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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Biblically-Accurate Keyboard

December 7, 2023 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Well, it was bound to happen at some point. [sporewoh]’s bunchiez40 keyboard for ants is made of mouse switches, which of course begs for a mouse made of keyboard switches.

[sporewoh]’s keyboards have been steadily shrinking, and they built this in order to get the smallest possible form factor for the number of keys. Surprisingly, since the mouse switches have an actuation force similar to some heavier MX-style switches (~70 g), [sporewoh] is able to squeeze 85 WPM out of it, albeit with some argument from the wrists.

If you want to build a bunchiez40, everything is available on GitHub, including the CAD files for that lovely anodized aluminium case. The typing video is coming soon, and I’m taking bets on whether it’s as quiet as a mouse, as one redditor joked.

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When Nearly Flat Isn’t Really Flat

December 6, 2023 by Jenny List 83 Comments

An aerial photo of the UK city of Milton Keynes — Is Mk really flat? Thomas Nugent, CC BY-SA 2.0.

From where I am sitting, the earth is flat. The floor that runs the length of the unit my hackerspace sits in is flat, the concrete apron behind it on which we test our Hacky Racers is flat, and a few undulations in terrain notwithstanding, it remains flat as I walk up the road towards Stony Stratford.

Of course, Hackaday hasn’t lost its mind and joined the conspiracy theorists, the earth is definitely spherical as has been known and proved multiple times since antiquity. But my trivial observation made in a damp part of Buckinghamshire still holds; that for a given value of flat which disregards a few lumps and bumps in the ground, my corner of the English city of Milton Keynes is pretty flat. Which leads from a philosophical discussion to an engineering one, if I can reasonably describe a city-sized area on an Earth-sized sphere as flat, how flat does a surface have to be to be considered flat? And from that stems a fascinating story of the evolution of precision machining. Continue reading “When Nearly Flat Isn’t Really Flat” →

Retrotechtacular: The Gunsmith Of Williamsburg

December 5, 2023 by Jenny List 11 Comments

A modern firearm is likely to be mass-produced using high-precision machine tools, and with a uniformity to the extent that parts from one can be interchanged with those from another. This marks a progression of centuries of innovation, in gunsmithing, in machine tooling, and in metallurgy. In the 18th century there was little of the innovations found in a modern weapon, and a rifle would have been made entirely by hand through the work of a master gunsmith. The video below the break is a fascinating 1969 film following Wallace Gusler, the gunsmith at the museum town of Williamsburg, Virginia, as he makes an 18th-century muzzle-loading flintlock rifle from raw materials. It’s a long video, but it leaves nothing out and has a really informative commentary we’re told from the gunsmith himself.

The film opens with a piece of wrought iron being forged into a long strip. We’ve talked about wrought iron as a difficult-to-find blacksmith’s material before here, so this immediately makes us curious as to what material the current Williamsburg gunsmiths use. The strip is formed round a mandrel and laboriously forge-welded to form a rough tube, before being bored with a series of drills and then rifled with a toothed slug. The finishing is done by had with a file, with the rough tube being filed to an octagonal shape. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Gunsmith Of Williamsburg” →

Retrotechtacular: The Story Of Turpentine

December 4, 2023 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

If someone in 2023 has ever had much call to use turpentine, chances are good it was something to do with paint or other wood finishes, like varnish. Natural turpentine is the traditional solvent of choice for oil paints, which have decreased in popularity with the rise of easy-to-clean polymer-based paints and coating. Oh sure, there are still those who prefer oil paint, especially for trim work — it lays up so nice — but by and large, turpentine seems like a relic from days gone by, like goose grease and castor oil.

It wasn’t always so, though. Turpentine used to be a very big deal indeed, as shown by this circa 1940 documentary on the turpentine harvesting and processing industry. Even then it was only a shadow of its former glory, when it was a vital part of a globe-spanning naval empire and a material of the utmost strategic importance. “Suwanee Pine” shows the methods used in the southern United States, where fast-growing pines offer up a resinous organic gloop in response to wounds in their bark. The process shown looks a lot like the harvesting process for natural latex, with slanting gashes or “catfaces” carved into the trunks of young trees, forming channels to guide the exudate down into a clay collecting cup.

