Hackaday Newsletter 0x9E

When good enough actually is! [HACKADAY]() You’ve Probably Never Considered Taking an Airship To Orbit [Read Article Now»]( About Right By [Elliot Williams]( I really enjoyed reading Anne Ogborn’s piece on [making simple DIY measurement devices for physical quantities]( like force, power, and torque. It is full of food for thought, if you’re building something small with motors and need to figure out how to spec them out. Aside from a few good examples, what I really took home from this piece is how easy it can be to take approximate measurements. Take the push stick, which is a spring-loaded plunger in a transparent barrel. You use it to measure force by, well, squeezing the spring and reading off how far it deflects. That’s obvious, but the real trick is in calibration by pushing it into a weighing scale and marking divisions on the barrel. That quickly and easily turns “it’s pressing this hard” into an actual numerical force measurement. The accuracy and precision of the push stick are limited by the quality of your scale and the fineness of the pen tip that you use to mark the barrel. But when you’re just looking to choose among two servo motors, this kind of seat-of-the-pants measure is more than enough to buy the right part. Almost any actual measurement is better than a wild-ass guess, so don’t hold yourself to outrageous standards or think that improvised quantitative measurement devices aren’t going to get the job done. Al Williams quoted a teacher of his as saying that the soul of metrology is “taking something you know and using it to find something you don’t know”, and that sums up this piece nicely. But it’s also almost a hacker manifesto: “take something you can do and use it to do something that you can’t (yet)”. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Hackaday Supercon 2024 Call for Participation: We Want You!]( By [Elliot Williams]( Supercon is on for 2024! What do you want to talk about? [Read more »]( [Supercon 2023: Building The Ultimate Apple IIe, Decades Later]( By [Lewin Day]( Follow James down the rabbit hole as he builds his own Apple IIe, from scratch. [Read more »]( [The Great Green Wall: Africa’s Ambitious Attempt To Fight Desertification]( By [Lewin Day]( If you want terraforming, here's a place to start. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast Episode 271: Audio Delay in a Hose, Ribbon Cable Repair, and DIY Hacker Metrology]( By [Hackaday Editors]() What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [The Perfect Desktop Kit For Experimenting With Self Driving Cars]( [Adaptive Chef’s Knife Provides Better Leverage]( [Non-Split-Flap Clock Does It With Fewer Flaps]( [Running Four Brushless Motors With A Single Pi Pico]( [Betta Aims to Bring Wire EDM to the Desktop]( [Autochrome For The 2020s]( [Hackaday]() NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA