Polymer Networks Make Better 3D Prints

October 17, 2020 by Al Williams 5 Comments

Biological machines such as human and animal bodies are quite incredible. Your body seamlessly incorporates materials as different as muscle, bone, and tendons into an integrated whole. Now Texas A&M researchers think they can imitate nature using polymer networks that have a tunable stiffness. As a bonus, similar to biological devices, the material spontaneously self-heals.

The trick relies on the Diels-Alder reaction which is a cycloaddition reaction of a conjugated diene to an alkene. Diels-Alder-based polymers or DAPs will bond together even when they have different physical characteristics and they undergo a reversible reaction to heat which offers shape-memory and healing capability.

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Attempting To Generate Photorealistic Video With Neural Networks

October 17, 2020 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

Over the past decade, we’ve seen great strides made in the area of AI and neural networks. When trained appropriately, they can be coaxed into generating impressive output, whether it be in text, images, or simply in classifying objects. There’s also much fun to be had in pushing them outside their prescribed operating region, as [Jon Warlick] attempted recently.

[Jon]’s work began using NVIDIA’s GauGAN tool. It’s capable of generating pseudo-photorealistic images of landscapes from segmentation maps, where different colors of a 2D image represent things such as trees, dirt, or mountains, or water. After spending much time toying with the software, [Jon] decided to see if it could be pressed into service to generate video instead.

The GauGAN tool is only capable of taking in a single segmentation map, and outputting a single image, so [Jon] had to get creative. Experiments were undertaken wherein a video was generated and exported as individual frames, with these frames fed to GauGAN as individual segmentation maps. The output frames from GauGAN were then reassembled into a video again.

The results are somewhat psychedelic, as one would expect. GauGAN’s single image workflow means there is only coincidental relevance between consecutive frames, creating a wild, shifting visage. While it’s not a technique we expect to see used for serious purposes anytime soon, it’s a great experiment at seeing how far the technology can be pushed. It’s not the first time we’ve seen such technology used to create full motion video, either. Video after the break.

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Robot Travels The World

October 17, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

Around the World in 80 Days may have been an impressive feat of international travel in a world before widespread air transit. In modern times though, it’s not even necessary to leave your home in order to travel around the world. To that end, [Norbert] is attempting to accomplish this journey using a robot that will do the traveling for him as part of this year’s Virtual Maker Faire.

The robot is called the World Tour Robot, and the idea for it is to be small enough to ship to each new location around the world and be simple enough to be repaired easily. It is driven by two servo motors and controlled by a Raspberry Pi which also handles a small camera. Once at its location, it can connect to the internet and then be able to be controlled through a web interface. Locations are selected by application, and the robot is either handed off to the next person in the chain or put back in a box to be shipped.

The robot hasn’t left for its maiden voyage just yet but [Norbert] plans to get it started soon. Hopefully there are enough interesting places for this robot to explore on its trip around the world, although it’s probably best to avoid Philadelphia as it is known to be unfriendly to robots.

SMD Breadboard Adaptors Skip Schematic, Goes Straight To PCB

October 17, 2020 by Chris Lott 23 Comments

If you need to add one or two SMT chips to your breadboarded prototype, [Travis Hein] has you covered. He designed a set of small SMD adaptor boards for various SOIC, SOT23, and DPAC patterns using KiCad. He has released them as open source, so you can feel free to use them or modify them as needed.

Normally we don’t see people bypassing the schematics when designing a PCB. But we can agree that [Travis] has found a situation where going direct to PCB makes more sense. He just plops down the package in Pcbnew, adds some pin headers and wires everything up directly on the PCB. (But don’t worry, some of you may remember [Travis] from his earlier SSR mains switching project, which demonstrates that he can indeed draw proper schematics.) We know there are more people out there who prefer to go straight to PCB layout… [mikeselectricstuff] comes to mind. If you could yourself among this tribe, let use know your reasoning in the comments below.

We wrote about a similar universal breakout boards for SMD parts back in 2016, which is a single breakout board for two- and three-pin jelly-bean components. If you paired some of those boards with [Travis]’s breakout boards, it would make a great combination to keep in your prototyping gadgets bin. Consider this project the next time your favorite PCB shop has a sale.

Spare Parts Express

October 17, 2020 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

I’ve got spare parts, and I cannot lie.

