An auspicious anniversary passed for me this week, as it’s a decade since I started writing for Hackaday. In that time this job has taken me all over Europe, it’s shown me the very best and most awesome things our community has to offer, and I hope that you have enjoyed my attempts to share all of that with you. It’s worth a moment to reflect on the last ten years in terms of what has made our world during that time. Continue reading “Reflections On Ten Years With The Wrencher”
It’s a blustery January day outside Lakehurst, New Jersey. The East Coast of North America is experiencing its worst weather in decades, and all civilian aircraft have been grounded the past four days, from Florida to Maine. For the past two days, that order has included military aircraft, including those certified “all weather” – with one notable exception. A few miles offshore, rocking and bucking in the gales, a U.S. Navy airship braves the storm. Sleet pelts the plexiglass windscreen and ice sloughs off the gasbag in great sheets as the storm rages on, and churning airscrews keep the airship on station.
If you know history you might be a bit confused: the rigid airship USS Akron was lost off the coast of New Jersey, but in April, not January. Before jumping into the comments with your corrections, note the story I’ve begun is set not in 1933, but in 1957, a full generation later.
The airship caught in the storm is no experimental Zeppelin, but an N-class blimp, the workhorse of the cold-war fleet. Yes, there was a cold war fleet of airships; we’ll get to why further on. The most important distinction is that unlike the last flight of the Akron, this story doesn’t end in tragedy, but in triumph. Tasked to demonstrate their readiness, five blimps from Lakehurst’s Airship Airborne Early-Warning Squadron 1 remained on station with no gaps in coverage for the ten days from January 15th to 24th. The blimps were able to swap places, watch-on-watch, and provide continuous coverage, in spite of weather conditions that included 60 knot winds and grounded literally every other aircraft in existence at that time. Continue reading “What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance”
The Industrial Revolution was powered by steam, with boilers being a crucial part of each steam engine, yet also one of the most dangerous elements due to the high pressures involved. The five Lancashire boilers at the Claymills Pumping Station are relatively benign in this regard, as they operate at a mere 80 PSI unlike e.g. high-pressure steam locomotives that can push 200 – 300 PSI. This doesn’t mean that refurbishing one of these boilers is an easy task and doesn’t involve plugging a lot of leaks, as the volunteers at this pumping station found out.
At this Victorian-era pumping station there are a total of five of these twin-flue Lancashire boilers, all about 90 years old after a 1930s-era replacement, with them all gradually being brought back into service. The subject of the video is boiler 1, which was last used in 1971 before the pumping station was decommissioned. Boilers 2 and 3 were known to be in a pretty bad condition, and they needed a replacement for boiler 5 as it was about to go down for maintenance soon.
Although the basic idea behind a Lancashire boiler is still to boil water to create steam, it’s engineered to do this as efficiently as possible to save fuel. This is why it has two flues where the burning coal deposits its thermal energy, which then goes on to heat the surrounding water. The resulting pressure from the steam also means that there are a lot of safeties to ensure that things do not get too spicy.
Continue reading “How To Restore Your 19th-Century Lancashire Boiler To Hold 120 PSI”
Although digital computers are – much like their human computer counterparts – about performing calculations, another crucial element is that of memory. After all, you need to fetch values from somewhere and store them afterwards. Sometimes values need to be stored for long periods of time, making memory one of the most important elements, yet also one of the most difficult ones. Back in the 1950s the storage options were especially limited, with a 1959 Bell Labs film reel that [Connections Museum] digitized running through the bleeding edge of 1950s storage technology.
After running through the basics of binary representation and the difference between sequential and random access methods, we’re first taking a look at punch cards, which can be read at a blistering 200 cards/minute, before moving onto punched tape, which comes in a variety of shapes to fit different applications.
Electromechanical storage in the form of relays are popular in e.g. telephone exchanges, as they’re very fast. These use two-out-of-five code to represent the phone numbers and corresponding five relay packs, allowing the crossbar switch to be properly configured.
Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Bleeding-Edge Memory Devices Of 1959”
Today, we take ice for granted. But having ice produced in your home is a relatively modern luxury. As early as 1750 BC, ancient people would find ice on mountains or in cold areas and would harvest it. They’d store it, often underground, with as much insulation as they could produce given their level of technology.
The key to Persian icemaking was yakhchāls. Not all of them were the same, but they typically consisted of an underground pit with a conical chimney structure. In addition, they often had shade walls and ice pits as well as access to a water supply.
The conical shape optimizes the solar chimney effect, where the sun heats air, which then rises. The top was typically not open, although there is some thought that translucent marble may have plugged the top to admit light while blocking airflow. yakhchālThe solar chimney produces an updraft that tends to cool the interior. The underground portion of the yakhchāl has colder air, as any hot air rises above the surface.
Imagine a line of affordable toys controlled by the player’s brainwaves. By interpreting biosignals picked up by the dry electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes in an included headset, the game could infer the wearer’s level of concentration, through which it would be possible to move physical objects or interact with virtual characters. You might naturally assume such devices would be on the cutting-edge of modern technology, perhaps even a spin-off from one of the startups currently investigating brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
But the toys in question weren’t the talk of 2025’s Consumer Electronics Show, nor 2024, or even 2020. In actual fact, the earliest model is now nearly as old as the original iPhone. Such is the fascinating story of a line of high-tech toys based on the neural sensor technology developed by a company called Neurosky, the first of which was released all the way back in 2009.
Yet despite considerable interest leading up to their release — fueled at least in part by the fact that one of the models featured Star Wars branding and gave players the illusion of Force powers — the devices failed to make any lasting impact, and have today largely fallen into obscurity. The last toy based on Neurosky’s technology was released in 2015, and disappeared from the market only a few years later.
I had all but forgotten about them myself, until I recently came across a complete Mattel Mindflex at a thrift store for $8.99. It seemed a perfect opportunity to not only examine the nearly 20 year old toy, but to take a look at the origins of the product, and find out what ultimately became of Neurosky’s EEG technology. Was the concept simply ahead of its time? In an era when most people still had flip phones, perhaps consumers simply weren’t ready for this type of BCI. Or was the real problem that the technology simply didn’t work as advertised?
Continue reading “The Complicated Legacy Of Mind Controlled Toys”
Although infrastructure like a 19th-century pumping station generally tends to be quietly decommissioned and demolished, sometimes you get enough people looking at such an object and wondering whether maybe it’d be worth preserving. Such was the case with the Claymills Pumping Station in Staffordshire, England. After starting operations in the late 19th century, the pumping station was in active use until 1971. In a recent documentary by the Claymills Pumping Station Trust, as the start of their YouTube channel, the derelict state of the station at the time is covered, as well as its long and arduous recovery since they acquired the site in 1993.
After its decommissioning, the station was eventually scheduled for demolition. Many parts had by that time been removed for display elsewhere, discarded, or outright stolen for the copper and brass. Of the four Woolf compounding rotative beam engines, units A and B had been shut down first and used for spare parts to keep the remaining units going. Along with groundwater intrusion and a decaying roof, it was in a sorry state after decades of neglect. Restoring it was a monumental task.
Continue reading “How Volunteers Saved A Victorian-Era Pumping Station From Demolition”
