Digital X-Ray Scanner Teardown Yields Bounty Of Engineering Goodies

We’ll just go ahead and say it right up front: we love teardowns. Ripping into old gear and seeing how engineers solved problems — or didn’t — is endlessly fascinating, even for everyday devices like printers and radios. But where teardowns really get interesting is when the target is something so odd and so specialized that you wouldn’t normally expect to get a peek at the outside, let alone tramp through its guts.

[Mads Barnkob] happened upon one such item, a Fujifilm FCR XG-1 digital radiography scanner. The once expensive and still very heavy piece of medical equipment was sort of a “digital film system” that a practitioner could use to replace the old-fashioned silver-based films used in radiography, without going all-in on a completely new digital X-ray suite. It’s a complex piece of equipment, the engineering of which yields a lot of extremely interesting details.

The video below is the third part of [Mads]’ series, where he zeroes in on the object of his desire: the machine’s photomultiplier tube. The stuff that surrounds the tube, though, is the real star, at least to us; that bent acrylic light pipe alone is worth the price of admission. Previous videos focused on the laser scanner unit inside the machine, as well as the mechatronics needed to transport the imaging plates and scan them. The video below also shows experiments with the PM tube, which when coupled with a block of scintillating plastic worked as a great radiation detector.

We’ve covered a bit about the making of X-rays before, and a few of the sensors used to detect them too. We’ve also featured a few interesting X-ray looks inside of tech, from a Starlink dish to knock-off adapters.

Continue reading “Digital X-Ray Scanner Teardown Yields Bounty Of Engineering Goodies”

Rhisotope: Addressing Poaching By Making Rhinoceros Horns Radioactive

There is no question that poaching has become an existential threat to the five species of rhinoceros alive today. Even the wildlife reserves where most rhinos live struggle to provide protection from the wanton and cruel poaching of the world’s last remaining rhinos.

Poachers are generally looking to sell the horns which consist of pure keratin, the same material that makes up our fingernails and hair. Rhino horns have seen a big rise in demand the past decades, with a black market in Vietnam representing the biggest buyers, primarily for use in fever and other medicines, as well as for processing into carved trinkets. This has contributed to a further rhino population collapse. Statistics from 2017 show about 18,000 white rhinos and fewer than 5,500 black rhinos remaining. Recently, the northern white rhino population in Africa went effectively extinct with the death of the last known male individual.

Clearly, if we wish to prevent extinction, we need to deal with poaching. The latest suggestion here is part of the Rhisotope project. This would make rhino horns radioactive, but how exactly would doing so prevent poaching? Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Rhisotope: Addressing Poaching By Making Rhinoceros Horns Radioactive”

Mariner 4: Our First Up-Close Look At Mars

In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t all that long ago that the entire body of knowledge of our solar system was built solely with Earth-based observations. Turning first their naked eyes to the heavens, and then a succession of increasingly complex and sensitive optical and radio telescopes gathering light from all across the spectrum, our astronomically curious forbears did a commendable job working out the broad strokes of what’s going on in the neighborhood.

But there’s only so much information that can be gathered by instruments operating at the bottom of a roiling ocean of air, so when the opportunity to send instruments to our planetary neighbors began to be possible some 60 years ago, scientists started planning how to accomplish it. What resulted was the Mariner program, a series of interplanetary probes launched between 1962 and 1973 that performed flyby missions of the inner planets.

The list of accomplishments of the Mariner program is long indeed, and the number of firsts achieved by its ten spacecraft is impressive. But it is Mariner 4, the first flyby mission of Mars, which set the stage for a lot of the science being done on and around Mars today, and the first mission where NASA wisely took a “pics or it didn’t happen” approach to planetary science. It was the first time a TV camera had traveled to another world, and it was anything but a sure bet that it would pay dividends.

Continue reading “Mariner 4: Our First Up-Close Look At Mars”

These Are The Top Projects In The 2017 Hackaday Prize

For the last eight months, Hackaday has been running the greatest hardware competition on Earth. The Hackaday Prize is a challenge to Build Something That Matters, make an impact, and create the hardware that will transform the world. These projects range from reliable utensils for the disabled, a way to clean drinking water for rural villages, refreshable Braille displays, and even a few high voltage Tesla coil hats. The Hackaday Prize is the preeminent hardware hackathon with a goal of making the world a better place, and this weekend we’re going to see the fruits of everyone’s labor.

