There’s nothing more guaranteed to excite a grizzled old railway enthusiast than the sight of a steam locomotive. The original main-line rail propulsion technology still clings on in a few places, but for practical purposes, it disappeared a lifetime ago. It’s interesting then to hear of a brand new steam locomotive prototype being considered for revenue freight use on British metals. Is it yet another rebuild of a heritage design to be used for enthusiasts only? No, it’s an entirely new design with nothing in common with the locomotives of the past, as [Terrier55Stepney] tells us in the video below the break.
Gone is the huge boiler and reciprocating pistons of old, as indeed is the notion of boiling anything. Instead, this is a steam turbine, nothing like the 1920s and 30s experiments with conventional locomotives, nor even the Union Pacific’s oil-fired condensing turbo-electrics. The new idea here from the British company Steamology is to create steam directly from the combustion of hydrogen in a series of small modular steam generators, and the resulting prototype turbo-generator will replace the diesel engine in a redundant British Rail class 60 freight locomotive. It’s unclear whether it will incorporate a condenser, but since it has no need to retain the water for a boiler we’re not sure it would need one.
Prototype locomotives featuring new technologies have a long and inglorious history of not making the grade, so while this is definitely an exciting and interesting development we’re not guaranteed to see it in widespread use. But it could offer a way to ensure a low-carbon replacement for diesel heavy freight locomotives, and unexpectedly provide engine upgrades for existing classes. The fact it’s technically a steam locomotive is incidental.
In a lot of ways, Etch-A-Sketch is the perfect toy; simple, easy to use, creative, endlessly engaging, and as a bonus, it’s completely mechanical. We find that last attribute to be a big part of its charm, but that’s not to say an electronic version of the classic toy can’t be pretty cool, especially when it’s done without the aid of a microcontroller.
This is one of those “because I can” projects that we always find so interesting, and more so because it wasn’t entirely clear to [BigZaphod] that he had the skills to pull it off. While his initial design centered around a bunch of 8×8 LED matrix displays and a 256×4-bit RAM chip, the rest of it was a lot of hand-waving. After a few experiments with addressing the LEDs, [Zaphod] started filling in the blanks with a refresh circuit using a 555 — naturally — and a pair of counters. Properly debounced encoders for the horizontal and vertical controls came next, along with more counters to track the cursor and a host of other circuits that ended up looking like a “one of each” selection from the 7400-series catalog.
While we do wish for a schematic on this one, it’s still a pretty enjoyable video, and the end product seems to work really well. The electronic version has a few features the original lacks, such as wrapping the cursor to the other side of the screen. We’d imagine that the buttons on the encoders could be put to work, too; perhaps a click could make it so you can move the cursor without leaving a trail behind. That might be a challenge to execute in logic, but then again, that was the point of the whole thing.
Still jonesing for that mechanical Etch-A-Sketch experience? Not a problem.
If you need to get up to speed, check out our previous coverage of the all-band hack for the UV-K5, in which [Paul (OM0ET)] installs a tiny PCB to upgrade the radio’s receiver chip to an Si4732. Along with a few jumpers and some component replacements on the main board, these hardware mods made it possible for the transceiver, normally restricted to the VHF and UHF amateur radio bands, to receive everything down to the 20-meter band, in both AM and single-sideband modulations.
The new mod featured in the video below does all that and more, all while making the installation process slightly easier. The new PCB is on a flexible substrate and is considerably slimmer, and also sports an audio amplifier chip, to make up for the low audio output on SSB signals of the first version. Installation, which occupies the first third of the video below, is as simple as removing one SMD chip from the radio’s main board and tacking the PCB down in its footprint, followed by making a couple of connections with very fine enameled wire.
You could load the new firmware and call it a day at that point, but [Paul] decided to take things a step further and install a separate jack for a dedicated HF antenna. This means sacrificing the white LED on the top panel, which isn’t much of a sacrifice for most hams, to make room for the jack. Most of us would put a small SMA jack in, but [Paul] went for a BNC, which required some deft Dremel and knife work to fit in. He also used plain hookup wire to connect the jack, which sounds like a terrible idea; we’d probably use RG-316, but his mod didn’t sound that bad at all.
