Separating Ideas From Words

November 6, 2021 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

We covered Malamud’s General Index this week, and Mike and I were talking about it on the podcast as well. It’s the boldest attempt we’ve seen so far to open up scientific knowledge for everyone, and not just the wealthiest companies and institutions. The trick is how to do that without running afoul of copyright law, because the results of research are locked inside their literary manifestations — the journal articles.

The Index itself is composed of one-to-five-word snippets of 107,233,728 scientific articles. So if you’re looking for everything the world knows about “tincture of iodine”, you can find all the papers that mention it, and then important keywords from the corpus and metadata like the ISBN of the article. It’s like the searchable card catalog of, well, everything. And it’s freely downloadable if you’ve got a couple terabytes of storage to spare. That alone is incredible.

What I think is most remarkable is this makes good on figuring out how to separate scientific ideas from their prison — the words in which they’re written — which are subject to copyright. Indeed, if you look into US copyright law, it’s very explicit about not wanting to harm the free sharing of ideas.

“In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.”

But this has always been paradoxical. How do you restrict dissemination of the papers without restricting dissemination of the embodied ideas or results? In the olden days, you could tell others about the results, but that just doesn’t scale. Until today, only the richest companies and institutions had access to this bird’s eye view of scientific research — similar datasets gleaned from Google’s book-scanning program have trained their AIs and seeded their search machines, but they only give you a useless and limited peek.

Of course, if you want to read the entirety of particular papers under copyright, you still have to pay for them. And that’s partly the point, because the General Index is not meant to destroy copyrights, but give you access to the underlying knowledge despite the real world constraints on implementing copyright law, and we think that stands to be revolutionary.

Dream Bigger, Predict The Future

October 30, 2021 by Elliot Williams 55 Comments

I’d love to tell you that I’m never wrong, but I’ve been wrong a lot. Remember the Arduino? When it was brand new, I thought it was some silly collection of libraries and a drop-down menu for people who are too lazy to just type out their own #include statements. Needless to say, it launched about a million hacks and brought microcontroller programming into the mainstream. Oops.

Similarly, about fifteen years ago, I saw an educational project out of MIT’s Media Lab. It consisted of a bunch of blocks that had LCD screens on them and would interact with each other when put together. The real hook, though, was that each block had an accelerometer inside, so you could “pour water” out of one block into another, for instance.

At that time, accelerometers were expensive, even in quantities. Even one of these cubes must have cost $100 at the time, much less a whole set. Accelerometers were so expensive that I wouldn’t have thought about incorporating one into a project, much less a dozen, so I ignored them for hacker purposes. Then came the cellphone and economies of scale. Today, even in chip shortage times, they’re readily available for around $2 each, making them useful for exactly this kind of “frivolous” use.

From the Arduino experience, I learned to never underestimate the impact of what seem to me to be “small” conveniences. (And maybe more so, the value of the tremendous common effort from the community.) From the MIT accelerometer story, the moral is that some parts will get drastically cheaper in the future, so you shouldn’t necessarily exclude the cool new sensor from your design repertoire. After all, ten years ago, nobody would have thought that we’d have laser time-of-flight rangefinders for less than a hamburger.

What new components are fantastically useful, or full of potential, that might be cheap enough in the future to make them also worth looking into? Swing by Hackaday tomorrow morning and join in the conversation!

Being Green, It’s A Rich Man’s Game

October 26, 2021 by Jenny List 245 Comments

It’s an old saying with an apocryphal origin: “May you live in interesting times“. We Brits are certainly living in interesting times at the moment, as a perfect storm of the pandemic, rising energy prices, global supply chain issues, and arguably the post-Brexit departure of EU-national truck drivers has given us shortages of everything from fresh vegetables in the supermarket to carbon dioxide for the food industry. Of particular concern is a shortage of automotive fuels at the filling station, and amid sometimes-aggressive queues for the pumps it’s reported that there’s a record uptick in Brits searching online for information about electric cars.

