Don’t Miss Your Last Chance To Enter The Hack It Back Challenge

July 21, 2022 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

While the 2022 Hackaday Prize as a whole winds its way through a good chunk of the year, each individual challenge that makes up the competition only sticks around for a limited time. As hard as it might be to believe, our time with theHack it Back challenge is nearly at a close, with just a few days left to enter your project before the July 24th deadline.

Each challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize has been designed around the core themes of sustainability, resiliency, and circularity — and for the Hack it Back phase of the competition we asked hackers to essentially keep as much hardware out of the landfill as possible. That could mean making a simple fix that puts a piece of equipment back into service, or it might be a be complete rebuild of an older device to bring it up to modern standards. These are the kind of projects Hackaday was built on, so turning it into an official challenge this year made perfect sense. Continue reading “Don’t Miss Your Last Chance To Enter The Hack It Back Challenge” →

Ask Hackaday: Resin Printer Build Plates

July 20, 2022 by Al Williams 29 Comments

The early days of FDM 3D printing were wild and wooly. Getting plastic to stick to your build plate was a challenge. Blue tape and hairspray-coated glass were kings for a long time. Over time, better coatings have appeared and many people use spring steel covered in some kind of PEI. There seem to be fewer choices when it comes to resin printers, though. We recently had a chance to try three different build surfaces on two different printers: a Nova3D Bene4 and an Anycubic Photon M3. We learned a lot.

Resin Printing Review

If you haven’t figuratively dipped your toe into resin yet — which would literally be quite messy — the printers are simple enough. There is a tank or vat of liquid resin with a clear film on the bottom. The vat rests on an LCD screen and there is a UV source beneath that.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Resin Printer Build Plates” →

Dead Solar Panels Are The Hottest New Recyclables

July 19, 2022 by Zoe Skyforest 99 Comments

When it comes to renewable energy, there are many great sources. Whether it’s solar, wind, or something else, though, we need a lot of it. Factories around the globe are rising to the challenge to provide what we need.

We can build plenty of new solar panels, of course, but we need to think about what happens when they reach end of life. As it turns out, with so much solar now out in the field, a major new recycling industry may be just around the corner.

Continue reading “Dead Solar Panels Are The Hottest New Recyclables” →

Tech In Plain Sight: Fire Hydrants

July 19, 2022 by Al Williams 42 Comments

You probably see them so often that you don’t even notice they are there. Fire hydrants are one of those things that aren’t interesting until you need them, but then they are of paramount importance. You sometimes hear them called fireplugs and it made us wonder what was a plug about it. Perhaps it was because that’s where you plug in your hose? Turns out, no. The real story is much stranger. Not to mention, did you know that there are even “dry” fire hydrants?

Apparently, in the 16th century, water mains were made of wood. When there was a fire, a team would dig the cobblestones out to expose the wooden mains and cut a hole to make an ad hoc well to fill buckets or to pump. Of course, after the fire, you had to repair the mains and that was done with a plug. The city would keep a record of plugs so that if a fire was nearby in the future, you could just “pull the plug” instead of making a new hole.

Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Fire Hydrants” →

The 2022 Hackaday Supercon Is On! And The Call For Proposals Is Open

July 18, 2022 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

After two years in remote mode, we’re very excited to announce that this year’s Hackaday Supercon will be coming back, live! Join us Nov. 4th, 5th, and 6th in sunny Pasadena, CA for three days of hacks, talks, and socializing with the Hackaday community. And we’d love to see and hear in person what you’ve been up to for the last two years – so start brainstorming what you’re going to talk about now and fill out the call for proposals.

Supercon is On!

We’ll be starting off on Friday Nov. 4th with early-bird registration, a mellow afternoon of badge-hacking and workshops, and a party to kick off the con. Saturday and Sunday will be the full enchilada: two tracks of talks, hacking stations and food set up in the alley, and workshops aplenty. (Just thinking about hacking in the alley and sharing tacos afterward again brings a tear of joy to my eye.) We’ll close up Sunday night with the 2022 Hackaday Prize Awards and a chance to demo the weekend’s badge hacking on stage.

