TechyMagThings

The formula for a Raspberry Pi camera is by now a straightforward one: take a Pi and camera module, add a display, buttons, and battery, and you’re done. This doesn’t mean that there’s no scope for more though, and [Irtaza2009] has one in the PiShot. It’s a few months old now but the repository is still being updated.

The 3D printed case follows a compact camera form factor with the screen on the rear, and a cold shoe on top. Inside is a Pi Zero 2 W and a Camera Module 3, with an 18650 cell and battery management/power supply board. The buttons are tactile switches hooked up to GPIOs, and the screen is an ST7789 SPI display.

For software there’s a Python script, which should do the job. We’ve not tested this one, but our experience is that slowness is the Achilles’ heel of Python based Pi cameras. We hope this one has managed to eke out some performance.

An interesting upgrade to this device would be to use an HQ camera module, for a mirror-less compact. It wouldn’t be the first such camera we’ve seen.

You’ve seen fiber-reinforced-plastic before, no doubt, but perhaps never quite like in this video by [Whitburn Studio]: it’s still got the usual resin, but instead of glass or carbon fibers, he’s using printed Japanese cotton to create strong, lightweight and good looking parts for the interior of his RV– specifically the countertops.

The technique is very similar to the sort of moldless composite work Burt Rutan pioneered in aircraft use. The fiber-reinforced plastic is formed around a positive ‘buck’ that remains inside the final part, adding stiffness and some backing. Unlike Rutan’s designs, which used pure Styrofoam inside, [Whitburn] is using a sandwhich of two layers of thin ply (3.6 mm) with XPS foam in between. Adding plywood means you don’t need many layers of fiber– again, that’s a decorative cotton, here– to get a surface that won’t dent into the styrofoam when you drop a coffee cup on it.

Indeed, with the plywood providing much of the strength, he’s only using a single layer of cotton and a second of fiberglass– though the glass fibers are really there to protect the pretty print from oopsies while sanding, rather than for their mechanical properties, by the sounds of it. Everything is held together with clear epoxy resin, which also fills the weave of the fabrics. Multiple coats of that are required to get the smooth, shiny surface he shows off at the end, but all that sanding and buffing really pays off. That’s also where you have to be really careful to avoid oopsies– go through the cotton and you have to start over.

Aside from the aesthetics, since this is going in a vehicle the weight is an important consideration– the bigger of the two counters he makes, pictured here, weighs in at only 2.4 kg or 5.2 lb including the cutout covering the sink. That’s pretty good all things considered– a lot lighter than a cement countertop, or even one made of DIY resin tiles.

A recent addition to mountain bikes is the dropper seat post. This invention is in the vein of office swivel chairs, allowing the seat height to be adjusted with a simple handlebar mounted lever. They are rather fascinating inventions ranging in complexity from simple mechanical systems, to electronic monstrosities actuated by Bluetooth. Inspired by the panoply of possibilities, [kane components] set forth to create such a home-built dropper post. 

Inspired by woodworking bar clamps, [kane’s] design utilizing angled plates binding against a rail inside the dropper post. Two pairs of plates sitting at opposite angles resist opposite forces from either the rider sitting on the post, or the return spring. A simple cable actuated cam moves the plates to a nonbinding position when the lever is actuated, and springs return the plates to a binding rest-state. The return is handled by an air spring pressurized against a piston at the bottom of the shaft.

Though 3D printing could be used for a cursory test the mechanism, properly machined parts are needed to handle the loads running through a typical seat post. But instead of machining everything from scratch, [kane] reused the lower post and bushings from a broken post. To fit everything together, the lower post got thread milled so the entire mechanism can be threaded into the seat post as a replaceable cartridge. The upper telescopic section consists of aluminum tubing and a custom machined seat clam mechanism press-fit together.

As is the case with all engineering projects, a number of issues came forth once the dropper post made it onto a bike. Issues ranged from the cable pull causing the seat post to move slightly, to all manner of mechanical jamming. Filing down the ball end of the cable so it didn’t rub against the outer-housing of the seat post fixed that particular issue. The two-piece upper design also proved problematic with the press-fit having a bad tendency to come apart.

