Prusa XL Goes Big, But That’s Only Half The Story

November 29, 2021 by Tom Nardi 44 Comments

For a few years now it’s been an open secret that Prusa Research was working on a larger printer named, imaginatively enough, the Prusa XL. Positioned at the opposite end of their product spectrum from the wildly popular Prusa Mini, this upper-tier machine would be for serious hobbyists or small companies that need to print single-part objects that were too large for their flagship i3 MK3S+ printer. Unfortunately, the global COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for the Czech company to focus on bringing a new product to market, to the point that some had begun to wonder if we’d ever see this mythical machine.

But now, finally, the wait is over. Or perhaps, it’s just beginning. That’s because while Prusa Research has officially announced their new XL model and opened preorders for the $1,999+ USD printer, it’s not expected to ship until at least the second quarter of 2022. That’s already a pretty substantial lead time, but given Prusa’s track record when it comes to product launches, we wouldn’t be surprised if early adopters don’t start seeing their machines until this time next year.

So what do you get for your money? Well, not an over-sized Prusa i3, that’s for sure. While many had speculated the XL would simply be a larger version of the company’s popular open source printer with a few modern niceties like a 32-bit control board sprinkled in, the reality is something else entirely. While the high purchase price and ponderous dimensions of the new machine might make it a tough sell for many in the hacker and maker communities, there’s little question that the technical improvements and innovations built into the Prusa XL provide a glimpse of the future for the desktop 3D printer market as a whole.

Continue reading “Prusa XL Goes Big, But That’s Only Half The Story” →

Why Deep Frying Turkey Can Go Very Wrong

November 24, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 93 Comments

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and that means Americans across the United States will be cooking up a turkey feast. One of the most popular ways to cook the bird is by deep frying it in oil.

Local TV stations everywhere spend this week warning about turkey frying. They’re not wrong… if things get out of hand you can end up burning down your house, if not your entire street. Let’s talk the science behind November turkey fires, and hopefully avoid a turkeyferno.

Simple Errors

The typical setup for deep frying a turkey involves lowering the bird into a big pot full of oil sitting on a gas burner. Ropes and pulleys are often used to lower the turkey into the pot to avoid getting one’s hands near the hot oil. Ideally, this should be done in a backyard, away from structures, to provide good ventilation and plenty of room in the case something does go wrong.

Continue reading “Why Deep Frying Turkey Can Go Very Wrong” →

Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From The 1940s

November 23, 2021 by Chris Lott 15 Comments

If you can’t imagine writing a letter on a typewriter and putting it in a mailbox, then you take computers for granted. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More niche applications begat niche machines, and a number of them are on display in this film that the Computer History Archives Project released last month. Aside from the File-o-matic Desk, the Addressograph, or the Sound Scriber, there a number of other devices that give us a peek into a bygone era.

One machine that’s still around, although in a much computerized form, is the stenograph. Not so popular these days is the convenient stenograph carrier, allowing a patient’s statement to be recorded bedside in the hospital immediately after a car accident. Wire recorders were all the rage in 1947, as were floppy disks (for audio, not data). Both media were used to time-shift dictation. Typing champions like Stella Pajunas could transcribe your letters and memos at 140 WPM using an electric typewriter, outpacing dot matrix printers but a snail’s pace compared to a laser jet.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From The 1940s” →

Blue Origin Rolls Out Test Article For Next-Gen Rocket

November 22, 2021 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

By any metric you care to use, this is a very exciting time for America’s space program. NASA is refocusing their efforts towards the Moon and beyond, SpaceX is launching routine crew and cargo flights to the International Space Station with reusable rockets, and if you’ve got deep enough pockets, there are now multiple companies offering suborbital pleasure trips requiring little more than a few hours worth of training. It’s taken longer than many people had hoped, but it seems we’re finally making the confident strides necessary to truly utilize space’s vast resources.

But things are just getting started. A new generation of massive reusable rockets are currently being developed, which promise to make access to space cheaper and faster than ever before. We’ve seen quite a bit of SpaceX’s Starship, thanks in no small part to the dramatic test flights that the media-savvy company has been regularly live streaming to YouTube. But Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has been far more secretive about their New Glenn. That is, until now.

