Mysterious Files PH

An orrery is a beautiful type of mechanical contrivance, built to demonstrate the motion of heavenly objects. LEGO happens to offer just such a device, built using its Technic line of blocks, shafts, and gears. Only, it has a serious limitation—it has to be cranked manually to make it spin the Earth around the sun. [Görkem] set out to fix this glaring oversight with some good old-fashioned hardware.

The setup removes just five LEGO pieces from the original design, eliminating the hand crank from the mechanism. In its place, [Görkem] installed a NEMA 17 stepper motor, paired with a custom PCB mounted on the back. That carries an ESP32 microcontroller and a TMC2208 stepper motor driver set up for silent drive. Rigged up like so, the orrery can simulate the motion of the Earth and Moon around the Sun in real time. There’s also a knob to track back and forth in time, and a button to reset the system to the correct real-time position.

The final build looks great, combining the LEGO Technic parts with some chunky electronics and 7-segment displays that make it a wonderful techy desk decoration. Down the line, [Görkem] hopes to offer a plug-and-play kit to others who wish to duly animate their own LEGO orrery sets (set #42179).

We love a good LEGO build around these parts. We’ve featured everything from parts sorters to functional typewriters in the past.

The ancient question of whether or not it’s possible to construct a circle with the same area as a given square using only a drawing compass and straightedge was finally answered in 1882, where it was proved that pi is a transcendental number, meaning it cannot be accurately represented in a compass-and-straightedge system. This inability to accurately represent pi is just one of the ways in which these systems resemble a computer, a similarity that [0x0mer] explored in CasNum.

The core of the program represents operations with a drawing compass and unmarked straightedge. There are only a few operations that can be used for calculation: constructing a line through two points, constructing a circle centered at one point and intersecting another point, and constructing the intersection(s) of two lines, a line and a circle, or two circles. An optional viewer visualizes these operations. Another class builds on top of this basic environment to perform arithmetic and logical operations, representing numbers as points in the Cartesian plane. To add two numbers, for example, it constructs the midpoint between them, then doubles the distance from the origin.

There are some examples available, including the RSA algorithm. [0x0mer] also altered a Game Boy emulator to implement the ALU instructions using compass and straightedge operations. In testing, it took about fifteen minutes to boot, and runs at a “totally almost playable” speed, near one FPS. This is after extensive caching has been applied to minimize computation time; the performance here is impressive, but in a more qualitative than quantitative sense.

Being virtual, this system is discrete, but a physical compass and straightedge form a simple analog computer capable of dealing with continuous values.

You may not remember [Mr. Wizard], but he was a staple of nerd kids over a few decades, teaching science to kids via the magic of television. The Computer History Archives Project has a partially restored film of [Mr. Wizard] showing off sounds and noise on a state-of-the-art (for 1963) Tektronix 504 oscilloscope. He talks about noise and also shows the famous IBM mainframe rendition of the song “Daisy Bell.” You can see the video along with some extras below.

You might recall that the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” paid homage to the IBM computer’s singing debut by having HAL 9000 sing the same song as it is being deactivated. The idea that HAL was IBM “minus one” has been repeatedly denied, but we still remain convinced.

Can you imagine a TV show these days that would teach kids about signal-to-noise ratio or even show them an actual oscilloscope? We suppose that’s what YouTube is for.

At about the 17-minute mark, you can see some enormous walkie-talkies. A far cry from today’s cell phones. At the 27-minute mark, another film shows how engineers at Bell created the song using a mainframe.

We wish there were a modern version of [Mr. Wizard]. Then again, there’s no reason you can’t fill in. You might not be on TV, but you can always drop in on a few classrooms.

Isn’t this glorious? If you don’t recognize what this is right away (or from the post title), it’s an AlphaSmart NEO word processor, repackaged in a 3D-printed typewriter-esque shell, meticulously designed by the renowned [Un Kyu Lee] of Micro Journal fame.

If you don’t want to spend roughly 40 hours printing ~1 kg of filament in order to make your own, you can join the wait-list on Tindie like I did. Go here to figure out which color you want, and email [Un Kyu Lee] when you order. In the meantime, you can watch the assembly video and then check out this playlist that shows the available colors.

