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

The Many Levels Of Autonomous Motoring

May 28, 2021 by 40 Comments

For years now we have been told that self-driving cars will be the Next Big Thing, and we’ve seen some companies — yes, Tesla but others too — touting current and planned features with names like “Autopilot” and “self-driving”. Cutting through the marketing hype to unpacking what that really means is difficult. But there is a standard for describing these capabilities, assigning them as levels from zero to five.

Now we’re greeted with the news that Honda have put a small number of vehicles in the showrooms in Japan that are claimed to be the first commercially available level 3 autonomous cars. That claim is debatable as for example Audi briefly had level 3 capabilities on one of their luxury sedans despite having few places to sell it in which it could be legally used. But the Honda Legend SENSING Elite can justifiably claim to be the only car on the market to the general public with the feature at the moment. It has a battery of sensors to keep track of its driver, its position, and the road conditions surrounding it. The car boasts a “Traffic Jam Pilot” mode, which “enables the automated driving system to drive the vehicle under certain conditions, instead of the driver, such as when the vehicle is in congested traffic on an expressway“.

Sounds impressive, but just what is a level 3 autonomous car, and what are all the other levels?

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Electric Vehicles Do Battle On Pikes Peak

May 27, 2021 by 61 Comments

When we think of electric cars, more often than not we’re drawn to the environmental benefits and the smooth quiet commuter drives they’re so ideally suited for. However, EVs can also offer screaming performance, most notably due to their instant-on torque that gives them a big boost over internal combustion vehicles.

In recent years, this has led to a variety of independent and manufacturer-supported efforts taking on some of motorsport’s classic events. Today, we’re looking at a handful of recent entries that have tackled one of the most gruelling events in motorsport – the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb. Continue reading “Electric Vehicles Do Battle On Pikes Peak” →

Flat-Pack Pasta: Like Ikea Furniture Without The Weird Wrench

May 26, 2021 by 46 Comments

When it comes to food packaging, there’s no bigger scam than potato chip bags, right? People complain about the air (nitrogen, actually) inside, but it’s there for a reason — nitrogen pushes out oxygen, so the chips live in a state of factory-fresh dormancy until you rip open the bag and release the gas. If you want flat-pack chips, there’s always those uniformly-shaped potato slurry wafers that come in a can. But even those usually manage to have a few broken ones.

On the other hand, no one complains about the extra space in their box of fusilli — that would be silly. But seriously, successfully shipping fragile foods requires either flat packing or a lot of extra space, especially if that food comes in a myriad of fun 3D shapes like pasta does. Everybody knows that 3D pasta is superior to flat pasta because it holds sauces so much better. The pasta must be kept intact!

The great thing about pasta as a food is that it’s simple to make, and it’s more nutritious than potato chips. Because of these factors, pasta is often served in extreme situations to large groups of people, like soldiers and the involuntarily displaced. But storing large quantities of shapely pasta takes up quite a bit of space. And because of all that necessary air, much of the packaging goes to waste.

So what if you could keep your plethora of pasta in, say, a filing cabinet? A research team led by the Morphing Matter Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to make flat-pack pasta that springs to life after a few minutes in boiling water.

Continue reading “Flat-Pack Pasta: Like Ikea Furniture Without The Weird Wrench” →

Technical Audacity And The Phone Book

May 25, 2021 by 74 Comments

I often think we — or maybe the people who control our money — lack the audacity to take on really big projects. It is hard to imagine laying the transatlantic cable for the first time today, for example. When I want a good example of this effect, I usually say something like: “Can you imagine going to a boardroom of a major company today and saying, ‘We plan to run wire to every house and business in the world and connect them all together.'” Yet that’s what the phone company did. But it turns out, running copper wire everywhere was only one major challenge for the phone company. The other was printing phone directories. In today’s world, it is easy to imagine a computer system that keeps track of all the phone numbers that can spit out a printed version for duplication. But that’s a relatively recent innovation. How did big city phonebooks work before the advent of the computer?

Turns out, the Saturday Evening Post talked about how it all worked in a 1954 article. We aren’t sure there weren’t some computerized records by 1954, but the whole process was still largely manual. By that year, an estimated 60,000,000 directories went out each year in the United States alone. Some of these were small, but the Chicago directory — not including suburban directories — had over 2,100 pages. In New York City, the solution was to print a separate book for each borough. Even then. the Manhattan book was three inches thick and projected to grow to five inches by 1975.

