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https://hackaday.com/2014/12/22/the-heathkit-mystery/ | The Heathkit Mystery | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"News"
] | [
"classic",
"Heath Kit",
"heathkit",
"kits"
] | Heathkit is a company that requires no introduction. From the mid-40s until the 90s, Heathkit was
the
brand for electronic kits ranging from test equipment, HiFis, amateur radio equipment, computers, to freakin’ robots. Their departure was a tragic loss for generations of engineers, electronic tinkerers and hobbyists who grew up with these excellent and useful kits.
Although Heathkit is dead, 2013 brought an announcement that Heathkit was back in the biz.
A Facebook page was launched
, a
Reddit AMA was held
, and the news was that Heathkit would rise from the dead in the first half of 2014. It’s now Christmas, 2014, and there’s no sign of Heathkit anywhere.
Adafruit has been keeping a watchful eye on the on the (lack of) developments
, and the only surprising thing to report is that there is
nothing
to report. There has been no new announcement, there are no new products, the “official” Heathkit website hasn’t been updated in a year, and no one knows what’s going on.
Adafruit has decided to dig into the matter, and while they’ve come up with a few items of note, there’s not much to report. A trademark for ‘HEATHKIT’ was filed October 27, 2014 – two months ago. An email was sent to the attorney of record and there has been no response.
This trademark was granted to Heathkit Company, Inc., incorporated in Delaware. Searching for any companies in Delaware using the Heathkit name returns exactly two results: Heathkit Company, Inc., and Heathkit Holdings, Inc.. Adafruit is probably going to pay the $20 to the Delaware Department of State to get the detailed information that includes Heathkit’s tax assessment and tax filing history.
The last bit of information comes from a whois on the heathkit.com domain. The relevant contacts have been emailed, and there are no further details. The
Heathkit virtual museum
was contacted for information, as was the news editor for
ARRL.org
. Nobody knows anything, or at least nobody is telling anybody anything.
To date, the only physical evidence of Heathkit’s rebirth is a geocache
that was left at Brooklyn Bridge Park
, announced during the Reddit AMA. This geocache was recovered by
reddit user IFoundTheHeathKit
, a throwaway account that had no posts before or since finding the cache. We have no idea what was in that geocache, what the ‘secret passphrase’ or set of instructions was, or if anything ever came of the promise to send one of the first new kits.
So there ‘ya go. A lot of words but no information. If
you
have any info,
the Adafruit crew would like to have a word with you
.
Update
The person who found the Heathkit geocache has been found:
The full comment referred to below is,
Hey, person who found the Heathkit geocache here. The secret passcode was an Einstein quote about radio vs wired communication (invisible cats), and they said they’d send me something in early 2014. Never had any communication except through FB, and they haven’t replied to any of my recent messages.
IFoundTheHeathKit might want to email Adafruit with a copy of all the emails. | 58 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "2276683",
"author": "Stephanie",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T18:43:53",
"content": "So to summarize your report: We have nothing, we know nothing. Very informative. :p",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2276934",
"author": "... | 1,760,375,964.408274 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/22/1k-in-components-hit-the-hands-of-hackaday-prize-semifinalists/ | $50k In Components Hit The Hands Of Hackaday Prize Semifinalists | Mike Szczys | [
"contests",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"credit",
"distributor",
"mouser",
"parts",
"prize"
] | We anticipate a cornucopia of hacks from
the top fifty 2014 Hackaday Prize entrants
based on the recent awarding of the 50 grab bags of electronics. That’s right, the grand prize was out of this world but there were a lot of other rewards worth shooting for. Instead of making hardware choices without the seminifinalists’ input we went with a shopping spree on Mouser.com.
It’s a great idea if we do say so ourselves. However, it turned out not to be as easy as purchasing fifty-grand in gift cards. Did you know that none of the major parts distributors have gift card systems built into their sites? We’re of two minds on this. We’d love to open a birthday card from grannie and pull out some chits that can be traded for chips. But at the same time, it would be a longshot for your non-hacker relatives to even know what sites are our go-to parts emporiums.
Long story short these prizes are themselves a hack. We had a lot of help from the sales crew over at Mouser who abused their account tracking software in order to make these credits work. All fifty of the Hackaday prize semifinalists now have a cool G to spend and we’ll be watching their Hackaday.io accounts for updates as they inevitably use the upcoming holidays to embark on exciting builds.
A big thanks to Supplyframe Inc. for sponsoring
these 50 prizes, as well as all others
awarded for the 2014 Hackaday Prize. Get those workbenches cleared off and
sharpen
tin your soldering tips because details about the 2015 Hackaday Prize will start to roll out in just a few weeks. Until then, occupy your time trying to win one of the many prizes offered during
our Trinket Everyday Carry Contest
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2276405",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T16:48:04",
"content": "Cool that you guys managed to get store credit for prized.Now if only people start stuffing their prizes with Benjamin (or faces of politicians or Beavers etc), there will be a whole less line up at t... | 1,760,375,964.549505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/22/green-sweep-for-your-ultrasonic-rangefinder/ | Green-Sweep For Your Ultrasonic Rangefinder | Will Sweatman | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"radar",
"servo",
"ultrasonic rangefinder"
] | Maybe you’ve never programmed an Arduino before. Or maybe you have, but nothing beyond das blinkenlights. Maybe your soldering iron sits in a corner of your garage, gazing at you reproachfully every time you walk by, like a ball begging to be thrown. Maybe you’ve made a few nifty projects, but have never interfaced them with a PC. If this describes you, then this article and project is just what you need. So grab your favorite beverage, tuck in and prepare to get motivated.
[Anuj Dutt] has not only made a really cool project, he has also done a most excellent job at documenting it. It’s
an Arduino controlled “RADAR” like project
that uses the familiar Parallax ultrasonic sensor. It’s mounted to a servo and feeds data to a PC where a custom VB.NET program translates the data in to a cool “green radar sweep” screen. It also pushes text to an LCD which reveals the distance from the target.
[Anuj Dutt] hand rolled his Arduino
just because
, but ran into some trouble getting everything to talk to the PC. He wound up using the ultra user friendly FTDI to save the day. Be sure to check out the video below to see the project in action. [Anuj] published
the code for both the Arduino and PC
in the video description. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "2276337",
"author": "ColumbusIS",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T16:15:40",
"content": "It must key on micro-changes in air density",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2278429",
"author": "Mystick",
"timestamp": "2014-12... | 1,760,375,964.723823 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/22/a-year-long-time-lapse-camera/ | A Year Long Time Lapse Camera | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"JPEG",
"JPEG camera",
"time lapse camera",
"time-lapse"
] | All [val3tra] wanted was an RF-accessible camera. A camera that would take pictures, save them to an SD card, and occasionally send them over an RF link to a computer.
This project has grown out of control
, and now it has become an open-source camera that’s able to take year-long time-lapse movies.
The build started as a low power camera using an eBay JPEG camera modified for 3.3V. That’s only 640×480, but each frame averages only 48kb – small enough to store a few thousand pictures on a FAT16 formatted SD card. A $4 RF module, an ATMega, and an RTC make up the rest of the build that has a power draw of about 100 Joules per hour. A D-cell has about 60,000 Joules, and a pessimistic estimate of a battery of four in series, two in parallel gives a run time of 200 days.
This build was then improved, bringing the total battery consumption down to about 3.5-4 Joules per frame, or at one frame every 10 minutes, about 24 Joules an hour. That’s impressive, and getting this camera to run longer than a dozen or so months raises some interesting challenges. The self-discharge of the battery must be taken into account, and environmental concerns – especially when leaving this camera to run in a Moscow winter, seen in the video below – are significant.
If you don’t want to go equipment-lite you could seal your
DSLR, Pi, and some serious batteries
in a weatherproof enclosure. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2275890",
"author": "butterfly",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T12:58:45",
"content": "Geez put a fucking solar cell on it already.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2276018",
"author": "Pixel Pirate",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,375,964.93721 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/22/sheet-music-to-midi-converter/ | Sheet Music To MIDI Converter | Eric Evenchick | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ATmega 1284P",
"Melexis MLX75306",
"midi",
"optical array",
"piano roll"
] | Learning to read sheet music is a challenge for new musicians, so a group of Cornell students decided to make a robot do it instead. For their final project, they built a
robotic sheet music reader
(link warning: this page seems to automatically start a .mov file download when loaded).
As an input, the robot takes a piano roll. This is a long strip of paper with music printed on it, which can easily be fed through the reader. A rotational servo keeps the strip feeding at a constant speed, and passes it through the reader.
The reader is based on a Melexis
MLX75306
linear optical array. This IC is a 142 x 1 array of photodiodes, which is designed for fuel quality sensing in cars. In this project, it’s been repurposed as a camera to read the music as it passes by. An array of LEDs illuminates the piano roll, providing a more accurate reading.
The components are connected to an Atmel
ATmega1284P
, which does all the required control and processing. It creates a MIDI output of the piano roll, which can be connected to any hardware or software synthesizer. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2275752",
"author": "Miles Togoh",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T12:06:01",
"content": "Interesting hack but how this relates to sheet music is beyond me, the “piano roll” seems to be a proprietary format with little or no relation to sheet music. A scanner that would actually read sheet... | 1,760,375,964.659662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/old-timey-mp3-player-blends-old-styling-with-new-technology/ | Old-Timey MP3 Player Blends Old Styling With New Technology | Rich Bremer | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"diy radio",
"mp3 player",
"radio"
] | No, this isn’t the first commercial MP3 player ever produced. It’s a blend of the old and the new, old time looks with modern electronics. [viscomjim] recently made this
MP3 Player
from the ground up for the noble reason to give as a Christmas present.
[viscomjim] started by laying out a circuit using a solder-less breadboard to test his circuitry. He’s using PIC microcontroller to control the unit. There is an 20×4 LCD display, two rotary encoders with push buttons, a serial MP3 player module, real time clock and an infrared receiver. A wires-all-over mess wasn’t acceptable for this Christmas gift so [viscomjim] put on his learning cap and tried out Autotrax Dex PCB layout software. This was his first project with the software and everything went well. After the design was done, the board files were sent out to a fab shop. A few weeks later they were delivered. All the parts were wired up and tested and… it worked!
Next up was building a cabinet, this one was built out of wood and stained to give it a feeling of yesteryear. A pair of 4″ car speakers are responsible for sharing the tunes and are powered by a small amplifier and power supply mounted inside the enclosure. The front panel is laser cut clear acrylic and backed with a nicely prepared Photoshop’d parchment paper graphic. And those fancy grill covers, also laser cut acrylic, this time opaque brown in color.
There are only two knobs for control, the left is the volume and the right is the program changer. Push the left knob inward and the unit turns on or off, the right plays and pauses. This MP3 player plays music off the internal SD card on the MP3 module. [viscomjim] also went one step further and implemented some code to work with an Apple remote he had kicking around, hence the IR receiver mentioned above.
If you’d be interested in making something similar, you’re have-way there as [viscomjim] made his schematics available but, unfortunately, not his code. Want to build your own MP3 Player but want something a little smaller? Check this
tiny one
out. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "2274952",
"author": "Jeff",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T07:03:33",
"content": "I wanted to do something similar to this with a style of radio from the time Art Bell from C2C AM came about.Wanted to include either an AM or FM transmitter into it that would broadcast out old episodes on ... | 1,760,375,964.502603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/irobot-releases-hackable-roomba-without-the-vacuum/ | IRobot Releases Hackable Roomba — Without The Vacuum | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Android Hacks",
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"create",
"irobot",
"irobot create",
"roomba",
"roomba hacks"
] | We love forward thinking companies that take a risk and do something different. iRobot, the company behind the iconic Roomba, just released the newest version of their
Roomba Create
— a programmable Roomba (minus the vacuum) that can be hacked and programmed to do all sorts of things.
The company developed the Create with STEM students in mind — a robotics learning platform. It came out originally back in 2007, and we’ve covered
many hacks
that have
made
use of it.
Many
. Like,
a lot
. One of our favorites has got to be this
data center monitoring robot
that makes use of the platform!
Anyway, the newest version of the Create features the typical hardware upgrades you’d expect, and with some
special emphasis on 3D printing.
In fact, the CEO of iRobot [Colin Angle] thinks that 3D printing is going to make a big difference in a few years:
“Your Roomba could be a software file that you print at home,” he says. He says the Create’s new features are a way for the company to get ready for that day, while also providing a platform that educators and hobbyists can use to tinker.
Kudos to you guys, iRobot! We just wish people
would stop giving Roomba’s knives…
[Thanks PSUbj21!] | 32 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2274353",
"author": "William G",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T03:30:32",
"content": "Well this doesn’t suck.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2274441",
"author": "Genki",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T03:59:20",
... | 1,760,375,964.61525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/hackaday-links-december-21-2014/ | Hackaday Links: December 21, 2014 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"3d",
"a320",
"aquarium",
"augmented reality",
"canon",
"Canon EOS",
"flight simulator",
"flite test",
"google cardboard",
"indiegogo",
"mineral oil",
"NX300",
"object tracking",
"oculus rift",
"RC transmitter"
] | Most of the incredible flight simulator enthusiasts with 737 cockpits in their garage are from the US. What happens when they’re from Slovenia?
They built an A320 cockpit
. The majority of the build comes from an old Cyprus Airways aircraft, with most of the work being wiring up the switches, lights, and figuring out how to display the simulated world out of the cockpit.
Google Cardboard is the $4 answer to the Oculus Rift – a cardboard box and smartphone you strap to your head. [Frooxius] missed being able to interact with objects in these 3D virtual worlds,
so he came up with this thing
. He adapted
a symbol tracking library for AR
, and is now able to hold an object in his hands while looking at a virtual object in 3D.
Heat your house with candles
! Yes, it’s the latest Indiegogo campaign that can be debunked with 7th grade math. This “igloo for candles” will heat a room up by 2 or 3 degrees, or a little bit less than a person with an average metabolism will.
Last week, we saw a post that gave the Samsung NX300 the ability to
lock the pictures taken by the camera
with public key cryptography. [g3gg0] wrote in to tell us he
did the same thing with a Canon EOS camera
.
The guys at Flite Test put up a video that should be handy for RC enthusiasts and BattleBot contenders alike.
They’re tricking out transmitters
, putting push buttons where toggle switches should go, on/off switches where pots should go, and generally making a transmitter more useful. It’s also a useful repair guide.
[Frank Zhao] made a mineral oil aquarium
and put a computer in it
. i7, GTX 970, 16GB RAM, and a 480GB SSD. It’s a little bigger than most of the other aquarium computers we’ve seen thanks to the microATX mobo, and of course there are NeoPixels and a bubbly treasure chest. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2273804",
"author": "murdock",
"timestamp": "2014-12-22T00:51:24",
"content": "Pop a road flare in the egloo and it’ll work great. I give them credit for making money off of an upside down plant pot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,375,964.457786 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/boxing-trainer-uses-diy-force-sensors/ | Boxing Trainer Uses DIY Force Sensors | Rick Osgood | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"1284p",
"atmega",
"boxing",
"college",
"cornell",
"force",
"game",
"microcontroller",
"project",
"school",
"sensors",
"trainer"
] | A team of Cornell students have designed and built their own
electronic boxing trainer
system. The product of their work is a game similar to Whack-A-Mole. There are five square pads organized roughly into the shape of a human torso and head. Each pad will light up based on a pre-programmed pattern. When the pad lights up, it’s the player’s job to punch it! The game keeps track of the player’s accuracy as well as their reaction time.
The team was trying to keep their budget under $100, which meant that off the shelf components would be too costly. To remedy this, they designed their own force sensors. The sensors are basically a sandwich of a few different materials. In the center is a 10″ by 10″ square of ESD foam. Pressed against it is a 1/2″ thick sheet of insulating foam rubber. This foam rubber sheet has 1/4″ slits cut into it, resulting in something that looks like jail bars. Sandwiching these two pieces of foam is fine aluminum window screen. Copper wire is fixed the screen using conductive glue. Finally, the whole thing is sandwiched between flattened pieces of corrugated cardboard to protect the screen.
The sensors are mounted flat against a wall. When a user punches a sensor, it compresses. This compression causes the resistance between the two pieces of aluminum screen to change. The resistance can be measured to detect a hit. The students found that if the sensor is hit harder, more surface area becomes compressed. This results in a greater change in resistance and can then be measured as a more powerful hit. Unfortunately it would need to be calibrated depending on what is hitting the sensor, since the size of the hitter can throw off calibration.
Each sensor pad is surrounded by a strip of LEDs. The LEDs light up to indicate which pad the user is supposed to hit. Everything is controlled by an ATMEGA 1284p microcontroller. This is the latest in a
string
of
student projects
to come out of Cornell. Make sure to watch the demonstration video below.
[Thanks Bruce] | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2273391",
"author": "Velli",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T21:24:00",
"content": "Another class project that’s “under $100” if you have access to multiple university research and engineering labs.These have been some very cool projects that have that one stupid, distracting line. Doesn’t... | 1,760,375,964.889511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/plug-into-usb-get-a-reverse-shell/ | Plug Into USB, Get A Reverse Shell | Eric Evenchick | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"DNS spoofing",
"hid",
"keyboard",
"mouse",
"reverse shell",
"Teensy",
"usb"
] | Computers blindly trust USB devices connected to them. There’s no pop-up to confirm a device was plugged in, and no validation of whether the device should be trusted. This lets you do some nefarious things with a simple USB microcontroller.
We’ve recently seen two examples of this: the
USBdriveby
and the
Teensyterpreter
. Both devices are based on the
Teensy
development board. When connected to a computer, they act as a
Human Interface Device
to emulate a keyboard and mouse.
The USBdriveby targets OS X. When connected, it changes the DNS server settings to a custom IP, to allow for
DNS spoofing
of the victim’s machine. This is possible without a password through the OS X System Preferences, but it requires emulating both keystrokes and clicks. AppleScript is used to position the window in a known location, then the buttons can be reliably clicked by code running on the Teensy. After modifying DNS, a reverse shell is opened using
netcat
. This allows for remote code execution on the machine.
The Teensyterpreter gives a reverse shell on Windows machines. It runs command prompt as administrator, then enters a one-liner to fire up the reverse shell using Powershell. The process happens in under a minute, and works on all Windows versions newer than XP.
With a $20 microcontroller board you can quickly fire up remote shells for… “support purposes”. We’d like to see the two projects merge into a single codebase that supports both operating systems. Bonus points if you can do it on our
Trinket Pro
. Video demos of both projects after the break. | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "2273038",
"author": "Josh",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T18:07:23",
"content": "I’m curious now as to weather something likehttp://www.gfi.com/products-and-solutions/network-security-solutions/gfi-endpointsecurity/specificationsorhttp://www.lok-it.net/usb-storage-device-control/would be... | 1,760,375,966.112283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/risc-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/ | RISC, Tagged Memory, And Minion Cores | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware",
"News"
] | [
"architecture",
"computer architecture",
"lowRISC",
"minion",
"minion cores",
"risc",
"tagged memory"
] | Buy a computing device nowadays, and you’re probably getting something that knows x86 or an ARM. There’s more than one architecture out there for general purpose computing with dual-core MIPS boards available and some very strange silicon that’s making its way into dev boards.
lowRISC
is the latest endeavour from a few notable silicon designers, able to run Linux ‘well’ and adding a few novel security features that haven’t yet been put together this way before.
There are two interesting features that make the lowRISC notable. The first is
tagged memory
. This has been used before in older, weirder computers as a sort of metadata for memory. Basically, a few bits of each memory address tag each memory address as executable/non-executable, serve as memory watchpoints, garbage collection, and a lock on every word. New instructions are added to the ISA, allowing these tags to be manipulated, watched, and monitored to prevent the most common single security problem: buffer overflows. It’s an extremely interesting application of tagged memory, and something that isn’t really found in a modern architecture.
The second neat feature of the lowRISC are the minions. These are programmable devices tied to the processor’s I/O that work a lot like a
Zynq SOC
or the PRU inside the BeagleBone. Basically, they’re used for programmable I/O, implementing SPI/I2C/I2S/SDIO in software, offloading work from the main core, and devices that require very precise timing.
The current goal of the lowRISC team is to develop the hardware on an FPGA, releasing some beta silicon in a year’s time. The first complete chip will be an embedded SOC, hopefully release sometime around late 2016 or early 2017. The ultimate goal is an SOC with a GPU that would be used in mobile phones, set-top boxes, and Raspi and BeagleBone-like dev boards. There are enough people on the team, including [Robert Mullins] and [Alex Bradbury] of the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi, researchers at UC Berkeley, and [Bunnie Huang].
It’s a project still in its infancy, but the features these people are going after are very interesting, and something that just isn’t being done with other platforms.
[Alex Bardbury] gave a talk on lowRISC at
ORConf last October
. You can check out
the presentation here
. | 23 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2272776",
"author": "tekkieneet",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T15:27:34",
"content": "Sounds like something might be useful for IP/router type of applications too – tagged memory and Minions.The core might be targeting beyond the $100 (or below) of FPGA eval boards. :(",
"parent_id... | 1,760,375,965.076142 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/beating-the-skins-of-oatmeal-tins/ | Beating The Skins Of Oatmeal Tins | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"2-liter bottle",
"ATmega1284p",
"cornell",
"force-sensing resistor",
"ithaca is gorges",
"neil peart",
"quaker oats",
"smoke on the water"
] | Ithaca-based power trio [Nick, Roshun, and Ian] share a love of music and beating on things with drum sticks. To that end (and for class credit),
they built a Digitally-Recordable, User-Modifiable Sound Emitting Tool
(DRUMSET) using force-sensing resistors housed in oatmeal cans.
Anyone who has dealt with FSRs knows how persnickety they can be. In order to direct the force and avoid false positives, these enterprising beat purveyors suspended a sawed-off 2-liter bottle to the underside of each lid. This directs the force coming in from their patent-pending foam-enhanced drum sticks to the small, round sensing area of the FSR. There’s just enough space between the cap and the FSR to account for the play in the oatmeal can lid drum head when struck.
DRUMSET offers different-sounding kits at the push of a momentary switch. At present, there are four pre-programmed kits: the acoustic and electronic foursomes you’d expect, and a kit of miscellaneous sounds like hand claps and wooden claves that sound like something
They Might Be Giants
would have used on their first album. The fourth is called ‘Smoke on Water’, and is exactly what it sounds like. Should you tire of these, DRUMSET has a program mode with around 20 samples. These can be cycled through on the LCD and assigned to any of the four drums.
The microphone is for record mode, and whatever is recorded can be mapped to any drum. The memory limitations of the ‘1284P make for a 0.2 second sample of whatever is barked into the mic, but that’s plenty of time for shouting ‘hack!’ or firing off whatever hilarious bodily sound one can muster. We think this four track-like functionality of DRUMSET has interesting recording and live performance implications. The team’s future plans include space for longer samples and more robust drum construction (although it is possible to
do this without any drums whatsoever
). They’d also like to add more drums in case Neil Peart calls. The beat goes on after the break. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "2272545",
"author": "qwerty",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T13:33:13",
"content": "Well made guys. I found interesting the part about debouncing which is a common problem among diy pad controllers.A question: why did you choose force sensing resistors instead of easily obtainable and muc... | 1,760,375,965.164517 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/21/worlds-first-smart-snowboard-changes-music-according-to-your-actions/ | World’s First Smart Snowboard Changes Music According To Your Actions | Matt Freund | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"gps",
"led",
"music",
"snowboard"
] | Ever wanted a soundtrack to your life? For a couple of minutes at a time, Signal Snowboards creates that experience with a
smart snowboard that varies your music
depending on the tricks you perform on your way down the mountain.
The sign on the door says “School For Gifted Hackers”. Inside [Matt Davis] helped interface audio with an accelerometer – something he regularly does with all manner of hacked devices. At first the prototype was an iPhone mimicking the motions of a snowboarder the way fighter pilots describe dogfights with their hands. The audio engine that pulls those mostions to sound is open source and anyone is welcome to do their own tuning.
Once the audio was figured out the boys took it back to their shop and embedded the sensors into a new snowboard. The board is equipped with GPS, an accelerometer, a few rows of LEDs and a bluetooth board to connect to the phone app. It’s all powered by an on-board LiPo battery and a barrel jack out the side to charge it. Channels were cut by hand with a router then electronics sealed in place with epoxy. Not wanting to “just strap some
Christmas lights onto a snowboard
” the lighting is also connected to the sensors and is programmable.
See the video below of them making the board and taking it out for a test run on Bear Mountain.
Thanks [Ronald] for the tip. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "2272100",
"author": "Fennec",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T09:30:07",
"content": "AT first I thought it looked super mean…but all that they seem to be doing is upping higher frequencies and killing the lower frequencies whenever they get a big change from the accelerometer…could do so m... | 1,760,375,965.128978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/is-this-power-supply-bigger-than-a-bread-box-no-it-is-one/ | Is This Power Supply Bigger Than A Bread Box? No, It Is One. | Rich Bremer | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atx power supply",
"power supply"
] | [newtonn2] must have had food on his mind when he was deciding to embark on a
power supply project
. The enclosure is quite different…. it is a
Bread Box
! Even so, flipped up on end we must say it looks pretty cool. [newtonn2’s] previous power supply had crapped out and he needed a replacement supply ASAP, it was a
loaf
or death situation for this electronics enthusiast.
Similar to
a lot of
DIY bench
power supplies
, this one would also be based on an ATX computer power supply. These are good high-current supplies that output voltage in several convenient amounts and in this case are are all routed to their own spring terminals mounted on the enclosure. Even though those standard voltages might be good enough for most, [newtonn2] is extremely
kneady
and wanted a fully adjustable output so he designed up an adjustable voltage regulation circuit using an LM350 regulator. A volt meter and an amp meter indicates the power being supplied on the adjustable circuit.
Since his last power supply was
toast
, [newtonn2] wanted this one to be easily repairable. The ATX power supply inside can be replaced in two minutes because nothing is hard wired. The only connections are the ATX connector and power cord. For cooling, holes were drilled in the side of the enclosure so that fans could be installed. This was the
yeast
he could do to keep the temperature of the interior components down.
In the end [newtonn2] completed his goal of building a pretty unique and functional bench top power supply without spending a lot of
dough
. Check out his Instructable for extremely detailed build instructions including schematics for how all his components are wired. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "2271893",
"author": "Fennec",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T07:47:30",
"content": "Awesome! An excellent ATX power supply equivalent to a $300 lab supply! Now if only oscilloscopes were cheaper/easier to homebrew",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,375,965.640513 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/electronic-glove-detects-sign-language/ | Electronic Glove Detects Sign Language | Rick Osgood | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"1284p",
"accelerometer",
"algorithm",
"ASL",
"atmega",
"cornell",
"flex sensor",
"gyroscope",
"machine learning",
"MPU-6050",
"sign language",
"student"
] | A team of Cornell students recently built a
prototype electronic glove
that can detect sign language and speak the characters out loud. The glove is designed to work with a variety of hand sizes, but currently only fits on the right hand.
