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19 Articles

Show ‘Em What You’re Made Of With This Repair Logo

July 7, 2023 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

The only thing better than getting your hands on a repairable piece of hardware is actually finding the thing in the first place, which is why we love this “official” repair logo created by [Yves Parent]. Our predilection for crossed wrenches had (almost) nothing to do with it.

We’ve got a soft spot for logos that work well on dark web pages.

Designed to mimic the ubiquitous “Recycle” logo, [Yves] originally created the icon for Repair Café Roeselare — but realizing that it had wide practical applications, he got the OK to put it up on GitHub for others to use. Whether you’re a hobbyist creating your first PCB or a pro designing a commercial product for a particularly forward-thinking client, slapping this logo on signifies that your creation is destined for better things than the scrap heap.

[Yves] has helpfully provided the logo in both vector format (SVG) and PNG, the latter at several scales for your convenience. We’d love to see it offered in various production and CAD formats as well, so it can be dropped into as many projects as possible. So if you end up creating a DXF or STL version, be sure to submit a pull request.

While getting others onboard with this logo is just a ground roots effort currently, who knows what the future may bring? Today we take it for granted, but the official open source hardware “gear” logo has only been around for about a decade.

Posted in hardware, Repair HacksTagged logo, open source hardware, repair

Marvin Minsky’s 2500 Logo Computer

June 18, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 7 Comments

[Prof. Marvin Minsky] is a very well-known figure in the field of computing, having co-founded the MIT AI lab, published extensively on AI and computational intelligence, and, let’s not forget, inventing the confocal microscope and, of course, the useless machine. But did you know he also was a co-developer of the first Logo “turtle,” and developed a computer intended to run Logo applications in an educational environment? After dredging some PDP-10 tapes owned by the MIT Media Lab, the original schematics for his machine, the Turtle Terminal TT2500 (a reference to the target price of $2500, in 1970 terms), are now available for you to examine.

Continue reading “Marvin Minsky’s 2500 Logo Computer” →

Posted in computer hacksTagged logo, marvin minsky, turtle

The Real World Strikes Back

February 12, 2022 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

My son was into “Secret Coders“, a graphic novel series wherein a pair of kids discover and thwart a plot to take over the world by learning to program in the LOGO computer language. When I told him that these “turtle bots” were originally actually real physical things, he wanted one. So we built one out of some nice geared DC motors I had lying around.

A turtle bot has essentially three jobs: move forward in a straight line a controlled distance, turn a given number of degrees, and raise and lower a pen. If you’re already screaming “use stepper motors!” at your screen, well, you’re probably right. But I had these nice Faulhaber/Micromo geared motors with encoders that were just collecting dust in the closet, so I used ’em. And because of that, the robot stumbles on two of its three goals in life — the servo pen lifter works just fine.

Perfectly matched DC motors don’t exist. Of course I knew this, because I’ve built bots with DC motors before. But they’ve all had complex control mechanisms and/or feedback that made it moot. Not here. This bot needs to drive perfectly straight without any lines to guide it or more interesting navigation algorithms.

We spent a good half hour driving it around in not-quite-but-almost squares, tweaking each side’s PWMs, running the motors backwards for short bursts to brake the wheels, and generally trying to map degrees of rotation to milliseconds of motor drive. And you know what, my son enjoyed it. The concepts were simple enough for a second grader, and guessing the right PWM values was like a game. When we finally got it good enough, there was a small celebration.

Of course I know that what it really needs is encoder feedback. I installed those encoder gearmotors on purpose after all. But dealing with quadrature and probably a PID loop to control and sync the two sides is not for my son, at least not for another couple years. (They do learn closed-loop control theory in fourth grade these days, right?) I’ll have to do that all offline some night while he’s sleeping.

