Kritik sah

We’ve seen furniture made out of all sorts of interesting materials here, but clay certainly isn’t the first one that comes to mind. [Mia Mueller] is expanding our horizons with this clay stool she made for her garden. Starting with an out-of-budget inspiration piece, [Mueller] put her own spin on a ceramic stool that looks like a whimsical human head. An experienced potter, she shows us several neat techniques for working with larger pieces throughout the video. Her clay extruder certainly beats making coils by hand like we did in art class growing up! Leaving the coils wrapped in a tarp allows her to batch the process coils and leave them for several days without worrying about them drying out. Dealing with the space constraints of her small kiln, her design is a departure from the small scale prototype, but seeing how she works through the problems is what really draws us to projects like this in the first place. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be making, would it? The final result ...

Making a microcontroller speak to a VGA monitor has been a consistent project in our sphere for years, doing the job for which an IBM PC of yore required a plug-in ISA card. Couldn’t a microcontroller talk to a VGA card too? Of course it can, and [0xmarcin] is here to show how it can be done with an Arduino Mega . The project builds on the work of another similar one which couldn’t be made to work, and the Trident card used couldn’t be driven in 8-bit ISA mode. The web of PC backwards compatibility saves the day though, because many 16-bit ISA cards also supported the original 8-bit slots from the earliest PCs. The Arduino is fast enough to support the ISA bus speed, but the card also needs the PC’s clock line to operate, and it only supports three modes:  80 x 25, 16 colour text, 320 x 200, 256 colour graphics, and 640 x 480, 16 colour graphics. Looking at this project, it serves as a reminder of the march of technology. Perhaps fifteen years or more ago we’d have been able to ...

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) was founded to support moonshot projects in the realm of energy, with a portfolio that ranges from the edge of current capabilities to some pretty far out stuff. We’re not sure exactly where their newest “Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)” falls, but they’re looking for critical materials from the wastewater treatment process . [via CleanTechnica ] As a refresher, critical materials are those things that are bottlenecks in a supply chain that you don’t want to be sourcing from unfriendly regions. For the electrification of transportation and industrial processes required to lower carbon emissions, lithium, cobalt, and other rare earth elements are pretty high on the list. ARPA-E also has an interest in ammonia-based products which is particularly interesting as industrial fertilizers can wreak havoc on natural ecosystems when they become run off instead of making it into the soil. As any farm...

Back when CD-Rs were the thing, there were CD burner drives which would etch images in the unoccupied areas of a CD-R. These so-called LightScribe drives were a novelty of which most users soon tired, but they’re what’s brought to our mind by [dbalsom]’s project. It’s called PNG2disk, and it does the same job as LightScribe, but for floppies . There’s one snag though; the images are encoded in magnetic flux and thus invisible to the naked eye. Instead, they can be enjoyed through a disk copying program that shows a sector map. The linked GitHub repository has an example, and goes in depth through the various options it supports, and how to view images in several disk analysis programs. This program creates fully readable disks, and can even leave space for a filesystem. We have to admit to being curious as to whether such an image could be made physically visible using for example ferrofluid, but we’d be the first t admit to not being magnetic flux experts. PNG2disk is part of the F...

“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is playing on the radio now in the Northern Hemisphere which begs the question, “What happened to the American chestnut?” Would you be surprised to hear there’s a group dedicated to bringing it back from “functional extinction?” [via Inhabitat ] Between logging and the introduction of chestnut blight, the once prevalent American chestnut became increasingly uncommon throughout its traditional range in the Appalachians. While many trees in the southern range were killed by Phytophthora root rot (PRR), the chestnut blight leaves roots intact, so many chestnuts have been surviving by growing back from the roots only to succumb to the blight and be reborn again. Now, scientists are using a combination of techniques to develop blight-resistant trees from this remaining population. The American Chestnut Foundation recognizes you can’t improve what you can’t measure and uses a combination of “small stem assays (SSAs) performed on potted seedlings, imp...

We don’t know much more than what we see with [Kounotori_DIY]’s battery loader design (video embedded below) but it just looks so cool we had to share. Watch it in action, it’ll explain itself. Before 3D printers made it onto hobbyist workbenches, prototyping something like this would have been much more work. [Kounotori_DIY] uses a small plastic linear guide as an interface for an 18650 battery holder and as you can see, it’s pretty slick. A little cylindrical container slides out of the assembly, allowing a spent cell to drop out. Loading a freshly charged cell consists of just popping a new one into the cylinder, then snapping it closed. The electrical connection is made by two springy metal tabs on either end that fit into guides in the cylindrical holder. It’s just a prototype right now, and [Kounotori_DIY] admits that the assembly is still a bit big and there’s no solid retention — a good bump will pop the battery out — but we think this is onto something. We can’t help b...

