Kritik sah

Remember the “suitcase” form-factor for PCs? In the time before latops, these luggable machines were just the thing for the on-the-go executive. OK, maybe not really — but the ability to have PC, monitor, and peripherals in a single package had real appeal, and a lot of that rationale is behind the cyberdeck phenomenon. So when we saw this retro portable TV turned into a cyberdeck , it really caught our eye. Ironically, the portable black-and-white TV that [Lucas Dul] chose as the basis for his cyberdeck hails from about the same period in time that luggable PCs were having their brief time in the sun. Scored from eBay, the Magnavox TV/radio combo had seen better days, and required a bit of surgery to repair what might have been drop damage. With the CRT restored and the video and audio paths located, the TV got a Raspberry Pi, a small touchpad, and a couple of concealed USB connectors. The Pi’s composite output drives the CRT, with about the results you’d expect. The keyboard appear...

When people are thinking of the future of space travel, an idea that floats around is a spaceship with a giant solar sail pushed along by a massive laser. Inspired by the concept but lacking a giant laser, [Tom Stanton] build a small craft powered by a vortex cannon . Creating a vortex is hard enough, but creating a vortex with enough oomph to travel a longer distance and push something takes some doing. [Sam] started with some cheap solenoids, but had a few issues. Their interior nozzles were quite small, which restricted airflow. He used four valves all plumbed together to provide the volume of air needed. Additionally, he found that their response time was lacking. They couldn’t quite switch off quickly enough so instead of a puff of air, it pushed out something closer to a stream. To compensate, [Sam] 3d printed and tried a few different sizes of cone nozzles to see if that helped. Unfortunately, it did not. So he combined the nozzle with an expansion chamber that allowed the pre...

In any given field there are epoch-defining moments, those events after which nothing was quite the same as it had been before. It’s been a decade since the launch of the first Raspberry Pi single board computer. This was by no means the first inexpensive computer board, nor was it the first to support the GNU/Linux operating system, but it was among the first to promise a combination of those two. Coupled with support from a crop of British 8-bit alumni meant that from when it first gained publicity in early 2011 it garnered a huge buildup of interest. We were first teased with a USB stick style prototype, which morphed into a much larger Raspberry Pi alpha board and finally into pre-production boards much closer to the model launched at the end of February ten years ago. How To Disappoint Every Single British Geek At 6 AM An array of Pi prototype boards pictured on display at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. Pedants will claim that the 10th birthday of the Pi is t...

On our news feeds and TV channels at the moment are many stories concerning the war in Ukraine, and among them is one which may have an effect on the high-tech industries. It seems that a significant percentage of the world’s neon gas is produced in Ukrainian factories, and there is concern among pundits and electronics manufacturers that a disruption of this supply could be a further problem for an industry already reeling from the COVID-related chip shortage. It’s thus worth taking a quick look at the neon business from an engineering perspective to perhaps make sense of some of those concerns. As most readers will know from their high school chemistry lessons, neon is one of the so-called inert gasses, sitting in the column at the extreme right of the Periodic table. It occurs in nature as a small percentage of the air we breathe and is extracted from the air by fractional distillation of the liquid phase. The important point from the above sentences is that the same neon is all ...

If there’s one thing that can trigger people, it’s the printer racket. Printer manufacturers who put DRM-like features into their consumables are rightly viewed as Satan’s spawn, and while these monsters have been content so far to only put digital rights management features into their ink and toner cartridges, they appear to now have their rapacious gaze set on print media too. At least according to the good folks over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who claim that Dymo’s latest generation of label printers will have RFID tags in the label cartridges, apparently to prevent consumers from buying non-Dymo media. The company doesn’t bill it as a way to lock you into their exorbitantly priced consumables, of course; rather, this is an exciting new feature that’s called “Automatic Label Recognition,” which keeps track of what labels are installed and how many are left. Of course, this is just red meat to people like us, and we fully expect to see workarounds in the not-to-distant ...

Often, reprogramming a microcontroller involves placing it in reset, flashing the code, and letting it fire back up. It usually involves shutting the chip down entirely. However, [bor0] has built a virtual machine that runs on the ESP32, allowing for dynamic program updates to happen. The code is inspired by the CHIP-8, a relatively ancient interpreter that had some gaming applications. [bor0] had already created a VM simulating the CHIP-8, and repurposed it here, taking out the gaming-related drawing instructions and replacing them with those that control IO pins. Registers have also been changed to 16 bits for added flexibility and headroom. It’s probably not something with immediate ground-breaking applications for most people, but it’s a different way of working with and programming the ESP32, and that’s pretty neat. The ESP32 is a powerful chip, too, as we all know – and it makes a great 8-bit emulator to boot. Sound off in the comments with your thoughts on what would make ...

