Kritik sah

[Carl Bugeja] finds the engineering behind the Las Vegas Sphere fascinating, and made a video all about the experience of designing and building a micro-sized desktop version . [Carl]’s version is about the size of a baseball and crams nearly a thousand RGB pixels across the surface. A four-layer flexible PCB is the key to routing data and power to so many LEDs. Putting that many addressable LEDs — even tiny 1 mm x 1 mm ones — across a rounded surface isn’t exactly trivial. [Carl]’s favored approach ended up relying on a flexible four-layer PCB and using clever design and math to lay out an unusual panel shape which covers a small 3D printed geodesic dome. Much easier said that done, by the way. All kinds of things can and do go wrong, from an un-fixable short in the first version to adhesive and durability issues in later prototypes. In the end, however, it’s a success. Powered over USB-C, his mini “sphere” can display a variety of patterns and reactive emojis. As elegant and i...

Rejoice, those of us who have purchased a Nice-Power lab PSU from an Eastern source. Yes, the name might sound like a re-brand of a generic product, maybe you will even see this exact PSU on a shelf at a physical store near you, under a more local brand name and with a fair markup. Nevermind the circumstances, the most important part is that [Georgi Dobrishinov] found a way to add an ESP8266 to the PSU by tapping its internal UART control interface, and wrote a web UI for all your Internet-of-Lab-PSUs needs, called the PowerLinkESP project. All you need is a Wemos D1 development board, or any other ESP8266 board that has UART pins exposed and handles 5 V input. [Georgi] brings everything else, from pictures showing you where to plug it in and where to tap 5 V, to extensive instructions on how to compile and upload the code, using just the Arduino IDE. Oh, and he tops it off with STLs for a 3D printed case, lest your Wemos D1 board flop around inside. With [Georgi]’s software, you c...

There are plenty of cool clocks out there, and maps by their very essence are cool, too. But a map that’s also a clock — or is it a clock that’s also a map? — has to be the coolest thing ever. Of course we’re talking about the Geochron, a world clock that makes the relationship between the Earth and the Sun clear and has graced the offices of executives who want to impress visitors with the global nature of their importance for decades. [Attoparsec] has long coveted one of these electromechanical beauties, and when a used one popped up online for a pittance, at least compared to what they cost new, he jumped at the chance. The Geochron he ended up with was in need of some TLC, but surprisingly little considering its mid-1980s vintage. The real treat in the video below is getting to see how these wonderful devices work. They’re basically simple slide projectors. While we here in the future would simply do everything in software on a nice flat-screen display, the base map, night-day ...

These days, when most folks think of a computer they imagine a machine with multiple CPUs, several gigabytes of RAM,  and a few terabytes of non-volatile storage for good measure. With such modern expectations, it can be difficult to see something like a microcontroller as little more than a toy. But if said MCU has a keyboard, is hooked up to a display, and lets you run basic productivity and development software, doesn’t that qualify it as a computer? It certainly would have in the 1980s. With that in mind, [Olimex] has teased the RVPC , which they’re calling the “world lowest cost Open Source Hardware All-in-one educational RISC-V computer” (say that three times fast). The tiny board features the SOIC-8 variant of the CH32V003 and…well, not a whole lot else. You’ve got a handful of passives, a buzzer, an LED, and the connectors for a PS/2 keyboard, a power supply, and a VGA display. The idea is to offer this as a beginner’s soldering kit in the future, so most most of the comp...

Cooking some types of noodles requires that the uncooked noodles be placed in boiling water, cooked for some time, and then strained before eating. To get around all of this tedium, there are a few “instant” varieties of noodles available that simply need to have hot water added to them. After a short time absorbing the water they are ready to eat. Most would use a simple kitchen timer to let us know when it’s time to chow down, but this unique mechanical timer uses the weight of the noodles themselves to power a timing mechanism. The timer acts in much the same way that a pendulum clock would, in that a weight provides the energy to drive the clock’s mechanism which releases that energy in discrete steps. Besides a few metal parts and some magnets, the majority of the clock is 3D printed with a small platform on the side where the noodles rest. As the platform falls the weight drives the clock mechanism which will finally alert the user when they finish their descent three minutes ...

