Most of us see the world in a very narrow band of the EM spectrum. Sure, there are people with a genetic quirk that extends the range a bit into the UV, but it’s a ROYGBIV world for most of us. Unless, of course, you have something like this ESP32 antenna array, which gives you an augmented reality view of the WiFi world.
According to [Jeija], “ESPARGOS” consists of an antenna array board and a controller board. The antenna array has eight ESP32-S2FH4 microcontrollers and eight 2.4 GHz WiFi patch antennas spaced a half-wavelength apart in two dimensions. The ESP32s extract channel state information (CSI) from each packet they receive, sending it on to the controller board where another ESP32 streams them over Ethernet while providing the clock and phase reference signals needed to make the phased array work. This gives you all the information you need to calculate where a signal is coming from and how strong it is, which is used to plot a sort of heat map to overlay on a webcam image of the same scene.
The results are pretty cool. Walking through the field of view of the array, [Jeija]’s smartphone shines like a lantern, with very little perceptible lag between the WiFi and the visible light images. He’s also able to demonstrate reflection off metallic surfaces, penetration through the wall from the next room, and even outdoor scenes where the array shows how different surfaces reflect the signal. There’s also a demonstration of using multiple arrays to determine angle and time delay of arrival of a signal to precisely locate a moving WiFi source. It’s a little like a reverse LORAN system, albeit indoors and at a much shorter wavelength.
There’s a lot in this video and the accompanying documentation to unpack. We haven’t even gotten to the really cool stuff like using machine learning to see around corners by measuring reflected WiFi signals. ESPARGOS looks like it could be a really valuable tool across a lot of domains, and a heck of a lot of fun to play with too.
Contrario a Baldur’s Gate 3 y Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Avowed, el recién lanzado RPG de Obsdian Entertainment, cuenta con una opción para activar o activar pronombres de identidad de género, de modo que aquellos que quieran optar por una o otra alternativa, puedan usarlos o no según su preferencia.
Si van a jugar Avowed, recuerden que hay nuevos controladores de AMD, Intel y Nvidia para el juego en cuestión, y pueden encontrar sus correspondientes descargas debajo:
Avowed, el nuevo RPG en primera persona de Obsidian Entertainment, se lanzará oficialmente el próximo 18 de febrero. Quienes hayan adquirido la Edición Premium de US$ 89.99, podrán jugarlo a partir del 13 de febrero.
Requisitos Mínimos:
Requiere un procesador y un sistema operativo de 64 bits
Requiere un procesador y un sistema operativo de 64 bits
SO: Windows 10/11 con actualizaciones
Procesador: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X / Intel i7-10700K
Memoria: 16 GB de RAM
Gráficos: AMD RX 6800 XT / Nvidia RTX 3080
DirectX: Versión 12
Almacenamiento: 75 GB de espacio disponible
Estamos a solo unos meses del lanzamiento del juego de rol de fantasía en primera persona de Obsidian Entertainment, Avowed, y todos en el estudio no podrían estar más emocionados de invitar a los jugadores a experimentar el misterio y el encanto de Living Lands.
Avowed, que llegará el 18 de febrero de 2025, te llevará a una región nunca antes vista del inolvidable mundo de Eora, presentado por primera vez en el galardonado Pillars of Eternity. En tu papel de enviado, junto a tus compañeros, descubrirás verdades ocultas y navegarás por situaciones delicadas, donde cada elección determina el destino de la tierra y de las personas que viven aquí.
¿Estás ansioso por comenzar tu aventura temprano? Buenas noticias: reserva la Avowed Premium Edition en Xbox Series X|S, la aplicación Xbox en Windows, Battle.net o Steam y obtendrás acceso anticipado hasta cinco días a partir del 13 de febrero. Nuevas formas de conocer a los jugadores dondequiera que estén, Avowed también estará disponible para pedidos anticipados y compras en Battle.net, la plataforma para PC de Blizzard.
Además, los jugadores con una membresía de Game Pass Ultimate o PC Game Pass podrán jugar Avowed en Battle.net vinculando sus cuentas de Xbox y Battle.net. Ya sea que estés jugando en Xbox Series X|S, la aplicación Xbox en Windows, Battle.net, Steam, la nube o el primer día con Xbox Game Pass, prepárate para sumergirte en un mundo en el que juegas a tu manera.
Elige tu edición
Avowed ofrece dos ediciones digitales y una edición física:
Avowed Digital Standard Edition: US$ 69,99 (o juega desde el primer día con Xbox Game Pass)
Juego base
Avowed Digital Premium Edition: US$ 89.99
Juego base
Hasta cinco días de acceso anticipado
Dos paquetes de aspectos premium
Acceso al libro de arte digital y banda sonora
Si compras la Edición Estándar o juegas con Xbox Game Pass y luego decides que quieres la Edición Premium, puedes actualizarla en cualquier momento por US$ 24.99. Recibirás todo el contenido digital adicional, incluido hasta cinco días de acceso anticipado y bonificaciones digitales.
