TechyMagThings

PCB circuits are cool, but you know what is cooler? Terminator circuits that’s what! And what if the same material that makes Terminator circuits could also be used for smart heat sinks, flexible circuits, and self-healing material properties? Well, that is exactly what the lab at Virginia Tech’s VT MADE Lab has created, presented by Joel from [3DPrintingNerd].

So what does a Terminator circuit actually entail? Well, just like in Terminator 2, the circuits are made of liquid metal. Specifically, small drops of liquid metal alloy made of gallium and indium. These drops are contained within a matrix of PDMS polymer, which contains the magical liquid for conductivity, thermal and electrical . This makes a flexible and stretchy composite which can even self-repair when punctured or cut by bridging the

broken circuit with the liquid alloy. Having a polymer matrix allows this self-repairing property but also makes the material insulating by default, only allowing current to flow after selectively “popping” the matrix bubbles.

To create something with the composite material, you’ll find it similar to many other resin-based materials. You can pour, mold, and even 3d print a custom geometry. A short bake later and you get a solidified model made for whatever custom flexible circuitry you have in mind.

While this process requires chemicals, polymerization reactions, and a taste for liquid alloys, that shouldn’t stop you from trying out flexible electronics. For a more hands on method to flexible electronics check out this glove with circuits running throughout!

Recently French and international researchers took a look at the state of the thousands of barrels of radioactive waste that were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean between 1950 and 1990, trying to ascertain the state of this waste and its effect on the ecosystem.

Although a lot of fuss is made of the spent uranium fuel and high-level waste produced by light water reactors and fuel reprocessing facilities, the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste is low- and intermediate-level waste (LLW and ILW) churned out by hospitals, laboratories and various industries.

Due to the sheer volume of this waste over the decades creative ways have been sought to dispose of it, which include burying in landfills and incinerating.

For a while tossing such waste into the ocean was also deemed to be an excellent destination for LLW and ILW, with the latter especially encapsulated in bitumen or cement. This was the poured into the barrels that many people have come to associate with nuclear waste in general. Since the approximately 200,000 tons of such barrels and similar were tossed into the Atlantic Ocean decades ago the question was where they ended up and their state.

The Radiocean mission site lists the objectives, including the mapping of the sites and identifying the elements of the ecosystems in addition to any radioisotope levels and their effect on said ecosystems. As it turns out, although the barrels have definitely degraded and their contents are slowly collapsing, the local ecosystems seem to have adapted well, treating the dump sites more as convenient shelters rather than a hazard. Some more photos can be found on the Bluesky account of [Javier Escartin].

None of this should come as a surprise if you are aware of just how much radioactive material is already dissolved naturally in the oceans, with much more uranium present in seawater than can be mined on-shore. Although the introduction of isotopes that are not part of the normal thorium and uranium decay chains into the ocean is of course undesirable, it’s good to know that this rather haphazard treatment of LLW and ILW has apparently just resulted in some Atlantic Ocean floor critters ending up with an interesting reef.

Recently [The Parallel Port] was asked to take a look at repairing the PoE++ feature on a Ubiquiti switch that otherwise worked fine. This is a pretty nice 24-port rackmounted switch with 2.5 Gbit-capable RJ-45 ports and two 10 Gbit SFP+ ports, so by itself it’s pretty useful, but having the 400 Watt PoE feature just go AWOL still stings, especially if you bought it new for $800.

With power applied the switch starts up as normal, including its 1.3″ touch screen that provides direct port information as well as a fancy screensaver cum QR code for the AR feature.

After logging into the switch’s BusyBox console it showed that all ports reported bad for the PwrGood status, and there were PoE power status request errors in the log, but this could be just the consequence of something else. Using a PoE splitter it was confirmed that the PoE functionality was indeed dead.

After disassembly and some testing with a multimeter and thermal camera, a short and related hot spot on the PCB that the PoE power board connects to was identified, with the short persisting after removing this PCB from the switch. Since the switch had suffered a bit of an electrical event the TVS diode was checked, but it turned out to be fine.

Next to it, marked as fuses, were protective thyristor surge protection devices (Trisil), functioning as a crowbar device. These aren’t supposed to be shorted to ground until a surge event occurs, but these were indeed both shorted when measured directly. Clearly they had taken the brunt of the electrical event and sacrificed themselves in the process.

One replacement later of these devices the switch now happily reports a good PoE status and even was able to power a DC fan via the PoE splitter. Even if it wasn’t a particularly hard fix, this is definitely one of those cases where knowing how the protective circuit works can save a lot of time in diagnosing and fixing a fault.

Packet radio is a particularly fun part of the ham radio hobby. Once upon a time, you might have squirted data about the airwaves using something like the Heathkit HK-21 Pocket Packet. Heathkit stopped being a going concern some time ago, but [btech] has now recreated the device with modern hardware.

