The Blessings And Destruction Wrought By Lead Over Millennia

October 24, 2019 by Maya Posch 120 Comments

Everyone one of us is likely aware of what lead — as in the metal — is. Having a somewhat dull, metallic gray appearance, it occupies atomic number 82 in the periodic table and is among the most dense materials known to humankind. Lead’s low melting point and malleability even when at room temperature has made it a popular metal since humans first began to melt it out of ore in the Near East at around 7,000 BC in the Neolithic period.

Although lead’s toxicity to humans has been known since at least the 2nd century BC and was acknowledged as a public health hazard in the late 19th century, the use of lead skyrocketed in the first half of the 20th century. Lead saw use as a gasoline additive beginning in the 1920s, and the US didn’t abolish lead-based paint until 1978, nearly 70 years after France, Belgium and Austria banned it.

With the rise of consumer electronics, the use of lead-based solder became ever more a part of daily life during the second part of the 20th century, until an increase in regulations aimed at reducing lead in the environment. This came along with the World Health Organization’s fairly recent acknowledgment that there is truly no safe limit for lead in the human body.

In this article I’ll examine the question of why we are still using lead, and if we truly must, then how we can use this metal in the safest way possible.

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A Handy Way To Cheaply Print A Robotic Arm

August 29, 2019 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

There’s something fascinating about humanoid robotic hands, if only because of how they are such close approximations of our own hands. One could almost picture them with tendons and skin covering them. Sadly, making your own is quite prohibitive because in addition to being complex bits of machinery, making one of these marvels of engineering is usually rather expensive.

[Gray Eldritch]’s Humanoid Robot Arm project seeks to fix both points, by providing a ready to print project. All it takes is about a kilogram of PLA filament, some TPU filament, five MG996r servos (or equivalent), an SG90 servo or similar, an Arduino Uno board and a few other bits and pieces. This should result in a robotic arm with hand as covered in the video of the Mark 3 version that is embedded after the break.

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Pegleg: Raspberry Pi Implanted Below The Skin (Not Coming To A Store Near You)

August 29, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 87 Comments

Earlier this month, a group of biohackers installed two Rasberry Pis in their legs. While that sounds like the bleeding edge, those computers were already v2 of a project called PegLeg. I was fortunate enough to see both versions in the flesh, so to speak. The first version was scarily large — a mainboard donated by a wifi router roughly the size of an Altoids tin. It’s a reminder that the line between technology’s cutting edge and bleeding edge is moving ever onward and this one was firmly on the bleeding edge.

How does that line end up moving? Sometimes it’s just a matter of what intelligent people can accomplish in a long week. Back in May, during a three-day biohacker convention called Grindfest, someone said something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” Anyone who has spent an hour in a maker space or hacker convention knows how those conversations go. Rather than ending with a laugh, things progressed at a fever pitch.

The router shed all non-vital components. USB ports: ground off. Plastic case: recycled. Battery: repurposed. Amazon’s fastest delivery brought a Qi wireless coil to power the implant from outside the body and the smallest USB stick with 64 GB on the silicon. The only recipient of PegLeg version 1.0 was [Lepht Anonym], who uses the pronoun ‘it’. [Lepht] has a well-earned reputation among biohackers who focus on technological implants who often use the term “grinder,” not to be confused with the dating app or power tool.

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Following Pigs: Building An Injectable Livestock Tracking System

August 27, 2019 by Sean Boyce 43 Comments

I’m often asked to design customer and employee tracking systems. There are quite a few ways to do it, and it’s an interesting intersection of engineering and ethics – what information is reasonable to collect in different contexts, anonymizing and securely storing it, and at a fundamental level whether the entire system should exist at all.

On one end of the spectrum, a system that simply counts the number of people that are in your restaurant at different times of day is pretty innocuous and allows you to offer better service. On the other end, when you don’t pay for a mobile app, generally that means your private data is the product being bought and sold. Personally, I find that the whole ‘move fast and break things’ attitude, along with a general disregard for the privacy of user data, has created a pretty toxic tech scene. So until a short while ago, I refused to build invasive tracking systems – then I got a request that I simply couldn’t put aside…

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Glia Is Making Open Medical Devices, And You Can Help

August 25, 2019 by Tom Nardi 40 Comments

The Glia project aims to create a suite of free and open-source medical equipment that can be assembled cheaply and easily when and where it’s needed. Even essential tools like stethoscopes and tourniquets can be difficult to acquire in certain parts of the world, especially during times of war or civil unrest. But armed with a 3D printer and the team’s open-source designs, an ad-hoc factory can start producing these lifesaving tools anywhere on the planet.

Glia member [Tarek Loubani] has recently written a blog post discussing the team’s latest release: an otoscope that can be built for as little as $5. Even if you don’t recognize the name, you’ve almost certainly seen one of them in use. The otoscope is used to look inside the ear and can be invaluable in diagnosing illnesses, especially in children. Unfortunately, while this iconic piece of equipment is quite simple on a technical level, professional-quality versions can cost hundreds of dollars.

