Curated

76 Articles

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

When Is An Engineer Not An Engineer? When He’s A Canadian Engineer

December 18, 2023 by 218 Comments

In medieval Europe, many professions were under the control of guilds. These had a monopoly over that profession in their particular city or state, backed up with all the legal power of the monarch. If you weren’t in the guild you couldn’t practice your craft. Except in a few ossified forms they are a thing of the past, but we have to wonder whether that particular message ever reached Western Canada.

An electoral candidate with an engineering degree who practices what any sane person would call engineering, has been ordered by a judge to cease calling himself an engineer. The heinous crime committed by the candidate, one [David Hilderman], is to not be a member of the guild Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. We get it that maybe calling a garbage truck driver a waste collection engineer may be stretching it a little, but here in the 21st century we think the Canadian professional body should be ashamed of themselves over this case. Way to encourage people into the engineering profession!

Here at Hackaday, quite a few of us writers are engineers. Stepping outside our normal third person, I, [Jenny List], am among them. My electronic engineering degree may be a little moth-eaten, but I have practiced my craft over several decades without ever being a member of the British IEE. No offence meant to the IEE, but there is very little indeed they have to offer me. If the same is true in Canada to the extent that they have to rely on legal sanctions to protect their membership lists, then we think perhaps the problem is with them rather than Canadian engineers. You have to ask, just how is an engineering graduate who’s not a guild member supposed to describe themselves? Some of us need to know, in case we ever find ourselves on holiday in Canada!

Header: Joe Gratz, CC0.

Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity

December 18, 2023 by 72 Comments

Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage. Continue reading “Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity” →

Mickey Shall Be Free!

December 18, 2023 by 24 Comments

The end of the year brings with it festive cheer, and a look forward into the new year to come. For those with an interest in intellectual property and the public domain it brings another treat, because every January 1st a fresh crop of works enter the public domain.

We’ll take a look at the wider crop around the day, but this year the big story is that Mickey Mouse, whose first outing was in 1928’s Steamboat Willie, is to get his turn to be released from copyright. [Jennifer Jenkins] from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is using Mickey’s impending release to take a look at the law surrounding such a well-protected work.

Mickey has perhaps the greatest symbolism of all intellectual property when it comes to copyright terms, having been the reason for the Disney Corporation’s successive successful attempts to have copyright terms extended. Now even their reach is about to come to an end, but beware if you’re about to use him in your work, for the Mickey entering the public domain is an early outing, without gloves or the colours and eyes of his later incarnations. Added to that, Disney have a range of trademarks surrounding him. The piece makes for an interesting read as it navigates this maze, and makes some worthwhile points about copyright and the public domain.

Last year, we welcomed Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the public domain. Meanwhile if you’re reading this in 2023, we believe our use of a header image featuring the 1928 Mickey to be covered by the doctrine of fair use.

How Germany’s Troubled Pebble Bed Reactor Came Of Age In China

December 14, 2023 by 58 Comments

Although the concept of nuclear fission is a simple and straightforward one, the many choices for fuel types, fuel design, reactor configurations, coolant types, neutron moderator or reflector types, etc. make that nuclear fission reactors have blossomed into a wide range of reactor designs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The story of the pebble bed reactor (PBR) is among the most interesting here, with its development winding its way from the US Manhattan Project over the Atlantic to Germany’s nuclear power industry during the 1960s, before finding a welcoming home in China’s rapidly growing nuclear power industry.

As a reactor design, PBRs do not use fuel rods like most other nuclear reactors, but rather spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’) that are inserted at the top of the reactor vessel and extracted at the bottom, allowing for continuous refueling, while helium acts as coolant. With a strong negative temperature coefficient, the design should be extremely safe, while providing high-temperature steam that can be used for applications that otherwise require a coal boiler or gas turbine.

With China recently having put its twin-PBR HTR-PM plant into commercial operation, why is it that it was not the US, Germany or South Africa to first commercialize PBRs, but relative newcomer China?

Continue reading “How Germany’s Troubled Pebble Bed Reactor Came Of Age In China” →

Radio Station WWV: All Time, All The Time

December 13, 2023 by 47 Comments

Of all the rabbit holes we technical types tend to fall down, perhaps the one with the most twists and turns is: time. Some of this is due to the curiously mysterious nature of time itself, but more has to do with the various ways we’ve decided to slice and dice time to suit our needs. Most of those methods are (wisely) based upon the rhythms of nature, but maddeningly, the divisions we decided upon when the most precise instrument we had was our eyes are just a little bit off. And for a true time junkie, “a little bit off” can be a big, big problem.

Luckily, even the most dedicated timekeepers — those of us who feel physically ill when the clock on the stove and the clock on the microwave don’t match — have a place to go that’s a haven of temporal correctness: radio station WWV. Along with sister stations WWVB and WWVH, these stations are the voice of the US National Institutes for Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Division, broadcasting the official time for the country over shortwave radio.

Some might say the programming coming from these stations is a bit on the dry side, and it’s true that you can only listen to the seconds slip by for so long before realizing that there are probably better things to do with your day. But the WWV signals pack a surprising amount of information into their signals, some of it only tangentially related to our reckoning of time. This makes these stations and the services they provide essential infrastructure for our technological society, which in turn makes it worth your time to look into just how they do it.

Continue reading “Radio Station WWV: All Time, All The Time” →

Can Google’s New AI Read Your Datasheets For You?

December 12, 2023 by 25 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of AI tools lately, and, of course, we know they aren’t really smart, but they sure fool people into thinking they are actually intelligent. Of course, these programs can only pick through their training, and a lot depends on what they are trained on. When you use something like ChatGPT, for example, you assume they trained it on reasonable data. Sure, it might get things wrong anyway, but there’s also the danger that it simply doesn’t know what you are talking about. It would be like calling your company’s help desk and asking where you left your socks — they simply don’t know.

We’ve seen attempts to have AI “read” web pages or documents of your choice and then be able to answer questions about them. The latest is from Google with NotebookLM. It integrates a workspace where you can make notes, ask questions, and provide sources. The sources can be text snippets, documents from Google Drive, or PDF files you upload.

You can’t ask questions until you upload something, and we presume the AI restricts its answers to what’s in the documents you provide. It still won’t be perfect, but at least it won’t just give you bad information from an unknown source. Continue reading “Can Google’s New AI Read Your Datasheets For You?” →

Bunnie Huang’s Shenzhen Guide Gets A New Edition – Written By Naomi Wu

December 11, 2023 by 23 Comments

If there’s one city which can truly claim to be the powerhouse of high-tech manufacturing here in the 21st century, it’s the Chinese city of Shenzhen. It’s likely that few people don’t own something made in that city or with parts that have passed through companies in the legendary electronic component markets of its Huaqiangbei district.

For years now the essential introduction to this world has come in the form of [Bunnie Huang]’s Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen, a publication that unlocks the Chinese-speaking maze of vendors. All paper publications eventually become dated though, and this guide is no exception, so we’re very pleased to see a new version is on its way. Better still, it comes courtesy of Shenzhen native and maker extraordinaire [Naomi Wu], whose video series on YouTube has opened up so many corners of her city for those of us thousands of miles away. We can’t wait to see what she puts in it.

It’s also very good indeed on another level to see [Naomi]’s involvement, as earlier in the year she had to curtail her social media output under pressure from the Chinese government. We miss her unique window into the wonders of her city, and aside from her online shop it’s been concerning to hear very little from her of late. You can hear her talking about the book in a promotional video below the break.

Continue reading “Bunnie Huang’s Shenzhen Guide Gets A New Edition – Written By Naomi Wu” →