Video Provides Rare Look Inside China’s Space Station

October 28, 2024 by 71 Comments

China has a space station — it’s called Tiangong, the first module was launched in 2021, and it’s all going quite swimmingly, thank you very much. That’s essentially what we know about the orbital complex here in the West, as China tends to be fairly secretive when it comes to their activities in space.

But thanks to a recently released video by the state-funded CCTV Video News Agency, we now have an unprecedented look inside of humanity’s newest orbital laboratory. Shenzhou-18 crew members [Ye Guangfu], [Li Cong], and [Li Guangsu] provide viewers with a full-blown tour of the station, and there’s even baked-in English subtitles so you won’t miss a beat.

The few looks the public has gotten inside of Tiangong in the past have been low-resolution and generally of the “shaky cam” variety. In comparison, this flashy presentation was clearly made to impress an international audience. But let’s be fair, if you managed to build your own crewed station in low Earth orbit, wouldn’t you want to show it off a bit? Continue reading “Video Provides Rare Look Inside China’s Space Station” →

Lock-In Thermography On A Cheap IR Camera

October 28, 2024 by 17 Comments

Seeing the unseen is one of the great things about using an infrared (IR) camera, and even the cheap-ish ones that plug into a smartphone can dramatically improve your hardware debugging game. But even fancy and expensive IR cameras have their limits, and may miss subtle temperature changes that indicate a problem. Luckily, there’s a trick that improves the thermal resolution of even the lowliest IR camera, and all it takes is a little tweak to the device under test and some simple math.

According to [Dmytro], “lock-in thermography” is so simple that his exploration of the topic was just a side quest in a larger project that delved into the innards of a Xinfrared Xtherm II T2S+ camera. The idea is to periodically modulate the heat produced by the device under test, typically by ramping the power supply voltage up and down. IR images are taken in synch with the modulation, with each frame having a sine and cosine scaling factor applied to each pixel. The frames are averaged together over an integration period to create both in-phase and out-of-phase images, which can reveal thermal details that were previously unseen.

With some primary literature in hand, [Dmytro] cobbled together some simple code to automate the entire lock-in process. His first test subject was a de-capped AD9042 ADC, with power to the chip modulated by a MOSFET attached to a Raspberry Pi Pico. Integrating the images over just ten seconds provided remarkably detailed images of the die of the chip, far more detailed than the live view. He also pointed the camera at the Pico itself, programmed it to blink the LED slowly, and was clearly able to see heating in the LED and onboard DC-DC converter.

The potential of lock-in thermography for die-level debugging is pretty exciting, especially given how accessible it seems to be. The process reminds us a little of other “seeing the unseeable” techniques, like those neat acoustic cameras that make diagnosing machine vibrations easier, or even measuring blood pressure by watching the subtle change in color of someone’s skin as the capillaries fill.

The Pound ( Or Euro, Or Dollar ) Can Still Be In Your Pocket

October 27, 2024 by 88 Comments

A British journalistic trope involves the phrase “The pound in your pocket”, a derisory reference to the 1960s Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s use of it to try to persuade the public that a proposed currency devaluation wouldn’t affect them. Nearly six decades later not so many Brits carry physical pounds in their pockets as electronic transfers have become more prevalent, but the currency remains. So much so that the governor of the Bank of England has had to reassure the world that the pound won’t be replaced by a proposed “Britcoin” cryptocurrency should that be introduced.

Normally matters of monetary policy aren’t within Hackaday’s remit, but since the UK is not the only country to mull over the idea of a tightly regulated cryptocurrency tied to their existing one, there’s a privacy angle to be considered while still steering clear of the fog of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. The problem is that reading the justification for the new digital pound from the Bank of England, it’s very difficult to see much it offers which isn’t already offered by existing cashless payment systems. Meanwhile it offers to them a blank regulatory sheet upon which they can write any new rules they want, and since that inevitably means some of those rules will affect digital privacy in a negative manner, it should be a worry to anyone whose government has considered the idea. Being at pains to tell us that we’ll still be able to see a picture of the King (or a dead President, or a set of bridges) on a bit of paper thus feels like an irrelevance as increasingly few of us handle banknotes much anyway these days. Perhaps that act in itself will now become more of an act of protest. And just when we’d persuaded our hackerspaces to go cashless, too.

