Can We Repurpose Old Wind Turbine Blades?

October 8, 2021 by Lewin Day 92 Comments

Wind turbines are a fantastic, cheap, renewable source of energy. However, nothing lasts forever, and over time, the blades of wind turbines fatigue and must be replaced. This then raises the question of what to do with these giant waste blades. Thankfully, a variety of projects are exploring just those possibilities.

A Difficult Recycling Problem

Around 85% of a modern wind turbine is recyclable. The problem is that wind turbine blades currently aren’t. The blades last around 20 to 25 years, and are typically made of fiberglass or carbon fiber. Consisting of high-strength fibers set in a resin matrix, these composite materials are incredibly difficult to recycle, as we’ve discussed previously. Unlike metals or plastics, they can’t just be melted down to be recast as fresh material. Couple this with the fact that wind turbine blades are huge, often spanning up to 300 feet long, and the problem gets harder. They’re difficult and expensive to transport and tough to chop up as well.

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Decoding SMD Part Markings

October 6, 2021 by Chris Lott 29 Comments

You’ve probably encountered this before — you have a circuit board that is poorly documented, and want to know the part number of a tiny SMD chip. Retro computer enthusiast [JohnK] recently tweeted about one such database that he recently found, entitled The Ultimate SMD Marking Codes Database. This data base is only a couple of years old judging from the Wayback Machine, but seems to be fairly exhaustive and can be found referenced in quite a few electronics forums.

Unlike their larger SMD siblings, these chips in question are so small that there is no room to print the entire part number on the device. Instead, the standard practice is for manufacturers use an abbreviated code of just a few characters. These codes are only unique to each part or package, and aren’t necessarily unique across an entire product line. And just because it is standard practice does not imply the marking codes themselves follow any standard whatsoever. This seemingly hodgepodge system works just fine for the development, procurement and manufacturing phases of a product’s lifecycle. It’s during the repair, refurbishment, or just hacking for fun phases where these codes can leave you scratching your head.

Several sites like the one [JohnK] found have been around for years, and adding yet another database to your toolbox is a good thing. But none of them will ever be exhaustive. There’s a good reason for that — maintaining such a database would be a herculean task. Just finding the part marking information for a known chip can be difficult. Some manufacturers put it clearly in the data sheet, and some refer you to other documentation which may or may not be readily available. And some manufacturers ask you to contact them for this information — presumably because it is dynamic changes from time to time. Continue reading “Decoding SMD Part Markings” →

Counting Down To The Final Atlas Rocket

October 4, 2021 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

The Atlas family of rockets have been a mainstay of America’s space program since the dawn of the Space Age, when unused SM-65 Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were refurbished and assigned more peaceful pursuits. Rather than lobbing thermonuclear warheads towards the Soviets, these former weapons of war carried the first American astronauts into orbit, helped build the satellite constellations that our modern way of life depends on, and expanded our knowledge of the solar system and beyond.

Naturally, the Atlas V that’s flying today looks nothing like the squat stainless steel rocket that carried John Glenn to orbit in 1962. Aerospace technology has evolved by leaps and bounds over the last 60 years, but by carrying over the lessons learned from each generation, the modern Atlas has become one of the most reliable orbital boosters ever flown. Since its introduction in 2002, the Atlas V has maintained an impeccable 100% success rate over 85 missions.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end. After more than 600 launches, United Launch Alliance (ULA) has announced that the final mission to fly on an Atlas has been booked. Between now and the end of the decade, ULA will fly 28 more missions on this legendary booster. By the time the last one leaves the pad the company plans to have fully transitioned to their new Vulcan booster, with the first flights of this next-generation vehicle currently scheduled for 2022.

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RORO Vessels: Driving Cars Across The Ocean

September 23, 2021 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

YouTube does a pretty good job of making itself a target for criticism, but one thing you can say about their algorithms: when they work, they really work. Case in point, the other day I found a suggestion in my feed for a very recent video about salvaging a shipwreck. I can’t begin to guess what combination of view history and metadata Google mined to come to the conclusion that I’d be interested in this video, but they hit the nail on the head.

But more importantly, their algorithmic assessment of my interests must have been a goldmine to them — or it could have been if I didn’t have a minefield of ad blockers protecting me — because I fell down a rabbit hole that led me to a bunch of interesting videos. As it turns out, the shipwreck in that first video was of a cargo ship that was carrying thousands of brand-new automobiles, which were all destroyed in the fire and subsequent capsizing of a “roll-on/roll-off” (RORO) vessel off the coast of Georgia (the state, not the country) in 2019.

