Robotic Canoe Puts Robot Arms To Work

September 1, 2025 by 25 Comments

Most robots get around with tracks or wheels, but [Dave] had something different in mind. Sufficiently unbothered by the prospect of mixing electronics and water, [Dave] augmented a canoe with twin, paddle-bearing robotic arms to bring to life a concept he had: the RowboBoat. The result? A canoe that can paddle itself with robotic arms, leaving the operator free to take a deep breath, sit back, and concentrate on not capsizing.

There are a couple of things we really like about this build, one of which is the tidiness of the robotic platform that non-destructively attaches to the canoe itself with custom brackets. A combination of aluminum extrusion and custom brackets, [Dave] designed it with the help of 3D scanning the canoe as a design aid. A canoe, after all, has nary a straight edge nor a right angle in sight. Being able to pull a 3D model into CAD helps immensely in such cases; we have also seen this technique used in refitting a van into an off-grid camper.

The other thing we like is the way that [Dave] drives the arms. The two PiPER robotic arms are driven with ROS, the Robot Operating System on a nearby Jetson Orin Nano SBC. The clever part is the way [Dave] observed that padding and steering a canoe has a lot in common with a differential drive, which is akin to how a tank works. And so, for propulsion, ROS simply treats the paddle-bearing arms as though they were wheels in a differential drive. The arms don’t seem to mind a little water, and the rest of the electronics are protected by a pair of firmly-crossed fingers.

The canoe steers by joystick, but being driven by ROS it could be made autonomous with a little more work. [Dave] has his configuration and code for RowboBoat up on GitHub should anyone wish to take a closer look. Watch it in action in the video, embedded below.

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A Label Printer Gets A New Brain

September 1, 2025 by 9 Comments

The internals of a printer, whatever technology it may use, are invariably proprietary, with an abstracted more standard language being used to communicate with a host computer. Thus it’s surprisingly rare to see hacks on printers as printers, rather than printer hacks using the parts for some other purpose. This makes [Oelison]’s brain-swap of a Casio thermal label printer a welcome surprise, as it puts an ESP32 in the machine instead of whatever Casio gave it.

The value in the hack lies in the insight it gives into how a thermal printer works as much as it does in the ESP32 and the Casio, as it goes into some detail on the various signals involved. The strobe line for instance to enable the heater is a nuance we were unaware of. The resulting printer will lose its keyboard and display, but  make up for it in connectivity.

Despite what we said earlier this isn’t the first label printer hack we’ve seen. A previous one was Linux-based though.

A photo of the vending machine sitting on an electronics workbench

Building A Halloween Vending Computer That Talks

September 1, 2025 by 2 Comments

Our hacker from [Appalachian Forge Works] wrote in to let us know about their vending machine build: a Halloween vending computer that talks.

He starts by demonstrating the vending process: a backlit vend button is pressed, an animation plays on the screen as a synthetic voice speaks through attached speakers, the vending mechanism rotates until a successful vend is detected with a photoelectric sensor (a photoresistor and an LED) or a timeout of 10 seconds is reached (the timeout is particularly important for cases when the stock of prizes is fully depleted).

For a successful vend the prize will roll out a vending tube and through some ramps, visible via a perspex side panel, into the receptacle, as the spooky voice announces the vend. It’s the photoelectric sensor which triggers the mask to speak.

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Making The World’s Smallest E-Bike Battery

September 1, 2025 by 24 Comments

Often times, e-bikes seek to build the biggest battery with the most range. But what if you want to take a couple lunch loops on your bike and only need 20 minutes of charge? That’s [Seth] from Berm Peak set out to find out with his minuscule Bermacell battery.

The battery is made from only 14 18650s, this tiny 52V batty is nearly as small an e-bike battery as can be made. Each cell is 3000 mAh making a total battery capacity of 156 Wh. All the cells were welded in series with an off the shelf BMS and everything was neatly packaged in an over-sized 3D printed 9V battery case. [Seth] plans to make another smaller battery with less then 100 Wh of capacity so he can take it on a plane, so stay tuned for more coverage!

