Day: December 23, 2024

Watch Any Video On Your Game Boy, Via Link Cable

December 23, 2024 by 6 Comments

Game Boys have a link cable that lets two of them play together. You know, to battle with a friend’s Pokemon and stuff like that. But who says that it should be limited to transmitting only what Big N wants you to?

[Chromalock] wrote a custom GB program that takes in data over the link cable, and displays it on the screen as video, as fast as it can be sent. Add in a microcontroller, a level shifter, and software on the big computer side, and you can hook up your Game Boy Color as a normal video device and send it anything you want, from a webcam to any program that outputs video.

Well, almost. The biggest limitation is the data link cable, of course. On the older Game Boys, the link cable is apparently only good for 8 kHz, while the Color models can pull a not-quite-blistering 512 kHz. Still, that’s enough for 60 fps in a low-res black and white mode, or a slow, screen-tearing high-res color experience. You pick your poison.

There are gotchas that have to do with the way the GB displays palettes that get left as “to-do” on the software side. There is room for improvement in hardware too. (GB Link looks like SPI to us, and we’d bet you can push the speeds even higher with clever GB-side code.) In short, this is an awesome demo that just invites further hacking.

If you want to know more about the Game Boy to get started, and maybe even if you don’t, you absolutely must watch The Ultimate Game Boy Talk. Trust us on this one.

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

ALSEP: Apollo’s Modular Lunar Experiments Laboratory

December 23, 2024 by 13 Comments
Down-Sun picture of the RTG with the Central Station in the background. (Credit: NASA)
Down-Sun picture of the RTG with the Central Station in the background. (Credit: NASA)

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)

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Camera Slider Uses Repositionable Rail To Do Rotational Moves

December 23, 2024 by 2 Comments

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.

Why should a camera get all the fun? Try your phone.

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.

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students overlooking their rope-traversing robots

Crawler Challenge: Building Rope-Traversing Robots

December 23, 2024 by 4 Comments

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.

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A Pi Pico Makes A Spectrum Laptop

December 23, 2024 by 8 Comments

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.

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Atoms For Peace: The US Nuclear Fleet Build-Out And Modern-Day Revival

December 23, 2024 by 24 Comments

By the end of World War II the world had changed forever, as nuclear weapons were used for the first and – to this date – only time in anger. Although the use of these weapons was barely avoided during the Korean War in the early 1950s, the dawning of the Atomic Age had come in the form of obliterated cities and an increasing number of these weapons being test fired around the world. It was against this background that on December 8, 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower held his ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech, during which he would not only promote the peaceful use of nuclear technologies but also lay the groundwork for what would become the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as announced in the full speech.

Under the Eisenhower administration the US became one of the world’s nuclear power pioneers, as it competed with the UK and later others in establishing world’s firsts in commercial nuclear power. Dresden Generating Station would become the first purely commercial boiling water reactor (BWR) in 1960 and Yankee-Rowe, the first pressurized water reactor (PWR) in 1961. Following these, the number of new reactors planned and constructed kept increasing year over year, setting the trend for the few decades of the US nuclear power industry.

Today the US operates 94 reactors, which generate nearly 20% of the country’s electricity. Exactly how did the US build so many reactors before 1990, and how does this compare to the recent revival with both new builds and retired plants being put back into service?

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Silicone Tubing As Springs For Capacitive Touch Buttons

December 23, 2024 by 7 Comments

Capacitive touch buttons are a great way to turn just about any (non-conductive) surface into a button, but people generally dislike the lack of tactile feedback.  [KontinuumLab] apparently agreed and decided to experiment a bit with ways to make such buttons more springy. You can check out the results of those experiments in the video below. There are a few ways to add some spring to buttons and switches like these, including compliant mechanisms in the (3D-printed) plastic structure, but this isn’t always an option in a project. A separate plastic spring can be added, but they aren’t very durable. A metal spring works great but can be a bit of a hassle to integrate and they aren’t as cheap as the other options. So what about everyone’s favorite keyboard switch, the rubber dome type?

Silicone tubing is plentiful and (generally) cheap. It can be selected for just the right springiness and dimensions, and in the automated test that [KontinuumLab] ran, it is also very durable in this application. When your goal is to have a switch that activates at the end of the travel, this may work a treat, with the size of the silicone tube determining the travel before the finger gets close enough to trigger the switch. As rubber dome keyboards demonstrate, this is a highly reliable technology, though this version ditches the typical membrane for the capacitive touch sensor.

Sometimes, a metal spring is the right option, of course, such as when you want to make a surface a touch sensor and the PCB is at the other side of the enclosure. The fun part is that we have all of these options to make our projects work, with many being very affordable to hobbyists. Not all touch sensors require a finger, either.

Thanks to [BrightBlueJim] for the tip.

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