Detrás de escena con el libro de arte digital y la banda sonora
Uno de los aspectos más destacados de la Edición Premium es el libro de arte digital y la banda sonora de Avowed, donde podrás sumergirte más profundamente en el mundo de Avowed con obras de arte detrás de escena del equipo y música del compositor Venus Theory.
Estos extras son perfectos para los fanáticos de la franquicia Pillars of Eternity y los recién llegados que buscan sumergirse por completo en la historia y los paisajes sonoros de Living Lands.
Skins exclusivas para ti y tus acompañantes
La Edición Premium incluye dos paquetes de aspectos cosméticos: el conjunto de colección Eora y el conjunto de colección Obsidian. Cada paquete incluye cinco máscaras: una para cada uno de los cuatro compañeros del juego y otra para tu personaje jugador.
Conjunto de colección Eora: inspirado en queridos personajes y regiones de Pillars of Eternity, un retroceso perfecto a los juegos originales.
Conjunto de colección Obsidian: elegantes conjuntos negros que aportan un aspecto elegante a tus compañeros, inspirados en nuestro propio estudio.
Características de accesibilidad para todos los jugadores
Avowed ofrece una variedad de funciones de accesibilidad para que todos los jugadores disfruten del juego. Además, a través del menú de accesibilidad está disponible una opción de modo en tercera persona, que ayuda a quienes lo necesiten a disfrutar del juego desde una perspectiva diferente, mejorando tanto la comodidad como la jugabilidad. Algunas opciones clave de accesibilidad incluyen:
Interfaz de usuario y cámara: personalice el campo de visión, desactive el movimiento de la cámara, cambie el movimiento de la cabeza y ajuste el balanceo de la cámara.
Texto y subtítulos: ajuste el tamaño del texto de la interfaz de usuario, el tamaño del texto de los subtítulos y la opacidad del fondo de los subtítulos para una legibilidad óptima.
Controles: controles totalmente reasignables con sensibilidad ajustable para todas las entradas analógicas, lo que mejora la comodidad del juego.
Idiomas: Si bien todas las actuaciones de voz serán en inglés, en el lanzamiento Avowed estará traducido a 12 idiomas, incluidos francés, italiano, alemán, español (España y México), polaco, portugués brasileño, ruso, coreano, japonés y chino simplificado.
Reserva ahora y asegura tu acceso anticipado
Los pedidos anticipados de Avowed están abiertos a partir de hoy en Xbox Series X|S, la aplicación Xbox en Windows, Battle.net y Steam. Embárcate en una emocionante aventura llena de compañeros memorables, enemigos y situaciones peligrosos, y elecciones que dan forma al mundo que te rodea. Al reservar la Edición Premium, estarás entre los primeros en explorar las Tierras Vivientes con hasta cinco días de acceso anticipado, a partir del 13 de febrero.
La cuenta regresiva para febrero ha comenzado. ¿Estás listo para descubrir los secretos de Eora? ¡Estamos ansiosos por ver adónde te lleva tu viaje! Avowed se lanza el 18 de febrero de 2025 en Xbox Series X|S, la aplicación Xbox en Windows, Battle.net, Steam y la nube, o juega desde el primer día con Xbox Game Pass.
Acerca de Avowed
Te damos la bienvenida a las Tierras Vivas, un territorio misterioso donde habrá muchas aventuras y peligros.
Avowed está ambientado en el mundo de Eora, que se presentó originalmente a los jugadores de la franquicia Pillars of Eternity. Es un RPG de acción y fantasía en primera persona desarrollado por el galardonado equipo de Obsidian Entertainment.
Tomarás el rol de un emisario de las lejanas tierras de Aedyr que llega a las Tierras Vivas con la misión de investigar los rumores sobre una plaga que se extiende en esta isla… pero ten cuidado, porque aquí abundan los misterios, secretos, peligros y aventuras, y todas tus decisiones tendrán consecuencias en este territorio salvaje.
Descubrirás una conexión personal con las Tierras Vivas y un antiguo secreto que amenaza con destruirlo todo. ¿Podrás salvar estas tierras desconocidas y a tu propia alma de las fuerzas que las amenazan?
Características principales:
Las extrañas y maravillosas Tierras Vivas – Las Tierras Vivas serán un lugar extraño y a la vez familiar para ti, conforme percibas que la isla misma te hace un llamado de auxilio. Explora una isla llena de diversos entornos y paisajes, cada uno con su propio ecosistema único.
