Do you feel nostalgia for a childhood novelty toy that had potential but ultimately fell short of its promise? Do you now have the skills to go make a better version of that toy to satisfy your long-held craving? [ExpensivePlasticCrap] does and has set off on a mission to make a better jumping bean.

Jumping beans, the phenomenon on which the novelty of [ExpensivePlasticCrap]’s childhood is based, are technically not beans, and their movement is arguably not a jump — a small hop at best. The trick is that the each not-a-bean has become the home to moth larvae that twitches and rolls on the ground as the larvae thrash about, trying to move their protective shells out of the hot sun.

The novelty bean was a small plastic pill-like capsule with a ball bearing inside what would cause the “bean” to move in unexpected ways as it rolled around. [ExpensivePlasticCrap]’s goal is to make a jumping bean that lives up to its name.

Various solenoids and motors were considered for the motion component of this new and improved bean. Ultimately, it was a small sealed vibrating motor that would be selected to move the bean without getting tangled in what was to become a compact bundle of components.

An ATtiny microcontroller won out over discrete components for the job of switching the motor on and off (once per second), for ease of implementation. Add this along with a MOSFET, battery and charging board for power into a plastic capsule, and the 1 Hz jumping bean was complete.

[ExpensivePlasticCrap] offers some thoughts on how to get more jump out of the design by reducing the weight of the build and giving it a more powerful source of motion.

If insect-inspired motion gets you jumping, check out this jumping robot roach and these tiny RoboBees.

hackaday.com/2025/07/17/2025-o…

On this date in 1975, a Soviet and an American shook hands. Even for the time period, this wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened approximately 220 kilometers (136 miles) over the surface of the Earth.
Crew of the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project
Although their spacecraft actually launched a few days earlier on the 15th, today marks 50 years since American astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald “Deke” Slayton docked their Apollo spacecraft to a specifically modified Soyuz crewed by Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov. The two craft were connected for nearly two days, during which time the combined crew was able to freely move between them. The conducted scientific experiments, exchanged flags, and ate shared meals together.

Politically, this very public display of goodwill between the Soviet Union and the United States helped ease geopolitical tensions. On a technical level, it not only demonstrated a number of firsts, but marked a new era of international cooperation in space. While the Space Race saw the two counties approach spaceflight as a competition, from this point on, it would largely be treated as a collaborative endeavour.

The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project lead directly to the Shuttle–Mir missions of the 1990s, which in turn was a stepping stone towards the International Space Station. Not just because that handshake back in 1975 helped establish a spirit of cooperation between the two space-fairing nations, but because it introduced a piece of equipment that’s still being used five decades later — the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS) docking system.

Meeting in the Middle

While the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project was the first time spacecraft from two different countries linked up, it was far from the first docking in space. The Apollo program relied heavily on the concept, as the Command Module and Lunar Module would dock and undock multiple times on each lunar mission. For their part, the Soviets had also docked a pair of Soyuz capsules together as early as 1967. By the early 1970s, both nations had also docked spacecraft to their respective space stations.

The problem was, the docking systems used by both countries weren’t compatible with each other. In fact, things were changing so fast that even vehicles from the same country couldn’t necessarily dock with each other. For example, an American Gemini capsule wouldn’t be able to dock with Skylab. Of course, this isn’t terribly surprising. At this point, most of the hardware was mission-specific, and only flew once.

What was the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project needed was a standardized docking interface that took into account the lessons learned by both countries so far. By 1970, Soviet and US engineers had started meeting and exchanging information to decide what such a docking standard would look like. It was decided early on that this new docking standard should be androgynous — rather than having distinct “male” and “female” variants as was the norm with earlier docking ports. In this way, the same docking port could be used to support two spacecraft docking together as was planned for the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, while at the same time allowing a vehicle to dock to a space station.

This capability was so key to the design that the docking standard ultimately came to be known as the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System. While the US and Soviet versions did differ slightly, they were mechanically compatible with each other. Some elements of the design were the result of a compromise, such as the overall diameter of the port being limited to the size of the existing Apollo and Soyuz capsules, but otherwise it was hoped the concept would prove useful for future missions and spacecraft from both nations.

Built to Last

The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project was the only time an Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docked in space. In fact, it was the last time an Apollo spacecraft flew — after the conclusion of this mission, there wouldn’t be anther crewed American mission until the Space Shuttle came online nearly six years later.

