Grand venues of spectacle to entertain audiences has long been a part of history, but such tradition is highly problematic at the moment in the light of the pandemic. Some sports leagues are testing the waters with a soft restart by playing only to a broadcast audience, leaving the stadium empty. Many experiments are in progress trying to liven up an empty stadium and this is where SoftBank saw an opportunity: as a multinational conglomerate that has both a baseball team and a robotics division, they called a team of robots to cheer-leading duty.

Some clips of the cheerleading squad in action have started circulating. A few people may greet the sight with an indifferent shrug, but most tend to fall to an extreme: either finding them hilarious or react with horror. It is only natural to have a strong reaction to such a jarring sight.

「Spotさん」と「Pepperさん」によるおそらく宇宙史上初のいざゆけ若鷹軍団コラボレーションダンス(部) #sbhawks pic.twitter.com/MeGxUkmxo6

— パ・リーグ.com Lite / パーソル パ・リーグTV Lite (@PLcom_lite) July 7, 2020

Spot was only available for sale recently, and we admit this was not the type of task that came to our minds. Pepper has a longer track record and this is not Pepper’s first baseball game. The humanoid robot has been around long enough to raise questions about a robot’s role in society from unionization to sex work. We haven’t made much progress answering those questions, and now we have even more questions that the lightweight SoftBank Robotics press release (in Japanese) didn’t try to answer.

When people fret about “robots taking our jobs” the conversation doesn’t usually involve sports team cheerleaders, yet here we are. Welcome to the future.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/softbank-robots-pinch-hit-for-baseball-cheerleaders/

There has been an argument raging for years over whether you should design circuit boards with 45-degree corners or 90-degree corners. Why make them with corners at all? This breathtaking circuit board art is from a digital watch circa 1975.

The Pulsar Calculator Watch was the first of its kind and came along with a stylus to operate the miniscule buttons. The circuit board traces would have been laid out by hand, explaining the gentle curves rather than straight lines. The chip-on-board construction is wild, with the silicon die bonded directly to those traces on multiple chips in this image. There is also a mercury tilt sensor on this model that would have switched the display off when not being held up to view the time (or calculate your tip at the Ritz).

We found working models of this watch for sale online for about $225-350. That’s a steal considering the original list price for these is reported to be $550 ($2600 considering inflation).

The beauty of the PCB artwork is hidden away, not just inside the watch case, but obscured by the plastic battery housing to which those tabs on the right are soldered. Think of how many geeks were lucky enough to have one of these and never realized the beauty within. If you’re looking to unlock more of these hidden masterpieces, check out [Greg Charvat’s] article on collecting and restoring digital wristwatches.

[via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories link dump]

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/1975-circuit-board-was-a-masterpiece-hidden-on-your-wrist/

Custom weather stations are a common enough project these days, especially based around the ESP8266. Wire a sensor up to the MCU, power it up with an old phone charger, and you’re half way there. But if you want something that’s going to operate remotely on the long term, you’ve got to put a little more thought into it.

Which is exactly what [BuckarewBanzai] did for his solar powered Raspberry Pi weather station. With an industrial NEMA-rated enclosure, a beefy 35 watt photovoltaic panel, and enough lead-acid battery capacity to keep the show going for days, this build is certainly more robust than most. Some might call it overkill, but we think anyone who’s ever deployed hardware outdoors for more than a few days knows you can never be too careful when Mother Nature is involved.

To keep the 18 Ah battery topped off, [BuckarewBanzai] is using a 10 amp Wanderer charge controller. It sounds as though he burned through a few lesser models before settling on this one; something to consider for your own off-grid projects. An LM2596 regulator is then used to provide a stable 5 V for the Raspberry Pi.

In addition to the BME280 environmental sensor that picks up on temperature, humidity, and pressure, there’s also a AS3935 lightning sensor onboard which [BuckarewBanzai] says can pick up strikes up to 40 kilometers away. All of this environmental data is collected and stored in a local SQLite database, and gets pushed offsite every five minutes with a REST API so it can be visualized with Grafana.

