Kritik sah

Sometimes silly projects catch our eye, and we just can’t resist covering them. Over on Hackaday.io, [solderking] realised that there was a glaring omission in the multi-game management hardware for the game boy Colour. Obviously, it’s too mundane to carry the game boy around with a bunch of games in one’s pocket, and a hardware multichanger would definitely improve the usability. This  convenient, pocket-friendly multichanger  allows you to dock up four game carts at a time, and with only a little mild inconvenience, spin the whole assembly, lock in a game and load it up. What could be easier? Constructed from a ridiculous three-tier PCB stack, with a rotating center joint, the assembly is completely passive, with the connections from the ‘selected’ game cartridge passed down a series of connectors before finally entering the game boy via the usual edge connector. The mere fact that this works at all, just shows how tolerant (and we guess, slow) older gaming platforms used to be, an

Making narrative film just keeps getting easier. What once took a studio is now within reach of the dedicated hobbyist. And Neural Radiance Fields are making it a dramatic step easier. The guys from [Corridor Crew] give an early peek. Filming and editing have reached the cell phone and laptop stage of easy. But sets, costumes, actors, lighting, and so on haven’t gotten substantially cheaper, and making your own short film is still a major project. Enter 3D graphics. With a good gaming laptop, anybody can make a photorealistic scene in Blender and place live action actors in it. But it takes both a lot of skill and work. And often, the scene you’re making is available as  a real place, but you can’t get permission to film or haul actors, props, crew, and so on to the set. A new technology, NERF, for “NEural Radiance Fields”, has decreased the headaches a lot.  Instead of making a 3D model of the scene and using that to predict what reaches the camera, the software starts with video

When we think about greening up the planet, solar panels and electric cars are often at the forefront of our mind. However, there’s a whole bunch of other things out there that are spewing out carbon dioxide that also need to be cleaned up. That includes leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and yes – big equipment for construction and agricultural work! JCB manufactures diesel engines for big machines, but is now looking to switch things up for a cleaner future. To that end, the company is working on hydrogen-burning engines for its big machines. Burning The Lightest Gas Hydrogen can be used to produce electricity by passing it through a fuel cell, where it can then be used to power motors. Companies have explored using hydrogen in this manner to power cars and trucks. JCB initially started by looking at hydrogen fuel cells, too, but found they weren’t great at delivering the instantaneous high power needed for construction machinery. Instead, the company began  exploring using hydrogen t

With billions of computers talking to each other daily, how do they decide anything? Even in a database or server deployment, how do the different computers that make up the database decide what values have been committed? How do they agree on what time it is? How do they come to a consensus? But first, what is the concept of consensus in the context of computers? Boiled down, it is for all involved agents to agree on a single value. However, allowances for dissenting, incorrect, or faulting agents are designed into the protocol. Every correct agent must answer, and all proper agents must have the same answer. This is particularly important for data centers or mesh networks. What happens if the network becomes partitioned, some nodes go offline, or the software crashes weirdly, sending strange garbled data? One of the most common consensus algorithms is Raft. Raft The Secret Lives Of Data has a great animated demonstration of how data flows inside the Raft algorithm between agents

The trick to producing great 3D printing time-lapse animations is to ensure that the extruder has moved out of the frame each time a photo is taken — which usually requires OctoPrint to be controlling both the camera and printer. But [NirL] managed to bodge up a system to get the same result with a spare limit switch, a resistor, his mobile phone, and an old set of earbuds . Not bad for some spare parts and a little extra G-Code. The print head hits a remote shutter button during a brief parking action after each layer. Inserting custom G-Code to park the print head at regular intervals takes care of standardizing the printer’s movements; there’s even a post-processing extension in Cura that makes this easy. As for triggering the camera, [NirL] was inspired by the remote shutter button on a selfie stick. By positioning a physical switch in such a way that the print head pushes it every time it (briefly) parks, a photo gets taken for every layer. Essentially the same thing Octolaps

