How Did I Live Without A Microscope?

June 26, 2021 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

Get yourself a decent stereo inspection microscope, preferably optical. Something that can magnify from maybe 4x to 40x is fine, anything outside this range is icing on the cake. Some people claim they’re fine with a minimum of 10x, but if you go there, you’re going to need a reducing lens eventually. Either way, get one, and you’ll thank me.

How do I know this? I finally caved in and bought one about two years ago now, and while it’s not something I use daily, it’s something that I use at least once a month and for which there is simply no substitute.

This is Hackaday, so a lot of you will be thinking “inspection scope = fine-pitch soldering” and you’re not wrong. With clearance of 10 cm or more, and a slab of sacrificial optical glass (“neutral density filter”) to protect the optics from tarry flux fumes, a stereo scope at 4x makes even the fiddliest solder joints possible. Good lighting, and sharp tweezers are also a must, of course. That’s what got me in the door.

But that’s the half of it, or less. When my scope was new to me — it hasn’t been “new” since the late 1980s — we spent a whole rainy Sunday afternoon microscoping whatever would fit under the lens. Grains of salt, blades of grass, all manner of bugs living and otherwise, shells, skin, textiles. Everything is cooler under the microscope.

The event that triggered this article wasn’t my son’s school project this week to photograph dandelion seeds. Nope, today my wife found a bug in the basement; to the microscope! And with a very quick and unfortunately very positive identification, we now know that we have to strain all of our flour for bread beetles and pitch whichever bags they came in with. Hooray!

The inspection scope was intended for the soldering bench, but has found general use as an irreplaceable household tool. While I admittedly also intended to use it to lure my son into science, the real fight over scope time has been with my wife. And that’s why you want an optical scope instead of one that’s tethered to a monitor — as a general-purpose tool, portability is paramount. No menu diving, no power source, and anyone can just grab it and go.

Convinced? Ready to pull out your wallet? Microscopes are like cars. You can spend as much as you’d like on one, the cheapest will cause you nothing but pain and suffering, and the difference between the mid-range and high-end is full of diminishing returns. Buying used, especially if you can kick the metaphorical tires, can be a great bargain, and a high-end used scope will hold its value a lot better than a new budget model. Just around $200 is a sweet spot new and $300-$400 will get you the top of the line from yesteryear if you shop around. That’s not cheap, but if you’re the microscope type, it’s easily worth it. Trust me.

Know Audio: A Loudspeaker Primer

June 25, 2021 by Jenny List 27 Comments

As we’ve started out on our journey through the world of Hi-Fi audio from a strictly practical and engineering viewpoint without being misled by any audiophile woo, we’ve already taken a look at the most important component in any audio system: the listener’s ear. It’s time to move down the chain to the next link; the loudspeaker.

Sound is pressure waves in the air, and the purpose of a loudspeaker is to move the air to create those waves. There are a variety of “exotic” loudspeaker technologies including piezoelectric and electrostatic designs, here we’ll be considering the garden variety moving-coil speaker. It’s most usually used for the large bass or smaller mid-range drivers in a typical speaker system. Continue reading “Know Audio: A Loudspeaker Primer” →

Hackaday Podcast 124: Hard Drivin’ With Graphene, Fooled By Lasers, Etching With Poison Acid, And All The Linux Commands

June 25, 2021 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the dangerous projects on display this week, including glass etching with hydrofluoric acid and pumping 200,000 A into a 5,000 A fuse. A new board that turns the Raspberry Pi into an SDR shows off the power of the secondary memory interface (SMI) present in those Broadcom chips. We also discuss the potential for graphene in hard drives, and finish up with a teardown of a very early electronic metronome.

You know you want to read the show notes!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (55 MB or so.)

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Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 124: Hard Drivin’ With Graphene, Fooled By Lasers, Etching With Poison Acid, And All The Linux Commands” →

This Week In Security: Schemeflood, Modern Wardialing, And More!

