An artist's depiction of a lystrosaurus munching on a prehistoric plant. It looks kind of like a hippo with a beak. The main body of the animal is grey-ish green and it's beak is ivory with two tusks jutting out from its top jaw.

Mammalian Ancestors Shed Light On The Great Dying

November 22, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 31 Comments

As we move through the Sixth Extinction, it can be beneficial to examine what caused massive die-offs in the past. Lystrosaurus specimens from South Africa have been found that may help clarify what happened 250 million years ago. [via IFLScience]

The Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, or the Great Dying, takes the cake for the worst extinction we know about so far on our pale blue dot. The primary cause is thought to be intense volcanic activity which formed the Siberian Traps and sent global CO₂ levels soaring. In Karoo Basin of South Africa, 170 tetrapod fossils were found that lend credence to the theory. Several of the Lystrosaurus skeletons were preserved in a spread eagle position that “are interpreted as drought-stricken carcasses that collapsed and died of starvation in and alongside dried-up water sources.”

As Pangea dried from increased global temperatures, drought struck many different terrestrial ecosystems and changed them from what they were before. The scientists say this “likely had a profound and lasting influence on the evolution of tetrapods.” As we come up on the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, perhaps you should give thanks for the prehistoric volcanism that led to your birth?

If you want to explore more about how CO₂ can lead to life forms having a bad day, have a look at paleoclimatology and what it tells us about today. In more recent history, have a look at how we can detect volcanic eruptions from all around the world and how you can learn more about the Earth by dangling an antenna from a helicopter.

DIY Spacer Increases FDM Flow Rate For Faster, Better Printing

July 12, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

The host of problems to deal with when you’re feeling the need for FDM speed are many and varied, but high on the list is figuring out how to melt filament fast enough to accommodate high flow rates. Plus, the filament must be melted completely; a melty outside and a crunchy inside might be good for snacks, but not for 3D printing. Luckily, budget-minded hobbyists can build a drop-in booster to increase volumetric flow using only basic tools and materials.

[aamott]’s booster, which started life as a copper screw, is designed to replace the standard spacer in an extruder, with a bore that narrows as the filament gets closer to the nozzle to ensure that the core of the filament melts completely. Rather than a lathe, [aamott]’s main tool is a drill press, which he used to drill a 0.7 mm bore through the screw using a PCB drill bit. The hole was reamed out with a 10° CNC engraving bit, generating the required taper. After cutting off the head of the screw and cleaning up the faces, he cut radial slots into the body of the booster by threading the blade of a jeweler’s saw into the bore. The result was a bore wide enough to accept the filament on one end, narrowing to a (roughly) cross-shaped profile at the other.

Stacked up with a couple of knock-off Bondtech CHT nozzles, the effect of the booster was impressive — a 50% increase in flow rate. It’s not bad for a prototype made with simple tools, and it looks a little easier to build than [Stefan]’s take on the same idea.

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How The Hunga Tonga Volcano Eruption Was Felt Around The World

February 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

On the 14th of January, 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano began a gigantic eruption that would go on to peak in ferocity the next day. The uninhabited island volcano would quickly make headlines as the country of Tonga was cut off the world and tsunamis bore out from the eurption zone.

In a volcanic event of this size, the effects can be felt around the world. With modern instruments, they can be properly understood too. Let’s take a look at how the effects of the Hunga Tonga eruption were captured and measured across the globe.

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Hackaday Links: January 23, 2022

January 23, 2022 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

When Tonga’s Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai volcano erupted on January 15, one hacker in the UK knew just what to do. Sandy Macdonald from York quickly cobbled together a Raspberry Pi and a pressure/humidity sensor board and added a little code to create a recording barometer. The idea was to see if the shock wave from the eruption would be detectable over 16,000 km away — and surprise, surprise, it was! It took more than 14 hours to reach Sandy’s impromptu recording station, but the data clearly show a rapid pulse of increasing pressure as the shockwave approached, and a decreased pressure as it passed. What’s more, the shock wave that traveled the “other way” around the planet was detectable too, about seven hours after the first event. In fact, data gathered through the 19th clearly show three full passes of the shockwaves. We just find this fascinating, and applaud Sandy for the presence of mind to throw this together when news of the eruption came out.

Good news for professional astronomers and others with eyes turned skyward — it seems like the ever-expanding Starlink satellite constellation isn’t going to kill ground-based observation. At least that’s the conclusion of a team using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory outside San Diego. ZTF is designed to catalog anything that blinks, flashes, or explodes in the night sky, making it perfect to detect the streaks from the 1,800-odd Starlink satellites currently in orbit. They analyzed the number of satellite transients captured in ZTF images, and found that fully 20 percent of images show streaks now, as opposed to 0.5 percent back in 2019 when the constellation was much smaller. They conclude that at the 10,000 satellite full build-out, essentially every ZTF image will have a streak in it, but since the artifacts are tiny and well-characterized, they really won’t hinder the science to any appreciable degree.

