Quantcast
Channel: Controlrede
Viewing all 4677 articles
Browse latest View live

xLIDAR Is A Merry-Go-Round Of Time-Of-Flight Sensors

0
0

[JRodrigo]’s xLIDAR project is one of those ideas that seemed so attractively workable that it went directly to a PCB prototype without doing much stopping along the way. The concept was to mount a trio of outward-facing VL53L0X distance sensors to a small PCB disk, and then turn that disk with a motor and belt while taking readings. As the sensors turn, their distance readings can be used to paint a picture of the immediate surroundings (at least within about 1 meter, which is the maximum range of the VL53L0X.)

The hardware is made to be accessible and has a …read more

Continue reading

R/C Rocket-Beest Burns Up Fuses Out There Alone

0
0

We’re beginning to think the “S” in [Jeremy S Cook] stands for strandbeest. He’ll be the talk of the 4th of July picnic once he brings out his latest build—a weaponized, remote-controlled strandbeest that shoots bottle rockets. There are a bank of money shots up on Imgur.

This ‘beest is the natural next step after his remote-controlled walker, which we featured a month or so ago. Like that one, the locomotion comes from a pair of micro gear motors that are controlled by an Arduino Nano over Bluetooth. The pyrotechnics begin when nitinol wire cleverly strung across two lever nuts …read more

Continue reading

Handmade Robot Brings Stop Motion to Life

0
0

Stop motion animation is often called a lost art, as doing it (or at least, doing it well) is incredibly difficult and time consuming. Every detail on the screen, no matter how minute, has to be placed by human hands hundreds of times so that it looks smooth when played back at normal speed. The unique look of stop motion is desirable enough that it still does get produced, but it’s far less common than hand drawn or even computer animation.

If you ever wanted to know just how much work goes into producing even a few minutes of stop motion animation, look no farther than the fascinating work of [Special Krio]. He not only documented the incredible attention to detail required to produce high quality animation with this method, but also the creation of his custom robotic character.

Characters in stop motion animation often have multiple interchangeable heads to enable switching between different expressions. But with his robotic character, [Special Krio] only has to worry about the environments, and allow his mechanized star do the “acting”. This saves time, which can be used for things such as making 45 individual resin “drops” to animate pouring a cup of tea (seriously, go look).

To build his character, [Special Krio] first modeled her out of terracotta to get the exact look he wanted. He then used a DIY 3D laser scanner to create a digital model, which in turn he used to help design internal structures and components which he 3D printed on an Ultimaker. The terracotta original was used once again when it was time to make molds for the character’s skin, which was done with RTV rubber. Then it was just the small matter of painting all the details and making her clothes. All told, the few minutes of video after the break took years to produce.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen 3D printing used to create stop motion animation, but the final product here is really in a league of its own. It reminds us of that 3D printed stop motion film [Bre Pettis] was working on, but you know, a real thing and not just a publicity stunt.

[Thanks to Antonio for the tip.]

The BBC Computer Literacy Project From The 1980s Is Yours To Browse

0
0

In the early 1980s there was growing public awareness that the microcomputer revolution would have a significant effect on everybody’s lives, and there was a brief period in which anything remotely connected with a computer attracted an air of glamour and sophistication. Broadcasters wanted to get in on the act, and produced glowing documentaries on the new technology, enthusiastically crystal-ball-gazing as they did so.

In the UK, the public service BBC broadcaster produced a brace of series’ over the decade probing all corners of the subject as part of the same Computer Literacy Project that gave us Acorn’s BBC Micro, and we are lucky enough that they’ve put them all online so that we can watch them (again, in some cases, if a Hackaday scribe can get away with revealing her age).

You can see famous shows such as the moment when the presenters experienced a live on-air hack while demonstrating an early online service, but most of it is a fascinating contemporary look at the computers we now enthuse over as retro devices. Will the MSX sweep all before it, for example? (It didn’t).

They seem very dated now with their 8-bit micros (if not just for the word “micro”), synth music, and cheesy graphics. But what does come across is the air of optimism, this was the future, and it was packaged not as a threat, but as a good place to be. Take a look, but make sure you have plenty of time. You may spend a while in front of the screen.

