For all the advances in digital photography, there remains a mystique for photographers and filmmakers about chemical film. Using it presents an artistic and technical challenge, and it lends an aesthetic to your work which is difficult to find in other ways. But particularly when it comes to moving pictures, how many of us have ever ventured beyond the Super 8 cartridge? If you’re not lucky enough to have a Spielberg budget, [Stand-Up Maths] is here with a video taking the viewer through the various movie film formats. He claims it’s the first video shot for YouTube in 35mm, and given that his first point is about the costs involved, we can see why.
In particular it serves as an introduction to the various film terms and aspect ratios. We all know what full frame and IMAX are, but do many of us know what they really mean in camera terms. A particularly neat demonstration comes when he has two cameras side by side with the same stock as a split screen, one 35mm and the other 16mm. The cheaper smaller framed format is good quality, but using a profession resolution chart you can see some of the differences clearly. The full film is below the break, and we’d suggest you watch it in the full 4K resolution if you are able to.
Additive manufacturing (AM) has been getting a lot of attention over the years, with its use in construction a recurring theme. Generally this brings to mind massive 3D printers that are carted to construction sites and assemble entire homes on the spot. That’s the perspective with which a recent ZDNet article by [Rajiv Rao] opens, before asking whether AM in construction is actually solving any problems. As [Rajiv] notes, the main use of such on-site AM construction is for exclusive, expensive designs, such as ICON’s House Zero which leans into the extruded concrete printing method.
Their more reasonable Wolf Ranch residential homes in Texas also use ICON’s Vulcan II printer to print walls out of concrete, with a roof, electrical wiring, plumbing, etc. installed afterwards. Prices for these Wolf Ranch 3 to 4 bedroom houses range from about $450,000 to $600,000, and ICON has been contracted by NASA to work a way to 3D print structures on the Moon out of regolith.
3D printed home by WASP out of clay. (Credit: WASP)
Naturally, none of these prices are even remotely in the range of the first-home buyers, or the many economically disadvantaged who make up a sizable part of the population in the US and many other nations in the Americas, Africa, etc. To make AM in construction economically viable, it would seem that going more flatpack and on-site assembly is the way to go, using the age-old pre-fabrication (prefab) method of constructions.
This is the concept behind the University of Maine’s BioHome3D, which mainly uses PLA, wood fiber and similar materials to create modules that contain insulation in the form of wood fiber and cellulose. These modules are 3D printed in a factory, after which they’re carted off to the construction site for assembly, pretty much like any traditional prefab home, just with the AM step and use of PLA rather than traditional methods.
Prefab is a great way to speed up construction and already commonly used in the industry, as modules can have windows, doors, insulation, electrical wiring, plumbing, etc. all installed in the factory, with on-site work limited to just final assembly and connecting the loose bits. The main question thus seems to be whether AM in prefab provides a significant benefit, such as in less material wasted by working from (discarded) wood pulp and kin.
While in the article [Rajiv] keeps gravitating towards the need to use less concrete (because of the climate) and make homes more affordable through 3D printing, AM is not necessarily the panacea some make it out to be, due to the fact that houses are complex structures that have to do much more than provide a floor, walls and a roof. If adding a floor (or two) on top of the ground floor, additional requirements come into play, before even considering aspects like repairability which is rarely considered in the context of AM construction.
If you follow the world of clean energy, you will probably have read all about the so-called hydrogen future and the hydrogen economy. The gas can easily be made from water by electrolysis from green solar electricity, contains a lot of stored energy which is clean to recover, and seems like the solution to many of our green energy woes. Sadly the reality doesn’t quite match up as hydrogen is difficult to store and transport, so thus far our hydrogen cars haven’t quite arrived. That hasn’t stopped researchers looking at hydrogen solutions though, and a team from ETH Zurich might just have found a solution to storing hydrogen. They’re using it to reduce iron oxide to iron, which can easily release the hydrogen by oxidation with water.
