2022 Hackaday Prize: Hack It Back And Make It Yours

June 13, 2022 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

The 2022 Hackaday Prize continues to hurtle along, with two of the five Challenges already in the rear-view mirror. While we’re naturally excited about every phase of this year’s contest, we’ve got particularly high hopes for what the community can do with this third Challenge: Hack it Back.

It’s a simple formula: find some outdated and disused piece of gear, spruce it up, and keep it out of the landfill. But extending the lifetime of consumer hardware is only one side of the coin, by upgrading and modifying something instead of buying an off-the-shelf replacement, you also turn the mundane into something unique and personal. But of course, we hardly have to explain the benefits to you fine folk — this is the sort of bespoke engineering we see on a nearly daily basis here at Hackaday. The difference now is that there’s cash prizes on the line.

So if there’s an old iPod collecting dust in your desk, perhaps now is the time to replace its guts with some modern silicon and teach it a few new tricks. Sure a brand-new robotic vacuum might be nice, but you could save yourself some money by picking up a second-hand Roomba and tucking an ESP8266 onboard. Got a nice piece of test equipment that predates the handy data export functions we take for granted these days? You might need to use the nuclear option and skim the desired data right off the unit’s LCD controller. We could spend all day pulling examples from the archives, but you get the picture.

What’s that you say? You aren’t the type to be seduced by shiny new features? Happy to keep things local while others ship it all off to the cloud? You’ll get no complaints from us, and that’s why the Hack it Back Challenge also recognizes repairs that simply put a piece of gear back into service. But don’t be fooled, as fixing something can often be harder than rebuilding it from scratch.

When you’ve got to crack out the x-ray machine to find all the damaged traces on a decades-old PCB, only to then tediously replace them all with microscopic bits of wire, you may find yourself wondering what you’ve done to anger the Keeper of the Magic Smoke. On the other hand, plenty a gadget has been disabled due to nothing more exotic than a single bad solder joint. In either event, there’s a certain sense of satisfaction when you can return a literal piece of history to working condition.

Ready to put your hardware-reviving skills on display? Just head over to Hackaday.io, make a new project page, and get hacking. But don’t wait too long, you’ve only got until July 24th to enter the Hack it Back Challenge and stake your claim on one of the ten $500 awards up for grabs.

Hackaday Links: June 12, 2022

June 12, 2022 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

“Don’t worry, that’ll buff right out.” Alarming news this week as the James Webb Space Telescope team announced that a meteoroid had hit the space observatory’s massive primary mirror. While far from unexpected, the strike on mirror segment C3 (the sixth mirror from the top going clockwise, roughly in the “south southeast” position) that occurred back in late May was larger than any of the simulations or test strikes performed on Earth prior to launch. It was also not part of any known meteoroid storm in the telescope’s orbit; if it had been, controllers would have been able to maneuver the spacecraft to protect the gold-plated beryllium segments. The rogue space rock apparently did enough damage to be noticeable in the data coming back from the telescope and to require adjustment to the position of the mirror segment. While it certainly won’t be the last time this happens, it would have been nice to see one picture from Webb before it started accumulating hits.

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How Is Voyager Still Talking After All These Years?

June 8, 2022 by Dan Maloney 49 Comments

The tech news channels were recently abuzz with stories about strange signals coming back from Voyager 1. While the usual suspects jumped to the usual conclusions — aliens!! — in the absence of a firm explanation for the anomaly, some of us looked at this event as an opportunity to marvel at the fact that the two Voyager spacecraft, now in excess of 40 years old, are still in constant contact with those of us back on Earth, and this despite having covered around 20 billion kilometers in one of the most hostile environments imaginable.

Like many NASA programs, Voyager has far exceeded its original design goals, and is still reporting back useful science data to this day. But how is that even possible? What 1970s-era radio technology made it onto the twin space probes that allowed it to not only fulfill their primary mission of exploring the outer planets, but also let them go into an extended mission to interstellar space, and still remain in two-way contact? As it turns out, there’s nothing magical about Voyager’s radio — just solid engineering seasoned with a healthy dash of redundancy, and a fair bit of good luck over the years.

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Aerial Robotics Hack Chat

June 6, 2022 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, June 8 at noon Pacific for the Aerial Robotics Hack Chat with Nick Rehm!

When it comes to robots, especially ones that need to achieve some degree of autonomy, the more constrained the environment they work in, the easier it is for them to deal with the world. An industrial arm tethered next to a production line, for example, only has to worry about positioning its tool within its work envelope. The problems mount up for something like an autonomous car, though, which needs to deal with the world in two — or perhaps two and a half — dimensions.