[JBV Creative] recently became a proud owner of a laser cutter and, like most of us, started to think about what they could make with it. The answer was simple, a clever little piece of art or puzzle made of stacked acrylic . He created some text and extruded it from a single point, but not every part intersected with every plate, giving each plate an indecipherable appearance. This allows a small light source (like the LED likely on the back of your phone) to cast a shadow on the wall. With some 3D printed brackets and spacers, it was mounted to a nice piece of cherry plywood. Overall, the technique is quite simple and easy to understand. [JBV Creative] didn’t include more detail on the process, which is a shame because it looks like a beautiful effect to recreate for some puzzles. These glowing coasters are fantastic if you’re looking for engraved acrylic with a light source. Or this puzzle that lights up as the pieces are placed. from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/YkwFG7g

[Luke Towan] has a cool HO scale Escalator mostly made of 3D printed parts, with some laser cut acrylic, for a station on his HO model railroad. Escalators are mesmerizing to watch – there’s something magical about the stairs unfolding at the bottom and folding up at the top. But they’re very hard to model. [Luke Towan] has done it – his 3D printed version closely resembles the real thing mechanically. Pins are carried around, cantilevered out from a 3D printed chain. A stair swivels on each pin – at the bottom each stair’s free end rests on a ‘bottom’ far enough down for the stairs to be level, while on the incline the ‘bottom’ is just below the pins. It’s a tricky build. If you like pushing the envelope of what 3D printing can do this is an interesting project, even if you’re not planning to build an escalator. There are lots of tips for making small mechanisms with 3D printing, and for making small mechanisms that work reliably without stuttering. He’s not the first to build a

For basic prototyping, the go-to tool to piece together a functioning circuit is the breadboard. It’s a great way to prove a concept works before spending money and time on a PCB. For more complex tasks we can make use of simulation software such as SPICE. But there hasn’t really been a tool to blend these two concepts together. T hat’s what CRUMB is hoping to solve as a tool that allows simulating breadboard circuits. Currently, most basic circuit functions are working for version 1.0. This includes passive components like resistors, capacitors, switches, some LEDs, and potentiometers, as well as some active components like transistors and diodes. There are some logic chips available such as 74XX series chips and 555 timers, which opens up a vast array of circuit building. There’s even an oscilloscope feature, plus audio output to incorporate buzzers into the circuit simulation. Currently in development is an LCD display module and improvements to the oscilloscope. Besides prototy

We’re all familiar with batteries. Whether we’re talking about disposable AAs in the TV remote, or giant facilities full of rechargeable cells to store power for the grid, they’re a part of our daily lives and well understood. However, new technologies for storing energy are on the horizon for grid storage purposes, and they’re very different from the regular batteries we’re used to. These technologies are key to making the most out of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power that aren’t available all the time. Let’s take a look at some of these ideas, and how they radically change what we think of as a “battery.” Iron Flow Batteries Diagram indicating the operation of an iron flow battery. Credit: ESS, Inc, YouTube Normally, the batteries we use consist of a metal or plastic case with some electrolyte inside, sandwiched between electrodes. Usually, the electrolyte is in a paste or gel form and for all intents and purposes, we think of batteries as a typically solid o

Have you ever experienced dizziness, vertigo, or nausea while in a virtual reality experience? That’s VR sickness, and it’s a form of motion sickness. It is not a completely solved problem, and it affects people differently, but it all comes from the same root cause, and there are better and worse ways of dealing with it. If you’ve experienced a sudden onset of VR sickness, it was most likely triggered by flying, sliding, or some other kind of movement in VR that caused a strong and sudden feeling of vertigo or dizziness. Or perhaps it was not sudden, and was more like a vague unease that crept up, leaving you nauseated and unwell. Just like car sickness or sea sickness, people are differently sensitive. But the reason it happens is not a mystery; it all comes down to how the human body interprets and reacts to a particular kind of sensory mismatch. Why Does It Happen? The human body’s vestibular system is responsible for our sense of balance. It is in turn responsible for many bo

