Are Today’s Engineers Worse?

Today’s engineers are just as good as the ones that came before, but that should not be the case and there is massive room for improvement. Improvement that can be realized by looking for the best of the world to come and the one we left behind.

Hey kids! Let's learn why the CE certifications exist!
Hey kids! Let’s learn why the CE certifications exist!

Survivorship bias is real. When we look at the accomplishments of the engineers that came before us we are forced to only look at the best examples. It first really occurred to me that this was real when I saw what I still consider to be the most atrocious piece of consumer oriented engineering the world has yet seen: the Campbell’s soup warmer.

This soup warmer is a poor combination of aluminum and Bakelite forged into the lowest tier of value engineering during its age. Yet it comes from the same time that put us on the moon: we still remember and celebrate Apollo. It’s possible that the soup warmer is forgotten because those who owned it perished from home fires, electrocution, or a diet of Campbell’s soup, but it’s likely that it just wasn’t worth remembering. It was bad engineering.

In fact, there’s mountains of objects. Coffee pots whose handles fell off. Switches that burned or shocked us. Cars that were ugly and barely worked. Literal mountains of pure refuse that never should have seen the light of day. Now we are here.

The world of engineering has changed. My girlfriend and I once snuck into an old factory in Louisville, Kentucky. The place was a foundry and the only building that survived the fire that ended the business. It happened to be where they stored their professional correspondence and sand casting patterns. It was moldy, dangerous, and a little frightening but I saw something amazing when we cracked open one of the file cabinets. It was folders and folders of all the communication that went into a single product. It was an old enough factory that some of it was before the widespread adoption of telephony and all documents had to be mailed from place to place.

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Brew A Cup Of Coffee Without Electricity!

So, wether you’ve blown your house’s breakers while cranking up the power on your latest project or a storm has brought low the local power grid, what do you do if you desperately need coffee with no electricity to power your coffee maker? Make like [austiwawa]: crack it open and bust out the tea lights.

Removing the bottom of the coffee maker is simply done, exposing the resistance heating element. Improvising a jig to hold the coffee maker over an arrangement of five tea lights, the candle flames slowly do the work of heating the element to set the maker in motion.

It’s a solution for after the apocalypse… as long as you can find tea lights, coffee plus a grinder, and for some reason don’t want to use the quick and efficient method of brewing over an actual fire (though kitchen hearths are a rarity these days). Now we kind of want to see this adapted for all kinds of other heat sources. Reflected sunlight anyone?

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How To Find, Buy, And Renovate A Titan II Missile Silo

Why would you want to live in a missile silo is the wrong question. Why wouldn’t you want to live in a missile silo is the right question. You’ll have weird, antiquated machinery hanging above your head, a great reason to change your name to ‘Zephram’, and living underground is much more ecologically sound, in any event.

For a certain class of people, the benefits of living in a missile silo are self-evident, but no one has really gone through the process of documenting all those unanswered questions. How do you buy a missile silo? How do you re-commission it and turn it into livable space? Is it even possible to get a bank to sign onto this? All these questions and more are being answered by a relatively new YouTube channel, [Death Wears Bunny Slippers].

In 2010, the creator of this channel decided to buy a missile silo. He ended up with a Titan II missile silo that was decommissioned in spring of 1986. In its prime, this missile silo held a single Titan II, pointed at a target over the pole, a three-story access tunnel, and a hardened command and control pod capable of keeping a few airmen alive after the apocalypse.

[DWBS] has been working on this project for a half-decade now, and what’s been shown so far is impressive. When this missile silo was decommissioned, the Air Force dropped a bunch of broken concrete down the access shaft, tore down the top 10 or so feet of the access tunnel, and generally made a huge mess of the place. After renting an excavator, [DWBS] was able to turn this hole filled with crap into a blank canvas.

Already, [DWBS] has been working on his missile silo home for years, and video updates are coming in at a rate of about one per week. The project is great, and a perfect example of a rare, strange, yet unbelievably interesting genre of YouTube channels: the huge, multi-year build broken up into weekly segments. If you’re looking for projects similar in scope, check out SV Seeker, the project that’s building a Chinese junk in the middle of Oklahoma, or the Camberghini, an abortion of an MX-5 designed to make you irrationally angry. Buying and refitting a missile silo is a step above any of these projects, and over the next weeks and months will make for spectacular YouTubing.

Below, you can check out the two most interesting videos to date – opening the access tunnel to the silo and draining all the water.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: 3D Prints For The Visually Impaired

Students with visual impairments can have difficulty with visual and spatial relationships. 3D printers can print almost everything, and with a lot of CAD work, this project in the Hackaday Prize provides these students with physical objects to learn any subject.

