Should You Be Able To Repair It? We Think So.

August 11, 2021 by Jenny List 179 Comments

You own it, you should be able to fix it. So much equipment on sale today has either been designed to be impossible to maintain, unnecessarily too complex to maintain, maintainable only with specialist tooling only available to authorised service agents, or with no repair parts availability. It’s a hot-button issue in an age when sustainability is a global concern, so legislators and regulators worldwide now finally have it in their sights after years of inaction and it’s become a buzzword. But what exactly is the right to repair, and what do we want it to be?

Is It Designed For Repair?

A Nestle Dolce Gusto machine — For some reason, pod coffee makers are especially resistant to repair. Andy1982, CC BY 3.0

The first question to consider is this: does it matter whether or not you have the right to repair something, if it’s designed specifically with lack of repairability in mind? Consider a typical domestic pod coffeemaker such as a Tassimo or similar: despite being physically quite a simple device, it is designed to be especially complex to dismantle and reassemble. You just can’t get into it when something goes wrong.

Should it be the preserve of regulators to require design for easy repair? We think so. There are other forces working on the designers of home appliances; design-for-manufacture considerations and exterior appearance concerns directly affect the firm’s bottom line, while the end users’ repair experience is often at the bottom of the list, even though the benefit at a national level is obvious. That’s what laws are for.
Continue reading “Should You Be Able To Repair It? We Think So.” →

New Contest: Halloween Hackfest

August 10, 2021 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

It’s as if Halloween was made for hardware hackers. The world is begging us to build something cleaver as we decorate our houses and ourselves for the big day. And one thing’s for sure: the Hackaday crowd never disappoints. This year we’re fully embracing that with the Halloween Hackfest, our newest contest beginning today along with the help of our sponsors Digi-Key and Adafruit.

The animated video combined with the 3D-printed prop makes for an excellent effect.

Wait, isn’t it the beginning of August? Why are we talking about Halloween? The procrastinator’s dillema, that’s why! Start working on your build now and it will be epic by the time the day actually rolls around. Decorating for trick-or-treaters is a good place to start. For our money, projected heads are a really cool party trick, like these singing Jack-o-laterns, or these disembodied heads inspired by Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Or maybe you’re more of a flamethrower-hidden-in-pumpkin type of person?

It doesn’t take much tech to bring a good costume to life — a few LED strips make a plain old princess dress light up the night and builds some permanent memories for the lucky little one who’s wearing it. Speaking of memories, we doubt the little one will remember this mechwarrior family costume, which is why you’ve always got to make a video of these things.

Over the year’s we’ve seen claw machines for candy delivery, and even a pumpkin piano. Of course pumpkin carving is an entire category unto itself where five-axis CNC machines are fair game. Look around, get inspired, and build something!

Three top winners will receive $150 shopping sprees in Digi-Key’s parts warehouse. If your build happens to use an Adafruit board, your prize will be doubled. We’ll also be awarding some $50 Tindie gift cards to the most artistic projects.

Get started now by creating a project page on Hackaday.io. In the left sidebar of your project page, use the “Submit Project To” button to enter in the Halloween Hackfest. You have from now until October 11th to spill the ~~beans~~ pumpkin seeds on what you’ve made.

China MagLev Train Aspirations Boosted By New 600 Km/h Design

August 10, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 65 Comments

Maglev trains have long been touted as the new dawn for train technology. Despite keen and eager interest in the mid-20th century, development has been slow, and only limited commercial operations have ever seen service. One of the most well-known examples is the Shanghai Maglev Train which connects the airport to the greater city area. The system was purchased as a turnkey installation from Germany, operates over a distance of just 30.5 km, and according to Civil Engineering magazine cost $1.2 billion to build in 2001. Ever since, it’s served as a shining example of maglev technology — and a reminder of difficult and expensive maglev can be.

However, China has fallen in love with high-speed rail transport in the last few decades and has invested heavily. With an aggressive regime of pursuing technology transfers from foreign firms while building out the world’s largest high-speed rail network, the country has made great progress. Now, Chinese rail transit manufacturer, CRRC Corporation, have demonstrated their newest maglev train, which hopes to be the fastest in the world.

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A New Flying Car Illustrates The Same Old Problems

August 9, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 98 Comments

For almost as long as there have been cars and planes, people have speculated that one day we will all get around in flying cars. They’d allow us to “avoid the traffic” by flying through the air instead of sitting in snarling traffic jams on the ground.

The Klein Vision AirCar hopes to be just such a panacea to our modern traffic woes, serving as a transformable flying car that can both soar through the air and drive on the ground. Let’s take a look at the prototype vehicle’s achievements, and the inherent problems with the underlying flying car concept.