Owning an oscilloscope is a real gamechanger and these days, scopes are more capable and less expensive than ever before. However, there is a big difference between scopes that cost several hundred dollars which are usually quite good and many of the very inexpensive — below $100 — instruments that are often — but not always — little more than toys. [Adrian] looks at a PC-based scope from Hantek that costs about $60. Is it a toy? Or a useful tool? He answers the question in the video below. The Hantek 6022BE sports two channels with a 20 MHz bandwidth and 48 million samples per second. The device included probes, too. Of course, you also need a PC, although there is apparently third-party software for Android if you don’t want to lug a laptop around. With two channels and relatively low bandwidth and sample rates, this Hantek is not going to displace a good benchtop scope, but you aren’t going to get one of those at this price point. The question you have to ask yourself is what ...

The late 90s and early 2000s were a breakout time for mobile phones, with cheap GSM handsets ushering in the era in which pretty much everybody had a phone. Back then, a popular way to customize one’s phone was to install a sticker that would flash when the phone rang. These required no batteries or any other connection to the phone, and [Big Clive] has dived in to explain how they worked.  The simple schematic of the flashing sticker circuit. The flashing was generated by the pulses of RF energy from the smartphone. It’s an old-fashioned teardown that requires a bit of cutting to get inside the sticker itself. A typical example had three LEDs in series for a total voltage drop of around 7V, hooked up to two diodes and a PCB trace antenna. A later evolution used raw unpackaged components bonded to the PCB. Future versions went down to a single diode, using the LEDs to serve as the second. The basic theory was that the PCB traces would pick up RF transmitted by the phone when a...

Technology enables all kinds of possibilities to mold our environments in the way we best see fit. Plenty of ski resorts use snowmaking to extend their seasons, there are wave pools for surfing hundreds of miles away from oceans, and if you don’t live near any mountains you can build your own climbing wall as well. For the latter, many have turned to 3D printers to create more rock-like climbing grips but plastic doesn’t tend to behave the same as rock unless you do what [Giles Barton-Owen] did and incorporate salt into the prints. For small manufacturers, typically the way that the rock texture is mimicked is by somehow incorporating sand, permanently, into the grip itself. This works well enough but is often too rough on climbers’ hands or otherwise doesn’t faithfully replicate a rock climbing experience. For these grips, instead of including sand, salt crystals of a particular size were added to a resin that was formed over the 3D printed grip. Once the resin cures substantially, ...

We’ve all experienced power outages of some kind, be it a breaker tripping at an inconvenient time to a storm causing a lack of separation between a tree and a power line. The impact is generally localized and rarely is there a loss of life, though it can happen. But in the video below the break, [Brady] of Practical Engineering breaks down the Northeast Blackout of 2003 , the largest power failure ever experienced in North America. Power was out for days in some cases, and almost 100 deaths were attributed to the loss of electricity. [Brady] goes into a good amount of detail regarding the monitoring systems, software simulation, and contingency planning that goes into operating a large scale power grid. The video explains how inductive loads cause reactance and how the effect exacerbated an already complex problem. Don’t know what inductive loads and reactance are? That’s okay, the video explains it quite well, and it gives an excellent basis for understanding AC electronics and eve...

Thin clients were once thought by some to be the future of computing. These relatively low-power machines would rely on large server farms to handle the bulk of their processing and storage, serving only as a convenient local way for users to get access to the network. They never quite caught on, but [Jan Weber] found an old example and set about repurposing it as a NAS . The Fujitsu Futro S900 was built up to 2013, and only had one SATA port from the factory. [Jan] wanted to add another as this would make the device more useful as a network attached storage server. The motherboard design was intended primarily for industrial control or digital signage applications, and thus has plenty of interfaces onboard. [Jan]’s first target was some unpopulated footprints for SATA ports onboard, but after soldering on a connector, it was found that the BIOS wouldn’t recognise the extra ports anyway. However, after reflashing the BIOS with one from an alternate model, the port worked! The syste...

