Real Time Trends Network

It’s the season to be surrounded by greeting cards of all shapes and sizes from friends old and new. News of their families and achievements, reminders that they exist, and a pile of cards to deal with sometime in January. Wouldn’t it be great if you could send something with a little more substance, something your friends would remember, maybe even hang on to? [Brian Brocken]’s 3D-printed Da Vinci catapult kit may not fill that niche for everyone, but we can guarantee it will be a talking point. The Da Vinci catapult design uses a pair of springs similar to an archer’s bow, to unwind a pair of ropes and thus turn the shaft upon which the catapult shaft itself is fitted. All these components are mounted in a single piece with sprues similar to an injection moulded model kit, allowing the whole to easily be posted in an envelope. The parts are all available to print separately among the files on the Thingiverse page for those with no need to mail them. For the casual spectator he’s ...

Pixelated RPGs are pretty standard in games like Legend of Zelda and Pokemon, but have you ever seen anything like ASCIICKER ? It’s a full-color three-dimensional world rendered with ASCII art and playable in your browser. For the time being, the game exists as an experiment. There’s no storyline or goals other than exploring the world, although you can meet up with (or follow) others exploring the game — although all of the sprites look the same, so it may be difficult to have interactions. The game was created by [Gumix] and built entirely in JavaScript without using any other game engines. All of the previous iterations have also been published online and are accessible by adding X1 up to X13 to the end of the URL. With game development beginning in 2017, it has since been through a considerable amount of change. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to the game with regular updates from the creator on the development of an open-source dev tool for building new levels and featur...

Everything you need to prevent—or just treat—your headache, dark circles, and general misery. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/39vtsXH via IFTTT

Flight shaming is the hot new thing where people who take more than a handful of trips on an airplane per year are ridiculed for the environmental impact of their travels. It’s one strategy for making flying more sustainable, but it’s simply not viable for ultimately reducing the carbon impact that the airline industries have on the environment. Electric planes are an interesting place to look for answers. Though carbon-free long haul travel is possible, it’s not a reality for most situations in which people travel today. Current battery technology can’t get anywhere near the energy density of fossil fuels and larger batteries aren’t an option since every pound matters when designing aircraft. Even with land travel and electric grids improving in their use of renewables and electric power, aviation tends to be difficult to power with anything other than hydrocarbons. Student engineers in the AeroDelft program in the Netherlands have created Project Phoenix to develop an aircraft pow...

Good morning everyone, and what a lovely start to the new year it is, because it’s your birthday! Happy birthday, it’s your 50th! What’s that you say, you aren’t 50 today? (Looks…) That’s what all these internet databases say, because you’ve spent the last decade or so putting 1970-01-01 as your birth date into every online form that doesn’t really need to know it! It’s been a staple for a subset of our community for years, to put the UNIX epoch, January 1st 1970, into web forms as a birth date. There are even rumours that some sites now won’t accept that date as a birthday, such is the volume of false entries they have with that date. It’s worth taking a minute though to consider UNIX time, some of its history and how its storage has changed over the years. Don’t Use Up That 32 Bit Int Too Quickly How do you turn a 1960s minicomputer into a clock? Digital pdp8f.jpg: Simon Claessen [ CC BY-SA 3.0 ]Most readers will be familiar with the UNIX timestamp that the date command will retur...

Resolved to work harder this year? This mixture of notebooks, audio gear, and sleep gear are the 13 productivity tools you need. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/35ac2fH via IFTTT

Let’s face it, breadboarding can be frustrating, even for advanced electronics wizards. If you have an older board, you could be dealing with loose tie points left from large component legs, and power rails of questionable continuity. Conversely, it can be hard to jam just-made jumper wires into new boards without crumpling the copper. And no matter what the condition of the board is, once you’ve plugged in more than a few components, the circuit becomes hard to follow, much less troubleshoot when things go pear-shaped. In the last twenty years or so, we’ve seen systems like Snap Circuits and Little Bits emerge that simplify the circuit building process by making the connections more intuitive and LEGO-like than even those 160-in-1 kits where you shove component legs between the coils of tight little springs. You will pay handsomely for this connective convenience. But why should you? Just make your own circuit blocks with cardboard, magnets, and copper tape . It should only cost abou...

