Asbestos: The Miracle Mineral Of Our Worst Nightmares

December 5, 2022 by 99 Comments

For much of the 19th and 20th century, the mining and use of asbestos saw near-constant growth, with virtually every material used in the construction of homes, offices, ships, road networks and industries featuring this miraculous mineral in some fashion. Some of these materials would contain only a few percent asbestos mineral as a binder, while others would be mostly or entirely composed out of asbestos.

What had begun as mostly a curiosity thousands of years prior was now turning into the material that was helping propel humanity into an era of hitherto unknown levels of prosperity and technological progress. It seemed as if the addition of even just a bit of asbestos would make houses weather- and fireproof, make concrete and asphalt nearly indestructible and add just that little bit of zing to tiling and interior decorations, as well as rigidity to the predecessor to today’s plastics: bakelite. Continue reading “Asbestos: The Miracle Mineral Of Our Worst Nightmares” →

Miracle Of Science: Scotch Tape Improves Generator

December 4, 2022 by 11 Comments

We were always amused that one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the recent past — graphene — was started with pencil lead and Scotch tape. Now, researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have determined that double-sided Scotch tape can improve triboelectric power generators. Triboelectric generation, of course, is nothing new. These energy harvesters take mechanical and thermal energy and turn them into tiny amounts of electricity. What’s new here is that PET plastic, aluminum, and double-sided tape can make an inexpensive generator that works well.

Keep in mind we are talking about little bits of power. In the best scenario with the device stimulated at 20 Hz, the generator peaked at 21.2 mW. That was better than some designs that only got to 7.6 mW in the same configuration.

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This Is The Future Of Waste Management

December 4, 2022 by 13 Comments

Many of us have been asking for some time now “where are our robot servants?” We were promised this dream life of leisure and luxury, but we’re still waiting. Modern life is a very wasteful one, with items delivered to our doors with the click of a mouse, but the disposal of the packaging is still a manual affair. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to summon a robot to take the rubbish to the recycling, ideally have it fetch a beer at the same time? [James Bruton] shares this dream, and with his extensive robotics skillset, came up with the perfect solution; behold the Binbot 9000. (Video, embedded below the break)

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A Cycle-Accurate Intel 8088 Core For All Your Retro PC Needs

December 3, 2022 by 17 Comments

A problem faced increasingly by retrocomputer enthusiasts everywhere is the supply of chips. Once a piece of silicon goes out of production its demand can be supplied for a time by old stock and second hand parts, but as they become rare so the cost of what can be dubious parts accelerates out of reach. Happily for CPUs at least, there’s a ray of hope in the form of FPGA-based cores which can replace the real thing, and for early PC owners there’s a new one from [Ted Fried]. MCL86 is a cycle accurate Intel 8088 FPGA Core that can be used within an FPGA design or as a standalone in-circuit replacement for a real 8088. It even has a full-speed mode that sacrifices cycle accuracy and can accelerate those 8088 instructions by 400%.

Reading the posts on his blog, it’s clear that this is a capable design, and it’s even been extended with a mode that adds cache RAM to mirror the system memory at the processor’s speed. You can find all the code in a GitHub repository should you be curious enough to investigate for yourself. We’ve pondered in the past where the x86 single board computers are, perhaps it could be projects like this that provide some of them.

Build Your Own Mini Fogging Cauldron

December 3, 2022 by 12 Comments

The best cauldrons are full of bubbling, steamy potions of great magical potential. We don’t have many of those in the real world, though, so sometimes we have to make do with a simulacra. [wannabemadsci] has built just that, with this fogging cauldron prop that uses no fog fluid or dry ice, running solely with water instead.

The heart of the build is a piezo element that vibrates at ultrasonic frequencies to atomize water. They’re available from websites like AliExpress complete with a driver circuit to energize the piezo element. The water is delivered from a wetted fiber wick, and quickly becomes a fog when the piezo is energized.

The disk was installed in a custom PVC water cup with the wetted wick, along with the electronics. The assembly was then lowered into an off-the-shelf plastic cauldron party favor to complete the look. The trick is to mount the piezo element sideways to get a nice-looking distribution of fog. A green LED was installed to light the cauldron from within.

The resulting effect is a sinister-looking glowing cauldron with a steady stream of fog emanating from the top. It’s a great piece of Halloween decor, and as a bonus, it doesn’t require any fancy chemicals to make it work. If you’re thirsty for more, be sure to check out the winners of last year’s Halloween Hackfest. Video after the break.

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Stack Trace From The 1950s Punches Again

December 2, 2022 by 4 Comments

This repair/tutorial video by the telephone Connections Museum of Seattle features an amazing piece of electro-mechanical technology from the 1950s — the 5XB trouble recorder. Museum volunteer Sarah the “Switch Witch” has a deep passion for old phone equipment, and gives an excellent description of the trouble recorder, the problems it solved, and how it works, and how they went about fixing it.

As central office switching became more complex and more dense, the manual methods of hunting down faults became unmanageable. Semi-automatic approaches using trouble lamps, but even that had its limits. This “stack trace”, which could have hundreds of indicators, had to be frozen while the technician recorded the status on a form. If another fault came along during this time, it was lost. The solution, using the available technology of the day, was a mind-boggling punched card apparatus that punches over a thousand bits of information when an switching error is detected or when various watchdog timers expire.

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Hackerboards: Making Finding The Right Single-Board Computer Easy

December 2, 2022 by 18 Comments

The great thing about the wide availability of single-board computers (SBCs) is that it offers such a large selection of options, in terms of CPU performance, GPU features, RAM size, I/O options and much more. This is however also the largest issue, especially with the annual surge of new boards with new feature sets. Trying to make sense of all these offerings is the recently overhauled Board-DB, also known as Hackerboards.

As [Martijn Braam] explains in the blog post on the changes, a major upgrade over the old Hackerboards (which we covered in 2016) is a far more extensive set of parameters that can be filtered against. This makes a fine-grained selection of detailed features significantly easier, which is also reflected in the technical specifications comparison feature. With over 450 active entries there are a lot of boards that can already be filtered on, but manufacturers are invited to take up contact to add further entries, which should keep the list up to date.

Incidentally, if you’d like to know how [Martijn] gets those gorgeous PCB photographs, he wrote a whole a separate write-up that goes over his camera setup.

Thanks to [Vlad] for the tip.