Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

June 8, 2023 by 117 Comments

Last week I penned a cheesy fake relationship breakup letter to Ubuntu, my Linux distribution of choice for the last 15 years or so. It had well and truly delivered on its promise of a painless Linux desktop for most of that time, but the most recent upgrades had rendered it slow and bloated, with applications taking minutes to load and USB peripherals such as my film scanner mysteriously stopping working. I don’t have to look far to identify the point at which they adopted Snap packages as the moment when it all went wrong. I’d reached the point at which I knew our ways must part, and it was time to look for another distro.

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Radio Apocalypse: Hardening AM Radio Against Disasters

June 6, 2023 by 64 Comments

If you’ve been car shopping lately, or even if you’ve just been paying attention to the news, you’ll probably be at least somewhat familiar with the kerfuffle over AM radio. The idea is that in these days of podcasts and streaming music, plain-old amplitude modulated radio is becoming increasingly irrelevant as a medium of mass communication, to the point that automakers are dropping support for it from their infotainment systems.

The threat of federal legislation seems to have tapped the brakes on the anti-AM bandwagon, at least for now. One can debate the pros and cons, but the most interesting tidbit to fall out of this whole thing is one of the strongest arguments for keeping the ability to receive AM in cars: emergency communications. It turns out that about 75 stations, most of them in the AM band, cover about 90% of the US population. This makes AM such a vital tool during times of emergency that the federal government has embarked on a serious program to ensure its survivability in the face of disaster.

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What Makes Wedge Coils Better Than Round For PCB Motors?

June 2, 2023 by 11 Comments

PCB motors are useful things. With coils printed right on the board, you don’t need to worry about fussy winding jobs, and it’s possible to make very compact, self contained motors. [atomic14] has been doing some work in this area, and decided to explore why wedge coils perform better than round coils in PCB motor designs.

[atomic14]’s designs use four-layer PCBs which allow for more magnetic strength out of the coils made with traces. While they’ve tried a variety of designs, like most in this area, they used wedge-shaped coils to get the most torque out of their motors. As the video explains, the wedge layout allows a much greater packing efficiency, allowing the construction of coils with more turns in the same space. However, diving deeper, [atomic14] also uses Python code to simulate the field generated by the different-shaped coils. Most notably, it shows that the wedge design provides a significant increase in field strength in the relevant direction to make torque, which scales positively on motors with higher numbers of coils.

This kind of simulation and optimization is typical in industry. It’s great to see an explainer on real engineering methods on YouTube for everyone to enjoy. Video after the break.

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Chatting About The State Of Hacker-Friendly AR Gear

June 2, 2023 by 13 Comments

There are many in the hacker community who would love to experiment with augmented reality (AR), but the hardware landscape isn’t exactly overflowing with options that align with our goals and priorities. Commercial offerings, from Google’s Glass to the Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap 2 are largely targeting medical and aerospace customers, and have price tags to match. On the hobbyist side of the budgetary spectrum we’re left with various headsets that let you slot in a standard smartphone, but like their virtual reality (VR) counterparts, they can hardly compare with purpose-built gear.

But there’s hope — Brilliant Labs are working on AR devices that tick all of our boxes: affordable, easy to interface with, and best of all, developed to be as open as possible from the start. Admittedly their first product, Monocle, it somewhat simplistic compared to what the Big Players are offering. But for our money, we’d much rather have something that’s built to be hacked and experimented with. What good is all the latest features and capabilities when you can’t even get your hands on the official SDK?

This week we invited Brilliant Lab’s Head of Engineering Raj Nakaraja to the Hack Chat to talk about AR, Monocle, and the future of open source in this space that’s dominated by proprietary hardware and software.

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IR Camera Is Excellent Hacking Platform

June 1, 2023 by 14 Comments

While there have been hiccups here and there, the general trend of electronics is to decrease in cost or increase in performance. This can be seen in fairly obvious ways like more powerful and affordable computers but it also often means that more powerful software can be used in other devices without needing expensive hardware to support it. [Manawyrm] and [Toble_Miner] found this was true of a particular inexpensive thermal camera that ships with Linux installed on it, and found that this platform was nearly perfect for tinkering with and adding plenty of other features to turn it into a much more capable tool.

The duo have been working on a SC240N variant of the InfiRay C200 infrared camera, which ships with a Hisilicon SoC. The display is capable of displaying 25 frames per second, making this platform an excellent candidate for modifying. A few ports were added to the device, including USB and MicroSD, and which also allows the internal serial port to be accessed easily. From there the device can be equipped with the uboot bootloader in order to run essentially anything that could be found on any other Linux machine such as supporting a webcam interface (and including a port of DOOM, of course). The duo doesn’t stop at software modifications though. They also equipped the camera with a lens, attached magnetically, which changes the camera’s focal length to give it improved imaging capabilities at closer ranges.

