Diesel Station Wagon Runs On Plastic

November 15, 2023 by 58 Comments

Old diesel engines from various car manufacturers like Mercedes and Volkswagen are highly prized even in modern times. Not only were these engines incredibly reliable and mechanically simple, but they can easily be modified to run on a wide variety of fuels. It’s common to see old Volkswagen Jettas or Mercedes 300Ds running on used vegetable oil or any other free flammable liquid that might otherwise end up in the garbage. [Gijs Schalkx] has an diesel Volvo 240 wagon, and rather than compete with all the other diesel owners looking for cooking oil, he modified this one to run on plastic waste instead. (Google Translate from Dutch)

While our Dutch language skills aren’t the best, what we gather about this project is that it uses standard solid plastic waste for fuel, but an intermediate step of cooking the plastic into a liquid is first needed. The apparatus on the roof is actually a plastic refinery which uses a small wood fire to break the plastic molecules into usable hydrocarbons, which are then sent to the engine for burning. The car is street legal and seems to operate like any other diesel of this vintage, although the fuel delivery system may not be able to provide it enough to get it going at very high speeds.

While it is possible to use wood to produce wood gas for fuel in an internal combustion engine like this wood gas-powered lawnmower, the hydrocarbon strings in plastic are essentially stabilized hydrocarbons from refining oil and have potentially much more available energy. Releasing this energy is generally difficult enough that used plastic is simply landfilled. [Gijs Schalkx] has made plenty of alternative fuel vehicles, too, like this moped that used locally-harvested swamp gas to ride around town.

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Num Pad Reborn As Stream Deck

November 15, 2023 by 11 Comments

Stream decks are cool and all, but they are essentially expensive, albeit sorta cool-looking macro pads. So why not try to make your own? You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch.

It all started when [dj_doughy] found an extremely clicky num pad in a recycle pile. It was so clicky, in fact, that even though [dj_doughy] didn’t need an external num pad, they wanted to keep it around as a fidget toy. From the video after the break, they look to be white ALPS switches. The only problem? It had a PS/2 connector.

Well, okay, there was another problem. The chip inside seemingly has no datasheet available. [dj_doughy] took to Discord for help, and was advised to just have the thing use extended keys, like F13-F24, and assign those as hotkeys in OBS.

In order to make it USB, [dj_doughy] need a microcontroller capable of acting as a Human Interface Device (HID). While [dj_doughy] tested using an Arduino Leonardo, they ended up using an Arduino Beetle due to its diminutive size. [dj_doughy] had a bit of trouble with the code sending two key presses, but found out they were just missing some variables. Now it works like a charm.

Would you like a macro pad that lets you physically reassign macros? Then check out this tile-based macro pad.

The Quaint History Of The Commodore ChessMate

November 14, 2023 by 6 Comments

The Commodore International of the 1970s was a company which dabbled in a bit of everything when it came to consumer electronics, with the Commodore ChessMate being a prime example of the circuitous way that some of its products came to be. Released in 1978, its existence was essentially the result of MOS Technology releasing the KIM-1 single board computer in 1976. In May of that year, [Peter Jennings] traveled all the way from Toronto, Canada to Cleveland, USA to attend the Midwest Regional Computer Conference and acquire a KIM-1 system and box of manuals for a mere $245. On this KIM-1 he’d proceed to develop his own chess game, called MicroChess, implemented fully in 6502 ASM to fit within the 1 kB of RAM.

As one of the first major applications to run on the KIM-1, it quickly became an international hit, which caught the attention of Commodore – which had acquired MOS Technology by then – who ended up contacting [Peter] about a potential chess computer project. This turned out to based on the custom MOS 6504 CPU, while sharing many characteristics with the KIM-1 SBC. Being a MicroChess-only system, the user experience was optimized for more casual users, with the user manual providing clear instructions on how to start a new game and how to enter the position of a newly moved piece, along with no less than eight difficulty settings.

If you’re feeling like making your own ChessMate, or want to dig into the technical details, this excellent article by [Hans Otten] has got you covered.

Top image: Commodore ChessMate Prototype in 1978. (Credit: Peter Jennings)

(Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip)

Balloon To Fly During Solar Eclipse

November 14, 2023 by 9 Comments

The Great American Eclipse was a solar eclipse that passed nearly the entire continental United States back in 2017. While it might sound like a once-in-a-lifetime event to experience a total solar eclipse, the stars have aligned to bring another total solar eclipse to North America although with a slightly different path stretching from the west coast of Mexico and ending off the cost of Newfoundland in Canada. Plenty of people near the path of totality have already made plans to view the event, but [Stephen] and a team of volunteers have done a little bit of extra preparation and plan to launch a high-altitude balloon during the event.

