0:02

Give me a break here, man. Get

0:04

this show on the road. Hello

0:08

and welcome to the Hackaday podcast. I'm

0:10

Elliott Williams. And I'm Tom Lardie.

0:13

This is episode 275. Mud

0:16

pulse telemetry, 3D printed

0:18

gears in detail, and display

0:20

hacking in our future. This

0:22

week in the news, Raspberry Pi goes

0:25

public. If you were clicking on the

0:27

London Stock Exchange website over and over

0:29

again to see when Raspberry Pi finally

0:31

showed up, it finally happened what? I

0:34

guess it was Monday last week? We'd

0:37

heard rumors of their IPO for a

0:39

few months and it looks like it's

0:41

finally happened. 39

0:44

pounds cents, which I guess are called

0:46

pence. A share will get you a

0:49

share of Raspberry Pi holdings, PLC. Yeah,

0:51

I mean, I feel like we've been

0:53

talking about this so long. Part of

0:55

me thought it already happened, I guess,

0:58

because we've definitely done like several articles

1:00

on it. I, Jenny's been on top

1:02

of this, like you said, for months

1:04

now. It was all when I, when I

1:06

saw the headlines, I was almost like, wait, I thought

1:08

we did that already. Like, were

1:10

they not already? But now it's

1:13

official, official. Everybody seems

1:15

not super happy in the comments about

1:17

it, I gotta say. I didn't see

1:19

a lot of positive sentiment. The

1:23

comments are off the rail

1:25

negative about capitalism in general,

1:27

and I think are full

1:29

of misunderstandings and I'm

1:32

sorry, I don't mean to call you

1:34

all out, but my God. So

1:37

I dug into this a little

1:39

bit and the way that Raspberry

1:41

Pi has been run since forever

1:44

actually is the nonprofit part, the

1:46

Raspberry Pi Foundation, spun off and

1:48

wholly owned. The Raspberry

1:51

Pi Limited, which was the part

1:53

that actually did the money stuff,

1:55

made the computers, sold them and

1:58

did the marketing there. Whereas

2:00

the Pi Foundation is basically

2:03

makes educational stuff and tries to

2:05

get computers into schools and in

2:07

the hands of students. It's a

2:10

real legit non-profit charity. And this

2:12

is apparently a normal thing to

2:14

do in the UK. If

2:17

there's a business-y aspect to a

2:20

charity, it lets the charity earn

2:22

money through this one part of

2:24

the company, support itself by owning

2:26

kind of a company that then

2:28

makes money to be funneled into

2:30

the charity. And that's the way it's

2:33

been working since forever. They've spun it

2:35

off now, right? And so the Raspberry

2:37

Pi Limited is now Raspberry Pi Holdings,

2:39

PLC, and you can buy shares in

2:42

it. And the foundation still owns it.

2:44

And in fact, what happened here is

2:46

the foundation sold a bunch of its

2:49

shares. They were saying that the foundation

2:51

still owns 70% of the stock,

2:53

although I'm not 100% sure of this. But

2:56

they basically made a crap

2:58

ton of money for the charity-slash-nonprofit

3:01

part by selling the stock off.

3:03

And now they've got a big

3:05

old fat endowment with which to

3:08

keep doing their public good stuff.

3:10

So I think that's really cool,

3:12

actually. Whether this will

3:14

change the business going on with the

3:17

Raspberry Pi making, who knows, right? The

3:19

foundation's still the majority shareholder. So they

3:21

kind of have to do what the

3:23

foundation tells them to do. There

3:26

were some people in the comments saying, you know,

3:28

now they have a profit motive, they'll something, something,

3:30

something, but I don't think they have

3:32

any more or less of a profit

3:34

motive than they have before. And their

3:36

profit motive was to make more money

3:39

so they could give it to the

3:41

charity. Like, that's actually the goal of

3:43

Raspberry Pi Limited. So I don't know.

3:45

A lot of the commenters said, oh, you know,

3:47

they're moving away from the makers and they're

3:49

going on a more corporate route or whatever.

3:52

But like, it was never really about makers.

3:54

We just sort of co-opted it. You know,

3:56

it was always about being an educational computer

3:58

that was cheap enough that you could... give

4:00

away, right? Like we saw, oh

4:02

wow, cheap Linux computer with GPIO, we could do

4:04

stuff with that and kind of ran with it,

4:06

but it was never really meant for us. So

4:09

I always thought this was kind of weird. Whether

4:11

this, like they, there's this feeling in the community

4:13

that they, the raspberry pie foundation like Oza something,

4:15

you know, like they've always been pretty clear about

4:18

what they're trying to do and

4:20

they're just continuing to do that. And you

4:22

know, undoubtedly it's been a boon for them

4:24

to have, you know, hackers and makers buying

4:26

these things, right? But that was

4:29

never, it was all, it was just like a

4:31

nice side effect. I think it was, it

4:33

was never the goal. It was not made

4:35

for us. We just, you know, saw it

4:37

as an opportunity. You know,

4:39

when we were pushing even Upton

4:41

about this in interview with Floss

4:43

Weekly, he ended up saying, look,

4:45

I started this whole thing trying

4:47

to make computers cheap and ubiquitous

4:49

and get Linux into the hands

4:51

of school kids everywhere. And that's

4:54

how I started it. And that's

4:56

what I'm still doing. And anyone who doubts

4:58

that can just, you know, wait 10 years

5:00

and see how it turns out. And

5:03

now that it's happened, I think that's where we're at.

5:05

I think we're at the no

5:07

more time for guessing what's going to happen. It's just

5:09

now the wait and see time. This

5:14

is a journey into sound.

5:16

What's that sound? What's

5:19

that sound? All right.

5:21

Well, let's head on off to what's

5:23

that sound. This week is a guest,

5:25

the sound week, which means you listeners

5:28

and special guest, Tom Nardi get to

5:30

listen to the sound. Guess

5:32

what it is. The difference of course, is

5:34

that you will be eligible to enter your

5:36

guests and hope to win a Hackaday podcast

5:38

t-shirt if you get it right. Whereas Tom,

5:41

I just gets fame and fortune. Yeah. Right. I'm

5:43

starting to think, you know, what's that like face

5:45

blindness where you can look at somebody,

5:47

you know, but you don't recognize them. I think I have

5:49

that book for sound. I have sound blindness.

5:51

Like I can hear them, but I can't

5:53

identify them. It's hard. Let me

5:56

listen to this one. Oh,

6:02

come on. And,

6:07

uh, what the hell is

6:09

this? Like

6:15

I recognize it, but I just can't.

6:18

Especially that... You

6:22

can blame Christina Panos for this one, by

6:25

the way. She sent this one in. It

6:27

is certainly some game thing

6:29

of an age. Yup.

6:32

Yup, exactly. Game thing of a certain age. Correct.

6:35

Is it an arcade? It is. Oh,

6:37

man, why can I not? It's not... It's

6:39

not... Congratulations, Tom Nardi. Oh, there we go.

6:42

Oh, man. There you go. Good job.

6:45

I instantly, I remembered, you know,

6:47

it unlocked like a core memory,

6:49

but I have trouble drawing the

6:58

connections. I had to let that one percolate

7:01

long enough and it'll, it'll come up. Well,

7:04

congratulations, Tom. The rest of

7:06

you head on over to hackaday.com/podcast. Scroll

7:08

on down to what's that sound. Click

7:11

on the form, enter your handle and

7:13

your best guess. And

7:15

if you get it right, we'll put you in the

7:17

drawing to get a Hackaday podcast t-shirt next week. I

7:20

think we'll get a lot, a lot of ones

7:22

for this. Last week we

7:24

were looking at a hack from Marco

7:27

Reps, who's a little bit of a

7:29

volt nut. And it was how to

7:31

make a switch that is all copper

7:33

so that it didn't have any temperature

7:35

sensitive thermocouple like junctions in it that

7:38

would introduce like nano volts of imprecision

7:40

into his measurements. Reflecting on that, I

7:42

realized that what I really liked about

7:44

that problem was not his solution to

7:47

it, although it was totally awesome. But

7:49

what I really liked most about that

7:51

was like the problem itself was a

7:53

crazy and interesting problem. You

7:56

could just kind of spin your mind around for

7:58

a little bit. And that is the. with

8:00

this hack, but in spades.

8:03

This is bi-directional data

8:05

transfer through mud. This

8:08

is a review article, an

8:10

academic review paper by Saleh

8:12

Mochaka, Ai Ping Wu, and

8:14

Ching Ching Fu. It

8:16

is about mud pulse telemetry.

8:18

And you're all saying, what?

8:21

But here's the problem, and it's

8:23

a really interesting problem. If you're

8:25

drilling a really deep well, like

8:28

for oil or whatever, kilometers

8:30

deep into the ground, you

8:32

wanna know the temperature, the

8:35

pressure, radiation, speed

8:37

of rotation, all sorts of information

8:39

about what's going on at the

8:41

drill head way down there, but

8:44

you're stuck up at the surface.

8:46

How do you transmit this up?