A pair of would-be exam cheats were caught red-handed at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College in Indore, India, as they tried to use Bluetooth devices surgically implanted in their ears for a bit of unauthorised exam-time help. It’s a news story that’s flashed around the world and like most readers we’re somewhat fascinated by the lengths to which they seem to have been prepared to go, but it’s left us with a few unanswered questions. The news reports all have no information about the devices used, and beyond the sensationalism of the story we’re left wondering what the practicalities might be. Implanting anything is a risky and painful business, and while we’ve seen Bluetooth headphones and headsets of all shapes and sizes it’s hardly as though they’re readily available in a medically safe and sterile product. Either there’s a substantial rat to be smelled, or the device in question differs slightly from what the headlines would lead us to expect. Miniature Bluetooth head...

Bending wood is a complex affair. Despite the curves inherent in trees, most wood does not naturally want to bend. There are a few tricks you can use to bend it however, such kerf cutting and steaming. [JAR made] has a clever hack to make better kerf cuts using a CNC bit . Typically kerfs are cut with a table saw or a miter saw set to trench. Many laser-cut box generations use kerfs to allow the piece to bend . The downside is that the cuts are straight cuts that are the same thickness throughout. This means that when the wood is bent into its shape, there are large gaps that need to be filled if you want the wood to look continuous. The hack comes in by using a router (not the networking kind) with a 6.2-degree taper. This means that the kerfs that it makes are angled. By placing the right amount of cuts and spacing them out equally, you get a perfectly rounded curve. To help with that even spacing, he whipped up a quick jig to make the cuts repeatable. Once all the cuts were made, ...

Started by graduate students from the California Institute of Technology in the late 1930s, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was instrumental in the development of early rocket technology in the United States. After being tasked by the Army to analyze the German V2 in 1943, the JPL team expanded from focusing purely on propulsion systems to study and improve upon the myriad of technologies required for spaceflight. Officially part of NASA since December of 1958, JPL’s cutting edge research continues to be integral to the human and robotic exploration of space. For longtime friend of Hackaday Ara “Arko” Kourchians, getting a job JPL as a Robotics Electrical Engineer was a dream come true. Which probably explains why he applied more than a dozen times before finally getting the call to join the team. He stopped by the Hack Chat back in August of 2019 to talk about what it’s like to be part of such an iconic organization, reminisce about some of his favorite projects, and reflect on...

A right-to-repair battle is being waged in courts. The results of it, we might not see for a decade. The Caps Wiki is a project tackling our repairability problem from the opposite end – making it easy to share information with anyone who wants to repair something. Started by [Shelby], it’s heavily inspired by his vintage tech repairs experience that he’s been sharing for years on the [Tech Tangents] YouTube channel . When repairing a device, there are many unknowns. How to disassemble it? What are the safety precautions? Which replacement parts should you get? A sporadic assortment of YouTube videos, iFixit pages and forum posts might help you here, but you have to dig them up and, often, meticulously look for the specific information that you’re missing. The Caps Wiki talks a lot about capacitor replacement repairs – but not just that. Any device, even modern ones, deserves a place on the Caps Wiki, only named like this because capacitor repairs are such a staple of vintage devic...

These days, live music performance often involves electronic synthesizers and computers rather than traditional instruments played by hand. To aid in his own performances, [alekappa] built a special interface to take signals from a joystick and convert them to MIDI messages carried over USB. The build is simple and straightforward, using a Teensy LC to interface with a simple gameport joystick. With a smattering of simple components, it’s easy to read the outputs of the joystick with only a little debounce code needed to ensure the joystick’s buttons are read accurately. Similarly, analog axes are read using the analog-to-digital converters onboard the microcontroller. This data is then converted into control changes, note triggers and velocity levels and sent out over the Teensy LC’s USB interface. A mode switch enables changes to the system’s behaviour to be quickly made. The device is wrapped up in a convenient housing nabbed from an old Gameport-to-USB converter from many years ...

For all its ability to advance modern society in basically every appreciable way, science still has yet to explain some seemingly basic concepts. One thing that still has a few holes in our understanding is the method by which a bicycle works. Surely, we know enough to build functional bicycles, but like gravity’s inclusion into the standard model we have yet to figure out a set of equations that govern all bicycles in the universe. To push our understanding of bicycles further, however, some are performing experiments like this self-balancing omniwheel bicycle robot . Functional steering is important to get the bicycle going in the right direction, but it’s also critical for keeping the bike upright. This is where [James Bruton] is putting the omniwheel to the test. By placing it at the front of the bike, oriented perpendicularly to the direction of travel, he can both steer the bicycle robot and keep it balanced. This does take the computational efforts of an Arduino Mega paired wi...