Chandra X-ray Observatory Threatened By Budget Cuts

April 10, 2024 by Tom Nardi 39 Comments

Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the most capable space telescope of its kind. As of this writing, the spacecraft is in good health and is returning valuable scientific data. It’s currently in an orbit that extends at its highest point to nearly one-third the distance to the Moon, which gives it an ideal vantage point from which to make its observations, and won’t reenter the Earth’s atmosphere for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Yet despite this rosy report card, Chandra’s future is anything but certain. Faced with the impossible task of funding all of its scientific missions with the relative pittance they’re allocated from the federal government, NASA has signaled its intent to wind down the space telescope’s operations over the next several years. According to their latest budget request, the agency wants to slash the program’s $41 million budget nearly in half for 2026. Funding would remain stable at that point for the next two years, but in 2029, the money set aside for Chandra would be dropped to just $5.2 million.

Drastically reducing Chandra’s budget by the end of the decade wouldn’t be so unexpected if its successor was due to come online in a similar time frame. Indeed, it would almost be expected. But despite being considered a high scientific priority, the x-ray observatory intended to replace Chandra isn’t even off the drawing board yet. The 2019 concept study report for what NASA is currently calling the Lynx X-ray Observatory estimates a launch date in the mid-2030s at the absolute earliest, pointing out that several of the key components of the proposed telescope still need several years of development before they’ll reach the necessary Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for such a high profile mission.

With its replacement for this uniquely capable space telescope decades away even by the most optimistic of estimates, the potential early retirement of the Chandra X-ray Observatory has many researchers concerned about the gap it will leave in our ability to study the cosmos.

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2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: [HEX]POD – Climate Tracker And Digital Nose

March 27, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 10 Comments

[eBender] was travelling India with friends, when one got sick. Unable to find a thermometer anywhere during COVID, they finally ended up in a hospital. After being evacuated back home, [eBender] hatched an idea to create a portable gadget featuring a few travel essentials: the ability to measure body temperature and heart rate, a power bank and an illumination source. The scope evolved quite a lot, with the concept being to create a learning platform for environmental multi-sensor fusion. The current cut-down development kit hosts just the air quality measurement components, but expansion from this base shouldn’t be too hard.

ML for Hackers: Fiddle with that Tensor Flow

This project’s execution is excellent, with a hexagon-shaped enclosure and PCBs stacked within. As everyone knows, hexagons are the bestagons. The platform currently hosts SCD41 and SGP41 sensors for air quality, a BME688 for gas detection, LTR-308 for ambient light and motion, and many temperature sensors.

On top sits a 1.69-inch IPS LCD, with an OLED display on the side for always-on visualization. The user interface is completed with a joystick and a couple of buttons. An internal blower fan is ducted around the sensor array to pull not-so-fresh air from outside for evaluation. Control is courtesy of an ESP32 module, with the gory details buried deep in the extensive project logs, which show sensors and other parts being swapped in and out.

On the software side, some preliminary work is being done on training TensorFlow to learn the sensor fusion inputs. This is no simple task. Finally, we would have a complete package if [eBender] could source a hexagonal LCD to showcase that hexagon-orientated GUI. However, we doubt such a thing exists, which is a shame.

There are many air quality sensors on the market now, so we see a few hacks based on them, like this simple AQ sensor hub. Let’s not forget the importance of environmental CO2 detection; here’s something to get you started.

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pocket Cyberdeck

March 12, 2024 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

When you find something you love doing, you want to do it everywhere, all the time. Such is the case with [jefmer] and programming. The trouble is, there is not a single laptop or tablet out there that really deals well with direct sunlight. So, what’s a hacker to do during the day? Stay indoors and suffer?

The answer is a project like Pocket Pad. This purpose-built PDA uses a Nice! Nano and a pair of two very low-power ST7302-driven monochrome displays. They have no backlight, but they update much faster than e-paper displays. According to [jefmer], the brighter the ambient light, the more readable the displays become. What more could you want? (Besides a backlight?)

The miniature PocketType 40% is a little small for touch typing, but facilitates thumbs well. [jefmer] added those nice vinyl transfer legends and sealed them with clear nail polish.

