One Man’s Disenchantment With The World Of Software

September 22, 2018 by Jenny List 164 Comments

There is a widely derided quote attributed to [Bill Gates], that “640k should be enough for anyone”. Meaning of course that the 640 kb memory limit for the original IBM PC of the early 1980s should be plenty for the software of the day, and there was no need at the time for memory expansions or upgrades. Coupled with the man whose company then spent the next few decades dominating the software industry with ever more demanding products that required successive generations of ever more powerful PCs, it was the source of much 1990s-era dark IT humour.

In 2018 we have unimaginably powerful computers, but to a large extent most of us do surprisingly similar work with them that we did ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago. Web browsers may have morphed from hypertext layout formatting to complete virtual computing environments, but a word processor, a text editor, or an image editor would be very recognisable to our former selves. If we arrived in a time machine from 1987 though we’d be shocked at how bloated and slow those equivalent applications are on what would seem to us like supercomputers.

[Nikita Prokopov] has written an extremely pithy essay on this subject in which he asks why it is that if a DOS 286 could run a fast and nimble text editor, the 2018 text editor requires hundreds of megabytes to run and is noticeably slow. Smug vi-on-hand-rolled GNU/Linux users will be queuing up to rub their hands in glee in the comments, but though Windows may spring to mind for most examples there is no mainstream platform that is immune. Web applications come under particular scorn, with single pages having more bloat than the entirety of Windows 95, and flagship applications that routinely throw continuous Javascript errors being the norm. He ends with a manifesto, urging developers to do better, and engineers to call it out where necessary.

If you’ve ever railed at bloatware and simply at poor quality software in general, then [Nikita]’s rant is for you. We suspect he will be preaching to the converted.

Windows error screen: Oops4321 [CC BY-SA 4.0]

Maker Faire NY: Programmable Air

September 22, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

At this year’s World Maker Faire in New York City we’re astonished and proud to run into some of the best projects that are currently in the running for the Hackaday Prize. One of these is Programmable Air, from [Amitabh], and it’s the solution to pneumatics and pressure sensing in Maker and IoT devices.

The idea behind Programmable Air is to create the cheapest, most hacker-friendly system for dealing with inflatable and vacuum-based robotics. Yes, pneumatic robotics might sound weird, but there’s plenty of projects that could make use of a system like this. The Glaucus is one of the greatest soft robotic projects we’ve ever seen, and it turns a bit of silicone into a quadruped robot with no moving parts. The only control you have over this robot is inflating one side or the other while watching this silicone slug slowly crawl forward. This same sort of system can be expanded to a silicone robot tentacle, too.

On display at the Programmable Air booth were three examples of how this device could be used. The first was a simple pressure sensor — a weird silicone pig with some tubing coming out of the nostrils was connected to the Programmable Air module. Squeeze the pig, and some RGB LEDs light up. The second demo was a balloon inflating and deflating automatically. The third demo was a ‘jamming gripper’, basically a balloon filled with rice or coffee grounds, connected to a pump. If you take this balloon, jam it onto an odd-shaped object and suck the air out, it becomes a gripper for a robotic arm. All of these are possible with Programmable Air.

Right now, [Amitabh] has just finalized the design and is getting ready to move into mass production. You can get some updates for this really novel air-powered robotics platform over on the main website, or check out the project over on Hackaday.io.

Prusa Introduces A Resin Printer At Maker Faire NY

September 22, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

For one reason or another, the World Maker Faire in New York has become the preeminent place to launch 3D printers. MakerBot did it with the Thing-O-Matic way back when, and over the years we’ve seen some interesting new advances come out of Queens during one special weekend in September.

Today Prusa Research announced their latest creation. It’s the resin printer you’ve all been waiting for. The Prusa SL1 is aiming to become the Prusa Mk 3 of the resin printer world: it’s a solid printer, it’s relatively cheap (kit price starts at $1299/€1299), and it produces prints that are at least as good as resin printers that cost three times as much.

The tech inside the SL1 is about what you’d expect if you’ve been following resin printers for a while. The resin is activated by a bank of LEDs shining through a photomask, in this case a 5.5 inch, 1440p display. Everything is printed on a removable bed that can be transferred over to a separate ‘curing chamber’ after the print is done. It’s more or less what you would expect, but there are some fascinating refinements to the design that make this a resin printer worthy of carrying the Prusa name.

Common problems with a masked SLA printer that uses LEDs and an LCD are the interface between the LCD and the resin, and the temperature of the display itself. Resin is not kind to LCD displays, and to remedy this problem, Prusa has included an FEP film on the bottom of the removable tank. This is a user-replaceable part (technically a consumable, at least to the same extent as a PEI build plate on a filament printer), and Prusa will be selling those as spare parts on their store. The LCD is also cooled; one of the major drawbacks of shining several watts of UV through an LCD is the lifetime of the display. Cooling the display helps, and should greatly increase the lifetime of the printer. All of this is wrapped up in an exceptionally heavy metal case with the lovely hinged UV-opaque orange plastic lid.

