Kritik sah

This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with Tony Zeoli about Netmix and the Radio Station WordPress plugin. The story starts with the Netmix startup, one of the first places doing Internet music in the 1990s. That business did well enough to get bought out just before the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000. Today, Tony runs the Radio Station plugin, which is all about putting a station’s show schedule on a WordPress site. In the process, the trio covers Internet radio history, the licensing complications around radio and streaming, the state of local radio, and more. Is there a long term future for radio? Does Creative Commons solve the licensing mess? Is AI going to start eating radio, too? All this and more! – wordpress.org/plugins/radio-station – radiostation.pro – netmix.com – tonyzeoli.com – avlhms.com – linkedin.com/in/tonyzeoli Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord ? Next week we’re interviewing Matt Ray of the Openco...

Building a 3D motor printed motor is one thing, but creating a completely custom servo motor with encoder requires some significant engineering. In the video after the break [365 Robots] takes us through the build process of a closed-loop motor with a custom optical encoder . The motor, an axial flux design, uses a stack of 0.2mm PCBs with wedge shaped coils clamped in a 3D printed body. It’s similar to some of the other PCB motors we’ve featured, but what really sets this build apart is its custom optical encoder, which was a project in its own right. The 4-bit absolute position encoder uses IR LEDs to shine through an PCB disc with concentric gray code copper encoder rings onto IR receivers. This works because FR4, the composite material used in PCBs doesn’t block IR light. The motor’s body was printed from ABS to withstand the heat during operation. [365 Robots] didn’t skimp on the testing either, creating a 3D printed closed-loop test stand with load cell and Arduino. Like o...

3D mice with six degrees of freedom (6DOF) motion are highly valued by professional CAD users. However, the entry-level versions typically cost upwards of $150 and are produced by a single manufacturer. [Colton Baldridge] has created the OS3M Mouse — an open source alternative using PCB coils and 3D printed flexures. The primary challenges in creating a 6DOF input device, similar to the 3Dconnexion Space Mouse, lie in developing a mechanical coupling that enables full range motion, and electronics capable of precisely and consistently measuring this motion. After several iterations of printed flexure combinations and trip down the finite element analysis (FEA) rabbit hole, [Colton] had a working single-piece mechanical solution. To measure the knob’s movement accurately, [Colton] employs inductive sensing. Inductance to Digital Converters (LDCs) assess the inductive alterations across three pairs of PCB coils , each having an opposing metal disk mounted on the knob. This setup all...

Have you ever wished you had more control over what goes into a kit keyboard build? Like, a whole lot more control? Well, that’s the idea behind the Akruvia 12×4 Playground by [iketsj]. Image by [iketsj] via YouTube This is a 48-key ortholinear keyboard, but other than that, it’s a complete blank slate. The kit includes the PCB, diodes, RGB LEDs, and Kailh Choc V1 hot swap sockets, which is really the only choice you don’t have in the matter. All the rest is up to you, thanks to a generous prototyping area that wraps around three sides of the keys. Bring your own microcontroller and anything else that sounds useful, like displays, rotary encoders, gesture sensors, pointing devices, you name it. You could even magnetically link a macro pad to one side, as [iketsj] teases in the intro video . [iketsj] has made the kit available through links on their website, and you’ll find a product guide there as well. The Boston Typewriter Orchestra The Boston Typewriter Or...

Over the last five years or so there has been a quiet take-over of the ports on laptops, phones, and other devices, as a variety of older ports as well as the familiar USB A and micro USB sockets have been replaced by the now-ubiquitous USB-C port. It’s a connector which can do so many things, so many in fact that it bears a handy explanation. The Electromagnetic Field 2022 hacker camp has been quietly uploading videos of its talks, and a recent one has [Tyler Ward] explaining the intricacies of the interface . Many of you will be familiar with XKCD number 927 which makes a joke about proliferating connector standards, and it’s evident that USB-C is a rare case of a connector which bucks the trend of simply making another standard, and has instead created something with which it makes sense to replace what went before. We learn about the intricacies of inter-device communications and USB-PD, and the multiple high-speed connection  lanes shoehorned into it. That one small connect...