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A worker inspects JUNO's acrylic sphere under the watching eye of PMTs

Worlds Largest Neutrino Detector Is Collecting Data In China

September 1, 2025 by 15 Comments

To say that neutrinos aren’t the easiest particles to study would be a bit of an understatement. Outside of dark matter, there’s not much in particle physics that is as slippery as the elusive “ghost particles” that are endlessly streaming through you and everything you own. That’s why its exciting news that JUNO is now taking data as the world’s largest detector.

First, in case you’re not a physics geek, let’s go back to basics. Neutrinos are neutral particles (the name was coined by Fermi as “little neutral one”) with very, very little mass and a propensity for slipping in between the more-common particles that make up everyday matter. The fact that neutrinos have mass is kind of weird, in that it’s not part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Since the Standard Model gets just about everything else right (except for dark matter) down to quite a few decimal points, well… that’s a very interesting kind of weird, hence the worldwide race to unravel the mysteries of the so-called “ghost particle”. We have an explainer article here for anyone who wants more background.

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NASA Seeks Volunteers To Track Artemis II Mission

September 1, 2025 by 29 Comments

As NASA’s Artemis program trundles onwards at the blazing pace of a disused and very rusty crawler-transporter, the next mission on the list is gradually coming into focus. This will be the first crewed mission — a flyby of the Moon following in the footsteps of 1968’s Apollo 8 mission. As part of this effort, NASA is looking for volunteers who will passively track the Orion capsule and its crew of four as it makes its way around the Moon during its 10-day mission before returning to Earth. Details can be found here.

This follows on a similar initiative during the Artemis I mission, when participants passively tracked the radio signals from the capsule. For this upcoming mission NASA is looking for Doppler shift measurements on the Orion S-band (2200-2290 MHz) return link carrier signals, with the objective being to achieve and maintain a carrier lock.

Currently penciled in for a highly tentative April 2026, the Artemis II mission would fly on the same SLS Block 1 rocket configuration that launched the first mission, targeting a multi-trans-lunar injection (MTLI) profile to get to the Moon using a free return trajectory. The crew will check out the new life support system prior to starting the MTLI burns.

Because Artemis II will be on a free return trajectory it will not be orbiting the Moon, unlike Apollo 8’s crew who made ten lunar orbits. Incidentally, Apollo 8’s crew included James Lovell, who’d go on to fly the world-famous Apollo 13 mission. Hopefully the Artemis astronauts will be spared that level of in-space excitement.

In the center of the picture is a colored drawing of a man wearing a kimono, climbing out of a window. To the left and right the sides of two other pictures are just visible.

The Challenges Of Digitizing Paper Films

August 31, 2025 by 17 Comments

In the 1930s, as an alternative to celluloid, some Japanese companies printed films on paper (kami firumu), often in color and with synchronized 78 rpm record soundtracks. Unfortunately, between the small number produced, varying paper quality, and the destruction of World War II, few of these still survive. To keep more of these from being lost forever, a team at Bucknell University has been working on a digitization project, overcoming several technical challenges in the process.

The biggest challenge was the varying physical layout of the film. These films were printed in short strips, then glued together by hand, creating minor irregularities every few feet; the width of the film varied enough to throw off most film scanners; even the indexing holes were in inconsistent places, sometimes at the top or bottom of the fame, and above or below the frame border. The team’s solution was the Kyōrinrin scanner, named for a Japanese guardian spirit of lost papers. It uses two spools to run the lightly-tensioned film in front of a Blackmagic cinematic camera, taking a video of the continuously-moving film. To avoid damaging the film, the scanner contacts it in as few places as possible.

After taking the video, the team used a program they had written to recognize and extract still images of the individual frames, then aligned the frames and combined them into a watchable film. The team’s presented the digitized films at a number of locations, but if you’d like to see a quick sample, several of them are available on YouTube (one of which is embedded below).

This piece’s tipster pointed out some similarities to another recent article on another form of paper-based image encoding. If you don’t need to work with paper, we’ve also seen ways to scan film more accurately.

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