Design And The Golden Rule

September 19, 2024 by Al Williams 36 Comments

You often learn the golden rule or some variation of it as early as kindergarten. There are several ways to phrase it, but you most often hear: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” While that’s catchy, it is really an aphorism that encourages us to consider the viewpoints of others. As people who design things, this can be tricky. Sometimes, what you want isn’t necessarily what most people want, and — conversely — you might not appreciate what most people want or need.

EDIT/1000

I learned this lesson many years ago when I used to babysit a few HP/1000 minicomputers. Minicomputer sounds grand, but, honestly, a Raspberry Pi of any sort would put the old HP to shame. Like a lot of computers in those days, it had a text editor that was arcane even by the standards of vi or emacs. EDIT/1000 couldn’t be sure you weren’t using a printing terminal, and the commands reflect that.

For example, printing a few lines around the current line requires the command: “/-2,L,5” which isn’t that hard, I suppose. To delete all lines that contain a percent sign, “1$ D/%/A/” assuming you don’t want to be asked about each deletion.

Sure, sure. As a Hackaday reader, you don’t find this hard to puzzle out or remember. But back in the 1980s, a bunch of physicists and chemical engineers had little patience for stuff like that. However, the editor had a trick up its sleeve.

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Trees Turned Into Wind Turbines, Non-Destructively

September 18, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 57 Comments

Trees and forests are an incredibly important natural resource — not only for lumber and agricultural products, but also because they maintain a huge amount of biodiversity, stabilize their local environments, and help combat climate change as a way to sequester atmospheric carbon. But the one thing they don’t do is make electricity. At least, not directly. [Concept Crafted Creations] is working on solving this issue by essentially turning an unmodified tree into a kind of wind turbine.

The idea works by first attaching a linear generator to the trunk of a tree. This generator has a hand-wound set of coils on the outside, with permanent magnets on a shaft that can travel up and down inside the set of coils. The motion to power the generator comes from a set of ropes connected high up in the tree’s branches. When the wind moves the branches, the ropes transfer the energy to a 3D printed rotational mechanism attached to a gearbox, which then pumps the generator up and down. The more ropes, branches, and generators attached to a tree the more electricity can be produced.

Admittedly, this project is still a proof-of-concept, although the currently deployed prototype seems promising. [Concept Crafted Creations] hopes to work with others building similar devices to improve on the idea and build more refined prototypes in the future. It’s also not the only way of building a wind energy generator outside of the traditional bladed design, either. It’s possible to build a wind-powered generator with no moving parts that uses vibrations instead of rotational motion as well.

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Creating A Twisted Grid Image Illusion With A Diffusion Model

September 18, 2024 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

Images that can be interpreted in a variety of ways have existed for many decades, with the classical example being Rubin’s vase — which some viewers see as a vase, and others a pair of human faces.

Where things get trickier is if you want to create an image that changes into something else that looks realistic when you rotate each section of it within a 3×3 grid. In a video by [Steve Mould], he explains how this can be accomplished, by using a diffusion model to identify similar characteristics of two images and to create an output image that effectively contains essential features of both images.

Naturally, this process can be done by hand too, with the goal always being to create a plausible image in either orientation that has enough detail to trick the brain into filling in the details. To head down the path of interpreting what the eye sees as a duck, a bunny, a vase or the outline of faces.

Using a diffusion model to create such illusions is quite a natural fit, as it works with filling in noise until a plausible enough image begins to appear. Of course, whether it is a viable image is ultimately not determined by the model, but by the viewer, as humans are susceptible to such illusions while machine vision still struggles to distinguish a cat from a loaf and a raisin bun from a spotted dog. The imperfections of diffusion models would seem to be a benefit here, as it will happily churn through abstractions and iterations with no understanding or interpretive bias, while the human can steer it towards a viable interpretation.

