Boom Hopes To Reignite Supersonic Travel With XB-1

Since the last Concorde rolled to a stop in 2003, supersonic flight has been limited almost exclusively to military aircraft. Many have argued that it’s an example of our civilization seeming to slip backwards on the technological scale, akin to returning to the Age of Sail. There’s no debating that we have the capability of moving civilian passengers and cargo at speeds above Mach 1 safely, it’s just something that isn’t done anymore.

Concorde on its final flight, November 2003

Of course to be fair, there’s plenty of good reasons why the sky isn’t filled with supersonic aircraft. For one, they’ve historically been more drastically expensive to build and operate than their slower peers. The engineering that goes into an aircraft that can operate for an extended period of time at supersonic speeds doesn’t come cheap, nor do the materials required. But naturally, the same could have been said for commercial jet aircraft at one time. With further development, the cost would eventually come down.

The real problem holding supersonic aircraft back is much more practical: they are just too loud. From the roar of their powerful engines on takeoff to the startling and sometimes even dangerous “sonic boom” they leave in their wake, nobody wants them flying over their homes or communities. In fact, civilian flight above Mach 1 over land has been outlawed in the United States for exactly this reason since 1973 under the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulation 91.817.

For any commercial supersonic aircraft to be viable, it needs to not only be much cheaper to build and operate than older designs, but it also needs to be far quieter. Which is exactly what Boom hopes to demonstrate with their XB-1 prototype. The sleek craft will never enter into commercial service itself, but if all goes according to plan during its 2021 test flights, it may prove that the state-of-the-art in aircraft design is ready to usher in a new era of supersonic civilian transport.

Continue reading “Boom Hopes To Reignite Supersonic Travel With XB-1”

Recreating Retrocomputers Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, August 12 at noon Pacific for the Recreating Retrocomputers Hack Chat with Mike Gardi!

Building the first commercial computers in the late 1950s and early 1960s was certainly a complex a task, but building the computer industry was even harder. Sure, engineers were already getting on board with designing in silicon and germanium instead of glass and tungsten, and all digital circuits are really just abstractions of analog designs most of them were already familiar with. But what about all the other people who would need to get up to speed on the workings of digital computers? What good is a tool if the only people who know how to use it art the ones who built it?

To make computers make money, companies needed legions of installers, operators, programmers, marketers, and salespeople, and all of them needed training. And so early computer companies put a lot of effort into building training devices to get people up to speed. These trainers helped teach everything from basic logic circuits and Boolean relationships to simple programming concepts, and each of them contributed in their own way to developing the computer industry that we know today.

Mike Gardi has a unique hobby: among other things, he builds faithful replicas of some of the nicer examples of these lost bits of computing history. His reproduction of Claude Shannon’s Minivac 601 trainer is a great example of the art, as is the DEC H-500 Computer Lab build he’s currently working on. Along the way, he’s explored some side alleys on the road to our computerized world, like Dr. Nim and the paperclip computer. All his builds are lovingly created from 3D-prints and really capture the essence of the toys and tools of the time.

Join us as we take a trip inside this niche realm of retrocomputing and find out why Mike finds it fascinating enough to devote the time it obviously takes to build such exacting replicas. We’ll talk about what projects he’s got going on right now, what he has planned for the future, and maybe even dive into some of his secrets for such great looking 3D prints.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 12 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Continue reading “Recreating Retrocomputers Hack Chat”

Acoustic Camera Uses Many, Many Microphones

If you’re a human or other animal with two ears, you’ll probably find great utility in your ability to identify the direction of sounds in the world around you.  Of course, this is really just a minimal starting point for such abilities. When [John Duffy] set out to build his acoustic camera, he chose to use ninety-six microphones to get the job done.

The acoustic camera works by having an array of microphones laid out in a prescribed grid. By measuring the timing and phase differences of signals appearing at each microphone, it’s possible to determine the location of sound sources in front of the array. The more microphones, the better the data.

[John] goes into detail as to how the project was achieved on the project blog. Outlining such struggles as assembly issues, he also shares information about how to effectively debug the array, and just how to effectively work with so many microphones at once. Particularly impressive is the video of [John] using the device to track a sound to its source. This technology has potential applications in industry for determining the location of compressed air leaks, for example.

Overall, it’s a university research project done right, with a great writeup of the final results. [John]’s project would serve well as a jumping off point for anyone trying to build something similar. Phased array techniques work in RF, too, as this MIT project demonstrates. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Acoustic Camera Uses Many, Many Microphones”

The Weather Station At The Top Of The World

The crown jewels of the Earth’s mountain ranges, the Himalayas, are unsurpassed in their beauty, their height, and their deadly attraction to adventurers, both professional and amateur. The gem of the Himalayas is, of course, Mount Everest, known as Sagarmatha to the Nepalis and Chomolungma to the Tibetans. At 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) — or more; it’s a geologically young mountain that’s still being thrust upward by tectonic activity — it’s a place so forbidding that as far as we know the summit was never visited until 1953, despite at least 30 years of previous attempts, many of which resulted in death.

