This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.
In our occasional series charting audio and Hi-Fi technology we have passed at a technical level the main components of a home audio set-up. In our last outing when we looked at cabling we left you with a promise of covering instrumentation, but now it’s time instead for a short digression into another topic: stereo. It’s a word so tied-in with Hi-Fi that “a stereo” is an alternative word for almost any music system, but what does it really mean? What makes a stereo recording, and how does it arrive at your ears?
As most of you will know, a mono recording uses a single microphone and a single channel while a stereo one uses two microphones recording simultaneously a left and right channel. These are then played back through a pair of speakers, and the result is a sense of spatial field for the listener. Instruments appear to come from their relative positions when recorded, and the sense of being in the performance is enhanced.
Stereo recording as we know it was first perfected as one of the many inventions credited to Alan Blumlein, then working for EMI in London. We have one of his stereo demonstration films in “Trains at Hayes“, filmed from the EMI laboratories overlooking the Great Western Railway, and featuring a series of steam-hauled trains crossing the field of view with a corresponding stereo sound field. His work laid down the fundamentals of stereo recording, including microphone configurations and what would become the standard for stereo audio recording on disk with the channels on the opposite sides of a 45 degree groove. Continue reading “Know Audio: Stereo”→
Do you know the name [George Devol]? Probably not. In 1961 he received a patent for “Programmed Article Transfer.” We’d call his invention the first robot arm, and its name was the Unimate. Unlike some inventors, this wasn’t some unrealized dream. [Devol’s] arm went to work in New Jersey at a GM plant. The 4,000 pound arm cost $25,000 and stacked hot metal parts. With tubes and hydraulics, we imagine it was a lot of work to keep it working. On the other hand, about 450 of the arms eventually went to work somewhere.
The Unimate became a celebrity with an appearance in at least one newsreel — see below — and the Johnny Carson show. Predictably, the robot in the newsreel was pouring drinks.
We always love when people take the trouble to show information in new, creative ways — after all, there’s a reason that r/dataisbeautiful exists. But we were particularly taken by this version of the periodic table of the elements, distorted to represent the relative abundance on Earth of the 90 elements that make up almost everything. The table is also color-coded to indicate basically how fast we’re using each element relative to its abundance. The chart also indicates which elements are “conflict resources,” basically stuff people fight over, and which elements go into making smartphones. That last bit we thought was incomplete; we’d have sworn at least some boron would be somewhere in a phone. Still, it’s an interesting way to look at the elements, and reminds us of another way to enumerate the elements.
It’s wildfire season in the western part of North America again, and while this year hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as last year — so far — there’s still a lot of activity in our neck of the woods. And wouldn’t you know it, some people seem to feel like a wildfire is a perfect time to put up a drone. It hardly seems necessary to say that this is A Really Bad Idea™, but for some reason, people still keep doing it. Don’t misunderstand — we absolutely get how cool it is to see firefighting aircraft do their thing. The skill these pilots show as they maneuver their planes, which are sometimes as large as passenger jets, within a hundred meters of the treetops is breathtaking. But operating a drone in the same airspace is just stupid. Not only is it likely to get you in trouble with the law, but there’s a fair chance that the people whose property and lives are being saved by these heroic pilots won’t look kindly on your antics.
I was reading [Al Williams]’ great rant on why sometimes the public adoption of tech moves so slowly, as exemplified by the Japanese Minister of Tech requesting the end of submissions to the government on floppy diskettes. In 2022!
Along the way, [Al] points out that we still trust ballpoint-pen-on-paper signatures more than digital ones. Imagine going to a bank and being able to open an account with your authentication token! It would be tons more secure, verifiable, and easier to store. It makes sense in every way. Except, unless you’ve needed one for work, you probably don’t have a Fido2 (or whatever) token, do you?
Same goes for signed, or encrypted, e-mail. If you’re a big cryptography geek, you probably have a GPG key. You might even have a mail reader that supports it. But try requesting an encrypted message from a normal person. Or ask them to verify a signature.
Honestly, signing and encrypting are essentially both solved problems, from a technical standpoint, and for a long time. But somehow, from a societal point of view, we’re not even close yet. Public key encryption dates back to the late 1970’s, and 3.5” diskettes are at least a decade younger. Diskettes are now obsolete, but I still can’t sign a legal document with my GPG key. What gives?