While the internal machinations of this device are interesting, it actually turns out to be a fairly capable infrared camera on its own as well. The hardware and software requirements for these devices certainly don’t need a full Linux environment to work, and while we have seen thermal cameras that easily fit in a pocket that are based on nothing any more powerful than an ESP32, it does tend to simplify the development process dramatically to include Linux and a little more processing power if you can.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: This Challenge Makes It So Easy Being Green

May 31, 2023 by 2 Comments

This year’s Hackaday Prize is our first nice round number – number ten! We thought it would be great to look back on the history of the Prize and cherry-pick our favorite themes from the past. Last year’s entire theme was sustainable hacking, and we challenged you to come up with ways to generate or save power, keep existing gear out of the landfill, find clever ways to encourage recycling or build devices to monitor the environment and keep communities safer during weather disasters, and you all came through. Now we’re asking you to do it again.

There are hundreds of ways that we can all go a little bit lighter on this planet, and our Green Hacks Challenge encourages you to make them real. Whether you want to focus on clean energy, smarter recycling, preventing waste, or even cleaning up the messes that we leave behind, every drop of oil left unburned or gadget kept out of the landfill helps keep our world running a little cleaner. Here’s your chance to hack for the planet.

Inspiration

One thing we really loved about last year’s Green Hacks was that it encouraged people to think outside the box. For instance, we got some solar power projects as you’d expect, but we also got a few really interesting wind power entries, ranging from the superbly polished 3D Printed Portable Wind Turbine that won the Grand Prize to the experimental kite turbine in Energy Independence While Travelling, to say nothing of the offbeat research project toward making a Moss Microbial Fuel Cell.

3D Printed Portable Wind Turbine
Moss Microbial Fuel Cell
Energy Independence While Travelling

Plastic was also in the air last year, as we saw a number of projects to reuse and recycle this abundant element of our waste stream. From a Plastic Scanner that uses simple spectroscopy to determine what type of plastic you’re looking at, to filament recyclers and trash-based 3D printers to make use of shredded plastic chips.

Polyformer
The Trash Printer – Version 3
Plastic Scanner

Finally, you all really put the science into citizen science with projects like OpenDendrometer that helps monitor a single tree’s health, and the Crop Water Stress Sensor that does the same for a whole field. Bees didn’t get left out of the data collection party either, with the Beehive Monitoring and Tracking project. And [Andrew Thaler]’s tremendously practical Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD brought the basics of oceanic environmental monitoring down to an affordable level.

OpenDendrometer
Crop Water Stress Sensor
Beehive Monitoring and Tracking
Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD

Now It’s Your Turn to be Green

If any of the above resonates with your project goals, it’s time to put them into action! Start up a new project over on Hackaday.io, enter it into the Prize, and you’re on your way. Ten finalists will receive $500 and be eligible to win the Grand Prizes ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. But you’ve only got until Tuesday, July 4th to enter, so don’t sleep.

As always, we’d like to thank our sponsors in the Hackaday Prize, Supplyframe and DigiKey, but we’d also like to thank Protolabs for sponsoring the Green Hacks challenge specifically, and for donating a $5,000 manufacturing grant for one finalist. Maybe that could be you?

The HackadayPrize 2023 is Sponsored by:

What Next For The SBC That Has Everything?

May 31, 2023 by 113 Comments

In the decade-and-a-bit since the first Raspberry Pi was launched we’ve seen an explosion of affordable single-board computers (SBCs), but as the prices creep up alongside user expectation and bloat, [Christopher Barnatt] asks where the industry will go next.

The Pi started with an unbeatable offer, $35 got you something similar to the desktop PC you’d had a decade earlier — able to run a Linux desktop on your TV from an SD card. Over the years the boards have become faster and more numerous, but the prices for ARM boards are now only nominally as affordable as they were in 2012, and meanwhile the lower end of x86 computing is now firmly in the same space. He demonstrates how much slower the 2023 Raspberry Pi OS distribution is on an original Pi compared to one of the early pre-Raspbian distros, and identifies in that a gap forming between users. From that he sees those people wanting a desktop heading towards the x86 machines, and the bare-metal makers at the lower end heading for the more powerful microcontrollers which simply weren’t so available a decade ago.

We have to admit that we agree with him, as the days when a new Raspberry Pi board was a special step forward rather than just another fast SBC are now probably behind us. In that we think the Pi people are probably also looking beyond their flagship product, as the hugely successful lunches of the RP2040 and the industrial-focused Compute Module 4 have shown.

What do you think about the SBC market? Tell us in the comments.

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