The glove uses several different sensors to detect hand motion and position. Perhaps the most obvious are the flex sensors that cover each finger. These sensors can detect how each finger is bent by changing the resistance according to the degree of the bend. The glove also contains an MPU-6050 3-axis accelerometer and gyroscope. This sensor can detect the hand’s orientation as well as rotational movement.
While the more high-tech sensors are used to detect most characters, there are a few letters that are similar enough to trick the system. Specifically, they had trouble with the letters R, U, and V. To get around this, the students strategically placed copper tape in several locations on the fingers. When two pieces of tape come together, it closes a circuit and acts as a momentary switch.
The sensor data is collected by an ATmega1284p microcontroller and is then compiled into a packet. This packet gets sent to a PC which then does the heavy processing. The system uses a machine learning algorithm. The user can train the it by gesturing for each letter of the alphabet multiple times. The system will collect all of this data and store it into a data set that can then be used for detection.
This is a great project to take on. If you need more inspiration there’s a lot to be found, including another Cornell project that
speaks the letters you sign
, as well as
this one which straps all needed parts to your forearm
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2271335",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T03:27:01",
"content": "Knowing that 5 or 6 fingers on on-off buttons can communicate clearly is a given. That Morse’s assistant Vail figured it out in the middle of the eighteenth century in serial is amazing. ANSI is archaic... | 1,760,375,965.73243 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/santas-autonomous-helping-hands-let-the-jolly-ol-fellow-kick-back-this-season/ | Santa’s Autonomous Helping Hands Let The Jolly Ol’ Fellow Kick Back This Season | Sonya Vasquez | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous robot",
"CITEC",
"KUKA",
"manipulator",
"robotic grasp",
"ros"
] | For those skeptical about the feasibility of Santa’s annual delivery schedule, here’s
an autonomous piece of the puzzle
that will bewilder even the most hard-hearted of non-believers.
The folks over at the Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) in Germany have whipped together a fantastic demo featuring Santa’s extra pair of helping hands. In the two-and-a-half minute video, the robot executes a suite of impressive autonomous stocking-stuffing maneuvers: from recognizing the open hole in the stocking, to grasping specific candies from the cluster of goodies available.
On the hardware-side, the arms appear to be a
KUKA-variant
, while on the software-side, the visualizations are being handled by the open source robot software
ROS
‘ RVIZ tool.
If some of the props in the video
look familiar
, you’ll find that the researchers at CITEC have already explored some stellar perception, classification, and grasping of related research topics. Who knew this pair of hands would be so jolly to clock some overtime this holiday season? The entire video is set to a crisp computer-voiced jingle that serves as a sneaky summary of their approach to this project.
Now, if only we could set these hands off to do our
other dirty work
…. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "2270887",
"author": "thewritingoflife",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T00:32:18",
"content": "Looks cool. Explains so much.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2271114",
"author": "cbaer",
"timestamp": "2014-12-21T01:56:29",
... | 1,760,375,965.687117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/first-ever-parts-emailed-to-space/ | First Ever Parts Emailed To Space | Matt Freund | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"iss",
"nasa",
"ratchet",
"space",
"wrench"
] | The shocking thing is not that this happened. The shocking thing is how normal it seems. An astronaut inside a space station needed a ratcheting socket wrench. Someone else on Earth drew it up on a computer then e-mailed the astronaut. The astronaut clicked a button and then
the tool was squirted out of a nozzle
. Then he picked up and used the tool for the job he needed done. No big deal.
The story itself is almost uneventful – of course we can do these things now. Sure, it happens to be the first time in mankind’s history we have done this. Yes, it is revolutionary to be able to create tools on demand rather than wait months for one to be built planet-side and put onto the next resupply rocket. But, amateurs living in places without even widespread electricity or running water have already
built these machines from actual garbage
.
Every once in a while a story slaps us with how much the future is now.
These particular 3d prints were duplicated on the ground, and both sets preserved for future comparative analysis to see if microgravity has any effect on 3d prints. They have an eye on sending them to Mars, a journey where resupply is more than just a couple-month inconvenience.
See the first link above for more detail and photos of NASA’s 3d printer and the Microgravity Science Glovebox in the Columbus laboratory module. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "2270491",
"author": "RandyKC",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T21:17:53",
"content": "Now this is sexy!!! (Various catcalls and someone saying “I’d tap dat” in the background)My prediction is that there will be no difference for extruded parts, but sintered parts will be a different story.... | 1,760,375,965.846611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/right-hand-loses-job-as-head-mouse-enters-mousing-arena/ | Right Hand Loses Job As Head-Mouse Enters Mousing Arena | Rich Bremer | [
"computer hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"hid",
"mouse"
] | Moving the cursor around your computer screen is an everyday occurrence that we humans do not give much of a second thought to. But what if you didn’t have to move your hands from the keyboard anymore? Sure there are keyboards with Track Point or even track pads not to far from the keys, which isn’t too bad. What if you could just slightly point your face in the desired direction the mouse would move? The [Sci-Spot] folks wondered that same question and came up with a
DIY Head Mouse
.
The concept is pretty darn simple; a web cam is mounted to the user’s head and points at the computer screen. Mounted on top of the screen is one IR LED. Our eyes can not see the IR light so it is not annoying or distracting. The camera, however, is filtered to only see IR by placing a couple of layers of camera film negative over the lens. Before you go complaining about strapping a camera to your noggin just think of building it into a hat, which we’ve seen used for adaptive technologies
like this PS3 controller
.
Custom software was written to move the mouse cursor; see the black window in the above dialog box? That represents the webcam’s field of view and the white spot is the IR LED. When the user’s head moves, the IR LED moves in relation to the camera’s field of view, in turn telling the computer to move the cursor a certain amount. There are a couple of options available like ‘magnification’ which changes how much the cursor moves with a given amount of head movement and ‘deadzone’ that ignores extremely small movements that can result from breathing.
There is no mention of how button clicks are recorded but we think a couple of buttons right below the space bar would be great. The control software is available for download on the Sci-Spot page for those who want to make their own. | 34 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "2270109",
"author": "Camerin",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T18:17:28",
"content": "I had an eog version of this partially working about 5 years ago… I need to dig that project up and rebuild it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2270... | 1,760,375,965.983865 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/diy-bicycle-roller-helps-cure-the-winter-blues/ | DIY Bicycle Roller Helps Cure The Winter Blues | Rich Bremer | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"bike",
"DIY bicycle",
"trainer"
] | Winter’s a-brewing and that is a downer for the everyday cycling enthusiast. There are certainly ‘bike trainers’ out on the market that will let you ride in your living room but they clamp to (or require replacing the) the rear axle. These bike trainers hold the bike in an upright position so that the rider can’t tip the bike and might feel a little boring for some. There is another indoor biking solution called a bicycle roller which is, just as it sounds, a few rollers on the ground that the bike wheels rest on and is not attached to the bike by any mechanical means. When the rider pedals the bike, the bike wheels spin the rollers. Even with the lack of forward momentum the spinning of the wheels is enough for the rider to stay upright.
[Sky-Monkey] wanted to bike during inclement weather and felt that a
bike roller
was simple enough for him to try building one. He likes building things and already had all the necessary parts kicking around his shop. The rollers are standard 3″ PVC pipe with plywood discs pressed into each end. The discs are counter-bored to accept standard skate bearings. Off the shelf steel rod make up the axles. The 3 rollers and axle assemblies are mounted in a wood frame made from dimensional lumber. It’s important that the front bike wheel also spins so [Sky-Monkey] made a power transmission belt out of cloth strap that spins the front roller with the rear.
The result is a fully functional bike roller that only cost a few hours of time to make. Video of this puppy in action after the break…. | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "2269746",
"author": "NotArduino",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T15:19:55",
"content": "An awful lot of work to make exercise equipment you’ll only use once!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2269749",
"author": "NotArduino",
... | 1,760,375,965.920955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/one-mans-mini-symphony-of-many-strings/ | One Man’s Mini Symphony Of Many Strings | Sarah Petkus | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bach",
"cello",
"mechanical string",
"music machine",
"one man orchestra",
"string instrument",
"violin"
] | If you don’t get along with your orchestra, screw ‘em. [Vladimir Pliassov] proves that you can play each of the virtuosic string instruments yourself, all at the same time (with the exception of the double bass of course).
For the life of me, I can’t imagine how long it took to get situated in this spider’s web of moving parts, but it’s impressive. With the help of this unique mechanical invention all his own, [Vladimir] is able to finger not only the neck of a violin and viola, but also a cello hoisted at an angle below his desk so that he can execute chords with his FEET. To help with the actual sound-making, a complex series of resinous fibers turn on a continuous mill of wooden beams and are tensioned ever so carefully over the bridge of each instrument. [Vladimir] controls which string is making contact with the turning fibers with a pulley wrapped around his thigh that rocks the body of the instrument back and forth.
[Vladimir] gives us an overview of his machine and how it works in the video below. If you’re itching to see it used for the purpose it was created for, well…
there’s a video for that too
. Even though the quality of the performance suffers a little due to the complicated nature of the setup, [Vladimir] is playing of all things, a piece for the pipe organ by J.S. Bach. Bach being hard mode in any case, let alone the one where you’re playing all the instruments yourself.
Thanks [tinkartank] for pointing out this unique invention. It’s definitely worthy of some awe! | 23 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "2269447",
"author": "Pedram Azimaie",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T12:51:40",
"content": "WTF!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2269473",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T13:09:26",
"content": "Impressive build. Bu... | 1,760,375,965.787697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/20/brother-builds-zerg-berg-coffee-table-media-server-38-usb-drives/ | Brother Builds “Zerg-Berg” Coffee Table Media Server – 38(!) USB Drives | Matt Freund | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"coffee table",
"hard drive",
"leather",
"usb",
"Xeon"
] | After [Travis]’s media server died a couple months ago, his brother [Nick] secretly plotted to replace it for Christmas. Admitting it to be an “asinine Rube Goldberg” arrangement, [Nick] wanted something custom and remarkable for his sibling. Rather than go the normal SATA route,
38 USB hot-swap laptop drives
were clustered together inside a custom leather enclosure with a bronzed glass top.
[Nick] picked up 45 of the 500GB drives for only $350 and designed the project around those. He spent $1000 on matching metal docks for each of them, powered by $800 worth of PCIe quad independent USB controllers – no hubs. A $550 Xeon motherboard with 14 USB ports, 16GB of RAM, a basic video card and a 1000W power supply rounded out the electronics.
Under Windows 8.1 all drives are arranged in a single giant array under Storage Spaces, no
raid
.
Everything was built into a wood-framed coffee table wrapped in high-end leather that [Nick] spent 65 hours hand stitching himself. Fancy brass corner braces hold the frame square. All the wires were run underneath the table so the visible surfaces are clean and clear. The table structure is lifted up on legs made from half-inch square barstock bent into a hairpin and bolted to the underside.
All together [Travis]’s Zerg-Berg media server cost in the range of $4500. [Nick] intends it to be something that lasts him a very long time.
See the video below for [Nick]’s
rationalization
explanation of the hardware and methods chosen. | 152 | 44 | [
{
"comment_id": "2268939",
"author": "imroy264",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T09:14:42",
"content": "No RAID, just concatenation. So as soon as one drive fails (which could be soon, given that they’re second-hand) his whole 17TB filesystem is gone. Genius.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,375,966.392778 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/arduino-thermostat-includes-vacation-mode/ | Arduino Thermostat Includes Vacation Mode | Rick Osgood | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"dht22",
"heating",
"internet",
"ip",
"ntp",
"thermostat",
"vacation"
] | When [William’s] thermostat died, he wanted an upgrade. He found a few off-the-shelf Internet enabled thermostats, but they were all very expensive. He knew he could
build his own
for a fraction of the cost.
The primary unit synchronizes it’s time using NTP. This automatically keeps things up to date and in sync with daylight savings time. There is also a backup real-time clock chip in case the Internet connection is lost. The unit can be controlled via the physical control panel, or via a web interface. The system includes a nifty “vacation mode” that will set the temperature to a cool 60 degrees Fahrenheit while you are away. It will then automatically adjust the temperature to something more comfortable before you return home.
[William’s] home is split into three heat zones. Each zone has its own control panel including an LCD display and simple controls. The zones can be individually configured from either their own control panel or from the central panel. The panels include a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, an LCD display, a keypad, and support electronics. This project was clearly well thought out, and includes a host of other small features to make it easy to use. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "2269065",
"author": "Fennec",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T10:01:06",
"content": "You’ll seriously cool down your house, wasting a tonne of power while you’re away on holiday? What the hell?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2269327... | 1,760,375,966.034235 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/multiplexing-pi-cameras/ | Multiplexing Pi Cameras | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"camera",
"csi",
"CSI interface",
"multiplexing",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspi"
] | The Raspberry Pi and its cool camera add-on is a great way to send images and video up to the Intertubes, but what if you want to monitor more than one scene? The
IVPort can multiplex up to sixteen of these Raspi camera modules
, giving the Pi sixteen different views on the world and a ridiculously high stack of boards connected to the GPIO header.
The Raspberry Pi’s CSI interface uses high-speed data lines from the camera to the CPU to get a lot of image data quickly. Controlling the camera, on the other hand, uses regular old GPIOs, the same kind that are broken out on the header. We’ve seen builds that
reuse these GPIOs to blink a LED
, but with a breakout board with additional camera connectors, it’s possible to use normal GPIO lines in place of the camera port GPIOs.
The result is a stackable extension board that splits the camera port in twain, allowing four Raspi cameras to be connected. Stack another board on top and you can add four more cameras. A total of four of these boards can be stacked together, multiplexing sixteen Raspberry Pi cameras.
As far as the obvious, ‘why’ question goes, there are a few interesting things you can do with a dozen or so computer controlled cameras. The obvious choice would be a bullet time camera rig, something this board should be capable of, given its time to switch between channels is only 50ns. Videos below. | 39 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "2268034",
"author": "ryg",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T03:46:33",
"content": "Nice project, but $80+ for one multiplexer board seems a tad much",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2268130",
"author": "scuffles",
"time... | 1,760,375,966.464571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/trinket-edc-contest-entry-lazydoro/ | TRINKET EDC CONTEST ENTRY: Lazydoro | Adam Fabio | [
"contests",
"Featured",
"News"
] | [
"adafruit",
"adxl345",
"ADXL377",
"Analog devices",
"arudino",
"EDC Contest",
"Hackaday Contests",
"Pro Trinket",
"Trinket",
"Trinket Everyday Carry",
"Trinket Everyday Carry Contest"
] | [Vasilis] has entered
Lazydoro
in the
Trinket Everyday Carry Contest
. Lazydoro is designed to get him up off his backside, and walking around. Recent medical research has determined that sitting too long is a bad thing. In fact,
Dr. David Agus
has been quoted by Nike as saying that sitting for several hours is
as bad as smoking
(wayback machine link). While we’re not exactly up on the latest medical trends, we can definitely see that getting up and walking around a bit never hurt anyone. Lazydoro will alert [Vasilis] once every 20 minutes or so to get up and stretch his legs a bit.
[Vasilis] plans to pair a Pro Trinket with an accelerometer module, specifically an
ADXL377
from Analog Devices. The accelerometer will allow Lazydoro to determine if [Vasilis] has moved around. If 20 or 30 minutes go by without major movement, Lazydoro will nudge him to get up and take a walk.
Since shipping to Greece takes awhile, [Vasilis] is developing with an Arduino Uno and a ADXL345 while he waits for his parts to arrive. He’s hacked this into a wrist mounted device for testing. One thing [Vasilis] hasn’t figured out yet is how to alert the user to move around. A small vibrating motor would probably work – but we’d suggest electric shocks. A good zap always puts the spring in our step!
There is still plenty of time to enter the
Trinket Everyday Carry Contest
. The main contest runs until January 2, but we’re having random drawings every week! Don’t forget to write a project log before the next drawing at 9pm EDT on Tuesday, December 23. You and all of the other entrants have a chance to win a
Cordwood Puzzle
from
The Hackaday Store! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "2268725",
"author": "hefto",
"timestamp": "2014-12-20T08:07:42",
"content": "well…. nice tinkering and stuff… but… where is the point? a simple alarmclock widget on your mobile would do the job.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,375,966.79885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/hacklet-27-holiday-hacks/ | Hacklet 27 – Holiday Hacks | Adam Fabio | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"christmas",
"Festive",
"hackaday.io",
"hacklet",
"holiday",
"lights",
"The Hacklet"
] | It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays around here. That means it’s time for holiday hacks here on The Hacklet! This week we’re looking at the coolest festive hacks created by YOU on
Hackaday.io!
We start with [charliex] and
Cypress PSOC 4 + ESP8266 WS2812 RGB XMAS Lights
. The name might be a mouthful, but the goal of the project is a simple one: Awesome Christmas lights! [Charliex] has created WiFi controllable Christmas lights. To do this, he’s utilized ARM core based PSOC4 chips from Cypress. WiFi duty is handled by the popular ESP8266 module, and the lights themselves are WS2812 addressable strips.
[charliex] really outdid himself this time, creating a complete solution from the ground up. He started with a Cypress dev board, but quickly moved to a board of his own design. The PCBs first were milled at home, then sent out for manufacturing.
Control of the strip is via UDP through a WiFi network. [Charliex] found the strips have plenty of WiFi range to place outside his home. The last part of the puzzle was control – which [charliex] handled in style by creating his own GUI to handle synchronizing several strips to music played on a central computer.
Next up is [nsted] with another LED hack,
Glowing Xmas Snowflake Sculpture
. [Nsted] was contracted to add some extra LED bling to a sculpture. The problem was that these LEDs would be filling in gaps left in the primary interactive lighting system which ran the entire sculpture. Any time you have to meld two systems, things can get crazy. [Nsted] found this out as he added WS2812B Adafruit NeoPixel strips to the Sensacell modules already designed into the sculpture. Communications happen via RS485, with Arduino Due and Megas handling the processing. Power was a concern with this sculpture, as it was pulling over 100 amps at low voltage. Like many art installations, this was a “work down to the wire” event. Everything came together at the last-minute though, and the project was a success!
Next up is [Jeremy Weatherford] with
Christmas Orchestra
. [Jeremy] has taken on the task of making the most epic retro electronics orchestra ever created. He’s playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Wizards in Winter on four floppies, three scanners, and an ancient inkjet printer. LED strips on the moving elements add lights to the sound. An Arduino Mega with a RAMPS board controls the show. [Jeremy] had his orchestra professionally recorded both on audio and in video. We’re anxiously awaiting the final video upload so we can rock out to some old hardware!
Finally, we’ve got [crenn6977] with his
Solar powered Christmas Light Controller.
This was [crenn6977’s] entry in the The Hackaday Prize. While it didn’t take him to space, we’re sure it will bring Santa to his door. Rather than run lots of tiny solar cells for his Sun powered Christmas lights, [crenn6977] is going for a single large panel and wireless control. The nRF24L01+ is handling the wireless connectivity, while a STM32F042 ARM cortex M0 processor is the brains of the operation. Solar power demands efficient design, so [crenn6977] is digging deep into op-amp circuits to keep those LEDs running through the night, and the batteries charging through the day.
It’s just about time for us to settle our brains for a long winter’s nap, so we’ll close this edition of The Hacklet here. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of
Hackaday.io! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,375,966.615765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/nist-randomness-beacon/ | Towards The Perfect Coin Flip: The NIST Randomness Beacon | Elliot Williams | [
"Featured",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"hashing",
"nist",
"random number generator",
"random numbers"
] | Since early evening on September 5th, 2013 the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been
publishing a 512-bit, full-entropy random number every minute of every day
. What’s more, each number is cryptographically signed so that you can easily verify that it was generated by the NIST. A date stamp is included in the process, so that you can tell when the random values were created. And finally, all of the values are linked to the previous value in a chain so that you can detect if any of the past numbers in the series have been altered after the next number is published. This is quite an extensive list of features for a list of random values, and we’ll get into the rationale, methods, and uses behind this scheme in the next section, so stick around.
But first, before those of you who’ve got crypto on the brain start thinking crazy thoughts, note that the NIST has a banner stating the obvious in all caps: “WARNING: DO NOT USE BEACON GENERATED VALUES AS SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS.” Why not? Cryptographically speaking, they’re phenomenal random numbers; they’re just not secret at all! In contrast, they’re publicly available to everyone and archived for all time. The aim of the Randomness Beacon is to provide a random number standard, not to generate secrets. This distinction between secrecy and randomness is important in order to realize what the NIST is up to, so put your secrecy on the shelf for now. We’re talking randomness here.
The Perfect Coin Flip
A random variable, says the statistician, is a function that produces a value that is unknown before a given point in time, but is constant thereafter. This instant when the value is realized is crucial to understanding randomness. It’s the instant that separates the past, a period of time when the outcome has a probability distribution around its possible values, from the present in which the outcome is a simple constant number.
Before you roll that twenty-sided die, any number from one to twenty could come up. After the die comes to a stop, it’s absolutely certain that you just rolled a seventeen, and that fact is never going to change. You just rolled a seventeen, and only a seventeen, with certainty and forevermore. The probability distribution has collapsed to a point, which is exactly why we roll dice or flip coins if you think about it. Keep these concepts of uncertainty and timing in your mind as I tell you a brief, entirely fictional, story.
My wife and I are going out to a restaurant, but we can’t decide whether to get Italian or Thai. For the past year, we’ve been deciding restaurants with a coin flip, but that hasn’t worked since she got suspicious and discovered that the “random” coin flip isn’t random at all, and that I’d been using a two-headed coin. She’s not going to accept a dice roll either, for the same reason that we don’t play craps together anymore. What we need is a perfect coin flip: some future random event with an outcome that’s currently totally unpredictable, impossible for either of us to influence, but then easily verifiable after the event so there’s no room for argument.
Note what’s going on here. If either of us knew what the future random value would be, it wouldn’t be random. But we require something even stronger, that we can’t even make useful predictions about the outcome — that the coin is a fair coin. And since she doesn’t trust me anymore, the only way we’re going to go out to dinner is if neither of us can possibly influence the future value. Burned by a year of eating Thai food, she’s not going to trust me to read the result out to her either, she’ll need to see the results herself.
This is exactly what is provided by the NIST Randomness Beacon. To pick a restaurant, we agree to look at the NIST’s webpage at 7:00 pm and if the first digit is even, we go Thai. If it’s odd, we go Italian. We both agree that this is fair because the 7:00 pm result isn’t published until 7:00 pm. As late as 6:59 pm, the outcome is entirely unknowable, and after 7:00 pm it’s publicly available to anyone and hashed and signed with the NIST Beacon’s secret key, so it’s easily verifiable. Because the Beacon’s Output Value is the product of a few
hashing
steps, it’s also almost impossible that I could influence the value ahead of time even if I had an insider at the NIST. Even if I’ve hacked into the NIST’s servers and tried to change that one value, the way that the values are chained will eventually make this tampering obvious.
While it’s overkill for picking restaurants, there are a lot of similar agreements that a publicly available source of randomness will facilitate. One similar example from the NIST’s website is that of random inspections. If a saboteur knew ahead of time which box of mangoes was going to be “randomly” inspected, he could fill it with contraband, and the whole shipment would get impounded. Or if a pharmaceutical company knew ahead of time which patients were going to receive the real drug and which the placebo, they could assign healthier patients to the test group. By using a neutral source of randomness, the saboteur is left guessing and the pharma firm can demonstrate that it didn’t cheat on its science. Or the Beacon could be used in an election in a scheme to randomly sample precincts and re-count votes, immune to influence from any political parties.
More esoterically, one could use the Randomness Beacon to prove that something is newer than a certain date by including a recent Beacon entry. As of this writing, the values for December 31, 2014 are all still up in the air, so I can’t possibly write one of them down yet. But from Jan 1, 2015 and on, it’s trivial to do so. So if I get a bunch of t-shirts made with the midnight value from December 31, it’s absolutely verifiable that I got them made in the new year. In short, you could use the Beacon as a not-older-than dating scheme.
How Does It Work?
So to see how the NIST pulls this off, let’s take a quick look behind the curtains at how the Randomness Beacon achieves its goals of providing a random string of bits that’s completely unpredictable, stupendously difficult to influence, and publicly verifiable. See Figure 1 for the overview.
It all begins, naturally, with the random number generators. Two independent hardware random number generators provide 512 bits of randomness, and these two values are XOR’ed together to yield the
Seed Value
. Taken on its own, this is an extremely good 512-bit random number.
The S
eed Value
is then collected together with the rest of the relevant descriptive data: version number, frequency of output, the time stamp, a code for the chaining status, and the value of the previous output. This collection ties the random outcome together with the time that it was created and links this value with the previous one. The collection of data is then hashed with SHA-512 and signed with the Beacon’s private key, yielding the
Signature
. Given the
Beacon’s public key
, one can easily verify that the signature corresponds to the relevant data and is signed by the Beacon. You can use the UNIX shell script at the bottom of this article to run a verification for you.
Finally, the signature is hashed with SHA-512 again to create the final
Output Value
. This is the value that you’ll want to use as your random number. It incorporates all the relevant information about this minute’s value because it’s a hash of the signature, which is in turn a hash of the data. All of this hashing preserves the original entropy from the
Seed Value
but additionally makes the
Output Value
depend on the Beacon’s secret key and all the relevant background data in a verifiable way.
Devil’s Advocacy
Now let’s say that you don’t trust the NIST. That’s OK, because by design you don’t need to. What you would care about, for the purpose of deciding on dinner, is that the value isn’t manipulable in a way that could affect whether we go out for Thai or Italian. If someone inside the NIST wants to change the
Output Value
by picking a particular
Seed Value
, there are two rounds of SHA-512 hashing standing between the
Seed Value
and the
Output Value
even if they know the Beacon’s secret key. SHA-512 is not known to be broken at present, and so even working backwards through one of the SHA-512 stages is essentially impossible; two rounds is impossible squared.
Combining NIST with your own hashes (like our One TIme Pad) creates an even more secure system than using just one source.
If you want to make the outcome even more difficult to manipulate, you could use two values from the Beacon and XOR or hash them together to create the final random value. Because the outputs are chained, changing any value in the past introduces a changed
Previous Output
value which would have to be propagated forward to the current observation. So if you’d like to make your adversary’s work super-duper difficult, combine the
Output Values
from today at 7:00 pm and yesterday at 7:00 pm. Your adversary will have to work backwards through 2 * 24 * 60 = 2,880 SHA-512 stages to make the chain verify, still assuming that he knows the NIST’s secret key.
But suppose SHA-512 were broken and working it backwards were easy instead of being ridiculously difficult. Nothing prevents you from writing your contract to take the
Output Value
, add one to it, and run this value through a better hash of your choosing. Now the bad actor inside the NIST has to reverse your chosen hash function as well.
To put it another way: It’s virtually impossible to manipulate the
Output Value
, and even if your adversary could, they’d have to tailor a publicly-announced value to target you specifically. The cost of doing so would be astronomical, and the cost of altering the algorithm that you use to post-process the output value is trivial. When you start believing that a government standards organization has people on the inside who are doing the impossible in order to make you eat Thai food, it’s time to get back on your meds.