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In the electronics world, even for the hobbyists, things have only gotten smaller over the years. We went from through-hole components to surface mount, and now we’re at the point where the experienced DIYers are coming around to the idea of using ball grid array (BGA) components in their designs. We’d wonder what things are going to look like in another couple decades, but frankly, it gives us the heebie-jeebies.
So while we’re pretty well versed these days in the hows and whys of tiny things, we see comparatively little large-scale engineering projects. Which is why we were excited to have Andy Oliver stop by this week for the Heavy Engineering Hack Chat. His day job sees him designing and inspecting the control systems for movable bridges — or what many would colloquially refer to as drawbridges.
Now you might think there’s not a lot of demand for this particular skill set, but we’re willing to bet there’s a lot more of these bridges out there than you realized. Andy kicked things off with the revelation that just between the states of Florida and Louisiana, there are about 200 movable bridges of various sizes. On a larger scale, he points out that BridgeHunter.com lists an incredible 3,166 movable bridges in their database, though admittedly many of those are historical and no longer standing. (There really is a site for everything!)
Andy Oliver
There’s also a huge incentive to keep the existing bridges functioning for as long as possible — building a new one these days could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, repairs and upgrades are the name of the game. Andy says that if it’s properly maintained, you should get about a century out of a good bridge.
It will probably come as little surprise to find that keeping things as simple as possible is key to making sure a movable bridge can withstand the test of time. While we might imagine that all sorts of high-tech automation systems are at work, and they probably would be if any of us were in charge, Andy says that most of the time it’s old school relay logic.
Even controlling the speed of motors is often down to using beefy relays to switch some additional resistance into the circuit. But when reliability and ease of repair are top priorities, who’s to argue against a classic? Andy recalled a time when a government client made it clear that the only tool you should need to maintain a particular bridge’s control system was a hammer.
Of course, when moving around a million pounds of steel, there’s more than just electrical considerations at play. You’ve also got to take into account things like wind forces on the bridge, specifically that your gears and motors can handle the extra load without tearing themselves apart. The bridge also needs an emergency stop system that can arrest movement at a moment’s notice, but not damage anything in the process.
A lot of fascinating details about these motorized behemoths were covered in the Chat, so we’d invite anyone who’s ever watched a bridge slowly reconfigure itself to peruse through the full transcript. Special thanks to Andy Oliver for stopping by and sharing some of the details about his unique career with the community, and remember that if you’ve got your own engineering stories to tell, we’d love to hear them.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the transcripts posted to Hackaday.io make sure you don’t miss out.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start off by talking about the chip shortage…but not how you think. With a list that supposedly breaks down all of the electronic components that the Russian military are desperate to get their hands on, we can see hackers aren’t the only ones scrounging for parts. If you thought getting components was tricky already, imagine if most of the world decided to put sanctions on you.
We’ll also talk about kid-friendly DIY stereoscopic displays, the return of the rotary cellphone, and using heat to seal up 3D printed parts for vacuum applications. Join us as we marvel over the use of rubbery swag wristbands as tank treads, and ponder an array of AI-created nightmares that are supposed to represent the Hackaday writing crew. Finally we’ll talk about two iconic legacies: that of the 3.5 inch floppy disk, and astrophysicist Frank Drake.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Automated Tank Gauges (ATGs) are nifty bits of tech, sitting unseen in just about every gas station. They keep track of fuel levels, temperature, and other bits of information, and sometimes get tied into the automated systems at the station. The problem, is that a bunch of these devices are listening to port 10001 on the Internet, and some of them appear to be misconfigured. How many? Let’s start with the easier question, how many IPs have port 10001 open? Masscan is one of the best tools for this, and [RoseSecurity] found over 85,000 listening devices. An open port is just the start. How many of those respond to connections with the string In-Tank Inventory Reports? Shodan reports 11,113 IPs as of August of this year. [RoseSecurity] wrote a simple Python script that checked each of those listening IPs came up with a matching number of devices. The scary bit is that this check was done by sending a Get In-Tank Inventory Report command, and checking for a good response. It seems like that’s 11K systems, connected to the internet, with no authentication. What could possibly go wrong? Continue reading “This Week In Security: 11,000 Gas Stations, TrustZone Hacks Kernel, And Unexpected Fuzzing Finds”→
