Rhisotope: Addressing Poaching By Making Rhinoceros Horns Radioactive

June 14, 2021 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

There is no question that poaching has become an existential threat to the five species of rhinoceros alive today. Even the wildlife reserves where most rhinos live struggle to provide protection from the wanton and cruel poaching of the world’s last remaining rhinos.

Poachers are generally looking to sell the horns which consist of pure keratin, the same material that makes up our fingernails and hair. Rhino horns have seen a big rise in demand the past decades, with a black market in Vietnam representing the biggest buyers, primarily for use in fever and other medicines, as well as for processing into carved trinkets. This has contributed to a further rhino population collapse. Statistics from 2017 show about 18,000 white rhinos and fewer than 5,500 black rhinos remaining. Recently, the northern white rhino population in Africa went effectively extinct with the death of the last known male individual.

Clearly, if we wish to prevent extinction, we need to deal with poaching. The latest suggestion here is part of the Rhisotope project. This would make rhino horns radioactive, but how exactly would doing so prevent poaching? Let’s take a look.

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Game Boy Macro Build Retains DS Compatibility

June 14, 2021 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Building a so-called “Game Boy Macro” is a great way to salvage a Nintendo DS that has a broken hinge or top screen, as the system only needs the lower display to play Game Boy Advance games. Naturally, DS games that were designed to use both screens would no longer be playable. Or at least, that’s what we thought. But as [Facelesstech] shows, it’s actually possible to play DS games on a Game Boy Macro if you do a little extra soldering.

It turns out that there are two test points on the original DS motherboard where you can pick up the signal for the top and bottom screens respectively. With just three wires and a simple switch, you can select which signal gets fed into the bottom screen in real-time with no image degradation. Now, this won’t do you any good on games that make constant use of both the top and bottom DS displays, but for many titles, the bottom screen was used for little more than a map or inventory display that you only need to glance at occasionally.

Installed screen switch. Note USB-C upgrade module.

With the ability to switch between them at will, a large number of DS games are perfectly playable with just one screen. Interestingly, the touch panel still works the same regardless of which video feed is being pipped in; so if you memorize which areas need to be touched to perform different actions, you don’t even need to flip the images. In the video below, [Facelesstech] demonstrates the concept with New Super Mario Bros, which would otherwise be unplayable as the action usually is shown on the top screen.

This hack is only possible because the two displays on the DS are identical beyond the touch overlay, which as we learned during a previous deep-dive into the technology behind this revolutionary handheld, was a trick Nintendo used to squeeze as much performance as they could out of its relatively meager 3D hardware. Unfortunately, it seems like the modification is much harder to pull off on the DS Lite, so it wouldn’t be compatible with the slick Game & Watch styled Game Boy Macro we covered recently. Continue reading “Game Boy Macro Build Retains DS Compatibility” →

Recore Hacks The Hidden Microcontroller For 3D Printing

June 14, 2021 by Chris Lott 24 Comments

No stranger to the world of 3D printers, [Elias Bakken] from the [Intelligent Agent] workshop has released a new controller board called Recore. The typical 3D printer has a dedicated controller which handles the real-time aspects of driving stepper motors. Many setups also have a second computer, often Linux-based, which is dedicated to supporting tasks like running an Octoprint server and interfacing to a digital camera to monitor print progress remotely. [Elias]’s design merges these together into one compact 12 x 12 x 4 cm package.

The Recore board is powered by an AllWinner A64 system on chip (SoC) which packs four ARM Cortex-A53 AArch64 cores running Debian Linux. The applications include Klipper, a project we wrote about when it was first introduced, and the OctoPrint print server. “But Linux is not a real-time operating system”, we hear you cry, “and controlling stepper motor drivers from an A64 SoC is just asking for trouble”. [Elias] could have addressed this problem by putting a secondary microcontroller on the board, but he found an even more elegant solution instead.

It turns out that there is already a secondary microcontroller hidden in plain sight, integrated into the A64 itself. See that small box labeled AR100 at the top of the block diagram? Meet the AR100, a controller originally intended to manage low-power operations of the A64. It is an OpenRISC 32-bit OR1k processor. But the AR100 is extremely underutilized, and [Elias] takes good advantage of this by repurposing it to those real-time tasks associated with a 3D printer controller. Watch the short video down below to learn how he solves a few of the nitty-gritty implementation details such as timers and communicating with the Linux processors. You might learn some tips from the other short videos in the series featuring some interesting debugging and problem solving sessions. There is a project GitHub repository and a Wiki full of good information and testing results.