8:48

They've tried all sorts of things,

8:51

including but not limited to direct

8:53

electrical and electromagnetic transmission, but the

8:55

borehole is filled with a mud

8:58

fluid, basically. And you could think

9:00

of it as being a tube

9:02

with a slightly wider than the

9:04

tube drill head at the bottom.

9:06

And so then there's all this

9:08

kind of extra space there, and

9:10

they fill it, they pump pressurized

9:12

mud through there, both to kind

9:14

of excavate out the junk that

9:16

they're drilling up at the time,

9:18

but also to keep everything cool.

9:20

And mud pulse telemetry is modulating

9:23

the pressure wave in this

9:25

mud that goes back up to send signals

9:27

from the drill head. If you haven't read

9:29

the article, take a wild guess

9:31

at what kind of baud rates

9:34

they're getting out of this, that

9:36

six kilometers underground by modulating the

9:38

amount of mud flowing

9:40

through this crazy pipe. The answer is

9:43

kind of in the two to 10,

9:46

maybe the highest baud rate systems are

9:48

kind of up around 20 baud. And

9:51

so there's not much data you

9:53

can get out of this. And

9:55

the reason is it's just an

9:57

incredibly difficult problem. The

10:00

paper goes into the kind of three ways

10:02

that they do this. The first two are

10:04

basically by opening and closing a valve, and

10:06

so you either let more mud slip through,

10:09

or you push some extra mud through

10:11

with kind of a secondary little pump.

10:13

And the third one is called the

10:15

siren, which is my favorite of them,

10:17

which is letting more and less mud

10:20

go through. So you're making kind of

10:22

a sinusoidal pressure wave in there and

10:24

then opening and closing the veins on

10:26

this. So you're actually doing amplitude

10:29

modulation on the carrier

10:31

of varying mud pressure. I just,

10:33

that's the craziest thing I've ever

10:35

heard. So the paper takes this

10:37

as kind of a signal processing

10:39

challenge and looks at what the

10:41

different sources of noise are, which

10:43

include, you know, mud isn't just

10:45

mud and the pressure wave like

10:47

disperses as it moves up the

10:49

mud. There can be more or

10:51

less air in the line, more

10:54

or less gas, more or less

10:56

rock that changes the transmission characteristics

10:58

all the time. Well, I mean,

11:00

there's the pump that's pumping this mud

11:02

through the system. It's got to have

11:04

its own kind of noise. And so

11:06

then they look at all the kind

11:09

of frequency domain ways you can filter

11:11

this noise out and try to recover

11:13

the signal from this weird, weird, weird

11:15

signal. Anyway, really, really, really neat research

11:18

paper because it just opened

11:20

my eyes to something I'd never even thought

11:22

about before. You know, when I first read

11:24

this, I immediately like, wow, this is like

11:27

a Dan Maloney thing. So I

11:29

liked when we did our weekly call and

11:31

Dan was like a little upset that

11:34

he didn't get dibs on this because

11:36

he's kind of the resident, like, here's

11:38

a weird thing that your life depends

11:40

on in a way, but

11:42

you didn't know about it, right? Because, you

11:44

know, as we saw in the comments, the people

11:47

who work in, you know, the oil field, this

11:50

is something they deal with daily that none of us

11:52

have ever come across, right? Unless

11:54

you have a borehole in your backyard that

11:56

you've been working on. This is just well

11:59

outside. of our wheelhouse. But fascinating

12:01

stuff. To me, I think the

12:04

most interesting part, and Potslough have

12:06

misunderstood this entirely, but when

12:08

they're drilling these things, they're just sections of pipe,

12:10

right? So you go as far as you can,

12:12

and then you just put another section of pipe

12:14

on and put another section of pipe on. That's

12:16

how you get farther and farther down. So there's

12:18

no wires or anything, right? So they needed to

12:20

use the medium to transmit,

12:22

but that also means there's no power.

12:24

Is it powered or running on a

12:26

battery? Maybe. Maybe, but then you're not

12:29

pulling it up to charge it. Once it's

12:32

down there, it's down there. Right. So unless

12:34

I'm wholly misunderstanding it, and

12:37

I'm sure someone will be happy to

12:39

correct me. That's funny. This whole article

12:41

is all about the data transmission and

12:43

the signals problem here, and

12:45

not at all about what the sensor's

12:47

like. I was looking for that, an

12:50

explanation of the actual sending part, and they do

12:52

kind of skip over that. But there could be

12:54

some little turbine or something down there. I bet

12:56

it's powered with a big trunk and battery. Maybe

12:59

it's a turbine. Maybe. I mean, if you're

13:01

got working fluid, it could be spinning off

13:03

of that. Well, I mean, in

13:05

any case, it's certainly, it's its own little

13:07

island, right? Whatever it's doing, it has to

13:10

get its own power and send its own

13:12

stuff. It's not physically connected. And that kind

13:14

of made me think of one

13:16

of the ideas for like

13:19

a Venus probe was because

13:21

it's so ridiculously hot and

13:24

high pressure that you would send like an analog

13:27

kind of thing that would, you know,

13:29

based on the temperature, it would like

13:31

flap a reflector and then you would

13:33

use radar to see that. You

13:36

know what I mean? So you'd be able

13:38

to get sensor data from the surface, but

13:40

there would be no electronic components. It would

13:42

be all this like mechanical analog stuff that

13:44

would, that would be able to survive. And

13:46

it just made me think of that where

13:48

like you're trying to get data from an

13:51

incredibly hot style environment with

13:53

no traditional link. And you kind

13:55

of have to think outside of

13:58

the box. But what I

14:00

love about it, about it is that

14:02

a number of people in the comments,

14:04

of course, have worked in the oil

14:06

and gas drilling industry. And your comments

14:08

range from mud butts, I

14:10

cannot express how hilarious it is to

14:12

have a single bit per second data

14:14

transfer rate with 2024 tech, but

14:17

that is the reality on some nightmare

14:19

wells. He's like, if you could make

14:21

a Pulsar that worked reliably, even at

14:24

1k per second, you'd be able to

14:26

print money. And I guess he's right,

14:28

you know? Oh, look at that,

14:30

there you go. Another interesting bit of this tech

14:32

is the tools strive to get the sensors as

14:34

close to the drill bit as possible. Some of

14:36

the designs are working to push the temperature ratings

14:38

of equipment to 200 degrees C, including

14:41

the mud pulsors. The batteries for

14:43

these devices are designed for extreme

14:45

heat and don't work at all,

14:48

even at room temperature. What? Yeah,

14:50

so totally crazy. And of

14:52

course he's right, like the

14:54

oil and gas drilling industry

14:57

is trillions and trillions of

14:59

dollars, right? And it's super important

15:01

for them to get good data about

15:03

what's going on way down at the

15:05

drill head. So this does have to

15:07

be one of those things where, you

15:09

know, if you could actually double or

15:11

triple the data rate they'd get out,

15:13

it would actually be worth tons and

15:15

tons and tons of money. And it's

15:17

pretty funny that a number of people

15:20

in the comments worked in the oil

15:22

and gas drilling industry and yeah, worked

15:24

at these holes and all came up

15:26

with this. And everybody's like confirming this

15:28

to be a super difficult problem and

15:30

be a really interesting problem domain. So

15:32

really, really cool. I have to say

15:35

19 years of reading Hackaday, how have

15:37

I never heard of mud pulse transmission?

15:39

All right, now I picked this next

15:41

one because it caused quite a bit

15:43

of debate over the weekend, but also

15:46

it's something that I've kind of looked

15:48

into personally. So I found it fascinating.

15:50

This is gas-tight FDM 3D printing is

15:52

within your grasp. And I got to

15:54

say, perhaps if Jenny hadn't

15:58

picked that particular title. Because

16:00

if you are making 3D

16:03

printed little pressure tanks, you probably shouldn't

16:05

be holding them. They should not be

16:07

within your grasp. They should be safely

16:09

separated from your personage. Because

16:12

obviously there's a high likelihood that

16:14

they're gonna delaminate and explode, right?

16:16

So this is a whole experimental

16:19

thing that the person's name is German Engineer.

16:21

At first I thought that was like a

16:24

placeholder, but apparently that is the

16:26

name, German Engineer. And they

16:29

wanted to 3D print little

16:31

propane tanks for reasons

16:33

that we won't worry about. But when the

16:35

propane is liquefied, it's between like 150 and

16:38

200 PSI, which is considerable. And

16:42

when attempting to 3D print a little tank

16:44

for it, it just, forget about it. Like

16:46

there's no way. It just

16:48

permeates through the layers. Like

16:51

I said, I've tried to do something similar

16:53

with like compressed air and it just doesn't

16:55

work. That's not what 3D

16:58

printing, desktop 3D printing is designed for, right?

17:00

But what this person found is that they

17:02

were able to seal the print,

17:04

in this case was able to

17:06

create a gas-tight little tank that

17:09

successfully held the pressure. You know,

17:11

even though Jenny very clearly said

17:14

in there that this is probably something

17:16

you shouldn't take lightly, it was

17:19

like the topic of the day on the

17:21

comments was everybody saying, oh, this is crazy.