Header: Wikitropia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Hackaday Links: October 27, 2024

October 27, 2024 by 14 Comments

Problem solved? If the problem is supplying enough lithium to build batteries for all the electric vehicles that will be needed by 2030, then a new lithium deposit in Arkansas might be a resounding “Yes!” The discovery involves the Smackover Formation — and we’ll be honest here that half the reason we chose to feature this story was to be able to write “Smackover Formation” — which is a limestone aquifer covering a vast arc from the Rio Grande River in Texas through to the western tip of the Florida panhandle. Parts of the aquifer, including the bit that bulges up into southern Arkansas, bear a brine rich in lithium salts, far more so than any of the brines currently commercially exploited for lithium metal production elsewhere in the world. Given the measured concentration and estimated volume of brine in the formation, there could be between 5 million and 19 million tons of lithium in the formation; even at the lower end of the range, that’s enough to build nine times the number of EV batteries needed.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: October 27, 2024” →

BNCs For An Old Instrument

October 27, 2024 by 5 Comments

Back in the summer our eye was caught by [Jazzy Jane]’s new signal generator, or perhaps we should say her new-to-her signal generator. It’s an Advance E1 from around 1950, and it was particularly interesting from here because it matches the model on the shelf above this bench. She’s back with a new video on the E1, allowing us a further look inside it as she replaces a dead capacitor, gets its audio oscillator working, and upgrades its sockets.

Treating us to a further peek inside the unit, first up is a leaky capacitor. Then a knotty question for old tech enthusiasts, to upgrade or not? The ancient co-ax connectors are out of place on a modern bench, so does originality matter enough to give it a set of BNC sockets? We’d tend to agree; just because we have some adapters for the unit here doesn’t mean it’s convenient. Following on from that is a period variable frequency audio mod which has failed, so out that comes and a little fault-finding is required to get the wiring of the audio transformer.

These instruments are not by any means compact, but they do have the advantage of being exceptionally well-built and above all cheap. We hope readers appreciate videos like the one below the break, and that you’re encouraged not to be scared of diving in to older items like this one to fix them. Meanwhile the first installment is here.

Continue reading “BNCs For An Old Instrument” →

A stack of Activation Locked MacBooks destined for the shredder in refurbisher [John Bumstead]’s workshop.

Apple IOS 18’s New Repair Assistant: Easier Parts Pairing Yet With Many Limitations

October 27, 2024 by 12 Comments

Over the years, Apple has gone all-in on parts pairing. Virtually every component in an iPhone and iPad has a unique ID that’s kept in a big database over at Apple, which limits replacement parts to only those which have their pairing with the host system officially sanctified by Apple. With iOS 18 there seems to be somewhat of a change in how difficult getting a pairing approved, in the form of Apple’s new Repair Assistant. According to early responses by [iFixit] and in a video by [Hugh Jeffreys] the experience is ‘promising but flawed’.

As noted in the official Apple support page, the Repair Assistant is limited to the iPhone 15+, iPad Pro (M4) and iPad Air (M2), which still leaves many devices unable to make use of this feature. For the lucky few, however, this theoretically means that you can forego having to contact Apple directly to approve new parts. Instead the assistant will boot into its own environment, perform the pairing and calibration and allow you to go on your merry way with (theoretically) all functionality fully accessible.

Continue reading “Apple IOS 18’s New Repair Assistant: Easier Parts Pairing Yet With Many Limitations” →

A Brand-New Additive PCB Fab Technique?

October 27, 2024 by 68 Comments

Usually when we present a project on these pages, it’s pretty cut and dried — here’s what was done, these are the technologies used, this was the result. But sometimes we run across projects that raise far more questions than they answer, such as with this printed circuit board that’s actually printed rather than made using any of the traditional methods.

Right up front we’ll admit that this video from [Bad Obsession Motorsport] is long, and what’s more, it’s part of a lengthy series of videos that document the restoration of an Austin Mini GT-Four. We haven’t watched the entire video much less any of the others in the series, so jumping into this in the middle bears some risk. We gather that the instrument cluster in the car is in need of a tune-up, prompting our users to build a PCB to hold all the instruments and indicators. Normally that’s pretty standard stuff, but jumping to the 14:00 minute mark on the video, you’ll see that these blokes took the long way around.

Starting with a naked sheet of FR4 substrate, they drilled out all the holes needed for their PCB layout. Most of these holes were filled with rivets of various sizes, some to accept through-hole leads, others to act as vias to the other side of the board. Fine traces of solder were then applied to the FR4 using a modified CNC mill with the hot-end and extruder of a 3D printer added to the quill. Components were soldered to the board in more or less the typical fashion.

It looks like a brilliant piece of work, but it leaves us with a few questions. We wonder about the mechanics of this; how is the solder adhering to the FR4 well enough to be stable? Especially in a high-vibration environment like a car, it seems like the traces would peel right off the board. Indeed, at one point (27:40) they easily peel the traces back to solder in some SMD LEDs.

Also, how do you solder to solder? They seem to be using a low-temp solder and a higher temperature solder, and getting right in between the melting points. We’re used to seeing solder wet into the copper traces and flow until the joint is complete, but in our experience, without the capillary action of the copper, the surface tension of the molten solder would just form a big blob. They do mention a special “no-flux 96S solder” at 24:20; could that be the secret?

We love the idea of additive PCB manufacturing, and the process is very satisfying to watch. But we’re begging for more detail. Let us know what you think, and if you know anything more about this process, in the comments below.

Continue reading “A Brand-New Additive PCB Fab Technique?” →