We’ve mentioned int he past another spin-off from the Computer Literacy Project, the Domesday Project.

Thanks [Darren Grant] for the tip.

Gyrotourbillion Blesses The Eyes, Hard to Say

0
0

Clock movements are beautifully complex things. Made up of gears and springs, they’re designed to tick away and keep accurate time. Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of the universe, various sources of error tend to creep in – things like temperature changes, mechanical shocks, and so on. In the quest for ever better timekeeping, watchmakers decided to try and rotate the entire escapement and balance wheel to counteract the changing effect of gravity as the watch changed position in regular use.

They’re mechanical works of art, to be sure, and until recently, reserved for only the finest and most luxurious …read more

Continue reading

Sonar in Your Hand

0
0

Sonar measures distance by emitting a sound and clocking how long it takes the sound to travel. This works in any medium capable of transmitting sound such as water, air, or in the case of FingerPing, flesh and bone. FingerPing is a project at Georgia Tech headed by [Cheng Zhang] which measures hand position by sending soundwaves through the thumb and measuring the time on four different receivers. These readings tell which bones the sound travels through and allow the device to figure out where the thumb is touching. Hand positions like this include American Sign Language one through ten.

From the perspective of discreetly one through ten on a mobile device, this opens up a lot of possibilities for computer input while remaining pretty unobtrusive. We see prototypes which are more capable of reading gestures but also draw attention if you wear them on a bus. It is a classic trade-off between convenience and function but this type of reading is unique and could combine with other bio signals for finer results.

Thank you, [QES], for the tip.

DEXTER Has the Precision To Get The Job Done

0
0

Robotic arms – they’re useful, a key part of our modern manufacturing economy, and can also be charming under the right circumstances. But above all, they are prized for being able to undertake complex tasks repeatedly and in a highly precise manner. Delivering on all counts is DEXTER, an open-source 5-axis robotic arm with incredible precision.

DEXTER is built out of 3D printed parts, combined with off-the-shelf carbon fiber sections to add strength. Control is through five NEMA 17 stepper motors which are connected to harmonic drives to step the output down at a ratio of 52:1. Each motor is fitted with an optical encoder which provides feedback to control the end effector position.

Unlike many simpler projects, DEXTER doesn’t play in the paddling pool with 8-bit micros or even an ARM chip – an FPGA lends the brainpower to DEXTER’s operations. This gives DEXTER broad capabilities for configuration and expansion. Additionally, it allows plenty of horsepower for the development of features like training modes, where the robot is stepped manually through movements and they are recorded for performance later.

It’s a project that is both high performing and open-source, which is always nice to see. We look forward to seeing how this one develops further!

DDL-4 Is A Visually Pleasing Modular CPU

0
0

Today’s CPUs are so advanced that they might as well be indistinguishable from magic, right? Wrong! Fundamentally, modern CPUs can be understood logically like any other technology, it’s just that they’re very fast, very small, and very complex, which makes it hard to get to grips with their inner workings. We’ve come a long way from the dawn of the home computer in the 80s, but what if there was something even simpler again, built in such a way as to be easily understandable? Enter the DDL-4-CPU, courtesy of [Dave’s Dev Lab].

The DDL-4 is a project to build a …read more

Continue reading

PCB Holder Quick-fix Turns Out To Be Big Improvement

0
0

When something needs improving, most hacks often make a small tweak to address a problem without changing how things really work. Other hacks go a level deeper, and that’s what [Felix Rusu] did with his 3D printed magnetic holders. Originally designed to address a shortcoming with the PCB holders in his LE40V desktop pick-and-place machine, they turned out to be useful for other applications as well, and easily modified to use whatever size magnets happen to be handy.

The problem [Felix] had with the PCB holders on his pick-and-place was that they hold the board suspended in midair by gripping the sides. The board is held securely, but the high density of parts on panelized PCB designs leads to vibrations in the suspended board as the pick-and-place head goes to work. Things are even worse when the board is v-scored for the purpose of easily snapping apart the smaller boards later; they sometimes break along the score lines due to the stress.

