering to teach you everything you need to know about properly laying out a PCB design in pretty much any EDA software you want. The course requires a two- to five-hour commitment every week for two months, after which you’ll have designed a PCB for a macropad using a Raspberry Pi Pico. The course facilitator is Mark Hughes from Royal Circuits, who did a great Hack Chat with us last year on PCB finishes. This seems like a great way to get up to speed on PCB design, so if you’re interested, act soon — 460 people are already signed up, and the deadline is October 10.

Some of us really love factory tours, no matter what the factory is making. All the better when the factory makes cool electronics stuff, and better still when it’s our friends at Adafruit showing us around their New York City digs. True, it’s a virtual tour, but it has pretty much become a virtual world over the last couple of years, and it’s still a great look inside the Adafruit factory. Hackaday got an in-person tour back in 2015, but we didn’t know their building used to be a Westinghouse radio factory. In fact, the whole area was once part of the famed “Radio Row” that every major city seemed to have from the 1920s to the 1960s. It’s good to get a look inside a real manufacturing operation, especially one that’s right in the heart of a city.

And finally, those with a fear of heights might want to avoid watching this fascinating film on the change-out of a TV transmitter antenna. The tower is over 1,500′ (450 m) tall, lofting an aging antenna over the flat Florida terrain. Most of the footage comes from body-mounted cameras on the riggers working the job, including the one very brave soul who climbed up the partially unbolted antenna to connect it to the Sikorsky S64 Skycrane helicopter. It’s a strange combination of a carefully planned and slowly executed ballet, punctuated by moments of frenetic activity and sheer terror. The mishap when releasing the load line after the new antenna was placed could easily have swept the whole rigging crew off the antenna, but luckily nobody was injured.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: October 3, 2021” →

Laser Theremin Turns Your Hand Swooshes Into Music

October 3, 2021 by Sonya Vasquez 10 Comments

In a world where smartphones have commoditized precision MEMS Sensors, the stage is set to reimagine clusters of these sensors as something totally different. That’s exactly what [chronopoulos] did, taking four proximity sensors and turning them into a custom gesture input sensor for sound generation. The result is Quadrant, a repurposable human-interface device that proves to be well-posed at detecting hand gestures and turning them into music.

At its core, Quadrant is a human interface device built around an STM32F0 and four VL6180X time-of-flight proximity sensors. The idea is to stream the measured distance data over as fast as possible from the device side and then transform it into musical interactions on the PC side. Computing distance takes some time, though, so [chronopoulos] does a pipelined read of the array to stream the data into the PC over USB at a respectable 30 Hz.

With the data collected on the PC side, there’s a spread of interactions that are possible. Want a laser harp? No problem, as [chronopoulos] shows how you can “pluck” the virtual strings. How about an orientation sensor? Simply spread your hand over the array and change the angle. Finally, four sensors will also let you detect sweeping gestures that pass over the array, like the swoosh of your hand from one side to the other. To get a sense of these interactions, jump to the video demos at the 2:15 mark after the break.

If you’re curious to dig into the project’s inner workings, [chronopoulos] has kindly put the firmware, schematics, and layout files on Github with a generous MIT License. He’s even released a companion paper [PDF] that details the math behind detecting these gestures. And finally, if you just want to cut to the chase and make music of your own, you can actually snag this one on Tindie too.

MEMs sensors are living a great second life outside our phones these days, and this project is another testament to the richness they offer for new project ideas. For more MEMs-sensor-based projects, have a look at this self-balancing robot and magic wand.

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