Ah, generic unbranded IP cameras. Safe, secure? Probably not. [Alex] has been hacking around with one of his very own, and he’s recently busted the thing wide open.

Determining that the camera had a software update function built in, [Alex] saw an opening for hijinks. The first issue was that the camera only accepts encrypted update packages, which complicates things somewhat. However, through some smart reverse engineering, the format of the updates and their encryption method became obvious to [Alex]. Oh, and partly because there was a GitHub repository online featuring the source code used by the manufacturer to encrypt their updates. That definitely helped. It also led [Alex] to suspect the manufacturer may not have properly respected the open source license of some of the routines involved.

In the demo of the exploit, [Alex] has the camera reach out to www.pudim.com.br instead of the servers of the original manufacturer. That’s a pretty clear way to show that the camera has been owned.

We first featured [Alex]’s work in this space all the way back in 2019. It’s come a long way since then!

You might think of the smartwatch era as beginning with Apple, relatively recently. Or, you might think back to those fancy Timex models with the datalink thing going on in the 1990s. Seiko can beat them all, though, with its UC-2000 smartwatch that debuted all the way back in 1984.

The UC-2000 very much looks cutting edge for its era, and absolutely ancient today. It featured a 4-bit CPU, 2 kilobytes of RAM, and 6 kilobytes of ROM. Display was via a simple 10×4 character LCD in a rectangular form factor, with four buttons along the bottom. Branded as a “personal information processor,” it was intended for use with the UC-2100 dock. This added a full physical QWERTY keyboard that interacted with the UC-2000 when the two were combined together. Alternatively, you could go for the UC-2200, which not only had a keyboard but also a thermal printer to boot. Oh, and ROM packs for Microsoft Basic, games, or an English-to-Japanese translator.

What could you do on this thing? Well, it had basic watch functions, so it told the time, acted as a stop watch, and an alarm, of course. But you could also use it to store two memos of up to 1000 characters each, schedule appointments, and do basic calculations.

The one thing this smartwatch was missing? Connectivity. It couldn’t get on the Internet, nor could it snatch data from the ether via radio or any other method. By today’s measures, it wouldn’t qualify as much of a smartwatch at all. Moreso a personal organizer that fit on the wrist. Still, for its day, this thing really was a whole computer that fit on your wrist.

Would you believe we’ve seen the UC-2000 before? In fact, we’ve even seen it hacked to play Tetris! Video of that wonderful feat after the break.

You can do all kinds of wonderful things with cameras and image recognition. However, sometimes spatial data is useful, too. As [madmcu] demonstrates, you can use depth data from a time-of-flight sensor for gesture recognition, as seen in this rock-paper-scissors demo.

If you’re unfamiliar with time-of-flight sensors, they’re easy enough to understand. They measure distance by determining the time it takes photons to travel from one place to another. For example, by shooting out light from the sensor and measuring how long it takes to bounce back, the sensor can determine how far away an object is. Take an array of time-of-flight measurements, and you can get simple spatial data for further analysis.

The build uses an Arduino Uno R4 Minima, paired with a demo board for the VL53L5CX time-of-flight sensor. The software is developed using NanoEdge AI Studio. In a basic sense, the system uses a machine learning model to classify data captured by the time-of-flight sensor into gestures matching rock, paper, or scissors—or nothing, if no hand is present. If you don’t find [madmcu]’s tutorial enough, you can take a look at the original version from STMicroelectronics, too.

It takes some training, and it only works in the right lighting conditions, but this is a functional system that can determine real hand sign and play the game. We’ve seen similar techniques help more advanced robots cheat at this game before, too! What a time to be alive.

The good old fashioned game of football used to be a simple affair. Two teams of eleven, plus a few subs, who were all wrangled by a referee and a couple of helpful linesmen. Long ago, these disparate groups lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when VAR attacked.

Suddenly, technology was being used to adjudicate all kinds of decisions, and fans were cheering or in uproar depending on how the hammer fell. That’s only become more prevalent in recent times, with smart balls the latest controversial addition to the world game. With their starring role in the Euro 2024 championship more than evident, let’s take a look at what’s going on with this new generation of intelligent footballs.

