In the neverending quest for unique ways to display the time, hackers will try just about anything. We’ve seen it all, or at least we thought we had, and then up popped this purely mechanical digital clock that uses nothing but steel balls to display the time. And we absolutely love it!
Click to embiggen (you’ll be glad you did)
One glimpse at the still images or the brief video below shows you exactly how [Eric Nguyen] managed to pull this off. Each segment of the display is made up of four 0.25″ (6.35 mm) steel balls, picked up and held in place by magnets behind the plain wood face of the clock. But the electromechanical complexity needed to accomplish that is the impressive part of the build. Each segment requires two servos, for a whopping 28 units plus one for the colon. Add to that the two heavy-duty servos needed to tilt the head and the four needed to lift the tray holding the steel balls, and the level of complexity is way up there. And yet, [Eric] still managed to make the interior, which is packed with a laser-cut acrylic skeleton, neat and presentable, as well he might since watching the insides work is pretty satisfying.
We love the level of craftsmanship and creativity on this build, congratulations to [Eric] on making his first Arduino build so hard to top. We’ve seen other mechanical digital displays before, but this one is really a work of art.
Modern society has brought us all kinds of wonders, including rapid intercontinental travel, easy information access, and decreased costs for most consumer goods thanks to numerous supply chains. When those supply chains break down as a result of a natural disaster or other emergency, however, the disaster’s effects can be compounded without access to necessary supplies. That’s the focus of Field Ready, a nonprofit that sets up small-scale manufacturing in places without access to supply chains, or whose access has been recently disrupted.
As part of this year’s Hackaday Prize, a each of our four nonprofit partners outline specific needs that became the targets of a design and build challenge. Field Ready was one of those nonprofits, and for the challenge they focused on quality control for their distributed manufacturing system. We took a look at Field Ready back in June to explore some of the unique challenges associated with their work, which included customers potentially not knowing that a product they procured came from Field Ready in the first place, leading to very little feedback on the performance of the products and nowhere to turn when replacements are needed.
The challenge was met by a dream team whose members each received a $6,000 microgrant to work full time on the project. The’ve just made their report on an easier way of tracking all of the products produced, and identifying them even for those not in the organization. As a result, Field Ready has a much improved manufacturing and supply process which allows them to gather more data and get better feedback from users of their equipment. Join us after the break for a closer look at the system and to watch the team’s presentation video.
Decades ago, Einstein predicted the existence of something he didn’t believe in — black holes. Ever since then, people have been trying to get a glimpse of these collapsed stars that represent the limits of our understanding of physics.
For the last 25 years, Andrea Ghez has had her sights set on the black hole at the center of our galaxy known as Sagittarius A*, trying to conclusively prove it exists. In the early days, her proposal was dismissed entirely. Then she started getting lauded for it. Andrea earned a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008. In 2012, she was the first woman to receive the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Now Andrea has become the fourth woman ever to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics for her discovery. She shares the prize with Roger Penrose and Reinhard Genzel for discoveries relating to black holes. UCLA posted her gracious reaction to becoming a Nobel Laureate.
A Star is Born
Andrea Mia Ghez was born June 16th, 1965 in New York City, but grew up in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. Her love of astronomy was launched right along with Apollo program. Once she saw the moon landing, she told her parents that she wanted to be the first female astronaut. They bought her a telescope, and she’s had her eye on the stars ever since. Now Andrea visits the Keck telescopes — the world’s largest — six times a year.
Andrea was always interested in math and science growing up, and could usually be found asking big questions about the universe. She earned a BS from MIT in 1987 and a PhD from Caltech in 1992. While she was still in graduate school, she made a major discovery concerning star formation — that most stars are born with companion star. After graduating from Caltech, Andrea became a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA so she could get access to the Keck telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The Keck telescopes and the Milky Way. Image via Flickr
The Center of the Galaxy
Since 1995, Andrea has pointed the Keck telescopes toward the center of our galaxy, some 25,000 light years away. There’s a lot of gas and dust clouding the view, so she and her team had to get creative with something called adaptive optics. This method works by deforming the telescope’s mirror in real time in order to overcome fluctuations in the atmosphere.
Thanks to adaptive optics, Andrea and her team were able to capture images that were 10-30 times clearer than what was previously possible. By studying the orbits of stars that hang out near the center, she was able to determine that a supermassive black hole with four millions times the mass of the sun must lie there. Thanks to this telescope hack, Andrea and other scientists will be able to study the effects of black holes on gravity and galaxies right here at home. You can watch her explain her work briefly in the video after the break. Congratulations, Dr. Ghez, and here’s to another 25 years of fruitful research.
As far as robots are concerned, wheels and tracks are great ways to get around when you’ve got serious work to do. However, if you want to build something that feels more animal than machine, building a walking ‘bot is the way to go. [Technovation] delivers a great example in the form of this quadruped design.
