Seeing Like Bees With Ultraviolet Photography

December 19, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

When it comes to seeing in strange spectrums, David Prutchi is the guy you want to talk to. He’s taken pictures of rocks under long, medium and short UV light, he’s added thermal imaging to consumer cameras, and he’s made cameras see polarization. There’s a lot more to the world than what the rods and cones on your retina can see, and David is one of the best at revealing it. For this year’s talk at the Hackaday Superconference, David is talking about DIY Ultraviolet Photography. It’s how bees see, and it’s the bees knees.

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GoPro Factory Goes Nomad To Dodge Tariff Threat

December 19, 2018 by Tom Nardi 71 Comments

Despite the fact that the United States and China are currently in the middle of a 90-day “cease fire” in their ongoing trade war, with new tariffs on hold until March 2019 while the two countries try to reach agreement, not everyone is waiting around to see who comes out on top. In a recent press release, action camera manufacturer GoPro has announced their intention to move some production out of China in the face of potential tariff expansions; which many analysts fear will be the result of the current stalemate. That’s right, only some of their production is moving.

“We’re proactively addressing tariff concerns by moving most of our US-bound camera production out of China,” says GoPro CFO Brian McGee. “We believe this diversified approach to production can benefit our business regardless of tariff implications.” Reading his words carefully, the key phrase here is “diversified approach”. GoPro doesn’t intend to move their entire production capability out of China, but only the production of the cameras which are designated for importation into the United States. GoPro models which are to be sold to other parts of the world will still be made in China.

This might seem an extravagant move just to avoid US tariffs, but with better than 40% of GoPro’s revenue for the third quarter of 2018 coming from the Americas, the company stands to be hit hard by the proposed 25% tax. Combined with the fact they shuttered their drone division last year citing “an extremely competitive aerial market”, and the proliferation of “GoPro clones” available for pennies on the dollar, it seems pretty clear that belt-tightening is the name of the game for the company that was once synonymous with action cameras.

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GPS III Launching Today But You Can’t Use It Until 2022

December 18, 2018 by Al Williams 49 Comments

Imagine if you bought a new car but they keys were not going to be shipped to you until a few years later. That’s analogous to the situation the U.S. Air Force finds itself in. The first GPS III satellite is finally ready to launch today, December 18, 2018 — a little over 2 years beyond the original schedule. However, most of the unique GPS III features won’t be available until at least 2022, according to a 2017 Government Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress.

GPS III is a project to launch 32 new satellites that will — for military users — be more difficult to jam. For civilian users, the new GPS satellites will be compatible with other systems, including the EU’s Galileo system. But the big draw? About three times the accuracy of the current system. For civilian use, that means 3 to 10 feet under good conditions as opposed to the current systems’ 10- to 33-foot resolution.

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The Hydrogen Economy May Be Coming Through Your Cooker

December 17, 2018 by Jenny List 106 Comments

About an hour’s drive from where this is being written there is a car plant, and as you drive past its entrance you may notice an unobtrusive sign and an extra lane with the cryptic road marking “H2”. The factory is the Honda plant at Swindon, it produces some of Europe’s supply of Civics, and the lane on the road leads to one of the UK or indeed the world’s very few public hydrogen filling stations. Honda are one of a select group of manufacturers who have placed a bet on a future for environmentally sustainable motoring that lies with hydrogen fuel cell technologies.

The hydrogen-powered Honda Clarity FCV, a car most of us will probably never see. Lcaa9 [CC BY-SA 4.0].

The trouble for Honda and the others is that if you have seen a Honda Clarity FCV or indeed any hydrogen powered car on the road anywhere in the world then you are among a relatively small group of people. Without a comprehensive network of hydrogen filling stations such as the one in Swindon there is little incentive to buy a hydrogen car, and of course without the cars on the road there is little incentive for the fuel companies to invest in hydrogen generating infrastructure such as the ITM Power electrolysis units that seem to drive so many of the existing installations. By comparison an electric car is a much safer bet; while the charging point network doesn’t rival the gasoline filling station network there are enough to service the electric motorist and a slow charge can be found from most domestic supplies. Continue reading →

Welcome To The Slow Death Of Satellite TV In America

December 17, 2018 by Tom Nardi 131 Comments

During an earnings call on November 29th, CEO of AT&T Communications John Donovan effectively signed the death warrant for satellite television in the United States. Just three years after spending $67 billion purchasing the nations’s largest satellite TV provider, DirecTV, he made a comment which left little doubt about the telecom giant’s plan for the service’s roughly 20 million subscribers: “We’ve launched our last satellite.”

The news might come as a surprise if you’re a DirecTV customer, but the writing has been on the wall for years. When the deal that brought DirectTV into the AT&T family was inked, they didn’t hide the fact that the actual satellite content delivery infrastructure was the least of their concerns. What they really wanted was the installed userbase of millions of subscribers, as well as the lucrative content deals that DirecTV had already made. The plan was always to ween DirecTV customers off of their satellite dishes, the only question was how long it would take and ultimately what technology they would end up using.

