Tech In Plain Sight: Windshield Frit

January 18, 2024 by Al Williams 29 Comments

You probably see a frit every day and don’t even notice it. What is it? You know the black band around your car’s windshield? That’s a frit (which, by the way, can also mean ingredients used in making glass) or, sometimes, a frit band. What’s more, it probably fades out using a series of dots like a halftone image, right? Think that’s just for aesthetics? Think again.

Older windshields were not always attached firmly, leading to them popping out in accidents. At some point, though, the industry moved to polyurethane adhesives, which are superior when applied correctly. However, they often degrade from exposure to UV. That’s a problem with a windshield, which usually gets plenty of sunlight.

The answer is the frit, a ceramic-based baked-on enamel applied to both sides of the windshield’s edges, usually using silk screening. The inner part serves as a bonding point for the adhesive. However, the outer part blocks UV radiation from reaching the adhesive. Of course, it also hides the adhesive and any edges or wiring beneath it, too.

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Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File?

January 17, 2024 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Disk storage has exploded in the last 40 years. These days, even a terabyte drive is considered small. There is one downside, though. The more stuff you have, the harder it is to find it. Linux provides numerous tools to find files when you can’t remember their name. Each has plusses and minuses, and choosing between them is often difficult.

Definitions

Different tools work differently to find files. There are several ways you might look for a file:

Find a file if you know its name but not its location.
Find a file when you know some part of its name.
Find a file that contains something.
Find a file with certain attributes (e.g., larger than 100 kB)

You might combine these, too. For example, it is reasonable to query all PDF files created in the last week that are larger than 100 kB.

There are plenty of different types of attributes. Some file systems support tags, too. So, you might have a PERSONAL tag to mark files that apply to you personally. Unfortunately, tool support for tags is somewhat lacking, as you’ll see later.

Another key point is how up-to-date your search results are. If you sift through terabytes of files for each search, that will be slow. If you keep an index, that’s fast, but the index will quickly be out of date. Do you periodically refresh the index? Do you watch the entire file system for changes and then update the index? Different tools do it differently. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Where’s That Darn File?” →

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Really Snazzy Folding Keyboard

January 16, 2024 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Sometimes you just have to throw your hat in the ring, and throw it hard. Here is [mkdxdx]’s rockin’ EVH 5150-esque take on the keyboard business. The Mriya foldable keyboard aims to be and sport a number of things, and it does all of them in great style. I could totally see my fingers flying over this thing somewhere in the wild, with robots fighting in the distance.

I have to say I really like the fact that [mkdxdx] uses thumb keys here for what I can only assume are Enter, Space, and Backspace. It’s a nice compromise between compactness and ergonomics. I also really like the totally impractical but quite cool-looking connector that runs between the top and bottom.

If the color scheme looks familiar, you’re probably remembering [mkdxdx]’s first-place-winning entry into the 2023 Cyberdeck Contest. This RP2040-based keyboard might just end up as part of a larger project, but it’s already an outstanding peripheral. We can’t wait to see the next phase, should there be one for this keyboard.

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USB-C PD: New Technology Done Right

January 15, 2024 by Jenny List 42 Comments

There is a tendency as we get older, to retreat into an instinctive suspicion of anything new or associated with young people. All of us will know older people who have fallen down this rabbit hole, and certainly anything to do with technological advancement is often high on their list of ills which beset society. There’s a Douglas Adams passage which sums it up nicely:

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Here at Hackaday we’re just like anybody else, in that we all get older. Our lives are devoted to an insatiable appetite for new technology, but are we susceptible to the same trap, and could we see something as against the antural order of things simply because we don’t like it? It’s something that has been on my mind in some way since I wrote a piece back in 2020 railing at the ridiculous overuse of new technologies to limit the lifespan and repairability of new cars and then a manifesto for how the industry might fix it, am I railing against it simply because I can’t fix it with a screwdriver in the way I could my 1960 Triumph Herald? I don’t think so, and to demonstrate why I’d like to talk about another piece of complex new technology that has got everything right.

