TechyMagThings

If you’re reading Hackaday there’s pretty good odds you’re at least somewhat fond of Star Trek. We’d bet good money most of you would quit your jobs today if a Starfleet recruiter showed up. That’s something you’d have in common with [PeterAJansen], who has been working for over a decade now to create something worthy of being called a tricorder. If his latest iteration, the Open Source Science Tricorder Cyberdeck, isn’t there yet, it’s pretty darn close.

The “tri” in tricorder means three, but this device has more than three instruments– so did the ones on the show, come to think of it. You won’t be scanning for veteron radiation with this, but you do get a scintillation crystal to get a spectroscopic analysis of beta- or gamma-ray sources; there’s also a visible light spectrometer, thermal camera, and magnetic field camera along with a standard magnetometer and the usual environmental sensors to give you temperature, pressure, and humidity, plus particulate, VOC and CO2 concentration. Enough to explore an alien planet? That’s hard to say, but it seems like enough to explore this one.

The device is based around a Clockwork Pi uConsole, which takes care of the form-factor: a slabtop with a QWERTY keyboard and an IPS display in a nice screen, and a Compute Module 5 to crunch all that data. It might not be quite as stylish as the folding units seen on-screen in Star Trek, but it seems like an eminently practical form factor. There are videos of it in operation as well as being assembled on the GitHub repository,  where you can get all the details needed to make your own. It is the Open Source Science Tricorder, after all.

This isn’t the first project we’ve seen chasing tricorder glory, but many of the others were more interested in screen accuracy than science. [Peter]’s earlier “arducorder” was a very notable exception to that trend.

Thanks to [MarcCote] for the tip! If your scanners pick up something interesting in cyberspace, remember our hailing frequencies are always open. 

It’s been true for a while now that Apple’s AirPods have been effectively disposable, with [iFixit] slapping each successive generation with an abysmal 0/10 repairability score. The moment that any of the built-in batteries faltered you could effectively toss the whole package out as e-waste.

Interestingly, with the fifth generation it would seem that a battery swap in the earbuds is now actually possible without whole-scale destruction, according to the [iFixit] teardown video.

Although it’s still a far cry from the demonstrated FairBuds battery replacement, this time around a bit of gentle heat allows for the glued-together earbud to cleanly separate, with inside a socketed coin cell. The catch here is that the polarity on these sockets differs between the left and right earbud, which was discovered after a quick swap.

Unfortunately this same easy-to-open change doesn’t carry over to the case for the earbuds, which still requires  physical destruction of the plastic to get to its battery. Accordingly [iFixit] gives this generation of AirPods a generous 2/10. Although a step in the right direction, it seems clear that if repairability or even simply being able to replace the batteries is a concern, the AirPod’s probably aren’t for you.

Last year’s third generation AirPods made [iFixit] really angry, so this is borderline glowing praise. Of course, the issue with non-removable batteries remains a problem, especially when new EU regulations that should have fixed this get watered down.

Although graphene gives diamond a solid run for its money when it comes to being the most useful assembly of carbon atoms, both have the distinct property of material scientists still trying to figure out all their properties and potential applications. This includes something like the melting curve of diamond and potential phases beyond this diamond lattice phase that occur when exposed to extreme pressures and temperatures. Such as those experienced on a planetary scale and during inertial confinement fusion (ICF).

In this research (paywalled) by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), it was investigated how close theoretical simulations were to physical reality by blasting diamond samples with a laser. This ablated the surface and sent a shockwave through the material that caused it to melt. Using X-ray diffraction data this entire process was followed, elucidating the exact melting temperature under such conditions.

This revealed that previous estimates based on earlier experiments had been off by many hundreds of degrees, giving a far better idea of how diamond responds to such extreme pressures and temperatures. Where such information is very relevant is in fields like planetary science where diamonds can occur naturally and being able to predict their presence can be essential.

The other application, and the primary reason why LLNL does this kind of research is for the sake of ICF at the national ignition facility (NIF), which is the best way to investigate the behavior of e.g. hydrogen isotopes under extreme conditions like those of nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately this research will have no impact on practical power generation using nuclear fusion, as the only viable path there involves forms of magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), but it’s still pretty rad to improve our understanding this carbon form.

Many of us of a certain age will have had their first true, good 3D video game experience with Super Mario 64. Unlike previous 3D games, the camera was an object controllable by the player, rather than a first-person-ony mode or one where the game tries to guess the best placement for the camera. We might take this mechanic for granted today, but 3D was a new technology at the time that took experimentation before settling on the norms we have today. From a programming perspective, 3D graphics can be a bit of a head-scratcher but [Gabriel] shows that perspective and the camera can be as simple as a few lines of math.

