This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb chat with Andreas Kling about Ladybird, the new browser in development from the ground up. It was started as part of SerenityOS, and has since taken on a life of its own. How much of the web works on it? How many people are working on the project? And where’s the download button? Listen to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 800: Champagning The Ladybird Browser”
Oscilloscopes are one of our favorite tools for electronics development. They make the hidden dances of electrons visually obvious to us, and give us a clear understanding of what’s actually going on in a circuit.
The question few of us ever ask is, how do they work? Most specifically—how do you design a circuit that’s intended to measure another circuit? Aleksa Bjelogrlic has pondered that very idea, and came down to explain it all to us at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.
Continue reading “Supercon 2023: Aleksa Bjelogrlic Dives Into Circuits That Measure Circuits”
Following in the tracks of unconventional science projects, [The Thought Emporium] seeks to answer the question of whether you can use a potato as a photograph recording medium. This is less crazy than it sounds, as ultimately analog photographs (and photograms) is about inducing a light-based change in some kind of medium, which raises the question of whether there is anything about potatoes that is light-sensitive enough to be used for capturing an image, or what we can add to make it suitable.
Unfortunately, a potato by itself cannot record light as it is just starch and salty water, so it needs a bit of help. Here [The Thought Emporium] takes us through the history of black and white photography, starting with a UV-sensitive mixture consisting out of turmeric and rubbing alcohol. After filtration and staining a sheet of paper with it, exposing only part of the paper to strong UV light creates a clear image, which can be intensified using a borax solution. Unfortunately this method fails to work on a potato slice.
The next attempt was to create a cyanotype, which involves covering a surface in a solution of 25 g ferric ammonium oxalate, 10 g of potassium ferricyanide and 100 mL water and exposing it to UV light. This creates the brilliant blue that gave us the term ‘blueprint’. As it turns out, this method works really well on potato slices too, with lots of detail, but the exposure process is very slow.
Speeding up cyanotype production is done by spraying the surface with an ammonium oxalate and oxalic acid solution to modify the pH, exposing the surface to UV, and then spraying it with a 10 g / 100 mL potassium ferricyanide solution, leading to fast exposure and good details.
This is still not as good on paper as an all-time favorite using silver-nitrate, however. These silver prints are the staple of black and white photography, with the silver halide reacting very quickly to light exposure, after which a fixer, like sodium thiosulfate, can make the changes permanent. When using cyanotype or silver-nitrate film like this in a 35 mm camera, it does work quite well too, but of course creates a negative image, that requires inverting, done digitally in the video, to tease out the recorded image.
Here the disappointment for potatoes hit, as using the developer with potatoes was a soggy no-go. Ideally a solution like that used with direct positive paper that uses a silver solution suspended in a gel, but creates a positive image unlike plain silver-nitrate. As for the idea of using the potato itself as the camera, this was also briefly attempted to by using a pinhole in a potato and a light-sensitive recording surface on the other side, but the result did indeed look like a potato was used to create the photograph.
Continue reading “Using A Potato As Photographic Recording Surface”
[Joe Barnard] made a solid propellant rocket motor, and as one does in such situations, he put it through its paces on the test stand. The video below is not about the test, nor is it about the motor’s construction. Rather, it’s a deconstruction of the remains of the motor in order to better understand its design, and it’s pretty interesting stuff.
Somewhere along the way, [Joe], aka “BPS.Space” on YouTube, transitioned from enthusiastic model rocketeer to full-fledged missile-man, and in the process stepped up his motor game considerably. The motor that goes under the knife — or rather, the bandsaw — in this video is his “Simplex V2,” a completely DIY build of [Joe]’s design. For scale, the casing is made from a 6″ (15 cm) diameter piece of aluminum tubing over a meter in length, with a machined aluminum forward closure and a composite nozzle assembly. This is a pretty serious piece of engineering.
