Flipped Bit Could Mark The End Of Voyager 1‘s Interstellar Mission

February 9, 2024 by 95 Comments

Sometimes it’s hard to read the tea leaves of what’s going on with high-profile space missions. Weighted down as they are with the need to be careful with taxpayer money and having so much national prestige on the line, space agencies are usually pretty cagey about what’s going on up there. But when project managers talk about needing a “miracle” to continue a project, you know things have gotten serious.

And so things now sit with Voyager 1, humanity’s most distant scientific outpost, currently careening away from Mother Earth at 17 kilometers every second and unable to transmit useful scientific or engineering data back to us across nearly a light-day of space. The problem with the 46-year-old spacecraft cropped up back in November, when Voyager started sending gibberish back to Earth. NASA publicly discussed the problem in December, initially blaming it on the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) that packages data from the remaining operable scientific instruments along with engineering data for transmission back to Earth. It appeared at the time that the TMU was not properly communicating with the flight data system (FDS), the main flight computer aboard the spacecraft.

Since then, flight controllers have determined that the problem lies within the one remaining FDS on board (the backup FDS failed back in 1981), most likely thanks to a single bit of corrupted memory. The Deep Space Network is still receiving carrier signals from Voyager, meaning its 3.7-meter high-gain antenna is still pointing back at Earth, so that’s encouraging. But with the corrupt memory, they’ve got no engineering data from the spacecraft to confirm their hypothesis.

The team has tried rebooting the FDS, to no avail. They’re currently evaluating a plan to send commands to put the spacecraft into a flight mode last used during its planetary fly-bys, in the hope that will yield some clues about where the memory is corrupted, if indeed it is. But without a simulator to test the changes, and with most of the engineers who originally built the spacecraft long gone now, the team is treading very carefully.

Voyager 1 is long past warranty, of course, and with an unparalleled record of discovery, it doesn’t owe us anything at this point. But we’re not quite ready to see it slip into its long interstellar sleep, and we wish the team good luck while it works through the issue.

Power Supply Efficiency Measurements

February 9, 2024 by 12 Comments

Even if you don’t have a Rohde Schwarz oscilloscope, you can still enjoy their recent video about using an oscilloscope to measure power supply efficiency. Of course, you don’t have to have a scope to do this. You can use a voltmeter and an ammeter, but it is very straightforward if you have a four-channel scope with a pair of current probes.

Of course, if you can measure the voltage and the current at the input, you can calculate the input power. Then again, most scopes these days can do the math for you. Then, you make the same measurement and calculation at the output. If you know the input and output power, you can calculate a percentage or many scopes can do it for you now.

Continue reading “Power Supply Efficiency Measurements” →

[Usagi] Whips A Chain Printer Into Shape

February 8, 2024 by 7 Comments

What does it take to get a 47-year-old printer working? [Usagi Electric] shows us it’s not too hard, even if you don’t exactly know what you’re doing.  When we last left this project, he’d tested and verified his power supply was working. This week, after a bit of cleaning, it was time to dig into the mechanics.

If you haven’t seen a chain printer in action before, definitely check one out. They’re big, loud, and sound a bit like a turbine when they spool up. The type chains on these printers never stops moving. This means the printer has to know exactly where a particular letter is before launching one of 66 hammers at it. If the timing is off, parts will fly. To the average computer user, they’re quite intimidating.

Thankfully [Usagi’s] printer was in pretty good shape. When he flipped the big power switch, there was plenty of strange noises, culminating in the test pattern of dollar signs. Probably an early reminder to customers that they needed to order more print supplies.

Continue reading “[Usagi] Whips A Chain Printer Into Shape” →

A line-art diagram of the microfluidic device. On the left, in red text, it says "Fibrillization trigger (CPB pH 5.0). There is a rectangular outline of the chip in grey, with a sideways trapezoid on the left side narrowing until it becomes an arrow on the right. At the right is an inset picture of the semi-transparent microfluidic chip and the text "Negative Pressure (Pultrusion)." Above the trapezoid is the green text "MaSp2 solution" and below is "LLPS trigger (CPB pH 7.0)" in purple. The green, purple, and red text correspond with inlets labeld 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Three regions along the arrow-like channel from left to right are labeled "LLPS region," "pH drop," and in a much longer final section "Fiber assembly region."

