Curated

76 Articles

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

Deep Drawing With Ultrasonics

March 9, 2025 by 17 Comments

Small cylindrical parts are often formed through deep drawing — a process by which a punch forms the finished piece from a flat sheet of metal using a forming die. If it sounds like that stresses the metal, it does. But researchers at Fraunhofer have found a way to reduce friction protecting both the material and the tools that do the forming. The process — known as VibroDraw — uses ultrasonic vibrations at around 500 Hz.

Researchers claim a 20% reduction in friction now, and it may be possible to go even further. With less friction, it is possible to do a deeper draw in a single stage. It also creates less heat which is good for tool life and prevents overheating lubricant. The process has a patent if you want more details. You might need to brush up on your German, though. Unsurprisingly, the vibrations are from a piezoelectric transducer.

Copper is soft enough to use 3D printed dies. We don’t know if this technique would help with that or not. Then there’s hydroforming. If you have any results using ultrasonics with these or any other techniques, be sure to let us know.

Open Source Hardware, How Open Do You Want It To Be?

March 7, 2025 by 43 Comments

In our wider community we are all familiar with the idea of open source software. Many of us run it as our everyday tools, a lot of us release our work under an open source licence, and we have a pretty good idea of the merits of one such document over another. A piece of open source software has all of its code released under a permissive licence that explicitly allows it to be freely reproduced and modified, and though some people with longer beards take it a little too seriously at times and different flavours of open source work under slightly different rules, by and large we’re all happy with that.

When it comes to open hardware though, is it so clear cut?  I’ve had more than one rant from my friends over the years about pieces of hardware which claim to be open-source but aren’t really, that I think this bears some discussion.

Open Source Hardware As It Should Be Done

To explore this, we’ll need to consider a couple of open source hardware projects, and I’ll start close to home with one of my own. My Single 8 home movie cartridge is a 3D printable film cartridge for a defunct format, and I’ve put everything necessary to create one yourself in a GitHub repository under the CERN OHL. If you download the file and load it into OpenSCAD you can quickly create an STL file for your slicer, or fiddle with the code and make an entirely new object. Open source at its most efficient, and everyone’s happy. I’ve even generated STLs ready to go for each of the supported ISO values. Continue reading “Open Source Hardware, How Open Do You Want It To Be?” →

Combined Crypto, Anglo-American Style

March 6, 2025 by 8 Comments

If you think about military crypto machines, you probably think about the infamous Enigma machine. However, as [Christos T.] reminds us, there were many others and, in particular, the production of a “combined cipher” machine for the US and the UK to use for a variety of purposes.

The story opens in 1941 when ships from the United States and the United Kingdom were crossing the Atlantic together in convoys. The US wanted to use the M-138A and M-209 machines, but the British were unimpressed. They were interested in the M-134C, but it was too secret to share, so they reached a compromise.

Starting with a British Typex, a US Navy officer developed an attachment with additional rotors and converted the Typex into a CCM or Combined Cipher Machine. Two earlier verisons of the attachment worked with the M-134C. However the CSP 1800 (or CCM Mark III) was essentially the same unit made to attach to the Typex. Development cost about $6 million — a huge sum for the middle of last century.

Continue reading “Combined Crypto, Anglo-American Style” →

Why 56k Modems Relied On Digital Phone Lines You Didn’t Know We Had

March 6, 2025 by 51 Comments

If you came of age in the 1990s, you’ll remember the unmistakable auditory handshake of an analog modem negotiating its connection via the plain old telephone system. That cacophony of screeches and hisses was the result of careful engineering. They allowed digital data to travel down phone lines that were only ever built to carry audio—and pretty crummy audio, at that.

Speeds crept up over the years, eventually reaching 33.6 kbps—thought to be the practical limit for audio modems running over the telephone network. Yet, hindsight tells us that 56k modems eventually became the norm! It was all thanks to some lateral thinking which made the most of the what the 1990s phone network had to offer.

Continue reading “Why 56k Modems Relied On Digital Phone Lines You Didn’t Know We Had” →

Big Chemistry: Glass

March 5, 2025 by 12 Comments

Humans have been chemically modifying their world for far longer than you might think. Long before they had the slightest idea of what was happening chemically, they were turning clay into bricks, making cement from limestone, and figuring out how to mix metals in just the right proportions to make useful new alloys like bronze. The chemical principles behind all this could wait; there was a world to build, after all.

Among these early feats of chemical happenstance was the discovery that glass could be made from simple sand. The earliest glass, likely accidentally created by a big fire on a sandy surface, probably wasn’t good for much besides decorations. It wouldn’t have taken long to realize that this stuff was fantastically useful, both as a building material and a tool, and that a pinch of this and a little of that could greatly affect its properties. The chemistry of glass has been finely tuned since those early experiments, and the process has been scaled up to incredible proportions, enough to make glass production one of the largest chemical industries in the world today.

Continue reading “Big Chemistry: Glass” →

LTA’s Pathfinder 1: The Dawn Of A New Age Of Airships?

March 4, 2025 by 32 Comments

Long before the first airplanes took to the skies, humans had already overcome gravity with the help of airships. Starting with crude hot air balloons, the 18th century saw the development of more practical dirigible airships, including hydrogen gas balloons. On 7 January 1785, French inventor, and pioneer of gas balloon flight Jean-Pierre Blanchard would cross the English Channel in such a hydrogen gas balloon, which took a mere 2.5 hours. Despite the primitive propulsion and steering options available at the time, this provided continued inspiration for new inventors.

With steam engines being too heavy and cumbersome, it wasn’t until the era of internal combustion engines a century later that airships began to develop into practical designs. Until World War 2 it seemed that airships had a bright future ahead of them, but amidst a number of accidents and the rise of practical airplanes, airships found themselves mostly reduced to the not very flashy role of advertising blimps.

Yet despite popular media having declared rigid airships such as the German Zeppelins to be dead and a figment of a historic fevered imagination, new rigid airships are being constructed today, with improvements that would set the hearts of 1930s German and American airship builders aflutter. So what is going on here? Are we about to see these floating giants darken the skies once more?

Continue reading “LTA’s Pathfinder 1: The Dawn Of A New Age Of Airships?” →

FOSDEM 2025, A Hardware Hacker’s Haven

March 3, 2025 by 5 Comments

Have you been to FOSDEM? It’s a yearly two-day megaconference in Brussels, every first weekend of February. Thousands of software and hardware hackers from all across Europe come here each year, make friends, talk software and hardware alike, hold project-specific meetups to drink beer and talk shop, and just have a fun weekend surrounded by like-minded people.

In particular, FOSDEM has free admission – drop by for the weekend, no need to buy entry tickets, just sort out your accomodation, food, travel, and visit for a day or two. I’ve covered FOSDEM quite extensively in 2023, so if you want to know more about how it works, I invite you to check out that article – plenty of stories, cool facts about FOSDEM, showcases, and so on. This year, I’ve also been to FOSDEM, it’s been pretty great, and I’d like to tell you about cool things I’ve seen happen during FOSDEM 2025.

FOSDEM is often described as an open software conference, and you might’ve had been fooled by this if you simply have checked the Wikipedia page. However, let me assure you – there’s always plenty of hardware, large amounts of it! This year, I feel like hardware has taken the spotlight in particular – let me show you at least some of it, so that you know what kinds of cool stuff you can expect and plan for in 2026.

Continue reading “FOSDEM 2025, A Hardware Hacker’s Haven” →