Combate intuitivo para que juegues a tu manera – Combina espadas, hechizos, armas y escudos para combatir a tu manera. Usa tu grimorio para conjurar hechizos que atrapen, quemen o congelen a tus enemigos, azótalos con tu escudo o atácalos desde lejos con arcos y flechas.
Encuentra compañeros de viaje – A tu lado combatirán compañeros de diversas clases, cada uno con habilidades únicas. Desde un mercenario retirado hasta un mago excéntrico, tus camaradas serán parte de tu travesía, y tus decisiones darán forma a su historia conforme los ayudes a cumplir sus misiones.
Unless you work for the government or a large corporation, constrained designs are a fact of life. No matter what you’re building, there’s likely going to be a limit to the time, money, space, or materials you can work with. That’s good news, though, because constrained projects tend to be interesting projects, like this airborne polarimetric synthetic aperture radar.
If none of those terms make much sense to you, don’t worry too much. As [Henrik Forstén] explains, synthetic aperture radar is just a way to make a small radar antenna appear to be much larger, increasing its angular resolution. This is accomplished by moving the antenna across a relatively static target and doing some math to correlate the returned signal with the antenna position. We saw this with his earlier bicycle-mounted SAR.
For this project, [Henrik] shrunk the SAR set down small enough for a low-cost drone to carry. The build log is long and richly detailed and could serve as a design guide for practical radar construction. Component selection was critical, since [Henrik] wanted to use low-cost, easily available parts wherever possible. Still, there are some pretty fancy parts here, with a Zynq 7020 FPGA and a boatload of memory on the digital side of the custom PCB, and a host of specialized parts on the RF side.
The antennas are pretty cool, too; they’re stacked patch antennas made from standard FR4 PCBs, with barn-door feed horns fashioned from copper sheeting and slots positioned 90 to each other to provide switched horizontal and vertical polarization on both the receive and transmit sides. There are also a ton of details about how the radar set is integrated into the flight controller of the drone, as well as an interesting discussion on the autofocusing algorithm used to make up for the less-than-perfect positional accuracy of the system.
The resulting images are remarkably detailed, and almost appear to be visible light images thanks to the obvious shadows cast by large objects like trees and buildings. We’re especially taken by mapping all combinations of transmit and receive polarizations into a single RGB image; the result is ethereal.
In days gone by, a common retail hack used by some of the less honorable of our peers was the price tag switcheroo. You’d find some item that you wanted from a store but couldn’t afford, search around a bit for another item with a more reasonable price, and carefully swap the little paper price tags. As long as you didn’t get greedy or have the bad luck of getting a cashier who knew the correct prices, you could get away with it — at least up until the storekeeper wised up and switched to anti-tamper price tags.
For better or for worse, those days are over. The retail point-of-sale (POS) experience has changed dramatically since the time when cashiers punched away at giant cash registers and clerks applied labels to the top of every can of lima beans in a box with a spiffy little gun. The growth and development of POS systems is the subject of [TanRu Nomad]’s expansive video history, and even if you remember the days when a cashier kerchunked your credit card through a machine to take an impression of your card in triplicate, you’ll probably learn something.
The history of POS automation stretches back to the 1870s, perhaps unsurprisingly thanks to the twin vices of alcohol and gambling. The “Incorruptible Cashier” was invented by a saloon keeper tired of his staff ripping him off, and that machine would go on to become the basis of the National Cash Register Corporation, or NCR. That technology would eventually morph into the “totalisator,” an early computer used to calculate bets and payout at horse tracks. In fact, it was Harry Strauss, the founder of American Totalisator, who believed strongly enough in the power of computers to invest $500,000 in a struggling company called EMCC, which went on to build UNIVAC and start the general-purpose computer revolution.
To us, this was one of the key takeaways from this history, and one that we never fully appreciated before. The degree to which the need of retailers to streamline their point-of-sale operations drove the computer industry is remarkable, and the video gives multiple examples of it. The Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor, was designed mainly for calculators but also found its way into POS terminals. Those in turn ended up being so successful that Intel came up with the more powerful 8008, the first eight-bit microprocessor. People, too, were important, such as a young Chuck Peddle, who cut his teeth on POS systems and the Motorola 6800 before unleashing the 6502 on the world.
So the next time you’re waving your phone or a chipped credit card at a terminal and getting a sterile “boop” as a reward, spare a thought for all those clunky, chunky systems that paved the way.
If you’re someone who moves a lot, or just likes to change your decor, the limitations of conventional furniture can be a bit of a pain. Why not build your furniture modularly, so it can change with you?