Most people would solve this problem by putting a spacer underneath the board to stabilize things, but [Felix] decided to go a level deeper and change the mounting system altogether with a simple mod. The boards now lie on a flat metal plate, and his magnetic holders are simple to make and easily do the job of holding any size PCB secure. As a bonus, it turns out that the holders also do a passable job of holding work materials down on a laser cutter’s honeycomb table. A video overview is embedded below, and the design files are available on Thingiverse.

The beveled edges and screw for a handle are nice, but back before 3D printers were common we briefly saw another way to make magnetic holders: plop down the magnet, gob on some oven-curable modeling clay, mold it as needed, then bake in the oven. Sugru (or its home-made alternative, Oogoo) might also do the trick.

Heartwatch Monitors Your Ticker

0
0

The heart! A pump of the most fantastical kind, it is capable of operating for decades without rest. It’s responsible for supplying vital oxygen to the body’s subsystems, and can be readily monitored with modern technology. [Dave Vernooy] wanted to build a watch that could take heartrate and blood oxygen measurements – so he did.

Named Heartwatch, the device is a DIY smartwatch build with a bunch of exciting features. Heart monitoring is taken care of by the MAX30102 sensor which integrates all the hardware to sense heart rate and oxygen saturation into a single tiny plastic package. There’s then an assortment of accelerometers, gyros and even a color LCD to display all the wonderful information.

It’s all wrapped up in a 3D printed case, with an ATMEGA1284 running the show. The project just goes to show how much can be achieved with an 8-bit processor – there’s not always a need to run a high-powered ARM chip for an embedded project.

There are a fair few DIY smartwatch builds out there – like this classy unit with an OLED screen.

Nintendo Switch Gets Internal Trinket Hardmod

0
0

If you haven’t been following the Nintendo Switch hacking scene, the short version of the story is that a vulnerability was discovered that allows executing code on all versions of the Switch hardware and operating system. In fact, it’s believed that the only way to stop this vulnerability from being exploited is for Nintendo to release a new revision of the hardware. Presumably there are a lot of sad faces in the House of Mario right about now, but it’s good news for us peons who dream of actually controlling the devices we purchase.

To run your own code on Nintendo’s latest and greatest, you must first put it into recovery mode by shorting out two pins in the controller connector, and then use either a computer or a microcontroller connected to the system’s USB port to preform the exploit and execute the binary payload. It’s relatively easy, but something you need to do every time you shut the system down. But if you’re willing to install an Adafruit Trinket M0 inside your Nintendo Switch, you can make things a little easier.

Stemming from work done by [atlas44] and [noemu], the final iteration of this mod was created by [Quantum-cross]. The general idea is to strip down the Trinket M0 board to as small as possible by removing the USB port and a few capacitors, and then install it inside the Switch’s case. By wiring it up to power, the back of the USB-C connector, and the controller connector, the Trinket can interact with all the key components involved in the exploit.

You can even use the Switch’s USB port to update the firmware on the Trinket to load different payloads, though in his walkthrough video after the break, [xboxexpert] mentions eventually this won’t really be necessary as the homebrew software environment on the Switch matures. Indeed, there will almost certainly come a time when performing this exploit on every boot of the system will be made unnecessary, rendering this modification obsolete. But until then, this is a pretty slick way of getting your feet wet in the world of Switch hacking.

It was only six months or so back that we were reading about the first steps towards running arbitrary code on the Nintendo Switch, and just a few months prior to that we saw people experimenting with controlling the system with a microcontroller.

Raspberry Pi Zero Stepper Driver, First of Many Modules

0
0

The Raspberry Pi in general (and the Zero W model in particular) are wonderful pieces of hardware, but they’re not entirely plug-and-play when it comes to embedded applications. The user is on the hook for things like providing a regulated power source, an OS, and being mindful of proper shutdown and ESD precautions. Still, the capabilities make it worth considering and [Alpha le ciel] has a project to make implementation easier with the Raspberry Pi Zero W Stepper Motor Module, which is itself part of a larger project plan to make the Pi Zero W into a robust building block for robotic and CNC applications.