Critics in the audience will no doubt pick up on the solderless breadboard located in the center of the weather station, but [BuckarewBanzai] says he’s already on the case. He’s working on a custom PCB that will accept the various modular components. Not only should this make the station more reliable, but he says it will cut down on the “spaghetti” wiring. Though for the record, this is hardly the worst offender we’ve seen in that department.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/solar-weather-station-listens-for-lightning/

When starting out on a project, it’s accepted best practice to try to avoid feature creep. Of course, we can’t all say that we follow this guideline completely every time. In fact, sometimes it can get away from us, and in rare situations it might actually turn out pretty well. That appears to be what happened with [superczar]’s home automation project which now covers basically everything possible in home automation.

The build started in 2013, so we assume that features have been added periodically and that the system wasn’t designed and built all in one furious weekend. Either way, though, it covers a lot: lights, switches, media players in several rooms, includes sensors and logging for temperature, smoke, fire, and power, supports a number of cameras, the doorbell, and the locks. It also includes voice control for most of the systems.

That’s an impressive list, but what really drew our attention to this project is that it used to be based on domoticz, but that community has waned over the years and [superczar] had kept his system patched together with self-built scripts. An accidental upgrade recently broke the entire setup, so rather than rebuild everything a migration was made to home-assistant, an open-source platform that has a more active community. We’ve seen plenty of projects around here that use it as a platform, for ceiling fans, custom remotes, and doorbells.

Thanks to [pradeepmur] for the tip!

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/home-automation-covers-everything/

Analog Devices will acquire Maxim Integrated for $20.9 billion dollars in stock, as reported by Bloomberg this morning.

Perhaps the confusing part of the news is that the Bloomberg article mentions the acquisition will let Analog Devices better compete with Texas Instruments. Wait, didn’t Texas Instruments acquire Maxim back in 2015? Actually, no. There were rumors (reported then by Bloomberg) that TI was nearing an acquisition deal but it fell through in January of 2016.

You may remember that Analog Devices snapped up Linear Tech in a $30 B acquisition back in 2017. Considering this morning’s news, how will they compare to the might of TI? Looks like 2019 revenue for TI was $14.38 B while Analog reported $5.99 B. Add in Maxim’s revenue of $3.1 B and there’s still a David and Goliath scenario here. Although revenue doesn’t tell the whole story and the proverbial slingshot for Analog may be its existing portfolio of high-margin devices, grown even larger with this acquisition.

Considering how the last half decade played out, this might mark the beginning of another wild cycle of mergers and acquisitions. The consolidation trend continues as we approach a world where just a few gigantic semiconductor companies turn production lines up to eleven to fill the world’s insatiable appetite for more powerful electronics (and more electronics in general).

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/mergers-and-acquisitions-analog-devices-snaps-up-maxim-integrated-for-21-b/

If playing with but a single laser pointer is fun, then playing with 500 laser pointers must be 500 times the fun, right? So by extension, training 500 laser pointers on a single point must be the pinnacle of pointless mirth. And indeed it is.

When we first spotted this project, we thought for sure it was yet another case of lockdown-induced  boredom producing an over-the-top build. Mind you, we have no problem with that, but in this case, [nanoslavic] relates that this is actually a project from a few years back. It’s really as simple as it looks: 500 laser pointer modules arranged on a plate with a grid of holes in a 25 by 20 array. As he placed the laser modules on the board with a glob of hot glue, he carefully aimed each one to hit a single point about a meter and a half away.  There are also a handful of blue LEDs nestled into the array, because what project is complete without blue LEDs?

The modules are wired in concentric circuits and controlled by a simple bank of toggle switches. Alas, 500 converging 150-mW lasers do not a 75-W laser make; when fully powered, the effect at the focal point is reported to be only a bit warm. But it looks incredible, especially through smoke. Throwing mirrors and lenses into the beam results in some interesting patterns, too.

You’ll still need to take safety seriously if you build something like this, of course, but this one is really just for show. If you’re really serious about doing some damage with lasers, check out the long list of inadvisable laser builds that [Styropyro] has accumulated — from a high-powered “lightsaber” to a 200-Watt laser bazooka.

(Terminate your beams carefully, folks. We don’t want anyone going blind.)

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/500-lasers-are-not-necessarily-better-than-one-but-they-look-great/

When it comes to antenna projects, we usually cover little ones here. From copper traces on a circuit board to hand-made units for ham radio. But every once in a while it’s fun to look at the opposite end of the spectrum, and anyone who craves such change of pace should check out DSS43’s upgrade currently underway.

Part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) built to communicate with spacecraft that venture far beyond Earth, Deep Space Station 43 is a large dish antenna with a diameter of 70 meters and largest of the Canberra, Australia DSN complex. However, the raw reflective surface area is only as good as the radio equipment at its center, which are now outdated and thus focus of this round of upgrades.