Synthetic Spider Silk

February 8, 2024 by 7 Comments

While spider silk proteins are something you can make in your garage, making useful drag line fibers has proved a daunting challenge. Now, a team of scientists from Japan and Hong Kong are closer to replicating artificial spider silk using microfluidics.

Based on how spiders spin their silk, the researchers designed a microfluidic device to replicate the chemical and physical gradients present in the spider. By varying the amount of shear and chemical triggers, they tuned the nanostructure of the fiber to recreate the “hierarchical nanoscale substructure, which is the hallmark of native silk self-assembly.”

We have to admit, keeping a small bank of these clear, rectangular devices on our desk seems like a lot less work than keeping an army of spiders fed and entertained to produce spider silk Hackaday swag. We shouldn’t expect to see a desktop microfluidic spider silk machine this year, but we’re getting closer and closer. While you wait, why not learn from spiders how to make better 3D prints?

If you’re interesting in making your own spider silk proteins, checkout how [Justin Atkin] and [The Thought Emporium] have done it with yeast. Want to make your spider farm spiders have stronger silk? Try augmenting it with carbon.

Lawny Five Keeps Lawn Mowed, Snow Plowed

February 8, 2024 by 10 Comments

Although there’s been considerable excitement over the past half century of a Jetsons-like robotic future, outside of a few niche uses of our day-to-day lives there hasn’t been much in the way of robotic assistants coming to ease our physical household workloads. Sure, robots exist in manufacturing and other industrial settings, but the vast majority of us won’t see a robotic revolution unless we make it for ourselves. To that end, [Jim] has begun construction of a robot that can at least mow his lawn and eventually plow his driveway, among other potential tasks.

The robot, called the Lawny Five, is a tracked vehicle currently under remote control but with a planned autonomous capability. The frame includes a set of caster wheels at the front to take advantage of the differential steering of the tracks, and between everything is where the mower, plow, or other tool can sit. The attachment system is based on a 2″ receiver hitch, allowing the robot to eventually change tools at will while still preserving the usefulness of the tools in their original state. The robotic platform has been tested with the mower on a wet lawn with a 20° slope and showed no signs of struggle (and didn’t damage the grass) so it’s ready to take on more challenging tasks now as well.

With the core of the build out of the way, [Jim] is well on his way to a robotic lawnmower and potentially even an autonomous one, not to mention one with interchangeable tools that he hopes will be put to work in other ways like parking his boat in a small space by his house. For those maintaining a piece of land a little more involved than suburban turfgrass, there are other robotic platforms capable of helping out farmers with things like planting, watering, and weeding.

Continue reading “Lawny Five Keeps Lawn Mowed, Snow Plowed” →

3D Printing Silicone Parts

February 8, 2024 by 6 Comments

Silicone is a useful material for many purposes. Traditionally, creating something out of silicone required injection molding. That’s not difficult, but it does require a good bit of setup. As [Formlabs] points out in a recent video, there are at least three other routes to create silicone parts that utilize 3D printing technology that might fit your application better, especially if you only need a few of a particular item. You can see the video below.

The three methods are either printing silicone directly, printing a mold, casting silicone, or using high-performance elastomers, which are very silicone-like. Of course, as you might expect, some of this is aimed at prompting some of [Formlab’s] products, like a new silicone resin, and you can’t blame them for that.

Continue reading “3D Printing Silicone Parts” →

A Tube Tester Laid Bare

February 8, 2024 by 13 Comments

There’s still a mystique around vacuum tubes long after they were rendered obsolete by solid state devices, and many continue to experiment with them. They can be bought new, but most of us still come to them through the countless old tubes that still litter our junk boxes. But how to know whether your find is any good? [Rob’s Fixit Shop] took a look at a tube tester, once a fairly ubiquitous item, but now a rare sight.

To look at it’s a box with an array of tube sockets, a meter, and a set of switches to set the pinout for the tube under test. We expected it to use a common-cathode circuit, but instead it measures leakage between the grid and the other electrodes, a measure of how good the vacuum in the device is. In a worrying turn this instrument can deliver an electric shock, something he traces to a faulty indicator light leading to the chassis. We are however still inclined to see it as anything but safe, because the lack of mains isolation still exposes the grid to unwary fingers.

All in all though it’s an interesting introduction to an unusual instrument, and given a suitable isolating transformer we wouldn’t mind the chance to have one ourselves. If you need to test a tube and don’t have one of these, don’t worry. It’s possible to roll your own.

Continue reading “A Tube Tester Laid Bare” →