Getting Serial Data Out Of An Old Spectrophotometer

June 25, 2022 by Zoe Skyforest 15 Comments

[Jure Spiler] came into possession of an old spectrophotometer, which measures the absorbance and transmittance of light in a sample. Getting data out of the device was difficult, particularly as the model in question was an educational version missing some functionality. However, perseverance got the old machine talking happily to a PC.

After an earlier experiment with sniffing the signals being sent to the LCD, [Jure] did some more research. It turned out that a special expensive cable could hook up to the device’s parallel port and deliver serial data, for the low price of € 356 Euros. Now knowing a serial output was present, [Jure] was able to find the data stream desired.

Hooking up a logic analyzer to the “parallel port” on the machine revealed that the device would actually send serial data out over certain pins on the port. The trick that made it harder was that it was in Inverted RS232 form. Thus, all it took was a simple TTL inverter hooked up to a USB-TTL adapter to get the device talking to a modern PC.

With that achieved, [Jure] was able to whip up a simple VB6 program to collect data from the spectrometer and put it in a CSV file for further analysis. There’s even a program to graph the data right off the bat, making the scientific instrument easier and quicker to use than ever!

Oftentimes, old scientific hardware like this isn’t especially difficult to hack. It’s usually just hard enough to make busy scientists stump up the cash for the fancy adapters and cable, while being no match for the dedicated hacker!

Sea Level Rise From Melting Ice Sheets Could Soon Be Locked In

June 23, 2022 by Zoe Skyforest 124 Comments

Where today we talk broadly of climate change and it’s various effects, the conversation was once simpler. We called it “global warming” and fretted about cooking outside in the summer and the sea level rise that would claim so many of our favorite cities.

Scientists are now concerned that sea level rises could be locked in, as ice sheets and glaciers pass “tipping points” beyond which their loss cannot be stopped. Research is ongoing to determine how best we can avoid these points of no return.

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Up In The Sky… It’s A Bird… It’s A Drone… Oh Yeah, It’s A Drone

June 21, 2022 by Al Williams 15 Comments

One staple of science fiction is the ornithopter, which is a plane with moving wings. While these haven’t proved very practical in the general sense, a recent paper talks about mimicking natural wings changing shape to improve maneuverability in drones and other aircraft. In particular, the paper talks about how the flight performance of many birds and bats far exceeds that of conventional aircraft.

The technical term for being more maneuverable than a conventional aircraft is, unsurprisingly, called supermaneuverability. Aircraft performing things like the Pugachev Cobra maneuver (watch the video below, or the latest Top Gun movie) require this type of operation, and with modern aircraft, this means using thrust-vector technology along with unstable airframes and sophisticated computer control. That’s not how birds or bats operate, though, and the paper uses modern flight simulation techniques to show that biomimicry and thrust vector technology don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

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NASA Mission Off To Rough Start After Astra Failure

June 17, 2022 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

When Astra’s diminutive Rocket 3.3 lifted off from its pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 12th, everything seemed to be going well. In fact, the mission was progressing exactly to plan right up until the end — the booster’s second stage Aether engine appeared to be operating normally until it abruptly shut down roughly a minute ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, orbital mechanics are nothing if not exacting, and an engine burn that ends a minute early might as well never have happened at all.

According to the telemetry values shown on-screen during the live coverage of the launch, the booster’s upper stage topped out at a velocity of 6.573 kilometers per second, well short of the 7.8 km/s required to attain a stable low Earth orbit. While the video feed was cut as soon as it was clear something had gone wrong, the rigid physics of spaceflight means there’s little question about the sequence of events that followed. Without the necessary energy to stay in orbit, the upper stage of the rocket would have been left in a sub-orbital trajectory, eventually reentering the atmosphere and burning up a few thousand kilometers downrange from where it started.

An unusual white plume is seen from the engine as it shuts down abruptly.