But once the Americans started flying the Shuttle, and the Soviets had established their Mir space station, it wasn’t long before the two would meet. The Soviets had already designed a modified version of APAS that they called APAS-89, which was intended to allow the Buran spacecraft to dock with Mir. Buran never made it past the testing phase, but the work on the docking port ended up being adapted once more for the Shuttle. This final version of the standard became known as APAS-95, and was used until the final Shuttle-Mir mission in June of 1998.
The International Space Station
APAS-95 performed so well during the Mir missions that it was decided the Shuttle would continue to use it for the International Space Station. In addition, APAS-95 (as well as a modified “hybrid” version) would also be used to hold together the core US and Russian modules of the Station.

It was the defacto docking standard used until the introduction of the International Docking Adapter in 2015, which converted the exposed APAS-95 ports used for visiting American spacecraft to a newer design to be used by modern vehicles such as the SpaceX Dragon and Boeing Starliner.

While it has now been retired for the International Docking System Standard (IDSS), the ISS is still being held together by APAS-95, and will remain that way until the space laboratory is eventually de-orbited. Not a bad legacy for a technology initially developed for a simple handshake.

hackaday.com/2025/07/17/the-ap…

Feeling nostalgic? Weren’t around in the 90s but wonder what it was like? ProtoWeb has you covered! Over on his YouTube channel [RetroTech Chris] shows you how to browse the web like it’s 1995.

The service that [RetroTech Chris] introduces is on the web over here: protoweb.org. The way it works is that you configure your browser to use the service’s proxy server, then the service will be able to intercept your browsing activity and serve you old content from its cache. Also, for some supported sites, you will see present-day content but presented in the format you would have seen in the 90s. Once you have configured your browser to use the ProtoWeb proxy you can navigate to inode.com/ where you will find a directory listing of sites which have been archived or emulated within the service.

In his video [RetroTech Chris] actually demos some of the old web browsers running on old hardware, which is a very good recreation of what things were like. If you want the most realistic experience you can even configure ProtoWeb to slow down your network connection to the speed of a 56k dial-up modem. There are some things from the 90s that we miss, but waiting for websites to load isn’t one of them!

We had a look in our own archive to see how far back we here at Hackaday could go, and we found our first post, from September 2004: Radioshack Phone Dialer – Red Box. A red box! Spicy.

youtube.com/embed/-Qs3LVPmLgk?…

Thanks to [Teejay] for writing in about this one.

hackaday.com/2025/07/17/protow…

Пиратская партия Германии на сайте Пиратского Интернационала обратила внимание на важную проблему: корпорации преследуют людей за создание мемов, не имеющих коммерческой цели.

Мемы, пародии и интернет-фольклор — важная часть современной культуры. Они рождаются в сетевых сообществах, переосмысливают медиа и становятся новым языком общения. Но так называемые правообладатели пытаются приватизировать даже те образы, которые давно стали частью общественного достояния.

В России, как и во всём мире, люди сталкиваются с аналогичными проблемами. Правообладатели активно подают в суд за использование мемов, даже если они созданы для развлечения. Например, «Си Ди Лэнд Контакт», приватизировавший Ждуна, несколько раз судился за его использование, Москвариум заявил о намерении зарегистрировать товарный знак «Рыбов показываем», петербургский предприниматель пытался, впрочем, безуспешно, зарегистрировать товарный знак «Как тебе такое, Илон».

Эта мировая практика показывает, как устаревшие законы о так называемом авторском праве, которое в первую очередь защищает не автора, а правообладателя, то есть, того, кто первым подберёт плохо лежащее, подавляют творчество и свободное выражение.

Пиратская партия России всецело поддерживает позицию ПП Германии.

Публикуем перевод их заявления:

Культура мемов — это здорово! Пираты обожают мемы. Мемы помогают людям делиться идеями и шутками. Но некоторые жадные создатели корпоративного контента нападают на тех, кто их создаёт. Они подают в суд на тех, кто создаёт мемы без какой-либо коммерческой цели. Мы должны дать этому отпор!

Один явный случай произошел в Германии. Фанаты создали мемы о героине детской книги Конни. Издатель разослал письма с требованием прекратить противоправные действия. Они угрожали аккаунту в <запрещённой в РФ соцсети с фотографиями>. И им это удалось. Они закрыли аккаунт. Они ограничили свободу слова. Они уничтожили собственное творение. Мемы позволили бы Конни выжить. Конни умрёт. Спасите Конни!

Хотя в Германии особенно строго относятся к «нарушению авторских прав», эта проблема носит глобальный характер и не ограничивается только мемами.

Такие случаи случаются в мире искусства. Disney разослал официальные уведомления о фан-арте.

