Gas-Powered Fly Swatter Slightly Over-Engineered

July 10, 2023 by 10 Comments

Any good flyswatter ought to be able to break through a hefty piece of wood. At least, that is how [Finn] explains the design philosophy behind this enormous, overpowered flyswatter. Although we don’t know if everyone needs as robust a machine as this to deal with a minor annoyance like a house fly, we can certainly appreciate the over-engineered, extremely powerful (and dangerous) machine that can swat flies but also break through a two-by-four with ease.

The build comes to us in two parts, with the first part documenting the construction of some of the parts of the flyswatter, including the piston-driven gas cylinder. As a bit of a tangent, [Finn] first tests this part by using it to shoot lemons at pieces of plywood. After this initial testing of the gas cylinder, a cam mechanism is installed on the top, and the gas cylinder is slightly modified to pull on a piece of Dyneema rope attached to the cam. At the other end of the rope is a long metal lever with the flyswatter on the end, in this case, made out of a sheet of laser-cut plate steel.

With the addition of a few safety features, like a spring-assisted bumper to keep the flyswatter from swinging too far and hitting its operator, the machine is ready for use. It also eventually received some other upgrades as well including extra weights to prevent the flyswatter from bouncing after firing and a reinforced metal rod to hold the flyswatter after its demonstrations on various dimensional lumber destroyed it. In all likelihood, this is the largest insect-control device we’ve seen since this microwave-powered bug zapper. Now if you are building an insect…

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Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Slackware 15

July 10, 2023 by 50 Comments

As a recent emigre from the Ubuntu Linux distribution to Manjaro, I’ve had the chance to survey the field as I chose a new distro, and I realised that there’s a whole world of operating systems out there that we all know about, but which few of us really know. Hence this is the start of what I hope will be a long-running series, in which I try different operating systems in my everyday life as a Hackaday writer, to find out about them and then to see whether they can deliver on the promise of giving me a stable platform on which to earn a living.

For that they need an internet connection and a web browser up-to-date enough to author Hackaday stories, as well as a decent graphics package. In addition to using the OS every day though, I’ll also be taking a look at what makes it different from all the others, what its direction and history is, and how user-friendly it is as an experience. Historical systems such as CP/M are probably out of the question as are extremely esoteric ones such as the famous TempleOS, but this still leaves plenty of choice for an operating system tourist. Join me then, as I try all the operating systems.

A Distro From The 1990s, Today

A desktop mini tower PC with monitor showing the Slackware boot screen
The Hackaday test PC gets its first outing.

When deciding where to start on this road, there was an obvious choice. Slackware was the first Linux-based distribution I tried back in 1995, I’m not sure which version it was , but it came to me via a magazine coverdisk. It was by no means the first OS that captured my attention as I’d been an Amiga user for quite a few years at that point, but at the moment I can’t start with AmigaOS as I don’t have nay up-to-date Amiga-compatible hardware.

July 2023 also marks the 30th anniversary for the distro making it the oldest one still in active development, so this seems the perfect month to start this series with the descendant of my first Linux distro. Slackware 15 comes as a 3.8 GB ISO file download for 64-bit computers, and my target for the distro was an old desktop PC with an AMD processor and a big-enough spinning rust hard disk which had been a high-end gaming system a little over ten years ago. Not the powerhouse it once was, but it cost me nothing and it’s adequate for my needs. Installed on a USB Flash drive the Slackware installer booted, and I was ready to go. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Slackware 15” →

Kim-1: Memory Problem Resolved

July 10, 2023 by 20 Comments

At the very start of the personal computer revolution, there were relatively inexpensive boards with little more than a CPU, some memory, a display, and switches or a keypad. Some of these had expansion ports meant to allow you to build up, and some were just “trainers” to learn about computers. While you could argue that the Altair fell into this category, it had a case and a proper bus. The computers we are thinking about were usually just on a single board and — with luck — had an edge connector for expansion. Perhaps the most famous of these was the KIM-1 and [Old VCR] shows us how he brought one back to life.