The Balls Are Connected

Adidas has been a pioneer of so-called “connected ball” technology. This involves fitting match balls with motion sensors which can track the motion of the ball in space. The aim is to be able to track the instant of player contact with the ball, for investigating matters like calls of handball and offside. The German country first debuted the technology at the 2022 World Cup, and it showed up at the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2024 championship, too.

According to Adidas, an inertial measurement unit is suspended in the middle of the ball. This is done with a delicate structure that holds the IMU stably in place without impacting the performance of the ball from the player’s perspective. Powering the TDK ICM-20649 IMU is a small battery that can be recharged using an induction system. The IMU runs at a rate of 500 Hz, allowing hits to the ball to be measured down to tiny fractions of a second. The ball also features a DW1000 ultra-wideband radio system for position tracking, developed by Kinexion.

No more must match officials rely on their own perception, or even blurry video frames, to determine if a player touched the ball. Now, they can get a graphical readout showing acceleration spikes when a players foot, hand, or other body part impinges on the motion of the ball. This can then be used by the on-field referee and the video assistant referee to determine the right call more accurately. The idea is that this data removes a lot of the confusion from the refereeing process, giving officials exacting data on when a player may have touched the ball and when. No more wondering if this ball came close, or if that ball ricocheted based on a rough camera angle. What really happened is now being measured, and the data is all there for the officials to see, clear as day. What could be better, right?

Case In Point

The UEFA Euro 2024 championship was the latest battleground to showcase this technology. As the national teams of Europe went in to play critical matches, players and fans alike knew that this technology would be on hand to ensure the fairest playing field yet. You might think that it would leave everyone feeling happier about how their favored team got treated, but as always, humans don’t react so predictably when emotions are hot and national pride is on the line.

The match between Germany and Denmark was the perfect example of how technology could sway a game, one way or the other. The Video Assistant Referee killed Denmark’s first goal with a ruling from the Semi-Automated Offside Technology system, and the ball technology would soon curse the Danes, too. As Germany’s David Raum crossed the ball, it ever so slightly clipped the hand of Danish player Joachim Andersen. In the past, this might have gone unnoticed, or at the least unpunished. But in today’s high-tech world, there was data to reveal the crime in explicit detail.

As the video replays showed the footage, we were treated to a graph indicating the spike picked up by the ball’s sensors just as it clipped Andersen’s hand in the video. The referee thus granted a penalty for the handball, which has duly slotted home by German striker Kai Havertz. Germany would go on to win the match 2-0, with midfielder Jamal Musiala scoring the follow-up.

The incident inflamed fans and pundits alike, with the aftermath particularly fiery on ITV. “If he didn’t pay that, if he did pay that, we’d be saying, okay, he saw it that way,” said football manager Ange Postecoglou, noting that the technology was creating frustration in a way that traditional referring decisions did not. Meanwhile, others noted that the technology is, to a degree, now in charge. “[Referee] Michael Oliver cannot go to that monitor and say I refuse to take that recommendation,” said VAR pundit Christina Unkel. “This has been issued by FIFA as what he needs to take for consistency across the world.”

Fundamentally, smart ball technology is not so different from other video assist technologies currently being used in football. These tools are flooding in thick and fast for good reason. They are being introduced to reduce variability in refereeing decisions, and ultimately, to supposedly improve the quality of the sport.

Sadly, though, smart balls seem to be generating much the same frustration as VAR has done so in the past. It seems when a referee is solely at fault for a decision, the fans can let it go. However, when a smart ball or a video referee disallows a goal because of a matter of some inches or millimeters, there’s an uproar so predictable that you can set your watch to it.

Given the huge investment and the institutional backing, don’t expect these technologies to go away any time soon. Similarly, expect fan outrage to blossom most every time they are they used. For now, smart balls and VAR have the backing they need to stay on, so you’d best get used to them for now.

The printing press was first invented in 1440 AD by Johannes Gutenberg. It’s not so relevant to our day to day lives today, but it’s a technology that forever changed the path of human history. Now you can whip one up yourself using this teeny design from the [3DPrintingEnthusiast]!

Don’t expect to be making broadsheets with this thing—it’s a strictly table-top sized unit made on a 3D printer. Still, it does the job! The bed, frame, paper holder, and clamps are all 3D-printed. However, you will need some minor additional supplies to complete the carriage and inkballs.