17:23

And you're basically making a grenade and never

17:25

do this and all that kind of stuff.

17:27

I mean, I don't disagree. I

17:29

would probably, I would say I would definitely never

17:31

put 200 PSI into a 3D printed tank,

17:35

but I do think there's, you know,

17:38

the technique of sealing the print to

17:40

the point that it can hold pressure,

17:42

I think is interesting. And there's certainly,

17:44

you know, lower pressure applications that are

17:46

less exploding than I think. Like I

17:49

was saying, my thing that I wanted

17:51

to try to do compressed air for

17:53

like a horn that

17:55

I was thinking about doing something with, you

17:57

know, would not need to be.

18:00

that kind of pressure, right? So I think

18:02

that the idea has merit mainly

18:05

because you can make these bespoke

18:07

tanks that could be, you know,

18:09

fit into whatever shape is necessary

18:12

for your project, you know, if

18:14

you had something that needed a little bit

18:16

of pressurized something to be able to do

18:19

like a conformal tank is pretty interesting. But

18:21

yeah, it's definitely a, you need to be

18:23

very cautious with this kind of thing for

18:25

obvious reasons and kind of keep in mind

18:27

that you know, you're well outside of the

18:30

intended use for 3D printed

18:32

plastics. Is he doing this

18:35

for propane or just for? Yes,

18:37

but specifically for propane and I

18:39

don't 100% sure

18:41

why. So it's a really double whammy

18:43

where he has a pressurized gas that

18:45

may explode and also happens to be

18:48

hugely flammable. Because part of me wouldn't

18:50

hesitate to do this with pressure air

18:52

or pressure water if you had tested

18:57

it enough beforehand. What I mean

18:59

by that is you, you know,

19:01

do what they do when they test metal

19:03

pressure tanks. You fill it with water, you

19:05

put it up to that pressure and you

19:08

make sure it doesn't explode and then you

19:10

put it up to twice that pressure and

19:12

you make sure it doesn't explode, then you

19:14

can be pretty sure that it won't explode

19:17

at the, you know, rated pressure. Ironically, you

19:19

don't fill it with air at that pressure

19:21

because the air wants to keep expanding and

19:23

it makes it into a very dangerous little

19:26

bomb. Water is non-compressible, it doesn't store any

19:28

energy, it just pressures the tank up.

19:30

So there are totally safe and

19:32

reasonable hobbyist ways to test these

19:34

pressure tanks, but man, I don't

19:36

know anything about propane, but it

19:38

wouldn't surprise me if it were

19:41

a solvent that worked on plastic.

19:43

And so... Oh yeah, that

19:45

seems reasonable, you know. He's coating it

19:47

with something called Dichthal and I mean,

19:50

they must tell you what it's resistant

19:52

to, etc, etc, but I don't know.

19:54

And that's true, somebody points out in

19:56

the comments that, you know, the whole

19:59

phase changed. thing with the propane

20:01

makes it extremely cold too. So not

20:03

only do you have whatever dissolving properties

20:05

the propane probably has to begin with

20:07

on the plastic, now it's now it's

20:10

cold. So it's like really just daring

20:12

this plastic to blow up in your

20:14

face. And brittle. I

20:16

should say for anybody who's just listening that

20:18

like when we say tank, I

20:21

mean the things he's making are very tiny,

20:23

you know, so it's not like he's trying

20:25

to put this thing on a barbecue grill

20:27

or something. I mean these things are like

20:29

golf ball sized. I mean they're super, right?

20:31

Super small volume. Again, not saying I mean

20:33

there's still plenty of danger to be had

20:35

here, but I mean I think it is

20:37

important to just say we're not talking about,

20:39

you know, a 15 pound tank of propane

20:41

like you'd get, you know, for your grill.

20:43

I mean this is a much much smaller

20:45

thing. I would be really

20:47

sure to dot the I's across

20:49

the T's on this one before

20:51

making even tiny little bombs like

20:53

these. Remember folks, even the tiny

20:55

bombs you need to

20:57

be careful of. See what we got there.

21:00

Two, five, six, eight. I mean

21:02

I'm looking at this the sheet

21:04

for it doesn't really mention. There

21:06

we go. Your advantage is efficient

21:08

use of materials, drinking water approved,

21:10

gas and liquid type components, high

21:12

chemical resistance, including oil, improved

21:15

UFEE resistance. I

21:17

mean it may be. So they got

21:20

a phone number. It says there'll be

21:22

happy to answer any questions. We should

21:24

do a live call. Call them right

21:26

up. Yeah, you ask them in German

21:28

like hey if I wanted to make

21:30

some small propane tanks. I

21:32

mean if this stuff is

21:34

resistant to propane then maybe?

21:37

Oh god I'm so

21:39

scared. None for me.

21:42

Good luck Lewis Marks. Yeah probably

21:44

don't do this one at home.

21:46

Well from totally sketchy 3D printing

21:48

to completely normal entirely sane 3D

21:51

printing, HowToMechatronics has a video studying

21:53

the finer points of 3D printed

21:56

gears. And here he's going through

21:58

how noisy they are. are,

22:00

how efficient they are, how

22:03

easy they are to put together, how

22:05

much backlash they have and then in

22:08

the end kind of how strong you

22:10

can make a gear train out of

22:12

3D printed gears and he's looking at

22:14

the three main contenders which are kind

22:16

of flat gears, helical gears and herringbone

22:19

gears and if you've never seen the

22:21

kind of two weirder types, you know

22:23

flat gears are what you normally think

22:25

of as gears. Helical gears,

22:28

the gears themselves, the gear teeth

22:30

themselves are cut on an angle

22:32

and then herringbone of course is

22:34

cut in a V shape so

22:36

that they angle in from both

22:38

sides. The advantage of helical and

22:40

herringbone should be that they have

22:43

less backlash than flat gears because

22:45

instead of the teeth mating in

22:47

one plane, they actually mate across

22:49

the slant or the double slant

22:51

in the case of the herringbone

22:53

and that should help with the

22:55

backlash. Conversely, the more complicated gears

22:57

should also have a little more

22:59

friction, should be a little bit less

23:02

efficient and that's one of the things he

23:04

actually tests here. Not entirely

23:06

surprisingly, he does get that result. What's

23:08

interesting to me is that the flat

23:10

gears run the loudest and I guess

23:13

that's because they don't have a continuous

23:15

surface of pressure on each other whereas

23:18

the helical and herringbone gears run quieter

23:20

but then what he does is he

23:22

runs them at a certain speed and

23:24

figures out how much power he has

23:26

to put in to have it run

23:28

at that speed and that's kind

23:31

of a measure of how efficient they

23:33

are and he of course also gets

23:35

the expected result there that the flat

23:38

gears are the most efficient. What I

23:40

thought was really weird here is that

23:42

although when he does his backlash test

23:44

and he finds that as

23:47

you'd expect the flat gears are the

23:49

worst, the helical gears are the best,

23:51

I would have expected the herringbone gears

23:53

to do at least as well. Maybe

23:55

his V angle isn't steep enough or

23:57

something. When he repeats this with a

24:00

a four gear gear train, he actually

24:02

gets a lot less backlash on the

24:04

flat gears than he does on the

24:06

helicals. And I think that must be

24:09

due to some kind of precision in

24:11

manufacturer or something. I don't know. I mean, these

24:14

are all 3D printed, so it must be some

24:16

kind of difference across the gears in that way.

24:19

I really can't explain that result. The

24:21

thing that I think ends up being

24:23

a totally useful take home if you

24:25

end up having to do your own

24:27

gear train is when he's doing the

24:29

strength tests, the wider and bigger

24:31

the teeth on the gear are,

24:33

especially with 3D printed ones, the

24:36

stronger they are in general. And

24:38

so there's kind of a ratio

24:40

of the tooth width to the

24:42

diameter of the gear that's called

24:44

the modulus. And so if you

24:46

are picking gears for this, design

24:48

your gears to have fewer, bigger

24:50

teeth and they'll be stronger and

24:52

more infill if you need it,

24:54

more perimeters if you don't wanna

24:56

change the whole infill. But that's

24:58

kind of the big take home

25:00

on this for me. You will never, ever

25:02

get me to give up my herringbone gears

25:04

though. Yeah, I knew you were gonna go

25:06

for this one. There you are, I confirmed

25:09

herringbone fuxiano. And I think that

25:11

is his end conclusion, right? Is that if

25:13

you're gonna be printing them, you might as

25:15

well just print the herringbone because they are

25:17

uniquely suited for 3D printing because of the

25:20

shape. And it turns out, hey, they actually

25:22

work pretty well, which I don't think is

25:24

any great surprise. I remember

25:26

some of the old school 3D printers

25:28

had like the big printed herringbone gear

25:31

for the extruder. As long as we've

25:33

been squirting plastic out on desktops, the

25:36

herringbone gear has been a part

25:38

of it, right? And that's cause when you'd

25:40

have to do those retracts, the lower backlash

25:42

there makes them respond better. I have an

25:44

Wade's herringbone gear extruder on my old Prusa

25:47

2 printer, which has gotta be like 12

25:49

years old at this point. But no, it's

25:51

always cool to see some

25:53

real data to back it up

25:55

and some of these things we just take for granted,

25:57

right? They were granted and maybe not

25:59

know why. And so

26:01

I did appreciate this one. I also thought it

26:03

was like when it goes into stuff like the

26:06

noise that they make, it's not something I normally

26:08

kind of consider, right? It's interesting to see like

26:10

the causes of the actual gear noise and how

26:12

they mesh together and why that might be. If

26:14

you need something that needs to be quiet for

26:17

whatever reason, you know, that's the design of the

26:19

gear can impact that. And it

26:21

wasn't something that immediately comes to mind

26:23

when I think about designing gears is how

26:25

to, you know, reduce noise, you know,

26:27

the more gradual engagement, he says, like the

26:30

helicals and stuff, instead of just, I guess, basically,

26:32

instead of smashing into each other full

26:34

force, you know, when both faces hit each other

26:37

simultaneously, you have this kind of gradual thing.