QUIX is a modular building system designed for furnishings developed by [Robert Kern]. Giving people the ability to “build any kind of furniture in minutes with no tools,” it seems like a good gateway for people who love building with LEGO but find the pegs a little uncomfortable and expensive for full-sized chairs and couches. Anything that makes making more accessible is an exciting development in our book.
Featuring a repeating series of interlocking hooks, the panels can be produced via a number of techniques like CNC, laser cutter, or even smaller 3D printed models. Dowels and elastic bands serve as locks to prevent the furniture from tilting and since you have such a wide variety of panel materials to choose from, the color combinations can range from classic plywood to something more like a Mondrian.
If you’re looking for more modular inspiration for your house, how about gridbeam or Open Structures? If you’re wanting your furniture more musically-inclined, try Doodlestation instead.
For better or worse, the fundamental design of guitars has remained familiar since they electrified around a century ago. A few strings, a fretboard, and a body of some sort will get you most of the way there for an acoustic guitar, with the addition of electromagnetic pickups and wiring for electric variants. However, technology has advanced rapidly in the last 100 years outside the musical world, so if you want to see what possibilities lie ahead for modernizing guitars take a look at the Cyberbass created by [Matteo].
The guitar starts its life as many guitars do: with a block of wood. One of the design goals was to be able to use simple tools to build the guitar, so the shape of the instrument was honed with a Japanese hacksaw and the locations for the pickups and other electronics were carved out with chisels.
The neck of the guitar was outsourced since they take some pretty specialized tools to build, so simply bolting it to the body takes care of that part of the build, but [Matteo] had a few false starts setting the bridge in the exact location it needed to be.
Luckily he was able to repair the body and move the bridge. With the core of the guitar ready, it was on to paint and then to its custom electronics. [Matteo] built in not only a set of pickups and other common electric guitar parts but also integrated a synth pedal into the body as well as including a chromatic tuner.
With everything assembled and a few finishing touches added including a custom-engraved metal signature plate, the Cyberbass is ready to go on tour. [Matteo] learned a lot about guitar building in general, as well as a few things about electronics relating to musical instruments (including how expensive tuners work just as well as cheap ones).
How any string instrument sounds depends on hundreds of factors; even the tiniest details matter. Seemingly inconsequential things like whether the tree that the wood came from grew on the north slope or south slope of a particular valley make a difference, at least to the trained ear. Add electronics into the mix, as with electric guitars, and that’s a whole other level of choices that directly influence the sound.
To experiment with that, [Mark Gutierrez] tried rolling some home-brew capacitors for his electric guitar. The cap in question is part of the guitar’s tone circuit, which along with a potentiometer forms a variable low-pass filter. A rich folklore has developed over the years around these circuits and the best way to implement them, and there are any number of commercially available capacitors with the appropriate mojo you can use, for a price.
[Mark]’s take on the tone cap is made with two narrow strips of regular aluminum foil separated by two wider strips of tissue paper, the kind that finds its way into shirt boxes at Christmas. Each of the foil strips gets wrapped around and crimped to a wire lead before the paper is sandwiched between. The whole thing is rolled up into a loose cylinder and soaked in mineral oil, which serves as a dielectric.
To hold the oily jelly roll together, [Mark] tried both and outer skin of heat-shrink tubing with the ends sealed by hot glue, and a 3D printed cylinder. He also experimented with a wax coating to keep the oily bits contained. The video below shows the build process as well as tests of the homebrew cap against a $28 commercial equivalent. There’s a clear difference in tone compared to switching the cap out of the circuit, as well as an audible difference in tone between the two caps. We’ll leave the discussion of which sounds better to those with more qualified ears; fools rush in, after all.
Whatever you think of the sound, it’s pretty cool that you can make working capacitors so easily. Just remember to mark the outer foil lead, lest you spoil everything.
[Azpaca] purchased a fun little toy car from Tamiya, only… there was a problem. The little off-roader wasn’t up to scratch—despite its four-wheel-drive, it couldn’t get over rough ground to save its life. Thus, it was time to 3D-print a better chassis that could actually get through it!
The problem was quite obvious. With no suspension and a rigid chassis, the vehicle would tend to end up with one or more wheels on the air on rough surfaces. To rectify this, [Azpaca] created a twisting chassis which would allow the wheels to better remain in contact with the ground. The design is relatively straightforward, and reuses much of the original drivetrain, including the simple brushed motor. However, with a pivot right behind the front wheels, it has much more traction on rocks and gravel, and can traverse these terrains much more easily.
Tamiya’s motorized toys aren’t particularly well known in the West, but it’s neat to see the community that exists around modifying them around the world. Design files are available for the curious. If you’re not down with mods, perhaps you’d prefer to print your own cars from scratch. Video after the break.
