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In the latest Solid State Technology magazine there is a great article about the Nobel Prize in chemistry being awarded being awarded to Dan Shechtman. Subscribing to the Solid State Technology magazine is free as long as you are in USA, if you are outside the USA you can subscribe to the digital version. Hacked Gadgets does receive a small payment for each subscription to any of our Free Magazine Subscriptions so we appreciate the support from all who subscribe to the free magazines that we offer. “The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Dan Shechtman, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, for the discovery of quasicrystals. Shechtman discovered the solid-matter arrangement in April 1982, using an electron microscope. Until his research, all solid-matter atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically. Scientists considered this repetition required in order to obtain a crystal. Shechtman showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that followed mathematical rules but could not be repeated. The controversial findings led to Shechtman being asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter. Shechtman’s quasicrystals are now described by “the golden ratio;” the ratio of various distances between quasicrystal atoms is related to the golden mean.” |
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Ryan Pourcillie hacked his inkjet printer to have a straight through path so that he could print resist directly onto a copper clad board to make a custom PCB. He then uses special ink in the printer which can act as a resist since the normal ink jet ink would just be eaten away in the etchant tank. “Materials:
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Mike Szczys from Jumptuck has put his larsen scanner to good use by using it as a status indicator on his computer. He is interfacing it to the computer using the parallel port which seems to be a dying port these days. “I decided to finish up my Cylon Eye (Larson Scanner) project by adding it as a status indicator for my computer. I record over the air programming and transcode it to DVD quality. Since things can be a bit slower when FFmpeg is running, I set it up for the Eye to scan to let me know it’s processing a video file in the background. “
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We have seen some Stroboscopes in operation before, for this DIY Stroboscope that uses a Three Phase DC Motor which eLabs put together I think the actual stroboscope is the simpler part of the build. Since the project is using a three phase motor actually getting the motor to run is in my mind a huge part of the project. I love the reuse of computer related stuff in this build which is great since most of us normally have that stuff available for free! The code and schematics are available at the links below. Part 1 of the Project Build “With three driver inputs it is possible to create only two levels at the ends of the windings: LOW and HIGH. Using three different levels – LOW, HIGH and OPEN could have enabled us to disable one of the windings on each of the steps, which results in more torque and also enables rotational speed feedback via measuring voltage induced on the disabled winding by the permanent magnet of the rotor”
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Solar Pop Can Heating Systems are getting quite popular these days. As heating costs rise everyone is looking for ways to save on their energy bill. Most people are aware of insulating and using good weatherstripping to keep the heat in and the cold out but many don’t know about the alternate heating methods that are available. One of the alternative heating methods that is gaining some traction is capturing the heat energy from the sun and using it to heat the inside of your house. These systems use black aluminum tubes to capture the heat from the sun, as the heat rises in the tubes it is collected in an upper plenum which is then ducted into the house. These systems can be built quite inexpensively since the main component of the system are the aluminum tubes which can be constructed from recycled pop cans. These pop cans get the top and bottom cut out, then they are stacked together to form an air tight tube, after a flat black paint job they are ready to soak up the heat from the sun. Wyatt West Ranch Solar Pop Can Heater Zsnowshredder has built one of these Pop Can Solar Heaters which has 17 aluminum tubes made from 204 aluminum pop cans. He has cut a circular hole in one end of the can and used tin snips to cut a fin shaped design in the other end. This is used to make the air swirl as it rises in the tube. Four inch dryer venting is used to move the air in and out of the heater. A solar atic fan is used to blow the cold room air into the bottom of the heater. This will allow the hot air to be forced out of the top. The fan is a 200 CFM unit and allows for temperatures of around 133 degrees to be blown into the room with an outdoor temperature of 47 degrees. He was able to get 155 degrees during initial testing but this was when it was angled at a better angle to the sun. The installed position of the heater is flat against the building which caused the angle to the sun to not be optimal and caused the loss in heating. A simple mirror on the ground is allowing him to boost some of the light energy that is hitting the pop can heater.
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I remember about 10 years ago the bank I was using changed the sequence of cash withdrawals, instead of giving the card back then the cash they started giving cash then the card. After withdrawing some money I was about 10 feet from the ATM before I realized that I didn’t have my card, when I turned around the next person in line was already on the withdraw cash screen. That was the closest I have ever come to having my bank account compromised. Turns out that criminals now have some additional tricks they can play with. In Canada there seems to be a huge campaign telling people to shield the entry of their PIN at grocery stores etc. Well this new technique doesn’t need to see your code as it is pressed, rather it just needs access to the keypad shortly after the code was entered. Of course this PIN alone is meaningless unless the crooks have physical access to your card or were able to get a swipe of the magnetic strip. I wonder if we might see some banks swapping out the regular plastic keypads for metal ones which are apparently not susceptible to this exploit. I personally would be more concerned about this venerability being used to get codes for door access keypads and safe codes. “The research, which Mowery conducted with fellow student Sarah Meiklejohn and professor Stefan Savage, is based on previous work by well-known security researcher Michal Zalewski, who in 2005 used an infrared camera to detect codes punched into a safe with a keypad lock. While Zalewski was able to detect the codes even after five minutes, the UCSD researchers found that the chance of extracting the proper digits dropped to about 20 percent after 90 seconds.” With this process being about 80 percent accurate I am thinking we might see some very smart card skimmers come out within the next few years that use accelerometers to determine what keys were pressed with similar accuracies. This technique has been shown to work by Georgia Tech graduate student Arunabh Verma, Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Henry Carter and Philip Marquardt of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. They used an iPhone on a desk beside a computer keyboard to detect the keys being typed and were able to determine what was being typed with an 80% accuracy level. |
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This is a cool 3D UV Laser Printer, you can see lots of other details over at the Rob Hopeless site. It uses a UV laser to print items in a container of liquid UV-curable photopolymer. There is a platform that moves the item being printed down as the laser beam traces to solidify each layer in the polymer. The printed items look a bit gooey but this is an interesting printing process. Thanks for the tip Andy. “I have wanted a 3D Printer for a while now and there are some very reasonably priced kits available like the Makerbot, Ultimaker and the RepRap project. I could have just bought a kit and started printing things but at the time I had not seen great resolution or print quality from those. I started looking around at the other 3D printing technologies and found SLA made some amazing quality prints, so I decided to try making my own.“
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