Hackaday Links: November 24, 2019

November 24, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

It barely seems like it, but it’s been a week since the 2019 Hackaday Superconference wrapped up in sunny Pasadena. It was an amazing weekend, filled with fun, food, camaraderie, and hacks galore. For all who were there, it’ll likely take quite some time before spinning down to Earth again from the post-con high. For those who couldn’t make it, or for those who did but couldn’t squeeze in time for all those talks with everything else going on, luckily we’ve got a ton of content for you to review. Start on the Hackaday YouTube channel, where we’ve got videos already posted from most of the main stage talks. Can’t-miss talks include Chris Gammell’s RF deep-dive, Kelly Heaton’s natural electronic art, and Mohit Bhoite’s circuit sculpture overview. You’ll also want to watch The State of the Hackaday address by Editor-in-Chief Mike Szczys. More talks will be added as they’re edited, so watch that space for developments.

One of the talks we missed – and video of which appears not to be posted yet – was Adam Zeloof’s talk on thermodynamic design for your circuits. While we wait for that, here’s an interesting part that might prove useful for your next high-power design. It’s a Thermal Jumper Chip, which is essentially a ceramic SMD component that can conduct heat but not electricity. It’s intended to be used where a TO-220 case needs to be electrically isolated but thermally connected to a heatsink. Manufacturer TT Electronics has a whole line of the chips in various sizes and specs, plus a lot of other cool components like percussive igniters.

We got an interesting tip this week about a new development in the world of 3D-printing. A group from Harvard demonstrated a multinozzle extruder that can print multimaterial objects in a single pass. The work is written up in a Nature article entitled “Voxelated soft matter via multimaterial multinozzle 3D printing”, which is unfortunately paywalled, but the abstract and supplementary videos are really interesting. This appears not to be a standard hot plastic extrusion process; rather, the extruder uses elastomeric inks that cure after they’re extruded. They manage some clever tricks, including a millipede-like, vacuum-powered soft robot extruded in one pass from both soft and rigid silicone elastomers. It’s genuinely interesting stuff, and watching the multimaterial extruder head switch materials at up to 50 times per second is mesmerizing.

People really seemed to get worked up over the transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun last week, and for good reason – astronomical alignments such as these which can be seen from Earth are rare indeed, and worth taking time to see. Not everyone was in the right place at the right time with the right gear to view the transit directly, though, which is why we were glad that Justin over at The Thought Emporium did a video on leveraging online assets for space-based observations. We’ve featured a ton of hacks using SDRs and the like to intercept data from weather satellites, and while those hacks are fun and you should totally try them, Justin points out that most of these streams are readily available for free over the Internet. Clouds, lightning, forest fires and Earth changes, and yes, even the state of the Sun can all be monitored from the web.

Speaking of changes, do you know what has changed in Unix over the last 50 years? For that matter, did you know that Unix turned 50 recently? Sean Haas did after reading this article in Advent of Computing, which he shared on the tipline. The article compares a modern Debian distro to documentation from 1971 that pre-dates Unix version 1; we assume the “Dennis_v1” folder in the doc’s URL refers to none other than Dennis Ritchie himself. It turns out that Unix is remarkably well-conserved over 50 years, at least in the userspace. File system navigation and shell commands are much the same, while programming was much different. C didn’t yet exist – Dennis was busy – but there were assemblers and linkers, plus a FORTRAN compiler and an interpreter for BASIC. It’s comforting to know that if you drop into a wormhole and end up sitting in front of a PDP-11 with Three Dog Night singing “Joy to the World” on the radio in the background, you’ll at least be able to look like you belong there.

And finally, it’s nearly Sparklecon time again. Sparklecon VII will be held on January 25 and 26, 2020, at the 23b Shop hackspace in Fullerton, California. We’ve covered previous Sparkelcons and we’ve even sponsored the meetup in the past, and it looks like a blast. The organizers have put out a Call for Proposals for talks and workshops, so if you’re in the mood for some mischief, get your application going. And be quick about it – the CFP closes on December 8.

Hackaday Links: December 9, 2018

December 9, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

SpaceX launched a rocket this week, and things did not go as planned. The hydraulics on the grid fins were stuck when the first stage started its atmospheric recovery, and the booster became a fish. The booster landed about a mile or so offshore, which meant we got some great footage of a failed landing, and there are even better shots of the guts of a landed booster. [Scott Manley] whipped out a video showing the ‘new’ discoveries of what’s going on inside a Falcon 9 booster. Interestingly: the weight of the upper stage is carried through the thrust plate of its engine (which makes sense…). There’s a lot of pneumatic stuff going on, and while the composite interstage is very strong along the long axis of the rocket, it doesn’t like being slammed into the ocean.

