Retrotechtacular: The Incredibly Difficult Task Of Copying A Document

It seems hard to imagine, but in the early part of the 20th century, there weren’t a lot of great options for creating copies of documents. The most common method was to use carbon paper to create multiple copies at once from a typewriter or a line printer. All that changed with a company called Haloid. Never heard of them? They later became the Xerox company.

The underlying technology dates back to 1938 (invented by a physicist who was also a lawyer). In 1944, they produced a practical copier and shortly thereafter sold the rights to Haloid. The Haloid company originally made photographic copy machines that used wet chemistry.

In 1959, the Xerox 914 (so called because it could copy a 9″ x 14″ document) came on the scene (that’s it, below). The 650 pound copier could make seven copies per minute and came with a fire extinguisher because it had a tendency to burst into flames. If you didn’t want to spend the $27,500 price tag, you could rent for only $25/month (keep in mind that in 1959, $25 would buy about 25 pounds of T-bone steaks). You can see a commercial for the 914 in the video below.

Xerox_914

In the commercial, you’ll see them make a big deal out of the fact that the print was dry. That’s because a lot of previous machines used actual photographic processes with wet chemistry. Obviously, that also took special paper.

Even Further Back

If the copier didn’t exist until recently, how did people make copies before? Turns out there were lots of ways to make copies of varying degrees of bad quality or extreme trouble. In some sense, the best copies were made by scribes just writing down a second copy of things. There were a variety of machines that would capture what you wrote and make a copy by mechanical or other means. A polygraph (not the lie detecting kind) allowed Thomas Jefferson to write letters and make a copy. The machine moved a pen to match the movements of the author’s pen, thus making a near perfect copy. With a few adjustments, this became the pantograph which not only does the same job, but also can shrink or enlarge the copy. Carbon paper was widely used to make multiple copies of handwritten and typewritten documents.

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Hackers On Planet Earth — We’ll Be There!

This weekend, Hackaday will be rolling into New York for the Eleventh HOPE. This biyearly conference draws hackers from all around the globe. There’s a ton going on at HOPE: talks, hardware hacking, workshops, and pretty much everything else you might be interested in. But really, this gathering which was founded by 2600 in ’94, is where you go to meet and hang out with other hackers. And we want to hang out with you.

Pre-sale tickets are gone. But if you don’t have a ticket yet there are a limited number still available at the door. We’re happy that Hackaday is a sponsor of HOPE this year and for that we have a spot in the vendor’s area. We’re not selling anything — we’re actually reverse-vending. We want you to stop by and show us your hacks!

Hackaday Meetups at HOPE

Find us in the vendor area for two meetups: Saturday 2:30-5:00 (after Cory Doctorow’s keynote) and Sunday 11:00-1:00 2:30-5:00. We’ll be there with our cameras at the ready so don’t forget to bring your hacks. We’re always hungry to hear interesting stories which will end up on the front page for all to enjoy.

We have swag like Hackaday and Tindie stickers, and dev boards to give away from our Hackaday Prize sponsors Atmel and Microchip. During the two meetup times we’ll have munchies (Hackaday branded of course) and a limited supply of T-shirts. Come early and come often.

Brian Benchoff and Mike Szczys will be on hand covering the best the convention has to offer. Hit us up on those Twitter links if you want to get our attention. Sophi Kravitz, Aleksandar Bradic, and Shayna Gentiluomo will also be there, so stop by whenever and hang out with us. Our spot in the vendor area will be open the whole weekend.

We are always looking for awesome things to do in addition to what’s on the official agenda. The meetup on Saturday is the place to get the inside scoop on those plans. Whether you’re going to be at HOPE or not, we’d love to hear from you in the comments. Let us know about any talks we shouldn’t miss, any hackers we should track down and interview, and any of those extra curricular activities for a bunch of hackers in the middle of Manhattan on a hot July night.

Ourobot: What Happens When A Snake Bot Swallows Its Own Tail

For all their joking about “reinventing the wheel”, the team behind Ourobot made a very cool robot (German, automatic translation here). The team, at the University of Applied Sciences in “Bielefeld, Germany“,  built their wheel out of twelve segments, each with its own servo motor, a 3D-printed case, and a pressure sensor mounted on the outside of the wheel. The latter, plus some clever programming, allows the robot wheel to vary its circular gate and climb up over obstacles automatically.