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Upgraded Raster Laser Projector Goes RGB

September 18, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 10 Comments

We’ve covered a scanning laser project by Ben Make’s Everything last year, and now he’s back with a significant update. [Ben]’s latest project now offers a higher resolution and RGB lasers. A couple of previous versions of the device used the same concept of a rotating segmented mirror synchronised to a pulsed laser diode to create scanlines. When projected onto a suitable surface, the distorted, pixelated characters looked quite funky, but there was clearly room for improvement.

More scanlines and a faster horizontal pixel rate

The previous device used slightly inclined mirrors to deflect the beam into scanlines, with one mirror per scanline limiting the vertical resolution. To improve resolution, the mirrors were replaced with identically aligned mirrors of the type used in laser printers for horizontal scanning. An off-the-shelf laser galvo was used for vertical scanning, allowing faster scanning due to its small deflection angle. This setup is quicker than then usual vector galvo application, as the smaller movements require less time to complete. Once the resolution improvement was in hand, the controller upgrade to a Teensy 4 gave more processing bandwidth than the previous Arduino and a consequent massive improvement in image clarity.

Finally, monochrome displays don’t look anywhere near as good as an RGB setup. [Ben] utilised a dedicated RGB laser setup since he had trouble sourcing the appropriate dichroic mirrors to match available lasers. This used four lasers (with two red ones) and the correct dichroic mirrors to combine each laser source into a single beam path, which was then sent to the galvo. [Ben] tried to find a DAC solution fast enough to drive the lasers for a proper colour-mixing input but ended up shelving that idea for now and sticking with direct on-off control. This resulted in a palette of just seven colours, but that’s still a lot better than monochrome.

The project’s execution is excellent, and care was taken to make it operate outdoors with a battery. Even with appropriate safety measures, you don’t really want to play with high-intensity lasers around the house!

Here’s the previous version we covered, a neat DIY laser galvo using steppers, and a much older but very cool RGB vector projector.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 801: JBang — Not Your Parents Java Anymore

September 18, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 12 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie chat with Max Rydahl Andersen about JBang, the cross-platform tool to run Java as a system scripting language. That’s a bit harder than it sounds, particularly to take advantage of Java’s rich debugging capabilities and the ecosystem of libraries that are available. Tune in to get the details, as well as how polyglot files are instrumental to making JBang work!

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Catching The BOAT: Gamma-Ray Bursts And The Brightest Of All Time

September 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Down here at the bottom of our ocean of air, it’s easy to get complacent about the hazards our universe presents. We feel safe from the dangers of the vacuum of space, where radiation sizzles and rocks whizz around. In the same way that a catfish doesn’t much care what’s going on above the surface of his pond, so too are we content that our atmosphere will deflect, absorb, or incinerate just about anything that space throws our way.

Or will it? We all know that there are things out there in the solar system that are more than capable of wiping us out, and every day holds a non-zero chance that we’ll take the same ride the dinosaurs took 65 million years ago. But if that’s not enough to get you going, now we have to worry about gamma-ray bursts, searing blasts of energy crossing half the universe to arrive here and dump unimaginable amounts of energy on us, enough to not only be measurable by sensitive instruments in space but also to effect systems here on the ground, and in some cases, to physically alter our atmosphere.

Gamma-ray bursts are equal parts fascinating physics and terrifying science fiction. Here’s a look at the science behind them and the engineering that goes into detecting and studying them.

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Bringing The Horror Of Seaman Into The Real World

September 18, 2024 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

A little under 25 years ago, a particularly bizarre game was released for Sega’s Dreamcast. In actually, calling it a “game” might be something of a stretch. It was more of a pet simulator, where you need to feed and care for a virtual animal as it grows. Except rather than something like a dog or a rabbit, your pet is a talking fish with a human face that doesn’t seem to like you very much. Oh, and Leonard Nimoy is there too for some reason.

Most people in the world don’t even know this game ever existed, and frankly, their lives are all the better for it. But for those who lovingly cared for (or intentionally killed) one of these rude creatures back in the early 2000s, it’s an experience that sticks with you. Which we assume is why [Robert Prest] decided to build this incredibly faithful physical recreation of Seaman.

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