Miss Beatrice Shilling Saves The Spitfire

January 16, 2018 by Dan Maloney 54 Comments

On a bright spring morning in 1940, the Royal Air Force pilot was in the fight of his life. Strapped into his brand new Supermarine Spitfire, he was locked in mortal combat with a Luftwaffe pilot over the English Channel in the opening days of the Battle of Britain. The Spitfire was behind the Messerschmitt and almost within range to unleash a deadly barrage of rounds from the ~~four~~ eight Browning machine guns in the leading edges of the elliptical wings. With the German plane just below the centerline of the gunsight’s crosshairs, the British pilot pushed the Spit’s lollipop stick forward to dive slightly and rake his rounds across the Bf-109. He felt the tug of the harness on his shoulders keeping him in his seat as the nimble fighter pulled a negative-g dive, and he lined up the fatal shot.

But the powerful V-12 Merlin engine sputtered, black smoke trailing along the fuselage as the engine cut out. Without power, the young pilot watched in horror as the three-bladed propeller wound to a stop. With the cold Channel waters looming in his windscreen, there was no time to restart the engine. The pilot bailed out in the nick of time, watching his beautiful plane cartwheel into the water as he floated down to join it, wondering what had just happened.

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They’re Putting Soy In Your Wires, Man

January 15, 2018 by Tom Nardi 111 Comments

I’ve got a friend who tells me at every opportunity that soy is the downfall of humanity. Whatever ails us as a society, it’s the soy beans that did it. They increase violent tendencies, they make us fat and lazy, they run farmers out of business, and so on. He laments at how hard it is to find food that doesn’t include soy in some capacity, and for a while was resigned to eating nothing but chicken hot dogs and bags of frozen peas; anything else had unacceptable levels of the “Devil’s Bean”. Overall he’s a really great guy, kind of person who could fix anything with a roll of duct tape and a trip to the scrap pile, but you might think twice if he invites you over for dinner.

A column of soy soldiers stand at the ready.

So when he recently told me about all the trouble people are having with soy-based electrical wiring, I thought it was just the latest conspiracy theory to join his usual stories. I told him it didn’t make any sense, there’s no way somebody managed to develop a reliable soy-derived conductor. “No, no,” he says, “not the conductor. They are making the insulation out of soy, and animals are chewing through it.”

Now that’s a bit different. I was already well aware of the growing popularity of bioplastics: the PLA used in desktop 3D printers is one such example, generally derived from corn. It certainly wasn’t unreasonable to think somebody had tried to make “green” electrical wiring by using a bioplastic insulation. While I wasn’t about to sit down to a hot bag of peas for dinner, I had to admit that maybe in this case his claims deserved a look.

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Software Design Patterns For Real Hardware

January 12, 2018 by Sonya Vasquez 21 Comments

Here on Hackaday, we’re generally designers of hacks that live in the real world. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that some of the most interesting feats are at the mercy of what’s possible in software, not hardware. Without the right software, no 3D printer could print and no quadcopter could fly. The source code that drives these machines may take months of refinement to flesh out their structure. In a nutshell, these software packages are complicated, and they don’t happen overnight.

So how do they happen; better yet: how could we make that happen? How do we write software that’s flexible enough to coexist peacefully on all sorts of hardware variations?

What separates the big open-source software projects like ROS, LinuxCNC, and Multiwii from the occastional hackathon code are the underlying principles that govern how they’re written. In object-oriented programming, these principles are called design patterns. In the next couple posts, I’m going to crack the lid on a few of these. What’s more, I’ll package them into real-world examples so that we can see these patterns interact with real hardware. The next time you pop open the source code for a big open source hardware project, I hope you can tease out some of these patterns in the code. Better yet, I hope you carry these patterns into your next robot and machine project. Let’s get started.

For readability, all of the examples run in Python3. The snippets below are truncated for brevity, but the real examples in the repository will work if you’ve got a similar hardware setup.