Assembly looks easy enough; there’s no soldering, but you do have to disconnect and reconnect the fiddly ribbon cables. After that, it’s just screws.

This design happened by accident. A friend named [Hook] who happens to manage the AlphaSmart Flickr community had given [Un Kyu Lee] a NEO2 to try out, but before he could, it fell from a shelf and the enclosure suffered a nasty hole near the screen. But the internals seemed fine, so he got the idea to design a new enclosure.

I don’t believe the knobs do anything, but they sure do look nice. There’s an area along the top where you can clip a light, since the NEO has no backlight. There are also two smaller slots on the sides if your light won’t clip to the top.

I’d really like to do this to one of my NEOs. I have two NEO regulars, but reviewers on Tindie report that it works just as well with those as the NEO2.

IBM 701c Butterfly Keyboard Flaps Its Wings Again

I feel like this wonderful laptop and its butterfly keyboard come up often enough, but for today’s lucky 10,000, the IBM 701C laptop has a sweet keyboard that automatically extends when the lid is opened, kind of like one of those special birthday cards.

[LCLDIY] found such a laptop at a junkyard with no screen, a damaged motherboard, and a shell that’s old and broken. He decided to try to save it with 3D printing, and well, it worked.

First, he obtained a replacement screen and motherboard, and set about modeling a new case. Be sure to watch the video below so you can catch the machine [LCLDIY] does his modeling on. Now, here’s a surprise: the filament is all hand-spun from plastic bottles he collected from the streets.

Once the case was done, he ran into a slight problem. Namely, the keyboard has a ribbon cable and not a USB interface, so he had to make a PCB to handle that and get it over to the motherboard. Really, [LCLDIY] did so much more than save a keyboard; he built an entire laptop around it. To that, I say kudos. Kudos from Kristina.

The Centerfold: the Smurve80 Is a Thing You Could Buy

What is this? A baby Model M? A Unicomp? Neither — it is the Smurve80 from Play Keyboard x Swagkeys. This 87-key TKL is heavily inspired by the Model M, however, down to the curved keyboard. And the name? It’s an amalgamation of ‘smile’ and ‘curve’, and this is reflected in the unfortunately Amazon-like logo in the upper left. I might get one anyway.  I haven’t decided. If I do, you can bet I will probably be reviewing it.

Here’s the full info post, and here’s the post about the group buy, which is live now (NA link) through February 16th at 10PM ET. Not in North America? Check the group buy post for a list of vendors. For a mere $100, this baby can be yours in either Sandstone (pictured) or Graphite (semi-pictured), and that’s the fully assembled price. There’s also a bare-bones kit version. The best part, aside from the price, has to be the built-in solenoid. So you can get it with reds if you want, but it’s gonna be loud regardless. Just kidding; you can switch off the solenoid.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Wellington

Are you familiar with Wellington Parker Kidder? His name is nearly as one with typewriter history as Christopher Latham Sholes (the guy responsible for QWERTY). I myself had not heard of Kidder, but his name is directly and indirectly associated with dozens of machines, including the Franklin, the Rochester, and the Noiseless, which was later bought by Remington. Then there’s all the clones of his work.

Kidder’s patents for the Wellington first appeared in 1892. The appeal of this machine is in the thrust-action type bars, which punch the platen rather than swinging to strike it. The design was well-received, and the Wellington was produced virtually unchanged from 1892 to 1924.

There were two models, No. 1 and No. 2. The former had square key tops, while the latter featured rounded key tops. Both models had a three-row keyboard with a double-shift mechanism, and used an extra-wide ribbon. They also both had that attractive cover on the type bars that reminds me of the fender skirts on, say, a 1950 Mercury.

And much like that 1950 Mercury, Wellingtons were well-built, but unfortunately the passage of time has proven them to be rust buckets. That’s really sad to me and I wish I could forget the fact.

The Wellington sold well enough in the States, but it really shone in Europe. Many typewriters are based on the either the overall design, or at least the type bar mechanism. Antikey Chop calls Kidder’s Wellington one of the most influential typewriters of all time, and I believe it.

