Gertrude Elion, DNA Hacker

January 25, 2018 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

Some people become scientists because they have an insatiable sense of curiosity. For others, the interest is born of tragedy—they lose a loved one to disease and are driven to find a cure. In the case of Gertrude Elion, both are true. Gertrude was a brilliant and curious student who could have done anything given her aptitude. But when she lost her grandfather to cancer, her path became clear.

As a biochemist and pharmacologist for what is now GlaxoSmithKline, Gertrude and Dr. George Hitchings created many different types of drugs by synthesizing natural nucleic compounds in order to bait pathogens and kill them. Their unorthodox, designer drug method led them to create the first successful anti-cancer drugs and won them a Nobel Prize in 1988.

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The Current State Of The Black Market: You Can’t Buy Vantablack

January 25, 2018 by Zoe Skyforest 89 Comments

Sometimes you need something to be utterly, totally, irredeemably black. Not just a little bit black, not just really really really dark blue, but as black as it is possible to get. It might be to trap light in a camera or a telescope, for artistic purposes, or even to make your warplane a more difficult target for enemy missiles. Either way, we’re here to help, not to judge. So what are your options?

Well, first of all, there’s the much-lauded Vantablack. The name itself is a clue as to its origin – Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Arrays. It works by coating an object with a forest of carbon nanotubes in a complicated vacuum deposition process. When light hits the surface, some of it is absorbed by the nanotubes, and any that is reflected tends to be absorbed by neighbouring nanotubes rather than escaping the surface coating of the object.

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Quantum Weirdness In Your Browser

January 24, 2018 by Al Williams 29 Comments

I’ll be brutally honest. When I set out to write this post, I was going to talk about IBM’s Q Experience — the website where you can run real code on some older IBM quantum computing hardware. I am going to get to that — I promise — but that’s going to have to wait for another time. It turns out that quantum computing is mindbending and — to make matters worse — there are a lot of oversimplifications floating around that make it even harder to understand than it ought to be. Because the IBM system matches up with real hardware, it is has a lot more limitations than a simulator — think of programming a microcontroller with on debugging versus using a software emulator. You can zoom into any level of detail with the emulator but with the bare micro you can toggle a line, use a scope, and hope things don’t go too far wrong.

So before we get to the real quantum hardware, I am going to show you a simulator written by [Craig Gidney]. He wrote it and promptly got a job with Google, who took over the project. Sort of. Even if you don’t like working in a browser, [Craig’s] simulator is easy enough, you don’t need an account, and a bookmark will save your work.

It isn’t the only available simulator, but as [Craig] immodestly (but correctly) points out, his simulator is much better than IBM’s. Starting with the simulator avoids tripping on the hardware limitations. For example, IBM’s devices are not fully connected, like a CPU where only some registers can get to other registers. In addition, real devices have to deal with noise and the quantum states not lasting very long. If your algorithm is too slow, your program will collapse and invalidate your results. These aren’t issues on a simulator. You can find a list of other simulators, but I’m focusing on Quirk.

What Quantum Computing Is

As I mentioned, there is a lot of misinformation about quantum computing (QC) floating around. I think part of it revolves around the word computing. If you are old enough to remember analog computers, QC is much more like that. You build “circuits” to create results. There’s also a lot of difficult math — mostly linear algebra — that I’m going to try to avoid as much as possible. However, if you can dig into the math, it is worth your time to do so. However, just like you can design a resonant circuit without solving differential equations about inductors, I think you can do QC without some of the bigger math by just using results. We’ll see how well that holds up in practice.

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Printed It: Rubber Band PCB Vise

January 24, 2018 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

If you’ve ever worked on a small PCB, you know how much of a hassle it can be to hold on to the thing. It’s almost as if they weren’t designed to be held in the grubby mitts of a human. As designs have become miniaturized over time, PCBs are often so fragile and festooned with components that tossing them into the alligator clips of the classic soldering “third hand” can damage them. The proper tool for this job is a dedicated PCB vise, which is like a normal bench vise except it doesn’t crank down very hard and usually has plastic pads on the jaws to protect the board.

Only problem with a PCB vise is, like many cool tools and gadgets out there, not everybody owns one. Unless you’re doing regular PCB fabrication, you might not take the plunge and buy one either. So what’s a hacker on a budget to do when they’ve got fiddly little PCBs that need attention?

