Hackaday Prize 2023: An Anti-Tremor Handle, With No Electronics

September 27, 2023 by 16 Comments

Many of us will have seen the various active assistive devices which have appeared over the last few years to help people with a hand tremor. Probably the best known was a fork with a set of servos and an accelerometer, that kept the end of the utensil steady despite the owner’s hand movements. It’s a field which has the potential to help many people, but it’s undeniable that such technology comes with a cost.

What if the same effect could be achieved passively, without all those electronics? It’s something [Jacob] is investigating with his mechanical anti-tremor cup handle. It’s a university project completed as part of his studies so it’s very much a work-in-progress which if we’re being fair isn’t quite there yet, but we think the potential in this idea of bringing a useful assistive device at least bears further attention.

The write-up is available as a Norwegian PDF file so takes a little bit of Google Translate cut and pasting for an Anglophone. Sadly due to what must be report format requirements set by the university it’s long on procedure and shorter on engineering calculations than we’d like, but there’s an attempt to calculate the properties of the helical springs in each of the joints to match the likely forces. Our intuition is that the design as shown would require significantly more mass on the end of it than that of the mug and beverage alone to achieve some form of stability, but despite that as we said it’s an interesting enough idea that it deserves more thought.

Hand tremor assistive devices have appeared more than once on these pages before, here’s one for soldering that enlists the aid of a camera gimbal.

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You’ve Got Mail: Faster And Faster We Go

September 27, 2023 by 9 Comments

When we last left the post office, they had implemented OCR to read even the sloppiest of handwriting. And to augment today’s 99% accuracy rate, there’s a center full of humans who can decipher the rest of those messy addresses with speed and aplomb. Before that, we took a look at many of the machines that make up the automated side of the post office’s movements. But what was being done to improve the customer experience during all of this time?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. In this installment, we’ll take a look at the development of vending machines and programs like Speed Mail, Missile Mail, and V-Mail (no, not voicemail!) as they relate to enhanced customer service over the years.

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String Art Build Uses CNC To Make Stringy Art

September 27, 2023 by 12 Comments

String art is as old as, well, string and something to hang it from. But, like most things, it gets more enjoyable when you involve a CNC. [Paul MH] went the whole hog with this build, creating a CNC string art builder that could handle the whole process, from placing the nails to running the string.

It’s an impressive build: you feed in an image, and the system calculates the location of the pins and the path that the string will need to follow. It then puts the nails into the board, pushes them in, and, with a custom attachment for the CNC, runs the string to create the art.

Of course, the path to this was filled with prototypes, failures, and dead ends. [Paul] has laid these out pretty well in the video for the project, which he just released. In this, problems like detecting when the nails are picked up and placed are detailed, and the prototypes and Rube Goldberg solutions that [Paul] came up with are covered.

Like all great projects, it is still a work in progress, but [Paul] has made some impressive progress, although he hasn’t posted the code and models for his custom parts yet. We’ve featured several string art builds, from polar platforms to fully formed commercial-grade builds that print your work for you.

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Do Bounties Hurt FOSS?

September 27, 2023 by 17 Comments

As with many things in life, motivation is everything. This also applies to the development of software, which is a field that has become immensely important over the past decades. Within a commercial context, the motivation  to write software is primarily financial, in that a company’s products are developed by individuals who are being financially compensated for their time. This is often different with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, where the motivation to develop the software is in many cases derived more out of passion and sometimes a wildly successful hobby rather than any financial incentives.

Yet what if financial incentives are added by those who have a vested interest in seeing certain features added or changed in a FOSS project? While with a commercial project it’s clear (or should be) that the paying customers are the ones whose needs are to be met, with a volunteer-based FOSS project the addition of financial incentives make for a much more fuzzy system. This is where FOSS projects like the Zig programming language have put down their foot, calling FOSS bounties ‘damaging’.