One link in the chain
One link in the chain

There are a bunch of interesting constraints in designing the control for this bot. The tracks on the ground, naturally, have to adjust their relative angles so that they lie each flat on the surface, even if that surface isn’t itself flat or level. The segments in the air are unconstrained, but the sum of all the servos’ interior angles has to add up to 1800 degrees, and these angles control where its center of gravity is.

Our head is spinning. The paper, “OUROBOT – A Self-Propelled Continuous-Track-Robot for Rugged Terrain” is unfortunately behind the IEEE paywall, but goes into detail if you can find it. Continue reading “Ourobot: What Happens When A Snake Bot Swallows Its Own Tail”

3D Printering: G-Code Post Processing With Perl

Most of our beloved tools, such as Slic3r, Cura or KISSlicer, offer scripting interfaces that help a great deal if your existing 3D printing toolchain has yet to learn how to produce decent results with a five headed thermoplastic spitting hydra. Using scripts, it’s possible to tweak the little bits it takes to get great results, inserting wipe or prime towers and purge moves on the fly, and if your setup requires it, also control additional servos and solenoids for the flamethrowers.

This article gives you a short introduction in how to post-process G-code using Perl and Slic3r. Perl Ninja skills are not required. Slic3r plays well with pretty much any scripting language that produces executables, so if you’re reluctant to use Perl, you’ll probably be able to replicate most of the steps in your favorite language.

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Simple Beetle Robot Uses Smoking Soldering Iron

As robot projects go, [creative ideas km]’s isn’t going to impress many Hackaday readers. Still, as an art project or something to do with the kids, it might be fun. But the reason it caught our interest wasn’t the actual robot, but the improvised soldering iron used in its construction.

The robot itself isn’t really autonomous. It is just a battery, a motor, and a switch. The motor vibrations make the robot scoot around on its bent copper wire legs. Some hot glue holds it all together, but the electrical wiring is soldered.

If you look at the video below, you’ll see the soldering is done with an unusual method. A disposable lighter generates a flame that hits an attached copper wire with a coil wound in it. The coil acts as a heat exchanger, and the wire becomes a soldering iron tip.

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Hot Russian Tubes

On the heels of our post on retro-Soviet transistor teardowns and die-shots, [nikitas] wrote in to tell us about a huge thread on rare vacuum devices of all varieties: oddball cathode-ray tubes, obscure Nixies, and strange Soviet valves. We thought the other forum post was overwhelming at just over 110 pages, but how about 391 pages (and counting) of blown-glass electronics?

If you read through the decaptholon, we mentioned that a particularly enthusiastic poster, [lalka], looked to be cataloguing every Soviet oscillator circuit. It turns out that he’s also the one behind this incredible (random) compendium of everything that’s had the air sucked out of it.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: The Cheapest Logic Analyzer

There are piles of old 128MB and 256MB sticks of RAM sitting around in supply closets and in parts bins. For his Hackaday Prize project, [esot.eric] is turning these obsolete sticks of RAM into something useful – a big, fast logic analyzer. It’s cheap, and simple enough that it can be built on a breadboard.

If using old SDRAM in strange configurations seems familiar, you’re correct. This project is based on [esot.eric]’s earlier AVR logic analyzer project that used a slow AVR to measure 32 channels of logic at 30 megasamples per second. The only way this build was possible was by hacking an old stick of RAM to ‘free run’, automatically logging data to the RAM and reading it out with an AVR later.

This project expands on the earlier projects by using bigger sticks of RAM faster, with the ultimate goal being a 32-bit, 133MS/s logic analyzer that is more of a peripheral than a single, monolithic project. With a Raspberry Pi Zero, a stick of RAM, and a few miscellaneous logic chips, this project can become anything from a logic analyzer to a data logger to an oscilloscope. It’s weird, yes, but the parts to make this very handy tool can be found in any hackerspace or workshop, making it a great trick for the enterprising hardware hacker.