A Clock Created With Conway’s Life

March 11, 2017 by Adam Fabio 22 Comments

Conway’s life has to be the most enduring zero-player computer game in history. Four simple cellular automaton rules have been used to create amazing simulations since the 1970’s. The latest is an entire digital clock implemented in life. StackExchange user [dim] created this simulation in response to a challenge from [Joe Z]. We have to admit that we didn’t believe it at first, but you can run it yourself by importing [dim’s] gist to the online Javascript Conway’s Life Simulator. To say this is impressive would be an understatement. We don’t know exactly how long it took [dim] to build this clock, but the challenge has been around since August of 2016.

[Dim] does a pretty good job of describing exactly how the clock works. The timebase is at the top. Below it is clock distribution and counters. After that come counters, latches, and lookup tables. Data moves around the clock in the form of gliders. P30 (aka Queen Bee) gliders to be exact. It might make things simpler to think of the glider paths as circuit traces, and the gliders themselves as clock pulses.

We couldn’t get over all the little details in this design. If you zoom way in, you can see all the lookup table patterns have been annotated, much in the way a schematic would be. For [Dim’s] next feat, we hope he takes on [Joe Z’s] Tetris challenge!

Conway’s life is like honey for hackers. We’ve seen it running on our own Hackaday Badge. We’ve even seen clocks that run the game on their display. Someone needs to implement a clock that runs the game that runs this clock. Clockception, anyone?

Light Replaces Electrons For Giant Vector-Graphics Asteroids Game

March 8, 2017 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

For all its simplicity, the arcade classic Asteroids was engaging in the extreme, with the ping of the laser, the rumble of the rocket, the crash of crumbling space rocks, and that crazy warble when the damn flying saucers made an appearance. Atari estimates that the game has earned operators in excess of $500 million since it was released in 1979. That’s two billion quarters, and we’ll guess a fair percentage of those coins came from the pockets of Hackaday’s readers and staff alike.

One iconic part of Asteroids was the vector display. Each item on the field was drawn as a unit by the CRT’s electron beam dancing across the phosphor rather than raster-scanned like TV was at the time. The simple graphics were actually pretty hard to create, and with that in mind, [standupmaths] decided to take a close look at the vector display of Asteroids and try to recreate it using a laser.

To be fair, [Seb Lee-Delisle] does all the heavy lifting here, with [standupmaths] providing context on the history and mathematics of the original vector display. [Seb] is a digital artist by trade, and has at the ready a 4-watt RGB laser projector for light shows and displays. Using the laser as a replacement for the CRT’s electron beam, [Seb] was able to code a reasonably playable vector-graphic version of Asteroids on a large projections screen. Even the audio is faithful to the original. The real treat comes when the laser is slowed and a little smoke added to show us how each item is traced out in order.

All [Seb]’s code is posted on GitHub, so if you have a laser projector handy, by all means go for it. Or just whip up a custom vector display for your own tabletop version of Asteroids.

Continue reading “Light Replaces Electrons For Giant Vector-Graphics Asteroids Game” →

Simple Marble Machine Captivates The Eyes

March 5, 2017 by Manuel Rodriguez-Achach 21 Comments

Marble machines are the kind of useless mechanisms that everybody loves. Their sole purpose is to route marbles through different paths for your viewing pleasure. They can be extremely complicated contraptions, and sometimes that is the precisely the point. However, even a simple mechanism can be delightful to watch. [Denha] just uploaded his latest creation, using a spring as elevator and a simple zig-zag path.

The construction is relatively simple, a spring with the appropriate pitch for the steel balls size is used as an elevator. The spring is driven by a small electric motor via a couple of gears, and a wooden zig-zag path for the marbles lies next to the spring. The marbles go up with the spring and return in the wooden path in an endless journey.

We believe that a serious hacker should build a marble machine at least once in their life. We have posted several of them, from simple ones to other more complicated designs that require careful craftsmanship. [Denha]’s Youtube channel is full of good ideas to inspire your first project. In any case, watching a marble machine at work is quite a nice, relaxing experience.

Continue reading “Simple Marble Machine Captivates The Eyes” →

Wimshurst Machines: High Voltage From The Gods

March 3, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 38 Comments

The Wimshurst machine is one of the oldest and best known electrostatic machines, consisting of its iconic two counter rotating disks and two Leyden jars. Most often you see someone hand cranking it, producing sparks, though we’ve seen it used for much more, including for powering a smoke precipitator for cleaning up smoke and even for powering a laser.

