A woman with a black vest and pink shirt with curly hair stands behind a podium in front of a projected presentation. She is speaking and has her hands moving in a vague guesture.

Supercon 2022: Carrie Sundra Discusses Manufacturing On A Shoestring Budget

October 31, 2023 by 2 Comments

Making hardware is hard. This is doubly true when you’re developing a niche hardware device that might have a total production run in the hundreds of units instead of something mass market. [Carrie Sundra] has been through the process several times, and has bestowed her wisdom on how not to screw it up.

The internet is strewn with the remains of unfulfilled crowdfunding campaigns for tantalizing devices that seemed so simple when they showed of the prototype. How does one get something from the workbench into the world without losing their life savings and reputation?

[Sundra] walks us through her process for product development that has seen several products successfully launch without an army of pitchfork-wielding fiber crafters line up at her door. One of the first concepts she stresses is that you should design your products around the mantra, “Once it leaves your shop IT SHOULD NEVER COME BACK.” If you design for user-serviceability from the beginning, you can eliminate most warranty returns and probably make it easier to manufacture your widget to boot. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Carrie Sundra Discusses Manufacturing On A Shoestring Budget” →

Building Penny’s Computer Watch From Inspector Gadget

October 31, 2023 by 4 Comments

When you help your bumbling Uncle Gadget with all kinds of missions, you definitely need a watch that can do it all. Penny’s video watch from Inspector Gadget has a ton of features including video communication with Brain and Chief Quimby, a laser, a magnet, a flashlight, a sonar signal, and much more.

To round out her Penny costume, [Becky Stern] has created a 3D printed version of Penny’s incredibly smart watch. It listens for Penny’s iconic phrase — come in, Brain! — and then loads a new picture of Brain on the rounded rectangle TFT display. Inside the watch is an Arduino Nicla Voice, which has to be one of the tinier machine learning-capable boards out there.

[Becky] created the watch case in Tinkercad and modified a watch band from Printables to fit her wrist. With such a small enclosure to work with, [Becky] ended up using that really flexible 30 AWG silicone-jacketed wire for all the fiddly connections between the Arduino and the screen.

After getting it all wired up to test, she found that the screen was broken, either from pressing it into the enclosure, or having a too-close encounter with a helping hands. Let that be a lesson to you, and check out the build video after the break.

More interested in Uncle Gadget’s goodies? Check out these go-go-Gadget shoes and this propeller backpack for skiers.

Continue reading “Building Penny’s Computer Watch From Inspector Gadget“ →

Black 4.0 Is The New Ultrablack

October 31, 2023 by 104 Comments

Vantablack is a special coating material, moreso than a paint. It’s well-known as one of the blackest possible coatings around, capable of absorbing almost all visible light in its nanotube complex structure. However, it’s complicated to apply, delicate, and not readily available, especially to those in the art world.

It was these drawbacks that led Stuart Semple to create his own incredibly black paint. Over the years, he’s refined the formula and improved its performance, steadily building a greater product available to all. His latest effort is Black 4.0, and it’s promising to be the black paint to dominate all others.

Continue reading “Black 4.0 Is The New Ultrablack” →

A schematic representation of the different ionospheric sub-layers and how they evolve daily from day to night periods. (Credit: Carlos Molina)

Ham Radio Operators’ Ionospheric Science During The Solar Eclipse

October 31, 2023 by 3 Comments

The Earth’s ionosphere is the ionized upper part of the atmosphere, and it’s also the most dynamic as it swells and ebbs depending on whether it’s exposed to the Sun or not. It’s the ionosphere that enables radio frequency communications to reach beyond the horizon, its thickness and composition also affects the range and quality of these transmissions. Using this knowledge, a group of ham radio operators used the October 14 solar eclipse to crowdsource an experiment, as part of the Ham Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) community.

A solar eclipse is an interesting consideration with ionospheric RF transmissions, as it essentially creates a temporary period of night time, which is when the ionosphere is the least dense, and thus weakening these transmissions and their total range. As with previous solar eclipses, they turned it into a kind of game, where each ham operator attempts to contact as many others as possible within the least amount of time. Using the collected data points on who was able to talk to whom on the globe, the event’s effect on RF transmissions could be plotted over time. For the August 21, 2017 solar eclipse, the results were published in a 2018 paper by N. A. Frissell et al. in Geophysical Research Letters.