Attention, slackers — if you do remote work for a financial institution, using a mouse jiggler might not be the best career move. That’s what a dozen people learned this week as they became former employees of Wells Fargo after allegedly being caught “simulating keyboard activity” while working remotely. Having now spent more than twice as many years working either hybrid or fully remote, we get it; sometimes, you’ve just got to step away from the keyboard for a bit. But we’ve never once felt the need to create the “impression of active work” during those absences. Perhaps that’s because we’ve never worked in a regulated environment like financial services.
For our part, we’re curious as to how the bank detected the use of a jiggler. The linked article mentions that regulators recently tightened rules that require employers to treat an employee’s home as a “non-branch location” subject to periodic inspection. More than enough reason to quit, in our opinion, but perhaps they sent someone snooping? More likely, the activity simulators were discovered by technical means. The article contains a helpful tip to avoid powering a jiggler from the computer’s USB, which implies detecting the device over the port. Our guess is that Wells tracks mouse and keyboard activity and compares it against a machine-learning model to look for signs of slacking.
Speaking of the intersection of soulless corporate giants and AI, what’s this world coming to when AI walks you right into an online scam? That’s what happened to a Canadian man recently when he tried to get help moving Facebook to his new phone. He searched for a customer service number for Facebook and found one listed, but thought it would be wise to verify the number. So he pulled up the “Meta AI”-powered search tool in Facebook Messenger and asked if the number was legit. “No problem,” came the reply, so he called the number and promptly got attacked by the scammers on the other end, who within minutes used his PayPal account to buy $500 worth of Apple gift cards. From the sound of it, the guy did everything he should have to protect himself, at least up to a point. But when a company’s chatbot system gives you bad information about their own customer support, things like this are going to happen.
Just a reminder that we’re deep into con season now. Open Sauce should be just about wrapped up by the time this gets published, and coming up the week after is Teardown 2024 in Portland. The schedule for that has been released, which includes a workshop on retrocomputing with the “Voja4” Supercon badge. A little further on into the summer and back on the East Coast will be HOPE XV, which still has some tickets left. The list of speakers for that one looks pretty good, as does the workshop roundup.
And finally, if you have some STL models in need of a little creative mutilation, try out this STL twister online tool. It’s by our friend [Andrew Sink], who has come up with a couple of other interesting 3D tools, like the Banana for Scale tool and the 3D Low-Poly Generator. The STL Twister does pretty much what it says and puts the screws to whatever STL model you drop on it. The MakerBot Gnome mascot that pops up by default is a particularly good model for screwifying. Enjoy!
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: being able to build your own radios is the best thing about being an amateur radio operator. Especially low-power transmitters; there’s just something about having the know-how to put something on the air that’ll reach across the planet on a power budget measured in milliwatts.
This standalone WSPR beacon is a perfect example. If you haven’t been following along, WSPR stands for “weak-signal propagation reporter,” and it’s a digital mode geared for exploring propagation that uses special DSP algorithms to decode signals that are far, far down into the weeds; signal-to-noise ratios of -28 dBm are possible with WSPR.
Because of the digital nature of WSPR encoding and the low-power nature of the mode, [IgrikXD] chose to build a standalone WSPR beacon around an ATMega328. The indispensable Si5351 programmable clock generator forms the RF oscillator, the output of which is amplified by a single JFET transistor. Because timing is everything in the WSPR protocol, the beacon also sports a GPS receiver, ensuring that signals are sent only and exactly on the even-numbered minutes. This is a nice touch and one that our similar but simpler WSPR beacon lacked.
This beacon had us beat on performance, too. [IgrikXD] managed to hit Texas and Colorado from the edge of the North Sea on several bands, which isn’t too shabby at all with a fraction of a watt.
We’ve been harping a lot lately about the effort by carmakers to kill off AM radio, ostensibly because making EVs that don’t emit enough electromagnetic interference to swamp broadcast signals is a practical impossibility. In the US, push-back from lawmakers — no doubt spurred by radio industry lobbyists — has put the brakes on the move a bit, on the understandable grounds that an entire emergency communication system largely centered around AM radio has been in place for the last seven decades or so. Not so in Japan, though, as thirteen of the nation’s 47 broadcasters have voluntarily shut down their AM transmitters in what’s billed as an “impact study” by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The request for the study actually came from the broadcasters, with one being quoted in a hearing on the matter as “hop[ing] that AM broadcasting will be promptly discontinued.” So the writing is apparently on the wall for AM radio in Japan.
There was another close call this week with our increasingly active sun, which tried but didn’t quite launch a massive stream of plasma out into space. The M-class flare was captured in the act by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which keeps an eye on what’s going on with our star. The video of the outburst is fascinating; it almost looks like a CGI render, but it’s real imaging and pretty spectacular. The active region on the sun’s surface suddenly belches out a few gigatons of plasma, which quickly get sucked right back down to the surface. You can actually see the material following ethereal lines of magnetic force, and the way it splashes when it hits the surface is just beautiful. Seeing this puts us in the mood for a feature on the SDO and how it gets these fascinating images, so stay tuned for that.
Also in space news, we’re saddened by the sudden loss of yet another of the Apollo astronauts. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot on Apollo 8, died Friday in a small plane crash off San Juan Island in Washington. Anders, 90, was piloting the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, a single-engine military trainer aircraft from the 1950s. Anders’ only trip in space was Apollo 8, but what a trip it was. Along with Commander Frank Borman and pilot James Lovell, they were the first humans to leave Earth’s gravity well and visit another world, riding the mighty Saturn V rocket all the way to the Moon for a ten-orbit visit that paved the way for the landing on Apollo 11. He is also officially the luckiest photographer in history, having been in just the right place at just the right time to snap the famous “Earthrise” picture that gave us for the first time a Moon’s-eye-view of our fragile little world:
Godspeed, Major General Anders.
In more mundane news, a story from Maryland that should give anyone who depends on tools for a living a moment’s pause. Police cracked a massive tool-theft ring thanks to the actions of a carpenter who, sick of having his tools ripped off repeatedly, stashed a couple of AirTags among his stock in trade. When the inevitable occurred and his tools took a walk yet again, he tracked them to a storage facility and alerted police. They in turn conducted an investigation and got search warrants for twelve locations, where the scale of this criminal enterprise became apparent. Check out the photos in the story; mountains of cordless tools sorted by brand, DeWalt yellow here and Milwaukee red there. There’s a surprising amount of puke-green Ryobi, too; are people really trying to make money with those tools? Between the piles of cordless tools and the rows of air compressors, the total value of the haul is estimated to be from $3 to $5 million. Hats off to the carpenter for running his own mini-sting operation.
And finally, from the Genuinely Interesting Apps files we have ShadeMap, which does exactly what you think it does: plot shade and shadow on a map. It has controls for time and date, and zooms down to a pretty fine level of detail, even for the free version. Shadows from buildings, terrain, and trees are calculated and displayed, making it perfect for surveys of locations for solar power installations. There’s also supposed to be a way to virtually remove shadow-casting features, although we couldn’t find it; perhaps in a paid version? That would be a handy tool indeed to see which trees need to be cut down or which buildings demolished to improve your solar aspect. YMMV on that last one, of course.
The radio hackers in the audience will be familiar with a spectrogram display, but for the uninitiated, it’s basically a visual representation of how a range of frequencies are changing with time. Usually such a display is used to identify a clear transmission in a sea of noise, but with the right software, it’s possible to generate a signal that shows up as text or an image when viewed as a spectrogram. Musicians even occasionally use the technique to hide images in their songs. Unfortunately, the audio side of such a trick generally sounds like gibberish to human ears.
Or at least, it used to. Students from the University of Michigan have found a way to use diffusion models to not only create a spectrogram image for a given prompt, but to do it with audio that actually makes sense given what the image shows. So for example if you asked for a spectrogram of a race car, you might get an audio track that sounds like a revving engine.
The first step of the technique is easy enough — two separate pre-trained models are used, Stable Diffusion to create the image, and Auffusion4 to produce the audio. The results are then combined via weighted average, and enter into an iterative denoising process to refine the end result. Normally the process produces a grayscale image, but as the paper explains, a third model can be kicked in to produce a more visually pleasing result without impacting the audio itself.