The one way that we can think of that the NIST could cheat in making the beacon is in the generation and timing of the random
Seed Values
themselves. Imagine that the
Seed Values
are generated randomly as stated but that they were generated a year ago instead of just a few seconds ago. Insiders at the NIST could then know the values ahead of their publication date, and even if they are not able to influence the values, they could possibly profit from knowing what decisions other parties are going to take in the future. One could even structure the agreement to take advantage of a known future outcome. Say using the value at 7:01 pm for our dinner selection instead of 7:00 pm.
We have no reason to believe this is happening, and it’s hard to imagine that the institution in charge of
running the nation’s most accurate clocks
would also be putting fake timestamps on the Beacon data. But it
is
the one hole in the system that we can think of, and if the outcomes of the Beacon end up moving stock markets, for instance, the incentive to cheat will be there.
Anyway, if nothing less than twelve layers of tinfoil will suffice for your hat, some researchers at NIST suggested that other organizations should also run their own Beacons so that users can combine outputs from institutionally different sources of entropy. One can imagine a future world where there are multiple beacon sources available to choose from. As long as you trust that the conspiracy doesn’t extend to the NIST
and
your other source, you can be sure that you’re getting non-manipulable values. Problem solved.
A Bell Test
This leaves us with the issue of true randomness. Sure, the values that come out of the hardware RNGs look random, but is there maybe some underlying deterministic physical rule that we could discover to predict the future evolution of the system? Our guess is no, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could issue a guarantee that the hardware generates actual randomness?
[Chua’s] Double-scroll attractor hardware for random number generation we saw in
a recent feature
.
On the
NIST’s webpage
, there’s a teaser for a future implementation that will provide guaranteed non-deterministic randomness. An experiment set up to test the
Bell Inequality
could generate results that are guaranteed to be quantum-mechanically random and absolutely unknowable before a certain time. Going through the experiment in detail is way beyond the scope of this article, but it goes a little bit like this:
Two
entangled photons
are generated and sent off in opposite directions. Measurements are chosen and made on each photon in locations that are far enough away from each other that there is not enough time for light from one measuring station to reach the other until after both measurements are finalized. This means that there’s no way that the result of one measurement could affect the other, and high correlation between the two measurements demonstrates that (random) quantum mechanics is deciding the outcome rather than normal deterministic physics. And as a bonus, the final outcome couldn’t possibly be known until the time that it takes light to reach one measurement station from the other. We have a guarantee of randomness and an earliest-knowable time in one apparatus.
A really solid test of the Bell Inequality and photon entanglement
is interesting from a fundamental physics perspective, but it’s also a source of physically undeniable random numbers. It’s also ridiculously difficult to construct such an apparatus, but they’re working on it. The NIST plans to plug the output from the Bell experiment into the Randomness Beacon described above and then make the results available to everyone. You said you wanted random numbers, right?
Conclusion
So in short, the NIST Randomness Beacon is designed to be the perfect coin flip. It’s a public source of random values that’s totally unpredictable, but also ex-post verifiable and extremely difficult to manipulate. They’ve been running the service for over a year now in public beta, and we think it’s time that folks started thinking up interesting new applications. You’re invited to post up your new ideas, conspiracy theories, or anything else related to public random numbers in the comments below.
And before we leave the subject of random numbers, we can’t help recommending looking at
Hackaday’s own One-Time Pad
pictured earlier in the post (0x0f 0x000 NUEM FAEUD POMEZRH BNRBRG) or RAND’s 1955 page-turner “
A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
“, two other sources of Grade A random numbers. Just don’t use these resources, or the NIST Randomness Beacon values, to encrypt any important secret data. Because they’re not secret.
I’d also like to thank the folks at NIST who helped with numerous clarifications and ideas for this article. Thanks in particular to [Rene Peralta] and [John Kelsey] for interesting usage ideas. [Lawrence Bassham] explained the entire Beacon procedure in great detail, and provided the code that makes verification of the chaining and signatures a breeze. Any mistakes or misapprehensions that remain, despite their help, are mine.
Appendix: Beacon Test Code
## NIST Randomness Beacon verification routine
## Only slightly adapted by Elliot Williams
## from code provided by Lawrence Bassham, NIST
## The UNIX time that you'd like to test:
##
whichRecord=1400878200
## --------------- Utility Functions ----------------
## Extracts specified record from xml file
getValue() {
xmllint --xpath "/record/$1/text()" $2
}
## Converts little-endian to big-endian
byteReverse() {
len=${#1}
for((i=${len}-2; i>=0; i=i-2)) do
rev="$rev${1:$i:2}"
done
echo ${rev}
}
## ---------------- Get an arbitrary record -----------------
echo "Downloading data for: ${whichRecord}"
curl -s https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/${whichRecord} -o rec.xml
## ------------- Pack data into correct format --------------
echo
echo "## Create a summary of all of the data, save as beacon.bin"
## Strangest choice of format ever!
## Version number (ascii text)
## Update frequency (4 bytes)
## Time Stamp (8 bytes)
## The HW RNG seedValue (64 bytes)
## The previous output value, does the chaining (64 bytes)
## Status code (4 bytes)
getValue version rec.xml > beacon.bin
printf "%.8x" `getValue frequency rec.xml` | xxd -r -p >> beacon.bin
printf "%.16x" `getValue timeStamp rec.xml` | xxd -r -p >> beacon.bin
getValue seedValue rec.xml | xxd -r -p >> beacon.bin
getValue previousOutputValue rec.xml | xxd -r -p >> beacon.bin
printf "%.8x" `getValue statusCode rec.xml` | xxd -r -p >> beacon.bin
## ------------------ Verify signature on data --------------------
echo "## Verify that the signature and NIST's public key correctly SHA512 sign the data"
## Download Beacon's public key
echo "Downloading Beacon's public key"
curl -s https://beacon.nist.gov/certificate/beacon.cer -o beacon.cer
## Create a bytewise reversed version of the listed signature
## This is necessary b/c Beacon signs with Microsoft CryptoAPI which outputs
## the signature as little-endian instead of big-endian like many other tools
## This may change (personal communication) in a future revision of the Beacon
signature=`getValue signatureValue rec.xml`
byteReverse ${signature} | xxd -r -p > beacon.sig
## Pull public key out of certificate
/usr/bin/openssl x509 -pubkey -noout -in beacon.cer > beaconpubkey.pem
## Test signature / key on packed data
/usr/bin/openssl dgst -sha512 -verify beaconpubkey.pem -signature beacon.sig beacon.bin
echo
echo
## ------------------ Verify Signature -> Output and Chaining ------------
echo "The following three values should match: "
echo " a direct SHA512 of the extracted signature"
echo " the reported output value"
echo " next record's previous output value"
echo
## Just print output value
echo "Reported output value"
getValue outputValue rec.xml
echo
## Now turn the signature into the output value: again SHA512
echo "SHA512 of the signature"
getValue signatureValue rec.xml | xxd -r -p | sha512sum
## Now test chaining
## Get next record
echo "Downloading the next record"
curl -s https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/next/${whichRecord} -o next.xml
## Make sure that this period's output shows up as next period's "previous output"
echo "Next value's reported previous output (test of forward chaining)"
getValue previousOutputValue next.xml
echo
echo
## --------------------- The End -----------------------------------------
## If this all worked, we've verified that the signature (plus NIST's key)
## sign the hash of the random number and its support info
## _and_ we've verified that the outputValue is derived from them,
## so we know that this output value is in the chain.
## If we run this on every entry in the chain, and all works out just fine,
## then we'd know all is well | 75 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "2266761",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T19:06:16",
"content": "This reminds me of “what the bleep do we know.” If everyone in the world focuses on the same thing then random number generators become less random. What if everyone focuses on the same random number genera... | 1,760,375,966.575255 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/amateur-builds-super-deep-super-cheap-ocean-vehicle/ | Amateur Builds Super Deep Super Cheap Ocean Vehicle | Matt Freund | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"quadcopter",
"rov",
"sailboat",
"sonar",
"submarine"
] | During the summers [Doug] has been building a 75 foot sailing junk to be launched from America’s most inland port. When Oklahoma’s winter hits he heads indoors to work on an
ROV that will prowl 3,000 feet below the surface
. Originally building a piloted submarine, he grew bored and decided to use the sailboat as a carrier for his fleet of remote submersibles instead.
A consummate amateur, [Doug] is the first to admit how little he knows about anything and how much he enjoys the open source spirit: collaboration, cooperation and learning from others. Determination and hard work fills in everything in between.
Hackaday covered the
beginnings of his ROV
last winter. In the year since it has progressed from some sketches and a 10″ steel pipe turned into a pressure testing rig to a nearly-complete, 10 foot long, custom-lathed 4″ aluminum torpedo laying on his shop table. In a bow-to-stern walk-through [Doug] shows how he is building science equipment for less than a penny on the dollar by using largely off-the-shelf imaginatively-repurposed parts or things he could fabricate himself with only a lathe and a 3d printer.
Continue after the break for a breakdown of the tech used.
The body of the ROV alternates between wet (flooded) and dry sections to preserve balance. Surprisingly, the multitude of thrusters on-board are plain RC outrunners most of us would recognize from quadcopters – apparently with a little potting they are not overly harmed by immersion in salt water. Ditto for the LED banks which lack any heat-sinking, relying on exposure to near-freezing seawater for cooling. Dry sections are stuffed full of all manner of gear: a complement of HD IP cameras, RC LiPo (11.1v, 6Ah each) packs, motor ESCs, external & internal pressure sensors, humidity sensors, an inertial measurement unit and relay banks all controlled by an Arduino Mega with an ethernet shield.
The pride and joy of the electronics are an affordable pair of Lowrance sonars for ocean bed mapping, commonly used as fish-finders. He chose the model he did because the board can be collapsed smaller, making it easier to fit into a pressure vessel. Each sonar board is connected to a transducer, one side-scanning and one spotlight facing forward. These display up on the surface what the terrain looks like 150 feet away in the pitch black.
Unexposed wiring having to traverse a between dry sections is handled by brass hose barbs and sealed inside vinyl aquarium tubing. The pressure through the wet section crushes the tubing tight onto the wires. For exposed wiring, [Doug] has come up with own solution of centrifugally packing epoxy into plumbing fittings fitted with connection pins for a 2,600 PSI seal.
The ROV maintains a data connection to the surface with a simple, slightly-buoyant Cat-5e and polycord tether. 5000 feet of cord is too long of a run for household hardware so [Doug] has mounted ordinary Startech VDSL2 extenders which also reduce the wiring requirements down to a single twisted pair (3000 feet yielded 46MBps and only 2ms lag). A bigger issue are the HD cams themselves which they found to be rather jello-like anywhere near HD performance.
When his carrier ship is finished [Doug] plans on sailing around the world, exploring the depths and doing meaningful science into retirement. He figures his $5,000 ROV will match ones sold for $1,200,000. For research projects that puts his open source ROV design in the realm of disposable relative to operations costs. For him it means he is able to own one at all.
All of [Doug]’s videos
regarding both his
sailing ship
(with an ubiquitous $250 schoolbus diesel engine as a backup) and his ROV are superbly filmed, cut and edited. Camera angles change quickly enough to stave off boredom and show both scale and detail of the work. It is easy to spend hours watching how he overcomes each obstacle and budget hurdle.
Ever the collaborator, [Doug] is calling out for anyone who wants to stop by for a visit to work on the boat or to participate in the ROV build with advice. His videos regularly feature collaborators who travelled to help. If you feel you have something to contribute, he seems welcome for assistance. | 41 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "2266261",
"author": "heatgap",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T15:24:53",
"content": "This reads rather weird: “During the summers [Doug] has been building a 75 foot sailing junk to be launched from America’s most inland port.” ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,375,966.977037 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/yule-inspired-tool-time-with-becky-stern/ | Yule-Inspired Tool Time With [Becky Stern] | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"anthropomorphized LEDs",
"factory tours",
"favorite tools",
"festivus",
"muppets",
"tools"
] | And now for something completely different: [Becky Stern]’s
musical tour of her favorite tools
around the Adafruit factory is the best holiday tune we’ve heard since The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping”. Of course, good tools are near and dear to us as well, and we found ourselves nodding frequently in agreement and smiling as broadly as [Billie, Ruby, and Gus], the anthropomorphic LED backup singers.
In other Adafruity news, it looks like their new Samsung SM482 pick and place machine was given the gift of
eyes as big as pizza pies
. What tools would you like to see under the tree, leaning against the Festivus pole, or all wrapped up a safe distance from the menorah this year? Do tell. | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "2265962",
"author": "Hassan Chaouki",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T12:43:03",
"content": "Dat Lady…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2266003",
"author": "Dj Biohazard",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T13:09:24",
"c... | 1,760,375,966.762711 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/gibson-girl-emergency-beacon-built-from-a-wind-up-flashlight/ | ‘Gibson Girl’ Emergency Beacon Built From A Wind-Up Flashlight | Gregory L. Charvat | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio"
] | Batteries flat and no cellphone coverage and you need to communicate hundreds of miles? No problem. [
Peter Parker VK3YE
] has created a wind-up ham radio transmitter built into a discount store crank-handle flashlight (or torch). No batteries – all power comes from you turning the hand crank. This design was inspired by the ‘Gibson Girl’ emergency beacon transmitter used during Second World War. But what used to be an very large, full body cranking box is now tiny and simple to crank. Let’s take a look at he video and the build details after the break.
With a simple wire antenna its continuous wave (CW) morse code signals can be heard hundreds of kilometers away, which is demonstrated in the video.
How it’s built
Removing the torch’s LEDs, battery and PC board frees room for the three transistor transmitter. The generator remains to power the transmitter.
The first transistor is an RF oscillator using a 7.023 MHz crystal. It’s on whenever the handle is being cranked. The oscillator’s output is amplified by the second transistor connected as an RF power amplifier. Its output goes to the antenna via a low pass filter which suppresses harmonics. The faster you crank the greater the RF output but 500 milliwatts is typical.
Sending Morse code requires that the transmitted signal be switched on and off. This is accomplished by the keying transistor which energizes the RF power amplifier only when the key is pressed. This simple and reliable transmitter circuit is based on the famous OXO by [George Burt GM3OXX] many years ago.
A momentary push-button switch salvaged from an old video recorder acts as the key. Mount this in a spot where you can press it with the hand holding the torch while cranking the generator with the other.
Construction cost is under $20 and the project can be built in a day. The video linked above includes a description, a demonstration and circuit diagram. The one below shows a demo of [Peter’s] hand-cranked radio communicating with a station 700km away. We think some possible add-ons for the ingenious device include a companion receiver, a PIC-controlled automatic keyer or a GPS attachment that send the position in Morse. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2265503",
"author": "Janez D.",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T09:10:55",
"content": "Wrong youtube link.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2265533",
"author": "Chema",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T09:28:21",
"content": "Here yo... | 1,760,375,966.6803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/hobbit-sword-glows-blue-then-vanquishes-unprotected-wifi/ | Hobbit Sword Glows Blue, Vanquishes Unprotected Wifi | Matt Freund | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"Hobbit",
"Spark Core",
"Sting",
"sword",
"wifi"
] | Whilst the original Sting glowed blue as a defensive alert, Spark’s “
WarSting
” is all about aggression. The project hacks a toy Hobbit sword and teaches it to glow blue when vulnerable WiFi is detected. Once alerted, combat ensues. If its bearer slashes, the sword will battle the helpless network, swinging and clanging until it acquires an IP from the defeated DHCP server. Once conquered, the sword publishes a “Vanquished” message to Spark’s cloud, teaching the sword to ignore it from thenceforth.
While “wardriving” has not really been a thing since the first Lord of the Rings movie came out, the last time we saw someone do
something similar
the hardware was limited to detecting WiFi, not connecting.
Spark CEO [Zach] chose the particular sword because it could be disassembled without being cut apart and already came equipped with easily-hackable LEDs, motion control, and sound effects. Naturally he added one of his own products – the Spark Core – to the hilt to graft WiFi features onto the weapon (a cheaper alternative would be an MCU of your choice and the new ESP8266). The project then hijacks the LED lighting, sound, and hit detection sensor. Our readers can probably come up with some more imaginative actions to take once connected, though the project’s existing code for the Core is
published on Github
. As-is, in many jurisdictions even merely connecting to an unsecured WiFi these days is unlawful so beware your local restrictions.
Lots of companies could simply advertise the easy way and while obviously an ad, the WarSting is still a creative and fun hack.
See the video below for the sword in action and a Spark’s lore regarding the hack. Thanks [Chris] for the tip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmjkUv5OtLM | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2265339",
"author": "NoHat",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T07:55:03",
"content": "Was done before in early 2013:http://hackaday.com/2013/01/21/plastic-sword-detects-wifi-enabled-orcs/But it looks nice nevertheless.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,375,967.088783 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/touching-light-with-haptic-feedback/ | Touching Light With Haptic Feedback | Sarah Petkus | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"3d printing",
"cornell",
"exoskeleton",
"haptic",
"light",
"touch",
"virtual reality",
"virtual touch",
"vr"
] | Many of us have gone on a stationary romp through some virtual or augmented scape with one of the few headsets out in the wild today. While the experience of viewing a convincing figment of reality is an exciting sensation in itself, [Mark Lee] and [Kevin Wang] are figuring out how to tie other senses into the mix.
The duo from Cornell University have built a
mechanical exoskeleton
that responds to light with haptic feedback. This means the wearer can touch the sphere of light around a source as if it were a solid object. Photo resistors are mounted like antenna to the tip of each finger, which they filed down around the edges to receive a more diffused amount of light. When the wearer of the apparatus moves their hand towards a light source, the sensors trigger servo motors mounted on the back of the hand to actuate and retract a series of 3D printed tendons which arch upward and connect to the individual fingers of the wearer. This way as the resistors receive varying amounts of light, they can react independently to simulate physical contours.
One of the goals of the project was to produce a working proof of concept with no more than 100 dollars worth of materials, which [Mark] and [Kevin] achieve with some cash to spare. Their list of parts can be found on their blog along with some more details on the project. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "2264526",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T03:43:58",
"content": "So, I guess if you had a rendering of a sphere on a black background on an LCD screen, you could feel that it is a round, spherical object if you run your fingers over the screen. Correct?",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,375,967.556043 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/crypto-photography-and-custom-firmware/ | Crypto Photography And Custom Firmware | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"encryption",
"firmware",
"linux",
"NX camera",
"NX300",
"public key encryption",
"Samsung NX300"
] | Imagine a camera that took encrypted pictures. If your camera is stolen, the only thing on the memory card would be random data that can only be unlocked with a key. If you hire a photographer, those images cannot be copied without the key. At the very least, it’s an interesting idea
made impressive because this actually exists
.
[Doug] recently got his hands on a Samsung NX300, a nice camera for the price that conveniently runs Linux and is kinda open-sourced by Samsung. With special firmware, [Doug] created public/private key encryption for this camera, giving only the person with the private key the ability to unlock the pictures taken with this camera.
[Doug] started his build by
looking at the firmware for this camera
, figuring out how to take everything apart and put it back together. With a few modifications that included encryption for all images taken with this camera, [Doug] repackaged the firmware and upgraded the camera.
The encryption firmware
is available on the site
, but considering how easily [Doug] was able to make this hack happen, and a great walkthrough of how to actually do it raises some interesting possibilities. The NX300 is a pretty nice camera that’s a little bit above the Canon PowerShot cameras supported by
CHDK
. It also runs Linux, so if you’re looking for something cool to do with a nice camera, [Doug] has a very good resource. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2263614",
"author": "mofosyne",
"timestamp": "2014-12-19T00:40:45",
"content": "Had a thought about this before in halfbakeryhttp://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Asymmetric_20Encryption_20CamcorderStill doesn’t deal with the fact that if anybody sees you filming and they don’t like you, t... | 1,760,375,967.028412 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/counting-transistors-in-the-playstation/ | Counting Transistors In The Playstation | Brian Benchoff | [
"Playstation Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"playstation",
"ps1",
"psx",
"reverse engineering"
] | Over in Russia there are a few people doing extremely in-depth technical teardowns, and the latest is one of the most ambitious ever seen. The PSXDEV team is
tearing into the heart of the original PlayStation
(
Google translatrix
), looking at 300,000 transistors, and re-implementing the entire console in a logic level simulator.
While the CPU in the PSX is unique to that specific piece of hardware, a lot of this custom silicon can be found in other places. The core – a RISC LSI LR33300 – is documented in a few rare tomes that are somehow available for free on the Internet. Other parts of this chip are a little stranger. There is a bizarre register that isn’t documented anywhere, a Bus Unit that handles the access between various devices and peripherals, and a motion picture decompressor.
The reverse engineering process begins by de-encapsulating the CPU, GPU, sound processing unit, and CD-ROM controller, taking very high magnification photos of the dies, and slowly mapping out the semiconductors and metals to figure out what cells do what function, how they’re connected, and what the big picture is. It’s a painstaking process that requires combing through gigabytes of die shots and apparently highlight gates, wires, and busses with MS Paint.
The end result of all this squinting at a monitor is
turning tracings of chips into logic elements
with Logisim. From there, the function of the CPU can be understood, studied, and yes, eventually emulated down to the gate level. It’s an astonishing undertaking, really.
If this sort of thing sounds familiar, you’re right: the same team behind PSXDEV is also responsible for
a similar effort focused on the Nintendo Entertainment System
. There, the CPU inside the NES – the Ricoh 2A03 – was torn down, revealing the 6502 core, APU, DMA, and all the extra bits that made this a custom chip.
Thanks [Rasz] for the tip. | 40 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "2262983",
"author": "Rich",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T21:04:24",
"content": "Why?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2262998",
"author": "Jon",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T21:07:18",
"content": "Why not?",
... | 1,760,375,967.2283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/wire-wrap-101/ | Wire Wrap 101 | Bil Herd | [
"Featured"
] | [
"prototype board",
"wire wrap",
"wire wrapping"
] | You might notice
that many of my writings start with “Back in the day”. Not wanting to disappoint I will say that back in the day we used to use wire wrap technology when we needed a somewhat solid, somewhat reliably assembly. Given a readable schematic a good tech could return a working or near-working unit in a day or two depending on the completeness and accuracy of the schematic.
Properly done a wire wrap assembly is capable of fairly high speed and acceptable noise when the alternative option of creating a custom PCB would take too long or not allow enough experimentation. Wire wrap is also used in several types of production, from telco to NASA, but I am all about the engineer’s point of view on this.
My first wire wrap tool and wire wrap wire came from Radio Shack in the mid 1970’s. I still have the wire, because frankly its kind of cheap wire and I use it when it’s the only thing I can reach quickly when I need to make a jumper on a PCB. The tool is still around also, given the fact that I can’t find it at the moment the one shown here is my new wire wrap tool which is good for low quantity wrapping, unwrapping and stripping.
The skinny little wrap tool is okay for hobbyist as the wraps are fine with a little practice. But I do recommend investing in high-quality wire. A common wire available is Kynar® coated, a fluorinated vinyl that performs well as an insulator.
Before I go too much further, here’s the video walkthrough of wire wrap, its uses, and several demonstration. But make sure you also join me after the break where I cover the rest of the information you need to start on the road to wire wrap master.
Another important You will also hear me harp on good power and ground layout; “stubs or lengths of power supply wire that terminate in dead ends should be kept to a minimum and the power and ground wires are routed in close proximity to each other.
Inductively coupling the supply and return together reduces impedance, hence noise. Obviously there is a lot more to it than that but that’s for another video.
A good wrap has 3-4 turns of the exposed wire on the square post and a turn of insulated wire which improves resistance to vibration and vibration based failure. The drawing here is from the NASA standards part of their website showing an acceptable wrap.
Wire wrap sockets are still available and I keep wire wrap SIP terminal strips as a custom socket footprint can be created as needed.
For more complex wire wrap components such as connectors you might have to find other sources such as electronic junk-yards. Hackaday’s [Brian Benchoff] was able to get a 64 pin “Hershey Bar” wire wrap socket from Apex Electronics in Sun Valley CA with an assist from [Todd Black].
Wrap-ID Labels for Wire Wrap
Little slip on tags are available to help keep track of “reversed” pin numbering as seen from the bottom of the board.
Wrapping a wire on a post is accomplished by first stripping back the insulation on the wire wrap wire to 1″. The bare wire is then inserted into the hole on the wire wrap tool end (that is
not
in the center), and then the wire is pushed in until it is stopped by the tool. Next the tool and wire is placed over the specific square post being sure that the post goes into the hole in the center of the tool. For a manual router the tool is rotated with slight downward force to keep the wire wrap tight until the wire is completely wrapped, between 5-6 turns.
With the hand operated or power tool the same procedure is performed with inserting wire into the tool, then placing tool and wire onto the post, and finally the tool wraps the number of turns it is set up for.
Hand Operated Wire Wrap Gun & Tool
Electric Wire Wrap Gun
There are different techniques for organizing the wires on a wire wrap board; sometimes the wires are routed together down channels and sometimes the individual wires connect straight across the board in as little length as possible. Both techniques have pros and cons as crosstalk and impedance are affected by wire placement.
Discrete components can be soldered to headers that then insert into standard wire wrap sockets as shown above with the 3.3K resistors.
And finally a technician named [Jeff] in the old MOS/Commodore R&D lab showed me how his boards never seemed to have much slack in them. He would take one of the skinny wire wrap tools and get on a socket pin/tail, then rotate the pin itself taking up the slack. While this looks better what he didn’t really address was the fact he was making a more pronounced inductor at the end of some wires. The answer to this technique as well as the channel routing technique (the techs would actually lace up the little bundles some times) was that my boards were to be “jungle routed”, I.E. more or less straight connections between pins, and slack was to be dealt with by adding some convolutions in the wire between the two pins by looping over other pins, similar to what you see on a high speed PCB where a trace will take a few extra turns to control the length/propagation time.
I should tell you that [Jeff] threw away my coffee cup one day because of what I had growing in it. From that day until I left Commodore I would make at least one trip a day to the R&D lab to throw his coffee cup away.
[Wire wrap diagram is from the
nasa.gov website on Discrete Wiring
] | 72 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "2262587",
"author": "RIP",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T18:31:05",
"content": "Or you can make a sample PCB for $20 with a built-in perf area zone.Wire wrap was awful for finding bugs, and practically impossible to fix a few months later.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,375,967.518081 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/meme-themed-pinball-machine-much-flipping-y-u-no-win/ | Meme Themed Pinball Machine – Much Flipping, Y U No Win?! | Matt Freund | [
"classic hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3dprinting",
"arcade",
"Meme",
"nyan",
"nyan cat",
"pinball",
"raspberry pi",
"rickroll"
] | Summoning 4chans, 9gags, Reddits and other denizens of easily-digested content, Liberty Games stripped apart a dilapidated “Baby Doll” pinball arcade machine and turned it into this
meme-spouting monstrosity
. A complete redo of the vinyl and graphics to sport dozens of familiar internet tropes was first, then they had Shapeways create internal scenery and finally some electronics were added to spice things up.
We have seen
PINMAME-based digital machines
but this took a different path. Pinball machines this old pre-date common transistors so they rely on electro-mechanicals for everything. This made hacking the machine challenging so the team intercepted most of the signals and tied them into a Raspberry Pi with a Pi-face interface board. A videoscreen was added to the scoreboard, triggering all manner of memey videos and sounds according to actions performed and unlocked on the screen.
