Ask Hackaday: The Turing Test Is Dead: Long Live The Turing Test!

June 22, 2023 by Al Williams 89 Comments

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence that no longer works. The idea was to have people communicate over a terminal, with another real person and with a computer. If the computer is intelligent, Turing mused, most people will incorrectly identify the computer as a human. Clearly, with the advent of modern chatbots, that test is now broken. Despite the “AI” moniker, chatbots aren’t sentient or even pre-sentient, but they certainly seem that way. An AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, is proposing a new test: The AI has to take a $100,000 budget and earn $1,000,000.

We were a little bemused at this. By that measure, most of us aren’t intelligent, either, and it seems like this is a particularly capitalistic idea. We could probably write an Excel script that studied mutual fund performance and pull off the same trick, given enough time for the investment to mature. Is it intelligent? No. Besides, even humans who have demonstrated they can make $1,000,000 often sell their companies and start new ones that fail. How often does the AI have to succeed before we grant it person status?

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Dual Channel POV Display Also Has Nixie Tubes

June 22, 2023 by Al Williams 4 Comments

What’s a tachyscope? According to [Daniel Ross], it is an animated display from an alternate timeline circa 1880. The real ones, of course, didn’t have LEDs and microcontrollers. The control unit looks like an old-timey radio, complete with Nixie tubes. The spinning part has blue and white LEDs, each accepting data from one of two serial ports. You can select to see data from one port, the other, or both. You can see the amazing contraption in the video below.

The LEDs are surface mounted and placed inside a glass test tube. Each display has its own processor. The project appears to have a PCB, but it is just a piece of fiberglass with a color print on top of it and holes drilled with a rotary tool. The board has no actual conductors — everything is point-to-point wiring. The base of the unit is old cookware. The slip ring is pretty interesting, too. It uses an old video tape head, D-cell batteries cut up, and contacts from a relay.

You might remember [Daniel] from his steampunk Victorian computer project, including a punk teletype and a magic eye tube. If you want some theory on these kinds of displays, we can help. If you just want a simple display, it doesn’t have to cost much.

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China Plans Its Own Megaconstellation To Challenge Starlink

June 22, 2023 by Lewin Day 39 Comments

Satellite internet used to be a woeful thing. Early networks relied on satellites in geostationary orbits, with high latency and minimal bandwidth keeping user demand low. That was until Starlink came along, and provided high-speed, low-latency internet access using a fleet of thousands of satellites in Low Earth orbit.

Starlink has already ruffled feathers due to concerns around light pollution and space junk in particular. Now, it appears that China may be readying its own competing constellation to avoid being crowded out of low orbits by the increasingly-popular service.

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The Many Robots That Ventured Into The Chernobyl NPP #4 Reactor

June 22, 2023 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Before the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP, spelled ‘Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian) disaster in 1986, there had been little need for radiation-resistant robots to venture into high-risk zones.

Yet in the aftermath of the massive steam explosion at the #4 reactor that ripped the building apart — and spread radioactive material across the USSR and Europe — such robots were badly needed to explore and provide clean-up services. The robots which were developed and deployed in a rush are the subject of a recent video by [The Chornobyl Family].

While some robots were more successful than others, with the MF-2 remote mine handling robot suffering electronic breakdowns, gradually the robots became more refined. As over the years the tasks shifted from disaster management to clean-up and management of the now entombed #4 reactor, so too did the robots. TR-4 and TR-5 were two of the later robots that were developed to take samples of material within the stricken reactor, with many more generations to follow.

The video also reveals the fate of many of these robots. Some are buried in a radioactive disposal site, others are found on the Pripyat terrain, whether set up as a tourist piece, or buried in shrubbery. What’s beyond doubt is that it are these robots that provided invaluable help and saved countless lives, thanks to the engineers behind them.

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Inside Digital Calipers

June 22, 2023 by Al Williams 51 Comments

If you do any kind of machining, 3D printing, or PCB layout, you probably have at least considered buying a pair of calipers. Old-fashioned ones had a dial and were mechanical devices, but lately, digital ones have become quite affordable. We keep meaning to tear a set of ours apart to see what’s inside, but thanks to [learnelectronics], we don’t have to — the video below provides a fascinating look at what’s inside a cheap pair of Harbor Freight calipers.

Honestly, it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to figure out how far down a bar you are. The trick is the caliper has to be super accurate. Oddly enough, the cheap calipers examined use capacitors as a sensing element.

There is a long flexible PCB stuck to the sliding part with conductive pads. The display unit is also a printed circuit and manages the battery, the display, and the other half of the capacitive sensor. If you want a more detailed explanation of how the sensor actually works, check out capsense.com. If you note, the pattern on the sliding part has traces that look like a square wave, and half have a different phase than the other half. These are the sine plates and the cosine plates. A 100 kHz signal flows through the capacitor, and it is possible to read the direction of travel and the amount of travel easily.

The calipers are very accurate, but it’s possible to improve them. A more practical project is to make them communicate with the outside world.

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A Pico-Based ZX Spectrum Emulator

June 21, 2023 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

The ZX Spectrum was a popular computer of the 8-bit era. Now, it’s possible to emulate this machine on a microcontroller so cheap that it’s literally been given away on the front cover of magazines. Yes, we’re talking about the Pico ZX Spectrum project.

The project consists of all the necessary code to emulate a ZX Spectrum upon the hardware of the RP2040 microcontroller that makes up the Raspberry Pi Pico. The community has then taken this code and run with it, using it as the basis for all manner of different ZX Spectrum builds. If so desired, you can go barebones and use the Pico to run a ZX Spectrum off a breadboard with HDMI video output. Alternatively, you can build something like the PicoZX from [Bobricius]. The handheld computer features a PCB-based housing, along with an LCD and an integrated keyboard. Other configurations support features like USB keyboards, VGA outputs, and working sound output.

It’s great to see a classic 8-bit computer reimagined in all kinds of new tribute form factors. The Spectrum was always beloved for its neat all-in-one design, and there are several modern remixes that riff on that theme. The fact that they can all be powered by a cheap single-board microcontroller is all the more astounding. Video after the break.

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An Unexpected Upset In EV Charging Standards

June 21, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 52 Comments

Last November, Tesla open-sourced parts of its charging infrastructure, not-so-humbly unveiling it as the North American Charging Standard (NACS). It’s finally taking off with a number of manufacturers signing on.

Companies launching “standards” based on their previously proprietary technology in opposition to an established alternative usually leads to standards proliferation. However, with recent announcements from Ford, GM, and Rivian that they would begin supporting NACS in their vehicles, it seems a new dominant standard is supplanting CCS (and the all-but-dead CHAdeMO) in North America.

As Tesla already has the most extensive charging network on the continent and has begun opening it up for other EVs, it makes sense that other marques would want to support NACS, if nothing else to satiate customer demand for a dead-simple charging experience. Dongles are annoying enough for plugging in an external monitor. Having to mess with one while handling high-power electrical connections is less than ideal, to say the least.

If you want to add NACS to your own EV project, the standard is here. We’ve discussed some of the different standards before as well as work toward wirelessly charging EVs (besides the inductive charger on the EV1). It certainly seems like the time to get in on the ground floor of an EV charging empire with an army of Charglas.