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

Painted Over But Not Forgotten: Restoring Lost Paintings With Radiation And Mathematics

January 4, 2022 by 23 Comments

An intrinsic property of paintings, that makes them both wonderful and very annoying, is the fact that they are physical objects. Sometimes they survive across the ages as amazing artifacts of their era, but they are also susceptible to being lost and even destroyed. Sometimes this destruction is deliberate, such as when a painting is painted over.

Artists reuse canvas all the time — painting over what was already there. Sometimes they might be coerced by a client into altering a painting, or removing entire elements from a scene. Fortunately, nowadays we have many techniques, involving x-rays and infrared radiation, that can analyze paintings to determine not only the composition of what we can see with the naked eye, but also that what lies underneath.

In some cases, we can then reconstruct what was previously hidden, returning to physical reality paintings and sketches which haven’t seen the light of day for sometimes centuries. Continue reading “Painted Over But Not Forgotten: Restoring Lost Paintings With Radiation And Mathematics” →

2021: As The Hardware World Turns

January 3, 2022 by 15 Comments

Well, that didn’t go quite as we expected, did it? Wind the clock back 365 days, and the world seemed to be breathing a collective sigh of relief after making it through 2020 in one piece. Folks started getting their COVID-19 vaccines, and in-person events started tentatively putting new dates on the calendar. After a rough year, it seemed like there was finally some light at the end of the tunnel.

Turns out, it was just a another train. New variants of everyone’s favorite acute respiratory syndrome have kept the pandemic rolling, and in many parts of the world, the last month or so has seen more new cases of the virus than at any point during 2020. This is the part of the Twilight Zone episode were we realize that not only have we not escaped the danger, we didn’t even understand the scope of it to begin with.

Case in point, the chip shortages. We can’t blame it entirely on the pandemic, but it certainly hasn’t helped matters. From video game systems to cars, production has crawled to a standstill as manufacturers fight to get their hands on integrated circuits that were once plentiful. It’s not just a problem for industry either, things have gotten so bad that there’s a good chance most of the people reading this have found themselves unable to get their hands on a part or two these last few months. If you were working on a hobby project, it’s a temporary annoyance. But for those who planned on finally bringing their latest big idea to market, we’ve heard tales of heartbreaking delays and costly redesigns.

It would be easy to look at the last twelve months and see nothing but disappointment, but that’s hardly the attitude you want to have at the beginning of the year. So let’s take the high road, and look back on some of the highlights from 2021 as we turn a hopeful eye towards the future.

Continue reading “2021: As The Hardware World Turns” →

New Cars Will Nickel-and-Dime You – It’s Automotive As A Service

December 30, 2021 by 230 Comments

Every few years, someone pushing a startup to investors comes up with an acronym or buzzword which rapidly becomes the new hotness in those circles. One of the most pernicious is “as a Service,” which takes regular things and finds a way to charge you a regular fee to use them.

Automotive companies just absolutely loved the sound of this, and the industry is rapidly moving to implement subscription services across the board. Even if there’s hardware in your car for a given feature, you might find you now need to pay a monthly fee to use it. Let’s explore how this came about, and talk about which cars are affected. You might be surprised to find yours already on the list.
Continue reading “New Cars Will Nickel-and-Dime You – It’s Automotive As A Service” →

Astronaut Food Is Light Years Beyond Tang And Freeze-Dried Ice Cream

December 29, 2021 by 9 Comments

When it comes down to it, we humans have two major concerns when venturing away from home for an extended period of time: what we’ll eat, and where we will sleep. Depending on the mode of travel, you might take some snacks along, or else rely on restaurants and/or the pantry of your possible hosts. Until the day we can reliably grow many types of food in space, or that Milliways, that five-star eatery at the end of the universe is operational, astronauts and other space-bound travelers will have to bring most of their food with them.

Cubes and Tubes

Space food has its roots in military rations, which in the United States were devised during the Revolutionary War. Both the variety and delivery methods of food have changed significantly since the beginning of the space program. While the menu may have at first been limited to tubes of nutrient-rich goo, bite-sized cubes and freeze-dried powdered beverages, the fare is more far-out these days. Astronauts on the ISS even enjoy tortillas, fresh fruits, and vegetables thanks to resupply missions, though they have to eat some of these types of foods quickly.

The average astronaut has also changed quite a bit, too. At first, they were all young and super-fit ex-military men, but nowadays they are more likely to be middle-aged science-y types and women. All three of these groups have different nutritional needs when faced with the rigors of living and working in space.

Continue reading “Astronaut Food Is Light Years Beyond Tang And Freeze-Dried Ice Cream” →

Quantum Atomic Interferometer For Precision Motion Sensing

December 28, 2021 by 16 Comments

The current state of the art of embedded motion sensing is based around micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) devices. These miracles of microfabrication use tiny silicon structures, configured to detect acceleration and rotational velocity in three dimensions. Accumulate these accelerations and rotations, and you’ve got a device that can find its orientation and track movement without any external waypoints. This is the basis of the technique of dead reckoning.

Why do we care about dead reckoning anyway? Surely GPS and related positioning systems are good enough? Above ground GPS is usually good enough, but underwater and underground this simply won’t work. Even heading indoors has a dramatic effect on the GPS signal strength, so yes, we need another way for some applications.

Right now, the current state of the art in portable sensors are MEMS devices, and you can get them for the cost of a hamburger. But if you want the ultimate in accuracy, you’ll want a quantum atomic interferometer. What that is, and how it will be possible to make one small enough to be useful, is half of the story. But first, let’s talk MEMS.

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The Label Says HDMI 2.1 But That Doesn’t Mean You’ll Get It

December 27, 2021 by 48 Comments

Technology moves quickly these days as consumers continue to demand more data and more pixels. We see regular updates to standards for USB and RAM continually coming down the pipeline as the quest for greater performance goes on.

HDMI 2.1 is the latest version of the popular audio-visual interface, and promises a raft of new features and greater performance than preceding versions of the standard. As it turns out, though, buying a new monitor or TV with an HDMI 2.1 logo on the box doesn’t mean you’ll get any of those new features, as discovered by TFT Central.

Continue reading “The Label Says HDMI 2.1 But That Doesn’t Mean You’ll Get It” →

The Dreamcast Legacy

December 22, 2021 by 48 Comments

The Dreamcast is a bit of an odd beast. Coming on the heels of the unpopular Sega Saturn, the Dreamcast was meant to be a simple console built with off-the-shelf parts and released in late 1998. The Nintendo 64 was already tough competition (1996). Ultimately, the Dreamcast fell out of the public eye in the early 2000s as the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube were all released with incredible fanfare just a few years later. In some sense, Sega’s last console is a footnote in gaming history.

But despite not achieving the success that Sega hoped for, the Dreamcast has formed a small cult following, because as we know, nothing builds a cult-like following like an untimely demise. Since its release, it has gained a reputation for being ahead of its time. It was the first console to include a modem for network play and an easy storage solution for transferring game data between consoles via the VMUs that docked in the controllers. It had innovative and classic games such as Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and Shenmue. Microsoft even released a version of Windows CE with DirectX allowing developers to port PC games to the console quickly.

We see our fair share of console hacks here on Hackaday, but what is the ultimate legacy of the Dreamcast? How did it come to be? What happened to it, and why did so much of Sega’s hopes ride on it? Continue reading “The Dreamcast Legacy” →