This week I’m sending out two care packages to friends and coworkers because I’ve got too many hackables on hand, and not enough time to hack them all. One is a funky keyboard, and the other is an FPGA dev board, but that’s not the point. The point is that the world is too interesting, and many of us have more projects piled up in the to-do box, with associated gear, than we’ll ever have time to complete.

Back in the before-times, we would meet up, talk about our ongoing hacks, and invariably someone would say “oh you need an X, I’ve got half a box of them” and send you one. Or maybe you’d be the one with the extra widgets on hand. I know I’ve happily been in both positions.

Either way, it’s a win for the giver, who gets to take a widget off the widget pile, for the receiver, who doesn’t have to go to the widget store, and for the environment, which has to produce fewer widgets. (My apologies to the widget manufacturers and middlemen.)

This reminded me of Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay’s Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk back in the late aughts. Trolling through the wiki was like a trip down memory lane. This box visited my old hackerspace, and then ended up with Bunnie Huang. Good times, good people, good hacker junk! And then there’s our own Brian Benchoff’s Travelling Hacker Box and spinoffs.

These are great and fun projects, but they all end up foundering in one respect: to make sense, the value of goods taken and received has to exceed the cost of the postage, and if you’re only interested in a few things in any given box, that’s a lot of dead weight adding to the shipping cost.

So I was trying to brainstorm a better solution. Some kind of centralized pinboard, where the “have too many h-bridge drivers” folks can hook up with the “need an h-bridge” people? Or is this ad-hoc social network that we already have working out well enough?

What do you think? How can we get the goods to those who want to work on them?

Turning A Desk Drawer Into A Flight Yoke

October 17, 2020 by Danie Conradie 9 Comments

[Christofer Hiitti] found himself with the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator on his PC, but the joystick he ordered was still a few weeks out. So he grabbed an Arduino, potentiometers and a button and hacked together what a joke-yoke.

The genius part of this hack is the way [Christopher] used his desk drawer for pitch control. One side of a plastic hinge is attached to a potentiometer inside a drawer, while the other side is taped to the top of the desk. The second pot is taped to the front of the drawer for pitch control and the third pot is the throttle. It works remarkably well, as shown in the demo video below.

The linearity of the drawer mechanism probably isn’t great, but it was good enough for a temporary solution. The Arduino Leonardo he used is based on the ATmega32u4 which has a built-in USB, and with libraries like ArduinoJoystickLibrary the computer interface very simple. When [Christopher]’s real joystick finally arrived he augmented it with a button box built using the joke-yoke components.

There’s no doubt that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 will spawn a lot of great controller and cockpit builds over the next few years. We’ve already covered a new joystick build, and a 3D printed frame to turn an Xbox controller into a joystick.

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It Came From Outer Space: Listening To The Deep Space Network

October 17, 2020 by Adam Zeloof 26 Comments

Ham radio operators love to push the boundaries of their equipment. A new ham may start out by making a local contact three miles away on the 2m band, then talk to somebody a few hundred miles away on 20m. Before long, they may find themselves chatting to fellow operators 12,000 miles away on 160m. Some of the adventurous return to 2m and try to carry out long-distance conversations by bouncing signals off of the Moon, waiting for the signal to travel 480,000 miles before returning to Earth. And then some take it several steps further when they listen to signals from spacecraft 9.4 million miles away.

That’s exactly what [David Prutchi] set out to do when he started building a system to listen to the Deep Space Network (DSN) last year. The DSN is NASA’s worldwide antenna system, designed to relay signals to and from spacecraft that have strayed far from home. The system communicates with tons of inanimate explorers Earth has sent out over the years, including Voyager 1 & 2, Juno, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Because the craft are transmitting weak signals over a great distance (Voyager 1 is 14 billion miles away!), the earth-based antennas need to be big. Real big. Each of the DSN’s three international facilities houses several massive dishes designed to capture these whispers from beyond the atmosphere — and yet, [David] was able to receive signals in his back yard.

Sporting a stunning X-band antenna array, a whole bunch of feedlines, and some tracking software, he’s managed to eavesdrop on a handful of spacecraft phoning home via the DSN. He heard the first, Bepi-Colombo, in May 2020, and has only improved his system since then. Next up, he hopes to find Juno, and decode the signals he receives to actually look at the data that’s being sent back from space.

We’ve seen a small group of enthusiasts listen in on the DSN before, but [David]’s excellent documentation should provide a fantastic starting point for anybody else interested in doing some interstellar snooping.