The Last Acorn BBC Computer Wasn’t A BBC Micro

December 17, 2024 by 27 Comments

For home computer users, the end of the 1980s was the era of 16-bit computers. The challenge facing manufacturers of 8-bit machines through the middle of the decade was to transfer their range and customers to the new hardware, and the different brands each did this in their own way. Commodore and Atari had 68000-based powerhouses, and Apple had their 16-bit-upgraded IIGS for the middle ground below the Mac, but what about Acorn, makers of the BBC Micro? They had the Archimedes, and [RetroBytes] takes us through how they packaged their 32-bit ARM processor for consumers.

The A3000 was the computer you wanted if you were a geeky British kid at the end of that decade, even if an Amiga or an ST was what you got. Schools had bought a few of the desktop Archimedes’, so if you were lucky you’d got to know Arthur and then RiscOS, so you knew just how fast these things were compared to the competition. The video below the break takes a dive into the decisions behind the design of this first ARM consumer product, and along the way it explains a few things we didn’t know at the time.  We all know what happened to Acorn through the 1990s and we all use ARM processors today, so it’s a fascinating watch. If only an extra two hundred quid had been in the kitty back then and we could have bought one ourselves.

If you have never used an Archimedes you can get pretty close today with another Cambridge-designed and ARM-powered computer. RiscOS never went away, and you can run it on a Raspberry Pi. As we found, it’s still pretty useful.

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Man Overboard Systems Aim To Increase Survival Rates At Sea

December 17, 2024 by 22 Comments

When you hear the cry of “Man Overboard!” on a ship, it’s an emergency situation. The sea is unkind to those that fall from their vessel, and survival is never guaranteed—even in the most favorable conditions. Raging swell and the dark of night can only make rescue more impossible.

Over the centuries, naval tradition has included techniques to find and recover the person in the water as quickly and safely as possible. These days, though, technology is playing an ever-greater role in such circumstances. Modern man-overboard (MOB) systems are designed to give crews of modern vessels a fighting chance when rescuing those in peril.

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See What ‘They’ See In Your Photos

December 17, 2024 by 46 Comments

Once upon a time, a computer could tell you virtually nothing about an image beyond its file format, size, and color palette. These days, powerful image recognition systems are a part of our everyday lives. They See Your Photos is a simple website that shows you just how much these systems can interpret from a regular photo.

The website simply takes your image submission, runs it through the Google Vision API, and spits back out a description of the image. I tried it out with a photograph of myself, and was pretty impressed with what the vision model saw:

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3D Printed Blaster Does It With Compliant Components

December 17, 2024 by 20 Comments

The ease of integrating bendy parts into designs is one of 3D printing’s strengths. A great example of this is [uhltimate]’s six-shot blaster which integrates several compliant mechanisms. The main blaster even prints in one piece, so there’s not even any assembly required.

The ergonomics are unconventional, but the design is pretty clever.

The blaster itself has three main parts: the trigger, the sear, and the striker. Each of them rely on compliant mechanisms in order to function. The user pulls back the trigger, which hooks into and pulls back the striker. When the trigger is pulled back far enough, the sear releases the striker. This zips forward and slams into a waiting projectile, sending it flying.

The other interesting part is the projectiles and magazine in which they sit. The magazine fits onto the front of the blaster and pulling the trigger allows the magazine to drop down, putting the next projectile into firing position. After the final round is fired, the empty magazine falls away. It’s a pretty clever design, even if the ergonomics are a little unusual and it relies on gravity in order to feed. Tilt it too far sideways or upside down, and it won’t load properly.

We’ve seen compliant mechanisms used for projectile firing before, but this design really raises the bar in the way it does more than just firing the striker.

3D printing allows rapid iteration of designs, which makes devices that rely on compliant mechanisms much easier to develop and fine-tune.

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Robot Air Hockey Player Predicts Your Next Move

December 16, 2024 by 21 Comments

Air hockey is a fun game, but it’s one you can’t play by yourself. That is, unless you have a smart robot hockey player to act as your rival. [Zeroshot] built exactly that.

The build is based around a small 27-inch air hockey table—not exactly arcade-spec, but big enough to demonstrate the concepts at play. The robot player moves its mallet in the X and Y axes using a pair of NEMA17 stepper motors and an H-belt configuration. To analyze the game state, there’s a Raspberry Pi 3B fitted with a camera, and it has a top-down view of the board. The Pi gives the stepper motors commands on how to move the mallet via an Arduino that communicates with the stepper drivers.  The Pi doesn’t just aim for the puck itself, either. With Python and OpenCV, it tries to predict your own moves by tracking your mallet, and the puck, too. It predicts the very-predictable path of the puck, and moves itself to the right position for effective defence.

Believe it or not, we’ve featured quite a few projects in this vein before. They’ve all got their similarities, and their own unique quirks. Video after the break.
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Fairey Rotodyne in flight

Versatile, Yet Grounded: The Rotodyne Revisited

December 16, 2024 by 26 Comments

When it comes to aviation curiosities, few machines captivate the imagination like the Fairey Rotodyne. This British hybrid aircraft was a daring attempt to combine helicopter and fixed-wing efficiency into a single vehicle. A bold experiment in aeronautical design, the Rotodyne promised vertical takeoffs and landings in cramped urban spaces while offering the speed and range of a regional airliner. First flown in 1957, it captured the world’s attention but ultimately failed to realize its potential. Despite featured before, new footage keeps fascinating us. If you have never heard about this jet, keep reading.

The Rotodyne’s innovative design centered around a massive, powered rotor that utilized a unique tip-jet system. Compressed air, mixed with fuel and ignited at the rotor tips, created lift without the need for a tail rotor. The result: a smoother transition between vertical and forward flight modes. Inside, it offered spacious seating for 50 passengers and even had clamshell doors for cargo. Yet its futuristic approach wasn’t without drawbacks—most notably, the thunderous noise produced by its rotor jets, earning complaints from both city planners and residents.

Despite these hurdles, the helicopter-plane crossover demonstrated its versatility, setting a world speed record and performing groundbreaking intercity flights. Airlines and militaries expressed interest, but escalating development costs and noise concerns grounded this ambitious project.

To this day, the Rotodyne remains a symbol of what could have been—a marvel of engineering ahead of its time. Interested in more retro-futuristic aircraft tales? Read our previous story on it, or watch the original footage below and share your thoughts.

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Emulating The Battery Controller In An Ancient Acer PDA

December 16, 2024 by 11 Comments

[Mark B] had a problem. He’d come into possession of an Acer N30 PDA, sans batteries. He couldn’t just throw any old cells in, since the unit expected to communicate with an onboard controller chip in the original pack. What ensued was his effort to emulate the original battery controller hardware. This is classic Hackaday right here, folks.

Just wiring in typical Li-Ion voltages to the PDAs battery pins wasn’t enough to make this Windows CE device happy. The device kept fleeing to sleep mode, thinking the battery was faulty or very low. Eventually, inspecting the motherboard revealed the PDA hosted a BQ24025 charger IC from Texas Instruments. [Mark] surmised it was trying to communciate with a BQ26500 “gas gauge” IC from the original battery pack. Armed with that knowledge, he then set about programming an STM32 chip to emulate its behavior. He then successfully ported the functionality over to a CH32V003 microcontroller as well. Paired with a Nokia BL-5CT battery, he had a working portable power solution for his PDA.

It’s great to see ancient hardware brought back to functionality with some good old fashioned hacking. I’d hoped to do the same with my Apple Newton before someone nicked it from my lounge room, more’s the pity. If you’re rescuing your own beleaguered battery-powered portables, don’t hesitate to let us know!