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4371 Articles

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” →

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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” →

Tech In Plain Sight: Super Glue

December 11, 2023 by 68 Comments

Many inventions happen not by design but through failure. They don’t happen through the failure directly, but because someone was paying attention and remembered the how and why of the failure, and learns from this. One of these inventions is Super Glue, the adhesive that every tinkerer and engineer has to hand to stick pretty much anything to anything, quickly. Although it was a complete failure for the original uses it was developed for, a chemist with good memory and an eye for a helpful product created it in a process he described as “one day of synchronicity and ten years of hard work.”

Super Glue was initially invented in 1942, when the chemist Harry Coover was working on a team trying to develop a clear plastic gun sight that would be cheaper than the metal ones already in use. The team cast a wide net, trying a range of new materials. Coover was testing a class of chemicals called cyanoacrylates. They had some promise, but they had one problem: they stuck to pretty much everything. Every time that Coover tried to use the material to cast a gun sight, it stuck to the container and was really hard to remove. 

When the samples he tried came into contact with water, even water vapor in the air, they immediately formed an incredibly resilient bond with most materials. That made them lousy manufacturing materials, so he put the cyanoacrylates aside when the contract was canceled. His employer B. F. Goodrich, patented the process of making cyanoacrylates in 1947, but didn’t note any particular uses for the materials: they were simply a curiosity. 

It wasn’t until 1951 when Coover, now at Eastman Kodak, remembered the sticky properties of cyanoacrylates. He and his colleague Fred Joyner were working on making heat-resistant canopies for the new generation of jet fighters, and they considered using these sticky chemicals as adhesives in the manufacturing process. According to Coover, he told Joyner about the materials and asked him to measure the refractive index to see if they might be suitable for use. He warned him to be careful, as the material would probably stick in the refractometer and damage it. Joyner tested the material and found it wasn’t suitable for a canopy but then went around the lab using it to stick things together. The two realized it could make an excellent adhesive for home and engineering use. Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Super Glue” →