The Challenge Of Weather Modification In The Face Of Climate Change

Over the past decades we have been able to observe a change in the Earth’s climate, caused by an increasing amount of energy being retained in the atmosphere. This in turn has affected weather systems around the globe, causing more extreme weather. As a result, the prospect of weather control is more relevant than ever for the nations which are most directly impacted by severe rain and winds.  Although the concept of weather modification is not new, it used to be primarily focused on rather limited aspects, such as cloud seeding to increase precipitation.

Recent proposals such as Japan’s weather modification moonshot program seek to find ways to prevent or lessen the impact of torrential rains, typhoons and similar extreme weather events which accompany climate change.  This proposal is part of Japan’s multi-topic Moonshot R&D program which seeks to advance the state of the art in a wide range of fields in a very significant way by 2050. As far as weather modification is concerned, this naturally raises many questions. Clearly we are capable of affecting the climate through emissions of e.g. greenhouse gases and large-scale construction, but are there ways in which humans can affect the climate and weather in a more refined manner that benefits society, or is this something which will remain beyond our grasp for the foreseeable future?

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Hackaday Links: September 17, 2023

OK, it’s official — everyone hates San Francisco’s self-driving taxi fleet. Or at least so it seems, if this video of someone vandalizing a Cruise robotaxi is an accurate reflection of the public’s sentiment. We’ve been covering the increasingly fraught relationship between Cruise and San Franciscans for a while now — between their cabs crashing into semis and being used for — ahem — non-transportation purposes, then crashing into fire trucks and eventually having their test fleet cut in half by regulators, Cruise really seems to be taking it on the chin.

And now this video, which shows a wannabe Ninja going ham on a Cruise taxi stopped somewhere on the streets of San Francisco. It has to be said that the vandal doesn’t appear to be doing much damage with what looks like a mason’s hammer; except for the windshield and side glass and the driver-side mirror — superfluous for a self-driving car, one would think — the rest of the roof-mounted lidars and cameras seem to get off lightly. Either Cruise’s mechanical engineering is better than their software engineering, or the neo-Luddite lacks the upper body strength to do any serious damage. Or maybe both.

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Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well

If you build your own devices or hack on devices that someone else has built, you know the feeling of opening a serial terminal and seeing a stream of sensor data coming from your device. However, looking at scrolling numbers gets old fast, and you will soon want to visualize them and store them – which is why experienced makers tend to have a few graph-drawing and data-collecting tools handy, ready to be plugged in and launched at a moment’s notice. Well, if you don’t yet have such a tool in your arsenal, listen to this 16-minute talk by [Alex Whittemore] to learn about a whole bunch of options you might not even know you had!

For a start, there’s the Arduino Serial Plotter that you get for free with your Arduino IDE install, but [Alex] also reminds us of the Mu editor’s serial plotter – about the same in terms of features, but indisputably an upgrade in terms of UX. It’s not the only plotter in town, either – Better Serial Plotter is a wonderful standalone option, with a few features that supercharge it, as [Alex] demonstrates! You don’t have to stop here, however – we can’t always be tethered to our devices’ debugging ports, after all. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well”

Rocker Bogie Suspension: The Beloved Solution To Extra-Planetary Rovers

When navigating the vast and unpredictable expanses of outer space, particularly on the alien terrains of distant planets, smart engineering often underlies every major achievement. A paramount example of this is the rocker bogie suspension system. It’s an integral component of NASA’s Mars rovers and has become an iconic feature in its own right. Its success has seen the design adopted by the Indian space program and thousands of hobbyists in turn.

So, what exactly is it that makes rocker bogie suspension such a compelling design solution? Let’s dive into the engineering that makes these six-wheeled wonders so special.

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You’ve Got Mail: Automatic For The People

When we last left the post office, I told you all about various kinds of machinery the USPS uses to move mail around. Today I’m going to tell you about the time they thought they could automate nearly every function inside the standard post office — and no, it wasn’t anytime recently.

By 1953, the post office badly needed modernization. When Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was appointed that year, he found the system essentially in shambles. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, the USPS had done absolutely no spending beyond the necessary, with little to no investment in the future. But Summerfield was an ideas man, and he had the notion to build a totally automated post office. One of them would be located in Providence, Rhode Island and be known as Project Turnkey — as in a turnkey operation. The other would be located in Oakland, California, and serve as a gateway to the Pacific.

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Determining The Size Of The New US Lithium Deposit Amidst Exploding Demand

With demand for lithium in the world market projected to increase by 2040 to as much as eight times the demand in 2022, finding new deposits of this metal has become a priority. Currently most of the world’s lithium comes from Australia, Chile, China and Argentina, with potential new mining sites under investigation. One of these sites is the McDermitt caldera in the US, a likely remnant of the Yellowstone hotspot and resulting volcanic activity. According to a recent study (Chemistry World article) by Thomas R. Benson and colleagues in Science Advances, this site may not only contain between 20 to 40 million tons of lithium in the form of the mineral clay illite, but was also formed using a rather unique process.

This particular group of mineral clays can contain a number of other chemicals, which in this particular case is lithium due to the unique way in which the about 40 meter thick layer of sediment was formed. Although lithium is a very common metal, its high reactivity means that it is never found in its elementary form, but instead bound to other elements. Lithium is thinly distributed within the Earth’s crust and oceans. Incidentally, the Earth’s oceans contain by far the largest amount of lithium, at approximately 230 billion tons.

So how much lithium could be extracted from this new area, and how does this compare to the increasing demand?

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Logic Analyzers: Capabilities And Limitations

Last time, we’ve used a logic analyzer to investigate the ID_SD and ID_SC pins on a Raspberry Pi, which turned out to be regular I2C, and then we hacked hotplug into the Raspberry Pi camera code with an external MCU. Such an exercise makes logic analyzers look easy, and that’s because they are! If you have a logic analyzer, you’ll find that a whole bunch of hacks become available to you.

In this article, let’s figure out places where you can use a logic analyzer, and places where you can’t. We’ll start with the first limitation of logic analyzers – capture speed. For instance, here’s a cool thing you can buy on Aliexpress – a wristband from TTGO that looks like a usual fitness tracker, but has an ESP32 in it, together with an IMU, an RTC, and an IPS screen! The seller also has an FFC-connectable devboard for programming this wristband over UART, plus vibromotor and heartrate sensor expansion modules.

You can run C, MicroPython, Rust, JavaScript, or whatever else – just remember to bring your own power saving, because the battery is super small. I intended to run MicroPython on it, however, and have stumbled upon a problem – the ST7735-controller display just wouldn’t work with the st7735.py library I found; my image would be misaligned and inverted.

The specifications didn’t provide much other than “ST7735, 80×160”. Recap – the original code uses an Arduino (C++) ST7735 library and works well, and we have a MicroPython ST7735 library that doesn’t. In addition to that, I was having trouble getting a generic Arduino ST7735 library to work, too. Usually, such a problem is caused by the initialization commands being slightly different, and the reason for that is simple – ST7735 is just the name of the controller IC used on the LCD panel.

Each display in existence has specifics that go beyond the controller – the pixels of the panel could be wired up to the controller in a bunch of different ways, with varying offsets and connection types, and the panel might need different LCD charge pump requirements – say, depending on the panel’s properties, you might need to write 0x10 into a certain register of the ST7735, or you will need 0x40. Get one or more of these registers wrong, and you’ll end up with a misaligned image on your display at best, or no output at worst. Continue reading “Logic Analyzers: Capabilities And Limitations”