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Hackaday Links: September 15, 2024

September 15, 2024 by 10 Comments

A quick look around at any coffee shop, city sidewalk, or sadly, even at a traffic light will tell you that people are on their phones a lot. But exactly how much is that? For Americans in 2023, it was a mind-boggling 100 trillion megabytes, according to the wireless industry lobbying association CTIA. The group doesn’t discuss their methodology in the press release, so it’s a little hard to make judgments on that number’s veracity, or the other numbers they bandy about, such as the 80% increase in data usage since 2021, or the fact that 40% of data is now going over 5G connections. Some of the numbers are more than a little questionable, too, such as the claim that 330 million Americans (out of a current estimate of 345.8 million people) are covered by one or more 5G networks. Even if you figure that most 5G installations are in densely populated urban areas, 95% coverage seems implausible given that in 2020, 57.5 million people lived in rural areas of the USA. Regardless of the details, it remains that our networks are positively humming with data, and keeping things running is no mean feat.

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Citizen Scientists Spot Super Fast Moving Object In NASA Data

August 22, 2024 by 18 Comments

When you were five, you probably spotted your best friend running at “a million miles an hour” when they beat everybody at the local athletics meet. You probably haven’t seen anything that fast snice. According to NASA, though, a group of citizen scientists spotted a celestial object doing just that!

The group of citizen scientists were involved in a NASA program called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They were working on images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer mission. Scanning through stored images, Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden identified a curiously speedy object termed CWISE J124909.08+362116.0. There are lots of fast-moving objects out in space, but few quite as fast as this one. It’s quite literally zooming through the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour.

It’s unclear exactly what the object is. It appears light enough to be a low-mass star, or potentially a brown dwarf—somewhere in between the classification of gas giant and star. It also has suspiciously low iron and metallic content. The leading hypothesis is that CWISE J1249 might have been ejected from a supernova, or that it got flung around a pair of black holes.

For now, it remains a mystery. It’s a grand discovery that really highlights the value of citizen science. If you’ve been doing your own rigorous scientific work—on NASA’s data or your own—do let us know!

Documenting Real Hidden Messages In Music

March 25, 2024 by 22 Comments

During the 1980s, a moral panic swept across the landscape with the mistaken belief that there were Satanic messages hidden in various games, books, and music that at any moment would corrupt the youth of the era and destroy society as we knew it. While completely unfounded, it turns out that there actually were some hidden messages in vinyl records of the time although they’d corrupt children in a different way, largely by getting them interested in computer science. [Dandu] has taken to collecting these historic artifacts, preserving the music and the software on various hidden recordings.

While it was possible to record only programs or other data to vinyl, much in the same way that cassette tapes can be used as a storage medium, [Dandu]’s research focuses mostly on records, tapes, and CDs which had data included alongside music. This includes not only messages or images, but often entire computer programs. In some cases these programs were meant to be used with the accompanying music, as was the case for The Other Side Of Heaven by Kissing The Pink with a program for the BBC Micro. Plenty of other contemporary machines are represented here too including the ZX Spectrum, Atari, Apple II, and the Commodore 64. The documentation extends through the CD era and even into modern music platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

The process of extraction and recovery is detailed for each discovery, making it a comprehensive resource for retro computing enthusiasts stretching from the 80s to now. There are likely a few hidden pieces of data out there hidden in various antique storage media that [Dandu] hasn’t found yet, either. You could even make your own records with hidden programs provided you have some musical and programming talents, and a laser engraver for the record itself.

Running Power And Data Over Just Two Wires

March 19, 2024 by 50 Comments

When you’re hooking up equipment across a vehicle, you’re often stuck sending power and data to and from things like sensors or actuators. The more wires you have to run, the more hassle, so it’s desirable to get this number as low as possible. That’s an especially big deal in the world of cycling electronics, where every additional gram is considered a drawback. To this end, companies have developed two-wire methods of sending power and data together, and now, [Keith Wakeham] has devised his own way of doing so.

[Keith] was inspired by Shimano’s E-Tube system which is fairly fancy in its encoding schemes, but he went his own way. His concept relied on old-school On-Off Keying methods to take a signal and capacitively couple a signal into power lines. He explains the theory behind the method, and shares schematics that can be used to actually communicate over power lines. Then, he shows off the real hardware that he built to test the concept for himself.