Finally, the Zerowriter Is Shipping For Early Backers

In case you don’t have an AlphaSmart NEO and/or dislike the Freewrite for whatever reason, there’s also the Zerowriter, created by a one-man team out of Canada. You can pre-order it today for $279 and it’ll ship March 30th for free, worldwide.

So, what is this thing? It’s a distraction-free writing tool with an e-ink screen and a low-profile mechanical keyboard. The battery is supposed to last a long time, and it’s cheaper than a Freewrite.

This thing has Kailh Choc Pro red switches, which are thankfully hot-swappable. Much like the NEO, it comes on and is instantly ready for typing. There’s no account to register, no login to memorize. Files are saved as .txt to a microSD card and can be transferred to a computer, though unlike the NEO, there’s a companion app standing between you and file transfer.

That said, this baby uses an ESP32 and was coded in Arduino, so do what you will. The battery is supposed to last for weeks of daily use on a single charge. It’s a user-replaceable LiPo pouch with USB-C charging. They actually encourage you to open her up, and I think that’s great.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

Although infrastructure like a 19th-century pumping station generally tends to be quietly decommissioned and demolished, sometimes you get enough people looking at such an object and wondering whether maybe it’d be worth preserving. Such was the case with the Claymills Pumping Station in Staffordshire, England. After starting operations in the late 19th century, the pumping station was in active use until 1971. In a recent documentary by the Claymills Pumping Station Trust, as the start of their YouTube channel, the derelict state of the station at the time is covered, as well as its long and arduous recovery since they acquired the site in 1993.

After its decommissioning, the station was eventually scheduled for demolition. Many parts had by that time been removed for display elsewhere, discarded, or outright stolen for the copper and brass. Of the four Woolf compounding rotative beam engines, units A and B had been shut down first and used for spare parts to keep the remaining units going. Along with groundwater intrusion and a decaying roof, it was in a sorry state after decades of neglect. Restoring it was a monumental task.

The inventor of the compounding beam engine, Arthur Woolf, was a Cornish engineer who had figured out how to make this more efficient steam engine work. While his engineering made pumping stations like these possible, the many workers and their families ensured that they kept working smoothly. Although firmly obsolete in the 21st century, pumping stations like these are excellent examples of all the engineering and ingenuity that got us to where we are today, and preserving them is the best way to retain all this knowledge and the memories associated with them.

For that reason, one can really congratulate the volunteers who turned this piece of history into a museum. It features a static display of the restored machinery. If you want to see it running, there are seven demonstrations of the station operating under steam every year, during which the six-story tall machinery can be observed in all its glory.

Top image: Claymills Pumping Station in 2010. (Credit: Ashley Dace)

Once upon a time, the cathode ray tube was pretty much the only type of display you’d find in a consumer television. As the analog broadcast world shifted to digital, we saw the rise of plasma displays and LCDs, which offered greater resolution and much slimmer packaging. Then there was the so-called LED TV, confusingly named—for it was merely an LCD display with an LED backlight. The LEDs were merely lamps, with the liquid crystal doing all the work of displaying an image.

Today, however, we are seeing the rise of true LED displays. Sadly, decades of confusing marketing messages have polluted the terminology, making it a confusing space for the modern television enthusiast. Today, we’ll explore how these displays work and disambiguate what they’re being called in the marketplace.

The Rise Of Emissive Displays

When it comes to our computer monitors and televisions, most of us have got used to the concept of backlit LCD displays. These use a bright white backlight to actually emit light, which is then filtered by the liquid crystal array into all the different colored pixels that make up the image. It’s an effective way to build a display, with a serious limitation on contrast ratio because the LCD is only so good at blocking out light coming from behind. Over time, these displays have become more sophisticated, with manufacturers ditching cold-cathode tube backlights for LEDs, before then innovating with technologies that would vary the brightness of parts of the LED backlight to improve contrast somewhat. Some companies even started using arrays of colored LEDs in their backlights for further control, with the technology often referred to as “RGB mini LED” or “micro RGB.” This still involves an LCD panel in front of the backlight, limiting contrast ratios and response times.

The holy grail, though, would be to ditch the liquid crystal entirely, and just have a display fully made of individually addressable LEDs making up the red, green, and blue subpixels. That is finally coming to pass, with manufacturers launching new television lines under the “Micro LED” name. These are true “emissive” displays, where the individual red, blue, and green subpixels are themselves emitting light, not just filtering it from a backlight source behind them.

