One Small Step: All About Stepper Motors

January 6, 2025 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

The primary feature of stepper motors is listed right within their name: their ability to ‘step’ forwards and backwards, something which they (ideally) can do perfectly in sync with the input provided to their distinct coils. It’s a feature that allows the connected controller to know the exact position of the stepper motor, without the need for any sensor to provide feedback after a movement, saving a lot of hardware and effort in the process.

Naturally, this is the optimal case, and there are a wide number of different stepper motor configurations in terms of coil count, types of rotors and internal wiring of the coils, as well as complications such as skipped steps due to mechanical or driver issues. Despite this, in general stepper motors are quite reliable, and extremely versatile. As a result they can be found just about anywhere where accurate, step-based movement is desirable, such as (3D) printers and robotics.

For each application the right type of stepper motor and driving circuit has to be determined, of course, as they also have many reasons why you’d not want to use them, or just a particular type. When diving into a new stepper motor-based project, exactly what are the considerations to pay attention to?

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Turns Out Humans Are Terrible At Intuiting Knot Strength

January 6, 2025 by Donald Papp 36 Comments

We are deeply intuitively familiar with our everyday physical world, so it was perhaps a bit of a surprise when researchers discovered a blind spot in our intuitive physical reasoning: it seems humans are oddly terrible at judging knot strength.

One example is the reef knot (top) vs. the grief knot (bottom). One is considerably stronger than the other.

What does this mean, exactly? According to researchers, people were consistently unable to tell when presented with different knots in simple applications and asked which knot was stronger or weaker. This failure isn’t because people couldn’t see the knots clearly, either. Each knot’s structure and topology was made abundantly clear (participants were able to match knots to their schematics accurately) so it’s not a failure to grasp the knot’s structure, it’s just judging a knot’s relative strength that seems to float around in some kind of blind spot.

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Mechanical Calculator Finds Derivatives

January 6, 2025 by Al Williams 10 Comments

We like mechanical calculators like slide rules, but we have to admit that we had not heard of the Ott Derivimeter that [Chris Staecker] shows us in a recent video. As the name implies, the derivimeter finds the derivative of a function. To do that, you have to plot the function on a piece of paper that the meter can measure.

If you forgot calculus or skipped it altogether, the derivative is the rate of change. If you plot, say, your car’s speed vs time, the parts where you accelerate or decelerate will have a larger derivative (either positive or negative, in the decelerate case). If you hold a steady speed, the derivative will be zero.

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Flashlight shining through gold leaf on glass

Shining Through: Germanium And Gold Leaf Transparency

January 5, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 26 Comments

Germanium. It might sound like just another periodic table entry (number 32, to be exact), but in the world of infrared light, it’s anything but ordinary. A recent video by [The Action Lab] dives into the fascinating property of germanium being transparent to infrared light. This might sound like sci-fi jargon, but it’s a real phenomenon that can be easily demonstrated with nothing more than a flashlight and a germanium coin. If you want to see how that looks, watch the video on how it’s done.

The fun doesn’t stop at germanium. In experiments, thin layers of gold—yes, the real deal—allowed visible light to shine through, provided the metal was reduced to a thickness of 100 nanometers (or: gold leaf). These hacks reveal something incredible: light interacts with materials in ways we don’t normally observe.

For instance, infrared light, with its lower energy, can pass through germanium, while visible light cannot. And while solid gold might seem impenetrable, its ultra-thin form becomes translucent, demonstrating the delicate dance of electromagnetic waves and electrons.

The implications of these discoveries aren’t just academic. From infrared cameras to optics used in space exploration, understanding these interactions has unlocked breakthroughs in technology. Has this article inspired you to craft something new? Or have you explored an effect similar to this? Let us know in the comments!

We usually take our germanium in the form of a diode. Or, maybe, a transistor.

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Perfecting 20 Minute PCBs With Laser

January 5, 2025 by Al Williams 40 Comments

Normally, you have a choice with PCB prototypes: fast or cheap. [Stephen Hawes] has been trying fiber lasers to create PCBs. He’s learned a lot which he shares in the video below. Very good-looking singled-sided boards take just a few minutes. Fiber lasers are not cheap but they are within range for well-off hackers and certainly possible for a well-funded hackerspace.

One thing that’s important is to use FR1 phenolic substrate instead of the more common FR4. FR4 uses epoxy which will probably produce some toxic fumes under the laser.

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Hackaday Links: January 5, 2025

January 5, 2025 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Good news this week from the Sun’s far side as the Parker Solar Probe checked in after its speedrun through our star’s corona. Parker became the fastest human-made object ever — aside from the manhole cover, of course — as it fell into the Sun’s gravity well on Christmas Eve to pass within 6.1 million kilometers of the surface, in an attempt to study the extremely dynamic environment of the solar atmosphere. Similar to how manned spacecraft returning to Earth are blacked out from radio communications, the plasma soup Parker flew through meant everything it would do during the pass had to be autonomous, and we wouldn’t know how it went until the probe cleared the high-energy zone. The probe pinged Earth with a quick “I’m OK” message on December 26, and checked in with the Deep Space Network as scheduled on January 1, dumping telemetry data that indicated the spacecraft not only survived its brush with the corona but that every instrument performed as expected during the pass. The scientific data from the instruments won’t be downloaded until the probe is in a little better position, and then Parker will get to do the whole thing again twice more in 2025. Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 5, 2025” →

Reverse-Engineering The Polynomial Constants In The Pentium’s FPU

January 5, 2025 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

Die photo of the Intel Pentium processor with the floating point constant ROM highlighted in red. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)

Released in 1993, Intel’s Pentium processor was a marvel of technological progress. Its floating point unit (FPU) was a big improvement over its predecessors that still used the venerable CORDIC algorithm. In a recent blog post [Ken Shirriff] takes an up-close look at the FPU and associated ROMs in the Pentium die that enable its use of polynomials. Even with 3.1 million transistors, the Pentium die is still on a large enough process node that it can be readily analyzed with an optical microscope.

In the blog post, [Ken] shows how you can see the constants in each ROM section, with each bit set as either a transistor (‘1’) or no transistor (‘0’), making read-out very easy. The example looks at the constant of pi, which the Pentium’s FPU has stored as a version with no fewer than 67 significand bits along with its exponent.

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