Updates from the enigmatic [NODE] are unfortunately few and far between these days. In fact his latest post is only the second time we’ve heard from the hacker in 2021. But as we’ve come to expect from his white-on-sorta-black releases, it certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Just in time to ring in whatever holiday you may celebrate, [NODE] has unveiled The Pinouts Book. A project he’s been working on for some time now with colleague [Baptiste], the free PDF download contains over 300 pages of high-contrast hardware diagrams and their respective pinouts. It’s about as straightforward as you can get, beyond the dedication page in the beginning, there’s not a word of fluff in the entire document. This is a work of hacker minimalism at its best, and we’re all about it.

From audio/video connectors all the way to development boards and single-board computers, The Pinouts Book sticks to the same format of a diagram and accompanying chart, making it exceptionally easy to find what you’re looking for. If you need more information than this streamlined layout can provide, each entry includes a link to a dedicated page on the book’s companion website. This will redirect you to supplemental data such as the manufacturer’s website, the part’s full datasheet, etc.

According to [NODE], the original plan for the Creative Commons BY-SA licensed work was to release it as a physical book, but the project ballooned up to such a scale that they realized it would be much easier to navigate and use as a digital document. While we don’t disagree, a physical release would certainly look lovely on our bookshelf. In the meantime, those who want to support the effort financially can purchase shirts emblazoned with diagrams pulled straight from the book’s pages.

We’ve long believed that a large-format electronic paper device would be an ideal gadget for the hacker’s workbench, as it allows for browsing through schematics and datasheets with a minimum of eye strain. Now we can also add a copy of The Pinouts Book to the list of things we’d install on our hacker-friendly e-ink compendium.

Thanks to [karnathe] on the Hackaday Discord server for tipping us off to this one.

Ever wondered what, exactly, goes into creating a technical book? If you’d like to know the steps that bring a book from idea to publication, [Sara Robinson] tells all about it as she explains what went into co-authoring O’Reilly’s Machine Learning Design Patterns.

Her post was written in 2020, but don’t let that worry you, because her writeup isn’t about the book itself so much as it is about the whole book-writing process, and her experiences in going through it. (By the way, every O’Reilly book has a distinctive animal on the cover, and we learned from [Sara] that choosing the cover animal is a slightly mysterious process, and is not done by the authors.)

It turns out that there are quite a few steps that need to happen — like proposals and approvals — before the real writing even starts. The book writing itself is a process, and like most processes to which one is new, things start out slow and inefficient before they improve.

[Sara] also talks a bit about burnout, and her advice on dealing with it is as insightful as it is practical: begin by communicating honestly how you are feeling to the people involved.

Over the years I’ve learned that people will very rarely guess how you’re feeling and it’s almost always better to tell them […] I decided to tell my co-authors and my manager that I was burnt out. This went better than expected.

There is a lot of code in the book, and it has its own associated GitHub repository should you wish to check some of it out.

By the way, [Sara] celebrated publication by making a custom cake, which you can see near the bottom of her blog post. This comes as no surprise seeing as she has previously managed to combine machine learning with her love of making cakes!

If we knew how much math goes into writing a video game, we might have paid more attention in math class. If you need a refresher, [Fletcher Dunn] and [Ian Parbery] have their book “3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development” available free online. The book was originally a paper book from 2011 with a 2002 first edition but those are out of print now. However, math is math, so regardless of the age of the book, it is worth a look. For now, the online version is a bunch of web pages, but we hear a PDF or E-reader version is forthcoming.

There’s quite a bit of discussion about vectors, matrices, linear transformations, and 3D graphics. The last part of the book covers calculus, kinematics, and parametric curves. Some of these topics will be of interest even if you don’t care about graphics but do want to learn some math with practical examples.

The writing in this book is more accessible than in your standard math class. You still probably need a little basic math background to tackle the topic, especially algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. There isn’t much about specific programming here, it is all about the math.

