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Microsoft Flight Simulator’s Data Insanity Spawns Enormous Buildings And Anomalies From OpenStreetMap

August 21, 2020 by 33 Comments

The OpenStreetMap project is an excellent example of how powerful crowdsourced data can be, but that’s not to say the system is perfect. Invalid data, added intentionally or otherwise, can sometimes slip through the cracks and lead to some interesting problems. A fact that developers Asobo Studio are becoming keenly aware of as players explore their recently released Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

Like a Wiki, users can update OpenStreetMap and about a year ago, user nathanwright120 marked a 2 story building near Melbourne, Australia as having an incredible 212 floors (we think it’s this commit). The rest of his edits seem legitimate enough, so it’s a safe bet that it was simply a typo made in haste. The sort of thing that could happen to anyone. Not long after, thanks to the beauty of open source, another user picked up on the error and got it fixed up.

But not before some script written by Asobo Studio went through sucked up the OpenStreetMap data for Australia and implemented it into their virtual recreation of the planet. The result is that the hotly anticipated flight simulator now features a majestic structure in the Melbourne skyline that rises far above…everything.

The whole thing is great fun, and honestly, players probably wouldn’t even mind if it got left in as a Easter egg. It’s certainly providing them with some free publicity; in the video below you can see a player by the name of Conor O’Kane land his aircraft on the dizzying edifice, a feat which has earned him nearly 100,000 views in just a few days.

But it does have us thinking about filtering crowdsourced data. If you ask random people to, say, identify flying saucers in NASA footage, how do you filter that? You probably don’t want to take one person’s input as authoritative. What about 10 people? Or a hundred?

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ESP32 Altair Emulator Gets Split Personality

August 20, 2020 by 36 Comments

If you wanted me to demo CP/M running on an emulated Altair 8800, I’d pull out a tiny board from my pocket. You might wonder how I wound up with an Altair 8800 that runs CP/M (even WordStar), that fits in your pocket and cost less than $10. Turns out it’s a story that goes back to 1975.

When the Altair 8800 arrived back in 1975, I wanted one. Badly. I’d been reading about computers but had no hands-on experience. But back then, as far as I was concerned, the $400 price tag might as well have been a million bucks. I was working for no real pay in my family’s store, though in all fairness, adjusted into today’s money that was about $2,000.

I’d love to buy one now, but a real Altair costs even more today than it did back then. They also take up a lot of desk space. Sure, there are replicas and I’ve had a few. I even helped work the kinks out of Vince Briel’s clone which I’ve enjoyed. However, the Briel computer has two problems. First, it takes a little work to drive a serial port (it uses a VGA and a PS/2 keyboard). Second, while it’s smaller than a real Altair, it is still pretty large — a byproduct of its beautiful front panel.

So to quickly show off CP/M to someone, you need to haul out a big box and find a VGA monitor and PS/2 keyboard — both of which are becoming vanishing commodities. I made some modifications to get the serial port working, but it is still a lot to cart around. You could go the software route with a simulator like SIMH or Z80pack, but now instead of finding a VGA monitor and a PS/2 keyboard, you need to find a computer where you can install the software. What I really wanted was a simple and portable device that could boot CP/M.

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How To Get Into Cars: Aero Mods For More Grip

August 19, 2020 by 32 Comments

In 1960, Enzo Ferrari said “Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines”. It’s a quote that’s been proven laughably wrong in decades since. Aerodynamics are a key consideration for anyone serious about performance in almost any branch of motorsport. Today, we’ll take a look at how aero influences the performance of your car, and what modifications you might undertake to improve things.

Gains To Be Had

Improving the aerodynamics of your vehicle can mean wildly different things, depending on what your end goal is. Aerodynamics affects everything from top speed, to fuel economy, to grip, and optimizing for these different attributes can take wildly different routes. Often, it’s necessary to find a balance between several competing factors, as improvements in one area can often be detrimental in another.

To understand aerodynamics with regards to cars, we need to know about the forces of lift (or downforce), and drag. Drag is the force that acts against the direction of motion, slowing a vehicle down. Lift is the force generated perpendicular to the direction of motion. In the context of flight, the lift force is generated upwards with respect to gravity, lofting planes into the air. In an automotive context, we very much prefer to stay on the ground. Wings and aerodynamic surfaces on cars are created to create lift in the opposite direction, pushing the vehicle downwards and creating more grip. We refer to this “downwards lift” as downforce.