Now that John Donovan has made it clear their fleet of satellites won’t be getting refreshed going forward, the clock has officially started ticking. It won’t happen this year, or even the year after that. But eventually each one of the satellites currently beaming DirecTV’s content down to Earth will cease to function, and with each silent bird, satellite television (at least in the United States) will inch closer to becoming history.

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Scott Swaaley On High Voltage

December 14, 2018 by Jenny List 29 Comments

If you were to invent a time machine and transport a typical hardware hacker of the 1970s into 2018 and sit them at a bench alongside their modern counterpart, you’d expect them to be faced with a pile of new things, novel experiences, and exciting possibilities. The Internet for all, desktop computing fulfilling its potential, cheap single-board computers, even ubiquitous surface-mount components.

What you might not expect though is that the 2018 hacker might discover a whole field of equivalent unfamiliarity while being very relevant from their grizzled guest. It’s something Scott Swaaley touches upon in his Superconference talk: “Lessons Learned in Designing High Power Line Voltage Circuits” in which he describes his quest for an electronic motor brake, and how his experiences had left him with a gap in his knowledge when it came to working with AC mains voltage.

When Did You Last Handle AC Line voltages?

If you think about it, the AC supply has become something we rarely encounter for several reasons. Our 1970s hacker would have been used to wiring in mains transformers, to repairing tube-driven equipment or CRT televisions with live chassis’, and to working with lighting that was almost exclusively provided by mains-driven incandescent bulbs. A common project of the day would have been a lighting dimmer with a triac, by contrast we work in a world of microcontroller-PWM-driven LEDs and off-the-shelf switch-mode power supplies in which we have no need to see the high voltages. It may be no bad thing that we are rarely exposed to high-voltage risk, but along the way we may have lost a part of our collective skillset.

Scott’s path to gaining his mains voltage experience started in a school workshop, with a bandsaw. Inertia in the saw kept the blade moving after the power had been withdrawn, and while that might be something many of us are used to it was inappropriate in that setting as kids are better remaining attached to their fingers. He looked at brakes and electrical loads as the solution to stopping the motor, but finally settled on something far simpler. An induction motor can be stopped very quickly indeed by applying a DC voltage to it, and his quest to achieve this led along the path of working with the AC supply. Eventually he had a working prototype, which he further developed to become the MakeSafe power tool brake.

Get Your AC Switching Right First Time

The full talk is embedded below the break, and gives a very good introduction to the topic of switching AC power. If you’ve never encountered a thryristor, a triac, or even a diac, these once-ubiquitous components make an entrance. We learn about relays and contactors, and how back EMF can destroy them, and about the different strategies to protect them. Our 1970s hacker would recognise some of these, but even here there are components that have reached the market since their time that they would probably give anything to have. We see the genesis of the MakeSafe brake as a panel with a bunch of relays and an electronic fan controller with a rectifier to produce the DC, and we hear about adequate safety precautions. This is music to our ears, as it’s a subject we’ve touched on before both in terms of handling mains on your bench and inside live equipment.

So if you’ve never dealt with AC line voltages, give this talk a look. The days of wiring up transformers to power projects might be largely behind us, but the skills and principles contained within it are still valid.

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How To Stay Grounded When You Have Zero Potential

December 12, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 100 Comments

Ground is an interesting topic when it comes to engineering. Either it’s the reference level for a digital circuit (not necessarily at zero volts, either), or it’s the return path for current, or it’s the metal chassis, which shouldn’t be the return path for current or else something’s terribly broken. Erika Earl’s talk at this year’s Hackaday Superconference is all about ground.

The first type of ground to talk about is the ground in your outlets and walls. The AC safety ground is the third pin on your plug that should be attached to the chassis of your washer/dryer on one end, and somehow connected to the neutral wire somewhere near your breaker box. The theory of this being if a conductor touches the chassis of a lamp or appliance, all the current will go along that ground bus saving you from electrocution. It should also trip the circuit breaker.

But really we’re rarely dealing with mains power around here. When it comes to electronic design, we’re mostly dealing with analog grounds and digital grounds in circuits. Sometimes these are the same, sometimes they’re not, but they’re both usually referenced to 0 Volts, Add in some considerations for EMC, and ground loops, and you have an astonishing amount of knowledge wrapped up in having zero potential.

If you want to know about what ground actually is, this isn’t a talk to miss. Erika has tons of experience chasing down grounds as an audio engineer, and her career highlights including the director of hardware engineering at Slate Digital and the Senior Technical Engineer at LA’s legendary Village Recording Studios. There’s a lot of experience here, and if you want to where to find your ground, Erika is the person to ask.