As for your printing plates, you could go out and source some ancient lead type—or you could just 3D print some instead. The latter is probably easier if you’re living in 2024 like yours truly. Who knows, though. 2028 could be a banner year where printing presses roar back to prominence. Try not to think about the global scale disasters that would make that a reality.

In any case, there’s got to be some kind of irony about 3D-printing a printing press on a 3D printer? Perhaps, perhaps not. Debate it below!

When we talk about audio amplifier tubes, we’re normally talking about the glass little blobby things you might find in a guitar amplifier. We’re not normally talking about big ol’ color CRTs, but apparently they can do the job too. That’s what [Termadnator] is here to show us.

The CRT in question is a 14″ unit from a common garden variety Philips color TV.  [Termadnator] pulled out the TV’s original circuitry, and replaced much of it with his own. He had to whip up a high-voltage power supply with a 555 and a laptop power supply, along with a bunch of fake MOSFETs pressed into service. He also had to build his own Leyden jar capacitor, too. The specifics of converting it to audio operation get a bit messy, but fear not—[Termadnator] explains the idea well, and also supplies a schematic. Perhaps the coolest thing, though, is the crazy color pattern that appears on the display when it’s working as an amp.

Sound output isn’t exactly loud, and it’s a little distorted, too. Still, it’s amusing to see an entire TV instead doing the job of a single amplifier tube. Video after the break.

[Thanks to bugminer for the tip!]

The original Xbox forever changed the console world, because it was basically just PC components laced together in a slightly different architecture. It featured a Pentium 733 MHz CPU with just 64MB of RAM. [Prehistoricman] has been hard at work, figuring out how to up that to 256MB instead.

This isn’t [Prehistoricman’s] first rodeo. Previously, he managed to up the Xbox’s RAM to 128 MB. To figure out how to go further, he had to figure out the addressing scheme. A datasheet for the Xbox’s original memory chip was a help in this regard, as was the envytools project and an Xbox source code leak.

A BIOS hack was needed to move the auto-precharge pin to free up more address pins for the higher memory space. Furthermore, the only available memory chips that were suitable used BGA packages, so a small PCB with castellated edges was needed to adapt the chip to the Xbox’s motherboard, which expects a TQFP package.

Ultimately, getting this hack to work involved a lot of bare-metal hacking. It also won’t help the performance of commercial games at all, as they were all designed within the limitations of the original console. Still, it’s impressive to see this now-ancient platform hacked to do more. It’s also hilarious to compare it with a contemporary PC, which could simply accept 256 MB of RAM by using additional memory slots. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

The Magis Spun chair is a weird piece. It’s basically a kind of seat with a round conical base that stops it from sitting still in one place. Instead, it rolls and pivots around when you sit on it, which is apparently quite fun. They’re expensive though, which gave [Morley Kert] a neat idea. Why not 3D print one instead?

Obviously 3D printing a sofa wouldn’t be straightforward, but the Magis Spun is pretty much just a hunk of plastic anyway. The real thing is made with rotational molding. [Morley] suspected he could make one for less than the retail price with 3D printing.

With no leads on a big printer, he decided to go with a segmented design. He whipped up his basic 3D model through screenshots from the manufacturer’s website and measurements of a display model in a store. After print farming the production, the assembly task was the next big challenge. If you’re interested in doing big prints with small printers, this video is a great way to explore the perils of this idea.

Ultimately, if you want to print one of these yourself, it’s a big undertaking. It took 30-50 print days, or around 5 days spread across 15 printers at Slant 3D’s print farm. It used around $300-400 of material at retail prices, plus some extra for the epoxy and foam used to assemble it.

The finished product was killer, though, even if it looks a little rough around the edges. It rolls and pivots just like the real thing.

We don’t feature a lot of chair hacks on Hackaday, but we do feature some! Video after the break.

Arguably the greatest strength of the Raspberry Pi is the ecosystem — it’s well-supported by its creators and the aftermarket. At the same time, the proliferation of different boards has made things more complicated over the years. Thankfully, though, the community is always standing by to help fix any problems. [Rastersoft] has stepped up in this regard, solving an issue with the Raspberry Pi 5 and DSI screen cables.

The root cause is that the DSI cable used on the Raspberry Pi 5 has changed relative to earlier boards. This means that if you use the Pi 5 with many existing screens and DSI cables, you’ll find your flat ribbon cable gets an ugly twist in it. This can be particularly problematic when using the cables in tight cases, where they may end up folded, crushed, or damaged.

