Ep 295: Circuit Graver, Zinc Creep, and Video Tubes
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Okay, what's this role that who knows?

I quit.

Hello, mom to the hacker podcast time, elliot .

Williams.

and only this is episode ninety five, a circuit graver zinc creep and video tubes. And welcome back after a week off at super conn, IT was really fun. The C.

E. O, thanks very much for your positive feedback on the podcast. And IT was really cool to see three, four people out there with hack day podcast teachers. We are trying to think about how many of them there are in existence and numbers probably around like a hundred. So to see three of them at super cn was pretty impressive this week in hack day news. I just got back from super gun, had to do hack day payroll, had to zoom down and ago, visit the front of mind for a day, and then fly back out here to germany, where arrived about two and half hours ago. And boy, my wings tired.

Jet lag always makes for the best podcast experience.

Yes, I feel like i'm Operating on no hours of sleep and a bug, a crazy pills. Well, you know what's going on anyway? Short story long super cn was absolutely fantastic.

Was great to see everybody always come back from these just full of crazy new ideas, and this time was no exception. So that's really fun. Also a bunch of new story ideas and always a super productive time.

Yeah, look like IT was a good time.

What else in the news? You've got space news.

Yeah, I wrote up a story last week about how voyager won when into this weird fault state that seem to be triggered, when they kind of all, you know, what does this button do moment they turned down a heater at at some part of the equipment needed, needed a little bit of extra heat, so they turned one on.

And so, you know, two days later, when the when the acknowledgement finally came in, they realized that had actually flip switch that the acknowledged was missing, that LED them to kind of search around the bans and try to figure out where voyager was in the they manage to find an s band signal which sort of gave them kind of this uh cascade of events that um when they turned here on IT, when you'll fault state and then had to shut down a number of different systems include building the main expand transmitter or so IT fell back to the s band transmitter or which hasn't been used since one thousand and eighty one. Then IT worked, IT came on and IT worked. And I don't know what the story is now.

I don't know if they, if y've managed to get past the hater fault and then get back to expand at this point, but at the last I heard of the story, they were still in communication with voyage and trying to figure this out. So here's open that. It'll come back to full service with its four instruments, and it's rapidly diminishing a supply of power from the R, T, G. But uh, you know, happens to the best of us.

I love the void. The continuing ogi is full of roller costers like this is insane. They try to turn something on IT doesn't work IT cuts the radio out. They have to use some old crazy radio like it's it's just pure remote control hacking, but it's remote control hacking with this like you pointed out, two day delay in the middle of IT.

Yeah someone in the comments um on this article had to be sharky about you. Well, why we spend in all this tax money on blow blew blow, someone did that. A very interesting analysis of of exactly how much resource from G P L N NASA is being put into a voyer work, the numbers making some assumptions and everything and and IT came out of some ridiculously percentage of NASA budget point, oh, one percent or something like that.

Forget what the exact number was and and that was assuming people are working full time on the project, like eighteen people working full time, which is certainly not the case yeah they don't say, you know eighteen people stand around while one guy pushes a button to send a command and they wait forty six hours for the still on the clock. No, we got a way for that command and might come back anytime soon. Now it's not like that. I mean, obviously, they're doing other things that are being more productive than than just serving voyager. So was a good sort of a common reality check here.

I mean, it's got to be amazing value for money. First of all, how many other any things do we have that far out? nothing. None, zero. So like the marginal value of a little bit of science at the absolute edge of the solar system has to be something, yes. So first of all, and b, it's on such a string budget anyway, such a small crew running IT, it's it's incredibly low cost, least in the sense that is the only one we've got out there. So like I can't even imagine asking that question.

Yeah, the only opportunity costs that I see is the you know is the fact that is plugging up the the deep space network for a certain monticle time. It's a very low bit rate at this point. So the messages they can offer a long time to send and receive while the messages in flight, there's plenty other things that d sn can do. So I don't think that's really a problem. Let's keep voyager going as long as he wants to keep going at this point.

Well, would you like to head on off to what's that sound?

sure. will.

This is a channel into .

something. What's that? What's that sound?

In honor of super cn brought you a sound back from super cn itself.

Okay, let's say, let's here.

I I that just sounds exactly.

uh, is that one of the ones with the don't know.

it's the one with a i'm sorry.

this is the one with the.

oh, I could I couldn't tell the difference.

My god, I tell you what how much of a sticker can we be on this one? I mean, it's obviously HMM. If I told people that this was an entry into the bad tracking chAllenge, was actually an S A O around someone's neck, would that help them or confuse them further?

I think that will confuse them further.

be as specific as you can. I'll see how the answers come in and we'll figure IT out then. So head on over the high com slash podcast handle your best gas and your email in case we pick you next week to get a hug day podcast t shirt.