These displays promise greater contrast than backlit LCDs, because individual pixels can be turned completely off to create blacker blacks. Response times are also fast because LEDs switch on and off much more quickly than liquid crystals can react. They’re also relatively power efficient, as there’s no need to supply electrons to pixels that are off. Contrast this to LCDs, which are always spending power on turning some pixels black in front of a  glowing backlight which is also drawing power. Viewing angles of emissive displays are also top-notch. Inorganic LEDs also have long lifetimes, which makes them far more desirable than OLED displays (discussed further below). Their high brightness also makes them ideal for us in bright conditions, particularly where sunlight is concerned.

Given the many boons of this technology, you might question why it’s taken true LED displays this long to hit the market. The ultimate answer comes down to cost and manufacturability. If you’ve ever built your own LED array, you’ve probably noted the engineering challenges in reducing pixel size and increasing resolution. When it comes to producing a 4K display, you’re talking about laying down 8,294,400 individual RGB LEDs, all of which need to work flawlessly and be small enough to not show up as individually visible pixels from typical viewing ranges. Other technologies like LCDs and OLEDs have the benefit that they can be easily produced with lithographic techniques in great sizes, but the technology to produce pure LED displays on this scale is only just coming into fruition.

You can purchase an all-LED TV today, if you so desire. Just note that you’ll pay through the nose for it. Few models are on the market, but Best Buy will sell you a 114″ Micro LED set from Samsung for the charming price of $149,999.99. If that’s a bit big for your house, condo, or apartment, you might consider the 89″ model for a more acceptable $109,999.99. Meanwhile, LG has demonstrated a 136″ model of a micro LED TV, but there have been no concrete plans to bring it to market. Expect it to land somewhere firmly in the six-figure range, too.

If you’re not feeling so flush, you can get a lesser “Micro RGB” TV if you like, which combines a fancy RGB matrix backlight with LCD technology as discussed above. Even then, a Samsung R95 television with Micro RGB technology will set you back $29,999.99 at Best Buy, or you can purchase it on a payment plan for $1,250 a month. In fact, with the launch of these comparatively affordable TVs, Samsung has gone somewhat quiet on its Micro LED line since initially crowing about it in 2024. Still, whichever way you go, these fancy TVs don’t come cheap.

But What About OLED?

It’s true that emissive LED displays have existed in the market for some time, but not using traditional light-emitting diodes. These are the popular “OLED” displays, with the acronym standing for “organic light emitting diode.” Unlike standard LEDs, which use inorganic semiconductor crystals to emit light, OLEDs instead use special organic compounds in a substrate between electrodes, which emit light when electricity is applied. They can readily be fabricated in large arrays to create displays, which are used in everything from tiny smartwatches to full-sized televisions.

You might question why the advent of “proper” LED displays is noteworthy given that OLED technology has been around for some time. The problem is that OLEDs are somewhat limited in their performance versus traditional inorganic LEDs. The main area in which they suffer is longevity, as the organic compounds are susceptible to degradation over time. The brightness of individual pixels in an OLED display tends to drop off very quickly compared to inorganic LEDs. A display can diminish to half of its original brightness in just a few years of moderate to heavy use. In particular, blue OLED subpixels tend to degrade faster than red or green subpixels, forcing manufacturers to take measures to account for this over the lifetime of a display. Peak brightness is also somewhat limited, which can make OLED displays less attractive for use in bright rooms with lots of natural light. Dark spots and burn in are also possible, at rates greater than those seen in contemporary LCD displays.

The limitations of OLED displays have not stopped them gaining a strong position in the TV marketplace. However, the technology will be unlikely to beat true LED displays in terms of outright image quality, brightness, and performance. Cost will still be a factor, and OLEDs (and LCDs) will still be relevant for a long time to come. However, for now at least, the pure LED display promises to become the prime choice for those looking for a premium viewing experience at any cost.