[Rastersoft] got around this by designing a new cable that avoided the problem. It not only solves the twist issue, but frees up space around the CPU if you wish to use a cooler. Thanks to modern PCB houses embracing flexible boards, it’s easy to get it produced, too.

This is a great example of the democratization of PCB and electronics production in general. 20 years ago, you wouldn’t be able to make a flex cable like this without ordering 10,000 of them. Today, you can order a handful for your own personal use, and share the design with strangers on a whim. Easy, huh? It’s a beautiful world we live in.

Today’s memory sticks have hundreds of pins and many gigabytes of RAM on board. Decades ago, though, the humble 30-pin SIMM was the state of the art where memory was concerned. If you’ve got vintage gear, you can try and hunt down old RAM, or you can copy [Bits und Bolts] and make your own.

Previously, [Bits und Bolts] built a 4 MB SIMM, but he’s now ramped up to building 16 MB RAM sticks — the largest size supported by the 30-pin standard. That’s a ton compared to most 30-pin sticks from the 1980s, which topped out at a feeble 1 MB.

We get to see four of his 16 MB sticks installed in a 386 motherboard, set up to operate in the appropriate Fast Page Mode. He was able to get the system operating with 64 MB of RAM, an amount still considered acceptable in the early Pentium 3 era. Hilariously, memtest took a full ten hours to complete a single pass with this configuration. [Bits and Bolts] also tried to push the motherboard further, but wasn’t able to get it to POST with over 64 MB of RAM.

As [Bits und Bolts] demonstrates, if you can read a schematic and design a PCB, it’s not that hard to design RAM sticks for many vintage computers. We’ve seen some other RAM hacks in this vein before, too.

Cars have had DRM-like measures for longer than you might think. Go back to the 1990s, and coded cassette decks were a common way to stop thieves being able to use stolen stereos. Sadly, they became useless if you ever lost the code. [Simon] had found a deck in great condition that was locked out, so he set about building his own controller for it. 

The build relies on the cassette transport of a car stereo and a VFD display, but everything else was laced together by Simon. It’s a play-only setup, with no record, seeing as its based on an automotive unit. [Simon]’s write up explains how he reverse engineered the transport, figuring out how the motors and position sensors worked to control the playback of a cassette.

[Simon] used an Atmega microcontroller as the brains of the operation, which reads the buttons of the original deck via an ADC pin to save I/O for other tasks. The chip also drives the VFD display for user feedback, and handles auto reverse too. The latter is thanks to the transport’s inbuilt light barriers, which detect the tape’s current status. On the audio side, [Simon] whipped up his own head amplifier to process the signal from the tape head itself.

Fundamentally, it’s a basic build, but it does work. We’ve seen other DIY tape decks before, too. There’s something about this format that simply refuses to die. The fans just won’t let Compact Cassette go down without a fight. Video after the break.

In the early days of the internet, online conversations were an event. The technology was novel, and it was suddenly possible to socialize with a whole bunch of friends at a distance, all at once. No more calling your friends one by one, you could talk to them all at the same time!

Many of us would spend hours on IRC, or pull all-nighters bantering on MSN Messenger or AIM. But then, something happened, and many of us found ourselves having shorter conversations online, if we were having any at all. Thinking back to my younger days, and comparing them with today, I think I’ve figured out what it is that’s changed.

Deliberate Choices

Twenty five years ago, a lot more of us were stuck getting by with dialup. The Internet wasn’t always on back then. You had to make the decision to connect to it, and sit at your computer to use it.

Similarly, logging into an IRC room was a deliberate action. It was a sign that you were setting aside time to communicate. If you were in a chat room, you were by and large there to talk. On AIM or MSN Messenger, it was much the same deal. If you wanted to have a chat, you’d leave your status on available. If you didn’t wanna talk, you’d set yourself to Busy or Away, or log off entirely.

This intentionality fostered meaningful interactions online. Back then, you’d sign in and you’d flick through your list of friends. If someone’s icon was glowing green, you knew they were probably up to talk. You might have a quick chat, or you could talk for hours. Indeed, logging on to a chatroom for an extended session was a pastime enjoyed by many.