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Local Infrastructure: The Devil Is In The Details

January 11, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 107 Comments

About two months ago I rode my bike to work like any other day, but on the way home a construction project seemed to have spontaneously started at one of the bridges that I pass over. Three lanes had merged into one which, for a federal highway, seemed like a poorly planned traffic pattern for a such a major construction project. As it happens, about an hour after I biked across this bridge that morning both outside sections of the bridge fell into the water. There was no other physical damage that seemed to explain why parts of a bridge on U.S. 1 would suddenly collapse.

The intriguing thing about this bridge collapse was that the outer retaining wall and about half of the sidewalk on both the northbound side and the southbound side had fallen into the water at the same time. This likely wasn’t caused by something like a boat impact, car accident, or an overweight truck. Indeed, Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) investigated the incident and found that two post tension wires that held these sections of the bridge together had failed, making it unsafe for pedestrians and bicyclists but also for any boaters below. Continue reading “Local Infrastructure: The Devil Is In The Details” →

You Got A 3D Printer, Now What?

January 10, 2018 by Tom Nardi 89 Comments

Given the incredibly low prices on some of the models currently on the market, it’s more than likely a number of Hackaday readers have come out of the holiday season with a shiny new desktop 3D printer. It’s even possible some of you have already made the realization that 3D printing is a bit harder than you imagined. Sure the newer generation of 3D printers make it easier than ever, but it’s still not the same “click and forget” experience of printing on paper, for instance.

In light of this, I thought it might be nice to start off the new year with some advice for those who’ve suddenly found themselves lost in a forest of PLA. Some of this information may seem obvious to those of us who’ve spent years huddled over a print bed, but as with many technical pursuits, we tend to take for granted the knowledge gained from experience. For my own part, the challenges I faced years ago with my first wooden 3D printer were wholly different than what I imagined. I assumed that the real challenge would be getting the machine assembled and running, but the time it took to build the machine was nothing in comparison to the hours and hours of trial and error it took before I gained the confidence to really utilize the technology.

Of course, everyone’s experience is bound to be different, and we’d love to hear about yours in the comments. Grand successes, crushing defeats, and everything in between. It’s all part of the learning process, and all valuable information for those who are just starting out.

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Henrietta Lacks And Immortal Cell Lines

January 9, 2018 by Adam Fabio 80 Comments

In early 1951, a woman named Henrietta Lacks visited the “colored ward” at Johns Hopkins hospital for a painful lump she found on her cervix. She was seen by Dr. Howard W. Jones, who indeed found a tumor growing on the surface of her cervix. He took a tissue sample, which confirmed Henrietta’s worst fears: She had cancer.

The treatment at the time was to irradiate the tumor with radium tubes placed in and around the cervix. The hope was that this would kill the cancerous cells while preserving the healthy tissue. Unbeknownst to Henrietta, a biopsy was taken during her radium procedure. Slivers of her tumor and of healthy cervix cells were cut away. The cancer cells were used as part of a research project. Then something amazing happened: the cancerous cells grew and continued to grow outside of her body.

As Henrietta herself lay dying, the HeLa immortal cell line was born. This cell line has been used in nearly every aspect of medical research since the polio vaccine. Millions owe their lives to it. Yet, Henrietta and her family never gave consent for any of this. Her family was not informed or compensated. In fact, until recently, they didn’t fully grasp exactly how Henrietta’s cells were being used.

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First Light: The Story Of The Laser

January 8, 2018 by Dan Maloney 36 Comments

Lasers are such a fundamental piece of technology today that we hardly notice them. So cheap that they can be given away as toys and so versatile that they make everything from DVD players to corneal surgery a reality, lasers are one of the building blocks of the modern world. Yet lasers were once the exclusive province of physicists, laboring over expansive and expensive experimental setups that seemed more the stuff of science fiction than workhouse tool of communications and so many other fields. The laser has been wildly successful, and the story of its development is an intriguing tale of observation, perseverance, and the importance of keeping good notes.

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