Author Archives: Gerrit Coetzee

Transcend Wifi SD Card Is A Tiny Linux Server

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[jamesone111] bought a Transcend WifiSD card, presumably for photography, but it may just have been because he heard that they’re actually tiny Linux servers.

He read a post about these cards on the OpenWRT forums. They’re all a similar configuration of a relatively large amount of memory (compared to the usual embedded computer), a WiFi chip, and an ARM processor running a tiny Linux install. The card acts as a WiFi access point with a little server running on it, and waits for the user to connect to it via a website. It also has a mode where it will connect …read more

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Fail Of The Week (in 1996): The 7 Billion Dollar Overflow

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The year was 1996, the European Space agency was poised for commercial supremacy in space. Their new Ariane 5 Rocket could launch two three-ton satellites into space. It had more power than anything that had come before.

The rocket rose up towards the heavens on a pillar of flame, carrying four very expensive and very uninsured satellites. Thirty-seven seconds later it self destructed. Seven billion dollars of RUD rained down on the local beaches near the Guiana Space Centre in Southern America. A video of the failed launch is after the break.

The cause of all this was a single …read more

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Puzzling Out an 80s Puzzle Toy

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[Ido Gendel] looks back a time in the 80s when kids would learn by answering the questions to quizzes on their “TOMY Teacher,” or, “Sears Quiz-A-Tron”. There’s a bit of a conundrum with this toy. How did it know which answers were correct. Chip memory of any kind wasn’t the kind of thing you’d sweep into the dust bin if you had extras like it is now; it was expensive.

To use the toy, the child would place the notebook in the plastic frame on the device. They’d open the page with the quiz they would like to take. Printed …read more

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Wireless Robotic Gripper With Haptic Feedback

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We’re not sure what kind of, “High School,” [Sam Baumgarten] and his friend goes to that gave him the tools to execute his robotic gripper so well. We do know that it was not like ours. Apparently some high schools have SLS 3D printers and Solidworks. Rather than a grumpy shop teacher with three fingers who, despite that, kept taking the safety off the table saws and taught drafting on boards with so many phalluses and names carved into the linoleum, half the challenge was not transferring them to the line work.

Our bitterness aside, [Sam] and his friend built …read more

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One Man’s Journey To Build Portable Concrete 3D Printer Produces Its First Tiny House

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[Alex Le Roux] want to 3D print houses.  Rather than all the trouble we go through now, the contractor would make a foundation, set-up the 3D printer, feed it concrete, and go to lunch.

It’s by no means the first concrete printer we’ve covered, but the progress he’s made is really interesting. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s claimed to make the first livable structure in the United States. We’re not qualified to verify that statement, maybe a reader can help out, but that’s pretty cool!

The printer is a very scaled gantry system. To avoid having an extremely heavy frame, …read more

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Ghostbuster Proton Pack Made from Everything

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[John Fin] put a lot of work into his Ghostbuster’s proton pack prop with full-featured user control and effects. What appealed to us well beyond the exquisite build is the extra effort taken to write down the whole process in a PDF for anyone wishing to imitate him.

We all know that a lot of famous props are creatively rearranged household items. The famous Mr. Fusion from Back to The Future is actually a Krups coffee grinder with some logos adhered.

[John]’s prop is no different. The cyclotron is a five gallon bucket. A garlic powder container fills another function. …read more

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The Politest Patent Discussion, OSHW v. Patents

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We’ve covered [Vijay] refreshable braille display before. Reader, [zakqwy] pointed us to an interesting event that occured in the discussion of its Hackaday.io project page.

[Vijay] was inspired by the work of [Paul D’souza], who he met at Makerfaire Bangalore. [Paul] came up with a way to make a refreshable braille display using small pager motors. [Vijay] saw the light, and also felt that he could make the vibrating motor display in such a way that anyone could make it for themselves at a low cost.

Of course, [Paul], had patented his work, and in this case rightly so. As …read more

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Reverse Engineering the McDonald’s French Fry

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McDonald’s is serious about their fries. When they were forced by shifting public opinion (drunkenly swaggering around as it always does) to switch from their beef tallow and cottonseed oil mixture to a vegetable oil mixture; they spent millions to find a solution that retained the taste. How they make the fries is not the worlds most closely guarded secret, but they do have a unique flavor, texture, and appearance which is a product of lots of large scale industrial processes. [J. Kenji López-Alt] decided to reverse engineer the process.

His first problem was of procurement. He could easily buy …read more

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Minecraft Trojan Horse Teaches Kids to Love Electronics and Code

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Kids love Minecraft, and a clever educator can leverage that love to teach some very practical skills. The summer class offered by the Children’s Museum in Bozeman Montana would have blown my mind if such a thing existed when we were younger. (Rather than begging one of the dads in my Boy Scout Troop to pirate Visual Studio for me, which was delivered in the form of an alarmingly tall stack of CDs.) The kids in Bozeman get to learn hardware, software, their integration, and all while playing Minecraft.

Minecraft is an immersive universe that has proven to suck in …read more

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HobbyKing Cheetah: Building Running Robots from Hobby Motors

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[Ben Katz] is building a running robot from hobby level brushless motors, all on his blog under the tag, “HobbyKing Cheetah.”

One of the features of fancy modern industrial motor and controller sets is the ability for the motor to act as a mass-spring-damper. For example, let’s say you want a robot to hold an egg. You could have it move to the closed position, but tell the controller you only want to use so much force to do it. It will hold the egg as if there was a spring at its joint.

Another way you could use this …read more

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