Hackaday Links: December 25, 2022

December 25, 2022 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

Looks like it’s lights out on Mars for the InSight lander. The solar-powered lander’s last selfie, sent back in April, showed a thick layer of dust covering everything, including the large circular solar panels needed to power the craft. At the time, NASA warned that InSight would probably give up the ghost sometime before the end of the year, and it looks like InSight is sticking to that schedule. InSight sent back what might be its last picture recently, showing the SEIS seismic package deployed on the regolith alongside the failed HP3 “mole” experiment, which failed to burrow into the soil as planned. But one bad experiment does not a failed mission make — it was wildly successful at most everything it was sent there to do, including documenting the largest marsquake ever recorded. As it usually does, NASA has anthropomorphized InSight with bittersweet sentiments like “Don’t cry, I had a good life,” and we’re not quite sure how we feel about that. On the one hand, it kind of trivializes the engineering and scientific accomplishments of the mission, but then again, it seems to engage the public, so in the final rinse, it’s probably mostly harmless.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 25, 2022” →

Hackaday Links: December 18, 2022

December 18, 2022 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

By now everyone has probably seen the devastation wrought by the structural failure of what was once the world’s largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium. The scale of the tank, which until about 5:50 AM Berlin time on Friday graced the lobby of the Raddison Blu hotel, was amazing — 16 meters tall, 12 meters in diameter, holding a million liters of saltwater and some 1,500 tropical fish. The tank sat atop a bar in the hotel lobby and was so big that it even had an elevator passing up through the middle of it.

But for some reason, the tank failed catastrophically, emptying its contents into the hotel lobby and spilling the hapless fish out into the freezing streets of Berlin. No humans were killed by the flood, which is miraculous when you consider the forces that were unleashed here. Given the level of destruction, the displaced hotel guests, and the fact that a €13 million structure just up and failed, we’re pretty sure there will be a thorough analysis of the incident. We’re pretty interested in why structures fail, so we’ll be looking forward to finding out the story here.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 18, 2022” →

This Gun Should Be Banned During The Month Of December

December 13, 2022 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Do you play Whamageddon? It’s a pastime for the month of December, something like the Game, in which you lose when you are exposed to the 1984 Wham! Christmas classic, Last Christmas. Such is the pervasive nature of Christmas music at this time of year, it’s extremely difficult not to encounter a bit of unexpected Wham! during the month. At Tkkrlab hackerspace in the Netherlands, they evidently take their Whamageddon seriously. Seriously enough it seems, to weaponise it, because one of their members has created a Wham! gun.

Starting with a compressed-air kit gun (we think that’s a sealant cartridge gun, for Anglophones) because of its comedy plastic-firearm-like appearance, they’ve put in an AliExpress audio sample player module and a speaker. Add a suitably hazard-warning paint job, and Wham! Any unwary visitor might be ambushed and lose their Whamageddon game before they can even pop the cap on a refreshing bottle of Club-Mate.

It’s all a bit of seasonal fun, but deadly serious if the dulcet tones of George Michael are anathema to you. Don’t get mad, get equal, never visit a Dutch hackerspace in December without first fixing your noise cancelling headphones.

Hackaday Links: December 11, 2022

December 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” That might be stretching things a bit, especially when the “paradise” in question is in New Jersey, but there’s a move afoot to redevelop the site of the original “Big Bang Antenna” that has some people pretty upset. Known simply as “The Horn Antenna” since it was built by Bell Labs in 1959 atop a hill in Holmdel, New Jersey, the antenna was originally designed to study long-distance microwave communications. But in 1964, Bell Labs researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the microwave remnants of the Big Bang, the cosmic background radiation, using the antenna, earning it a place in scientific history. So far, the only action taken by the township committee has been to authorize a study to look into whether the site should be redeveloped. But the fact that the site is one of the highest points in Monmouth County with sweeping views of Manhattan has some people wondering what’s really on tap for the site. A petition to save the antenna currently has about 3,400 signatures, so you might want to check that out — after all, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 11, 2022” →

PDP-8 Plays Period Popcorn Piece

December 11, 2022 by Chris Lott 18 Comments

[Kyle Owen], collector of antique tech, decided to try his hand at music arrangement — for the PDP-8 computer, that is (listen to the video below the break). He’s using a program submitted by Richard Wilson to the Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society (DECUS) in 1976, appropriately named MUSIC. It runs on OS/8 and is written in the PDP-8 assembly language PAL8. Using the syntax of MUSIC, [Kyle] arranged Gershon Kingsley’s famous Moog synthesizer hit “Popcorn” (the Hot Butter version from 1972).

