A Hacker’s Travel Guide To Europe

October 18, 2024 by Jenny List 54 Comments

This summer, I was pleasantly surprised when a friend of mine from Chicago turned up at one of the hacker camps I attended. A few days of hanging out in the sun ensued, doing cool hacker camp stuff, drinking unusual beverages, and generally having fun. It strikes me as a shame that this is such a rare occurrence, and since Hackaday is an American organisation and I am in a sense writing from its European outpost, I should do what I can to encourage my other friends from the USA and other parts of the world to visit. So here I’m trying to write a hacker’s guide to visiting Europe, in the hope that I’ll see more of you at future camps and other events.

It’s Intimidating. But Don’t Worry.

Danish road sign: "Se efter tog", or according to Google Translate: "Look for trains". — Yes. We’d find this intimidating, too. Bewitchedroutine, Public domain.

First of all, I know that it’s intimidating to travel to an unfamiliar place where the language and customs may be different. I’m from England, which sits on a small island in the North Atlantic, and believe it or not it’s intimidating for us to start traveling too. It involves leaving the safety of home and crossing the sea whether by flight, ferry, or tunnel, and that lies outside one’s regular comfort zone.

Americans live in a country that’s almost a continent in its own right, so you can satisfy your travel lust without leaving home. Thus of course the idea of landing in Germany or the Netherlands is intimidating. But transatlantic flights are surprisingly cheap in the scheme of international travel because of intense competition, so I’m here to reassure you that you can travel my continent ‘s hacker community without either feeling out of your depth, or breaking the bank.

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Mining And Refining: Mine Dewatering

October 17, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

From space, the most striking feature of our Pale Blue Dot is exactly what makes it blue: all that water. About three-quarters of the globe is covered with liquid water, and our atmosphere is a thick gaseous soup laden with water vapor. Almost everywhere you look there’s water, and even where there’s no obvious surface water, chances are good that more water than you could use in a lifetime lies just below your feet, and accessing it could be as easy as an afternoon’s work with a shovel.

And therein lies the rub for those who delve into the Earth’s depths for the minerals and other resources we need to function as a society — if you dig deep enough, water is going to become a problem. The Earth’s crust holds something like 44 million cubic kilometers of largely hidden water, and it doesn’t take much to release it from the geological structures holding it back and restricting its flow. One simple mineshaft chasing a coal seam or a shaft dug in the wrong place, and suddenly all the hard-won workings are nothing but flooded holes in the ground. Add to that the enormous open-pit mines dotting the surface of the planet that resemble nothing so much as empty lakes waiting to fill back up with water if given a chance, and the scale of the problem water presents to mining operations becomes clear.

Dewatering mines is a complex engineering problem, one that intersects and overlaps multiple fields of expertise. Geotechnical engineers work alongside mining engineers, hydrogeologists, and environmental engineers to devise cost-effective ways to control the flow of water into mines, redirect it when they can, and remove it when there’s no alternative.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Tasers Shooting Confetti

October 16, 2024 by Al Williams 40 Comments

One of the standard tropes in science fiction is some kind of device that can render someone unconscious — you know, like a phaser set to stun. We can imagine times when being aggressively knocked out would lead to some grave consequences, but — we admit — it is probably better than getting shot. However, we don’t really have any reliable technology to do that today. However, if you’ve passed a modern-day policeman, you’ve probably noticed the Taser on their belt. While this sounds like a phaser, it really isn’t anything like it. It is essentially a stun gun with a long reach thanks to a wire with a dart on the end that shoots out of the gun-like device and shocks the target at a distance. Civilian Tasers have a 15-foot long wire, while law enforcement can get longer wires. But did you know that modern Tasers also fire confetti?

It sounds crazy, and it isn’t celebratory. The company that makes the Taser — formerly, the Taser company but now Axon — added the feature because of a common complaint law enforcement had with the device. Interestingly, many things that might be used in comitting a crime are well-understood. Ballistics can often identify that a bullet did or did not come from a particular weapon, for example. Blood and DNA on a scene can provide important clues. Even typewriters and computer printers can be identified by variations in their printing. But if you fire a taser, there’s generally little evidence left behind.

