Arduino Sticker Dispenser Saves Time

November 12, 2023 by 18 Comments

What’s the worst part about packaging up a whole lot of the same basic thing? It might just be applying the various warning stickers to the outside of the shipping box. Luckily, [Mr Innovative] has built an open-source automatic sticker dispenser that does the peeling for you, while advancing the roll one at a time quite satisfyingly.

This tidy build is made primarily of 20×20 extruded aluminium and stainless steel smooth rod. All the yellow bits are 3D printed. The brains of this operation is an Arduino Nano, with an A4988 stepper motor driver controlling a NEMA17.

Our favorite part of this build is the IR sensor pair arranged below the ready sticker. It detects when a sticker is removed, then the stepper advances the roll by one sticker height. The waste is collected on a spool underneath.

Between the video and the instructions, [Mr Innovative] has made it quite simple to build one for yourself. Definitely check this one out after the break.

[Mr Innovative] may as well go by [Mr. Automation]. Check out this automated wire prep machine from a few years ago.

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The IBM MDA Should Have Been The CDA

November 12, 2023 by 21 Comments

If you are reading this on an IBM PC-compatible computer, it is a certainty that its graphics card will support the lowest common denominator of PC displays, the Monochrome Display Adapter, or MDA. This was a video card which delivered a text-only display in black-and-white that was an option fitted to the very first PC models. But was it really a monochrome display adapter? [TubeTimeUS] is here to show us that when connected to the appropriate colour monitor, it can produce text in colour. It seems that this was a feature only on the very earliest revisions of the card.

Reading up on the MDA card, we find that at its heart it had a Motorola MC6845 CRT controller, a chip that appeared in a huge variety of machines from that era. The beauty of this chip was that it provided the correct timing signals and memory locations for video to be created, but didn’t include any video circuitry thus the designer was free to craft a video device to their specification, allowing for it to appear in both colour and monochrome devices. While the MDA card only supported a text mode it seems its designers managed to put in some form of colour attribute support even if it was never marketed as such. We’re not students of IBM graphics card modes here at Hackaday, but it would be fascinating to know whether this undocumented mode works in the same way from the software side as the colour text modes on CGA and better colour cards.

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A Classic Shortwave Radio Restored

November 12, 2023 by 20 Comments

Before the Internet, if you wanted to hear news from around the world, you probably bought a shortwave receiver. In the golden age of world band radio, there was a great deal of high-quality programming on the shortwave bands and a large variety of consumer radios with shortwave bands. For example, the Sony CRF-160 that [M Caldeira] is restoring dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s and would have been a cool radio in its day. It retailed for about $250 in 1972, which sounds reasonable, but — don’t forget — in 1972 that would have been a 10% downpayment on a new car or enough to buy a Big Mac every day for a year with change left over.

As you can see in the video below, the radio seemed to work well right out of the gate, but the radio needed some rust removal and other sprucing up. However, it is an excellent teardown, with some tips about general restoration.

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Molybdenene whiskers. (Credit: Sahu et al., 2023)

Introducing Molybdenene As Graphene’s New Dirac Matter Companion

November 12, 2023 by 9 Comments

Amidst all the (well-deserved) hype around graphene, it’s important to remember that its properties are not unique to carbon. More atoms can be coaxed into stable 2-dimensional configuration, with molybdenene previously theoretically possible. This is now demonstrated by Tumesh Kumar Sahu and colleagues in a recent Nature Nanotechnology article, through the manufacturing of a 2D molybdenum-based material which they showed to be indeed molybdenene. Essentially, this is a 2D lattice of molybdenum atoms, a configuration in which it qualifies as Dirac matter, just like graphene. For those of us unfamiliar with Dirac materials, this gentle introduction by Jérôme Cayssol in Comptes Rendus Physique might be of use.

Manufacturing process of molybdenene. (Credit: Sahu et al., 2023)
Manufacturing process of molybdenene. (Credit: Sahu et al., 2023)

In order to create molybdenene, the researchers started with molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), which using a microwave-assisted field underwent electrochemical transformation into whiskers that when examined turned out to consist out of monolayers of Mo. The sulfur atoms were separated using a graphene sheet. As is typical, molybdenene sheets were exfoliated using Scotch tape, in a process reminiscent of the early days of graphene research.

Much like graphene and other Dirac materials, molybdenene has many potential uses as a catalyst, as cantilever in scanning electron microscope (SEM) tips, and more. If the past decades of research into graphene has demonstrated anything, it is that what once seemed more of a novelty, suddenly turned out to have endless potential in fields nobody had considered previously. One of these being as coatings for hard disk platters, for example, which has become feasible due to increasingly more efficient ways to produce graphene in large quantities.

Leaky SMD Electrolytics? Try These Brute Force Removal Methods

November 12, 2023 by 25 Comments

When you say “recapping” it conjures up an image of a dusty old chassis with point-to-point wiring with a bunch of dried-out old capacitors or dodgy-looking electrolytics that need replacement. But time marches on, and we’re now at the point where recapping just might mean removing SMD electrolytics from a densely packed PCB. What do you do then?

