Metallurgist working by the blast furnaces in Třinec Iron and Steel Works. (Credit: Třinecké železárny)

We Already Live In A Hydrogen Economy: Steel Production, Generator Cooling, And Welding Gas

May 4, 2023 by Maya Posch 61 Comments

Although generally hydrogen is only mentioned within the context of transportation and energy storage, by far the most useful applications are found in industrial applications, including for the chemical industry, the manufacturing of steel, as well as that of methanol and fertilizer. This is illustrated by how today most of all hydrogen produced today is used for these industrial applications, as well as for applications such as cooling turbo generators, with demand for hydrogen in these applications rapidly increasing.

Currently virtually all hydrogen produced today comes from natural gas, via steam methane reformation (SMR), with potentially methane pyrolysis making natural gas-derived hydrogen a low-carbon source. The remainder of hydrogen comes from coal gasification and a small fraction from electrolysis of water. The hydrogen is often produced on-site, especially at industrial plants and thermal power plants. So aside from any decarbonization efforts, there are many uses for hydrogen which the public appears to be generally unaware of.

This leads us to the somewhat controversial hydrogen ladder.

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Four square, unpopulated purple PCBs sit in front of a tube of soldering flux on a light grey work surface. The PCBs are only 1"x1".

BeagleStamp Makes Soldering Linux Into Your Projects Easier

May 4, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 44 Comments

There are a lot of things you can do with today’s powerful microcontrollers, but sometimes you really need a full embedded Linux setup. [Dylan Brophy] wanted to make it easier to add Linux to his own projects and designed the BeagleStamp.

Squeezed onto a 1″ square, the BeagleStamp puts the power of a PocketBeagle into an easy to solder module you can add to a project without all that tedious mucking about with individually soldering all the components of a tiny Linux computer every time. As a bonus, the 4 layer connections are constrained to the stamp as well, so you can use lower layer count boards in your project and have your Linux too.

The first run of boards was delivered with many of the pins unplated, but [Brophy] plans to work around it for the time being so he can spot any other bugs before the next board revision. Might we suggest a future version using RISC-V?

Virgin Galactic Cautiously Returns To Flight

May 4, 2023 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

After Richard Branson delivered some inspiring words from his seat aboard SpaceShipTwo Unity, he unbuckled himself and started to float around the vehicle’s cabin along with three other Virgin Galactic employees. Reaching an apogee of 86 kilometers (53 miles), the passengers enjoyed four minutes of weightlessness during the July 2021 flight that was live-streamed over the Internet to an audience of millions. After years of delays, SpaceShipTwo had finally demonstrated it was capable of taking paying customers to the edge of space. As far as victories go — it was pretty impressive.

Yet despite the spectacle, weeks and months went by without an announcement about when commercial flights of the world’s first “spaceline” would finally begin. Now, nearly two years after Branson’s flight, Unity has flown again. Except instead of carrying the first group of customers, it performed the sort of un-powered test flight that Virgin Galactic hasn’t performed since 2017. Clearly, something didn’t go to plan back then.

The company is being as tight-lipped as ever, saying only that this test flight was necessary to “evaluate the performance of the spaceship…following the modification period.” The exact nature of these modifications is unclear, but for some hints, we could look at the New Yorker article from September 2021. It alleged that, unwilling to derail Branson’s highly publicized flight, Unity’s pilots decided not to abort their ascent despite several warning lights in the cockpit alerting them that the vehicle’s trajectory was deviating from the norm. Virgin Galactic later denied their characterization of the event, but the fact remains that Unity did leave its designated airspace during the flight, and that the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the spacecraft until an investigation into the mishap could be completed. Continue reading “Virgin Galactic Cautiously Returns To Flight” →

Jet Engine Tachometer Turned Into Unique CPU Utilization Meter

May 4, 2023 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

When you’ve got a piece of interesting old aviation hardware on your desk, what do you do with it? If you’re not willing to relegate it to paperweight status, your only real choice is to tear it down to see what makes it tick. And if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to put it to work based on what you learned.

That’s what happened when [Glen Akins] came across a tachometer for a jet airplane, which he promptly turned into a unique CPU utilization gauge for his computer. Much of the write-up is concerned with probing the instrument’s innards to learn its secrets, although it was clear from the outset that his tachometer, from Kollsman Instruments, was electrically driven. [Glen]’s investigation revealed a 3-phase synchronous motor inside the tach. The motor drives a permanent magnet, which spins inside a copper cup attached to the needle on the tach’s face. Eddy currents induced in the cup by the spinning magnet create a torque that turns the needle against the force of a hairspring. Pretty simple — but how to put the instrument to work?

[Glen]’s solution was to build what amounts to a variable frequency drive (VFD). His power supply is based on techniques he used to explore aircraft synchros, which we covered a while back. The drive uses a trio of MCP4802 8-bit DACs to generate three phase-shifted sine waves via direct digital synthesis with an RP2040. The 3-phase signal drives the motor and spins the dial, with 84-Hz corresponding to full-scale deflection.

The video below shows the resulting CPU utilization gauge — which just queries for the current load level and sends it to the RP2040 over serial — in action. It’s not exactly responsive to rapid changes, but that’s to be expected from a mechanical system. And compared to exploring such a nice instrument, it really doesn’t matter.