But I hope he’ll remember the lessons learned from stabbing at it the naive way. Abstractions are great, but no two motors are ever perfectly alike. You’d think you could just calibrate it out, but the motors differ in driven and coasting behavior, so you’ve got a lot more calibrating to do than you think at first. The real world is tough, and although it’s important to have theory and ideas and abstractions to guide you, you’re going to have to tweak to make it work when the wheels hit the floor. But also that it’s fun to do so, and super rewarding when it finally draws a wonky square.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!
Posted in Hackaday Columns, Rants, Robots HacksTagged learning, logo, newsletter, Practice, robots, theory
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Hackaday Links: April 12, 2020

April 12, 2020 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Anyone who worked in the tech field and lived through the Y2K bug era will no doubt recall it as a time seasoned with a confusing mix of fear and optimism and tempered with a healthy dose of panic, as companies rushed to validate that systems would pass the rollover of the millennium without crashing, and to remediate systems that would. The era could well have been called “the COBOL programmers full-employment bug,” as the coders who had built these legacy systems were pulled out of retirement to fix them. Twenty years on and a different bug — the one that causes COVID-19 — is having a similarly stimulative effect on the COBOL programmer market. New Jersey is one state seeking COBOL coders, to deal with the crush of unemployment insurance claims, which are killing the 40-year-old mainframe systems the state’s programs run on. Interestingly, Governor Phil Murphy has only put out a call for volunteers, and will apparently not compensate COBOL coders for their time. I mean, I know people are bored at home and all, but good luck with that.

In another throwback to an earlier time, “The Worm” is back. NASA has decided to revive its “worm” logo, the simple block letter logo that replaced the 50s-era “Meatball” logo, the one with the red chevron bracketing a starfield with an orbiting satellite. NASA switched to the worm, named for the sinuous shape of the letters and which honestly looks like a graphic design student’s last-minute homework assignment, in the 1970s, keeping it in service through the early 1990s when the meatball was favored again. Now it looks like both logos will see service as NASA prepares to return Americans to space on their own launch vehicles.

Wait a minute, what happens when we stand this thing upright?

Looking for a little help advancing the state of your pandemic-related project? A lot of manufacturers are trying to help out as best they can, and many are offering freebies to keep you in the game. Aisler, for one, is offering free PCBs and stencils for COVID-19 prototypes. It looks like their rules are pretty liberal; any free and open-source project that can help with the pandemic in any way qualifies. Hats off to Aisler for doing their part.

And finally, history appears to have been made this week in the amateur radio world with the first direct transatlantic contact on the 70-cm band was made. It seems strange to think that it would take 120 years since transatlantic radio became reduced to practice by the likes of Marconi for this accomplishment to occur, but the 70-cm band is usually limited to line of sight, and transatlantic contacts at 430 MHz are usually done using a satellite as a relay. The contact was between stations FG8OJ on Guadaloupe Island in the Caribbean — who was involved in an earlier, similar record on the 2-meter band — and D4VHF on the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, and used the digital mode FT8. The 3,867-km contact was likely due to tropospheric ducting, where layers in the atmosphere form a refractive tunnel that can carry VHF and UHF signals much, much further than they usually go. While we’d love to see that record stretched a little more on each end, to make a truly transcontinental contact, it’s still quite an accomplishment, and we congratulate the hams involved.

Posted in Hackaday Columns, Hackaday linksTagged 70 cm, Aisler, cobol, Covid-19, FT8, hackaday links, logo, meatball, nasa, pcb, retro, stencils, transatlantic, uhf, worm, y2k

Custom Logo Display Pushes Nixie Tube Technology

March 16, 2020 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

No matter what you think about Nixie tubes, you’ve got to admit that having a Nixie custom made for you would be pretty cool. The cost of such a vanity project is probably prohibitive, but our friends at Keysight managed to convince none other than [Dalibor Farný] to immortalize their logo in glass, metal, and neon, and the results are beautiful.

Nixie aficionados and lovers of fine craftsmanship will no doubt be familiar with [Dalibor]’s high-end, hand-built Nixie tubes, the creation of which we’ve covered before. He’s carved out a niche in this limited market by turning the quality far above what you can find on the surplus Nixie market, and his custom tubes grace sleek, distinctive clocks that really make a statement. Bespoke tubes are not a normal offering, but he decided to tackle the build because it gave him a chance to experiment with new methods and materials. Chief among these are the mesh cathodes seen in the video below. Most Nixies have thin cathodes for each character cut from solid sheet metal. The elements of the Keysight logo were skeletonized, with a solid border and a hexagonal mesh infill. We’d have loved to see the process used to create those pieces — laser cutting, perhaps?

