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Head out in the normal “civilian” world and look at the shirts around you. I don’t want to be too nasty about about it, but let’s face facts — the T-shirts you see will be boring and uninventive. Now compare that to your favorite hacker cons. We wear our shirts like they’re oil paintings.
Going into the weekend of SuperCon I had no intention of writing this post. But then I saw a really awesome shirt and already had the camera in my hands so I asked if I could snap a picture. A bit later that day it happened again. Then I don’t know what came over me. Here are my favorites, but I’ve curated an epic number of great garments for your viewing pleasure after the break.
“The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.” Truer words were never spoken, and this goes double for the hobbyist world of hardware hacking. It seems that every module, every company, and every individual hacker has a favorite way of putting the same pins in a row.
We have an entire drawer full of adapters that just go from one pinout to another, or one programmer to many different target boards. We’ll be the first to admit that it’s often our own darn fault — we decided to swap the reset and ground lines because it was convenient for one design, and now we have two adapters. But imagine a world where there was only a handful of distinct pinouts — that drawer would be only half full and many projects would simply snap together. “You may say I’m a dreamer…”
This article is about connectors and standards. We’ll try not to whine and complain, although we will editorialize. We’re going to work through some of the design tradeoffs and requirements, and maybe you’ll even find that there’s already a standard pinout that’s “close enough” for your next project. And if you’ve got a frequently used pinout or use case that we’ve missed, we encourage you to share the connector pinouts in the comments, along with its pros and cons. Let’s see if we can’t make sense of this mess.
In the 1950s it seemed likely that the Cold War could at any minute take a turn for the worse, and we might all be consumed in the fiery conflagration of nuclear war. Fortunately neither the leaders on our side of the fence nor those on the other were the dangerous unpredictable lunatics their opponent’s propaganda might have portrayed them as, and instead we continued on our way uneasily gazing at each other over the Iron Curtain.
For civilian America, the Government created a series of promotional efforts to prepare them for the effects of nuclear war and equip them with the means to survive. Some of them like the infamous “Duck and cover” film seem quaint and woefully inadequate when viewed with several decades hindsight, but others tried hard to equip the 1950s American with what looked like the real means to survive.
Our film below the break today is part of one such effort. The Family Fallout Shelter was a booklet produced in 1959 by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and it described in detail the construction of a series of fallout shelters of differing designs. There was a concrete underground shelter, a partially buried twin-wall shelter with infill, and the one shown in the film, a basement fallout shelter made from concrete blocks. Our narrator and protagonist is [Walt], a capable bespectacled middle-aged man in a check shirt who takes us through the shelter’s construction.
We start with him giving some friends a tour of the finished shelter, and we see its cozy furnished interior with bunk beds and all mod cons. We’re told it would make a useful extra spare bedroom, or a darkroom. Then we flash back to construction as [Walt] takes us through all the steps required to build your own basement shelter. As he says, it’s a project that could be attempted by almost anyone, and what follows is a pretty good introduction to basic bricklaying. We can’t help being concerned about the security of those unmortared roof blocks in the face of a Tsar Bomba, but fortunately they were never put to the test. We do find it amusing that this is presented by the National Concrete Masonry Association — how better to boost sales than get the populace to build extra brick walls in every home?
The film and booklet provide a fascinating window into some of the culture surrounding preparations for nuclear war in the early Cold War era. The ideas that it would be survivable, and that two weeks in a home-made fallout shelter would be sufficient to ensure that civilians would be safe are in stark contrast to the then-secret deep shelters and long-term survival plans that the governments of the time created for themselves. It would be interesting to know how many of these home shelters were built, and how many survive. Did you ever spend a night in a basement spare bedroom with a blast wall?
We’ll leave you with the film’s closing words from the Director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization.
“No home in America is modern without a family fallout shelter. This is the nuclear age.“
Over the last year, Hackaday.io has seen an incredible project. It’s a migratory box of random electronic junk, better known as the Travelling Hackerbox. The idea behind this mobile electronic surplus store is simple: receive the box, take out some cool electronic gizmos, add some of your own, and send it on to the next person on the list. It is the purest expression of the hacker aesthetic, all contained in a cardboard box.
