A render of a BiC Cristal ballpoint pen showing the innards.

This Is How A Pen Changed The World

April 29, 2024 by 75 Comments

Look around you. Chances are, there’s a BiC Cristal ballpoint pen among your odds and ends. Since 1950, it has far outsold the Rubik’s Cube and even the iPhone, and yet, it’s one of the most unsung and overlooked pieces of technology ever invented. And weirdly, it hasn’t had the honor of trademark erosion like Xerox or Kleenex. When you ‘flick a Bic’, you’re using a lighter.

It’s probably hard to imagine writing with a feather and a bottle of ink, but that’s what writing was limited to for hundreds of years. When fountain pens first came along, they were revolutionary, albeit expensive and leaky. In 1900, the world literacy rate stood around 20%, and exorbitantly-priced, unreliable utensils weren’t helping.

Close-up, cutaway render of a leaking ballpoint pen. In 1888, American inventor John Loud created the first ballpoint pen. It worked well on leather and wood and the like, but absolutely shredded paper, making it almost useless.

One problem was that while the ball worked better than a nib, it had to be an absolutely perfect fit, or ink would either get stuck or leak out everywhere. Then along came László Bíró, who turned instead to the ink to solve the problems of the ballpoint.

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Space Mirrors: Dreams Of Turning The Night Into Day Around The Clock

April 3, 2024 by 28 Comments

Recently, a company by former SpaceX employee Ben Nowack – called Reflect Orbital – announced that it is now ready to put gigantic mirrors in space to reflect sunshine at ground-based solar farms. This is an idea that’s been around for a hundred years already, both for purposes of defeating the night through reflecting sunshine onto the surface, as well as to reject the same sunshine and reduce the surface temperature. The central question here is perhaps what the effect would be of adding or subtracting (or both) of solar irradiation on such a large scale as suggested?

We know the effect of light pollution from e.g. cities and street lighting already, which suggests that light pollution is a strongly negative factor for the survival of many species. Meanwhile a reduction in sunshine is already a part of the seasons of Autumn and Winter. Undeniable is that the Sun’s rays are essential to life on Earth, while the day-night cycle (as well as the seasons) created by the Earth’s rotation form an integral part of everything from sleep- and hibernation cycles, to the reproduction of countless species of plants, insects, mammals and everyone’s favorite feathered theropods.

With these effects and the gigantic financial investments required in mind, is there any point to space-based mirrors?

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Retrotechtacular: Air Mail For The Birds

March 14, 2024 by 9 Comments

Today, if you want to send a message to a distant location, you’ll probably send an e-mail or a text message. But it hasn’t always been that easy. Military commanders, in particular, have always needed ways to send messages and were early adopters of radio and, prior to that, schemes like semaphores, drums, horns, Aldis lamps, and even barrels of water to communicate over distances.

One of the most reliable ways to pass messages, even during the last world war, was by carrier pigeon.  Since the U.S. Army Signal Corps handled anything that included messages, it makes sense that the War Department issued TM 11-410 about how to use and care for pigeons. Think of it as the network operations guide of 1945. The practice, though, is much older. There is evidence that the Persians used pigeons in the 6th century BC, and Julius Caesar’s army also used the system.

You wouldn’t imagine that drawing an assignment in the Signal Corps might involve learning about breeding pigeons, training them, and providing them with medical attention, but that’s what some Signal Corps personnel did. The Army started experimenting with pigeons in 1878, but the Navy was the main user of the birds until World War I, when the U.S. Pigeon Intelligence Service was formed. In World War II, they saw use in situations where radio silence was important, like the D-Day invasion.

The Navy also disbanded its earlier Pigeon Messenger Service. It then returned to avian communications during the World Wars, using them to allow aviators to send messages back to base without radio traffic. The Navy had its own version of the pigeon manual.

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Custom Mouse-Making: Clay Is The Way

March 10, 2024 by 10 Comments

For something that many of us handle all day long, it sure would be nice if mice came in more sizes and shapes, wouldn’t it? Until that day, we’ll just have to find something passable or else design and build a custom-shaped mouse from scratch like [Ben Makes Everything] did.