Featured image: “Micro LED” displays. Credit: Samsung

It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to find that most of the Hackaday staff aren’t exactly what you’d call sports fanatics, so we won’t judge if you didn’t tune in for the Super Bowl last week. But if you did, perhaps you noticed Ring’s Orwellian “Search Party” spot — the company was hoping to get customers excited about a new feature that allows them to upload a picture of their missing pet and have Ring cameras all over the neighborhood search for a visual match. Unfortunately for Ring, the response on social media wasn’t quite what they expected.

One commenter on YouTube summed it up nicely: “This is like the commercial they show at the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi film to quickly show people how bad things have gotten.” You don’t have to be some privacy expert to see how this sort of mass surveillance is a slippery slope. Many were left wondering just who or what the new system would be searching for when it wasn’t busy sniffing out lost pups.

The folks at Wyze were quick to capitalize on the misstep, releasing their own parody ad a few days later that showed various three-letter agencies leaving rave reviews for the new feature. By Thursday, Ring announced they would be canceling a planned expansion that would have given the divisive Flock Safety access to their network of cameras. We’re sure it was just a coincidence.

Speaking of three-letter agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced this week that they will no longer incentivize the inclusion of stop-start systems on new automobiles. The feature, which shuts off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop, was never actually required by federal law; rather, the EPA previously awarded credits to automakers that added the feature, which would help them meet overall emission standards. Manufacturers are free to continue offering stop-start systems on their cars if they wish, but without the EPA credits, there’s little benefit in doing so. Especially since, as Car and Driver notes, it seems like most manufacturers are happy to be rid of it. The feature has long been controversial with drivers as well, to the point that we’ve seen DIY methods to shut it off.

An incredible story ran in The Washington Post yesterday (free to read archive) that’s so wild that it’s almost hard to believe. In fact, if it wasn’t from The Washington Post, we’d be sure it was some kind of conspiracy theory fanfic. The short version goes like this: a Norwegian researcher who was so confident the “Havana syndrome” wasn’t the result of a directed energy weapon decided to prove it by not only building some sort of pulsed RF device based on leaked classified documents, but  fired the thing at himself as a test. We’re not sure what the Norwegian equivalent to the “Shocked Pikachu Face” meme is, but we’ll give you one guess as to what happened.

If that wasn’t crazy enough, the article goes on to casually mention that the US Department of Homeland Security secretly purchased a similar pulsed-energy weapon for several million dollars on the black market during the Biden administration, and is currently studying it. Despite it apparently containing Russian components, the Feds have yet to determine who actually built the thing. You’ll have a hard time finding a bigger proponent for the free exchange of information than Hackaday, but even we have to admit…maybe there are some things it’s better we don’t know about.

Of course, if you’re looking to really maximize the effects of your black market pulsed-energy weapon, you’ll need to get it up high (maybe, what the hell do we know). Or perhaps you’re just a radio enthusiast. In either event, if you’re within driving distance of Tennessee, you’ll want to keep an eye on this government auction for an 80-foot-tall mobile communications tower. According to the listing posted by the Madisonville Police Department, the towable rig was built in 2016, weighs in at a little over 10,000 pounds, and has been kept in storage. It just needs some air in the tires to get it moving again.

As of this writing, the high bid is just $565, but with 18 days left to go on the auction, we suspect that number will be considerably higher when the gavel drops. We’ll check back next month to see what it sold for, and on the off-chance that any of you actually buy it, please let us know.

If all this talk of mass surveillance and shady government dealings has you down, perhaps a quick game of web-based Descent will lighten the mood. It’s the product of a port to Three.js by [mrdoob], completed with the aid of Claude. We know many of you are critical of AI-produced code, and not without good reason, but the results in this case are pretty slick.

Finally, we’ll go out on a limb and guess that more than a few in the audience are fans of the film Short Circuit, which turns 40 years old this year. In celebration, an event is being planned for June in Astoria, Oregon, where parts of the movie were filmed. As if you needed any other reason to meet Steve Guttenberg, you’ll also get the chance to pose for pictures with Johnny 5 and sit in on Q&A discussions with the cast and crew. There’s even going to be licensed merch for sale, which we can only hope means you’ll be able to buy one of those miniature J5’s from Short Circuit 2. It’s not the sort of event Hackaday generally covers, but we’re certainly tempted.

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