If you yearn for expired pranks of years gone by and are bad at pinball, you are in luck. Losing the game gets you Rickrolled – over and over again. On the plus side, Nyan Cat rockets away to bonuses and even the Admiral himself warns you of impending danger.
We resisted the urge to write this article as a chain of one meme to the next, you will get plenty of that from the well-documented project conversion and the following video. Someone in the comments will probably make a list of all memes.
http://www.libertygames.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/internet-meme-pinball.mp4 | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2262032",
"author": "8complex",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T15:07:31",
"content": "It might be a cool project, but it is a horrible table layout.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2262380",
"author": "Matt Freund",
... | 1,760,375,967.273331 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/towards-more-interesting-instant-cameras/ | Towards More Interesting Instant Cameras | Brian Benchoff | [
"ARM",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"JPEG",
"JPEG camera",
"thermal printer",
"thermal receipt printer"
] | When [Ch00f] was getting jeans rung up at Nordstroms, he noticed how fast thermal receipt printers can put an image on a piece of paper. This observation isn’t unique to the circles [Ch00f] frequents – there are a few small receipt paper printers out there that connect to the Internet, iPhones, and a whole bunch of other Kickstarter-friendly keyword devices.
Nevertheless, a device that can make a hard copy of an image quickly and cheaply isn’t something you just stop thinking about. After rolling the concept around in his head for a few years, [Ch00f] finally came up with the perfect build –
a camera
.
The hardware for the build is based around an STM32F4 Discovery board. It’s a bit overpowered for this sort of application, and this is one of [Ch00f]’s first adventures in ARM-land. The rest of the hardware consists of a thermal receipt printer and
a JPEG camera
, the latter of which replaced a cellphone CMOS camera module that was lost in a move.
A custom camera requires a custom enclosure, and for this [Ch00f]
made something remarkable
. The entire enclosure is CNC milled out of a beautiful piece of figured walnut. The end result looks far too good for a prototype, but it does polish up nicely with a bit of linseed oil.
Now [Ch00f] has an instant camera that takes the idea of a Polaroid and turns it into something that produces a print for tenths of a cent. There’s a time-lapse function – just a zip tie on the shutter button – filters with the help of highlighters, and the ability to record movies in flipbook format.
It’s a great project, and also something that will make for a great crowdfunding campaign. [Ch00f] has already started work on this. He already has
a sleek, modern-looking website
that requires far too much scrolling than should be necessary – the first step to a winning Kickstarter. [Ch00f] also learned a lot about ARMs, DMA, dithering, gamma correction, and the JPEG format, but that’s not going to get anyone to open up their wallet. You know what will? A slick video. You’ll find that below. | 22 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "2261551",
"author": "gravatarnonsense",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T12:05:42",
"content": "You can get colour printers using a similar technique.https://www.zink.com/content/technology-0",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2261597",
... | 1,760,375,967.649162 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/18/edge-lit-clear-plastic-bike-combines-nighttime-riding-safety-with-aurora-borealis-flair/ | Edge-Lit Clear Plastic Bike Combines Nighttime Riding Safety With Aurora Borealis Flair | Rich Bremer | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"bicycle frame",
"bike",
"bike hack",
"DIY bicycle"
] | Several years ago [dan] saw some plastic frame bikes designed by MIT students. Ever since he saw those bikes he thought it would be cool to make an
edge-lit plastic framed bike
.
The frame is made from 1/8″ and 3/8″ thick polycarbonate sheet. The parts were designed with tongue and grooves so they fit together nicely. The joints were glued to hold everything together. Holes were drilled in the edge of the plastic large enough to fit an LED. Once the LED was inserted in the hole, it was wired up and secured with hot glue. There are about 200 LEDs on the bike, powered by a constant current LED driver circuit that [dan] designed specifically for this project.
The build process was certainly not flawless. For example, the plastic holding the bottom bracket (where the crank and pedals attach) broke. This can be avoided by increasing the amount of material in that area prior to cutting out the pieces. [dan] was able to fiberglass his broken parts back together.
[dan] admits that the bike is heavy and a little wobbly, but is definitely ride-able. He did us a favor and made all his CAD files available to anyone that wants to make one themselves. If polycarbonate is too expensive for your blood, check out this
bike make from cardboard
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2262186",
"author": "soundman98",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T15:58:12",
"content": "“Step 7: The electrical circuit & programming (overview)I used a very simple circuit here. the LED’s are in 3 banks. each bank is all one color of led (one bank is red, one is green, one is blue). all ... | 1,760,375,967.594826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/repairing-a-router-plagued-by-capacitors/ | Repairing A Router Plagued By Capacitors | Brian Benchoff | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"capacaitor",
"modem",
"overheating",
"repair",
"router"
] | [psgarcha]’s modem/router comes straight from his internet provider, is on 24/7, and is built with the cheapest components imaginable. Eventually, this will be a problem and for [psgarcha], this problem manifested itself sooner than expected.
Fortunately, there was a soldering iron handy
.
The problems began with a boot loop – starting the router up, watching the blinking LEDs, and watching these lights follow the same pattern forever. Initially thinking this would be a problem with the firmware, [psgarcha] did the only thing he could do – take it apart. Inside, he found some bulging capacitors. Unsheathing his iron and replacing the obviously faulty components, [psgarcha] plugged the router in and had everything work. Great. Until those caps failed again a few months later.
There was obviously something wrong with the circuit, or wrong with the environment. Figuring it was hot out anyway, [psgarcha] replaced those caps again and added a fan and a small heatsink to the largest chip on the board. This
should
solve any overheating problems, but the real testing must be done in summer (or putting the router in a well-insulated enclosure). It’s an easy fix, a good reminder of exactly how often caps fail, and a great example of reducing the electronic cruft building up in landfills. | 59 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "2260611",
"author": "preamp",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T06:38:03",
"content": "Never replace Chang with CapXon or vice versa…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2260830",
"author": "squantmuts",
"timestamp": "2014-... | 1,760,375,968.016709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/singlock-protects-your-valuables-from-shy-people/ | SingLock Protects Your Valuables From Shy People | Rick Osgood | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Atmel",
"audio",
"authentication",
"cornell",
"lock",
"MEGA1284P",
"security",
"singlock",
"sound"
] | Two Cornell students have designed their own
multi-factor authentication system
. This system uses a PIN combined with a form of voice recognition to authenticate a user. Their system is not as simple as speaking a passphrase, though. Instead, you have to sing the correct tones into the lock.
The system runs on an ATMEL MEGA1284P. The chip is not sophisticated enough to be able to easily identify actual human speech. The team decided to focus their effort on detecting pitch instead. The result is a lock that requires you to sing the perfect sequence of pitches. We would be worried about an attacker eavesdropping and attempting to sing the key themselves, but the team has a few mechanisms in place to protect against this attack. First, the system also requires a valid PIN. An attacker can’t deduce your PIN simply by listening from around the corner. Second, the system also maintains the user’s specific voice signature.
The project page delves much more deeply into the mathematical theory behind how the system works. It’s worth a read if you are a math or audio geek. Check out the video below for a demonstration. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2259945",
"author": "Thopter",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T03:10:12",
"content": "How many people setting up a system like this would hum the 5 tones from Close Encounters? :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2262303",
"au... | 1,760,375,967.760335 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/derbys-got-legs-he-knows-how-to-use-them/ | Derby’s Got Legs, He Knows How To Use Them | Theodora Fabio | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printed prosthetic",
"derby",
"dog",
"multijet printing",
"prosthetics"
] | There’s just something about the holidays and man’s best friend that brings out the best in people. [Tara Anderson], Director of CJP Product Management at 3D Systems, fostered a husky mix named Derby. Derby was born with a congenital defect: his forelegs were underdeveloped with no paws. This precluded the poor fellow from running around and doing all of the things dogs love to do. [Tara] had fitted him with a wheel cart, but she still felt that Derby deserved more mobility and freedom.
Deciding that 3D-printed prosthetics was the answer
, she turned to her colleagues and collaborated with Derrick Campana, a certified Animal Orthotist, to create a new set of forelegs for Derby.
The design is different from typical leg prosthetics; Tara felt that the typical “running man” design would not work for a dog, since they’d just sink right into the ground. Instead, the “loop” design was used, allowing for more playful canine antics. They were constructed using
MultiJet Printing
on the 3DS’ ProJet 5500X. MultiJet Printing enabled the prosthetics to be printed with firm and soft parts, both needed for comfort and durability.
The first set they designed is lower, to help ease the dog into using the prosthetics and strengthening his muscles. As he grows more accustomed to his newfound mobility, newer ones will be printed that will gradually increase in height. Derby has taken a shine to his new legs, happily gallivanting around and in some cases outrunning his new owners!
This is a very neat variation on prosthetics; we are impressed with the novel design and efficacy. We would love to see this MultiJet concept explored in the Maker community with
open-source platforms
and materials, as well as more unconventional designs made possible by 3D-printing. We never get tired of seeing the many ways people have already created
amazing
prosthetics
for
men
,
women
, and
children
. No matter your personal opinion on 3D Systems, you can’t deny that Derby is having a blast with his awesome gams.
If you are interested in following his story, Derby has a
Facebook page.
You can also check out the
Peace and Paws
dog rescue that saved Derby from euthanization. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2259190",
"author": "911Ducktail",
"timestamp": "2014-12-18T00:13:46",
"content": "Love this story, but I was thinking, shouldn’t the pups front legs be a bit taller? Seems like he doesn’t walk/run on the level. The look on his face in the videos is amazing though!",
"parent_id"... | 1,760,375,967.715091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/drawing-on-glow-in-the-dark-surfaces-with-lasers/ | Drawing On Glow In The Dark Surfaces With Lasers | Brian Benchoff | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino DUE",
"glow in the dark",
"glow in the dark vinyl",
"laser",
"stepper",
"stepper motor",
"tinyg"
] | What do you get when you have a computer-controlled laser pointer and a big sheet of glow in the dark material?
Something very cool
, apparently. [Riley] put together a great build that goes far beyond a simple laser diode and servo build. He’s using stepper motors and a proper motion control software for this one.
The theory behind the device is simple – point a laser at some glow in the dark surface – but [Riley] is doing this project right. Instead of jittery servos, the X and Y axes of the laser pointer are stepper motors. These are controlled by an Arduino Due and
TinyG motion control software
. This isn’t [Riley]’s first rodeo with TinyG; we saw him at Maker Faire NYC with a pendulum demonstration
that was absolutely phenomenal
.
Right now, [Riley] is taking SVG images, converting them to Gcode, and putting them up on some glow in the dark vinyl. Since the Hackaday Skull ‘n Wrenches is available in SVG format, that was an easy call to make on what to display in weird phosphorescent green. You can see a video of that along with a few others below. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2258787",
"author": "rj",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T21:26:06",
"content": "What’s causing the jaggy edges in the last video?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2258819",
"author": "hodginsa",
"timestamp": "2014-12-... | 1,760,375,967.920734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/lumographic-images-created-with-lens-only/ | Lumographic Images Created With Lens Only | Matt Freund | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"lens",
"luminography",
"MoMath",
"optics"
] | Lumographic images are those patterns you see at the bottom of swimming pools. When water works as a lens, the light patterns of bright and dark are random and wandering based on the waves above. [Matthew] figured out a way to
create fixed images from lens shape alone
. The images only morph into view clearly when light shines at the proper angle. At near angles an eerie fun-house mirror effect appears, but too far off and it scatters unrecognisably.
The exact method for designing the optics is not explained, though we are sure someone in our readership could figure it out. The artist claims it to be a hundred year old million-variable math problem. The
lenses
are often quite thick and do not resemble much of anything. The effect however, is sharp, clear and detailed.
At first he suspected he needed astronomically-expensive military-grade 50 nanometer (0.000002″) precision machining for the lenses, but some friends in the autobody industry gave him a few tips to squeeze good enough accuracy from more affordable industrial machines. The technique also allows for images to appear from mirrors and internal reflections. It is probably not something you can
3D print
or
machine yourself
, but it would be interesting to see someone try.
[Matthew]’s work is on display in the “
Composite
” gallery at the National Museum of Math in New York (MoMath). See the video after the break for a peak at the machinery he uses to manipulate the lenses to enhance the visuals in the exhibit. | 18 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "2258356",
"author": "Rob",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T18:10:56",
"content": "Whoa… that’s trippy! Love it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2258409",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T18:30:55",
"content": "... | 1,760,375,968.072899 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/the-most-minimal-ws2812b-driver/ | The Most Minimal WS2812B Driver | Brian Benchoff | [
"ARM",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"ARM M0+",
"lpc810",
"ws2812",
"ws2812b"
] | Whether you call them individually controllable RGB LEDs, WS2812, or NeoPixels, there’s no denying they are extremely popular and a staple of every glowey and blinkey project. Fresh off the reel, they’re nearly useless – you need a controller, and that has led to many people coming up with many different solutions to the same problem.
Here’s another solution
, notable because it’s the most minimal WS2812 driver we’ve ever seen.
The critical component in this build is
NXP’s LPC810
, an ARM Cortex M0+ in an 8-pin DIP package. Yes, it’s the only ARM in a DIP-8, but still able to run at 30MHz, and hold a 4kB program.
JeeLabs is using the SPI bus on the LPC810 to clock out data at the rate required by the LEDs. The only hardware required is a small LED to drop the voltage from 5V to 3.3V and a decoupling capacitor. Yes, you could easily get away with this as a one-component build.
The build consists of a ring of sixty WS2812b RGB LEDs, and the chip dutifully clocking out bits at the correct rate. It’s the perfect start to an LED clock project, an Iron Man arc reactor (are we still doing those?), or just random blinkey LEDs stuffed into a wearable.
Thanks [Martyn] for sending this one in. | 32 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2257891",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T15:05:50",
"content": "Small correction. Not the only ARM in a DIP package. I believe you guys have a previous post on this one:http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers/cortex_m0_m0/lpc1100/LPC1114FN28.html",
"parent_id... | 1,760,375,968.180445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/tiptoe-through-the-tulips-in-no-time-with-ukule-led/ | Tiptoe Through The Tulips In No Time With Ukule-LED | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ATmega1284p",
"chord shapes",
"chords",
"neopixel",
"serial",
"tiny tim",
"ukulele"
] | Take it from someone who has played at the guitar for over 20 years: reading sheet music can be a big stumbling block to musical enjoyment. Playing by ear is somewhat unreliable, tablature only works well if you’re already familiar with the tune and tempo, and pulling melody from chord charts is like weaving fiction from the dictionary. A lot can be said for knowing basic chord formations, but it can be difficult get your fingers to mimic what you see on the page, the screen, or someone else’s fretboard. Enter
Ukule-LED
, a learning tool and all-around cool project by [Raghav and Jeff] at Cornell.
Ukule-LED uses 16 NeoPixels across the first four positions of the fretboard to teach chord positions. All 16 NeoPixels are connected in series to a single pin on an ATMega1284P, which sits on a board mounted to the bottom of the uke along with power and serial. [Raghav and Jeff] set the NeoPixels below the surface so as not to interrupt playability. The uke can operate in either of two modes, ‘play’, and ‘practice’. In ‘play’ mode, the user feeds it a text file representing a song’s chords, tempo, and time signature. The LEDs show the chord changes in real-time, like a karaoke teleprompter for fingers. In ‘practice’ mode, the user enters a chord through the CLI, and the lights hold steady until they get a new assignment. Knowing which fingers to use where is up to the user.
To add another layer of learning, major chords alight in green, minor chords in red, and 7th chords in blue. These are the currently supported chord types, but the project was built with open, highly extendable Python sorcery available for download and subsequent tinkering. Go on tour after the break. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2257707",
"author": "timgray1",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T13:31:49",
"content": "Nice first prototype. cant wait to see it when they refine it better and use smaller pixels.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2258013",
"author"... | 1,760,375,968.11521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/17/esp-gets-fcc-and-ce/ | ESP Gets FCC And CE | Brian Benchoff | [
"hardware"
] | [
"ESP",
"ESP8266",
"fcc",
"module",
"uart",
"wifi",
"Wifi module"
] | The ESP8266 Internet of Things module is the latest and greatest thing to come out of China. It’s ideal for turning plastic Minecraft blocks into Minecraft servers, making your toilet tweet, or for some bizarre home automation scheme. This WiFi module is not, however, certified by the FCC.
The chipset, on the other hand, is
.
Having a single module that’s able to run code, act as a UART to WiFi transceiver, peek and poke a few GPIOs, all priced at about $4 is a game changer, and all your favorite silicon companies are freaking out wondering how they’re going to beat the ESP8266.
Now the chipset is FCC certified
, the first step to turning these modules into products.
This announcement does come with a few caveats: the chipset is certified, not the module. Each version of the module must be certified by itself, and there are versions that will
never
be certified by the FCC. Right now, we’re looking at the ESP8266-06, -07, -08, and -12 modules – the ones with a metal shield – as being the only ones that could potentially pass an FCC cert. Yes, those modules already have an FCC logo on them, but you’re looking at something sold for under $5 in China, here.
Anyone wanting to build a product with the ESP will, of course, also need to certify it with the FCC. This announcement hasn’t broken down any walls, but it has cracked a window. | 58 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2257000",
"author": "technolomaniac",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T09:15:54",
"content": "Worth mentioning…It is only the ESP8266EX (note the EX suffix) that passed. Earlier devices have not been certified. This is a subtle but no less important detail. This means that most modules (... | 1,760,375,968.878776 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/trinket-edc-drawing-3-results/ | Trinket EDC Contest Drawing #3 Results | Adam Fabio | [
"contests",
"Featured"
] | [
"bus pirate",
"cordwood",
"Hackaday Contest",
"hackaday store",
"Trinket Everyday Carry",
"Trinket Everyday Carry Contest"
] | We’ve held our third drawing for the
Trinket Everyday Carry Contest
. Once again we’ve
used a Pro Trinket
to pick the random winner. This week’s winner is [Scissorfeind] with his project
Stylin’ safety jacket
In true hack style, [Scissorfeind] went into this project with two goals: A jacket that will be visible at night, and keep him “looking f*cking sick”. The jacket itself is a faux leather affair from a thrift store. [Scissorfeind] added some studs for bling, and he’s working on adding a ton of electronics for light.
The Pro Trinket will be driving a series of LED matrices, which [Scissorfeind] is working on turning into POV displays. The matrices come from an LED clock which [Scissorfeind] saved from the landfill. In fact, most of the parts in the jacket are upcycled from e-waste. The jacket is just starting to come together. We can’t wait to see the final results!
We hope that [Scissorfeind] enjoys his
Bus Pirate V3.6
from
The Hackaday Store.
The Bus Pirate was designed by former Hackaday writer [Ian Lesnet] as a Swiss Army knife of electronic communications. If you’re trying to connect to a circuit with SPI, I²C, JTAG, or UART, the Bus Pirate has you covered. It can do plenty more though – from reading analog data to programming components. Check out [Brian Benchoff’s] full review on the
Bus Pirate V3.6 product page!
If the pseudo random number gods didn’t smile on you this week, don’t worry, there are still two more chances to win a random drawing! Our next drawing will be on 12/23/2014 at 9pm EST. The prize will once again be a
Cordwood Puzzle!
To be eligible you need to submit your project as an official entry and publish at least one project log during the week.
The main contest entry window closes on January 2, 2015 – but don’t wait for the last minute! Hit the contest page and build some awesome wearable or pocketable electronics! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "2257082",
"author": "Laszlo",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T09:45:32",
"content": "It was my understanding that the project had to fit in your pocket… Is this still the case?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2257115",
"autho... | 1,760,375,968.401639 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/drm_protection_removed_for_coffee/ | DRM Protection Removed For… Coffee? | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"coffee",
"drm",
"keurig"
] | Keurig, the manufacturer of a single-serve coffee brewing system, has a very wide following amongst coffee drinkers. Their K-cup (pre-packaged coffee grounds with a coffee filter, all in a plastic container) is an interesting concept and makes brewing a single cup of coffee much more efficient over making a whole pot. Their newer line of coffee makers, the Keurig 2.0, has some interesting (and annoying) security features though, which [Kate Gray] has found an
interesting and simple way around
.
The DRM security in these coffee makers is intended to keep third-party “cups” from being used in the Keurig. It can recognize an authentic Keurig cup, and can stop the operation of the coffee pot if a knockoff is placed in the machine. We can only assume that this is because Keurig makes a heap of cash by selling its canisters of coffee. One simple solution was already covered a few days ago by
taping an authentic lid to the machine
. This one doesn’t require any authentic pods but just removes one wire from a wiring harness inside of the case.
There are
other ways
around the security on these devices, but when [Kate Gray] actually investigated, she found the security decidedly lacking. With something this simple, one can only speculate how much Keurig has really invested in making sure users don’t use third-party cups of coffee in their machines, but it also brings up the classic question of
who really owns hardware
if we can’t use it in the way we want, rather than the way the manufacturer wants.
You can read more about the project on
its Reddit page
. Thanks to [MyOwnDemon] for the tip! | 75 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "2255952",
"author": "Fritoeata",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T03:19:04",
"content": "I have a well featured “Original” Keurig with zero hassles… two pricks in the container and BAM!coffee! I actually use it for hot water for tea, too! (flip lever up/down).Why on earth would a reputable ... | 1,760,375,968.5301 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/battery-basics-choosing-a-battery-for-your-project/ | Battery Basics – Choosing A Battery For Your Project | Matt Freund | [
"how-to",
"Parts"
] | [
"battery",
"battery life",
"life",
"lithium",
"lithium polymer",
"nicad",
"nimh"
] | If choosing a rechargeable battery for your project intimidates you, [Afroman] has prepared a primer video that should put you at ease. In this
tutorial for battery basics
he not only walks you through a choice of 5 rechargeable chemistries and their respective tradeoffs, but gives a procedure that will allow you to navigate through the specs of real-world batteries for sale – something that can be the most intimidating part of the process.
You cannot learn everything about batteries in 9 minutes, but watching this should get you from zero to the important 80% of the way there. Even if your project does not give you the specs you need to begin buying, [Afroman] tells you what to measure and how to shop for it. In particular, the information he gives is framed in the context you care about, hopefully ensuring you are not waylaid by all the details that were safe to ignore. If this is not enough, [Afroman]’s prequel
video on battery terminology
has more detail.
Much like your high school English teacher told you, you need to know the rules before you can choose to break them. Many of battery absolute Dos or Don’ts are written for the manufacturer, who provides for the consumer,
not the hacker
. Hackaday has published hundreds of battery articles over the years; search our archives when you are ready for more. | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2255192",
"author": "dingus",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T00:17:45",
"content": "afroman is a hero!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2255212",
"author": "Afroman",
"timestamp": "2014-12-17T00:23:06",
"content": "Thanks f... | 1,760,375,968.35106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/uav-coaxial-copter-uses-unique-drive-mechanism/ | UAV Coaxial Copter Uses Unique Drive Mechanism | Rick Osgood | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"coaxial",
"copter",
"drone",
"linkage",
"modlab",
"pitch",
"research"
] | Personal UAV’s are becoming ubiquitous these days, but there is still much room for improvement. Researchers at [Modlab] understand this, and they’ve come up with a
very unique method
of controlling pitch, yaw, and roll for a coaxial ‘copter using only the two drive motors.
In order to control all of these variables with only two motors, you generally need a mechanism that adjusts the pitch of the propeller blades. Usually this is done by mounting a couple of tiny servos to the ‘copter. The servos are hooked up to the propellers with mechanical linkages so the pitch of the propellers can be adjusted on the fly. This works fine but it’s costly, complicated, and adds weight to the vehicle.
[Modlab’s] system does away with the linkages and extra servos. They are able to control the pitch of their propellers using just the two drive motors. The propellers are connected to the motors using a custom 3D printed rotor hub. This hub is specifically designed to couple blade lead-and-lag oscillations to a change in blade pitch. Rather than drive the motors with a constant amount of torque, [Modlab] adds a sinusoidal component in phase with the current speed of the motor. This allows the system to adjust the pitch of the blades multiple times per rotation, even at these high speeds.
Be sure to watch the demonstration video below. | 48 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "2254832",
"author": "SparkyGSX",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T21:33:46",
"content": "I’m not sure I fully understand, but it’s very neat!If I understand correctly, it uses the mass moment of inertia of the blades with a hinge at an angle to the shaft to change the angle of the blade, an... | 1,760,375,968.705452 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/retrotechtacular-pipeline-to-the-arctic/ | Retrotechtacular: Pipeline To The Arctic | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"black gold",
"oil",
"pipeline",
"stanchion",
"TAPS",
"texas tea",
"trans-alaska pipeline system",
"tugboat"
] | They said it couldn’t be done, and perhaps it shouldn’t have been attempted. Shouldas and couldas aside, the oil crisis of the 1970s paved the legislative way for an 800-mile pipeline across the Alaskan frontier,
and so the project began
. The 48-inch diameter pipe sections would be milled in Japan and shipped to Alaska. Sounds simple enough. But of course, it wasn’t, since the black gold was under Prudhoe Bay in Alaska’s North Slope, far away from her balmy southern climes.
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was constructed in three sections: from Valdez to Fairbanks, Fairbanks to a point in the Brooks Pass, and south from Prudhoe Bay to the mountain handoff. Getting pipe to the Valdez and Fairbanks is no big deal, but there is no rail, no highway, and no standard maritime passage to Prudhoe Bay. How on earth would they get 157 miles worth of 58-foot sections of pipe weighing over 8 tons each up to the bubblin’ crude?
Barges! Ridiculously huge, specifically-built barges with 35-foot stanchions to hold pipe sections stacked on decks as large as football fields. Four barges were built close to the steel mills, two in Japan and two in Hong Kong. Several other barges were constructed stateside, departing regularly from Tacoma to meet the demanding timeline of the project. The barges headed for Prudhoe Bay from Asia would be towed 3300 miles by a pair of heroic tugboats to rendezvous with the other barges at Nome.
About 150 miles from Prudhoe Bay, the tugs encountered the arctic ice floe as expected. What they didn’t expect was no sign of an open channel. Time was of the essence here: if they didn’t make it to Prudhoe and back within about a month, they’d be mired in ice all winter long. Each tug was towing two barges in tandem. Since no channel ever opened, they decided to anchor each tug’s rear barge, take the lead barges through the ice all nice and easy, and come back for the rest. Ninety miles of ice cakes and cursing later, they reached the open waters of the Arctic Ocean and floored it for Prudhoe Bay. Pretty slick stuff, eh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXVViPgF02U
Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by
sending in your ideas for future installments
. | 42 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "2254475",
"author": "Some Guy",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T18:51:50",
"content": "It seems you left out the part about the Arduino and the LEDs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2254494",
"author": "thoriumbr",
"t... | 1,760,375,968.78056 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/home-computers-behind-the-iron-curtain/ | Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Czech",
"Czechoslovak",
"Czechoslovaka",
"Didaktik"
] | I was born in 1973 in Czechoslovakia. It was a small country in the middle of Europe, unfortunately on the dark side of the Iron Curtain. We had never been a part of Soviet Union (as many think), but we were so-called “Soviet Satellite”, side by side with Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.
