Drilling Glass With Femtosecond Lasers Just Got Even Better

February 16, 2023 by Lewin Day 48 Comments

Glass! It’s a finicky thing. Strong as hell, yet chip it and glance at it the wrong way, and you’re left with a bunch of sharp rubbish. It’s at once adored for its clarity and smoothness, and decried for how temperamental it can be in the case of shock, whether mechanical, thermal, or otherwise.

If you’ve ever tried to drill glass, you’ll know it’s a tough errand. To do so without cracking it is about as likely as winning the lottery on Mars. Even lasers aren’t great at it. However, a research team from France has developed a new technique that uses femtosecond lasers to drill microscopic holes in glass with a minimum of tapering and no cracking! Brilliant, no?
Continue reading “Drilling Glass With Femtosecond Lasers Just Got Even Better” →

How To Build Jenny’s Budget Mixing Desk

February 15, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 35 Comments

Jenny did an Ask Hackaday article earlier this month, all about the quest for a cheap computer-based audio mixer. The first attempt didn’t go so well, with a problem that many of us are familiar with: Linux applications really doesn’t like using multiple audio devices at the same time. Jenny ran into this issue, and didn’t come across a way to merge the soundcards in a single application.

I’ve fought this problem for a while, probably 10 years now. My first collision with this was an attempt to record a piano with three mics, using a couple different USB pre-amps. And of course, just like Jenny, I was quickly frustrated by the problem that my recording software would only see one interface at a time. The easy solution is to buy an interface with more channels. The Tascam US-4x4HR is a great four channel input/output audio interface, and the Behringer U-PHORIA line goes all the way up to eight mic pre-amps, expandable to 16 with a second DAC that can send audio over ADAT. But those are semi-pro interfaces, with price tags to match.

But what about Jenny’s idea, of cobbling multiple super cheap interfaces together? Well yes, that’s possible too. I’ll show you how, but first, let’s talk about how we’re going to control this software mixer monster. Yes, you can just use a mouse or keyboard, but the challenge was to build a mixing desk, and to me, that means physical faders and mute buttons. Now, there are pre-built solutions, with the Behringer X-touch being a popular solution. But again, we’re way above the price-point Jenny set for this problem. So, let’s do what we do best here at Hackaday, and build our own. Continue reading “How To Build Jenny’s Budget Mixing Desk” →

All About USB-C: Talking Low-Level PD

February 14, 2023 by Arya Voronova 25 Comments

In this USB-C series, we’ve covered quite a bit of USB-C – things that are well known, things that should be better known, and a couple things that just appeared online for the first time. We’ve covered almost everything in some depth except USB Power Delivery. I’ve described the process a bit in the “Power” article, but that was mostly about how to use PD by simply buying the right solution. However, that’s not enough for a hacker. Let’s see if we can make our own PD trigger board. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Talking Low-Level PD” →

Methane Pyrolysis: Producing Green Hydrogen Without Carbon Emissions

February 13, 2023 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

Generally, when we talk about the production of hydrogen, the discussion is about either electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen, or steam methane reforming (SMR). Although electrolysis is often mentioned – as it can create hydrogen using nothing but water and electricity – SMR is by far the most common source of hydrogen. Much of this is due to the low cost and high efficiency of SMR, but a major disadvantage of SMR is that large amounts of carbon dioxide are released, which offsets some of the benefits of using hydrogen as a fuel in the first place.

Although capturing this CO₂ can be considered as a potential solution here, methane pyrolysis is a newer method that promises to offer the same benefits as SMR while also producing hydrogen and carbon, rather than CO₂. With the many uses for hydrogen in industrial applications and other fields, such as the manufacturing of fertilizer, a direct replacement for SMR that produces green hydrogen would seem almost too good to be true.

What precisely is this methane pyrolysis, and what can be expect from it the coming years?