Despite these particular issues, did it end up working? No, not consistently. The binding mechanism does not consistently produce enough force to keep the dropper post from falling under a rider’s weight. Regardless, we really enjoyed following along with [kane] for the journey of creating such a mechanically complicated bicycle component!

To our surprise, this isn’t the first dropper post hack we have come across. So make sure to check out this bodge of a fix for a far more complex (and expensive) dropper next!

For most people the term ‘DNA sequencing’ probably brings to mind large, expensive laboratory equipment in sterile rooms, but over the past decades technological progress really has had its way with it, to the point where it’s now just another small portable device. Something like the Oxford Nanopore MinION unit that [Mike] recently took to bits to ogle at the intricate insides.

This device was trialed in 2014 in a limited release before its commercial release in 2015, with this paper by [Miten Jain] et al. in Genome Biology detailing the workings of this nanopore sequencer. At a mere $2,000 it’s rather remarkable how affordable it is, though this comes with the caveat of the consumables, which are also shown in the video. These come in at a cool £690 per unit, can sequence either RNA or DNA and can be used at most a few times before they need to be replaced.

The main unit is fairly simple, featuring a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA and a rather nice slim fan-based cooling solution. For the nanopore unit you get the typical microfluidics system, to guide the deposited fluid containing the genetic material to sequence over the nanopore system. In here we see the actual magic as well, in the form of the high-density pitch ICs on both sides of the PCB inside the consumable sequencer unit.

Although this particular unit got discontinued already, the consumables are still available for it if you are feeling the sequencing itch. Of course, we’re likely to see the costs for DNA and RNA sequencing to keep plummeting, as what were once complex chips get overtaken once again by the progress of technology.

As awesome as trebuchets are, the fact that medieval engineers didn’t create versions capable of launching supersonic projectiles is a bit of a bummer. Fortunately it’s possible to correct this oversight with modern insights and technologies, as [Tom Stanton] demonstrates in a recent video.

While a traditional trebuchet is fairly straightforward, using a heavy weight moving an arm around a pivot that has the projectile attached to the other side, a few tweaks can make it much more lethal. One change is to have the projectile’s rope wound around the arm, forcing an additional pass around the arm to gain velocity. The other is to use a gearing system which uses the dropping weight’s energy more efficiently.

One complication here is that the arm now takes a few rotations to come up to speed, meaning that the release of the payload has to be controlled exactly, with only about an 0.0025 second release window. The solution was both low-tech and effective: since the arm is attached to a drum that the rope is wound onto, the moment enough rope is unwound from the dropping weight, a latch inside the drum is released to launch the projectile.

In a first test with a 10 kg weight, the projectile reached a velocity of around 528 km/h, which definitely was a good start, but also showed just how not aerodynamic the arm was. Some redesigns later of the entire trebuchet, the entire system was tested again with 10 kg and achieved a projectile velocity of 634 km/h. From there it was time to ramp up the weight to the full 40 kg, which theoretically should hit supersonic speeds.

Unfortunately the first attempt hit a mere 1,152 km/h (716 mph), which is just shy of the sound barrier at 1,235 km/h at 39% system efficiency and some components clearly breaking apart. Some more redesigns later and with a lighter projectile at 4 grams, a 40 kg weight achieved an arm speed of 2,342 rpm. The projectile now left the sling with 346.4 m/s, or 1,249 km/h, with an audible snap as the sound barrier got broken.

Even if the era of trebuchets in warfare is well and truly past, they remain fascinating physics demonstrations, with this case in point.

If you didn’t live through it, it is hard to understand how excited the general public was about the race for the moon. You can capture some of it by watching “Lunar Bridgehead,” a film about JPL monitoring the Ranger spacecraft as it hit, rather hard, on the lunar surface.

The Ranger program had been plagued with problems. The first five didn’t make it to the moon. Ranger 6 hit the moon, but failed to start its cameras. Ranger 7 was the first successful mission. There would be two more successful missions before the end of the program.