June 25, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 17 Comments

There’s been yet another technique discovered to fingerprint users, and this one can even work in the Tor browser. Scheme flooding works by making calls to application URLs, something like steam://browsemedia. If your machine supports the requested custom URL, a pop-up is displayed, asking permission to launch the external application. That pop-up can be detected by JavaScript in the browser. Detect enough apps, and you can build a reasonable fingerprint of the system the test is run on. Unlike some previous fingerprinting techniques, this one isn’t browser dependent — it will theoretically give the same results for any browser. This means even the Tor browser, or any browser being used over the Tor network, can give your potentially unique set of installed programs away.

Now for the good news. The Chrome devs are already working on this issue, and in fact, Chrome on my Linux desktop didn’t respond to the probes in a useful way. Feel free to check out the demo, and see if the results are accurate. And as for Tor, you really should be running that on a dedicated system or in a VM if you really need to stay anonymous. And disable JavaScript if you don’t want the Internet to run code on your computer.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Schemeflood, Modern Wardialing, And More!” →

ISS Gets Roll-Out Solar Panels In Post-Shuttle Fix

June 24, 2021 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Astronauts are currently installing the first of six new solar arrays on the International Space Station (ISS), in a bid to bolster the reduced power generation capability of the original panels which have now been in space for over twenty years. But without the Space Shuttle to haul them into orbit, developing direct replacements for the Stations iconic 34 meter (112 foot) solar “wings” simply wasn’t an option. So NASA has turned to next-generation solar arrays that roll out like a tape measure and are light and compact enough for the SpaceX Dragon to carry them into orbit.

Space Shuttle *Atlantis* carrying part of the ISS truss.

Considering how integral the Space Shuttle was to its assembly, it’s hardly a surprise that no major modules have been added to the ISS since the fleet of winged spacecraft was retired in 2011. The few small elements that have been installed, such as the new International Docking Adapters and the Nanoracks “Bishop” airlock, have had to fit into the rear unpressurized compartment of the Dragon capsule. While a considerable limitation, NASA had planned for this eventuality, with principle construction of the ISS always intended to conclude upon the retirement of the Shuttle.

But the International Space Station was never supposed to last as long as it has, and some components are starting to show their age. The original solar panels are now more than five years beyond their fifteen year service life, and while they’re still producing sufficient power to keep the Station running in its current configuration, their operational efficiency has dropped considerably with age. So in January NASA announced an ambitious timeline for performing upgrades the space agency believes are necessary to keep up with the ever-increasing energy demands of the orbiting laboratory.

Continue reading “ISS Gets Roll-Out Solar Panels In Post-Shuttle Fix” →

Teardown: Franz Crystal Metronome

June 22, 2021 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

I wish I could tell you that there’s some complex decision tree at play when I select a piece of hardware to take apart for this series, but ultimately it boils down two just two factors: either the gadget was something I was personally interested in, or it was cheap. An ideal candidate would check both boxes, but that’s not always the case. This time around however, I can confidently say our subject doesn’t fall into either category.

Now don’t get me wrong, at first glance I found the Franz Crystal Metronome to be intriguing in its own way. With that vintage look, how could you not? But I’m about as far from a musician as one can get, so you’d hardly find a metronome on my wish list. As for the cost, a check on eBay seems to show there’s something of a following for these old school Franz models, with ones in good condition going for $50 to $80. Admittedly not breaking the bank, but still more than I’d like to pay for something that usually ends up as a pile of parts.

That being the case, why are you currently reading about it on Hackaday? Because it exploits something of a loophole in the selection process: it doesn’t work, and somebody gave it to me to try and figure out why. So without further ado let’s find out what literally makes a Franz Crystal Metronome tick, and see if we can’t get it doing so gain.

Continue reading “Teardown: Franz Crystal Metronome” →

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Chinese Typewriter

June 21, 2021 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

As much as I’d like to devote an article to each and every bit of keyboard-related what-have-you that I come across in my travels through the intertubes, there just aren’t enough hours. And after all, this isn’t Clack-a-Day. To that end, I gained editorial approval to bring you a periodic round-up of news and other tidbits on the keyboard and keyboard accessories front, and here we are. So let’s get to it!

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Chinese Typewriter” →