[This Does Not Compute]’s answer to that question is to try a bunch of different techniques and see what works best, and the results may surprise you. Removal of SMD electrolytic caps can be challenging; the big aluminum can sucks a lot of heat away, the leads are usually pretty far apart and partially obscured by the plastic base, and they’re usually stuffed in with a lot of other components, most of which you don’t want to bother. [TDNC] previously used a hot-air rework station and liberally applied Kapton tape and aluminum foil to direct the heat, but that’s tedious and time-consuming. Plus, electrolytics sometimes swell up when heated, expelling their corrosive contents on the PCB in the process.

As brutish as it sounds, the solution might just be as simple as ripping caps off with pliers. This seems extreme, and with agree that the risk of tearing off the pads is pretty high. But then again, both methods seemed to work pretty well, and on multiple boards too. There’s a catch, though — the pliers method works best on caps that have already leaked enough of their electrolyte to weaken the solder joints. Twisting healthier caps off a PCB is likely to end in misery. That’s where brutal method number two comes in: hacking the can off the base with a pair of flush cutters. Once the bulk of the cap is gone, getting the leads off the pad is a simple desoldering job; just don’t forget to clean any released schmoo off the board — and your cutters!

To be fair, [This Does Not Compute] never seems to have really warmed up to destructive removal, so he invested in a pair of hot tweezers for the job, which works really well. But perhaps you’re not sure that you should just reflexively replace old electrolytics on sight. If so, you’re in pretty good company.

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Ham Radio Memes In The 1970s

November 11, 2023 by 12 Comments

If you have a fondness for old and unusual ham gear, [Saveitforparts] has a great video (see below) about a Robot slow scan receiver he found at a junk store.  Slow scan or SSTV is a way to send pictures via low-bandwidth audio, such as you often find on the ham bands. The idea is you take a picture, send some squeaks and blips over the air, and in about 8 or 10 seconds, a single frame of video shows up at the receiver. Hams aren’t the only ones who used it. The Apollo missions used an SSTV system in some cases, too.

I’ve been a ham radio operator for a very long time. When I first heard about SSTV, I thought it sounded cool that you could be talking to someone and then show them a picture of your station or your dog or your kids. But when I looked into it, the reality was far different. In the pre-internet days, SSTV-equipped hams hung out on a handful of watering hole frequencies and basically just sent memes and selfies to each other. Everyone would take turns, but there wasn’t really any conversation.

This actually still goes on, but the hardware isn’t a big deal anymore. The Robot in the video had to decode the signal from audio and store the image somehow. On old gear — some of it homebrew — it was simply persistent phosphor that would eventually fade, but, of course, eventually, images were stored in some form of digital memory. These days, you are likely to use a PC soundcard to both send and receive the necessary audio.

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Human AI Pin marketing picture. (Credting: Humane)

The AI Pin: A Smart Body Camera That Wants To Compete With Smartphones

November 11, 2023 by 21 Comments

Seeking to shake up the smartphone market, Humane introduced its ‘AI Pin’, which at first glance looks like someone put a very stylish body camera on their chest. There’s no display, only the 13 MP camera and some other optics visible above what turns out to be a touch panel, which is its main gesture-based input method, while it’s affixed to one’s clothing using either a magnet on the other side of the fabric, a wireless powerbank or a clip. Inside the unit you find a Qualcomm octa-core processor with 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage, running a custom Android-based ‘Cosmos’ OS.

The AI Pin home screen, demonstrating why hand palms are poor projection surfaces. (Credit: Humane)
The AI Pin home screen, demonstrating why hand palms are poor projection surfaces. (Credit: Humane)

There is also a monochrome (teal) 720p laser projector built-in that provides something of a screen experience, albeit with the expectation that you use your hand (or presumably any other suitable surface) to render it visible. From the PR video it is quite clear that visibility of the projection is highly variable, with much of the text often not remotely legible, or only after some squinting. The hand-based gestures to control the UI (tilting to indicate a direction, touching thumb & index finger together to confirm) are somewhat of a novelty, though this may get tiresome after a day.

An article by [Ron Amadeo] over at Ars Technica also takes a look at the device, where the lack of an app ecosystem is pointed out, as well as the need for a mandatory internet connection (via T-Mobile). Presumably this always-on ‘feature’ is where the ‘AI’ part comes in, as the device has some voice assistant functionality, which seems to rely heavily on remote servers. As a result, this ends up being a quirky device with no third-party app support for a price tag of $700 + the $25/month for online service. Not to mention that people may look a bit odd at you walking around with a body camera-like thing on your chest that you keep rubbing and holding your hand in front of.

To be fair, it’s not often that we see something more quaint in this space come out than Google Glass, now many years ago.