If you haven’t ever been to a Supercon before, it’s Hackaday in real life. People bring hacks to show and share, projects to work on, and their ideas that are too big to fit in the overhead compartment anyway. The crowd is awesome. There are seasoned pros, famous YouTubers, and brand-new hackers to boot. But yet it’s not overwhelming – Supercon is too big to fit in your living room, but it’s nonetheless cozy. The folks in attendance are all fantastic and you’ll stumble into the most awesome conversations.

It’s a weekend you don’t want to miss, so start figuring out how you’re going to get to Pasadena now.

We’ll be putting tickets on sale soon, and while we can’t see into the future, they have sold out every year, so keep your eyes on Hackaday to get yours. And of course, speakers don’t need no stinking tickets. Continue reading “The 2022 Hackaday Supercon Is On! And The Call For Proposals Is Open” →

Hackaday Links: July 17, 2022

July 17, 2022 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Webb’s first deep-field image. Source: NASA

The folks at NASA are taking a well-deserved victory lap this week after the splashy reveal of the first scientific images from the James Webb Space Telescope. As we expected, the first public release included a lot of comparisons to images obtained from Hubble, as the general public understandably sees Webb as the successor to the venerable space telescope, now in its third decade of service. So for a “let’s see what this baby can do” image, they turned Webb loose on a tiny patch of sky in the southern hemisphere containing galactic cluster SMACS 0723, and sent back images and spectroscopic data from galaxies up to 13 billion light years away. There are plenty of analyses of Webb’s deep field and the other images in the first release, but we particularly liked the takes by both Anton Petrov and Dr. Becky. They both talk about the cooler scientific aspects of these images, and how Webb is much more than just a $10 billion desktop image generator.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: July 17, 2022” →

Fighting The Good Fight

July 16, 2022 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

We here at Hackaday are super-duper proponents of open source. Software, hardware, or firmware, we like to be able to see it, learn from it, modify it, and make it ourselves. Some of this is self-serving because when we can’t see how it was done, we can’t show you how it’s done. But it’s also from a deeper place than that: the belief that the world is made better by sharing and open access.

One of the pieces of open-source firmware that I have running on no fewer than three devices in my house right now is grbl – it’s a super-simple, super-reliable G-code interpreter and stepper motor controller that has stood the test of time. It’s also GPL3 licensed, which means that if you want to use the code in your project, and you modify it to match your particular machine, you have to make the modified version available for those who bought the machine to modify themselves.

So when Norbert Heinz noticed that the Ortur laser engravers were running grbl without making the code available, he wrote them a letter. They responded with “business secrets”, he informed them again of their responsibility, and they still didn’t comply. So he made a video explaining the situation.

Good news incoming! Norbert wrote in the comments that since the post hit Hackaday, they’ve taken notice over at Ortur and have gotten back in touch with him. Assuming that they’re on their way to doing the right thing, this could be a nice win for grbl and for Ortur users alike.

Inside the free software world, we all know that “free” has many meanings, but I’d bet that you don’t have to go far outside our community to find people who don’t know that “free” software can have tight usage restrictions on it. (Or maybe not – it all depends on the license that the software’s author chose.) Reading software licenses is lousy work better left for lawyers than hackers anyway, and I can no longer count how many times I’ve clicked on a EULA without combing through it.

So what Norbert did was a good deed – educating a company that used GPL software of their obligations. My gut says that Ortur had no idea what they needed to do to comply with the license, and Norbert told them, even if it required some public arm-twisting. But now, Ortur has the opportunity to make good, and hackers everywhere can customize the firmware that drives their laser engravers. Woot!

It’s probably too early to declare victory here, but consider following Norbert’s example yourself. While you can’t bring a lawsuit if you’re not the copyright owner, you can still defend your right to free software simply by explaining it politely to companies that might not know that they’re breaking the law. And when they come around, make sure you welcome them into the global open-source hive mind, because we all win. One of us!