First, [Ben] played around with some modelling clay until he had a shape he was happy with, then took a bunch of pictures of it mounted on a piece of wood for easy manipulation and used photogrammetry to scan it in for printing after cleaning it up in Blender. About six versions later, he had the final one and was ready to move on to electronics.

That’s right, this isn’t just mouse guts in an ergonomic package. Inside is Arduino Pro Micro and a PMW 3389 optical sensor on a breakout board. [Ben] was going to use flexible 3D printed panels as mouse buttons, but then had an epiphany — why not use keyboard switches and keycaps instead? He also figured he could have two buttons per finger if he wanted, so he went with Kailh reds for the fingers and and whites in the thumb.

Speaking of the thumb, there was no room for a mouse wheel in between those comparatively huge switches, so he moved it to the the side to be thumb-operated. [Ben] got everything working, and after all this, decided to make it wireless. So he switched to an Adafruit Feather S3 and designed his first PCB for both versions. Ultimately, he found that the wireless version is kind of unreliable, so he is sticking with the wired one for now.

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Parts We Miss: The Mains Transformer

February 14, 2024 by 56 Comments

About two decades ago there was a quiet revolution in electronics which went unnoticed by many, but which overturned a hundred years of accepted practice. You’d have noticed it if you had a mobile phone, the charger for your Nokia dumbphone around the year 2000 would have been a weighty device, while the one for your feature phone five years later would have been about the same size but relatively light as a feather. The electronics industry abandoned the mains transformer from their wall wart power supplies and other places in favour of the much lighter and efficient switch mode power supply. Small mains transformers which had been ubiquitous in electronics projects for many years, slowly followed suit.

Coils Of Wire, Doing Magic With Electrons

Inside and outside views of Jenny Lists's home made linear power supply from about 1990
This was a state of the art project for a future Hackaday scribe back in 1990.

A transformer works through transferring alternating electrical current into magnetic flux by means of a coil of wire, and then converting the flux back to electric current in a second coil. The flux is channeled through a ferromagnetic transformer core made of iron in the case of a mains transformer, and the ratio of input voltage to output voltage is the same as the turns ratio between the two. They provide a safe isolation between their two sides, and in the case of a mains transformer they often have a voltage regulating function as their core material is selected to saturate should the input voltage become too high. The efficiency of a transformer depends on a range of factors including its core material and the frequency of operation, with transformer size decreasing with frequency as efficiency increases.

When energy efficiency rules were introduced over recent decades they would signal the demise of the mains transformer, as the greater efficiency of a switch-mode supply became the easiest way to achieve the energy savings. In a sense the mains transformer never went away, as it morphed into the small ferrite-cored part running at a higher frequency in the switch-mode circuitry, but it’s fair to say that the iron-cored transformers of old are now a rare sight. Does this matter? It’s time to unpack some of the issues surrounding a small power supply. Continue reading “Parts We Miss: The Mains Transformer” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: This Year’s Spooky Winners

November 20, 2023 by 1 Comment

With the zombies, ghouls, and ghosts now safely returned to their crypts until next October, it’s time to unveil this year’s winners for the 2023 Halloween Hackfest.

For this contest, sponsors DigiKey and Arduino challenged the community to come up with their best creations for what’s arguably the most hacker-friendly of holidays. Pretty much everything was fair game, from costumes to decorations. The top three winners will get $150 credit from DigiKey and some treats from Arduino — just don’t try to eat them.

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XMems Cowell MEMS-based tweeter on top of dynamic driver. (Credit: xMEMS)

After MEMS Microphones, MEMS Speakers Enter The Market

November 15, 2023 by 15 Comments

These days it’s hard to not come across solid-state (micro-electromechanical systems, MEMS) microphones, as they are now displacing electret microphones almost everywhere due to their small size and low cost. Although MEMS speakers are not impossible, creating a miniature speaker that can both displace a lot of air (‘volume’) and accurately reproduce a wide range of frequencies – unlike simple piezo buzzers – is a lot tougher. Here a startup called xMEMS figures that they have at least partially cracked the code with their piezoMEMS speakers, with Creative using the Cowell version in their brand-new Aurvana Ace in-ear monitors. Continue reading “After MEMS Microphones, MEMS Speakers Enter The Market” →