Kritik sah

Soldering is one of those jobs that are conceptually simple enough, but there’s quite a bit of devil in the detail and having precisely the right tool for the job in hand is essential for speed and quality of results. The higher-quality soldering stations have many options for the hot end, but switching from a simple pencil to hot tweezers often means unplugging one and reattaching the other, and hoping the station recognises the change and does the right thing. [Lajt] had three soldering options and a single output station. Their solution was a custom-built three-way frontend box that provides a push-button selection of the tool to be connected to the station sitting atop. [Lajt] shows in the blog post how each of their target hot ends is wired and the connectivity the control station expects to determine what is plugged in. Failing to recognise a connected 50 W heating element as if the smaller 25 W unit was still connected would suck, with a huge amount of lag as the temperature

In 1897 the state assembly of the American state of Indiana famously tried and failed to pass a bill which would have had the effect of denying the value of the mathematical constant Pi. It was an attempt to define a method to “square the circle”, or draw a square of the same area as a given circle through a series of compass and straight edge steps. It’s become something of a running joke and internet meme, and of course defining Pi exactly remains as elusive as ever. Today and today alone though, you can in one sense claim that Pi is 3, because it’s twelve years since the launch of the original Raspberry Pi . The 29th of February 2012 was a leap day, and today being the third leap day since, could be claimed by a date pedant to be the third birthday of the little board from Cambridge. It’s all a bit of fun, but the Pi folks have marked the occasion by featuring an LED birthday cake. Three leap days ago, your scribe was up at the crack of dawn to be one of the first to snag a board

There’s great potential in salvaging a motor from a broken appliance, but so often the part in question is very specific to its application, presenting a puzzle of wires to the experimenter. This was very much the case with older washing machines and other white goods, and while their modern equivalents may have switched to more understandable motors, there are still plenty of the older ones to be had. [Matthias random stuff] sheds a bit of light on how these motors worked , by means of a 1980s Maytag washing machine motor. Many of us will be used to old-style induction motors, in which two windings were fed out of phase via a large capacitor. This one doesn’t have a capacitor, instead it has a primary winding and a secondary one with a higher resistance. We’re not quite sure the explanation of the resistance contributing to a phase shift holds water, however this winding is connected in for a short time at start-up by a centrifugal switch. Even better, reversing its polarity reverse

In the Holy Programming Language Wars, the lingua franca of system programming – also known as C – is often lambasted for being unsecure, error-prone, and plagued with more types of behavior that are undefined than ones that are defined by the C standards. Many programming languages were said to be ‘C killers’, yet C is still alive today. That didn’t stop the US White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) from putting out a report in which both C and C++ got lambasted for being ‘unsafe’ when it came to memory management. The full report (PDF) is pretty light on technical details, while citing only blog posts by Microsoft and Google as its ‘expert sources’. The claim that memory safety issues are the primary cause of CVEs is not substantiated, or at least ignores the severity of CVEs when looking at the CISA statistics for active exploits. Beyond this call for ‘memory safety’, the report then goes on to effectively call for more testing and validation, while kicking

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Elliot Williams talk with Eben Upton About the Raspberry Pi! The conversation covers the new Pi 5 , the upcoming CM5 , the possible Pi500, and the Initial Public Offering (IPO) that may happen before too long. There’s also the PCIe port, the RP1, and the unexpected effects of using Broadcom chips. And then we ask the Billion Dollar question: What’s the money from an IPO going to fund? New hardware, software upgrades, better documentation? Nope, and the answer surprised us, too. Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord ? Next week, we’re talking with Julian Lam about NodeBB! Direct Download in DRM-free MP3. If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode . Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast: Spotify RSS from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/XcGbKYE

