Expanding, And Eventually Replacing, The International Space Station

March 3, 2020 by 99 Comments

Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), humanity has managed to maintain an uninterrupted foothold in low Earth orbit for just shy of 20 years. There are people reading these words who have had the ISS orbiting overhead for their entire lives, the first generation born into a truly spacefaring civilization.

But as the saying goes, what goes up must eventually come down. The ISS is at too low of an altitude to remain in orbit indefinitely, and core modules of the structure are already operating years beyond their original design lifetimes. As difficult a decision as it might be for the countries involved, in the not too distant future the $150 billion orbiting outpost will have to be abandoned.

Naturally there’s some debate as to how far off that day is. NASA officially plans to support the Station until at least 2024, and an extension to 2028 or 2030 is considered very likely. Political tensions have made it difficult to get a similar commitment out of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, but its expected they’ll continue crewing and maintaining their segment as long as NASA does the same. Afterwards, it’s possible Roscosmos will attempt to salvage some of their modules from the ISS so they can be used on a future station.

This close to retirement, any new ISS modules would need to be designed and launched on an exceptionally short timescale. With NASA’s efforts and budget currently focused on the Moon and beyond, the agency has recently turned to private industry for proposals on how they can get the most out of the time that’s left. Unfortunately several of the companies that were in the running to develop commercial Station modules have since backed out, but there’s at least one partner that still seems intent on following through: Axiom.

With management made up of former astronauts and space professionals, including NASA’s former ISS Manager Michael Suffredini and Administrator Charles Bolden, the company boasts a better than average understanding of what it takes to succeed in low Earth orbit. About a month ago, this operational experience helped secure Axiom’s selection by NASA to develop a new habitable module for the US side of the Station by 2024.

While the agreement technically only covers a single module, Axiom hasn’t been shy about their plans going forward. Once that first module is installed and operational, they plan on getting NASA approval to launch several new modules branching off of it. Ultimately, they hope that their “wing” of the International Space Station can be detached and become its own independent commercial station by the end of the decade.

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A Honeycomb Patching Robot Powered By Arduino

March 3, 2020 by 13 Comments

No, it’s not the kind of honeycomb you’re probably thinking of. We’re talking about the lightweight panels commonly used in aerospace applications. Apparently they’re rather prone to dents and other damage during handling, so Boeing teamed up with students from the California State University to come up with a way to automate the time-consuming repair process.

The resulting machine, which you can see in action after the break, is a phenomenal piece of engineering. But more than that, it’s an impressive use of off-the-shelf components. The only thing more fascinating than seeing this robotic machine perform its artful repairs is counting how many of its core components you’ve got laying around the shop.

Built from aluminum extrusion, powered by an Arduino Due, and spinning a Dewalt cut-off tool that looks like it was just picked it up from Home Depot, you could easily source most of the hardware yourself. Assuming you needed to automatically repair aerospace-grade honeycomb panels, anyway.

At the heart of this project is a rotating “turret” that holds all the tools required for the repair. After the turret is homed and the condition of all the cutting tools is verified, a hole is drilled into the top of the damaged cell. A small tool is then carefully angled into the hole (a little trick that is mechanical poetry in motion) to deburr the hole, and a vacuum is used to suck out any of the filings created by the previous operations. Finally a nozzle is moved into position and the void is filled with expanding foam.

Boeing says it takes up to four hours for a human to perform this same repair. Frankly, that seems a little crazy to us. But then again if we were the ones tasked with repairing a structural panel for a communications satellite or aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars, we’d probably take our time too. The video is obviously sped up so it’s hard to say exactly how long this automated process takes, but it doesn’t seem like it could be much more than a few minutes from start to finish.

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Evolution Of A Backpack VR System

March 3, 2020 by 8 Comments

Persistence is what a hacker needs to make it to their goal. That’s exactly what it took for [Erik] to make an untethered VR backpack system.

Starting way back in the Spring of 2019, [Erik] began working on an untethered VR system. Sure, the Oculus Quest was coming out, but it wouldn’t be compatible with the game library of PC based systems. [Erik] decided he wanted the best of both worlds, so he decided to build a backpack that carries a computer powerful enough to drive the Rift S.

The initial system was to use a cut-up backpack, an HP mini PC with an external Nvidia 1060 GPU, and a basic DC-DC converter. The result? Just about nothing worked. The HP’s boot process didn’t play well with an external GPU.

[Erik] went through several iterations of this project. He switched over to a standard PC motherboard and tried a few different DC-DC converters. He settled on a device from HDPLEX rated at 200 watts continuous. The converter plugs directly into a standard 24-pin ATX motherboard power connector and isn’t much larger than the connector itself.

The old backpack with its added padding and wood frame gave way to a Zotac VR go backpack. Only the straps and frame of the Zotac are used, with [Erik’s] custom parts mounted using plywood and 3D printed parts. The outer frame is aluminum, with acrylic panels.

Power comes from 7000 mAH LiFe batteries, with each pack providing an hour of runtime. The Backpack can hold two packs though, so wiring them up in parallel should double that runtime.