Their reactor is simplicity itself, a large stainless steel tank filled with powdered iron ore. Pump hydrogen into it and the iron oxide in the ore becomes water and iron which forms the storage medium, and retrieve the hydrogen later by piping steam through the mixture. Hydrogen generated in the summer using solar power can then be released in the winter months. Of course it’s not perfectly efficient, and a significant quantity of energy is lost in heat, but if the heat is recovered and used elsewhere that effect can be mitigated. The hope is that their university might be benefiting from a pilot plant in the coming years, and then perhaps elsewhere those hydrogen grids and cars might become a reality. We can hope.
Magnets are pretty nice little tools. [EmGi] has used them in many a cool 3D printed build with great success. But getting them where you want can be really tricky. More often than not, you end up with glue all over your fingers, or the magnets fly out of place, or they stick together when you don’t want them to.
Well, [EmGi] created a mighty fine magnet insertion tool that you can print for yourself. It’s finger-operated and uses a single embedded magnet to place magnets wherever they’re needed.
This thing went through several designs before [EmGi] ever printed it out. Originally, there were two magnets, but there was an issue where if the tool wasn’t lifted off perfectly, it would send the magnet flying.
But now it works great, and [EmGi] even deposited an array of 64 magnets without using glue to test it out before printing a second one to handle the other polarity. Check out the build/demo video after the break.
For almost as long as there have been microcomputers, there have been attempts with varying success to make tiny handheld microcomputers. Sometimes these have been very good, and other times they’ve missed the mark in some way. Latest to find its way to us is the CL-32 from [Moosepr], it’s a handheld computer with an ESP32 as brains, an electronic paper display, and a QWERTY keyboard in its smart printed case.
The hardware is relatively standard, save for the keyboard which is a dome-switch design in which the membrane carrying the domes is hand-made. We like this, and don’t think we’ve seen anyone else doing that. Expansion is taken care of by a novel socket arrangement in which boards nestle in a recess in the surface. Some experimentation was required as always to drive the display, but the result is a functional computer.
Sadly there’s little detail in terms of what the software will be, and no hardware files as yet. But what we can see is promising enough to make this one to watch, so we’ll look forward to what they come up with. If an ESP32 OS is a problem, there’s always badge.team, who have been continuously improving theirs since 2017.
The bulbs inside scanners (before transitioning to LED, anyway) were cold cathode fluorescent tubes that emit a fairly wide bandwidth of light. They were purpose-built to produce a very specific type and shape of light, but [Julius Curt] has taken this in a new, upcycled direction. Instead of just producing light, the light itself is also part of the aesthetic. A very cool 3D printed case houses the bulb and power supply and smartly hides the connecting wires to achieve a very clean look.
Part of the design involves adding a DC-DC converter before the lamp driver, allowing fading of the light. This isn’t anything new in lamps, but [Julius] noticed an interesting effect when dimming the vertically oriented lamp: as the power was reduced, the column of light would start to extinguish from one end, leading to an elongated teardrop-shaped light source.
This leads to a very interesting look, and the neat case design leads to an extremely unique lamp! The emitted light’s color temperature seems to vary a bit as the voltage drops, going from what appears to be a pretty cold white to a slightly warmer tone.
The design process is detailed on the project page, with a quick look at the CAD design process for the case. A neat touch was using a greeble (part of a coffee grinder) to add some different textures and break up the plastic-only look. That’s one we’ll have to note in our design books!
We’re guessing most readers can cite things from their youth which gave them an interest in technology, and spurred on something which became a career or had a profound impact on their life. Public engagement activities for technology or science have a crucial role in bringing forth the next generations of curious people into those fields, and along the way they can provide some fun for grown-ups too.
A case in point is from NASA’s Landsat engagement team, Your Name In Landsat. Type in a text string, and it will spell it out in Earth features seen by the imaging satellites, that resemble letters. Endless fun can be had by all, as the random geology flashes by.
No text emojis, boo hiss!
In itself, though fun, it’s not quite a hack. But behind the kids toy we’re curious as to how the images were identified, and mildly sad that the NASA PR people haven’t seen fit to tell us. We’re guessing that over the many decades of earth images there exists a significant knowledge base of Earth features with meaningful or just amusing shapes that will have been gathered by fun-loving engineers, and it’s possible that this is what informed this feature. But we’d also be curious to know whether they used an image classification algorithm instead. There must be a NASA employee or two who reads Hackaday and could ask around — let us know in the comments.
