Curated

76 Articles

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

Dad? Where Did Printed Circuit Boards Come From?

July 5, 2024 by 19 Comments

These days, it is hard to imagine electronics without printed circuit boards. They are literally in everything. While making PCBs at home used to be a chore, these days, you design on a computer, click a button, and they show up in the mail. But if you go back far enough, there were no PC boards. Where did they come from? That’s the question posed by [Steven Leibson] who did some investigating into the topic.

There were many false starts at building things like PCBs using wires glued to substrates or conductive inks.  However, it wasn’t until World War II that mass production of PC boards became common. In particular, they were the perfect solution for proximity fuzes in artillery shells.

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A Look Back At The USSR’s Mi-6 Helicopter Airliner

July 5, 2024 by 26 Comments

Most of us would equate commercial airline travel with fixed-wing aircraft, but civilian transport by helicopter, especially in large and sparsely populated regions, is common enough. It was once even big business in the Soviet Union, where the Aeroflot airline operated passenger helicopters in regular service for many decades. In the mid-1960s they even started work on converting the Mil Mi-6 — the USSR’s largest and fastest helicopter — to carry paying passengers. Unfortunately this never got past a single prototype, with the circumstances described by [Oliver Parken] in a recent article.

This passenger version of the Mi-6 got the designation Mi-6P (for passazhirskyi, meaning passenger) and would have seated up to 80 (3 + 2 row configuration), compared to the Mi-8 passenger variant that carried 28 – 31 passengers. Why exactly the Mi-6P never got past the prototype stage is unknown, but its successor in the form of the Mi-26P has a listed passenger variant and features. Both have a cruising speed of around 250 km/h, with a top of 300 km/h. The auxiliary winglets of the Mi-6 provided additional lift during flight, and the weight lifting record set by the Mi-6 was only broken by the Mi-26 in 1982.

An obvious disadvantage of passenger helicopters is that they are more complicated to operate and maintain, while small fixed wing airliners like the ATR 72 (introduced in 1988) can carry about as many passengers, requires just a strip of tarmac to land and take off from, travel about twice as fast as an Mi-6P would, and do not require two helicopter pilots to fly them. Unless the ability to hover and land or take-off vertically are required, this pretty much explains why passenger helicopters are such a niche application. Not that the Mi-6P doesn’t have that certain je ne sais quoi to it, mind.

Retrotechtacular: The Tools And Dies That Made Mass Production Possible

July 3, 2024 by 15 Comments

Here at Hackaday we’re suckers for vintage promotional movies, and we’ve brought you quite a few over the years. Their boundless optimism and confidence in whatever product they are advancing is infectious, even though from time to time with hindsight we know that to have been misplaced.

For once though the subject of today’s film isn’t something problematic, instead it’s a thing we still rely on today. Precision manufacturing of almost anything still relies on precision tooling, and the National Tool and Die Manufacturers Association is on hand in the video from 1953 below the break to remind us of the importance of their work.

The products on show all belie the era in which the film was made: a metal desk fan, CRT parts for TVs, car body parts, a flight of what we tentatively identify as Lockheed P-80 Shooting Stars, and a Patton tank. Perhaps for the Hackaday reader the interest increases though when we see the training of an apprentice toolmaker, a young man who is being trained to the highest standards in the use of machine tools. It’s a complaint we’ve heard from some of our industry contacts that it’s rare now to find skills at this level, but we’d be interested to hear views in the comments on the veracity of that claim, or whether in a world of CAD and CNC such a level of skill is still necessary. Either way we’re sure that the insistence on metrology would be just as familiar in a modern machine shop.

A quick web search finds that the National Tool and Die Manufacturers Association no longer exists, instead the search engine recommends the National Tooling And Machining Association. We’re not sure whether this is a successor organisation or a different one, but it definitely represents the same constituency. When the film was made, America was at the peak of its post-war boom, and the apprentice would no doubt have gone on to a successful and pretty lucrative career. We hope his present-day equivalent is as valued.

If you’re of a mind for more industrial process, can we direct you at die casting?

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Access To Fresh And Potable Water: An Ancient And Very Current Challenge

July 2, 2024 by 28 Comments

Throughout history, clean and potable water has been one of the most prized possessions, without which no human civilization could have ever sustained itself. Not only is water crucial for drinking and food preparation, but also for agriculture, cleaning and the production of countless materials, chemicals and much more. And this isn’t a modern problem: good water supplies and the most successful ancient cultures go hand in hand.

