Fail Of The Week: Commute-Shortening Electric Scooter

November 21, 2013 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

Please don’t judge [Alan] on his choice of vests. This project is from 1999 when it was common to see people rockin’ these threads. Anyone who has ever spent time on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, Minnesota will know that parking is at a premium. [Alan] had a 12-15 minute walk from his parking garage to his office and was considering a cheaper parking location that would balloon that to 20-25 minutes. But engineers don’t see problems, they see project ideas. He started work on a tiny electric scooter that could slim down his commute. Obviously he did find some success, but it was interspersed with failures that make his scooter the Fail of the Week.

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3D Printering: Wherein ABS Is Dangerous

November 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 84 Comments

A lot of the ‘prosumer’ – for as much as I hate that word – 3D printers out there like the Makerbot Replicator and countless other Kickstarter projects only officially support PLA filament. This has a few advantages from a product development standpoint, namely not necessitating the use of a heated build plate. There are other reasons for not supporting ABS and other filaments, as one of the Kickstarter updates for the Buccaneer printer elucidates (update available to backers only, here’s a mirror from somebody on reddit).

The main crux of the Buccaneer team’s decision not to support ABS is as follows:

We spoke to our legal counsel about it and they told us that if we officially support a certain “material” type then our printer has to go through massive certification to prove that it is totally safe to use or we will/can get sued badly.

Despite the Buccaneer team’s best efforts, we’re sure, their lawyers were actually able to find some studies that showed ABS could affect a person’s health. The issue isn’t with the ABS itself – LEGO are made of ABS and kids chew on blocks all the time. The issue comes from the decomposition of ABS when it is heated.

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Retrotechtacular: [Zoltán Bay’s] Moon Bounce Coulometer Signal Amplifier

November 19, 2013 by Todd Harrison 15 Comments

In the years before World War II it was theorized that shortwave radio waves could propagate through the ionosphere relatively undisturbed and allow for a signal to be bounced off the moon and returned. [Zoltán Bay] calculated that the return signal would be too faint to be detected above background noise with the radio receiving equipment of the day. To overcome this receiver dilemma he devised a new receiving element consisting of 10 coulometers sharing a common tank of a water solution. Each of the coulometers had a separate electrical connector and when current flowed through the electrode, hydrogen bubbles would form in an attached glass capillary column. By periodically sweeping through all 10 coulometers using a rotating switch attached to the radar receiver, any radar echo as well as random background noise would be readable by the amount of bubbles in the capillary columns. A single radar echo would be indistinguishable from random background noise in the columns of bubbles, but if the sweep is continued for 30 minutes any periodic radar echo would show as an increased accumulation of bubbles in a respective column. By reading these coulometers and knowing the switching period you could determine that you were receiving a true radar echo from the moon.

What an amazing apparatus to amplify a periodic signal above background noise! Nowadays we would call this a long-time integrator or persistence measurement and it’s a relatively simple task. You can download and read [Zoltán Bay’s] paper on “Reflection of Microwaves From the Moon” dated 1946 in PDF form. His integrator apparatus details start on page 17.

It took some years but in 1946 [Zoltán Bay’s] receiving apparatus was tested and did confirm reception from moon bounce. However, U.S. Army Signal Corps with better crystal frequency stabilized equipment was able to perform the same task earlier as seen in the below video without the use of an integrator. Even though the U.S. Army equipment was superior for this task [Zoltán Bay’s] apparatus enjoyed years of service in the field of planetary radar observation where such a high sensitivity scheme was still necessary.

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Hacking And Philosophy: Crackdown Part II

November 18, 2013 by Marsh 13 Comments

hnpHackerCrackdownP2

This week we’re back with Hacker Crackdown: Part II! The caliber of last week’s comments was exceptional, but the level of participation planed off, and I’ll risk a guess: The Mentor’s Manifesto was more likely encountered as part of any given reader’s childhood—or, if not, easily skimmed at just over one page long—and therefore drew more interest. Crackdown, however, is perhaps less familiar. You also needed to read over 50 pages for last week (100 for this week). I list these things not as an apology or a rationalization, but as an attempt to better serve the community by providing accessible content. If you can’t commit to a lengthy reading, that shouldn’t exclude your participation.

This week, I’m adjusting the format to focus on key quotations from the text. Never even heard of Hacker Crackdown? No problem! Stick with us after the break where you’ll find all the relevant issues in a brief outline, then join us in our discussion!

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Hackaday Links: November 17, 2013

November 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

If you purchased a knock-off FM transmitter and were unhappy with its broadcast range [Thiagohersan] shows how to double the range with a simple transistor amplifier circuit. He also hacked it for used without the 12V car socket.

[Patrick Herd] had a project that required him to strip about twenty Mindstorm batteries from their plastic enclosures. It’s not too tough getting into them but it does require drilling out the plastic rivets. He made a jig and used a CNC mill to automate the process.

