With Rocket Lab’s Daring Midair Catch, Reusable Rockets Go Mainstream

May 12, 2022 by Tom Nardi 34 Comments

We’ve all marveled at the videos of SpaceX rockets returning to their point of origin and landing on their spindly deployable legs, looking for all the world like something pulled from a 1950s science fiction film. On countless occasions founder Elon Musk and president Gwynne Shotwell have extolled the virtues of reusable rockets, such as lower operating cost and the higher reliability that comes with each booster having a flight heritage. At this point, even NASA feels confident enough to fly their missions and astronauts on reused SpaceX hardware.

Even so, SpaceX’s reusability program has remained an outlier, as all other launch providers have stayed the course and continue to offer only expendable booster rockets. Competitors such as United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin have teased varying degrees of reusability for their future vehicles, but to date have nothing to show for it beyond some flashy computer-generated imagery. All the while SpaceX continues to streamline their process, reducing turnaround time and refurbishment costs with each successful reuse of a Falcon 9 booster.

But that changed earlier this month, when a helicopter successfully caught one of Rocket Lab’s Electron boosters in midair as it fell back down to Earth under a parachute. While calling the two companies outright competitors might be a stretch given the relative sizes and capabilities of their boosters, SpaceX finally has a sparing partner when it comes to the science of reusability. The Falcon 9 has already smashed the Space Shuttle’s record turnaround time, but perhaps Rocket Lab will be the first to achieve Elon Musk’s stated goal of re-flying a rocket within 24 hours of its recovery.

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Animate Your Robot In Blender

May 11, 2022 by Anne Ogborn 10 Comments

You’ve built a robot crammed full of servos and now you settle down for the fun part, programming your new dancing animatronic bear! The pain in your life is just beginning. Imagine that you decide the dancing bear should raise it’s arm. If you simply set a servo position, the motor will slew into place as fast as it can. What you need is an animation, and preferably with smooth acceleration.

You could work through all the math yourself. After half an hour of fiddling with the numbers, the bear is gracefully raising it’s arm like a one armed zombie. And then you realize that the bear has 34 more servos.

Fortunately for everybody who’s done the above, there’s Blender. It’s all about creating smooth motion for animations and computer graphics. Making robot motion with Blender is, if not easy, at least tolerable. We made a sample project, a 3-axis robot arm to illustrate. It has a non-moving pedestal, rotating base, upper arm, and lower arm. We’ll be animating it first in Blender and then translating the file over to something we can use to drive the servos with a little script.

Now, Blender is notorious for a difficult user interface. The good news is that, with revision 2.9, it moved to a much more normal interface. It still definitely is a large program, with 23 different editors and literally thousands of controls, but we’ll only be using a small subset to make our robot move. We won’t teach you Blender here, because there are thousands of great Blender tutorials online. You want to focus on animation, and the Humane Rigging series is particularly recommended.

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Large Scale Carbon Capture Without The Technology

May 10, 2022 by Jenny List 213 Comments

We humans are in something of a pickle, as we’ve put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and caused climate change that might even wipe us out. There may still be people to whom that’s a controversial statement, but knowing something needs to be done about it should be a position for which you don’t necessarily have to be a climate change activist glueing yourself to the gates of a refinery.

It’s obvious that we can reduce our CO2 emissions to tackle the problem, but that’s not the only way that atmospheric CO2 can be reduced. How about removing it from the air? It’s an approach that’s being taken seriously enough for a number of industrial carbon capture solutions to be proposed, and even for a pilot plant to be constructed in Iceland. The most promising idea is that CO2 from power stations can be injected into porous basalt rock where it can react to form calcium carbonate. All of which is very impressive, but is there not a way that this can be achieved without resorting to too much technology? Time for Hackaday to pull out the back-of-envelope calculator, and take a look. Continue reading “Large Scale Carbon Capture Without The Technology” →

Will We Ever Shake The Polaroid Picture?

May 9, 2022 by Kristina Panos 47 Comments

Today, most of us carry supercomputers in our pockets that happen to also take instantly-viewable pictures.This is something that even the dumbest phones do, meaning that we can reasonably draw the conclusion that photographic capability has become a basic feature of everyday carry, a necessity of 21st century life.

Despite the unwashed masses of just-plain-bad photographs clouding the digital landscape, photography itself remains as important as ever so we can retain and disseminate information as history unfolds. In a sense, the more instant, the better — unless it comes at the cost of image quality. The invention of photography is on par with the printing press or with language itself in that all three allow us to communicate within our own time as well as preserve The Way Things Were in frozen silence. And no invention made vivid preservation more convenient than the instant camera.