The unmanned balloon will primarily be carrying a solar telescope with the required systems onboard to stream its images live during its flight. The balloon will make its way to the stratosphere, hopefully above any clouds that are common in New Brunswick during the early spring, flying up to 30,000 meters before returning its payload safely to Earth. The telescope will return magnified images of the solar eclipse live to viewers on the ground and has been in development for over two years at this point. The team believes it to be the first time a non-governmental organization has imaged an eclipse by balloon.

For those who have never experienced a total solar eclipse before, it’s definitely something worth traveling for if you’re not already in its path. For this one, Canadians will need to find themselves in the Maritimes or Newfoundland or head south to the eastern half of the United States with the Americans, while anyone in Mexico needs to be in the central part of the mainland. Eclipses happen in places other than North America too, and are generally rare enough that you’ll hear about a total eclipse well in advance. There’s more to eclipses than watching the moon’s shadow pass by, though. NASA expects changes in the ionosphere and is asking ham radio operators for help for the 2024 eclipse.

Increase Your Blinkenlights With This Silicon Wafer Necklace

November 14, 2023 by 5 Comments

Necklaces aren’t often very high-tech, mostly because of the abuse they have to go through being worn. This was obviously a problem that needed solving, so [Matt Venn] decided to change that by making a necklace out of ASICs just in time for Supercon.

Although this isn’t the first time [Matt] made such a necklace, he though his previous one was “too hip-hop” and not enough “15 million dollar Nikon Lithography Stepper”. Obviously, this means designing the whole chain, art included, from scratch with the blinkenlights to match. Together with [Pat Deegan] and [Adam Zeloof], the team created a beautiful technopunk necklace with art on every chain link and of course a real silicon wafer with a RISC-V tapeout from 2022 on it.

With [Adam] doing modeling for the chain links, and [Pat] and [Matt] designing the electronics required for the mandatory blinkenlights, and some last-minute soldering and assembling the project was finished just in time for Supercon, where it fit right in with all the other blinkenlights. It even runs on one of the RISC-V cores from the same tapeout as the central wafer!

A large, teardrop-shaped van with a wide, friendly face sits in a grassy field. A grey canvas pop top is opened on its top and solar panels extend from either side of its roof, making it look somewhat like a large insect with wings extended.

An Off-Grid EV Camper Van

November 14, 2023 by 34 Comments

Despite our predilection for creature comforts like electricity, it can be nice to get away from it all from time-to-time. Students from Eindhoven University of Technology developed Stella Vita to let you glamp from the power of the sun alone.

Solar-powered vehicles have been plying the highways for decades, but we’re only now getting vehicles with multiple seats that could potentially be used for transport outside of protected race conditions. While production vehicles that can charge off the sun are yet to appear in any appreciable numbers, universities are continuing to push the envelope of what’s possible in a solar car.

Stella Vita is a whale shark-esque camper van designed to be as aerodynamic as possible while still housing all the accoutrements one would want when car camping including a large bed, inductive cooktop, fridge, shower, sink, toilet, and standing room via a pop top. The 2 kW solar array expands to 4 kW when parked via two wings extending from the pop top that also function as awnings for your base camp. By keeping the car lightweight (1,700 kg or 3,700 lb) and aerodynamic, it can go about 600 km (370 mi) on a single charge with its 60 kWh battery.

While it’s still experimental, the team took Stella Vita on a road trip of 3,000 km (1,900 mi) to the south of Spain and were able to get there with only a couple charging stops to account for technical difficulties. A full charge on solar alone takes 2-3 days, which we can see being a convenient amount of time to stop in one spot for your outdoor adventures before heading home or to your next destination.

If you want to build a slightly smaller off-grid camper that’s fueled by coffee instead, you might want to check out this bike camper or this other example.

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There’s No AI In A Markov Chain, But They’re Fun To Play With

November 14, 2023 by 72 Comments

Amid all the hype about AI it sometimes seems as though the world has lost sight of the fact that software such as ChatGPT contains no intelligence. Instead it’s an extremely sophisticated system for extracting plausible machine generated content from the corpus on which it is trained. There’s a long history behind machine generated text, and perhaps the simplest example comes in the form of a Markov chain. [Ben Hoyt] takes us through how these work, and provides some Python code so that you can roll your own.

If you’re uncertain what a Markov chain is, consider the predictive text on your phone. It works by offering the statistically most likely next word in your sentence, and should you accept all of its choices it will deliver sentences which are superficially readable but otherwise complete nonsense. He demonstrates with very simple short source texts how a collocate probability map is generated for two-word phrases, and how from that a likely next word can be extracted. It’s not AI, but it can be a lot of fun to play with and it opens the door to the entire field of computational linguistics. We haven’t set one loose on Hackaday’s archive yet but we suspect it would talk a lot about the Arduino.

We’re talking about Markov chains here with respect to language, but it’s also worth remembering that they work for music too.

Header: Bad AI image with Dall-E prompt, “Ten thousand monkeys with typewriters”.