Hackaday Podcast Episode 278: DIY Subs, The ErgoRing, And Finding NEMA 17

July 5, 2024 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

In this episode, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi kick things off with a reminder about the impending deadline for Supercon talk and workshop proposals. From there discussion moves on to the absolutely incredible tale of two brothers who solved a pair of missing person cases with their homebrew underwater vehicle, false data sneaking into OctoPrint’s usage statics, and an organic input device that could give the classic mouse a run for its money.

You’ll also hear about cheap radar modules, open source Xbox mod chips, and lawnmowers from the grocery store. The episode wraps up with a look at the enduring mystique of perpetual motion devices, and the story of a legendary ship that might soon end up being turned into paper clips.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this week’s episode is available as a DRM-free MP3.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 790: Better Bash Scripting With Amber

July 3, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch chat with Paweł Karaś about Amber, a modern scripting language that compiles into a Bash script. Want to write scripts with built-in error handling, or prefer strongly typed languages? Amber may be for you!

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USB And The Myth Of 500 Milliamps

July 3, 2024 by Arya Voronova 91 Comments

If you’re designing a universal port, you will be expected to provide power. This was a lesson learned in the times of LPT and COM ports, where factory-made peripherals and DIY boards alike had to pull peculiar tricks to get a few milliamps, often tapping data lines. Do it wrong, and a port will burn up – in the best case, it’ll be your port, in worst case, ports of a number of your customers.

Want a single-cable device on a COM port? You might end up doing something like this.

Having a dedicated power rail on your connector simply solves this problem. We might’ve never gotten DB-11 and DB-27, but we did eventually get USB, with one of its four pins dedicated to a 5 V power rail. I vividly remember seeing my first USB port, on the side of a Thinkpad 390E that my dad bought in 2000s – I was eight years old at the time. It was merely USB 1.0, and yet, while I never got to properly make use of that port, it definitely marked the beginning of my USB adventures.

About six years later, I was sitting at my desk, trying to build a USB docking station for my EEE PC, as I was hoping, with tons of peripherals inside. Shorting out the USB port due to faulty connections or too many devices connected at once was a regular occurrence; thankfully, the laptop persevered as much as I did. Trying to do some research, one thing I kept stumbling upon was the 500 mA limit. That didn’t really help, since none of the devices I used even attempted to indicate their power consumption on the package – you would get a USB hub saying “100 mA” or a mouse saying “500 mA” with nary an elaboration.

Fifteen more years have passed, and I am here, having gone through hundreds of laptop schematics, investigated and learned from design decisions, harvested laptops for both parts and even ICs on their motherboards, designed and built laptop mods, nowadays I’m even designing my own laptop motherboards! If you ever read about the 500 mA limit and thought of it as a constraint for your project, worry not – it’s not as cut and dried as the specification might have you believe.
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Peering Into The Black Box Of Large Language Models

July 3, 2024 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce extremely human-like communication, but their inner workings are something of a mystery. Not a mystery in the sense that we don’t know how an LLM works, but a mystery in the sense that the exact process of turning a particular input into a particular output is something of a black box.

This “black box” trait is common to neural networks in general, and LLMs are very deep neural networks. It is not really possible to explain precisely why a specific input produces a particular output, and not something else.

Why? Because neural networks are neither databases, nor lookup tables. In a neural network, discrete activation of neurons cannot be meaningfully mapped to specific concepts or words. The connections are complex, numerous, and multidimensional to the point that trying to tease out their relationships in any straightforward way simply does not make sense.

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Access To Fresh And Potable Water: An Ancient And Very Current Challenge

July 2, 2024 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

Throughout history, clean and potable water has been one of the most prized possessions, without which no human civilization could have ever sustained itself. Not only is water crucial for drinking and food preparation, but also for agriculture, cleaning and the production of countless materials, chemicals and much more. And this isn’t a modern problem: good water supplies and the most successful ancient cultures go hand in hand.

For instance, the retention and management of fresh water in reservoirs played a major role in the Khmer Empire, with many of its reservoirs (baray) surviving to today. Similarly, the Anuradhapure Kingdom in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) featured massive reservoirs like Kala Wewa that was constructed in 460 CE with a capacity of 123 million m³. In the New World, the Maya civilization similarly created reservoirs with intricate canals to capture rainwater before the dry season started, as due to the karst landscape wells were not possible.

Keeping this water fresh and free from contaminants and pollution was a major problem for especially the Maya, with a recent perspective by Lisa J. Lucera in PNAS Anthropology suggesting that they used an approach similar to modern day constructed wetlands to keep disease and illness at bay, while earlier discoveries also suggest the use of filtration including the use of zeolite.

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Tasty Snacks Board

July 2, 2024 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

A pocket cyberdeck-looking thing with a screen and a thumb keyboard. — Image by [MakerM0] via Hackaday.IO

[MakerM0]’s LangCard is an entry into our 2024 Business Card Challenge that just so happens to fit the Keebin’ bill as well.

You might label this a pocket cyberdeck, and that’s just fine with me. The idea here is to have a full-keyboard development board for learning programming languages like CircuitPython, MicroPython, C++, and so on, wherever [MakerM0] happens to be at a given moment.

Open up the LangCard and you’ll find an RP2040 and a slim LiPo battery. I’m not sure what display that is, but there are probably a few that would work just fine were you to make one of these fun learning devices for yourself.

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A FreeCAD sticker, a FreeCAD pencil, a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher SAO PCB and the board-to-be-encased next to each other

FreeCAD Foray: Shells For All Our PCBs

July 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 58 Comments

Are you the kind of hacker who tries to pick up FreeCAD, but doesn’t want to go through a tutorial and instead pokes around the interface, trying to transfer the skills from a CAD suite you’ve been using before? I’ve been there too, and in my experience, FreeCAD doesn’t treat such forays lightly. It’s a huge package that enables everything from architecture to robotics design, so if you just want a 3D-printed case for a PCB project, the hill can be steep. So let’s take that first simple project as an example, and see if it helps you learn a little bit of FreeCAD.

As motivation, I recently built a USB-C PSU board that uses a DC PSU and does the USB-C handshaking to provide 20 V to a laptop. It is currently my only 100 W USB-C PSU, and my 60 W PSU just died, which is why I now use this board 24/7. I have brought it on two different conferences so far, which has highlighted a problem – it’s a board with tons of exposed contacts, which means that it isn’t perfectly travel-friendly, and neither it is airport-friendly – not that I won’t try and bring it anyway. So, currently, I have to watch that nothing shorts out – given the board has 3.3 V close to 20 V at 9 A, it’s a bit of a worry.

This means I have to design some sort of case for it. I was taught SolidWorks in the half a year that I spent in a university, and honestly, I’m tired of the licensing and proprietary format stuff. When it comes to more hobbyist-accepted tools like Fusion360, I just don’t feel like exchanging one proprietary software for another. So, FreeCAD is the obvious choice – apart from OpenSCAD, which I know and love, but I don’t always want to think up fifteen variable names for every silly little feature. That, and I also want to fillet corners every now and then.

For a full-open-source workflow, today’s PCB is designed with KiCad, too. Let’s see about installing FreeCAD, and the few things you need to import a KiCad board file into FreeCAD.

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