My first tag this week also comes from super cn. This is zim ed's circuit graver and is an awesome pcb making device that he actually gave a talk on in the design lab will have to process that video and get IT up for you real soon. Until then, you can go check out his haga IO page that we linked in our right up here.

It's an interesting take on that kind of pcb mill. Instead of using a spinny loud and horrible toxic dust making spinning mill blade, he instead uses a cutting tool from a leave. And so this is one of those really sharp car bide cutting tools and build a really fantastic three d printed machine around this thing, so that IT can carve out isolation on a small piece of PC b.

What's really fun about this is that IT needs to be a four access machine. So IT needs to go X, Y, Z, as you'd expect. But because this leave cutting tool has a front side and actually he needs to get the rate angle on IT just right to have IT pull up nice clean cuts out of the circuit board.

There's actually a fourth angle where IT needs to be able to spin around so that IT aligns the blade with the cuts. But what's really cool about this is just how impressively fine separations and find pitch she's able to get out of this exact claims that he can get eight eight design rules, that zero point two millimetre trace and space very well. And if he moves down to six, six, it's little bit sketcher.

What's fun about that is that kind of ordering up on what you'd use to get our professional pcb made anyway. And so this means that your pcb prototyping stage can use use the same garbs as you send IT off and get IT manufactured one. That is if they're kind of weird because what's really fun about this, he's cutting out isolation traces while you could make kind of arbitrarily complicated paths.

He's actually doing some really need very artistic looking stuff with no slower curves and bigger chunks of copper under the L I was watching IT run live and he showed me a bunch of the board he made. And IT just makes fantastic looking. It's unfortunately in his haga IO page he doesn't have the S A O he made for super cn, but it's got the super con eight logo in IT and a bunch of, I think o four or two els soto.

The as a person who occasionally makes pcbs by just taking in the exact or knife and cutting out isolation traces like this, I definitely appreciate the ability to make boards this way. Doing IT precisely. And with this custom like mill machine is really pretty fun. I really .

like the design of this is so much cleaner looking, then then having that you that v bit spin around and kicking up the the copper shavings and far four dust from the substance. I mean, that's still all there. You're still creating that warm, but it's more controlled, I guess, is the way i'm looking at IT and way either and wait quieter.

I mean, these things just sipped along in in in raising its ocurred little bit of copper and and just kind of go on about its business. A nice idea. I mean, I i've seen a lot of graving the manual kind mean the stuff that or a talk man does and then there is the stuff that click spring has been doing, you decorating some of his stuff. But no, that's all decorative stuff is IT doesn't have any function. And this is an interesting functional use for for something that was you know pretty much designed to be a decorative, an art form sort of thing.

You do have to check out the machine IT is almost all three d printed. Its on the new rails up and down. And I think there's an aluminum piece on the z access. Well, there's a little piece of aluminium on the z access, but what gives the stability and the ability to travel up and down is actually a really super chunky three d printed flecks.

And it's kind of fun that this is able to move up and down, but not get pushed backwards and forwards by the force of the graving bit as it's going across this thing. In practice, it's you know probably two inches. Why it's a know it's a big old three d printed part.

But what's really cool about this frame is that IT is basically entirely three d printed and uses flecked res here and there and a couple other like the the leads grew actually on a part that's got a little bit of play and IT due to the way the three d print is designed. It's just some really very clever third print design here in making this thing. I mean, it's a four access machine and it's got such beautiful, crazy coordinated movements.

I really, really like that part a lot. Yeah, just super fun to watch IT go in real life. IT moves surprisingly fast.

The other thing he did that was really fun for super cn is he got custom blanks made all the same size, so they're all the same form factor. And he got them in a coded. So he actually just ordered P, C, B, S, where they are all just nothing on them.

No soda mask, no nothing. Just ordered pcbs in a certain size and was using those as blanks. It's absolutely horrendous abuse of cheap pcb services these days.

You know they're nice and flat. They are all dimensionally basically perfect like it's hard to beat that. So that goes a long way towards solving some of those problems with the flatness.

He also has a the three d printed base for IT, also as nice little duck tales in a wedge that squeeze the little pieces in their fairly stably presumedly without buckling them as well. So incredibly nice machine design all around, and a really satisfying machine to watch run. He manages to take IT all part, put IT in a pelletier case and bring IT to a conference where he was cutting out tiny little parts. So it's early days with this machine, but I want to see a few more of them remade by some other people. And everybody can get working on IT.

All right. First for me, inc. Creep, an electoral plasticity y erb l collapsed. This is a report from the national academies who put together a committee to look into the root causes of the airport radio telescope, which collapsed in, I think, december twenty twenty.

I mean, we've probably all by now seeing the video of that and I was kind of one of the most telegraphs structural failures in uh in engineering history. I think you know unlike A A bridge collapse or a building collapse or something like that, the they they knew this was coming. They were able to collect a lot of data on IT.