Такие случаи происходят в игровой индустрии. Nintendo закрывает игры, созданные на основе их контента.

В музыкальной индустрии такое случается. Музыканты подают в суд на других музыкантов за ремиксы своих треков.

Они происходят в социальных сетях. Поклонников событий в Южной Корее предостерегли по поводу мемов о военном положении.

Мемы — это здорово! Переделки игр — это здорово! Ремиксы — это здорово! Протесты в социальных сетях — это здорово! Так общество развивается и создаёт новые формы самовыражения. Знания — производны. Мы учимся на истории и создаём новые версии, которые немного отличаются, но лучше.

Давайте потребуем защиты мемов! Ни один материал не должен быть заморожен авторским правом!

Вся история искусства — это цепочка заимствований, переосмыслений и новых интерпретаций. Шекспир перерабатывал старые сюжеты, музыканты делали каверы, а кинорежиссёры снимали ремейки. Сегодня цифровые технологии позволяют людям создавать новые формы искусства на основе существующих произведений, но корпорации хотят запретить это, превратив культуру в «закрытый клуб».

Наша цель — культура, которая принадлежит людям и авторам, а не так называемым правообладателям!

Вступайте в Пиратскую партию России и присоединяйтесь к борьбе за свободные мемы, открытые лицензии и право на ремиксы. Вместе мы сможем остановить цензуру и сохранить интернет как пространство творчества.

Сообщение Пираты любят мемы появились сначала на Пиратская партия России | PPRU.

Hanno cominciato ad ammazzare cattolici, stai a vedere che adesso comincia a importarcene qualcosa...

La presidente del Consiglio Giorgia Meloni ha condannato l’attacco contro la chiesa e in generale contro la popolazione civile con toni particolarmente duri: in un comunicato ha detto che «sono inaccettabili gli attacchi contro la popolazione civile che Israele sta dimostrando da mesi. Nessuna azione militare può giustificarla.

ilpost.it/2025/07/17/chiesa-sa…

Israele ha attaccato l’unica chiesa cattolica nella Striscia di Gaza

Quella della Sacra Famiglia: tre persone sono state uccise e nove ferite, fra cui il parroco

^{Il Post}

So far in the “Field Guide” series, we’ve mainly looked at critical infrastructure systems that, while often blending into the scenery, are easily observable once you know where to look. From the substations, transmission lines, and local distribution systems that make up the electrical grid to cell towers and even weigh stations, most of what we’ve covered so far are mega-scale engineering projects that are critical to modern life, each of which you can get a good look at while you’re tooling down the road in a car.

This time around, though, we’re going to switch things up a bit and discuss a less-obvious but vitally important infrastructure system: the cold chain. While you might never have heard the term, you’ve certainly seen most of the major components at one time or another, and if you’ve ever enjoyed fresh fruit in the dead of winter or microwaved a frozen burrito for dinner, you’ve taken advantage of a globe-spanning system that makes sure environmentally sensitive products can be safely stored and transported.

What’s A Cold Chain?

Simply put, the cold chain is a supply chain that’s capable of handling items that are likely to be damaged or destroyed unless they’re kept within a specific temperature range. The bulk of the cold chain is devoted to products intended for human consumption, mainly food but also pharmaceuticals and vaccines. Certain non-consumables also fall under the cold chain umbrella, including cosmetics, personal care products, and even things like cut flowers and vegetable seedlings. We’ll be mainly looking at the food cold chain for this article, though, since it uses most of the major components of a cold chain.

As the name implies, the cold chain is designed to maintain a fixed temperature over the entire life of a product. “Farm to fork” is a term often used to describe the cold chain, since the moment produce is harvested or prepared foods are manufactured, the clock starts ticking. The exact temperature required varies by food type. Many fruits and vegetables that ripen in the summer or early autumn can stand pretty high temperatures, at least for a while after harvesting, but some produce, like lettuces and fresh greens, will start wilting very quickly after harvest.

For extremely sensitive crops, the cold chain might start almost the second the crop is harvested. Highly perishable crops such as sweet corn, greens, asparagus, and peas require rapid cooling to remove field heat and to slow the biological processes that were still occurring within the plant tissues at the time of harvest. This is often accomplished right in the field with a hydrocooler, which uses showers or flumes of chilled water. Extremely perishable crops such as broccoli might even be placed directly into flaked ice in the field. Other, less-sensitive crops that can wait an hour or two will enter the cold chain only when they’re trucked a short distance to an initial processing plant.