26:39

He says it's not only smoother, but you

26:42

can just hear it. You can hear that it's

26:44

quieter. So if you were looking to have something

26:46

that's sitting next to you and needs to be

26:49

operating without disturbing you, you know, that's an interesting

26:51

takeaway that, you know, using a more

26:53

angled gear face can make it quieter. And

26:55

not entirely irrelevant. In the end, he wants

26:58

to do a wear test and he runs

27:00

these for an hour or two and doesn't

27:02

see any change in his first sample. And

27:04

he's like, this is too loud. I can't

27:07

run these. You know, he's got a weight

27:09

on the end of one of these arms

27:11

and he's running it at high speed, hoping

27:14

to wear the gears out and doesn't wear

27:16

them out within an hour and gives up

27:18

because it's just too noisy in his apartment,

27:20

bails out on that one. And so we

27:23

don't get the results on that one at

27:25

all. The PLA seemed

27:27

to work fine, you know, whereas

27:29

I kind of think of, I don't know,

27:31

maybe because it's stuff like PETG is

27:34

kind of gained popularity. I think a PLA is sort

27:36

of the, you know, if I'm printing like some little

27:38

trinket or something, it's PLA. I don't really think of

27:41

it as a, if I'm thinking like a practical functional

27:43

print, I'm usually thinking of a more

27:45

robust plastic. So it was interesting to

27:47

see that even with like the bare

27:49

minimum PLA that any printer, no matter

27:52

how janky it is, should be able

27:54

to square it out PLA can

27:56

still produce viable gears is a cool

27:58

takeaway too. need some abs

28:00

or something just to make a working gear,

28:03

at least not at this scale. These are

28:05

pretty chunky gears. The other takeaway I got

28:07

out of this, and this is one that

28:09

kind of undoes some of the results, I

28:12

guess, in a way, like another takeaway that

28:14

you can get out of this is that

28:17

he had some gears printed in PLA,

28:19

and then he had some gears printed

28:21

in PLA that was an older PLA,

28:23

and it was brittle and it broke

28:25

at a different strength and stuff. And

28:27

he had nylon, and he had nylon

28:29

gears fail at a really low

28:31

force, like lower than the PLA and

28:34

lower than the PTG. And like you,

28:36

I would expect the nylon gears to

28:38

hold up better than the kind of,

28:41

you know, the pedestrian PLA, right? But

28:43

I think that, you know, I don't

28:45

know if it was difficulty in printing

28:48

nylon. Nylon's a bitch to print with.

28:50

I don't know if it absorbed water

28:52

because it likes to do that too.

28:54

I mean, I don't know what the

28:57

reasons for this variation are, but it's

28:59

worth noting that he had a

29:01

bunch of variation across these different

29:03

plastic types, and from gear to

29:06

gear even, that he couldn't really

29:08

explain, and doesn't really make sense

29:10

with kind of the theory and

29:12

the fundamentals here. And so I

29:14

think that's another, I mean,

29:16

on one hand that kind of clouds his

29:19

scientific results a little bit. It puts

29:21

a little more fuzz in there, but

29:23

on the other hand it's useful to

29:25

know that if you're worried about printing

29:27

these gears yourself and all you've got

29:29

is PLA, just make the cleanest,

29:31

bestest, thickest, most infilliest print

29:33

you can, and that'll probably do

29:36

it. Given variation across plastics and

29:38

everything, if it really

29:40

matters, you're just gonna have to test

29:42

it. Well, to briefly pull this away

29:45

from the trials and tribulations of 3D

29:47

printed plastic, this one I want to

29:49

talk about is ESP32 powered crunchy makes

29:51

beats on the go. I thought this

29:54

was a really cool project, so much

29:56

that I wrote it up when I

29:58

saw it. I'm not... necessarily musically

30:00

inclined, but I thought it was

30:03

really cool. This is just described

30:05

as like a key chain

30:07

form factor music making platform

30:09

where it's, you know, it's

30:12

ESP32, it's an audio

30:15

amplifier, it's some buttons and LEDs and not

30:17

a whole lot else. It can be built

30:19

with like off the shelf modules on a

30:21

little perf board or you could do a

30:24

proper PCB. Regardless how you

30:26

get there, you have an array of, you

30:28

know, four by four tactile buttons and

30:31

there's a little, you know, printable

30:33

legend that shows what they all

30:35

do and they play different electronic

30:38

sounds and instruments and you can

30:40

layer them and mix them. And I

30:43

guess a tracker would be the

30:45

proper term for this sort of

30:48

does a lot of stuff without

30:50

requiring a lot of hardware, which I thought

30:52

was really impressive. A lot of the, a

30:54

lot of the heavy lifting is being done

30:56

in the software, which is open source and

30:59

kind of the hardware here

31:01

is my interpretation of it is that it's

31:03

a little bit free form where there's a

31:05

few different ways you can arrive at the

31:07

end goal and it's not super important how

31:09

you put it together. So long as the

31:11

key players are there, you know, so long

31:13

as you got the ESP32 and you got

31:16

the audio, the I2S audio

31:19

chip that the code is written for

31:21

and you have enough buttons and LEDs,

31:23

the rest kind of just takes care

31:25

of itself. So there's room

31:27

for interpretation in the hardware side of

31:29

things to get this code running on it.

31:32

There's a little demo video that I said to me,

31:34

it sounds awesome. Maybe I don't

31:36

have the trained ear necessary for this,

31:39

necessary to pass judgment, but I was

31:42

very impressed with the sounds it was

31:44

making for how little hardware was involved.

31:46

And I think just how cheaply and

31:48

easily it can be put together is

31:51

really interesting. I think it's

31:53

very approachable. I could see this

31:55

being something you could do it

31:57

like a hacker con or something

31:59

like Like it could be like a

32:01

little workshop that people put these things together.

32:03

You could do it even as like the

32:06

badge for an event, honestly, and still have

32:08

the per unit cost pretty low. This was

32:10

just released right before we wrote

32:12

about it. I think what I was writing

32:14

the article, like the, the GitHub wasn't even

32:16

like more than a day old. So cutting

32:18

edge stuff. And I'm interested to see where

32:20

it goes from here. I think it's a

32:22

really cool little platform to play around with.

32:24

So if you're, you want to mess around

32:26

with electronic music but you don't want to

32:28

spend big money for like a synthesizer or

32:31

like real stuff. And you just want to

32:33

say, Hey, am I into this? Am I

32:35

into pushing little buttons and making

32:37

sounds? Like this

32:39

is a cool way to get

32:41

started. This is super similar to

32:43

like the teenage engineering pocket operator

32:46

rhythm one. Like they're like drum

32:48

and bass sequencer machine. It's got

32:50

like 16 buttons. So you

32:52

can do the 16 step thing and you just

32:54

hit them when their time comes and it plays

32:57

in loops and looks like a

33:00

total lot of fun. It's like a

33:02

pocket operator, but it doesn't have a

33:04

screen on it. And ooh, maybe that's

33:06

the next thing for people to work

33:08

on here. It's funny because I've heard

33:10

a bunch of people talk about making

33:12

a device like this but never actually

33:14

seen one show up. So I saw

33:16

this and I'm like, Oh, who did

33:18

this finally? I was stoked to see

33:20

it done. This is like you say,

33:22

the GitHub is three days old and

33:25

the code commits half of them

33:27

say initial commit code is a

33:29

bit unorganized but fully functional, which

33:32

is totally my kind of commit

33:34

message. So, you know, you know

33:36

what you're getting here folks, but

33:38

like you, I really like that

33:40

the hardware is kind of what

33:42

it's not anything special. It's entirely

33:45

in flux. You could just totally

33:47

take this run with it. You

33:49

know, A just wire up

33:51

a couple of modules, B make a

33:53

super simple PCB and do it that

33:55

way. You know, there's a million different

33:57

ways to do this. And I think

33:59

that's... pretty cool because of

34:02

how accessible it's going to be. You

34:04

know, maybe I would add some more

34:06

blinking lights to it. I want a

34:08

couple more. I want an LED per

34:10

button, I think. But other than that,

34:12

I can't think of anything I'd change

34:14

on that side. So then it's all

34:16

just software refinement. And I'm hoping that

34:18

a bunch of other people will help

34:20

him in his project start sending him

34:22

commits with some really cool either sounds

34:25

or modes or whatever else. This

34:27

could turn into something really fun. And I

34:29

do like that the hardware side of the

34:31

platform is just so accessible. It makes it

34:33

easier for people to hack on the software side. Yeah,

34:35

I mean, I think there's a good chance a lot

34:38

of people could build this with what they have laying around

34:41

right now. Like as they're listening

34:43

to this, you know, I mean, maybe the audio

34:45

chip is, you know, you might

34:47

have to go out and get that. Although

34:49

I'm fairly sure I even have one or

34:51

two of those. Yeah, I think it's a

34:53

pretty common like Adafruit audio module. This

34:56

is sort of, you know, boilerplate

34:58

minimalist hardware. It could definitely stand

35:00

to be like with a screen

35:02

and more LEDs. But of course

35:04

that could be further variations. You know,

35:06

like you could you I like that you could

35:08

still have this very basic thing, but then you

35:10

could you could expand it if you wanted to.