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USB-C For Hackers: Program Your Own PSU

December 4, 2023 by Arya Voronova 20 Comments

Last time, I showed off a few ways you can convert an existing PSU to USB-C duty, and zoomed in on a particular way you can use to convert one of the ever-abundant 18 V – 20 V laptop PSUs to USB-C. All we have left is to write software for it, and I’ll explain how it works. There’s also that one cool USB-C secret I’ve found out, but you’ll have to read on to find out more.

From the last article, we have a board that has an RP2040 and FUSB302 combo on it, which takes a 20 V DC PSU input from a laptop brick, and can switch either 5 V, 20 V or 0 V to its USB-C socket using FETs. The USB-C communication firmware is simple enough, but there’s caveats, especially regarding safety. Let’s go through those!

The Code Logic

VBUS has to be non-powered by default – we only supply 5 V when the FUSB302 detects a 5.1 kΩ pulldown on one of the CC lines. After supplying 5 V, we send out PSU capability advertisements, of the kind that we’ve learned to parse in the Replying PD article – and whenever we get a Request, we have to switch to the requested profile, connecting the voltage rail requested to the FET. I opt to not do any current consumption control in this design, assuming a well-behaved device, but you theoretically should do that. It wouldn’t be hard to add a high-side current sensor, say, something from Analog Devices – I just don’t want to do that now, especially given that I’m already using two of the exposed ADC pins to do Lenovo/HP PSU capability detection instead, one is used up for VBUS measurement, and the fourth is used for VIN (20 V rail) measurement – that’s four ADCs, which is as much as the RP2040 has got. However, if I ever need more ADCs, I can add an analog mux like 4051 in the next version! Continue reading “USB-C For Hackers: Program Your Own PSU” →

The Hoarder’s Dilemma Hack Chat

December 4, 2023 by Dan Maloney 31 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, December 6 at noon Pacific for the The Hoarder’s Dilemma Hack Chat with Gabe Emerson!

There’s a lot to be said for the power of a well-stocked junk bin. It’s almost a magical thing, being able to dive into a random box and retrieve just the right part to perform a needful repair or to complete a project without the need to hit the web or hop in the car for a trip to the hardware store. For those who pride themselves on their resourcefulness, it can be a heady experience indeed.

But as with everything, such feats of fix-it come at a price. That little squirt of dopamine that comes from having just the right thing can make your monkey brain fixate on a simple equation: “More stuff is better stuff.” The higher and deeper your stash, the better your chances of having what you need, assuming you can find it, of course. This way lies madness, and perhaps an appearance on a reality TV show.

Is there a better way? It’s hard to say, but we figured it would be a good idea to loop in someone with a lot of experience collecting junk that somehow finds its way into some pretty cool projects. Gabe Emerson runs the popular and aptly named “saveitforparts” channel over on YouTube, and fancies himself an accomplished hoarder. We’d have to agree, given his recent 1,000-mile drive to pick up a used geodesic dome, or his ever-increasing collection of RV satellite dishes, which he somehow puts to good use. His junk collection is pretty epic; he even has a whole piece of property devoted to the larger pieces of his collection, like an entire monorail train. He seems uniquely qualified to discuss the “Hoarder’s Dilemma” and the painful process of deciding what stays and what goes.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, December 6 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Hackaday Links: December 3, 2023

December 3, 2023 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

Sure, it does less than originally promised, but hey — at least it’s more expensive. That about sums up Tesla fans’ feelings after the long-awaited Cybertruck reveal at the Texas Gigafactory on Thursday, where Elon Musk himself handed over the keys — or their Cyber equivalent — to a few new owners. These are expensive machines — $61,000 for the two-motor model, and just shy of $100,000 for the three-motor all-wheel-drive model with all the bells and whistles. That’s considerably more than they were expected to cost back in 2019, a fact which may be at least partially behind the drop in Tesla shares after the launch.

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