The NASA page linked above offers a few pieces of fun trivia about DSS43 and its capabilities. If that whets an appetite for more, head over to Twitter for a huge treasure trove. Whoever is in charge of Canberra DSN’s Twitter account has an endless fountain of facts and very eager to share them in response to questions, usually tagged with #DSS43. Example: the weight of DSS43 is roughly 8.5 million kilograms, 4 million of which is moving structure. They also shared time lapse video clips of work in progress, one of which is embedded after the break.

Taking the uniquely capable DSS43 offline for upgrades does have some consequences, one of which is losing our ability to send commands to distant interplanetary probe Voyager 2. (Apparently smaller DSN dishes can be arrayed to receive data, but only DSS43 can send commands.) Such sacrifices are necessary as an investment for the future, with upgrade completion scheduled for January 2021. Just in time to help support Perseverance (formerly “Mars 2020”) rover‘s arrival in February and many more missions for years to come.

BIG DAY for the BIG DISH #DSS43

Installation of the new X-band cone in the centre of the antenna dish – Deep Space Station 43 pic.twitter.com/nFg8zf58tJ

— CanberraDSN (@CanberraDSN) May 7, 2020

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/nasa-making-big-upgrades-to-their-big-dish-dss43/

When it comes to antenna projects, we usually cover little ones here. From copper traces on a circuit board to hand-made units for ham radio. But every once in a while it’s fun to look at the opposite end of the spectrum, and anyone who craves such change of pace should check out DSS43’s upgrade currently underway.

Part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) built to communicate with spacecraft that venture far beyond Earth, Deep Space Station 43 is a large dish antenna with a diameter of 70 meters and largest of the Canberra, Australia DSN complex. However, the raw reflective surface area is only as good as the radio equipment at its center, which are now outdated and thus focus of this round of upgrades.

The NASA page linked above offers a few pieces of fun trivia about DSS43 and its capabilities. If that whets an appetite for more, head over to Twitter for a huge treasure trove. Whoever is in charge of Canberra DSN’s Twitter account has an endless fountain of facts and very eager to share them in response to questions, usually tagged with #DSS43. Example: the weight of DSS43 is roughly 8.5 million kilograms, 4 million of which is moving structure. They also shared time lapse video clips of work in progress, one of which is embedded after the break.

Taking the uniquely capable DSS43 offline for upgrades does have some consequences, one of which is losing our ability to send commands to distant interplanetary probe Voyager 2. (Apparently smaller DSN dishes can be arrayed to receive data, but only DSS43 can send commands.) Such sacrifices are necessary as an investment for the future, with upgrade completion scheduled for January 2021. Just in time to help support Perseverance (formerly “Mars 2020”) rover‘s arrival in February and many more missions for years to come.

BIG DAY for the BIG DISH #DSS43

Installation of the new X-band cone in the centre of the antenna dish – Deep Space Station 43 pic.twitter.com/nFg8zf58tJ

— CanberraDSN (@CanberraDSN) May 7, 2020

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/nasa-making-big-upgrades-to-their-big-dish-dss43/

When it comes to antenna projects, we usually cover little ones here. From copper traces on a circuit board to hand-made units for ham radio. But every once in a while it’s fun to look at the opposite end of the spectrum, and anyone who craves such change of pace should check out DSS43’s upgrade currently underway.

Part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) built to communicate with spacecraft that venture far beyond Earth, Deep Space Station 43 is a large dish antenna with a diameter of 70 meters and largest of the Canberra, Australia DSN complex. However, the raw reflective surface area is only as good as the radio equipment at its center, which are now outdated and thus focus of this round of upgrades.

The NASA page linked above offers a few pieces of fun trivia about DSS43 and its capabilities. If that whets an appetite for more, head over to Twitter for a huge treasure trove. Whoever is in charge of Canberra DSN’s Twitter account has an endless fountain of facts and very eager to share them in response to questions, usually tagged with #DSS43. Example: the weight of DSS43 is roughly 8.5 million kilograms, 4 million of which is moving structure. They also shared time lapse video clips of work in progress, one of which is embedded after the break.

