Curated

76 Articles

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

Ask Hackaday: What Is The Future Of Implanted Electronics?

June 7, 2018 by 139 Comments

Biohacking is the new frontier. In just a few years, millions of people will have implanted RFID chips under the skin between their thumb and index finger. Already, thousands of people in Sweden have chipped themselves to make their daily lives easier. With a tiny electronic implant, Swedish rail passengers can pay their train ticket, and it goes without saying how convenient opening an RFID lock is without having to pull out your wallet.

That said, embedding RFID chips under the skin has been around for decades; my thirteen-year-old cat has had a chip since he was a kitten. Despite being around for a very, very long time, modern-day cyborgs are rare. The fact that only thousands of people are using chips on a train is a newsworthy event. There simply aren’t many people who would find the convenience of opening locks with a wave of a hand worth the effort of getting chipped.

Why hasn’t the most popular example of biohacking caught on? Why aren’t more people getting chipped? Is it because no one wants to be branded with the Mark of the Beast? Are the reasons for a dearth of biohacking more subtle? That’s what we’re here to find out, so we’re asking you: what is the future of implanted electronics?

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The Hacky Throttle Repair That Got Me On The Road Again

June 6, 2018 by 82 Comments

Old cars are great. For the nostalgia-obsessed like myself, getting into an old car is like sitting in a living, breathing representation of another time. They also happen to come with their fair share of problems. As the owner of two cars which are nearing their 30th birthdays, you start to face issues that you’d never encounter on a younger automobile. The worst offender of all is plastics. Whether in the interior or in the engine bay, after many years of exposure to the elements, parts become brittle and will crack, snap and shatter at the slightest provocation.

You also get stuck bolts. This was the initial cause of frustration with my Volvo 740 Turbo on a cold Sunday afternoon in May. As I tried in vain to free the fuel rail from its fittings, I tossed a spanner in frustration and I gave up any hope of completing, or indeed, starting the job that day. As I went to move the car back into the driveway, I quickly noticed a new problem. The accelerator was doing approximately nothing. Popping the hood, found the problem and shook my head in resignation. A Volvo 740 Turbo is fitted with a ball-jointed linkage which connects the accelerator cable to the throttle body itself. In my angst, the flying spanner had hit the throttle body and snapped the linkage’s plastic clips. It was at this point that I stormed off, cursing the car that has given me so much trouble over the past year.

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Ted Dabney, Atari, And The Video Game Revolution

June 5, 2018 by 30 Comments

It may be hard for those raised on cinematic video games to conceive of the wonder of watching a plain white dot tracing across a black screen, reflecting off walls and bounced by a little paddle that responded instantly to the twist of a wrist. But there was a time when Pong was all we had, and it was fascinating. People lined up for hours for the privilege of exchanging a quarter for a few minutes of monochrome distraction. In an arcade stuffed with noisy pinball machines with garish artwork and flashing lights, Pong seemed like a calm oasis, and you could almost feel your brain doing the geometry to figure out where to place the paddle so as not to miss the shot.

As primitive as it now seems, Pong was at the forefront of the video game revolution, and that little game spawned an industry that raked in $108 billion last year alone. It also spawned one of the early success stories of the industry, Atari, a company founded in 1972. Just last week, Ted Dabney, one of the co-founders of Atari, died at the age of 81. It’s sad that we’re getting to the point where we’re losing some of the pioneers of the industry, but it’s the way of things. All we can do is reflect on Dabney’s life and legacy, and examine the improbable path that led him to be one of the fathers of the video game industry.

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Pipelining Digital Logic In FPGAs

June 5, 2018 by 11 Comments

When you first learn about digital logic, it probably seems like it is easy. You learn about AND and OR gates and figure that’s not very hard. However, going from a few basic gates to something like a CPU or another complex system is a whole different story. It is like going from “Hello World!” to writing an operating system. There’s a lot to understand before you can make that leap. In this set of articles, I want to talk about a way to organize more complex FPGA designs like CPUs using a technique called pipelining.

These days a complex digital logic system is likely to be on an FPGA. And part of the reason we can get fooled into thinking digital is simple is because of the modern FPGA tools. They hide a lot of complexity from you, which is great until they can’t do what you want and then you are stuck. A good example of that is where you are trying to hit a certain clock frequency. If you aren’t careful, you’ll get a complaint from the tool that you can’t meet timing constraints.

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Hackaday guide to Lathes

Preparing For A Lathe: How To Move 3000 Pounds Of Iron

June 4, 2018 by 91 Comments

You say to yourself, “Self, I want, nay, need a lathe”. Being a good little trooper, you then did all your research, having chosen Import or American, Imperial or Metric, and all your feed options and such. You then pulled the trigger and the machine is en route to your shop. Now what?

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Power Harvesting Challenge: Scavenge Some Power, Win Prizes

June 4, 2018 by 26 Comments

It’s a brand new day as the Power Harvesting Challenge begins. This is the newest part of the 2018 Hackaday Prize and we’re looking for 20 entries who will each receive $1,000 and move onto the finals to compete for the top five spots, scoring cash prizes of $50k, $25k, $15k, $10k, and $5k.

Put simply, Power Harvesting is anything you can do that will pull some of the energy you need from a source other than wall-power or traditional battery tech. The most obvious power harvesting technologies are solar and wind. Ditch the battery in your doorbell for a solar panel, or turn your time-lapse camera rig into one that tops its battery with a tiny wind turbine. On the other end of the spectrum you could go nuts with chemistry and develop your own take on harvesting power from saltwater, or sip off the ambient RF waves all around us.

Every Idea Matters

We live in an amazing time as chip manufacturers have squeezed every low power trick out of their silicon dies that they possibly can. The Power Harvesting Challenge is the complement to those achievements: can we now squeeze as much energy out of non-traditional sources as possible to further reduce our energy footprints?

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A 100th Birthday Celebration For The Flip Flop

June 4, 2018 by 27 Comments

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creation as we’re building our latest widget. By the same token, it’s sometimes difficult to fully appreciate just how old some of the circuits we use are. Even the simplest of projects might make use of elements that were once a mess on some physicist’s or engineer’s lab bench, with components screwed to literal breadboards and power supplied by banks of wet-cell batteries.

One such circuit turns 100 years old in June, which is surprising because it literally is the building block of every computer. It’s the flip-flop, and while its inventors likely couldn’t have imagined what they were starting, their innovation became the basic storage system for the ones and zeros of the digital age.

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