My hobbies were electronics and – in the middle of 80s – computers. The history of computers behind the Iron Curtain is very interesting, with a lot of unusual moments. For example – communists at first called cybernetics as “bourgeois’ pseudoscience” (as well as sociology or semiotics), “used to enslave a mankind by machines”. But later on they understood the importance of computers, primarily for science and army. So in 50s the Eastern Bloc started to build its own computers, separately and “in its own way.”
The biggest problem was a lack of modern technologies. There were a lot of skilled and clever people in eastern countries, but they had a lot of problems with the elementary technical things. Manufacturing of electronics parts was divided into diverse countries of
Comecon
– The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In reality, it led to an absurd situation: You could buy the eastern copy of Z80 (made in Eastern Germany as
U880D
), but you couldn’t buy 74LS00 at the same time. Yes, a lot of manufacturers made it, but “it is out of stock now; try to ask next year”. So “make a computer” meant 50 percent of electronics skills and 50 percent of unofficial social network and knowledge like “I know a guy who knows a guy and his neighbor works in a factory, where they maybe have a material for PCBs” at those times.
We can talk a lot about Czechoslovak computers, for example the
SAPO computer
(7000 relays and 400 vacuum tubes, 1958) or Epos 2 (1968, diodes and transistors). Later on Comecon decided to build clones – better said “unlicensed pirate copies” – of western computers, namely IBM-360 or DEC PDP-11. In 1974 Comecon came with another strategy: build a line of small computers.
Just for context: at those times
the CoCom embargo
denied the export of modern technology to the Soviet bloc, for example modern CPUs (e.g. 68000). But eastern manufacturers made their own copies, based on reverse engineering, espionage and datasheets. Czechoslovak IC manufacturer Tesla made 8080 clone MHB8080 and copy of Intel 3000, a Germany supplier made 8008 and Z80 clones (U808D and U880D), Soviets produced 8080 and 8086 clones, Bulgarian plants made, for example, floppy disk mechanics etc.
I have to apologize to all other post-Comecon countries. They had their own home computer scenes, but I don’t know details about their computers etc. But we can say each country behind the Iron Curtain made its own home computers in 80’s. It was half on half “own design” and “clone of a western computer”. For example, Bulgarians had “Pravetz” computers, compatible with Apple II (but one type was compatible with Oric-1).
In Czechoslovakia, there was the major electronics factory named Tesla. Its name should be an abbreviation of “Technika Slaboprouda” (“Low Voltage Technology” in English), but I guess it obviously referred to [Nicola Tesla]. It was formed as a holding of diverse electronics-related plants. One Tesla made semiconductors, another one made TVs, yet another produced record player chassis. It was a little bit of competition in the world of “total cooperative” (I remember they taught us that “competition is bad” in basic school, because “workers should cooperate in developing of socialism, neither compete nor rival”).
One of Czechoslovak computer prodigies, [Eduard Smutný], together with his twin brother [Tomáš] designed the industrial computer JPR-12, based on Israeli ELBIT, and pushed it into production in Tesla. Some years later they made JPR-1, the simple 8bit computer, based on 8080. One important moment about this computer was that these designers published complete schematics and PCBs in Czechoslovak hobby magazine “Amatérské Rádio”. It was curious – you could not buy parts like LEDs in a store, but there was a very strong hobbyist’s scene. These people made radio transmitters or home automation or HiFi amplifiers. The communist regime surprisingly supported them (or better say: don’t repressed them) in their activities, because it felt the economy needed technically skilled people.
The JPR-1 was a single board computer with 8080 and its support chips (8224 and 8228) and some memory on a board. [Smutný] also designed other boards, for example alphanumeric TV display, port board, memory board, membrane keyboard, serial ports etc. Tesla made a whole line of these boards as an industrial computer, named SAPI. [Smutný] also made a Z80-based equivalent JPR-1Z, because (as he said) JPR-1 could work as CP/M machine, but Turbo Pascal needed Z80 instructions.
Tesla Ondra.
His last computer was “Ondra” (1986) – simple Z80-based computer with 64kB of RAM, built on single board, embedded in single case with the keyboard. Author says it was inspired by Sinclair’s ZX-81, but he couldn’t rely on ULA or similar custom VLSI, so he designed all these functions like RAM refresh or display timing as very clever hardware hacks, based on 8253 timers / counters and other parts, available in Comecon. Tesla made just about 1000 pieces of this computer, the majority of them was used in clubs of youth electronics.
PMI-80
Other Tesla computers were designed by Slovak engineer [Roman Kišš]. The first one, PMI-80, was a classic Single Board Computer, like e.g. well known KIM-1. PMI-80 has 8080 equivalent MHB8080, 1 kB RAM, 8255 PIO (you can add second PIO and expand the port lines), calculator keyboard (5×5 matrix) and calculator LED display (9 positions). Its monitor takes 1kB of ROM. Users can connect some hardware to control and store the programs on cassette tape (all controlled by software, no special IC). PMI-80 was widely used as a school computer or as a simple industrial computer.
The second computer, designed by [Kišš] , was PMD 85. The “85” doesn’t refer to Intel 8085. Kišš says he was inspired by Hewlett-Packard’s computer HP-85. PMD 85 has 32kB of user RAM, 16kB of video RAM, 4kB of Monitor ROM and it was based on 8080A. PMD 85 came with EPROM module with built BASIC G. G is for Graphic – and PMD 85 was the first Czechoslovak 8bit computer with fine graphic mode 288 x 256 pixels (Black and White).
PMD 85-1
PMD-85 became quite popular. It had his drawbacks; sockets for some IOs weren’t precise and some IO could sometimes overheat. On the other hand, it was really the best Czechoslovak computer of the time. Tesla made some successors, named PMD 85-2, PMD 85-2A and PMD 85-3, with better keyboard, more memory, color display or ALL RAM mode. Czech fans made a lot of games and utilities for PMD, as well as hardware add-ons, from industrial printer interface to a joystick interface. PMD still has a strong community in both Czech and Slovak Republic till today and you can buy or build for example floppy disk drive or MIF-85 – a sound interface based on SAA1099.
PMD has some clones, namely Maťo, Zbrojováček or Didaktik Alfa, manufactured not by Tesla, but by a co-op, a school supplier, or the arms manufacturer Zbrojovka Brno.
If PMD-85 was the most beloved computer, its cousin,
the IQ-151
was the widely hated one. It was designed by Czech company ZPA, a research plant focused on industrial automation. IQ-151 was a very big and heavy computer. It contains “mainboard” with 8080 CPU and some support parts, dock for expansion module and the infamous power supply which overheated, but it couldn’t provide enough power for more than two modules. If you wanted to work you have to connect at least a display module and a BASIC module. It was really a horrible computer. Poorly designed, poorly manufactured, with terrible keyboard seemingly based on a doorbell. The manufacturer made some necessary changes later on, but users disliked IQ-151.
The IQ-151 was planned as a school computer and some schools actually got it. At the dawn of the Eastern Bloc, the IQ-151 was upgraded to work in a local area network, with some kind of CP/M. The Mathematics and Physics department at the Charles University in Prague developed their own operating system, AMOS, and a Pascal compiler.
Let me say a little remark about “home computers”. Ondra or PMD-85 were home computers as we understand this term now: single case with keyboard, cassette tape as storage and TV for video out. But “home” is strongly misleading in the conjunction with Czechoslovak computers. The price of these computers was really fantastic – six month average salary or so, so the majority of production was bought by schools, clubs, industrial plants or research institutes. Technically, there were home computers, but almost nobody had these computers really at home as own, personal computer.
So the question is: What did we have in our households as our real home computer? Simple answer is: Everything we could smuggle from Western Germany, Austria or Britain. The most popular brands were Sinclair and Atari. You could buy, unofficially, of course, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Atari 800 XL at prices about one month salary. Sometimes some official importer went mad and bought 1000 pieces of Sharp MZ-821 and sold them on the local market. The same situation was with Sord m5 – there were about 1000 m5s in Czechoslovakia. At the end of 80s some Amigas or Atari STs appeared in Czechoslovakia, but again individually imported.
But none of these importers ever imported any literature, manuals, just anything, so Czechoslovak computer fans were “hackers with a reason”. Total lack of information made us find fragments of knowledge almost everywhere. In hobby magazines, bad photocopies of foreign catalogs, books, foreign magazines. My friend, for example, had only an Atari 800XL, a list of instruction names for 6502 and disassembler software, so he reconstructed the whole instruction code table and meaning of codes by trial and error. I rewrote his remarks and “discoveries” on my typewriter in three exemplars, sent them to club newsletter.
Needless to say there was not only the official electronics and radio magazine Amatérské Rádio, but some computer clubs issued their own magazines too. They were published at varying levels of quality, from four papers joined by paperclip to professional brochures, issued in series of tens or hundreds copies. Members of these clubs shared their knowledge, lent documentation and made copies of software, from cassette to cassette, free of charge. Yes, it was breaking the copyright, and it was everywhere – from hobbyists to big corporations.
The ZX Spectrum and Atari 800XL
There was two strong scenes: one around Sinclair/Spectrum, and one around Atari, both with thousands of owners. Some people had Commodore C64, some Sord, Sharp MZ or Amstrad CPC, with tens or hundreds owners of each type. But there was rare computers too. For example, my friend’s father on his business trip “to the West” bought a Laser 210, which was rare computer here. It was very expensive, so he did not buy any software or something more. My friend then had a computer with literally no software or knowledge, he had a User Manual only, and he couldn’t find anyone with the same computer to share info or software.
Talking about software – the situation was even more ridiculous! Try to guess – how many software titles for home computers could you buy in Czechoslovak software shops in 1987? No, it wasn’t 1000. Not even 500. Neither 100 nor 50… No, not 10. The correct answer is: You couldn’t buy software in a shop! There were no shops with software or computer games. It was smuggled and copied from western countries. On the other side the lack of software meant that nearly every computer owner had to learn a little bit programming, at least in BASIC. There were a lot of skilled programmers who wrote games, compilers, and database programs. Another curiosity: when you wrote a software, it was illegal to sell it! That only became legal in 1988 and you still had to get an authority agreement.
To answer to the question “why Czechoslovak home computers uses primarily cassette tapes and not floppy disks?” Because you couldn’t simply buy a floppy disk at your local shop. There were five or ten better equipped shops in the whole country and they maybe had floppy disks. They got for example ten boxes of 5.25” floppies, sold out in one hour, and no more for two, three, six months… The only solution was smuggling, or black market. It got slightly better at the end of 80s.
Didaktik Gama
In 1987 manufacturer of school supplies Didaktik Skalica, maker of PMD clone Didaktik Alfa, made another computer named
Didaktik Gama
– a real clone of ZX Spectrum, extended with 8255 PIO and with RAM expanded to 80 kB. They bought a lot of original ULAs somewhere, so they built ZX Spectrum clone and started to sell it for a reasonable price. At the very end of 80’s we could buy this Czechoslovak computer at home for about one month salary.
This was the official part of Czechoslovak personal computers. We have to mention two local phenomena. The first one was a “capitalist enclave” – JZD Slušovice (JZD means ‘agricultural cooperative’). Its leader built a market oasis with a lot of economical exceptions, so they could buy ICs directly for foreign currencies, Dollars or Deutsche Marks. Therefore they made very sophisticated computers with contemporary design, for example based on Z80, with two floppy drives, RAM disk and CP/M. Oh, pardon, not CP/M, it was MIKROS or TNS-DOS – it was totally compatible with CP/M, but it was unlicensed. At the end of 80s they planned 16-bit computers compatible with PC, but then the Eastern Bloc collapsed and we could buy the original PC directly, mainly at the sales in neighbor countries like Austria or Germany.
The second phenomenon of these times was hobby computers. Mentioned earlier Amatérské Rádio published a lot of schematics and PCBs for different single board computers from Czechoslovak hobbyists. These computers had only one or very few exemplars. Amatérské Rádio itself published its own modular computer system Mikro-AR. But the most weird design I can remember was Mistrum computer – it was compatible with ZX Spectrum, but ULA was simulated by a bunch of chips from 74LSxx line. An unbelievable piece, a monument of an era in which people could develop computers, but couldn’t do it easy as “buy components and build”, the era of true hacking not for fun, but of necessity.
When the Eastern bloc fell down, we quickly filled the technological gap and started to use contemporary hardware, buy software (well… slowly) and adapt ourselves to standard computer economics (I worked with AT286 and laser printer in my first job in spring 1992). But you know – we sometimes reminisce our first computers…
Czechoslovak “home computers” from behind the Iron Curtain – or better say “Officially-made 8bit computers you could meet in 80’s”:
JPR-1 (SAPI-1):
Multi board computer, based on 8080A, 1kB RAM, up to 8kB EPROM. Other boards added RAM, EPROM, TV display 20 lines x 40 characters, QWERTY membrane keyboard etc. Built-in MIKRO BASIC and monitor. Its primary aim was industry.
PMI-80:
Single board school CPU 8080A, 1.1111MHz (10MHz / 9), 1kB RAM, 1kB ROM, 25 key calculator type keyboard, 9 digit 7 segment LED display. Built-in monitor. Tape I/O. Created as didactic tool for technical schools.
PMD 85-1
CPU 8080A, 2.048MHz, 48kB RAM (later models with 56kB or 64kB), 4 kB ROM (later model with 8kB). Standard QWERTY keyboard, TV OUT 288×256 monochrome graphics, 25 lines, 48 chars. Last model can use 8 colors, first model just 4: black, white, grey and blinking). Tape deck as storage. 1bit beeper. Two parallel ports, serial port (8251). It uses ROM cartridges with BASIC (later you could buy Pascal too).
IQ-151:
School computer, based on CPU 8080A, 2MHz, 32kB RAM (up to 64), 6kB EPROM (+ cartridges), 32 lines x 32 characters TV OUT (later 64 characters per line), you can add graphic monochrome module with 512×256 pixels resolution. Single bit speaker. 5 expansion slots, two of them were permanently taken by display adapter and BASIC. Very poor power supply, tends to overheat.
Tesla Ondra:
Very rare computer. CPU U880D (Z80 clone from GDR), 2MHz, 64kB RAM, 4kB ROM, TV display 20 lines x 40 chars, graphic mode 320 x 240 monochrome. QWERTY keyboard, tape interface. BASIC was on the tape and you had to load it before use.
Didaktik Gama:
ZX Spectrum clone with original ULA (later models Didaktik M and Didaktik Kompakt from early 90’s use ULA1 from USSR, so the display was square shaped instead of rectangle and there were some timing incompatibilities). It was the first real home computer you could buy.
About the author
[Martin Malý] works as a media technology consultant and team leader of developers for some Czech newspapers. He has experience from startups and did a lot of web projects (e.g. was a Lead developer, Programmer, Administrator, Manager and Ideologist for a cutting edge Czech blogging system called Bloguje.cz).
His biggest hobby, beside programming, is microelectronics and old computers. He did some task programming on railroad engines, based on microcontrollers (8051 family, AVR, Microchip) and some “homebrew” gadgets, computers etc. He joined his two hobbies together in
ASM80.com
– an online IDE and assembler for 8bit CPUs.
[Martin] is an Evangelist and Teacher of New Web Technologies (OpenID, OAuth, cloud computing, HTML5, Node.js, Coffeescript and other stuff) as well as Evangelist of HTML5 development for mobile devices.
He does quite a bit of writing – starting with some juvenile textperiments, continuing through a series of blogs and online magazines, and he ended up as an Editor-in-Chief of
zdrojak.cz
– an online mag about web technologies. | 127 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "2250744",
"author": "Bob Alexander",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T18:18:23",
"content": "I remember in the late 70s there were controversies about selling supercomputers to the Soviets. The concern was they’d use them for nuclear weapon development. We (the public) were assured that the... | 1,760,375,971.216376 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/reverse-engineering-a-robotic-arm/ | Reverse Engineering A Robotic Arm | Rich Bremer | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"reverse engineering",
"robot",
"robot arm"
] | Not too many people will argue that Robot Arms aren’t cool. [Dan] thinks they are cool and purchased a LabVolt Armdroid robotic arm on eBay for a mere $150. Unfortunately, he did not get the power supply or the control unit. To most, this would a serious hurdle to overcome, but not for [Dan]. He opened up the robot and started probing around the circuit board to figure out
what was going on
.
Since there was a DB9 connector on the outside of the robot arm, he assumed it was a standard RS-232 controlled device. Good thing he checked the internal circuitry because this was not the case at all. There was no mircocontroller or microprocessor found inside. [Dan] painstakingly reversed engineered the circuit board and
documented his results
. He found that there were
SN76537A chips
that drove the 6 unipolar stepper motors and
SN75HC259
latches to address each individual motor.
Now knowing how the robot works, [Dan] had to figure out how to control the robot from his computer. He started by making a custom
Parallel Port to DB9
cable to connect the computer to the arm. After a series of several programs, starting with simply moving just one arm joint, the
latest iteration
allows manual control of all joints using the computer keyboard. A big ‘Thanks’ goes out to [Dan] for all his work and documentation. | 9 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "2250289",
"author": "colin",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T15:15:44",
"content": "On Oct 16, 2006, I purchased…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2250305",
"author": "rue_mohr",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T15:22:03",
"content"... | 1,760,375,970.599559 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/making-a-paintball-gun-from-scratch/ | Making A Paintball Gun From Scratch | James Hobson | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"creo elements",
"diy paintball gun",
"home made paintball gun"
] | [Ben’s] big brother [Brian] has been slowly building up a respectable mini-machine shop in his garage over the past few years, collecting odds and ends off of Craigslist for cheap. Looking for a fun project to do together, they decided to try their hand at building a paintball gun —
completely from scratch.
They have a Spyder paintball gun that they have taken apart many times — but it uses a stacked tube configuration for the firing mechanism — a bit too complex for a first project. After discovering
ZDSPB.com
(which is an awesome site that has animations of all the different styles of paintball guns) they settled on making a Tippman clone.
Trying to keep the budget as small as possible, [Brian] found a free 3D CAD program from the makers of Pro/E — it’s called
Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express 6.0
, and with that they began designing the gun…
Once they had the mechanism down pat they just had to start machining. Here’s the highly anticipated first test fire — can you hear the joy in the success?
And after a bit more refinement, semi automatic mode.
Fancy something a bit bigger? How about ‘Ol Painless,
a paintball mini-gun
? Or if you’re more of a sneaky player, why not make your own
paintball gun silencer? | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "2250328",
"author": "sneakypoo",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T15:34:38",
"content": "If you’re wearing headphones and value your hearing, lower the volume, a lot.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2250520",
"author": "CodeRed",
... | 1,760,375,970.556352 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/gift-your-next-robot-with-the-brain-of-a-roundworm/ | Gift Your Next Robot With The Brain Of A Roundworm | Sarah Petkus | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bio hack",
"brain",
"brain mapping",
"connectome",
"mapping",
"neurorobotics",
"openworm",
"robotics",
"roundworm"
] | A group of developers called [OpenWorm] have mapped the 302 neurons of the Caenorhabditis elegans species of roundworm and created a
virtual neural network
that can be used to solve all the types of problems a worm might encounter. Which, when you think about it, aren’t much different from those a floor-crawling robots would be confronted with.
In a demo video released by one of the projects founders, [Timothy Busbice], their network is used to control a small Lego-rover equipped with a forward sonar sensor. The robot is able to stop before it hits a wall and determine an appropriate response, which may be to stop, back up, or turn. This is all pretty fantastic when you compare these 302 neural connections to any code you’ve ever written to accomplish the same task! It might be a much more complex route to the same outcome, but its uniquely organic… which makes watching the little Lego-bot fascinating; its stumbling around even looks more like
thinking
than
executing
.
I feel obligated to bring up the implications of this project. Since we’re all thinking about it now, let’s all imagine the human brain similarly mapped and able to simulate complex thought processes. If we can pull this off one day, not only will we learn a lot more about how our squishy grey hard drives process information, artificial intelligence will also improve by leaps and bounds. An effort to do this is already in effect, called the
connectome
project, however since there are
a few
more connections to map than with the c. elegans’ brain, it’s a feat that is still underway.
The project is called “open”worm, which of course means you can download the code from their website and potentially
dabble in neuro-robotics yourself
. If you do, we want to hear about your wormy brain bot. | 52 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "2249544",
"author": "John Connor",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T09:06:54",
"content": "yadda yadda ‘skynet’ yadda yadda",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2249548",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T09:09:57",
"cont... | 1,760,375,970.842525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/diy-chicken-feed-indicator-tells-you-when-to-feed-the-chickens/ | DIY Chicken Feed Indicator Tells You When To Feed The Chickens | Rich Bremer | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"bird feeder",
"feeder",
"prep",
"prepping"
] | While prepping for the upcoming apocalypse, the [prepforshtf] folks had time to design and build an
automatic chicken feeder
. It’s a very simple design (the best kind) that is made from standard PVC drain pipe. The pipe is positioned vertically and filled with chicken feed. A T-joint at the bottom of the pipe allows chickens to access the food inside. As food is eaten away, gravity pulls more food down to the feeding area.
That sounds pretty straight forward but it quickly became clear that checking the food level was a chore, almost as much as just feeding the chickens everyday. To remedy the requirement to constantly check the food level, the automatic feeder system was taken apart and modified to include a
level indicator
. Now, inside the 4-inch pipe resides a plate that resembles a
butterfly valve
.
This plate doesn’t control the flow of feed like a normal butterfly valve would, the feed actually holds the plate in a vertical position until the feed level drops below the plate. Since the plate has a heavier side, it will rotate when the feed no longer holds it in position. A large red pointer was attached to the plate’s axle and, since it is on the outside of the feeder, it allows a clear indication that the feeder needs a refill.
This is a great project that shows that even simple projects can be very beneficial in everyday life. With no electronics or batteries to fail, this feed indicator will certainly be very reliable. No doubt the chickens will be happy. Check this out for a more involved
electricity-powered feeder
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2249621",
"author": "simon M",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T09:40:07",
"content": "So cool. Love it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2249694",
"author": "Dra",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T10:09:46",
"content": "Basic autom... | 1,760,375,970.518616 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/taste-the-rainbow-one-color-at-a-time/ | Taste The Rainbow One Color At A Time | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"atmega1284",
"candy sorter",
"color sorter",
"nichrome",
"skittles",
"solenoids"
] | It’s the end of another fall semester of Bruce Land’s ECE4760 class at Cornell, and that means a fresh crop of microcontroller-based student projects. For their project, [Alice, Jesse, and Mikhail] built
a Skittle-sorting miniature factory
that bags and seals same-colored candies into little pouches of flavor.
Their design is split into three stages, which are visually delineated within the all-cardboard housing. Skittles are loaded into a funnel at the top that leads to the color detection module. The color is determined here with an RGB LED and OPT101 photodiode driven by an ATMega1284. Because the reflected RGB values of red and orange Skittles are so similar, the detector uses white light to make the final determination.
Once the matchmaking is over, a servo in the second stage rotates to the angle that corresponds with the color outcome. The Skittle then slides down a cardboard chute, passes through a hole in a cardboard disk, and drops into a hanging bag. Once the bags have reached the predetermined capacity, another servo moves the carousel of bags to a nichrome wire sealing rig. Lead factory worker [Jesse] must intervene at this point to pull the bags off the line. You can see the full walk-through and demonstration of this Skittle flavor separator after the break. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2248839",
"author": "SirNopetheHellOutaHere",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T04:13:33",
"content": "I can’t see the link anywhere, so I’ll just mention for people who want to view the other projects they can at (http://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalProjects/)",
"par... | 1,760,375,970.648573 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/hackaday-links-december-14-2014/ | Hackaday Links: December 14, 2014 | Brian Benchoff | [
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"AAAA battery",
"calculator",
"christmas",
"cnc",
"debounce",
"debounce circuit",
"harmonograph",
"laser cutter",
"odb-ii",
"Progressive Snapshot",
"sim",
"snowflake",
"woodcut",
"zippo"
] | The Progressive Snapshot is a small device that plugs into the ODB-II port on your car, figures out how terrible of a driver you are, and sends that data to Progressive servers so a discount (or increase) can be applied to your car insurance policy. [Jared] wondered what was inside this little device,
so he did a teardown
. There’s an Atmel ARM in there along with a SIM card. Anyone else want to have a go at reverse engineering this thing from a few pictures?
[Alex]’s dad received a special gift for his company’s 50th anniversary – a Zippo Ziplight. Basically, its a flashlight stuffed into the metal Zippo lighter we all know and love. The problem is, it’s battery-powered, and Zippo doesn’t make them any more. It also uses AAAA batteries. Yes, four As. No problem,
because you can take apart a 9V and get six of them
.
‘Tis the season to decorate things, I guess, and
here’s a Hackaday snowflake
. That’s from [Benjamin Gray], someone
who really knows his way around a laser cutter
.
HHaviing trouble wiith a debounce ciircut?
HHer’s a calculator for just thhat problem
. Put iin the logiic hhiigh voltage level, the bounce tiime, and the fiinal voltage, and you get the capaciitor value and resiistor value.
A harmonograph is a device that puts a pen on a pendulum, drawing out complex curves that even a spirograph would find impressive. [Matt] wanted to make some harmonographs,
but a CNC and a printing press got in the way
. He’s actually making some interesting prints that would be difficult if not impossible to make with a traditional harmonograph – [Matt] can control the depth and width of the cut, making for some interesting patterns.
The Mooltipass
, the Developed On Hackaday offline password keeper, has had an interesting crowdfunding campaign
and now it’s completely funded
. The person who tipped it over was [Shad Van Den Hul]. Go him. There’s still two days left in the campaign, so now’s the time if you want one. | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "2247748",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T00:18:46",
"content": "I thought the Progressive Snapshot was just a recording device, but apparently it is cellular? Not able to discern from the pictures, there probably is an accelerometer (MEMS) device to check for jackrabbit ... | 1,760,375,970.710829 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/fpga-ambilight-clone-packs-a-ton-of-features/ | FPGA Ambilight Clone Packs A Ton Of Features | Ethan Zonca | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"ambilight",
"led",
"LED array",
"RGB LED"
] | [Stephen] designed a standalone Ambilight clone built around an FPGA and
recently added many new features
to make his design even better. His original design was based around a Spartan 3-E FPGA, but his new design uses the Papilio One board with a Spartan-6 LX9 FPGA. This gives him dedicated DSP hardware and more RAM, allowing him to add more processing-intensive features.
[Steven]’s new board can drive up to 4096 LEDs total, and each LED is colored from one of 256 segmented screen areas. The output of the LEDs is smoothed over a configurable time period which makes the result a bit more pleasant. [Steven] also added color correction matrices and gamma correction tables to make up for differences in LED coloration and so the output can be fine-tuned to the color of the wall behind the TV.