We see plenty of solar projects here on Hackaday, but they primarily consist of projects that use an off-the-shelf solar panel to power something else. We see very few projects where people actually create their own solar panels. And yet, that’s precisely what [Shih Wei Chieh] has done! The project consists of a large dye-sensitized solar panel. These are a type of solar panel that can easily be created by the DIY builder, though their efficiency leaves something to be desired versus the best commercial types available. However, you can build them in any way you like to suit your application, which can have some potential benefits. It consists of two pieces of FTO glass that is etched and prepared to become the electrodes for a string of solar cells. The cells have to be treated with titanium dioxide and then laced with silver traces, before being assembled with liquid electrolyte squirted in between. It’s finicky stuff, but the video almost makes it look easy… if you’re familiar w

The behavior of electrons and the exact fundamentals underlying the phenomenon we call ‘electricity’ are still the subject of many competing theories and heated debates. This is most apparent in the area of superconducting research, where the Fermi liquid theory — which has has formed the foundation of much of what we thought we knew about interacting fermions and by extension electrons in a metal — was found to break down in cuprates as well as in other metals which feature a state that is a non-Fermi liquid, also called a ‘strange metal phase’. This phase was the subject of a 2023 research article by [Liyang Chen] and colleagues in Science titled Shot Noise in a Strange Metal . As summarized in a Quanta Magazine article, the term ‘shot noise’ refers hereby to the quasiparticles that are postulated by the Fermi liquid theory to form part of the electrical current as electrons interact and ‘clump’ together, creating discrete ‘particles’ that can be measured like rain drops falling

Last time, we talked about the surface-level details of Ethernet. They are fundamental to know for Ethernet hacking, but they’re also easy to pick up from bits and pieces online, or just from wiring up a few computers in your home network. Now, there’s also a bunch of equipment and standards that you will want to use with Ethernet – easy to find whether used or new, and typically as easy to work with. Let’s give you a few beacons! Routers And Switches Whenever you see a box with a few Ethernet ports, it’s either referred to as a router, or a switch, sometimes people will even use the word “hub”! Fortunately, it’s simpler than it may seem. A router is a smart device, typically with an OS, that ties two or more networks together – routing packers from one network to another, and typically taking care of things like handing out local IP addresses via DHCP. A switch merely helps Ethernet devices exchange packets between each other on the same level – it’s typically nowhere near as smar

If you want to draw schematics today, you probably sit down at your computer. Why not? There are a ton of programs made to do the work easily, and the results look great. Back in the day, you might sit at a drafting table with a full set of T-squares, triangles, and maybe a Leroy. But what about when inspiration struck at the coffee shop (no, not a Starbucks in those days)? Well, you probably had a schematic drawing template. We were surprised you can still buy these at high prices. Or you can 3D print your own , thanks to [Jan Stech]. Templates of all kinds used to be very common. There were several for schematics, logic symbols, furniture, and even geometric shapes and curves. They were almost always green and transparent. A quick search on Amazon for “drafting template” shows you can still get the generic templates, but schematic ones are still expensive. [Jan’s] templates are miniature. You probably can’t easily make them clear either, although you could probably use them as a

Telescopes are fun to point around the sky, but they’re even better when you have some idea of what you’re actually looking at. Experienced sky-gazers love nothing more than whipping out some quality glassware and pointing it to the heavens to try and view some photons from some fancy celestial point of interest. To aid your own endeavors in this realm, you might consider following [aeropic’s] example in building a capable wireless telescope DSC. Yes, [aeropic] built a capable digital setting circle (DSC) which can be used to quickly point a telescope at objects in the sky, with the aid of the right astronomical software. An ESP32 board runs the show, using AS5600 positional encoders on each axis of the telescope to understand the device’s orientation. The encoders are attached via 3D-printed components to track the motion of the telescope accurately. It can then be paired over Bluetooth with a smartphone running an app like Skysafari. Once calibrated on some known stars, the app can