When starting out as a programmer, [Gabriel] used various tools that provided a camera somewhat automatically. But after reaching the limits of these types of frameworks, the next step is to learn how that works from scratch. It turns out that it’s a bit of matrix math, with values for foreground and background clipping planes as well as aspect, field of view, and position. This basically replicates a trapezoidal prism which can be thought of as a viewer looking at a scene from the perspective of a camera. To provide the depth effect, the X and Y coordinates are divided by the Z coordinate within this matrix system, making far-away objects smaller and generating the 3D effect.

On [Gabriel]’s site which explains this method, there are a few sliders in several examples that demonstrate how changing values of each of these variables changes the perspective and the object being displayed. For a math lesson it is very interactive and helps intuit these concepts. Cameras aside, the generation of 3D objects has its own unique set of math equations to learn about that are “equally” interesting.

Even if almost tragically impractical in a world where digital calculators are cheap as chips, mechanical calculators and their big mechanical computer brethren remain an absolute marvel of engineering. Using nothing but elements like simple gears their motion is used to calculate everything from a simple multiplication to the proper targeting instructions for an Iowa-class battleship’s guns.

This fascination, along with the mind-bendingly high prices for commercial digital calculators led [3D all Workshop] to spend 2 months on designing his own mechanical calculator. Fully FDM 3D-printed, of course.

In the video the design process and troubleshooting step are covered along with the workings of the mechanisms for both addition and multiplication. While this may seem simple, basically converting numbers of rotations into a final indicator position, aspects like carrying a digit and adding a multiplication feature to the mechanism require some proper engineering.

Of course, using FDM printing for tolerance-sensitive things like gears meant that a lot of time was spent redesigning aspects of the mechanism, going through about a hundred design iterations until it worked, with the help from a bit of lubrication.

Naturally this isn’t the first 3D-printed mechanical calculator, not to mention ones made from wood, but always it’s pretty cool to see one made from first fundamentals.

In the era before PCB shops would make almost any PCB imaginable, as well making many other manufacturing processes for prototypes available to hobbyists, there were several ways of making PCBs at home. Many of which involve harsh chemicals and were easy to mess up. Getting a single-layer PCB using the toner transfer method, for example, took a bit of practice (and a fume hood) to get right. [Bettina Neumryr] is working on a custom two-layer PCB, and has a new trick to get it to come out right despite the added complexity of the second layer.

The method starts out as a standard single-layer board in effect. Toner is ironed onto a copper board, in this case using a laminator, which allows the board to go into an acid bath which washes away all of the un-tonered copper. But with the second layer exposed, this would wash away the other side of the board completely. [Bettina] is using a new method here to protect that layer during the first bath: covering it in ink from a magic marker. With the first board etched, the ink and toner get washed off and the second layer is carefully lined up, put through the laminator, and then the opposite side gets covered in ink for the second acid bath.

After the process is complete and many layers of ink and toner are removed, [Bettina] is left with a PCB that’s ready to receive electronic components, if a little stained from all the ink. As to what this specific board is going to be used for, she’s kept that a bit cryptic as it’s the subject of a future video. Her builds usually revolve around designs from antique elecronics magazines, so it’s almost certainly something of that nature, and that’s also why this specific design couldn’t be just sent off to a board shop.

Although we often think that we got certain aspects of aerodynamics pretty much licked at this point, details like the optimal shape of a propeller remains hotly debated, both in- and outside of academia. This also includes wilder designs like toroidal propellers that even after more than a hundred years are still mostly just being evaluated. Recently [Neuronautics] took a shot at figuring out whether toroidal propellers even make sense.

In order to do this, first an efficiency baseline was established using a conventional and highly optimized propeller. After scanning it in to get its exact geometry and running it through a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, the software spat out a number of about 73%.

This left figuring out an optimized shape for the toroidal propeller to pit against it. While you can absolutely brute-force the seventeen shape parameters being considered here and test them in CFD, this would take insanely long. The hack here is to use multiple reference frame (MRF) to drastically speed up the selection process, though even then it still took two months. An example of using MRF with regular propellers is discussed  in a 2019 paper by [Randi Franzke] et al. in Energies.

Although MRF saves a lot of simulation time, you still end up with a lot of data that has to be analyzed for interesting patterns. For this [Neuronautics] trained a artificial neural network to automate filtering the many options for the most optimal ones, until converging onto a single design.

This G1401 design was the lucky winner, though with only a simulated 62.9% efficiency. Subsequently the one aspect that had been left unchanged was also iterated through, in the form of many different airfoil shapes until the final design appeared.

This design was then 3D printed in resin, which showed the first hurdle with the selection process, in that the printed versions were too thin and flexible to be usable as propellers. Cue many hours of manual tweaking of the design to make it actually printable.

Although the final design didn’t exceed 62% efficiency in a final test, the comment section to the video rightfully points out that the comparison was between a commercially made propeller and a DIY resin-printed one, which adds a whole other batch of variables. That said, it’s unlikely that there’d have been an obvious improvement either way, otherwise we’d already have seen toroidal propellers pop up everywhere on drones and aircraft.