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Airlines Seek Storage For Grounded Fleets Due To COVID-19

August 19, 2020 by 58 Comments

Ask any airline executive what their plans were back in January 2020, and you’d probably get the expected spiel about growing market share and improving returns for shareholders. Of course, the coronovirus pandemic quickly changed all that in the space of just a few months. Borders closed, and worldwide air travel ground to a halt.

Suddenly, the world’s airlines had thousands of planes and quite literally nowhere to go. Obviously, leaving the planes just sitting around in the open wouldn’t do them any good. So what exactly is involved in mothballing a modern airliner?

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The Mostly Forgotten Story Of Atmospheric Railway

August 17, 2020 by 58 Comments

It doesn’t matter whether you know it as a railway, a railroad, a chemin de fer, or a 铁路, it’s a fair certainty that the trains near where you live are most likely to be powered either by diesel or electric locomotives. Over the years from the first horse-drawn tramways to the present day there haven’t been many other ways to power a train, and since steam locomotives are largely the preserve of museums in the 21st century, those two remain as the only two games in town.

But step back to the dawn of the railway age, and it was an entirely different matter. Think of those early-19th-century railway engineer-barons as the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos’ of their day, and instead of space and hyperloop startups their playground was rail transport. Just as some wild and crazy ideas are spoken about in the world of tech startups today, so it was with the early railways. One of the best-known of these even made it to some real railways, I’m speaking of course about the atmospheric railway.

These trains were propelled not by a locomotive, but by air pressure pushing against a piston in a partially evacuated tube between the tracks.

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Your Phone Is Now Helping To Detect Earthquakes

August 17, 2020 by 37 Comments

Most people’s personal experience with seismographs begins and ends with simple childhood science experiments. Watching a pendulum make erratic marks on a piece of paper while your classmates banged on the table gave you an idea on how the device worked, and there’s an excellent chance that’s the last time you gave the concept much thought. Even among hackers, whose gear in general tends to be more technologically equipped than the norm, you’re unlikely to find a dedicated seismograph up and running.

But that’s not because the core technology is hard to come by or particularly expensive. In fact, one could say with almost absolute certainty that if you aren’t actively reading these words on a device with a sensitive accelerometer onboard, you have one (or perhaps several) within arm’s reach. Modern smartphones, tablets, and even some laptops, now pack in sensors that could easily be pushed into service as broad strokes seismometers; they just need the software to collect and analyze the data.

Or at least, they did. By the time you read this article, Google will have already started rolling out an update to Android devices which will allow them to use their onboard sensors to detect possible earthquakes. With literally billions of compatible devices in operation all over the planet, this will easily become the largest distributed sensor network of its type ever put into operation. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to be getting a notification on your phone to duck and cover anytime soon.

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Under Pressure: How Aluminum Extrusions Are Made

August 13, 2020 by 50 Comments

At any given time I’m likely to have multiple projects in-flight, by which of course I mean in various stages of neglect. My current big project is one where I finally feel like I have a chance to use some materials with real hacker street cred, like T-slot extruded aluminum profiles. We’ve all seen the stuff, the “Industrial Erector Set” as 80/20 likes to call their version of it. And we’ve all seen the cool projects made with it, from CNC machines to trade show displays, and in these pandemic times, even occasionally as sneeze guards in retail shops.

Aluminum T-slot profiles are wonderful to work with — strong, lightweight, easily connected with a wide range of fasteners, and infinitely configurable and reconfigurable as needs change. It’s not cheap by any means, but when you factor in the fabrication time saved, it may well be a net benefit to spec the stuff for a project. Still, with the projected hit to my wallet, I’ve been looking for more affordable alternatives.

My exploration led me into the bewilderingly rich world of aluminum extrusions. Even excluding mundane items like beer and soda cans, you’re probably surrounded by extruded aluminum products right now. Everything from computer heatsinks to window frames to the parts that make up screen doors are made from extruded aluminum. So how exactly is this ubiquitous stuff made?

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