Kritik sah

Synthesizers can make some great music, but sometimes they feel a bit robotic in comparison to their analog counterparts. [Chris Guichet] built a “minimum viable” expressive synth to overcome this challenge. (YouTube) Dubbed “The Wiggler,” [Guichet]’s expressive synth centers on the idea of using a flexure as a means to control vibrato and volume. Side-to-side and vertical movement of the flexure is detected with a pair of linear hall effect sensors that feed into the Daisy Seed microcontroller to modify the patch. The build itself is a large 3D printed base with room for the flexure and a couple of breadboards for prototyping the circuits. The keys are capacitive touch pads, and everything is currently held in place with hot glue. [Guichet] goes into detail in the video (below the break) on what the various knobs and switches do with an emphasis on how it was designed for ease of use. If you want to learn more about flexures, be sure to checkout this Open Source Flexure Construct...

The Briggs & Stratton single cylinder sidevalve engine is one that has been in production in one form or another for over a century, and which remains one of the simplest, most reliable, and easiest to maintain internal combustion engines there is. The little single-cylinder can be found on lawnmowers and other similar machinery everywhere, so it’s rather easy to find yourself in possession of more than one. [Lyckebo Mekaniska] evidently had no shortage of them, because he’s produced a V8 engine for a small lawn tractor using eight of them . A small air-cooled V8 sidevalve is something of a unique engine to be made in the 2020s, and the series of videos is definitely worth a watch from start to finish. We’ve been keeping an eye on this build for a while now, and we’ve embedded it below the break for your entertainment. Clearly a lot of CAD work has gone into this build. For an engine which uses mass-produced engines for its construction, this one still relies heavily on parts ...

Haddington Dynamics is a particular company. After winning the 2018 Hackaday Prize with an open-source robotic arm, we’ve covered their micro-factories and suction cup end-effectors for making face shields during 2020. They’ve been laser-focused on their mission of creating a fantastic robot arm at a small price tag with open-source software and design. So how does a company with such a hacker ethos get bought by a much larger company, and why? They came to SuperCon 2022 to share their story  in a panel discussion. Haddington Dynamics started with two clever inventions: optical encoders that used analog values instead of digital values and an FPGA that allowed them to poll those encoders and respond rapidly. This allowed them to use cheaper motors and rely on the incredibly sensitive encoders to position them. After the Hackaday prize, they open-sourced the HD version of the robot and released the HDI version. But in 2020, they were bought by a group called Ocado. As to why th...

When looking at the specifications of smartphones that have been released over the past years, it’s remarkable to see how aspects like CPU cores, clockspeeds and GPU performance have improved during this time, with even new budget smartphones offering a lot of computing power, as well as a smattering of sensors. Perhaps even more remarkable is that of the approximately 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year, many will be discarded again after a mere two years of use. This seems rather wasteful, and a recent paper by Jennifer Switzer and colleagues proposes that a so-called Computational Carbon Intensity (CCI) metric should be used to determine when it makes more sense to recycle a device than to keep using it. What complicates the decision of when it makes more sense to reuse than recycle is that there are many ways to define when a device is no longer ‘fit for purpose’. It could be argued that the average smartphone is still more than good enough after two years to be continued as ...

PeriscopeFilm owners [Doug] and [Nick] just released a mini-documentary about the rescue of a large collection of old 35 and 16 mm celluloid films from the landfill. The video shows the process of the films being collected from the donor and then being sorted and organized in a temporary storage warehouse. There is a dizzying variety of films in this haul, from different countries, in both color and black and white. We can see in the video that their rented 8 meter (26 foot) cargo truck wasn’t enough to contain the trove, so they dragged along a 1.8 x 3.6 m (6 x 12 ft) double-axle trailer as well. That makes a grand total of 49 cubic meters of space. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations says that filled to the brim, that would be over 30,000 canisters of 600 m (2,000 ft) 35 mm movie reels. When it comes to preserving these old films, one big problem is physical deterioration of the film stock itself. You will know something is wrong when you get a strong acetic or vinegary odor w...