When you’re spitting out G-Code for a 3D print, you can pick all kinds of infill settings. You can choose the pattern, and the percentage… but the vast majority of slicers all have one thing in common. They all print layer by layer, infill and all. What if there was another way?
There’s been a lot of chatter in the 3D printing world about the potential of non-planar prints. Following this theme, [TenTech] has developed a system for non-planar infill. This is where the infill design is modulated with sinusoidal waves in the Z axis, such that it forms a somewhat continuous bond between what would otherwise be totally seperate layers of the print. This is intended to create a part that is stronger in the Z direction—historically a weakness of layer-by-layer FDM parts.
Files are on Github for the curious, and currently, it only works with Prusaslicer. Ultimately, it’s interesting work, and we can’t wait to see where it goes next. What we really need is a comprehensive and scientific test regime on the tensile strength of parts printed using this technique. We’ve featured some other neat work in this space before, too. Video after the break.
Although much diminished now, the public switched telephone network was one of the largest machines ever constructed. To make good on its promise of instant communication across town or around the world, the network had to reach into every home and business, snake along poles to thousands of central offices, and hum through the ether on microwave links. In its heyday it was almost unfathomably complex, with calls potentially passing through thousands of electronic components, any of which failing could present anything from a minor annoyance to a matter of life or death.
The brief but very interesting film below deals with “The Tyranny of Large Numbers.” Produced sometime in the 1960s by Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the Bell System, it takes a detailed look at the problems caused by scaling up systems. As an example, it focuses on the humble carbon film resistor, a component used by the millions in various pieces of telco gear. Getting the manufacturing of these simple but critical components right apparently took a lot of effort. Initially made by hand, a tedious and error-prone process briefly covered in the film, Western Electric looked for ways to scale up production significantly while simultaneously increasing quality.
While the equipment used by the Western engineers to automate the production of resistors, especially the Librascope LGP-30 computer that’s running the show, may look quaint, there’s a lot about the process that’s still used to this day. Vibratory bowl feeders for the ceramic cores, carbon deposition by hot methane, and an early version of a SCARA arm to sputter gold terminals on the core could all be used to produce precision resistors today. Even cutting the helical groove to trim the resistance is similar, although today it’s done with a laser instead of a grinding wheel. There are differences, of course; we doubt current resistor manufacturers look for leaks in the outer coating by submerging them in water and watching for bubbles, but that’s how they did it in the 60s.
The productivity results were impressive. Just replacing the silver paint used for terminal cups with sputtered gold terminals cut 16 hours of curing time out of the process. The overall throughput increased to 1,200 pieces per hour, an impressive number for such high-reliability precision components, some of which we’d wager were still in service well into the early 2000s. Most of them are likely long gone, but the shadows cast by these automated manufacturing processes stretch into our time, and probably far beyond.
At Hackaday, we see community-driven open source development as the great equalizer. Whether it’s hardware or software — if there’s some megacorp out there trying to sell you something, you should have the option to go with a comparable open source version. Even if the commercial offering is objectively superior, it’s important that open source alternatives always exist, or else its the users themselves that end up becoming the product before too long.
So we were particularly excited when [Neumi] wrote in to share his Open Echo project, as it contains some very impressive work towards democratizing the use of sonar. Over the years we’ve seen a handful of underwater projects utilize sonar in some form or another, but they have always simply read the data from a commercial, and generally expensive, unit. But Open Echo promises to delete the middle-man, allowing for cheaper and more flexible access to bathymetric data.
The TUSS4470 Shield lets you experiment with driving transducers.
The project started with the reverse engineering of a cheap commercial fish finder, which gave [Neumi] first-hand experience with driving ultrasonic transducers and interpreting the signal they return. Further research lead him to the Texas Instruments TUSS4470, a ultrasonic sensor IC that can do much of the heavy lifting. He spun up an Arduino shield using this chip, and wrote the necessary code to interface directly with a commercial transducer.
This is already a huge milestone for DIY sonar, but [Neumi] isn’t stopping there. The newest iteration of the hardware is designed not just to work with commercial transducers, but can be used with home-built ones as well. While the project isn’t complete, he’s made some very rapid progress as demonstrated in the video below.
We’ve covered a number of projects over the years that involved reading the depth of body of water, and this project would have been able to make each one of them cheaper and easier accomplish. While admittedly not every hacker is keen to map the bottom of their local waterway, we know there is a niche group out there that have been waiting a long time for a project like this to come around.
During the Cambrian Explosion of cellphone form factors at the turn of the millenium, Nokia reigned supreme. If you’d like to see what they were doing behind the scenes to design these wild phones, you’ll love the Nokia Design Archive from Aalto University.
