The USAF (Almost) Declares War On Illinois Radio Amateurs

February 18, 2023 by 132 Comments

Every week the Hackaday editors gather online to discuss the tech stories of the moment, and among the topics this week was the balloons shot down over North America that are thought to be Chinese spying devices. Among the banter came the amusing thought that enterprising trolls on the Pacific rim could launch balloons to keep the fearless defenders of American skies firing off missiles into the beyond.

But humor may have overshadowed by events, because it seems one of the craft they shot down was just that. It wasn’t a troll though, the evidence points to an amateur radio pico balloon — a helium-filled Mylar party balloon with a tiny solar-powered WSPR transmitter as its payload.

The balloon thought to have been shot down was launched by the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a group of radio amateurs who launch small helium-filled Mylar balloons carrying the barest minimum for a solar-powered WSPR beacon. Its callsign was K9YO, and having circumnavigated the globe seven times since its launch on the 10th of October it was last seen off Alaska on February 11th. Its projected course and timing tallies with the craft reported shot down by the US Air Force, so it seems the military used hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of high-tech weaponry to shoot down a few tens of dollars worth of hobby electronics they could have readily tracked online. We love the smell of napalm in the morning!

Their website has a host of technical information on the balloons and the beacons, providing a fascinating insight into this facet of amateur radio that is well worth a read in itself. The full technical details of the USAF missile system used to shoot them down, sadly remains classified.

Stair Climbing Rover Gets Up With Rocker Bogies

February 18, 2023 by 8 Comments

Doctor Who eventually made light of the fact that the Daleks were critically impaired when it came to staircases. This rover from [WildWillyRobots] doesn’t share that issue, thanks to a smart suspension design.

The rover itself is built using 3D printed components for everything from the enclosure, to the suspension system, as well as the wheels themselves. It uses a rocker-bogie design, which NASA designed for Mars-bound rovers and we often see copied for terrestrial applications. Gear motors are used for their plentiful torque, and they are placed directly within the wheels. Servos allow the individual wheels to be steered, allowing the rover to crab sideways and perform zero-radius turns.

The rocker-bogie setup does a great job of keeping the rover’s wheels touching the ground, even over rough terrain. It readily tackles a random pile of bricks with ease, in a way that many four-wheeled designs would struggle to match. Given its trials on Mars, it’s easy to call the rocker-bogie setup a thoroughly-proven design.

We’ve featured plenty of other rocker-bogie builds in the past; many of them are 3D printed as well.

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A Call For Better Shower Temperature Controls

February 18, 2023 by 144 Comments

A good shower is a beautiful, rejuvenating experience. Contrarily, a shower that’s either too hot or too cold becomes a harrowing trial of endurance. [Ben Holmen] has been musing on the way we control temperature in our showers, and he has come to the conclusion that it’s not good enough. He’s done the math, quantified the problem, and is calling for better solutions for all.

[Ben]’s plot of shower temperature vs. mixer tap angle.
[Ben]’s complaint rests with the mixer taps that have become the norm in modern shower installations. These taps have a 180-degree range of motion. On one end, you get maximum cold water output, on the other, maximum hot water output. This is fine for a kitchen sink where we often want one extreme or the other, and exact temperature isn’t important. However, for a shower, it’s terrible.

By [Ben]’s measurements, just a 10-degree range on his own shower tap corresponds to comfortable, usable temperatures. That’s means just 5.6% of the control range is devoted to temperatures the user is likely to select. His argument goes that this is the opposite of how it should work, and that most of the tap’s range should be dedicated to comfortable temperatures.

Ideal water temperature curve, compared to standard tap.

This would allow much finer control of shower temperature in the actual useful range. It would allow us to make tweaks to our shower temperature without having to ever-so-delicately nudge the mixer tap. Extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures should still be available, but left at the utter extremes.

Sadly, [Ben] doesn’t work for Big Tap, so he can’t directly influence the product sold to the public. Instead, he’s calling for manufacturers to develop shower valves that prioritize the temperatures that humans desire most. Unfortunately, it’s not immediately clear how the mechanics of such a valve would work without adding considerable cost and complexity when compared to the traditional model.

What do you think? Are things fine the way they are, or does [Ben] have a point? Perhaps you’re a two-tap evangelist! In any case, we’d love to hear your comments below. Meanwhile, if you’re more worried about the water bill than the temperature, we can help you there as well!

Anatomy Of A Fake CO2 Sensor

February 18, 2023 by 44 Comments

The pandemic brought with it a need to maintain adequate ventilation in enclosed spaces, and thus, there’s been considerable interest in inexpensive C02 monitors. Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous actors out there that have seen this as a chance to make a quick profit.

