Smart Ball Technology Has Reached Football, But The Euros Show Us It’s Not Necessarily For The Better

July 16, 2024 by 56 Comments
Adidas brought smart balls to Euro 2024, for better or worse. Credit: Adidas

The good old fashioned game of football used to be a simple affair. Two teams of eleven, plus a few subs, who were all wrangled by a referee and a couple of helpful linesmen. Long ago, these disparate groups lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when VAR attacked.

Suddenly, technology was being used to adjudicate all kinds of decisions, and fans were cheering or in uproar depending on how the hammer fell. That’s only become more prevalent in recent times, with smart balls the latest controversial addition to the world game. With their starring role in the Euro 2024 championship more than evident, let’s take a look at what’s going on with this new generation of intelligent footballs.

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Time’s Up For Mbed

July 16, 2024 by 18 Comments

In a forum post has come the announcement that mBed, ARM’s accessible microcontroller development platform, is to reach end-of-life in July 2026. This means that the online platform and OS will no longer be supported by ARM, though the latter will remain an open source project. The website will be shuttered, and no new projects can be created after that date using ARM infrastructure.

mBed was originally launched back in 2009, as a competitor to the Arduino IDE for ARM’s chips. Its easy development made it attractive and there were soon an array of boards from different manufacturers supporting it, but perhaps due to its support for only the one architecture, it failed to find success. It’s certainly not the first time a single-architecture microcontroller development platform has been discontinued, we need only look to the Intel Edison for that, but given the success of ARM platforms in general it’s still something of a surprise. Perhaps it’s time to take the press release explanation that other platforms such as Arduino have simply been much more popular.

Will a community form around an open source mBed? Given that it’s been a definite minority among Hackaday projects over the years, while we hope it does, we’re not so sure.

mBed board image: Viswesr, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Flexures Make Robotic Fingers Simpler To Print

July 16, 2024 by 6 Comments

Designing an anthropomorphic robotic hand seems to make a lot of sense — right up until the point that you realize just how complex the human hand is. What works well in bone and sinew often doesn’t translate well to servos and sensors, and even building a single mechanical finger can require dozens of parts.

Or, if you’re as clever about things as [Adrian Perez] is, only one part. His print-in-place robotic finger, adorably dubbed “Fingie,” is a huge step toward simplifying anthropomorphic manipulators. Fingie is printed in PLA and uses flexures for the three main joints of the finger, each of which consists of two separate and opposed coil springs. The flexures allow the phalanges to bend relative to each other in response to the motion of three separate tendons that extend through a channel on the palmar aspect of the finger, very much like the real thing.

The flexures eliminate the need for bearings at each joint and greatly decrease the complexity of the finger, but the model isn’t perfect. As [Adrian] points out, the off-center attachment for the tendons makes the finger tend to curl when the joints are in flexion, which isn’t how real fingers work. That should be a pretty easy fix, though. And while we appreciate the “one and done” nature of this print, we’d almost like to see the strap-like print-in-place tendons replaced with pieces of PLA filament added as a post-processing step, to make the finger more compact and perhaps easier to control.

Despite the shortcomings, and keeping in mind that this is clearly a proof of concept, we really like where [Adrian] is going with this, and we’re looking forward to seeing a hand with five Fingies, or four Fingies and a Thumbie. It stands to be vastly simpler than something like [Will Cogley]’s biomimetic hand, which while an absolute masterpiece of design, is pretty daunting for most of us to reproduce.

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Sharing 3D Printing With Kids

July 15, 2024 by 16 Comments

If you have a hobby, it is natural to want to share it with kids. If you are interested in 3D printing, you may even have kids who want to try their hand at printing without prompting. There are a number of “kid printers” aimed specifically at that market. Are they worthwhile? How old is old enough? [Everson Siqueirar] tries out a Kidoodle with this 6-year-old daughter, and the results are good, as you can see in the video below.

Impressively, his daughter [Sophie] was able to set up the printer with a little help. The build plate is very small and not heated. Apparently, a glue stick is necessary for bed adhesion. The printer has WiFi but also has a collection of models you can print without any internet connection.