[Joan] and [Whosawhatsis] have already written the book on 3D printed science projects and have produced a 3D printed Braille map of a campus, but for this project, they’re making things a little bit simpler. Visually impaired students are tactile learners and the simplest of their 3D printable objects are fixed volume objects. This collection of 3D printable cylinders, cones, prisms, and pyramids give a physical representation of geometric solids. These objects also have another trick up their sleeve: they all contain the same volume. Fill the cylinder up with water, pour that water into a cone, and the student will discover that they all contain the same volume.  That’s useful for the visually impaired, but would also put these printable shapes at home in any elementary or middle school math class.

This project already has a rather large following, with teachers of the visually impaired contributing on a Google Group, and a ton of people downloading the models. [Joan] and [Whosawhatsis] are getting a lot of great feedback and growing the range of contributors, making this the start of an awesome community and a great Hackaday Prize entry.

Dumb Terminals And Raspberry Pis

Back in the old days, the cool kids didn’t have an Apple II or a Trash-80. The cool kids had jobs, and those jobs had Vaxxen all over the place. The usual way of working with a Vax would have been a terminal, a VT220 at least, or in the case of [Sudos]’ experiments with a Raspberry Pi, A DEC VT510, a single session, text only serial terminal.

Usually, when we see a ‘new hardware stuffed into old tech’ project like this, the idea is simply to find a use for the old hardware. That makes sense; a dumb terminal from the late 90s should be a bit rarer than a Raspberry Pi Zero. This is not the case for [Sudos]’s build. He recently came across a few Raspberry Pi Zeros at Microcenter, and looking for a use for them, he decided to turn a serial terminal into a Real Unix System™.

As you would expect from a serial terminal, connecting a Raspberry Pi and putting some awesome character graphics on the screen is as simple as a Max3232 board picked up from eBay, a WiFi dongle, and an Ethernet adapter. Connect the Pi to the terminal with a serial adapter cable, and you’re off to the races.

While the VT510 serial terminal is just about the end of the line as far as dedicated terminals go, there are classier options. The VT100 terminal, older than most of the Hackaday readership, features a port on its gigantic board, meant to connect to whatever weirdness was coming out of Maynard in the late 70s. You can attach a BeagleBone to this connector, making for a very slick stealth mod.

Fail Of The Week: Cutting Steel With Baking Soda

[NightHawkInLight] wants what may be the impossible – a dirt cheap replacement for a laser cutter or a water jet. He’s got this crazy idea about using electrolysis to etch sheet steel parts, but he just can’t get the process to work. Sounds like a job for the Hackaday community.

In theory, electrolytic cutting of metal  is pretty simple to understand. Anyone who lives in the northeast of the USA knows all about how road salt can cut holes in steel given enough time – say, one winter into payments on that new car. Adding a few electrons to the mix can accelerate the process of removing metal, but doing so in a controlled manner seems to be the crux of [NightHawkInLight]’s problem.

In his research into the method, he found a 2010 video by [InterestingProducts] of etching reed valves for DIY pulse jet engines from spring steel that makes it look easy. [NightHawkInLight] deviated from the reed valve process by substituting baking soda for salt to avoid the production of chlorine gas and changed up the masking technique by using different coatings. We applaud the empirical approach and hope he achieves his goal, but we tend to agree with frequent-Hackaday-tipline-project notable [AvE]’s assessment in the YouTube comments – the steel is just too darn thick. Once the etching starts, a third dimension is created at 90° to the surface and is then available to electrolyze, causing the corrosion to extend under the masking.

What does the Hackaday hive mind think? Is there any way to fix this process for thicker steel stock? Narrower traces, perhaps? Somehow modulating the current in the tank? Perhaps using the Hackaday logo would have helped? Chime in down below in the comments, and maybe we can all throw out our laser cutters.

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Make Any PC A Thousand Dollar Gaming Rig With Cloud Gaming

The best gaming platform is a cloud server with a $4,000 dollar graphics card you can rent when you need it.

[Larry] has  done this sort of thing before with Amazon’s EC2, but recently Microsoft has been offering a beta access to some of NVIDIA’s Tesla M60 graphics cards. As long as you have a fairly beefy connection that can support 30 Mbps of streaming data, you can play just about any imaginable game at 60fps on the ultimate settings.

It takes a bit of configuration magic and quite a few different utilities to get it all going, but in the end [Larry] is able to play Overwatch on max settings at a nice 60fps for $1.56 an hour. Considering that just buying the graphics card alone will set you back 2500 hours of play time, for the casual gamer, this is a great deal.

It’s interesting to see computers start to become a rentable resource. People have been attempting streaming computers for a while now, but this one is seriously impressive. With such a powerful graphics card you could use this for anything intensive, need a super high-powered video editing station for a day or two? A CAD station to make anyone jealous? Just pay a few dollars of cloud time and get to it!