Speaking of space, we finally have a bit of insight into the causes of space anemia. The 10% to 12% decrease in red blood cells in astronauts during their first ten days in space has been well known since the dawn of the Space Age, but the causes had never really been clear. It was assumed that the anemia was a result of the shifting of fluids in microgravity, but nobody really knew for sure until doing a six-month study on fourteen ISS astronauts. They used exhaled carbon monoxide as a proxy for the destruction of red blood cells (RBCs) — one molecule of CO is liberated for each hemoglobin molecule that’s destroyed — and found that the destruction of RBCs is a primary effect of being in space. Luckily, there appears to be a limit to how many RBCs are lost in space, so the astronauts didn’t suffer from complications of severe anemia while in space. Once they came back to gravity, the anemia reversed, albeit slowly and with up to a year of measurable changes to their blood.

From the “Better Late Than Never” department, we see that this week that Wired finally featured Hackaday Superfriend Sam Zeloof and his homemade integrated circuits. We’re glad to see Sam get coverage — the story was also picked up by Ars Technica — but it’s clear that nobody at either outfit reads Hackaday, since we’ve been featuring Sam since we first heard about his garage fab in 2017. That was back when Sam was still “just” making transistors; since then, we’ve featured some of his lab upgrades, watched him delve into electron beam lithography, and broke the story on his first legit integrated circuit. Along the way, we managed to coax him out to Supercon in 2019 where he gave both a talk and an interview.

And finally, if you’re in the mood for a contest, why not check out WIZNet’s Ethernet HAT contest? The idea is to explore what a Raspberry Pi Pico with Ethernet attached is good for. WIZNet has two flavors of board: one is an Ethernet HAT for the Pico, while the other is as RP2040 with built-in Ethernet. The good news is, if you submit an idea, they’ll send you a board for free. We love it when someone from the Hackaday community wins a contest, so if you enter, be sure to let us know. And hurry — submissions close January 31.

DIY High Flow 3D Printing Nozzle

November 23, 2021 by Al Williams 50 Comments

Sometimes advances happen when someone realizes that a common sense approach isn’t the optimal one. Take radio. Success in radio requires bigger antennas and more power, right? But cell phones exist because someone realized you could cram more people on a frequency if you use less power and smaller antennas to limit the range of each base station. With FDM 3D printing, smaller nozzles were all the rage for a while because they offer the possibility of finer detail. However, these days if you want fine detail you should be using resin-based printers and larger nozzles offer faster print times and stronger parts. The Volcano hotend started this trend but there are other options now. [Stefan] over at CNC Kitchen decided to make his own high flow nozzle and he claims it is better than other options.

Don’t get too carried away with the DIY part. As you can see in the video below, he starts with a standard nozzle, so it is really a nozzle conversion or hack. The problem with high flow isn’t the hole in the nozzle. It is melting the plastic fast enough. The faster the plastic moves through the nozzle, the less time there is for it to melt.

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Peeking Inside A Volcano Sensor

July 14, 2021 by Chris Lott 21 Comments

On a recent walk through the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, [Andrew Cooper] stumbled upon an unlocked monitoring station. Being an engineer, he couldn’t resist taking a look. This station is one of a network of sulfur dioxide (SO2) monitoring stations installed around the park to keep an eye on volcanic emissions. Unsurprisingly, sulfur dioxide is unhealthy to breathe. Sensors like these keep people informed about local conditions before taking their strolls among the volcanic foothills, enjoying gorgeous vistas as [Andrew] describes it.

[Andrew] wasn’t particularly surprised at the contents of the station, since he builds similar equipment in his day job. Continuous power is provided by lead acid batteries kept charged by an array of three mis-matched solar panels. There are duplicate SO2 monitors, an air particulate meter, and a standard weather station affixed to the top. Data is logged on-site and reported up the chain by a cell-phone modem. [Andrew] wasn’t impressed with the workmanship, noting:

It appeared as if the circuits were wired by a ham-handed grad student with no sense of pride in their work.

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Raspberry Shake Detects Quakes

August 25, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

The Raspberry Pi’s goal, at least while it was being designed and built, was to promote computer science education by making it easier to access a working computer. What its low price tag also enabled was a revolution in distributed computing projects (among other things). One of those projects is the Raspberry Shake, a seismograph tool which can record nearby earthquakes.

Of course, the project just uses the Pi as a cost-effective computing solution. It runs custom software, but if you want to set up your own seismograph then you’ll also need some additional hardware. There are different versions of the Raspberry Shake, the simplest using a single Geophone which is a coil and magnet. Vibrations are detected by sensing the electric signal generated by the magnet moving within the coil of wire. Other models increase the count to three Geophones, or add in MEMS accelerometers, you can easily whip one of these up on your own bench.

The entire setup will fit nicely on a coffee table as well, making it much smaller (and cheaper) than a comparable professional seismograph. Once all of the Raspberry Shakes around the world were networked together, it gives an accurate, real-time view of seismic activity anywhere you can imagine. If you’ve ever been interested in geology or just want to see where the latest earthquake was, check out their projects. But you don’t need even a Raspberry Pi to see where the earthquakes are, thanks to a Hackaday Prize entry all you need is a Twitter account.

Thanks to [Rich Cochran] aka [AG6QR] for the tip!