For instance, the retention and management of fresh water in reservoirs played a major role in the Khmer Empire, with many of its reservoirs (baray) surviving to today. Similarly, the Anuradhapure Kingdom in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) featured massive reservoirs like Kala Wewa that was constructed in 460 CE with a capacity of 123 million m3. In the New World, the Maya civilization similarly created reservoirs with intricate canals to capture rainwater before the dry season started, as due to the karst landscape wells were not possible.

Keeping this water fresh and free from contaminants and pollution was a major problem for especially the Maya, with a recent perspective by Lisa J. Lucera in PNAS Anthropology suggesting that they used an approach similar to modern day constructed wetlands to keep disease and illness at bay, while earlier discoveries also suggest the use of filtration including the use of zeolite.

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A Brief History Of Perpetual Motion

July 1, 2024 by 65 Comments

Conservation of energy isn’t just a good idea: It is the law. In particular, it is the first law of thermodynamics. But, apparently, a lot of people don’t really get that because history is replete with inventions that purport to run forever or produce more energy than they consume. Sometimes these are hoaxes, and sometimes they are frauds. We expect sometimes they are also simple misunderstandings.

We thought about this when we ran across the viral photo of an EV with a generator connected to the back wheel. Of course, EVs and hybrids do try to reclaim power through regenerative braking, but that’s recovering a fraction of the energy already spent. You can never pull more power out than you put in, and, in fact, you’ll pull out substantially less.

Not a New Problem

If you think this is a scourge of social media and modern vehicles, you’d be wrong. Leonardo da Vinci, back in 1494, said:

Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.

There was a rumor in the 8th century that someone built a “magic wheel,” but this appears to be little more than a myth. An Indian mathematician also claimed to have a wheel that would run forever, but there’s little proof of that, either. It was probably an overbalanced wheel where the wheel spins due to weight and gravity with enough force to keep the wheel spinning.

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Cleaning Up World War 2’s Legacy On The Seafloor With Robots

June 28, 2024 by 26 Comments

Until the 1970s, a very common method to dispose of unneeded munitions was to simply tip them off the side of a ship. This means that everything from grenades to chemical weapons have been languishing in large quantities around Europe’s shorelines, right alongside other types of unexploded ordnance (UXO).

Although clearing and mapping such dump sites are a standard part of e.g. marine infrastructure such as undersea cabling and off-shore wind turbines, no large-scale effort has so far been undertaken to remove them, even as they continue to pose an increasing hazard to people and the environment. Most recently, efforts are underway to truly begin clearing these UXO, as the BBC reports.

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The SS United States: The Most Important Ocean Liner We May Soon Lose Forever

June 27, 2024 by 14 Comments

Although it’s often said that the era of ocean liners came to an end by the 1950s with the rise of commercial aviation, reality isn’t quite that clear-cut. Coming out of the troubled 1940s arose a new kind of ocean liner, one using cutting-edge materials and propulsion, with hybrid civil and military use as the default, leading to a range of fascinating design decisions. This was the context in which the SS United States was born, with the beating heart of the US’ fastest battle ships, with light-weight aluminium structures and survivability built into every single aspect of its design.

Outpacing the super-fast Iowa-class battleships with whom it shares a lot of DNA due to its lack of heavy armor and triple 16″ turrets, it easily became the fastest ocean liner, setting speed records that took decades to be beaten by other ocean-going vessels, though no ocean liner ever truly did beat it on speed or comfort. Tricked out in the most tasteful non-flammable 1950s art and decorations imaginable, it would still be the fastest and most comfortable way to cross the Atlantic today. Unfortunately ocean liners are no longer considered a way to travel in this era of commercial aviation, leading to the SS United States and kin finding themselves either scrapped, or stuck in limbo.

In the case of the SS United States, so far it has managed to escape the cutting torch, but while in limbo many of its fittings were sold off at auction, and the conservation group which is in possession of the ship is desperately looking for a way to fund the restoration. Most recently, the owner of the pier where the ship is moored in Philadelphia got the ship’s eviction approved by a judge, leading to very tough choices to be made by September.

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