You might notice the lack of a disk or tape drive in his setup. That’s because [Kyle] is using an RK05 disk emulator he wrote back in 2014. It’s running on a Raspberry Pi and connects over serial, which he says is slower than an RK05 but faster than a tape drive. He has connected up a Cordovox amplifier cabinet for this demonstration, but the original means of listening to the MUSIC output was an AM radio held near the computer (hear the second video below the break). This worked by executing the PDP-8 CAF instruction at a desired frequency, say 440 Hz.

Thus, when this instruction is executed, logic all over the computer goes “zap”, clearing out various registers. Now, if a radio is held close to the computer, it will pick up some of this energy, and at 440 times a second, will deliver a pulse to the speaker. The result is that you will hear a tone from the radio — as a matter of fact, you will hear an A.

Continue reading “PDP-8 Plays Period Popcorn Piece” →

Hackaday Links: December 4, 2022

December 4, 2022 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

Well, this is embarrassing! Imagine sending a multibillion-dollar rover to an ancient lakebed on Mars only to discover after a year of poking around at the rocks that it might not actually have been a lake after all. That seems to be the impression of Jezero Crater that planetary scientists are forming after looking at the data coming back from Perseverance since it nailed the landing in what sure as heck looked like a dried-up lake, complete with a river delta system. A closer look at the sediments Perseverance has been sampling reveals a lot of the mineral olivine, which on Earth is rare near the surface because it readily reacts with water. Finding lots of olivine close below the surface of Jezero suggests that it either wasn’t all that watery once upon a time, or that what water was there was basically ice cold. The results are limited to where the rover has visited, of course, and the nice thing about having wheels is that you can go somewhere else. But if you were hoping for clear signs that Jezero was once a lake teeming with life, you might have to keep waiting.

In other space news, we have to admit to taking NASA to task a bit in the podcast a couple of weeks back for not being quite up to SpaceX’s zazzle standards with regard to instrumenting the SLS launch. Yeah, a night launch is spectacular, but not having all those internal cameras like the Falcon has just sort of left us flat. But we should have been more patient, because the images coming back from Artemis 1 are simply spectacular. We had no idea that NASA attached cameras to the solar panels of the Orion spacecraft, which act a little like selfie sticks and allow the spacecraft to be in the foreground with Earth and the Moon in the background. Seeing Earth from lunar distance again for the first time in 50 years has been a real treat, and getting our satellite in the frame at the same time is a huge bonus.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 4, 2022” →

A Timepiece Straight Out Of Back To The Future

December 2, 2022 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

[Stephen Holdaway] needed a desk clock, and decided to whip something up from scratch. The result is a beautiful tribute to the DeLorean’s time circuits from legendary 1985 film Back to the Future.

We say it’s a tribute rather than an exact replica, as it only implements the “present time” section of the time circuits. However, for those of us without time machines, that’s more than enough. In any case, the build is a very faithful recreation. It uses a lovely sheet metal enclosure complete with era-appropriate sticky labels.

Naturally, the numerals are all shown on green segment displays, though [Stephen] used 16-segment devices instead of the more typical 7-segment parts. What really helps add to the look is the shaded acrylic windows, which adds a very nice effect.

It’s a nice tribute piece that any fan would instantly recognize. We’ve seen some other great builds, too, like this replica of the RC controller that first gets the DeLorean up to 88 mph. If you’ve been whipping up your own neat prop project, don’t hesitate to hit us up on the tipsline!