The conquest of Everest remains a bucket list challenge for many adventurers, and despite advances in technology that have made the peak accessible to more people — or perhaps because of that — more than 300 corpses litter the mountain, testament to what can happen when you take the power of Mother Nature for granted.

To get better data on the goings-on at the Roof of the World, an expedition recently sought to install five weather stations across various points on the route up Mount Everest, including one at its very peak. The plan was challenging, both from a mountaineering perspective and in terms of the engineering required to build something that would be able to withstand some of the worst conditions on the planet, and to send valuable data back reliably. It didn’t all go exactly to plan, but it’s still a great story about the intersection of science and engineering.

Continue reading “The Weather Station At The Top Of The World”

The Zero Terminal 3: A Pop-Out Keyboard Linux Computer In Your Pocket

The mobile phone revolution has delivered us attractively packaged and convenient computing in our pockets, but without the easy hackability we like in our community. Meanwhile the advent of single board computers has given us affordable super-powerful hardware that can run a very capable GNU/Linux operating system and fulfill all our hackable computing needs. Combine the two though? Plenty have tried, few have succeeded in making something as slick as the former with the open power of the latter. Fine if you like your portable devices to have a cyberdeck vibe, but maybe not something you’d take into the boardrooom. Never fear though, for [N-O-D-E] have the solution, in version 3 of the Zero Terminal. It’s the ultimate in Raspberry Pi based handheld computing, and it resembles a slightly chunky mobile phone.

At its heart is a Waveshare OLED 5.5″ touch screen, on the back owhich is mounted a PCB that carries a USB hub and power circuitry. A Pi Zero is mounted directly to this, and a cleverly designed HDMI adapter board interfaces it to the display. The power board is a generic one, the one designed for the PCB proved difficult to hand solder. There’s a very smartly designed case to give it that mobile phone feel, and on the back are a set of sockets with all the relevant Pi connections. This opens the possibility of some exciting add-ons, the first of which is a sliding keyboard similar to those on early Android phones. The ‘board is based on a [Bobricius] design, though sadly isn’t quite working yet.

As you can see in the video below the break, this is about as slick a mobile Pi as it’s possible to get. [N-O-D-E], we want one. Just take our money!

Continue reading “The Zero Terminal 3: A Pop-Out Keyboard Linux Computer In Your Pocket”

Unique Instrument Plucks Out Notes On A Ruler

How does one describe the notes that come from a ruler that is anchored on one end and then plucked? The best word we can come up with is “wubulation”. So would that make this ruler-plucking synthesizer a “wubulator”? Or perhaps a “wubatron”?

Whatever we decide to call it, [Dmitry Morozov] dubbed it the RBS-20, or “ruler bass synth, 20-cm”, for the 20-cm stainless steel ruler that forms the heart of the instrument. The ruler is attached to a linear slide which varies the length of the sprung section. A pair of servos can pluck the free section of the ruler in two different places, providing notes in different registers, while another pair of servos control metal fingers that can damp the vibration, change the sustain, and alter the notes. There’s no resonator; the sounds are instead picked up by a piezo mic. Twelve keys on the base of the instrument can be programmed for various lengths, and an OLED display gives the musician feedback. The video below shows the instrument wubulating, and brings us back to those desktop jam sessions in our grade school days — at least until the rulers were confiscated.

We’ve covered a ton of similarly unique musical instruments before, like this hybrid synthesizer-violin, a symphony of soda bottles, and inexplicably, a leg guitar.

Continue reading “Unique Instrument Plucks Out Notes On A Ruler”

45 Minute Podcast Served Up On A Floppy Disk

Near the turn of the millenium, portable media players like the iPod led to the development of the podcast. The format generally consists of content similar to talk-based radio, and is typically served up in modern codecs like AAC, M4A and MP3. However, [Sean Haas] decided these were all too chunky, and wanted to see if it was possible to deliver similar content on a floppy disk. The results are predictable, but impressive.

[Sean]’s aim was to try and fit roughly 45 minutes of audio on to a 1.44 MB floppy disk. To pull this off, he looked far and wide for a codec fitting for the task. The choice landed on was Adaptive Multi-Rate, or AMR. Typically used to encode audio for GSM phone calls, it can also be used to create compressed audio files.

Initial attempts weren’t quite good enough to do the job, so [Sean] introduced a pre-processing step with FFMPEG, to speed the audio up 1.2 times. It was then passed through SoX and encoded in AMR at approximately 5 kbit/s. This allowed a 45-minute long MP3 file of 72MB to be compressed down into just 1.2 MB, and thus able to fit onto a floppy disk. Audio quality is predictably poor, as you can hear in the embedded clip below, but definitely intelligible. You’d probably want to skip any musical passages if you were doing this seriously.

Continue reading “45 Minute Podcast Served Up On A Floppy Disk”