It’s a build executed in the modern style, taking full advantage of contemporary design tools and processes. The entire robot is built around twelve servo motors that provide rotation and translation to the robot’s joints. After importing the servo models into Fusion 360, [Technovation] set about building the rest of the body around them. An Arduino Uno runs the show, which addresses the many servos thanks to a Sensor Shield that has a multitude of useful outputs.
[Technovation] put a specific focus on durability and robustness during the design phase. The platform is intended as a test bed for various walking styles and gaits, and thus any hardware failures would be an unnecessary distraction from the project’s goals. The chassis is a great platform to learn on, and we expect to see further developments in future.
Currently, if you want to use the Autopilot or Self-Driving modes on a Tesla vehicle you need to keep your hands on the wheel at all times. That’s because, ultimately, the human driver is still the responsible party. Tesla is adamant about the fact that functions which allow the car to steer itself within a lane, avoid obstacles, and intelligently adjust its speed to match traffic all constitute a driver assistance system. If somebody figures out how to fool the wheel sensor and take a nap while their shiny new electric car is hurtling down the freeway, they want no part of it.
So it makes sense that the company’s official line regarding the driver-facing camera in the Model 3 and Model Y is that it’s there to record what the driver was doing in the seconds leading up to an impact. As explained in the release notes of the June 2020 firmware update, Tesla owners can opt-in to providing this data:
Help Tesla continue to develop safer vehicles by sharing camera data from your vehicle. This update will allow you to enable the built-in cabin camera above the rearview mirror. If enabled, Tesla will automatically capture images and a short video clip just prior to a collision or safety event to help engineers develop safety features and enhancements in the future.
But [green], who’s spent the last several years poking and prodding at the Tesla’s firmware and self-driving capabilities, recently found some compelling hints that there’s more to the story. As part of the vehicle’s image recognition system, which usually is tasked with picking up other vehicles or pedestrians, they found several interesting classes that don’t seem necessary given the official explanation of what the cabin camera is doing.
If all Tesla wanted was a few seconds of video uploaded to their offices each time one of their vehicles got into an accident, they wouldn’t need to be running image recognition configured to detect distracted drivers against it in real-time. While you could make the argument that this data would be useful to them, there would still be no reason to do it in the vehicle when it could be analyzed as part of the crash investigation. It seems far more likely that Tesla is laying the groundwork for a system that could give the vehicle another way of determining if the driver is paying attention.
Over the years, the 1993 classic Doom has gained an almost meme-like status where it can seemingly run on anything. Everything from printers to smartwatches has been shown off running the now-iconic first level of Doom. Looking to up the bar, [Equalo] set out to run Doom on potatoes. However until we develop full biological computers, he had to settle for running Doom on a device powered by potatoes. (Video, embedded below.)
As we’ve seen with other hacks before, potatoes are a decent power source that just requires potato, zinc, and copper. Some have attempted to make it easier to scale potato power and others have focused on making the individual potatoes more powerful. The biggest obstacle when working with potatoes as a battery is that even though each potato can put out almost a volt, the current is laughably small.
The lack of current is what drove [Equalo] to dramatically scale up the typical potato battery. With a target device of a Raspberry Pi Zero requiring around 100 mA at 4.5V, this means he needed over 700 potato slices. After boiling hundreds of potatoes and with a bit of help from friends and family, the giant potato battery was constructed, and we can’t help but marvel at the sheer scale and audacity. The challenge of scaling up a potato battery is that by the time you’re wiring up the 400th potato, your first potato has already started to corrode.
Next time you’re looking for some inspiration for a monumental task, perhaps watch the tale of [Equalo’s] giant potato battery and remember what can be accomplished with some determination and a hundred pounds of spuds.
You need a Swiss Army knife of serial communications? Ollie is a compact isolated USB adaptor that provides USB, CAN bus, and two UARTs at logic, RS-232, and RS-485 signaling levels, as well as an isolated power supply. [Slimelec] has managed to squeeze all this into a package the size of a harmonica. We like the technique of making the enclosure from PCB material, complete with clearly labeled switch, LED and connector pinout names.
So far, only the compiled firmware is available for this project, but hardware files, and presumably the source code and documentation, are coming soon.
The central themes here are isolation and flexibility. We can’t find the isolation voltage in the project specifications, but the CANable project on which this adaptor is based provides 2.5 kV galvanic isolation. A single isolated USB interface is also provided over a standard Type A connector. The four-wire logic-level UART signals are available on a 2 x 7 box header, and are voltage selectable. The RS-232, RS-485, and CAN signals are on an 8-pin pluggable screw terminal block, or you can use a DB9 connector with a pluggable adaptor board.
Whether you need a troubleshooting aid for field testing, are using CAN bus on your projects, or just want to isolate your expensive computer from sketchy prototype hardware, have a look at this project.