[Elias] has a long history of building printer controllers. While his last one had to be abandoned because of manufacturing issues, he learned from that experience. Manufacturability was a top priority in the design of the Recore. We’re jealous of the well-appointed [Intelligent Agent] facility in Norway, but even more so of the nomadic lifestyle that [Elias] appears to enjoy — in his videos, he can be seen working from far-flung locales such as a tropical island resort and a laboratory floating in high Earth orbit. We’ve featured [Elias]’s projects in the past, including the Replicate 3D printer controller, a semi-automatic liquor cabinet, and the dog-operated treat dispenser.

Continue reading “Recore Hacks The Hidden Microcontroller For 3D Printing” →

You Have About Four Months To Find A Lost Satellite

June 13, 2021 by Jenny List 10 Comments

In the annals of technical achievement originating from the United Kingdom there lies a forgotten success story that should have led to greater things but instead became a dead-end even before it had happened. We’re referring of course to Prospero, a British satellite that holds the honour of being the only one to have been launched on board a British-developed satellite launch platform. On the 28th of October 1971 it was launched aboard a Black Arrow rocket from the Woomera launch site in Australia and successfully entered orbit to complete its mission. When it was launched the Black Arrow program had already been canceled by the British government, with the launch proceeding only because rocket and satellite were by then already on the pad.

So the Brits became the sixth nation to develop a satellite launch capability, and promptly canned it. Prospero was a success though and remains in orbit, and was even re-activated periodically as late as the 1990s. With its fiftieth anniversary approaching in October we think it’s worth looking for to mark the occasion, and so would like to remind you of its existence and the impending anniversary. If any community can find a lost satellite, hear its call if it is still transmitting anything, and maybe even wake it up, it’s you lot. Hackaday readers never cease to amaze us with their talents, and we know that among you will be people with what it takes to find Prospero.

To help you along your way there’s a lot of information about the satellite to be found online, including the details of an unsuccessful attempt to contact it a decade ago for the anniversary in 2011, and a real-time tracker to help you find its position. Maybe some of you have a decent enough telescope to take a snap of it as it passes over, but if a radio signal could be retrieved from it that would be particularly impressive. Watch out though, you might find yourself hearing an Orbcomm satellite on the same frequency.

So if any of you fancy firing up your SDRs and pointing an antenna skywards over the next few months, we’d like to hear about your progress. It’s possible that the craft may by now be incapable of life, but if anything can be found it’s worth a try.

This isn’t the first satellite rescue attempt documented here on Hackaday. A few years back we put out the call to rescue ICE/ISEE-3.

Gesture-Detecting Macro Keyboard Knows What You Want

June 13, 2021 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

[jakkra] bought a couple of capacitive touchpads from a Kickstarter a few years ago and recently got around to using them in a project. And what a project it is: this super macro pad combines two touchpads with a 6-pack of regular switches for a deluxe gesture-sensing input device.

Inside is an ESP32 running TensorFlow Lite to read in the gestures from the two touchpads. The pad at the top is a volume slider, and the square touchpad is the main input and is used in conjunction with the buttons to run AutoHotKey scripts within certain programs. [jakkra] can easily run git commands and more with a handful of simple gestures. The gestures all seem like natural choices to us: > for next media track, ∧ to push the current branch and ∨ to fetch and pull the current branch, s for git status, l for git log, and the one that sounds really useful to us — draw a C to get a notification that lists all the COM ports. One of the switches is dedicated to Bluetooth pairing and navigating menus on the OLED screen.

We love the combination of inputs here and think this looks great, especially with the double touchpad design. Be sure to check out the gesture demo gif after the break.

Gesture input seems well-suited to those who compute on the go, and a gesture glove feels like the perfect fit.

Continue reading “Gesture-Detecting Macro Keyboard Knows What You Want” →

Hackaday Links: June 13, 2021

June 13, 2021 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

When someone offers to write you a check for $5 billion for your company, it seems like a good idea to take it. But in the world of corporate acquisitions and mergers, that’s not always the case, as Altium proved this week when they rebuffed a A$38.50 per share offer from Autodesk. Altium Ltd., the Australian company whose flagship Altium Designer suite is used by PCB and electronic designers around the world, said that the Autodesk offer “significantly undervalues” Altium, despite the fact that it represents a 42% premium of the company’s share price at the end of last week. Altium’s rejection doesn’t close the door on ha deal with Autodesk, or any other comers who present a better offer, which means that whatever happens, changes are likely in the EDA world soon.

