Slider

4365 Articles

Australia Bans Engineered Stone, Workers Elsewhere Demand The Same

December 19, 2023 by 199 Comments

Engineered stone, also known as artificial stone or composite stone, has become a popular material in the construction and design industries due to its aesthetic appeal and durability. It’s become the go-to solution for benchtops in particular, with modern kitchens and bathrooms heavily featuring engineered stone in this way.

However, this seemingly innocuous material harbors a dark side, posing significant health risks to workers involved in its manufacturing and installation. The hazards associated with engineered stone have gone unnoticed for some time, but the toll is adding up, and calls for action grow louder. Let’s examine why engineered stone is so harmful, and explore the measures being taken across the world to curtail or even ban its use.

Continue reading “Australia Bans Engineered Stone, Workers Elsewhere Demand The Same” →

Ask Hackaday: What Do You Do When You Can’t Solder?

December 18, 2023 by 93 Comments

Ah, soldering. It’s great for sticking surface mount parts to a PCB, and it’s really great for holding component legs in a plated through-hole. It also does a pretty great job of holding two spliced wires together.

With that said, it can be a bit of a fussy process. There are all manner of YouTube videos and image tutorials on the “properest” way to achieve this job. Maybe it’s the classic Lineman’s Splice, maybe it’s some NASA-approved method, or maybe it’s one of those ridiculous ones where you braid all the copper strands together, solder it all up, and then realize you’ve forgotten to put the heat shrink on first.

Sure, soldering’s all well and good. But what about some of the other ways to join a pair of wires?

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: What Do You Do When You Can’t Solder?” →

The Superconference Badge Hack Chat

December 18, 2023 by No comments

Join us on Wednesday, December 20 at noon Pacific for the Superconference Badge Hack Chat with Elliot Williams and Voja Antonic!

There’s a lot to get excited about when October rolls around and you know Supercon is right around the corner. Catching up with old friends, making new ones, hanging out in the alley, catching the talks, and of course the food. But at the top of everyone’s list has to be The Badge. Finding out what cool bit of technology is going to be built into the badge and figuring out exactly how you’re going to hack it once you get your greedy mitts on it — now that’s excitement!

join-hack-chatThe 2023 Supercon badge was quite a hit, at least judging by all the cool hacks that people came up with. But what exactly went into getting this badge into everyone’s hands? A lot of work, that’s what, along with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And while there was plenty of work to go around and a lot of shoulders to the wheel, a lot of the work fell to Elliot and Voja. They’re going to be hopping into the last Hack Chat of the year to talk all about this amazing badge, from concept to conference, and all the hellish steps in between.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, December 20 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity

December 18, 2023 by 72 Comments

Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage. Continue reading “Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity” →

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: December 17, 2023

December 17, 2023 by 16 Comments

Disappointing news from the US Senate this week as the “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act” failed to advance in the sausage-making legislative process. We’ve previously covered this bill, which aims to force vehicle manufacturers to provide the means to receive terrestrial AM broadcasts in their cars and trucks without the need for extra subscriptions or charges. The bill’s sponsors tried to get it through on a “unanimous consent” maneuver, but Senator Rand Paul decided he didn’t like the idea of the government mandating what equipment cars should have. The coverage we’ve seen on this bill leads us to believe its sponsors are missing the point. Instead of pitching this as an issue of freedom of choice in entertainment, what they should be concentrating on is the safety aspect of AM radio. We’ve seen how much the government has invested in keeping AM stations on the air in just about any foreseeable emergency, so it’s only natural to look at a car’s AM radio as essential safety equipment like airbags, antilock brakes, and backup cameras. Seems like that’s something that everyone can agree on.  Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 17, 2023” →

How Germany’s Troubled Pebble Bed Reactor Came Of Age In China

December 14, 2023 by 57 Comments

Although the concept of nuclear fission is a simple and straightforward one, the many choices for fuel types, fuel design, reactor configurations, coolant types, neutron moderator or reflector types, etc. make that nuclear fission reactors have blossomed into a wide range of reactor designs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The story of the pebble bed reactor (PBR) is among the most interesting here, with its development winding its way from the US Manhattan Project over the Atlantic to Germany’s nuclear power industry during the 1960s, before finding a welcoming home in China’s rapidly growing nuclear power industry.

As a reactor design, PBRs do not use fuel rods like most other nuclear reactors, but rather spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’) that are inserted at the top of the reactor vessel and extracted at the bottom, allowing for continuous refueling, while helium acts as coolant. With a strong negative temperature coefficient, the design should be extremely safe, while providing high-temperature steam that can be used for applications that otherwise require a coal boiler or gas turbine.

With China recently having put its twin-PBR HTR-PM plant into commercial operation, why is it that it was not the US, Germany or South Africa to first commercialize PBRs, but relative newcomer China?

Continue reading “How Germany’s Troubled Pebble Bed Reactor Came Of Age In China” →

Radio Station WWV: All Time, All The Time

December 13, 2023 by 46 Comments

Of all the rabbit holes we technical types tend to fall down, perhaps the one with the most twists and turns is: time. Some of this is due to the curiously mysterious nature of time itself, but more has to do with the various ways we’ve decided to slice and dice time to suit our needs. Most of those methods are (wisely) based upon the rhythms of nature, but maddeningly, the divisions we decided upon when the most precise instrument we had was our eyes are just a little bit off. And for a true time junkie, “a little bit off” can be a big, big problem.

Luckily, even the most dedicated timekeepers — those of us who feel physically ill when the clock on the stove and the clock on the microwave don’t match — have a place to go that’s a haven of temporal correctness: radio station WWV. Along with sister stations WWVB and WWVH, these stations are the voice of the US National Institutes for Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Division, broadcasting the official time for the country over shortwave radio.

Some might say the programming coming from these stations is a bit on the dry side, and it’s true that you can only listen to the seconds slip by for so long before realizing that there are probably better things to do with your day. But the WWV signals pack a surprising amount of information into their signals, some of it only tangentially related to our reckoning of time. This makes these stations and the services they provide essential infrastructure for our technological society, which in turn makes it worth your time to look into just how they do it.

Continue reading “Radio Station WWV: All Time, All The Time” →