Hacking When It Counts: Setting Sail in a Submarine

By the early 20th century, naval warfare was undergoing drastic technological changes. Ships were getting better and faster engines and were being outfitted with wireless communications, while naval aviation was coming into its own. The most dramatic changes were taking place below the surface of the ocean, though, as brave men stuffed themselves into steel tubes designed to sink and, usually, surface, and to attack by stealth and cunning rather than brute force. The submarine was becoming a major part of the world’s navies, albeit a feared and hated one.

For as much animosity as there was between sailors of …read more

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Finding The Sun And Moon The New Old-Fashioned Way

The ability to build a robot to take care of a tedious task for you is power indeed. For a few centuries, the task of helping determine one’s location fell to the sextant. Now, you can offload that task to this auto-sextant, courtesy of [Raz85].

To be clear, this robo-sextant doesn’t give you your exact location, but it does find and display the bearing and altitude of the most luminous object around and display them on the LCD — so, the sun and moon. A pair of cheap servos handle the horizontal and vertical movement, an Arduino Uno acts as …read more

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