Hands On With Python 3.7: What’s New In The Latest Release

July 23, 2018 by 42 Comments

Used for general purpose programming, data science, website backends, GUIs, and pretty much everything else; the first programming language for many, and claimed to be the fastest growing in the world, is of course Python. The newest version 3.7.0 has just recently been released.
Naturally any release of Python, no matter how small, undergoes meticulous planning and design before any development is started at all. In fact, you can read the PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) for Python 3.7, which was created back in 2016.

What’s new in 3.7? Why should you upgrade? Is there anything new that’s actually useful? I’ll answer these questions for you by walking through some examples of the new features. Whilst there’s not much in this release that will make a difference to the Python beginner, there’s plenty of small changes for seasoned coders and a few headline features you’ll want to know about.

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Chinese ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle

Chinese Laser AK-47: Myth Or Reality?

July 9, 2018 by 164 Comments

 

Chinese company ZKZM Laser has produced the ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle which people are calling the Chinese AK-47 because of its similar size, weighing in at three kilos (6.6 lbs). Claims of its capabilities, however, are being disputed.

The South China Morning Post writes that the company claims the laser to:

  • be powered by a rechargeable lithium battery back,
  • have a range of 800 meters (0.5 miles),
  • have a beam that is invisible to the eye,
  • be able to fire 1000 “shots”, each no longer than two seconds,
  • be able to burn human flesh if held in place long enough,
  • be able to set fire to clothes and hair, and
  • be able to set fire to banners from a distance.

Burning things with lasers is nothing new but the disputes are mostly based around such a small laser being effective at an 800 meter range. To be fair, while the 800 meter range claim is everywhere, the Post writes that the company brochure says the range is 500 meters (0.3 miles), still quite a long distance.

[styropyro], a YouTuber with a lot of experience with lasers has done an analysis, starting by deducing a wavelength of around 2000 nanometers. He finds that at 800 meters the beam would have dispersed to a diameter of 26 cm (10 inches) and produce 53 W over that area. (EDIT: The 53 W is how much sunlight would produce for that area. In the video he carries the calculations further to work out the minimum power needed, ignoring losses, to light the cotton on fire, 645 W.) For 500 meters, using the same formula we calculate that the dispersion would be a diameter of 16 cm (6 inches) with 500 W spread over that area, which would get uncomfortable very fast, think of half a square meter of sunlight focused down to a circle of that diameter. (EDIT: Again, this it 500 W for sunlight, the laser produces more.) His video doesn’t include enough detail for us to replicate the remainder of the calculations so we’ll just have to go with the 800 meter claim. See the video below for his full analysis. If anyone else has any experience that’ll either support or dispute the claims then please share it with us in the comments.

After all the disputes against their claim, the Chinese company did produce a video firing the laser from a shorter distance. Check it out on this page by the post.

While waiting to see how much truth there is to the Chinese company’s claims we can sit back and enjoy [styropyro’s] home-brew high power ruby laser, both his build and him doing some serious damage with it.

Oh, and don’t try this at home. It’s probably in violation of the Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in addition to common sense.

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Hackaday Links: June 17, 2018

June 17, 2018 by 16 Comments

Do you like badges? Of course you like badges. It’s conference season, and that means it’s also badge season. Well good news, Tindie now has a ‘badge’ category. Right now, it’s loaded up with creepy Krustys, hypnotoads, and fat Pikas. There’s also an amazing @Spacehuhn chicken from [Dave]. Which reminds me: we need to talk about a thing, Spacehuhn.

On the list of ‘weird emails we get in the tip line’ comes Rat Grease. Rat Grease is the solution to rodents chewing up cabling and wires. From what we can gather, it’s a mineral oil-based gel loaded up with capsaicin; it’s not a poison, and not a glue. Rats are our friends, though, which makes me want to suggest this as a marinade, or at the very least a condiment. The flash point is sufficiently high that you might be able to use this in a fryer.

[Matthias Wandel] is the guy who can build anything with a table saw, including table saws. He posts his stuff online and does YouTube videos. A while back, he was approached by DeWalt to feature their tools in a few videos. He got a few hand tools, a battery-powered table saw, and made some videos. The Internet then went insane and [Matthias] lost money on the entire deal. Part of the reason for this is that his viewers stopped buying plans simply because he featured yellow power tools in his videos. This is dumpster elitism, and possibly the worst aspect of the DIY/engineering/maker community.

Elon Musk is the greatest inventor ever. No scratch that. The greatest person ever. Need more proof? The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and our hearts has been given the green light to build a high-speed underground train from Chicago O’Hare to downtown. Here’s the kicker: he’s going to do it for only $1 Billion, or $55 Million per mile, making it the least expensive subway project by an order of magnitude. Yes, Subways usually cost anywhere between $500 to $900 Million per mile. How is he doing it? Luck, skill, and concentrated power of will. Elon is the greatest human ever, and we’re not just saying that to align ourselves with an audience that is easy to manipulate; we’re also saying this because Elon has a foggy idea for a ‘media vetting wiki’.

There are rumors Qualcomm will acquire NXP for $44 Billion. This deal has been years in the making, with reports of an acquisition dating back to 2016. Of course, that time, the deal was set to go through but was apparently put on hold by Chinese regulators. Now it’s the same story again; there were recent rumors of Qualcomm buying NXP, and the story was later changed to rumors. We’re waiting for an actual press release on this one. It’s just another long chapter in the continuing story of, ‘where the hell are all the Motorola app notes and data sheets?’