35:13

Right. Just like you could

35:15

get it done on a proper PCB or you

35:17

could just kind of dead bug it. You know,

35:19

if those kind of improvements could be made, you

35:22

know, without compromising the low bar of entry. I

35:24

think that's cool, too. Right. Like

35:26

you could have if your board has a screen and

35:28

great, then it uses it. If not, it just, you

35:30

know, it just doesn't. You know, I mean, I think

35:32

that that would be cool to see that you could

35:35

get in in the door with with a very minimal

35:37

hardware. And then if you want to add that screen,

35:39

if you want to add more LEDs and that sort

35:41

of thing. All right. Well,

35:43

that was it. If you enjoyed us

35:46

not talking about 3D printing for 10

35:48

seconds, that time is over because here

35:50

comes Thomas and Latterer. Can

35:52

a toy 3D printer be made

35:54

great? And a few videos ago,

35:56

he was looking at a $75.

36:00

3D printer, the EZ3D. As

36:02

he says, it's a toy 3D

36:04

printer. It's a pretty crappy 3D

36:06

printer, but it has some neat

36:09

design features. One of them

36:11

in particular is that the three movement

36:13

axes are identical to each other, and

36:15

they're just kind of stuck on to

36:18

each other to give it movement in

36:20

XYZ. That's kind of this device's most

36:23

obvious design feature, but it's also kind

36:25

of its Achilles heel, because none

36:27

of them are particularly stiff, and

36:29

in particular they're based on

36:31

kind of C-shaped sections of

36:34

molded plastic. And although

36:36

they're pretty stiff in two directions, they're

36:38

not very torsionally stable, so you can

36:40

twist them really easily. And this thing

36:42

is a wobblebot because of

36:45

it. And so that's the first thing

36:47

he is trying to fix in this

36:49

video by printing kind of a really

36:51

neat insert that goes inside the C-channel

36:54

and makes it torsionally stiffer. He concludes

36:56

that the motors are crap and adds

36:58

better motors to it. Not much

37:01

of a surprise there. And as

37:03

Jenny points out in the article,

37:05

this video is sponsored by a

37:08

company that makes motor controllers, so

37:10

he throws these BQ... What

37:12

is it? Big Tree Tech Clipper

37:14

Motor Driver and Controller Suite at

37:17

it. And that's kind

37:19

of funny to do. For those of

37:21

you who aren't clipper nerds, it moves

37:23

the motion control over to a bigger

37:25

computer, over to a full-fledged Linux computer

37:28

rather than a tiny little microcontroller. And

37:30

so it can do all sorts of

37:33

real-time processing things, like compensate for the

37:35

way the frame wiggles and stuff. And

37:37

so actually if there's anything that clipper

37:39

would be best for, it's kind of

37:42

a crappy little printer like this. Because,

37:44

you know, if the frame's wobbling but

37:46

you can compensate that out in software,

37:48

that's a winner. It's interesting to see

37:50

he actually gets incredibly fast speeds out

37:53

of this thing in the end by

37:55

stiffening it up and throwing good motors

37:57

at it. On the other hand...

38:00

It's a tiny little print bed,

38:02

and there is kind of the

38:04

square cube law where the smaller

38:06

your printer is, the easier it

38:08

is to make it stiffer. And

38:10

at this size, I think you

38:12

should be able to make a

38:15

printer that's really, really, really fast.

38:17

The size-speed relationship is taken super

38:19

advantage of by the 100 printer.

38:22

I'll throw the link for that in

38:24

the show notes, which is a mostly

38:27

3D printed frame. And you'd think 3D

38:29

printed frame, it's gonna wobble like

38:31

crazy. But again, it's printing on

38:34

such a small scale that it

38:36

can do outrageous speeds and accelerations.

38:39

And this is

38:41

a stunt printer. It's designed to

38:43

print a benchy, so a

38:45

small print as fast as it possibly

38:47

can, and everything else be damned. But

38:49

it's really kind of cool. And

38:52

if you wanna see how far you could

38:54

press this kind of make it stronger just

38:56

simply by making it smaller, I think this

38:58

is the way to go. This

39:00

is really interesting to me because if you kind

39:02

of wind the clock back, there was this feeling

39:05

that the $100 3D printer was

39:07

some goal that had to be hit

39:10

for mass market adoption, right? It

39:12

seemed like at the time, unless

39:15

3D printers could be as cheap as

39:17

2D paper printers, they'll never

39:19

be in everybody's home and they'll never be

39:22

this transformative technology. And obviously that never happened

39:24

for a lot of reasons, but I think

39:26

the cost of the printer ended up not

39:28

being nearly as much of a problem as

39:31

the fact that these are just not meant

39:33

for everybody's home. I think

39:35

that in the early buzzword days where everybody

39:37

will have a 3D printer and it's gonna

39:39

hyper-local manufacturing and all this stuff, you won't

39:41

have to wait for things to be shipped

39:43

to you. You'll just print them out overnight

39:46

and all the crazy hype that was surrounding

39:48

the printers. And it's interesting to see that

39:50

now we can do it. We

39:52

can make a sub $100 printer, but

39:55

nobody wants it because we

39:57

realized that that was never actually the goal.

40:00

and goose that we thought it was.

40:02

People are happy to pay, not a

40:04

whole lot more, maybe like $250. They're

40:07

happy to pay that, $250, $300

40:09

for a machine that is not

40:11

made entirely of plastic and can

40:13

function without these kind of systemic

40:15

modifications. So it's an interesting

40:17

kind of example of something that we waited

40:20

so long for and then in the end

40:22

didn't really want or need. It's one of

40:24

those things where like the anticipation is better

40:26

than having it, right? I just

40:29

bought a $100 3D printer and it's actually the

40:31

second $100 3D printer I bought and it's because

40:33

of mass production

40:37

and kind of cheap and cheesy mass

40:39

production that I was able to do

40:42

it. It's normally like you say a

40:44

$260 printer, but

40:46

they take returns and then

40:48

they sell their returns unchecked

40:50

to unsuspecting suckers for a

40:52

hundred bucks. Al Williams told

40:54

me to do this and I did it

40:56

anyway and it turned out to be

40:59

fantastic. I picked up a printer

41:01

that was unchecked, returned

41:03

to the manufacturer for a hundred bucks,

41:05

bolted it together, it worked straight out

41:07

of the box. My son is the

41:09

happiest son with a 3D printer in

41:12

the world and after watching

41:14

this go jealously for three, four months

41:16

now, I just ordered myself one last

41:18

week. No lie, $100 3D printer coming

41:21

to my door

41:23

and it's not even a piece

41:25

of crap. It's a one-year-old Creality,

41:28

right? It's a $260 printer,

41:30

but because I'm willing to take the

41:32

risk on it requiring possibly some work

41:34

on my part, a hundred bucks, no

41:37

problem. And it's like a hundred times

41:39

better than this $75 crappy printer with

41:43

any kind of work done to it. But then

41:45

again, I also agree with you and we're

41:47

at a point now where the

41:49

price pressure on 3D printers isn't

41:51

such a big deal. You can

41:53

get a totally reasonable 3D printer

41:55

for 200-300 bucks and I think

41:57

there's just not much incentive.