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Turning Horrible Browser Controls Into A Game

July 15, 2024 by 7 Comments

With all of the various keyboards, mouses (mice?), and other human interface devices (HID) available for our computers, there’s no possible way for developers to anticipate every type of input for every piece of software they build. Most of the time everything will work fine as long as some basic standards are kept, both from the hardware and software sides, but that’s not always the case. [Losso] noticed a truly terrible volume control method when visiting certain websites while also using a USB volume knob, and used this quirk to build a Breakout game with it.

It turns out his volume control knob would interact simultaneously with certain video players’ built-in volume control and the system volume for the operating system, leading to a number of undesirable conditions. However, the fact that this control is built in to certain browsers in the first place led to this being the foundation for the Breakout clone [Losso] is calling KNOB-OUT. Unlike volume buttons on something like a multimedia keyboard, the USB volume control knob can be configured much more easily to account for acceleration, making it more faithful to the original arcade version of the game. The game itself is coded in JavaScript with the source code available right in the browser.

If you’d like to play [Losso]’s game here’s a direct link to it although sometimes small web-based projects like these tend to experience some slowdown when they first get posted here. And, if you’re looking for some other games to play in a browser like it’s the mid-00s again, we’re fans of this project which brings the unofficial Zelda game Zelda Classic to our screens.

Low-Cost Cryocooler Pumps Out Cheap DIY Liquid Nitrogen

July 15, 2024 by 18 Comments

A word of caution if you’re planning to try this cryocooler method for making liquid nitrogen: not only does it involve toxic and flammable gasses and pressures high enough to turn the works into a bomb, but you’re likely to deplete your rent account with money you’ll shell out for all the copper tubing and fittings. You’ve been warned.

In theory, making liquid nitrogen should be as easy as getting something cold enough that nitrogen in the air condenses. The “cold enough” part is the trick, and it’s where [Hyperspace Pirate]’s cryocooler expertise comes into play. His setup uses recycled compressors from cast-off air conditioners and relies on a mixed-gas Joule-Thomson cycle. He plays with several mixtures of propane, ethylene, methane, argon, and nitrogen, with the best results coming from argon and propane in a 70:30 percent ratio. A regenerative counterflow heat exchanger, where the cooled expanding gas flows over the incoming compressed gas to cool it, does most of the heavy lifting here, and is bolstered by a separate compressor that pre-cools the gas mixture to about -30°C before it enters the regenerative system.

There’s also a third compressor system that pre-cools the nitrogen process gas, which is currently supplied by a tank but will eventually be pulled right from thin air by a pressure swing adsorption system — basically an oxygen concentrator where you keep the nitrogen instead of the oxygen. There are a ton of complications in the finished system, including doodads like oil separators and needle valves to control the flow of liquid nitrogen, plus an Arduino to monitor and control the cycle. It works well enough to produce fun amounts of LN2 on the cheap — about a quarter of the cost of commercially made stuff — with the promise of efficiency gains to come.

It does need to be said that there’s ample room for peril here, especially containing high pressures within copper plumbing. Confidence in one’s brazing skills is a must here, as is proper hydro testing of components. That said, [Hyperspace Pirate] has done some interesting work here, not least of which is keeping expenses for the cryocooler to a minimum.

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How The Bell System Was Built

July 15, 2024 by 9 Comments

We’ve often thought that while going to the moon in the 1960s was audacious, it was just the flashiest of many audacious feats attempted and accomplished in the 20th century. Imagine, for a minute, that the phone system didn’t exist today, and you stood up in front of a corporate board and said, “Let’s run copper wire to every home and business in the world.” They’d probably send you for a psychiatric evaluation. Yet we did just that, and, in the United States, that copper wire was because of the Bell system, which [Brian Potter] describes in a recent post.

The Bell company, regardless of many name changes and divisions, was clearly a very important company. [Brian] points out that in 1917, it was the second-largest company in the United States and continued to grow, eventually employing a whopping 1% of the entire U.S. workforce. That’s what happens when you have a monopoly on a product that is subject to wild demand. In 1900, Bell handled 5 million calls a day. By 1925, that number was over 50 million. In 1975, it was just shy of 500 million. If Wester Electric — just one part of Bell — was its own company, it would have been the 12th largest company in the U.S. during the 1970s.

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