Kritik sah

While in aquatic environments microplastics can be filtered out relatively easily, in soil it’s much harder to get to these microscopic particles. While you can certainly strip mine an entire area to process its soil, a less invasive method would involve something like the magnetic flakes proposed and demonstrated by [Jeonghyo Kim] et al. in a recent article in npg asia materials . The Ti 3 C 2 T x flakes, referred to as MXene microparticles, were designed to attract target microplastics. These were then combined with ferromagnetic nickel nanoparticles to make structures that can be propelled through soil using an external magnetic field. During tests under laboratory conditions the researchers managed to remove about 81% of polystyrene and 72% of PET particles this way from soil, with a correspondingly higher percentage in water. After having the flakes rummage about for a while through the target material, they are removed with a strong magnetic field, which should recover m...

The Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers are great little devices, and they can do great things with cameras and video. However, there can be a fair bit of latency involved in these tasks depending on the board you’re using and just what you’re doing. You need to have things set up just so to get peak performance. [MattKC] has tangled with this issue in a personal project, and recently had somewhat of a breakthrough. The issue came up during [MattKC’s] work on cloning the WiiU gamepad . The idea was to receive the video stream from the WiiU console and display it using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. He had some problems with latency, wherein there was a strange 3 frames of latency in the video pipeline that just wouldn’t go away. Even substituting in some dummy frames into the pipeline and ignoring them at output time didn’t work—the latency stuck around. Eventually, [MattKC] realized the delay wasn’t about a certain number of frames—it was about ti...

Most hackers and makers end up with a cheap pair of calipers in the toolbox at some point or another. [DiodeGoneWild] decided to take a particularly cheap plastic pair and tear them down to see what makes them tick measure. The electronics is, unsurprisingly, all contained inside the carriage which slides along the ruler. The ruler itself has an etched copper strip inside, underneath the scale sticker, with repetitive T-shaped sections. Meanwhile, the PCB in the carriage has a series of plates for capactive sensing. As the carriage slides along the copper strip inside the ruler, the capacitive sensing plates pick up varying capacitances which are directly proportional to how far the carriage has moved, allowing for precise measurement of  relative position. Zeroing is a job for the user, via the ZERO button. We get to see how this works on the bare hardware level, and [DiodeGoneWild] even breaks out the oscilloscope to help show us what’s going on. [DiodeGoneWild] also notes t...

The Tasmota firmware is a popular choice for flashing to a range of Espressif microcontrollers to turn them into smart home devices. If you have such devices in your house, you might wish they were easier to integrate with the Apple Home platform. As it turns out, though, there’s a convenient app for that. [Christof Müller] built an app called Tasmoshelf for just this purpose. Its primary claim to fame is that it can easily help port a Tasmota-based setup into the Apple Home universe. It can achieve this without requiring a Home Assistant server or MQTT broker or any other workarounds. This is thanks to the fact that Apple Home is compatible with Matter technology, as are ESP32 devices running Tasmota 13 firmware or newer. They can natively jump on an Apple Home setup, and even act as a bridge for older ESP8266 devices that can’t speak Matter themselves. The device is able to run network scans to automatically discover devices and advise whether they can hook up directly t...

Exciting discoveries in particle physics are one of those things that it can be easy to get blase about. Some people get caught up in the obvious excitement, while others yawn: “Oh, you found the Higgs Boson, just like Higgs predicted. Call me when you have something new.” Well, if you’re in category B, prepare to yawn while the rest of us break out champagne, because it looks like we’ve finally found the glueball.  The glueball has got to be one of the oddest particles to fall out of the Standard Model. It’s not a fundamental particle, but its makeup contains no quarks– those itty bits that make up protons and neutrons– nor any leptons like electrons or muons. No, the glueball is a hadron made entirely of baryons: specifically, gluons, the force-carrying particles of the strong nuclear force. It’s also been called gluonium or a gluon-ball, but glueball is more fun. Try and imagine a proton without any quarks. Remember that inside the pr...

It’s likely many of us have been in the position of first set-up on a machine such as a Raspberry Pi, and had keyboard problems. Either no spare keyboard is to be found, or a cluttered desk has to find extra space for a full-size keyboard. [Henk] has a handy solution, use the existing keyboard on your laptop . His approach is both ingenious and simple, as it’s only the K part of a KVM. On the laptop end, it’s a serial terminal, without the receiving side. The serial port in question is an RP2040 board which implements a USB-to-serial port. This serial connection goes to another RP2040, which does the ingenious bit. It’s a serial-to-USB HID keyboard. All of this means that keystrokes on the laptop are sent down the serial connection, and appear on the Pi or whatever computer as a USB keyboard as though typed locally. The mildly annoying first set-up can be done, and then it can be run via SSH or whatever other remote access protocol as normal. The code is provide...