Many foods, including different kinds of produce, fresh meat and fish, and lots of prepared meals, benefit from flash freezing. Flash freezing aims to reduce damage to the food by controlling the size and number of ice crystals that form within the cells of the plant or animal tissue. Simply putting a food item in a freezer and waiting for the heat to passively transfer out of it tends to form few but large ice crystals, which are far more damaging than the many tiny ice crystals that form when the heat is rapidly removed. Flash freezing methods include cryogenic baths using liquid nitrogen or liquid carbon dioxide, blast cooling with high-velocity jets of chilled air, fluidized bed cooling, where pressurized chilled air is directed upward through a bed of produce while it’s being agitated, and plate cooling, where chilled metal plates lightly contact flat, thin foods such as pizza or sliced fish.

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Big and Cold

A very large public refrigerated warehouse. Note the high-bay storage area to the left, which houses a fully automated AS/RS freezer section. Source: Lineage Logistics.
Once food is chilled to the proper temperature, it needs to be kept at that temperature until it can be sold. This is where cold warehousing comes in, an important part of the cold chain that provides controlled-temperature storage space that individual producers simply can’t afford to maintain. The problem for farmers is that many crops are determinate, meaning that all the fruits or vegetables are ready for harvest more or less at the same time. Outsourcing their cold warehousing to companies that specialize in that part of the cold chain allows them to concentrate on growing and harvesting their crop instead of having to maintain a huge amount of storage space, which would sit unused for the entire growing season.

Cold warehouses, or public refrigerated warehouses (PRWs) as they’re known in the trade, benefit greatly from economies of scale, and since they accept produce from hundreds or even thousands of producers, their physical footprints can be staggering. The average PRW in the United States has grown in size dramatically since the post-pandemic e-commerce boom and now covers almost 185,000 square feet, or more than 4 acres. Most PRWs have four temperature zones: deep freeze (-20°F to -10°F) for items such as ice cream and frozen vegetables; freezer (0°F to 10°F) for meats and prepared foods; refrigerated (35°F to 45°F), for fresh fruits and vegetables; and cool storage, which is basically just consistent room-temperature storage for shelf-stable food items. What’s more, each zone can have sub-zones tailored specifically for foods that prefer a specific temperature; bananas, for example, do best around 46°F, making the fridge section too cold and the cool section too warm. Sub-zones allow goods to be stored just right.
A map of some of the key public refrigerated warehouses in the United States. Notice how there are practically none in the areas that raise primarily cereal grains. Source: map via ArcGIS, data from Global Cold Chain Alliance (public use).
Due to the nature of their business, location is critical to PRWs. They have to be close to where the food is produced as well as handy to transportation hubs, which means you’ve probably seen one of these behemoth buildings from a highway and not even known it. The map above highlights the main agricultural regions of the United States, such as the fruit and vegetable producers in the Central Valley of California and the Willamette Valley in Oregon, meat packing plants in the Upper Midwest, the hog and chicken producers in the South, and seafood producers along both coasts. It also shows a couple of areas with no PRWs, which are areas where agriculture is limited to cereal grains, which don’t require refrigeration after harvest, and livestock, which are usually shipped for slaughter somewhere other than where they were raised.

Thanks to the complicated logistics of managing multiple shippers and receivers, most cold warehouses have a level of automation that rivals that of an Amazon distribution center. A lot of the automation is found in the high-bay freezer, a space often three or four stories tall that has rack after rack of space for storing palletized products. Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) store and fetch pallets using large X-Y gantry systems running between the racks. Algorithms determine the best storage location for pallets based on their contents, the temperature regime they require, and the predicted length of stay within the warehouse.

While AS/RS reduces the number of workers needed to run a cold warehouse, and there are some fully automated PRWs, most cold warehouses maintain a large workforce to run forklifts, pick pallets, and assemble orders for shipping. These workers face significant health and safety challenges, risking everything from slips and falls on icy patches to trench foot and chill-induced arthritis and dermatitis. Cold-stress injuries, such as hypothermia and frostbite, are possible too. Warehouses often have to limit the number of hours their employees work in the cold zones, and they have to provide thermal wear along with the standard complement of PPE.

