Hackaday Podcast 179: Danger Chess, Corona Motors, An Omni-Walker, And A Fast Talking Telescope

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for their take on the hottest hacks in a hot, hot week. We found a bunch of unusual mechanisms this week, like an omnidirectional robot that’s not quite wheeled but not quite a walker either. Or, if you’d rather fly, there’s a UAV that’s basically a flying propeller. There’s danger afoot too, with news of a chess-playing robot with a nasty streak, a laser engraver that’ll probably blind you, and a high-voltage corona motor that actually does useful work. We’ll use our X-ray vision to take a deep dive into a 60-GHz phased array antenna, let a baby teach a machine what it means to be hungry, and build a couple of toy cameras just for funsies. Balloons as a UI? Maybe someday, thanks to ultrasonic levitation. And we’ll wrap things up by snooping in on the Webb telescope’s communications, as we find out how many people it takes to make wire harnesses. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download here!

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You Can Build A Giant 7-Segment Display Of Your Very Own

Sometimes you need to display a number nice and large, making it easily readable at a good distance. [Lewis] has just the thing for that: a big expandable 7-segment display.

The build is modular, allowing it to be extended from 2 to 10 digits and beyond. The digits themselves are made of 3D-printed parts assembled onto acrylic. These can then be ganged up in a wooden frame for displaying larger numbers with more digits. Individual elements are lit by addressable LEDs, and the project can be built using an Arduino Nano or an ESP8266 for control. The latter opens up possibilities for controlling the screen over WiFi, which could prove useful.

[Lewis] has built his own version for a local swim club, where it will be used as a laptimer. Other applications could be as a scoreboard in various sports, or to confuse your neighbours by displaying random numbers in your front yard.

We’ve seen a similar build from [Ivan Miranda] that served well as a workshop clock, too. Video after the break.

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A ’70s TV With ’20s Parts

Keeping older technology working becomes exponentially difficult with age. Most of us have experienced capacitor plague, disintegrating wire insulation, planned obsolescence, or even the original company failing and not offering parts or service anymore. To keep an antique running often requires plenty of spare parts, or in the case of [Aaron]’s vintage ’70s Sony television set, plenty of modern technology made to look like it belongs in a machine from half a century ago.

The original flyback transformer on this TV was the original cause for the failure of this machine, and getting a new one would require essentially destroying a working set, so this was a perfect candidate for a resto-mod without upsetting any purists. To start, [Aaron] ordered a LCD with controls (and a remote) that would nearly fit the existing bezel, and then set about integrating the modern controls with the old analog dials on the TV. This meant using plenty of rotary encoders and programming a microcontroller to do the translating.

There are plenty of other fine details in this build, including audio integration, adding modern video and audio inputs like HDMI, and adding LEDs to backlight the original (and now working) UHF and VHF channel indicators. In his ’70s-themed display wall, this TV set looks perfectly natural. If your own display wall spotlights an even older era, take a look at some restorations of old radios instead.

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Hackaday Podcast 178: The Return Of Supercon, Victory For Open Source, Exquisite Timepieces, And Documentation To Die For

Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start this week’s podcast off with an announcement the community has been waiting years for: the return of the Hackaday Supercon! While there’s still some logistical details to hammer out, we’re all extremely excited to return to a live con and can’t wait to share more as we get closer to November. Of course you can’t have Supercon without the Hackaday Prize, which just so happens to be wrapping up its Hack it Back challenge this weekend.

In other news, we’ll talk about the developing situation regarding the GPLv3 firmware running on Ortur’s laser engravers (don’t worry, it’s good news for a change), and a particularly impressive fix that kept a high-end industrial 3D printer out of the scrapheap. We’ll also fawn over a pair of fantastically documented projects, learn about the fascinating origins of the lowly fire hydrant, and speculate wildly about the tidal wave of dead solar panels looming menacingly in the distance.

Or download the fresh bitstream yourself.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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Hackaday Links: July 17, 2022

Webb’s first deep-field image. Source: NASA

The folks at NASA are taking a well-deserved victory lap this week after the splashy reveal of the first scientific images from the James Webb Space Telescope. As we expected, the first public release included a lot of comparisons to images obtained from Hubble, as the general public understandably sees Webb as the successor to the venerable space telescope, now in its third decade of service. So for a “let’s see what this baby can do” image, they turned Webb loose on a tiny patch of sky in the southern hemisphere containing galactic cluster SMACS 0723, and sent back images and spectroscopic data from galaxies up to 13 billion light years away. There are plenty of analyses of Webb’s deep field and the other images in the first release, but we particularly liked the takes by both Anton Petrov and Dr. Becky. They both talk about the cooler scientific aspects of these images, and how Webb is much more than just a $10 billion desktop image generator.

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Hackaday Podcast 177: Microscopes, Telescopes, Telephonoscopes, And A Keyboardoscope?

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos stood around talking like they weren’t thousands of miles apart. And we mean that literally: Kristina just got an up/down desk, and it turns out that Elliot’s had the exact same one for years.

Kristina’s phone is heavier than yours.

In between the hammerings on Kristina’s house (she’s getting new siding), we kick things off by drooling over the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and compare a few of them to the same shots from Hubble.

We managed to save a bit of saliva for all the seriously swell keyboards and not-keyboards we saw throughout the Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals contest, all of which are winners in our book.

This week, we ask the tough questions, like why would someone who has never played guitar want to build one from scratch? We can only guess that the answer is simply, ‘because l can’. As lazy as that reasoning may sound, this build is anything but.

Later on, we’ll ogle an ocean of PS/2 keyboards and their new owner’s portable testing rig, complain about ASMR, and laugh about a giant nose that sneezes out sanitizer.

Direct download. And burn it to CD-RW!

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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Hackaday Podcast 176: Freezing Warm Water, Hacking Lenses, Hearing Data, And Watching YouTube On A PET

It’s podcast time again, and this week Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams sat down with Staff Writer Dan Maloney to review the best hacks on the planet, and a few from off. We’ll find out how best to capture lightning, debate the merits of freezing water — or ice cream — when it’s warm, and see if we can find out what R2D2 was really talking about with all those bleeps and bloops. Once we decode that, it’ll be time to find out what Tom Nardi was up to while the boss was away with his hidden message in episode 174, and how analog-encoded digital data survives the podcast production and publication chain. But surely you can’t watch a YouTube video on a Commodore PET, can you? As it turns out, that’s not a problem, and neither apparently is 3D printing a new ear.

The meat of Elliot’s “super secret mastering script”?  Use it on your videos too!

ffmpeg -i $infile.wav -c:v copy -af loudnorm=I=-17:LRA=5:tp=-1.5 -ar 44100 $outfile.flac

Direct download, record it to tape, and play it on your boombox.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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