Finally, [Steven] added multiple configurations which can be stored in Flash memory. The FPGA can detect letterboxes and pillarboxes in the video stream and change to a corresponding configuration automatically, so settings rarely need to be manually adjusted. He also added an extensive serial interface to configure all of the parameters and configurations in Flash. Be sure to check out the video after the break to see his setup in action. | 59 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "2253964",
"author": "AlanH",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T15:15:37",
"content": "Nicely done! Thought about doing this for a long time; even designed a dedicated board. But I had no where near the feature set planned as his project. Kudos.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,375,970.932569 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/create-an-inclinometer-using-a-raspberry-pi/ | Create An Inclinometer Using A Raspberry Pi | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"IMU",
"inclinometer",
"off road",
"raspberry pi",
"SDL"
] | The latest gizmo that you can make using the cheap and easy Raspberry Pi is here courtesy of [Mark Williams]. He has hooked up an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to the Pi and built an
inclinometer to use to measure the various angles of an off-road vehicle
.
This particular guide goes through the setup of
SDL
to control the video output to a small screen. Then, a function is created to rotate the images based on input from the IMU so that the vehicle position can be shown graphically on the screen. Now, when your truck is about to roll over on a hill, you’ll get advance warning!
Of course, this whole project is predicated on installing the IMU and getting it up and running on the Raspberry Pi in the first place. [Mark] has you covered on
a guide for setting that up
as well. This delves into setting up the IMU over I2C to get it talking to the Raspberry Pi, and then converting the raw data from the IMU into data that is more usable. Be sure to check out [Mark]’s page for all of the code and details! | 11 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "2253607",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T12:16:09",
"content": "Is this able to compensate for the movement of the vehicle?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2253787",
"author": "Tom D'Netto",
"timest... | 1,760,375,970.752773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/boy-off-the-grid-for-years-writes-gui-for-dos/ | Boy Off The Grid For Years Writes GUI For DOS | Matt Freund | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"486",
"dos",
"Qbasic",
"raycaster"
] | In a hacker version of Jumanji, when [fiberbundle]’s parents divorced, his thrice-fugitive new stepfather took him to a remote location in Australia without any access to technology or the outside world. With him he brought an old 486, a
gift from his real dad
. Lest the police discover them, [fiberbundle] was forbidden contact from most of society and even restricted in the books he was allowed to read.
The boy spent years trying to get the most he could out of his two-generations-old PC. Using only two textbooks from a decade and a half earlier, DOS 6.0, and QBasic he managed to write his own shell dubbed OSCI (pronounced “Aussie”), a ray-caster 3d engine and lots more. No mentors, no Internet. The computers at school were even more outdated Power Macs.
Eventually life returned him to civilization to be mindblown by modern technology 1000x as powerful. He went from playing text-based adventures he had to write for himself, to seeing Crysis. From QBasic to C++. From ASCII art “shooters” to Half-Life 2. From a 486 to a 4-core CPU. From a rural library to Wikipedia.
Follow the link above to see screens of his projects over the years. As of yet no one has verified the story, but, even if only that it is worth a read.
Thanks [Gustavo] for the tip. | 97 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "2253177",
"author": "garym53",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T09:20:05",
"content": "This chap has gone through something similar to what any 60 year old has already gone through, and more – great to see a much younger chap realise what it was like, the rest of you should take note and be... | 1,760,375,971.343924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/using-lasers-for-hair-growth/ | Using Lasers For Hair Growth | Brian Benchoff | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"hair",
"hair growth",
"laser",
"laser diode"
] | HowToLou is back with a rather interesting build:
One hundred laser diodes for hair growth
.
Before you guffaw at the idea of lasers regrowing hair lost to male pattern baldness, there’s
a surprising amount of FDA documents
covering the use of laser diodes and red LEDs for hair growth and
an interesting study
covering teeth regrowth with lasers. Yes folks, it’s a real thing, but something that will never get a double-blind study for obvious reasons.
[Lou] is building his hat with 100 laser diodes, most of which were sourced from Amazon. These diodes were implanted in a piece of foam flooring, a rather interesting solution that puts dozens of diodes in a flexible module that’s pretty good for making a wearable device.
The lasers are powered by three AA batteries, stuffed into a four-slot battery holder that was modified to accommodate a power switch. [Lou] has been wearing a nine-diode hat for a month now, and if the pictures are to be believed, he is seeing a little bit of hair growth. At the very least, it’s an interesting pseudo-medical build that seems to be producing results.
Hats like these are commercially available for about $700. [Lou] built his for about $60. We’re calling that a win even if it doesn’t end up working to [Lou]’s satisfaction. Just don’t look at the lasers with your remaining eye. | 41 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "2252861",
"author": "macona",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T06:43:32",
"content": "His results are just Hair-say.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2252963",
"author": "max",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T07:30:30",
... | 1,760,375,971.458394 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/diy-video-microscope-used-for-soldering-smd-parts/ | DIY Video Microscope Used For Soldering SMD Parts | Rich Bremer | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"microscope",
"smd soldering",
"smt"
] | Fortunately (or unfortunately), [ucDude] has had the opportunity to try out a high quality video microscope while soldering some small surface mount components. He loved it, the problem was he had a hard time going back to using just his eyes. He wanted a video microscope but the cost for a professional one could not be justified. The solution?
Build one
!
[ucDude] called on one of his photographer friends to help. After discussing the project they decided to use a webcam and a lens from an SLR camera. Testing with the webcam resulted in an image that could not be zoomed-in enough, plus having to connect it to an external computer proved to be a bulky solution. They next tried a Raspberry Pi, camera module and
zoom monocular
. It worked great! The entire assembly was then mounted to a camera boom stand making it easy for the camera to be positioned over the work area and out of the way of hands and soldering irons. The Raspberry Pi’s HDMI output is plugged straight into an HD monitor. The result is exactly what [ucDude] was looking for. Now he can quickly and confidently solder his surface mount circuit boards. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "2252386",
"author": "notabena4us",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T03:29:42",
"content": "What a sharp idea… ;^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2252513",
"author": "j",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T04:07:12",
"c... | 1,760,375,971.691664 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/meet-registroid-mutant-cash-register-music-sequencer/ | Meet Registroid – Mutant Cash Register Music Sequencer | Matt Freund | [
"classic hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"cash register",
"maxmsp",
"msgeq7",
"sequencer"
] | 73 years ago WWII was in full swing, the world’s first computer had not yet crunched atomic bomb physics and department store cash registers had to add up your purchases mechanically. Back then, each pull caused the device to whirl and kerchunk like a slot machine. [David] & [Scott] kidnapped one of those clunkers and
forced it to sing a new tune
. Thus the Registroid was born, a self-described “mutant vintage cash register that is a playable, interactive electro-house looping machine.” Why did no one else think of this yet?
Inside, the
adding gears and tumbling counters
were gutted to make room for the electronics, amp and speaker. Keys were converted to Arduino inputs that then feed to MAX/MSP which serves as a basic midi controller. On top, five “antennae” lamps with LEDs serve as a color organ where they pulse with the audio as split up by an MSGEQ7 equalizer chip. Each row of latching keys corresponds to a different instrument: drum beats, baselines, synths, and one-shots.
We have seen similar things done to a
Game Boy
and
typewriter
before, but a cash machine is new to us. Perhaps someday someone will flip the trend and type their twitter messages from an antique harpsichord.
The Registroid appears quite popular when on display at local events, including some wonder when a secret code opens the cash drawer. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "2252364",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-12-16T03:23:02",
"content": "Three trills of Scarlatti on harpsichord and twitter would max out.Video did not start at the beginning, so I have no idea what’s going on. Just something beating but no musicianship.",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,375,971.385712 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/trinket-edc-contest-entry-shame-on-you/ | Trinket EDC Contest Entry: Shame On You! | Adam Fabio | [
"contests",
"Featured"
] | [
"adafruit",
"arudino",
"EDC Contest",
"Hackaday Contests",
"Pro Trinket",
"Trinket",
"Trinket Everyday Carry",
"Trinket Everyday Carry Contest"
] | [BDM] is helping others keep WiFi safe with “
Shame On You!
“, his entry in Hackaday’s
Trinket Everyday Carry Contest
. We all have that family member, friend, or neighbor who just can’t seem to get their WiFi locked down. Shame On You will show them how easy it is to detect such a hotspot, which hopefully will motivate them to correct the issue. [BDM] was a bit worried when he learned that
Adafriut already has an open WiFi detector
as one of their Pro Trinket example projects. However, we think he has added more than enough features to make his project stand out.
Shame On You is using a Pro Trinket running at 3.3 volts, along with an ESP8266 WiFi module. Power comes from a LiPo battery and is handled by an Adafruit LiPo backpack. Like several other EDC contest entries, Shame On You is using a cell phone shell as a case. The display is a 1.27″ color OLED with an SD card. A disc style vibrator motor will also help get the user’s attention.
[BDM] hasn’t made much progress this last week, as he’s been battling some
Christmas light cutting bandits
. Logging each week’s work doesn’t always have to be technical, sometimes life intervenes!
We’re heading into our third week here in the
Trinket Everyday Carry Contest
, but there is still plenty of time to enter! The main contest runs until January 2, but we’re having random drawings every week! Don’t forget to write a project log before the next drawing at 9pm EDT on Tuesday, December 16th. You and all of the other entrants have a chance to win a
BusPirate 3.6
from The Hackaday Store! | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "2251338",
"author": "Nater",
"timestamp": "2014-12-15T22:14:24",
"content": "That’s a cool implementation, but why is having an open WAP shameful?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2254941",
"author": "Audin",
"t... | 1,760,375,971.627125 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/eprom-coffee-table/ | EPROM Coffee Table | Brian Benchoff | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"coffee table",
"eprom",
"furniture",
"PDIP",
"plywood"
] | Either in need of a coffee table or suffering a severe lack of upscaled electronics, [Darren]
just finished up a great build for his living room
. It’s a huge, scaled up version of a UV erasable EPROM with an infinity mirror in place of the fused quartz window.
[Darren]’s coffee table was inspired by
an earlier build by the geniuses at Evil Mad Scientist
. A few years ago, they built a 555 footstool that was scaled up about 30 times its normal size. Even at footstool scale, the 555 is still relatively tiny.
[Darren] is using a similar construction technique by forming the legs of the EPROM out of laminated plywood. Since this build is significantly larger, building the entire device out of solid, laminated plywood would result in an unwieldy and expensive piece of furniture. Instead, [Darren] constructed the legs and sides out of plywood laminations, covering the ends, top, and bottom with plywood panels. The result is a hollow EPROM/coffee table that’s still structurally sound.
If you’re a bit confused after counting the number of pins on the coffee table, you’re in good company. This is technically a scaled-up version of a 16-pin 0.600″ PDIP, something that a quick googling suggest isn’t historically accurate. Maybe there was an EPROM with a 4-bit wide data bus somewhere in the annals of electronics history, but we’re happy with saying that a completely accurate scaled-up ROM would be far too big for [Darren]’s living room.
via
reddit | 22 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2247395",
"author": "qwerty",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T21:11:05",
"content": "Great build, I never thought of a DIL chip shaped table and now I have visions of resistor shaped pillows complete with color stripes and 3-4 legged tea cup holders shaped as TO52 transistors.",
"paren... | 1,760,375,971.79752 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/improving-a-modern-instant-camera/ | Improving A Modern Instant Camera | Brian Benchoff | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"fujifilm",
"instant camera",
"instant film",
"photography",
"polaroid"
] | Instant film never went away – Fujifilm has been producing instant film for decades before Polaroid ceased production. Yes, cries of a lost photographic heritage were all for naught, and you can still buy an instant camera. [Dan] picked up a Fujifilm Instax Wide camera – an instant camera that produces not-square images – and figured some electronic tinkering could vastly expand the capabilities of this camera.
He took it apart and made some modifications
, giving it a bulb mode for long exposures and multi-exposure capability.
[Dan] began his tinkering by figuring out how to put multiple exposures on one frame of film. The Instax Wide camera has an eject sensor, a wire for the shutter button, and a few wires leading to the motor. By adding a switch to turn off the motor and a pushbutton to bypass the ejection sensor, [Dan] can stack multiple exposures on a single frame of film.
Multiple exposures are one thing, but how about longer exposures for light painting and all those other cool things you can do with microcontrolled LEDs? Modding the camera for that is pretty easy. All you need are a few mini toggle switches. It’s just a simple matter of opening the shutter for as long as you need, painting a scene with light, and flipping a few more switches to eject the film. [Dan] is getting some pretty respectable exposures with this – somewhat impressive considering the camera’s fixed aperture. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2247205",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T19:16:09",
"content": "Smart hacks. I remember once I heard someone say that instant film pictures were the “best evidence” of somthing because they “can’t be faked”, seems a hack like this could be fun, like a double exposur... | 1,760,375,971.501405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/downloading-data-through-the-display/ | Downloading Data Through The Display | Brian Benchoff | [
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"qr code",
"security",
"TGXf",
"ThruGlassXfer",
"ThruKeyboardXfer",
"TKXf"
] | HIPAA – the US standard for electronic health care documentation – spends a lot of verbiage and bureaucratese on the security of electronic records, making a clear distinction between the
use
of records by health care worker and the
disclosure
of records by health care workers. Likewise, the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 makes the same distinction; records that should never be
disclosed
or transmitted should be used on systems that are disconnected from networks.
This distinction between
use
and
disclosure
or transmission is of course a farce; if you can display something on a screen, it can be transmitted. [Ian Latter] just gave a talk at Kiwicon
that provides the tools to do just that
. He calls it ThruGlassXfer (TGXf), and it does exactly what it says on the tin: anything that can be displayed on a screen can be transmitted. All you need are the right tools.
How is [Ian] doing this? With QR codes, strangely enough. [Ian] has designed a protocol and application that allows people to download files through a screen. By using TGXf, anyone can load a file stored locally on a computer, have the binary data displayed through QR codes, and record that data with a smartphone or tiny video camera. This video is then analyzed, the data is recovered, and the file is transmitted, defeating all security measures a sysadmin has in mind.
ThruKeyboardXfer (TKXf) keyboard stuffer
Displaying binary data as a QR code presents another problem. How do you put an application that will convert raw data to QR codes on a locked-down system? That’s another trick up [Ian]’s sleeve called ThruKeyboardXfer (TKXf). This requires a hardware device to emulate a USB HID keyboard, pushing data up to a computer simply by emulating a keyboard.
TKXf encodes binary data that are sent out the serial port of one computer (or smartphone) and enters them via the keyboard of another. Either a single file (i.e. an app that encodes data as a QR code) or a continuous stream of data can be sent into a computer through the a USB HID keyboard interface.
For a demonstration of his system, [Ian]
put up a video
of a smartphone downloading a PDF from YouTube through a laptop screen. The only requirement for this file transfer are pointing the phone directly at the screen; no WiFi or cellular network is necessary to send data from a computer to a smartphone.
If this sounds like something torn from the pages of a yet-to-be-written [Cory Doctorow] YA novel, you’re probably not far off: nearly all official recommendations for security and privacy controls,
including publications published by NIST
, place a distinction between
use
of a file, and
distribution
or
disclosure
of a file. There is a marked difference between displaying information on a screen and sending it over a network. By transmitting binary data through a display, [Ian] has kicked that door down, turning every monitor and every employee into a security risk.
Thanks [Roman] for sending this in. | 75 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "2246693",
"author": "Ben",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T15:12:43",
"content": "A little sensationalized, no? If an employee wants to break the law, and reveal confidential information, they hardly need to resort to such a suspicious-looking method that would immediately raise questions... | 1,760,375,972.06104 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/sqonkbox-55-is-a-cigar-box-organ-of-awesome/ | Sqonkbox 55 Is A Cigar Box Organ Of Awesome | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"555",
"555 organ",
"astable",
"cigar box",
"forrest mims",
"lm386"
] | Sometimes, the best birthday presents are the ones you give yourself. In [Dino]’s case, they’re the ones you make for yourself. In honor of his 55th,
he built the Sqonkbox 55
, a 13-note cigar box organ based on a 555 and amplified with an LM386.
It’s based on a
555
wired in astable mode, turning it into an oscillator that outputs a frequency. This frequency is determined by the resistors between pins 6 and 7, another between 7 and 8, and the capacitor between pin 2 and ground. [Dino] shows a breadboard version first, with a single tuning pot and momentary acting as a piano key. As he explains, this portion of the circuit is repeated 13 times with pots and momentaries that he arranges like piano keys through the lid of a cigar box.
“Sqonkbox,” you ask? A second 555 in astable mode sends the output through an LED. This LED stands face to face with an LDR, and they are shrouded in this configuration with black heat shrink tubing. The ‘sqonk’ 555 changes the frequency of the first 555, providing a clippy, rhythmic tone at the rate set by a potentiometer. [Dino]’s full video of the build is after the break. A BOM is forthcoming, but it’s easy enough to puzzle it out between the video and the lovely, Forrest Mims-esque
schematic
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2246334",
"author": "jaromirs",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T12:20:19",
"content": "The output of LM386 could be really shorted to ground when volume is at minimum? The pot sould be connected “in reverse” – the middle lead going to speaker. Also, its input shoud be ground referenced – s... | 1,760,375,971.950117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/14/redlining-your-cpu-via-automotive-tachometer/ | Redlining Your CPU Via Automotive Tachometer | Matt Freund | [
"car hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"7404",
"7805",
"pwm",
"raspberry pi",
"tachometer",
"Tektronix 3252C"
] | Many CPU-usage widgets have stylistically borrowed from vehicles, displaying something mimicking the tachometer found in the dashboard. [Pat] took it a step further and tried his hand at re-borrowing this style. He figured, why not use
an actual physical tachometer
to display how hard the CPU on his Raspberry Pi was revving?
With the goal of tuning 0-100% CPU usage to 0-8000 RPM on the tach, the first step was diagnosing the range of PWM input frequencies that moved the needle across the tach’s full arc. Using his Tektronix 3252C function generator he quickly determined 0-440 Hz would be needed and graphed a handful of intermediate points. The response curve was not linear, so he drew up some fudging guidelines to make all the datapoints match.
Next, he wrote a few lines of Python (he shared) to make the Pi to poll its CPU usage and translate it to the proper frequency. The Pi makes outputting easy, GPIO pin 11 carried the signal to a 7404 for buffering, then out to the tach. The automotive tach itself ran on 12V, but its input signal required only 5V so he pulled a 7805 from his parts bin.
Once it was all put together it worked beautifully using just the one extra component. Some might see this as more clever than
USB dependent
or
Arduino
bloated
based
tachometer hacks.
See the video after the break of the tach twitching even when the mouse moved, and pegging the red when opening a browser. No more need to use up valuable screen real-estate (or use a screen at all) if you want to see at a glance when your Pi is putting in work.
If you were hoping for a device that adds a tachometer to display actual RPMs of something, we have
covered that before
too! | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "2246175",
"author": "Wonko the Sane",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T11:11:04",
"content": "The Tacho is a linear devive, but the input signal has to be right….The early tachos took a signal off the ignition, so it got a very short pulse.Later units take a pulse off the crankshaft…if you ... | 1,760,375,972.109477 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/simple-and-elegant-single-digit-nixie-tube-clock/ | Simple And Elegant Single Digit Nixie Tube Clock | Rick Osgood | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"clock",
"IN-12",
"IN-12a",
"nixie",
"nixie tube",
"pic",
"simple"
] | We’ve seen a few Nixie projects around here before, but this one might be the simplest yet. [Pinomelean] designed this
simple nixie tube clock
with just a handful of components.
The Nixie tube chosen for the project is an IN-12a. This tube can be purchased for around just four dollars. It is capable of displaying one digit at a time, zero through nine. Since the tube can only display one digit at a time, the clock is programmed to flash each digit of the current time one by one. There is a longer pause in between each cycle to make it easier to tell when the cycle begins and ends.
The system is broken into two main components. The first is the clock circuit. The clock runs off a PIC microcontroller with a 4MHz crystal. All of the logic is performed via the PIC and only a handful of other components are required. This includes some resistors and capacitors as well as a few high voltage SMD transistors to control the Nixie tube. [Pinomelean] has made this PCB design available so anyone can download it and make their own clock.
The second component to the clock is the power supply. The system is powered by a lithium-ion rechargeable battery, but [Pinomelean] notes that it can also be powered with USB. The lower voltage works well for the microcontroller, but the Nixie tube needs a higher voltage. [Pinomelean] built his own high voltage supply using components scavenged from an old disposable camera. This power supply board design is also made available for download, but it plugs into the main board so you can use
another design
if desired.. Check out the demo video below to see it in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu_8dR9vmck | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "2245652",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T06:58:55",
"content": "Very nice, judging from the watch either a European hacker or a ham. Also this clock is begging to be made into a watch, I just don’t know how fragile the tube would be in a watch configuration and he’e... | 1,760,375,972.569022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/1-37-crt-restored-by-hacklab-for-miniature-mame-cabinet/ | 1.37″ CRT Restored By Hacklab For Miniature MAME Cabinet | Matt Freund | [
"Portable Video Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"AN5715",
"C80580",
"crt",
"hackerspace",
"Hacklab",
"makerfaire",
"mame",
"raspberry pi",
"toronto",
"tv"
] | For $5, [William] of Toronto’s Hacklab hackerspace got a hold of one of the smallest CRT screens ever made – about the size of a large coin. Over the course of a couple sessions – including a public hack boothside at their Mini Makerfaire – [William], [Igor], and several other members managed to connect it as a
monitor directly off a Raspberry Pi
. The end-goal is the world’s smallest MAME cabinet (smaller by almost half than
this LCD one
).
As Canada followed the US and stopped broadcasting analog back in 2011, it became quite a challenge to feed the screen a video source. They disclosed early that the easiest solution would just be an RF transmitter on the Pi and then tune the micro-set to that channel. Too easy. They wanted something elegant and challenging so they went digging into the circuitry to find a place to insert a composite video signal directly.
The real story here is their persistence at reverse engineering. The PCB was folded like a cardboard box to fit in the original case, making large portions of the circuitboard and wiring inaccessible. Even when they managed to trace the signal to what they thought was the appropriate chip (marked C80580), they could not find any information on the 30 year old chip. Noting that every other chip on the board was Panasonic and started with “AN5”, [Igor] suspected the mystery silicon was just renamed and went through every single datasheet he could find with that prefix. Combined with form factor, pin count and purpose, his sleuthing was rewarded with a guess for a match – the AN5715. His hunch was correct – using that datasheet led him to the answers they required.
Then they just had to figure out how get the composite signal the Pi outputted into something the chip would use to display the correct image. There were no shortage of challenges, failures and dead ends here either, but they had help from the rest of their membership.
Their project log is an interesting narrative through the process and in the end of course, it worked. It is displayed beautifully with a clear acrylic case and ready for a cabinet to be built. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2245232",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T03:50:42",
"content": "Smallest not meant to be held to the eye with a lens. Some of those viewfinders were small.Come up with a thumb size MAME cabinet.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,375,973.057289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/midi-keyboard-with-frickin-laser-keys/ | MIDI Keyboard With Frickin’ Laser Keys | Rick Osgood | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"ESi keycontrol 49",
"harp",
"keyboard",
"laser",
"midi",
"music",
"photo resistor",
"photocell",
"sensor"
] | MIDI instruments are cool, but they’re not
laser
cool. That is, unless you’ve
added lasers
to your MIDI instrument like [Lasse].
[Lasse] started out with an old MIDI keyboard. The plan was to recycle an older keyboard rather than have to purchase something new. In this case, the team used an ESi Keycontrol 49. They keyboard was torn apart to get to the
creamy center
circuit boards. [Lasse] says that most MIDI keyboards come withe a MIDI controller board and the actual key control board.
Once the key controller board was identified, [Lasse] needed to figure out how to actually trigger the keys without the physical keyboard in place. He did this by shorting out different pads while the keyboard was hooked up to the computer. If he hit the correct pads, a note would play. Simple, but effective.
The housing for the project is made out of wood. Holes were drilled in one piece to mount 12 laser diodes. That number is not arbitrary. Those familiar with music theory will know that there are 12 notes in an octave. The lasers were powered via the 5V source from USB. The lasers were then aimed at another piece of wood.
Holes were drilled in this second piece wherever the lasers hit. Simple photo resistors were mounted here. The only other components needed for each laser sensor were a resistor and a transistor. This simple discreet circuit is enough to simulate a key press when the laser beam is broken. No programming or microcontrollers required. Check out the demonstration video below to see how it works. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "2245091",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T02:57:50",
"content": "Where did he hide the sharks?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2245218",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2014-12-14T03:44:54",
"conten... | 1,760,375,972.340926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/tripping-on-oscilloshrooms-with-an-analog-scope/ | Tripping On Oscilloshrooms With An Analog Scope | Sarah Petkus | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"audio imaging",
"dancing mushroom",
"Jerobeam",
"mushrooms",
"oscilloscope",
"sine",
"sound"
] | This might be an old trick, but it’s still cool to see a functional tool like the oscilloscope manipulated for an unrelated purpose such as this. [Jerobeam Fenderson] made a video explaining how to input stereo audio into an old digital scope in order to create of all things, dancing mushrooms… because why not?
In this case, [Jerobeam] used a Tektronix D11 5103N set in X Y mode and attached the left and right channels from his RME Fireface UC audio interface. One channel corresponds with X, and the other with Y. From here, he controls the wave forms discretely with the help of software like
Pure Data
(Pd) and
Max
(not free, but more powerful) which are visual programming environments made to enable musicians and artists to create software without writing lines of code. His video explains how to make a circle out of a sine wave, and then beat the crap out of it with math far beyond our comprehension. The outcome is pretty mesmerizing and leaves us wanting to try it out ourselves. Luckily, if you’re interested in experimenting with the voice of sine waves… [Jerobeam] has more information on his blog on how to
do some scope play of your own
whether your hardware is analog or digital.
You can see the dancing mushrooms in his video below: | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2244344",
"author": "Me",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T21:47:22",
"content": "Wasn’t this on here a long time ago?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2244414",
"author": "Brian Benchoff",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T22:1... | 1,760,375,972.618153 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/logic-simulator-atanua-goes-free-possibly-open-source/ | Logic Simulator Atanua Goes Free, Possibly Open Source | Brian Benchoff | [
"Software Development",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atanua",
"digital logic",
"Logic simulation",
"software",
"software licensing",
"tools"
] | The history of software is littered with developers that built a great product, gave people a reasonable option to license the software, and ended up making a pittance. There’s a reason you don’t see shareware these days – nobody pays. It looks like [Gates] had a point with his Open Letter to Hobbyists.
Such is the case with Atanua. [Jari] built a nice little graphical logic simulator that has tens of thousands of downloads, and is being used in dozens of universities. [Jari] has sold only about 60 licenses for Atanua, netting him only a few thousand Euro. You can’t develop software with a pittance, so now
[Jari] is giving Atanua away
. This neat little logic simulator has reached the end of its life, the license is free, and [Jari] is out of the business.
This isn’t an ideal situation, but [Jari] is strongly considering open-sourcing Atanua. The code is a little bit of a mess at the moment, and cleaning it up will require a bit of work. [Jari] is leaving the option to buy a license for Atanua open, and anyone who wants to see this bit of software open sourced could buy a license or hundred.