We miss real books. But it is great to be able to just make a few clicks and read about just about any topic. If your math interests are more binary, check this out. If math isn’t your thing, maybe you’d rather read about software defined radio.

We always like to call out a commercial success stemming from projects that got their start on Hackaday.io, and so we’re proud to announce the release of MAKE: Calculus by Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron, a book that takes a decidedly different approach to teaching calculus than traditional courses. Geared to makers and hackers, who generally tend to have a visual style of learning, the book makes heavy use of 3D-printed models to illustrate the relationships between functions. The project started five years ago as a 2017 Hackaday Prize entry, and resulted in a talk at the 2019 Supercon. Their book is now available for preorder, and might be a great way to reacquaint themselves with calc, or perhaps even to learn it for the first time.

So what were you doing at 11:15 UTC on Friday, July 8? Whatever it was, chances are excellent that you were doing it under at least partial sunlight. That’s because at that moment, an estimated 99% of the world’s 8 billion or so people are somewhere between dawn and dusk. A glimpse at the day-night map for that moment shows what happened — with the Sun directly above northern Niger, the only populous continent (sorry, Antarctica) in the dark is Australia. The curve of the terminator almost exactly matches the outline of the other continents, from Japan where the Sun was just setting to the west coasts of the Americas, where it was just coming up. This bit of trivia is almost certainly of zero practical use to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less cool or worth thinking about.

It seems like we might need to talk about RadioShack. Depending on how old you are, you’ll either recall a Radio Shack (notice the space) which was a one-stop shop for everything from rebadged stereo gear to individual resistors, or later as the camel-cased place where your parents bought their cell phones. We’ve been tracking the storied retailer’s downward spiral since at least 2011, including a few head-fakes that seemed to promise its return to brick-and-mortar or at least as an online entity. But now were hear that RadioShack has transmogrified itself yet again, this time into a mean-tweeting crypto exchange. Somewhere along the way, Retail Ecommerce Ventures, the private equity firm that bought RadioShack in 2020 along with such dying retailers as Pier 1 Imports and Modell’s Sports, launched crypto exchange RadioShack Swap, and started blasting out some pretty raunchy tweets for some reason. It’s… really weird.

If you’re looking for a palate cleanser after that, you could do worse than listening to the dulcet tones of WWV, the Colorado-based “all time, all the time” radio station. WWV has been on the air pretty much since there’s been air to be on, transmitting time signals from their atomic clocks. Trouble is, their signals are on the shortwave and HF bands, so unless you’ve got a radio to receive them, you’re out of luck. Or are you? Turns out that if all you’re interested in is the sounds of WWV, there’s an app for that. The WWV Simulator plays the unique combinations of tones, clicks, and voice announcements that WWV listeners have come to love. It’s not clear whether the simulation includes WWV’s digital time codes; we’d guess no, but it should be easy enough to figure out.

And finally, if you’ve never seen the work of a beaver up close, consider yourself somewhat deficient in your engineering education. What these fur-bearing critters can accomplish in a single night or work is beyond belief, if sometimes beyond the pale, as their infrastructure projects have the capacity to flood out human structures. And so some clever social engineering by their human neighbors has been required to relocate them, as this gem with footage from 1948 shows. A passel of pesky beavers caught by the Idaho Fish and Game Department was relocated by dropping them from airplanes. Unlike fish-bombing, beavers require a gentler landing, so the Fish and Game people came up with a clever box that keeps each animal contained during its ride to the ground on surplus WWII parachutes. The box opens on touchdown and out pops the critter, no doubt confused by his new surroundings and the wicked strange thing that just happened to him.

