Retrotechtacular: Submarine Cable Splicing Is Serious Business

December 24, 2013 by Kristina Panos 50 Comments

Really. As this wonderfully narrated talkie picture from 1939 will attest, keeping even one drop of water from penetrating undersea cables is of the utmost importance.

How do they do it? Many, many layers of protection, including several of jute wrapping. The video centers on splicing a new cable to an existing one in the San Francisco Bay to bring the wonder of telephony to a man-made island created for the Golden Gate International Expo.

The narrator makes these men out to be heroes, and when you see how much lead they came into contact with, you’ll understand what he means. Each of the 1,056 individually insulated wires must be spliced by hand. After that comes a boiling out process in which petrolatum is poured over the splice to remove all moisture. Then, a lead sleeve is pulled over the connections. Molten lead is poured over the sleeve and smoothed out by hand.

At this point, the splice is tested. The sleeve is punctured and nitrogen gas is pumped in at 20psi. Then comes the most important step: the entire sleeve is painted with soap suds. Any gas that escapes will make telltale bubbles.

Once they are satisfied with the integrity of the sheath, they wrap the whole thing in what appears to be lead cables and pound them into submission. Surely that would be enough, don’t you think? Nope. They weld the cables all around and then apply two coats of tar-treated jute wrapping, which retards saltwater corrosion considerably.

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3D Printering: Making A Thing In AutoCAD, Part II

December 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

It’s time once again for another part in 3D Printering’s series of Making A Thing. Last week was a short tutorial on the beginnings of making a thing in AutoCAD. This is an extremely complex software package, and in a desire to make things short and sweet, I broke this AutoCAD tutorial into two parts.

Since we already covered the 2D design portion of AutoCAD, part II of this tutorial is going to turn our 2D part into a three-dimensional object. Check out the rest of the tutorial below.

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Hackaday Links: December 22, 2013

December 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Korben] is using a picture frame as a Bluetooth speaker (translated). He hacked a Rock’R² for this project. It’s a device that has a vibrating element which can be used to make any hollow item into a speaker.

Entertain yourself over the holidays by mastering the Apollo Guidance Computer simulator. It’s a JavaScript version of the computer used in the modules of the Apollo moon missions. [Thanks Gregory and Paul]

Here’s a little mirror attachment that lets you use your laptop as an overhead projector. [Ian] calls it the ClipDraw. Affix it to the webcam and use the keyboard as the drawing surface. Since it’s simply using the camera this works for both live presentations and video conferencing. What we can’t figure out is why the image doesn’t end up backward?

This guide will let you turn a Carambola board into an AirPlay speaker.

Those who suck at remembering the rules for a game of pool will enjoy this offering. It’s some add-on hardware that uses a color sensor to detect when a ball is pocketed. The Raspberry Pi based system automatically scores each game.

We spend waaaay too much time sitting at the computer. If we had a treadmill perhaps we’d try building [Kirk’s] treadmill desk attachment. It’s made out of PVC and uses some altered reduction fittings to make the height adjustable. It looks like you lose a little bit of space at the front of the belt, but if you’re just using it at a walking pace that shouldn’t matter too much.

You can have your own pair of smart tweezers for just a few clams. [Tyler] added copper tape to some anti-static tweezers. The copper pads have wires soldered to them which terminate on the other end with some alligator clips. Clip them to your multimeter and you’ve got your own e-tweezers.

Fail Of The Week: Baby Monitor Hack Ends In Facepalm

December 19, 2013 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

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Editor’s Note: This was the last Fail of the Week tip we had stored up. If you want to see the series continue on a weekly basis we need help finding more documented fails! Please look back through your projects and document the ones that didn’t go quite right. We also encourage you to send in links to other fails you’ve found. Just drop the links in our tips line. Thanks!

Now on with business. This is a baby monitor which [Eric] cleverly repaired, only to realize that he more than likely did it the hard way. The monitor was broken and went unused until his son figured out how to climb out of the crib, so he figured it was time to start monitoring again. Pulling the unit from the brink of the parts bin he set to work repairing the broken power connector.

Further inspection of the power adapter showed that it was spec’d to put out 5V at 1A. This falls in line with USB power, so he clipped the end off of a USB-B cable and used a hunk of proto-board to inject the 5V lines into the device. It was when it came time to reassemble the case that he flipped the board over and discovered an existing USB-B port. He could have just cut a hole in the case to get at the connector and plugged the un-altered cable in directly. Oh well… we’re sure it was fun figuring out his own custom solution!

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

3D Printering: Making A Thing With AutoCAD, Part I

December 18, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

Octopodes and useless plastic baubles begone. It’s time yet again for another installment of learning how to make a thing with 3D design tools. This week, we’re making something with AutoCAD. It’s an amazing piece of software that costs $4000 per seat. Hilariously expensive for any home tinkerer, but if you go to a university with an engineering program, there’s a computer lab with machines running AutoCAD somewhere on campus.

Last week we took a look at making something with OpenSCAD. AutoCAD is much, much different. Where OpenSCAD is sorta, kinda like programming, AutoCAD is just a digital version of t-squares, triangles, straight edges, and people getting uppity when you don’t call their drawing device a ‘lead holder’.

I’ve broken this tutorial down into two parts: right now you’re reading the tutorial on drawing 2D objects in AutoCAD. This weekend I’ll publish the transformation of 2D objects into a 3D printable part. Read on for how to create a 2D object in AutoCAD.

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Developed On Hackaday: First Version Of The Hardware

December 18, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 42 Comments

The Hackaday writers and readers are currently working hand-in-hand on an offline password keeper, the mooltipass (click to see the project description).

Next in our Developed on Hackaday series, we present the first version of our schematics. There’s already been a lot of discussions going on in our dedicated Google group, mainly about the project’s basic functionality. Because our firmware developers wanted to get to work, we decided to send the first version of our hardware into production a few days ago. Before going through the schematics, let’s review the required list of the mooltipass’s core components:

an easily-readable screen
a read-protected smart-card
large flash memory to store the encrypted passwords
an Arduino-compatible microcontroller with USB connectivity

We’ve been drowning in component suggestions from motivated hobbyists, so we figured we’d make the mooltipass v1 as simple as possible and then move from there. Given this device is developed on Hackaday, we also wanted future users to modify it, building completely new projects based around these main components. Keep reading for our schematics…

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Retrotechtacular: Films Used To Be Recorded On Film

December 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

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We’re sure that this title makes some readers itch because there are still a number of well-respected directors who insist on shooting with film rather than digital, but the subject of this week’s Retrotechtacular shows a portion of the movie industry that has surely been relegated to life-support in the past few decades. Photo finishing, once the stronghold of chemical processes used by all to develop their photographs, has become virtually non-existent. This is the story of how film and photo finishing drove cinema for much of its life.

The reels seen above are negative and positive film. The negative film goes in the camera and captures the images. After developing and fixing the negative film, the process is repeated. Light shines through the fixed negative in order to expose a fresh reel of film. That film is finished and fixed to create the reel which can be used in a projector. This simple process is covered near the beginning of the clip found below. The 1940 presentation moves on to discuss the in-depth chemistry techniques used in the process. But you’re really in for a treat starting about half-way through when the old manual methods are shown, which have been replaced by the “modern laboratory”. We love those huge analog dials! The video concludes by showing the true industrialization of the film developing process.

We’re running out of Retrotechtacular topics. If you know of something that might be worth a feature please send in a tip!

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