Watch It Live

We will announce the winners of the Hackaday Prize live on stage at the Hackaday Superconference this weekend. Even if you can’t make it to the conference, you can join in by watching the livestream (broadcast on YouTube and Facebook) and by joining the Supercon chat room.

What the Judges Have to Say

Over the last few weeks, our fantastic team of judges have been combing over the finalists in the Hackaday Prize. We’ve put together this video roundup with judges discussing the top ten finishers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bniJs6i6qZE

These ten projects are the best the Hackaday Prize has to offer, and one of these projects will walk away with the Grand Prize of $50,000 USD. The second, third, fourth, and fifth place winners will take away $20,000, $15,000, $10,000 and $5,000, respectively. The top ten projects in the Hackaday Prize are, in no particular order:

 

5 Top Finishers for Best Product

The Hackaday Prize isn’t just about finding the best projects. We’re also looking for the best products. For that, the Hackaday Prize includes a Best Product award. This promises to awaken the hardware entrepreneurs to build a manufacturable thing that will shake up an industry. Here’s an overview of the five top finishers in the Best Product Category:

From a field of the twenty best product finalists entered into the Hackaday Prize our fantastic panel of judges have winnowed these down to five incredible finalists. They are, in no particular order:

The winner of the Best Product competition will walk away with $30,000 USD and an opportunity to interview for a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab. Here, the hackers behind the Best Product will have a materials budget, mentoring, and access to some world-class tools that will enable them to turn their prototype into a real product.

These are the best projects and products the 2017 Hackaday Prize has to offer, and we couldn’t ask for more. Watch live as the Hackaday Prize is awarded tomorrow at 6:30pm Pacific. It’s going to be a blast, and a few lucky projects will take away a pile of prize money and the respect of their peers. It really doesn’t get better than that.

Review: IoT Data Logging Services With MQTT

For the last few months, I had been using Sparkfun’s Phant server as a data logger for a small science project. Unfortunately, they’ve had some serious technical issues and have discontinued the service. Phant was good while it lasted: it was easy to use, free, and allowed me to download the data in a CSV format. It shared data with analog.io, which at the time was a good solution for data visualization.

While I could continue using Phant since it is an open-source project and Sparkfun kindly releases the source code for the server on Github, I thought it might be better to do some research, see what’s out there. I decided to write a minimal implementation for each platform as an interesting way to get a feel for each. To that end, I connected a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor to a NodeMCU board to act as a simple data source.

Continue reading “Review: IoT Data Logging Services With MQTT”

These Twenty Projects Won $1000 In The Hackaday Prize

For the last several months, we’ve been hosting the greatest hardware competition on Earth. This is the Hackaday Prize, and we’ve just wrapped up the last of our five hardware challenges. For the Anything Goes challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize, we’re asking hardware hackers to build the best, the coolest thing. No, it doesn’t matter what it is. We’re looking for technical skill and awesome applications. There are no limits here.

We just wrapped up the Anything Goes challenge last week, and now it’s time to announce the winners. These are the best, the coolest projects the Hackaday Prize has to offer.

The winners of the Anything Goes challenge are, in no particular order:

Anything Goes Hackaday Prize Finalists:

Continue reading “These Twenty Projects Won $1000 In The Hackaday Prize”

Best Product Entry: Open Source Internet Of Dosimeter

[Radu Motisan] Has entered a cool project into the Best Product portion of this year’s Hackaday Prize. It’s called an Open Source IoT Dosimeter. It has a Geiger tube for detecting radiation levels along with Internet connectivity and a host of other goodies.

Dubbed the KIT1, this IoT dosimeter can be used as a portable radiation detector with its Nokia 5110 LCD as an output or a monitoring station with Ethernet. With its inbuilt speaker, it alerts users to areas with excessive radiation. KIT1 is a fully functioning system with no need for a computer to get readouts, making it very handy and easy to use. It also has room for expansion for extra sensors allowing a fully customized system. The project includes all the Gerbers and a BOM so you can send it off to a PCB fab lab of your choice, solder on a few components, and have a fully functioning IoT Dosimeter. you don’t even need the LCD or the Ethernet; you can choose which output you prefer from the two and just use that allowing for some penny-pinching.

This is a great project and who doesn’t need an IOT Dosimeter these days?