[btech] has called the project the Pocket Pico, and like the hardware that inspired it, it acts as a terminal node controller for amateur packet radio. It literally runs the same firmware as the real HK-21. It achieves this by using the Raspberry Pi Pico to run a Z80 processor emulator that can run the same code, while also using the microcontroller to do the work of modulating and demodulating Bell 202 audio tones at 1200 baud to avoid the need for a dedicated modem chip.

Thanks to running the same firmware as the HK-21, you can use the Pocket Pico with lots of old packet radio software. It’s fully capable of doing APRS as well as AX.25 Level 2, and has a built in Personal Bulletin Board System for other stations to leave messages.

If you’re looking to get into packet radio, you might just find this project to be useful. Alternatively, you might like taking a look at some other projects we’ve featured in this space, like the capable OpenModem project. Video after the break.

[Thanks to btech for the tip!]

These days, it’s pretty easy to buy old retail console games just by hunting online auction sites. It’s much rarer to come across a disc holding a beta version that was only ever intended for internal us, and yet, that’s precisely what landed in [MattKC’s] hands—a copy of the Beta 3 release of Burnout 3 for the original Xbox. He thus set about the task of investigating the differences to the retail release and preserving the beta for the future.

The first task involved figuring out how to read the disc. Retail Xbox games show up as a DVD Video disc if you put them into a PC, which can complicate reading them. However, being a burnt beta disc for use in an Xbox devkit, this one was a little different. It was easy enough to read and dump with a regular DVD drive and some common tools for ripping Xbox ISOs.

From there, it was a matter of comparing the dumped disc to the retail PAL release. There wasn’t a lot of differences to find—with [MattKC] noting that the beta was dated just six days before the official retail release. Mostly, this beta had just a few localization differences in non-English languages compared to the final release. Still, [MattKC] nonetheless was able to preserve this curio for the future, and it now lives on the Internet Archive for future generations to enjoy. Perhaps the diehard Burnout 3 fans will one day decide that PAL Beta 3 is the ultimate version of the game.

It’s always interesting to get a look behind the scenes of big-time game development. We’ve taken a look at console devkits before, too—hardware that is never intended for the public to see.

Since you’re reading Hackaday, we’re pretty sure CERN needs no introduction, so we’ll get right to it– they’re giving back again, this time with a VHDL library called “colibri” containing over 100 components, functions, and procedures to help jumpstart your next FPGA project.

Like a lot of what CERN gives away under its CERN Open Hardware Licence, this library and the functions in it were developed in house to make CERN run better– specifically to streamline the development of gateway devices. As you might imagine, with the prodigious amount of data CERN’s various experiments spit out, FPGAs have become a key part of many of them. The best part is that because the fine folks at CERN don’t want to get locked in, everything here is vendor-independent and has been tested on multiple platforms. Speaking of tested, you get self-checking testbenches in there to make sure everything’s working, and there’s even formal verification, at least for some things. We’ve seen formal verification in software compilers, but its not common in the FPGA world. The whole thing is on GitLab if you want to take a look.

While CERN’s library might not have much to help you make a ternary processor or bus controller with everyone’s favourite programmable silicon, much like software libraries you can save some time at least not implementing say, SPI or i2c– both of which are in colibri, along with a whole lot more.

Thanks to [Alberto Perro] for the tip!

[Jude Robinson]’s robot Daisy has an unusual function: making a literal chain of daisies. The device is his student final project and demonstrates how a system can replace sensing with clever mechanical constraints. Instead of bringing tools to bear on each daisy, the daisies are brought to the tools in a repeatable, deterministic way.

Daisy is essentially two X-Y gantries with grippers facing one another. Between them is a conveyor upon which daisies are fed, plus a blade at the top with a threading post nearby. A gripper takes a daisy, feeds the stem through the hole in the previous one, then lifts the new addition up to a scalpel blade which cuts a short incision. The thin threading post goes through the new hole in the new stem, ready for the next daisy to be inserted. The two gantries alternate roles, building the chain one daisy link at a time.

[Jude] says that daisy stem shape and diameter have the most impact on reliability, so it’s very important to constrain the daisies such that the scalpel and threading operations work reliably. This is primarily done with v-shaped profiles in the grippers which automatically center stems of different sizes. The sheath around the scalpel blade also plays a role in constraining and supporting the stems as they are gently pierced and sliced. Tuning these elements was a big part of making the system work.

Watch it in action in the video (embedded below) which shows how clever mechanical design can turn an uncertain problem — like how to handle daisies of different sizes — into a deterministic one with the help of clever mechanical design. That same concept is at work in everything from simple nut sorters to highly complex paper airplane machines.