TechyMagThings

Although the US’ Moon landings were mostly made famous by the fact that it featured real-life human beings bunny hopping across the lunar surface, they weren’t there just for a refreshing stroll over the lunar regolith in deep vacuum. Starting with an early experimental kit (EASEP) that was part of the Apollo 11 mission, the Apollo 12 through Apollo 17 were provided with the full ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package). It’s this latter which is the subject of a video by [Our Own Devices].

Despite the Apollo missions featuring only one actual scientist (Harrison Schmitt, geologist), these Bendix-manufactured ALSEPs were modular, portable laboratories for running experiments on the moon, with each experiment carefully prepared by scientists back on Earth. Powered by a SNAP-27 radioisotope generator (RTG), each ALSEP also featured the same Central Station command module and transceiver. Each Apollo mission starting with 12 carried a new set of experimental modules which the astronauts would set up once on the lunar surface, following the deployment procedure for that particular set of modules.

Although the connection with the ALSEPs was terminated after the funding for the Apollo project was ended by US Congress, their transceivers remained active until they ran out of power, but not before they provided years worth of scientific data on many aspects on the Moon, including its subsurface characteristics and exposure to charged particles from the Sun. These would provide most of our knowledge of our Moon until the recent string of lunar landings by robotic explorers.

Heading image: Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package of the Apollo 16 mission (Credit: NASA)

You can buy motorized camera sliders off-the-shelf, but they’re pretty costly. Alternatively, you can make one yourself, and it’s not even that hard if you’re kitted out with a 3D printer. [Creative 3D Printing] did just that with a nifty design that adds rotation into the mix. Check it out in the video below.

The basic slider is built out of 3D-printed components and some good old aluminum extrusion. A small 12-volt motor trucks the camera cart back and forth using a leadscrew. It’s torquey enough and slow enough that there isn’t much need for more advanced control—the motor just does the job. There’s also a limit switch set up to trigger a neat auto-reverse function.

The neat part, though, is the rotational mechanism. A smooth steel rod is attached to the slider’s housing, which can be set up in a straight line or aligned diagonally if desired. In the latter case, it rotates the mounting on the camera cart via a crank, panning the camera as it moves along the slider’s trajectory.

It’s a mechanically sophisticated design and quite unlike most of the camera sliders we feature around these parts.

Rope-climbing robots are the stuff of engineering dreams. As kids, didn’t we all clutter our family home with constructions of towers and strings – Meccano, or Lego – to have ziplines spanning entire rooms? Good for the youngsters of today, this has been included in school curricula. At the University of Illinois, the ME 370 students have been given the task of building a robot that can hang from a rope and walk across it—without damaging the rope. The final projects show not only how to approach tricky design problems, but also the creative solutions they stumbled upon.

Imagine a tiny, rope-climbing walker in your workshop—what could you create?

The project is full of opportunities for those thinking out of the box. It’s all about the balance between innovation and practicality: the students have to come up with a solution that can move at least 2 meters per minute, fits in a shoebox, and has some creative flair—no wheels allowed! The constraints provide an extra layer of challenge, but that’s where the fun lies. Some students use inverted walkers, others take on a more creature-like approach. The clever use of motors and batteries shows just how far simple tech can go when combined with a bit of engineering magic.

This project is a fantastic reminder that even small, seemingly simple design challenges can lead to fascinating creations. It invites us adults to play, and by that, we learn: a win-win situation. You can find the original article here, or grab some popcorn and watch the video below.

There are many retrocomputer emulation projects out there, and given the relative fragility of the original machines as they enter their fifth decade, emulation seems to be the most common way to play 8-bit games. It’s easy enough to load one on your modern computer, but there are plenty of hardware options, too. “The computer we’d have done anything for back in 1983” seems to be a phrase many of them bring to mind, but it’s so appropriate because they keep getting better. Take [Stormbytes1970]’s Pi Pico-powered Sinclair ZX Spectrum mini laptop (Spanish language, Google Translate link), for example. It’s a slightly chunky netbook that’s a ZX Spectrum, and it has a far better keyboard than the original.

On the PCB is the Pico, the power supply circuitry, an SD card, and a speaker. But it’s when the board is flipped over that the interesting stuff starts. In place of the squidgy rubber keyboard of yore, it has a proper keyboard,. We’re not entirely sure which switch it uses, but it appears to be a decent one, nevertheless. The enclosure is a slick 3D-printed sub-netbook for retro gaming on the go. Sadly, it won’t edit Hackaday, so we won’t be slipping one in the pack next time we go on the road, but we like it a lot.

It’s not the first Spectrum laptop we’ve covered, but we think it has upped the ante over the last one. If you just want the Spectrum’s BASIC language experience, you can try a modern version that runs natively on your PC.

Camera sliders are a popular project for makers—especially those who document their projects on video. They’re fun and accessible to build, and they can really create some beautiful shots. [Lechnology] set about to follow in this fine tradition and built a rather capable example of his own. Check it out in the video below.

The slider relies on V-slot rails, perhaps most familiar for their heavy use in modern 3D printers. The rails are paired with a 3D-printed camera carriage, which runs on smooth rubber rollers. A chunky stepper motor provides drive via a toothed belt. Trinamic motor controllers were chosen for their step interpolation feature, making the motion much smoother.

