Author Archives: Steven Dufresne

Living On The Moon: The Challenges

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Invariably when we write about living on Mars, some ask why not go to the Moon instead? It’s much closer and has a generous selection of minerals. But its lack of an atmosphere adds to or exacerbates the problems we’d experience on Mars. Here, therefore, is a fun thought experiment about that age-old dream of living on the Moon.

Inhabiting Lava Tubes

The Moon has even less radiation protection than Mars, having practically no atmosphere. The lack of atmosphere also means that more micrometeorites make it to ground level. One way to handle these issues is to bury structures under …read more

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Cocktail Machine Mixes Perfect Drinks Every Time

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For many of us. the holiday season is coming up and that means hosting parties and mixing drinks, which can get tiresome. [GreatScott] has come up with a solution, what he calls a crude cocktail mixing machine. But don’t be fooled — it may look crude on the surface, and vibrate a bit while working, but the mechanism is plenty sound and functional.

The machine can mix three different liquids and does so using three peristaltic pumps. In typical [GreatScott] style, while he tears apart the pumps to replace the tubes, he gives us a good glimpse of just how …read more

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The IBM PC That Broke IBM

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It was the dawn of the personal computer age, a time when Apple IIs, Tandy TRS-80s, Commodore PETs, the Atari 400 and 800, and others had made significant inroads into schools and people’s homes. But IBM, whose name was synonymous with computers, was nowhere to be seen. And yet within a few years, the IBM PC would be the dominant player.

Those of us who were around at the time cherished one of those early non-IBM computers, and as the IBM PC came out, either respected it, looked down on it, or did both. But now, unless your desktop machine …read more

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Floppy Drive Music By Emmy Winning Composer

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We’ve featured a lot of awesome music made using floppy drives before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it used as the main instrument in a movie score, and by Emmy winning composer [Bear McCreary]. The movie, in this case is alien invasion film, Revolt, but you’ve surely heard Bear’s amazing work in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, The Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (my favorite of his), or the one for which he won an Emmy, Da Vinci’s Demons wherein the main theme sounds the same backwards as forwards, to name just a few. So …read more

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Skelly The Skeleton Is A Scary Good Musician

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There are a lot of things to like about [BoneConstructor]’s Skelly the skeleton robot project. Note that we said, “project”. That’s because not only does the robot work well and is built well, but the journey he took to make it contains steps we’ve all taken ourselves. We can say that with confidence since it’s his first, and we’ve all had those.

Skelly started life as a skeleton sitting in [BoneConstructor]’s antique race car at local car shows. Its eyes lit up and it made a moaning sound, which didn’t always work right.  From there came lessons learned with head …read more

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Skelly The Skeleton Is A Scary Good Musician

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There are a lot of things to like about [BoneConstructor]’s Skelly the skeleton robot project. Note that we said, “project”. That’s because not only does the robot work well and is built well, but the journey he took to make it contains steps we’ve all taken ourselves. We can say that with confidence since it’s his first, and we’ve all had those.

Skelly started life as a skeleton sitting in [BoneConstructor]’s antique race car at local car shows. Its eyes lit up and it made a moaning sound, which didn’t always work right.  From there came lessons learned with head …read more

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The Flight That Made The Calculator And Changed The World

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It was the fall of 1965 and Jack Kilby and Patrick Haggerty of Texas Instruments sat on a flight as Haggerty explained his idea for a calculator that could fit in the palm of a hand. This was a huge challenge since at that time calculators were the size of typewriters and plugged into wall sockets for their power. Kilby, who’d co-invented the integrated circuit just seven years earlier while at TI, lived to solve problems.

By the time they landed, Kilby had decided they should come up with a calculator that could fit in your pocket, cost less than …read more

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Make A Cheap Muon Detector Using Cosmicwatch

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A little over a year ago we’d written about a sub $100 muon detector that MIT doctoral candidate [Spencer Axani] and a few others had put together. At the time there was little more than a paper on arxiv.org about it. Now, a few versions later they’ve refined it to the level of a kit with full instructions for making your own under the banner, CosmicWatch including PCB Gerber files for the two surface mount boards you’ll need to assemble.

What’s a muon? The Earth is under constant bombardment from cosmic rays, most of them being nuclei expelled from supernova …read more

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Smarter Phones In Your Hacks With TensorFlow Lite

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One way to run a compute-intensive neural network on a hack has been to put a decent laptop onboard. But wouldn’t it be great if you could go smaller and cheaper by using a phone instead? If your neural network was written using Google’s TensorFlow framework then you’ve had the option of using TensorFlow Mobile, but it doesn’t use any of the phone’s accelerated hardware, and so it might not have been fast enough.

Google has just released a new solution, the developer preview of TensofFlow Lite for iOS and Android and announced plans to support Raspberry Pi 3. On …read more

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Prototyping, Making A Board For, And Coding An ARM Neural Net Robot

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[Sean Hodgins]’s calls his three-part video series an Arduino Neural Network Robot but we’d rather call it an enjoyable series on prototyping, designing a board with surface mount parts, assembling it, and oh yeah, putting a neural network on it, all the while offering plenty of useful tips.

In part one, prototype and design, he starts us out with a prototype using a breadboard. The final robot isn’t on an Arduino, but instead is on a custom-made board built around an ARM Cortex-M0+ processor. However, for the prototype, he uses a SparkFun SAM21 Arduino-sized board, a Pololu DRV8835 dual motor …read more

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