[Alpha le ciel] is building this stepper motor module as the first of many Raspberry Pi hats meant to provide the Raspi with the hardware for robotics applications. This module, in particular, features two A4988 stepper motor drivers, a connector for a power supply or battery providing 7-20V, and a buck converter to bring that power down to the 5V needed by the Pi itself. All the relevant pins are broken out onto the Pi’s GPIO header, making this module the simplest way possible to add a pair of motors to a Pi. What does that mean? Printers or self-balancing robots, really whatever you want.

A stepper driver that conforms to the footprint of the Pi Zero is a good start, and the larger concept of creating additional modules is a worthy entry to the Hackaday Prize.

Hackaday Links: July 1, 2018

0
0

Remember when computer mice didn’t have scroll wheels? The greatest mouse of all time, the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0, is back in production. This mouse was released in 2003, before the popularity of ‘gaming’ mice from the likes of Razer, and at the time it was the standard mouse for RTS and FPS professional gamers. After producing a few million of these mice, the molds died or the sensors were out of stock, Microsoft stopped shipping the Intellimouse Explorer 3.0, and the ones that were out in the wild slowly died. Now this fantastic mouse is back, and it’s only going to set you back $40. Believe me when I say this is one of the greatest user interface devices ever created, right up there with the Model M keyboard.

Another week, another update on building an airplane in a basement. [Peter Sripol] has basically finished the fuselage of his homebuilt ultralight with working elevator, rudder, and landing gear that looks like it might hold up.

The Pebble was one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever, and now it’s dead. Pebble was bought by Fitbit for $40M, and now the Pebble servers are off, as of June 30th. Of course there are community-based projects to keep the Pebble working, notably the rebble project.

It’s time for Steam’s summer sale, and your wallet is crying. The standout deal is the Steam Link, a sort of ‘thin client for Steam’ that plugs into your TV, looks on the network for your battlestation, and allows you to play Fortnite or whatever on the big screen. The Steam Link normally sells for $50, but with the summer sale it’s two dollars and fifty cents.

Here are a few experiments in CNC joinery. [Mirock] has a CNC machine and a few pieces of wood, and explored what is possible when you want to join two boards at ninety degrees to each other. Why is this interesting? One of the joints on this simple box project consists of a circle with a hole on one board, and a pin on the other. This is basically a Knapp joint, a ‘dovetail’ of sorts that was developed in the 1860s. This was the first popular machine-made joint in woodworking, and if you ever see it on an antique, it solidly dates that piece to any time between 1870-1900. Of course, now that you can just buy a CNC router, an infinite variety of joints are possible, and [Mirock] can experiment with all sorts of combinations of pins and tails and mortises and tenons.

Electronics Manufacturers React To China Trade Tariffs

0
0

Mere weeks ago, the United States announced it was set to impose a 25% tariff on over 800 categories of Chinese goods. These tariffs include nearly every component that goes into the manufacture of any piece of electronic hardware, from resistors to capacitors, semiconductors to microcontrollers, and even the raw components that are turned into printed circuit boards. These tariffs will increase the cost of materials for electronics, even if those electronics are ultimately manufactured in the United States because suppliers and subcontractors must source their materials from somewhere, and more often than not, that place is China.

Now, manufacturers are feeling the pinch. An email distributed by Moog Music last Friday has asked their supporters to contact their senators and representatives.

In the world of musical synthesizers, there is no bigger name than Moog. The company was founded in the 1950s manufacturing theremins, and in the 1960s, production moved to synthesizers. The famous Minimoog, launched in 1970, has been featured on tens of thousands of albums. Modern music simply wouldn’t exist without Moog synthesizers. After a buyout, mismanagement, and bankruptcy in the 1980s, the company was reborn in the early 2000s, moved into a beautiful factory in Asheville, North Carolina, and has gone on to produce some of the most popular synthesizers ever made.