They knew there was nothing. They were gonna about IT. And there really was no mystery about what the failure mode was. And you haven't been kept scored home. What basically happened was one of the cables, or a number of the cables on one of the support towers that holds these huge cables up over the natural valley that the dish the premier reflector was in and held this nine hundred one platform more.

All the scientific instruments were, number of those cables started suffering from pull out of the sockets that held the steel rope, the wire rope, into the the support structure. The part is called the belt or socket. These are things that are used in rigging all over the words for hundreds ds of years now.

And basically what IT is, is they take the cable, the seal cable, and they put IT inside a cup, and then they splay out the individual wires of of the cable, filled a cup with sink, multi sink, when the sink carden's IT bonds to the wires individually, and then makes IT so that he can't pull out of the socket. That socket can then sit in a sadder, you know, you can prove how how strong these things are. You know that the hundreds and hundreds of tons of of force, and they're used all over the place, and there are dozens, I guess, in in arc.

Bo, so why did one fail? How come this was the one and only spelter socket that has failed in this way in one hundred years of using them? what? What was different about eric bel? And when they started asking that question, then IT became obvious what's different about arc bo versus all the other places where felt or sockets are are used, nobody else.

Gigg antic radar transmitter bathing these cables in in r of energy for decades. That becomes an obvious thing that you want to check out. They weren't actually able to do the work to prove that that's what IT was.

But they make a pretty good case for the red flags should be waiving. And this is something we should be checking out based on the fact that nothing else fits the the failure mode. All the other explanations like hurray e camera, the name of the hurricane that came through um like thirty nine months before did cause some damage and probably started the the collapse process.

But the pull out problem was already unknown phenomenon at that point and there was no reason for this link to be doing this. So their hypothesis at this point is electoral plasticity, which is a known but not well characterized, a phenomenon that with certain amount of current through the similar metals, you can actually cause one of the medals to soft in verses. Um what IT would be if I weren't subjected to these electrical current.

So the thought is that all of this are of energy is getting coupled into the cable through skin effect being transmitted up or conducted up into the the zing sockets where IT was having this electric plastic effect on the sink enough to soft in IT. And it's not really softening. It's more of us.

It's not really related to a phase change. I don't really I don't really understand IT fully my self. It's kind of some hand waving there what elector plasticity is.

But IT basically, at the end of the day, is kind of soften the the inc. Uh, to the point where was able to pull back away from the individual fibers inside the socket. And then we saw what happened. December first or whatever IT was of twenty twenty, not conclusive, but certainly suggestive.

The whole report was really interesting to read if it's like ninety eight pages and there's IT goes into a lot of detail and a lot of different ways to look at the data that they already had and then kind of suggest path forward for for looking add other failure modes that might be similar. These these small currents and IT doesn't have to be R F. I could be current from whatever from the similar medals from, like I noted, kind of uh, corrosion or cathode corrosion, I guess that would be and you know other kind of of these microcom that could be causing elector plasticity. Some kind of situation is similar to this.

My next tag is a super sweet little robot hack from eric. You think wu little coder pad has pcb spine and no wiring and there's both a github for all of the parts you need here, but also an assembly video, which is just first of all, beautifully made. And second, you should have a look at IT because it's got a lot of eric's secret tricks for this in designing and building this robot laid bear.

So if you want to rebuild IT to give ups the way to go, if you want to watch and learn, definitely check out the video. Thing that's most striking about the design of this robot is that IT basically has no wiring at all. It's a coped and it's got one, two, three, eight motors.

And you would think that that would mean that all of the survey motors have three wires, four wires, all going back to the P, C. B. But no area is designed this so that the motors can screw directly into the P.

C. B. And that's one of the first coolest things about this design, is that he actually takes the motor, but it's got like a little face plate on IT. Removing this face plate exposes the pins that would otherwise go to wires to remotely hook them up.

He designs the pcb with a little cut out for this and a little three d printed spacer, so that once you take the face off, the motor IT can actually screw directly into the pcb itself. And so you've got a really strong mechanical connection, but IT also plugs itself straight into the the pcb as really, really sweet here. IT means that there's not much going on other than batteries, P, C, B, motors, which I guess, in a way is all you need for robot sort of the legs are of the kind of four bar linkage style at a five bar linkage.

I don't know. I'm not a mechanical engineer. The legs are built like actually kind of like two legs connected together the foot. And each one of them is driven by one motoring. It's like those, I guess we've seen them in drobot that use the same linkage to move pencils around and stuff.

It's a fantastic way to get two degrees of freedom from two motors as long as you don't need the fall like X, Y square range of them. What you don't with legs here, this is a fun robot to watch in motion because it's got a fun range of gates and IT looks like it's not incredibly expensive to build either. I think basically, the cost is buying eight of the moderately fancy dynamics al services that he uses, which you are those that have the controllers built into them so you can drive them in a constant velocity mode, which is, I think, key here. Anyway, watch the body video is a fantastic sweet little bill. And it'll give you ideas if you need to make something compact and light weight like .

this yourself. Yeah, I just love that direct to the pcb mounting of those of those motors that's really, really slick. There's nothing wasted here.