It works through an interesting sequence of events. Most explanations attempt to cram it all into one picture, requiring some major mental gymnastics to visualize. This often means people give up, resigned to assume these work through some mythical mechanics that defy a mortal’s ability to understand.

So instead, let’s do a step-by-step explanation.

Continue reading “Wimshurst Machines: High Voltage From The Gods” →

Raiders Of The Lost OS: Reclaiming A Piece Of Polish IT History

March 3, 2017 by James Hobson 48 Comments

In today’s digital era, we almost take for granted that all our information is saved and backed up, be it on our local drives or in the cloud — whether automatically, manually, or via some other service. For information from decades past, that isn’t always the case, and recovery can be a dicey process. Despite the tricky challenges, the team at [Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante] and [mera400.pl], as well as researchers and scientists from various museums, institutions, and more all came together in the attempt to recover the Polish CROOK operating system believed to be stored on five magnetic tapes.

Originally stored at the Warsaw Museum of Technology, the tapes were ideally preserved, but — despite some preliminary test prep — the museum’s tape reader kept hanging at the 800 BPI NRZI encoded header, even though the rest of the tape was 1600 BPI phase encoding. Some head scratching later, the team decided to crack open their Qualstar 1052 tape reader and attempt to read the data directly off the circuits themselves!!

Continue reading “Raiders Of The Lost OS: Reclaiming A Piece Of Polish IT History” →

A Meteorite Gift Box

March 1, 2017 by Adam Fabio 10 Comments

[Justin Cole] was looking for the perfect birthday gift ~~from~~ for his wife. After some pondering, the answer fell from the sky in the form of a meteorite. The problem was how to present it. They don’t exactly make meteorite gift boxes, so [Justin] decided to build one of his own design. The box has a Russian space age theme reflecting the meteorite’s country of origin. The theme also made it a perfect entry for Hackaday’s Sci-Fi contest.

The gift box started life as an old steel film reel box. Some of us may still have boxes like this in our basements, protecting old 8mm family movies. [Justin] modeled the box in Solidworks, then added in his custom modifications. An angled walnut platform forms the stage. In the center of the stage is a 3D printed cone. The meteorite itself sits on a platform in the middle of the cone. A magnet keeps the iron meteorite in place.

A Neopixel ring provides indirect lighting below the meteorite. The ring is controlled by an Arduino, which also drives a couple of vibration motors. The motors create a hum in time to the changing colors of the ring. The whole package creates a neat way to present a rock from space.

We really like that [Justin] didn’t go over the top with sound effects, smoke, or bright lights. More importantly, [Justin’s] wife loved it, and couldn’t wait to share a video of the box with her friends.

It’s not to late to get in on the Hackaday Sci-Fi contest action. You have until Monday evening to enter your own creation.

The Fab Lab Next Door: DIY Semiconductors

February 25, 2017 by Dan Maloney 39 Comments

You think you’ve got it going on because you can wire up some eBay modules and make some LEDs blink, or because you designed your own PCB, or maybe even because you’re an RF wizard. Then you see that someone is fabricating semiconductors at home, and you realize there’s always another mountain to climb.

We were mesmerized when we first saw [Sam Zeloof]’s awesome garage-turned-semiconductor fab lab. He says he’s only been acquiring equipment since October of 2016, but in that short time he’s built quite an impressive array of gear; a spin-coating centrifuge, furnaces, tons of lab supplies and toxic chemicals, a turbomolecular vacuum pump, and a vacuum chamber that looks like something from a CERN lab.

[Sam]’s goal is to get set up for thin-film deposition so he can make integrated circuits, but with what he has on hand he’s managed to build a few diodes, some photovoltaic cells, and a couple of MOSFETs. He’s not growing silicon crystals and making his own wafers — yet — but relies on eBay to supply his wafers. The video below is a longish intro to [Sam]’s methods, and his YouTube channel has a video tour of his fab and a few videos on making specific devices.

[Sam] credits [Jeri Ellsworth]’s DIY semiconductor efforts, which we’ve covered before, as inspiration for his fab, and we’re going to be watching to see where he takes it from here. For now, though, we’d better boost the aspiration level of our future projects.

Continue reading “The Fab Lab Next Door: DIY Semiconductors” →