Featuring images, presentations, videos and a number of other goodies (remember transparencies?), this collection gives us some in-depth insight into how consumer products were dreamed up, designed, and brought to market. Some projects require more reading between the lines than others as the Archive is somewhat fragmented, but we think it could still be an invaluable peek into product design, especially if you’re working on projects that you want to be usable outside of a hacker audience.
The Archive also includes approximately 2000 objects including many unreleased “unknown” models and prototypes of phones that actually did make it into the wild. While we’d love to get our hands on some of these devices IRL, having images with reference colors is probably the next best thing. Having replaced a number of smartphone screens, we hope more hackers take up the buttons and indestructible casing of these elegant devices for a more civilized age.
Thanks to [Michael Fitzmayer] for the tip! Be sure to checkout his work on Nokia N-Gage phones, including an SDK if you too love to taco talk.
There are a huge number of manufacturers building awesome radio-controlled cars these days. However, sometimes you just have to go your own way. That’s what [snamle] did with this awesome 3D-printed RC car—and the results are impressive.
This build didn’t just aim to build something that looked vaguely car-like and whizzed around on the ground. Instead, it was intended to give [snamle] the opporunity to explore the world of vehicle dynamics—learning about weight distribution, suspension geometry, and so many other factors—and how these all feed into the handling of a vehicle. The RC side of things is all pretty straightforward—transmitter, receiver, servos, motors, and a differential were all off-the-shelf. But the chassis design, the steering, and suspension are all bespoke—designed by [snamle] to create a car with good on-road handling and grip.
It’s a small scale testbed, to be sure. Regardless, there’s no better way to learn about how a vehicle works on a real, physical level—you can’t beat building one with your own two hands and figuring out how it works.
It’s true, we see a lot of 3D printed RC cars around these parts. Many are built with an eye to robotics experimentation or simply as a learning exercise. This one stands out for its focus on handling and performance, and of course that nicely-designed suspension system. Video after the break.
This week, we witnessed a couple of space oopsies as both Starship and New Glenn suffered in-flight mishaps on the same day. SpaceX’s Starship was the more spectacular, with the upper stage of the seventh test flight of the full stack experiencing a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” thanks to a fire developing in the aft section of the stage somewhere over the Turks and Caicos islands, about eight and a half minutes after takeoff from Boca Chica. The good news is that the RUD happened after first-stage separation, and that the Super Heavy booster was not only able to safely return to the pad but also made another successful “chopsticks” landing on the tower. Sorry, that’s just never going to get old.
On the Bezos side of the billionaire rocket club, the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn ended with the opposite problem. The upper stage reached orbit, but the reusable booster didn’t make it back to the landing barge parked off the Bahamas. What exactly happened isn’t clear yet, but judging by the telemetry the booster was coming in mighty fast, which may indicate that the engines didn’t restart fully and the thing just broke up when it got into the denser part of the atmosphere.
While we’re not huge fans of doorbell cameras, mainly on privacy grounds but also because paying a monthly fee for service just seems silly, we might reconsider our position after one captured video of a meteorite strike. The impact, which occurred at the Prince Edward Island home of Joe Velaidum, happened back in July but the video was only just released; presumably the delay was for confirmation that the object was indeed a meteorite. Joe’s Ring camera captured video of something yeeting out of the sky and crashing into the sidewalk next to the driveway, in the exact spot he’d been standing only moments before. It’s hard to say if he would have been killed by the impact, but it sure wouldn’t have been fun.
While we’re on space-adjacent topics, we saw an interesting story about a satellite that was knocked out of service for a couple of days thanks to 2024 being a leap year. The Eutelsat OneWeb communications satellite went offline on the last day of the year, apparently because some software wasn’t prepared for the fact that 2024 had 366 days. It’s not clear if this caused any problems with the satellite itself, although the company said the problem was with the “ground segment” so it likely wasn’t. Engineers were able to work through the problem and get it back online within 48 hours, but we’re left wondering how something like this could happen with so many standard libraries out there that specifically deal with leap day calculations.
It’s that time of year again — HOPE_16 is gearing up, and tickets for the August 15-17 conference at St. John’s University in Queens are already on sale. It looks like the Call for Proposals is active now too, so if you’ve got a talk you’d like to give, get going.
And finally, sad news for a hapless early adopter of Bitcoin, whose eleven-year effort to locate a hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin on it has reached a legal end. Back in 2013, a hard drive owned by James Howells containing the Bitcoin wallet was accidentally disposed of, ending up in a landfill in Newport, Wales. Howells immediately asked for permission to search for the missing fortune, which at the time was worth about $7.5 million. This seems to us like his first mistake; in light of the potential payout, we’d probably have risked a trespassing charge. Howells spent the next couple of years trying to get access while assembling a recovery team, with the effort driven by the ever-increasing price of Bitcoin. Howells also brought suit against the council to get access, an effort that a High Court judge brought to an end last week. So Howells is out of luck, and the hard drive, now worth $765 million, still lies in the landfill.