Nothing Like A Crisis To Make You Green

My VW Polo loaded for EMF 2018 — How I miss my little car, here loaded for EMF 2018.

This sudden interest in lower-carbon motoring may be driven by the queues rather than a concern for the planet, but it’s certainly true that as a culture we should be making this move if we are to have a hope of reducing our CO2 production and meeting our climate goals. A whole slew of lifestyle changes will have to be made over the coming years of which our car choices are only a part. Back to those beleaguered Brits again, a series of environmental protests have caused major disruption on the motorway network round London, not protesting against the traffic but campaigning for better home insulation.

For reasons of personal circumstance rather than principle, earlier this year I gave my trusty VW Polo to an old-Volks-nut friend and now rely on a bicycle. Living where I do within reach of everything I need it hasn’t been as challenging as I expected it to be, and aside from saving a bit of cash I know my general fitness level has gone up. Though I have less need for a car now than I used to, I intend to find myself another vehicle in due course so that I can do silly things such as throwing a Hackaday village in the back and driving halfway across Europe to a hacker camp. With an awareness that whatever I choose should be as good for the planet as I can make it then, I’ve been cruising the used-car websites to see what I can find.

Continue reading “Being Green, It’s A Rich Man’s Game” →

Where You Are Influences What You Invent

October 16, 2021 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

[Timon] just bought a new PCB holder setup for his desk. It’s one of those spring-loaded jobbies that uses strong magnets to hold it up off of a work surface, and is made of metal so that you can reflow solder with it. It might be a clone of the PCBite, but frankly I’ve seen similar projects everywhere — it’s hard to say who is copying whom these days. And anyway, that’s not the point.

What struck me about the holders was their tops: they’re repurposed 3D printer nozzles. That’s a fantastic idea because they’re non-magnetic, heat tolerant, relatively uniform, and probably dirt cheap in Shenzhen, where the designer of this board almost certainly lives. Maybe he or she even works in a 3D printer factory? Who knows? But the designer almost certainly looked around for something that would fit the bill, and found the nozzles.

Indeed, there’s been a lot of innovation in all things board-holding coming out of China over the last decade. I can remember when the state of the art was a vise-like affair. (I still like my homebrew Stickvise clone for low, square jobs.)

But with cell phone repairs requiring the ability to hold and reflow ever stranger board shapes, there’s been a flourishing of repositionable holders. The pawn-pillar designs are cool, but their utility rests firmly in how strong the magnets are. (I wouldn’t buy the one linked, for instance, without trying it first-hand.) I really like the look of these jobbies, which have springs to maintain tension. (Will the 3D-printed plastic jaws hold up to multiple reflows?) Anyway, it’s no coincidence that the inventors of these devices are in the cellphone-repair capital of the universe.

The old saying is that necessity is the mother of invention. But what if, like with real estate, it’s location, location, location? You dream up solutions to problems around you, using parts that you’ve got on-hand. If that sounds a little fatalistic, consider that you can also change your surroundings, either physical or even virtual. Are you in the middle of the right challenges and opportunities?

Hackers And China

October 9, 2021 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

The open source world and Chinese manufacturing have a long relationship. Some fifteen years ago, the big topic was how companies could open-source their hardware designs and not get driven bankrupt by competition from overseas. Companies like Sparkfun, Adafruit, Arduino, Maple Labs, Pololu, and many more demonstrated that this wasn’t impossible after all.

Maybe ten years ago, Chinese firms started picking up interesting hacker projects and producing them. This gave us hits like the AVR transistor tester and the NanoVNA. In the last few years, we’ve seen open-source hardware and software projects that have deliberately targeted Chinese manufacturers, and won. We do the design and coding, they do the manufacturing, sales, and distribution.

But this is something else: the Bangle.js watch takes an essentially mediocre Chinese smartwatch and reflashes the firmware, and sells them as open-source smartwatches to the general public. These pre-hacked watches are being sold on Kickstarter, and although the works stands on the shoulders of previous hacker’s reverse engineering work on the non-open watch hardware, it’s being sold by the prime mover behind the Espruino JavaScript-on-embedded language, which it runs on.