These were highly popular mainly because of the low price of $245 back in 1976. For that price you got a calculator-style keyboard and LED display, 1K of RAM, and 2K of ROM. [Old VCR] has several and noticed that one was developing memory problems.

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The ThinkPad You All Wish You Had, With A Brain That’s Not Ancient

July 10, 2023 by 26 Comments

An IBM (or, later, Lenovo) ThinkPad is a popular choice in our community. They’re prized for their rugged design, longevity, and good software support. Over the many years that the line has been available, there have been a few models which have captured the attention more than others, and among those, probably the most sought-after is the ThinkPad 701c. It would be an unremarkable mid-1990s 486 laptop were it not for the party piece of that flip-out butterfly keyboard (see video, below). [Karl Buchka] has one that’s profoundly dead, and rather than use it as a novelty paperweight, he’s giving it a new lease of life with a Framework motherboard.

This is very much a work in progress, so there will be plenty more to come, but so far, he’s taken the display panel from an iPad and made it work with the Framework board, and designed an entirely new lower case for the Thinkpad. This will hold the Framework board with its USB-C ports at the edge, so in the place of its USB-based expansion modules, he’s made a custom external port replicator. Meanwhile, a Teensy handles that unique keyboard. We’re told that the design files will all eventually be put online should anyone else want to try.

We’d normally be slightly upset were someone to butcher something as unusual as a 701c, however, in thic ase we can see that it turns a broken computer into one that should see quite a bit of use.  We can’t help envying him this project.

Understandably not many 701c owners have dived inside their machines, but we have previously brought you a contemporary processor upgrade. If you’ve never seen the 701c’s keyboard — or you just want to see it again — here you go:

Thanks [Ł. Juszczak] for the tip.

Enhance VR Immersion By Shoehorning An Ambilight Into A Headset

July 9, 2023 by 6 Comments

Everyone wants a wider field of view in their VR headsets, but that’s not an easy nut to crack. [Statonwest] shows there’s a way to get at least some of the immersion benefits with a bit of simple hardware thanks to the VR Ambilight.

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A Quick Look At The Hilbert Transform

July 9, 2023 by 30 Comments

While the Fourier transform gets all the attention, there are other transforms that engineers and mathematicians use to transform signals from one form to another. Sometimes you use a transform to make a signal more amenable to analysis. Other times, you do it because you want to manipulate it, and the transform is easier to change than the original signal. [Electroagenda] explains the Hilbert transform, which is often used to generate single-sideband signals.

The math behind the transformation is pretty hairy. However, if you understand the Fourier transformer, you can multiply the Fourier transform by -i sgn(ω), but that isn’t really going to help you much in a practical sense. If you don’t want to bog down in the math, skip immediately to section two of the post. That’s where it focuses more on the practical effect of the transform. You can think of the transform as a function that produces a 90 degree phase shift with a constant gain. For negative frequencies, the rotation is 90 degrees and for positive frequencies, the shift is negative.

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Hackaday Links: July 9, 2023

July 9, 2023 by 8 Comments

Good news this week from Mars, where Ingenuity finally managed to check in with its controllers after a long silence. The plucky helicopter went silent just after nailing the landing on its 52nd flight back on April 26, and hasn’t been heard from since. Mission planners speculated that Ingenuity, which needs to link to the Perseverance rover to transmit its data, landed in a place where terrain features were blocking line-of-sight between the two. So they weren’t overly concerned about the blackout, but still, one likes to keep in touch with such an irreplaceable asset. The silence was broken last week when Perseverance finally made it to higher ground, allowing the helicopter to link up and dump the data from the last flight. The goal going forward is to keep Ingenuity moving ahead of the rover, acting as a scout for interesting places to explore, which makes it possible that we’ll see more comms blackouts. Ingenuity may be more than ten-fold over the number of flights that were planned, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for retirement quite yet.

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