It Flies and Drives

The AirCar is a somewhat futuristic looking, yet simultaneously dated, vehicle. It’s a two-seater with a big bubble canopy for the driver and a single passenger. At the rear, there’s a propeller and twin-boom tail, while the folding wings tuck along either side of the vehicle in “car” mode. At the flick of a switch, the wings fold out and lock in place, while the tail extends further out to the rear. The conversion from driving mode to flight mode takes on the order of a few minutes. The powerplant at the heart of the vehicle is a 160-horsepower BMW engine which switches between driving the wheels and the propeller as needed.

Unlike some concepts we’ve explored in the past, the AirCar has successfully demonstrated itself as a working flying car without incident. Additionally, it did so as a single vehicular package, without removable wings or other such contrivances. On June 28th, 2021, it successfully flew from an airport in Nitra, Slovakia, down to the neighbouring city of Bratislava in 35 minutes – roughly half the time it takes by car. Company founder Stefan Klein was behind the controls, casually driving the vehicle downtown after the successful landing. Continue reading “A New Flying Car Illustrates The Same Old Problems” →

Permanent Artificial Hearts: Long-Sought Replacements May Not Be Far Away

August 9, 2021 by Dan Maloney 44 Comments

The number of artificial prosthetic replacement parts available for the human body is really quite impressive. From prosthetic eyes to artificial hips and knees, there are very few parts of the human body that can’t be swapped out with something that works at least as well as the original, especially given that the OEM part was probably in pretty tough shape in the first place.

But the heart has always been a weak spot in humans, in part because of the fact that it never gets to rest, and in part because all things considered, we modern humans don’t take really good care of it. And when the heart breaks down past the point where medicine or surgery can help, we’re left with far fewer alternatives than someone with a bum knee would face. The fact is that the best we can currently hope for is a mechanical heart that lets a patient live long enough to find a donor heart. But even then, tragedy must necessarily attend, and someone young and healthy must die so that someone else may live.

A permanent implantable artificial heart has long been a goal of medicine, and if recent developments in materials science and electrical engineering have anything to say about it, such a device may soon become a reality. Heart replacements may someday be as simple as hip replacements, but getting to that point requires understanding the history of mechanical hearts, and why it’s not just as simple as building a pump.

Continue reading “Permanent Artificial Hearts: Long-Sought Replacements May Not Be Far Away” →

Hands On: DEF CON 29 Badge Embraces The New Normal

August 5, 2021 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

To say that 2020 was a transformative year would be something of an understatement. The COVID-19 pandemic completely changed the way we worked, learned, and lived. Despite all those jokes about how much time people spend on their devices rather than interacting face-to-face with other humans, it turns out that when you can’t get more than a few people together in the same room, it throws our entire society into disarray.

Our community had to rethink how we congregated, and major events like HOPE, DEF CON, and even our own Hackaday Supercon, had to be quickly converted into virtual events that tried with varying degrees of success to capture the experience of hundreds or thousands of hackers meeting up in real life. While few would argue that a virtual hacker convention can ever truly replace a physical one, we learned there are undeniable benefits to embracing the advantages offered by cyberspace. If nothing else, the virtual hacker meetups of 2020 saw a far larger and more diverse array of attendees and presenters than ever before.

As we begin seeing the first rays of light at the end of the long, dark, tunnel we’ve been stuck in, it’s clear that some of the changes that COVID-19 forced on our community are here to stay. As eager as we all are to get back to the epic hackfests of old, nobody wants to close the door on all those who would be unable to attend physically now that they’ve gotten to peek behind the curtain.

With this in mind, this year’s DEF CON is being presented in both physical and virtual forms simultaneously. If you made to Las Vegas, great. If not, you can follow along through chat rooms and video streams from the comfort of your own home. Following the theme, the DC29 badge is not only a practical tool for virtual attendees, but an electronic puzzle for those who are able to bring a few of them together physically. Let’s take a closer look at this socially distanced badge and the tech that went into it.

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Linux Fu: The Windows X11 Connection

August 5, 2021 by Al Williams 39 Comments

The life of a Linux user can be a bit difficult. Sometimes you have to — or want to — run Windows. Why Windows? Sometimes you have a work computer or a laptop that Linux doesn’t support well. Or it might be software. Although there are plenty of programs that can edit, say, Word documents, there’s always that one document that doesn’t quite translate correctly. Things like videoconferencing software sometimes works on Linux but might have fewer features.

So what do you do? You can dual boot, of course, but that’s not very handy. You can run Windows in a virtual machine if you have enough horsepower. There’s also Wine, but that often has its own set of problems with features and stability of complex programs. However, recent versions of Windows provide the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

With WSL, you can have most of what you like about Linux inside your Windows session. You just have to know how to set it up, and I’m going to show you one way that works for me with reasonably stable versions of Windows 10. Continue reading “Linux Fu: The Windows X11 Connection” →