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google over the past decade bought their way into the top tier of U.S. and global advertisers. The four internet titans last year spent $17.5 billion on worldwide advertising, up from $1.1 billion in 2009. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/37j8d9E via IFTTT

Geico over the past decade spent its way to become the nation's most-advertised brand. Amazon moved into prime time, vaulting to the No. 2 advertised brand. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2ZGGAob via IFTTT

Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre in Paris is as far removed from Melbourne, Australia, as is Donato Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome. The buildings also straddle different time periods. Chareau’s from the early 1930s, and Bramante’s completed in the early 16th century. Yet both became an inspiration for the conversion of a 1930s Melbourne duplex, comprising two apartments, into a single, contemporary home – as it happens, the one I share with my partner, Naomi. When we purchased the simple, almost brutalist duplex in South Yarra in 2011, the idea of talking about either Chareau or Bramante would have been odd, given its lack of architectural pedigree. Yet when architect Robert Simeoni first inspected our simple abode, he saw something quite special. ‘There was a wonderful spirit in the existing home, even though it was two separate apartments,’ says Simeoni. He was also captivated by the muted light and the building’s heritage as working-class accommodation in the interwar period. ‘A...

Have any last-minute projects you finished just before the end of the decade? To help pass the time, [Erich Styger] decided to build a meta digital clock made up of 24 individual analog clocks, the perfect item to help welcome in the new year. The stepper clock is controlled by a network of LPC microcontrollers, displaying the time and room temperature, as well as several aesthetically pleasing loading animations. Each clock operates from a 5 V USB power bank drawing less than 2 A for the full 24-clock setup. The meta-clock resides in a laser cut enclosure, with 3D printed hands telling the time. While having one board per clock would be easier to implement, [Erich] decided to use one board per four clocks arranged in rows to save on costs. The arrangement fixes the distance between clocks, though [Erich] also made the clock size slightly smaller to compensate. The ‘stepper’ part of the stepper clock uses a 360 degree version of the VID28 stepper motor to reduce the height of the d...

The first thing that stands out about Casa Mérida is its unashamed brutalism, defined by raw and omnipresent concrete, all hard edges and rough surfaces under the strong Mexican sun. The second is that most of the building seems to be open to the outdoors, with few fully enclosed spaces. The project’s defining feature, though, is that it is 80m long but just 8m wide. While this odd stretch would be considered unusual in most places, in Mérida, capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán, it’s fairly common, explains the house’s architect, French-born, Mexico City-based Ludwig Godefroy: ‘This type of lot is everywhere in the historic centre of Mérida and it has to do with inheritance, when people started to slice bi er plots into smaller ones, to distribute to different siblings.’ And while a big part of the city comprises grand colonial architecture, some urban chunks include more humble styles, such as old workers’ cottages. It was one such building that Godefroy came across, when he...

Addressable LEDs are a staple of homemade Christmas decorations in our community, as is microprocessor control of those LEDs. So at first sight [Glen Akins]’ LED decorated Christmas tree looks pretty enough, but isn’t particularly unusual. But after reading his write-up you’ll discover there’s far more to the project than meets the eye, and learn a lot about the technologies behind it that has relevance far beyond a festive light show. The decoration is powered exclusively from power-over-Ethernet, with a PIC microcontroller translating Art-Net DMX-over-Ethernet packets into commands for the LED string. The control board is designed from the ground up and includes all the PoE circuitry, and the write-up  gives a very thorough introduction to this power source that takes the reader way beyond regarding PoE as simply another off-the-shelf black box. Along the way we see all his code, as well as learn a few interesting tidbits such as the use of a pre-programmed EEPROM containing a...