No you know no wasted space, no wasted why or no nothing unnecessary is like high level design like is very impressive ah and the server of themselves with the controllers built in there, I think there were a key to this kind of, you know if you see that like you, you can disassemble them to the point that he did so that but you know not going too far and then IT also offers that those those pints for you to to um connect to the pcb. It's really um really slick. I think that was probably the enabling part here.

Oh, and dust buster seven thousand also calls out that he has a neat manufacturing trick when he's doing the solar sensor. He actually uses this neat jig that raises and lowers a section, section around IT that holds the solar stance of flat using a vacuum cleaner. And so he can put the pcb in place lower down IT holds a sense al dead flat against the scrape, the sad off.

And then he pulls IT out and IT lifts itself directly straight up off of the pcb. So there's none of that tendency. I don't know. You've ve done soter sensors yourself. It's always the peeling IT up phase is always a little bit sketchy. You don't want to wigless and mug or any of that this holds a downadup at and lifts IT up directly straight up through the help of this like jig and it's apparently another open source project of its own uh mac shelf sensor fix and all throw the links to that in the github for you if you are interested in again and awesome assembly video of a very slick design robot and you'll learn something from that or even just the really cool tools he uses to get the soldering done.

And i'm actually going to talk about makell's souter station in a second. But first.

no, you aren't. Yes, I am. That's too funny.

So hardware in the loop, continuous integration. This is from dank, and this is kind of the hardware version of integration testing unit testing in software development. And if you're not familiar the proper way, the accepted way, the controversial in some circles way of writing software is to write a test, to test a function that doesn't exist yet, make sure that test actually returns the values that you wanted to do, and then write the function that solves the problem of passing the test. This is kind of that concept for hardware.

When you make a change to solve ware, the unit tests should tell you if you've done anything wrong because you're expecting it's going to give you X, Y, Z for a value out, and that gives you Y, Y, Z for a value out. Thank you. Best friends, you know, you did something wrong with the function that you wrote. You you put some code in that that messed up something like that. The hardware version of that is, well, I i've made changes to the firm.

Where of this system is is still gonna me the same result is is still gonna the same old is is still gonna a respond the same way to to the button, presses things like that unless you actually are are testing for that you don't know what your your form where state is gonna be the idea here is to make that automatic um every time that there's A A get push this will download the form where low from where to the chip under test the microcontroller I believe was all um C H five five toom not mistaken IT would load the firm where and then simulate the various button pushes and uh that that the firm where was expecting and then the appropriate responses in this case was was mostly lighting a belly d now it's not actually doing anything like vision analysis to see if els are lighting up. It's it's just looking at vantage levels. So if IT knows that IT pin in A G P L fifteen is is the supposed to go high um and that will light up an L E D in the um in the finish project then I have to do is look for the voltage on the uh on the pin at the proper time.

So it's simulating those binky lights in all bad at that level, not actually looking at the the the the the results. If I can see that being necessary at some point for for some projects where you actually would want to see you know that the body is flashing or an L C D is displaying the right values or you even point out like if you're doing something like something that has a speaker and you need to, you know figure out if it's making the right sounds that might be a little bit difficult to analyze with just an anal digital converter. And in taking a vvnd ge level and kind look with a USB ry pie, it's probably asking a little much you might have to go into into some other different kind of testing regime. But for simple test for for microcontroller suppose spd, a button portions flashes. This kind of thing can really streamline the automated, automated testing.

Now there are so many possible ways to expand this testing gig to support all the possible use cases you might exactly have with yours. Like here, it's just doing you does the firm where do on the MC what it's but you could worry about are all of the different preferable you could attach to IT behaving correctly. And that would be a much more interesting and involved test rig.

But what I really loved is that a whole bunch of people said they're doing this in practice from cat mad, who used to work at microchip, where they had a testing look like this. Chris camel comes in and says, mike stitch, all the editor in chief, mike stitch, has been doing harder in the loop. Testing stuff with their work is just dangerous thing to see all of the different people doing this sort of thing in industry.

And I guess I like to see that happen in hacker practice, too. So if you're tempted to dip your toes into hardware in the loop testing, maybe you should. Although the big at here, and this comes from cat the mad, and I can totally imagine IT quote, fun thing is how loud the cover, john, this was, and how many years IT took to get new MC use added to the system. And it's true like this is a bigger project, probably in the project you're testing to make the test rig and make sure that IT covers all of the different possible failure modes. So I could see that too, but definitely give you a little a that at least the obvious things aren't going wrong when you write that new firm where well.

in that kind of was the the problem that I experienced in in my shop when I was doing software in doing my unit testing and and I was the only one doing unit everything actually on my project. And I caught a lot of flag from from the other developers. None of us were developer developers.

