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A Nebula Straight from the Stars to Your Table

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Space may truly be the final frontier, but maybe that frontier can be closer than you thought. Pictures of nebulae and planets bring the colorful sights of deep space right to your screen. You may even have models of some of the rockets used for those missions on a shelf. However, did you know that you could even have a model of those nebulae or planetary surfaces from [NASA]? While we have covered some distributed models from [NASA] here before , the catalog has expanded far past what 2016 had in store. Additionally, the catalog has been sorted into a more user-friendly, filterable interface than a simple GitHub repository. Most models even have a description attached, giving some basic background information on what the Crab Nebula is, for example . There could always be more; there don’t appear to be many models of the space shuttle or some other expected files, but what is there is incredible. Some non-3D model files can also be found from star maps to full planetary maps. Whi...
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LED Matrix Clock Proudly Shows Its Inner Wiring

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Some projects take great care to tuck away wire hookups, but not [Roberto Alsina]’s Reloj V2 clock . This desktop clock makes a point of exposing all components and wiring as part of its aesthetic. There are no hidden elements, everything that makes it work is open to view. Well, almost. The exception is the four MAX7219 LED matrices whose faces are hidden behind a featureless red panel, and for good reason. As soon as the clock powers up, the LEDs shine through the thin red plastic in a clean glow that complements the rest of the clock nicely. [Roberto]’s first version was a unit that worked similarly, but sealed everything away in a wedge-shaped enclosure that was just a little too sterile, featureless, and ugly for his liking. Hence this new version that takes the opposite approach. Clocks have long showcased their inner workings, and electronic clocks — like this circuit-sculpture design — are no exception. The only components, besides the Raspberry Pi Zero W and the LED m...
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How Small Can A Linux Executable Be?

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With ever increasing sizes of various programs (video games being notorious for this), the question of size optimization comes up more and more often. [Nathan Otterness] shows us how it’s done by minifying a Linux “Hello, World!” program to the extreme . A naive attempt at a minimal hello world in C might land you somewhere about 12-15Kb, but [Nathan] can do much better. He starts by writing everything in assembly, using Linux system calls. This initial version without optimization is 383 bytes. The first major thing to go is the section headers; they are not needed to actually run the program. Now he’s down to 173 bytes. And this is without any shenanigans! The final tiny ELF file The first shenanigans are extreme code size optimizations: by selecting instructions carefully (and in a way a C compiler never would), he shaves another 16 bytes off. But the real shenanigans begin when he starts looking for spaces in the ELF header that he can clobber while the program is still acce...
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An Oscilloscope The Way They Used To Be

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It’s likely that Hackaday has a readership with the highest percentage of oscilloscope ownership among any in the world, and we’re guessing that most of you who fit in that bracket have a modern digital instrument on your bench. It’s a computer with a very fancy analogue front end, and the traces are displayed in software. Before those were a thing though, a ‘scope was an all-analogue affair, with a vacuum-tube CRT showing the waveform in real time. [Joshua Coleman] has made one of these CRT ‘scopes from scratch , and we rather like it. Using a vintage two inch round tube, it includes all the relevant power supplies and input amplifiers for the deflection plates. It doesn’t include the triggers and timebase circuitry you’d expect from a desktop instrument though, so unless you add a sawtooth on its X input it’s only good for some Lissajous figures. But that’s not the point of a project like this one, because it’s likely even the cheapest of modern ‘scopes way exceeds any capabilities...
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See The Computers That Powered The Voyager Space Program

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Have you ever wanted to see the computers behind the first (and for now only) man-made objects to leave the heliosphere? [Gary Friedman] shows us, with an archived tour of JPL building 230 in the ’80s . A NASA employee picks up a camcorder and decides to record a tour of the place “before they replace it all with mainframes”. They show us computers that would seem prehistoric compared to anything modern; early Univac and IBM machines whose power is outmatched today by even an ESP32, yet made the Voyager program possible all the way back in 1977. There are countless peripherals to see, from punch card writers to Univac debug panels where you can see the registers, and from impressive cabinets full of computing hardware to the zip-tied hacks “attaching” a small box they call the “NIU”, dangling off the inner wall of the cabinet. And don’t forget the tape drives that are as tall as a refrigerator! We could go on ad nauseum, nerding out about the computing history, but why don’t you see...
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This Front Panel Makes Its Own Clean-Edged Drill Guides

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We haven’t seen an instrument panel quite like [bluesyann]’s, which was made by curing UV resin directly onto plywood with the help of a 3D printer and a bit of software work. The result is faintly-raised linework that also makes hand drilling holes both cleaner and more accurate. The process begins by designing the 2D layout in Inkscape, which has the advantage of letting one work in 1:1 dimensions. A 10 mm diameter circle will print as 10 mm; a nice advantage when designing for physical components. After making the layout one uses OpenSCAD to import the .svg and turn it into a 3D model that’s 0.5 mm tall. That 3D model gets loaded into the resin printer, and the goal is to put it directly onto a sheet of plywood. A little donut shape makes a drill centering feature, and the surrounding ring keeps the edges of the hole clean. To do that, [bluesyann] sticks the plywood directly onto the 3D printer’s build platform with double-sided tape. With the plywood taking the place of the...
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Retro Open Source Camera Straight from the ’90s

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In our modern society, we have started to take the humble camera for granted. Perhaps because of this, trendy standalone cameras have started to take off. Unfortunately, most of the time these cameras are expensive and not any better than those in our everyday smartphones. If only there were some open-source solution where you could build and customize your own standalone device? [Yutani] has done just that with the SATURNIX . Simple microcontrollers and cameras meant for Raspberry Pis are a dime a dozen these days. Because of this, it’s no surprise to hear that the SATURNIX is based on recognizable hardware, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and an Arducam 16MP sensor. The Pi Zero powers both the sensors’ capture abilities and the interactive LCD display. Some sample filtered shots from the SATURNIX With a simple visual design, the device could certainly fit into the same market we see so many other standalone cameras. Pictures from the camera look great without or with the included filte...
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