[Kagen Sound] is a woodworker and artist who gives a great behind-the-scenes look at his amazingly high-quality puzzle boxes (video). Not only do his varied puzzle box designs show his math background, but they are all made entirely of wood. There are no nails or fasteners; just intricately-fitted wood and some glue. There’s a lot of variety in his designs, and while it’s all fantastic from beginning to end, two things stood out to us as being of particular interest. One is the “Plus Box” which makes a clicking sound when the pieces are moved (at 2:47 ) thanks to a clever wooden spring. [Kagen] shows an example of the concept, where a flat wood piece with slots cut from the sides acts as a spring and clicks into notches when moved, providing audible and tactile feedback without anything other than wood. The other is a patterned puzzle box (at 7:10 ) whose geometric designs change as the user moves the pieces. A reminder that [Kagen]’s devices are made entirely of wood and glue, so ...

The team of [Michael] and [Chimdi] from Cornell’s Designing with Microcontrollers (ECE 4760) Fall 2023 session designed a version of Simon Says on an RP2040 which they call Pico Says . It uses UDP packets over WiFi to communicate between the players, and supports VGA graphics for output. Each player’s hardware consists of a Pico W module plus a control panel containing the four LEDs and buttons ( red, green, yellow, and blue ) plus send and reset buttons. For purposes of this lab, the modules were build on a solderless breadboard and used perfboard for the control panels. They weren’t entirely happy with their choice of UDP because they experienced frequent datagram dropouts in the noisy environment of the microcontroller lab. They also planned to implement sound effects, but ran out of time after spending too much time on the WiFi implementation, and had to drop that feature. In the end, however, they wrapped up their project and demonstrated a working game. We can only speculate w...

Today, we’ll build our own input devices. And they will be easy to create and write firmware for, they will work perfectly, and they will be cross-platform. We can do that with help of the Human Interface Device (HID) standard, and by way of introduction, so that you never get confused by what a “descriptor” means, and we’ll build our own HID device — a Human Interface Device device. The way we build them won’t require reading specifications – instead, I’ll teach your how to steal HID descriptors from existing devices, tweak them for our purposes, and use them in our devices to harness the power of HID. For decades now, it’s been possible to build a HID mouse or keyboard by using a library or two, and it’s been a godsend for hackers all around the world. However, these libraries are typically confined to a certain template and inflexible, and we hackers often go outside of what’s expected. HID allows for much more than a simple keyboard or a mouse. That’s why today we’re building a t...

During a press event on January 23rd, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) demonstrated two new robots at the mock-up facility at Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s Naraha Center for Remote Control Technology Development ( NARREC ). As pictured by AP , one is a snake-like robot that should be able to reach very inaccessible areas, while four flying drones will be the first to enter the containment vessel of the Unit 1 reactor for inspection. The flying drone to be used at Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit 1 building. (Credit: Daisuke Kojima/Kyodo News via AP) These flying drones are 20 cm across, weigh 185 grams each, and were adapted from an existing model that’s used for boiler inspections. At the Naraha Town facility, operators were able to practice flying it into a copy of the Unit 1’s containment vessel via the piping. As the most heavily damaged unit at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, engineers are interested to learn the details of the fuel and debris that has fallen to the bottom of the v...

If your pointing device is a mouse, turn it over. The chances are you’ll see a red LED light if you’re not seriously old-school and your mouse has a ball, this light serves as the illumination for a very simple camera sensor. The mouse electronics do their thing by looking for movement in the resulting image, but it should be possible to pull out the data and repurpose the sensor as a digital camera. [Doctor Volt] has a new video showing just that with the innards of a Logitech peripheral . The mouse contains a microcontroller and the camera part, which fortunately has an SPI interface. The correct register to query the sensor information was deduced, and as if my magic, an image appeared. An M12 lens provided focus with a handy 3D printed mount, and the board went back into the mouse case as a housing. The pictures have something of the Game Boy camera about them, being low-res and monochrome, but it’s still a neat hack. If you’d like to give it a go you can find the code in a GitH...

[Let’s Print] has been fascinated with creating a 3D printed axial compressor that can do meaningful work, and his latest iteration mixes FDM and SLA printed parts to successfully inflate (and pop) a latex glove, so that’s progress! Originally, the unit couldn’t manage even that until he modified the number and type of fan blades on the compressor stages. There were other design challenges as well. For example, one regular issue was a coupling between the motor and the rest of the unit breaking repeatedly. At the speeds the compressor runs at, weak points tend to surface fairly quickly. That’s not stopping [Let’s Print], however. He plans to explore other compressor designs in his quest for an effective unit. Attaching motor shafts to 3D printed devices can be tricky, and in the past we’ve seen a clever solution that is worth keeping in mind: half of a spider coupling (or jaw coupling) can be an economical and effective way to attach 3D printed things to a shaft . While blowing up...