We all started off the scientists. And, you know, you became sort of developed by default. You know, you were the only one you could make an instrument talk to our systems.

I was always a huge fight, and I was like, guys, this really makes IT easier, makes IT easier, makes IT Better. Let's, let's all do this. No, no, no. You spend more time writing the test than you do writing the code. It's a waste time. It's a waste time like, okay, well, you know, i'm just going to keep doing what i'm doing and you guys, i'll get laid off before me, which they did. Sorry.

that's evil. Yeah, I know. I M this week i'd like to pick an awesome cell phone hack from doctor vote, reusing an old android phone for g pro with external USB devices.

This one's really fun. IT takes an F T D I chip, which we usually think of as being a USB, the serial converter trip, but some versions of A F T D I two, three, two r. In fact, IT has a few G P I O lying on them. This one has four, and he's using them to provide four pins output from an android cell phone. I thought I was really fun take on this.

I've always wondered why IT is that we don't use old cellphones in our projects because they just have so many parts in them from from a powerful processor to a full excells ether gio magnetometer set up to a good camera, good audio out. I mean, there's a lot to love for. We're using in a project in a cell phone.

The problem is always how to interface IT with the real world. This is a cool solution, I think, because it's deadly simple. It's wired. IT gives you for gp OS that you can use.

And they integrate super well with the android S T K, which I think has always been what stopped me from using cell phones in my projects, is that the programing on the android side of IT is the hard part. And indeed, in this video, he spends quite a while going through the android standard S K. To make an APP on the phone that then you can press to make the four L S.

On the bread board that are standings for whatever other devices you want lied up. But that said, this is a great through of how you could do so if you wanted. The following question was pretty old and may not have the USB yond the go, which lets you inject power and charge the cell phone up while using IT with your device.

But the phone is also old enough, but IT has a removable battery, so you just post the battery out, sticks in a piece of perth board that's basically battery shaped and powers the phone that way. I think that's absolutely lovely and a very simple solution for this. So that was super fun.

Who among us does not have a uh draw full of old cell phones um and tablets that would be able to be put to use with something like this. So it's always tempting. I when I looked there and I think about doing a miro magic miro kind of project or something like that um really should put those things to work one of these days.

And this maybe makes us a little easier because now you've got a way to get some G P I O and anything weird like have you know a blue tooth connection to some board that can do the I for you. Now why do that when you've got A U. S B? So it's pretty cool. I like the, I like the approach her.

Then if you read through the comments, I think that's kind of the consensus is that these days, the wireless is the lowest nominated. And maybe actually doing IT this way, one step too hard, commenter reta p points this out. You know, you've got an asp thirty two.

It's got wifi. The phone has wifi. If you're already used two coating for the E. S. P. Thirty two IT might even be the path of least software resistance to just whip up a quick HTML page on S P.

Thirty two hosts that there use the browser in your phone to connect to IT and control IT. I think there are reasons you probably don't want to do that. And some of them are probably the latency between the phone and the device, if there's like lots of complicated processing, using all of the different senses might be a problem.

On the other hand, pushing all of the fast, real time time stuff off to the E S, P thirty two is probably a win as well. So I definitely understand both sides is like why if you really just want some simple G P I O S may be doing the F T to thirty two trick is the way to go if you have more complicated demands. I think it's probably worth looking into maybe using wifi or then suggested against bluetooth as the middle man and doing some of the heavy lifting on the device. In question.

OK asked up for me, portable solar pay station prevents mess with section. And this is what we're talking about before, are talking about that queried project. This little sad station makes an appearance in there.

The idea here is to make your solar gentling neeter and easier. This one is version to that. Max shetler has dirt. This is A A portable version of IT. His previous version is basically the same mechanically. And in the whole concept of verdict, lifting the tense up off of the P, C, B after the paste has been applied, and that accomplish through a sort of a parallel lift mechanism, the upper platform upon which the dental rests is sort of a spring loaded.

So when the vacuum is turned on and is pulling air through the, through the preparations that move this platform down, that holding the sensor that moves down onto the platform, that holding the P C B underneath IT, the stance on the P C B are glue together by atmosphere pressure. So your you're good. Your sensus not going to move.

Your P, C, B is not going to move. You can shmall your, are your solar paste on there, make sure everything's good, and then turn the vacuum off. When is the spring preload is IT overcomes the the remaining air pressure.

The tensile pops up directly away from the PC board, no smiling, no lifting on the edges of of the solar pads. Real nice, real simple. But the previous version that max made was powered by A H shop bag that seems like massive overkill for the job.

d. Have a shot back, roaring away on your bench top, connected to this sense holder by a hose. Not everybody has got the room for a, uh, a shop back.