The company’s statement says these new tariffs will, ‘immediately and drastically increase the cost of building our instruments, and have the very real potential of forcing us to lay off workers and could.. require us to move some, if not all, of our manufacturing overseas’. In a statement on Twitter, Moog says they source half their PCBs and a majority of other materials domestically, already paying up to 30% more than if the PCBs were sourced from China. However, because the raw materials for PCB manufacture are also sourced from China, board manufacturers for Moog’s synths will be forced to pass along the 25% tariff to their customers.

The threat of Moog being forced to move production of their instruments to China is real. Like cell phones, laptops, and other finished goods, synthesizers are not covered by the new tariff. As noted by Bunnie Huang, these tariffs have the perverse incentive of shifting US manufacturing jobs to China.

These tariffs have been a point of contention for the electronics and engineering communities. Anyone can easily pull up the distributor information from a Mouser or Digikey order and find the country of origin for an entire Bill of Materials. It has already been confirmed that most of the FR4 and other raw components that go into manufacturing PCBs in the United States come from Chinese suppliers. These items can be cross-referenced with the list of items that will be subject to a 25% tariff next week. Manufacturing electronics in the United States, even if you get your PCBs from US manufacturers and parts from US suppliers, will cost more in just a few short days.

Spy Tech: How an Apollo Capsule Landed in Michigan after a Layover in the USSR

0
0

There’s an Apollo module on display in Michigan and its cold-war backstory is even more interesting than its space program origins.

Everyone who visits the Van Andel Museum Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan is sure to see the Apollo Command Module flanking the front entrance. Right now it’s being used as a different kind of capsule: as time capsule they’ll open in 2076 (the American tricentennial). If you look close though, this isn’t an actual Command Module but what they call a “boilerplate.”

Technically, these were mass simulators made cheaply for certain tests and training purposes. A full spacecraft costs a lot of money but these — historically made out of boilerplate steel — could be made with just the pieces necessary and using less expensive materials. What you might not know is that the boilerplate at the Van Ardel — BP 1227 — has a cold war spy history unlike any other boilerplate in the fleet.

The early life of BP 1227 is a little sketchy. It appears the Navy was using it for recovery training somewhere between the Azores and the Bay of Biscay in early 1969. We don’t know for sure if the picture to the left is BP 1227 or not. Comparing it to the one at the museum, it probably isn’t, but then again the museum’s does have a fresh paint job and possibly a top cap. Regardless, the picture to the left was from 1966 in the Atlantic, giving us an idea of how boilerplate capsules were put into service.

In those days — the height of the cold war — Naval ships were often followed by Soviet “fishing trawlers.” These were universally understood to be spy ships — Auxiliary, General Intelligence or AGI vessels.

The AGI, the Navy, and a Capsule Lost

AGI crews were highly trained, and after the Cuban missile crisis, the U. S. Navy had a program to actively discourage them by pushing against them, fouling their screws with steel nets, and focusing high power electromagnetic transmitters to burn out their electronic sensors. There were even cases of dumping ship’s garbage from a helo onto the decks of an AGI. Of course, the AGIs also crowded the U. S. ships and occasionally would strike them, so it wasn’t all one sided. This ended — for the most part — when both sides signed a treaty in 1972.

However, in 1969, U. S. Navy ships often had AGI shadows. We don’t know the exact circumstances or if one or more AGIs were involved, but apparently BP 1227 was lost during those 1969 training exercises. It is a good bet that if an AGI was not involved in causing the loss, one or more did know exactly where the boilerplate capsule went down.

What Happened Next?

The is where the story goes cold for a while. There is a rumor that we know so little because the US and the Soviets agreed not to disclose some details of what happened until 2021 — which isn’t that far away. Here’s what we do know.

This is the Southwind, a US Coast Guard Wind-class icebreaker which was in the fleet for less than a year before the ship was given over to the Russians in 1945 as part of the Lend-Lease program. She was renamed the Admiral Makarov and joined Russia’s fleet for a brief five years before they gave her back and she became a US Navy ship, Atka.

In 1966, the Coast Guard got the ship back from the Navy and reverted the name to Southwind. You’re likely wondering why the long backstory on this ship. In 1970, is was the Southwind that became the first U. S. vessel to visit the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. The ship had an AGI escort, the whole way.