The slider doesn’t just move linearly, either. It can rotate the camera, too, since it has an additional motor in the carriage itself. In a nice retro touch, the wires for this motor are run with an old coiled telephone cable. It’s perfect for the job since it easily extends and retracts with the slider’s motion. Controlling everything is an Arduino, with speed and rotational modes set via a tiny screen and a rotary encoder control.

It’s a very complete build, and it performs well too. The video it produces is deliciously smooth. We’ve featured some other great camera sliders over the years, too. If you want to dig into Trinamic drivers, we can get you started.

Early Monday morning, while many of us will be putting the finishing touches — or just beginning, ahem — on our Christmas preparations, solar scientists will hold their collective breath as they wait for word from the Parker Solar Probe’s record-setting passage through the sun’s atmosphere. The probe, which has been in a highly elliptical solar orbit since its 2018 launch, has been getting occasional gravitational nudges by close encounters with Venus. This has moved the perihelion ever closer to the sun’s surface, and on Monday morning it will make its closest approach yet, a mere 6.1 million kilometers from the roiling photosphere. That will put it inside the corona, the sun’s extremely energetic atmosphere, which we normally only see during total eclipses. Traveling at almost 700,000 kilometers per hour, it won’t be there very long, and it’ll be doing everything it needs to do autonomously since the high-energy plasma of the corona and the eight-light-minute distance makes remote control impossible. It’ll be a few days before communications are re-established and the data downloaded, which will make a nice present for the solar science community to unwrap.

While Parker has been in a similar position on previous orbits and even managed a fortuitous transit of a coronal mass ejection, this pass will be closer and faster than any previous approach. It’s the speed that really grabs our attention, though, as Parker will be traveling at a small but significant fraction of the speed of light for a bit. That makes us wonder if there was any need for mission planners to allow for relativistic effects. We’d imagine so; satellite navigation systems need to take relativity into account to work, and they don’t move anywhere near as fast as Parker. Time will be running slower for Parker at those speeds, and it sure seems like that could muck things up, especially regarding autonomous operation.

Ever since the seminal work of Cameron, Hamilton, Schwarzenegger, et al, it has been taken as canon that the end of humanity will come about when the moral equivalent of SkyNet becomes self-aware and launches all the missiles at once to blot us out with a few minutes of thermonuclear fire. But it looks like AI might be trying to raise an army of grumpy teenagers if this lawsuit over violence-inciting chatbots is any indication. The federal product liability lawsuit targets Character.AI, an outfit that creates LLM-powered chatbots for kids, for allegedly telling kids to do some pretty sketchy stuff. You can read the details in the story, but suffice it to say that one of the chatbots was none too pleased with someone’s parents for imposing screen time rules and hinted rather strongly about how the child should deal with them. The chat logs of that interaction and others that are part of the suit are pretty dark, but probably no darker than the advice that most teenagers would get online from their carbon-based friends. That’s the thing about chatbots; when an LLM is trained with online interactions, you pretty much know what’s going to come out.

In today’s “Who could have seen that coming?” segment, we have a story about how drivers are hacked by digital license plates and are keen to avoid tolls and tickets. The exploit for one specific brand of plate, Reviver, and while it does require physical access to the plates, it doesn’t take much more than the standard reverse engineering tools and skills to pull off. Once the plates are jailbroken — an ironic term given that license plate manufacturing has historically been a prison industry — the displayed numbers can be changed at will with a smartphone app. The worst part about this is that the vulnerability is baked right into the silicon, so there’s nothing to be patched; the plates would have to be recalled, and different hardware would need to be reissued. We’ve been skeptical about the need for these plates from the beginning and questioned why anyone would pay extra for them (last item). But maybe the ability to dump your traffic cam violations into someone else’s lap is worth the extra $20 a month.

And finally, this local news story from Great Falls, Montana, is a timely reminder of how machine tools can mess up your life if you let them. Machinist Butch Olson was alone at work in his machine shop back on December 6 when the sleeve of his jacket got caught in a lathe. The powerful machine pulled his arm in and threatened to turn him to a bloody pulp, but somehow, he managed to brace himself against the bed. He fought the lathe for 20 whole minutes before the motor finally gave out, which let him disentangle himself and get some help. He ended up with a broken back, four fractured ribs, and an arm that looks “like hamburger” according to his sister. That’s a high price to pay, but at least Butch gets to brag that he fought a lathe and won.

Many of us grew up with dreams of piloting a forklift one day. Sadly, most warehouses take a dim view of horseplay with these machines, so few of us get to live out those fantasies. Playing with this desk-sized RC model from [ProfessorBoots] is probably a safer way to get those kicks instead. You can check it out in the video below.

The 3D-printed body of the forklift is the first thing you see. It’s great quality, and it instantly puts you in mind of the real thing. The build is true to the dynamics of a real forklift, too, with proper rear steering. Inside, there’s a custom circuit board hosting an ESP32 that serves as the brain of the operation. Its onboard wireless hardware allows remote control of the forklift via a smartphone app, PS4 controller, or many other options. It controls the drive motors and steering servo, along with another motor driving a threaded rod to move the forks up and down. The whole thing is powered by two Fenix 16340 batteries—small lithium-ion cells that can be recharged with an integral micro USB port.

The project video is very thorough about the design and build. It’s worth watching just to understand the specifics of how forklifts actually raise their forks up and down. It’s good stuff.

This forklift is just the latest RC build from [ProfessorBoots]. He’s done great work in this space before, like this charming skid steer and incredibly complex crane.