Not everybody has a shop back. It's loud. There's there's a lot of disadvantage. He undertook an upgrade of the concept and one of to make up an all in one unit where IT had A A vacuum fan built into IT. So as you do, you will go on the usual three d design suspects uh sites online and you find the design for an impeller that you can three d print. Max did that and gave IT a shot with a basely just sort of a unity old regular everyday motor and got exactly the kind of reception expect stl didn't move the top and suck down there just was not enough.

So um regard the whole thing and came up with A A brushless dc motor in a three printing paler kind of ditched the whole toroidal closure that he had used for the first impaler and went with a more OpenAIrflow d esign t hat b asically u se o f t he e ntire l ower p art o f t he s tation a s a s k ind o f a p lanum a nd u m h as l ots a nd l ots o f a ir s pace t o t o g et r id o f a ir t hat w orked a w hole l ot B etter e ven i f t he c ontrols f or c ontrolling t he s peed a nd t he s peed o f t he t he b rushes m otor k now a ll t hat t hey n eeded a m otor c ontroller a nd a nd c ontroller t o t alk t o t he m otor c ontroller a nd a nd a ll t hat s tuff. So kind of over complicate things in some ways. But if you got IT and you know how to use IT, put IT to work.

And I think that's what he did here. The video that included with the article goes into some detail about the construction and and you know that the the distance that um then he went down before he got to the the final form of this. But um basically what you see is what you get you you put the put the P C B onto the the top plate and that is customer to fit the the P C B you're gonna you're going to be working with.

So you would print a new one for different size pcbs or different shape pcbs. And then you put the tense on on top and turn on the the switch, turn up the nab and IT. Just suck right down, put your paste on. All done, very neat, very slick and, uh, good look project too. Really like that.

I, for my quick acts, I can't believe, didn't pick this one. Ham radio rookie random wire antenna uses no wie. This is a really neat anta made out of a seven year long telescoping carbon fiber collapsing fishing pole.

I actually have one of these in the basement is funny. I was like, where do you even get these? I use mine for getting lost R, C, airplanes out of trees.

That's not the point. These polls, despite being made out of fiber, are not very conductive. So the trick to turning IT into an anta na is ham radio.

Rocky takes some conductive fairy tape and put stripes on each of the individual sections. And when you pull them out so that they telescope into each other is somehow connects between the segments. And he's thinking that is probably capacity coupling between the because there's like strip of tape, probably non conductive epoxy carbon fiber and then strip of tape.

And I think that might be true. I don't think he's done any particular investigation into this and tuning and maybe that will on a later video, but it's a really need idea to get a very long wire up and firmly mounted in a quick mount time. So we will see we'll see if this can end up being tunable as well.

How is going to be an even more interesting project? Weaker walk a pico ROM, a dep thirty two a bit ROM emulator. This is a rasper pipe go doing its thing.

He's flashed IT with some software that makes IT emulate an old ROM. He's using this ROM in an old arcade board and wants test putting different software on the thing. The pico is easy to connect to buy USB, so he can just write a new image to IT and then, boom, he's off the races.

What makes this work, of course, is the program able input outputs on the pico, which let IT respond quickly enough to pretend to be an approach without losing a beat and last up, is kind of an art piece, and unfortunately, a little bit short on details. Club clock, split flap clock floods its way to displaying time without numbers. This is the coolest split flat display i've seen in a long time.

It's basically a circle, and the split flap clock is just drawing hands on this otherwise circular face. But if you watch the video, the split flaps are two sides rather than an up downtime. They're kind of like flipped touts in that sense more than they are like a split flap display.

It's not going through all the letters of the alphabet. It's only at two states, black and White. But I have a look at IT and i'm be interested that to see if anyone knows what's going on with these individual elements or is interested in recreating them.

okay. First up for me for quick pick. One of the day calendar is a great use of e paper. This is from the tech I used to love more, the day calendars, which which just have three hundred and sixty five pieces of paper and you d peel off every day.

And I would have some cartoon or something like that I remember gave one of my wife is lattin words every day, so you can relive high school latin class glory days. This one is a little bit more conservative with the waste of paper. This one uses an a wave share e paper display, really quite small, as the clever thing about this is the use of a of wolf, you know, for election ical switch in the space that the switch would occupy.

The decoration types switch is accepted by the e paper display. And then he goes out to the site and grabs A H french word for for the day. So very nice looking project and a super tiny and kind of a good idea on a lot of levels. Next up, use pico glitter for voltage glitches attacks. I've been much into glitchy attacks lately.

Um just because it's it's kind of cool the idea that you can force an era state into A N mcu by um by bathing IT in um R F energy or or giving IT a little kick on the power supply, paco glitter is basically falling into that latter category. This is a mattis kasin heim's effort at learning how to reverse engineer through glitches. IT uses some level shifters to connect different targets to different vault ges and try to inject an error at different part points of code execution cycles and inject hours that will let you figure out what's going on in the system.