Of course, saying you’ve built a resin printer is one thing, but how do the prints look? Exceptional. The Prusa booth at Maker Faire was loaded up with sample prints from the machine, and they’re of the same high quality you would expect from the Form 3D printers that have been the go-to in the resin printer world. The Prusa SLA also works with big-O Open resins, meaning you’re not tied to a single resin vendor.

This is just the announcement of the Prusa resin printer, but they are taking preorders. The price for the kit — no word on how complex of a kit it is — is $1300, while the assembled printer is $1600, with the first units shipping in January.

Space Garbage Truck Passes Its First Test

September 20, 2018 by Tom Nardi 54 Comments

Back in April we reported on the successful launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station which carried, along with supplies and experiments for the orbiting outpost, the RemoveDEBRIS spacecraft. Developed by the University of Surrey, RemoveDEBRIS was designed as the world’s first practical demonstration of what’s known as Active Debris Removal (ADR) technology. It included not only a number of different technologies for ensnaring nearby objects, it even brought along deployable targets to use them on.

Orbital debris (often referred to simply as “space junk”) is a serious threat to all space-faring nations, and has become even more pressing of a concern as the cost of orbital launches have dropped precipitously over the last few years, accelerating number and frequency of new objects entering orbit. The results of these first of their kind tests have therefore been hotly anticipated, as the technology to actively remove debris from Low Earth orbit (LEO) is seen by many in the industry to be a key element of expanding access to space for commercial purposes.

Six months after its arrival in space we’ve now starting to see the first results of the groundbreaking tests performed by the RemoveDEBRIS spacecraft, and so far it’s very promising.

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Show That Sega Saturn Save Battery Who’s Boss

September 20, 2018 by Drew Littrell 26 Comments

Breaking out the Sega Saturn out of the closet for a hit of 90’s nostalgia comes with its own set of compromises: the wired controllers, the composite video, and worst of all that dead CR2032 battery behind the backdoor. Along with the death of that battery went your clock and all those precious hours put into your game save files. While the bulk of us kept feeding the insatiable SRAM, a friendly Canadian engineer named [René] decided to fix the problem for good with FRAM.

The issue with the battery-backed memory in the Saturn stems from the particularly power-hungry factory installed SRAM chip. Normally when the console is plugged-in to a main power source the CR2032 battery is not in use, though after several weeks in storage the battery slowly discharges. [René’s] proposed solution was to use a non-volatile form of RAM chip that would match the pinout of the factory SRAM as close as possible. This would allow for easier install with the minimum number of jumper wires.

Enter the FM1808 FRAM chip complete with a whopping 256 kb of addressable memory. The ferroelectric chip operates at the same voltage as the Saturn’s factory SRAM, and has the added benefit of being able to use a read/write mode similar to that of the Saturn’s original memory chip. Both chips conform to a DIP-28 footprint, and only a single jumper wire on pin 22 was required to hold the FM1808 chip’s output-enable signal active-low as opposed to the active-high enable signal on the Saturn’s factory memory chip. The before and after motherboard photos are below:

After a quick test run of multiple successful read and writes to memory, [René] unplugged his Saturn for a couple days and found that his save files had been maintained. According to the FM1808 datasheet, they should be there for the next 45 years or so. The only downside to the upgrade is that the clock & calendar settings were not maintained upon boot-up and reset to the year 1996. But that’s nothing a bit of button-mashing through couldn’t solve, because after all wasn’t the point of all this to relive a piece of the 90s?

For more Sega Saturn goodness, check out how the Sega Saturn was finally cracked after 20 years.

Learn ARM Assembly With The Raspberry Pi

September 20, 2018 by Al Williams 41 Comments

We live in a time when you don’t have to know assembly language to successfully work with embedded computers. The typical processor these days has resources that would shame early PCs and some of the larger ones are getting close to what was a powerful desktop machine only a few years ago. Even so, there are some cases where you really want to use assembly language. Maybe you need more speed. Or maybe you need very precise control over timing. Maybe you just like the challenge. [Robert G. Plantz] from Sonoma State University has an excellent book online titled “Introduction to Computer Organization: ARM Assembly Langauge Using the Raspberry Pi.” If you are interested in serious ARM assembly language, you really need to check out this book.

If you are more interested in x86-64 assembly and Linux [Plantz] has you covered there, too. Both books are free to read on the Internet, and you can pick up a printed version of the Linux book for a small payment if you want.

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Industrial 3D Printing Uses Layers Like We’ve Never Seen Before

September 19, 2018 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

We’ve seen FDM printers lay down layers by extruding plastic in a line. We’ve seen printers use sintering and lithography to melt or cure one layer at a time before more print medium moves into place for the next layer. What we’ve never seen before is a printer like this that builds parts from distinct layers of substrate.

At the International Manufacturing Technology Show last week I spoke with Eric of Impossible Objects. The company is using a “sheet lamination process” that first prints each layer on carbon fiber or fiberglass, then uses a hydraulic press and an oven to bake the part into existence before bead-blasting the excess substrate away. Check out my interview with Eric and join me below for more pictures and details.

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