Inspiration

September 16, 2023 by Elliot Williams 55 Comments

While we were debating about whether it even makes any sense to reboot RadioShack, or indeed any brick-and-mortar electronics store in the modern era, Dan Maloney and I stumbled on what probably is the real source of all of our greybeard nostalgia for the store chain: inspiration.

For both of us, the appeal of a store like RadioShack was going through the place and thinking of what you’d do with all of those parts. Looking at the back of the beefiest MOSFET in the joint, you’d think about all the current you could pass with it. Or what you’d do with all of those piezo buzzers. And if you didn’t know yet what electronics project you wanted to make, there were things like the Forrest Mims notebooks to inspire you. There you’d find a way to turn the humble LED into a light sensor, whether you needed to or not. I wonder how many packs of assorted LEDs that book sold?!

Dan got his first hands on with a computer in RadioShack as well, because they let folks try them right there. If you didn’t know what you wanted a computer for, and that was the big question of the early microcomputer era, you could head into the store yourself and find out. Seeing, and playing with, Demon Dancer inspired.

A lot of this role is taken over by hackerspaces these days, and even more is taken by the Internet itself, of course. We have no shortage of inspiration – just read a day’s worth of Hackaday if you don’t believe me. So is there any room left for RadioShack’s inspirational role? Maybe not. But if that’s the cost of living in a world where we have access to more great ideas than we’ll ever have time to execute, then so be it!

Toy Bulldozer Becomes Epic Terrifying Lawnmower

September 16, 2023 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Regular lawnmowers are a perfectly fine way to mow your lawn, but they can be a bit boring. They’re also not always the best at tackling thick brush and bushes. [rctestflight] has a solution to both of those problems, in the form of a plant-munching bulldozer.

The concept is simple — it starts with a hefty miniature RC bulldozer. Weighing in at 27 kilograms (60 pounds), the beast has actual functioning hydraulics to control the blade and plow. It struggles somewhat with traction, particularly in muddier conditions, and can’t really dig much, but it nonetheless looks the business.

As cool as it was, [rctestflight] decided to employ it for some real yard work by outfitting it with a mowing rig. The ‘dozer was outfitted with a pair of sawblades, run by twin brushless motors for plenty of grunt. That gave the bulldozer the ability to mow through not just lawn, but even thick blackberry bushes and two-foot high weeds.

It’s not great at steering, but it’s able to destroy thick brush with reckless abandon. Fundamentally, it looks like a very fun way to mow an overgrown yard.

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Kinetic Sculpture Intermittently Lights Up The Night

September 16, 2023 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

We absolutely love the impetus of this project, as it definitely sounds like something a Hackaday reader would go through. After finally deciding between a CNC router and a laser cutter, [Eirik Brandal] was planning to “Hello, World” the CNC with something quick and simple, like maybe a few acrylic plates with curves and some electronics. Instead, feature creep took over, “things escalated out of control”, and [Eirik] came up with this intriguing and complicated kinetic sculpture.

As you’ll see in the demo video below, this is a motor-driven sculpture with sound and intermittent light. It has an Arduino Nano Every, two motors, and eight gears with various cog counts to accommodate the project. The light comes from LEDs that are attached to the DIY gears with their legs bent and their little feet sliding around homemade slip rings in order to alight.

But what about the sound? There’s an affixed piezo disk that picks up the gears’ vibrations and chafing, and this gets amplified to augment the acoustic sounds of the sculpture. Be sure to check out the quite satisfying demo video after the break, and stick around for the build video.

Are you as fascinated by kinetic sculptures as we are? Here’s on that uses machine learning in order to bring balance to itself.

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Preserving Floppy Disks

September 15, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 36 Comments

Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, floppy disks, and hard disk drives, and after several decades data may not be recoverable anymore. It’s always worth trying to back it up, though, especially if you have something on your hands like critical evidence or court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.

This project all started when an investigation unit in Maryland approached the Bloop Museum with a request to use their antique computer resources to decode the information on a 5.25″ floppy disk. Even finding a floppy disk drive of this size is a difficult task, but this was further compounded not just by the age of the disk but that the data wasn’t encoded in the expected format. Using a GreaseWeazle controlled by a Raspberry Pi, they generated an audio file from the data on the disk to capture all available data, and then used that to work backwards to get to the usable information.