Taking the uniquely capable DSS43 offline for upgrades does have some consequences, one of which is losing our ability to send commands to distant interplanetary probe Voyager 2. (Apparently smaller DSN dishes can be arrayed to receive data, but only DSS43 can send commands.) Such sacrifices are necessary as an investment for the future, with upgrade completion scheduled for January 2021. Just in time to help support Perseverance (formerly “Mars 2020”) rover‘s arrival in February and many more missions for years to come.

BIG DAY for the BIG DISH #DSS43

Installation of the new X-band cone in the centre of the antenna dish – Deep Space Station 43 pic.twitter.com/nFg8zf58tJ

— CanberraDSN (@CanberraDSN) May 7, 2020

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/nasa-making-big-upgrades-to-their-big-dish-dss43/

[Leaded Solder] found some ColecoVision game cartridges at a flea market, and like most of us would, thought, “I’ll build a ColecoVision console from scratch to play them!” Well, maybe most of us would think of that, but not actually do it. He did and you can read about the results in great detail since he wrote up two posts, one covering the design and one covering the construction.

The ColecoVision was a game console that famously could be expanded into a nice — for its day — personal computer. It even had a daisy wheel printer in that configuration. However, in either configuration, the game console was the brains of the operation. According to [Leaded Solder] the price of a unit in working order is high even though over 2 million were made because of several design problems that make them less likely to survive the decades. Rather than repair and modify an original unit, it was cheaper and much more educational to build new.

The design goal was to use composite video, a single power supply, and reduce the size of the board, mainly by using surface mount parts where possible. [Leaded Solder] admits he didn’t fully understand how address and data buses worked in a system like this when starting this project, and he documents what he learned and winds up with a pretty succinct summary of bus operation. We’d argue that the statement, “…only one chip on a bus is supposed to be enabled at a time…” is a little misleading, however. Two chips are enabled at a time, one writer and one reader. In addition, it isn’t uncommon to have several devices read at the same time (for example, some CPUs have two copies of each register). But that’s a nitpick, especially in the context of the Z80 CPU used here.

By the time the PCBs arrived, the total price tag was up to just over $68 Canadian. We remember scrambling EPROMS on circuit boards to make layout easier. After all, you don’t care that location 0 and 1 in your EPROM are actually in adjacent cells. You just care that when you ask for one, you get it. The ColecoVision apparently did the same thing with its video and audio chips. The data bus runs in reverse. That is the Z80’s D0 pin connects to D7 and D7 connects to D0. Unfortunately, the original PCB didn’t take that into account for the sound chip, so a new board revision solved that problem.

The posts are pretty blunt about mistakes made and maybe we can all learn a little from reading about them. For example, subtle differences in footprints caused several problems with the first two versions of the board. By the end, there were 6 spins of the board. Luckily, PC boards are cheaper than they used to be.

Even so, there are still some controller issues, but we have no doubt he’ll solve it and tell us about it when he does. If you’ve ever tackled a project of this size, you are probably all too familiar with the process of debugging a new board. But most of us don’t document it to this extent. If you ever wanted to watch over someone’s shoulder doing a new design like this, you’ll want to read these posts.

Maybe before making boards, a breadboard would have helped. The idea of converting a game console into a PC wasn’t just for the ColecoVision and Adam (the ColecoVision’s computer personality). There were some attempts to do the same with the popular Atari 2600.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/remaking-a-colecovision/

Today, you probably don’t think much about object-oriented programming, it’s just part of the landscape. But decades ago, it was strange and obscure technology. While there were several languages that led up to the current object-oriented tools we use today, one of the most influential was Xerox PARC’s Smalltalk language. [Michael Engel] took a C++ implementation of the Smalltalk VM, some byte code for a complete Smalltalk system, a Raspberry Pi “bare metal” library, and produced a Smalltalk workstation running on a bare Raspberry Pi — even a Pi Zero. The code is on GitHub and is admittedly a work in progress.

Smalltalk was interesting — and sometimes annoying — because everything was an object. Literally everything. The system took over the entire machine. It provided the GUI, the compiler, and the run time libraries. That’s probably why it was easy for [Michael] to forego the usual Linux OS for his project.

If you don’t want to use a spare flash card to boot into the system, there are Smalltalk 80 versions that run on normal operating systems. The tutorial in that program’s user manual might be helpful to you if you haven’t done Smalltalk before.