The results? Good! [Keith] was able to maintain speeds of 57,600 bits/second even with an electrically-noisy gear motor operating on the lines. That’s more then enough for all kinds of applications.

If you’ve got your own data-over-powerline hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know. Continue reading “Running Power And Data Over Just Two Wires” →

Satellite Provides Detailed Data On Antarctic Ice

February 2, 2024 by 19 Comments

Ever since the first satellites started imaging the Earth, scientists have been using the data gathered to learn more about our planet and improve the lives of its inhabitants. From weather forecasting to improving crop yields, satellites have been put to work in a wide array of tasks. The data they gather can go beyond imaging as well. A new Chinese satellite known as Fengyun-3E is using some novel approaches to monitor Antarctic sea ice in order to help scientists better understand the changing climate at the poles.

While it is equipped with a number of other sensors, one of the more intriguing is a piece of equipment called WindRad which uses radar to measure wind at various locations and altitudes based on how the radar waves bounce off of the atmosphere at various places.  Scientists have also been able to use this sensor to monitor sea ice, and can use the data gathered to distinguish new sea ice from ice which is many years old, allowing them to better understand ice formation and loss at the poles. It’s also the first weather satellite to be placed in an early morning orbit, allowing it to use the long shadows cast by the sun on objects on Earth’s surface to gather more information than a satellite in other orbits might be able to.

With plenty of other imaging sensors on board and a polar orbit, it has other missions beyond monitoring sea ice. But the data that it gathers around Antarctica should give scientists more information to improve climate models and understand the behavior of sea ice at a deeper level. Weather data from satellites like these isn’t always confined to academia, though. Plenty of weather satellites broadcast their maps and data unencrypted on radio bands that anyone can access.

Balloon To Fly During Solar Eclipse

November 14, 2023 by 9 Comments

The Great American Eclipse was a solar eclipse that passed nearly the entire continental United States back in 2017. While it might sound like a once-in-a-lifetime event to experience a total solar eclipse, the stars have aligned to bring another total solar eclipse to North America although with a slightly different path stretching from the west coast of Mexico and ending off the cost of Newfoundland in Canada. Plenty of people near the path of totality have already made plans to view the event, but [Stephen] and a team of volunteers have done a little bit of extra preparation and plan to launch a high-altitude balloon during the event.

The unmanned balloon will primarily be carrying a solar telescope with the required systems onboard to stream its images live during its flight. The balloon will make its way to the stratosphere, hopefully above any clouds that are common in New Brunswick during the early spring, flying up to 30,000 meters before returning its payload safely to Earth. The telescope will return magnified images of the solar eclipse live to viewers on the ground and has been in development for over two years at this point. The team believes it to be the first time a non-governmental organization has imaged an eclipse by balloon.

For those who have never experienced a total solar eclipse before, it’s definitely something worth traveling for if you’re not already in its path. For this one, Canadians will need to find themselves in the Maritimes or Newfoundland or head south to the eastern half of the United States with the Americans, while anyone in Mexico needs to be in the central part of the mainland. Eclipses happen in places other than North America too, and are generally rare enough that you’ll hear about a total eclipse well in advance. There’s more to eclipses than watching the moon’s shadow pass by, though. NASA expects changes in the ionosphere and is asking ham radio operators for help for the 2024 eclipse.

Investigating The Fourth Passive Component

September 27, 2023 by 45 Comments

When first learning about and building electronic circuits, the first things all of us come across are passive components such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors. These have easily-understandable properties and are used in nearly all circuits in some way or another. Eventually we’ll move on to learning about active components like transistors, but there’s a fourth passive circuit component that’s almost never encountered. Known as the memristor, this mysterious device is not quite as intuitive as the other three, so [Andrew] created an Arduino shield to investigate their properties.

Memristors relate electric charge and magnetic flux linkage, which means that their resistance changes based on the current that passes through them. As their name implies, this means they have memory, and retain their properties even after power is removed. [Andrew] is testing three different memristors, composed of tungsten, carbon, and chromium, using this specialized test set. The rig is based on an Arduino Uno and has a few circuit components that can be used as references and generates data on the behavior of the memristors under various situations.

The memristors used here do exhibit expected behavior when driven with positive voltage signals, but did exhibit a large amount of variability when voltage was applied in a negative direction. [Andrew] speculates that using these devices for storage would be difficult and would likely require fairly bespoke applications for each type. But as the applications for these seemingly bizarre circuit components increase, we expect them to improve much like any other passive component.

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