Historical map of The Netherlands overlayed with clouds

Hacking Global Positioning Systems Onto 16th-Century Maps

November 25, 2024 by 9 Comments

What if GPS had existed in 1565? No satellites or microelectronics, sure—but let’s play along. Imagine the bustling streets of Antwerp, where merchants navigated the sprawling city with woodcut maps. Or sailors plotting Atlantic crossings with accuracy unheard of for the time. This whimsical intersection of history and tech was recently featured in a blog post by [Jan Adriaenssens], and comes alive with Bert Spaan’s Allmaps Here: a delightful web app that overlays your GPS location onto georeferenced historical maps.

Take Antwerp’s 1565 city map by Virgilius Bononiensis, a massive 120×265 cm woodcut. With Allmaps Here, you’re a pink dot navigating this masterpiece. Plantin-Moretus Museum? Nailed it. Kasteelpleinstraat? A shadow of the old citadel it bordered. Let’s not forget how life might’ve been back then. A merchant could’ve avoided morning traffic and collapsing bridges en route to the market, while a farmer relocating his herd could’ve found fertile pastures minus the swamp detour.

Unlike today’s turn-by-turn navigation, a 16th-century GPS might have been all about survival: avoiding bandit-prone roads, timing tides for river crossings, or tracking stars as backup. Imagine explorers fine-tuning their Atlantic crossings with trade winds mapped to the mile. Georeferenced maps like these let us re-imagine the practical genius of our ancestors while enjoying a modern hack on a centuries-old problem.

Although sites like OldMapsOnline, Google Earth Timelapse (and for the Dutch: TopoTijdreis) have been around for a while, this new match of technology and historical detail is a true gem. Curious to map your own world on antique charts? Navigate to Allmaps and start georeferencing!

Programmable Zener Is Really An IC

November 24, 2024 by 25 Comments

[Kevin] doesn’t stock zener diodes anymore. Why? Because for everything he used to use zeners, he now uses TL431 bandgap voltage references. These look like zener diodes but have an extra terminal. That extra terminal allows you to set the threshold to any value you want (within specifications, of course). Have a look at the video below for an introduction to these devices and a practical circuit on a breadboard.

Inside, there’s a voltage reference, an op-amp, and a transistor, so these are tiny 3-terminal ICs. The chip powers itself from the load, so there are no separate power supply pins.

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Student-built rocket launch in Black Rock Desert, Nevada

Aftershock II: How Students Shattered 20-Year Amateur Rocket Records

November 24, 2024 by 40 Comments

When it comes to space exploration, we often think of billion-dollar projects—NASA’s Artemis missions, ESA’s Mars rovers, or China’s Tiangong station. Yet, a group of U.S. students at USC’s Rocket Propulsion Lab (RPL) has achieved something truly extraordinary—a reminder that groundbreaking work doesn’t always require government budgets. On October 20, their homemade rocket, Aftershock II, soared to an altitude of 470,000 feet, smashing the amateur spaceflight altitude and speed records held for over two decades. Intrigued? Check out the full article here.

The 14-foot, 330-pound rocket broke the sound barrier within two seconds, reaching hypersonic speeds of Mach 5.5—around 3,600 mph. But Aftershock II didn’t just go fast; it climbed higher than any amateur spacecraft ever before, surpassing the 2004 GoFast rocket’s record by 90,000 feet. Even NASA-level challenges like thermal protection at hypersonic speeds were tackled using clever tricks. Titanium-coated fins, specially engineered heat-resistant paint, and a custom telemetry module ensured the rocket not only flew but returned largely intact.

This achievement feels straight out of a Commander Keen adventure—scrappy explorers, daring designs, and groundbreaking success against all odds. The full story is a must-read for anyone dreaming of building their own rocket.

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Hackaday Links: November 24, 2024

November 24, 2024 by 6 Comments

We received belated word this week of the passage of Ward Christensen, who died unexpectedly back in October at the age of 78. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s understandable, because the man behind the first computer BBS wasn’t much for the spotlight. Along with Randy Suess and in response to the Blizzard of ’78, which kept their Chicago computer club from meeting in person, Christensen created an electronic version of a community corkboard. Suess worked on the hardware while Christensen provided the software, leveraging his XMODEM file-sharing protocol. They dubbed their creation a “bulletin board system” and when the idea caught on, they happily shared their work so that other enthusiasts could build their own systems.

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Double Your Analog Oscilloscope Fun With This Retro Beam Splitter

November 24, 2024 by 18 Comments

These days, oscilloscope hacking is all about enabling features that the manufacturer baked into the hardware but locked out in the firmware. Those hacks are cool, of course, but back in the days of analog scopes, unlocking new features required a decidedly more hardware-based approach.

For an example of this, take a look at this oscilloscope beam splitter by [Lockdown Electronics]. It’s a simple way to turn a single-channel scope into a dual-channel scope using what amounts to time-division multiplexing. A 555 timer is set up as an astable oscillator generating a 2.5-kHz square wave. That’s fed into the bases of a pair of transistors, one NPN and the other PNP. The collectors of each transistor are connected to the two input signals, each biased to either the positive or negative rail of the power supply. As the 555 swings back and forth it alternately applies each input signal to the output of the beam splitter, which goes to the scope. The result is two independent traces on the analog scope, like magic.

More after the break…

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Flyback, Done Right

November 24, 2024 by 6 Comments

A common part used to create a high voltage is a CRT flyback transformer, having been a ubiquitous junk pile component. So many attempts to use them rely on brute force, with power transistors in simple feedback oscillators dropping high currents into hand-wound primaries, so it’s refreshing to see a much more nuanced approach from [Alex Lungu]. His flyback driver board drives the transformer as it’s meant to be used, in flyback mode relying on the sudden collapse of a magnetic field to generate an output voltage pulse rather than simply trying to create as much field as possible. It’s thus far more efficient than all those free running oscillators.

On the PCB is a UC3844 switch mode power supply controller driving the transformer at about 25 kHz through an IGBT. We’d be curious to know how closely the spec of the transformer is tied to the around 15 kHz it would have been run at in a typical TV, and thus what frequency would be the most efficient for it. The result as far as we can see it a stable and adjustable high voltage source with out all the high-current and over heating, something of which we approve.

Need to understand more about free running versus flyback? Read on.

RISC CPU Lives In Excel

November 24, 2024 by 13 Comments

Last time we checked in on [Inkbox], he had made a 16-bit CPU in Excel. Impressive, but not really practical. Presumably, his latest project isn’t any more practical, but we suspect an 8-bit RISC CPU was easier to implement in Excel and probably runs faster, too. The new machine uses a stack architecture with a simplified instruction set of ten instructions. You can follow along with his Excel adventure in the video below.

If you think about it, you may decide that doing something like this in Excel is easy because you could just script it and use Excel as the user interface. That’s true, but that’s not how [Inkbox] does it. He won’t use scripts or IF statements in a cell. That makes things much harder.

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