A 4D printed object is like a 3D printed object, but it changes shape or self-assembles when its environment changes. [Teaching Tech] has been reading about this technology and decided to try to replicate it using his conventional 3D printer. His attempts to make a joint that changes when submerged in the water looked at several options: material that can absorb water, material that expands with temperature, and — the selected option — a dissolvable locking mechanism. Essentially, a hinge is held open by a water-soluble lock. When water dissolves the lock, the hinge can spring to its natural position. Like most experiments, this one had a few false starts. But you always learn something each time. The final design had a TPU hinge and spring with PLA structural beams. The TPU required flat printing, so various pieces have to be rotatable so they can be placed in their final orientation after printing. Usually, multi-material setups are for printing different colors of the same kind

Some of us who’ve been online since the early days fondly remember the web of yore — with its flashing banners, wildly distracting backgrounds, and automatic side-scrolling text. But there was a time before the worldwide web and the Internet as we recognize it today, and the way of communicating in this before-time was through Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS. There are still some who can cite this deep magic today, and this page is perhaps the definitive guide to this style of retrocomputing . This how-to is managed by [Blake . Patterson] who is using a wide variety of antique machines and some modern hardware in order to access the BBSes still in service. He notes in this guide that it’s possible to use telnet and a modern computer to access them, but using something like an Amiga or Atari will give you the full experience. There are some tools that convert the telephone modem signals from that original hardware to something that modern networking equipment can understand, and while

We spotted [Segfault]’s new tattoo on a fast failing bird app a few days ago. We thought it was nice looking piece of skin art, but without a write up couldn’t cover it. The bearer of the tattoo pointed us to this blog post about the tattoo , and now we really like it. It’s fun on it’s own, but when you start staring at it you realize it’s full of hidden jokes and meanings. If you like puzzles, go hunting for them before you read the blog post. We also liked the reminiscence about [Segfault]’s early electronics experimentation days, and how the 555 timer IC figured prominently in them. We’ve not covered a lot of tattoos here at Hackaday.  Mostly we cover the technology behind skin fused or embedded hacks. But occasionally some tattoo art catches our eye, as it did in this interesting barcode tattoo . from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/pqtwLbE

For those who model CAD models regularly, a pair of calipers is essential as it allows reasonably accurate measurements to fit a specific part. However, [Jason Harris] is taking that concept to the next level with a signed distance function-based CAD tool, SDFX . For those who don’t know, Signed Distance Functions can tell you from a given point how close the nearest part of the model is. The model is represented as a single function that offers some exciting benefits. For instance, chamfering and fileting are often quite complex in traditional CAD programs and trivial in an SDF setting. SDFX is a golang library that allows you to write golang programs to describe the model. OpenSCAD is a favorite of Hackaday as it is a beautiful parametric code-first CAD package. But the syntax and language are somewhat cludgy, to say the best. The advantage of using golang rather than a DSL is that you can use all the niceties that a full-featured language brings. For example, you can export mult

Few CPUs have had the long-lasting influence that the 8086 did. It is hard to believe that when your modern desktop computer boots, it probably thinks it is an 8086 from 1978 until some software gooses it into a more modern state. When [Ken] was examining an 8086 die, however, he noticed that part of the die didn’t look like the rest . Turns out, Intel had a bug in the original version of the 8086. In those days you couldn’t patch the microcode. It was more like a PC board — you had to change the layout and make a new one to fix it. The affected area is the Group Decode ROM. The area is responsible for categorizing instructions based on the type of decoding they require. While it is marked as a ROM, it is more of a programmable logic array. The bug was pretty intense. If an interrupt followed either a MOV SS or POP SS instruction, havoc ensues. The bug was a simple mistake for a designer to make. Suppose you want to change the stack pointer register entirely. You have to load the st

Computers! They’re in everything these days. Everything from thermostats to fridges and even window blinds are now on the Internet, and that makes them all ripe for hacking. Electric vehicle chargers are becoming a part of regular life. They too are connected devices, and thus pose a security risk if not designed and maintained properly. As with so many other devices on the Internet of Things, the truth is anything but.  Compromised! Sometimes, securing a certain system or device is as easy as disconnecting it from the network. When it comes to light switches and door locks, for example, we got by perfectly fine for years without accessing them online. However, in the case of EV chargers, it’s not practical. At the very least, connectivity is required to run payment systems. Additionally, being able to monitor the status and health of EV chargers remotely is a big help in keeping them available and operational. Given that EV chargers must be connected, securing them is important.