Honestly, given the state of technology and computers in those days, it is a miracle they could do it at all. Even more sobering to think that a scant five years later, Neil Armstrong would set foot on the lunar surface. In fact, Ranger 8 would land in the Sea of Tranquility, just like Armstrong’s Eagle.

The video has a lot of cool shots of old tech: magnetic tape drives, teletypes, paper tape readers, and giant dish antennas. The six onboard cameras even had to warm up, something unfamiliar to those who have only used modern electronics.

Of course, the cameras didn’t survive the crash, and that was expected. By today’s standards, the images are crude, but in 1964, they were nothing short of amazing.

Turns out, landing on the moon is harder than people think. Even with modern tech.

Bad news for anyone who was hoping for some relief from the memory shortage — Digitimes is reporting that the production capacity of major players such as Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix has already been booked for 2027 due to record demand. Their industry sources indicate that what we’re experiencing currently is just a prelude to when things get really ugly, which is why customers are paying a premium to lock in their orders so far out.

Although there’s been no official word from either side of the transaction, the Digitimes article further points out that these sort of agreements are usually 3 to 5 year contracts. If that’s the case, and nothing changes in supply and demand equation, we could be in for a very rough ride. There’s a potential opportunity here for other manufacturers to step in and start producing DRAM, possibly even focusing on lower-performance offerings intended for the consumer market, but setting up those production lines isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s always possible the AI bubble could pop in the next couple of years, but we’re not sure we’d put money on it.

There’s a developing story this weekend about the breach of customer data over at Framework. The maker of modular and repairable computers has recently sent an email out to all customers that their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses were leaked due to an upstream zero-day attack against database provider Metabase.

Metabase disclosed the breach on August 3rd, but we were mildly surprised to see that Framework doesn’t seem to have made any public acknowledgement of the event so far. As far as we can tell, the only reason there are copies of the email from them circulating online is because several customers posted it to social media. In their statements to sources such as TechCrunch, Framework reps were also hesitant to give hard details such as how many customers were impacted. While we’re fans of what Framework is trying to do in terms of hardware customization and repairability, we have to admit that being cagey about this sort of thing isn’t a good look.

If you’re looking to vent about this situation and others like it with similarly-minded folks, HOPE 26 will be the perfect place to do it. We’re just days away from the New York hacker con, and there are less than 150 tickets still available for anyone who’s still undecided about going. At this point, it seems likely there won’t be any ticket sales at the door.

Luckily, there’s no shortage of virtual tickets which will let you experience the event from the comfort of your own basement. Since their week-long marathon event during COVID, HOPE has offered a better virtual experience than most hacker cons, so ticket holders can look forward to more than just a YouTube link.

As reported by Neowin, developer Justin Marshall has ported Word for Windows 1.1a to Microsoft’s modern incarnation of the operating system on 64-bit hardware. Rather than running it in some emulator, Justin took the source code that Microsoft released back in 2014 and rewrote the bits that relied on the early 90s platform it was intended for.

While we’re not sure the lawyers in Redmond are going to lose much sleep over somebody hacking around with a 35 year old version of Word, it’s worth mentioning that the Microsoft Research License that the code was released under back in 2014 allows access to the source for personal use but specifically forbids redistribution.

To comply with the letter of the law on this one, our read on it is that this project should have been made public as a series of patches against that release rather than bundling in Microsoft’s own code. In other words, if you’re interested in this one, you might want to pull down a local copy now in the event it goes down the memory hole.

Finally, Word isn’t the only decades-old piece of software getting a new lease on life in 2026. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Quake, and to celebrate Bethesda has unveiled a new chapter for the seminal first person shooter. Titled Dawn of the Machine, the update was created by a group of developers within MachineGames, who have not only been responsible for the modern Wolfenstein games but also 2024’s critically-acclaimed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Although Quake may be 30 years young, it’s still available on pretty much everything, so you won’t need to break out your old DOS machine to get in on the action. The announcement page says the free update is available now for all current and previous-generation game consoles, as well as PC.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line; we’d love to hear about it.