The Many Ways To Solve Your Enclosure Problems

September 15, 2021 by Bob Baddeley 63 Comments

Most projects around here involve some sort of electronics, and some sort of box to put them in. The same is true of pretty much all commercially available electronic products as well.

Despite that, selecting an enclosure is far from a solved problem. For simple electronics it’s entirely possible to spend more time getting the case just right than working on the circuit itself. But most of the time we need to avoid getting bogged down in what exactly will house our hardware.

The array of options available for your housing is vast, and while many people default to a 3D printer, there are frequently better choices. I’ve been around the block on this issue countless times and wanted to share the options as I see them, and help you decide which is right for you. Let’s talk about enclosures!

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Monoclonal Antibodies: The Guided Missiles Of Medicine

September 15, 2021 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

Whenever anyone mentions the word “antibodies” these days, it’s sure to grab your attention. Thoughts generally flow to the human immune system and the role it plays in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and to how our bodies fight off disease in general. The immune system is complex in the extreme, but pretty much everyone knows that antibodies are part of it and that they’re vital to the ability of the body to recognize and neutralize invaders like bacteria and viruses.

But as important as antibodies are to long-term immunity and the avoidance of disease, that’s far from all they’re good for. The incredible specificity of antibodies to their target antigens makes them powerful tools for biological research and clinical diagnostics, like rapid COVID-19 testing. The specificity of antibodies has also opened up therapeutic modalities that were once the stuff of science-fiction, where custom-built antibodies act like a guided missile to directly attack not only a specific protein in the body, but sometimes even a specific part of a protein.

Making these therapies work, though, requires special antibodies: monoclonal antibodies. These are very much in the news recently, not only as a possible treatment for COVID-19 but also to treat everything from rheumatoid arthritis to the very worst forms of cancer. But what exactly are monoclonal antibodies, how are they made, and how do they work?

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The World’s First Autonomous Electric Cargo Ship Is Due To Set Sail

September 14, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 55 Comments

Maritime shipping is big business, with gigantic container ships responsible for moving the vast majority of the world’s goods from point A to points B, C and D. Of course, there’s a significant environmental impact from all this activity, something ill befitting the cleaner, cooler world we hope the future will be. Thus, alternatives to the fossil fuel burning ships of old must be found. To that end, Norwegian company Yara International has developed a zero-emission ship by the name of Yara Birkeland, which aims to show the way forward into a world of electric, autonomous sea transport.

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A Rant On Personal Software Projects

September 14, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 41 Comments

Looking across your hard drive and GitHub, you might find hundreds of notes and skeletons of Git repositories. A veritable graveyard of software side projects. The typical flow for many of these projects is: get an idea, ruminate on the idea until it becomes exciting, eventually becoming more exciting than the current side project, notes are captured, a repository is created, and work begins at a blistering pace as the focus and excitement are there. There might be some rewrites or some changes in direction. Questions of whether the project is worthwhile or “what even should this project actually be” start to arise. Eventually, enthusiasm wanes as these questions continue to multiply. Progress slows as the path forward seems less clear-cut as it once did. The project is either sunset with a mournful promise to someday return or quietly put aside as something new and exciting comes to take its place. Sound familiar? Perhaps not, but the principles here could be helpful.

This particular article is largely a piece of opinion from one engineer to another. It’s about engineering the process by which you design a project to have better outcomes. There are many reasons why a project could be shelved or scrapped and not all of them are from a lack of clear project definition. In the case where it isn’t clear what the project is, it can be helpful to think about it in a more holistic/meta sense. There are two types of personal projects in broad strokes: technology demos and products.

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Pinning Tails On Satellites To Help Prevent Space Junk

September 13, 2021 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

Low Earth orbit was already relatively crowded when only the big players were launching satellites, but as access to space has gotten cheaper, more and more pieces of hardware have started whizzing around overhead. SpaceX alone has launched nearly 1,800 individual satellites as part of its Starlink network since 2019, and could loft as many as 40,000 more in the coming decades. They aren’t alone, either. While their ambitions might not be nearly as grand, companies such as Amazon and Samsung have announced plans to create satellite “mega-constellations” of their own in the near future.

At least on paper, there’s plenty of room for everyone. But what about when things go wrong? Should a satellite fail and become unresponsive, it’s no longer able to maneuver its way out of close calls with other objects in orbit. This is an especially troubling scenario as not everything in orbit around the Earth has the ability to move itself in the first place. Should two of these uncontrollable objects find themselves on a collision course, there’s nothing we can do on the ground but watch and hope for the best. The resulting hypervelocity impact can send shrapnel and debris flying for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers in all three dimensions, creating an extremely hazardous situation for other vehicles.

One way to mitigate the problem is to design satellites in such a way that they will quickly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up at the end of their mission. Ideally, the deorbit procedure could even activate automatically if the vehicle became unresponsive or suffered some serious malfunction. Naturally, to foster as wide adoption as possible, such a system would have to be cheap, lightweight, simple to integrate into arbitrary spacecraft designs, and as reliable as possible. A tall order, to be sure.

But perhaps not an impossible one. Boeing subsidiary Millennium Space Systems recently announced it had successfully deployed a promising deorbiting device developed by Tethers Unlimited. Known as the Terminator Tape, the compact unit is designed to rapidly slow down an orbiting satellite by increasing the amount of drag it experiences in the wispy upper atmosphere.

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NASA Are Squaring Up Against The Asteroid Threat

September 10, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 43 Comments

The world faces many terrestrial crises right now, so it’s easy to forget that giant space rocks may one day threaten the very existence of entire civilizations. Yes, the threat of asteroid strikes is a remote one, but nevertheless something humanity may have to face one day, and one day soon.

NASA takes the issue seriously, and has staffed its Planetary Defence Coordination Office since 2016. In service to these efforts, it’s also developing a mission to research how dangerous androids may be deflected. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is set to launch within the next year. Continue reading “NASA Are Squaring Up Against The Asteroid Threat” →

Historical Hackers: The Hacker Of Cragside, Circa 1870

September 9, 2021 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Imagine visiting a home that was off the grid, using hydroelectric power to run lights, a dishwasher, a vacuum cleaner, and a washing machine. There’s a system for watering the plants and an intercom between rooms. Not really a big deal, right? This is the twenty first century, after all.

Armstrong with a 7 inch gun of his design — Image of Armstrong and his 7-inch gun from an 1887 edition of Illustrated London News

But then imagine you’ve exited your time machine to find this house not in the present day, but in the year 1870. Suddenly things become quite a bit more impressive, and it is all thanks to a British electrical hacker named William Armstrong who built a house known as Cragside. Even if you’ve never been to Northumberland, Cragside might look familiar. It’s appeared in several TV shows, but — perhaps most notably — played the part of Lockwood Manor in the movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Armstrong was a lawyer by training but dabbled in science including hydraulics and electricity — a hot topic in the early 1800s. He finally abandoned his law practice to form W. G. Armstrong and Company, known for producing Armstrong guns, which were breech-loading artillery pieces ranging from 2.5 inch bores up to 7 inches. By 1859, he was knighted and became the principal supplier of armaments to both the Army and the Navy.

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