Electrolysis Tank Removes Rust

November 24, 2018 by Al Williams 18 Comments

If you have something rusty, you can get a wire brush and a lot of elbow grease. Or you can let electricity do the work for you in an electrolysis tank. [Miller’s Planet] shows you how to build such a tank, but even better, he explains why it works in a very detailed way.

The tank uses a sodium carbonate electrolyte — just water and washing powder. In the reaction, free electrons from the electrolyte displace the oxygen from the rusted metal piece. A glass container, a steel rod, and a power supply make up the rest.

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Faux Aircon Units, Made Entirely From 2D Cuts

September 28, 2018 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

2D design and part fabrication doesn’t limit one to a 2D finished product, and that’s well-demonstrated in these Faux Aircon Units [Martin Raynsford] created to help flesh out the cyberpunk-themed Null Sector at the recent 2018 Electromagnetic Field hacker camp in the UK. Null Sector is composed primarily of shipping containers and creative lighting and props, and these fake air conditioner units helped add to the utilitarian ambiance while also having the pleasant side effect of covering up the occasional shipping container logo. Adding to the effect was that the fan blades can spin freely in stray air currents; that plus a convincing rust effect made them a success.

Fan hubs, showing spots for fan blades to be glued. With the exception of embedded bearings, the entire hub (like the rest of the unit) is made from laser-cut MDF.

The units are made almost entirely from laser-cut MDF. The fan blades are cut from the waste pieces left over from the tri-pronged holes, and really showing off the “making 3D assemblies out of 2D materials” aspect are the fan hubs which are (with the exception of bearings) made from laser-cut pieces; a close-up of the hubs is shown here.

Capping off the project is some paint and the rusted appearance. How did [Martin] get such a convincing rust effect? By using real rust, as it turns out. Some cyanoacrylate glue force-cured with misted water for texture, followed by iron powder, then vinegar and hydrogen peroxide with a dash of salt provided the convincing effect. He was kind enough to document the fake rust process on his blog, complete with photos of each stage.

Null Sector showcased a range of creativity; it’s where this unusual headdress was spotted, a device that also showed off the benefits of careful assembly and design.

Pun Intended: Bare Metal Attracts Rust

September 8, 2018 by Sven Gregori 36 Comments

Programming languages tend to polarize, and Rust is by far no exception. Whether it will stick around and grow as an alternative for the lower levels or not — time will tell. In the meantime, if you’re curious about the language and its low-level abilities yourself, [phil-opp] has written a series of blog posts on building your own little bare metal kernel in Rust.

Starting from the basics, [phil-opp] describes in detail the set-up and build process to create a standalone executable that won’t be linked against the Rust standard library. From here he proceeds to build a simple operating system kernel that prints a good old Hello World via VGA output — QEMU emulation included. And of course, there is a GitHub repository with all of the source code.

[phil-opp] has been working on this for a while already, and he is currently writing the second edition of the series. Some content is therefore still missing, but you may find more of it in his first edition. And in case you know absolutely nothing about Rust in the first place, let’s just take a step back and start with the basics. After all, we might see more of it in the future.

Baremetal Rust On The Horizon

March 12, 2018 by Inderpreet Singh 48 Comments

Rust Programming Langauge has grown by leaps and bounds since it was announced in 2010 by Mozilla. It has since become a very popular language owing to features such as memory safety and its ownership system. And now, news has arrived of an Embedded Devices Working Group for Rust aiming at improving support for microcontrollers.

Rust is quite similar to C++ in terms of syntax, however Rust does not allow for null or dangling pointers which makes for more reliable code in the hands of a newbie. With this new initiative, embedded development across different microcontroller architectures could see a more consistent and standardized experience which will result in code portability out of the box. The proposed improvements include IDE and CLI tools for development and setup code generation. There is also talk of RTOS implementations and protocol stack integration which would take community involvement to a whole new level.

This is something to be really excited about because Rust has the potential to be an alternative to C++ for embedded development as rust code runs with a very minimal runtime. Before Arduino many were afraid of the outcome of a simple piece of code but with rust, it would be possible to write memory-safe code without a significant performance hit. With a little community support, Rust could be a more efficient alternative. We have seen some Rust based efforts on ARM controllers and have covered the basics of Rust programming in the past if you want to get started. Good times ahead for hardware hackers.

Rescuing An Antique Saw Set

October 18, 2017 by Adam Fabio 16 Comments

Who doesn’t like old tools? Even if they aren’t practical to use for production, plenty of old tools still have a life to offer the hobbyist or home worker. Some tools might seem a bit too far gone – due to age, rust, or practicality, to use. That’s where [Hand Tool Rescue] comes in. [HTR] finds rusty, dirty old tools, and brings them back to life. Sometimes they’re practical tools, other times, they’re a bit out there. In a recent video, he restored a BeMaCo automatic saw set from the 1940’s. Saw sets are tools which bend each tooth of a saw blade slightly. Typically they are pliers-like devices.

The slight bend of each tooth on the blade widens the saw’s kerf and prevents binding. Typically these tools are pliers-like devices. The BeMaCo set is something else — it pulls the blade through tooth by tooth, while a spring-loaded head pecks away, bending each tooth. It’s something Rube Goldberg would have loved.

[HTR’s] filming style borrows a lot from [Jimmy DiResta], who we’ve covered here before. There are no words, and most of the video is sped up. Even with the fast video, [HTR] probably has many hours of footage to pare down to a 20-minute video.

The restoration begins with tearing the saw set apart. Every nut and bolt is removed. All the parts are cleaned, chemically de-rusted, and wire-wheeled. Even the motor is torn down, cleaned, and wired up. Then come the re-assembly. [HTR] gets every piece back in its proper place. We’re wondering how many times he had to refer to the teardown video to get everything right. Finally, the saw set is complete — ready for another 70 years of work.

Rusty ARM

May 3, 2017 by Al Williams 16 Comments

You’ve probably heard that Rust is a systems programming language that has quite the following growing. It purports to be fast like C, but has features like guaranteed memory and thread safety, generics, and it prevents segmentation faults. Sounds like just the thing for an embedded system, right? [Jorge Aparicio] was frustrated because his CPU of choice, an STM32 ARM Cortex-M didn’t have native support for Rust.

Apparently, you can easily bind C functions into a Rust program but that wasn’t what he was after. So he set out to build pure Rust programs that could access the device’s hardware and he documented the effort.

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Rust Running On The Realtek RTL8710: ESP8266 Alternative?

January 4, 2017 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

For simply getting your project connected to WiFi, a least among hacker circles, nothing beats the ESP8266. But it’s not the only player out there, and we love to see diversity in the parts and languages that we use. One of the big shortcomings of the ESP8266 is the slightly-oddball Xtensa CPU. It’s just not as widely supported by various toolchains as its ARM-based brethren.

And so, when [Zach] wanted to do some embedded work in Rust, the ESP8266 was out of the picture. He turned to the RTL8710, a very similar WiFi module made by Realtek. Documentation for the RTL8710 is, at the moment, crappy, much as the ESP8266 documentation was before the hacker community had at it. But in trade for this shortcoming, [Zach] got to use the LLVM compiler, which supports the ARM architecture, and that means he can code in Rust.

In the end, the setup that [Zach] describes is a mix of FreeRTOS and some of the mbed libraries, which should be more than enough to get you up and running fairly painlessly on the chip. We’ve actually ordered a couple of these modules ourselves, and were looking to get started in straight C, but having Rust examples working doesn’t hurt, and doesn’t look all that different.

Is anyone else using the RTL8710? An ARM-based, cheap WiFi chip should be interesting.