Looks like there’s trouble out at L2, where the James Webb Space Telescope suffered a mechanical anomaly back in August. The issue, which was just announced this week, involves only one of the six imaging instruments at the heart of the space observatory, known as MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument. MIRI is the instrument on Webb that needs the coldest temperatures to work correctly, down to six Kelvins — we’ve talked about the cryocooler needed to do this in some detail. The problem has to do with unexpectedly high friction during the rotation of a wheel holding different diffraction gratings. These gratings are rotated into the optical path for different measurements, but apparently the motor started drawing excessive current during its move, and was shut down. NASA says that this only affects one of the four observation modes of MIRI, and the rest of the instruments are just fine at this time. So they’ve got some troubleshooting to do before Webb returns to a full program of scientific observations.

There’s an old saying that, “To err is human, but to really screw things up takes a computer.” But in Russia, to really screw things up it takes a computer and a human with a really poor grasp on just how delicately balanced most infrastructure systems are. The story comes from Moscow, where someone allegedly spoofed a massive number of fake orders for taxi rides (story in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well) through the aggregator Yandex.Taxi on the morning of September 1. The taxi drivers all dutifully converged on the designated spot, but instead of finding their fares, they just found a bunch of other taxis milling about and mucking up traffic. Yandex reports it has already added protection against such attacks to its algorithm, so there’s that at least. It’s all fun and games until someone causes a traffic jam.

It may be hard for the normies out there to imagine a coffee table book of electronic components, but if you’ve followed along here much, you’ll no doubt have seen some of the beautiful cross-sections that Eric Schlaepfer, aka TubeTime, has come up with. Eric has teamed up with Windell Oskay from the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog and created “Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components.” You’ll definitely want to check out the first chapter, which is available as a PDF for download. Bunnie also did a glowing review, which you’ll want to check out at least for the coupon code — Christmas is coming, after all. Windell and Eric talked about the book on the Embedded.fm podcast too, if you’d rather hear them talk about the book.

We’ve all likely heard the horror stories of 3D printers catching fire in the middle of the night, and while the relative risk is probably small — it’s definitely non-zero. So a little prudence is probably indicated, which for most of us has some practical limitations. It’s just not easy to organize your day around babysitting a print, especially one that goes 24 hours or more. Utilities like OctoPrint can help, but at the end of the day, if you’re minutes away when seconds count, all a camera is going to do is document the destruction. But here’s an idea that might actually do something about a fire. It uses a product we’d never seen before, which is an automatic fire extinguisher for car interiors. They apparently self-activate above a preset temperature, spewing out some sort of dry chemical to put out the fire. We’ve got our doubts about how well this would work in a car, but inside a 3D printer enclosure, it might actually work. If anyone has experience with these things, sound off in the comments.

And finally, if like us you’re always feeling behind the curve on understanding quantum mechanics, you could be in the market for our friend Jeroen Vleggaar’s latest video on quantum fields. It’s pretty clever — he uses his recent bathroom remodeling project as a launching board for the discussion, which honestly we only got about halfway through before zoning out. That’s a consistent problem for us when dipping a toe into the quantum pool, and honestly getting that far is doing better than average. So hats off to Jeroen for attempting to explain things, and for the sweet bathroom upgrade. Oh, and on a related note, Sabine Hossenfelder just dropped a video on the “Nine Levels of Nothing,” which you might want to check out once your mind is in the proper quantum state.

Over the years, I’ve been curious to dig deeper into the world of the manufacturing in China. But what I’ve found is that Western anecdotes often felt surface-level, distanced, literally and figuratively from the people living there. Like many hackers in the west, the allure of low-volume custom PCBs and mechanical prototypes has me enchanted. But the appeal of these places for their low costs and quick turnarounds makes me wonder: how is this possible? So I’m left wondering: who are the people and the forces at play that, combined, make the gears turn?

Enter Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, by Silvia Lindtner. Published in 2020, this book is the hallmark of ten years of research, five of which the author spent in Shenzhen recording field notes, conducting interviews, and participating in the startup and prototyping scene that the city offers.

This book digs deep into the forces at play, unraveling threads between politics, culture, and ripe circumstances to position China as a rising figure in global manufacturing. This book is a must-read for the manufacturing history we just lived through in the last decade and the intermingling relationship of the maker movement between the west and east.

