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Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met up to trade their favorite posts of the week. Tune in and see if your favorites made the list. From crazy intricate automata to surprising problems in Peltier cooler designs, there’s a little bit of everything.
Should bikes have chains? What’s the hardest thing about Star Trek computers to duplicate? Can you make a TV station from a single microcontroller? The podcast this week answers these questions and more. Plus, weigh in on the What’s That Sound contest and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
For the Can’t Miss segment, Elliot had airships on his mind, while Al’s sick of passwords. But is he sick enough to take electronic pills that transmit his password?
Structurally, there’s nothing too wild going on here. It’s a wood-framed climbing structure that stands 10 meters long and 2.5 meters high, and can be covered in lots of climbing holds. It’s the electronic side of things where it gets fun. An Arduino Due is installed to run the show, hooked up with a small TFT display and some buttons for control. It’s then hooked up to control a whole bunch of LEDs and some buttons which are scattered all across the wall. It’s also paired with an Arduino Nano which runs sound feedback, and a 433 MHz remote for controlling the system at a distance.
[Superbender] uses the lighting for fun interactive games. One example is called Hot Lava, where after each climbing pass, more holds are forbidden until you can’t make the run anymore. Chase the Blues is another fun game, where you have to climb towards a given hold, at which point it moves and you have to scamper to the next one.
Personally, I love a monoblock or uni-body split. You’ll pry this Kinesis Advantage from under my cold, dead hands. But on the go, I really like the Glove 80, a true split that can be completely wireless in case you want to put the halves really far apart.
Image by [thehaikuza] via reddit[thehaikuza] is the opposite, preferring a full split at the desk, but finding it troublesome when using it on the couch or at a cafe or co-working space, and so created dǎ bāo (打包) — a uni-body split that can also be a distant split. And this best-of-both worlds creation is remarkably [thehaikuza]’s first keyboard.
The name means to take out food, and if you click the picture you can see a cute little take-out container on the silkscreen of the right half. Directly below it, there’s a track point nubbin to be used with the thumb.
It does its split-in-half trick via a magnetic four-pin connector for when you want the halves stuck together. When the halves are separated, they can instead talk over a USB-C cable. One half has the microcontroller, and the other has a GPIO expander.
You wake up in the middle of the night. Is it time to get up? Well, you can look at the nightstand clock. Unless your partner is in the way. Whoops. Even then, without your glasses, the time is just a fuzzball of light. You could ask Alexa, but that’s sure to wake your partner, too. The answer is a projection clock. In its modern form, it shoots a digital time display on a wall or ceiling with digits so large that you don’t need your glasses. If you can see the ceiling, you can tell what time it is.
New Tech
A modern invention, of course. No, not really. According to [Roger Russel], a UK patent in 1909 used an analog clock face and lightbulbs to project the clock face and hands on the ceiling. Unfortunately, [Roger’s] website is no more, but the Wayback Machine is on the job. You can see a device of the same type at the British Museum.
A modern projection clock on the ceiling.
In 1938, [Leendert Prins] filed for a patent on a similar projection clock. Sometimes known as “ceiling clocks” or “night clocks,” these devices often have a regular clock visible as well as a way to project the time. In the old days, this was often an image of a translucent analog clock lit up by light bulbs. In the modern era, it is almost always either LEDs or an LCD with a halogen backlight. Of course, there are many variations. A clock might use numbers on a rotating drum with a lamp behind it, for example.
Development
It isn’t hard to imagine someone putting a pocket watch in a magic lantern as a prototype. In general, some bright light source has to pass through a condenser lens. The light then travels through the LCD or translucent clock face. Finally, a projector lens expands the image.
We couldn’t find much about the actual history of old projection clocks outside of [Roger’s] defunct website. But if you can project an image and build a clock, all you need is the idea to combine them.
We’ll start things off this week with some breaking news from NASA: just days after the space agency announced the Artemis II crew was preparing to blast off towards the Moon as soon as March 6th, a new problem with the Space Launch System rocket has pushed the launch back indefinitely. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, problems encountered while loading helium into the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) necessitate rolling the massive rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for diagnosis and repair.
The logistics of shuffling the vehicle 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) from the pad to the VAB is going to eat up at least a week, and sending it back the other way is naturally just as much of a production. Add in the time they’ll need to actually figure out what’s wrong with the ICPS and make the necessary repairs, and it’s easy to see why a March launch is almost certainly off the table. It’s frustrating to see the Artemis II mission get delayed this close to launch, but sending humans into space isn’t the sort of thing you can cut corners on.
Your project doesn’t necessarily have to be a refined masterpiece to have an impact on the global hacker hivemind. Case in point: this great demo of using a 64-point time-of-flight ranging sensor. [Henrique] took three modules, plugged them into a breadboard, and wrote some very interactive Python code that let him put them all through their paces. The result? I now absolutely want to set up a similar rig and expand on it.
That’s the power of a strong proof of concept, and maybe a nice video presentation of it in action. What in particular makes [Henrique]’s POC work is that he’s written the software to give him a number of sliders, switches, and interaction that let him tweak things in real time and explore some of the possibilities. This exploratory software not only helped him map out what directions to go, but they also work in demo mode, when he’s showing us what he has learned.
But the other thing that [Henrique]’s video does nicely is to point out the limitations of his current POC. Instantly, the hacker mind goes “I could work that out”. Was it strategic incompleteness? Either way, I’ve been nerd-sniped.
So are those the features of a good POC? It’s the bare minimum to convey the idea, presented in a way that demonstrates a wide range of possibilities, and leaving that last little bit tantalizingly on the table?
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For today’s podcast Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, and we’re pushing the limits of mobile connectivity as Jenny’s coming to us from a North Sea ferry. We start by looking forward to the upcoming Hackaday Europe, with a new location in Lecco, Italy. We hope you can join us there!
There’s a bumper collection of hacks to talk about, with a novel soft pneumatic display, a CRT-based VR headset, an LCD photographic aperture, and a novel time-of-flight sensor array in the line-up.Then there are 3D printed PCBs, Scotch tape for a lens, and a project to map farts. We kid you not. Finally we wrap up with mind controlled toys, and a a treatise on requirements and specifications in an age of AI.