42:00

to push the price lower and I

42:02

think the horrible trade-offs you have to

42:04

make to push the price lower like

42:07

is evidenced here it's just not worth

42:09

doing and you shouldn't buy one. There

42:12

was a time it was it was

42:14

hype and buzz and all that where

42:16

you know everyone was breathlessly reporting on

42:18

the 3d printing it was gonna change

42:20

the world you know it was the

42:23

Bitcoin crypto blockchain

42:25

of its of its time for a while

42:27

right that is not the case for many

42:29

reasons and it now has become a tool

42:32

like any other right so now the

42:34

3d printer I think that the the

42:36

reality has more than kicked in and

42:38

if you want one you want a

42:40

good one and you're willing to spend

42:42

a couple hundred bucks and it's like

42:44

just like a drill press or you

42:46

know a table saw or something nobody's

42:49

chasing the $99 table

42:51

saw to put them in everybody's house

42:53

because the other day not everybody needs

42:55

table saw right you know it's so

42:57

it's it's made the transition from buzzword

43:00

and hype to practical tool and

43:02

the market has kind of found

43:05

the price people are comfortable with you know

43:07

of course if you could pay unless you

43:09

would but I think there's there's

43:11

an understanding that like there's too many too

43:13

many trade-offs and and the average person who

43:15

wants to be able to print stuff at

43:17

home is comfortable with paying you know two

43:20

to three hundred bucks and getting something that

43:22

works out of the box and and we've

43:24

sort of hit equilibrium now this last one has

43:26

nothing to do with a 3d printer I hope that you'll

43:28

forgive us it is fantastically

43:30

impressive accomplishment this is Baldur's

43:33

Gate 3 comes to the

43:35

TRS model 100 and that

43:37

is not

43:39

as exaggerated as you might

43:41

think this is a demake

43:44

of at least the beginning part of

43:46

Baldur's Gate 3 I mean it is

43:48

a TRS 80 right like you have

43:51

to have to give it some some

43:53

leeway this is created by Alex Bowen

43:56

and the project itself is

43:58

is really well documented and

44:00

it's all the sources out there should you

44:03

want to fork it. Alex

44:05

actually developed an engine that is

44:07

flexible enough you can load your

44:09

own levels and stuff

44:11

into it. And then kind of forked that

44:14

into the Baldur's Gate 3 DMake, which

44:17

is really cool instead of it making like

44:19

this monolithic thing. It kind of has now

44:21

set the stage for potentially other games to

44:23

use it for the hot TRS-80 Model 100

44:25

gaming scene. For

44:30

those in the audience who don't have a

44:32

TRS-80 Model 100, probably

44:34

roll back a little

44:37

bit. This is Tandy's

44:39

1983, I think,

44:42

foray into portable computing. I mean, it's

44:44

been called like the first laptop sometimes

44:46

and I think there is some debate

44:48

a little bit about who was first.

44:50

I think the not to get

44:53

too lost in the weeds. I think Tandy licensed

44:55

the design from a Japanese company or something that

44:57

was already out, but whatever. It's

44:59

a super early portable computer, one of the

45:01

very first. Certainly one of the

45:04

very first successful ones. And part of

45:06

that was that it came out of

45:08

the box with like a basic interpreter

45:10

and tools and stuff installed on it.

45:12

So it was easy to make your

45:14

own software and round the machine. Alex

45:17

actually did attempt to make

45:19

this game with the built-in

45:21

basic. If you see in the video, there's

45:23

a little bit of talk about that, but

45:26

it was just too limited to do

45:29

something of this scale mentions like

45:31

variable names can only have two

45:33

characters or something. So you very

45:35

quickly run out, you know, if you're trying to

45:37

make a game of this scale, you very quickly

45:40

run out of variable names when they can only

45:42

be two characters long. So the end

45:44

result had to switch it over to doing it

45:46

in assembly and there's all

45:48

kinds of crazy optimizations that had to

45:50

be made to pull this off. And

45:52

it's, you know, obviously it's ASCII art, to

45:56

do real graphics on a machine in this age

45:58

would be pushing it, but it looks really... impressive

46:00

with the ASCII world off to the left. And

46:05

then you have the text menus

46:07

and stuff on to the right.

46:09

And there's also a neat trick

46:11

where using Unicode characters in the

46:13

source code lets you get a

46:15

visual preview of what the game

46:17

will look like when it's running

46:20

on the hardware, because

46:22

the levels are made up of these,

46:24

basically, strings of characters. So you can

46:26

actually look at the strings of characters

46:28

in the source code and see what

46:30

the game would look like running on

46:32

it, because it's just printing out lines

46:34

of effectively text. There's a lot of

46:37

cool optimizations to make this even remotely

46:39

possible. And one of the ones I

46:41

really liked is there was no

46:43

way to put all the text and stuff.

46:46

This is an attempt to recreate a Baldur's Gate

46:49

3, which is a modern RPG. And so there's

46:51

a lot of text and story and stuff. And

46:53

there was no way to just fit all that

46:55

as is. So Alex came

46:57

up with this routine with a Python script

47:00

that ran through all the

47:02

text in the game and

47:04

identified repeating character patterns and

47:06

then mapped those to a

47:08

code that you could then piece

47:13

together sentences and words with

47:15

the code that corresponds to the

47:17

character, if that makes sense. So

47:21

instead of storing whole lines of

47:23

text, you'd be storing these strings

47:25

of digits, basically. It would

47:27

piece them together, which is a

47:29

really cool way to save a lot of

47:31

space, but it isn't computationally

47:34

complex or anything. It was relatively easy

47:36

just to look up these strings when

47:38

the text needs to get printed out.

47:41

So a lot of cool stuff about working on

47:44

extremely low-end hardware.

47:48

The fact that it runs on the real,

47:50

you could play it right now in an

47:52

emulator. But if you have

47:54

a Model 100 kicking around that you can run

47:56

this right on the real hardware is super

47:59

impressive. And I do actually

48:01

have a model 100 somewhere that

48:03

I'm very tempted to To

48:06

break out and try this If

48:09

anyone in the audience has one I'd love to I'd

48:12

love to hear about how it goes for you

48:14

And you know how far he got playing this

48:16

game All

48:21

right my first quick hack this week

48:23

from Nissan ICE pickup to Bev

48:26

with Nissan leaf heart is

48:28

the story of EV swap

48:30

conversions taking apart a normal

48:32

pickup truck and Reassembling

48:35

it and converting it into a

48:38

battery electric vehicle If you are the

48:40

kind of person who just clicks on

48:42

the video Don't do that here by

48:44

all means click on the first link

48:47

which goes into a long Forum

48:49

post about how this was

48:52

done That's where all the neat nitty-gritty

48:54

details are and that's where kind of

48:56

all the differences between Gas

48:59

car and an electric car are

49:01

hidden and it's of an incredibly

49:04

interesting look at Everything that's missing everything

49:06

that needed to be changed everything that

49:09

needed to be added in Taking

49:11

a crashed up leaf and making

49:13

it live again in a pickup

49:15

truck body next up unkulee Business

49:18

card challenge entry who do

49:20

you love this is his business card

49:22

for a Made

49:26

up doctor love divorce attorney

49:29

It's a galvanic skin sensor

49:31

love tester game And

49:33

he says he dreamt us up with

49:35

his wife and they had a good

49:38

time making it They've played it with

49:40

other couples who have either gotten into

49:42

fights or laughed themselves silly about it

49:44

so this is a lovely entry into

49:46

the business card challenge for doctor love

49:49

divorce attorney and A reminder that

49:51

it's running for another couple weeks if you've

49:53

got a business card project out there get

49:55

it on in And

49:58

last up AI kayak controller the

50:00

paddle show the way by Braden Sunwald.

50:02

This is the story of him building

50:05

the controller for an electric kayak. And

50:07

I think the electric kayak by itself

50:09

is really cool, but the idea that

50:12

you want to make it like an

50:14

electric bike, where you paddle with the

50:16

kayak paddle and it just assists you

50:19

on each stroke, seems like a lot

50:21

of fun. And so he's

50:23

got a little module that sticks on

50:25

the kayak paddle and it's got an

50:27

accelerometer in it. A lot of the

50:29

story here is about making it waterproof

50:31

and solid of course, because it's going

50:33

in the water. But the rest here

50:35

is about collecting data from the user

50:37

so that he can later figure out

50:39

how to best add some motor assist

50:41

to this. He gets a lot of

50:43

flack because he's going to use a

50:45

neural network for it. But I don't

50:47

think this is actually AI hype. I

50:49

think this is actually a totally legitimate

50:51

application of neural networks to figure

50:54

out how much motor impulse to

50:56

give based on accelerometer readings. Well,

50:58

my first quick hack is Donkey

51:01

Kong Bongos Ditch the GameCube Go

51:03

Mobile. You may but probably may

51:05

not be aware that in the

51:07

early 2000s, Nintendo released a bongo

51:09

for a few for their GameCube,

51:11

along with a couple rhythm games

51:13

that had you playing along in

51:16

front of your television. The

51:18

bongos have faded into

51:20

obscurity, probably not surprisingly. But

51:23

this particular hacker BL3i really

51:25

wanted to bring them

51:28

back to life and went through the

51:30

trouble of coming up with a add-on

51:33

that the bongos plug into and

51:35

the original bongos aren't modified in

51:37

any way. Like they are still

51:40

intact for bongo collectors out there.

