If you were expecting a post about ancient kings and queens, you are probably at the wrong website. [Burn Heart] has a fascination with ancient measuring devices and set out to recreate period-correct rules, although using decidedly modern techniques.
The first example is a French rule for measuring the “pied du Roi” or king’s foot. Apparently, his royal highness had large feet as a the French variant is nearly 13 inches long. The next rulers hail from Egypt and measure cubits and spans. Turns out the pyramid builders left a lot of information about measurements and their understanding of math and tools like dividers.
Other rules from Rome, Japan, and the Indus Valley are also included. According to the post, one set of these rulers used locally sourced wood, but a second “limited” edition used wood that the originals might have. Most of the rulers were etched via CNC, although the French ruler was hand-etched.
The Romans, apparently, had smaller feet than French royalty, as their Pes or foot was about 11.65 inches. There are plenty of little tidbits in the post ranging from the origin of the word inch to why the black wood used for piano keys is called ebony.
We’ll stipulate this isn’t exactly a hack, although it is fine workmanship and part of hacker culture is obsessing over measuring things, so we thought it was fair game. These days, rulers are often electronic. Which makes it natural to put them on a PC board.
Modern tech is great, but we have to admit that we sometimes miss when electronic things looked complicated. A modern computer looks dull compared to, say, an IBM 360. Control rooms now look no different than a stock trading room, instead of being full of indicators, knobs, and buzzers. [BorisDigital] must have some of those same feelings. He built a very cool control panel for his Home Assistant setup. He based it somewhat on a jet cockpit and a little on a nuclear plant control room, and the result, as you can see in the video below, is great.
This is less of a how-to video and more of an inspirational one. After all, you won’t have the same setup, but there are many details about how it was constructed with a Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, and control of the Home Assistant via web services.
You might point out that you could put everything on a computer screen, but what fun is that? There is a touchscreen, so you do have some options. Normally, the panel hangs on the wall, but you can snap feet on to rest the panel on a desk or table.
The panel has about 50 I/O devices, so a GPIO expander — actually several of them — was necessary. To make a nice-looking label, he fills in 3D-printed inset text with spackle. It isn’t perfect, but it looks good enough.
We have to admit that we often think about building unusual things, but we hadn’t really considered building our own hydroelectric dam before. [Mini Construction] did, apparently, and there’s a timelapse of the build in the video below.
We wished this was more of a how-to video, although if you are handy with brickwork, the mechanical construction seems straightforward. Presumably, you’d need to understand how much force the water had but we don’t know if there was math involved or just seat-of-the-pants design.
We were unclear what the tower was for until we saw the turbine installed in it. We weren’t clear where it came from, and it looked like maybe it was repurposed from something else. If you recognize what it is, or have a guess, drop a comment, will you? While the brickwork was impressive, the wiring — especially near water — looked a bit suspect. We hope that was just test wiring and a more permanent arrangement was made later.
We’ve all been there. You are on a flight, there’s WiFi, but you hate to pay the few bucks just to watch dog videos. What to do? Well, we would never suggest you engage in theft of service, but as an intellectual exercise, [Robert Heaton] had an interesting idea. Could the limited free use of the network be coopted to access the general internet? Turns out, the answer is yes.
Admittedly, it is a terrible connection. Here’s how it works. The airline lets you get to your frequent flier account. When there, you can change information such as your name. A machine on the ground can also see that change and make changes, too. That’s all it takes.
It works like a drop box. You take TCP traffic, encode it as fake information for the account and enter it. You then watch for the response via the same channel and reconstitute the TCP traffic from the remote side. Now the network is at your fingertips.
There’s more to it, but you can read about it in the post. It is slow, unreliable, and you definitely shouldn’t be doing it. But from the point of view of a clever hack, we loved it. In fact, [Robert] didn’t do it either. He proved it would work but did all the development using GitHub gist as the drop box. While we appreciate the hack, we also appreciate the ethical behavior!