Reinforced concrete is the miracle material which made possible so many of the twentieth century’s most iconic structures, but here in this century its environmental footprint makes it something of a concern. As part of addressing this problem, a team at TU Dresden in Germany have completed what is believed to be the world’s first building made with carbon-reinforced concrete , in which the steel rebar is replaced with carbon fiber. New materials are always of interest here at Hackaday, so it’s worth reading further about the nature of the reinforcement . The carbon fiber is woven into a mesh, or as a composite material that mimics existing rebar structures. These two types of reinforcement can be combined in a composite to produce a concrete structure much lighter than traditional steel-reinforced ones. If you page through the architecture critic description, it’s this lightness which has enabled the curving structure of the Dresden building to be so relatively thin. The carbon sav...

If you were a kid anywhere in the last 30 years, it was nearly impossible to avoid at least some exposure to the Pokemon franchise. Whether that’s through games like Red and Blue to Scarlet and Violet, the brief summer everyone played Pokemon Go, or to other media such as the trading card game or anime, it seems to have transcended generations and cultures fairly thoroughly. And, if you’ve consumed all there is of official Pokemon video gaming, you may be surprised to know there are a number of slightly modified games floating around out there that can be translated onto game carts just like their official counterparts. [imablisy] has played a lot of these ROM hack games but always within something like a virtual console or emulator, so he wanted something physical which would work on original hardware of the era. For this he’s making physical copies of Flora Sky and Vega, which are based on Pokemon Emerald and Fire Red originally for the Game Boy Advance. To get the cart he found a...

At first sight, Floppy-8 is simply a LattePanda based PC built into the shell of a external vintage floppy drive . Indeed, it’s a very nicely executed LattePanda PC in a floppy, and we’re impressed by it. What turns it from a nifty case mod into something a bit special though, is the way creator [Abraham Haskins] has used floppy-like cartridges in the original floppy slot, as a means of loading software. The cartridges started out as PCBs in the shape of a floppy with an SD socket on their bottom, and progressed to USB drives on 3D printed cartridges and finally and simplest of all, the same 3D printed cartridges with micro SD cards embedded in their leading edges. All this was necessary to get them thin enough to fit into the existing disk slot — if dimensions weren’t a concern, you could enclose various USB devices into printed cartridges . A script on the computer looks for new card insertion, and runs the appropriate autostart.sh script on the SD card if it finds one. If you don’...

Sometimes a Raspberry Pi will not cut it – especially nowadays, when the prices are high and the in-stock amounts are low. But if you look in your closet, you might find a decently-specced laptop with a broken screen or faulty hinges. Or perhaps someone you know is looking to get rid of a decent laptop with a shattered case. Electronics recycling or eBay, chances are you can score a laptop with at least some life left in it. Let’s hack! I’d like to show you how a used laptop motherboard could be the heart of your project, and walk you through some specifics you will want to know. And what a great deal it could be for your next project! Laptop motherboards can help bring a wide variety of your Linux- and Windows-powered projects to life, in a way that even NUCs and specialized SBCs often can’t do. They’re way cheaper, way more diverse, and basically omnipresent. The CPU can pack a punch, and as a rule PCIe, USB3, and SATA ports are easily accessible with no nonsense like USB-throttle...

Creating three-dimensional shapes from basic elements or even cells is an important research topic, with potentially many applications in the fields of medicine and general research. Although physical molds and scaffolding can be used, the use of ultrasonic holographs is in many ways preferable. Using ultrasonic sound waves into a liquid from two or more transducers shaped to interact in a predetermined manner, any particulates suspended in this liquid will be pushed into and remain in a specific location. Recent research by [Kai Melde] and colleagues has produced some fascinating results here , achieving recognizable 3D shapes in a liquid medium. These are some of the most concrete results produced, following years of research . What distinguishes ultrasonic holography from light-based xolography is that the latter uses photon interference between two light sources in order to rapidly 3D print an object within the print medium, whereas ultrasonic holography acts more as a ultrasoni...

Ever wanted an indoor environment sensor that’s dead simple yet a complete package? That’s the anotter-sensor-hub project from [Jana Marie], designed for the Sensirion SEN05x series sensors, with a SEN055 sensor shown in the picture above. Given such a sensor, you can measure VOCs and NOCs (Volatile and Non-Volatile Organic Compounds), as well as PM1, PM2.5, PM4 and PM10 particulate matter indices, with temperature and humidity sensing thrown in for good measure. Fully open and coupled with 3D printable stand files, this alone makes for an air quality hub fit for a hacker’s desk. That’s not all, however — this board’s elegant extensibility is a good match for the sensor’s impressive capabilities! The PCB itself might look simple, it’s simply an ESP32 and some supporting circuitry required. But you’ll notice there’s also a trove of connector footprints for different interfaces; whatever else you might want to add to your sensor hub, whether it connects through I2C, SPI or PWM, you c...

