Author Archives: Elliot Williams

Self-Driven: Uber and Tesla

Posted on by

Self-driving cars have been in the news a lot in the past two weeks. Uber’s self-driving taxi hit and killed a pedestrian on March 18, and just a few days later a Tesla running in “autopilot” mode slammed into a road barrier at full speed, killing the driver. In both cases, there was a human driver who was supposed to be watching over the shoulder of the machine, but in the Uber case the driver appears to have been distracted and in the Tesla case, the driver had hands off the steering wheel for six seconds prior to the crash. …read more

Continue reading Self-Driven: Uber and Tesla→

Scotty Allen Visits Strange Parts, Builds an iPhone

Posted on by

Scotty Allen has a YouTube blog called Strange Parts; maybe you’ve seen his super-popular video about building his own iPhone “from scratch”. It’s a great story, and it’s also a pretext for a slightly deeper dive into the electronics hardware manufacturing, assembly, and repair capital of the world: Shenzhen, China. After his talk at the 2017 Superconference, we got a chance to sit down with Scotty and ask about cellphones and his other travels. Check it out:

The Story of the Phone

Scotty was sitting around with friends, drinking in one of Shenzhen’s night markets, and talking about how …read more

Continue reading Scotty Allen Visits Strange Parts, Builds an iPhone→

What’s Inside A Neonode Laser Sensor?

Posted on by

Every once in a while, you get your hands on a cool piece of hardware, and of course, it’s your first instinct to open it up and see how it works, right? Maybe see if it can be coaxed into doing just a little bit more than it says on the box? And so it was last Wednesday, when I was at the Embedded World trade fair, and stumbled on a cool touch display floating apparently in mid-air.

The display itself was a sort of focused Pepper’s Ghost illusion, reflected off of an expensive mirror made by Aska3D. I don’t …read more

Continue reading What’s Inside A Neonode Laser Sensor?→

Can Open-source Hardware Be Like Open-source Software?

Posted on by

Hardware and software are certainly different beasts. Software is really just information, and the storing, modification, duplication, and transmission of information is essentially free. Hardware is expensive, or so we think, because it’s made out of physical stuff which is costly to ship or copy. So when we talk about open-source software (OSS) or open-source hardware (OSHW), we’re talking about different things — OSS is itself the end product, while OSHW is just the information to fabricate the end product, or have it fabricated.

The fabrication step makes OSHW essentially different from OSS, at least for now, but I think …read more

Continue reading Can Open-source Hardware Be Like Open-source Software?→

Mechanical Clocks that Never Need Winding

Posted on by

What is it about mechanical clocks? Maybe it’s the gears, or the soft tick-tocking that they make? Or maybe it’s the pursuit of implausible mechanical perfection. Combine mechanical clocks with “free” energy harvested from daily temperature and pressure variation, and we’re hooked.

Both the Beverly Clock, built by Arthur Beverly in 1864, and the Atmos series of clocks built between 1929 and 1939, run exclusively on the expansion and contraction of a volume of air (Beverly) or ethyl chloride (Atmos) over the day to wind up the clock via a ratchet. The Beverly Clock was apparently a one-off, and it’s …read more

Continue reading Mechanical Clocks that Never Need Winding→

OpenSCAD: Tieing It Together With Hull()

Posted on by

What’s your favorite OpenSCAD command? Perhaps it’s intersection() or difference()? Or are you a polygon() and extrude() modeler? For me, the most useful, and maybe most often overlooked, function is hull(). Hull() does just what it says on the can — creates a convex hull around the objects that are passed to it as children — but that turns out to be invaluable.

Hull() solves a number of newbie problems: making things round and connecting things together. And with a little ingenuity, hull() can provide a nearly complete modelling strategy all on its own. If you use OpenSCAD …read more

Continue reading OpenSCAD: Tieing It Together With Hull()→

You Can Learn a Lot From a Blinkenrocket

Posted on by

At this year’s Chaos Communication Congress, we caught up with [muzy] and [overflo], who were there with a badge and soldering project they designed to teach young folks how to solder and program. Blinkenrocket is a basically a 64-LED matrix display and just enough support hardware to store and display animations, and judging by the number of blinking rockets we saw around the necks of attendees, it was a success.

Their talk at 34C3 mostly concerns the production details, design refinements, and the pitfalls of producing thousands of a thing. If you’re thinking of building a hardware kit or badge …read more

Continue reading You Can Learn a Lot From a Blinkenrocket→

Amazing Mechanical Linkages and The Software to Design Them

Posted on by

Most of us are more bits-and-bytes than nuts-and-bolts, but we have the deepest appreciation for the combination of the two. So, apparently, does [rectorsquid]. Check out the design and flow of his rolling ball sculpture (YouTube, embedded below) to see what we mean. See how the arms hesitate just a bit as the ball is transferred? See how the upper arm gently places it on the ramp with a slight downward gesture? See how it’s done with one motor? There’s no way [rectorsquid] designed this on paper, right?

Of course he didn’t (YouTube). Instead, he wrote a simulator that …read more

Continue reading Amazing Mechanical Linkages and The Software to Design Them→

Build an Excellent Coffee Roaster With a Satisfyingly Low Price Tag

Posted on by

There’s a lot of mysticism around coffee roasting, but in the end it couldn’t be simpler. Take a bunch of beans, heat them up evenly, and stop before they get burned. The rest is details.

And the same goes for coffee roasters. The most primitive roasting technique involves stirring the beans in a pan or wok to keep them from scorching on the bottom. This works great, but it doesn’t scale. Industrial drum roasters heat a rotating drum with ridges on the inside like a cement mixer to keep the beans in constant motion while they pass over a gas …read more

Continue reading Build an Excellent Coffee Roaster With a Satisfyingly Low Price Tag→

Great People and Culture at 34th Chaos Communications Congress

Posted on by

If you’ve been to a Chaos Communication Congress, you know the feeling — the strange realization after it’s all over that you’re back in the “real world”. It’s somehow alienating and unfriendly in comparison to being surrounded by computer freaks, artists, hackers, activists, coders, and other like-minded individuals over the four days of the Congress. A hand-written poster by the podcasting center read “Endlich, normale Leute” — “At last, normal people” — which is irony piled on irony but the sentiment is still right for certain strange values of “normal”. Normal hackers? You’d probably fit right in.

We cover a …read more

Continue reading Great People and Culture at 34th Chaos Communications Congress→