Retrotechtacular: Car Navigation Like It’s 1971

June 17, 2018 by 63 Comments

Anyone old enough to have driven before the GPS era probably wonders, as we do, how anyone ever found anything. Navigation back then meant outdated paper maps, long detours because of missed turns, and the far too frequent stops at dingy gas stations for the humiliation of asking for directions. It took forever sometimes, and though we got where we were going, it always seemed like there had to be a better way.

Indeed there was, but instead of waiting for the future and a constellation of satellites to guide the way, some clever folks in the early 1970s had a go at dead reckoning systems for car navigation. The video below shows one, called Cassette Navigation, in action. It consisted of a controller mounted under the dash and a modified cassette player. Special tapes, with spoken turn-by-turn instructions recorded for a specific route, were used. Each step was separated from the next by a tone, the length of which encoded the distance the car would cover before the next step needed to be played. The controller was hooked to the speedometer cable, and when the distance traveled corresponded to the tone length, the next instruction was played. There’s a long list of problems with this method, not least of which is no choice in road tunes while using it, but given the limitations at the time, it was pretty ingenious.

Dead reckoning is better than nothing, but it’s a far cry from GPS navigation. If you’re still baffled by how that cloud of satellites points you to the nearest Waffle House at 3:00 AM, check out our GPS primer for the details.

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RoMeLa's ALPHRED - quadruped robot

RoMeLa’s Sideways Walking Robot Has Evolved More Limbs

May 21, 2018 by 19 Comments

Despite the success shown in prototypes from groups like Boston Dynamics, bipedal walking is still really hard to implement. When the robot lifts one leg, it has to shift its center of gravity over the other leg to avoid falling sideways.

The Autonomous Legged Personal Helper Robot with Enhanced Dynamics (ALPHRED) is getting around this problem by coming at it from a different angle. ALPHRED walks sideways and throws away the distinction between arms and legs.

The bot is RoMeLa at UCLA’s latest evolution in their approach to traditional bipedal roadblocks. Sideways walking is something we covered when we talked about their previous version, NABi, which had only two legs. ALPHRED expands that to four limbs. As the video below shows, all four limbs can be used for walking using either a wide, stable sprawl or the limbs can reorient to a narrower dog or horse-like stance for faster running.

Beyond walking, one or two of the limbs can be put to use as hands to open a door or hand over a package, which is why they refer to them as limbs instead of legs or hands. Only an animation is shown of that configuration but RoMeLa is a robotics lab which we keep an eye on so we’ll let you know if they demonstrate it.

The video goes on to show a neat actuator with active compliance which they call BEAR, Back-drivable Electromagnetic Actuator for Robots. A search turned up no further details but let us know in the comments if you have any. We also liked seeing how they use a speaker to give a rough idea of the amount of current being drawn. While it’s both practical and a hack, it also adds a nice sci-fi touch.

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We Couldn’t Resist This CNC Batik Bot

May 8, 2018 by 17 Comments

Batik is an ancient form of dyeing textiles in which hot wax is applied to a piece of cloth in some design. When the cloth is submerged in a dye bath, the parts covered with wax resist the pigment. After dyeing, the wax is either boiled or scraped away to reveal the design.

[Eugenia Morpurgo] has created a portable, open-source batik bot that rolls along the floor and draws with wax, CNC-style, on a potentially infinite expanse of cloth. The hardware should be familiar: an Arduino Mega and a RAMPS 1.4 board driving NEMA 17 steppers up and down extruded aluminium.

Traditionally, batik wax is applied with a canting, a pen-like object that holds a small amount of hot wax and distributes it through a small opening. The batik bot’s pen combines parts from an electric canting tool with the thermistor, heater block, and heater cartridge from an E3D V6 hot end. [Eugenia] built the Z-axis from scrap and re-used the mechanical endstops from an old plotter. Check out the GitHub for step-by-step instructions with a ton of clear pictures and the project’s site for even more pictures and information. Oh, and don’t resist the chance to see it in action after the break.

We love a good art bot around here, even if the work disappears with the tide.

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You Can Build Anything Out Of What Is Holding Your 97 Eagle Talon Together

April 7, 2018 by 29 Comments

We all know it, we all love it, and the guy parked outside of the 7-11 covered his car in it. What is it? Polyester body filler, better known by the almost generic trademark, Bondo. There’s a lot more you can do with Bondo than fairing in that sweet body kit, bro, and [Eric Strebel] is here to show you how far you can push the mechanical properties of polyester body filler.

We didn’t always have polyester body filler. In the days before OSHA, auto body workers would use a torch, bricks of lead, and a grinder. You can check out a video of the era before OSHA here. Needless to say, vaporizing and grinding lead in your shop isn’t the greatest idea, and there had to be a better way. This led Robert ‘Bondo Bob’ Spink to invent a much less toxic auto body filler that we now know as Bondo.

For the beginning of the demonstration, [Eric] mixes up a cup of polyester body filler with a few special additions: he’s using printer ink to get his mixture to something other than that one shade of pink we all know. Although Bondo is a bit too thick to cast, he did manage to put a little bit of it in a square mold, a PVC pipe, and applied a little to foam and wood. It’s enough for a demonstration, but for the actual ins and outs of machining Bondo we’re going to have to wait until [Eric]’s next video. Until then, you can check out this introduction below, or look at his previous work on free-form sculpting of uncured Bondo.

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