Pen plotters are popular builds amongst DIY CNC enthusiasts. They’re a great way to learn the fundamentals of motion control and make something useful along the way. In that vein, [Maker101] has created a neat barebones plotter for tabletop use.  The basic design relies on familiar components. It uses a pair of MGN15 linear rails as the basis of the motion platform, along with NEMA 17 stepper motors to run the X and Y axes. These are assembled with the aid of 3D-printed parts that bring the whole frame together, along with a pen lifter operated with a hobby servo. The neat thing about the design is that the barebones machine is designed to sit upon an existing tabletop. This eliminates the need to integrate a large flat work surface into the plotter itself. Instead, the X axis just runs along whatever surface you place it on, rolling on a small wheel. It’s likely not ideal for accuracy or performance; we could see the machine itself skating around if run too fast. For a lightwei...

[Paul Junkin] bought a curious product off the Internet. It was supposed to generate electricity when hooked up to a running hose. Only, it didn’t do a very good job. His solution was straightforward— he built his own hose-powered generator that actually worked. The design uses a turbine hooked up to a small motor acting as a generator. To maximize the transfer of energy from the stream of water to the blades of the turbine, the hose is hooked up to a convergent nozzle. [Paul] does a great job explaining the simple physics at play, as well as the iterative design process he used to get to the final product. He calculates the best-case power coming out of his hose around 50 watts, so for his turbine to collect 22 watts is a win, and it’s good enough to charge a phone or run some LED lighting. Of course, this isn’t a practical generator if you have to pay for the water, and there are other solutions that will get you less wet. Still, credit where it’s due—this thing does make power wh...

Renewables let you have a more diverse set of energy inputs so you aren’t putting all your generation eggs in one basket. One type of renewable that doesn’t see a lot of love, despite 80% of the world’s population living within 100 km (~60 mi) of a coastline, is harnessing the energy of the tides . [via Electrek ] “The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that wave energy has the potential to generate over 1,400 terawatt-hours per year,” so while this initial project won’t be huge, the overall possible power generation from tidal power is nothing to sneeze at. Known more for its role in shipping fossil fuels, the Port of Los Angeles will host the new wave power pilot being built by Eco Wave Power and Shell. Eco Wave’s system uses floaters to drive pistons that compress hydraulic fluid and turn a generator before the decompressed fluid is returned to the pistons in a nice, tidy loop. Eco Wave plans to finish construction by early 2025 and alread...

They simply don’t make them like they used to, and in the case of this retro LX system build, they only make what never existed in the first place. Earlier this year the long awaited video game UFO 50 released to widespread critical acclaim. The conceit of the game is an interactive anthology of a faux 1980’s game console constructed by a large group of actual indie game developers. Leave it to [Luke], who admitted to UFO 50 to taking over his life, to bring the LX system from the digital screen to the real world . Each piece of the LX System case was printed on a multi-color filament capable Bambu Labs P1S. Dual XLR jacks wired up as USB serve as controller ports, and the controller itself is a repurposed NES style USB controller fitted with a new housing printed with the same filament as the case. Both the prominent front mounted power and “sys” buttons are functional; the latter actually switches to a new game within UFO 50. The brains of this project is a mini Windows PC hooked u...

If you’re good at music theory, you can probably find all the chords and progressions you need just by using your fingers and a suitable instrument. For a lot of musicians, though, remembering huge banks of chords can be difficult, and experimenting with combinations can quickly become tedious and tiring. Enter the minichord , a tiny version of the Omnichord synth designed by [Benjamin] that offers to help out by putting all the chords you need a mere button press away. The minichord is based around the Teensy 4.0 , a capable microcontroller platform if ever there was one. It’s paired with a bunch of tactile buttons which are used to tell the Teensy which chord you desire to play. Various combinations of buttons can be used to play more advanced chords, too. There are potentiometers on board as well for volume control, as well as a touch pad for “strumming” arpeggios and other fine control tasks. An online interface allows modifying the presets onboard, too. [Benjamin] hopes to get...