On November 8th, Blue Origin rolled out their GS1 simulator for the New Glenn’s first stage. This stand-in for the real rocket will never fly, but it’s designed to perfectly recreate the dimensions, center of gravity, and mass, of the real thing. Ground teams will use the GS1 to practice safely transporting the booster, which is approximately half the length of the Saturn V, from their production facility to Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral. It will also be used to test the fit and function of various pieces of ground support equipment, and eventually, the second stage stacking procedure.

For the uninitiated, it might seem like this is a lot of fuss over what’s ultimately just a hollow metal tube. But the introduction of a test article such as this has traditionally been a major milestone during the design and construction of rockets and spacecraft, dating back to the “boilerplate” test capsules used during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs; a sure sign that what was just an idea is now becoming a reality.

Continue reading “Blue Origin Rolls Out Test Article For Next-Gen Rocket” →

Privacy Report: What Android Does In The Background

November 18, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 76 Comments

We’ve come a long way from the Internet of the 90s and early 00s. Not just in terms of technology, capabilities, and culture, but in the attitude most of us take when accessing the ‘net. In those early days most users had a militant drive to keep any personal or identifying information to themselves beyond the occasional (and often completely fictional) a/s/l, and before eBay and Amazon normalized online shopping it was unheard of to even type in a credit card number. On today’s internet we do all of these things with reckless abandon, and to make matters worse most of us carry around a device which not only holds all of our personal information but also reports everything about us, from our browsing habits to our locations, back to databases to be stored indefinitely.

It was always known that both popular mobile operating systems for these devices, iOS and Android, “phone home” or report data about us back to various servers. But just how much the operating systems themselves did was largely a matter of speculation, especially for Apple devices which are doing things that only Apple can really know for sure. While Apple keeps their mysteries to themselves and thus can’t be fully trusted, Android is much more open which paradoxically makes it easier for companies (and malicious users) to spy on users but also makes it easier for those users to secure their privacy on their own. Thanks to this recent privacy report on several different flavors of Android (PDF warning) we know a little bit more on specifically what the system apps are doing, what information they’re gathering and where they’re sending it, and exactly which versions of Android are best for those of us who take privacy seriously.

Continue reading “Privacy Report: What Android Does In The Background” →

Back of Rigol DS1104Z oscilloscope with the Ethernet and USB ports visible.

SCPI: On Teaching Your Devices The Lingua Franca Of Laboratories

November 17, 2021 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

One could be excused for thinking sometimes that the concept of connecting devices with other devices for automation purposes is a fairly recent invention. Yet for all the (relatively) recent hype of the Internet of Things and the ‘smart home’, laboratories have been wiring up their gear to run complicated measurement and test sequences for many decades now, along with factories doing much the same for automating production processes.

Much like the chaotic universe of IoT devices, lab equipment from different manufacturers feature a wide number of incompatible protocol and interface standards. Ultimately these would coalesce into IEEE-488.1 (GPIB) as the physical layer and by 1990 the first Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI) standard was released that built on top of IEEE-488.

SCPI defines (as the name suggests) standard commands to interact with instruments. It has over the past decades gone on to provide remote interaction capabilities to everything from oscilloscopes and power supplies to exotic scientific equipment. Many off the shelf devices a hobbyist can buy today feature an SCPI interface via its Ethernet, USB or RS-232C port(s) that combined with software can be used to automate one’s home lab.

Even better is that it’s relatively straightforward to add SCPI functionality to one’s own devices as well, so long as it has at least an MCU and some way to communicate with the outside world.

Continue reading “SCPI: On Teaching Your Devices The Lingua Franca Of Laboratories” →

Microplastics Are Everywhere: Land, Sea And Air

November 16, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 65 Comments

Plastics took off in the 20th century, with the new class of materials finding all manner of applications that metal, wood and paper simply couldn’t deliver on. Every field from electronics to the packaging of food found that plastics could play a role.

Now, over 150 years since the development of Parkesine in 1867, we’re now realizing that plastics come with more than a few drawbacks. They don’t break down well in nature, and now microplastics are beginning to appear all over the Earth, even in places where humans rarely tread. It seems they may even spread via the air, so let’s take a look at this growing problem and what can be done about it.

Continue reading “Microplastics Are Everywhere: Land, Sea And Air” →