Crowdfunding Follies: $100 To Disprove Isaac Newton

April 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 170 Comments

Are satellites fake? Nobody knows, because no one has done an experiment to determine if rocket engines will produce thrust in a vacuum. At least that’s what this Kickstarter says, and it’s asking for $100 to test multiple types of rocket engines in an enclosed, evacuated chamber.

Anyone who has thought about this problem for half a second will tell you yes, rocket engines will work in a vacuum. It’s an application of Newton’s Third Law of Motion; if you explode fuel and dump it out the back of a rocket, the rocket will go forward. Rocket engines don’t push against air.

Strap in, because this one gets better. In a video linked to from the Kickstarter Campaign, satellites do not exist. This is because gas molecules in the thermosphere can reach 2,500 °C, hot enough to melt the metal satellites are made of. Never mind that the 2,500 °C figure is only for individual gas molecules; the atmosphere at these altitudes is so rarefied, there isn’t much contact with matter. Oh, second point: have you ever realized that a Google image search of the word ‘satellite’ mostly shows illustrations and renders? It’s not because to take a picture of a satellite in orbit would require two satellites flying in formation; no, it must be because satellites don’t exist. It gets better from there.

Digital To Analog To Digital To Analog To Digital Conversion

January 3, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

[Andy] had the idea of turning a mixing desk into a MIDI controller. At first glance, this idea seems extremely practical – mixers are a great way to get a lot of dials and faders in a cheap, compact, and robust enclosure. Exactly how you turn a mixer into a MIDI device is what’s important. This build might not be the most efficient, but it does have the best name ever: digital to analog to digital to analog to digital conversion.

The process starts by generating a sine wave on an Arduino with some direct digital synthesis. A 480 Hz square wave is generated on an ATTiny85. Both of these signals are then fed into a 74LS08 AND gate. According to the schematic [Andy] posted, these signals are going into two different gates, with the other input of the gate pulled high. The output of the gate is then sent through a pair of resistors and combined to the ‘audio out’ signal. [Andy] says this is ‘spine-crawling’ for people who do this professionally. If anyone knows what this part of the circuit actually does, please leave a note in the comments.

The signal from the AND gates is then fed into the mixer and sent out to the analog input of another Arduino. This Arduino converts the audio coming out of the mixer to frequencies using a Fast Hartley Transform. With a binary representation of what’s happening inside the mixer, [Andy] has something that can be converted into MIDI.

[Andy] put up a demo of this circuit working. He’s connected the MIDI out to Abelton and can modify MIDI parameters using an audio mixer. Video of that below if you’re still trying to wrap your head around this one.

Continue reading “Digital To Analog To Digital To Analog To Digital Conversion” →

Strange Login Request At Hackaday.com

June 25, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 43 Comments

We’ve received numerous messages about this new login popup on our site. This is NOT our doing. It is most likely some ancient script from our ancient template that has finally become outdated or expired. We’re working on a resolution. If you hit cancel it will go away.

We are truly sorry for the inconvenience and are working to get rid of this immediately.

Update: It is gone. It was a site statistics script from sitemeeter that suddenly had issues on many sites. We try VERY HARD to make sure our advertisements are unobtrusive since we rely on those ads to support us. Anything that gets in the way of you reading our site is bad.

WTF-O-meter

July 3, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 25 Comments

Here’s something every office probably needs. Ours does at least. It’s a WTF counter. When the office gets just a little too weird, someone hits the button and it gets logged. It’s probably pretty easy to judge the day by the WTF chart. The button is connected to an Arduino that updates the status on a local web server. We can imagine a nice bar graph of WTFs per day, or possibly a pie chart with normal time vs WTF time. Unfortunately, imagining is all we’re going to do. They didn’t include any examples of the visualizations. Can you imagine saying something to a co worker just for them to promptly march over and slap the WTF button? Maybe we don’t need one.