44 Layers Of Katharine Burr Blodgett

January 2, 2018 by Kristina Panos 22 Comments

Whether you realize it or not, Katharine Burr Blodgett has made your life better. If you’ve ever looked through a viewfinder, a telescope, or the windshield of a car, you’ve been face to face with her greatest achievement, non-reflective glass.

Katharine was a surface chemist for General Electric and a visionary engineer who discovered a way to make ordinary glass 99% transparent. Her invention enabled the low-cost production of nearly invisible panes and lenses for everything from picture frames and projectors to eyeglasses and spyglasses.

Katharine’s education and ingenuity along with her place in the zeitgeist led her into other fields throughout her career. When World War II erupted, GE shifted their focus to military applications. Katharine rolled up her sleeves and got down in the scientific trenches with the men of the Research Lab. She invented a method for de-icing airplane wings, engineered better gas masks, and created a more economical oil-based smokescreen. She was a versatile, insightful scientist who gave humanity a clearer view of the universe.

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Great People And Culture At 34th Chaos Communication Congress

January 2, 2018 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

If you’ve been to a Chaos Communication Congress, you know the feeling — the strange realization after it’s all over that you’re back in the “real world”. It’s somehow alienating and unfriendly in comparison to being surrounded by computer freaks, artists, hackers, activists, coders, and other like-minded individuals over the four days of the Congress. A hand-written poster by the podcasting center read “Endlich, normale Leute” — “At last, normal people” — which is irony piled on irony but the sentiment is still right for certain strange values of “normal”. Normal hackers? You’d probably fit right in.

We cover a lot of the talks from the Congress, because they’re first-class and because you can play along at home, but the real soul of the Congress is people getting together, making something temporary and crazy, talking over their common plans, learning new things directly from one-another, and simply having fun. Here’s our chance to give you a little of the other side of the Congress.
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Retrotechtacular: 1950s Televisions Were Beasts

December 29, 2017 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

Television has been around for a long time, but what we point to and call a TV these days is a completely different object from what consumers first fell in love with. This video of RCA factory tours from the 1950s drives home how foreign the old designs are to modern eyes.

Right from the start the apparent chaos of the circuitry is mindboggling, with some components on circuit boards but many being wired point-to-point. The narrator even makes comments on the “new technique for making electrical connections” that uses a wire wrapping gun. The claim is that this is cleaner, faster, and neater than soldering. ([Bil Herd] might agree.) Not all of the methods are lost in today’s manufacturing though. The hand-stuffing and wave soldering of PCBs is still used on lower-cost goods, and frequently with power supplies (at least the ones where space isn’t at a premium).

It’s no surprise when talking about 60+ year-old-designs that these were tube televisions. But this goes beyond the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) that generates the picture. They are using vacuum tubes, and a good portion of the video delves into the manufacture and testing of them. You’ll get a glimpse of this at 3:20, but what you really want to see is the automated testing machine at 4:30. Each tube travels along a specialized conveyor where the testing goes so far as to give a few automated whacks from corks on the ends of actuators. As the tube gauntlet progresses, we see the “aging” process (around 6:00) when each tube is run at 3-4 times the rated filament voltages. Wild!

There’s a segment detailing the manufacture of the CRT tubes as well, although these color tubes don’t seem to be for the model of TV being followed during the rest of the films. At about 7:07 they call them “Color Kinescopes”, an early name for RCA’s CRT technology.

During the factory tours we get the overwhelming feeling that this manufacturing is more related to automotive than modern electronic. These were the days when televisions (and radios) were more like pieces of furniture, and seeing the hulking chassis transported by hanging conveyors is just one part of it. The enclosure plant is churning out legions of identical wooden consoles. This begins at 11:55 and the automation shown is very similar to what we’d expect to see today. It seems woodworking efficiency was already a solved problem in the ’50s.

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Hackaday Superconference Talk: Cory Grosser

December 28, 2017 by Jenny List 4 Comments

When we look at a product or project here at Hackaday it is likely that our interest has been caught by its internal technology, or perhaps by its functionality. It is easy to forget that there is another angle to each and every item that graces these pages, and it is every bit as important as those we have already mentioned. Aesthetic design, the look and feel of a product, is something that is so often overlooked.