This holiday season, [Chaz] wanted to continue his family’s tradition of enrobing a little bit of everything in dark chocolate, and built an improved, rotating chocolate-coating machine . You may remember last year’s offering, aka the conveyor belt version . Although that one worked, too much chocolate was ultimately lost to the surface of the kitchen table. [Chaz] once again started with a standard chocolate fountain and bought a round wire rack that fits the circumference of the bowl at the bottom. He snipped a hole in the center large enough to accommodate the business part of the fountain and printed a collar with holes that he cleverly zip-tied to the rack. [Chaz] also printed a large gear to go around the bowl, a small gear to attach to a six RPM motor, a motor mount for the bowl, and an air blade attachment for a portable Ryobi fan. The air blade worked quite well, doing the double duty of distributing the chocolate and thinning out the coating. Plus, it gives things a neat r...

If you’ve been tearing electronic devices apart for long enough, you’ll know that the old gear had just as many mysteries within as the newer stuff. The parts back then were bigger, of course, but often just as inscrutable as the SMD parts that populate boards today. And the one part that always baffled us back in the days of transistor radios and personal cassette players was those little silver boxes with a hole in the top and the colorful plug with an inviting screwdriver slot. We’re talking about subminiature intermediate-frequency transformers, of course, and while we knew their purpose in general terms back then and never to fiddle with them, we never really bothered to look inside one. This teardown of various IF transformers by [Unrelated Activities] makes up somewhat for that shameful lack of curiosity. The video lacks narration, relying on captions to get the point across that these once-ubiquitous components were a pretty diverse lot despite their outward similarities. Mo...

If you think your job sucks, be grateful you’re not this homebrew sewer inspection robot . Before anyone gets upset, yes we know what [Stargate System] built here isn’t a robot at all; it’s more of a remotely operated vehicle. That doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a very cool build, especially since it has to work in one of the least hospitable and most unpleasant environments possible. The backstory of this project is that the sewer on a 50-year-old house kept backing up, and efforts to clear it only temporarily solved the problem. The cast iron lateral line was reconfigured at some point in its history to include a 120-degree bend, which left a blind spot for the camera used by a sewer inspection service. What’s worse, the bend was close to a joint where a line that once allowed gutters and foundation drains access to the sewer. To better visualize the problem, [Stargate] turned to his experience building bots to whip up something for the job. The bot had to be able to...

[Angus] of Maker’s Muse has a video with a roundup of different 3D-printable hinge designs , and he points out that a great thing about 3D printing objects is that adding printable features to them is essentially free. These hinges have an indexing feature that allows them to lock into place, no additional parts needed. A great example of this is his experimental print-in-place butt hinge with indexing feature, which is a hinge that can lock without adding any additional parts. The whole video is worth a watch, but he shows off the experimental design at the 7:47 mark . The hinge can swing normally but when positioned just right, the squared-off pin within slots into a tapered track, locking the part in place. Inspired by a handheld shopping basket with a lockable handle, [Angus] worked out a design of his own and demonstrates it with a small GoPro tripod whose legs can fold and lock in place. He admits it’s a demonstration of the concept more than a genuinely useful tripod, but ...

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Lars Wikman chat about Elixir and Nerves — a modern language that’s a take on Erlang, and an embedded Linux approach for running Elixir code on devices. https://underjord.io https://elixir-lang.org/ https://nerves-project.org/ Introducing Elixir and the ecosystem from Oredev 2023 Introducing Nerves from Oredev 2024 (just released) The Soul of Erlang & Elixir, by Sasa Juric Subscribe to catch the show live, and come to Hackaday for the rest of the story! Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show Right on our YouTube Channel ? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us! Take a look at the schedule here .  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 Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Co...

Although humanity was hoping for a more optimistic robotic future in the post-war era, with media reflecting that sentiment like The Jetsons or Lost in Space, we seem to have shifted our collective consciousness (for good reasons) to a more Black Mirror/Terminator future as real-world companies like Boston Dynamics are actually building these styles of machines instead of helpful Rosies. But this future isn’t guaranteed, and a PhD researcher is hoping to claim back a more hopeful outlook with a robot called Blossom which is specifically built to investigate how humans interact with robots . For a platform this robot is not too complex, consisting of an accessible frame that can be laser-cut from wood with only a few moving parts controlled by servos. The robot is not too large, either, and can be set on a desk to be used as a telepresence robot. But Blossom’s creator [Michael] wanted this to help understand how humans interact with robots so the latest version is outfitted not only w...