What if your old, neglected toys could come to life — with a bit of sass? That’s exactly what [Binh] achieved when he transformed his sister’s worn-out teddy bear into ‘Ted’, an interactive talking plush with a personality of its own. This project, which combines the GLaDOS Personality Core project from the Portal series with clever microcontroller tinkering, brings a whole new personality to a childhood favorite.
[Binh] started with the basics: a teddy bear already equipped with buttons and speakers, which he overhauled with an ESP32 microcontroller. The bear’s personality originated from GLaDOS, but was rewritten by [Binh] to fit a cheeky, teddy-bear tone. With a few tweaks in the Python-based fork, [Binh] created threads to handle touch-based interaction. For example, the ESP32 detects where the bear is touched and sends this input to a modified neural network, which then generates a response. The bear can, for instance, call you out for holding his paw for too long or sarcastically plead for mercy. I hear you say ‘but that bear Ted could do a lot more!’ Well — maybe, all this is just what an innocent bear with a personality should be capable of.
Instead, let us imagine future iterations featuring capacitive touch sensors or accelerometers to detect movement. The project is simple, but showcases the potential for intelligent plush toys. It might raise some questions, too.
Telephone systems predate the use of cheap computers and electronic switches. Yesterday’s phone system used lots of stepping relays in a box known as a “selector.” If you worked for the phone company around 1951, you might have seen the Bell System training film shown below that covers 197 selectors.
The relays are not all the normal ones we think of today. There are slow release relays and vertical shafts that are held by a “dog.” The shaft moves to match the customer’s rotary dial input.
Be sure to check out part two to get the whole story. Actually, we think [Periscope] switched the videos, so maybe start with part two. It sort of gives an overview and more of a mechanical perspective. Part one shows the schematic and assumes you know about some things covered in what they are calling part two.
You have to wonder who designed these to start with. Seems hard enough to follow when someone is explaining it, much less dreaming it up from scratch. Like most things, many people contributed to the development of the technology, and we are pretty sure the type 197 selector wasn’t the first device to appear.
Watching the current flow through the wires in the video reminded us of the Falstad circuit simulator.
A research project shows that it’s possible to create complex single-piece lenticular objects, or objects that have lenticular lenses built directly into them. The result is a thing whose appearance depends on the viewer’s viewpoint. The object in the image above, for example, is the same object from five different angles.
What’s really neat is that these colorful things have been 3D printed as single objects, no separate lenses or assembly required. Sure, it requires equipment that not just everyone has on their workbench, but we think a clever hacker could put the underlying principles to work all the same.
This lampshade (which was 3D printed as a single object) changes color and displays Good Day or Good Night depending on viewing angle.
The effect is essentially the same as what is sometimes seen in children’s toys and novelties — where a perceived image changes depending on the viewing angle. This principle has been used with a lenticular lens sheet to create a clever lenticular clock, but there’s no need to be limited by what lenses are available off the shelf. We’ve seen a custom 3D printed lenticular lens slapped onto a mobile device to create a 3D screen effect.
Coming back to the research, the objects researchers created go beyond what we’ve seen before in two important ways. First is in using software to aid in designing the object and it’s viewpoints (the plugin for Rhino 3D is available on GitHub), and the second is the scale of the effect. Each lens can be thought of as a pixel whose color depends on the viewing angle, and by 3D printing the lenses, one can fit quite a lot of them onto a surface with a high degree of accuracy.
To make these objects researchers used PolyJet 3D printing, which is essentially UV-cured resin combined with inkjet technology, and can create multi-color objects in a single pass. The lenses are printed clear with a gloss finish, the colors are embedded, and a final hit of sprayed varnish helps with light transmission. It sure beats placing hundreds of little lenses by hand.
For a lot of us, soldering just seems to come naturally. But if we’re being honest, none of us was born with a soldering iron in our hand — ouch! — and if we’re good at soldering now, it’s only thanks to good habits and long practice. But what if you’re a company that lives and dies by the quality of the solder joints your employees produce? How do you get them to embrace the dark art of soldering?
If you’re Tektronix in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the answer is simple: make in-depth training videos that teach people to solder the Tek way. The first video below, from 1977, is aimed at workers on the assembly line and as such concentrates mainly on the practical aspects of making solid solder joints on PCBs and mainly with through-hole components. The video does have a bit of theory on soldering chemistry and the difference between eutectic alloys and other tin-lead mixes, as well as a little about the proper use of silver-bearing solders. But most of the time is spent discussing the primary tool of the trade: the iron. Even though the film is dated and looks like a multi-generation dupe from VHS, it still has a lot of valuable tips; we’ve been soldering for decades and somehow never realized that cleaning a tip on a wet sponge is so effective because the sudden temperature change helps release oxides and burned flux. The more you know.