It docked at Murmansk where the crew took shore leave and the ship was open for public tours by Soviet citizens. The surprise, though, was when the Soviets presented Southwind with BP 1227 which had been found by a “fishing boat.”  They lashed the faux capsule to the deck, and returned it to England. NASA eventually took possession and gave it to the Smithsonian. From there it was loaned for 100 years to the museum in Grand Rapids.

Spy Games

You can only speculate on why the Soviets would do this. It is doubtful they forcibly took the capsule, of course. We would guess it went under and they returned under better conditions and salvaged it. Why take the trouble? Maybe to say that they could. After all, the U. S. spent a lot of effort to temporarily steal a Lunik capsule that was also not a working flight article. You never know what information you could glean from something like that until you have it in your hands. You’d think the propaganda value alone would be good, but surprisingly, few people know the story of BP 1227. But now, you do.

Nearly 50 years later, with the Russians and the U. S. as major partners in the International Space Station it is hard to imagine that this kind of thing went on. You also have to wonder what a world space program with one direction and one massive budget could accomplish.

[Main image by Lisa Fessenden via A Field Guide to American Spacecraft]


Video Quick-Bit: The Things That Move Robots

0
0

Magenta Strongheart returns for a look at some of the coolest robotic entries from this year’s Hackaday Prize. Each of these answered the challenge for modular designs that will help supercharge new robot projects.

We think that cheap and abundant motor designs are poised to revolutionize robotics and several of the entries thought along those same lines. [Masahiro Mizuno] came up with a great 3D printed servo design based around a 6mm DC motor. Also in this ballpark, a team of two — Giovanni Leal and Jonathan Diaz — used 3D printing to turn some tiny metallic servos into linear actuators.

Picking stuff up is a difficult thing for a machine to do. We’ve long enjoyed seeing jamming grippers which do it with an inflatable bladder around a granular material (watch the video… it’s amazing). Two of these were demonstrated as part of the challenge. The Universal Jamming Gripper focuses on the entire mechanism, while Programmable Air took aim at the pneumatic actuation system and can adapt to other soft-robotics uses.

Rounding out this update, make sure to take a peek at the PCB stepper motor [Bobricius] built after being inspired by [Carl Bugeja’s] PCB motor. You’ll also want to see the entry that is taking on industrial farming. Imaging slow-rolling behemoths that use computer vision and spinning tillers to take care of weeds, cutting down on herbicide use.

Right now we’re in the thick of the Power Harvesting Challenge. Show us how you’re getting power from an interesting source and you’ll be on the way to the finals. Twenty power harvesting entries will get that honor, along with a $1,000 cash prize. The five top entries of the 2018 Hackaday Prize will split $100,000!

Driftwood Binary Clock Is No Hollow Achievement

0
0

It’s about time we had another awesome clock post around here. [Mattaw] has liked binary clocks since he was 0 and decided to make one in stunning fashion by using driftwood, nature’s drillable, fillable enclosure.

That beautiful wiring job on the RGB LEDs was done in 18g copper. To keep the LEDs aligned during soldering, he drilled a a grid of holes just deep enough to hold ’em face down. There’s an IR remote to set the time, the color, and choice of alarm file, which is currently set to modem_sound.mp3.

Under the wood, there are a pair of Arduino Nanos, an mp3 decoder board, and an RTC module. Why two Nanos, you ask? Well, the IR interrupts kept, uh, interrupting the LED timing. The remote feature was non-negotiable, so [mattaw] dedicated one Nano to receive remote commands, which it streams serially to the other. Here’s another nice touch: there’s an LDR in one of the nooks or crannies that monitors ambient light so the LEDs are never too bright. Don’t wait another second to check it out—we’ve got 10 videos of it after the break.

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first binary clock we’ve seen.  This honey of a clock uses RGB LEDs to tell the time analog style.

OpenDeck Makes Spinning Your Own MIDI Controller Easy

0
0

These days, MIDI controllers are just plain cool. There are a million of them out there, and they’re all dressed to the nines in flashing LEDs and sporting swag like USB MIDI interfaces and sliders that just feel right. With our italics budget running out, I should get to the point – you can make your own, and the OpenDeck platform makes it easy.

