A Soyuz-2.1b rocket booster with a Fregat upper stage and the Luna 25 lunar lander blasts off from a launchpad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia.

Luna 25’s Demise: Raising Fundamental Questions About Russia’s Space Program

August 21, 2023 by 79 Comments

The recent news that Russia’s Luna 25 Moon lander had made an unexpected lithobraking detour into the Moon’s surface, rather than the expected soft touchdown was met by a variety of responses, ranging from dismay to outright glee, much of it on account of current geopolitical considerations. Yet politics aside, the failure of this mission casts another shadow on the prospects of Russia’s attempts to revive the Soviet space program after a string of failures, including its ill-fated Mars 96 and Fobos-Grunt Mars missions, the latter of which also destroyed China’s first Mars orbiter (Yinghuo-1) and ignited China’s independent Mars program.

To this day, only three nations have managed to land on the Moon in a controlled fashion: the US, China, and the Soviet Union. India may soon join this illustrious list if its Chandrayaan-3 mission’s Vikram lander dodges the many pitfalls of soft touchdowns on the Moon’s surface. While Roscosmos has already started internal investigation, it does cast significant doubt on the viability of the Russian Luna-Glob (‘Lunar Sphere’) lunar exploration program.

Will Russia manage to pick up where the Soviet Union left off in 1976 with the Luna 24 lunar sample return mission?

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Mass Production 3D Printing Hack Chat

August 21, 2023 by 13 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, August 23 at noon Pacific for the Mass Production 3D Printing Hack Chat with Gabe Bentz!

We’ll take a wild guess and say that right now, within arm’s length of wherever you’re reading this, there’s something that was produced by injection molding. Look around; it’s there someplace, and whatever it is, thousands or perhaps millions of other identical artifacts were produced along with it, all by squeezing hot plastic into intricately machined metal tools.

It’s not much of an overstatement to say that, for good or for ill, the world is made from injection-molded plastic. But not every product can support the often considerable up-front costs associated with injection molding. The tooling needed is often remarkably complicated and correspondingly expensive, and running the machines that actually do the molding is expensive and highly specialized. Unless you’re committed to making a lot of parts, injection molding might just be out of your league.

join-hack-chatBut does that mean that medium-sized runs of parts are out of luck? Not at all! Gabe Bentz, founder and CEO of Slant 3D, is passionate about filling the manufacturing void where injection molding is prohibitive, either by virtue of start-up costs or because the part design is just not possible to manufacture. His massive print farms are busy day in and day out cranking out parts for customers that otherwise couldn’t be made. So if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to run a print farm, and what kinds of design considerations make a part a candidate for mass production by 3D printing, drop by the chat and we’ll see what he has to tell us.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 23 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Resin Printer Temperature Mods And Continuous IPA Filtration

August 21, 2023 by 33 Comments

Two essential parts to producing successful resin 3D prints: keeping resin at its optimal temperature and lots and lots of IPA to clean the printed parts with after printing. Unfortunately, most consumer MSLA printers do not come with a resin tray heater, and tossing out IPA after every cleaning session because of some resin contamination is both wasteful and somewhat expensive. These are two things that can be fixed in a number of ways, with [Nick Wilson] going for the ‘crank it to 11’ option, using a high-tech, fully integrated solution for both problems.

The vat with IPA is kept clean through the use of a diaphragm pump that circulates the alcohol through two filter stages, one for larger — up to 5 micrometer — particulates and one for smaller 0.5-micrometer junk. A 405 nm LED lighting section before the filters is intended to cure any resin in the IPA, theoretically leaving the IPA squeaky clean by the time it’s returned to the vat.

For the resin tray heater, a more straightforward 12V 150 Watt silicone heater strip is stuck to the outside edge of the metal resin tray, along with a temperature-controlled relay that toggles the heater strip on and off until the resin reaches the desired temperature. None of these are necessarily expensive solutions, but they can be incredibly useful if you do a fair amount of resin printing.