The bulk of the video is watching the painstaking assembly process, which centers around the glassblower’s lathe. It’s fascinating to watch, and the finished, somewhat out-sized tube is a work of art, although part of the display seems a little dark. Even though, [Dalibor] needs to be careful — plenty of outfits would love to see their logo Nixie-fied. Wouldn’t a Jolly Wrencher tube look amazing?

Continue reading “Custom Logo Display Pushes Nixie Tube Technology” →

Posted in Misc HacksTagged custom, glassblower, Keysight, lathe, logo, neon, nixie

This Space For Rent: Advertisements In Orbit

May 8, 2019 by Tom Nardi 34 Comments

Recently there’s been some buzz in the news that Pepsi, or more accurately the company’s Russian division, had partnered with a startup by the name of StartRocket to experiment with the idea of putting “billboards” in space. After overwhelmingly negative response to the idea on social media, Pepsi’s official line is that the StartRocket experiment was a one-time partnership, and that the company has no plans to push ahead with a space advertising program “at this time”.

Concept art from StartRocket

Had this been the first time a worldwide conglomerate like Pepsi had turned their eyes up into the black and saw dollar signs, you might think that humanity’s brief flirtation with space-bound advertisements was nothing but a social media stunt. But the truth of the matter is that companies such as Coca-Cola and Pizza Hut have been trying to get their products off terra firma since the 1980’s. This isn’t even Pepsi’s first attempt, despite what their PR department might want you to believe right about now.

So why haven’t we seen advertisers putting their money into space advertising schemes? Well, we have, actually. They just haven’t been terribly effective and the average person likely has no recollection of them. We’re seeing considerable excitement about spaceflight in the new media right now with billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos battling to see who can build the most outlandish rockets, but historically, you’d do better getting a 10 second spot during the Super Bowl than plastering your logo on the side of a weather satellite.

In honor of Pepsi’s recent blunder, let’s take a look at some of the standout attempts to conquer advertising’s true true final frontier from the last few decades.

Continue reading “This Space For Rent: Advertisements In Orbit” →

Posted in Current Events, Featured, Interest, SpaceTagged advertising, billboard, coke, logo, nasa, Space Shuttle

Building Your Bots The 1980s Way

November 25, 2016 by Jenny List 29 Comments

There are many kits available to today’s hobbyists who wish to try their hand at producing simple computer-controlled robots. Small concoctions of servos and laser-cut acrylic, to which boards such as the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Beaglebone can easily be fitted.

In the 1980s though this was a market that was yet to be adequately served. The sheer size of the many 8-bit machines of the day meant they could not be incorporated in your robot, and interfacing to them was a bit more challenging than the easy-to-use GPIOs of their modern counterparts. Then the mechanical hardware of a small robot was something that had not been easily and cheaply packaged for the constructor, making building a physical robotic platform a significant task in itself.

[Jeffery Brace] and [Evan Koblentz] write for IEEE Spectrum about their work at New York City’s World Maker Faire back in October, making a pair of small robots using only components and computers available in the 1980s.

Charlie the robot
Charlie the robot

[Charlie] is a robot based on the Capsela construction system, a toy consisting of interlocking plastic spheres containing different functions of shafts, gears, and motors. There was a Robotic Workshop kit for Capsella that featured a Commodore 64 interface, and it is through this means that [Charlie]’s three motors are controlled. It includes a ROM that extends Commodore BASIC with extra commands, which allow the robot to be easily controlled.

Artie the robot, with Dacta box in foreground
Artie the robot, with Dacta box in foreground

Meanwhile [Artie] is a Lego robot, using the Dacta TC Logo, a kit sold for the educational market and available at the time with interfaces for the PC and the Apple II. They had a Dacta control box but not the Apple II card to go with it, so had to make do with a functional replica built on a prototyping card. As the name suggests, this was programmed using Logo, and came with the appropriate interpreter software.

Both robots are reported to have been a success in terms of working in the first place, then demonstrating the 1980s technology and providing entertainment and engagement with the faire’s visitors.

We have covered numerous Lego robots over the years, as a search of our site will confirm. But this is only the second time we’ve featured a Capsela project, the first being this Arduino rover from 2011. [Mike] mused why we don’t see Capsela more often, and the same sentiment is true today. Do you have a Capsela set gathering dust somewhere that could make a robotic project?

Via Hacker News.

Posted in classic hacks, Robots HacksTagged apple II, basic, capsela, commodore 64, lego, logo, robot

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