Unique clocks are a mainstay around here, and while plenty are “human readable” without any instruction, there are a few that take a bit of practice before someone can glean the current time from them. Word clocks are perhaps on the easier side of non-traditional displays but at the other end are binary clocks or even things like QR code clocks. To get the best of both worlds, though, multiple clock faces can be combined into one large display like this clock build from [imitche3] . The clock is actually three clocks in one. The first was inspired by a binary clock originally found in a kit, which has separate binary “digits” for hour, minute, and second and retains the MAX 7219 LED controller driving the display. A standard analog clock rests at the top, and a third clock called a retrograde clock sits at the bottom with three voltmeters that read out the time in steps. Everything is controlled by an Arduino Nano with the reliable DS3231 keeping track of time. The case can be laser-...

If you want to make a good first impression on someone, it seems like the longer you can keep them talking, the better. After all, if they want to keep talking, that’s a pretty good sign that even if you don’t become business partners, you might end up friends. What better way to make an acquaintance than over a friendly game of tic-tac-toe? This one will probably take them by surprise, being a 4×4 matrix rather than the usual 3×3, but that just makes it more interesting. The front of the card has all the usual details, and the back is a field of LEDs and micro switches. Instead of using X and O, [Edison Science Corner] is using colors — green for player one, and red for player two. Since playing requires the taking of turns, the microcontroller lights up green and red with alternating single-button presses. Speaking of, the brains of this operation is an ATMega328P-AU programmed with Arduino. If you’d like to make your own tic-tac-toe business card, the schematic, BOM, and code are...

If your old camera’s WiFi picture upload feature breaks, what do you do? Begrudgingly get a new one? Well, if you’re like [Ge0rg], you break out Ghidra and find the culprit. He’s been hacking on Samsung’s connected cameras for a fair bit now, and we’ve covered his adventures hacking on Samsung’s Linux-powered camera series throughout the last decade, from getting root on them for fun, to deep dives into the series . Now, it was time to try and fix a problem with one particular camera, Samsung WB850F, which had its picture upload feature break at some point. [Ge0rg] grabbed a firmware update .zip , and got greeted by a bunch of compile-time debug data as a bonus, making the reverse-engineering journey all that more tempting. After figuring out the update file partition mapping, loading the code into Ghidra, and feeding the debug data into it to get functions to properly parse, he got to the offending segment, and eventually figured out the bug. Turned out, a particularly blunt line...

When you are young, you take it for granted that you can pick out a voice in a crowded room or a factory floor. But as you get older, your hearing often gets to the point where a noisy room merges into a mishmash of sounds. University of Washington researchers have developed what they call Target Speech Hearing . In plain English, it is an AI-powered headphone that lets you look at someone and pull their voice out of the chatter. For best results, however, have to enroll their voice first, so it wouldn’t make a great eavesdropping device. If you want to dive into the technical details, their paper goes into how it works. The prototype uses a Sony noise-cancelling headset. However, the system requires binaural microphones so additional microphones attach to the outside of the headphones. Given training data, we wonder if traditional correlation methods would be just as effective. In other words, you could use facial recognition to figure out who’s talking and pull their voice out u...

Most people have heard of or seen slide rules, with older generations likely having used these devices in school and at their jobs. As purely analog computers these ingenious devices use precomputed scales on slides, which when positioned to a specific input can give the output to a wide range of calculations, ranging from simple divisions and multiplications to operations that we generally use a scientific calculator for these days. Even so, these simple devices are both very versatile and can be extremely precise, as [Bob, the Science Guy] demonstrates in a recent video . Slide rules at their core are very simple: you got different scales (marked by a label ) which can slide relative to each other. Simple slide rules will only have the A through D scales, with an input provided by moving one scale relative to the relevant other scale (e.g. C and D for multiplication/division) after which the result can be read out. Of course, it seems reasonable that the larger your slide rule is,...

This week Jonathan Bennett chats with Dennis and Goran about EEZ, the series of projects that started with an Open Source programmable power supply, continued with the BB3 modular test bench tool, and continues with EEZ Studio, a GUI design tool for embedded devices. EEZ hardware: https://www.envox.eu/bench-power-supply/introduction/ https://www.envox.eu/eez-bb3/ https://hackaday.io/projects/hacker/90785 Build Yourself an Awesome Modular Power Supply EEZ software: https://www.envox.eu/studio/studio-introduction/ Goran’s EEZ related work: https://www.envox.eu/2021/12/22/production-testing-automation-for-open-hardware-ulx3s-board https://intergalaktik.eu/projects/stm32-ulx3s-module https://intergalaktik.eu/projects/bb3-cm4 https://intergalaktik.eu/news/bb3-cm4-emc-h7 https://intergalaktik.eu/projects/stm32-ulx3s-module Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord ? Have someone you’d like use to interview? Let us know, or co...