51:42

Like it even still has the

51:45

same controller cord. This is just like a

51:47

box that clips onto it and

51:49

has an Arduino to interpret the

51:51

control signals coming from the bongos

51:53

because they looked like a regular

51:55

GameCube controller to the console. It

51:57

reads the control signals, plays, wave

52:00

samples off an SD card, depending on what

52:02

part of the bongos you hit, and

52:05

has a battery and all this stuff so

52:07

you can go mobile. It's really cool. I

52:10

would say almost like

52:12

a preservation of this little

52:14

known accessory while still keeping

52:17

it intact and avoiding that. The urge to

52:19

just gut it and put a Raspberry Pi

52:21

in it. Kudos

52:23

to keeping them in their original

52:25

form while still being able to

52:28

accomplish the goal of playing them

52:30

without the console. Next

52:32

up is Baffled the Normies

52:34

with this binary thermometer. This

52:36

is a really cool, simple project

52:39

from Clovis Fritzen. It

52:41

is just a little

52:44

DigiSpark ATtiny board, temperature

52:47

sensor, and six LEDs.

52:49

The temperature value is

52:52

displayed in binary on the LEDs.

52:54

We've seen binary clocks plenty of

52:56

times before, but it's a little

52:58

bit harder to decode that

53:00

in your head than the temperature. So if

53:03

you're looking to get started on showing

53:05

information in binary around the

53:08

house, it might be good to start

53:11

with a project like this where it's

53:13

a little bit easier to digest and

53:15

work your way up. Finally, OpenSCAD cranks

53:17

out parametric CNC clamps. I'm

53:20

not alone in my love of OpenSCAD.

53:22

I know Elliott will agree with me.

53:24

It is an awesome way to do

53:26

parametric designs and make something where you

53:28

can just plug in a couple of

53:30

values and have the 3D model

53:32

change when I haven't to literally

53:35

redesign the model. It lends

53:37

itself to projects like this where

53:39

you can have a

53:42

base clamp design and just plug

53:44

in length and the width

53:46

and the height and the angle and

53:48

all that kind of stuff and get

53:50

a 3D file to print out. OSSTAT

53:53

released this script

53:55

that you can run locally on

53:57

OpenSCAD, but it's also... compatible

54:00

with Makerworld's online customizer, which is cool. I didn't

54:02

actually know they had kind of dusted that off.

54:04

That was like an old thing a verse thing

54:07

that I don't even know if it still works,

54:09

but you'll be able to, you know, create a custom

54:11

design right in the browser and download

54:14

an SCL that's fit for printing. You

54:16

know, some people would say, Hey, I

54:18

don't know that I want to hold

54:20

down my CNC work piece with 3d

54:22

printed clamps. But to that, I would

54:24

say, you know, they're 3d printed clamps.

54:26

You can just print more. Like if

54:28

one or two is a little sketchy,

54:30

I'm sure a dozen will, will be able

54:32

to get there. All

54:40

right. That brings us to our

54:42

campus articles. These are long form

54:44

pieces written by our fantastic Hackaday

54:47

writing staff. This week I picked

54:49

Dan Maloney's scrapping the local loop

54:51

by the numbers. And this is

54:53

started off as a thought experiment.

54:56

If we're switching all of our

54:58

telephone networks to fiber optic, what's

55:00

going to happen with all of

55:02

this buried copper with the prices

55:05

of copper going through the roof?

55:07

Maybe it's worth digging that up.

55:09

Or is it just too expensive to

55:11

do so? Should we leave it in

55:13

the ground? And so Dan's trying to

55:16

ballpark that here and comes up with

55:18

about 800,000 metric tons

55:20

of copper in the telephone, whatever

55:22

it is, the public switch telephone

55:25

network. And again, that's just amazing.

55:27

If you think about that in

55:29

terms of, you know, it's stretched

55:31

pretty thin in all those wires,

55:33

but then again, think about a

55:35

country the size of the U.S.

55:38

There's a wire that goes to everybody's

55:40

house. It's insane to think of the size

55:42

of the system. So you, you know, so

55:45

you add all that copper up and it

55:47

ends up being at today's rates about $7

55:49

billion worth of copper. And

55:52

now the question is, is that a lot? Is

55:55

that a little? It's spread pretty thin if you

55:57

think about it. And, uh, you know, that's a

55:59

lot. of digging to get it up.

56:01

So Dan Ballparks, what else you could do

56:04

with this copper wire, right? Say you took

56:06

all this wire and you melted it down,

56:08

reformed it into thicker wires, thinner wires, whatever.

56:10

What could you do with it? And so

56:12

he starts with, you know, an electric vehicle

56:15

has about 60 kilograms of

56:17

copper in its windings. If you

56:19

pulled all of the telephone network

56:21

up, you'd be able to build

56:23

13 million cars. That's kind

56:25

of cool. I mean, just the copper

56:27

for the windings on 13 million cars,

56:29

but 13 million cars is pretty good,

56:32

except in 2021, people globally bought

56:36

80 million cars, you know. So

56:38

if you did this one time, dig up

56:41

all that copper, it wouldn't even really cover

56:43

the number of cars produced in one year,

56:45

much less in forever. So he tries to

56:47

think about it in a different way, which

56:49

is to wind it up

56:52

into generators and use it in wind

56:54

farms. And there he kind of gets

56:56

a little bit of a bigger result.

56:58

So if you wound it up

57:01

into power generators, you could probably build 267,000

57:03

megawatts of online wind power, which is pretty

57:10

cool. And so when you compare that

57:12

number to how much it would take

57:14

to like completely decarbonize the world's economy

57:16

using wind power alone, it ends up

57:18

being about 0.05 percent of the amount

57:23

you'd need. So again, drop in the

57:25

bucket. And so that's what's weird here

57:27

is that somehow $7 billion

57:31

worth of copper ends up on a

57:33

global scale or on a national scale,

57:35

even just not being that much. And

57:37

it's one of these weird kind

57:40

of paradoxes. The scrap price

57:42

of the metal might be $7

57:44

billion, but if it costs $10 billion

57:46

to get it out of the ground, you've not

57:49

exactly made yourself a profit. And

57:52

I imagine you could do it for less

57:54

than $10 billion, but still, it would be a ridiculous

57:57

effort to pull it all out. Like

58:00

I said earlier, Dan always kind

58:02

of brings the receipts for these

58:05

technologies that are going on

58:07

around you and the copper

58:09

network that is strung

58:11

above and below us, is a

58:13

great example because

58:16

he describes it as one of the contenders

58:19

for the largest machine ever built, but how

58:21

much of us really think about the copper

58:23

lines that we probably don't use anymore because

58:25

we now have fiber optic internet and cell

58:28

phones and it's just a

58:30

thing that's sitting up there,

58:33

but still has that value because of

58:35

the raw material. So it is kind

58:37

of a unique, usually when a

58:39

technology kind of goes to the wayside, it's

58:41

just like, that's it because it's been

58:43

replaced by something else, but this one has a

58:46

material value that kind of makes it unique. And

58:48

I appreciate that he did do it by the

58:50

numbers, like the article says, and

58:52

kind of breaks down how many things you

58:54

could do and what the reality of it

58:56

is, we need a lot of copper. Like

58:59

we need a lot, a lot of copper

59:02

and even if you pull, even

59:04

if you can snap your fingers and get everything out

59:06

of the ground and off the poles and you had

59:08

it in this big pile for

59:10

you, that's nothing compared to what it

59:13

would really take to

59:15

get us where we need to be in

59:17

terms of electrification of everything. It's

59:19

kind of a sobering thought that, you know,

59:21

all that, like I said, all that effort

59:24

and all the technology and the labor,

59:26

the sweat equity to put all that

59:28

stuff out there is still nowhere

59:30

near what we would need to get where

59:32

we're trying to go. The

59:34

amount of copper we're mining annually

59:37

now makes this small amount that's

59:39

actually locked up in the telephone

59:41

network not look like all that

59:44

much. And you know,

59:46

Dan's baseline here is how much

59:48

copper do we need to completely

59:50

electrify the economy and that is

59:52

daunting and terrifying. But

59:54

then if you look at this as a

59:56

fraction of, you know, kind of annual copper

59:59

mining in copper production, it ends up not

1:00:01

being all that much. And so maybe it

1:00:03

doesn't make sense to pull it up. I

1:00:05

don't know. Dan's conclusion is,

1:00:07

you know, it's money sitting there in

1:00:10

the ground and it probably will eventually

1:00:12

be worth it to dig it all

1:00:14

up. And he sent

1:00:16

a link out that where it points

1:00:18

out that the mean time to starting

1:00:20

up a copper mine is about 18

1:00:23

years. And so

1:00:25

if you imagine we had a

1:00:27

demand spike five years ago, 10

1:00:29

years ago, somewhere in the world,

1:00:31

there are copper mines ramping up

1:00:34

to increase production to, you know,

1:00:36

offset future demands of electric motors

1:00:38

and whatever. But they're not

1:00:40

online yet and aren't going to be online for

1:00:42

another 10, 15 years? Question

1:00:45

mark. All right. Well,

1:00:47

my pick displays, we love hacking DSI

1:00:49

from Aria. This

1:00:52

is, well, it's an

1:00:55

article about hacking DSI displays. But

1:00:57

if you haven't poked around inside

1:01:00

of, you know, a modern smartphone

1:01:03

or tablet, you might not realize that they

1:01:06

are almost all using this

1:01:08

technology. There is a little bit

1:01:10

of like an embedded display

1:01:12

port, but DSI is

1:01:14

kind of like the standard for

1:01:16

little high res screens

1:01:19

and consumer stuff and

1:01:21

learning to master that, you know,

1:01:23

in the maker and the hacker

1:01:25

community opens up an incredible world

1:01:27

of displays on the

1:01:30

second hand or, you know, replacement

1:01:32

market that are dirt cheap thanks to

1:01:34

the economies of scale. I mean, even

1:01:36

look at like the official Raspberry Pi

1:01:38

display, they went like 70 bucks for

1:01:40

this thing and it's I don't even

1:01:42

think it's 720. It's like 800 by

1:01:44

400, something ridiculous. And

1:01:49

that's just kind of the price

1:01:51

gouging that we suffer through.