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Passive Components Get Better

September 27, 2023 by 42 Comments

When you want to talk about cool new components, you are probably thinking about chips or, these days, even modules. Passive components like resistors, capacitors, and inductors are a solved problem, right? [Darshill Patel] begs to differ. There is still innovation happening in the passive market, and he highlights some of the recent advances.

There are thick-film resistors that don’t need lead, for example. There are also supercapacitor modules with very low ESR. For inductors, at least one manufacturer is moving away from traditional wire loops and using flat wire windings instead. These have a larger cross-section, which reduces unwanted resistance. In addition, it offers more cooling area for heat dissipation.

Of course, passive components have never been as simple as people think. Picking a capacitor’s value is only half the battle. You also need to consider the material to optimize how it works in your design. Wirewound resistors are also inductors unless you get special non-inductive ones that use special wiring techniques to cancel much of the parasitic inductance.

It shows that you can never stop learning about even the simplest components. We are still waiting to figure out what we want to do with a memristor. While tiny surface mount components are good for some assembly reasons, they also have helped reduce unwanted component effects.

Will Nickel-Hydrogen Cells Be The Energy Storage Holy Grail?

September 27, 2023 by 38 Comments

You may have heard us here remarking in the past, that if we had a pound, dollar, or Euro for every miracle battery technology story we heard that was going to change the world, we would surely be very wealthy by now. It’s certainly been the case that many such pronouncements refer to promising chemistries that turn out only to be realizable in a lab, but here there’s news of one with a bit of pedigree. Nickel hydrogen batteries have a long history of use in space, and there’s a startup producing them now for use on the ground. Could they deliver the energy storage Holy Grail?

The cathode in a nickel-hydrogen battery is formed by nickel hydroxide, and the anode is formed of hydrogen. If a gas as an anode sounds far fetched, we’re guessing that their structure is similar to the zinc-air battery, in which zinc hydroxide forms in a paste of powdered zinc, and works against oxygen from the air over a porous conductive support. What gives them their exciting potential is their ability to take more than 30,000 charge/discharge cycles, and their relative safety when compared to lithium ion cells. Hydrogen in a pressure vessel might not seem the safest of things to have around, but the chemistry is such that as the pressure increases it reacts to form water. The cost of the whole thing is reduced further as new catalysts have replaced the platinum used by NASA on spacecraft.

We really hope that these batteries will be a success, but as always we’ll wait and see before calling it. They may well be competing by then with the next generation of zinc-air cells.

Dead E. Ruxpin Appears Alive And Well

September 26, 2023 by 12 Comments

What are you doing to scare trick-or-treaters this Halloween? Surely something, right? Well, Hackaday alum [CameronCoward] certainly has his holiday under control with Dead E. Ruxpin, a murderous, cassette tape-controlled animatronic bear.

Readers of a certain vintage will no doubt see the correlation to Teddy Ruxpin, an animatronic bear from the 1980s whose mouth moved as it read stories from cassette tapes. Cleverly, the engineers used one stereo channel for the story’s audio, and the other channel to control the bear’s mouth.

Dead E. Ruxpin takes this idea and expands it, using the same two channels to send audio and control three servo motors that move both arms and the mouth. How is this possible? By sending tones built from one or more frequencies.

Essentially, [Cameron] assigned a frequency to each movement: mouth open/closed, and left and/or right arm up or down. These are all, of course, synced up with specific points in the audio so Dead E. doesn’t just move randomly, he dances along with the music.

The bear is actually a hand puppet, which leaves room for a 3D-printed skeleton that holds the RP2040 and the servos and of course, moves the puppet’s parts. We can’t decide if we prefer the bulging bloodshot eyes, or think the cutesy original eyes would have made a scarier bear. Anyway, check out the build/demo video after the break to see it in action.

Are you now into Teddy Ruxpin? Here’s a bit more about those scare bears. And don’t forget, Halloween Hackfest runs now until October 31st.

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