Now to be fair, you’ll need quite a bit more than just the 3D printed parts to assemble the device. The final product requires some electrical components such as a battery holder, rocker switch, and LED. It also requires a custom lens, though the Glia team has thought ahead here and provided the files for printable jigs that will allow you to cut a larger lens down to the size required by their otoscope. In a situation where you might have to improvise with what you have, that’s a very clever design element.

So far the team is very happy with how the otoscope performs, but they’ve run into a bit of a logistical snag. It turns out that early work on the project was done in the web-based TinkerCAD, which isn’t quite in line with the team’s goals of keeping everything free and open. They’d like some assistance in recreating the STLs in FreeCAD or OpenSCAD so they’re easier to modify down the road. So if you’re a FOSS CAD master and want to earn some positive karma, head over to the GitHub page for the project and put those skills to use.

We’ve previously covered Glia’s work with 3D printed tourniquets to treat gunshot wounds, a project that led to [Tarek] himself being shot by a sniper while attempting to field test the design in Gaza. If that’s not commitment to the principles of open-source hardware, we don’t know what is.

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DIY ZigBee Therapy Lights Are Hue Compatible

August 23, 2019 by Tom Nardi No comments

Working on a project into the wee hours is hardly uncommon for us hackers, but if you’re consistently sleeping until the afternoon, it’s possible you’re suffering from a condition known as Delayed Phase Sleep Disorder (DPSD). Put simply, your body’s internal clock is out of alignment with the world around you. One of the ways to treat this condition is to expose yourself to bright light in the morning, which can help you wake up and feel more refreshed. Unfortunately, these so-called “Bright Light Therapy” boxes tend to be pretty expensive.

Looking for a way to treat his own DPSD, [Edward Shin] decided to build his own light box based on the research he’d done on the various commercial offerings out there. After all, a box full of bright lights that operates on a timer doesn’t seem particularly complex. Of course, in reality there’s a bit more to it than that, but so far the results are certainly promising.

The first decision [Edward] had to make was what kind of light he wanted. Classic light therapy devices, often used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), tend to be full spectrum lights that try and simulate sunlight. But in his research, he found a paper from Nature that explained the melanopsin in the human eye responds primarily to blue and green light. But as intense blue light can apparently lead to macular degeneration, he decided to go with green.

Since [Edward] already uses the Philips Hue system for his home’s lighting, he wanted to bring his therapy light into that ecosystem. The idea was that he could easily schedule his new green light box to go on when he wanted to wake up in the morning. So he used the Mesh Bee from Seeed Studio which not only supports ZigBee, but for which software is available to emulate a Hue bulb. Then he just needed to pair that with a sufficiently beefy LED driver and some 510 nm emitters. Everything is enclosed in a box made of laser cut wood that’s designed to hang from the headboard and shine down onto his face.

Over the years we’ve seen a number of similar projects trying to address SAD, so the idea of a hacker tweaking the concept to tackle DPSD seems a natural enough evolution of the idea. Just remember to speak with a medical professional before coming up with a homebrew treatment plan.

Retrotechtacular: Predictions That Just Missed It

August 13, 2019 by Al Williams 40 Comments

Few occupations are more fraught with peril than predicting the future. If you are a science fiction author, it might not matter, but if you are trying to design the next game-changing piece of hardware, the stakes are higher.

It seems like, for the most part, even if you manage to get some of the ideas right, the form is often way off. Case in point: telemedicine. Today you can visit a doctor using video conferencing with your phone or a PC for many common maladies. A new idea? Not really. Hugo Gernsback wrote about it in Radio Electronics back in 1955.

Gernsback wrote:

The average medical doctor today is overworked and short-lived. There are never enough doctors anywhere for the world’s constantly multiplying population. Many patients die because the doctor cannot reach them in time, particularly at night and in remote regions.

…[H]e can only see a few [patients] during the day. With increasing traffic congestion, many doctors refuse to make personal calls — execept in emergencies. Even then they arrive often too late. Much of this dilemma will be archaic in the near future, thanks to the Teledoctor.

Gernsback envisioned a doctor using what we now call Waldos similar to what people use to manipulate radioactive material. These super mechanical hands (Gernsback’s words) would allow the doctor to write a prescription, pour liquids, or even diaper a baby thanks to a sense of touch built into them.

Oddly enough, Gernsback’s vision included renting a teledoctor from the drugstore for $3.50 a day. This way, the doctor could call on you and then follow up as well. The drug store would deliver the machine and it would — get this — connect to your phone:

A cord with the a telephone plug attached to the teledoctor instrument is now plugged into a special jack on your telephone. Future telephones will be provided with this facility. The TV signals and telehand electronic signals, etc., will all travel over the closed circuit telephone lines.

In a footnote, Gernsback notes that you can’t send a 525-line TV signal on current phone lines, but a 250-350 line picture was possible and that would be sufficient.

Visionary? In some ways, maybe. The basic idea is coming true today, although it isn’t likely doctors will do surgery or inject you remotely in your home anytime soon. The special telephone plug sort of came true and is already obsolete. The images, by the way, are the ones that accompanied the original article in Radio Electronics.

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