While this isn’t great news for [Jari], if you’re looking for a neat tool to learn digital logic,
you now have a very nice free option
. Atanua simulates individual logic gates, 74-series chips, and even an 8051 microcontroller in real-time (up to about 1 kHz), with enough buttons, LEDs, and displays to do some very cool stuff. It’s more than enough to learn digital logic on, and good enough for a test bed for some odd and bizarre projects you might have floating around your head. | 46 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "2243885",
"author": "ganzuul",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T18:20:30",
"content": "SIM cards are based on the 8051, IIRC…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2243918",
"author": "Trui",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T18:32:04",
"c... | 1,760,375,972.819259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/3d-printed-lenses-open-up-possibilities/ | 3D Printed Lenses Open Up Possibilities | James Hobson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed glasses",
"3d printed lens",
"3d printed lenses",
"form 1",
"formlabs"
] | Now this is some seriously cool stuff. The folks over at FormLabs decided to try a little experiment to test the optical clarity of their clear resin. It’s
pretty damn clear.
Using their own slicing software,
PreForm
, [Craig Broady] printed the lens piece in an orientation that would maximize resin flow around the lens to help prevent defects, keeping it as smooth as possible. While the printed part looks quite clear, all lenses require some form of polishing to become optically clear. It was printed with a 50 micron resolution, and [Craig] used a power drill to sand the lens down from 220 grit to 2000 grit sand paper.
Once it was pretty smooth he switched over to polishing compound, using a piece of cork board to spin the lens against. He used Novus scratch remover to do this. Once it was clear to his liking, he repeated the whole process on the other side. He then popped it into his 3D printed monocle and chain and boom — an entirely 3D printed monocle.
SLA printers are expensive, but imagine the possibilities — make your own glasses!
[Thanks Jennifer!] | 35 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "2243446",
"author": "anonymous coward",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T15:24:59",
"content": "Getting glasses in third world countries is still very difficult and pricey.these guys cound make a change there !!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,375,972.901485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/sleek-desk-lamp-changes-colors-based-on-sun-position/ | Sleek Desk Lamp Changes Colors Based On Sun Position | Rick Osgood | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"aluminum",
"arduino",
"capacitive",
"college",
"desk lamp",
"diffuser",
"Electric Imp",
"jameco",
"lamp",
"led",
"light",
"machining",
"strip",
"student",
"touch sensor"
] | [Connor] was working on a project for his college manufacturing class when he came up with the idea for this
sleek desk lamp
. As a college student, he’s not fond of having his papers glowing brightly in front of him at night. This lamp takes care of the problem by adjusting the color temperature based on the position of the sun. It also contains a capacitive touch sensor to adjust the brightness without the need for buttons with moving parts.
The base is made from two sheets of aluminum and a bar of aluminum. These were cut and milled to the final shape. [Connor] found a nice DC barrel jack from Jameco that fits nicely with this design. The head of the lamp was made from another piece of aluminum bar stock. All of the aluminum pieces are held together with brass screws.
A slot was milled out of the bottom of the head-piece to make room for an LED strip and a piece of 1/8″ acrylic. This piece of acrylic acts as a light diffuser. Another piece of acrylic was cut and added to the bottom of the base of the lamp. This makes for a nice glowing outline around the bottom that gives it an almost futuristic look.
The
capacitive touch sensor
is a pretty simple circuit. [Connor] used the Arduino capacitive touch sensor library to make his life a bit easier. The electronic circuit really only requires a single resistor between two Arduino pins. One of the pins is also attached to the aluminum body of the lamp. Now simply touching the lamp body allows [Connor] to adjust the brightness of the lamp.
[Connor] ended up using an Electric Imp to track the sun. The Imp uses the wunderground API to connect to the weather site and track the sun’s location. In the earlier parts of the day, the LED colors are cooler and have more blues. In the evening when the sun is setting or has already set, the lights turn more red and warm. This is easier on the eyes when you are hunched over your desk studying for your next exam. The end result is not only functional, but also looks like something you might find at that fancy gadget store in your local shopping mall. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2243010",
"author": "zaprodk",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T12:11:47",
"content": "Eh, “capacities touch sensor” – How about some proofreading before posting ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2243468",
"author": "Mike Szcz... | 1,760,375,972.9489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/13/usb-on-the-teensy-3-from-the-ground-up/ | USB On The Teensy 3 From The Ground Up | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"device driver",
"Teensy",
"Teensy 3.1",
"usb",
"USB Driver"
] | When implementing USB on a microcontroller, most people are going to reach for V-USB if they’re using an AVR, one of Microchip’s USB libraries if a PIC is involved, or any number of the USB libraries for various ARM processors. [Kevin] had a different idea. As a challenge to himself,
he wrote a USB device driver for the Teensy 3.1
microcontroller board, getting as close to the bare metal as he could get.
Writing a USB device driver first required a literature review. There are a few peculiarities in the Freescale K20 family of microcontrollers – the one found in the Teensy 3.1 – that dictate the need for a specific memory layout, using several clocks, and handling all the USB descriptors. [Kevin] started with the clocks, every last one of which must be enabled. The clock is generated by the Multipurpose Clock Generator from a 16MHz crystal, PLL’ed to the frequencies the USB module needs, and sent out over the System Integration Module.
Following the flowcharts and sequences found in the Freescale reference guide told [Kevin] exactly what needed to be done with the startup sequence, and offered a few suggestions on what needed to be done to set up all the interrupts. [Kevin] spent an incredible amount of time documenting, programming, and smashing his head against the keyboard for this tutorial, but he does give everyone a great opportunity to learn from his struggles.
While [Kevin] has a mostly complete USB device driver, his work is far from done. That’s alright, because this project wasn’t meant to be a full-featured driver; it’s still missing real error handling, strings in the configuration, and a real VID/PID. That’s alright, it’s still a great exercise in building something from scratch, especially something that very few people have built successfully.
Oh,
blatant Hackaday Store plug
for the Teensy 3.1. | 13 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "2243268",
"author": "fpgacomputer",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T14:03:32",
"content": "Freescale provides a code generator and USB drivers, their stuff is overly complicated, unreadable and towards MQX. Freescale’s reference manuals coverage are spotty and doesn’t always tell you how... | 1,760,375,973.63227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/2014-advent-calender-of-circuits/ | 2014 Advent Calender Of Circuits | Matt Freund | [
"how-to",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"advent",
"Cockcroft-Walton",
"RF",
"tesla coil"
] | Every day this month and until Christmas, [vk2zay] is (has already been!) posting a simple but useful hack in his 2nd sort-of-annual “
Advent Calender of Circuits
” that many of you will want to be bookmarking. For those already saturated with the season of holiday hacks, don’t worry – other than being festively generous of him to tutor and demo a new hack every day, the hacks themselves have nothing to do with Christmas. Though he missed the last couple years we here at Hackaday covered his
first month of hacks back in 2011
(now in
playlist
).
The daily hacks posted so far cover a wide variety of useful projects (leaning towards HV) for the electronics hobbyist who might not have all the fancy tools in their shop: DIY high voltage probes, a 1-hour tesla coil from junk, measuring RF power, a stud detector, how to test an unknown transformer’s saturation, and many others. We cannot predict what will be posted the rest of the calender (the author hints to be making them up as he goes), but by now it is safe to say that they will not disappoint.
We would be stealing his thunder to cover them all, so, we will just pick our favorite for now:
The 1-hour tesla coil is a delightful all-shortcuts-taken hack project. If one were to listen to aficionados, teslacoiling is a highly precise hobby to get into. It appears to require careful planning, much calculation, special-ordered or soviet-surplus parts, custom jigs, fine tuning, etc. [vk2zay] shows otherwise.
Every single component of the assembly is itself a hack.
No fancy tungsten-infused grade 8 copper being water-cooled via heat pump here – the spark gap is just the bent leg of a capacitor hovering near the start of the primary winding. The power supply is a backlight inverter with a chain of Cockcroft-Walton voltage doublers. The high voltage resistor is a bunch of series-chained resistors shoved into a silicone tube. The topload is a couple cheap pie tins masking-taped together to “resemble something like a sphere.” The primary is a loose, unsupported spring of copper wire. The secondary was calculated to be whatever the height of the tube he had handy and coiled only as smoothly as a first attempt would allow. He does not even bother using wires or a switch – the circuit is completed by clipping a couple of test leads.
After all this hodgepodgery the circuit was then carefully tuned to optimize how little time it took to build (additional time used: zero). Since the frequencies do not match (1.7 vs. 2.6 mhz – 35% apart) the only thing this circuit resonates with is a hacker’s appeal for making do. Does not matter, still works. The streamers easily reach 2 inches and the author claims double that in dark lighting.
In the just 6 minute video he also manages to explain roughly what is going on theory-wise and suggest the time-effective things to considering upgrading. Almost a dozen hacks in the bag and over a dozen more to come before Christmas.
Thanks a bunch to [Thorsten] for the tip, what a gem! | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2242032",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T06:24:14",
"content": "Gidday mate!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2242259",
"author": "Vikas V",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T08:11:01",
"content": "Its late news ha... | 1,760,375,972.991824 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/robot-vision-detecting-obstacles-with-fpgas-and-line-lasers/ | Robot Vision: Detecting Obstacles With FPGAs And Line Lasers | Sonya Vasquez | [
"FPGA",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous robot",
"computer vision",
"fpga",
"Logi Board"
] | Somewhere down the road, you’ll find that your almighty autonomous robot chassis is going to need some sensor feedback. Otherwise, that next small step down the road may end with a blind leap off the coffee table. The first low-cost sensors we might throw at this problem would be sonars or IR rangefinders, but there’s a problem: those sensors only really provide distance data back from the pinpoint view directly ahead of them.
Rest assured, [Jonathan] wrote in to let us know that he’s got you covered. Combining a line laser, camera, and an FPGA, he’s
able to detect obstacles
that fall within the field of view of the camera and laser.
If you thought writing algorithms in software is tricky, wait till to you try hardware! (We know: division sucks!) [Jonathan] knows no fear though; he’s performing gradient computation on the FPGA directly to detect the laser in the camera image at a wicked 30 frames-per-second. Why roll up your sleeves and take the hardware route, you might ask? If we took a CPU-based approach at the tiny embedded-robot scale, Jonathan estimates a mere 10 frames-per-second. With an FPGA, we’re able to process images about as fast as they’re received.
Jonathan is using the Logi Board, a
Kickstarter success we’ve visited
in the past, and all of his code is up on
the Githubs
. If you crack it open, you’ll also find that many of his modules are Wishbone compliant, so developing your own projects with just some of these parts has been made much easier than trying to rip out useful features from a sea of hairy logic.
With computer-vision hardware keeping such a low profile in the hobbyist community, we’re excited to hear more about [Jonathan’s] FPGA-based robotics endeavors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZVa55p9Lo | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2241609",
"author": "IH8UKULELE",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T04:08:00",
"content": "Amazing work, I have been trying to learn the logiboard with the Beagle bone black and have been unsuccessful. This is exactly what I have been looking for as far as placing a robotic foot on uneven s... | 1,760,375,973.167797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/a-simple-hoverboard-everyone-can-understand/ | A Simple Hoverboard Everyone Can Understand | James Hobson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"hover board",
"hover craft",
"hoverboard",
"hovercraft",
"mr hoverboard"
] | To be honest, we were wondering when we would see
someone try this…
[Ryan Craven] has successfully built a working hovercraft that looks like a skateboard. It floats on two pockets of air generated by four Black and Decker leaf blowers — and by golly, it certainly looks like it works!
Ever since the
HUVr hoax
earlier this year, [Ryan] has had the goal to make a real, working hoverboard. Hendo may have
beaten him to the punch with their $10,000 eddy current inducing halbach array board
, but alas, it only works on copper or aluminum floors. [Ryan’s] can be used anywhere a normal skateboard can be. It’s far from sleek, but it’s only just the prototype — though we’re curious to see how far this could actually go.
Which is precisely why he’s shared it
over on Hackaday.io
and is hoping to draw some support and ideas from our wonderful community here.
What do you guys think? Is it worth continuing the pursuit of a hovercraft style hoverboard? Can we shrink the technology enough to make it feasible? It’s come a long way from the classic hover craft using a giant shop vac… | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "2240927",
"author": "furiousd",
"timestamp": "2014-12-13T00:12:34",
"content": "More power! Perhaps the next prototype should be a gas-powered backpack blower. Or some nice math to determine the amount of airflow needed to keep a taller skirt inflated for his body weight. All thr... | 1,760,375,973.126278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/reverse-engineering-capcoms-crypto-cpu/ | Reverse Engineering Capcom’s Crypto CPU | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Capcom",
"cpu",
"encryption",
"Kabuki",
"security",
"z80"
] | There are a few old Capcom arcade titles – Pang, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, and Block Block – that are unlike anything else ever seen in the world of coin-ops. They’re old, yes, but what makes these titles exceptional is the CPU they run on. The brains in the hardware of these games is a Kabuki, a Z80 CPU that had a few extra security features. why would Capcom produce such a thing? To combat bootleggers that would copy and reproduce arcade games without royalties going to the original publisher. It’s an interesting part of arcade history, but also a problem for curators: this security has killed a number of arcade machines,
leading [Eduardo] to reverse engineering and document the Kabuki in full detail
.
While the normal Z80 CPU had a pin specifically dedicated to refreshing DRAM, the Kabuki repurposed this pin for the security functions on the chip. With this pin low, the Kabuki was a standard Z80. When the pin was pulled high, it served as a power supply input for the security features. The security – just a few bits saved in memory – was battery backed, and once this battery was disconnected, the chip would fail, killing the game.
Plugging Kabuki into an old Amstrad CPC 6128
without the security pin pulled high allowed [Eduardo] to test all the Z80 instructions, and with that no surprises were found; the Kabuki is fully compatible with every other Z80 on the planet. Determining how Kabuki works with that special security pin pulled high is a more difficult task, but
the Mame team has it nailed down.
The security system inside Kabuki works through a series of bitswaps, circular shifts, XORs, each translation different if the byte is an opcode or data. The process of encoding and decoding the security in Kabuki is well understood, but [Eduardo] had a few unanswered questions. What happens after Kabuki lost power and the memory contents – especially the bitswap, address, and XOR keys – vanished? How was the Kabuki programmed in the factory? Is it possible to reprogram these security keys, allowing one Kabuki to play games it wasn’t manufactured for?
[Eduardo] figured being able to encrypt new, valid code was the first step to running code encrypted with different keys. To test this theory, he wrote a simple ‘Hello World’ for the Capcom hardware that worked perfectly under Mame. While the demo worked perfectly under Mame, it didn’t work when burned onto a EPROM and put into real Capcom hardware.
That’s where this story ends, at least for the time being. The new, encrypted code is valid, Mame runs the encrypted code, but until [Eduardo] or someone else can figure out any additional configuration settings inside the Kabuki, this project is dead in the track. [Eduardo] will be back some time next week tearing the Kabuki apart again, trying to unravel the mysteries of what makes this processor work. | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2240806",
"author": "kennedybushnell",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T23:15:53",
"content": "I always find spider wiring like that interesting. Point to point, banana clips, electrical taped wire to a pin… Definitely the start of a good hack :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,375,973.546502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/were-hiring-a-full-time-hackaday-prize-mythical-creature/ | We’re Hiring A Full-Time Hackaday Prize Mythical Creature | Mike Szczys | [
"Featured"
] | [
"Hackaday Prize",
"hiring",
"jobs",
"mythical creature",
"the hackaday prize"
] | On occasion we advertise jobs for Hackaday but this time around is an exceptionally big deal. The Hackaday Prize was
an amazing adventure this year
, and we’re already hard at work on the plans for the 2015 Hackaday Prize. To realize our vision for the movement we need someone who will live and breathe THP. We need to find the Hackaday Prize Mythical Creature.
This person will hold in their mind all things Hackaday Prize. The HPMC will gallivant across the land (both digital and real) heralding the message of grass-roots, high-level hardware development. Obviously this involves recruiting highly skilled Hackers, Designers, and Engineers to compete for the prize. But the HPMC will also make sure that the amazing creations competing for the Prize get the widespread recognition they deserve.
There are a lot of nuts and bolts to the job. The HPMC will lead the planning of all live events. The many talents of the Hackaday and Supplyframe crews will be fully and efficiently tapped thanks to the legendary organizational and people skills wielded by the HPMC. Can you see why we’re calling this job candidate a Mythical Creature?
The point is, we are going to accomplish great things in 2015 and beyond. We need the perfect person to make sure it happens smoothly. Mythical Creatures, sharpen your CV’s and
apply now
. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "2240155",
"author": "Nice robit",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T19:07:17",
"content": "What kind of budget does the mythical creature get?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2240242",
"author": "SnowMonster",
"timestam... | 1,760,375,973.419648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/hacklet-26-arduino-projects/ | Hacklet 26 – Arduino Projects | Adam Fabio | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"aa battery",
"atmega",
"atmega328",
"hackaday.io",
"hacklet",
"mega",
"Mega 2560",
"The Hacklet",
"uno"
] | Arduino is one of those boards that has become synonymous with hacking and making. Since its introduction in 2005, over 700,000 official Arduino boards have been sold, along with untold millions of compatible and clone boards. Hackers and makers around the world have found the Arduino platform a cheap and simple way to get their projects off the ground. This weeks Hacket focuses on some of the best Arduino based projects we’ve found on
Hackday.io!
[Niazangels] gets the ball – or ballpoint pen – rolling with
Roboartist
, a robot which creates line drawings. Roboartist is more than just a plotter though. [Niazangels] created a custom PC program which creates line drawings from images captured by a webcam. The line drawings are converted to coordinates, and sent to an Arduino, which controls all the motors that move the pen. [Niazangels] went with Dynamixel closed loop servo motors rather than the stepper motors we often see in 3D printers.
[Peter Edwards] is preserving the past with
Tapuino, the $20 C64 Tape Emulator
. Plenty of programs for the Commodore 64, 128, and compatibles were only distributed on tape. Those tapes are slowly degrading, though the classic Commodore
herdware
is still going strong. Tapuino preserves those tapes by using an Arduino nano to play the files from an SD card into the original
Datasette
interface. [Peter] also plans to add recording functionality to the Tapuino, which will make it the total package for preserving your data. All that’s missing is that satisfying clunk when pressing the mechanical Play button!
[Dushyant Ahuja] knows what time it is, thanks to his Infinity Mirror Clock. This clock tells time with the help of some WS2812B RGB LED. [Dushyant] debugged the clock with a regular Arduino, but when it came time to finish the project, he used an ATmega328 to create an Arduino compatible board from scratch. Programming is easy with an on-board Bluetooth module. [Dushyant] plans to add a TFT lcd which will show weather and other information when those power-hungry LEDs are switched off.
[IngGaro] built an entire home alarm system with his project
Arduino anti-theft alarm shield
. [IngGaro] needed an alarm system for his home. That’s a lot to ask of a standard ATmega328p powered Arduino Uno. However, the extra I/O lines available on an Arduino Mega2560 were just what the doctor ordered. [IngGaro] performed some amazing point-to-point perfboard wiring to produce a custom shield that looks and works great! The alarm can interface with just about any sensor, and can be controlled via the internet. You can even disarm the system through an RFID keycard.
Want MORE Arduino in your life? Check out our curated
Arduino List!
That’s about all the millis() we have for this weeks Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of
Hackaday.io! | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2240086",
"author": "joelfinkle",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T18:31:01",
"content": "Only criticism of the Tapuino is that it should have been engineered to fit into a standard cassette case",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2240268"... | 1,760,375,973.486002 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/mill-warped-pcb-blanks-on-an-uneven-bed/ | Mill Warped PCB Blanks On An Uneven Bed | Rich Bremer | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"autoleveling",
"autoleveller",
"PCB mill",
"PCB milling"
] | Milling a PCB at home is a great way to save some time and money if you are making one-off circuit boards. There is a downside though, it’s a little tough. Sure, just
export
your
Eagle
design to CNC-Machine-understandable g-code and fire up your mill…. well, it’s not that easy.
The copper on a PCB blank can be anywhere from about 0.001 to 0.006 inches thick. When milling a board the ideal situation is to mill just deep enough to get through the copper but not cut too deep into the fiberglass backer board. Cutting too deep can weaken the board, break a bit, or in an extreme case, cut through the entire board.
Shallow cuts can result in another problem, inconsistent cut depth over the surface of the board. Check out the left photo above. The traces on the left side of the board appears to have just faded away. This happened because the circuit board was not flat. The side where the traces are missing from is lower than the other so the tool bit is not able to reach that part of the board. Since an ideal depth of cut is about 0.010 inches, even a very small amount of waviness or out of flatness can cause a serious problem in the milling process. If you have a hard time picturing what 0.010 inches is, think the thickness of two pieces of paper, it’s not a lot. There are two main contributors to the flatness problem; the PCB board and/or the machine’s bed. If the bed is not flat, the PCB won’t be. Even if the bed is flat, the PCB may be warped or bent.
PCB fabrication enthusiast [daedelus] had this exact problem, and in true hacker fashion, decided to do something about it. He created a software program called
AutoLeveller
that takes a g-code file and adds a probing section to the beginning before the milling operation. When the modified g-code file is run on the CNC Machine, it first probes the surface of the PCB in a grid pattern and maps the flatness variation of the PCB’s surface. Then, when running the program, it adjusts the height of the tool bit on the fly so that the actual depth of cut is consistent over the entire board, regardless of how flat or not it is. The result is a clean and usable PCB on the first try.
There is one catch: the Machine Control Software has to be set up to accept a probe. This is easy to do if communicating to the CNC Machine via a computers parallel port. An input pin on the parallel port is pulled high with a resistor and connected electrically to the PCB board. The tool spindle is grounded with a clip lead. When the tool touches the board, the input pin is pulled low and the Machine Control Software records the tool height for that specific XY position. | 22 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "2239663",
"author": "martin2250",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T15:13:49",
"content": "Thing is, it only works with LinuxCNC or Mach3. The software won’t work with GRBL or an other DIY CNC soultions which are very popular. For TinyG there is Chillipeppr, but the grbl port does not work r... | 1,760,375,973.689055 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/making-microview-wordy/ | Making MicroView Wordy | Brian Benchoff | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"microview",
"oled",
"ring",
"wearable"
] | Despite the MicroView shipping a ton of units, we haven’t seen many projects using this tiny Arduino and OLED display in a project. Never fear, because embedded systems engineer, podcaster, and Hackaday Prize judge [Elecia White]
is here with a wearable build
for this very small, very cool device.
The size and shape of the MicroView just cried out to be made into a ring, and for that, [Elicia] is using air-drying bendy polymer clay. To attach the clay to the MicroView, [Elecia] put some female headers in a breadboard, and molded the clay over them into a ring shape. It works, and although [Elecia] didn’t do anything too tricky with the headers and clay, there are some interesting things you could do running wires through the clay.
What does this ring do? It’s a Magic 8 Ball, a game of Pong controlled by an accelerometer, a word-of-the-day thing (with definitions), all stuffed into a
brass
silicon, OLED, and clay knuckle. Video below.
If you’re wondering,
Turbillion
(n). A whirl; a vortex. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "2239422",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T12:52:57",
"content": "Cool, but a bit big for a ring should be a watch.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2239592",
"author": "timbo",
"timestamp": "2014... | 1,760,375,973.730808 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/12/online-altair-8800-clone-lets-you-play-zork/ | Online Altair 8800 Clone Lets You Play Zork | Theodora Fabio | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"altair 8800",
"html5",
"ser2sock",
"zork"
] | [Citponys] wanted to share their Altair 8800 clone with the world, and what better way to do so than by
hooking it up to the Internet
? This hack was pulled off by using a Linux computer which receives a Telnet connection and redirects it to a serial port. This serial port is connected to the Altair clone. In order to connect the serial port to the Internet using TCP, the
ser2sock program
was used. People can interact with the Altair on the webpage, where there is also a live camera feed showing the Altair’s
Blinkenlights
.
This is an ongoing project for [Citponys]. Zork 1-3 and Ladder are now available for play. You can
interact with other people in the current session
; play nice, or it’ll end up a Mad Libs version of
‘Twitch Plays Pokemon’
. Most recently, [Citponys] updated the webpage with a
HTML5-embedded terminal emulator
. If you want to quit the current session displayed, enter “quit” and you will be redirected to the main menu where you can choose another game. [Citponys] has links to game walkthroughs on the top of the page. We have a soft spot for
classic computers
and
games
, especially the
Altair
. Take a trip down memory lane and play some Zork at the fork where the past meets the present!
[
via
Reddit
] | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2239321",
"author": "Tomo",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T12:01:30",
"content": "Very cool!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2239409",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T12:48:59",
"content": "I’ed love to see... | 1,760,375,973.821591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/11/raspberry-pi-powered-super-digital-photo-frame/ | Raspberry Pi Powered Super Digital Photo Frame | Rich Bremer | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"digital photo frame",
"digital picture frame",
"raspberry pi"
] | HaD reader [Greg] just finished an LCD picture frame project he’s been working on for a while. This is no ordinary photo display. His brother came up with the idea of having a device to
display photos that could be changed remotely
. [Greg] gave it some thought and came up with a plan; use a Raspi as the brains, connect to the internet via WiFi and display photos stored in a specific Google Drive folder. Any authorized user can upload photos remotely to the frame so the frame-owner has a constant stream of new photos to view.
Of course, using an off-the-shelf picture frame may have been too easy. Instead [Greg] decided to start with an old computer monitor and wrap it in a wooden frame so it looks good. Mounted to the back of the LCD is a Raspberry Pi with a USB WiFi dongle. The monitor runs at 14 VDC and luckily has an external power supply. Since the Pi runs at 5 V, a buck converter taps into the LCD’s input power and outputs a Pi-happy 5 volts.
This project doesn’t stop with displaying photos! The user can also switch to a weather view. The weather image displayed is generated from weather data pulled from the internet in the exact same manor used by folks who make stand-alone
weather displays out of old Kindles
. Oh yeah, switching between photos and weather is done by wireless remote! On the frame unit itself there is only one button, but it has 3 functions: A quick press turns the screen off, a short hold syncs with Google Drive and a long hold powers off the RaspPi.
If you’d like to make your own frame, [Greg] has graciously made all his
scripts
available for download…. not to mention his very detailed build log. | 21 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "2238535",
"author": "Z00111111",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T06:32:57",
"content": "Cool. I like the idea of being able to set up similar rigs with friends/family and all putting photos into a pool. Would be good for long distance family.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,375,973.780072 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/11/quadcopter-beer-delivery-system/ | Quadcopter Beer Delivery System | Bryan Cockfield | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"beer",
"beer delivery",
"drone",
"parachute",
"quadcopter"
] | One of the major design challenges when it comes to building an efficient quadcopter is weight. The idea here is that the more you can trim down the weight of the frame, motors, and circuitry, the longer the batteries will last. Or, in [dalbyman]’s case, the
more beer it can carry
.
[Dalbyman]’s housemate built the actual quadcopter, but then [dalbyman] got a little inebriated and decided that, while the quadcopter was exciting on its own, it would be even better with this modification. The actual device is a modified Pringles can with two servo motors on the bottom with arms that hold the beer. A parachute is attached to the beverage can and the assembly is loaded in. With a simple press of a button, the servos turn the arms and the beer falls out of the tube. Hopefully the parachute deploys and gently (and accurately) floats the beer to the thirsty person on the ground!