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Thermal Camera Plus Machine Learning Reads Passwords Off Keyboard Keys

May 4, 2023 by Donald Papp 43 Comments

An age-old vulnerability of physical keypads is visibly worn keys. For example, a number pad with digits clearly worn from repeated use provides an attacker with a clear starting point. The same concept can be applied to keyboards by using a thermal camera with the help of machine learning, but it also turns out that some types of keys and typing styles are harder to read than others.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow show how machine learning can pull details from thermal images like these quickly and effectively.

Touching a key with a fingertip imparts a slight amount of body heat, and that small amount of heat can be spotted by a thermal sensor. We’ve seen this basic approach used since at least 2005, and two things have changed since then: thermal cameras gotten much more common, and researchers discovered that by combining thermal readings with machine learning, it’s possible to eke out slight details too difficult or subtle to spot by human eye and judgement alone.

Here’s a link to the research and findings from the University of Glasgow, which shows how even a 16 symbol password can be attacked with an average accuracy of 55%. Shorter passwords are much easier to decipher, with the system attacking 6 and 8 symbol passwords with an accuracy between 92% and 80%, respectively. In the study, thermal readings were taken up to a full minute after the password was entered, but sooner readings result in higher accuracy.

A few things make things harder for the system. Fast typists spend less time touching keys, and therefore transfer less heat when they do, making things a little more challenging. Interestingly, the material of the keycaps plays a large role. ABS keycaps retain heat far more effectively than PBT (a material we often see in custom keyboard builds like this one.) It also turns out that the tiny amount of heat from LEDs in backlit keyboards runs effective interference when it comes to thermal readings.

Amusingly this kind of highly modern attack would be entirely useless against a scramblepad. Scramblepads are vintage devices that mix up which numbers go with which buttons each time the pad is used. Thermal imaging and machine learning would be able to tell which buttons were pressed and in what order, but that still wouldn’t help! A reminder that when it comes to security, tech does matter but fundamentals can matter more.

Carbon Fiber And Kevlar Make This Linear Actuator Fast And Strong

May 3, 2023 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

When it comes to the “build versus buy” question, “buy” almost always wins. The amount of time you have to put into building something is rarely justified, especially with a world of options available at the click of a mouse.

That’s not always the case, of course. These custom-made linear actuators are a perfect example of when building your own wins. For a planned ball-juggling robot, [Harrison Low] found himself in need of linear actuators with long throw distance, high speed, and stiff construction. Nothing commercially available checked all the boxes, so he set out to design his own.

A few design iterations later, [Harrison] arrived at the actuators you see in the video below. Built mainly from carbon fiber tubing and 3D-printed parts, the actuators have about 30 centimeters of throw, and thanks to their cable-drive design, they’re pretty fast — much faster than his earlier lead screw designs. The stiffness of the actuator comes by way of six bearings to guide the arm, arranged in two tiers of three, each offset by 60 degrees. Along with some clever eccentric spacers to fine-tune positioning, this design provides six points of contact that really lock the tube into place.

The cable drive system [Harrison] used is pretty neat too. A Kevlar kite string is attached to each end of the central tube and then through PTFE tubes to a pulley on an ODrive BLDC, which extends and retracts the actuator. It’s a clever design in that it keeps the weight of the motor away from the actuator, but it does have its problems, as [Harrison] admits. Still, the actuator works great, and it looks pretty cool while doing it. CAD and code are available if you want to roll your own.

These actuators are cool enough, but the real treat here will be the ball juggler [Harrison] is building. We’ve seen a few of those before, but this one looks like it’s going to be mighty impressive.

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How To Install Mac OS On The Nintendo Wii

May 3, 2023 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

What if you could run Mac OS on a Nintendo Wii game console? That’s probably not a thought that has occurred to many Wii owners or Mac OS users, but that is no excuse not to give it a try, as [Michael] handily demonstrates in a recent video by running Mac OS 9 on a Nintendo’s legendary console. The first major issue is what anyone who has ever tried to put a Hackintosh together knows: just because a target system runs the same CPU architecture can you necessarily install Mac OS (or OS X) for Intel x86 on any Intel x86 system. The same is true for the Wii with its PowerPC CPU and running Mac OS 9 for PowerPC on it.

In order to make this work, a workaround is employed, which uses the fossilized Mac-on-Linux project to run PowerPC Mac OS essentially on Linux for the Wii. This is a kernel module which allows Mac OS to run at basically native speeds on Linux, but it being a Linux kernel module, it meant that [Michael] had to hunt down the correct kernel to go with it. After creating an SD card with a functioning bootloader, he was able to boot into Wii Linux with MoL enabled, and try to install Mac OS.

OS X didn’t work for some reason, but Mac OS 9 did work, albeit with severe font rendering and audio glitches. All of which seems to come down to that while it is possible to get Mac OS running on the Wii, doing so is definitely more for the challenge and experience. By the way, if all this sounds a bit familiar, it’s because [Michael] referenced the Mac-on-Wii work that [Dandu] did last year to make this latest iteration happen.

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