All of the software including the keyboard scanner is written in Espruino, which is an implementation of JavaScript that targets embedded devices. Since it’s an interpreted language, [jefmer] can both write and execute programs directly on the Pocket Pad, using the bottom screen for the REPL. I’d sure like to have one of these in my pocket!
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How Thermal Post-Curing Resin Prints Affects Their Strength

March 10, 2024 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Tensile strength of resin parts. (Credit: CNC Kitchen) — Credit: CNC Kitchen

Resin 3D prints have a reputation for being brittle, but [Stefan] over at [CNC Kitchen] would like to dispel this myth with the thing which we all love: colorful bar graphs backed up by scientifically appropriate experiments. As he rightfully points out, the average resin printer user will just cure a print by putting it in the sunshine or in a curing station that rotates the part in front of some UV lights. This theoretically should cause these photosensitive resins to fully cure, but as the referenced Formlabs documentation and their Form Cure station indicate, there’s definitely a thermal element to it as well.

To test the impact of temperature during the UV curing process, the test parts were put into an oven along with the UV lamp. Following this uncured, ambient cured and parts cured at 40 to 80 ºC were exposed to both tensile strength tests as well as impact strength. The best results came from the Siraya Tech Blu resin cured at 80 ºC, with it even giving FDM-printed parts a run for their money, as the following graphs make clear. This shows the value of thermal post-curing, as it anneals the resin prints. This reduces their impact strength somewhat, but massively improves their tensile strength.

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Ask Hackaday: What If You Did Have A Room Temperature Superconductor?

February 26, 2024 by Al Williams 80 Comments

The news doesn’t go long without some kind of superconductor announcement these days. Unfortunately, these come in several categories: materials that require warmer temperatures than previous materials but still require cryogenic cooling, materials that require very high pressures, or materials that, on closer examination, aren’t really superconductors. But it is clear the holy grail is a superconducting material that works at reasonable temperatures in ambient temperature. Most people call that a room-temperature superconductor, but the reality is you really want an “ordinary temperature and pressure superconductor,” but that’s a mouthful.

In the Hackaday bunker, we’ve been kicking around what we will do when the day comes that someone nails it. It isn’t like we have a bunch of unfinished projects that we need superconductors to complete. Other than making it easier to float magnets, what are we going to do with a room-temperature superconductor? Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: What If You Did Have A Room Temperature Superconductor?” →

Thermal Earring Tracks Body Temperature

February 13, 2024 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

If you want to constantly measure body temperature to track things like ovulation, you usually have to wear something around your wrist or finger in the form of a smartwatch or ring. Well, what if you can’t or don’t want to adorn yourself this way? Then there’s the thermal earring.

Developed at the University of Washington, the thermal earring is quite small and unobtrusive compared to a smartwatch. Sure, it dangles, but that’s so it can measure ambient temperature for comparison’s sake.

You don’t even need to have pierced ears — the earring attaches to the lobe magnetically. And yeah, the earring can be decorated to hide the circuitry, but you know we would rock the bare boards.

The earring uses BLE to transmit readings throughout the day, and of course goes into sleep mode between transmissions to save power. Coincidentally, it runs for 28 days per charge, which is the length of the average menstrual cycle. While the earring at this time merely “shows promise” as a means of monitoring stress and ovulation, it did outperform a smartwatch at measuring skin temperature while the wearers were at rest.

This is definitely not the only pair of earrings we’ve got around here. These art deco earrings use flexible PCBs, and this pair will light up the night.

Evidence For Graphite As A Room Temperature Superconductor

February 6, 2024 by Maya Posch 30 Comments

Magnetization M(H) hysteresis loops measured for the HOPG sample, before and after 800 K annealing to remove ferromagnetic influences. (Credit: Kopelevich et al., 2023)

Little has to be said about why superconducting materials are so tantalizing, or what the benefits of an ambient pressure, room temperature material with superconducting properties would be. The main problem here is not so much the ‘room temperature’ part, as metallic hydrogen is already capable of this feat, if at pressures far too high for reasonable use. Now a recent research article in Advanced Quantum Technologies by Yakov Kopelevich and colleagues provides evidence that superconducting properties can be found in cleaved highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG). The fact that this feat was reported as having been measured at ambient pressure and room temperature makes this quite noteworthy.

What is claimed is that the difference from plain HOPG is the presence of parallel linear defects that result from the cleaving process, a defect line in which the authors speculate that the strain gradient fluctuations result in the formation of superconducting islands, linked by the Josephson effect into Josephson junctions. In the article, resistance and magnetization measurements on the sample are described, which provide results that provide evidence for the presence of these junctions that would link superconducting islands on the cleaved HOPG sample together.

As with any such claim, it is of course essential that it is independently reproduced, which we are likely to see the results of before long. An interesting part of the claim made is that this type of superconductivity in linear defects of stacked materials could apply more universally, beyond just graphite. Assuming this research data is reproduced successfully, the next step would likely be to find ways to turn this effect into practical applications over the coming years and decades.