Continue reading “Methane Pyrolysis: Producing Green Hydrogen Without Carbon Emissions” →

Ask Hackaday: Incidental Earthquake Detection

February 9, 2023 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

It never seems to fail: at the very moment that human society seems to reach a new pinnacle of pettiness, selfishness, violence, and self-absorption, Mother Nature comes along and reminds us all who’s really in charge. The obvious case in point here is the massive earthquakes near the border of Turkey and Syria, the appalling loss of life from which is only now becoming evident, and will certainly climb as survivors trapped since the Monday quakes start to succumb to cold and starvation.

Whatever power over nature we think we can wield pales by comparison with the energy released in this quake alone, which was something like 32 petajoules. How much destruction such a release causes depends on many factors, including the type of quake and its depth, plus the soil conditions at the epicenter. But whatever the local effects on the surface, quakes like these have a tendency to set the entire planet ringing like a bell, with seismic waves transmitted across the world that set the needles of professionally maintained seismometers wiggling.

For as valuable as these seismic networks are, though, there’s a looser, ad hoc network of detection instruments that are capable of picking up quakes as large as these from half a planet away. Some are specifically built to detect Earth changes, while some are instruments that only incidentally respond to the shockwaves traveling through the planet. And we want to know if this quake showed up in the data from anyone’s instruments.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Incidental Earthquake Detection” →

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Breadboard Macropad

February 8, 2023 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

For their first custom, hand-wired keyboard, [terryorchard] aka [70rch] didn’t want to mess with making a total split, and we don’t really blame them. However, as you can see, they ended up with a monoblock split, which aside from being our own personal preference, looks fantastic, and also happened to be what fit on the print bed.

What you’re looking at is a 40% remix of the Alice layout with a columnar stagger. It’s also a bit 6×3 Corne-inspired on the ergonomic front. Brain-wise, it’s got an exposed Elite Pi driving a matrix of Kailh Choc pinks and an EC11 encoder. The encoder scrolls by default, and then becomes a volume knob on the numbers and symbols layer. One super cool thing about this keyboard is the secret third layer, which is unlocked by pressing the rotary encoder. This leads to some home row mods and disables the outside columns, culminating in a test 3×5 with two layers.

Via KBD #112

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Breadboard Macropad” →

All About USB-C: Manufacturer Sins

February 7, 2023 by Arya Voronova 85 Comments

People experience a variety of problems with USB-C. I’ve asked people online about their negative experiences with USB-C, and got a wide variety of responses, both on Twitter and on Mastodon. In addition to that, communities like r/UsbCHardware keep a lore of things that make some people’s experience with USB-C subpar.

In engineering and hacking, there’s unspoken things we used to quietly consider as unviable. Having bidirectional power and high-speed data on a single port with thousands of peripherals, using nothing but a single data pin – if you’ve ever looked at a schematic for a proprietary docking connector attempting such a feat, you know that you’d find horrors beyond comprehension. For instance, MicroUSB’s ID pin quickly grew into a trove of incompatible resistor values for anything beyond “power or be powered”. Laptop makers had to routinely resort to resistor and one-wire schemes to make sure their chargers aren’t overloaded by a laptop assuming more juice than the charger can give, which introduced a ton of failure modes on its own.

When USB-C was being designed, the group looked through chargers, OTG adapters, display outputs, docking stations, docking stations with charging functions, and display outputs, and united them into a specification that can account for basically everything – over a single cable. What could go wrong?

Of course, device manufacturers found a number of ways to take everything that USB-C provides, and wipe the floor with it. Some of the USB-C sins are noticeable trends. Most of them, I’ve found, are manufacturers’ faults, whether by inattention or by malice; things like cable labelling are squarely in the USB-C standard domain, and there’s plenty of random wear and tear failures.

I don’t know if the USB-C standard could’ve been simpler. I can tell for sure that plenty of mistakes are due to device and cable manufacturers not paying attention. Let’s go through the notorious sins of USB-C, and see what we can learn. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Manufacturer Sins” →