This project is a simple step that goes a long way towards a beer delivery system even Amazon could be proud of, and also shows off the capabilities of quadcopters in general. Perhaps the next step could be to automate the
beer delivery system
! | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "2238366",
"author": "danieljlouw",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T05:23:12",
"content": "This concept was commercially implemented last year at a local 3-day music event in South Africa. You would order with your smart-phone, cost would be deducted from your credit card, then a drone woul... | 1,760,375,973.860611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/11/using-the-oculus-rift-as-a-multi-monitor-replacement/ | Using The Oculus Rift As A Multi-Monitor Replacement | James Hobson | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"3D Windows Manager",
"Oculus",
"oculus rift",
"WorkSphere"
] | [Jason] has been playing around with the Oculus Rift lately and came up with
a pretty cool software demonstration.
It’s probably been done before in some way shape or form, but we love the idea anyway and he’s actually released the program so you can play with it too!
It’s basically a 3D Windows Manager, aptly called 3DWM — though he’s thinking of changing the name to something a bit cooler, maybe the
WorkSphere
or something.
As he shows in the following video demonstration, the software allows you to set up multiple desktops and windows on your virtual sphere created by the Oculus — essentially creating a virtual multi-monitor setup. There’s a few obvious cons to this setup which makes it a bit unpractical at the moment. Like the inability to see your keyboard (though this shouldn’t really be a problem), the inability to see people around you… and of course the hardware and it’s lack of proper resolution. But besides that, it’s still pretty awesome!
In the future development he hopes to add Kinect 2 and Leap Motion controller integration to help make it even more user intuitive — maybe more Minority Report style. | 28 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "2237355",
"author": "chuckstephensarts",
"timestamp": "2014-12-12T00:15:15",
"content": "One step closer to that cool rig Ed wears on Cowboy Bebop.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2239506",
"author": "Maave",
"... | 1,760,375,974.032421 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/11/over-engineering-ding-dong-ditch/ | Over-engineering Ding Dong Ditch | Brian Benchoff | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"ask",
"doorbell",
"gsm",
"OOK",
"radio",
"RTL-SDR"
] | One day, [Samy]’s best friend [Matt] mentioned he had a wireless doorbell. Astonishing. Even more amazing is the fact that anyone can buy a software defined radio for $20, a small radio module from eBay for $4, and a GSM breakout board for $40. Connect these pieces together, and you have a device that can ring [Matt]’s doorbell from anywhere on the planet.
Yes, it’s the ultimate over-engineered ding dong ditch
, and a great example of how far you can take practical jokes if you know which end of a soldering iron to pick up.
Simply knowing [Matt] has a wireless doorbell is not enough; [Samy] needed to know the frequency, the modulation scheme, and what the doorbell was sending. Some of this information can be found by looking up the FCC ID, but [Samy] found a better way. When [Matt] was out of his house, [Samy] simply rang the doorbell a bunch of times while looking at the waterfall plot with an RTL-SDR TV tuner. There are a few common frequencies tiny, cheap remote controls will commonly use – 315 MHz, 433 MHz, and 900 MHz. Eventually, [Samy] found the frequency the doorbell was transmitting at – 433.8 MHz.
After capturing the radio signal from the doorbell, [Samy] looked at the audio waveform in Audacity. It looked like this doorbell used On-Off Keying, or just turning the radio on for a binary ‘1’ and off for a binary ‘0’. In Audacity, everything the doorbell transmits becomes crystal clear, and with a $4 434 MHz transmitter from SparkFun, [Samy] can replicate the output of the doorbell.
For the rest of the build, [Samy] is using
a mini GSM cellular breakout board
from Adafruit. This module listens for any text message containing the word ‘doorbell’ and sends a signal to an Arduino. The Arduino then sends out the doorbell code with the transmitter. It’s evil, and extraordinarily over-engineered.
Right now, the ding dong ditch project is set up somewhere across the street from [Matt]’s house. The device reportedly works great, and hopefully hasn’t been abused too much. Video below. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2236953",
"author": "Nater",
"timestamp": "2014-12-11T21:21:55",
"content": "Samy, you left out an important piece of information about your build. Please provide us with the phone number. We want to participate too. :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},... | 1,760,375,974.701083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/11/reverse-engineering-a-game-boy-clones-boot-rom/ | Reverse-Engineering A Game Boy Clone’s Boot ROM | Ethan Zonca | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"clock glitching",
"gameboy",
"rom",
"ROM hack"
] | [nitro2k01] got his hands on a Game Fighter, a clone of the original Game Boy. While there’s a ton of information about the boot ROM and operation of the original Game Boy, not much is known about these clones. [nitro2k01] wanted to learn more, so he used a
clock-glitching technique to dump the device’s ROM
and made some interesting discoveries about its copyright protection and boot process along the way.
Reading the contents of the Game Boy ROM is a bit challenging. The ROM is readable while booting, but afterwards the address space of the ROM is remapped for interrupt vectors and other uses. There are a couple of methods to get around this, but the simplest method involves glitching the crystal by grounding one of its leads. This causes the CPU to jump to random locations in memory. Eventually the CPU will jump to a location where the boot ROM is accessible (if you’re lucky!).
Although [nitro2k01]’s clone can run the same games as the Game Boy, it has a different boot ROM and also has some significant hardware differences. [nitro2k01] managed to use a modified version of the crystal-grounding technique to glitch his clock and dump the clone’s boot ROM. He found that the clone uses an unusual variation on the Game Boy’s copyright-checking technique, along with some other oddities. [nitro2k01] also posted a disassembly of the boot ROM, which he explains in detail.
Thanks for the tip, [Ove]. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "2237293",
"author": "gdogg",
"timestamp": "2014-12-11T23:51:56",
"content": "Very cool. Not sure why people would really care to dumb it, after knowing that all you need is to fake the logo plus set up some hardware to get it to work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,375,974.843256 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/11/fail-of-the-week-teddy-top-and-fourteen-fails/ | Fail Of The Week: Teddy Top And Fourteen Fails | Brian Benchoff | [
"classic hacks",
"Fail of the Week",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Apple IIc",
"fails",
"Hackaday Fail"
] | Last summer, [Quinn] made the trip out to KansasFest, the annual Apple II convention in Kansas City, MO. There, she picked up the most modern Apple II system that wasn’t an architecturally weird IIGS: she lugged home an Apple IIc+, a weird little machine that looks like an old-school laptop without a screen.
Not content with letting an old computer just sit on a shelf looking pretty, [Quinn] is working on a project called the Teddy Top. ‘Teddy’ was one of the code names for the Apple IIc, and although add-ons to turn this book-sized computer into something like a laptop existed in the 80s, these solutions have not withstood the test of time. [Quinn] is building her own clamshell addition to her IIc+,
and somehow failing at something she’s done hundreds of times before
.
While the IIc+ has an NTSC composite output, the super-special video add-ons for the IIc+ used a DB15 expansion connector. Here, any add-on could access video sync signals, the a sound signal from the audio circuit, and even a +12V line that could drive loads up to 300 mA. It just so happened the display [Quinn] is using for this project runs at 12V, 200 mA. Everything was great, but as a worthy trustee of this computer’s Earthly existence, [Quinn] thought a bit of current limiting should be included in her addon. She designed a circuit around an NPN power transistor, that would allow the display to draw power until the load was around 250mA. After that, the transistor would start dumping excess power as heat. Yes, a fuse would be better. [Quinn] calls this Fail #1. There are thirteen more to go.
With the circuit working on a breadboard, [Quinn] needed something a little more permanent to stick in her Teddy Top. It’s a simple circuit and something that would be a good fit for protoboard, but [Quinn] decided to make a PCB.
[Quinn]’s home PCB manufacturing is her specialty
, able to put 16 mil traces on a board with 5 mil separation. That’s good for a Chinese board house, let alone someone in her kitchen.
The first board neglected to take into consideration how the input header would map to the DB-15 IIc+ expansion port. Another fail.
After so many successes with her PCB process, [Quinn] was apparently getting complacent about the errors that could creep in. The developer didn’t work, and trying to be scientific about it, she played with the developer time, UV exposure time, and copper etch time. Everything failed until she realized the developer should be diluted to 10:1. We’re up to fail #8 here.
With a PCB properly etched, [Quinn] got to the point where she could see her circuit etched in copper. She drilled the board, began the assembly, and realized the board was a mirror image of what it should be. Correcting this somehow produced
another
mirror image, and triple checking everything a third time produced
another
inverted image. Put some text on your copper layer in Eagle, people.
With a working board, it was time to assemble the circuit. While the circuit worked on a breadboard, the copper traces had just enough resistance to throw off the experimentally determined resistor values. While the current limiter circuit would keep everything below 250 mA on the breadboard, the limit on the PCB circuit, with the slight increase in resistance in the copper traces, shot up to 310 mA, above what the IIc+ could provide. That’s fail #13.
The final fail, and something [Quinn] should have caught in the breadboard stage, was flipping the collector and emitter on the power transistor. The idea of running video and power through a current limiter was invalid all along.
At this point [Quinn] decided to cut her losses. The LCD board only draws 200mA anyway, and she opted to simply wire it directly to the IIc directly. If the IIc needs protection, a 250mA fuse will be thrown in. Simple enough, and not as infuriating.
With the fixed circuit, the prototype for the Teddy Top works perfectly: a screen, powered by the expansion port on the IIc, is a working display. No extra wires necessary. At the very least, it’s an exercise in minimalism: don’t do what you don’t need to do. If you decide against that little bit of advice, at least you’ll learn something in the process.
Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Thursday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and
sending us a link to the story
— or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels. | 72 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "2236082",
"author": "mojojoe",
"timestamp": "2014-12-11T15:09:42",
"content": "A fail is only a fail until the experience is used towards success. Then it is just part of the success.Therefore… not a fail.Good read though",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,375,975.235518 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/10/yik-yak-mitm-hack-give-the-dog-a-bone/ | Yik Yak MITM Hack (Give The Dog A Bone) | Rick Osgood | [
"internet hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"encryption",
"https",
"man-in-the-middle",
"mitm",
"script",
"shell",
"social",
"ssl",
"twitter",
"user id",
"Yik Yak"
] | Yik Yak is growing in popularity lately. If you are unfamiliar with Yik Yak, here’s the run down. It’s kind of like Twitter, but your messages are only shared with people who are currently within a few miles of you. Also, your account is supposed to be totally anonymous. When you combine anonymity and location, you get some interesting results. The app seems to be most popular in schools. The anonymity allows users to post their honest thoughts without fear of scrutiny.
[Sanford Moskowitz] decided to
do some digging
into Yik Yak’s authentication system. He wanted to see just how secure this “anonymous” app really is. As it turns out, not as much as one would hope. The primary vulnerability is that Yik Yak authenticates users based solely on a user ID. There are no passwords. If you know the user’s ID number, it’s game over.
The first thing [Sanford] looked for was an encrypted connection to try to
sniff out
User ID’s. It turned out that Yik Yak does actually encrypt the connection to its own servers, at least for the iPhone app. Not to worry, mobile apps always connect to other services for things like ad networks, user tracking, etc. Yik Yak happens to make a call to an analytics tool called Flurry every time the app is fired. Flurry needs a way to track the users for Yik Yak, so of course the Yik Yak App tells Flurry the user’s ID. What other information would the anonymous app have to send?
Unfortunately, Flurry disables HTTPS by default, so this initial communication is in plain text. That means that even though Yik Yak’s own communications are protected, the User ID is still exposed and vulnerable. [Sanford] has published a shell script to make it easy to sniff out these user ID’s if you are on the same network as the user.
Once you have the user ID, you can take complete control over the account. [Sanford] has also published scripts to make this part simple. The scripts will allow you to print out every single message a user has posted. He also describes a method to alter the Yik Yak installation on a rooted iPhone so that the app runs under the victim’s user ID. This gives you full access as if you owned the account yourself.
Oh, there’s another problem too. The Android app is programmed to ignore bad SSL certificates. This means that any script kiddie can perform a simple man in the middle attack with a fake SSL certificate and the app will still function. It doesn’t even throw a warning to the user. This just allows for another method to steal a user ID.
So now you have control over some poor user’s account but at least they are still anonymous, right? That depends. The Yik Yak app itself appears to keep anonymity, but by analyzing the traffic coming from the client IP address can make it trivial to identify a person. First of all, [Sanford] mentions that a host name can be a dead giveaway. A host named “Joe’s iPhone” might be a pretty big clue. Other than that, looking out for user names and information from other unencrypted sites is easy enough, and that would likely give you everything you need to identify someone. Keep this in mind the next time you post something “anonymously” to the Internet.
[via
Reddit
] | 24 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "2232502",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2014-12-10T15:52:10",
"content": "Thanks for the info! As a person who has shot off his “mouth” too many times on the Internet, thinking he was “safely anonymous”. It’s good to know this should I ever decide to Yik. (I haven’t bothered to ... | 1,760,375,974.762477 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/10/reverse-engineering-the-proto-x-quadcopter-radio/ | Reverse Engineering The Proto X Quadcopter Radio | Adam Fabio | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"drone",
"Estes",
"H107",
"Hubsan",
"Hubsan X4",
"Proto X",
"protoX",
"quadcopter",
"stm32"
] | Just a few years ago, palm sized radio controlled toys were nothing more than a dream. Today, you can find them at every mall, toy store, and hobby shop. [Alvaro] couldn’t resist the tiny Estes Proto X quadcopter. While he enjoyed flying the Proto X, he found that the tiny controller left quite a bit to be desired. Not a problem for [Alvaro], as he embarked on a project to
reverse engineer the little quad
.
Inside the quadcopter and its lilliputian radio, [Alvaro] found a STM8 based processor and an Amiccom A7105 2.4G FSK/GFSK Transceiver radio. The A7105 is well documented, with datasheets easily obtained on the internet. The interface between the processor and the radio chip was the perfect place to start a reverse engineering effort.
With the help of his Saleae logic analyzer, [Alvaro] was able to capture SPI data from both the quadcopter and the transmitter as the two negotiated a connection. The resulting hex files weren’t very useful, so [Alvaro] wrote a couple of Python scripts to decode the data. By operating each control during his captures, [Alvaro] was able to reverse engineer the Proto X’s control protocol. He tested this by removing the microcontroller from the remote control unit and wiring the A7105 to a STM32F4 dev board. Connecting the STM32 to his computer via USB, [Alvaro] was able to command the quad to take off. It wasn’t a very graceful flight, but it did prove that his grafted control system worked. With basic controls covered, [Alvaro] knocked up a quick user interface on his computer. He’s now able to fly the quadcopter around using keyboard and mouse. Not only did this prove the control system worked, it also showed how hard it is to fly a real aircraft (even a tiny model) with FPS controls.
The Estes Proto X is actually manufactured by Hubsan, a China based manufacturer best known for the x4 series of mini quadcopters. Since the Proto X and the x4 share the same communication protocol, [Alvaro’s] work can be applied to both. With fully computer controlled quads available for under $30 USD, we’re only a few cameras (and a heck of a lot of coding) away from cooperative drone swarms akin to those found in the
University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab
. | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "2232138",
"author": "Indyaner",
"timestamp": "2014-12-10T12:25:32",
"content": "Pretty neat sniffing. This might come in handy one day to have documented. Good work!offtpic:I like it when tinkers go the extra route and just start their camera and plainly show what they were doing to... | 1,760,375,974.803065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/10/the-epoch-christmas-tree/ | The Epoch Christmas Tree | Brian Benchoff | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"allpixel",
"epoch",
"epoch time",
"led",
"RGB LED",
"unix epoch",
"unix time"
] | It’s that time of the year again, and the halls are being decked with trees, the trees covered in lights, and everyone working in retail is slowly going insane from Christmas songs piped over the PA. [Dan] has a tree and a bunch of programmable LEDs, but merely pumping jollity down that strip of LEDs wouldn’t be enough. The Nerd Quotient must be raised even higher
with a tree that displays a Unix timestamp
.
This build was inspired by an earlier,
non-tree-based build
that displays Unix time on a 32 LED array. That build used an ATMega328p for toggling LEDs on and off. This time around, [Dan] is using a dedicated LED controller – the AllPixel – that just wrapped up
a very successful Kickstarter campaign
. The AllPixel is, in turn, controlled by a Raspberry Pi running
the BiblioPixel library
,
The tree displays the current time stamp in binary across 32 spaces, with green representing a ‘one’ and a red representing ‘zero’. The top of the tree is the least significant bit, but in case [Dan] gets tired of the bottom of the tree staying completely still for the rest of this holiday season, he can switch the order making the base of the tree the LSB.
Video below. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "2232468",
"author": "Mateus",
"timestamp": "2014-12-10T15:35:14",
"content": "Can’t help but remember this when I read the world Epoch:http://doneinanhour.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Chrono-Trigger-Epoch.png",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,375,974.884993 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/09/trinket-everyday-carry-contest-drawing-2-results/ | Trinket Everyday Carry Contest Drawing #2 Results | Adam Fabio | [
"contests"
] | [
"bus pirate",
"cordwood",
"Hackaday Contest",
"hackaday store",
"Trinket Everyday Carry",
"Trinket Everyday Carry Contest"
] | We’ve held our second drawing for the
Trinket Everyday Carry Contest
. This week we
used a Pro Trinket
to pick the random winner. The winner is [mikeneiderhauser] with his project
WorkoutAid!
[Mike] loves hitting the gym, but hates pulling out his phone or fumbling with his headphones to change songs during his routine. WorkoutAid is designed to fix this problem. It’s essentially a Bluetooth media display and remote. Track metadata will be displayed on a 128×64 OLED. 6 buttons will allow the user to change tracks, volume, or perform other functions. The whole device will communicate with a custom Android application through an RN42X Bluetooth radio.
We hope [Mike] enjoys his new
Cordwood Puzzle
from
The Hackaday Store
. No jigsaws here, cordwood is a puzzle that involves solder! It’s built using the
cordwood
assembly technique which was popular in the 1950’s and 1960s. We’re not kidding about it being a puzzle either – there are no instructions for this kit! [Mike] will know he’s got it right when all 3 LEDs light up.
If you didn’t win this week, don’t worry, there are still three more chances to win a random drawing! Our next drawing will be on 12/16/2014 at 9pm EST. The prize will be the ever handy
Bus Pirate V3.6
. To be eligible you need to submit your project as an official entry and publish at least one project log during the week.
The deadline for the
big contest
is January 2, 2014!
More than 60 projects are entered
so far, but only the top 50 will receive custom t-shirts. The top three projects will win some seriously awesome prizes, including a Rigol DS1054Z Oscilloscope, a Fluke 179 meter, and a Hakko/Panavise soldering bundle.
So what are you waiting for? Get off the couch and get hacking! | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "2232203",
"author": "mikeneiderhauser",
"timestamp": "2014-12-10T13:07:34",
"content": "Thanks to Hackaday for hosting this contest and thanks for picking my project! Stay tuned because I have a handful of project logs to update including hardware and Android updates. I’m also loo... | 1,760,375,975.13109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/09/digging-into-the-apa102-serial-led-protocol/ | Digging Into The APA102 Serial LED Protocol | Ethan Zonca | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"apa102",
"led",
"RGB LED",
"spi"
] | [Tim] got his hands on some APA102 RGB LEDs, which are similar in function to the common WS2812 addressable LEDs seen in many projects we’ve featured. The advantage of APA102 LEDs is that they don’t have the strict timing requirements of the WS2812. These LEDs are controlled with a SPI bus that can be clocked at any arbitrary rate, making them easy to use with pretty much any microcontroller or embedded system.
After working with the LEDs, [Tim] discovered that the LEDs
function a bit differently than the datasheet led him to believe
. [Tim] controlled a strand of APA102 LEDs with an ATtiny85 and connected a logic analyzer between some of the LEDs. He discovered that the clock signal of the SPI interface isn’t just passed through each LED, it actually looks like it’s inverted on the output. After some investigation, [Tim] found that the clock signal is delayed by a half period (which looks like an inversion) before it’s passed to the next LED. This gives the next LED in the strand enough time for data on the data line to become valid before latching it in.
Since the clock is delayed, [Tim] discovered that additional bits must be clocked as an “end frame” to generate clock signals which propagate the remaining data to the end of the strand. Although the datasheet specifies a 32-bit end frame, this only works for strings of up to 64 LEDs. More bits must be added to the end frame for longer strands, which the datasheet doesn’t even mention. Check out [Tim]’s post for more information, where he walks you through his logic analysis of the APA102 LEDs. | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "2231763",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2014-12-10T09:07:45",
"content": "The SPI analogue to the WS2811 protocol is WS2801… Nice job figuring out the padding requirement!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "2232727",
... | 1,760,375,975.00193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/09/12-mbps-communication-between-a-pc-and-mcu/ | 12 Mbps Communication Between A PC And MCU | Brian Benchoff | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"dma",
"DMA controller",
"labview",
"spi",
"stm32",
"usb"
] | The world of hobby electronics have only started putting USB in projects for the last few years, and right now, pushing 1.5 Mbps down a USB port is good enough for most cases. This isn’t true for all cases; that’s a terrible data rate, really, and to get the most out of a USB connection,
you can at least move up to USB Full Speed and 12 Mbps
.
[Linas] is using the STM32F4 microcontroller for this example, an extremely large and very capable chip. [Linas] is using FTDI’s FT2232D USB UART to send data from an SPI port over USB. This chip does support 12 Mbps, but only after a few additions; an external EEPROM must be connected to the FTDI chip to provide a USB 2.0 device descriptor, otherwise the connection between the microcontroller and a computer is limited to 1.5 Mbps. Even using the USB on the STM32 would be a bottleneck in this case; [Linas] is moving data out of the processor using only the DMA controller – using the USB on the STM32 would eat up processor cycles in the microcontroller.
Thanks to the DMA controller inside the STM32, the microcontroller is capable of sending and receiving data through SPI at the same time. The STM32 is capable of reading and writing to the Tx and Rx buffer at the same time, but the computer is only capable of half-duplex operation – it can only read
or
write at any one time. [Linas] is setting up the DMA controller on the STM32 as a circular mode, putting everything in the buffer into the FTDI chip, and reading everything sent from the computer back into the STM32’s memory. After counting off the correct number of packets. the controller resets everything, moves the circular buffer back to the beginning, and starts the whole process over again.
The circuit was prototyped with an STM Discovery board. With Labview, [Linas] can see the bits coming out of the microcontroller, and send some bits back to the micro over USB. [Linas] has an extraordinarily detailed video tutorial on this project. You can check that out below. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "2230299",
"author": "gmatstack",
"timestamp": "2014-12-10T01:07:12",
"content": "Using a FTDI (!) chip for it’s intended purpose is a hack now?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "2230385",
"author": "LOL",
"timest... | 1,760,375,974.950481 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/09/a-calculator-with-free-software-and-open-hardware/ | A Calculator With Free Software And Open Hardware | Bryan Cockfield | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"calculator",
"freecad",
"graphing calculator",
"imx233",
"open",
"ti"
] | We’re fond of open source things here. Whether it’s 3D printers, circuit modeling software, or a global network of satellite base stations, the more open it is the more it improves the world around us. [Pierre Parent] and [Ael Gain] have certainly taken these values to heart with their
open handheld graphing calculator
.
While the duo isn’t giving away the calculators themselves, they are releasing all of the hardware designs so that anyone can build this calculator. It’s based on a imx233 processor because this chip (and most everything else about this calculator) is easy to source and easy to use. That, and there is a lot of documentation on it that is in the public domain. All of the designs, including the circuit board and CAD files for the case, are available to anyone who is curious, or wants to build their own.
The software on the calculator (and the software that was used to design the calculator) is all free software too. The calculator runs Linux (of course) and a free TI simulator environment in the hopes of easing the transition of anyone who grew up using TI’s graphing calculators. The project is still in a prototype phase, but it looks very promising. Even though the calculator
can already run Pokemon
, maybe one day it will even be able to
run Super Smash Bros
as well! | 57 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "2229815",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2014-12-09T21:06:15",
"content": "It’s not so much a calculator that runs pokemon, as a computer in a calculator form factor that runs a calculator app :-P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,375,975.086875 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2014/12/09/retrotechtacular-supersonic-transport-initiatives/ | Retrotechtacular: Supersonic Transport Initiatives | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"air travel",
"boeing",
"concorde",
"double delta",
"lockheed",
"science reporter",
"SST",
"supersonic",
"WGBH"
] | In the early days of PBS member station WGBH-Boston, they in conjunction with MIT produced a program called
Science Reporter
. The program’s aim was explaining modern technological advances to a wide audience through the use of interviews and demonstrations. This week, we have a 1966 episode called
“Ticket Through the Sound Barrier”
, which outlines the then-current state of supersonic transport (SST) initiatives being undertaken by NASA.
MIT reporter and basso profondo [John Fitch] opens the program at NASA’s Ames research center. Here, he outlines the three major considerations of the SST initiative. First, the aluminium typically used in subsonic aircraft fuselage cannot withstand the extreme temperatures caused by air friction at supersonic speeds. Although the Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde was skinned in aluminium, it was limited to Mach 2.02 because of heating issues. In place of aluminium, a titanium alloy with a melting point of 3,000°F is being developed and tested.
A second important consideration was one of aerodynamics. The normal drag and subsequent shock waves produced by subsonic crafts may be marginalized through the use of piercing nose designs and sleeker wing profiles and configurations. Lastly, the engines must push out very little air at high velocities. [Mr. Fitch]’s first interview is with [Mark Kelly], Ames’ Chief of Large-Scale Aerodynamics. [Mr. Kelly] describes the SST initiative’s goals in everyday terms—the cruising speed, the size of the crafts, the passenger capacity, and the estimated flight time between New York and Los Angeles (about two hours).
[Mr. Kelly] introduces the idea of supersonic testing in subsonic wind tunnels using models. First, we tour a 1/5-scale Boeing SST with adjustable-sweep wings. The wings are set to 70° sweep for supersonic cruising and 20° sweep for takeoff and landing, an important transformation designed to meet the stringent speed and noise requirements for takeoff and landing. We also see a 1/4-scale
Lockheed double delta
featuring fixed wings with two triangular sections. The front portion generates a high-energy vortex that produces a low-pressure field over the aft wing. This design, in combination with the sheer size of the aft delta and its control flaps creates lift very quickly.
[John Fitch]’s next interview is with [Robert Shade], a project engineer at Langley. We learn that NASA performed SST flight testing using existing subsonic planes like the F5D and the XB-70. More interestingly, they hacked a Boeing 707 into all kinds of test configurations with a special computer. The pilot operates the 707 as intended, and this computer intervenes, translating his inputs into SST-caliber operations. Finally, [Mr. Fitch] is treated to the co-pilot seat of a landing simulator that be changed to simulate the parameters of any SST and simulates approach from 1,000 feet over a realistic landscape.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neswVVVwhns
[Thank you to Dave for sending this in]
Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by
sending in your ideas for future installments
. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "2229658",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2014-12-09T19:28:46",
"content": "I spent many hours as a kid watching documentaries on WGBH out of Boston. It was one of only three or four channels we could get, despite having a large rotatable antenna on the roof.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,375,975.534565 |
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