Curated

76 Articles

Hackaday’s finest original content articles curated by the Hackaday editors

The Surprisingly Manual Process Of Building Automotive Wire Harnesses

July 27, 2022 by 115 Comments

Even from the very earliest days of the automobile age, cars and trucks have been hybrids of mechanical and electrical design. For every piston sliding up and down in a cylinder, there’s a spark plug that needs to be fired at just the right time to make the engine work, and stepping on the brake pedal had better cause the brake lights to come on at the same time hydraulic pressure pinches the wheel rotors between the brake pads.

Without electrical connections, a useful motor vehicle is a practical impossibility. Even long before electricity started becoming the fuel of choice for vehicles, the wires that connect the computers, sensors, actuators, and indicators needed to run a vehicle’s systems were getting more and more complicated by the year. After the engine and the frame, a car’s wiring and electronics are its third most expensive component, and it’s estimated that by 2030, fully half of the average vehicle’s cost will be locked in its electrical system, up from 30% in 2010.

Making sure all those signals get where they’re going, and doing so in a safe and reliable way is the job of a vehicle’s wire harnesses, the bundles of wires that seemingly occupy every possible area of a modern car. The design and manufacturing of wire harnesses is a complex process that relies on specialized software, a degree of automation, and a surprising amount of people-power.

Continue reading “The Surprisingly Manual Process Of Building Automotive Wire Harnesses” →

Biomimetic Surfaces: Copying Nature To Deter Bacteria And Keep Ship Hulls Smooth

July 26, 2022 by 25 Comments

You might not think that keeping a boat hull smooth in the water has anything in common with keeping a scalpel clean for surgery, but there it does: in both cases you’re trying to prevent nature — barnacles or biofilm — from growing on a surface. Science has looked to nature, and found that the micro-patterning formed by the scales of certain sharks or the leaves of lotus plants demonstrate a highly elegant way to prevent biofouling that we can copy.

In the case of marine growth attaching to and growing on a ship’s hull, the main issue is that of increased drag. This increases fuel usage and lowers overall efficiency of the vessel, requiring regular cleaning to remove this biofouling. In the context of a hospital, this layer of growth becomes even more crucial. Each year, a large number of hospital patients suffer infections, despite the use of single-use catheters and sterile packaging.

Continue reading “Biomimetic Surfaces: Copying Nature To Deter Bacteria And Keep Ship Hulls Smooth” →

How Does The James Webb Telescope Phone Home?

July 25, 2022 by 31 Comments

When it comes to an engineering marvel like the James Webb Space Telescope, the technology involved is so specialized that there’s precious little the average person can truly relate to. We’re talking about an infrared observatory that cost $10 billion to build and operates at a temperature of 50 K (−223 °C; −370 °F), 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth — you wouldn’t exactly expect it to share any parts with your run-of-the-mill laptop.

But it would be a lot easier for the public to understand if it did. So it’s really no surprise that this week we saw several tech sites running headlines about the “tiny solid state drive” inside the James Webb Space Telescope. They marveled at the observatory’s ability to deliver such incredible images with only 68 gigabytes of onboard storage, a figure below what you’d expect to see on a mid-tier smartphone these days. Focusing on the solid state drive (SSD) and its relatively meager capacity gave these articles a touchstone that was easy to grasp by a mainstream audience. Even if it was a flawed comparison, readers came away with a fun fact for the water cooler — “My computer’s got a bigger drive than the James Webb.”

Of course, we know that NASA didn’t hit up eBay for an outdated Samsung EVO SSD to slap into their next-generation space observatory. The reality is that the solid state drive, known officially as the Solid State Recorder (SSR), was custom built to meet the exact requirements of the JWST’s mission; just like every other component on the spacecraft. Likewise, its somewhat unusual 68 GB capacity isn’t just some arbitrary number, it was precisely calculated given the needs of the scientific instruments onboard.

With so much buzz about the James Webb Space Telescope’s storage capacity, or lack thereof, in the news, it seemed like an excellent time to dive a bit deeper into this particular subsystem of the observatory. How is the SSR utilized, how did engineers land on that specific capacity, and how does its design compare to previous space telescopes such as the Hubble?

Continue reading “How Does The James Webb Telescope Phone Home?” →

Teardown: How Many Teddy Ruxpins Does It Take To Start A Coven?

July 21, 2022 by 35 Comments

Well, I did it. I conquered my childhood fear of talking bears and brought a vintage Teddy Ruxpin animatronic stuffed bear into my home. There were and still are plenty of his brethren both young and old to choose from on the auction sites, and when I saw this particularly carefree barefoot Teddy in his Hawaiian shirt and no pants, I was almost totally disarmed. Plus, the description promised a semi-working unit with a distorted voice, and who among us could resist a specimen in such condition? Maybe the tape deck motor is going out, or it just needs a new belt. Maybe the tape itself messed up, and Teddy is fine. I had to find out.

But let me back up a bit. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Teddy Ruxpin was a revolutionary toy that dropped in 1985. It’s a talking teddy bear that reads stories aloud, all the while moving his eyes and mouth to the sounds. Along with Teddy came special cassette tapes, corresponding story books, and outfits. I wanted one when I was a kid, but was also kind of scared of them. Since they were so expensive — about $250 inflation-adjusted for the bear and a single tape / book / outfit, plus another $15 for four D cells — I never did get one in my youth.

Continue reading “Teardown: How Many Teddy Ruxpins Does It Take To Start A Coven?” →

Ask Hackaday: Resin Printer Build Plates

July 20, 2022 by 29 Comments

The early days of FDM 3D printing were wild and wooly. Getting plastic to stick to your build plate was a challenge. Blue tape and hairspray-coated glass were kings for a long time. Over time, better coatings have appeared and many people use spring steel covered in some kind of PEI. There seem to be fewer choices when it comes to resin printers, though. We recently had a chance to try three different build surfaces on two different printers: a Nova3D Bene4 and an Anycubic Photon M3. We learned a lot.

Resin Printing Review

If you haven’t figuratively dipped your toe into resin yet — which would literally be quite messy — the printers are simple enough. There is a tank or vat of liquid resin with a clear film on the bottom. The vat rests on an LCD screen and there is a UV source beneath that.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Resin Printer Build Plates” →

Tech In Plain Sight: Fire Hydrants

July 19, 2022 by 42 Comments

You probably see them so often that you don’t even notice they are there. Fire hydrants are one of those things that aren’t interesting until you need them, but then they are of paramount importance. You sometimes hear them called fireplugs and it made us wonder what was a plug about it. Perhaps it was because that’s where you plug in your hose? Turns out, no. The real story is much stranger. Not to mention, did you know that there are even “dry” fire hydrants?

Apparently, in the 16th century, water mains were made of wood. When there was a fire, a team would dig the cobblestones out to expose the wooden mains and cut a hole to make an ad hoc well to fill buckets or to pump. Of course, after the fire, you had to repair the mains and that was done with a plug. The city would keep a record of plugs so that if a fire was nearby in the future, you could just “pull the plug” instead of making a new hole.

Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Fire Hydrants” →

Trucks Could Soon Run On Electrified Highways

July 18, 2022 by 180 Comments

Electric vehicles make for cleaner transport. However, they’re hung up by the limited range available from batteries. Long recharge times further compound the issue.

These issues are exacerbated when it comes to trucks hauling heavy goods. More payload means more weight, which means less range, or more batteries, which means less payload. Electric highways promise to solve this issue with the magic of overhead wires.

Continue reading “Trucks Could Soon Run On Electrified Highways” →