After some more trials with converting the analog information to digital and a clue that the data on the disk was not fragmented, they realized they were looking at data from a digital stenography machine and were finally able to decode it into something useful. Of course, stenography machines are dark magic in their own right so just getting this record still requires a stenographer to make much sense out of it.

Two white Chevy Bolt hatchbacks sit side-by-side, immobilized in the street, their roofs festooned with sensors and an orange cone on their hoods like a snowman's nose pointed toward the sky.

Coning Cars For Fun And Non-Profit

September 15, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 61 Comments

Self-driving cars are being heralded as the wave of the future, but there have been many hiccups along the way. The newest is activists showing how autonomous vehicles are easy to hack with a simple traffic cone.

As we’ve discussed before, self-driving cars aren’t actually that great at driving, and there are a number of conditions that can cause them to fail safe and stop in the middle of the road. Activist group Safe Street Rebel is exploiting this vulnerability by “coning” Waymo and Cruise vehicles in San Francisco. By placing a traffic cone on the vehicle’s hood in the way of the sensors and cameras used to navigate the streets, the vehicles are rendered inoperable. Continue reading “Coning Cars For Fun And Non-Profit” →

Infinite Z-Axis Printer Aims To Print Itself Someday

September 15, 2023 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

“The lathe is the only machine tool that can make copies of itself,” or so the saying goes. The reality is more like, “A skilled machinist can use a lathe to make many of the parts needed to assemble another lathe,” which is still saying quite a lot by is pretty far off the implication that lathes are self-replicating machines. But what about a 3D printer? Could a printer print a copy of itself?

Not really, but the Infini-Z 3D printer certainly has some interesting features that us further down the road to self-replication. As the name implies, [SunShine]’s new printer is an infinite Z-axis design that essentially extrudes its own legs, progressively jacking its X- and Y-axis gantry upward. Each leg is a quarter of an internally threaded tube that engages with pinion gears to raise and lower the gantry. When it comes time to grow the legs, the print head moves into each corner of the gantry and extrudes a new section onto the top of each existing leg. The threaded leg is ready to use in minutes to raise the gantry to the next print level.

The ultimate goal of this design is to create a printer that can increase its print volume enough to print a copy of itself. At this moment it obviously can’t print a practical printer — metal parts like bearings and shafts are still needed, not to mention things like stepper motors and electronics. But [SunShine] seems to think he’ll be able to solve those problems now that the basic print volume problem has been addressed. Indeed, we’ve seen complex print-in-place designs, assembly-free compliant mechanisms, and even 3D-printed metal parts from [SunShine] before, so he seems well-positioned to move this project forward. We’re eager to see where this goes. Continue reading “Infinite Z-Axis Printer Aims To Print Itself Someday” →

Backyard LED Sculpture Inspired By Las Vegas Sphere

September 15, 2023 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

The Las Vegas Sphere is a large building. It stands 112 meters high and 157 meters wide, and is covered in a full 54,000 square meters of LED displays. That’s a little difficult to recreate at home for the typical maker. A scaled-down version is altogether more achievable though, as demonstrated by [DrZzs & GrZzs].

The Pixelhead Megasphere, as it is known, is 1.98 meters high and 2.4 meters in diameter. That makes it altogether easier to fit in an average backyard, and it comes with a much smaller pricetag than the $2 billion used to build the Las Vegas Sphere. It runs 20,028 individual addressable LED pixels, and runs on four 12-volt 100-amp power supplies. As seen here, it’s only running at 15%, so it can go plenty brighter to really get those power supplies toasty. The sphere is controlled by Xlights, with the LEDs interfaced via Kulp controller boards. It’s able to run a variety of different animations at a good frame rate, with [DrZzs & GrZzs] busy whipping up different designs for Halloween. The eye of Sauron is a particularly nice example.

We’ve seen some other neat LED spheres before, too. Video after the break.

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