1:01:53

But you know, Aria makes the point that

1:01:55

display used on the Nexus 7 tablet, which

1:01:57

is fairly old at this point. it's

1:02:00

still a 1920 by 1200 display. You

1:02:03

can get them for like 20 bucks. The trick

1:02:05

is knowing how to talk to them.

1:02:07

And that's where these kinds of efforts

1:02:09

come in that she describes in the

1:02:11

article, breaking down

1:02:13

how the communication works and these

1:02:16

efforts from different hackers

1:02:19

and hardware types to kind of crack

1:02:21

the code on a lot of these

1:02:23

things. You know, the protocol itself is

1:02:26

one thing, how the device

1:02:28

talks to the screen, but you also

1:02:30

need to know like the secret handshake,

1:02:33

for lack of a better

1:02:35

word, like the initialization routines

1:02:37

that are display dependent and

1:02:39

sniffing that does require a little bit

1:02:42

more than your $10 logic analyzer, right? Like

1:02:46

there's a little bit more that

1:02:48

goes into it, but it is

1:02:50

still doable on the hobbyist level

1:02:52

and we're saying it happened. So,

1:02:54

you know, being able to unlock

1:02:56

these displays and use them in

1:02:58

our own devices, whether it's through

1:03:00

like a little adapter board or

1:03:02

you're actually implement, you know, DSI

1:03:04

right on your own device is

1:03:06

very, very compelling. And it's only

1:03:08

gonna get better as more of

1:03:11

these screens are kind of reverse

1:03:13

engineered. And listen,

1:03:15

there's no shortage of tiny

1:03:17

high resolution screens coming out for

1:03:20

the foreseeable future, right? Everything from

1:03:23

your watch to your thermostat, the

1:03:26

billions of phones that get cranked out will

1:03:28

have this kind of technology in it. So,

1:03:30

I mean, it's really a limitless

1:03:32

playground for us to

1:03:35

pull these displays out and

1:03:37

use them for our own purposes. So half

1:03:40

the article is that and what's gone into

1:03:42

that and a little bit about, it's not

1:03:44

super deep dive into the protocol, but it

1:03:46

gives you the Reader's Digest

1:03:48

version, for lack of a

1:03:50

better term. And then Aria goes into,

1:03:52

you know, some interesting examples that

1:03:55

we've seen whether it

1:03:57

was written up through Hackaday or just, you know, in the community

1:03:59

of people. taking these DSi displays

1:04:01

and doing cool stuff with them

1:04:04

and reverse engineering them. And, you know,

1:04:06

we've got stuff like Mike Harrison going

1:04:09

back to 2013, trying

1:04:12

to hack the iPod nano screens. And that

1:04:14

kind of gives you an idea too of

1:04:16

how long these things have been out there. Like

1:04:19

this isn't some recent innovation. I mean, devices have

1:04:21

been shipping with these things for these displays

1:04:23

for over a decade now. So give you

1:04:25

an idea how many are out there waiting

1:04:27

to be utilized. I'll tell you just

1:04:29

a really cool article about this

1:04:31

technology and how it's becoming

1:04:33

more accessible to hobbyists, which

1:04:36

is always, you know,

1:04:38

always a win in my book. Yeah,

1:04:41

I think you got it right. This

1:04:43

is the dominant display technology and it's

1:04:46

one that we should get working on.

1:04:48

It's unfortunately, as Aria points out and

1:04:50

you mentioned, it's MIPI,

1:04:52

it's the M-I-P-I Alliance,

1:04:55

D-S-I, whatever it is,

1:04:57

display serial interface or something. And MIPI

1:05:00

is super closed. You can get specs

1:05:02

for this probably if you have a

1:05:04

million dollars and are willing to sign

1:05:06

an NDA. But if you're me, you

1:05:09

have to dig around into the shadier

1:05:11

corners of the internet to find the

1:05:13

relevant PDFs, which shouldn't

1:05:16

stop you. The spec isn't

1:05:18

exactly open and confounding that,

1:05:20

of course, all the different

1:05:22

manufacturers have different negotiation, initialization,

1:05:25

handshake sequences. And so what you get

1:05:27

with people like Mike Harrison and Wen

1:05:29

Ting Zhang, who did some really cool

1:05:32

work on these, is basically you have

1:05:34

to take the display you're interested in,

1:05:36

look at it in the device it's

1:05:39

installed in, and then sniff the lines

1:05:41

and see what you can get. That's

1:05:43

not trivial because at least when the

1:05:46

video data starts flowing, it's gigabytes

1:05:48

per second on four different lanes

1:05:50

or something. And so probably need

1:05:52

a scope. It probably needs to

1:05:54

be a fast scope. And you

1:05:56

probably need to get clever with

1:05:58

your triggering sequence. to begin to

1:06:01

even get a feel for what's going

1:06:03

on here. And I think that's where

1:06:05

this becomes challenging. And the other

1:06:07

method Aria suggests, and I really like

1:06:09

this one, is you find

1:06:12

a screen for which there's already Linux

1:06:14

support, you've already got the device driver

1:06:16

written, and it's open source. And so

1:06:18

if you need to find out what

1:06:20

the funny initialization sequences are, it's probably

1:06:22

in the Linux driver source code. So

1:06:25

just go look it up and you

1:06:27

can find it out. And that's a

1:06:29

lot easier than having to do the

1:06:31

reverse engineering yourself. Of course,

1:06:33

this means that for every cell phone

1:06:35

out there, somebody's gonna have to do

1:06:38

it at least once. But short of

1:06:40

open documentation coming from every cell phone

1:06:42

manufacturer, I think that's the world we're living

1:06:44

in. I do like her

1:06:46

kind of blueprint here for how to

1:06:48

get started on this. Even though it's

1:06:50

kind of hard mode right now, I

1:06:53

think some people in our audience and in

1:06:55

our community are hard mode and are gonna

1:06:57

tackle this. And the

1:07:00

benefits of one person tackling a particular

1:07:02

screen if it's shared, spread out to

1:07:04

everybody else. So I don't think this

1:07:06

is an impossible problem. And like

1:07:09

you said, and like Arya said, I

1:07:11

think the benefits of kind of cracking

1:07:13

the DSI nut are so huge that

1:07:15

it's something that would be worth putting

1:07:18

the time into. You know, it's gonna

1:07:20

take a lot of leg

1:07:22

work realistically. I mean, short

1:07:24

of somebody leaking these documents out,

1:07:27

hint, hint, if

1:07:30

you're in a position to, you know, maybe

1:07:32

release some of this info for

1:07:35

the betterment of the hardware hacking community, please

1:07:37

feel free to do so. But short

1:07:39

of that, it's just gonna take a lot

1:07:42

of research and documentation and I don't think

1:07:44

she mentions it, but I'm sure there's gotta

1:07:46

be some wiki out there that's

1:07:48

building up a lot of this info too

1:07:50

so that people can contribute to it. Or

1:07:54

maybe just the best thing is to

1:07:56

get it working in mainline Linux, right?

1:07:58

Because that's about as visible. as

1:08:00

an open source compendium of drivers as

1:08:02

the world has ever seen. So if

1:08:04

you get it working in there, you

1:08:06

know, that's the example other people can

1:08:08

work from. Right. That sounds good to

1:08:10

me. I like it. Store

1:08:13

the information in the code. All

1:08:17

right. That's the end of this week's

1:08:19

Hackaday podcast. Thanks very much for listening.

1:08:21

If you'd like to follow the links

1:08:23

or leave us comments, head on over

1:08:26

to hackaday.com/podcast. And if you see anything

1:08:28

cool or do anything cool, write us

1:08:30

tips at hackaday.com. And until next week,

1:08:33

keep on hacking. Oh, yeah,

1:08:35

that's what it feels like. Oh,

1:08:40

that is the sound of Tom Nardi with

1:08:42

a head cold. I'm not sure it's where

1:08:44

you're going with it. I'm not either. I'd

1:08:47

like to help, but I signal

1:08:49

processing. I thought you were looking for something

1:08:52

a little more specific than that. Still

1:08:54

would love to find that. I can't. I

1:08:56

can't have made it up, but

1:08:58

I guess I could. Don't get me

1:09:00

started.