Some airlines allow free messaging, which is another way to tunnel traffic. If you can connect to something, you can probably find a way to use it as a tunnel.
If you’ve ever seen the cockpit of an airplane, you’ve probably noticed the round ball that shows your attitude, and if you are like us, you’ve wondered exactly how the Attitude Direction Indicator (ADI) works. Well, [msylvain59] is tearing one apart in the video below, so you can satisfy your curiosity in less than 30 minutes.
Like most things on an airplane, it is built solidly and compactly. With the lid open, it reminded us of a tiny CRT oscilloscope, except the CRT is really the ball display. It also has gears, which is something we don’t expect to see in a scope.
Getting to the ball mechanism was fairly difficult. It is nearly the end of the video before the ball comes apart, revealing a pair of hefty but tiny autosyn units and a clockwork full of gears. Bendix equipment often used the autosyn to transmit positions over wire similar to a selsyn but using AC instead of DC.
Next time you peek into a cockpit, you’ll know what’s driving that eyeball or, at least, what might be driving it since not every one of these is identical, of course.
These cool devices show up in our feed every so often. If you can cram a CPU, a screen, and an accelerometer into a Lego, you could build one for your next block model.
[Thomas Scherrer] likes to tear down old test equipment, and often, we remember the devices he opens up or — at least — we’ve heard of them. However, this time, he’s got a Hung Chang HC-F100 multifunction counter, which is a vintage 1986 instrument that can reach 100 MHz.
Inside, the product is clearly a child of its time period. There’s a transformer for the linear supply, through-hole components, and an Intersil frequency counter on a chip. Everything is easy to get to and large enough to see.
Powering it up, the display lit up readily. The counter seemed to work with no difficulties, which was a bit of a surprise.
The oscillator inside has a temperature regulator so that once warmed up, it should be more or less stable. Touching it disturbs it, but you really shouldn’t be making real measurements with the top off while you are poking around on the inside.
Conventional batteries have anodes and cathodes, but a new design from the University of Chicago and the University of California San Diego lacks an anode. While this has been done before, according to the University, this is the first time a solid-state sodium battery has successfully used this architecture.
Sodium is abundant compared to lithium, so batteries that use sodium are attractive. According to the University of Chicago’s news release:
Anode-free batteries remove the anode and store the ions on an electrochemical deposition of alkali metal directly on the current collector. This approach enables higher cell voltage, lower cell cost, and increased energy density…
Of course, there are also downsides. In particular, making anodeless batteries with liquid electrolytes can be easier to build, but the liquid forms solids that impede the battery’s performance over time.
The new battery uses an aluminum powder as a current collector. Interestingly, while this is a solid, it flows more like a liquid. Combined with a solid electrolyte, the battery flips the usual idea of a solid cathode and a liquid electrolyte.
We are always interested in new battery tech. However, we rarely see them out in the wild. Maybe AI will have better luck.
On the one hand, we were impressed that a tiny Brother label maker actually uses CUPS to support printing. Like [Sdomi], we were less than impressed at how old a copy it was using – – 1.6.1. Of course, [Sdomi] managed to gain access to the OS and set things up the right way, and we get an over-the-shoulder view.
It wasn’t just the old copy of CUPS, either. The setup page was very dated and while that’s just cosmetic, it still strikes a nerve. The Linux kernel in use was also super old. Luckily, the URLs looked like good candidates for command injection.
Worst of all, the old version of CUPS had some known vulnerabilities, so there were several avenues of attack. The interface had some filtering, so slashes and spaces were not passed, but several other characters could get around the limitations. Very clever.
The post contains a few good tricks to file away for future use. It also turned out that despite the Brother branding, the printer is really from another company, which was useful to know, too. In the end, does the printer work any better? Probably not. But we get the urge to check some of the other devices we own.
The last time we saw CUPS save an old printer, it had to be bolted on. CUPS was meant to support 3D printers, but we never see anyone using it like that.
