An Inexpensive Way To Break Down Plastic

March 27, 2025 by 11 Comments

Plastic has been a revolutionary material over the past century, with an uncountable number of uses and an incredibly low price to boot. Unfortunately, this low cost has led to its use in many places where other materials might be better suited, and when this huge amount of material breaks down in the environment it can be incredibly persistent and harmful. This has led to many attempts to recycle it, and one of the more promising efforts recently came out of a lab at Northwestern University.

Plastics exist as polymers, long chains of monomers that have been joined together chemically. The holy grail of plastic recycling would be to convert the polymers back to monomers and then use them to re-make the plastics from scratch. This method uses a catalyst to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), one of the more common plastics. Once broken down, the PET is exposed to moist air which converts it into its constituent monomers which can then be used to make more PET for other uses.

Of course, the other thing that any “holy grail” of plastic recycling needs is to actually be cheaper and easier than making new plastic from crude oil, and since this method is still confined to the lab it remains to be seen if it will one day achieve this milestone as well. In the meantime, PET can also be recycled fairly easily by anyone who happens to have a 3D printer around.

General Fusion Claims Success With Magnetized Target Fusion

March 27, 2025 by 21 Comments

It’s rarely appreciated just how much more complicated nuclear fusion is than nuclear fission. Whereas the latter involves a process that happens all around us without any human involvement, and where the main challenge is to keep the nuclear chain reaction within safe bounds, nuclear fusion means making atoms do something that goes against their very nature, outside of a star’s interior.

Fusing helium isotopes can be done on Earth fairly readily these days, but doing it in a way that’s repeatable — bombs don’t count — and in a way that makes economical sense is trickier. As covered previously, plasma stability is a problem with the popular approach of tokamak-based magnetic confinement fusion (MCF). Although this core problem has now been largely addressed, and stellarators are mostly unbothered by this particular problem, a Canadian start-up figures that they can do even better, in the form of a nuclear fusion reactors based around the principle of magnetized target fusion (MTF).

Although General Fusion’s piston-based fusion reactor has people mostly very confused, MTF is based on real physics and with GF’s current LM26 prototype having recently achieved first plasma, this seems like an excellent time to ask the question of what MTF is, and whether it can truly compete billion-dollar tokamak-based projects.

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3D-Printed Scanner Automates Deck Management For Trading Card Gamers

March 26, 2025 by 12 Comments

Those who indulge in trading card games know that building the best deck is the key to victory. What exactly that entails is a mystery to us muggles, but keeping track of your cards is a vital part of the process, one that this DIY card scanner (original German; English translation) seeks to automate.

At its heart, [Fraens]’ card scanner is all about paper handling, which is always an engineering task fraught with peril. Cards like those for Magic: The Gathering and other TCGs are meant to be handled by human hands, and automating the task of flipping through them presents some challenges. [Fraens] uses a pair of motorized 3D-printed rollers with O-rings to form a conveyor belt that can pull one card at a time off the bottom of a deck. An adjustable retaining roller made from the most adorable linear bearing we’ve ever seen ensures that only one card at a time is pulled from the hopper onto an imaging platen. An adjustable mount holds a smartphone to take a picture of the card, which is fed into an app that extracts all the details and categorizes the cards in the deck.

Aside from the card handling mechanism, there are some pretty slick details to this build. The first is that [Fraens] noticed that the glossy finish on some cards interfered with scanning, leading him to add a diffused LED ringlight to the rig. If an image isn’t scannable, the light goes through a process of dimming and switching colors until a good scan is achieved. Also, to avoid the need to modify the existing TCG deck management app, [Fraens] added a microphone to the control side of the scanner that listens for the sounds the app makes when it scans cards. And if Magic isn’t your thing, the basic mechanism could easily be modified to scan everything from business cards to old family photos.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Hearing Aids

March 26, 2025 by 38 Comments

You might think you don’t need a hearing aid, and you might be right. But in general, hearing loss eventually comes to all of us. In fact, you progressively lose hearing every year, which is why kids can have high-pitched ringtones their parents can’t hear.

