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Longform articles, the best of what the Hackaday writing crew has to offer.

In Our Own Image: Do We Need Humanoid Robots?

October 17, 2022 by 105 Comments

Science fiction is full of things you don’t want to think too hard about. Why do starships with transporters have brigs with forcefields? Why not just beam a prisoner into an enclosed space?  Why do Cylons fly ships with human controls? Why not have a plug in their… well, you get the idea. For that matter, why do Cylons (and Kaylons, and Gort) even look human at all? Why aren’t some Cylons just ships?

Of course, the real reason is so we can identify with them and actors can play them with some cosplay gear and makeup. But real-life robots that are practical rarely look like humans at all.

No one is going to confuse a robot factory arm or a Roomba with a person, yet they are perfectly suited for their purpose. Yet we are fascinated with human-looking robots and continue to build them, like Nadia from IHMC Robotics in the video below. Continue reading “In Our Own Image: Do We Need Humanoid Robots?” →

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Picking The Best Of The Best

October 13, 2022 by 15 Comments

Given how many incredible builds we’ve covered over the last couple of years, we knew that an official Cyberdeck Contest would certainly receive some impressive entries. But never in our wildest dreams could we have predicted that more than 100 decks would end up crossing the finish line, or that of them, the vast majority would be never-before-seen designs. In fact, the response to this contest was so overwhelming that the judging process took far longer than we originally anticipated.

Ultimately, we decided that there were simply too many phenomenal builds entered into the contest to award $150 Digikey spending sprees to just three of them. So as an added bonus, we’ve rustled up some $50 Tindie gift certificates that will go to the four special category honorable mentions.

With that, let’s take a look at the cyberdecks that took top honors as decided by our panel of judges.

Continue reading “2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Picking The Best Of The Best” →

Rollercoasters Are Triggering The IPhone’s Crash Detection System

October 12, 2022 by 68 Comments

Apple has been busy adding new features to its smartphone and smartwatch offerings. Its new iPhone 14 and Apple Watch 8 now feature a safety system that contacts emergency services in the event the user is in a automobile accident.

As with so many new technologies though, the feature has fallen afoul of the law of unintended consequences. Reports are that the “crash detection system” is falsely triggering on rollercoasters and in other strange circumstances. Let’s take a look at how these systems work, and why this might be happening.

Continue reading “Rollercoasters Are Triggering The IPhone’s Crash Detection System” →

front and back of the Jolly Wrencher SAO

Jolly Wrencher SAO, And How KiCad 6 Made It Easy

October 11, 2022 by 17 Comments

If you plan to attend Supercon or some other hacker conference, know that you’re going to get a badge with a SAO (Simple Add-On) connector, a 4-pin or 6-pin connector that you can plug an addon board onto. There’s myriads of SAOs to choose from, and if you ever felt like your choice paralysis wasn’t intense enough, now you have the option of getting a Jolly Wrencher SAO board!

This board gives you an SMD prototyping space, with 1.27mm (0.05″ pitch) pads, suitable for many passive components, ICs and even modules like the ESP32 WROOM. Those pads are diagonally interspersed with ground-fill-connected pads – if you want to bodge something on the spot, you don’t need to pull separate GND wires. Given the Supercon badge specifics, the SAO-standard SDA and SCL pins have RX and TX labels as well. For bonus points, the eyes are transparent, with LED footprints behind them – it’s my first time designing a PCB where the LED shines through the FR4, and I hope that the aesthetics work out!

This design is open with gerber files available for download, so if you thought of making a quick PCB order, I’m giving you one more .zip file to add to it. Otherwise, it’s possible that you will find a Wrencher board lying around at Supercon! Now, I’d like to tell you how KiCad 6 made it super easy to design this PCB – after all, there’s never enough SAOs, and it’s quite likely you’ll want to design your own special SAO, too.

Continue reading “Jolly Wrencher SAO, And How KiCad 6 Made It Easy” →

Lithium-Ion Battery Circuitry Is Simple

October 10, 2022 by 83 Comments

By now, we’ve gone through LiIon handling basics and mechanics. When it comes to designing your circuit around a LiIon battery, I believe you could benefit from a cookbook with direct suggestions, too. Here, I’d like to give you a collection of LiIon recipes that worked well for me over the years.

I will be talking about single-series (1sXp) cell configurations, for a simple reason – multiple-series configurations are not something I consider myself as having worked extensively with. The single-series configurations alone will result in a fairly extensive writeup, but for those savvy in LiIon handling, I invite you to share your tips, tricks and observations in the comment section – last time, we had a fair few interesting points brought up!

The Friendly Neighborhood Charger

There’s a whole bunch of ways to charge the cells you’ve just added to your device – a wide variety of charger ICs and other solutions are at your disposal. I’d like to focus on one specific module that I believe it’s important you know more about.

You likely have seen the blue TP4056 boards around – they’re cheap and you’re one Aliexpress order away from owning a bunch, with a dozen boards going for only a few bucks. The TP4056 is a LiIon charger IC able to top up your cells at rate of up to 1 A. Many TP4056 boards have a protection circuit built in, which means that such a board can protect your LiIon cell from the external world, too. This board itself can be treated as a module; for over half a decade now, the PCB footprint has stayed the same, to the point where you can add a TP4056 board footprint onto your own PCBs if you need LiIon charging and protection. I do that a lot – it’s way easier, and even cheaper, than soldering the TP4056 and all its support components. Here’s a KiCad footprint if you’d like to do that too.

Continue reading “Lithium-Ion Battery Circuitry Is Simple” →

Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green

October 7, 2022 by 153 Comments

The caterers for the volunteer workforce behind the summer’s MCH hacker camp in the Netherlands served all-vegan food. This wasn’t the bean sprouts and lentils that maybe some of the more meat-eating readers might imagine when confronted with vegan food, nor was it a half-as-good array of substitutes with leathery soy hamburgers and rubbery fake cheese smelling suspiciously of feet.

Instead it was a well-crafted, interesting, and tasty menu that was something to look forward to after several hours driving a vanload of handwashing sinks. It was in one of their meals that I found food for thought when driving a week later past the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine on my way through Germany to Luxembourg’s Haxogreen as part of my European hacker camp summer tour.

The meal was deep-fried soy protein strips and the mine is probably one of Western Europe’s dirtiest and most problematic CO2 sources in a country that likes to imagine itself as environmentally friendly, so where in this unlikely connection did I find a pairing? Continue reading “Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green” →

Git Your PCBs Online

October 6, 2022 by 16 Comments

Last time, I’ve shown you how to create a local Git repository around your PCB project. That alone provides you with local backups, helping you never lose the changes you make to your files, and always be able to review the history of your project as it developed.

However, an even more significant part of Git’s usefulness is the ability to upload our creations to one of the various online Git repository hosting services, and keep it up to date at all times with a single shell command. I’d like to show you how to upload your project to GitHub and GitLab, in particular!

Continue reading “Git Your PCBs Online” →