Kritik sah

The Industrial Revolution was powered by steam, with boilers being a crucial part of each steam engine, yet also one of the most dangerous elements due to the high pressures involved. The five Lancashire boilers at the Claymills Pumping Station are relatively benign in this regard, as they operate at a mere 80 PSI unlike e.g. high-pressure steam locomotives that can push 200 – 300 PSI. This doesn’t mean that refurbishing one of these boilers is an easy task and doesn’t involve plugging a lot of leaks, as the volunteers at this pumping station found out . At this Victorian-era pumping station there are a total of five of these twin-flue Lancashire boilers , all about 90 years old after a 1930s-era replacement , with them all gradually being brought back into service. The subject of the video is boiler 1, which was last used in 1971 before the pumping station was decommissioned . Boilers 2 and 3 were known to be in a pretty bad condition, and they needed a replacement for boiler 5 as i...

If you want to reverse engineer a PC board, you could do worse than X-ray it.  But thanks to [Philip Giacalone], you could just take a photo, load it into PCB Tracer , and annotate the images. You can see a few of a series of videos about the system below. The tracer runs in your browser. It can let you mark traces, vias, components, and pads. You can annotate everything as you document it, and it can even call an AI model to help generate a schematic from the net list. This is one of those things that you could do without. Any photo editor could do the same thing. But having the tool aware of what the photo is showing makes life easier. The built-in features are free, but if you use the AI tool, he says it will cost you about a half-dollar per schematic (paid to the AI company). Even if you don’t think you need to reverse-engineer anything, you may still find this useful if you are trying to understand a board for repair. We’ve had a good Supercon/Remoticon talk about PCB rev...

You can get an IDE to USB bridge from all the usual sources, but you may find those fail on the older drives in your collection– apparently they require drives using logical block addressing, which did not become standard until the mid-1990s. Some while some older drives got in on the LBA game early, you were more likely to see Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) addressing. That’s why [JJ Dasher], a.k.a [redruM0381] created ATABoy, an open-source IDE bridge that can handle the oldest drives that fit on the bus. The heart of the build is an RP2350, which serves as both IDE and USB host controller. To computer, after a little bit of setup, the drive attached to ATABoy shows up as a regular USB mass storage device. A little bit of setup is to be expected with drives of this vintage, you may remember. Luckily [JJ] included a handy BIOS-themed configuration utility that can be accessed through any serial console. He says you’ll usually be able to get away with “Auto Detect & Set Geometry,” b...

You wake up in the middle of the night. Is it time to get up? Well, you can look at the nightstand clock. Unless your partner is in the way. Whoops. Even then, without your glasses, the time is just a fuzzball of light. You could ask Alexa, but that’s sure to wake your partner, too. The answer is a projection clock. In its modern form, it shoots a digital time display on a wall or ceiling with digits so large that you don’t need your glasses. If you can see the ceiling, you can tell what time it is. New Tech A modern invention, of course. No, not really. According to [Roger Russel], a UK patent in 1909 used an analog clock face and lightbulbs to project the clock face and hands on the ceiling. Unfortunately, [Roger’s] website is no more, but the Wayback Machine is on the job . You can see a device of the same type at the British Museum . A modern projection clock on the ceiling. In 1938, [Leendert Prins] filed for a patent on a similar projection clock . Sometimes known as “ceil...

You may or may not know, but printf is a Turing-complete language, once you exploit all the strange and wonderful format characters in it (especially %n). But who has time to write code as printf modifiers? Now, thanks to [sebsite], you can at least write in a slightly higher level assembly language and compile to printf . Practical? No. Cool? Undeniably. As an example, the page shows fizzbuzz written in the assembler: <pre><code>alias i, fizz, buzz ->fizz ([i] + 1) % 3 == 0 ->buzz ([i] + 1) % 5 == 0 ->i [i] + 1 ->exit [i] == 100 [i] if !![i] & ![fizz] & ![buzz] "Fizz" if [fizz] "Buzz" if [buzz] "\n" if [i]</code></pre> <pre> The alias keyword defines constants and, owing to default values, sets i to zero, fizz to one, and buzz to 2. The “arrow” statements store a result into a variable (so the first assignment sets the resulting value into fizz). You need C23 to compile the assembler. Good luck tr...

Many people who use water cooling in their computer systems like to go full-bore with ‘aquarium’ aesthetic, which includes adding a window to their cooling blocks so that they see the water flowing through the window from behind the case’s window. Traditionally PMMA acrylic is used for these windows, as it’s quite durable and easy to handle. Using glass offers some advantages over acrylic, but has its own disadvantages, most of all that it’s hard to process, but also that it’s known for shattering quite easily if pushed beyond its limits. This is why [der8auer] as a manufacturer of such water blocks has now spent a few years investigating the viability of using glass for this purpose. First and foremost is safety, with an early prototype glass water block suddenly shattering without clear cause. Although normally the water cooling loop is only expected to experience pressures of about 600 mbar, the new glass windows that are now entering mass-production had to be tested to their br...

We’ll start things off this week with some breaking news from NASA: just days after the space agency announced the Artemis II crew was preparing to blast off towards the Moon as soon as March 6th , a new problem with the Space Launch System rocket has pushed the launch back indefinitely. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman , problems encountered while loading helium into the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) necessitate rolling the massive rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for diagnosis and repair. The logistics of shuffling the vehicle 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) from the pad to the VAB is going to eat up at least a week, and sending it back the other way is naturally just as much of a production. Add in the time they’ll need to actually figure out what’s wrong with the ICPS and make the necessary repairs, and it’s easy to see why a March launch is almost certainly off the table. It’s frustrating to see the Artemis II mission get delayed this close...