Recently [bigclivedotcom] got one such low-cost CO2 sensor on his bench for a teardown, and confirms that it’s a fake. But in doing so he reveals a fascinating story of design decisions good and bad, from something which could almost have been a useful product.

Behind the slick color display is a PCB with an unidentified microcontroller, power supply circuitry, a DHT11 environmental sensor, and a further small module which purports to be the CO2 sensor. He quickly demonstrates with a SodaStream that it doesn’t respond to CO2 at all, and through further tests is able to identify it as an alcohol sensor.

Beyond the alcohol sensor he analyses the PSU circuitry. It has a place for a battery protection chip but it’s not fitted, and an error in the regulator circuitry leads to a slow drain of the unprotected cell. Most oddly there’s an entire 5 volt switching regulator circuit that’s fitted but unused, being in place to support a missing infra-red module. Finally the screen is an application-specific LCD part.

It’s clear some effort went in to the design of this unit, and we can’t help wondering whether it could have started life as a design for a higher-spec genuine unit. But as [Clive] says, it’s a party detector, and of little more use than as a project case and battery.

Need more dubious instrumentation? How about a magnetic field tester?

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Hack Lets Intel MacBook Run Without A Battery

February 17, 2023 by 31 Comments

A long time ago, a laptop was a basic thing, and you could pretty much run one just by hooking up a power supply to the battery contacts. A modern MacBook is altogether fussier. However, when [Christophe] was stuck in the midst of a 2020 lockdown with no parts available, he found a way to get his damaged MacBook up and running without a battery.

The problem was brought about by a failing battery in the MacBook Pro 13″ from mid-2018, which swelled up and deformed the laptop’s case. Parts were unavailable, and the MacBook wouldn’t run at full speed without a battery fitted. That’s because with no battery present, the MacBook would send a BD_PROCHOT signal to the Intel CPU, telling it to slow down due to overheating, even when the chip was cool.

To get around the problem, [Christophe] used a tool called CPUTune. It allows fiddling with the various CPU settings of a MacBook. He deactivated the BD_PROCHOT signal, and also the CPU’s Turbo Boost feature. This ended the worst of the thermal throttling, and enabled semi-normal use of the machine.

It’s unclear why Apple would throttle the CPU with the battery disconnected. [Christophe]’s workaround got him back up and working again in the midst of a difficult period, regardless. We’ve seen some other great Macbook hacks before too, like this amazing save from serious water damage!

Thanks to [donaldcuckman] for the tip!]

Quantum Interconnects Get Faster

February 17, 2023 by 2 Comments

If you are a retrocomputer fan, you might remember when serial ports were a few hundred baud and busses ran at a few megahertz at the most. Today, of course, we have buses and fabric that can run at tremendous speeds. Quantum computing, though, has to start from scratch. One major problem is that jockeying quantum states around for any distance is difficult and slow. Part of it is that qubits decay rapidly, so you don’t have much time. They are also generally susceptible to noise and perturbation by outside forces. So many quantum machines today are limited by how much they can cram on one chip since there isn’t a good way to connect to another chip. The University of Sussex thinks it has improved the outlook for quantum interconnects with a technique they claim can move qubits around at nearly 2,500 links per second.

The technique, called UQ Connect, uses electric field links to connect multiple chips using trapped ions for qubits. If you want to read the actual paper, you can find it in Nature Communications.

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Fail Of The Week: Epic 312 Weeks Of Fixing A Broken Project

February 17, 2023 by 7 Comments

If a hacker guardian angel exists, then we’re sure he or she was definitely AWOL for six long years from [Aaron Eiche]’s life as he worked on perfecting and making his Christmas Countdown clock. [Aaron] started this binary clock project in 2016, and only managed to make it work as expected in 2022 after a string of failures.

In case you’d like to check out his completed project first, then cut the chase and head over to his Github repository for his final, working version. The hardware is pretty straightforward, and not different from many similar projects that we’ve seen before. A microcontroller drives a set of LED’s to show the time remaining until Christmas Day in binary format. The LEDs show the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds until Christmas and it uses two buttons for adjustments and modes. An RTC section wasn’t included in the first version, but it appeared and disappeared along the six year journey, before finding a spot in the final version.

The value of this project doesn’t lie in the final version, but rather in the lessons other hackers, specially those still in the shallow end of the pool, can learn from [Aaron]’s mistakes. Thankfully, the clock ornament is not very expensive to build, so [Aaron] could persevere in improving it despite his annual facepalm moments.

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