But what about adding a third dimension? That’s the realm that aerial robots have to live and work in, and it’s where the problems get really interesting. Not only are there hardly any constraints to movement, but you’ve also got to deal with the problems of aerodynamic forces, navigation in space, and control systems that need to respond to the slightest of perturbations without overcompensating.

The atmosphere is a tough place to make a living, and dealing with the problems of aerial robotics has kept Nick Rehm occupied for many years as a hobbyist, and more recently as an aerospace engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Nick has spent his time away from the office solving the problems of autonomous flight, including detection and avoidance of mid-air collisions, development of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and fixed-wing aircraft, and even ground-effect aircraft. He’ll drop by the Hack Chat to discuss the problems of aerial robots and the challenges of unconventional aviation, and help us figure out how to deal with the third dimension.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, June 8 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

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Hackaday Links: June 5, 2022

June 5, 2022 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

The big news this week comes from the world of medicine, where a woman has received a 3D-printed ear transplant. The 20-year-old woman suffered from microtia, a rare congenital deformity that left her without a pinna, the external structure of the ear. Using scans of the normal ear, doctors were able to make a 3D model of what the missing pinna should look like. Raw material for the print was taken from the vestigial ear of the patient in the form of cartilage cells, or chondrocytes. The ear was printed using a bioprinter, which is a bit like an inkjet printer. The newly printed ear was placed into a protective structure and transplanted. The operation was done in March, and the results are pretty dramatic. With a little squinting, it does look a bit like there are some printing artifacts in the ear, but we’d imagine that’s more from the protective cage that was over the ear as it healed.

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NASA Turns To Commercial Partners For Spacesuits

June 3, 2022 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

When NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station have to clamber around on the outside of the orbiting facility for maintenance or repairs, they don a spacesuit known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU). Essentially a small self-contained spacecraft in its own right, the bulky garment was introduced in 1981 to allow Space Shuttle crews to exit the Orbiter and work in the craft’s cavernous cargo bay. While the suits did get a minor upgrade in the late 90s, they remain largely the product of 1970s technology.

Not only are the existing EMUs outdated, but they were only designed to be use in space — not on the surface. With NASA’s eyes on the Moon, and eventually Mars, it was no secret that the agency would need to outfit their astronauts with upgraded and modernized suits before moving beyond the ISS. As such, development of what would eventually be the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) dates back to at least 2005 when it was part of the ultimately canceled Constellation program.

NASA’s own xEMU suit won’t be ready by 2025.

Unfortunately, after more than a decade of development and reportedly $420 million in development costs, the xEMU still isn’t ready. With a crewed landing on the Moon still tentatively scheduled for 2025, NASA has decided to let their commercial partners take a swing at the problem, and has recently awarded contracts to two companies for a spacesuit that can both work on the Moon and replace the aging EMU for orbital use on the ISS.

As part of the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contract, both companies will be given the data collected during the development of the xEMU, though they are expected to create new designs rather than a copy of what NASA’s already been working on. Inspired by the success of the Commercial Crew program that gave birth to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, the contract also stipulates that the companies will retain complete ownership and control over the spacesuits developed during the program. In fact, NASA is even encouraging the companies to seek out additional commercial customers for the finished suits in hopes a competitive market will help drive down costs.

There’s no denying that NASA’s partnerships with commercial providers has paid off for cargo and crew, so it stands to reason that they’d go back to the well for their next-generation spacesuit needs. There’s also plenty of incentive for the companies to deliver a viable product, as the contact has a potential maximum value of $3.5 billion. But with 2025 quickly approaching, and the contact requiring a orbital shakedown test before the suits are sent to the Moon, the big question is whether or not there’s still enough time for either company to make it across the finish line.

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Hackaday Podcast 171: Rent The Apple Toolkit, DIY An Industrial CNC, Or Save The Birds With 3D Printing

June 3, 2022 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney for a tour of the week’s best and brightest hacks. We begin with a call for point-of-sale diversity, because who wants to carry cash? We move on to discussing glass as a building material, which isn’t really easy, but at least it can be sintered with a DIY-grade laser. Want to make a call on a pay phone in New York City? Too late — the last one is gone, and we offer a qualified “good riddance.” We look at socially engineering birds to get them away from what they should be really afraid of, discuss Apple’s potential malicious compliance with right-to-repair, and get the skinny on an absolute unit of a CNC machine. Watching TV? That’s so 2000s, but streaming doesn’t feel quite right either. Then again, anything you watch on a mechanical color TV is pretty cool by definition.

Direct Download link

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!