Retrotechtacular: Right To Repair 1987

March 24, 2024 by 26 Comments

In 1987, your portable Osborne computer had a problem. Who you gonna call? Well, maybe the company that made “The Osborne Survival Kit,” a video from Witt Services acquired by the Computer History Museum. The narrator, [Mark Witt], tells us that they’ve been fixing these computers for more than three years, and they want to help you fix it yourself. Those days seem long gone, don’t they?

Of course, one thing you need to know is how to clean your floppy drives. The procedure is easy; even a 10-year-old can do it. At least, we think [William Witt] is about 10 in the video. He did a fine job, and we wonder what he’s up to these days.

The next step was taking the machine apart, but that required adult supervision. In some cases, it also took a soldering iron. As a byproduct, the video inadvertently is a nice tear-down video, too.

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Repairing A Gear With A Candle (and Some Epoxy)

March 19, 2024 by 19 Comments

You have a broken gear you need to fix, but there’s no equivalent part available. That’s the issue [Well Done Tips] faced with a plastic gear from a lawnmower. While we’d be tempted to scan the gear, repair the damage in CAD and then 3D print a new one, we enjoyed hearing about his low-tech solution. In addition to the write up, there’s a video showing the process you can watch below.

The idea is pretty simple. Using a piece of pipe and melted candle wax, he prepared a mold of an undamaged section of the gear. Then he cast epoxy resin in place to recreate the missing pieces. There are a few tricks, like putting holes in the remaining part of the gear so the epoxy flows into the existing part. Depending on the gear’s purpose and original material, you might be able to just use it as-is. However, you could also use the repaired gear as a template to create another mold and then cast an entire gear from resin or even metal if you can cast metal.

You can argue whether resin is better or worse than PLA, but of course, it depends on the kind of resin—photopolymers are different from epoxy resins you’d use for this sort of thing. If you think you might like to make your new gear out of aluminum, you might find some inspiration in a previous post.

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Super-Portable, Tunable VHF Antenna

March 16, 2024 by 6 Comments

Ham radio is having a bit of a resurgence these days, likely due to awards programs like Parks on the Air (POTA) and Summits on the Air (SOTA), which encourage amateur radio operators to head outside and “activate” at various parks and mountaintops. For semi-mobile operations like this, a low-power radio is often used, as well as other portable gear including antennas. In the VHF/UHF world, the J-pole is a commonly used antenna as well, and this roll-up tunable J-pole antenna is among the most versatile we’ve seen.

The antenna uses mostly common household parts which keeps the cost down tremendously. The structure of the antenna is replacement webbing for old lawn chairs, and the conductive elements for the antenna are made out of metallic HVAC tape which is fixed onto the chair webbing after being cut to shape. The only specialized parts needed for this is a 3D printed bracket which not only holds the hookup for the coax cable feeding the antenna, but is also capable of sliding up and down the lower section of the “J” to allow the antenna to be easily tuned.

As long as you have access to a 3D printer, this antenna is exceptionally portable and pretty easy to make as well. Although VHF and UHF aren’t too popular for POTA and SOTA, portable equipment like this for the higher frequency bands is still handy to have around when traveling or operating remotely. With the antenna situation sorted out, a DIY radio that can make use of it might be in order as well.

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On An Aging Space Station, Air Leaks Become Routine

March 11, 2024 by 41 Comments

Anyone who’s ever owned an older car will know the feeling: the nagging worry at the back of your mind that today might be the day that something important actually stops working. Oh, it’s not the little problems that bother you: the rips in the seats, the buzz out of the rear speakers, and that slow oil leak that might have annoyed you at first, but eventually just blend into the background. So long as the car starts and can get you from point A to B, you can accept the sub-optimal performance that inevitably comes with age. Someday the day will come when you can no longer ignore the mounting issues and you’ll have to get a new vehicle, but today isn’t that day.

Looking at developments over the last few years one could argue that the International Space Station, while quite a bit more advanced and costly than the old beater parked in your driveway, is entering a similar phase of its lifecycle. The first modules of the sprawling orbital complex were launched all the way back in 1998, and had a design lifetime of just 15 years. But with no major failures and the Station’s overall condition remaining stable, both NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency have agreed to several mission extensions. The current agreement will see crews living and working aboard the Station until 2030, but as recently as January, NASA and Roscosmos officials were quoted as saying a further extension isn’t out of the question.