Winter is coming, and that means you should take your car out during the first snow, drive out to an empty parking lot, and do donuts. I am not kidding this is how you learn to drive in the snow. How do they do it in Russia? They weld 3000 nails to a steel wheel. Does it work? For a while, then the nails bend. We’ve seen this done by drilling screws through a tire, and that works much better; it’s less length for the screws to fulcrum over.

Aaay, we got a date for Sparklecon! It’s February 1-3rd in the endless suburban wastes of Fullerton, California. It’s in an industrial park, there’s a liquor store around the corner, and there’s a remote-controlled couch. Get on it.

Do you wish you had a hassle-free and affordable way to get scorpions delivered straight to your mailbox? Enter Dollar Scorpion Club. Dollar Scorpion Club makes a great gift for all ages. Just enter your friend’s shipping address during checkout, and the extra-special scorpion supply chain management will mean your scorpions are delivered fast to their door.

Regular Car Reviews finally reviewed a Pontiac Aztek. The takeaway is that it’s a bug-out car for Boomers, designed in that episode of The Simpsons where Homer finds out he has a brother.

Want to see something weird? It’s a G3 iMac running Windows 8. This is… weird. Either someone is doing a remote desktop into a Windows 8 machine, someone is just using screenshots, or this machine is way cooler than the craigslist seller is letting on. If you’re in Dallas, it might be worth picking this up.

Hackaday Links: January 28, 2018

January 28, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

In case you haven’t heard, we have a 3D printing contest going on right now. It’s the Repairs You Can Print Contest. The idea is simple: show off how you repaired something with a 3D printer. Prizes include $100 in Tindie credit, and as a special prize for students and organizations (think hackerspaces), we’re giving away a few Prusa i3 MK3 printers.

[Drygol] has made a name for himself repairing various ‘home’ computers over the years, and this time he’s back showing off the mods and refurbishments he’s made to a pile of Amiga 500s. This time, he’s installing some new RAM chips, fixing some Guru Meditations by fiddling with the pins on a PLCC, adding a built-in modulator, installing a dual Kickstart ROM, and installing a Gotek floppy adapter. It’s awesome work that puts all the modern conveniences into this classic computer.

Here’s an FPGA IoT Controller. It’s a Cyclone IV and a WiFi module stuffed into something resembling an Arduino Mega. Here’s the question: what is this for? There are two reasons you would use an FPGA, either doing something really fast, or doing something so weird normal microcontrollers just won’t cut it. I don’t know if there is any application of IoT that overlaps with FPGAs. Can you think of something? I can’t.

Tide pods are flammable.

You know what’s cool? Sparklecon. It’s a party filled with a hundred pounds of LEGO, a computer recycling company, a plasmatorium, and a hackerspace, tucked away in an industrial park in Fullerton, California. It’s completely chill, and a party for our type of people — those who like bonfires, hammer Jenga, beer, and disassembling fluorescent lamps for high voltage transformers.

A few shoutouts for Sparklecon. The 23b Hackerspace is, I guess, the main host here, or at least the anchor. Across the alley is NUCC, the National Upcycled Computing Collective. They’re a nonprofit that takes old servers and such, refurbishes them, and connects them to projects like Folding@Home and SETI@Home. This actually performs a service for scientists, because every moron is mining Bitcoin and Etherium now, vastly reducing the computational capabilities of these distributed computing projects. Thanks, OSH Park, for buying every kind of specialty pizza at Pizza Hut. I would highly encourage everyone to go to Sparklecon next year. This is the fifth year, and it’s getting bigger and better every time.

Hackaday Links: January 21, 2018

January 21, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

You know what next week is? Sparklecon! What is it? Everybody hangs out at the 23b Hackerspace in Fullerton, California. Last year, people were transmuting the elements, playing Hammer Jenga, roasting marshmallows over hot resistors, and generally having a really great time. It’s the party for our sort of people, and there are talks on 3D projection mapping and a hebocon. I can’t recommend this one enough.

The STM32F7 is a very, very powerful ARM Cortex-M7 microcontroller with piles of RAM, oodles of Flash, DSP, and tons of I/O. It’s a relatively new part, so are there any breakout or dev boards for it? Sure thing. [satsha] used a desktop CNC mill to create what is probably the simplest possible breakout board for the STM32F7. There’s not much here — just some parts for power and a few LEDs — but this is all you need to get one of these powerful chips up and running.