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Reefer Madness

Once an order is assembled and ready to ship from the cold warehouse, food enters perhaps the most visible — and riskiest — link in the cold chain: refrigerated trucks and shipping containers. Known as reefers, these are specialized vehicles that have the difficult task of keeping their contents at a constant temperature no matter what the outside conditions might be. A reefer might have to deliver a load of table grapes from a PRW in California to a supermarket distribution center in Massachusetts, continue to Maine to pick up a load of live lobsters, and drop that off at a PRW in Florida before running a load of oranges to Washington.
Reefer trailers are one of the last links in the “farm to fork” cold chain. The diesel tank, which fuels the reefer and allows it to run with no tractor attached, can barely be seen between the legs of the trailer. Source: Felix Mizioznikov – stock.adobe.com
Meeting the challenge of all these conditions is the job of the refrigeration unit. Typically mounted in an aerodynamic fairing on the front of a semi-trailer unit, the refrigeration unit is essentially a heat pump on steroids. For over-the-road (OTR) reefers, as opposed to railcar reefers or shipping container reefers, the refrigeration unit is powered by a small but powerful diesel engine. Typically either three- or four-cylinder engines making 20 to 30 horsepower, these engines run the compressor that pumps the refrigerant through the condenser and evaporator, as well as the powerful fan that circulates air inside the trailer. Fuel for the engine is stored in a tank mounted under the trailer, allowing the reefer to run even when the trailer is parked with no tractor attached. The refrigeration unit is completely automatic, with a computer taking input from temperature sensors inside the trailer to make sure the interior remains at the setpoint. The computer also logs everything going on in the reefer, making the data available via a USB drive or to a central dispatcher via a telematics link.

The trailer body itself is carefully engineered, with thick insulation to minimize heat transfer to and from the outside environment while maximizing heat transfer between the produce and the air inside the trailer. For maximum cooling — or heating; if a load of bananas has to be kept at their happy place of 46°F while being trucked across eastern Wyoming in January, the refrigeration unit will probably have to run its cycle in reverse to add heat to the trailer — the air must reach the back of the unit. Reefer units use flexible ducts in the ceiling to direct the air 48 to 53 feet to the very back of the trailer, where it bounces off the rear doors and returns to the front of the trailer with the help of channels built into the floor. Shippers need to be careful when loading a reefer to obey load height limits and to correctly orient pallets so as not to block air circulation inside the trailer.

In addition to the data logging provided by the refrigeration unit, shippers will often include temperature loggers inside their shipments. Known generically to produce truckers as a “Ryan” for a popular brand, these analog strip chart recorders use a battery-powered motor to move a strip of paper past a bimetallic arm. Placed in a tamper-evident container, the recorder is placed within a pallet and records the temperature over a 10- to 40-day period. The receiver can break the seal open and see a complete temperature history of the shipment, detecting any accidental (or intentional; drivers sometimes find it hard to sleep with the reefer motor roaring right behind the sleeper cab) interruptions in the operation of the reefer.

Featured image: “Close Up of Frozen Vegetables” by Tohid Hashemkhani

hackaday.com/2025/07/17/a-fiel…

3D printing is arguably over-used in the maker community. It’s just so easy to run off a quick prototype and then… well, it’s good enough, right? Choosing the right plastic can go a long way to making sure your “good enough” prototype really is good enough for long term use. If you’re producing anything with gearing, you might want to cast your eyes to a study by [Mert Safak Tunalioglu] and [Bekir Volkan Agca] titled: Wear and Service Life of 3-D Printed Polymeric Gears.
No spin doctoring here, spinning gears.
The authors printed simple test gears in ABS, PLA, and PETG, and built a test rig to run them at 900 rpm with a load of 1.5 Nm against a steel drive gear. The gears were pulled off and weighed every 10,000 rotations, and allowed to run to destruction, which occurred in the hundreds-of-thousands of rotations in each case. The verdict? Well, as you can tell from the image, it’s to use PETG.

The authors think that this is down to PETG’s ductility, so we would have liked to see a hard TPU added to the mix, to say nothing of the engineering filaments. On the other hand, this study was aimed at the most common plastics in the 3D printing world and also verified a theoretical model that can be applied to other polymers.

This tip was sent in by [Benjamin], who came across it as part of the research to build his first telescope, which we look forward to seeing. As he points out, it’s quite lucky for the rest of us that the U.S. government provides funding to make such basic research available, in a way his nation of France does not. All politics aside, we’re grateful both to receive your tips and for the generosity of the US taxpayer.

We’ve seen similar tests done by the community — like this one using worm gears — but it’s also neat to see how institutional science approaches the same problem. If you need oodles of cycles but not a lot of torque, maybe skip the spurs and print a magnetic gearbox. Alternatively you break out the grog and the sea shanties and print yourself a capstan.

hackaday.com/2025/07/17/this-s…