Still, there’s no debating that the ISS isn’t in the same shape it was when construction was formally completed in 2011. A perfect case in point: the fact that the rate of air leaking out of the Russian side of the complex has recently doubled is being treated as little more than a minor annoyance, as mission planners know what the problem is and how to minimize the impact is has on Station operations.

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A white woman with a long ponytail in a green apron looks down at a mannequin head with pasta coming out of its chin. There is an orange pasta gun sticking out of the back of its head and a chef's hat on its head. It looks vaguely like a bust of Ramses.

Goatee Pasta Maker Makes Us Hunger For Hair

March 4, 2024 by 9 Comments

Some hacks are pure acts of whimsy, and [Simone Giertz] is back to her roots with this Goatee Pasta Maker.

If violence to mannequin heads is upsetting, the video may be a bit NSFW (to warn you now that you already clicked on it). What started out as a pasta-making version of those Play-Doh hair people quickly morphed into a more scaled-back endeavor with simply extruding pasta through the mannequin’s chin to create pasta hair.

Initial attempts at using a basketball to extrude clay (used as a pasta stand-in) through holes in a mannequin’s head were unsuccessful, so [Giertz] turned to a more conventional pasta gun to handle the pasta extrusion. Since the gun didn’t have the volume necessary to produce a full head of hair, or even a respectable mustache, the next mannequin’s chin was subjected to multiple drill holes for pasta to escape in a hairy tangle.

The results aren’t exactly appetizing, but it definitely does make edible pasta. If you’re looking for more pasta hacks, how about ramen in an edible package, flat pack pasta, or Barilla’s Open Source pasta tool?

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Printable Keyboard Dock Puts Steam Deck To Work

February 19, 2024 by 7 Comments

Whether or not you’re into playing video games, you have to admit, that the Steam Deck is a pretty interesting piece of hardware. We’ve seen hackers jump through all sorts of uncomfortable hoops to get Linux running on their mobile devices in the past. The fact that you can pick up a fairly powerful x86 handheld computer right now for a reasonable amount of money is certainly exciting. The Linux steam deck gets even more enticing when you consider the software support it enjoys thanks to its large and vibrant user community. No wonder we’ve started to see them dotting the workbenches during Hackaday Supercon.

If there’s a downside, it’s that the Steam Deck was very clearly designed to be a handheld gaming system, not a portable computer. Sure you can plug in an external monitor and keyboard, but things can quickly become ungainly. This is why a printable dock from [a8ksh4] caught our eye.

It’s officially designed to let you mate the Steam Deck with the Corne keyboard, a split ergonomic design that’s graced these pages a few times in the past. [A8ksh4] has included links for all the hardware you’ll need outside the printed parts, from the hinges and keyboard PCBs, all the way to the keycaps and stainless steel screws. If you’re looking for a turnkey experience, this is it.

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How Airplanes Mostly Stopped Flying Into Terrain And Other Safety Improvements

February 8, 2024 by 13 Comments

We have all heard the statistics on how safe air travel is, with more people dying and getting injured on their way to and from the airport than while traveling by airplane. Things weren’t always this way, of course. Throughout the early days of commercial air travel and well into the 1980s there were many crashes that served as harsh lessons on basic air safety. The most tragic ones are probably those with a human cause, whether it was due to improper maintenance or pilot error, as we generally assume that we have a human element in the chain of events explicitly to prevent tragedies like these.

Among the worst pilot errors we find the phenomenon of controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), which usually sees the pilot losing track of his bearings due to a variety of reasons before a usually high-speed and fatal crash. When it comes to keeping airplanes off the ground until they’re at their destination, here ground proximity warning systems (GPWS) and successors have added a layer of safety, along with stall warnings and other automatic warning signals provided by the avionics.

With the recent passing of C. Donald Bateman – who has been credited with designing the GPWS – it seems like a good time to appreciate the technology that makes flying into the relatively safe experience that it is today.

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