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About As Cold As It Gets: The Webb Telescope’s Cryocooler

May 5, 2022 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

If you were asked to name the coldest spot in the solar system, chances are pretty good you’d think it would be somewhere as far as possible from the ultimate source of all the system’s energy — the Sun. It stands to reason that the further away you get from something hot, the more the heat spreads out. And so Pluto, planet or not, might be a good guess for the record low temperature.

But, for as cold as Pluto gets — down to 40 Kelvin — there’s a place that much, much colder than that, and paradoxically, much closer to home. In fact, it’s only about a million miles away, and right now, sitting at a mere 6 Kelvin, the chunk of silicon at the focal plane of one of the main instruments aboard the James Webb Space telescope makes the surface of Pluto look downright balmy.

The depth of cold on Webb is all the more amazing given that mere meters away, the temperature is a sizzling 324 K (123 F, 51 C). The hows and whys of Webb’s cooling systems are chock full of interesting engineering tidbits and worth an in-depth look as the world’s newest space telescope gears up for observations.

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Four jumper wires with white heatshrink on them, labelled VCC, SCL, SDA and GND

The Connector Zoo: I2C Ecosystems

May 4, 2022 by Arya Voronova 56 Comments

I2C is a wonderful interface. With four wires and only two GPIOs, you can connect a whole lot of sensors and devices – in parallel, at that! You will see I2C used basically everywhere, in every phone, laptop, desktop, and any device with more than a few ICs inside of it – and most microcontrollers have I2C support baked into their hardware. As a result, there’s a myriad of interesting and useful devices you can use I2C with. Occasionally, maker-facing companies create plug-and-play interfaces for the I2C device breakouts they produce, with standardized pinouts and connectors.

Following a standard pinout is way better than inventing your own, and your experience with inconsistent pin header pinouts on generic I2C modules from China will surely reflect that. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just plug a single I2C-carrying connector into an MPU9050, MLX90614 or HMC5883L breakout you bought for a few dollars, as opposed to the usual hurdle of looking at the module’s silkscreen, soldering pin headers onto it and carefully arranging female headers onto the correct pins?

As with any standard, when it comes to I2C-on-a-connector conventions, you would correctly guess that there’s more than one, and they all have their pros and cons. There aren’t quite fifteen, but there’s definitely six-and-a-half! They’re mostly inter-compatible, and making use of them means that you can access some pretty powerful peripherals easily. Let’s start with the two ecosystems that only have minor differences, and that you’ll encounter the most! Continue reading “The Connector Zoo: I2C Ecosystems” →

Ask Hackaday: Repair Café Or Not?

May 3, 2022 by Jenny List 82 Comments

A huge part of the work our community does, aside from making things and doing a lot of talking about the things we’d like to make, involves repair. We have the skills to fix our own stuff when it breaks, we can fix broken stuff that other people throw out when it breaks, and we can fix broken stuff belonging to other people. As our consumer society has evolved around products designed to frustrate repairs and facilitate instead the sale of new replacements for broken items this is an essential skill to keep alive; both to escape having to incessantly replace our possessions at the whim of corporate overlords, and to fight the never-ending tide of waste.

Repair Cafés: A Good Thing

A German repair cafe — A German repair café. , Redaktion NdW, CC BY 2.0

So we repair things that are broken, for example on my bench in front of me is a formerly-broken camera I’ve given a new life, on the wall in one of my hackerspaces is a large screen TV saved from a dumpster where it lay with a broken PSU, and in another hackerspace a capsule coffee machine serves drinks through a plastic manifold held together with cable ties.

We do it for ourselves, we do it within our communities, and increasingly, we do it for the wider community at large. The Repair Café movement is one of local groups who host sessions at which they repair broken items brought in by members of the public, for free. Their work encompasses almost anything you’d find in a home, from textiles and furniture to electronics, and they are an extremely good cause that should be encouraged at all costs.

For all my admiration for the Repair Café movement though, I have chosen not to involve myself in my local one. Not because they aren’t a fine bunch of people or because they don’t do an exceptionally good job, but for a different reason. And it symbolically comes back to an afternoon over thirty years ago, when sitting in a university lab in Hull, I was taught how to wire a British mains plug. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Repair Café Or Not?” →