Back then, people were making the conscious decision to set aside time to talk. Conversations were more focused and meaningful because both parties had set aside time to engage. This intentionality led to richer, more engaging discussions because participants were fully present.

Furthermore, the need to log in and out helped create a healthy boundary between life online and off. Users balanced their online interactions with other responsibilities and activities. There was a clear distinction between online and offline life, allowing for more complete engagement in both. When you logged off, that was it. There was no way for your online friends to get a message to you in real time, so your focus was fully on what was going on in front of you.

Critical Shift

T’was the endless march of technology that changed the meta. Broadband internet would keep our computers online round the clock. You could still log in and out of your chat apps, of course, and when you walked away from your computer, you were offline.

But technology didn’t stop there. Facebook came along, and tacked on Messenger in turn. The app would live on the smartphones in our pockets, while mobile data connections meant a message from the Internet could come through at any time.

Facebook’s always-on messaging was right there, tied to a website many of us were already using on the regular. Suddenly, booting up another app like AIM or MSN seemed archaic when we could just chat in the browser. The addition of the app to smartphones put Messenger everywhere we went. For many, it even started to supplant SMS, in addition to making other online chat platforms obsolete.

Always-on messaging seemed convenient, but it came with a curse. It’s fundamentally changed the dynamics of our online interactions, and not always for the better.

Perpetual availability means that there is a constant pressure to respond. In the beginning, Facebook implemented “busy” and “available” status messages, but they’re not really a thing anymore. Now, when you go to message a friend, you’re kind of left in to the dark as to what they’re doing and how they’re feeling. Maybe they’re chilling at home, and they’re down for a deep-and-meaningful conversation. Or maybe they’re working late at work, and they don’t really want to be bothered right now. Back in the day, you could seamlessly infer their willingness to chat simply by noting whether they were logged in or not. Today, you can’t really know without asking.

That has created a kind of silent pressure against having longer conversations on Facebook Messenger. I’m often reluctant to start a big conversation with someone on the platform, because I don’t know if they’re ready for it right now. Even when someone contacts me, I find myself trying to close out conversations quickly, even positive ones. I’m inherently assuming that they probably just intended to send me a quick message, and that they’ve got other things to do. The platform provides no explicit social signal that they’re happy to have a proper conversation. Instead, it’s almost implied that they might be messaging me while doing something else more important, because hey, Messenger’s on all the time. Nobody sits down to chat on Facebook Messenger these days.

It’s also ruining the peace. If you’ve got Messenger installed, notifications pop up incessantly, disrupting focus and productivity. Conversations that might have once been deep and meaningful are now often fragmented and shallow because half the time, someone’s starting them when you’re in the middle of something else. If you weren’t “logged on” or “available”, they’d wait until you were ready for a proper chat. But they can’t know that on Facebook Messenger, so they just have to send a message and hope.

In a more romantic sense, Facebook Messenger has also killed some of the magic. The ease of starting a conversation at any moment diminishes the anticipation that once accompanied online interactions. Plenty of older Internet users (myself included) will remember the excitement when a new friend or crush popped up online. You could freely leap into a conversation because just by logging on, they were saying “hey, wanna talk?” It was the equivalent social signal of seeing them walk into your local pub and waving hello. They’re here, and they want to socialize!

It’s true that we effectively had always-on messaging before Facebook brought it to a wider audience. You could text message your friends, and they’d get it right away. But this was fine, and in fact, it acted as a complement to online messaging. SMSs used to at least cost a little money, and it was generally time consuming to type them out on a limited phone keypad. They were fine if you needed to send a short message, and that was about it. Meanwhile, online messaging was better for longer, intentional conversations. You could still buzz people at an instant when you needed to, but SMS didn’t get in the way of proper online chats like Facebook Messenger would.

The problem is, it seems like we can’t really go back. As with so many technologies, we can try and blame the creators, but it’s not entirely fair. Messenger changed how we used online chat, but Facebook didn’t force us to do anything. Many of us naturally flocked to the platform, abandoning others like AIM and MSN in short order .We found  it more convenient in the short term, even if some of us have found it less satisfying in the long term.

Online platforms tend to figure out what we respond to on a base psychological level, and game that for every last drop of interaction and attention they can. They do this to sell ads and make money, and that’s all that really matters at the end of the day. Facebook’s one of the best at it. It’s not just online chat, either. Forums went the same way, and it won’t end there.