When you think of solar energy, you probably think of flat plates on rooftops. A company called WAVJA wants you to think of spheres. The little spheres, ranging from one to four inches across, can convert light into electricity, and the company claims they have 7.5 times the output of traditional solar panels and could later produce even more. Unfortunately, the video below doesn’t have a great deal of detail to back up the claims.
Some scenes in the video are clearly forward-looking. However, the so-called photon energy system appears to be powering a variety of real devices. It’s difficult to assess some of the claims. For example, the video claims 60 times the output of a similar-sized panel. But you’d hardly expect much from a tiny 4-inch solar panel.
What do you think? Do they really have layers of exotic material? If we were going to bet, we’d bet these claims are a bit of hyperbole. Then again, who knows? We’ll be watching to see what technical details emerge. We have to admit that quotes like this from their website don’t make us especially hopeful:
…relies on the use of multiple layers of materials and special spheres to introduce sunlight and generate a significant amount of luminosity, which is then transformed into electricity using a silicon conductor module…
These days, it is hard to imagine electronics without printed circuit boards. They are literally in everything. While making PCBs at home used to be a chore, these days, you design on a computer, click a button, and they show up in the mail. But if you go back far enough, there were no PC boards. Where did they come from? That’s the question posed by [Steven Leibson] who did some investigating into the topic.
There were many false starts at building things like PCBs using wires glued to substrates or conductive inks. However, it wasn’t until World War II that mass production of PC boards became common. In particular, they were the perfect solution for proximity fuzes in artillery shells.
The environment for these fuzes is harsh. You literally fire them out of a cannon, and they can feel up to 20,000 Gs of acceleration. That will turn most electronic circuits into mush.
The answer was to print silver-bearing ink on a ceramic substrate. These boards contained tubes, which also needed special care. Two PCBs would often have components mounted vertically in a “cordwood” configuration.
From there, of course, things progressed rapidly. We’ve actually looked at the proximity fuze before. Not to mention cordwood.
Like many of us, [MIKROWAVE1] had a lot of electronic toys growing up. In a video you can watch below, he asks the question: “Did electronic toys influence your path?” Certainly, for us, the answer was yes.
The CB “base station” looked familiar although ours was marked “General Electric.” Some of us certainly had things similar to the 150-in-one kit and versions of the REMCO broadcast system. There were many versions of crystal radio kits, although a kit for that always seemed a little like cheating.
Shortwave radios were fun in those days, too. We miss the days when you could find interesting stations on shortwave. We were also happy to see the P-box kits. If you weren’t interested in radio, there were also digital logic kits including a “computer” that was really a giant multi-pole switch that could create logic gates.
It made us wonder what toys are launching the next generation of engineers. We are not convinced that video games, Tik Tok, and ChatGPT are going to serve the same purpose these toys did for many of us. What do you think? What were your favorite toys and what do think will serve that purpose for the next generation?
When you buy a cheap ham radio handy-talkie, you usually get a little “rubber ducky” antenna with it. You can also buy many replacement ones that are at least longer. But how good are they? [Learnelectronics] wanted to know, too, so he broke out his NanoVNA and found out that they were all bad, although some were worse than others. You can see the results in the — sometimes fuzzy — video below.
Of course, bad is in the eye of the beholder and you probably suspected that most of them weren’t super great, but they do seem especially bad. So much so, that, at first, he suspected he was doing something wrong. The SWR was high all across the bands the antennas targeted.
It won’t come as a surprise to find that making an antenna work at 2 meters and 70 centimeters probably isn’t that easy. In addition, it is hard to imagine the little stubby antenna the size of your thumb could work well no matter what. Still, you’d think at least the longer antennas would be a little better.
Hams have had SWR meters for years, of course. But it sure is handy to be able to connect an antenna and see its performance over a wide band of frequencies. Some of the antennas weren’t bad on the UHF band. That makes sense because the antenna is physically larger but at VHF the size didn’t seem a big difference.
He even showed up a little real-world testing and, as you might predict, the test results did not lie. However, only the smallest antenna was totally unable to hit the local repeater.