[packetandy] had a problem. He was still into classic analog photography, but local options for development were few and far between. After some frustration, he decided to take on the process himself, creating an automatic development tank for that very purpose. For black and white film, developing is fairly straightforward, if dull and time consuming. The film requires constant agitation during development, which can be dull to do by hand. To get around this, [packetandy] decided to build a development tank rig that could handle agitation duties for him by wiggling the film around in his absence. The tank itself is created by Patterson, and has a stick on top for agitating the film inside. The rig works by attaching a NEMA stepper motor to this stick to jerk it around appropriately. Rather than go with a microcontroller and custom code, [packetandy] instead just grabbed a programmable off-the-shelf stepper controller that can handle a variety of modes. It’s not sophisticated, but n

The 10BASE-T1 Ethernet standard is also known as ‘single pair Ethernet’ (SPE), as it’s most defining feature is the ability to work over a single pair of conductors. Being fairly new, it offers a lot of advantages where replacing existing wiring is difficult, or where the weight of the additional conductors is a concern, such as with the underwater sensor node project that [Michael Orenstein] and [Scott] dreamed up and implemented as part of a design challenge. With just a single twisted pair, this sensor node got access to a full-duplex 10 Mbit connection as well as up to 50 watts of power. The SPE standards (100BASE-T1, 1000BASE-T1 and NGBASE-T1) 10BASE-T1 can do at least 15 meters (10BASE-T1S), but the 10BASE-T1L variant is rated for at least 1 kilometer. This makes it ideal for a sensor that’s placed well below the water’s surface, while requiring just the single twisted pair cable when adding Power over Data Lines (PoDL). Whereas Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) uses its own dedicate

[Math the World] claims that your calculus teacher taught you integration wrong. That’s assuming, of course, you learned integration at all, and if you haven’t forgotten it. The premise is that most people think of performing an integral as finding the area under a curve or as the “antiderivative.” However, fewer people think of integration as adding up many small parts . The video asserts that studies show that students who don’t understand the third definition have difficulty applying integration to real-world problems. We aren’t sure that’s true. People who write software have probably looked at numerical integration like Simpson’s rule or the midpoint rule. That makes it pretty obvious that integration is summing up small bits of something. However, you usually learn that very early, so you’re forgiven if you didn’t get the significance of it at the time. Even if you didn’t learn calculus, the video is an easy introduction to the idea of integration with practical examples draw

Are you making your own decisions and mainlining causality like a sucker? Why go through the agony, when you could hand over the railway switch of determinism to a machine that can decide things for you! Enter the DeDeterminator, a decision machine from [Oliver Child]. The construction is simple enough, being built inside a small tin. One kind of wishes it had a secret third “PERHAPS” bulb that illuminates only when the universe’s continued existence has been called into question. The idea is simple. At the press of a button, the DeDeterminator illuminates a bulb—indicating either yes or no. The decision for which bulb to illuminate is truly random, as it’s determined by the radioactive decay of a Americium-241 alpha particle source. A Geiger-Muller tube is used to detect alpha particles, with the timing between detections used to determine the yes-or-no output of the device. It’s a neat concept, and it’s kind of fun knowing that your decision is both out of your hands and as ran

A few days ago, KiCad 8 was released, and it’s a straight upgrade to any PCB designer’s quality of life. There’s a blog post as usual, and, this year, there’s also a FOSDEM talk from [Wayne Stambaugh] talking about the changes that we now all get to benefit from. Having gone through both of these, our impression is that KiCad 8 developers went over the entire suite, asking: “this is cool, but could we make it better”? The end result is indeed a massive improvement in a thousand different ways, from small to fundamental, and all of them seem to be direct upgrades from the KiCad 7 experience . For a start, KiCad works better with whatever other tools you might use. There’s the recently added LTSpice schematic import and overall serious SPICE simulation improvements, SVG and DXF import for the schematic editor, an “export copper” option for STEP, mechanical CAD import QoL tweaks, IPC-2581 export for whenever manufacturers start supporting it, and Cadence Allegro netlist export in ca