Ultimately, for a lot of us, our days of spending hours having great conversations online are behind us. It’s hard to see what could ever get the broader population to engage again in that way. Instead, it seems that our society has moved on, for the worse or for the better. For me, that’s a shame!

In the annals of ambitious engineering projects, few have captured the imagination and courted controversy quite like Gerald Bull’s Supergun. Bull, a Canadian artillery expert, envisioned a gun that could shoot payloads directly into orbit. In time, his ambition led him down a path that ended in both tragedy and unfinished business.

Depending on who you talk to, the Supergun was either a new and innovative space technology, or a weapon of war so dangerous, it couldn’t be allowed to exist. Ultimately, the powers that be intervened to ensure we would never find out either way.

First Shots Fired

Gerald Bull was born in 1928 in Ontario, Canada. After a tumultuous youth, his uncle was able to find him a place at the University of Toronto at the age of sixteen. Where his uncle suggested the medical school, Bull requested a position in the newly established aeronautical engineering course. After passing an interview, he was able to begin his tertiary studies in the field at the age of sixteen.

He would go on to graduate in 1948, a strictly average student that had done little to distinguish himself during his period at the university. However, his energy and passion would eventually see him admitted to further study at the Institute of Aerodynamics, where he studied the design of advanced wind tunnels.

This academic pursuit laid the groundwork for his future endeavors. While finishing his PhD in 1950, Bull would eventually be nominated for military work with the Defence Research Board. That led to his position with the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment, where he dived into the world of advanced artillery technology.

He began exploring the use of artillery guns for supersonic aerodynamic research, as a cheaper alternative to building high-speed wind tunnels. Later on, he would go on to develop the High Altitude Research Project (HARP), a joint Canadian-American initiative aimed at exploring ballistics at extremely high altitudes.

Kicking off in the 1960s, HARP’s most notable achievement was the creation of a massive gun capable of firing projectiles into the stratosphere, setting the stage for Bull’s lifelong obsession with superguns.

His early experiments with HARP demonstrated the potential of using artillery to reach the upper atmosphere, though the project was eventually shuttered due to financial and political pressures. The project developed a 16.4 inch (41.6 cm) smooth-bore gun which was installed for testing in Barbados.

By 1962, HARP was firing 330 pound (150 kilogram) finned projectiles at over 10,000 feet per second (3000 m/s), reaching altitudes of 215,000 feet (65 kilometers). The project was funded by using the projectiles to capture meteorological data in the upper atmosphere.

Aiming Higher

The seeds for Bull’s later work on the infamous Supergun were sown during these formative years. His desire was not just to shoot projectiles into the upper atmosphere, but to fire them so fast that they could actually reach orbit. His idea to achieve this was simple — he’d use a large gun to fire a projectile high into the atmosphere, where it would then ignite a rocket to boost its velocity further.

Well, simple enough on paper, anyway. But achieving this feat was altogether more complex in reality. Bull began investigating the concept during his time at the HARP project. There, he developed rocket-assisted projectiles that could be fired from an artillery gun without damage to the solid fuel propellant.

Plans centered around a small multi-staged rocket called the Martlet. It was to be fired from a 16.4 inch (41.6 cm) gun that was assembled by joining two existing naval cannons together into one massive barrel a full 110 feet (33.5 meters) long. Sadly, HARP’s funding began to dry up towards the end of the 1960s, and a change of government sealed the project’s fate.

Bull ended up going out on his own, establishing the Space Research Corporation (SRC) to pursue his goals. The company operated as an artillery consultancy for international clients, including the Canadian and US military. He developed improved rifling techniques which helped give military artillery longer range and better accuracy. SRC and Bull would go on to sell shells and guns to states all around the world. On the side, he continued to develop his orbital gun technology.

The culmination of Bull’s work came in the late 1980s with the Supergun project. After serving jail time in the US for dealing arms to South Africa, Bull had moved away from clients in the West, and had taken up work with China and Iraq. Ultimately, though, this gave him the opportunity to pursue his dream of an orbital launch gun once more.

Officially known as Project Babylon, it was commissioned by Saddam Hussein in 1988, while he was then the Iraqi defense secretary. The project’s goal was ostensibly to develop a supergun capable of launching satellites into orbit, potentially reducing the cost and complexity of space launches. The guns were intended to fire multi-stage rocket propelled shells that would be capable of reaching orbit.