Conservation of energy isn’t just a good idea: It is the law. In particular, it is the first law of thermodynamics. But, apparently, a lot of people don’t really get that because history is replete with inventions that purport to run forever or produce more energy than they consume. Sometimes these are hoaxes, and sometimes they are frauds. We expect sometimes they are also simple misunderstandings.
We thought about this when we ran across the viral photo of an EV with a generator connected to the back wheel. Of course, EVs and hybrids do try to reclaim power through regenerative braking, but that’s recovering a fraction of the energy already spent. You can never pull more power out than you put in, and, in fact, you’ll pull out substantially less.
Not a New Problem
If you think this is a scourge of social media and modern vehicles, you’d be wrong. Leonardo da Vinci, back in 1494, said:
Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.
There was a rumor in the 8th century that someone built a “magic wheel,” but this appears to be little more than a myth. An Indian mathematician also claimed to have a wheel that would run forever, but there’s little proof of that, either. It was probably an overbalanced wheel where the wheel spins due to weight and gravity with enough force to keep the wheel spinning.
Villard’s machine
An architect named Villard de Honnecourt drew an impractical perpetual motion machine in the 13th century that was also an overbalanced wheel. His device, and other similar ones, would require a complete lack of friction to work. Even Leonardo da Vinci, who did not think such a device was possible, did some sketches of overbalanced wheels, hoping to find a solution.
Types of Machines
There isn’t just a single kind of perpetual motion machine. A type I machine claims to produce work without any input energy. For example, a wheel that spins for no reason would be a type I machine.
Type II machines violate the second law of thermodynamics. For example, the “zeromoter” — developed in the 1800s by John Gamgee, used ammonia and a piston to move by boiling and cooling ammonia. While the machine was, of course, debunked, Gamgee has the honor of being the inventor of the world’s first mechanically frozen ice rink in 1844.
Type III machines claim to use some means to reduce friction to zero to allow a machine to work that would otherwise run down. For example, you can make a flywheel with very low friction bearings, and with no load, it may spin for years. However, it will still spin down.
Often, machines that claim to be perpetual either don’t really last forever — like the flywheel — or they actually draw power from an unintended source. For example, in 1760, James Cox and John Joseph Merlin developed Cox’s timepiece and claimed it ran perpetually. However, it actually drew power from changes in barometric pressure.
Frauds
These inventions were often mere frauds. E.P. Willis in 1870 made money from his machine but it actually had a hidden source of power. So did John Ernst Worrell Keely’s induction resonance motion motor that actually used hidden air pressure tubes to power itself. Harry Perrigo, an MIT graduate, also demonstrated a perpetual motion machine to the US Congress in 1917. That device had a secret battery.
However, some inventors probably weren’t frauds. Nikola Tesla was certainly a smart guy. He claimed to have found a principle that would allow for the construction of a Type II perpetual motion machine. However, he never built it.
There have been hosts of others, and it isn’t always clear who really thought they had a good idea and how many were just out to make a buck. But some people have created machines as a joke. Dave Jones, in 1981, created a bicycle wheel in a clear container that never stopped spinning. But he always said it was a fake and that he had built it as a joke. Adam Savage looks at that machine in the video below. He wrote his secret in a sealed envelope before he died, and supposedly, only two people know how it works.
Methods
Most perpetual machines try to use force from magnets. Gravity is also a popular agent of action. Other machines depend on buoyancy (like the one in the video below) or gas expansion and condensation.
The US Patent and Trademark Office manual of patent examining practice says:
With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device. If operability of a device is questioned, the applicant must establish it to the satisfaction of the examiner, but he or she may choose his or her own way of so doing.
The UK Patent Office also forbids perpetual motion machine patents. The European Patent Classification system has classes for “alleged perpetua mobilia”
Of course, having a patent doesn’t mean something works; it just means the patent office thought it was original and can’t figure out why it wouldn’t work. Consider Tom Bearden’s motionless electromagnetic generator, which claims to generate power without any external input. Despite widespread denouncement of the supposed operating principle — Bearden claimed the device extracted vacuum energy — the patent office issued a patent in 2002.
