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

How Laser Headlights Work

March 22, 2021 by 142 Comments

When we think about the onward march of automotive technology, headlights aren’t usually the first thing that come to mind. Engines, fuel efficiency, and the switch to electric power are all more front of mind. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of engineers around the world working to improve the state of the art in automotive lighting day in, day out.

Sealed beam headlights gave way to more modern designs once regulations loosened up, while bulbs moved from simple halogens to xenon HIDs and, more recently, LEDs. Now, a new technology is on the scene, with lasers!

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New Part Day: Onion Tau LiDAR Camera

March 18, 2021 by 40 Comments

The Onion Tau LiDAR Camera is a small, time-of-flight (ToF) based depth-sensing camera that looks and works a little like a USB webcam, but with  a really big difference: frames from the Tau include 160 x 60 “pixels” of depth information as well as greyscale. This data is easily accessed via a Python API, and example scripts make it easy to get up and running quickly. The goal is to be an affordable and easy to use option for projects that could benefit from depth sensing.

When the Tau was announced on Crowd Supply, I immediately placed a pre-order for about $180. Since then, the folks at Onion were kind enough to send me a pre-production unit, and I’ve been playing around with the device to get an idea of how it acts, and to build an idea of what kind of projects it would be a good fit for. Here is what I’ve learned so far.

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Science Officer…Scan For Elephants!

March 17, 2021 by 29 Comments

If you watch many espionage or terrorism movies set in the present day, there’s usually a scene where some government employee enhances a satellite image to show a clear picture of the main villain’s face. Do modern spy satellites have that kind of resolution? We don’t know, and if we did we couldn’t tell you anyway. But we do know that even with unclassified resolution, scientists are using satellite imagery and machine learning to count things like elephant populations.

When you think about it, it is a hard problem to count wildlife populations in their habitat. First, if you go in person you disturb the target animals. Even a drone is probably going to upset timid wildlife. Then there is the problem with trying to cover a large area and figuring out if the elephant you see today is the same one as one you saw yesterday. If you guess wrong you will either undercount or overcount.

The Oxford scientists counting elephants used the Worldview-3 satellite. It collects up to 680,000 square kilometers every day. You aren’t disturbing any of the observed creatures, and since each shot covers a huge swath of territory, your problem of double counting all but vanishes.

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Unicode: On Building The One Character Set To Rule Them All

March 17, 2021 by 75 Comments

Most readers will have at least some passing familiarity with the terms ‘Unicode’ and ‘UTF-8’, but what is really behind them? At their core they refer to character encoding schemes, also known as character sets. This is a concept which dates back to far beyond the era of electronic computers, to the dawn of the optical telegraph and its predecessors. As far back as the 18th century there was a need to transmit information rapidly across large distances, which was accomplished using so-called telegraph codes. These encoded information using optical, electrical and other means.

During the hundreds of years since the invention of the first telegraph code, there was no real effort to establish international standardization of such encoding schemes, with even the first decades of the era of teleprinters and home computers bringing little change there. Even as EBCDIC (IBM’s 8-bit character encoding demonstrated in the punch card above) and finally ASCII made some headway, the need to encode a growing collection of different characters without having to spend ridiculous amounts of storage on this was held back by elegant solutions.

Development of Unicode began during the late 1980s, when the increasing exchange of digital information across the world made the need for a singular encoding system more urgent than before. These days Unicode allows us to not only use a single encoding scheme for everything from basic English text to Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, and even Mayan, but also small pictographs called ‘emoji‘, from Japanese ‘e’ (絵) and ‘moji’ (文字), literally ‘picture word’.

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Design Solutions For The Heat Crisis In Cities Around The World

March 16, 2021 by 75 Comments

It was 1999 when Smash Mouth dropped the smash hit All Star, stating “The ice we skate is getting pretty thin, the water’s getting warm so you might as well swim.” Since then, global temperatures have continued to rise, with no end in sight. Political will has been unable to make any grand changes, and the world remains on track to blow through the suggested hard limits set by scientists.

As a result, heatwaves have become more frequent, and of greater intensity, putting many vulnerable people at risk and causing thousands of deaths each year. This problem is worse in cities, where buildings and roads absorb more heat from the sun than natural landscapes do. This is referred to as the heat island effect, with cities often being several degrees warmer than surrounding natural areas. It’s significant enough that experts are worried some cities could become uninhabitable within decades. Obviously, that’s highly inconvenient for those currently living in said cities. How bad is the problem, and what can be done?

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There’s A Fungus Among Us That Absorbs Sound And Does Much More

March 15, 2021 by 36 Comments

Ding dong, the office is dead — at least we hope it is. We miss some of the people, the popcorn machine, and the printer most of all, but we say good riddance to the collective noise. Thankfully, we never had to suffer in an open office.

For many of us, yours truly included, home has become the place where we spend approximately 95% of our time. Home is now an all-purpose space for work, play, and everything in between, like anxiety-induced online shopping. But unless you live alone in a secluded area and/or a concrete bunker, there are plenty of sound-based distractions all day and night that emanate from both inside and outside the house. Headphones are a decent solution, but wearing them isn’t always practical and gets old after a while. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to print your own customized sound absorbers and stick them on the walls? Continue reading “There’s A Fungus Among Us That Absorbs Sound And Does Much More” →

Rocket Lab Plans Larger Neutron Rocket For 2024

March 15, 2021 by 6 Comments

When Rocket Lab launched their first Electron booster in 2017, it was unlike anything that had ever flown before. The small commercially developed rocket was the first to use fully 3D printed main engines, and instead of pumping its propellants with traditional turbines, the vehicle used electric motors that jettisoned their depleted battery packs overboard during ascent to reduce weight. It even looked different than its peers, as rather than a metal fuselage, the Electron was built from a lightweight carbon composite which gave it a distinctive black color scheme.

Packing so many revolutionary technical advancements into a single vehicle was a risk, but Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck believed a technical shakeup was the only way to get ahead in an increasingly competitive market. While that first launch in 2017 didn’t make it to orbit, the next year, Rocket Lab could boast three successful flights. By the end of 2020, a total of fifteen Electron rockets had completed their missions, carrying payloads from both commercial customers and government agencies such as NASA, the United States Air Force, and DARPA.

Rocket Lab’s gambit paid off, and the company has greatly outpaced competitors such as Virgin Orbit, Astra, and Relativity. In fact Electron is now the second most active orbital booster in the United States, behind SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Considering their explosive growth, it’s only natural they’d want to maintain that momentum going forward. But even still, the recent announcement that the company will be developing a far larger rocket they call Neutron to fly by 2024 took many in the industry by surprise; especially since Peter Beck himself had previously said they would never build it.

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