The OpenDeck board. Readily apparent is the fact that it has tons of IO.

In its most refined form, the OpenDeck is a board covered in pin headers. To these, you may connect an absolute truckload of buttons, encoders, sliders, and LEDs. The OpenDeck handles all of the inputs and outputs, while you get to have fun attaching your various gizmos to the control surface/keytar/birthday cake you happen to be building. It saves you reinventing the wheel as far as reading switches and potentiometers goes, allowing you to focus on the creative side of your project. All configuration is handled through a simple web interface.

Boards are available on Tindie,  but it’s also possible to take the code and run it on various Arduinos and the like, as it’s wonderfully opensource. This gives you the power to take things to a higher level once you’re good and ready.

We’ve seen a rather cool OpenDeck build already, and if you’ve got more, you know where to reach us.

A Cartoon-ifying Camera for Instant Absurdism

0
0

We take photographs as a way to freeze moments in time and to capture the details that get blurred by our unreliable memories. There is little room for interpretation, and this is kind of the whole point.

[Dan Macnish]’s latest project, Draw This, turns reality into absurdity. It’s a Raspberry Pi-based instant camera that trades whatever passed in front of the lens for a cartoon version of same. Draw This uses neural networks to ID the objects in the frame, and then draws upon thousands of images from Google’s Quick, Draw! dataset to provide a loose interpretation via thermal printer. Seems to us like the perfect camera to take to DEFCON (or any other part of Las Vegas).

If you have a Raspi3, a v2 camera, and a thermal printer, you can make your own crowd-sourced, cartoonified memories using the code in [Dan]’s repo. Still into recording reality? You can use Pi cameras to see in the dark or even explore a body of water.

Philo Farnsworth, RCA, and the Battle for Television

0
0

The parenthood of any invention of consequence is almost never cut and dried. The natural tendency to want a simple story that’s easy to tell — Edison invented the light bulb, Bell invented the telephone — often belies the more complex tale: that most inventions have uncertain origins, and their back stories are often far more interesting as a result.

Inventing is a rough business. It is said that a patent is just a license to get sued, and it’s true that the determination of priority of invention often falls to the courts. Such battles often pit the little guy against a corporate behemoth, the latter with buckets of money to spend in making the former’s life miserable for months or years. The odds are rarely in the favor of the little guy, but in few cases was the deck so stacked against someone as it was for a young man barely out of high school, Philo Farnsworth, when he went up against one of the largest companies in the United States to settle a simple but critical question: who invented television?

Furrows of Electrons

Young Philo, ca. 1920. Source: Utah Division of State History

Many great tales of American achievement start with the hero’s birth in a log cabin, and Philo Taylor Farnsworth’s story starts just this way. His family lived in a cabin in Utah when he was born in 1906. They would live in that remote location until moving to Rigby, Idaho when Philo was 12. The Farnsworth family had never had electricity in their Utah cabin, and Philo was excited by the discovery that their new ranch had a generator. He took to electricity quickly, rewiring motors and electrifying the farm in his spare time, and devouring all the reading material he could find on the subject. Electricity just made sense to Philo.

From his reading, he knew of the ideas floating about for television, all of which relied on cumbersome systems using mechanical devices to optically scan and reproduce a scene. Philo thought there must be a better way, and as he reported later, the furrows created as he plowed a field on the ranch gave him the idea for building up an image line by line. Philo realized that this would be the key to creating an electronic television system.

Whether this actually happened, and how the 13-year-old Philo translated that inspiration into an all-electronic television system, is unclear. What is clear is that in 1922, during the spring semester of his freshman year at Rigby High School, Philo approached his chemistry teacher to discuss some ideas he had regarding a vacuum tube to capture moving images. Philo filled the blackboards with his sketches and ideas for an “image dissector,” a tube with a screen covered with cesium oxide opposite an electron gun. Light falling on the screen would cause the cesium oxide to emit photoelectrons, forming an “electron image” on the screen. Deflection coils would scan the screen with electrons from the gun at the back of the tube. Areas with more photoelectrons would reflect the incident cathode rays back to a detector, providing a signal that could be amplified.