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Experimenting With MicroPython On The Bus Pirate 5

October 15, 2024 by Chris Lott 4 Comments

I recently got one of the new RP2040-based Bus Pirate 5 (BP5), a multi-purpose interface debugging and testing tool. Scanning the various such tools in my toolbox already: an Analog Discovery 2, a new Glasgow Interface Explorer, and a couple of pyboards, I realized they all had a Python or MicroPython user interface. A few people on the BP5 forums had tossed around the idea of MicroPython, and it just so happened that I was experimenting with building beta versions of MicroPython for a RP2350 board at the time. Naturally, I started wondering, “just how hard can it be to get MicroPython running on the BP5?”

The Lazy Approach

Rather than duplicating the BP5 firmware functionality, I decided to ignore it completely and go with existing MicroPython capabilities. I planned to just make a simple set of board definition files — perhaps Board Support Package (BSP) is a better term? I’ve done this a dozen times before for development and custom boards. Then write a collection of MicroPython modules to conform to the unique aspects in the BP5 hardware. As user [torwag] over on the Bus Pirate forums said back in March:

Micropython comes already with some modules and enough functions to get some stuff out-of-the-box working. E.g. the infamous version of “hello world” for microcontrollers aka led-blinking.

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The Biological Motors That Power Our Bodies

October 14, 2024 by Maya Posch 50 Comments

Most of us will probably be able to recall at least vaguely that a molecule called ATP is essential for making our bodies move, but this molecule is only a small part of a much larger system. Although we usually aren’t aware of it, our bodies consist of a massive collection of biological motors and related structures, which enable our muscles to contract, nutrients and fluids to move around, and our cells to divide and prosper. Within the biochemical soup that makes up single- and multi-cellular lifeforms, it are these mechanisms that turn a gooey soup into something that can do much more than just gently slosh around in primordial puddles.

There are many similarities between a single-cell organism like a bacteria and eukaryotic multi-cellular organisms like us humans, but the transition to the latter requires significantly more complicated structures. An example for this are cilia, which together with motor proteins like myosin and kinesin form the foundations of our body’s basic functioning. Quite literally supporting all this is the cytoskeleton, which is a feature that our eukaryotic cells have in common with bacteria and archaea, except that eukaryotic cytoskeletons are significantly more complex.

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Meet The Optical Data Format You’ve Never Heard Of Before

October 10, 2024 by Lewin Day 79 Comments

You consider yourself a power user. You’ve got lots of files, and damn it, you like to keep them backed up. Around a decade ago, you gave up on burning optical discs, and switched to storing your files on portable hard drives. One local, one off-site, and a cloud backup just to be sure. You’re diligent for a home gamer, and that gets you done.

The above paragraph could describe any number of Hackaday readers, but what of bigger operations? Universities, businesses, and research institutions all have data budgets far in excess of what the individual could even imagine. What might shock you is that some of them are relying on optical media—just not the kind you’ve ever heard of before. Enter Sony’s Optical Disc Archive.

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Lagrange Points And Why You Want To Get Stuck At Them

October 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 35 Comments

Visualization of the Sun-Earth Lagrange points.

Orbital mechanics is a fun subject, as it involves a lot of seemingly empty space that’s nevertheless full of very real forces, all of which must be taken into account lest one’s spacecraft ends up performing a sudden lithobraking maneuver into a planet or other significant collection of matter in said mostly empty space. The primary concern here is that of gravitational pull, and the way it affects one’s trajectory and velocity. With a single planet providing said gravitational pull this is quite straightforward to determine, but add in another body (like the Moon) and things get trickier. Add another big planetary body (or a star like our Sun), and you suddenly got yourself the restricted three-body problem, which has vexed mathematicians and others for centuries.

The three-body problem concerns the initial positions and velocities of three point masses. As they orbit each other and one tries to calculate their trajectories using Newton’s laws of motion and law of universal gravitation (or their later equivalents), the finding is that of a chaotic system, without a closed-form solution. In the context of orbital mechanics involving the Earth, Moon and Sun this is rather annoying, but in 1772 Joseph-Louis Lagrange found a family of solutions in which the three masses form an equilateral triangle at each instant. Together with earlier work by Leonhard Euler led to the discovery of what today are known as Lagrangian (or Lagrange) points.

Having a few spots in an N-body configuration where you can be reasonably certain that your spacecraft won’t suddenly bugger off into weird directions that necessitate position corrections using wasteful thruster activations is definitely a plus. This is why especially space-based observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope love to hang around in these spots.

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