[Felipe Tavares] wasn’t satisfied with the boring default fonts on an HD44780-based display. And while you can play some clever tricks with user-defined characters, if you want to treat the display as an array of pixels, you’ve got to get out your scalpel and cut up a data line. The hack builds on work from [MisterHW] who documented the bits going from the common display driver to the display , and suggested that by cutting the data line and sending your own bits, you could send arbitrary graphics. The trick was to make sure that they’re in sync with the display, though, which means reading the frame sync line in user code. This done, it looks like [Felipe] has it working! If you can read Rust for the ESP32, he has even provided us with a working demo of the code that makes it work. We can’t help but wonder if it’s not possible to go even lower-level and omit the HD44780 entirely. Has anyone tried driving one of these little LCD displays directly from a microcontroller, essential...

Images of whole-fruit chocolate formulations after kneading at 31 °C and subsequent heating to 50 °C. The ECP concentration in the sweetening gel and the added gel concentrations in the CM are shown on the X and Y axes, respectively. (Credit: Kim Mishra et al., Nature Food, 2024) It’s hard to imagine a world without chocolate, and yet it is undeniable that there are problems associated both with its manufacturing and its consumption. Much of this is due to the addition of sugar, as well as the discarding of a significant part of the cacao pod, which harbors the pulp and seeds. According to a study by [Kim Mishra] and colleagues in Nature Food , it might be possible to ditch the sugar and instead use a mixture of cacao pulp juice (CPJC) and endocarp powder (ECP), which are turned into a sweetening gel. This gel replaces the combination of sugar with an emulsifier (lecithin or something similar) in current chocolate while effectively using all of the cacao pod except for the husk. ...

[Thomas] found an interesting probable millivoltmeter with some Beckman displays. Like many instruments from that time period, this one had a lot of tobacco smoke residue inside. The display unit inside had a sticker that not only showed the company that made it, but also had their Telex number on it, another sign of the times. You can see the device in the video below. The unit looked like a one-off made by a hobbyist or a technician but the case looked suspiciously like old Bang and Olfusen equipment. Someone in the video comments mentions it was built for the service department. Some of the wiring had not survived well and there was a broken display digit. What’s more, is the millivolt marking applied to the display. The actual instrument has dividers that provide readings in volts, not millivolts. That Beckman display is very retro and [Thomas] breaks into that subassembly if you fancy a peek inside. Beckman made some interesting displays . Voltmeters sure have changed over ...

Sometimes it seems like ideas for projects spring out of nothingness from a serendipitous set of circumstances. [Maarten] found himself in just such a situation, with a combination of his existing Tetris novelty lamp and an awkwardly-sized window on a second-floor apartment, he was gifted with the perfect platform for a giant playable Tetris game built into that window . To make the giant Tetris game easily playable by people walking by on the street, [Maarten] is building as much of this as possible in the browser. Starting with the controller, he designed a NES-inspired controller in JavaScript that can be used on anything with a touch screen. A simulator display was also built in the browser so he could verify that everything worked without needing the giant display at first. From there it was on to building the actual window-sized Tetris display which is constructed from addressable LEDs arranged in an array that matches the size of the original game. There were some issues t...

Sometimes a hack doesn’t need to be rocket science to be useful. Take for instance [MofigoDIY] using an old spark plug to build a glass cutter . Sure, going to grab a glass cutter at the hardware store might be easy, but there’s something satisfying about going the DIY route. [MofigoDIY]’s version of this classic hack is a bit more refined than the quick and dirty route of smashing the spark plug alumina and hot gluing it into a tube. After using a rotary tool to cut off the threads and expose the narrow part of the ceramic, [MofigoDIY] grinds it down to a fine point. This lets the spark plug itself become the handle, so you don’t need any additional parts to make the cutter. Toward the end of the video, a heated wire is used to break a glass jar apart after it was scored which might be of interest even if you already have a glass cutter. Once you’re finished making your glass cutter, make sure you dispose of any chips left over, since ceramic spark plug fragments are considered bur...