[bitluni]’s laser-based display pretending to be a an old-school vector CRT. Phosphor-based displays like CRTs rely on the phosphor to emit light for a set amount of time after being activated, allowing them to display a seemingly persistent image with one drawing beam per color. Translated to UV-sensitive PLA filament, this means that you can totally use a printed sheet of this material in combination with a 405 nm laser diode to create a display that doesn’t look dissimilar to an early CRT. This is exactly what [bitluni] did in a recent video , meshing together said laser diode, UV-sensitive PLA, stepper motors and two mirrors with an Arduino-based controller to create a rather interesting vector display. In the video, [bitluni] goes over the development steps, including a range of improvements like being able to turn off the laser when moving between the end of a line and the beginning of a new one. While the Arduino Nano board does the driving of the stepper motor controllers, ...

By default, bash is the most popular command language simply because it’s included in most *nix operating systems. Additionally, people don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about whatever their computer uses for scripting as they might for other pieces of software like a word processor or browser. If you are so inclined to take a closer look at this tool that’s often taken for granted, there are a number of alternatives to bash and [monzool] wanted to investigate them closely . Unlike other similar documentation that [monzool] has come across where the writers didn’t actually use the scripting languages being investigated, [monzool] is planning to use each of these and accomplish specific objectives. This will allow them to get a feel for the languages and whether or not they are acceptable alternatives for bash. Moving through directories, passing commands back and forth, manipulating strings, searching for files, and manipulating the terminal display settings are all included...

Life was simpler when everything your computer did was text-based. It is easy enough to shove data into one end of a pipe and take it out of the other. Sure, if the pipe extends across the network, you might have to call it a socket and take some special care. But how do you pipe all the data we care about these days? In particular, I found I wanted to transport audio from the output of one program to the input of another. Like most things in Linux, there are many ways you can get this done and — like most things in Linux — only some of those ways will work depending on your setup. Why? There are many reasons you might want to take an audio output and process it through a program that expects audio input. In my case, it was ham radio software. I’ve been working on making it possible to operate my station remotely. If all you want to do is talk, it is easy to find software that will connect you over the network. However, if you want to do digital modes like PSK31, RTTY, or FT8, you ...

[Stephen] has a basement that depends on a sump pump. What that means is if the pump fails or the power goes out, the basement floods—which is rather undesirable. Not wanting to rely on a single point of failure, [Stephen] decided to build a monitor for the basement situation , which quickly spiralled to a greater degree of complexity than he initially expected. The initial plan was just to have water level sensors reporting data over a modified CATS packet radio transmitter. On the other end, the plan was to capture the feed via a CATS receiver, pipe the data to the internet via FELINET , and then have the data displayed on a Grafana dashboard. Simple enough. From there, though, [Stephen] started musing on the possibilities. He thought about capturing humidity data to verify the dehumidifier was working. Plus, temperature would be handy to get early warning before any pipes were frozen in colder times. Achieving those aims would be easy enough with a BME280 sensor, though hacking i...

Analog dials used to be a pretty common way of displaying information on test equipment and in industrial applications. They fell out of favor as more advanced display technologies became cheaper. However, if you combine an analog dial with a modern e-ink display , it turns out you get something truly fantastic indeed. This build comes to us from [Arne]. The concept is simple—get an e-ink display, and draw a dial on it using whatever graphics and scale you choose. Then, put it behind a traditional coil-driven analog dial in place of the more traditional paper scale. Now, you have an analog dial that can display any quantity you desire. Just update the screen to display a different scale as needed. Meanwhile, if you don’t need to change the display, the e-ink display will draw zero power and still display the same thing. [Arne] explains how it all works in the writeup. It’s basically a LilyGo T5 ESP32 board with an e-ink screen attached, and it’s combined with a MF-110A multimeter. I...

[MindYourDecisions] presents a Babylonian tablet dating back to around 1800 BC that shows that the hypotenuse of a unit square is the square root of two or 1.41421. How did they know that? We don’t know for sure how they computed it, but experts think it is the same as the ancient Greek method written down by Hero. It is a specialized form of the Newton method. You can follow along and learn how it works in the video below. The method is simple. You guess the answer first, then you compute the difference and use that to adjust your estimate. You keep repeating the process until the error becomes small enough for your purposes. For example, suppose you wanted to take the square root of 85. You can observe that 9 squared is 81, so the answer is sort of 9, right? But that’s off by 4 (85-81=4). So you take that number and divide it by the current answer (9) multiplied by two. In other words, the adjustment is 4/18 or 0.2222. Putting it together, our first answer is 9.2222. If you squ...