Wear Your Fave Cassette Tapes As A Necklace With This 3D Printed Adapter

December 29, 2022 by Lewin Day 47 Comments

While packing merch for a recent gig, I realised I had the opportunity to do something a little fun. I’d released an album on tape, and spent a little extra to ensure the cassette itself was a thing of beauty. It deserved to be seen, rather than hidden away in a case on a shelf. I wanted to turn this piece of musical media into a necklace.

Of course, cassette tapes aren’t meant to be used in this way. Simply throwing a chain through the cassette would lead to tape reeling out everywhere. Thus, I fired up some CAD software and engineered a solution to do the job! Here’s how I built an adapter to turn any cassette tape into a cool necklace.

Find the design on Thingiverse, and more details below!

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Lo-Fi Fun: Beer Can Microphones

December 27, 2022 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

Sometimes, you just need an easy win, right? This is one of those projects. A couple months back, I was looking at my guitars and guitar accessories and thought, it is finally time to do something with the neck I’ve had lying around for years. In trying to decide a suitable body for the slapdash guitar I was about to build, I found myself at a tractor supply store for LEGO-related reasons. (Where else are you going to get a bunch of egg cartons without eating a bunch of eggs?) I noticed that they happened to also stock ammo boxes. Bam! It’s sturdy, it opens easily, and it’s (very) roughly guitar body shaped. I happily picked one up and started scheming on the way home.

Having never built a cigar box guitar before and being of a certain vintage, I’m inclined to turn to books instead of the Internet, so I stocked up from the library. Among my early choices was Making Poor Man’s Guitars by Shane Speal, who is widely considered to be the guru on the subject. In flipping through the book, I noticed the beer can microphone project and was immediately taken by the aesthetic of some cool old 70s beer can with a 1/4″ instrument jack on the bottom, just asking for some dirty blues to be belted into it. I had to build one. Or twelve.

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Your Next Airport Meal May Be Delivered By Robot

December 23, 2022 by Lewin Day 26 Comments

Robot delivery has long been touted as a game-changing technology of the future. However, it still hasn’t cracked the big time. Drones still aren’t airdropping packages into our gutters by accident, nor are our pizzas brought to us via self-driving cars.

That’s not to say that able minds aren’t working on the problem. In one case, a group of engineers are working ton a robot that will handle the crucial duty of delivering food to hungry flyers at the airport.

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All About USB-C: Cable Types

December 13, 2022 by Arya Voronova 51 Comments

USB-C cables and connectors: these are controversial topics, and rightfully so – I don’t want to pull any punches. I will also show you that things don’t have to be that bad for you, as long as you’re willing to apply a few tricks and adjust your expectations.

Wild West of Wiring

You might have a bunch of USB-C cables, and they all might look exactly the same, but you’ve likely experienced that they’re not the same internally, and often there’s not a label in sight. Yes, it’s pretty bad, and one could argue it’s getting worse.

I’d like to clarify that I’m only talking about USB C male – USB C male cables here. While cables like USB-A to USB-C are popular, they are quite simple; you get USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 data and 2 A of current at most, and the USB-C plug is usually hardwired as “host, will supply five volts”, which is defined by a pullup resistor. Also, while cables like “Type-C to DisplayPort” might look like cables at a glance, they are adapters with a meaningful amount of active circuitry in them.

Purely following the specification, there used to be six types of USB-C to USB-C cables out there. Then, it became eight. Now, I’m afraid, there’s twelve of them, purely following the spec, and there’s way more when counting all the out-of-spec cables. Good news is – for most of the time, majority of these cables will be suitable for simple tasks like charging and data transfer, and situations where you need a very specific cable are going to be rare enough. Still, let’s go through it, and you’ll see that they’re easier to tell apart than it might look. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Cable Types” →

Singapore Branches Out Into Internet Of Trees

December 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Five years ago, a 38-year-old woman was enjoying an outdoor concert with her family with one of her twin infants in her arms. In the week prior, it had been windy and rainy, but today, the weather was nice, and the concert was crowded. Without warning, a 270-year-old tembusu tree fell on the woman, pinning and ultimately killing her after the other concertgoers couldn’t remove it in time. This tragedy happened in spite of twice-yearly inspections where the tree showed no visual signs of trouble.

It’s exactly this type of incident that Singaporean officials hope to avoid by building an Internet of Trees. The equatorial island nation is home to roughly 5.5 million people, and around 7 million trees — about 6 million of which are tracked by Singapore’s National Parks Board, so that they can be managed remotely with an app. (The Board only tracks trees once they’ve reached a certain size, so we’ll assume that the other million are too young to join the fun just yet.)

While tree-triggered deaths are fairly few and far between, there are plenty of other ‘tree incidents’ that can occur, such as a branch falling, or a tree trunk snapping or uprooting. Depending on the size of the branch, this can be a dangerous nuisance as it could block roads, obscure signage, or destroy property. Thanks to the efforts of the National Parks Board, these incidents have dropped from around 3,000 per year at the turn of the millennium to under 500 per year today.

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Review: Inkplate 2 Shrinks Down, Adds Color

December 7, 2022 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Regular Hackaday readers may recall the Inkplate family of devices: open source all-in-one development boards that combine the power and versatility of the ESP32 with electronic paper displays salvaged from commercial e-readers. By taking the sharp, high-speed, displays intended for readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and bundling it together with all the hardware and software you need to make it work, the Inkplate provided a turn-key platform for anyone looking to get serious with e-paper.

Given the fact that their screens were pulled from recycled readers, it’s no surprise the previous Inkplate entries came in familiar 6 and 10 inch variants. There was even an upgraded 6 inch model that benefited from newer reader technology by adopting a touch-sensitive backlit panel, which we took a close look at last year. Their large displays make them excellent for wall mounted applications, such as a household notification center or constantly-changing art display. Plus, as you might expect, the Inkplate is an ideal choice for anyone looking to roll their own custom e-reader.

But of course, not every application needs so much screen real estate. In fact, for some tasks, such a large display could be considered a liability. Seeing a void in their existing product lineup, the folks at Soldered Electronics (previously e-radionica) have recently unveiled the diminutive Inkplate 2. This new miniature Inkplate uses the same software library as its larger predecessors, but thanks to its 2.13 inch three-color display, lends itself to a wider array of potential projects. Plus it’s considerably cheaper than the larger Inkplate models, at just $35 USD.

Considering the crowd sourced funding campaign for the Inkplate 2 blew past its goal in just 72 hours, it seems clear there’s plenty of interest in this new smaller model. But if you’re still not sure if it’s the e-paper solution you’ve been waiting for, maybe we can help — the folks at Soldered sent along a pre-production version of the Inkplate 2 for us to play around with, so let’s take it for a test drive and see what all the fuss is about.

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Asbestos: The Miracle Mineral Of Our Worst Nightmares

December 5, 2022 by Maya Posch 99 Comments

For much of the 19th and 20th century, the mining and use of asbestos saw near-constant growth, with virtually every material used in the construction of homes, offices, ships, road networks and industries featuring this miraculous mineral in some fashion. Some of these materials would contain only a few percent asbestos mineral as a binder, while others would be mostly or entirely composed out of asbestos.

What had begun as mostly a curiosity thousands of years prior was now turning into the material that was helping propel humanity into an era of hitherto unknown levels of prosperity and technological progress. It seemed as if the addition of even just a bit of asbestos would make houses weather- and fireproof, make concrete and asphalt nearly indestructible and add just that little bit of zing to tiling and interior decorations, as well as rigidity to the predecessor to today’s plastics: bakelite. Continue reading “Asbestos: The Miracle Mineral Of Our Worst Nightmares” →