In Space, No One Can Hear You Explode: The Byford Dolphin Incident

February 15, 2019 by 47 Comments

“It wouldn’t happen that way in real life.” One of the most annoying habits of people really into the “sci” of sci-fi is nitpicking scientific inaccuracies in movies. The truth is, some things just make movies better, even if they are wrong.

What would Star Wars be without the sounds of an epic battle in space where there should be no sound? But there are plenty of other examples where things are wrong and it would have been just as easy to get them right — the direction of space debris in the movie Gravity, for example. But what about the age-old trope of explosive decompression? Some movies show gross body parts flying everywhere. Others show distressed space travelers surviving in space for at least brief periods.

It turns out, dropping pressure from one atmosphere to near zero is not really good for you as you might expect. But it isn’t enough to just make you pop like some meat balloon. You are much more likely to die from a pulmonary embolism or simple suffocation. But you are a meat balloon if you experience a much greater change in pressure. How do we know? It isn’t theoretical. These things have happened in real life.

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Pi Zero Gives Amateur Astronomer Affordable Control Of Telescope

January 3, 2019 by 18 Comments

Like many other hobbies, astronomy can be pursued on many levels, with equipment costs ranging from the affordable to the – well, astronomical. Thankfully, there are lots of entry-level telescopes on the market, some that even come with mounts that automatically find and track heavenly bodies. Finding a feature is as easy as aligning to a few known stars and looking up the object in the database embedded in the remote.

Few of the affordable mounts are WiFi-accessible, though, which is a gap [Dane Gardner]’s Raspberry Pi interface for Celestron telescopes aims to fill. For the price of a $10 Pi Zero W and a little know-how, [Dane] was able to gain full control over his ‘scope. His instrument is a Celestron NexStar, a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector with a 150-mm aperture, has a motorized altitude-azimuth mount. The handheld remote had enough room for him to add the Zero, powering it from the mount’s battery pack. The handset has an RS-232 serial port built-in, but with the level differences [Dane] just connected the Pi directly to the handset before the UART. Running INDI, a cross-platform astronomical instrument control library, he now has total control of the scope, and he can use open source astronomy software rather than the limited database within the handset. As a neat side trick, the telescope can now be controlled with a Bluetooth gamepad.

Astronomy and electronics go hand in hand, whether in the optical or radio part of the spectrum. We like the way [Dane] was able to gain control of his telescope, and we’d like to hear about what he sees with his new tool. Assuming the Seattle weather ever cooperates.

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Ford Ka Becomes Diwheel Monster

October 24, 2018 by 27 Comments

If you’ve been to the right events, you’ve seen them before – the cars with an external cage that let the car complete a somersault in the forward direction under heavy braking. They’re impressive, but it’s possible to take things even further. Enter [mastermilo82] and the RollKa.

The RollKa follows on from the RollGolf, which was a straightforward roll car build. Built around a Ford Ka, it eschews the external cage for a more radical design. The Ka has been shortened, and designed to fit within two enormous steel rims which wrap around each side of the car. Additional idler wheels have been welded to the Ka’s roof to enable it to effectively roll within the outer steel rims.

It’s a rather eccentric design, known as a diwheel. We’ve seen impressive electric versions before, but at least at this stage, this project appears to lack any advanced control systems and gets by on sheer luck and welding prowess. The build is still at an early stage, with episode three starting some early movement tests under power. It’s a testament to what can be achieved with a spacious garage and some imagination, and we can’t wait to see what happens next! Video after the break.

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

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Kipp Bradford On The Importance Of Boring Projects, Medical Tech, And Sci Fi Novels

September 27, 2018 by 16 Comments

If someone suggests you spend time working on boring projects, would you take that advice? In this case, I think Kipp Bradford is spot on. We sat down together at the Hackaday Superconference last fall and talked about medical device engineering, the infrastructure in your home, applying Sci-Fi to engineering, and yes, we spoke about boring projects.

Kipp presented a talk on Devices for Controlling Climates at Supercon last year. It could be argued that this is one of those boring topics, but very quickly you begin to grasp how vitally important it is. Think about how many buildings on your street have a heating or cooling system in them. Now zoom out in your mind several times to neighborhood, city, state, and country level. How much impact will a small leap forward have when multiplied up?

The next Hackaday Superconference is just around the corner. Before you join us below for the interview with Kipp, make sure you grab your 2018 Hackaday Superconference ticket to be there for great talks like Kipp’s!