Speaking of CNC, [Bertho] added some abstraction to distance himself from what he calls the “50+ years archaic syntax and grammar that G-code programs have”. The project is a meta-compiler for G-Code.

If you need a cold one and don’t have a HaDuino on hand you’ll thank yourself for hacking together this five-cent workbench bottle opener.

Just make sure you do all the lathe work for a custom speaker enclosure before you start pounding back those brewskis. Not only does [Shaun’s] creation look modern and stylish, but it boasts more than enough power to bump some tunes.

Here’s a project that adds LED feedback to your XBMC installation. It uses a Raspberry Pi to run the media center software, and a script to monitor it and actuate the lights on an Adafruit add-on board. At first glance you may not think much of it, but this is all the logic control you need to automate your viewing room. Who doesn’t want a home theater that automatically dims once you’ve made your viewing selection?

And finally, [08milluz] snagged some reactive electronics in the form of Disney’s Mickey Mouse ears. Apparently they glow different colors at live shows and based on where they are worn within the park. He did a complete teardown to show off the hardware within. It turns out to be controlled by an MSP430 which are known for their low power consumption. [Thanks Spikeo55]

Fail Of The Week: Automatic Baby Rocker

November 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

fotw-baby-bouncer

The art of hacking requires you to straddle many different types of engineering. In this case, it looks like [Dan] could use a little bit of brain-storming on how to get this doubly-failed project back on track. Do go easy on him as he wasn’t the one that submitted the write-up for this week’s Fail.

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Ask Hackaday: (How) Should We Control Kickstarter Campaigns?

November 14, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 112 Comments

Kickstarter campaigns helped bring new and innovative products to the market during these last years. However there often are failures that can happen at several stages. We’d like to hear your opinion about them and discover what you think could be done to foresee/prevent these kinds of bad experiences that damage the trust between individuals and funding platforms.

Post-funding failures

There are a few project teams that give up a few months after receiving the funds, like the people behind the iControlPad 2 recently (disclaimer: we’re not backers). Even if [Craig] stated that he would document the entire production process on film and be open about all the project life steps, that didn’t prevent the project from being dropped (oddly enough) exactly one year after they received the funds. The more the project was headed towards failure, less was the frequency of updates regarding the project’s current state. The official reasons for this decision were difficulties that arose with the chosen LEDs, we’ll let you make your own opinion by having a look at the updates section. Thanks [Nikropht] for the tipping us about it.

Pre-funding failures

What is happening even more often on kickstarter is (usually successful) campaigns being canceled by the website itself after a few people rang the alarm bell. This may be due to an unfeasible project idea, a fake demonstration video/photos or even an attempt to resell an existing item under a new name.

The best examples for the first category undeniably are free energy generators. Here is an indiegogo campaign which actually succeeded. The creators announced one month ago that the project is running a bit behind schedule (aha), that the machine will cost around $5000 and that they’ll “need the funds before they make the units”. What can be done to educate the public that such energy is not created out of thin air?

The second category includes the recently canceled LUCI advanced lucid dream inducer (thanks [Michael] for the tip), which ended 2 days before the deadline. Technical guys got skeptical when they saw that the electrode signals were amplified several feet from the brain with an audio amplifier. At first glance, this was the only sign that this project may have been a scam (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt). Further research indicated that GXP (the company behind the campaign) didn’t exist, and most of their pictures were photoshopped. Here is a link to a quick summary of the situation and if you want to be entertained we advise you to make some pop-corn and head to the comments section of the project. What’s terrible here is that backers started to turn against each other, as the company always had a ‘good’ explanation for all the backers’ questions.

At last, there are some persons that just make funding campaigns with already existing products. This is the case of the eye3 flying robot and the vybe vibrating bracelet (don’t order!). Note that all of them were successfully funded. The eye3 was created by the same persons that made LumenLab, a company that created the microcnc. You’ll find more details here. The vibrating bracelet was just this one, which would be made in different colors. We just discovered this website that covered both project in greater lengths as well as many others.

Kickstarter fraudsters

Scams can also happen on the backers’ side. Recently, a Kickstarter backer named “Encik Farhan” attempted to rip off many Kickstarter projects. A ‘credit card chargeback’ technique was used, were the backer would contribute to the campaign, receive his perk and later cancel his credit card transaction using diverse reasons. The money would later be taken from the campaign funding by the payment processor.

What can be done?

The examples cited in this article set precedents which may turn people away from crowdfunding. In your opinion, what could be done to prevent this? Another reason we ask is because Hackaday may launch a sponsored product soon, thanks to the new overlords. This hypothetical product would be designed with the Hackaday community in a completely transparent process.

In the meantime, if you find any perpetual motion machines on kicstarter or indiegogo, be sure to send them in. You may also want to checkout this website predicting the success probability of a given kickstarter campaign.

Hackaday