We suspect that if you want to write a blockbuster movie or novel, the wrong approach is to go to a studio or publisher and say, “I have this totally new idea that is like nothing you’ve ever seen before…” Even Star Trek was pitched to the network as “Wagon Train to the stars.” People with big money tend to want to bet on things that have succeeded before, which is why so many movies are either remakes or Star Trek XXII: The Search for 4 PM Dinner Specials. Maybe that’s what the El Salvador-based Unicomer Group had in mind when they bought one of our favorite brands, RadioShack. They are reportedly planning a major comeback for the beleaguered brand both online and in the physical world.
In all fairness, the Shack may be better in our memories than in our realities. It was handy to stop off and pick up a coax connector, even if it cost three times the going rate for one. There was a time when RadioShack offered reasonable parts for projects, and it seems like near the end, they tried to hit that target again, but for many years, you could not find the typical parts for a modern project there anyway. However, Unicomer isn’t just a random group of investors.
A culture in which it’s fair to say the community which Hackaday serves is steeped in, is electronic music. Within these pages you’ll find plenty of synthesisers, chiptune players, and other projects devoted to synthetic sound. Not everyone here is a musician of obsessive listener, but if Hackaday had a soundtrack album we’re guessing it would be electronic. Along the way, many of us have picked up an appreciation for the history of electronic music, whether it’s EDM from the 1990s, 8-bit SID chiptunes, or further back to figures such as Wendy Carlos, Gershon Kingsley, or Delia Derbyshire. But for all that, the origin of electronic music is frustratingly difficult to pin down. Is it characterised by the instruments alone, or does it have something more specific in the music itself? Here follows the result of a few months’ idle self-enlightenment as we try to get tot he bottom of it all.
Will The Real Electronic Music Please Stand Up?
If you own a synthesiser, the Telharmonium is its daddy.
Anyone reading around the subject soon discovers that there are several different facets to synthesised music which are collectively brought together under the same banner and which at times are all claimed individually to be the purest form of the art. Further to that it rapidly becomes obvious when studying the origins of the technology, that purely electronic and electromechanical music are also two sides of the same coin. Is music electronic when it uses an electronic instrument, when electronics are used to modify the sound of an acoustic instrument, when it is sequenced electronically often in a manner unplayable by a human, or when it uses sampled sounds? Is an electric guitar making electronic music when played through an effects pedal?
The history of electronic music as far as it seems from here, starts around the turn of the twentieth century, and though the work of many different engineers and musicians could be cited at its source there are three inventions which stand out. Thaddeus Cahill’s tone-wheel-based Telharmonium US patent was granted in 1897, the same year as that for Edwin S. Votey’s Pianola player piano, while the Russian Lev Termen’s Theremin was invented in 1919. In those three inventions we find the progenital ancestors of all synthesisers, sequencers, and purely electronic instruments. If it appears we’ve made a glaring omission by not mentioning inventions such as the phonograph, it’s because they were invented not to make music but to record it. Continue reading “Where Did Electronic Music Start?”→
Quartz, though, is at least a partial exception to this rule. Once its unusual electrical properties were understood, crystalline quartz was sent directly from quarries and mines to factories, where they were turned into piezoelectric devices with no chemical transformation whatsoever. The magic of crystal formation had already been done by natural processes; all that was needed was a little slicing and dicing.
As it turns out, though, quartz is so immensely useful for a technological society that there’s no way for the supply of naturally formed crystals to match demand. Like copper before it, which was first discovered in natural metallic deposits that could be fashioned into tools and decorations more or less directly, we would need to discover different sources for quartz and invent chemical transformations to create our own crystals, taking cues from Mother Nature’s recipe book on the way.
When we last left this subject, I told you all about Transorma, the first letter-sorting machine in semi-wide use. But before and since Transorma, machines have come about to perform various tasks on jumbled messes of mail — things like distinguishing letters from packages, making sure letters are all facing the same way before cancelling the postage, and the gargantuan task of getting huge piles of mail into the machines in the first place. So let’s dive right in, shall we?
Thermoforming — which includes vacuum-forming — has its place in a well-rounded workshop, and Mayku (makers of desktop thermoforming machines) have a short list of tips for getting the best results when 3D printing molds on filament-based printers.
A mold is put into direct, prolonged contact with a hot sheet of semi-molten plastic. If one needs a mold to work more than once, there are a few considerations to take into account. The good news is that a few simple guidelines will help get excellent results. Here are the biggest ones:
The smoother the vertical surfaces, the better. Since thermoforming sucks (or pushes) plastic onto and into a mold like a second skin, keeping layer heights between 0.1 mm and 0.2 mm will make de-molding considerably easier.
Generous draft angles. Aim for a 5 degree draft angle. Draft angles of 1-2 degrees are common in injection molding, but a more aggressive one is appropriate due to layer lines giving FDM prints an inherently non-smooth surface.
Thick perimeters and top layers for added strength. The outside of a mold is in contact with the most heat for the longest time. Mayku suggests walls and top layer between 3 mm to 5 mm thick. Don’t forget vent holes!
Use a high infill to better resist stress. Molds need to stand up to mechanical stress as well as heat. Aim for a 50% or higher infill to make a robust part that helps resist deformation.
Ensure your printer can do the job. 3D printing big pieces with high infill can sometimes lift or warp during printing. Use enclosures or draft shields as needed, depending on your printer and material.
Make the mold out of the right material. Mayku recommends that production molds be printed in nylon, which stands up best to the heat and stress a thermoforming mold will be put under. That being said, other materials will work for prototyping. In my experience, even a PLA mold (which deforms readily under thermoforming heat) is good for at least one molding.
Thermoforming open doors for an enterprising hacker, and 3D printing molds is a great complement. If you’re happy being limited to small parts, small “dental” formers like the one pictured here are available from every discount overseas retailer. And of course, thermoforming is great for costumes and props. If you want to get more unusual with your application, how about forming your very own custom-shaped mirrors by thermoforming laminated polystyrene?
The ways in which we interact with computers has changed dramatically over the decades. From flipping switches on the control panels of room-sized computers, to punching holes into cards, to ultimately the most common ways that we interact with computers today, in the form of keyboards, mice and touch screens. The latter two especially were developed as a way to interact with graphical user interfaces (GUI) in an intuitive way, but keyboards remain the only reasonable way to quickly enter large amounts of text, which raises many ergonomic questions about how to interact with the rest of the user interface, whether this is a command line or a GUI.
For text editors, perhaps the most divisive feature is that of modal versus non-modal interaction. This one point alone underlies most of the Great Editor War that has raged since time immemorial. Practically, this is mostly about highly opiniated people arguing about whether they like Emacs or vi (or Vim) better. Since in August of 2023 we said our final farewell to the creator of Vim – Bram Moolenaar – this might be a good point to put down the torches and pitchforks and take a sober look at why Vim really is the logical choice for fast, ergonomic coding and editing.
For a lot of reasons, home etching of PCBs is somewhat of a dying art. The main reason is the rise of quick-turn PCB fabrication services, of course; when you can send your Gerbers off and receive back a box with a dozen or so professionally made PCBs for a couple of bucks, why would you want to mess with etching your own?
Convenience and cost aside, there are a ton of valid reasons to spin up your own boards, ranging from not having to wait for shipping to just wanting to control the process yourself. Whichever camp you’re in, though, it pays to know what’s going on when your plain copper-clad board, adorned with your precious artwork, slips into the etching tank and becomes a printed circuit board. What exactly is going on in there to remove the copper? And how does the etching method affect the final product? Let’s take a look at a few of the more popular etching methods to understand the chemistry behind your boards.