It’s cold and dark and you can’t fly RC airplanes in January. It’s not because planes and quadcopters don’t work in the cold (they should work better, but I’d love to see a graph of battery temperature and density altitude), it’s that your hands don’t work in the cold. What’s the solution? Just strap some motorcycle handwarmer thingies onto your transmitter. With a 2200 battery strapped to the back, you’ll get about an hour of runtime for these handwarmers.

The BBC is reporting the latest advancement in Hyperloop technology. Is it a fundamentally different way of digging tunnels that isn’t simply scaling down the size of tunnel boring machines? No. Is it improvements in material science that would allow the seals on a 500-mile-long steel pressure chamber to exist? No. Does this latest advancement mitigate the ‘hillbillies with guns’ problem that would turn every Hyperloop car into a literal bullet screaming towards one of the most spectacular deaths possible? No. The chief executive of the Virgin Hyperloop project has something better in mind. A smartphone app, “that would connect future Hyperloop passengers with other modes of transport on arrival.”

Hackaday Links: November 26, 2017

November 26, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Hey, it’s sometime between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We’re blowing out everything in the Hackaday Store. There’s some great deals in there. Tindie, our lovable robot dog is also heading up hundreds of Tindie deals for Cyber Monday. If you want some electronic stuff direct from the people who make it, this is the sale to check out.

Looking for some other Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales? Adafruit has compiled a list of retailers so I don’t have to. Thanks, Phil. There are deals from Lulzbot to Makerbot, LittleBits to Sparkfun.

The engineer responsible for Dieselgate has been sentenced to 40 months in prison. There are two takeaways from this: 1) The Nuremberg Defense doesn’t work. 2) Don’t build a business plan around breaking the law, despite what the libertarian hellscape of Hacker News tells you.

The theme for next year’s DEF CON has been announced. It’s, “1983”. What does that mean? Brutalist architecture, first of all. They’re also going for a ‘year before 1984’ thing, where everyone installs always-on, far-field microphones in their house and connects them to the Internet. In other news, Alexas and Google Homes are on sale this Black Friday. Big props for the official DEF CON style guide with typefaces and colors, though.

Over on Hackaday.io, [Frank] has created a very interesting and very cool game for the Vectrex. It’s called Bloxorz, and you can think of it as a cross between Marble Madness and Q*Bert. It’s a puzzle game, and now it’s a project on Kickstarter. Want to check out what this game looks like? Take a look at the video. It’s big into the tradition of early-90s puzzle games (a genre we wish would come back), and if I had a Vectrex, I’d buy one.

I told you SparkleCon tickets are on sale, right?

Here’s an argument you can settle. What is the grit designation of sandpaper? Sandpaper comes in various grits, from 60 (very coarse) to 1500, 2000, and 6000 (for polishing, basically). Here’s a question: how are these numbers derived? I have a vague memory from my youth where someone who probably didn’t know what they were talking about said grit sizes are the number of abrasive particles per some unit of area. A 60-grit sandpaper would have sixty particles of aluminum oxide per square quarter inch, for example. This sounds too stupid to be correct, doesn’t fit with the mesh sizes of different grades of sandpaper, and a cursory Googling does not tell me how sandpaper grit sizes are derived. What say you, Hackaday peanut gallery? Where do the numbers on the back of a sheet of sandpaper actually come from?

Hackaday Links: January 22, 2017

January 22, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

What is a 1971 Ford Torino worth? It depends, but even a 2-door in terrible condition should fetch about $7 or $8k. What is a 1971 Ford Torino covered in 3D printed crap worth? $5500. This is the first ‘3D printed car’ on an auction block. It looks terrible and saying ‘Klaatu Varada Nikto’ unlocks the doors.

Old Apple IIs had a DB19 connector for external floppy drives. Some old macs, pre-PowerPC at least, also had a DB19 connector for external floppy drives. These drives are incompatible with each other for reasons. [Dandu] has a few old macs and one old Apple II 3.5″ external floppy drive. This drive can be hacked so it works with a Mac Classic. The hack is simply disconnecting one of the boards in the drive, and it only reads 400 and 800kB disks, but it does work.