Pretty clever and seems nicely set up for kind of universal use. And last, clever circuit makes exercise slightly less boring. This is by joe. I wrote to up the other day because I I really liked the forest mins.

Shout out that, uh, joe used here because he turned to the still useful, after all these years, engineers nobility from one thousand hundred and seventy nine to pull out IT, bounce the switch circuit that would make his lap counter for his exercise routine, which is just going up and down the stairs one hundred eight times. He often lose count of a of the number trip is taken. So he built this automatic optical beam break sensor that uses this cool little bounce less switch, or IT, to actually do the counting. 我的。

好。 Alright, that brings us to the camp this articles. These are long forming pieces written by our fantastic cake day writing staff.

This week I picked, I installed genti so you don't have to buy brian cock field. And first of kudos, the title the have to is hilarious. But second, I used to be an old linux salad.

And basically linux tinker and gentoo has always been one of those like holy grail Operating systems. And brian has the same experience. Basically, IT is a distribution where everything is self compiled by you in principal slash on paper.

And maybe in the past, this meant that you could customize everything to your exact needs and could hopefully get some kind of speed or efficiency your size gains out of IT. And while that is brian's motivation here, he actually finds out he doesn't get any of that out of IT. And I think part of the reason is that the kernel is not this big mess of a whole bunch of modules all put together anymore, but everything's kind of module and parts plugged in.

Parts plugged out. You are not going to get much out of optimizing the kernel for your machine, I think, these days. So he doesn't get much speed out of IT, but what he does get is a tremendous learning experience. And I think that's the real point of gentoo linux or even some of the other you know kind of bare bones ear linux distributions. He throws a little bit of loving shade at arch linux are just a little bit do IT yourself on the install phase and that I absolutely agree with that.

And if I were to do my system again, I would i'd still do arch, but I would hate having to do the set up phase because IT does take a while and you do have to think harder while you are configuring IT than you would possibly like to. Jen to is like that times ten and so half the other half, the reason he wants to do this is so he can toss shade that urge people who use precompiling binaries. And I appreciate that too, but I think the point of john too, and and actually the point of arch two is that you learn so much when you have to make all of these choices yourself, that it's actually kind of thing, is that for you, if you just want to set up an Operating system and get IT going and get to work, no, absolutely not.

These are kind of linux hobby Operating systems. This is the one you want to set up if you want to learn about how the Operating system works. And I think that goes double for jen tu.

The good news is brian mentioned this. This also gets picked up in the comments. The good news about genti in particular, but also large, is they have phenomenal documentation.

And so if the point of this in system really is for you to learn everything about what IT takes to get a linux system up and running, it's absolutely fantastic because the documentation is there to take you through every step of the way. Now again, is this easy? Is this quick? No, it's not at all.

Is that an in depth tour into what makes a linux stem tick? Yes, IT, absolutely, absolutely is. And i'll throw the link to the gen two handbook in here.

I don't even use jen tu, and I look at the genti handbook sometimes when I have problems because their documentation is just that good. It's a resource for all. Linux is not just for gen to he does also point out that there are a bunch of ways to kind of speed this whole thing up.

If sitting around waiting for compilations isn't your style, there are a bunch of binary packages that you can work out around the corners to Cherry pick a few of them to speed things up in pretty good browsing. Take forever to compile. At the end of the day, getu isn't so bad once you've got IT installed because they do have a really nice package manager, the emerge system when software gets updated, not like you have to go through this long hole suffering thing again, you just fetch IT down recompiled t again.

You don't have to like revisit your whole system configuration. It's actually as easy as just get in and run in IT brians report on genti here is that installing IT took a lot because he had to learn a whole bunch of things and because you have to spend all that time compiling. But once it's up and running, it's actually a fairly easy system to keep running and keep maintaining and keep current with modern bills. So in that sense, I think it's not so bad you're signing up for a one time vacation deep inside the linux kernel, not a lifetime of hacking.

I kind of no longer fit into the the linux power sort of crowd. If this is the measure of, you know, you want to compile your own Operating system, then yeah, I guess I don't. I just kind of need to get stuff done.

Then again, I. On my laptop here and everything I do you know is my daily driver. Not that that means anything past. That's the Operating system that I chose because most because i'm cheap and I don't want to pay for windows. You know I do appreciate the exploratory potentials of of something like genti.

So you can find an old machine in a classes in place and just throw IT on there and see what you know, see what you can do, see how you know an Operating system actually works. I do appreciate that stuff. I just, unfortunately, don't have time for that anymore, and I just need a machine that works.

My pic this week for camp. This is capturing light in a vacuum. The magic of two video cameras a journalists owe to the video tubes of old is I can hit home for me because I did a lot of the video work in high school IT will come to the surprise of no one that that was me on the, you know, on the A V crew.