Even a lowly integer is a full-scale object in Smalltalk. When you say “3+2” you are actually saying, in Smalltalk, that you have an integer object with value 3 that receives a + message with an integer argument of 2. If you were trying to wrap your mind around object-oriented principles, this was very confusing, although with a few decades of hindsight, it makes more sense. Smalltalk also did a lot to popularize the model/view/controller design for graphical user interface software.

We’ve looked at object-oriented for state machines before, which is a nice use case. If you want to see just how well PARC predicted the future, check out the mother of all demos.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/making-smalltalk-on-a-raspberry-pi/

As we’ve said many times in the past, the creation of custom cases and enclosures is one of the best and most obvious applications for desktop 3D printing. When armed with even an entry-level printer, your projects will never again have to suffer through the indignity of getting hot glued into a nondescript plastic box. But if you’re printing with basic PLA, you need to be careful that nothing gets too hot inside.

Which was a problem when [Oleg Vint] started work on this 3D printed case for the popular TS100 soldering iron. But with the addition of a standard 608 bearing, the case provides a safe spot for the iron to cool off before it gets buttoned back up for storage. Of course, you can also use the flip-out perch to hold the iron while you’re working.

As [Oleg] explains on the Thingiverse page for the case, he actually blended a few existing projects together to arrive at the final design. Specifically, the idea of using the 608 bearing came from a printable TS100 stand originally designed in 2017 by [MightyNozzle]. Released under Creative Commons, [Oleg] was able to mash the bearing stand together with elements from several other printable TS100 cases to come up with his unique combined solution.

In a physical sense, this project is a great example of the sort of bespoke creations that are made possible by desktop 3D printing. But it’s also a testament to the incredible community that’s sprung up around this technology. While the logistics of it still could use some work, seeing hackers and makers swap and combine their designs like this is extremely inspiring.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/printed-ts100-case-beats-the-heat-with-a-bearing/

As we’ve said many times in the past, the creation of custom cases and enclosures is one of the best and most obvious applications for desktop 3D printing. When armed with even an entry-level printer, your projects will never again have to suffer through the indignity of getting hot glued into a nondescript plastic box. But if you’re printing with basic PLA, you need to be careful that nothing gets too hot inside.

Which was a problem when [Oleg Vint] started work on this 3D printed case for the popular TS100 soldering iron. But with the addition of a standard 608 bearing, the case provides a safe spot for the iron to cool off before it gets buttoned back up for storage. Of course, you can also use the flip-out perch to hold the iron while you’re working.

As [Oleg] explains on the Thingiverse page for the case, he actually blended a few existing projects together to arrive at the final design. Specifically, the idea of using the 608 bearing came from a printable TS100 stand originally designed in 2017 by [MightyNozzle]. Released under Creative Commons, [Oleg] was able to mash the bearing stand together with elements from several other printable TS100 cases to come up with his unique combined solution.

In a physical sense, this project is a great example of the sort of bespoke creations that are made possible by desktop 3D printing. But it’s also a testament to the incredible community that’s sprung up around this technology. While the logistics of it still could use some work, seeing hackers and makers swap and combine their designs like this is extremely inspiring.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/printed-ts100-case-beats-the-heat-with-a-bearing/

As we’ve said many times in the past, the creation of custom cases and enclosures is one of the best and most obvious applications for desktop 3D printing. When armed with even an entry-level printer, your projects will never again have to suffer through the indignity of getting hot glued into a nondescript plastic box. But if you’re printing with basic PLA, you need to be careful that nothing gets too hot inside.

Which was a problem when [Oleg Vint] started work on this 3D printed case for the popular TS100 soldering iron. But with the addition of a standard 608 bearing, the case provides a safe spot for the iron to cool off before it gets buttoned back up for storage. Of course, you can also use the flip-out perch to hold the iron while you’re working.

As [Oleg] explains on the Thingiverse page for the case, he actually blended a few existing projects together to arrive at the final design. Specifically, the idea of using the 608 bearing came from a printable TS100 stand originally designed in 2017 by [MightyNozzle]. Released under Creative Commons, [Oleg] was able to mash the bearing stand together with elements from several other printable TS100 cases to come up with his unique combined solution.

In a physical sense, this project is a great example of the sort of bespoke creations that are made possible by desktop 3D printing. But it’s also a testament to the incredible community that’s sprung up around this technology. While the logistics of it still could use some work, seeing hackers and makers swap and combine their designs like this is extremely inspiring.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/printed-ts100-case-beats-the-heat-with-a-bearing/