In 2017 I lamented the lack of a universal low voltage DC power socket that was useful, but reading the piece here in 2024 it’s very obvious that in the years since my quest has been solved. USB Power Delivery was a standard back then, but hadn’t made the jump to the ubiquity the USB-C-based power plug and socket enjoys today. Most laptops still had proprietary barrel jack connectors, and there were still plenty of phones with micro-USB sockets. In the years since it’s become the go-to power standard, and there are a huge number of modules and devices to supply and receive it at pretty high power.

At first sight though, it might seem as though USB-PD is simply putting a piece of unnecessary technology in the way of what should be a simple DC connector. Each and every USB-PD connection requires some kind of chip to manage it, to negotiate the connection, and to transform voltage. Isn’t that the same as the cars, using extra technology merely for the sake of complexity? On the face of it you might think so, but the beauty lies in it being a universally accepted standard. If car manufacturers needed the same functionalty you’d have modules doing similar things in a Toyota, a Ford, or a Renault, but they would all be proprietary and they’d be eye-wateringly expensive to replace. Meanwhile USB-PD modules have to work with each other, so they have become a universal component available for not a huge cost. I have several bags of assorted modules in a box of parts here, and no doubt you do too. The significant complexity of the USB-PD endpoint doesn’t matter any more, because should it break then replacing it is an easy and cheap process.

This is not to say that USB-PD is without its problems though, the plethora of different cable standards is its Achilies’ heel. But if you’re every accused of a knee-jerk reaction to a bad piece of new technology simply because it’s new, point them to it as perhaps the perfect example of the responsible use of new technology.

Neutrino Hunters Hack Chat

January 15, 2024 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, January 17 at noon Pacific for the Neutrino Hunters Hack Chat with Patrick Allison!

It’s a paradox of science that the biggest of equipment is needed to study the smallest of phenomena. The bestiary of subatomic particles often requires the power and dimension of massive accelerators to produce, and caverns crammed with racks full of instruments to monitor their brief but energetic lives. Neutrinos, though, are different. These tiny, nearly massless, neutral particles are abundant in the extreme, zipping through space from sources both natural and artificial and passing through normal matter like it isn’t even there.

That poses a problem: how do you study something that doesn’t interact with the stuff you can make detectors out of? There are tricks that neutrino hunters use, and most of them use very, VERY big instruments to do it. Think enormous tanks of ultrapure water or a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, filled with photomultiplier tubes to watch for the slightest glimmer of Cherenkov radiation as a neutrino passes by.

Neutrino hunting is some of the biggest of Big Science, and getting all the parts to work together takes some special engineering. Patrick Allison has been in the neutrino business for decades, both as a physicist and as the designated guru who keeps all the electronics humming. He’ll join us on the Hack Chat to talk about the neutrino hunting trade, and what it takes to keep the data flowing.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 17 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Featured image: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hackaday Links: January 14, 2024

January 14, 2024 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

How long does it take a team of rocket scientists to remove two screws? When the screws they’re working on are keeping a priceless sample of asteroid safe, it’s about three months. That’s how long NASA has been working on the OSIRIS-REx sample return canister, which came back to Earth from asteroid Bennu back in September. The container was crammed full of asteroid bits, thanks in part to an overly energetic impact between the sample-collecting boom and Bennu. There was so much stuff that planetary scientists were able to recover about 70 grams of material that was covering the outside of the sealed container; this must have been a boon to the engineers, who got to figure out how to open the jammed cover of the container without anyone breathing down their necks for samples to study. The problem was a pair of stuck fasteners out of the 35 holding the lid on the container; the solution was far more complicated than a spritz of WD-40 and a little bit of heating with an oxy-acetylene torch. Engineers had to design two “clamp-like tools” and test them on a mock-up to make sure they wouldn’t contaminate the sample. We’d love to know more about these tools; trust us, we’ll be looking into this closely. If we find anything, a full article will be forthcoming.

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