The previous travels of the (second) Traveling Hackerbox
Last week, the Travelling Hackerbox appeared at the Hackaday Superconference where it was torn asunder. Its silicon and plastic innards were spilled for a badge hacking competition. The body of the box is gone from this world but the spirit lives on. Parts were collected, pins straightened, the contents of anti-static bags condensed, and now it’s time for the Travelling Hackerbox to leave the nest. It’s going down to the post office, sending in its passport application, and it’s finally heading out into far-flung lands that are not the United States.
Over the last year, and despite some jerk in Georgia, the Traveling Hackerbox has racked up the miles. From Maine to Flordia, and from Alaska to Hawaii, the Hackerbox has distributed parts to dozens of labs and workstations. If you want to get an idea of the box, the last recipient, Carl Smith, put together a great summary and photo log of what he found in this magical box.
I’ve always promised the Hackerbox would go international after racking up 25,000 miles – the distance around Earth’s equator. Now, it’s finally time. This is happening, and I’m looking for volunteers to take care of the box.
How this is going to go down
Right now, the Travelling Hackerbox is sitting at the Hackaday Overlords office in Pasadena. The next trip will be to Canada, hopefully around Vancouver, where it will eventually make it to the Maritimes. From there, the box will travel to Europe (West to East, possibly ending in Russia). The box will then travel through Africa, ending South Africa, and head over the Indian Ocean to Australia. The rest of Oceania, Southeast Asia, India, and China will be next, possibly followed by South and Central America. With any luck, the Travelling Hackerbox will arrive back at home base by next year.
Of course, this all depends on how many members of the hackaday.io community would like to receive the box and where those people are located. If you want to receive the box, this is the sign-up form [the sign up form is now closed]. This form will be open for the next week, afterwards I will look at the responses, consider each of them, and plan this epic trip around the world.
The current state of the box
The Travelling Hackerbox was originally based on a US Postal Service flat rate box. Because flat rate boxes are for US destinations only, the physical manifestation of the box must change. At the very least, this gives me an opportunity to laminate a new box in packing tape and reinforce the edges of the cardboard.
The new body for the Travelling Hackerbox is a 12x12x3 inch (about five liters) cardboard box, lovingly protected and reinforced with stickytape. This does reduce the overall volume of the somewhat, which required the disposal of a few parts that weren’t really cool. I assure you, nothing of great value was lost, and I only removed the larger, bulkier components I remember seeing the last time I had it.
All the coming travels will be planned next week when I get a few submissions to the international sign-up form.
Last time, I talked about a simple kind of neural net called a perceptron that you can cause to learn simple functions. For the purposes of experimenting, I coded a simple example using Excel. That’s handy for changing things on the fly, but not so handy for putting the code in a microcontroller. This time, I’ll show you how the code looks in C++ and also tell you more about what you can do when faced with a more complex problem.
Is it possible to recycle failed 3D prints? As it turns out, it is — as long as your definition of “recycle” is somewhat flexible. After all, the world only needs so many coasters.
To be fair, [Devin]’s experiment is more about the upcycling side of the recycling equation, but it was certainly worth undertaking. 3D printing has hardly been reduced to practice, and anyone who spends any time printing knows that it’s easy to mess up. [Devin]’s process starts when the colorful contents of a bin full of failed prints are crushed with a hammer. Spread out onto a properly prepared (and never to be used again for cookies) baking sheet and cooked in the oven at low heat, the plastic chunks slowly melt into a thin, even sheet.
[Devin]’s goal was to cast them into a usable object, so he tried to make a bowl. He tried reheating discs of the material using an inverted metal bowl as a form but he found that the plastic didn’t soften evenly, resulting in Dali-esque bowls with thin spots and holes. He then flipped the bowl and tried to let the material sag into the form; that worked a little better but it still wasn’t the win he was looking for.
In the end, all [Devin] really ended up with is some objets d’art and a couple of leaky bowls. What else could he have done with the plastic? Would he have been better off vacuum forming the bowls or perhaps even pressure forming them? Or does the upcycling make no sense when you can theoretically make your own filament? Let us know in the comments how you would improve this process.
I don’t know if it is true or not today, but in fiction, spies depend on lots of high-tech gadgets. I do know that during World War II, the various secret services like the OSS and the SOE did have gadgets like secret transmitters and concealed weapons. But, like [James Bond’s] grenade-launching ink pen, to [Maxwell Smart’s] shoe phone, those gadgets came from some organized lab. (When you watch the video below, remember that at that time, a personal phone going off in a theater was unknown as cell phones were years in the future.)