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Starlink: A Review And Some Hacks

May 24, 2021 by 129 Comments

I could probably be described as a SpaceX enthusiast. I catch their launches when I can, and I’ve watched the development of Starship with great interest. But the side-effect of SpaceX’s reusable launch system is that getting to space has become a lot cheaper. Having excess launch capacity means that space projects that were previously infeasible become suddenly at least plausible. One of those is Starlink.

Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite Internet service. Wireless and cellular internet have helped in some places, but if you really live out in the sticks, satellite internet is your only option. And while satellite Internet isn’t exactly new, Starlink is a bit different. Hughesnet, another provider, has a handful of satellites in geostationary orbit, which is about 22,000 miles above the earth. To quote Grace Hopper, holding a nearly foot-long length of wire representing a nanosecond, “Between here and the satellite, there are a very large number nanoseconds.”

SpaceX opted to do something a bit different. In what seemed like an insane pipe dream at the time, they planned to launch a satellite constellation of 12,000 birds, some of them flying as low as 214 mile altitude. The downside of flying so low is that they won’t stay in orbit as long, but SpaceX is launching them significantly faster than they’re coming down. So far, nearly 1,600 Starlink satellites are in orbit, in a criss-crossing pattern at 342 miles (550 km) up.

This hundred-fold difference in altitude matters. A Hughesnet connection has a minimum theoretical latency of 480 ms, and in reality runs closer to 600 ms. Starlink predicts a theoretical minimum of under 10 ms, though real-world performance isn’t quite that low yet. In the few weeks I’ve had the service, ping times have fallen from mid-60s down to 20s and 30s. The way Starlink works right now, data goes up to the closest satellite and directly back to the connected ground station. The long-term plan is to allow the satellites to talk directly to each other over laser links, skipping over the ground stations. Since the speed of light is higher in a vacuum than in a fiber-optic cable, the fully deployed system could potentially have lower latency than even fiber Internet, depending on the location of the endpoint and how many hops need to be made.

I got a Starlink setup, and have been trying out the beta service. Here’s my experience, and a bonus hack to boot.

Continue reading “Starlink: A Review And Some Hacks” →

Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network

May 20, 2021 by 68 Comments

It’s no secret that Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has lost some of its appeal in recent years. These days there’s plenty of free chat platforms boasting slick web interfaces and smartphone push notifications, to say nothing of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The ability to communicate with like minded individuals from all over the planet in real-time is now something we take for granted, so it’s little surprise that newer and flashier protocols and services have steadily eroded the IRC user base.

But there’s often a hidden cost to using these more modern communication protocols. A lack of operational transparency naturally leads to concerns over monitoring and censorship, which makes such services a poor match for the free and open source community. As such, many open projects have eschewed these newer and more popular services for IRC networks that were developed and maintained by the community itself. Among these, the best-known and most respected is Freenode. Originally started as a Linux support channel in 1995, Freenode grew to become the defacto communication and support tool for free and open source projects of all shapes and sizes, and by 2013 had officially become the largest and most active IRC network in the world.

Unfortunately, the incredible legacy of Freenode is now being jeopardized by what former staff members are describing as nothing short of a hostile takeover. Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication. Here’s where it gets weird.

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Raspberry Pi RP2040: Hands-On Experiences From An STM32 Perspective

May 19, 2021 by 97 Comments

The release of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspberry Pi Pico board with RP2040 microcontroller has made big waves these past months in the maker community. Many have demonstrated how especially the two Programmable I/O (PIO) state machine peripherals can be used to create DVI video generators and other digital peripherals.

Alongside this excitement, it raises the question of whether any of this will cause any major upheaval for those of us using STM32, SAM and other Cortex-M based MCUs. Would the RP2040 perhaps be a valid option for some of our projects? With the RP2040 being a dual Cortex-M0+ processor MCU, it seems only fair to put it toe to toe with the offerings from one of the current heavyweights in the 32-bit ARM MCU space: ST Microelectronics.

Did the Raspberry Pi Foundation pipsqueak manage to show ST’s engineers how it’s done, or should the former revisit some of their assumptions? And just how hard is it going to be to port low-level code from STM32 to RP2040? Continue reading “Raspberry Pi RP2040: Hands-On Experiences From An STM32 Perspective” →