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The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis: Unearthing Puzzles Of Warming Events Past

August 21, 2023 by 36 Comments

As the Earth continues to warm at a worrying rate, scientists continue to work to understand the processes and mechanisms at play. Amidst the myriad of climate-related theories and discussions, the clathrate gun hypothesis stands out not only for its intriguing name but for the profound implications it might have on our understanding of global warming events.

Delving into this hypothesis is akin to reading a detective novel written by Mother Earth, with clues hidden deep beneath the ocean and Arctic ice. It’s a great example of how scientists attempt to predict the future by unpicking the mysteries of the past.

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Adding MMIO RAM On The RP2040

August 21, 2023 by 19 Comments

[Dmitry Grinberg] is an adept tinkerer who wanted a much larger RAM space on his Raspberry Pi 2040 (RP2040) than the measly 264kb on-board SRAM. The chip does support 16MB of off-flash memory via a QSPI bus, but this must be accessed explicitly rather than being memory mapped. With clever trickery involving XIP (Execute in Place), Dmitry mapped 8MB of external QSPI RAM into the address space.

XIP mode allows the chip to fetch data on-demand from an external chip and place it into RP2040 caches mapped at 0x10xxxxxx. The RP2040, although incredibly versatile, has a limitation – it can only perform read and execute operations in its XIP mode. The first step to solving this was to get data from persistent storage to RAM on boot. Armed with a dual-OR gate IC, an inverter, and two resistors, [Dmitry] can toggle the nCS pin that selects between flash and RAM. A first-stage bootloader copies the program from flash to RAM, then sets up XIP mode and launches into a second-stage loader.

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Building A Hydraulic Lego Excavator Using Standard Pneumatic Cylinders

August 21, 2023 by 12 Comments

Everyone already knows that Lego Technic is pretty rad when it comes to existing, pre-made kits, but there’s also quite a bit of hacking potential left. One such area is the lack of hydraulics in Lego Technic, an egregious oversight that [Brick Technology] simply had to correct. His effort results in a partially hydraulic, fully remote-controlled excavator. Rather than a traditional gear hydraulic pump as you’d expect in a real-life excavator, a custom peristaltic pump is used to move the fluid to the hydraulic cylinders (rams for our British and Oceanic friends).

The undercarriage is (sadly) purely electrical, with a slip-ring providing power to the electric final drives in the tracks, enabling it to spin around endlessly without limitations. Where the hydraulics come into play is in the excavator’s arm, with two hydraulic lift cylinders on the boom, one cylinder to control the stick, and a final cylinder to control the bucket. Rather than a hydraulic switch, the setup is simplified by using a single peristaltic pump per cylinder circuit.

Remote control and power are provided using the rather chonky BuWizz 3.0 Pro, which offers a wireless control link (here controlled using BrickController 2 on Android). Although original Lego cylinders were used, these are only intended for pneumatics, where it’s hoped that the used mixture of water and windscreen wiper fluid will prevent corrosion.

(Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip)

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the PCB without the case on, showing the screen, battery, and removable sensor

2023 Hackaday Prize: A Reusable Plant Monitor

August 20, 2023 by 6 Comments

[Ovidiu] cares for their house plants, trying to dial in the perfect soil humidity and light levels. However, many cheap monitors tend to rust after a few weeks of sitting in a damp, slightly acidic environment. By creating a custom plant monitor with a removable probe, not only can [Ovidiu] integrate better with their Home Assistant setup, but it will also be less wasteful.

The build starts with an ESP32-S3, a TP4056 charging circuit, a small e-ink display, and an AHT20 IC for air humidity and temperature. The ESP32 reads the probe using the capacitance measuring devices for touchpads built into the chip. Or course, a 450mAh battery provides a battery life of about 11 days. The probe is just a bare PCB with a connector at the top, making them cheap and easy to swap. They included pads on the probe for a thermistor for reading soil temperature, but this is optional. A handsome 3D-printed case wraps it all up nicely.

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