Retrotechtacular: Field Assembling Airplanes Like Wartime “Ikea”

December 21, 2017 by 29 Comments

Imagine it’s 1943, and you have to transport 1,000 P-47 fighter planes from your factory in the United States to the front lines in Europe, roughly 5,000 miles over the open ocean. Flying them isn’t an option, the P-47 has a maximum range of only 1,800 miles, and the technology for air-to-air refueling of fighter planes is still a few years off. The Essex class aircraft carriers in use at this time could carry P-47s in a pinch, but the plane isn’t designed for carrier use and realistically you wouldn’t be able to fit many on anyway. So what does that leave?

It turns out, the easiest way is to simply ship them as freight. But you can’t exactly wrap a fighter plane up in brown paper and stick a stamp on it; the planes would need to be specially prepared and packed for their journey across the Atlantic. To get the P-47 inside of a reasonably shaped shipping crate, the wings, propeller, and tail had to come off and be put into a separate crate. But as any reader of Hackaday knows, getting something apart is rarely the problem, it’s getting the thing back together that’s usually the tricky part.

So begins the 1943 film “Uncrating and Assembly of the P-47 Thunderbolt Airplane“ which has been digitally restored and uploaded to YouTube by [Zeno’s Warbirds]. In this fascinating 40 minute video produced by the “Army Air Forces School of Applied Tactics”, the viewer is shown how the two crates containing the P-47 are to be unpacked and assembled into a ready-to-fly airplane with nothing more than manpower and standard mechanic’s tools. No cranes, no welders, not even a hanger: just a well-designed aircraft and wartime ingenuity.

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Microbalance Determines Alcohol Content

December 21, 2017 by 8 Comments

With the holiday season upon us, it is useful to be able to determine just how much (or how little) spiking the office party punch has received. [Russell Smith] shows how he tried to determine the proof level of booze using a microbalance made from an old-fashioned panel meter.

That might seem odd, but since alcohol evaporates faster than water, you can plot the change in evaporation rate if you have a good enough scale. That’s where the microbalance comes in. The idea is to weight down the needle of an old meter and measure the amount of current it takes to get to a certain deflection. His results weren’t totally satisfactory, but his methods were interesting.

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Magic Leap Finally Announced; Remains Mysterious

December 21, 2017 by 74 Comments

Yesterday Magic Leap announced that it will ship developer edition hardware in 2018. The company is best known for raising a lot of money. That’s only partially a joke, since the teased hardware has remained very mysterious and never been revealed, yet they have managed to raise nearly $2 billion through four rounds of funding (three of them raising more than $500 million each).

The announcement launched Magic Leap One — subtitled the Creator Edition — with a mailing list sign up for “designers, developers and creatives”. The gist is that the first round of hardware will be offered for sale to people who will write applications and create uses for the Magic Leap One.

We’ve gathered some info about the hardware, but we’ll certainly begin the guessing game on the specifics below. The one mystery that has been solved is how this technology is delivered: as a pair of goggles attaching to a dedicated processing unit. How does it stack up to current offerings?

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Read Home Power Meters With RTL-SDR

December 21, 2017 by 62 Comments

[k-roy] hates electricity. Especially the kind that can be lethal if you’re not careful. Annoyed by the constant advertisements for the popular Sense Home Energy monitors (which must be installed in the main breaker box by an electrician), [k-roy] set out to find a cheaper and easier way. He wondered how the power company monitored his meter, and guessed correctly that it must be transmitting the information wirelessly. Maybe he could just listen in?

Using a cheap RTL-SDR, it didn’t take long for [k-roy] to tap into this transmission and stumbled across the power readings for his entire neighborhood using a simple command:

~/gocode/bin/rtlamr -msgtype=idm --format=json -msgtype=scm+

Ironically, the hardest part wasn’t snooping on everyone’s power and water usage patterns in the neighborhood, it was trying to figure out which meter was his. In the end, he was able to make some nice graphical layouts of the data with PHP.

We’ve seen some righteous power meter hacks in our time, but this one stands out for its simplicity and elegance. Be sure to check out [k-roy’s] blog for more details, and [rtlamr’s] github for the program used to read the meters.

Thanks to [Jasper J] for the tip!

Military Surplus Repurposed For High Energy Physics

December 21, 2017 by 8 Comments

Performing high-energy physics experiments can get very expensive, a fact that attracts debate on public funding for scientific research. But the reality is that scientists often work very hard to stretch their funding as far as they can. This is why we need informative and entertaining stories like Gizmodo’s How Physicists Recycled WWII Ships and Artillery to Unlock the Mysteries of the Universe.

The military have specific demands on components for their equipment. Hackers are well aware MIL-SPEC parts typically command higher prices. That quality is useful beyond their military service, which lead to how CERN obtained large quantities of a specific type of brass from obsolete Russian naval ordnance.

The remainder of the article shared many anecdotes around Fermilab’s use of armor plate from decommissioned US Navy warships. They obtained a mind-boggling amount – thousands of tons – just for the cost of transport. Dropping the cost of high quality steel to “only” $53 per ton (1975 dollars, ~$250 today) and far more economical than buying new. Not all of the steel acquired by Fermilab went to science experiments, though. They also put a little bit towards sculptures on the Fermilab campus. (One of the few contexts where 21 tons of steel can be considered “a little bit”.)

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Old Scanner Finds New Life In DIY PCB Fab

December 20, 2017 by 33 Comments

Cheap, high-quality PCBs are truly a wonder of our age. That a professionally fabricated board with silkscreen and solder mask can be ordered online and delivered to your door has lowered the bar between a hobbyist project and a polished product. But the wait can be agonizing, and it can throw a wrench into the iterative design process. What to do?

[Andras Kabai] knows the answer to that, and this former flatbed scanner turned into a UV exposer is the centerpiece of his DIY board fab. The old Mustek scanner was a couple of bucks secondhand, and provided not only the perfect form-factor for a board scanner but a trove of valuable parts to reuse. [Andras] replaced the original fluorescent light bar with a long, narrow PCB stuffed with UV LEDs, and added an Arduino Mega to control the original stepper drive. The project looks like it went through a little feature creep, with an elaborate menu system and profiles that include controls for exposure time, the brightness of the LED array via PWM, and the length of board that gets exposed. It’s clearly a work in progress, but early results are encouraging and we’ll be watching to see how [Andras]’ in-house fab shapes up.

This approach to PCB fab is only one of many, of course. You can turn a budget 3D-printer into a PCB machine, or even use an LCD to mask the boards during exposure. The latter intrigues us — an LCD mask and a scanning UV light source could make for a powerful PCB creation tool.

FCC Fines Drone FPV Maker For Using Radio Spectrum

December 20, 2017 by 35 Comments

If you listen to the radio bands in the United States, you might wonder if anyone at the FCC is paying attention, or if they are too busy selling spectrum and regulating the Internet. Apparently however, they are watching some things. The commission just levied a $180,000 fine on a company in Florida for selling audio/visual transmitters that use the ham bands as well as other frequencies.

The FCC charged that Lumenier Holdco LLC (formerly known as FPV Manuals LLC) was marketing uncertified transmitters some of which exceeded the 1-W power limit for ham transmitters used on model craft.

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