This summer, I was pleasantly surprised when a friend of mine from Chicago turned up at one of the hacker camps I attended. A few days of hanging out in the sun ensued, doing cool hacker camp stuff, drinking unusual beverages, and generally having fun. It strikes me as a shame that this is such a rare occurrence, and since Hackaday is an American organisation and I am in a sense writing from its European outpost, I should do what I can to encourage my other friends from the USA and other parts of the world to visit. So here I’m trying to write a hacker’s guide to visiting Europe, in the hope that I’ll see more of you at future camps and other events.
It’s Intimidating. But Don’t Worry.
Yes. We’d find this intimidating, too. Bewitchedroutine, Public domain.
First of all, I know that it’s intimidating to travel to an unfamiliar place where the language and customs may be different. I’m from England, which sits on a small island in the North Atlantic, and believe it or not it’s intimidating for us to start traveling too. It involves leaving the safety of home and crossing the sea whether by flight, ferry, or tunnel, and that lies outside one’s regular comfort zone.
Americans live in a country that’s almost a continent in its own right, so you can satisfy your travel lust without leaving home. Thus of course the idea of landing in Germany or the Netherlands is intimidating. But transatlantic flights are surprisingly cheap in the scheme of international travel because of intense competition, so I’m here to reassure you that you can travel my continent ‘s hacker community without either feeling out of your depth, or breaking the bank.
In the 21st century, the global transportation landscape is in shift. Politicians, engineers, and planners all want to move more people, more quickly, more cleanly. Amid the frenzy of innovative harebrained ideas, high-speed rail travel has surged to the forefront. It’s a quiet achiever, and a reliable solution for efficient, sustainable, and swift intercity and intercountry transit.
From the thriving economies of Europe and Asia to the burgeoning markets of the Middle East and America, high-speed rail networks are being planned, expanded, and upgraded whichever way you look. A combination of traditional and magnetic levitation (maglev) trains are being utilized, reaching speeds that were once the stuff of science fiction. As we set our sights towards the future, it’s worth taking a snapshot of the current state of high-speed rail, a field where technology, engineering brilliance, and visions of a greener tomorrow converge.
There was a time when street lighting means someone had to go light the lamps. Electricity changed that, but street and outdoor lighting has been quietly going through a new revolution: LEDs. The problem, though, is that LEDs provide what scientists call “broad white” light and there are concerns about the impact the unnatural lighting will have on ecosystems, including people and animals.
Of course, the first step in worrying about something is to measure it. You would think that satellites would have a bird’s-eye view of the nighttime lighting landscape, and, of course, they do. But most of the imagery isn’t suitable for looking at the spectrum of wavelength data scientists need to quantify what they call ALAN — Artificial Light at Night.
The ISS imaging is, however, sufficient. Using special data techniques, they were able to track the adoption of LEDs over sodium lights and other technologies between 2012-2013 and 2014-2020 across Europe. For example, in the title image, you can see Belgium with an orange tint indicating low-pressure sodium lights. The Netherlands, France, and the UK have a more yellow hue, indicating high-pressure sodium lamps. Germany is more of a blue color due to fluorescent and mercury vapor bulbs.
Well, that de-escalated quickly. It seems like no sooner than a paper was announced that purported to find photographic evidence of fungi growing on Mars, that the planetary science and exobiology community came down on it like a ton of bricks. As well they should — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and while the photos that were taken by Curiosity and Opportunity sure seem to show something that looks a lot like a terrestrial puffball fungus, there are a lot of other, more mundane ways to explain these formations. Add to the fact that the lead author of the Martian mushroom paper is a known crackpot who once sued NASA for running over fungi instead of investigating them; the putative shrooms later turned out to be rocks, of course. Luckily, we have a geobiology lab wandering around on Mars right now, so if there is or was life on Mars, we’ll probably find out about it. You know, with evidence.
If you’re a fan of dystopic visions of a future where bloodthirsty robots relentlessly hunt down the last few surviving humans, the news that the New York Police Department decided to stop using their “DigiDog” robot will be a bit of a downer. The move stems from outrage generated by politicians and citizens alike, who dreamt up all sorts of reasons why the NYPD shouldn’t be using this tool. And use it they apparently did — the original Boston Dynamics yellow showing through the many scuffs and dings in the NYPD blue paint job means this little critter has seen some stuff since it hit the streets in late 2020. And to think — that robot dog was only a few weeks away from filing its retirement papers.
Attention, Commodore fans based in Europe: the Commodore Users Europe event is coming soon. June 12, to be precise. As has become traditional, the event is virtual, but it’s free and they’re looking for presenters.
In a bid to continue the grand Big Tech tradition of knowing what’s best for everyone, Microsoft just announced that Calibri would no longer be the default font in Office products. And here’s the fun part: we all get to decide what the new default font will be, at least ostensibly. The font wonks at Microsoft have created five new fonts, and you can vote for your favorite on social media. The font designers all wax eloquent on their candidates, and there are somewhat stylized examples of each new font, but what’s lacking is a simple way to judge what each font would actually look like on a page of English text. Whatever happened to “The quick brown fox” or even a little bit of “Lorem ipsum”?