Ultimately, neither the visual nor audio component is perfect. But they both get close enough that you get the idea, and that alone is pretty impressive. We won’t hazard to guess what practical applications exist for this technique, but the paper does hint at some potential use for steganography. Perhaps something to keep in mind the next time we try to hide data in an episode of the Hackaday Podcast.
Stay in the amateur radio hobby long enough and you might end up with quite a collection of antennas. With privileges that almost extend from DC to daylight, one antenna will rarely do everything, and pretty soon your roof starts to get hard to see through the forest of antennas. It may be hell on curb appeal, but what’s a ham to do?
One answer could be making one antenna do the work of two, as [Guido] did with this diplexer for dual APRS setups. Automatic Packet Reporting System is a packet radio system used by hams to transmit telemetry and other low-bandwidth digital data. It’s most closely associated with the 2-meter ham band, but [Guido] has both 2-meter (144.8-MHz) and 70-cm LoRa (433.775-MHz) APRS IGates, or Internet gateway receivers. His goal was to use a single broadband discone antenna for both APRS receivers, and this would require sorting the proper signals from the antenna to the proper receiver with a diplexer.
Note that [Guido] refers to his design as a “duplexer,” which is a device to isolate and protect a receiver from a transmitter when they share the same antenna — very similar to a diplexer but different. His diplexer is basically a pair of filters in parallel — a high-pass filter tuned to just below the 70-cm band, and a low-pass filter tuned just above the top of the 2-m band. The filters were designed using a handy online tool and simulated in LTSpice, and then constructed in classic “ugly” style. The diplexer is all-passive and uses air-core inductors, all hand-wound and tweaked by adjusting the spacing of the turns.
[Guido]’s diplexer performs quite well — only a fraction of a dB of insertion loss, but 45 to 50 dB attenuation of unwanted frequencies — pretty impressive for a box full of caps and coils. We love these quick and dirty tactical builds, and it’s always a treat to see RF wizardry in action.
Even though not all of us will do it, many of us are interested in the art of casting metal. It remains a process that’s not out of reach, though, especially for metals such as aluminium whose melting points are reachable with a gas flame. The video below the break takes us through the aluminium casting process by showing us the lost-foam casting of a cylinder head for a BSA Bantam motorcycle.
The foam pattern is CNC milled to shape, and the leftover foam swarf is removed with a hot wire. The pattern is coated with a refractory coating of gypsum slurry, and the whole is set up in a tub packed with sand. We get the impression that the escaping gasses make this a tricky pour without an extra sprue, and indeed, they rate it as not perfect. The cooling fins on the final head are a little ragged, so it won’t be the part that goes on a bike, but we can see with a bit of refining, this process could deliver very good results.
For this pour, they use a gas furnace, but we’ve seen it done with a microwave oven. Usually, you are losing wax, not foam, but the idea is the same.
As our climate changes, we fear that warmer temperatures and drier conditions could make life hard for us. In most locations, it’s a future concern that feels uncomfortably near, but for some locations, it’s already very real. Take the Sahara desert, for example, and the degraded landscapes to the south in the Sahel. These arid regions are so dry that they struggle to support life at all, and temperatures there are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet.
In the face of this escalating threat, one of the most visionary initiatives underway is the Great Green Wall of Africa. It’s a mega-sized project that aims to restore life to barren terrain.
A Living Wall
Concentrated efforts have helped bring dry lands back to life. Credit: WFP
Launched in 2007 by the African Union, the Great Green Wall was originally an attempt to halt the desert in its tracks. The Sahara Desert has long been expanding, and the Sahel region has been losing the battle against desertification. The Green Wall hopes to put a stop to this, while also improving food security in the area.
The concept of the wall is simple. The idea is to take degraded land and restore it to life, creating a green band across the breadth of Africa which would resist the spread of desertification to the south. Intended to span the continent from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, it was originally intended to be 15 kilometers wide and a full 7,775 kilometers long. The hope was to complete the wall by 2030.