You’d think hearing aids would be pretty simple, right? After all, we know how to pick up sounds, amplify them, and play them back. But there’s a lot more to it. Hearing aids need to be small, comfortable, have great battery life, and cram a microphone and speaker into a small area. That also can lead to problems with feedback, which can be very uncomfortable for the user. In addition, they need to handle very soft and loud sounds and accommodate devices like telephones.

Although early hearing aids just made sound louder and, possibly, blocked unwanted sound, modern devices will try to increase volume only in certain bands where the user has hearing loss. They may also employ sophisticated methods to block or reduce noise. Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Hearing Aids” →

Ancient Pocket Computer Gets A Serious Serial Upgrade

March 25, 2025 by 9 Comments

[Robert’s Retro] is one of those great YouTube channels that shows us the ins and outs of old and obscure computers. [Robert] likes going a step beyond the traditional teardown though, repairing and upgrading these old machines. His latest project involves giving the ZEOS Pocket PC a fully-functional serial port. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the ZEOS Pocket PC, you might know it as the Tidalwave PS-1000—it’s a pretty straightforward clone. Originally, these machines could be had with a proprietary serial adapter to enable them to interface with external peripherals. However, like most obscure cables and connectors from three decades ago, they’re virtually unobtainable today.

To solve this problem, [Robert] decided to hack in a traditional DE-9 connector instead. Commonly referred to as the DB-9, this is the most common serial port design used on IBM PCs and compatibles. Getting the larger port into the compact PC required some careful hacking of the case, as well as delicate soldering to hook up the pins to the right signals on the tightly-packed motherboard. This video does involve cutting some vintage plastic, but overall it’s a very neat mod that is handled with due respect and care.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen him upgrade a classic portable computer, either.

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Handheld Console Plays Original Pong With Modern E-Waste

March 24, 2025 by 8 Comments

[Simon] wrote in to let us know about DingPong, his handheld portable Pong console. There’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, however. Consider for a moment that back in the 1970s playing Pong required a considerable amount of equipment, not least of which was dedicated electronics and a CRT monitor. What was huge (in more than one way) in the 70s has been shrunk down to handheld, and implemented almost entirely on modern e-waste in the process.

The 1970s would be blown away by a handheld version of Pong, made almost entirely from salvaged components.

DingPong is housed in an old video doorbell unit (hence the name) and the screen is a Sony Video Watchman, a portable TV from 1982 with an amazing 4-inch CRT whose guts [Simon] embeds into the enclosure. Nearly everything in the build is either salvaged, or scrounged from the junk bin. Components are in close-enough values, and power comes from nameless lithium-ion batteries that are past their prime but still good enough to provide about an hour of runtime. The paddle controllers? Two pots (again, of not-quite-the-right values) sticking out the sides of the unit, one for each player.

At the heart of DingPong one will not find any flavor of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ESP32. Rather, it’s built around an AY-3-8500 “Ball & paddle” (aka ‘Pong’) integrated circuit from 1977, which means DingPong plays the real thing!

We have seen Pong played on a Sony Watchman before, and we’ve also seen a vintage Pong console brought back to life, but we’re pretty sure this is the first time we’ve seen a Sony Watchman running Pong off a chip straight from the 70s. Watch it in action in the video (in German), embedded below.

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Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025

March 23, 2025 by 9 Comments

What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days. The duo returned to Earth from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with a dolphin-welcoming committee. For the benefit of those living under rocks these past nine months, Williams and Wilmore slipped the surly bonds way back in June on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, bound for a short stay on the ISS before a planned return in the same spacecraft. Alas, all did not go to plan as their ride developed some mechanical difficulties on the way upstairs, and so rather than risk their lives on a return in a questionable capsule, NASA had them cool their heels for a couple of months while Starliner headed home without them.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Butch and Suni were “stranded,” but that doesn’t seem fair to us. Sure, their stay on the ISS was unplanned, or at least it wasn’t Plan A; we’re sure this is always a contingency NASA allows for when planning missions. Also unfortunate is the fact that they didn’t get paid overtime for the stay, not that you’d expect they would. But on the other hand, if you’re going to get stuck on a work trip, it might as well be at the world’s most exclusive and expensive resort.

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