If you are old enough, you may remember that, for a time, almost every year was the year that home video was going to take off. Except it never was, until VHS tape machines appeared. We saw something similar with personal computers. Nowadays, we keep hearing about the home robot, but it never seems to fully materialize or catch on. If you think about it, it could be a problem of expectations.
What we all want is C3PO or Rosie the Robot that can do all the things we don’t want to do. What we usually get is something far less than that. You either get something hideously expensive that does a few tasks or something cheap that is little more than a toy.
Labrador Systems is trying to hit the middle ground. While no one would confuse their Caddie and Retriever robots with C3PO, they are useful but also simple, presumably to keep the cost down which are expected to cost about $1,500. The robots have been described as “self-driving shelves.” You can watch a video about the devices below.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi on another whirlwind tour of the week’s top stories, hacks, and projects. We start off with some breaking Linux security news, and then marvel over impeccably designed pieces of hardware ranging from a thrifty Z table for the K40 laser cutter to a powerful homebrew injection molding rig. The finer technical points of a USB device that only stores 4 bytes at a time will be discussed, and after taking an interactive tour through the internals of the 555 timer, we come away even more impressed by the iconic 50 year old chip. We’ll wrap things up by speculating wildly about all the bad things that can happen to floating solar panels, and then recite some poetry that you can compile into a functional computer program should you feel so inclined.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
The CIA Hacktivists have launched a sort of ransomware campaign against the Belarusian rail system, but instead of cryptocurrency, they want the release of political prisoners and removal of Russian soldiers. This could be called an example of cyber-terrorism, though there is a reasonable theory that this is a state-sponsored hack, masquerading as hacktivism. What does seem certain is that something has interrupted rail transit, and a group on Twitter has produced convincing proof of a breach.
Your Antivirus Now Includes a CryptoMiner
Don’t look now, but your latest update of Norton 360 or Avira may have installed a cryptocurrency mining module. The silver lining is that some sanity has been retained, and you have to opt-in to the crypto scheme before your machine starts spending its spare cycles on mining. For users who do, they’re put into a mining pool, making for small payouts for most hardware. Norton, naturally, takes a 15% fee off the top for their trouble.
[Voja Antonic] has been building digital computers since before many of us were born. He designed with the Z80 when it was new, and has decades of freelance embedded experience, so when he takes the time to present a talk for us, it’s worth paying attention.
For his Remoticon 2022 presentation, he will attempt to teach us how to become a hardware expert in under forty minutes. Well, mostly the digital stuff, but that’s enough for one session if you ask us. [Voja] takes us from the very basics of logic gates, through combinatorial circuits, sequential circuits, finally culminating in the description of a general-purpose microprocessor.
A 4-bit ripple-carry adder with additional CPU flag outputs
As he demonstrates, complex digital electronics systems really are just built up in a series of steps of increasing complexity. starting with individual active elements (transistors operating as switches) forming logic elements capable of performing simple operations.
From there, higher level functions such as adders can be formed, and from those an ALU and so on. Conceptually, memory elements can be formed from logic gates, but it’s not the most efficient way to do it, and those tend to be made with a smaller and faster circuit. But anyway, that model is fine for descriptive purposes.
Once you have combinatorial logic circuits and memory elements, you have all you need to make the necessary decoders, sequencers and memory circuits to build processors and other kinds of higher complexity circuits.
Obviously forty minutes isn’t anywhere nearly enough time time to learn all of the intricacies of building a real microprocessor like the pesky details of interfacing with it and programming it, but for getting up the learning curve from just a knowledge of binary numbers to an understanding of how a CPU is built, it’s a pretty good starting point.
Humanity has been wondering about whether life exists beyond our little backwater planet for so long that we’ve developed a kind of cultural bias as to how the answer to this central question will be revealed. Most of us probably imagine that NASA or some other space agency will schedule a press conference, an assembled panel of scientific luminaries will announce the findings, and newspapers around the world will blare “WE ARE NOT ALONE!” headlines. We’ve all seen that movie before, so that’s the way it has to be, right?
Probably not. Short of an improbable event like an alien spacecraft landing while a Google Street View car was driving by or receiving an unambiguously intelligent radio message from the stars, the conclusion that life exists now or once did outside our particular gravity well is likely to be reached in a piecewise process, an accretion of evidence built up over a long time until on balance, the only reasonable conclusion is that we are not alone. And that’s exactly what the announcement at the end of last year that the Mars rover Perseverance had discovered evidence of organic molecules in the rocks of Jezero crater was — another piece of the puzzle, and another step toward answering the fundamental question of the uniqueness of life.
Discovering organic molecules on Mars is far from proof that life once existed there. But it’s a step on the way, as well as a great excuse to look into the scientific principles and engineering of the instruments that made this discovery possible — the whimsically named SHERLOC and WATSON.
Nuclear war was very much a front-of-mind issue during the fraught political climate of the Cold War era. Since then, atomic sabre rattling has been less frequent, though has never quite disappeared entirely.
Outside of the direct annihilation caused by nuclear war, however, is the threat of nuclear winter. The basic concept is simple: in the aftermath of a major nuclear war, the resulting atmospheric effects could lead to a rapid cooling in global temperatures.
Some say it couldn’t ever happen, while others – including Futurama – suggest with varying degrees of humor that it could help cancel out the effects of global warming. But what is the truth?
Hard data is isn’t really available, as thus far there have been no large-scale nuclear wars for scientists to measure. Several studies have explored the concept of nuclear winter, however, and explored its potential effects.
We could all use a hug once in a while. Most people would probably say the shared warmth is nice, and the squishiness of another living, breathing meatbag is pretty comforting. Hugs even have health benefits.
But maybe you’re new in town and don’t know anyone yet, or you’ve outlived all your friends and family. Or maybe you just don’t look like the kind of person who goes for hugs, and therefore you don’t get enough embraces. Nearly everyone needs and want hugs, whether they’re great, good, or just average.
So what makes a good hug, anyway? It’s a bit like a handshake. It should be warm and dry, with a firmness appropriate to the situation. Ideally, you’re both done at the same time and things don’t get awkward. Could a robot possibly check all of these boxes? That’s the idea behind HuggieBot, the haphazardly humanoid invention of Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and team at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany (translated). User feedback helped the team get their arms around the problem.