The US Army is working on a hoverbike. Actually, it’s not a hoverbike, because it doesn’t have a saddle or a seat, but it could carry 300 pounds at 60 mph. That’s 136,000 grams at 135 meters per second for the rest of the world out there. This ‘hoverbike’ will be used for very quick resupply, and hopefully a futuristic form of jousting.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a few new microcontrollers built around the RISC-V core. The first is the HiFive1, a RISC-V on an Arduino-shaped board. The Open-V is another RISC-V based microcontroller, and now it too supports the Arduino IDE. That may not seem like much, but trust me: setting up the HiFive1 toolchain takes at least half an hour.

The NAMM show has been going on for the last few days, which means new electronic musical gear, effects pedals, and drum machines. This is cool, but somewhat outside our editorial prerogative. This isn’t. It’s a recording studio using a Rasberry Pi. Tracktion is working on a high-quality digital audio input and output add-on for the Pi 3. This is really cool, and you only need to look back at MPCs and gigantic Akai samplers from 15 years ago to see why.

Hey LA peeps. Sparklecon is next weekend. What’s Sparklecon? The 23B hackerspace pulls out the grill, someone brings a gigantic Tesla coil, we play hammer Jenga, and a bunch of dorks dork around. Go to Sparklecon! Superliminal advertising! Anyone up for a trip to the Northrop ham meetup next Saturday?

Sparklecon: Crappy Robots, Better Robots, Hammer Jenga, Tesla Coils

February 3, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Last weekend was Sparklecon, the premier meetup in Southern California of dorks dorking around, fire, electricity, welding, and general mischief. Just imagine a party of a hundred or so like-minded individuals at a hackerspace. Now imagine the entire party is the after party. That’s a pretty good idea of what happened.

The event was held at the 23b shop in Fullerton, a true hackerspace tucked away in a small industrial park. The people at 23b are using their location to their advantage: no one in the neighborhood really cares what happens after 5pm on a Friday. This allows for some very loud, very bright, and very dangerous hijinks.

There weren’t many pages missing from the Hackaday Omnibus donated to the 23b shop. Oddly, the only pages missing were the articles written by Benchoff.

There was something for everyone at Sparklecon, including:

Electric Pickle. Take a stick welder, and put a few hundred amps through a pickle. First, the pickle turns into a sodium light. Then, it turns into a carbon arc light. Best done after dark.
FPV drone racing. Flying around and crashing into trees in an abandoned lot. FPV from a few quads were projected onto the side of a building
Live music! Analog synths and Game Boys!
Tesla coils! This was a 300 amp monster, and completely analog. The spark gap was impressive by itself, but it gets really cool when you steal a fluorescent light from a fixture and stand 20 feet away from the Tesla coil.
Hammer Jenga! Cut some 2x4s up and make a tower of Jenga. Get a hammer, some colorful commentators, a dozen people, and make some competition brackets. Hackaday’s own [Jasmine] was the first champion of the night.
Sparklebot Death Battle! It’s like BattleBots, only things break more often and we don’t have [Bil Dwyer].
Hebocon! Battling robots, but much crappier than the Sparklebot Death Battle. These robots broke more often.

Analog synths provided the tunes

The Sparklebot Death Battle ring

Tesla Coils and Spark Gaps

A Hebocon bot, using a mouse trap as a weapon

A lady tribble, vibrating her way across the Hebocon ring

The basic premise of Hammer Jenga

Art was made out of the spare parts left over from the Hebocon build-off. This robot is named Art

The main event was, of course, Sparklecon’s own version of Battlebots. There were only four competitors the entire night, but the competition was fierce.

Three of the bots were wedge designs, in keeping with the ramp-ification of battling robots. The lone exception to this was [Charlie]’s Slow Bot, a cube design equipped with a spinning steel blade. The blade moves fast, but Slow Bot doesn’t. It’s a purely defensive design, meant to destroy bots trying for an easy kill. The test video of Slow Bot can be seen here:

The first fight of Slow Bot did not live up to the hype, unfortunately. After Slow Bot’s primary weapon got up to speed, the opposing bot moved in for the kill. The bolts on Slow Bot‘s blade sheared, ending the match, and leaving five or six people looking around the 23b shop for M5 bolts, or some larger bolts and a tap.

Is it all hilarously unsafe? Well, there were some plexiglas shields in front of the crowd, and most people viewed the fights on the projector beaming against the wall, anyway.

Is it worth it to go to Sparklecon? If you like dangerous experiments, soldering wires directly onto AA batteries, fire, electricity, electromagnetic fields, broken robots, and hanging out by a fire, yes. It’s a party at a proper hackerspace, making it the best kind of party ever. If history repeats itself, there will also be an afterparty at 23b following the LayerOne conference in May.