Luckily for us, we live in a world where you can press a button and have a magical robot on your desktop build things for you. Online model repositories like Thingiverse and YouMagine are full of designs for printable PCB vises, all you have to do is pick one. After looking through a number of them I eventually decided on a model designed by [Delph27] on Thingiverse, which I think has a couple of compelling features and more than deserves the few meters of filament it will take to add to your bench.

Of course the best part of all of this is that you can customize and improve the designs you download, which is what I’m about to do with this PCB vise!

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Build An Excellent Coffee Roaster With A Satisfyingly Low Price Tag

January 23, 2018 by Elliot Williams 62 Comments

There’s a lot of mysticism around coffee roasting, but in the end it couldn’t be simpler. Take a bunch of beans, heat them up evenly, and stop before they get burned. The rest is details.

And the same goes for coffee roasters. The most primitive roasting technique involves stirring the beans in a pan or wok to keep them from scorching on the bottom. This works great, but it doesn’t scale. Industrial drum roasters heat a rotating drum with ridges on the inside like a cement mixer to keep the beans in constant motion while they pass over a gas fire. Fluidized-bed roasters use a strong stream of heated air to whirl the beans around while roasting them evenly. But the bottom line is that a coffee roaster needs to agitate the beans over a controllable heat source so that they roast as evenly as possible.

My DIY coffee roaster gave up the ghost a few days ago and I immediately ordered the essential replacement part, a hot air popcorn popper, to avert a true crisis: no coffee! While I was rebuilding, I thought I’d take some pictures and share what I know about the subject. So if you’re interested in roasting coffee, making a popcorn popper into a roaster, or even just taking an inside look at a thoroughly value-engineered kitchen machine, read on!

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The Precision Upon Which Civilizations Are Built

January 23, 2018 by Quinn Dunki 97 Comments

If you’re interested in making things (particularly metal things), you’re on a road that eventually leads to machine tools. Machine tools have a special place in history, because they are basically the difference between subsistence farming and modern civilization. A bold statement, I realize — but the ability to make very precise things is what gave us the industrial revolution, and everything that snowballed afterward. If you want to build a modern life filled with jet airplanes and inexpensive chocolate, start here.

Precision is more than just a desirable property. It’s a product. It has value, there is competition to create it, and our ability to create it as a species has improved over time. When your “precision product” is in the centimeter range, congratulations — you can make catapults and portcullises. Once you get into the millimeter range, guess what? You can make fine millwork in fancy houses, and indoor plumbing. Once you get sub-millimeter, now things get really interesting. It’s time for steam engines and automobiles. Once you get into the micrometer range, well, now we’re talking artificial heart valves and spaceships. Much like materials science, the ability to create precision is the unsung foundation and driving force of our standard of living.

Okay, so assuming I’ve sold you on the value of this product called “precision”, how do we make it? Machine tools are how humans currently get there, despite the dreams of the 3D printer crowd. Yes, drizzled plastic is great and the future is bright, but for right now, subtractive manufacturing is where it’s at when something has to be perfect.

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Teardown: What’s Inside A Christmas Laser Projector?

January 22, 2018 by Tom Nardi 56 Comments

In the world of big-box retail, December 26th is a very special day. The Christmas music playing on the overhead speakers switches back to the family friendly Top 40, the store’s decorations get tossed in the compactor, and everything that’s even remotely related to the holiday is put on steep clearance. No more money to be made on the most commercialized of all holidays, so back to business as usual.

It’s in this narrow corridor of time, between the Great Holiday Unloading and the new spring products coming in, that you can find some fantastic deals on Christmas decorations. Not that long ago, this would hardly be exciting news for the readers of Hackaday. But Christmas lights and decorations have really started pushing the envelope in terms of technology: addressable RGB LED strands, Bluetooth controlled effects, and as of the last couple years, friggin’ lasers.

That’s right, you’ve seen them all over the neighborhood, probably took a few stray beams to the eye, you might even own your own. Laser projectors have been one of the most popular Christmas decorations for the last couple of years, and it’s not hard to see why. Just set the projector up in front of your house, and you’re done. No need to get on a ladder and string lights on the roof when you can just blast some directed energy up there instead.

Given how popular they are, I was surprised to see a lone Home Accents Holiday Multi-Color Light Projector on the clearance rack at Home Depot for around $14 a few days after Christmas. This was a 75% price reduction from normal MSRP, and right in that sweet impulse-buy price range. Let’s see what’s hiding inside!

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