Bull agreed to continue work on conventional military artillery pieces for the Iraqi government, in exchange for a $25 million payment towards Project Babylon. The project would see the construction of multiple “Baby Babylon” guns, each measuring 147 feet (44.8 meters) long with a caliber of 13.8 inches (35 cm).

Big Babylon

The ultimate goal, however, was the production of two mighty PC-2 Big Babylon guns. They would measure 512 feet (156 meters) long with a massive 39 inch (99 cm) bore. The PC-2 was intended to be capable of launching a 440 lb (200 kg) satellite into an orbital trajectory, carried by a 4,400 lb (2,000 kg) rocket-assisted projectile. Alternatively, it could have launched a 1,300 lb (600 kg) projectile over 620 miles (1,000 km). The final gun would have sat almost 328 feet (100 m) high at the tip, with the barrel suspended by cables from a large supporting frame. The barrel itself was to weigh 1,510 tons,  with the whole structure coming in at a hefty 2,100 tons in total.

The technical challenges were immense. Achieving the necessary muzzle velocity to reach orbit required unprecedented gun lengths and extremely durable materials to withstand the immense pressures involved. The initial construction of the Baby Babylon revealed problems with seals between multiple barrel segments. This was a complication from a a necessary engineering decision, as producing a single barrel at such large sizes was impractical.

Meanwhile, the political implications of the project drew international concern. Given the fraught political situation at the time, a large Iraqi gun project was not popular on the international stage. On paper, the gun’s applications for military use were limited. It was not possible to readily aim the gun, nor could it fire rapid salvos on a given target. It was impossible to move or hide, and it was extremely vulnerable to air attack.

Regardless of these practical limitations, few countries wanted Iraq to have such a potent gun in any way, shape or form. Furthermore, Bull was continuing to work on other Iraqi artillery projects, including Scud missile development. This only made him more unpopular with Iraq’s enemies.

The project’s demise was as dramatic as its ambition. In 1990, Bull was assassinated in Brussels as he approached his apartment’s front door. It followed a series of break-ins to his home, which were suggested to be a threat to the engineer to cease his work on the project. His death effectively ended Project Babylon. Supergun components, which had been in production across Europe, were seized by customs officers, and Bull’s staff in turn abandoned the project. Parts of the gun still exist today, after being donated to museums in the UK.

In the aftermath, the Supergun project remains a fascinating study of the interactions between ambition, technology and politics. Gerard Bull’s legacy is a testament to the limits of engineering, and the limits of our own ruling structures. While technically feasible, the Supergun could not be born, given the perceived geopolitical ramifications of such a weapon.

Gerard Bull’s story is a poignant chapter in the history of space exploration technology, marked by brilliant engineering marred by political intrigue and a tragic end. It serves as a reminder of the complexities involved when mixed-use technologies clash with political interests and national security concerns.

Have you ever wished for an automaton that can get the party started, raise the roof, and all that? You’ll want to meet [DJ Pfeif]’s Flippin Rhobot, then. He’s a hype bot from the world of Twitch streaming, and he apparently knows how to party.

Flippin Rhobot is controlled by an ESP32 that listens into the chat on [DJ Pfeif]’s stream. He’s got a vaguely humanoid form, and he can rotate on the spot and wave his arms in the air courtesy of a few servos. He’s also got a little computer terminal that displays the show’s “Hack the Planet” logo when he turns to face the screen. His body also features some addressable LEDs that flash and dance on command.

[DJ Pfeif] does a good job of explaining the project, and includes the code that laces everything together. Interfacing with Twitch chat can be fun, and we’ve featured a guide on doing just that before, too.

If you’re building your own roboticized hype machine, don’t hesitate to let us know. Otherwise, consider musing on the very idea of humanoid robots as a whole!

Multi-filament printing can really open up possibilities for your prints, even more so the more filaments you have. Enter the 8-Track from [Armored_Turtle], which will swap between 8 filaments for you!

The system is modular, with each spool of filament installed in a drybox with its own filament feeder .The dryboxes connect to the 8-Track changer via pogo pins for communication and power. While [Armored_Turtle] is currently using the device on a Voron printer, he’s designed it so that it can be easily modified to suit other printers. As it’s modular, it’s also not locked into running 8 filaments. Redesigning it to use more or less is easy enough thanks to its modular design.