The second video below is aimed more at the Tek repair and rework technicians. It reiterates a lot of the material from the first video, but then veers off into repair-specific topics, like effective desoldering. Pro tip: Don’t use the “Heat and Shake” method of desoldering, and wear those safety glasses. There’s also a lot of detail on how to avoid damaging the PCB during repairs, and how to fix them if you do manage to lift a trace. They put a fair amount of emphasis on the importance of making repairs look good, especially with bodge wires, which should be placed on the back of the board so they’re not so obvious. It makes sense; Tek boards from the era are works of art, and you don’t want to mess with that.
Good news this week from the Sun’s far side as the Parker Solar Probe checked in after its speedrun through our star’s corona. Parker became the fastest human-made object ever — aside from the manhole cover, of course — as it fell into the Sun’s gravity well on Christmas Eve to pass within 6.1 million kilometers of the surface, in an attempt to study the extremely dynamic environment of the solar atmosphere. Similar to how manned spacecraft returning to Earth are blacked out from radio communications, the plasma soup Parker flew through meant everything it would do during the pass had to be autonomous, and we wouldn’t know how it went until the probe cleared the high-energy zone. The probe pinged Earth with a quick “I’m OK” message on December 26, and checked in with the Deep Space Network as scheduled on January 1, dumping telemetry data that indicated the spacecraft not only survived its brush with the corona but that every instrument performed as expected during the pass. The scientific data from the instruments won’t be downloaded until the probe is in a little better position, and then Parker will get to do the whole thing again twice more in 2025.
Good news too for Apple users, some of whom stand to get a cool $100 as part of a settlement into allegations that Siri-enabled devices “unintentionally” recorded conversations. The $95 million agreement settles a lawsuit brought by users who were shocked — SHOCKED! — to see ads related to esoteric subjects they had recently discussed, apparently independently of uttering the “Hey, Siri” wake phrase. Apple seems to acknowledge that some recordings were made without the wake word, characterizing them as “unintentional” and disputing the plaintiffs’ claims that the recordings were passed to third parties for targeted advertising. The settlement, which may be certified in February, would award the princely sum of $20 to claimants for each Apple device they owned over a ten-year period, up to five devices total.
In related news, Apple is also getting some attention for apparently opting users into its Enhanced Visual Search system. The feature is intended to make it easier to classify and search your photos based on well-known landmarks or points of interest, so if you take a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower or Grand Canyon, it’ll recognize those features visually and record the fact. It does so by running your snapshots through a local AI algorithm and then encrypting the portion of the image it thinks contains the landmark. The encrypted portion of the image then goes to the cloud for analysis, apparently without getting decrypted, and the suggested location goes back to your device in encrypted form. It’s possible to turn the feature off, but you have to know it’s there in the first place, which we imagine not a lot of Apple users do. While there’s no sign that this new feature leaks any user data, there are a lot of moving pieces that sure seem ripe for exploitation, given enough time.
Are you as sick of counting the numbers of bridges or traffic lights in potato-vision images or trying to figure out if that one square has a few pixels of the rear-view mirror of a motorcycle to prove you’re human? We sure are, and while we’d love to see CAPTCHAs go the way of the dodo, they’re probably here to stay. So, why not have fun with the concept and play a round of DOOM on nightmare mode to prove your non-robotness? That was Guillermo Rauch’s idea, and we have to say it’s pretty cool. You’ve got to kill three monsters to solve the puzzle, and we found it pretty difficult, in part because we’re more used to the WASD layout than using the arrow keys for player movement. Just watch out if you give it a try with headphones on — it’s pretty loud.
And finally, if you feel like your life is missing in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of a Boeing 777’s auxiliary power unit, we’ve got good news for you. We stumbled across this playlist of excellent animations that shows every nook and cranny of the APU, and how it operates. For the uninitiated, the APU is basically a gas turbine engine that lives in the tail of jetliners and provides electrical and pneumatic power whenever the main engines aren’t running. It sounds simple, but there’s so much engineering packed into the APU and the way it integrates into the aircraft systems. We’ve always known that jets have a lot of redundancy built into them, but this series really brought that home to us. Enjoy!
And finally finally, we generally don’t like to plug the Hack Chat here in this space, but we thought we’d make an exception since we’re kicking off the 2025 series in a big way with Eben Upton! The co-founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi will stop by the Hack Chat on January 15 at noon Pacific time, and we just want to get the word out as soon as possible. Hope to see you there!
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