The Most Insidious
The best machines are ones that use energy from some source that isn’t apparent. For example, a Crookes radiometer looks like a lightbulb with a little propeller inside. Light makes it move. It is also a common method to use magnetic fields to move something without obviously spinning it. For example, the egg of Columbus (see the video below) is a magnet, and a moving magnetic field makes the egg spin. This isn’t dissimilar from a sealed pump where a magnet turns on the dry side and moves the impeller, which is totally immersed in liquid.
Some low-friction systems, like the flywheel, can seem to be perpetual motion machines if you aren’t patient enough. But eventually, they all wear down.
Crazy or Conspiracy?
Venues like YouTube are full of people claiming to have free energy devices that also claim to be suppressed by “the establishment”. While we hate to be on the wrong side of history if someone does pull it off, we are going to go out on a limb and say that there can’t be a true perpetual motion machine. Unless you cheat, of course.
This is the place we usually tell you to get hacking and come up with something cool. But, sadly, for this time we’ll entreat you to spend your time on something more productive, like a useless box or put Linux on your Commodore 64.
You might think Google Glass was an innovative idea, but [Allison Marsh] points out that artist [Lisa Krohn] imagined the Cyberdesk in 1993. Despite having desk in the name, the imagined prototype was really a wearable computer. Of course, in 1993, the technology wasn’t there to actually build it, but it does look like [Krohn] predicted headgear that would augment your experience.
Unlike Google Glass, the Cyberdesk was worn like a necklace. There are five disk-like parts that form a four-key keyboard and something akin to a trackpad. There were two models built, but since they were nonfunctional, they could have any imagined feature you might like. For example, the system was supposed to draw power from the sun and your body, something practical devices today don’t really do, either.
She also imagined a wrist-mounted computer with satellite navigation, a phone, and more. Then again, so did [Chester Gould] when he created Dick Tracy. The post also talks about a more modern reimagining of the Cyberdesk last year.
While this wasn’t a practical device, it is a great example of how people imagine the future. Sometimes, they miss the mark, but even then, speculative art and fiction can serve as goals for scientists and engineers who build the actual devices of the future.
We usually think about machines augmenting our intelligence and senses, but maybe we should consider more physical augmentation. We do appreciate seeing designs that are both artistic and functional.
When we think about sending an STL off on the Internet for processing, we usually want someone to print it for us or we want mesh repair. But [Chuck] found an interesting project on GitHub from [Andrew Sink] that will let you add a variable amount of twist to any STL and then return it to you for printing or whatever else you use STLs for. If you don’t get what we mean, check out the video below.
The site that does the work initially loads a little gnome figure if you are too lazy to upload your own model. That’s perfect, though, because the little guy is a good example of why you might want to twist a model. With just a little work, you can make the gnome look in one direction or even look behind him.
[Chuck] shows how to use the tool for artistic effect by twisting his standard cube logo. The result is something that looks like it would be difficult to create, but could hardly be easier. The tool lets you rotate the object, too, so you can get the twist effect in the right orientation for what you want to accomplish. A great little tool for making more artistic 3D prints without learning new software. If you want some fun, you can try the version that uses sound from your microphone to control the twist.
If you’d rather twist in CAD, we can help. If you really want artsy 3D printing, you probably need to learn Blender.
[Teaching Tech] got an interesting e-mail from [Johan] showing pictures of 3D prints with a dye-sublimated color image on the surface. Normally, we think of dye sublimation, we think of pressing color pictures onto fabric, especially T-shirts. But [Johan] uses a modified Epson inkjet printer and has amazing results, as you can see in the video below.
The printers use separate tanks for ink, which seems to be the key. If you already have an Espon “tank” printer, you are halfway there, but if you don’t have one, a cheap one will set you back less than $200 and maybe even less if you pick one up used.