We have a cheap commodity smartwatch, being sold with frankly mediocre firmware, taken over by hackers, re-flashed, re-branded, and sold by the hackers on Kickstarter. As a result of it being (forcibly) opened, there’s a decently sized app store of contributed open-source applications that’ll run on the platform, making it significantly more useful and hacker friendly than it was before.

Will this boost sales? Will China notice the hackers’ work? Will this, and similar projects, end up in yet another new hacker/China relationship? We’re watching.

Embrace The New, But Don’t Forget The Old

September 25, 2021 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

We were trading stories of our first self-made PCBs in the secret underground Hackaday bunker, and a couple of the boards looked really good for first efforts. Of course there were mistakes and sub-optimal routing, but who among us never connects up the wrong signals or uses a bad footprint? What lead me to have a hacker “kids these days have it so easy” moment was that all of the boards were, of course, professionally fabbed with nice silkscreens. They all looked great.

What a glorious time to be starting down the hardware path! When I made my first PCB, the options were basically laying down tape, pulling out the etch resist pen, or paying a bazillion inflation-adjusted dollars for a rapid prototype board. This meant that the aspiring hacker also had to have a steady hand and be at least casually acquainted with a little chemistry. The ability to just send your files out to a PCB house means that the barrier to stepping up your hardware game from plug-them-together modules is lower than it’s ever been.

But if scratching or etching your own PCB out of copper plate is very hands-on, very DIY, and very low-tech, it’s also very fast in comparison to even the most rushed service. Last weekend, I needed a breakout board for some eight-pin SOIC H-bridge chips for a turtle robot project with my son. Everything was hand-soldered and hot-glued in a Saturday afternoon and evening, so there was no time for a PCB order. A perfect opportunity for the Old Ways™.

We broke out a Sharpie, traced out where the SOIC pins would land, connected up the grounds, brought the signals out to friendly pads, and then covered the rest of the board in islands of copper just in case we’d need any prototyping space later. Of course, some of the ink lines touched each other where they shouldn’t, but before the copper meets the etchant it’s easy enough to scrape the spaces clear with a pin. The results? My boards look like they were chiseled out by a caveman, but they worked. And more importantly, we got it done within the attention span of a second grader without firing up a computer.

So revel in your cheap offshore PCB factories, hackers of today! It’s a miracle that even four-layer boards come back within a week without breaking the bank. But I encourage you all to try it out by hand as well. For large enough packages and one-offs, full DIY absolutely has the speed advantage, but there’s also a certain wabi sabi to the hand-drawn board. Like brush strokes in residual copper.

NYT Crossword Decision Puzzles Many

September 24, 2021 by Chris Lott 48 Comments

Over at the New York Times (NYT) crossword puzzle desk, newly-appointed Games Editorial Director Everdeen Mason has caused a bit of a ruckus and hubbub (both six letter words with U as the 2nd and 5th letter) among digital puzzle solvers. In a short article published in early August, Ms. Mason announced the end of support for the crossword-solving program Across Lite, abruptly terminating a relationship between the two organizations spanning 25 years. But the ramifications extend much deeper than just one application.

The NYT first published its now-famous crossword puzzle back in 1942, appearing every Sunday, and in 1950 it became a daily feature. In 1993, Will Shortz was chosen as the fourth Crossword Puzzle Editor, a position he still holds today. The NYT online crossword puzzles first appeared in 1996 — puzzle files could be downloaded by modem and solved offline using the program Across Lite.

Modems aside, this basic method has continued until now, and a variety of programs and apps have sprung up over the years that allow not only offline play, but with tailored feature sets, such as support for the visually impaired, puzzle fanatics, puzzle creators, team playing, etc. Naturally the NYT joined the party as well, offering the crossword puzzles online and via smart phone apps.