How Three Letters Brought Down UK Air Traffic Control

September 13, 2023 by 51 Comments

The UK bank holiday weekend at the end of August is a national holiday in which it sometimes seems the entire country ups sticks and makes for somewhere with a beach. This year though, many of them couldn’t, because the country’s NATS air traffic system went down and stranded many to grumble in the heat of a crowded terminal. At the time it was blamed on faulty flight data, but news now emerges that the data which brought down an entire country’s air traffic control may have not been faulty at all.

Armed with the official incident report and publicly available flight data, Internet sleuths theorize that the trouble was due to one particular flight: French Bee flight 731 from Los Angeles to Paris. The flight itself was unremarkable, but the data which sent the NATS computers into a tailspin came from two of its waypoints — Devil’s Lake Wisconsin and Deauville Normandy — having the same DVL identifier. Given the vast distance between the two points, the system believed it was looking at a faulty route, and refused to process it. A backup system automatically stepped in to try and reconcile the data, but it made the same determination as the primary software, so the whole system apparently ground to a halt.

It’s important to note that there was nothing wrong with the flight plan entered in by the French Bee pilots, and that early stories blaming faulty data were themselves at fault. However we are guessing that air traffic software developers worldwide are currently scrambling to check their code for this particular bug. We’re fortunate indeed that safety wasn’t compromised and only inconvenience was the major outcome.

Air traffic control doesn’t feature here too often, but we’ve previously looked at a much earlier system.

Header image: John Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Determining The Size Of The New US Lithium Deposit Amidst Exploding Demand

September 13, 2023 by 22 Comments

With demand for lithium in the world market projected to increase by 2040 to as much as eight times the demand in 2022, finding new deposits of this metal has become a priority. Currently most of the world’s lithium comes from Australia, Chile, China and Argentina, with potential new mining sites under investigation. One of these sites is the McDermitt caldera in the US, a likely remnant of the Yellowstone hotspot and resulting volcanic activity. According to a recent study (Chemistry World article) by Thomas R. Benson and colleagues in Science Advances, this site may not only contain between 20 to 40 million tons of lithium in the form of the mineral clay illite, but was also formed using a rather unique process.

This particular group of mineral clays can contain a number of other chemicals, which in this particular case is lithium due to the unique way in which the about 40 meter thick layer of sediment was formed. Although lithium is a very common metal, its high reactivity means that it is never found in its elementary form, but instead bound to other elements. Lithium is thinly distributed within the Earth’s crust and oceans. Incidentally, the Earth’s oceans contain by far the largest amount of lithium, at approximately 230 billion tons.

So how much lithium could be extracted from this new area, and how does this compare to the increasing demand?

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BingGPT Brings AI Chat To The Desktop

September 13, 2023 by 28 Comments

Interested in AI, but sick of using everything in a browser? Miss clicking on a good old desktop icon to open a local bit of software? In that case, BingGPT could be just the thing for you.

It’s nothing too crazy—just a desktop application that gives you access to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot. It’s available on a range of platforms, from Windows, to Apple, and Linux, and binaries are available for Intel, Apple Silicon, and ARM processors.

Using BingGPT is simple. Sign in with your Microsoft account, and away you go. There’s no need to use Microsoft Edge or any ugly browser plugins, and you can export your conversations to Markdown, PNG, and PDF for sharing beyond the program. It’s also complete with a range of keyboard shortcuts to speed your interaction with the large language model when it gets off track. There’s also the Compose button which can actually go ahead and write stuff for you.

Fundamentally, all the cool stuff is still coming in via the web, but it’s nice to be able to use Bing’s chatbot without having to succumb to the horrors of a Microsoft browser. It’s interesting to see how large language models are becoming an all-pervasive tool of late. If you’re building your own nifty projects in this area, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Portrait Of A Long Wave Station In Its Twilight Years

September 13, 2023 by 25 Comments

There’s a quirk of broadcasting in Europe left over from the earliest days of the medium, which our American readers may not have encountered. As well as the familiar AM band, Europeans and Africans also have a so-called long wave band, on which you’ll find AM broadcast stations between about 150 and 280 kHz. Long wave transmissions were an ideal solution in the 1920s and 1930s to the problem of achieving national coverage from a single transmitter, and were widely used by state broadcasters. In an age of digital streaming they are increasingly irrelevant, and [Ringway Manchester] takes a look at one of Britain’s last long wave transmitter sites at Droitwich not too far from Birmingham.

The site covers around 50 acres, and is home to a variety of both medium wave (AM, for Americans), and a single long wave transmitter carrying BBC Radio 4 on 198 kHz. As he takes us through its history in the video below the break we hear a rundown of most of the major events in British broadcasting, while few Brits will have visited this unassuming field it’s likely most of us will have listened to something sent from here.

