TechyMagThings

A buckminsterfullerene, also known as a buckyball, is typically a fullerene consisting of sixty carbon atoms (C₆₀) arranged in a way that resembles a football-like sphere. Extending this arrangement to other types of atoms has until now however proven as illusive as finding non-carbon-based lifeforms. In a paper by [Hyun Wook Choi] et al. and published in Chemical Science the discovery of boron buckyballs is detailed. There is also a soft-paywalled article in the Chemical & Engineering News magazine for a higher-level perspective.

The discovered boron-based buckyball ups the number of atoms to eighty, forming B₈₀ (boron fullerite) with a slightly larger diameter than C₆₀ at 0.85 nm versus 0.71 nm. Perhaps more interesting are the claims by the authors that boron fullerite may have more practical applications than its carbon-based cousin, mostly due to it being predicted to be a semiconductor with an 0.8 eV energy gap and better electron acceptance that provides interesting doping prospects.

Producing these boron structures used laser vaporization with a helium carrier gas that was seeded with argon to increase cooling efficiency. Inside this boron cluster the reported structures were then discovered and characterized as described in the paper.

Obviously, going from a fascinating laboratory discovery to bulk production won’t be easy, and the predicted properties of boron fullerite may turn out to be incomplete or have a dark side that we aren’t aware of. Regardless, they’re bound to be more useful at least than the carbon version that’s remained mostly a curiosity despite many years of research.

No, we’re not talking about cultural appropriation of Japan’s most famous form of short poem–this is the other Haiku, the open-source descendant of BeOS, which now has a fully-native meshcore chat client called Sestriere, thanks to the efforts of one [Atomozero]. Of course you’ll need a LoRa radio to act as a modem, but anything that speaks USB serial– which is any of the ESP32-based offerings on the market–should work.

This is interesting in that we don’t see many desktop applications leveraging LoRa networks– meshtastic or meshcore– so for one to appear for the relatively-obscure BeOS derivative is just neat. It’s also a nice peice of work: the chat window is full featured, organizing your contacts, and communicating not just with text but emojis and reaction GIFs. GIFs seem a bit extravagant for LoRa bandwith, but apparently it works. There are also Codec2-based voice messages, another thing that we didn’t expect to see over LoRa, since most ‘chat’ projects restrict themselves to text messaging.

The software will also map all the nodes with which you are in contact, both diagrammatically and geographically, overlaid on OpenStreetMap tiles. The network map conveniently colour-codes your contacts by the link quality, but what’s even more interesting is the WireShark-inspired packet sniffer built into the software to let you keep a really close eye on traffic on the mesh network.

Neither Haiku or MeshCore are to everyone’s tastes, but as an OS it is a worthy daily driver, even if you have to jump through some hoops to install it if you have a UEFI-only system.

If you need more range, try a Yagi.

As straightforward as the concept of taking battery packs out of an old electric or hybrid car and reusing them for home power storage sounds, this thought process skips a few essential steps. As argued by [Ed] in a recent video based on his own experiences with high-voltage Nissan Leaf batteries in a home PV system, the main problem is that you’re taking a battery out of a larger system including a lot of the management hardware and software.

The referenced Battery Emulator project is an open source effort to create a suitable interface between these EV batteries, with the mentioned Nissan Leaf being just one example in the project Wiki, with the connection scheme shown in the top image. It’s also noted that the Leaf battery BMS is not designed to operate continuously, so they need to be restarted every day or so lest they become too inaccurate.

These and other things are all solid reasons why you have to be absolutely certain that you want to integrate these high-voltage battery packs into your 12 – 48V low-voltage DC system. You’re after all assuming all the responsibility of setting up a system that’s both safe and reliable, so having a good read through something like the Battery Emulator Wiki and sourcing first-hand experiences from the folk in this community would be a very wise first step.

This week Jonathan chats with Alexander Neumann about Restic, a particularly compelling backup and restore solution written in Go. Why did the world need one more backup program? And what’s Alexander’s personal take on transitioning from programmer to maintainer? Watch to find out!

• https://restic.net/
• https://github.com/restic/restic
• https://fosstodon.org/@restic

Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.

Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.

If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.

Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

If you are an American of a certain age, you know the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, beating the United States to orbit. You might even remember ham radio operators tuning into the satellites beeping. But you probably haven’t heard much about the team that built the vehicle, the problems they had, or the clever design choices they made. [Hoog] has a video that details the birth of Sputnik. You can see the video below.

The original plan was to launch a massive space lab, but it proved too ambitious. Keep in mind that in the late 1950s, you didn’t have tiny computers, high-density power sources, or advanced materials, and no one really knew what to expect in the Earth orbit environment. Even the viability of radio from the ground to orbit wasn’t a given. But Sputnik’s 1-watt transmitter did the job.

The event was part of the International Geophysical Year, but despite the agreement of international cooperation, the backdrop of the Cold War made politicians in the United States incite fear among Americans that the “Reds” were able to fly something over the United States both undetected and unopposed. Secretly, the US was pleased, as it wanted to fly spy satellites over the USSR, and this paved the way, since it could hardly complain if the US did the same thing the Soviets had already done.

The whole thing started the space race, which eventually led to the moon landings. It seems impossible that Sputnik was only 69 years ago. That means 70 years ago, there were no manmade satellites orbiting the Earth.

Watching the video, we’d hoped for more details about the internals but there just wasn’t time. However, we’ve covered that before (the main link is dead, but the detail links are still very interesting). The IGY was, for the most part, a great international cooperation, although few of its accomplishments are as memorable as Sputnik.

When it comes to robots, few are as iconic as Robby. [Ogrinz Labs] has wanted to build one and even examined a real one up for auction to get high-res photos of it. He also combined his designs with some other open-source designs, and it looks good. He’s released his design as a Creative Commons-licensed set of STL files that you, in theory, could print. There are more details and instructions in the video below.

If you are looking for something quick to print for the weekend, this isn’t it. As you might expect, this is a lot to print. The creator admits, too, that it isn’t totally accurate. It has bigger feet, for example, so his feet can fit inside. There are a few other modifications made for different reasons, but only a hard-core Robby enthusiast would notice any of them.

In theory, you can wear the robot as a costume, but at the current height, it doesn’t look like that will work for the creator. Also, the joints that would make things rotate are still forward work, but he’s promised to provide updates.

Robby started out on Forbidden Planet and went on to appear in many other movies and TV shows. Much of the original body was vacuum-formed plastic (an early form of ABS known as Royalite).

Thanks to modern slicers, you can easily print the parts on your printer for later assembly, and the video shows you how. You can select what connectors are used, and while we like the dovetail mode for most of what we do, Robby’s clean surfaces need dowel connectors. We would be really excited to see someone take these files and make a working robot based on the design.

We’ve been watching this project for a while. If you are sorry you missed the auction of the original, you aren’t alone. But we couldn’t have afforded the $5,375,000 price tag anyway.

For those of us old enough to remember the harrowing days of the early 2020s, alongside another major kerfuffle there was a complete breakdown in global supply chains that led to the 2020-2023 global chip shortage. Unsurprisingly, this pushed many hardware manufacturers into less orthodox approaches, massive BOM changes, and hurried redesigns. One of the results of this era found its way into the hands of the bloke over at the [Playduino] YouTube channel, who was mystified to find two bodge wires in his fancy Saleae logic analyzer.

The reason for popping open the LA was crosstalk between two channels, which was bad enough that it made the unit quite unusable for the intended task. After seeing the cut traces and bodge wires he initially assumed that since he bought it used that the previous owner had modified it, but said person denied having opened it since purchasing it from an official retailer.

This was when he emailed Saleae support to see whether they knew anything. Initially they denied knowing anything about such a modification, but then the CTO emailed back with a long and very detailed confession. As explained in the video, during the aforementioned chip crisis Saleae was forced to rapidly redesign their LAs to use whatever FPGAs and other parts they could still get their hands on.

An initial prototype unit passed their internal tests, so they had a first batch manufactured using PCBs from a different supplier. Despite sending the same Gerber files, the resulting PCBs had ground fill issues that necessitated the observed rework, but due to insufficient testing for crosstalk a total of 406 units made it into the wild.

Sadly he had to return the defective unit for a replacement, making it somewhat hard to let go of such a piece of history. That said, if you want to know whether you’re also one of the lucky remaining 405 LA owners, the CTO provided the affected serial number range: 00200026245 to 00200026675 are affected.