And I I I remember vividly the know getting center to do a high school football game with bring new video camera and that this was probably panasonic ic and I don't I don't remember specifically. But you know we had this V H S you know um deck for recording the uh the signal and we had this camera and we're up in the booth and and the the the guy know the the faculty member who is actually in charge, the whole thing was very adamant about not pointing the camera at the lights. Get the big, big friday night lights kind of shining down onto the stadium and he was like, you put that camera for those lights and a room in the brand new camera and you know, was just like five dollar camera back in the eighties or something like that.

So IT was that was a big deal and and that was one one time kind of agreed the edges of lights and he was smacked me around for that that I that I know that I would just destroy the camera, I didn't, but I understand the the caution. And now after reading jennie's article, you can kind of see why that would what happen. Pretty much all the cameras we have now or are using some sort of solid state uh, image sensor and they're smaller, their Better, their faster, their in in every way.

They're Better than than the old tubes, vehicles, new vons, all the other different con type tubes that used to populate these cameras. After high school, I started working for a company that was doing video production, and they're were using broadcast great equipment, and those cameras had three tubes in them. Jenny does mention that somewhat in the article that you know that broadcast cameras always had three tubes and a beam splitter sort of arrangements.

You'd get a red, Green and blue signal, the sort of the home grade and the presumed grade cameras. They've got one, one, two, because tube are very expensive. And then they would do color by, you know, kind of a version of of color filters are over the two.

They were interesting pieces of equipment, a lot of stuff jammed into those professional sort of E N G grade cameras that we used to use. The article that that Jenny here is, is based on the simpler cameras that he has in her position. SHE got a couple of R C A R security cameras that came out of the midi ties or so kind of little tear down of what's going on inside there.

The the whole concept of the of the vertical or or the the camera tube in general, there's went by different names from different manufacturer and slightly different technologies. But the basic idea, he explains, you know, is very simple. It's A A screen at the front of the tube that is going to get exposed to the light that's coming through the lens or some other optical arrangement and that illuminates the material that's on the front of the camera, which is photo a missive.

So if it's being illuminated, it's going to uh, give off more electronic and if it's dark, it's going to give off less electrons. And then a beam, electron beam rastas over that seen. And then you can get a current that is proportional to the amount of illumination that's uh in a particular place on that scene.

And then did that signal can then turn into voltage. And the rest is think and in history and all that stuff, IT was an interesting way to do the job. That's what we had. That's how TV worked. And um just kind of going through the differences between the two technology in the in in the simplicity of of solid state cameras that we have now is interesting.

One of the things that occurred to me when I was reading this article, and I probably said this before, but TV was and everybody was sitting down watching, and you're having the shared experience with the you talk about at the next day. See what they did, bobo, blah, you know, talk about your favorite scenes from whatever show. So you had this kind of shared experience, but IT IT was also shared in experience in another way.

In a level, nature probably weren't cognition at the time the electron be in. Everybody's TV was pointing at the exact same place at the exact time because that's how T, V. Had to work.

If the frame couldn't be a couple of lines behind on your neighbors, T. V, they'll had to be in the same place at the same time. You know everybody was having a shared experience at a higher level, but at a lower level to everybody was watching the electron beam at the exact same place, the exact same time.

I just thought that was kind of call the the vertical sort of turned that around. So it's it's basically the same technology as as a cathode red tube. It's just instead of generating light for people to see, is reading the light that's falling on the screen.

So kid, interesting that um you know how much technology is changed and uh a little bit jealous that that Jenny got all these fun little little bits lying around that SHE take a part and wipe up an article on it's it's it's kind of call ish. I wish I had A A deeper uh deeper bin of of stuff like that myself because I had come across a lot of this cool stuff in my in my time and electronics and most of most of IT sitting in a land fell some place. Now it's kind of call that he kept hold the some of the stuff.

This was one of those today. I learned articles for me. I had no idea how these old video tubes worked. And you explained IT really well, not gonna read, do that.

But what striking is how much is just a couple of rate tube running kind of a different mode, right? Instead of aiming the beam around and lighting up different globe sections, you're aiming the beam around and reading how much current IT takes because you've got a photo sensitive material on the outside. And that's just crazy.

And IT makes the whole system make a lot more sense because everything really is all kind of in sink with itself. And it's the same thing on the one side, on the recording side is on the play backside almost. It's just, you know, here you're measuring the voltage in turning that into the signal, and here you're using that to deflect the beam around.

That's really cool. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I just learned something new today, but this is a great one. Well, that wraps up for this week's check day podcast. Thanks very much for listening. If you see anything cool or do anything cool, drop us a line tips at hacked day dot com and to fall on along with the links head on over to the showed tes hacked day dot com slash podcast and until next week.

keep on action.

There we are again.

Wow, we're just gonna to deal with IT.

I can't use any of this in the shell. I did. I did what I thought I didn't do. I just did IT wrong. B, excuse me, think i'll delete all that.

I think that is the perfect ending i'm done.