The seminal 1993 first-person shooter from id Software, DOOM , has become well-known as a test of small computer platforms. We’ve seen it on embedded systems far and wide, but we doubt we’ve ever seen it consume as little power as it does on a specialized neural network processor . The chip in question is a Syntiant NDP200 , and it’s designed to be the always-on component listening for the wake word or other trigger in an AI-enabled IoT device. DOOM  running on as little as a milliwatt of power makes for an impressive PR stunt at a trade show, but perhaps more interesting is that the chip isn’t simply running the game, it’s also playing it. As a neural network processor it contains the required smarts to learn how to play the game, and in the simple circular level it’s soon picking off the targets with ease. We’ve not seen any projects using these chips as yet, which is hardly surprising given their niche marketplace. It is however worth noting that there is a development board ...

Everyone knows we’re big fans of displays that differ from the plain old flat-panel LCDs that seem to adorn most devices these days. It’s a bit boring when the front panel of your widget is the same thing you stare at hour after hour while using your phone. Give us the chunky, blocky goodness of a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) any day of the week for visual interest and retro appeal. From the video below , it seems like [Posy] certainly is in the VFD fandom too, rolling out as he does example after example of unique and complicated displays, mostly from audio equipment that had its heyday in the 1990s. In some ways, the video is just a love letter to the VFD, and that’s just fine with us. But the teardowns do provide some insights into how VFDs work, as well as suggest ways to tweak the overall look of a VFD. For example, consider the classy white VFDs that graced a lot of home audio gear back in the day. It turns out, the phosphors used in those displays weren’t white, but close...

If we were to talk to engineers about the childhood toys which most inspired them, it’s likely that the older among them would mention either Meccano or Erector Set. These similar construction toys using metal components originated independently around the turn of the 20th century in both Britain and America, and eventually became part of the same company. They were a staple of toy shops through the middle of the century, but have steadily declined in popularity over the past few decades. Now news has emerged that the last dedicated Meccano factory, in Calais, France, is to close . The products will still be made, but in other factories alongside other toys. It’s not the end for Meccano or Erector Set, but it’s clear that they are both toys whose time may have passed. It’s fair to say that the possibilities of those perforated metal sheets and myriad nuts and bolts might seem a little limited for the 2020s child, but it opens the age-old question of what remains to interest young mi...

Training robots to execute tasks in the real world requires data — the more, the better. The problem is that creating these datasets takes a lot of time and effort, and methods don’t scale well. That’s where Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience (ROSIE) comes in. The basic concept is straightforward: enhance training data with hallucinated elements to change details, add variations, or introduce novel distractions. Studies show a robot additionally trained on this data performs tasks better than one without. This robot is able to deposit an object into a metal sink it has never seen before, thanks to hallucinating a sink in place of an open drawer in its original training data. Suppose one has a dataset consisting of a robot arm picking up a coke can and placing it into an orange lunchbox. That training data is used to teach the arm how to do the task. But in the real world, maybe there is distracting clutter on the countertop. Or, the lunchbox in the training da...

If you’re like us, you’re always in need of a little more space to store things. [Javier Guerrero] realized his sofa wasn’t living up to its full storage potential and designed this sofa armrest storage . [Guerrero]’s sofa arms were hiding 80 liters of space, so he really wanted to do something with it. After disassembling them, he found his original plan of just cutting them up wouldn’t work due to the minimal structure inside. Not to be discouraged, he drew up some plans and built replicas from 15 mm plywood. For one armrest, he made a single giant box that opens from the top where he can store a couple of folding chairs. On the other side, he made a shorter top-opening bin for charging phones and storing the remote. Underneath that is a large pull out drawer with a pegboard for organizational bliss. The arms were upholstered using the fabric from the original arms plus a little extra from another slip cover. Separate arm modules and easily obtainable matching fabric aren’t a giv...