Ok, you caught us. It certainly isn’t going to be the year of Algol. When you think of “old” programming languages, you usually think of FORTRAN and COBOL. You should also think of LISP. But only a few people will come up with Algol. While not a household name, it was highly influential, and now, GCC is on the verge of supporting it just like it supports other languages besides C and C++ these days.
Why bring an old language up to the forefront? We don’t know, but we still find it interesting. We doubt there’s a bunch of Algol code waiting to be ported, but you never know.
As computer hardware gets better and better, most of the benefits are readily apparent to users. Faster processors, less power consumption, and lower cost are the general themes here. But sometimes increased performance comes with some unusual downsides. A research group at the University of California, Irvine found that high-performance mice have such good resolution that they can be used to spy on a user’s speech or other sounds around them.
The mice involved in this theoretical attack need to be in the neighborhood of 20,000 dpi, as well as having a relatively high sampling rate. With this combination it’s possible to sense detail fine enough to resolve speech from the vibrations of the mouse pad. Not only that, but the researchers noted that this also enables motion tracking of people in the immediate vicinity as the vibrations caused by walking can also be decoded. The attack does require a piece of malware to be installed somewhere on the computer, but the group also theorize that this could easily be done since most security suites don’t think of mouse input data as particularly valuable or vulnerable.
There’s no rule that says that logic circuits must always use electrically conductive materials, which is why you can use water, air or even purely mechanical means to implement logic circuits. When it comes to [soiboi soft]’s squishy robots, it thus makes sense to turn the typical semiconductor control circuitry into an air-powered version as much as possible.
We previously featured the soft and squishy salamander robot that [soiboi] created using pneumatic muscles. While rather agile, it still has to drag a whole umbilical of pneumatic tubes along, with one tube per function. Most of the research is on microfluidics, but fortunately air is just a fluid that’s heavily challenged in the density department, allowing the designs to be adapted to create structures like gates and resistors.
A transistor or valve using a silicone membrane. (Credit: soiboi soft, YouTube)
Logically, a voltage potential or a pressure differential isn’t so different, and can be used in a similar way. A transistor for example is akin to the vacuum tube, which in British English is called a valve for good reason. Through creative use of a flexible silicone membrane and rigid channels, pulling a vacuum in the ‘gate’ channel allows flow through the other two channels.
Similarly, a ‘resistor’ is simply a narrowing of a channel, thus resisting flow. The main difference compared to the microfluidics versions is everything is a much larger scale. This does make it printable on a standard FDM printer, which is a major benefit.
Quantifying these pneumatic resistors took a bit of work, using a pressure sensor to determine their impact, but after that the first pneumatic logic circuits could be designed. The resistors are useful here as pull-downs, to ensure that any charge (air) is removed, while not impeding activation.
The design, as shown in the top image, is a 5-stage ring oscillator that provides locomotion to a set of five pneumatic muscles. As demonstrated at the end of video, this design allows for the entire walking motion to be powered using a single input of compressed air, not unlike the semiconductor equivalent running off a battery.
While the somewhat bulky nature of pneumatic logic prevents it from implementing very complex logic, using it for implementing something as predictable as a walking pattern as demonstrated seems like an ideal use case. When it comes to making these squishy robots stand-alone, it likely can reduce the overall bulk of the package, not to mention the power usage. We are looking forward to how [soiboi]’s squishy robots develop and integrate these pneumatic circuits.
This week Jonathan talks to James Cole about Firefly III, the personal finance manager! This one itches James’ own itch, but brings great visualization and management tools for your personal finances!
In the history of entertainment, few properties have made the sort of indelible mark on popular culture as StarTrek has. In 950 episodes across the twelve television series that have carried the name, the franchise has made a spectacle not of explosions and machismo, but of competent professionals working together to solve complex problems. In the world of Star Trek, the coolest people in the room are the scientists, engineers, physicists, and doctors — is it any wonder so many in the sciences credit the show for putting them on their career path?
Hardware hacker, maker, and Trekkie Andrew [MakeItHackin] will lead the panel.To celebrate the impact of Star Trek, we’re proud to announce our keynote event for the 2025 Hackaday Supercon: Crafting the Final Frontier. This round-table discussion led by Andrew [MakeItHackin] will bring together some of the artists that have helped cultivate the look and feel of the final frontier since Star Trek:The Next Generation and all the way into the modern era with Star Trek: Picard.
While the art direction of the original Star Trek series from 1966 was remarkably ahead of its time, these are some of the key individuals who were brought in to refine those early rough-hewn ideas into cultural touchstones. Their work ended up becoming more than simple entertainment, and ultimately helped inspire some of the real-world technology we use on a daily basis. The iconic LCARS computer interface predicted the rise of the touch screen, while its impossible to look at props such as the PADD and Tricorder and not see the parallels with modern tablets and smartphones.
Every now and then in histories of the 20th’s century’s earlier years, you will see pictures of cars and commercial vehicles equipped with bulky drums, contraptions to make their fuel from waste wood. These are portable gas generators known as gasifiers, and to show how they work there’s [Greenhill Forge] with a build video.
A gasifier on a vintage tractor. Per Larssons Museum, CC BY 2.5.
When you burn a piece of wood, you expect to see flame. But what you are looking at in that flame are the gaseous products of the wood breaking down under the heat of combustion. The gasifier carefully regulates a burn to avoid that final flame, with the flammable gasses instead being drawn off for use as fuel.
The chemistry is straightforward enough, with exothermic combustion producing heat, water vapour, and carbon dioxide, before a further endothermic reduction stage produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen. He’s running his system from charcoal which is close to pure carbon presumably to avoid dealing with tar, and at this stage he’s not adding any steam, so we’re a little mystified as to where the hydrogen comes from unless there is enough water vapour in the air.
His retort is fabricated from sheets steel, and is followed by a cyclone and a filter drum to remove particulates from the gas. It relies on a forced air draft from a fan or a small internal combustion engine, and we’re surprised both how quickly it ignites and how relatively low a temperature the output gas settles at. The engine runs with a surprisingly simple gas mixer in place of a carburetor, and seems to be quite smooth in operation.
This is one of those devices that has fascinated us for a long time, and we’re grateful for the chance to see it up close. The video is below the break, and we’re promised a series of follow-ups as the design is refined.
If there ever was a toy that enjoys universal appeal and recognition, the humble Rubik’s Cube definitely is on the list. Invented in 1974 by sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik with originally the name of Magic Cube, it features a three-by-three grid of colored surfaces and an internal mechanism which allows for each of these individual sections of each cube face to be moved to any other face. This makes the goal of returning each face to its original single color into a challenge, one which has both intrigued and vexed many generations over the decades. Maybe you’ve seen one?
Although there have been some variations of the basic 3×3 grid cube design over the years, none have been as controversial as the recently introduced WOWCube. Not only does this feature a measly 2×2 grid on each face, each part of the grid is also a display that is intended to be used alongside an internal processor and motion sensors for digital games. After spending many years in development, the Rubik’s WOWCube recently went up for sale at $299, raising many questions about what market it’s really targeting.
Is the WOWCube a ‘real’ Rubik’s Cube, and what makes something into a memorable toy and what into a mere novelty gadget that is forgotten by the next year like a plague of fidget spinners?