Thus began my journey into RORO vessels, on which automobiles and other bulky cargo are transported around the world. And while my personal assessment of the interests of Hackaday readers probably is not as finely tuned as Google’s algos, I figured there’s a better than decent chance that people might enjoy tagging along too.

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Powering Up With USB: Untangling The USB Power Delivery Standards

September 16, 2021 by Maya Posch 37 Comments

Powering external devices directly from a PC’s I/O ports has been a thing long before USB was even a twinkle in an engineer’s eye. Some of us may remember the all too common PS/2 pass-through leads that’d tap into the 275 mA that is available via these ports. When USB was first released, it initially provided a maximum of 500 mA which USB 3.0 increased to 900 mA.

For the longest time, this provided power was meant only to provide a way for peripherals like keyboards, mice and similar trivial devices to be powered rather than require each of these to come with its own power adapter. As the number of computer-connected gadgets increased USB would become the primary way to not only power small devices directly, but to also charge battery-powered devices and ultimately deliver power more generally.

Which brings us to the USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) protocol. Confusingly, USB-PD encompasses a number of different standards, ranging from fixed voltage charging to Programmable Power Supply and Adjustable Voltage Supply. What are the exact differences between these modes, and how does one go about using them? Continue reading “Powering Up With USB: Untangling The USB Power Delivery Standards” →

A Rant On Personal Software Projects

September 14, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 41 Comments

Looking across your hard drive and GitHub, you might find hundreds of notes and skeletons of Git repositories. A veritable graveyard of software side projects. The typical flow for many of these projects is: get an idea, ruminate on the idea until it becomes exciting, eventually becoming more exciting than the current side project, notes are captured, a repository is created, and work begins at a blistering pace as the focus and excitement are there. There might be some rewrites or some changes in direction. Questions of whether the project is worthwhile or “what even should this project actually be” start to arise. Eventually, enthusiasm wanes as these questions continue to multiply. Progress slows as the path forward seems less clear-cut as it once did. The project is either sunset with a mournful promise to someday return or quietly put aside as something new and exciting comes to take its place. Sound familiar? Perhaps not, but the principles here could be helpful.

This particular article is largely a piece of opinion from one engineer to another. It’s about engineering the process by which you design a project to have better outcomes. There are many reasons why a project could be shelved or scrapped and not all of them are from a lack of clear project definition. In the case where it isn’t clear what the project is, it can be helpful to think about it in a more holistic/meta sense. There are two types of personal projects in broad strokes: technology demos and products.

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Pinning Tails On Satellites To Help Prevent Space Junk

September 13, 2021 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

Low Earth orbit was already relatively crowded when only the big players were launching satellites, but as access to space has gotten cheaper, more and more pieces of hardware have started whizzing around overhead. SpaceX alone has launched nearly 1,800 individual satellites as part of its Starlink network since 2019, and could loft as many as 40,000 more in the coming decades. They aren’t alone, either. While their ambitions might not be nearly as grand, companies such as Amazon and Samsung have announced plans to create satellite “mega-constellations” of their own in the near future.

At least on paper, there’s plenty of room for everyone. But what about when things go wrong? Should a satellite fail and become unresponsive, it’s no longer able to maneuver its way out of close calls with other objects in orbit. This is an especially troubling scenario as not everything in orbit around the Earth has the ability to move itself in the first place. Should two of these uncontrollable objects find themselves on a collision course, there’s nothing we can do on the ground but watch and hope for the best. The resulting hypervelocity impact can send shrapnel and debris flying for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers in all three dimensions, creating an extremely hazardous situation for other vehicles.

One way to mitigate the problem is to design satellites in such a way that they will quickly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up at the end of their mission. Ideally, the deorbit procedure could even activate automatically if the vehicle became unresponsive or suffered some serious malfunction. Naturally, to foster as wide adoption as possible, such a system would have to be cheap, lightweight, simple to integrate into arbitrary spacecraft designs, and as reliable as possible. A tall order, to be sure.

But perhaps not an impossible one. Boeing subsidiary Millennium Space Systems recently announced it had successfully deployed a promising deorbiting device developed by Tethers Unlimited. Known as the Terminator Tape, the compact unit is designed to rapidly slow down an orbiting satellite by increasing the amount of drag it experiences in the wispy upper atmosphere.

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