The closure and the nozzle are the focus of the video, which makes sense since that’s where most of the action takes place. To understand what happened during the test, [Joe] lopped them off and cut them roughly in half longitudinally. The nozzle throat, which was machined from a slug of graphite, fared remarkably well during the test, accumulating only a little slag from the propellant, a combination of powdered aluminum, ammonium perchlorate, and HTBP resin. The lower part of the nozzle, made from phenolic-impregnated linen, did pretty well too, building up a pyrolyzed layer that acted much like a space capsule’s ablative heat shield would. The forward closure, whose sole job is to contain the inferno and direct the exhaust anywhere but up, took more of a beating but stood up to the challenge. Especially interesting was the state of the O-rings and the way that the igniter interfaced with the closure.
Post mortems like these are valuable teaching tools, and while it must be heartbreaking to destroy something you put so much work into, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Hats off to [Joe] for the peek inside his world. Continue reading “A Look Inside A DIY Rocket Motor”
IO user [monte] was pointed towards an 1898 display patent issued to a [George Mason] and liked the look of the ‘creepy’ font it defined. The layout used no less than 21 discrete segments to display the complete roman alphabet and numerals, which is definitely not possible with the mere seven segments we are all familiar with. [monte] then did the decent thing and created a demonstration digit using modern parts.
For the implementation, [monte] created a simple PCB by hand (with an obvious mistake) and 3D-printed an enclosure and diffuser to match. After a little debugging, a better PCB was ordered from one of the usual overseas factories. There isn’t a schematic yet, but they mention using a CH32V003 Risc-V micro, which can be seen sitting on the rear of the PCB.
Maximum flexibility is ensured by storing every glyph as a 32-bit integer, with each LED corresponding to a single bit. It’s interesting to note the display incorporates serifs, which are definitely optional, although you could display sans-serif style glyphs if you wanted to. There is now a bit of a job to work out how to map character codes to glyph codes, but you can have a go at that yourself here. It’s still early doors on this project, but it has some real potential for a unique-looking display.
We love displays—every kind. Here’s a layout reminiscent of a VFD digit but done purely mechanically. And if you must limit yourself to seven digits, what about this unique thing?
Continue reading “Why Have Seven Segments When You Can Have 21?”
For getting around on most surfaces, it’s hard to beat the utility of the wheel. Versatile, inexpensive, and able to be made from a wide array of materials has led to this being a cornerstone technology for the past ten thousand years or so. But with that much history it can seem a little bit played out. To change up the locomotion game, you might want to consider using robotic legs instead. That’s what [Giliam] designed into this mobile coffee table which uses custom linkages to move its legs and get itself from place to place around the living room.
Continue reading “Mobile Coffee Table Uses Legs To Get Around”
Programming languages are generally defined as a more human-friendly way to program computers than using raw machine code. Within the realm of these languages there is a wide range of how close the programmer is allowed to get to the bare metal, which ultimately can affect the performance and efficiency of the application. One metric that has become more important over the years is that of energy efficiency, as datacenters keep growing along with their power demand. If picking one programming language over another saves even 1% of a datacenter’s electricity consumption, this could prove to be highly beneficial, assuming it weighs up against all other factors one would consider.
There have been some attempts over the years to put a number on the energy efficiency of specific programming languages, with a paper by Rui Pereira et al. from 2021 (preprint PDF) as published in Science of Computer Programming covering the running a couple of small benchmarks, measuring system power consumption and drawing conclusions based on this. When Hackaday covered the 2017 paper at the time, it was with the expected claim that C is the most efficient programming language, while of course scripting languages like JavaScript, Python and Lua trailed far behind.
With C being effectively high-level assembly code this is probably no surprise, but languages such as C++ and Ada should see no severe performance penalty over C due to their design, which is the part where this particular study begins to fall apart. So what is the truth and can we even capture ‘efficiency’ in a simple ranking?
Continue reading “Assessing The Energy Efficiency Of Programming Languages”