One of the speakers at the Hackaday Superconference was [Cory Grosser], one of America’s leading independent product designers, and the designer of the Supplyframe Design Lab in which the Superconference was being held. In his talk he covered some of the principles of design, touching on its psychology and its purpose in creating a successful product. In doing so he delivered a fascinating talk full of insights into the design of products both famous and somewhat obscure.

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Barbara McClintock: Against The Genetic Grain

December 28, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 8 Comments

The tale of much of Barbara McClintock’s life is that of the scientist working long hours with a microscope seeking to solve mysteries. The mystery she spent most of her career trying to solve was how all cells in an organism can contain the same DNA, and yet divide to produce cells serving different functions; basically how cells differentiate. And for that, she got a Nobel prize all to herself, which is no small feat either.

Becoming a Scientist

Human chromosomes, long strands of DNA by Steffen Dietzel CC BY-SA 3.0

McClintock was born on June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. From age three until beginning school, she lived with her aunt in Brooklyn, New York while her father strove financially to start up a medical practice. She was a solitary and independent-minded child, a trait she later called her “capacity to be alone”.

In 1919, she began her studies at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and took her first course in genetics in 1921. A year later, due to the interest she showed in genetics, she was invited to take the graduate genetics course at Cornell. It was here that she became interested in the new field of cytogenetics, specifically of maize or corn. Cytogenetics studies how the chromosomes relate to cell behavior, particularly during cell division. Chromosomes are the long strands of DNA within the nucleus of every cell and shown here in the photo at a time when they are condensed, or coiled up.

While still at Cornell she developed a number of methods for visualizing and characterizing maize which ended up in textbooks. She also became the first to describe the morphology of the ten maize chromosomes, basically their form and structural relationships, which then allowed her to discover more about the chromosomes. One of her colleagues observed that ten of the seventeen significant advances made in the field at Cornell between 1929 and 1935 were hers. This was only the first step in what would be the remarkable career of a very well respected scientist.

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JST Is Not A Connector

December 27, 2017 by Roger Cheng 45 Comments

When reading about cool projects and products, it’s common to see wiring plugs labelled “JST connector.” This looks fine until we start getting hands-on and begin hacking things together. Inevitably we find the JST connector from one part fails to fit in the JST connector of another. This is the moment we learn “JST” is not a connector specification. It is short for Japan Solderless Terminals Manufacturing Company, Ltd. A company whose history goes back to 1957 and their website (styled in 1999) lists hundreds of different types.

We can simplify to “JST connector” when chit-chatting about projects. But when it comes to actual hardware specification, that’s not good enough. Which JST connector?

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Hackaday Links: Not A Creature Was Stirring, Except For A Trackball

December 24, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

Hey, did you know Hackaday is starting an Open Access, peer-reviewed journal? The Hackaday Journal of What You Don’t Know (HJWYDK) is looking for submissions detailing the tools, techniques, and skills that we don’t know, but should. Want to teach everyone how to make sand think? Write a paper and tell us about it! Send in your submissions here.

Have you noticed OSH Park updated their website?

The MSP430 line of microcontrollers are super cool, low power, and cheap. Occasionally, TI pumps out a few MSP430 dev boards and sells them for the rock-bottom price of $4.30. Here ya go, fam. This one is loaded up with the MSP430FR2433.

lol, Bitcoin this week.

Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace and one of the first hackerspaces in the US, is now looking for a new place. Why, you may ask? Because San Francisco real estate. The current price per square foot is triple what their current lease provides. While we hope Noisebridge will find a new home, we’re really looking forward to the hipster restaurant that’s only open for brunch that will take its place.

The coolest soundcards, filled with DOS blips and bloops, were based on the OPL2 and OPL3 sound chips. If you want one of these things, you’re probably going to be digging up an old ISA SoundBlaster soundcard. The OPL2LPT is the classic sound card for computers that don’t have an easily-accessible ISA bus, like those cool vintage laptops. The 8-Bit Guy recently took a look at this at this neat piece of hardware, and apart from requiring a driver to work with any OPL2-compatible game, this thing actually works.

NVIDIA just did something amazing. They created a piece of hardware that everyone wants but isn’t used to turn electricity into heat and Bitcoin. This fantastic device, that is completely original and not at all derivative, is sold in the NVIDIA company store for under five dollars. Actually, the green logo silk/art on this PCB ruler is kinda cool, and I’d like to know how they did that. Also, and completely unrelated: does anyone want ten pounds of Digikey PCB rulers?