You have to fill bottles with special dye, of course. You can also use the printer to make things like T-shirts. The idea is to print a dye transfer page and place it on the bed before you start printing. The sublimation dye is activated with heat, and, of course, you are shooting out hot plastic, so the image will transfer to the plastic.
[Teaching Tech] explains the best settings to make it all work. The results look great and we’re interested to try this ourselves. Transferring bed images is old hat, but this is something else. Beats liar’s color printing.
While it’s currently the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it will inevitably get cold again. If you’re looking for a unique way of heating your workshop this year, you could do worse than build an 8-bit computer with a bunch of 6N3P vacuum tubes. While there are some technical details, you might find it a challenging build. But it is still an impressive sight, and it took 18 months to build a prototype and the final version. You can find the technical details if you want to try your hand. Oh, did we mention it takes about 200 amps? One of the prototype computers plays Pong on a decidedly low-tech display, which you can see below.
The architecture has 8 data bits and 12 address bits. It only provides six instructions, but that keeps the tube count manageable. Each tube has two triodes in one envelope and form a NOR gate which is sufficient to build everything else you need. In addition to tubes, there are reed relays and some NVRAM, a modern conceit.
Operating instructions are to turn it on and wait for the 560 tubes to warm up. Then, to quote the designer, “… I check the fire extinguisher is full, and run the code.” We wonder if one of the six instructions is halt and catch fire. Another quote from the builder is: “It has been a ridiculous amount of soldering and a fantastic amount of fun.” We can imagine.
If the computer seems familiar, we covered the first and second prototypes named ENA and Fred. We’ve also seen tube-base single-board computers.
[Poking Technology] doesn’t think much of his new smartwatch. It is, by his admission, the cheapest possible smartwatch, coming in at about $3. It has very few useful features but he has figured out how to port MicroPython to it, so for a wrist-mounted development board with BLE, it might be useful. You can check it out in the video below.
The first step is a teardown, which reveals surprisingly little on the inside. There’s a tiny battery, a few connections, a display, and a tiny CPU board. There are, luckily, a few test pads that let you get into the CPU. What do you get? A 24 MHz Telink CPU with 512k of flash and 16k of RAM, along with all the other hardware.
Of course, even if you just want a display with some smarts, $3 might be in your price range. The whole thing wound up taped down to a PCB. But the usual debugger didn’t want to connect. Grabbing an oscilloscope revealed that the output from the board had some level problems. He eventually wrote his own debugger interface using a Pi Pico.
He was able to find the onboard CPU’s development tools. The CPU claims to be proprietary but looks suspiciously like a slightly modified ARM. A short investigation shows that the object code is extremely similar to the ARM Thumb instruction set but with a few extra bits set and different mnemonics. But once you put Python on board, who really cares?
The only downside is that it doesn’t appear that the BLE is practically usable because of memory limitations. But there are still places you might use the little watch in a project.
If you want a smartwatch, maybe build your own. While many DIY watches are simple, you can get pretty complicated if you like.
Meshtastic is a way to build mesh networks using LoRa that is independent of cell towers, hot spots or traditional repeaters. It stands to reason that with an SDR and GNU Radio, you could send and receive Meshtastic messages. That’s exactly what [Josh Conway] built, and you can see a video about the project, Meshtastic_SDR, below. The video is from [cemaxecuter], who puts the library through its paces.
For hardware, the video uses a Canary I as well as the WarDragon software-defined radio kit which is an Airspy R2 and a mini PC running Dragon OS — a Linux distribution aimed at SDR work — in a rugged case. GNU Radio, of course, uses flows which are really just Python modules strung together with a GUI.
The GNU blocks send and receive data via TCP port, so using the radio as a data connection is simple enough. The flow graph itself for the receiver looks daunting, but we have a feeling you won’t change the default very much.
If you’ve wanted to dip your toe into Meshtastic or you want a meaty example of using GNU Radio, this would be a fun project to duplicate and extend. While Meshtastic is generally a mesh protocol, you can set up a node to act as a repeater. You never know when decentralized communications might save the day.
Conectar