Of course, it’s no secret that spaceflight is difficult. Doubly so for startup that only has a few successful flights under their belt. There’s no doubt that Astra will determine why their engine shutdown early and make whatever changes are necessary to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and if their history is any indication, they’re likely to be flying again in short order. Designed for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) competition that sought to spur the development of cheap and small rockets capable of launching payloads on short notice, Astra’s family of rockets have already demonstrated unusually high operational agility.

Astra, and the Rocket 3.3 design, will live to fly again. But what of the payload the booster was due to put into orbit? That’s a bit more complicated. This was the first of three flights that were planned to assemble a constellation of small CubeSats as part of NASA’s TROPICS mission. The space agency has already released a statement saying the mission can still achieve its scientific goals, albeit with reduced coverage, assuming the remaining satellites safely reach orbit. But should one of the next launches fail, both of which are currently scheduled to fly on Astra’s rockets, it seems unlikely the TROPICS program will be able to achieve its primary goal.

So what exactly is TROPICS, and why has NASA pinned its success on the ability for a small and relatively immature launch vehicle to make multiple flights with their hardware onboard? Let’s take a look.

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Helium Recovery System Saves Costs

June 13, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 31 Comments

Helium is the most common element in the universe besides hydrogen, but despite this universal abundance it is surprisingly difficult to come across on Earth. Part of the problem is that it is non-renewable, so unless it is specifically captured during mining its low density means that it simply escapes the atmosphere. For that reason [Meow] maintains a helium recovery system for a lab which is detailed in this build.

The purpose of the system is to supply a refrigerant to other projects in the lab. Liquid helium is around 4 Kelvin and is useful across a wide variety of lab tests, but it is extremely expensive to come across. [Meow]’s recovery system is given gaseous helium recovered from these tests, and the equipment turns it back into extremely cold liquid helium in a closed-cycle process. The post outlines the system as a whole plus goes over some troubleshooting that they recently had to do, and shows off a lot of the specialized tools needed as well.

Low-weight gasses like these can be particularly difficult to deal with as well because their small atomic size means they can escape fittings, plumbing, and equipment quite easily compared to other gasses. As a result, this equipment is very specialized and worth a look. For a less lab-based helium project, though, head on over to this helium-filled guitar instead.

Glass: Classic, But Mysterious

June 11, 2022 by Al Williams 19 Comments

For a large part of human history, people made things from what they could find. Some stones make arrowheads. Others make sparks. Trees can turn into lumber. But the real power is when you can take those same materials and make them into something with very different properties. For example, plant fibers turning into cloth, or rocks giving up the metals inside. One of the oldest engineered materials is glass. You’d think as old as glass is (dating back at least 4,500 years), we’d understand all there is to know about it by now. According to an interesting post by [Jon Cartwright] writing in Physics World, we don’t. Not by a long shot.

According to [Jon] there are at least five “glassy mysteries” that we still don’t understand. Sure, it is easy to just melt sand, soda, and lime — something we’ve talked about before — but, in fact, many materials can turn glassy when cooled quickly from liquid to solid. The problem is, we don’t really understand why that happens. Continue reading “Glass: Classic, But Mysterious” →

How To Make A Difference Through Plant Metabolism

June 7, 2022 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

Generally when we consider the many plants around us, we imagine them efficiently using the electromagnetic radiation from the Sun via photosynthesis in their leaves — pulling carbon-dioxide from the air, as well as water from the soil via their roots, and grow as quickly as they reasonably can. In reality, the efficiency of this process is less than 10% of the input energy, and the different types of plant metabolisms that have formed over the course of evolution aren’t all the same.

Among the plant metabolisms in use today, some use significantly more efficient carbon fixation pathways, while others end up wasting a lot of the energy they obtained from photosynthesis with unnecessarily complicated processes, especially to deal with waste. How fast plants can grow if they had all evolved the most efficient carbon fixation pathway has been the subject of a number of studies these past decades, involving everything from crop plants to trees.

As these studies are showing us, more than a scientific and evolutionary biological curiosity, these genetically engineered plants offer real opportunities in everything from food production to reforestation.

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