The long wave antenna is a T-shaped affair strung between two masts. We’re guessing that the radiator is the vertical portion, with the bar of the T forming a capacitance with the ground to make up for the radiator being a fraction of the 1515 meter wavelength. The video is something of a tribute to this once-vital station, as the Radio 4 transmissions are likely to stop in 2024 and the medium wave ones over the following years. We have to admit to catching our BBC transmissions online these days, but we still have to admit a pang of sadness at its impending end.

This reminds us, we’ve taken a fond look at AM radio in the past.

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ZX Spectrum Gets A 3D FPS Engine

September 12, 2023 by 21 Comments

The Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 are well-known for bringing 3D gaming into the mainstream in a way that preceding consoles just couldn’t. The ZX Spectrum, on the other hand, is known for text adventures and barebones graphics. However, it now has a rudimentary version of a Quake-like engine, as demonstrated by [Modern ZX-Retro Gaming].

As you might expect, the basic ZX Spectrum that sat in front of your dodgy old TV in the 1980s isn’t really up to the task of running a full 3D game. The engine runs at a fairly jerky frame rate on a 3.5 MHz ZX Spectrum, with purely monochrome graphics. However, the game can run more smoothly on 7, 14, and 28MHz ZX Spectrum compatibles. As with many such projects, most of the video you’ll see is of the game running in emulators. Impressively, the game features sound effects, three weapons, and a standard WASD control layout as per modern FPS games.

If you’re wondering about the confusing visuals, there’s a simple explanation. Yes, the UI and weapons are straight out of Doom. However, the game is running on a true 3D engine, with 3D enemies, not sprites. It’s inspired by the full 3D engine pioneered by Quake, hence the designation.

Files are available for those wishing to try it out at home. We do see a fair bit of the ZX Spectrum around these parts. Video after the break.

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Putting The Magic Smoke Back Into A Dodgy Spectrum Analyzer

September 12, 2023 by 3 Comments

The trouble with fixing electronics is that most devices are just black boxes — literally. Tear it down, look inside, but it usually doesn’t matter — all you see are black epoxy blobs, taunting you with the fact that one or more of them are dead with no external indication of the culprit.

Sometimes, though, you get lucky, as [FeedbackLoop] did with this Rigol spectrum analyzer fix. The instrument powered up and sort of worked, but the noise floor was unacceptably high. Even before opening it up, there was clearly a problem; in general, spectrum analyzers shouldn’t rattle. Upon teardown, it was clear that someone had been inside before and got reassembly wrong, with a loose fastener and some obviously shorted components to show for it. But while the scorched remains of components made a great place to start diagnosis, it doesn’t mean the fix was going to be easy.

Figuring out the values of the nuked components required a little detective work. The blast zone seemed to once hold a couple of resistors, a capacitor, a set of PIN diodes, and a couple of tiny inductors. Also nearby were a pair of chips, sadly with the markings lasered off. With some online snooping and a little bit of common sense, [FeedbackLoop] was able to come up with plausible values for most of these — even the chips, which turned out to be HMC221 RF switches.

Cleaning up the board was a bit of a chore — the shorted components left quite a crater in the board, which was filled with CA glue, and a bunch of missing pads. This called for some SMD soldering heroics, which sadly didn’t fix the noise problem. Replacing the two RF switches and the PIN diodes seemed to fix the problem, albeit at the cost of some loss. Sometimes, good enough is good enough.

This isn’t the first time [FeedbackLoop] has gotten lucky with choice test equipment in need of repairs — this memory module transplant on a scopemeter comes to mind.

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3D Printing A Sock Knitting Machine

September 12, 2023 by 33 Comments

3D printing socks isn’t really a thing yet. You’d end up with scratchy plastic garments that irritate your feet no end. You can easily 3D print all kinds of nifty little mechanisms, though, so why not 3D print yourself a machien to knit some socks instead? That’s precisely what [Joshua De Lisle] did.

The sock knitting machine is a simple device, albeit one that takes up most of the build area on a common 3D printer. It’s properly known as a circular sock machine, and is capable of producing the comfortable tubular socks that we’re all familiar with. All it takes is a bit of yarn and a simple handcranking of the mechanism, and it’s capable of extruding a sock before your very eyes.

He steps through his various iterative design improvements, and shows us how to build the device using knitting machine hooks to handle the yarn directly. The device is also instrumented with a digital counter to keep track of how far along your given sock is.

Your friends at the pub might go running for the doors when you start explaining that you’re thinking about making your own socks. Don’t let them deter you; we’ve seen others tread this path before. Video after the break.

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