The design hasn’t been publicly released yet, but [Armored_Turtle] states they hope to put it on Github when it’s ready. It’s early days, but we love the chunky design of those actively-heated drybox filament cassettes. They’re a great step up from just keeping filament hanging on a rod, and they ought to improve print performance in addition to enabling multi-filament switching.

We’ve seen some other neat work in this space before, too. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!]

Have you ever needed to hunt down a short circuit, but you’ve had no idea where it is or how it’s happening? As it turns out, there are tools to help in that regard. Enter the Leakseeker-89R.

The device is able to help hunt down short circuits that measure anywhere from 0 to 300 ohms. The device is typically used with two leads on a given pair of traces, and it has a display made up of red, yellow and green LEDs. As the leads are moved closer or farther from the short circuit, the display changes to indicate if you’re getting hotter or colder. There’s also a third lead that can be used to allow testing under more challenging conditions when there is a large capacitance in-circuit with the traces you’re testing.

Fundamentally, it’s basically a very accurate resistance meter, finely honed for the purpose of hunting down short circuits. We’ve featured similar tools before. They can be of great use for troubleshooting. Meanwhile, if you’re building your own test tools in your home lab, don’t hesitate to let us know! We’re always dying for hot tips on the best DIY lab equipment for saving time, frustration, and money.

Now that we have decent VR goggles, the world is more desperate than ever for a decent haptic interface for interacting with computers. We might be seeing a new leap forward in this wild new haptic glove design from the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University.

The glove gives each fingertip and thumb a small haptic pad. The pads are driven by electro-osmotic pumps, which are effectively solid-state. They use electricity to move fluid to create small dimples on the pad to provide haptic feedback to the user. The pads have 20 pixels per square centimeter, are quick and responsive, and can deform up to 0.5 mm in less than half a second.

The lightweight and self-contained electro-osmotic pads mean the haptic system can be far lighter and more practical than designs that use solenoids or other traditional technologies. The device is also high resolution enough that a user can feel pressure from a surface or the edges of an object in VR. If you watch the video, some of the demonstrations are quite revolutionary.

We’ve seen some other great haptics projects before too, like these low-cost force feedback gloves. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!]

Imagine you want to iterate on a shock-absorbing structure design in plastic. You might design something in CAD, print it, then test it on a rig. You’ll then note down your measurements, and repeat the process again. But what if a robot could do all that instead, and do it for years on end? That’s precisely what’s been going on at Boston University.

Inside the College of Engineering, a robotic system has been working to optimize a shape to better absorb energy. The system first 3D prints a shape, and stores a record of its shape and size. The shape is then crushed with a small press while the system measures how much energy it took to compress. The crushed object is then discarded, and the robot iterates a new design and starts again.

The experiment has been going on for three years continuously at this point. The MAMA BEAR robot has tested over 25,000 3D prints, which now fill dozens of boxes. It’s not frivolous, either. According to engineer Keith Brown, the former record for a energy-absorbing structure was 71% efficiency. The robot developed a structure with 75% efficiency in January 2023, according to his research paper.

Who needs humans when the robots are doing the science on their own? Video after the break.

[Thanks to Frans for the tip!]

Did you know there is a Guinness World Record for the smallest humanoid robot? We didn’t either, but apparently this is a challenge attracting multiple competitors. [Lidor Shimoni] had a red hot go at claiming the record, but came up ever so slightly short. Or tall.

The former record holder was measured at 141 mm, so [Lidor] had to beat that. He set about building a humanoid robot 95 mm tall, relying on off-the-shelf parts and 3D-printed components of his own design. An ESP32 served as the brains of the operation, while the robot, named Tiny Titan, got big flat feet to make walking relatively stable and controlled. Small servos were stacked up to actuate the legs and create a suitably humanoid robot to claim the title.

Sadly, [Lidor] was pipped to the post. Some procrastinating in finishing the robot and documentation saw another rival with a 60mm robot take the record. It’s not 100% clear what Guinness requires for someone to take this record, but it seems to involve a robot with arms, legs, and some ability to walk.

Sometimes robots are more fun when they’re very small. If you’re developing your own record-breaking automatons, drop us a line won’t you?