We have to say this is an extremely well-documented build. [Erik] explains how he chose each component and the advantages (and pitfalls) of the choices he made. An example would be the RAM he picked. He chose DDR4 with a higher spec than he needed, just so he could undervolt the parts for longer run-times.

Not everything in VR is fun and games though – you can ditch that monitor and go with a VR desktop.

Esper Makes Virtual Reality From Live Reality

March 2, 2020 by 3 Comments

There’s a scene in Bladerunner where Deckard puts a photograph in a magical machine that lets him zoom and enhance without limit, and even see around obstacles. In today’s climate, this is starting to seem more plausible, what with all the cameras everywhere. [Jasper van Loenen] explores this concept in Esper, a technological art installation he created in Seoul, Korea during an artist residency.

Esper is a two-part piece that turns virtual reality on its head by showing actual reality in VR. It covers two adjoining rooms, one to record reality, and the other for real-time virtual viewing on headsets. The first is outfitted with 60 ESP32 cameras on custom mounts, all pointing in different directions from various perches and ceiling drops. [Jasper] used an Android app based on openFrameworks to map the cameras’ locations in 3D space. The room next door is so empty, it’s even devoid of FOMO. You don’t want to miss this one, so check it out after the break.

Recreating sci-fi props is all fun and games until the dystopia arrives. Then again, the fact that we can all easily access 70,000 or so insecure surveillance cameras is a pretty good start.

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Arduino Drives Astronomy Dome

March 2, 2020 by 12 Comments

The South Florida Science Center recently added a new ten-inch telescope and turned to [Andres Paris] and his brother to replace the hand-cranked dome door system. They turned to an Arduino along with some beefy motor drivers. You can see some videos of the beast in operation, below.

According to a Reddit post, the brothers picked up a 5A 12V motor but decided to overdesign and selected an H-bridge that would handle 20A peak current. An IR remote allows the operator to open and shut the door and reed switches sense the extremes of the door’s motion.

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Multi-Band Receiver On A Chip Controlled By Arduino

March 2, 2020 by 18 Comments

The Silicon Labs Si4735 is a single-chip solution for receiving AM, FM, and shortwave radio. With a bit of hacking, it even supports single sideband (SSB). All you’ve got to do is provide it with a suitable control interface, which [Ricardo Lima Caratti] has done with his recent project.

Using an Arduino Pro Mini, a handful of buttons, and a standard TFT display, [Ricardo] has put together a serviceable little receiver with a fairly impressive user interface. We especially like the horizontal bars indicating the signal to noise ratio and received signal strength. The next evolution would be to put this whole rig into some kind of enclosure, but for now he seems content to control the action with a handful of unlabeled buttons on a piece of perfboard.

Of course, the presentation of this receiver isn’t really the point; it’s more of a proof of concept. You see, [Ricardo] is the person who’s actually developed the library that allows you to control the Si4735 from your microcontroller of choice over I2C. He’s currently tested it with several members of the official (and not so official) Arduino family, as well as the ESP32.

The documentation [Ricardo] has put together for his MIT licensed Arduino Si4735 library is nothing short of phenomenal. Seriously, if all open source projects were documented even half as well as this one is, we’d all be a few notches closer to world peace. Even if you aren’t terribly interested in adding shortwave radio reception to your next project, you’ve got to browse his documentation just to see where the high water mark is.

We actually first heard about this library a few days ago when we covered another receiver using the Si4735 and [Ricardo] popped into the comments to share some of the work he’d been doing to push the state-of-the-art forward for this promising chip.

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This DIY Dynamometer Shows Just What A Motor Can Do

March 2, 2020 by 11 Comments

Back in high school, all the serious gearheads used to brag about two things: their drag strip tickets, and their dynamometer reports. The former showed how fast their muscle car could cover a quarter-mile, while the latter was documentation on how much power their carefully crafted machine could deliver. What can I say; gas was cheap and we didn’t have the Internet to distract us.

Bragging rights are not exactly what [Jeremy Fielding] has in mind for his DIY dynamometer, nor is getting the particulars on a big Detroit V8 engine. Rather, he wants to characterize small- to medium-sized electric motors, with an eye toward repurposing them for different projects. To do this, he built a simple jig to measure the two parameters needed to calculate the power output of a motor: speed and torque. A magnetic tachometer does the job of measuring the motor’s speed, but torque proved a bit more challenging. The motor under test is coupled to a separate electric braking motor, which spins free when it’s not powered. A lever arm of known length connects to the braking motor on one end while bearing on a digital scale on the other. With the motor under test spun up, the braking motor is gradually powered, which rotates its housing and produces a force on the scale through the lever arm. A little math is all it takes for the mystery motor to reveal its secrets.

[Jeremy]’s videos are always instructional, and the joy he obviously feels at discovery is infectious, so we’re surprised to see that we haven’t featured any of his stuff before. We’ve seen our share of dynos before, though, from the tiny to the computerized to the kind that sometimes blows up.

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