The Great Green Wall concept moved past initial ideas around simply planting a literal wall of trees. It eventually morphed into a broader project to create a “mosaic” of green and productive landscapes that can support local communities in the region.
Reforestation is at the heart of the Great Green Wall. Millions of trees have been planted, with species chosen carefully to maximise success. Trees like Acacia, Baobab, and Moringa are commonly planted not only for their resilience in arid environments but also for their economic benefits. Acacia trees, for instance, produce gum arabic—a valuable ingredient in the food and pharmaceutical industries—while Moringa trees are celebrated for their nutritious leaves.
Choosing plants with economic value has a very important side effect that sustains the project. If random trees of little value were planted solely as an environmental measure, they probably wouldn’t last long. They could be harvested by the local community for firewood in short order, completely negating all the hard work done to plant them. Instead, by choosing species that have ongoing productive value, it gives the local community a reason to maintain and support the plants.
Special earthworks are also aiding in the fight to repair barren lands. In places like Mauritania, communities have been digging half-moon divots into the ground. Water can easily run off or flow away on hard, compacted dirt. However, the half-moon structures trap water in the divots, and the raised border forms a protective barrier. These divots can then be used to plant various species where they will be sustained by the captured water. Do this enough times over a barren landscape, and with a little rain, formerly dead land can be brought back to life. It’s a traditional technique that is both cheap and effective at turning brown lands green again.
Progress
The project has been an opportunity to plant economically valuable plants which have proven useful to local communities. Credit: WFP
The initiative plans to restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, while also sequestering 250 million tons of carbon to help fight against climate change. Progress has been sizable, but at the same time, limited. As of mid-2023, the project had restored approximately 18 million hectares of formerly degraded land. That’s a lot of land by any measure. And yet, it’s less than a fifth of the total that the project hoped to achieve. The project has been frustrated by funding issues, delays, and the degraded security situation in some of the areas involved. Put together, this all bodes poorly for the project’s chances of reaching its goal by 2030, given 17 years have passed and we draw ever closer to 2030.
While the project may not have met its loftiest goals, that’s not to say it has all been in vain. The Great Green Wall need not be seen as an all or nothing proposition. Those 18 million hectares that have been reclaimed are not nothing, and one imagines the communities in these areas are enjoying the boons of their newly improved land.
In the driest parts of the world, good land can be hard to come by. While the Great Green Wall may not span the African continent yet, it’s still having an effect. It’s showing communities that with the right techniques, it’s possible to bring some barren zones from the brink, turning hem back into useful productive land. That, at least, is a good legacy, and if the projects full goals can be realized? All the better.
The Altoids tin has long been the enclosure of choice for those seeking to show off their miniaturization chops. This is especially true for amateur radio homebrewers — you really have to know what you’re doing to stuff a complete radio in a tiny tin. But when you can build an entire 80-meter transceiver in a matchbox, that’s a whole other level of DIY prowess.
It’s no surprise that this one comes to us from [Helge Fykse (LA6NCA)], who has used the aforementioned Altoids tin to build an impressive range of “spy radios” in both vacuum tube and solid-state versions. He wisely chose solid-state for the matchbox version of the transceiver, using just three transistors and a dual op-amp in a DIP-8 package. There’s also an RF mixer in an SMD package; [Helge] doesn’t specify the parts, but it looks like it might be from Mini-Circuits. Everything is mounted dead bug style on tiny pieces of copper-clad board that get soldered to a board just the right size to fit in a matchbox.
A 9 volt battery, riding in a separate matchbox, powers the rig. As do the earbud and tiny Morse key. That doesn’t detract from the build at all, and neither does the fact that the half-wave dipole antenna is disguised as a roll of fishing line. [Helge]’s demo of the radio is impressive too. The antenna is set up very low to the ground to take advantage of near vertical incidence skywave (NVIS) propagation, which tends to direct signals straight up into the ionosphere and scatter them almost directly back down. This allows for medium-range contacts like [Helge]’s 239 km contact in the video below.
Banging out Morse with no sidetone was a challenge, but it’s a small price to pay for such a cool build. We’re not sure how much smaller [Helge] can go, but we’re eager to see him try.
Conectar