A later version of the image dissector. Source: Radiomuseum.org

Soon after discussing his ideas with his teacher, the Farnsworth family moved back to Utah. Philo finished high school and attended Brigham Young University but never completed a degree. By 1926 he had convinced a pair of what we’d now call “angel investors” to plow $6,000 into his image dissector idea, and he moved to California to chase his dream. Having already done some development on the tube at BYU, he was ready within a few months to apply for a patent, and on January 7, 1927 he submitted an application simply entitled “Television System.”

Reading Farnsworth’s 1927 patent application, it’s hard to believe that it was written by someone who hadn’t even encountered electricity for the first 12 years of his life. And yet a mere nine years later, young Philo had not only mastered the basics of electricity, he had progressed far enough to submit a patent application that described a complete television transmission system, from image capture to eventual reproduction on a receiver. What some people would take a lifetime to accomplish, Philo had managed before his 22nd birthday.

Enemies at the Gates

David Sarnoff, 1946. Source: Yousuf Karsh

By September of 1927, Farnsworth has successfully used his image dissector to transmit the world’s first electronic television signal — a single thin line scratched into a smoked glass slide. Progress was rapid from that point. A demonstration for the press was held in 1928, and in 1929 the first image of a human face, that of Farnsworth’s wife Pem, was transmitted.

Farnsworth wasn’t the only one with ideas about how to make electronic television a reality. Vladimir Zworykin had been working on his iconoscope since at least 1923, and while his design for a camera tube was superior to Farnsworth’s, which required impractically high light levels to deliver a usable picture, the iconoscope suffered from one major flaw: it didn’t work. Despite years of effort, Zworkykin had never been able to produce a tube that worked well enough to show his employers at Westinghouse. He did, however, have a patent for a television system built around this tube, issued in 1923.

Early drawing of the image dissector. It’s not clear if this is Farnsworth’s or his teacher’s copy.

Zworykin was recruited to radio giant RCA in 1930 by broadcasting head David Sarnoff. Sarnoff saw that television was going to be big and couldn’t afford to have RCA miss out. To hedge his bets, or perhaps to stifle the competition, Sarnoff offered Farnsworth $100,000 for his image dissector patent. Farnsworth stubbornly refused this princely sum, setting off a patent war between the boy inventor and one of the largest corporations in the country. RCA sued Farnsworth, claiming that Zworykin’s 1923 patent had priority even though he had never made a working version of his iconoscope, or “reduced to practice” in patent law parlance. RCA won the first round, as well as a subsequent appeal, but in 1934 a judge sided with Farnsworth, partly on the strength of handwritten notes made by Justin Tolman, Philo’s high school chemistry teacher. Tolman had sketched out Philo’s blackboard drawings at Rigby High all those years before, providing support for Farnsworth’s claim that he thought up the idea of electronic television at least a year before Zworykin’s patent was issued.

A Phyrric Victory

Farnsworth won the war, but the market would decide the real victor. The iconoscope was the superior tube for broadcast television, and once it was perfected it became the standard around which the television industry was built. It also effectively stranded the royalty payments that would have been due from RCA had Farnsworth’s tube taken off. The image dissector didn’t go away completely, though; given their need for abundant light, Farnsworth tubes were used for remote monitoring of furnaces and boilers, as well as arc welding and similar processes.

Apart from the image dissector, Farnsworth was a prolific inventor. He racked up hundreds of patents for everything from radar to telescopes to a baby incubator. He was also famous for the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, a nuclear fusion reactor used commercially to this day to produce neutrons and even by hobbyists to perform desktop fusion.

Sadly, Farnsworth died young, at 64, after a bout of pneumonia brought on by the stress of a failed business venture that bankrupted him. It’s a sad end for a life in which he accomplished so much, but his legacy will always be tied to that teenage dream of sending moving pictures through the air and those chalkboard drawings at Rigby High.

Viewing all 4677 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images