Quantum Sensor Uses Synthetic Diamond

August 18, 2024 by 3 Comments

Diamonds are nearly perfect crystals, but not totally perfect. The defects in these crystals give the stones their characteristic colors. But one type of defect, the NV — nitrogen-vacancy — center, can hold a particular spin, and you can change that spin with the correct application of energy. [Asianometry] explains why this is important in the video below.

Interestingly, even at room temperature, an NV center stays stable for a long time. Even more importantly, you can measure the spin nondestructively by detecting light emissions from the center.

Continue reading “Quantum Sensor Uses Synthetic Diamond” →

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: August 18, 2024

August 18, 2024 by 4 Comments

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in a slow-motion ballet of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to tootle their horn trumpets melodiously if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: August 18, 2024” →

Zero-dimensional PONG game built on a perfboard.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Coming At Ya With Zero-Dimensional PONG

August 18, 2024 by 5 Comments

A decade is a long time to carry around a project idea in your head. Fortunately, the Tiny Games Contest happens to coincide with [Senile Data Systems]’s getting back into ATMega programming, so they can finally make their zero-dimensional PONG dreams come true (and have the chance at great prizes, too, of course).

If you don’t already get what’s going on here, zero-dimensional PONG takes 1D PONG and turns it on the short side. Imagine the light coming toward you, then moving away toward your opponent, and you have the basic idea. So, how is this done? Pulse-width modulation controls the brightness of the LED, and, well, you have to be pretty fast, although there is a small margin for the inevitable error.

In the video after the break, you can watch [SDS] play themselves using a red/green LED. Player one must press the button when red is fully lit and green is off, and player two goes when green is fully lit and red is off. The cool thing is that this game uses sockets, so it can use any LED. There are nine difficulty levels to control the PWM speed,  so one can really test one’s reaction time.

If you want to build one of these, you’ll need an ATtiny2313 or something similar, a couple of buttons, a display, and the optional but fun buzzer. The well-commented code is available through [Senile Data Systems]’s site.

Continue reading “2024 Tiny Games Contest: Coming At Ya With Zero-Dimensional PONG” →

Categorizing Steel

August 18, 2024 by 24 Comments

In the movie Conan the Barbarian, we hear a great deal about “the riddle of steel.” We are never told exactly what that riddle is, but in modern times, it might be: What’s the difference between 4150 and 1020 steel? If you’ve been around a machine shop, you’ve probably heard the AISI/SAE numbers, but if you didn’t know what they mean, [Jason Lonon] can help. The video below covers what the grade numbers mean in detail.

The four digits are actually two separate two-digit numbers. Sometimes, there will be five digits, in which case it is a two-digit number followed by a three-digit number. The first two digits tell you the actual type of steel. For example, 10 is ordinary steel, while 41 is chromium molybdenum steel. The last two or three digits indicate how much carbon is in the steel. If that number is, say, 40, then the steel contains approximately 0.40% carbon.

Continue reading “Categorizing Steel” →

Retrotechtacular: Powerline Sagging And Stringing In The 1950s

August 17, 2024 by 13 Comments

While high-voltage transmission lines are probably the most visible components of the electrical grid, they’re certainly among the least appreciated. They go largely unnoticed by the general public — quick, name the power line closest to you right now — at least until a new one is proposed, causing the NIMBYs and BANANAs to come out in force. To add insult to injury, those who do notice the megastructures that make modern life possible rarely take a moment to appreciate the engineering that goes into stringing up hundreds of miles of cable and making sure it stays up.

Not so the Bonneville Power Administration, the New Deal-era federal agency formed to exploit the hydroelectric abundance of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, which produced this 1950 gem detailing the stringing and sagging of power lines. Unsurprisingly, the many projects needed to wire together the often remote dams to the widely distributed population centers in an area that was only just starting to see growth began in the BPA’s offices, where teams of engineers hunched over desks worked out the best routes. Paper, pencil, and slide rules were the tools of the trade, along with an interesting gadget called a conductor sag template, a hardware implementation of the catenary equation that allowed the “sagger” to determine the height of each tower. The conductors, either steel-cored aluminum or pure copper, were also meticulously selected based on tensile strength, expected wind and ice loading, and the electrical load the line was expected to carry.

Once the engineers had their say, the hard work of physically stringing the wires began out in the field. One suspects that the work today is much the same as it was almost eighty years ago, save for much more stringent health and safety regulations. The prowess needed to transfer the wires from lifting sheaves to the insulators is something to behold, and the courage required to work from ladders hanging from wires at certain death heights is something to behold. But to our mind, the real heroes were the logistics fellows, who determined how much wire was needed for each span and exactly where to stage the reels. It’s worth sparing a moment’s thought for the daring photographer who captured all this action, likely with little more than a leather belt and hemp rope for safety.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Powerline Sagging And Stringing In The 1950s” →

Spy Tech: Making Microdots

August 17, 2024 by 17 Comments

It isn’t just a spy movie trope: secret messages often show up as microdots. [The Thought Emporium] explores the history of microdots and even made a few, which turned out to be — to quote the video you can see below — “both easier than you might think, and yet also harder in other ways.”

If you want to hide a secret message, you really have two problems. The first is actually encoding the message so only the recipient can read it. However, in many cases, you also want the existence of the message to be secret. After all, if an enemy spy sees you with a folder of encrypted documents, your cover is blown even if they don’t know what the documents say.

Today, steganography techniques let you hide messages in innocent-looking images or data files. However, for many years, microdots were the gold standard for hiding secret messages and clandestine photographs. The microdots are typically no bigger than a millimeter to make them easy to hide in plain sight.

Continue reading “Spy Tech: Making Microdots” →

40,000 FPS Omega camera captures Olympic photo-finish

Olympic Sprint Decided By 40,000 FPS Photo Finish

August 17, 2024 by 55 Comments

Advanced technology played a crucial role in determining the winner of the men’s 100-meter final at the Paris 2024 Olympics. In a historically close race, American sprinter Noah Lyles narrowly edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by just five-thousandths of a second. The final decision relied on an image captured by an Omega photo finish camera that shoots an astonishing 40,000 frames per second.

This cutting-edge technology, originally reported by PetaPixel, ensured the accuracy of the result in a race where both athletes recorded a time of 9.78 seconds. If SmartThings’ shot pourer from the 2012 Olympics were still around, it could once again fulfill its intended role of celebrating US medals.

Omega, the Olympics’ official timekeeper for decades, has continually innovated to enhance performance measurement. The Omega Scan ‘O’ Vision Ultimate, the camera used for this photo finish, is a significant upgrade from its 10,000 frames per second predecessor. The new system captures four times as many frames per second and offers higher resolution, providing a detailed view of the moment each runner’s torso touches the finish line. This level of detail was crucial in determining that Lyles’ torso touched the line first, securing his gold medal.

This camera is part of Omega’s broader technological advancements for the Paris 2024 Olympics, which include advanced Computer Vision systems utilizing AI and high-definition cameras to track athletes in real-time. For a closer look at how technology decided this historic race, watch the video by Eurosport that captured the event.

Continue reading “Olympic Sprint Decided By 40,000 FPS Photo Finish” →