Anyone can put out a candle by blowing on it. According to [Physics Girl], that method is old hat. She made an educational video that shows five different ways to put out a candle using–what else–physics.
You might not need alternate ways to put out a candle, but if you are looking to engage students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), this video along with others from [Physics Girl] might spark interest.
The spirit of hacking takes many forms. We cobble things together to make our lives easier, to prove that a drawing-board theory will work, or just to have fun and explore. For the people of Cuba, hacking is a necessity. This is especially true when it comes to getting around. Transportation has been a big problem for decades, especially in the major cities. But the resourcefulness of Cuba’s citizens has fueled a revolution of creativity that has sparked imaginations and kept people moving.
It is believed that Cuba has the world’s largest collection of classic American cars. There are approximately 60,000 of them on the road nationwide in various states of repair. Some are kept in pristine condition by card-carrying automobile club members who baby them and keep them as close to stock as possible. But most of these cars see daily use as cheap public taxis. They are not for-hire cabs that can be easily hailed from the sidewalk, though. They are designed to maximize utility and carry as many passengers as possible along fixed routes. Taking one of these taxis is expensive, but the alternative is waiting hours in the hot sun for an overcrowded bus.
Continue reading “Hacker Island: Preserving Cuba’s Classic Cars”
Today, Microchip released a few interesting tools for embedded development. The first is a free online IDE called MPLAB Xpress, the second is a $10 dev board with a built-in programmer. This pair is aimed at getting people up and running quickly with PIC development. They gave us an account before release, and sent over a sample board. Let’s take a look!
Continue reading “Microchip Unveils Online MPLAB IDE And $10 Board”
[amazingdiyprojects] has been working on a 3D printable jet engine. You may remember seeing a 3D printed jet engine grace our front page back in October. That one was beautiful didn’t function. This one flips those values around. [amazingdiyprojects] seems to make a living from selling plans for his projects, so naturally most of the details of the build are hidden from us. But from what we can see in the video clips there are some really interesting solutions here.
Some of the parts appear to be hand-formed sheet metal. Others are vitamins like bearings and an electric starter. We really liked the starter mechanism, pressing in the motor to engage with a spline, or perhaps by friction, to give the starting rotation.
What really caught our attention was casting the hot parts of the printer in refractory cement using a 3D printed mold. It reminds us of the concrete lathes from World War 1. We wonder what other things could be built using this method? Flame nozzles for a foundry? A concrete tea-kettle. It’s pretty cool.
We’re interested to see how the jet engine performs and how others will improve on the concept. Video of it in action after the break.
UPDATE: [amazingdiyprojects] posted a video of the engine being disassembled.
Continue reading “A 3D Printed Jet Engine Appears To Function”
The Pi Zero is a great piece of hardware, even if you’re not designing another USB hub for it. [Marcel] wanted to control a few RGB LED strips from his phone, and while there are a lot of fancy ways you can do this, all it really takes is a Pi Zero and a few parts that are probably already banging around your parts drawers.
This isn’t a project to control individually addressable RGB LEDs such as NeoPixels, WS2812s, or APA102 LEDs. This is just a project to control RGB LEDs with five four connectors: red, green, blue, power, and or ground. These are the simplest RGB LEDs you can get, and sometimes they’re good enough and cheap enough to be the perfect solution to multi-colored blinkies in a project.
Because these RGB LEDs are simple, that means controlling them is very easy. [Marcel] is just connecting a transistor to three of the PWM pins on the Pi and using a TIP122 transistor to drive the red, green, and blue LEDs. You’ve got to love those TIPs package parts!
Control of the LEDs is accomplished through lighttpd. This does mean a USB WiFi dongle is required to control the LEDs over the Internet, but it is so far the simplest way we’ve seen to add multicolor blinkies to the web.
The Raspberry Pi Zero contest is presented by Hackaday and Adafruit. Prizes include Raspberry Pi Zeros from Adafruit and gift cards to The Hackaday Store!
See All the Entries || Enter Your Project Now!
If you’d like to risk blowing your fingers off for a good cause this week, look no further than [M. Bindhammer]’s search for an eco-friendly rocket fuel. [M. Bindhammer] predicts the increasing use of solid rocket boosters in the future. We’re into that. For now, rocket launches are so few and far between that the pollution doesn’t add up, but when we’re shipping consumer electronics to the moon and back twice a day, we might have a problem.
The most common solid rocket fuel emits chlorine gas into the atmosphere when burned. [Bindhammer] is exploring safe ways to manufacture a eutectically balanced and stabilized fuel compromised of sugar or sugar-alcohol, and potassium nitrate. If you watch home chemistry videos for fun on the weekend like us, [Bindhammer] goes through all his thinking, and even spells out the process for duplicating his fuel safely in a lab.
He’s done a lot of work. The resulting fuel is stable, can be liquid or solid. It has a high ignition temperature, but as you can see in the video after the break. Once ignited. It goes off like rocket fuel.
A few months ago, we posted all the videos from the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference. Putting all of these videos up on YouTube isn’t the greatest idea, and thanks to [Jason Scott] of the Internet Archive and a little bit of sneakernetting, all the talks are also available on archive.org.
As an aside, the SuperCon was filmed on two Blackmagic URSA cameras. The resulting files for the talks on both cameras came in at a little over one Terabyte. These were edited down into the finished videos for YouTube, at around 20 Gigs per video. Once those hit the YouTube servers, they were converted once again (trust me, this made the most sense), and I was able to download the YouTube files and sneakernet all the talks to [Jason] on an 8GB thumb drive. The next time we do this, we’ll build a Xeon-based SLI Titan rig for video editing.
The German TV show NEO MAGAZIN Royale asked their viewers to send in old hardware. These old floppy drives, scanners, typewriters, hard drives, modems, and speakers would be turned into instruments. The German hip hop group, Fettes Brot performed Die da on these instruments with sufficiently electronic results.
You know we’re having a con in Belgrade on April 9, right? Wait, I’m sorry. 9 April. The call for proposals ends very, very soon. If you have something cool to talk about, fill out the form.
Montreal has a lot of great architecture, all of which is coincidently held together by Robertson screws. Now one of those famous old buildings, the Saint-Sulpice Library is turning into a hackerspace or tech incubator sort of thing thanks to a $17 Million Canadian Peso investment from the city and province.
Just a reminder that the NL6621 WiFi SoC exists. It’s been called the ESP8266 killer, but some of the most recent posts on the English language development forum are for buying phentermine – an appetite suppressant – without a prescription. The people demand information, so if you have some, put it in the comments below.
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