Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair

The cover of the infamous issue of Astounding, March 1944

There’s an upcoming movie, Argylle, about an author whose spy novels are a little too accurate, and she becomes a target of a real-life spy game. We haven’t seen the movie, but it made us think of a similar espionage caper from 1944 involving science fiction author Cleve Cartmill. The whole thing played out in the pages of Astounding magazine (now Analog) and involved several other science fiction luminaries ranging from John W. Campbell to Isaac Asimov. It is a great story about how science is — well, science — and no amount of secrecy or legislation can hide it.

In 1943, Cartmill queried Campbell about the possibility of a story that would be known as “Deadline.” It wasn’t his first story, nor would it be his last. But it nearly put him in a Federal prison. Why?  The story dealt with an atomic bomb.

Nothing New

By itself, that’s probably not a big deal. H.G. Wells wrote “The World Set Free” in 1914, where he predicted nuclear weapons. But in 1914, it wasn’t clear how that would work exactly. Wells mentioned “uranium and thorium” and wrote a reasonable account of the destructive power: Continue reading “Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair”

Sun On The Run: Diving Into Solar With A Mobile PV System

For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of interest in small-scale residential solar power systems lately. Even in my neck of the woods, where the sun doesn’t shine much from October to April, solar arrays are sprouting up on rooftops in a lot of local neighborhoods. And it’s not just here in suburbia; drive a little way out into the country or spend some time looking around in Google maps and it won’t take long to spy a sizable array of PV panels sitting in a field next to someone’s ranch house or barn.

Solar has gotten to the point where the expense of an installation is no longer a serious barrier to entry, at least if you’re willing to put in a little sweat equity and not farm the project out to a contractor. Doing it yourself requires some specialized tools and knowledge, though, over and above your standard suite of DIY skills. So, in the spirit of sharing hard-won knowledge, I decided to take the somewhat unusual step of writing up one of my personal projects, which has been in progress for a couple of years now and resulted in a solar power system that isn’t on a rooftop or a ground-mounted array at all, but rather is completely mobile: my solar trailer.

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Solar Chimneys: Viable Energy Solution Or A Lot Of Hot Air?

We think of the power we generate as coming from all these different kinds of sources. Oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind… so varied! And yet they all fundamentally come down to moving a gas through a turbine to actually spin up a generator and make some juice. Even some solar plants worked this way, using the sun’s energy to heat water into steam to spin some blades and keep the lights on.

A solar updraft tower works along these basic principles, too, but in a rather unique configuration. It’s not since the dawn of the Industrial Age that humanity went around building lots of big chimneys, and if this technology makes good sense, we could be due again. Let’s find out how it works and if it’s worth all the bluster, or if it’s just a bunch of hot air.

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British Hospital Blasts Through Waiting Lists By Slashing Surgeon Downtime

It feels like it doesn’t matter where you go, health systems are struggling. In the US, just about any procedure is super expensive. In the UK and Australia, waiting lists extend far into the future and patients are left sitting in ambulances as hospitals lack capacity. In France, staff shortages rage furiously, frustrating operations.

It might seem like hope is fruitless and there is little that can be done. But amidst this horrid backdrop, one London hospital is finding some serious gains with some neat optimizations to the way it handles surgery, as The Times reports.

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A Few Reasonable Rules For The Responsible Use Of New Technology

If there’s one thing which probably unites all of Hackaday’s community, it’s a love of technology. We live to hear about the very latest developments before anyone else, and the chances are for a lot of them we’ll all have a pretty good idea how they work. But if there’s something which probably annoys a lot of us the most, it’s when we see a piece of new technology misused. A lot of us are open-source enthusiasts not because we’re averse to commercial profit, but because we’ve seen the effects of monopolistic practices distorting the market with their new technologies and making matters worse, not better. After all, if a new technology isn’t capable of making the world a better place in some way, what use is it?

It’s depressing then to watch the same cycle repeat itself over and over, to see new technologies used in the service of restrictive practices for short-term gain rather than to make better products. We probably all have examples of new high-tech products that are simply bad, that are new technology simply for the sake of marketing, and which ultimately deliver something worse than what came before, but with more bling. Perhaps the worst part is the powerlessness,  watching gullible members of the public lapping up something shiny and new that you know to be flawed, and not being able to do anything about it.

Here at Hackaday though, perhaps there is something I can do about it. I don’t sit in any boardroom that matters but I do have here a soapbox on which to stand, and from it I can talk to you, people whose work takes you into many fascinating corners of the tech industry and elsewhere. If I think that new technologies are being used irresponsibly to create bad products, at least I can codify how that might be changed. So here are my four Rules For The Responsible Use Of New Technology, each with some examples. They should each be self-evident, and I hope you’ll agree with me. Continue reading “A Few Reasonable Rules For The Responsible Use Of New Technology”

2023: As The Hardware World Turns

We’ve made it through another trip around the sun, and for the first time in what feels like far too long, it seems like things went pretty well for the hackers and makers of the world. Like so many, our community suffered through a rough couple of years: from the part shortages that made building even the simplest of devices more expensive and difficult than it should have been, to the COVID-mandated social distancing that robbed us of our favorite meetups. But when looking back on the last twelve months, most of the news was refreshingly positive.

Pepperoni costs ten bucks, but they can’t activate Windows on their registers…

Oh sure, a trip to to the grocery store can lead to a minor existential crisis at the register, but there’s not much we at Hackaday can do about that other than recommend you some good hydroponics projects to help get your own home farm up and running.

As has become our New Year tradition, we like to take this time to go over some of the biggest stories and trends that we picked up on from our unique vantage point. Some will be obvious, but there’s always a few that sneak up on us. These posts tend to make for interesting reading in the future, and if you’ve got the time, we’d recommend going back and reading the previous entries in this series and reminiscing a bit.

It’s also a good time to reflect on Hackaday itself — how we’ve grown, the things that have changed, and perhaps what we can do better going forward. Believe it or not we do read all of the feedback from the community, whether it’s in the comments of individual posts or sent into us directly. We couldn’t do this without readers like you, so please drop us a line and let us know what you’re thinking.

So before we get any farther into 2024, let’s wind back the clock and revisit some of the highlights from the previous year.

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Beyond The Basics: Exploring More Exotic Scope Trigger Modes

Last time, we looked at some powerful trigger modes found on many modern scopes, including the Rigol DHO900 series we used as an example. Those triggers were mostly digital or, at least, threshold-based. This time, we’ll look at some more advanced analog triggers as well as a powerful digital trigger that can catch setup and hold violations. You can find the Raspberry Pi code to create the test waveforms online.

In addition to software, you’ll need to add some simple components to generate the analog waveform. In particular, pin 21 of the Pi connects to  2uF capacitor through a 10K resistor. The other side of the capacitor connects to ground. In addition, pin 22 connects directly to the capacitor, bypassing the 10K resistor. This allows us to discharge the capacitor quickly. The exact values are not especially important.

Runt Triggers

A runt pulse is one that doesn’t have the same voltage magnitude as surrounding pulses. Sometimes, this is due to a bus contention, for example. Imagine if you have some square waves that go from 0 to 5V. But, every so often, one pulse doesn’t make it to 5V. Instead, it stops at 3V.

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