Here at Hackaday, we love it when someone picks up the ball from a previous project and runs with it. That’s what we’re all about, really — putting out cool projects that just might stimulate someone else to extend and enhance it, or even head off in an entirely new direction. That’s how the state of the art keeps moving. This DIY spectrometer project is a fantastic example of that ethos. It comes to us from [Michael Prasthofer], who was inspired by [Les Wright]’s PySpectrometer , a simple device cobbled together from a pocket spectroscope and a PiCam. As we noted at the time, [Les] put a lot of the complexity of his instrument in the software, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for improvement. [Michael]’s goals were to make his spectrometer a little easier to build, and to improve the calibration process and overall accuracy. To help with the former, he went with software correction of the color filter array on his Fuji X-T2. This has the advantage of not requiring a high-po...

The use of concrete and steel have both become the bedrock of modern-day construction, which of course also means that there is a lot of both which ends up as waste once said construction gets demolished again. While steel is readily recyclable, the Portland cement that forms the basis of concrete so far is not. Although the aggregate from crushed concrete can be reclaimed, the remainder tends to end up in a landfill, requiring fresh input of limestone to create more cement. Now a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge claim to have found a way to recycle hydrated Portland cement by using it as flux during steel production in electric arc furnaces ( EAFs ). Not only does this save a lot of space in landfills, it also stands to reduce a lot of the carbon dioxide produced during cement and steel production, which is primarily from the use of limestone for cement and lime-dolomite for steel. The details can be found in the open access paper in Nature by [Cyrille F. Duna...

For those willing to put some elbow grease into it, there is an almost unlimited supply of 18650 lithium ion batteries around for cheap (or free) just waiting to be put into a battery pack of some sort. Old laptop and power tool batteries are prime sources, as these often fail because of one bad cell while the others are still perfectly usable. [limpkin] built a few of these battery packs and now that he’s built a few, he’s back with a new project that allows him to use four custom packs simultaneously . The problem with using different battery packs in parallel is that unless the batteries are charged to similar voltages, they could generate a very high and potentially dangerous amount of current when connected in parallel. This circuit board, powered by a small ATtiny microcontroller, has four XT-60 connectors for batteries and a fifth for output. It then watches for current draw from each of the batteries and, using a set of solid-state relays, makes sure that no dangerous overcur...

You walk into a home office and see an attractive standing desk that appears bare. Where’s the computer? Well, if it is [DIY Perk]’s office, the desk is the computer. Like a transformer robot, the desk transforms into a good-looking PC. He starts with a commercial desk and creates a replacement desktop out of some aluminum sheets and extrusions. The motion uses some V-slot profiles and linear rails. The monitor and keyboard shelf pop up on invisible hinges. When closed, there’s no trace of a computer. The mechanics of the pop-out hatch are complex, but they worked the first time. At least, we think it was the first time. Video editing is a possibility! He did have to add some springs and pneumatics to keep it from slamming down. A magnet gives a positive lock feeling when you open the hatch. The monitor is an ultra-wide OLED that can be curved or flat. He removed the electronics from the panel and mounted the screen on the inner part of the hatch. Half of the electronics went ba...

We’re all used to wireless networking, but if there’s one thing the ubiquitous WiFi on 2.4 or 5 GHz lacks, it’s range. Inside buildings, it will be stopped in its tracks by anything more than a mediocre wall, and outside, it can be difficult to connect at any useful rate more than a few tens of metres away without resorting to directional antennas and hope. Technologies such as LoRa provide a much longer range at the expense of minuscule bandwidth, but beyond that, there has been little joy. As [Andreas Spiess] points out in a recent video though, this is about to change, as devices using the so-called HaLow or IEEE 802.11ah protocol are starting to edge into the realm of affordability. Perhaps surprisingly, he finds the 5 GHz variant to be best over a 1km test with a far higher bandwidth. However, we’d say that his use of directional antennas is something of a cheat. Where it does come into its own in his tests, though, is through masonry, with far better penetration across floors...

Some of us may have recently stumbled over these mysterious ‘Mini 560’ synchronous buck converter modules at various e-shopping websites. These little modules claim to take in 7-20 VDC and output whatever voltage they’re configured for (e.g., 5 VDC). What IC is used on these modules? Since the IC on these modules has had its markings laser-etched away, answering that particular question is a tedious sleuthing job. Fortunately, [MisterHW] has done the legwork for us already, with a detailed write-up. Details like the nominal input rating, measured currents, and resulting efficiency values provide clues. Looking at the 0603 SMD resistor values for given output voltages provides the programming resistances, combined with the footprint of the QFN-20 package. After desoldering the IC on a sample board, the footprint was reminiscent of certain Texas Instruments (Ti) packages, leading to a perusal of the Ti parametric database and a couple of candidate matches. JoulWatt JW5069A buck con...