One point which they wished to examine during the 2023 solar eclipse were the plasma bubbles that form near the Earth’s magnetic equator, in regions like Brazil. These plasma bubbles cause a lot of interference, which in the preliminary data can be seen as a clear Doppler shift of the signal due to the diffusion of the ionosphere as the eclipse’s effect took hold. For the next solar eclipse in April 2024 another experiment is scheduled, which will give even more ham radio operators the chance to sign up and contribute to ionospheric science.

Top image: A schematic representation of the different ionospheric sub-layers and how they evolve daily from day to night periods. (Credit: Carlos Molina)

Teensy Stands In For The Motorola 68k

October 31, 2023 by 24 Comments

While it might not seem like it today, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where Motorola was the processor manufacturer. They made chips for everything, but the most popular was arguably the 68000 or 68k. It’s still has a considerable following today, largely among retrocomputing enthusiasts or those maintaining legacy hardware. For those wanting to dip their toes into this world, this Motorola 68000 emulator created by [Ted Fried] may be the thing needed to discover the magic of these once-ubiquitous chips.

The emulator itself runs on a Teensy 4.1, a 32-bit ARM microcontroller running at 600 MHz — giving it enough computing power to act as a cycle-accurate emulator not only for the 68000 CPU but also the local bus interface, in this case for a Mac 512K. This capability also makes it a drop-in replacement for the 68000 in these older Macs and the original hardware in these computers won’t notice much of a difference. A few tricks are needed to get it fully operational though, notably using a set of latches to make up for the fact that the Teensy doesn’t have the required number of output pins to interface one-to-one with the original hardware.

While the emulator may currently be able to replace the hardware and boot the computer, there is still ongoing development to get every part of the operating system up and working. The source code is available on the project’s GitHub page though so any updates made in the future can be found there. And if you have a Mac 128k and still haven’t upgraded to the 512k yet, grab one of these memory switching modules for the upgrade too.

Continue reading “Teensy Stands In For The Motorola 68k” →

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Organ-playing Skeleton Livens Up Halloween

October 30, 2023 by 2 Comments

Every hacker appreciates how off-the-shelf parts can be combined into something greater, and [bryan.lowder] demonstrates this beautifully with his organ-playing skeleton, a wonderful entry to our 2023 Halloween Contest!

Skelly the 3-foot-tall novelty skeleton animatedly plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor while perched at an old (and non-functional) Hammond organ. The small animatronic skeleton has canned motions that work very well for mock organ playing while an embedded MP3 player takes care of playing the music.

That’s not to say the project didn’t have its challenges. Integrating off-the-shelf components into a project always seems to bring its own little inconveniences. In this case, the skeleton the MP3 player both expect to be triggered with button pushes, but taping the button down wasn’t enough to get the skeleton moving when power was applied. [bryan] ended up using relays to simulate button pushes, and a 555 timer circuit to take care of incorporating a suitable delay.

As [bryan] puts it, “a technical tour de force it ain’t, but it is practical and it works and it was done on time” which is well said. Watch Skelly in action in the video, embedded below. There’s also a second video showing the homebrewed controller and MP3 player, both concealed under Skelly’s robe.

Continue reading “2023 Halloween Hackfest: Organ-playing Skeleton Livens Up Halloween” →

AI In A Box Envisions AI As A Private, Offline, Hackable Module

October 30, 2023 by 10 Comments

[Useful Sensors] aims to embed a variety of complementary AI tools into a small, private, self-contained module with no internet connection with AI in a Box. It can do live voice recognition and captioning, live translation, and natural language conversational interaction with a local large language model (LLM). Intriguingly, it’s specifically designed with features to make it hack-friendly, such as the ability to act as a voice keyboard by sending live transcribed audio as keystrokes over USB.

Based on the RockChip 3588S SoC, the unit aims to have an integrated speaker, display, and microphone.

Right now it’s wrapping up a pre-order phase, and aims to ship units around the end of January 2024. The project is based around the RockChip 3588S SoC and is open source (GitHub repository), but since it’s still in development, there’s not a whole lot visible in the repository yet. However, a key part of getting good performance is [Useful Sensors]’s own transformers library for the RockChip NPU (neural processing unit).

The ability to perform things like high quality local voice recognition and run locally-hosted LLMs like LLaMa have gotten a massive boost thanks to recent advances in machine learning, and it looks like this project aims to tie them together in a self-contained package.

Perhaps private digital assistants can become more useful when users can have the freedom to modify and integrate them as they see fit. Digital assistants hosted by the big tech companies are often frustrating, and others have observed that this is ultimately because they primarily exist to serve their makers more than they help users.

Continue reading “AI In A Box Envisions AI As A Private, Offline, Hackable Module” →