The new campaign will debut on Jan. 1 during the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/2SDxhEe via IFTTT

If you’re the kind of person who hates this new generation of smartphone users and longs for a nostalgic past, you’re not far from the new target demographic for many commercial phone manufacturers. Major phone companies like Motorola and Huawei have been developing foldable versions of conventional smartphone designs, intended to be more versatile while maintaining the same functionality as their less flexible counterparts. It’s certainly gimmicky, but phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the Motorola Razr , and the Huawei MateX are elegant from an engineering perspective. Developing a seamless interface experience, maximizing surface area for functionality, and maintaining the same nostalgic flip phone aesthetic while making use of familiar smartphone features isn’t an easy design process. Motorola RAZR hinge shown by CNET’s Patrick Holland during a tour of their labs. For the Razr, a hinge system that takes up about a third of the phone’s internal space allows the OLED display to...

Line scan cameras are advanced devices used for process inspection tasks in industrial applications. Used to monitor the quality of silicon wafers and other high-accuracy tasks, they’re often outfitted with top-quality optics that are highly specialised. [Peter] was able to get his hands on a lens for a line-scan camera, and decided to put it to work on some macro photography instead. Macro image taken with the hacked lens. Judging by the specs found online, this is a fairly serious piece of kit. It easily competes with top-shelf commercial optics, which is what piqued [Peter]’s interest in the part. Being such a specialised piece of hardware, you can’t just cruise over to eBay for an off-the-shelf adapter. Instead, a long chain of parts were used to affix this lens to a Sony AIII DSLR, converting from threaded fittings to a Nikon mount and then finally to Sony NEX mount. Further work involved fitting an aperture into the chain to get the lens as close as possible to telecentric. Th...

When it comes to building sets and props for movies and TV, it’s so easy to get science fiction wrong – particularly with low-budget productions. It must be tempting for the set department to fall back on the “get a bunch of stuff and paint it silver” model, which can make for a tedious experience for the technically savvy in the audience. But low-budget does not necessarily mean low production values if the right people are involved. Take [Joel Hartlaub]’s recent work building sets for a crowdfunded sci-fi film called Infinitus . It’s a post-apocalyptic story that needed an underground bunker with a Fallout vibe to it, and [Joel] jumped at the chance to hack the sets together. Using mainly vintage electronic gear and foam insulation boards CNC-routed into convincing panels, he built nicely detailed control consoles for the bunker. A voice communicator was built from an old tube-type table radio case with some seven-segment displays, and the chassis of an old LCD projector made a co...

Swarms of robotic insects incapable of being swatted away may no longer be the product of science fiction and Black Mirror episodes. A team from EPFL’s School of Engineering has developed an insect propelled at 3 cm/s, dubbed the DEAnsect . What makes this robot unique is its exceptional robustness. Two versions of the robot were initially developed, one tethered with ultra-thin wires capable of being squashed with a shoe without impacting its functions and the second fully wireless and autonomous. The robot weighs less than 1 gram and is equipped with a microcontroller and photodiodes to recognize black and white patterns. The insect is named for its dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), an artificial muscle that propels it with vibrations and enables it to move lightly and quickly. The DEAs are made of an elastomer membrane wedged between soft electrodes that are attracted to each other when a voltage is applied, compressing the membrane. The membrane returns to its original s...

A police officer in Kansas got national attention before he was outed for writing the insult on his own cup. from CommaFeed - Real Time Trends Network https://ift.tt/35fIQ74 via IFTTT

If you’re going to fail, you might as well fail ambitiously. A complex project with a lot of subsystems has a greater chance of at least partial success, as well as providing valuable lessons in what not to do next time. At least that’s the lemonade [Josh Johnson] made from his lemon of a lost-cost vector network analyzer . For the uninitiated, a VNA is a versatile test instrument for RF work that allows you to measure both the amplitude and the phase of a signal, and it can be used for everything from antenna and filter design to characterizing transmission lines. [Josh] decided to port a lot of functionality for his low-cost VNA to a host computer and concentrate on the various RF stages of the design. Unfortunately, [Josh] found the performance of the completed VNA to be wanting, especially in the phase measurement department. He has a complete analysis of the failure modes in his thesis , but the short story is poor filtering of harmonics from the local oscillator, unexpected beha...