And finally, why are German ambulances — and apparently, German medics — covered in QR codes? Apparently, it’s a way to fight back against digital rubberneckers. The video below is in German, but the gist is clear: people love to stop and take pictures of accident scenes, and smartphones have made this worse, to the point that emergency personnel have trouble getting through to give aid. And that’s not to mention the invasion of privacy; very few accident victims are really at their best at that moment, and taking pictures of them is beyond rude. Oh, and it’s illegal, punishable by up to two years in jail. The idea with the QR codes is to pop up a website with a warning to the rubbernecker. Our German is a bit rusty, but we’re pretty sure that translates to, “Hey idiot, get back in your frigging car!” Feel free to correct us on that.
[Mare] has a visual guide and simple instructions for making DIY mini helical 868 MHz antennas for LoRa applications. 868 MHz is a license-free band in Europe, and this method yields a perfectly serviceable antenna that’s useful where space is constrained.
A metric 5 mm drill bit makes a convenient core.
The process is simple and well-documented, but as usual with antenna design it requires attention to detail. Wire for the antenna is silver-plated copper, salvaged from the core of RG214U coaxial cable. After straightening, the wire is wound tightly around a 5 mm core. 7 turns are each carefully spaced 2 mm apart. After that, it’s just a matter of measuring and bending the end for soldering to the wireless device in question. [Mare] has used this method for wireless LoRa sensors in space-constrained designs, and it also has the benefit of lowering part costs since it can be made and tested in-house.
Antennas have of course been made from far stranger things than salvaged wire; one of our favorites is this Yagi antenna made from segments of measuring tape.
You might be reading this six minutes early. Assuming that the Hackaday editors have done their job, this article should have appeared in your feed right on the half-hour. We have a set schedule to keep you supplied with the tastiest of hardware hacks and news. For some of you though perhaps there has been a treat, you’ve seen it and all the other stories six minutes early.
Think for a minute of a modern car on a hot day. When you turn on the air conditioning you will hear a slight dip in the engine revs as it accommodates the extra load. So it is with an alternating current power grid; a simple example is a power station supplying a city. In periods such as cold nights when the demands of the city go up, the result would be that the power station needs to work harder to satisfy it, and until that happens there would be a slight dip in its line frequency. Power grids compensate for this by increasing and decreasing the available generating capacity in real time, maintaining a mean frequency such that the “grid time” of a clock controlled by it matches an atomic clock as closely as possible over time.
It is at this point we leave the realm of electrical engineering and enter that of international politics, normally something far removed from Hackaday’s remit. It is fair to say that the history between Serbia and Kosovo is extremely delicate, and to understand some of the context of this story you should read about the war at the end of the 1990s. After the conflict the Serbian-majority region of what is now Kosovo refused to pay the Kosovan utility for its electricity, eventually leading to the Kosovans refusing to pay for that region’s share of the power received by Kosovo from Serbia. The resulting imbalance between demand and supply was enough to drag the supply frequency down across the whole continent, and though a short-term agreement has been reached the problem still remains on the grid.
Clocks and Mains Frequency
So if you are a continental European and you find yourself six minutes behind your British or American friends, don’t worry. We know that among our readers are people with significant experience in the power generation world, perhaps some of you would like to use your six minutes to give us a bit of insight in the comments. Meanwhile here at Hackaday we maintain an interest in the mechanics of power distribution even if some might say that it is Not A Hack. We’ve taken a look at utility poles, and examined how power grids are synchronised.
As for those slow clocks, the use of mains frequency to keep accurate time is quite brilliant and has been used reliably for decades. Tightly regulating grid frequency means that any clock plugged into an outlet can have the same dead-on accuracy for the cost of a few diodes. These clocks count the zero crossing of the alternating current. There may be moment to moment drifts but the power utility injects or removes cycles over the long term so the sum of crossings is dead on over the course of the day. It’s an interesting phenomenon to experiment with and that’s why we see it in microcontroller projects from time to time.
We are now just three days away from Hackaday World Create Day. On Saturday, April 23rd, the Hackaday community around the world will come together in real life to have fun, share their stories, and to do a little bit of engineering.
A few weeks ago, we put out the call for local meetup organizers and were overwhelmed by the response. The World Create Day events in Europe and Africa span pretty much from pole to pole with meetups in Salangen and Cape Town.
If you are near any of the events on the map, please join in the camaraderie on Saturday If you don’t see a marker near you, it’s not too late, you can still host your own meetup. Follow these easy steps to get your town on the map!
What can you expect from World Create Day? At its simplest, gather together and talk about solving a technology problem facing humanity. This can be submitted as your Challenge 1 entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize. But many organizers have more planned. We’ve heard from groups who are hosting hardware show-and-tell, others have lined of speakers or workshops, and we always suggest hosting lightning talks where anyone at the meetup can speak for around two minutes.
Hackaday is made up of doers. It’s time we all got together and celebrated what that means. Don’t miss out this Saturday!