There were reports this week of a massive explosion and fire at a Chinese polysilicon plant — sort of. A number of cell phone videos have popped up on YouTube and elsewhere that purport to show the dramatic events unfolding at a plant in Xinjiang province, with one trade publication for the photovoltaic industry reporting that it happened at the Hoshine Silicon “997 siloxane” packing facility. They further reported that the fire was brought under control after about ten hours of effort by firefighters, and that the cause is under investigation. The odd thing is that we can’t find a single mention of the incident in any of the mainstream media outlets, even five full days after it purportedly happened. We’d have figured the media would have been all over this, and linking it to the ongoing semiconductor shortage, perhaps erroneously since the damage appears to be limited to organic silicone production as opposed to metallic silicon. But the company does supply something like 17% of the world’s supply of silicon metal, so anything that could potentially disrupt that should be pretty big news.

It’s always fun to see “one of our own” take a project from idea to product, and we like to celebrate such successes when they come along. And so it was great to see the battery-free bicycle tire pressure sensor that Hackaday.io user CaptMcAllister has been working on make it to the crowdfunding stage. The sensor is dubbed the PSIcle, and it attaches directly to the valve stem on a bike tire. The 5-gram sensor has an NFC chip, a MEMS pressure sensor, and a loop antenna. The neat thing about this is the injection molding process, which basically pots the electronics in EDPM while leaving a cavity for the air to reach the sensor. The whole thing is powered by the NFC radio in a smartphone, so you just hold your phone up to the sensor to get a reading. Check out the Kickstarter for more details, and congratulations to CaptMcAllister!

We’re saddened to learn of the passing of Dale Heatherington last week. While the name might not ring a bell, the name of his business partner Dennis Hayes probably does, as together they founded Hayes Microcomputer Products, makers of the world’s first modems specifically for the personal computer market. Dale was the technical guru of the partnership, and it’s said that he’s the one who came up with the famous “AT-command set”. Heatherington only stayed with Hayes for seven years or so before taking his a $20 million share of the company and retiring, which of course meant more time and resources to devote to tinkering with everything from ham radio to battle bots. ATH0, Dale.

Sawdust Printer Goes Against The Grain By Working With Wood Waste

June 13, 2021 by Kristina Panos 28 Comments

Wood-infused filament has been around for awhile now, and while it can be used to create some fairly impressive pieces, the finished product won’t fool the astute observer. For one thing, there’s no grain to it (not that every piece needs to show grain). For another, you can’t really throw it on a fire for emergency heating like you could with actual wood.

But a company called Desktop Metal has created a new additive manufacturing process for wood and paper waste called Forust (get it?) that gets a lot closer to the real thing. It might be an environmental savior if it catches on, though that depends on what it ends up being good for.

The company’s vision is to produce custom and luxury wood products — everything from sophisticated pencil cups to stunning furniture, and to take advantage of the nearly limitless geometry afforded by additive manufacturing. Forust uses the single-pass binder jetting method of 3D printing to lay down layers of sawdust and lignin and then squirt out some glue in between each one to hold them together.

Although Desktop Metal doesn’t mention a curing process for Forust in their press release, post-processing for solidity and longevity is the norm in binder jetting, which is usually done with ceramic or metal-based materials.

Let’s talk about those wood grains. Here’s what the press release says:

Digital grain is printed on every layer and parts can then be sanded, stained, polished, dyed, coated, and refinished in the same manner as traditionally-manufactured wood components. Software has the ability to digitally reproduce nearly any wood grain, including rosewood, ash, zebrano, ebony and mahogany, among others. Parts will also support a variety of wood stains at launch, including natural, oak, ash, and walnut.

Beauty and workability are one thing. But this will only be worthwhile if the pieces are strong. This is something that isn’t too important for pencil holders, but is paramount for furniture. Forust’s idea is to ultimately save the trees, but how are they going to get sawdust and lignin without the regular wood industry — they want to be circular and envision recycling of their goods at end-of-life into new goods

We wondered if the wood waste printer would ever become a thing. You know, there’s more than one way to print in sawdust — here’s a printer that stacks up layers of particle boards and carves them with a CNC.

Images via Forust