Camera And Lens Repair Hack Chat

May 27, 2024 by 13 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, May 29 at noon Pacific for the Camera and Lens Repair Hack Chat with Anthony Kouttron!

Unlike the normies, most of us are pretty comfortable looking under the hood of just about anything electronic or mechanical. Whether it’s to effect a repair, make a modification, or just to take a look around, voiding warranties is what we do. A lot of us have hard limits, though, and will shy away from certain types of equipment. High voltages and radiation come to mind, as well as machines with lots of spinny bits that can devour your hands in a trice. One mustn’t be foolhardy, after all.

But one place that we’ve always feared to tread for some reason is camera equipment. Perhaps it has to do with all those impossibly tiny screws with subtly different lengths and the knowledge that putting the wrong screw in the wrong hole could have disastrous results. Or maybe it’s just the general fear that messing around with the insides of lenses could knock something slightly off-kilter and ruin the optics.

join-hack-chatWe’re certainly glad that Anthony Kouttron doesn’t share this trepidation. We recently featured a lens repair that he accomplished that was packed with tips and tricks for optical repairs. It turns out that Anthony has been repairing cameras for leisure since 2010, and has serviced both consumer and high-end cinema equipment — so he’s seen his fair share of broken camera bits. We’ve asked him to drop by the Hack Chat, so if you’ve been hesitant to dive into optical fixes, now might be your chance to learn about the dos and don’ts of camera and lens repair.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 29 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 271: Audio Delay In A Hose, Ribbon Cable Repair, And DIY Hacker Metrology

May 17, 2024 by No comments

What did Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams find interesting on Hackaday this week? Well, honestly, all the posts, but they had to pick some to share with you in the podcast below. There’s news about SuperCon 2024, and failing insulin pumps. After a mystery sound, the guys jump into reverbing garden hoses, Z80s, and even ribbon cable repair.

Adaptive tech was big this week, with a braille reader for smartphones and an assistive knife handle. The quick hacks ranged from a typewriter that writes on toast to a professional-looking but homemade ham radio transceiver.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download a file chock full of podcast here.

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You’ve Probably Never Considered Taking An Airship To Orbit

May 13, 2024 by 71 Comments

There have been all kinds of wild ideas to get spacecraft into orbit. Everything from firing huge cannons to spinning craft at rapid speed has been posited, explored, or in some cases, even tested to some degree. And yet, good ol’ flaming rockets continue to dominate all, because they actually get the job done.

Rockets, fuel, and all their supporting infrastructure remain expensive, so the search for an alternative goes on. One daring idea involves using airships to loft payloads into orbit. What if you could simply float up into space?

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Implantable Battery Charges Itself

April 25, 2024 by 18 Comments

Battery technology is the major limiting factor for the large-scale adoption of electric vehicles and grid-level energy storage. Marginal improvements have been made for lithium cells in the past decade but the technology has arguably been fairly stagnant, at least on massive industrial scales. At smaller levels there have been some more outside-of-the-box developments for things like embedded systems and, at least in the case of this battery that can recharge itself, implantable batteries for medical devices.

The tiny battery uses sodium and gold for the anode and cathode, and takes oxygen from the body to complete the chemical reaction. With a virtually unlimited supply of oxygen available to it, the battery essentially never needs to be replaced or recharged. In lab tests, it took a bit of time for the implant site to heal before there was a reliable oxygen supply, though, but once healing was complete the battery’s performance leveled off.

Currently the tiny batteries have only been tested in rats as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the chemistry and electricity generation capabilities, but there didn’t appear to be any adverse consequences. Technology like this could be a big improvement for implanted devices like pacemakers if it can scale up, and could even help fight diseases and improve healing times. For some more background on implantable devices, [Dan Maloney] catches us up on the difficulties of building and powering replacement hearts for humans.

How Do You Make A Repairable E-Reader

April 15, 2024 by 40 Comments

Mobile devices have become notorious for their unrepairability, with glued-together parts and impossible-to-reach connectors. So it’s refreshing to see something new in that field from the e-book reader brand Kobo in the form of a partnership with iFixit to ensure that their new reader line can be fixed.

Naturally, we welcome any such move, not least because it disproves the notion that portable devices are impossible to make with repairability in mind. However, the linked article is especially interesting because it includes a picture of a reader, and its cover has been removed. We’re unsure whether or not this is one of the new ones, but it’s still worth looking at it with reparability eyes. Just what have they done to make it easier to repair?

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Adjustable Lights Help Peer Inside Chips With IR

April 9, 2024 by 3 Comments

If you’re used to working through a microscope, you’ve probably noticed that the angle of the light greatly affects how your workpiece looks. Most of us prefer the relatively flat lighting provided by a ring light, but variable angle side lighting can be useful too, especially when you’re peering inside ICs to make sure the silicon is what it’s supposed to be.

That’s what [Bunnie] is working on these days with his Project IRIS, short for “Infrared in situ,” a non-destructive method for looking inside chip packages. The technique relies on the fact that silicon is transparent to certain wavelengths of light, and that some modern IC packages expose the underside of the silicon die directly to the outside world. Initial tests indicated that the angle of the incident IR light was important to visualizing features on the metal interconnects layered onto the silicon, so [Bunnie] designed a two-axis light source for his microscope. The rig uses curved metal tracks to guide a pair of IR light sources through an arc centered on the focal point of the microscope stage. The angle of each light source relative to the stage can be controlled independently, while the whole thing can swivel around the optical axis of the microscope to control the radial angle of the lighting.

The mechanism [Bunnie] designed to accomplish all this is pretty complex. Zenith angle is controlled by a lead screw driving a connecting rod to the lights on their guide tracks, while the azimuth of the lights is controlled by a separate motor and pulley driving a custom-built coaxial bearing. The whole optical assembly is mounted on a Jubilee motion platform for XYZ control. The brief videos below show the lights being put through their paces, along with how changing the angle of the light affects the view inside a chip.

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This Air Particulate Sensor Can Also Check Your Pulse Rate

March 26, 2024 by 7 Comments

The MAX30105 is an optical sensor capable of a great many things. It can sense particulate matter in the air, or pick up the blinking of an eye. Or, you can use it as a rudimentary way to measure your heart rate and blood oxygen levels. It’s by no means a medical grade tool, but this build from [Taste The Code] is still quite impressive.

The MAX30105 contains red, green, and infrared LEDs, and a very sensitive light detector. The way it works is by turning on its different LEDs, and then carefully measuring what gets reflected back. In this way it can measure particles in the air,  such as smoke, which is actually what it was designed for originally. Or, if you press your finger up against it, it can measure the light coming back from your blood and determine its oxygenation level. By detecting the variation in the light over time, it’s possible to pick up your pulse, too.

Getting this data out of the sensor is remarkably easy. One need only hook it up to a suitable microcontroller like the ESP8266 and use the MAX3010X library to talk to it. [Taste The Code] did exactly that, and also hooked up a screen for displaying the captured data. Alternatively, if you want the raw data from the sensor, you can get that too.

It should be noted that this build was done for educational purposes only. You shouldn’t rely on a simple DIY device for gathering useful medical data; there are reasons the real gear is so expensive, after all. We’ve looked at this sensor before, too, not long after it first hit the market. Continue reading “This Air Particulate Sensor Can Also Check Your Pulse Rate” →