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It’s 1984, And You Can’t Afford A Computer. Never Mind, Have This Pop-Up Paper One Instead!

July 16, 2018 by 40 Comments

It’s an oft-derided sentiment from a Certain Type of Older Person, that the Youth of Today don’t know how lucky they are with their technology. Back when they were young they were happy with paper and string! Part of the hilarity comes from their often getting the technology itself wrong, for example chastising the youngsters for their iPods and Game Boys when in reality those long-ago-retired devices are edging into the realm of retrotechnology.

But maybe they have a point after all, because paper and string could be pretty good fun to play with. Take the example presented  in a Twitter thread by [Marcin Wichary]. A pop-up book from 1984 that presents the inner workings of a computer in an astounding level of detail, perhaps it stretches the pop-up card designer’s art to the limit, but along the way it makes a fascinating read for any retrocomputing enthusiast. Aside from the pop-up model of the computer with an insertable floppy disk that brings text onto the screen we see at  first, there is a pop-up keyboard with a working key, a peer inside the workings of a floppy disc, a circuit board complete with a paper chip that the reader can insert into a socket, and a simulation of a CRT electron bean using a piece of string. A Twitter thread on a book is not our normal fare, but this one is something special!

Did any of you have this book when you were younger? Perhaps you still have it? We’d love to hear from you in the comments. It’s probably not the type of book we normally review, but we’ve been known to venture slightly outside tech on that front.

Opening A Ford With A Robot And The De Bruijn Sequence

June 18, 2018 by 72 Comments

The Ford Securicode, or the keyless-entry keypad available on all models of Ford cars and trucks, first appeared on the 1980 Thunderbird. Even though it’s most commonly seen on the higher-end models, it is available as an option on the Fiesta S — the cheapest car Ford sells in the US — for $95. Doug DeMuro loves it. It’s also a lock, and that means it’s ready to be exploited. Surely, someone can build a robot to crack this lock. Turns out, it’s pretty easy.

The electronics and mechanical part of this build are pretty simple. An acrylic frame holds five solenoids over the keypad, and this acrylic frame attaches to the car with magnets. There’s a second large protoboard attached to this acrylic frame loaded up with an Arduino, character display, and a ULN2003 to drive the resistors. So far, everything you would expect for a ‘robot’ that will unlock a car via its keypad.

The real trick for this build is making this electronic lockpick fast and easy to use. This project was inspired by [Samy Kamkar]’s OpenSesame attack for garage door openers. In this project, [Samy] didn’t brute force a code the hard way by sending one code after another; (crappy) garage door openers only look at the last n digits sent from the remote, and there’s no penalty for sending the wrong code. In this case, it’s possible to use a De Bruijn sequence to vastly reduce the time it takes to brute force every code. Instead of testing tens of thousands of different codes sequentially, this robot only needs to test 3125, something that should only take a few minutes.

Right now the creator of this project is putting the finishing touches on this Ford-cracking robot. There was a slight bug in the code that was solved by treating the De Bruijn sequence as circular, but now it’s only a matter of time before a 1993 Ford Taurus wagon becomes even more worthless.

An Open Source Sip-and-Puff Mouse For Affordable Accessibility

April 27, 2018 by 22 Comments

At the core of any assistive technology is finding a way to do something with whatever abilities the user has available. This can be especially difficult in the case of quadriplegia sufferers, the loss of control of upper and lower limbs caused by spinal cord damage in the cervical region. Quadriplegics can gain some control of their world with a “Sip-and-puff” device, which give the user control via blowing or sucking on a mouthpiece.

A sip-and-puff can make a world of difference to a quadriplegic, but they’re not exactly cheap. So to help out a friend, [Jfieldcap] designed and built an open source sip-and-puff mouse on the cheap. As is best for such devices, the design is simple and robust. The hollow 3D-printed mouthpiece acts as handle for a joystick module , and a length of tubing connects the mouthpiece to a pressure sensor. An Arduino lets the user move his head to position the cursor; hard sips and puffs are interpreted as left and right clicks, while soft mouth pressure is used for scrolling. In conjunction with some of the accessibility tools in modern OSes and personal assistant software like Siri or Cortana, the sip-and-puff opens up the online world, and for all of $50 in material.

We’re impressed by the effort and the results, but we worry that the standard PLA used for the mouthpiece won’t stand up to the cleaning it’ll need. Of course, printing extra mouthpieces is easy, but since it’s going to be in contact with the mouth, perhaps a review of food-safe 3D-printing is in order.