Aside from keeping decades-old consumer-grade computing hardware working, a major problem for many retrocomputing enthusiasts lies in doing the same for vintage monitors. Whether your screen is a domestic TV or a dedicated monitor, the heat and voltage stress of driving a CRT made these devices significantly less reliable than many of their modern-day counterparts. [Adrian’s Digital Basement] has a worn-out and broken Commodore 1701 monitor, which he’s brought back to life with a modern circuit board and a CRT transplant. Following on from a previous project , he’s using a replacement board sold as a repair option for CRT TVs on AliExpress. The Commodore monitor has its board on a metal chassis which takes the replacement with a bit of modification. He doesn’t say where the new CRT came from, but we’re guessing it was a late model TV as CRTs made over the last few decades are more interchangeable than might be expected. There’s a moment of mild dodginess as he makes a voltage doubler...

Alright, here’s your quick and dirty hack for the day. The astute among you may recall [Peter Waldraff]’s bookshelf train build of a few days ago, and the fact that he used a switch made from a dead ballpoint pen to light up the scene. Fortunately, [Peter] wrote in to give us the details of this low-voltage sub-build , which you can see in the video after the break. Essentially, [Peter] starts by making a shortened version of the pen. He modifies nearly every bit of it, including cutting down the ink cartridge, so if you try this, make sure the thing is all dried up first. Then, as he is screwing the point holder back on the barrel, he wraps elastic cord around the inside barrel in lieu of having sewing thread lying around. This cord along with some hot glue will hold a pair of paper clips to the sides of the point holder. When the pen is clicked into the writing position, it makes a connection between the paper clips and closes the circuit on whatever is wired into it. What types o...

[Janis Alnis] wanted to build an analog computer circuit and bought some multiplier chips. The first attempt used apparently fake chips that were prone to overheating. He was able to get it to work and also walked through some Octave (a system similar to Matlab) simulations for the circuit. You can follow along in the video below. Getting the little multiplier chips into the breadboard was a bit of a challenge. Of course, there are a variety of ways to solve that problem. The circuit in question is from the always interesting [Glen’s Stuff] website . From that site: The Lorenz system, originally discovered by American mathematician and meteorologist, Edward Norton Lorenz, is a system that exhibits continuous-time chaos and is described by three coupled, ordinary differential equations. So, the circuit is an analog solution to the system of differential equations. Not bad for a handful of chips and some discrete components on a breadboard. We’ve seen a similar circuit on Hackad...

From the “No good deed goes unpunished” files, this week came news of a German programmer who probably wishes he had selected better clients. According to Heise Online ( English translation ), a freelance programmer — referred to only as “defendant” in the article — was retained by a company to look into a database problem in their system. His investigation revealed that the customer’s database was being filled with log messages from a third-party service called Modern Solution GmbH & Co. KG. over a MySQL connection to a remote server. Assuming this connection was dedicated for his client’s use, the programmer looked at the executable used to make the connection with a text editor, which revealed a password in plain text. Upon connecting to t he remote database, he found that it not only contained data for all of Modern Solution’s customers, but also data for all the end users of their customers. Realizing he’d unintentionally wandered into verboten territory, the programmer im...

Nanoleaf is well-known as being that company that makes those lovely glowing tiles that you can hang on your wall. The only thing is, they’re not cheap. So if you want a really cool layout, you have to spend a great amount of money. [Projects with Red] was inspired by the basic concept, though, and whipped up their own gem-shaped wall tiles along similar lines. The devices can work as a big clock if you so desire. The irregular hexagon shape of each gem has ten connection points to attach the segments together. Physical connections are made using the 3D printed housings of each segment, while connections are simply made with wires and connectors hanging out the back for flexibility. Each segment features a black printed housing with a solid lid and a translucent acrylic sheet to act as a diffuser. An addressable LED strip is mounted to the lid for illumination, with Dupont connectors for hooking them up to power and data. An ESP32 is used to drive the addressable LED chain, runni...