From Copy to Prototype

Lindtner does a spectacular job detailing why Chinese manufacturers will readily duplicate and resell existing designs. The answer is multi-faceted but involves, in part, a culturally distinct approach to designs. Duplication offers a means of reverse engineering, a way of understanding how something works. In fact, a number of designs known as gongban (pg 94) regularly circulate openly across factories as templates. The consequence is not only the means of manufacturing something akin to the original, but a way of producing original designs too via customizations that can freely run wild. Lindtner’s punchline in all of this is that the copy is essentially the prototype.

Of course, bootstrapping manufacturing pipelines for existing products does have the consequence of building a Western perception of Chinese manufacturing as a sort of copycat. Lindtner engages with this idea as well, noting how some Western maker labels devote extra work to qualify their means of production in China as genuine (think Arduino “Genuino”) while others emerging directly from China like Seeed Studio have had to push through this perception to break into Western markets.

With gongban, manufacturing in China has developed under circumstances where unlicensed sharing is the norm. In a way, this culturally distinct approach challenges the Western style of binding designs to terms set by the creator. It’s almost as if the west were to operate with permissive open source licenses being the default, and it begs the question: what kinds of innovation we would see if this kind of relationship to designs existed in the west?

The Politics at Play

None of this manufacturing growth has happened in a vacuum. It turns out that a collection of forces loosely motivate this sort of rapid manufacturing development in China.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somewhat adopted the promise of the maker movement and used it, in part, to spur economic growth by creating a strong connection between making and entrepreneurship. Here, starting off as maker puts you on a path towards happiness by ultimately starting your own business. It’s no coincidence that the west now regularly sees Shenzhen as the “Silicon Valley of Hardware.” Both careful branding and financial investments via recognizing Shenzhen as a “Special Economic Zone” have made this the case.

On the other hand, the capacity to manufacture electronics cheaply has also brought in business from the west. Lindtner notes a number of Western articles comparing manufacturing in China as “going back in time,” and she ties this frontier-like perception to other scholarship that digs into the aftermath of Western colonialism. Overall, the politics between west and east are vastly complicated, and this section of the book makes for an eye-opening read.

And Much More

This article is only teasing you with a few highlights. Fret not, Dear Reader, with just over 220 pages and a thick bibliography to sink your teeth into, there’s plenty left to walk through. If you’ve ever been curious to step into the world of manufacturing in China, this book is a must-read. Give yourself a few afternoons, and let the details of prototyping in China draw you in.

For those who read often, e-readers are a great niche device that can help prevent eye fatigue with their e-ink displays especially when compared to a backlit display like a tablet or smartphone, all while taking up minimal space unlike a stack of real books. But for all their perks, there are still plenty of reasons to maintain a library of bound paper volumes. For those who have turned back to books or whose e-readers aren’t getting the attention they once did, there are plenty of things to do with them like this e-book picture frame.

The device started life as a PocketBook Basic Touch, or PocketBook 624, a fairly basic e-reader from 2014, but at its core is a decent ARM chip that can do many more things than display text. It also shipped running a version of Linux, which made it fairly easy to get a shell and start probing around. Unlike modern smart phones this e-reader seems to be fairly open and able to run some custom software, and as a result there are already some C++ programs available for these devices. Armed with some example programs, [Peter] was able to write a piece of custom software that displays images from an on-board directory and mounted the new picture display using an old book.

There were a number of options for this specific device that [Peter] explored that didn’t pan out well, like downloading images from the internet to display instead of images on the device, but in the end he went with a simpler setup to avoid feature creep and get his project up and running for “#inktober”, a fediverse-oriented drawing challenge that happened last month. While not strictly in line with a daily piece of hand-drawn artwork, the project still follows the spirit of the event. And, for those with more locked-down e-readers there’s some hope of unlocking the full functionality of older models with this FOSS operating system.